Technology

Netflix is introducing a new “mystery box” feature that’s intended to help kids discover new shows. Basically, it sounds like a kids-themed take on Netflix’s “Play Something” button, and it seems to take inspiration from the very popular trend of unwrapping toys. On “TVs around the world,” Netflix will add a sparkly icon with a question mark in the favorites row of a kid’s profile, according to a blog post about the feature. “Hover over the sparkly ‘mystery box’ to discover a title that is ‘new for you’! And voila, it’s showtime,” TJ Marston, Netflix’s director of product innovation for kids and family, said in the post. Netflix has steadily been investing in the version of its service for kids with things like a profile redesign, the Top 10 row for age-restricted profiles, and even a test...

The Defender who first headlined Netflix’s partnership with Marvel is coming back in a new Disney Plus series. Variety reports that Matt Corman (The Brave, Deck the Halls) and Chris Ord (The Enemy Within) have signed on to write a new Daredevil series that could delve into what Matt Murdock was up to in the time after Netflix’s Daredevil show came to an end in 2018. The news comes in the wake of Charlie Cox reprising his role as Daredevil in Spider-Man: No Way Home and all of Netflix’s Marvel shows migrating over to Disney Plus earlier this year. While there’s currently no word on whether this new series will directly address the events of the Netflix series, it stands to reason that it would given Vincent D’Onofrio’s reprisal of his Kingpin role for Disney Plus’ Hawkeye. Now that the mult...

Anyone lucky enough to get an F-150 Lightning in the next few months will find that one of the features they may have opted for is missing: the ability to unlock and control the electric truck using a phone. According to screenshots of Special Service Message notices and in-app messages posted to the Lightning Owners’ Forum, Ford will be rolling out support for its Phone as a Key system in “late summer 2022” via a software update instead of shipping it with the truck at launch. Ford’s Phone as a Key system lets you use its FordPass app to unlock and start your vehicle, as well as control various things like the windows, lights, and front trunk. What makes the delay slightly puzzling is that this isn’t new tech from Ford — the company introduced it on a few 2020 Lincoln models, and it’s als...

The Department of Energy (DOE) just launched a new $3.5 billion program to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it away. The program focuses on developing four “hubs” across the country focused on direct air capture, the technology that draws CO2 out of the air. Each of the hubs is ultimately supposed to be able to capture and store at least a million metric tons of CO2. That’s a massive endeavor. Currently, all the direct air capture facilities in the world only have the capacity to capture about 0.01 million metric tons of CO2. Today, the DOE filed a Notice of Intent — a kind of official “heads-up” — that says that they’ll be making a funding announcement related to those hubs “in the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2022.” At that point, companies can apply for funds to deve...

The Umbrella Academy’s second season followed the Hargreeves siblings into the not too distant past where they narrowly managed to prevent a doomsday scenario that would have turned the future into yet another apocalypse. Though the siblings believed they’d put everything right enough as they returned to their own time, The Umbrella Academy’s first season 3 trailer illustrates just how wrong they were. It’s unclear what about the Hargreeves’ actions in the past led to their timelines splitting and made it possible for them to travel into an alternate, unfamiliar reality where the Umbrella Academy was never founded by their adoptive father Sir Reginald (Colm Feore). Rather than the Umbrella Academy of their youths, Luther (Tom Hopper), Diego (David Castañeda), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), ...

On Thursday, Twitter announced a new policy for dealing with misinformation during a period of crisis, establishing new standards for gating or blocking the promotion of certain tweets if they are seen as spreading misinformation. “Content moderation is more than just leaving up or taking down content,” explained Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, in a blog post detailing the new policy, “and we’ve expanded the range of actions we may take to ensure they’re proportionate to the severity of the potential harm.” The new policy puts particular scrutiny on false reporting of events, false allegations involving weapons or use of force, or broader misinformation regarding atrocities or international response. Hoax tweets and other misinformation regularly go viral during emergenc...

Hot off the heels of Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness comes a new game from Marvel Entertainment that offers the same flavor of throwing everybody from everywhere in a big ole pot, shaking, and seeing what kind of shenanigans come out. Marvel Snap is a new collectible card game that its creators claim has some of the fastest gameplay in the CCG space. According to the announcement video, matches only last about three minutes, and players take their turns simultaneously so there’s no waiting for your opponent to just finally figure out they have lethal and kill you already. Marvel Snap matches seem to be based around arranging cards under one of three areas on the board in order to take control of them. The player who takes control of two of the three areas wins the match. To heigh...

The US Department of Justice says it won’t subject “good-faith security research” to charges under anti-hacking laws, acknowledging long-standing concerns around the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Prosecutors must also avoid charging people for simply violating a website’s terms of service — including minor rule-breaking like embellishing a dating profile — or using a work-related computer for personal tasks. The new DOJ policy attempts to allay fears about the CFAA’s broad and ambiguous scope following a 2021 Supreme Court ruling that encouraged reading the law more narrowly. The ruling warned that government prosecutors’ earlier interpretation risked criminalizing a “breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity,” laying out several hypothetical examples that the DOJ now pro...

After four months in closed beta, Fortnite is now available to stream via Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service. It means iOS users have another workaround to play one of the most popular games in the world after it was unceremoniously booted from the App Store in August 2020 for bypassing Apple’s in-app payment system. The official launch follows a months-long beta period during which Nvidia says 500,000 people streamed over 4 million sessions of Fortnite via the service. As a result of the testing, Nvidia claims it’s been able to optimize its “on-screen touch controls and game menus.” Hopefully the changes address a control scheme that my colleague Jay Peters called “finicky” back in January. Fortnite’s on-screen control interface. Image: Fortnite While iOS users have the most to gai...

On Thursday, aerospace company Boeing is set to conduct a critical test flight of its new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner — a mission that will launch the gumdrop-shaped capsule to the International Space Station without any people on board. It’s a flight that Boeing desperately needs to go well after a long journey to the launchpad that’s been marked by numerous failures, false starts, and lengthy delays. Starliner is, in essence, a space taxi. Designed to carry up to seven passengers, the capsule is meant to launch to orbit on top of an Atlas V rocket, automatically dock with the International Space Station, or ISS, and then eventually land back on Earth again under a suite of parachutes. Once it’s deemed operational, Starliner will primarily transport NASA astronauts to and ...