Technology

Today, Twitch is announcing the formation of its new Safety Advisory Council, a group made up of streamers, academics, and nonprofit leaders that will advise the company on online safety issues. The council will help Twitch draft new policies and update old ones, develop new products for safety and moderation, protect the interests of marginalized people, and identify new, toxic trends emerging from the platform. On the streamer side, the group is comprised of Twitch partners who have been using the site full-time for years; they’ve brought on CohhCarnage, Cupahnoodle, FerociouslySteph, and Zizaran, who are some of the site’s more prominent (and distinct) personalities. The academics are Sameer Hinduja and T.L. Taylor, who are experts in cyberbullying and internet / game studies, respectiv...

T-Mobile and Sprint are preparing to take the next step in merging their wireless companies, with the two brands reportedly planning to merge their customers and retail stores under a single T-Mobile banner this summer, via Fierce Wireless. In other words: the end of Sprint is near. The immediate changes are largely surface-level: Sprint’s brand will be eliminated in favor of T-Mobile’s on things like storefronts and bills. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert promised that existing Sprint customers will still be able to keep their current plans and won’t be forced to switch over to one of T-Mobile’s plans (at least, for now). New customers will presumably be directed to sign up for T-Mobile plans, instead of Sprint ones, once the changes take place, as part of the effort to consolidate the customer ...

Last week, Google’s parent company abandoned plans for an experimental “city-within-a-city” in Toronto. Sidewalk Labs had spent years designing a futuristic overhaul of the Quayside neighborhood, complete with modular buildings, self-driving cars, and streets that could be adapted quickly to the district’s changing needs. While Sidewalk’s plan grew out of Silicon Valley’s “moonshot” ethos, it actually fits into a much longer tradition of utopian planned communities. That includes one of the 1960s’ weirdest, yet surprisingly little-known, infrastructure projects: the Minnesota Experimental City. The Experimental City (or MXC) was conceived by an oceanographer and comic-strip artist named Athelstan Spilhaus, alongside a team that included futurist luminary Buckminster Fuller. Spilhaus imagin...

Nvidia is unveiling its next-generation Ampere GPU architecture today. The first GPU to use Ampere will be Nvidia’s new A100, built for scientific computing, cloud graphics, and data analytics. While there have been plenty of rumors around Nvidia’s Ampere plans for GeForce “RTX 3080” cards, the A100 will primarily be used in data centers. Nvidia’s latest data center push comes amid a pandemic and a huge increase in demand for cloud computing. Describing the coronavirus situation as “terribly tragic,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that “cloud usage of services are going to see a surge,” in a press briefing attended by The Verge. “Those dynamics are really quite good for our data center business … My expectation is that Ampere is going to do remarkably well. It’s our best data center G...

People stuck in quarantine who might want to watch Game of Thrones or Watchmen with friends and family have the option to do so using Scener. Scener, an online video chatting tool that allows people to sign in to their Netflix accounts to watch movies and TV shows with friends who also subscribe to the services, is adding HBO to people’s viewing options. Anyone with an HBO Now or HBO Go subscription in the United States can boot up the streaming service, create a private virtual theater for up to 20 people, and watch any title. Scener marks the first major partnership between WarnerMedia’s HBO network and an online co-viewing platform. Joe Braidwood, Scener’s co-founder, knew that finding an easy way to give people the ability to stream and hang out with their friends online that also work...

The Switch’s 2020 lineup has looked a little thin, but it just got a nice boost with the announcement of Paper Mario: The Origami King. It marks the series’s debut on the Switch, and it’ll launch on July 17th. The Paper Mario series debuted on the N64 and has differed from the main series with a focus on comedy and the occasional RPG spinoff. The Origami King looks to fit firmly in that classic Paper Mario style, complete with charming papercraft art and far too many puns. The game also includes what Nintendo describes as “a new ring-based battle system that lets you flex your puzzle-solving skills to line up scattered enemies and maximize damage.” In terms of the story, here’s how Nintendo describes the premise: Mario faces one of his most thrilling challenges yet in Paper Mario: The Orig...

Sony has announced the world’s first image sensor with integrated AI smarts. The new IMX500 sensor incorporates both processing power and memory, allowing it to perform machine learning-powered computer vision tasks without extra hardware. The result, says Sony, will be faster, cheaper, and more secure AI cameras. Over the past few years, devices ranging from smartphones to surveillance cameras have benefited from the integration of AI. Machine learning can be used to not only improve the quality of the pictures we take, but also understand video like a human would; identifying people and objects in frame. The applications of this technology are huge (and sometimes worrying), enabling everything from self-driving cars to automated surveillance. But many applications rely on sending images ...

There’s a lot of discussion going on right now about what will be forever changed by the pandemic. Over at Amazon, though, the company is promising that things are going back to normal. For one, the company said on Tuesday that delivery times — which have understandably stretched from days to weeks amid the huge logistical challenges posed by COVID-19 — were about to get shorter. Here’s Spencer Soper in Bloomberg: The company on Sunday lifted restrictions on the amount of inventory its suppliers can send to Amazon warehouses and is shortening delivery times — which had stretched for weeks for some products since the outbreak began — back to days. The shares rose 2.1% to $2,406 at 10:42 a.m. on Wednesday. […] “We removed quantity limits on products our suppliers can send to our fulfil...

When he was just 22, Marcus Hutchins rose to fame by single-handedly stopping the spread of WannaCry, a ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and effectively shut down over a dozen UK hospitals. But within months of stopping it, Hutchins was in police custody. His extraordinary story is the subject of a lengthy new feature in Wired, and it’s absolutely worth a read in its entirety. Hutchins was arrested because of his teenage work on code that would end up being used in banking trojan software. But so much time had passed, that when he was finally questioned by officers he initially thought they just wanted to learn about his work on WannaCry. For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic...

A tale of two hardware divisions. Google, as reported by The Information, suffers with operational chaos that is as bizarre as it is inept. Hardware boss Rick Osterloh reportedly held a meeting where he tells everybody “he did not agree with some of the decisions made about the phone” — are these decisions not things he himself is in charge of? The visionary who made the Pixel’s excellent camera what it is quietly leaves, while the man in charge of Pixel hardware overall is shuffled off to a strange job before leaving entirely. Woof. At Amazon, a few new, iterative updates to its Fire HD tablets. No fanfare and nothing to get really excited about — but also zero drama. Only Amazon, Samsung, and Huawei seem to really still keep trying to make Android tablets. And I bet only Amazon has a cle...

Elon Musk’s Boring Company has completed digging a second tunnel underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center, marking the end of the first phase of the $52.5 million project to build a “people-mover” system to shuttle visitors from one side of the venue to the other. The first of the two tunnels was finished in February. Workers will now turn their attention to completing the above-ground passenger stations on either end of the tunnels, as well as a third underground station in the middle of the system. The people-mover, which is being formally called the Convention Center Loop, is still scheduled to open to the public in January 2021 in time for the next Consumer Electronics Show — if CES happens, that is. Construction hasn’t been affected by the pandemic Once completed, the people mover w...

People are increasingly buying midrange Android devices over their more premium alternatives, data from research firms suggests. Strategy Analytics reports that Samsung’s midrange Galaxy A51 was the bestselling Android phone in the first three months of the year, followed by Xiaomi’s Redmi 8. The Galaxy S20 Plus was the only flagship phone in the firm’s top-six ranking, where it came in third. “As mobile operators have reduced subsidies in recent years, and many countries are now tumbling into post-virus recession, smartphone consumers globally are becoming increasingly price-sensitive,” Strategy Analytics Associate Director Juha Winter explains, “Consumers want value-for-money devices with good-enough specs at affordable prices. Android is entering a post-premium era.” Strategy Analytics’...