Technology

Twitch has re-signed popular streamers Jaryd “Summit1G” Lazar, Brett “Dakotaz” Hoffman, and Josh “JoshOG” Beaver, ensuring they will stay with the service at a time when others are taking deals to stream elsewhere (via The Washington Post). The terms of the contracts were not disclosed, though they are “multi-year content deals,” according to a press release from Loaded, the talent agency that represents all three of them. Combined, Lazar, Hoffman, and Beaver have more than 11 million Twitch followers. Lazar has more than 5 million followers, making him one of the top 10 most-followed streamers on Twitch. Hoffman has 4.3 million followers, and Beaver has 1.73 million followers. “At a time when community is paramount, these Creators are a core part of Twitch’s mission to bring people togeth...

Blizzard Entertainment will not host its annual BlizzCon event this year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The event is usually held later in the year, with BlizzCon 2019 kicking off on November 1st and concluding on November 2nd. In early April, Blizzard announced that it was uncertain about hosting BlizzCon this year. Despite canceling the convention, Blizzard may be looking to hold a virtual event in its place. “We’re talking about how we might be able to channel the BlizzCon spirit and connect with you in some way online,” BlizzCon executive producer Saralyn Smith said in a blog post. BlizzCon is just one of many video game conventions that have been canceled this year as a result of the pandemic. QuakeCon, Gamescom, and Tokyo Game Show have all been canceled, too. The biggest gam...

Microsoft created a fun Easter egg for its Edge browser to reveal the new logo last year, and it’s now available for everyone to play. The Edge surf game is very similar to SkiFree, a classic game that was released as part of Microsoft’s Entertainment Pack 3 for Windows back in 1991. While it was used as part of an elaborate Easter egg hunt, where Microsoft employees posted cryptic clues to a series of puzzles and images, it’s now an official offline game inside Microsoft Edge. You can access it from edge://surf/ in the address bar in Edge. There are three modes available: a classic surf mode, a time trial, and a slalom mode where you surf between gates. The standard classic surf mode is an endless surfer mode where you have to avoid obstacles and a kraken chasing after you. Time trial is ...

On the surface, Diablo isn’t exactly what most people would call comforting. It’s a series about exploring dark realms and fighting all manner of undead and demonic monsters. But there’s something about its formula of exploring dungeons, gathering loot, and steadily becoming immensely powerful that makes it easy to jump into, despite the dark subject matter. That feeling of comfort is even more pronounced when you take that formula and apply it to a familiar world, like, say, the Marvel universe. Now, the same can be said of Minecraft. Minecraft Dungeons is exactly what it sounds like. It takes the bestselling series, strips away its two most iconic features (mining and crafting), and replaces them with a light, charming experience that’s perhaps the most approachable Diablo-like game yet ...

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, Sandra Quinn asked hundreds of Americans if they’d be willing to take a hypothetical vaccine that was authorized for emergency use but wasn’t formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Most were hesitant: Quinn, the senior associate director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, found that only around 8 percent of people said that they’d definitely take the vaccine. An emergency H1N1 vaccine never came to be, but the questions Quinn asked 10 years ago are back in the spotlight today, as pharmaceutical companies in the US and around the world fight to produce a coronavirus vaccine as quickly as possible. It’s a real possibility that the FDA could allow for emergency use of a vaccine this time around. The United Sta...

An internal Facebook report presented to executives in 2018 found that the company was well aware that its product, specifically its recommendation engine, stoked divisiveness and polarization, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Yet, despite warnings about the effect this could have on society, Facebook leadership ignored the findings and has largely tried to absolve itself of responsibility with regard to partisan divides and other forms of polarization it directly contributed to, the report states. The reason? Changes might disproportionately affect conservatives and might hurt engagement, the report says. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” one slide from the presentation read. The group found that if this core element of its recom...

Spotify has finally removed its 10,000-song cap on library sizes, allowing users to add as much music as they’d like to their personal libraries without any limits at all, fixing a problem that has plagued music-lovers on the service for years. While Spotify has more than 50 million songs available to customers to stream at any time, until today, there was a hard limit of 10,000 songs that users could save to their own “Your Music” collections on Spotify for easy access. This is no more. After today, you can add as many songs as you like to your Liked Songs on @Spotify I’ve been working with a small team on the refactoring necessary to pull this off for a while now. Very happy to see this finally out. https://t.co/1nSExF5o3V — Felipe O. Carvalho (@_Felipe) May 26, 2020 Users have bee...

The OnePlus 8 series can now run Fortnite at 90fps, thanks to a collaboration between OnePlus and Epic Games. The update makes these devices the first phones to run Fortnite at a smooth 90 frames per second. Most Android phones run Fortnite at a maximum of 60fps, similar to the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game. Nintendo’s console, the Switch, falls behind with a maximum of 30 frames per second. Most Apple devices, including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, have the option to run the game at 60fps, while the iPad Pro can also run the game at a max frame rate of 120fps, thanks to the tablet’s high refresh rate display. Enabling a higher frame rate on the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro will default the graphical settings to “Low,” as noted by GameSpot, so the game won’t look better in every way. Of c...

Niantic Labs is adding a new augmented reality feature to Pokémon Go next month that will make the virtual creatures look even more realistic. The new feature will let real-world objects obscure parts of the pocket monsters or let them hide entirely behind environmental fixtures like trees or furniture. The company calls the feature “reality blending,” and it’s based on the AR technique known as occlusion, which uses a mix of hardware and software features on powerful, modern smartphones to map an environment and understand the shape and depth of real-world objects. Niantic says the feature will come first to Samsung Galaxy S9 and S10 devices as well as the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 4. More devices are expected to join the list in the future. Niantic’s new reality blending will let pokémon ...

Slack is exploring a wide variety of new features that could be making their way to the popular messaging platform, including scheduled messages, Instagram-style stories, and short video and audio messages. According to CEO Stewart Butterfield in a recent interview on The Vergecast, the company has already “implemented APIs for scheduled sending of messages, and I think we’re going to end up putting that in the product at some point.” He also noted that competitors like G Suite already offer similar features. Butterfield also mentioned that the company is looking to add more tools to make it easier for users to “keep track of the things you want to get back to,” including the aforementioned scheduling tools and “more control over notifications,” although there aren’t too many details as to...

If you still think cars, even electric cars, are the future of urban transportation, the Carqon electric cargo bike is here to convince you otherwise. Cargo bikes are a way of life for many European families. For a decade, I bicycled my three kids everywhere in Amsterdam using a traditional “bakfiets.” My three-speed Dutch cargo bike with its large wooden box attached low to the elongated frame was something of a spectacle to tourists but very much the norm for cities that recognize the primacy of people over cars. The problem with cargo bikes has always been weight and bulk, making them difficult to maneuver when fully loaded. Adding an electric motor completely transforms the experience, making even the daintiest of parents feel superhuman. I just spent a week riding Carqon’s first produ...

ARM has announced its latest high-end mobile designs, the Cortex-A78 CPU and the Mali-G78 GPU, which will be used to power the next flagship smartphones of 2021 and beyond. ARM isn’t usually advertised on the spec sheets of your new smartphone or tablet, but it’s a critical company. It provides the designs that chipmakers like Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung use to create the system-on-a-chip designs that power nearly every mobile phone and tablet — and increasingly, laptops like the Surface Pro X. Double-digit improvements in CPU and GPU performance Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865, for example, uses partially customized versions of the ARM Cortex-A77 and Cortex-A55 designs for its Kryo 585 CPU, while Samsung’s Exynos 990 uses Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 CPU cores, along with a Mali-G77 GPU. The Cor...