Sunday, 28 February 2021

OnePlus Watch: All the rumors and what we want to see (Updated: Mar. 1)


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The Redmi Note 10 series macro camera might actually be great. Here’s how.


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Lime says it will spend $50 million on a huge e-bike expansion

Lime is getting back to its roots. The scooter company formerly known as LimeBike says it will invest $50 million to grow its shared electric bicycle network, including adding a new model of bike and doubling the number of cities in which it operates.

Lime got its start with shared bikes, only to quickly pivot after Bird first introduced the concept of dockless electric scooters in 2017. The company dropped the “bike” from its name and started phasing out its bikes in 2019. But the following year, Lime acquired bike-share company Jump from Uber, and suddenly, bikes were back on the menu.

Now, the company is doubling down on shared electric bikes, with plans to launch in “a dozen” new cities in North...

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Lime's latest e-bike can borrow batteries from scooters

Lime might have another way to make e-bikes more practical: have them use the same batteries as its scooters. The mobility service is rolling out a new e-bike whose battery is interchangeable with the one in Gen4 scooter models. That saves the compan...

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2021 Golden Globes: Netflix dominates the night, Nomadland takes top honor

78th Annual Golden Globe® Awards: Show
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Hollywood Foreign Press Association

In a year of ongoing movie delays and stalled television productions, it’s no surprise that this year’s Golden Globes winners were dominated by streaming services — in particular, Netflix.

However, before getting into the winners of the evening, it’s impossible to ignore that this year’s Golden Globes were surrounded by a number of important controversies. Last week the Los Angeles Times published an in-depth feature investigation into the questionable ethics involving all 87 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the voting body that selects Golden Globe winners every year. Some members were flown to Paris and put up in expensive hotels on Netflix’s dollar for on-set visits to Emily in Paris, which was nominated for...

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Oppo Find X3 Pro launch date (and some key specs) finally confirmed


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Cybersecurity firm says social media bots hyped GameStop during trading frenzy

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A cybersecurity firm found that bots were promoting GameStop stock on social media before and after the stock’s frenzied rise last month, Reuters reported. Massachusetts-based PiiQ Media says social media bots promoted Dogecoin, GameStop, and other “meme” stocks in posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The firm estimated that tens of thousands of bots participated, but it’s still unclear how much influence they had or didn’t have on the rise and fall of GME and other stocks.

Shares in GME skyrocketed in January as Reddit users on r/wallstreetbets rallied around the stock in an attempt to squeeze hedge funds that had bet against the video game company. PiiQ told Reuters it detected “patterns of artificial behavior” in...

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Minneapolis hiring social media influencers for former police officers’ trials

MINNEAPOLIS, MN - OCTOBER 14: Flameless candles are illuminated
George Floyd died in police custody in May 2020 | Getty

Minneapolis is hiring social media influencers to share “city-generated and approved messages” during the trials of four former city police officers charged in the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, according to the Minnesota Reformer. The Minneapolis city council approved the plan on Friday, which calls for six influencers to be paid about $2,000 each to spread the city’s messages with Black, Native American, Hmong, and Latino communities.

The goal is to “address/dispel incorrect information” by using “trusted messengers,” part of a program the city refers to as its Joint Information System to share “timely and relevant information” with the public during the trials.

“Through the Communications and Neighborhood and Community Relations...

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Lordstown Motors' electric race truck is (mostly) ready for off-roading

Lordstown Motors wants to prove its Endurance electric truck is ready for the wilderness through a familiar strategy: it's entering a prominent race. Autoblog reports that Lordstown has unveiled a race-ready version of its Endurance Beta truck th...

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New AI ‘Deep Nostalgia’ brings old photos, including very old ones, to life

MyHeritage

An AI-powered service called Deep Nostalgia that animates still photos has become the main character on Twitter this fine Sunday, as people try to create the creepiest fake “video” possible, apparently.

The Deep Nostalgia service, offered by online genealogy company MyHeritage, uses AI licensed from D-ID to create the effect that a still photo is moving. It’s kinda like the iOS Live Photos feature, which adds a few seconds of video to help smartphone photographers find the best shot.

But Deep Nostalgia can take photos from any camera and bring them to “life.” The program uses pre-recorded driver videos of facial movements and applies the one that works best for the still photo in question. Its intended purpose is to allow you to upload...

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Scientists sequence 64 human genomes to better reflect genetic diversity

The Human Genome Project shed light on our species in 2001, but it was a patchwork of different humans' genes that didn't really reflect humanity's genetic makeup. Flash forward 20 years, however, and science is taking a significant leap...

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How to watch the 2021 Golden Globes online

US-ENTERTAINMENT-VIRUS-GLOBES-AWARD
Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images

Awards season in Hollywood begins Sunday, February 28th, with the 78th Golden Globe Awards, hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The Golden Globes, usually considered a harbinger of who may take home awards at other shows like the Oscars, will look a bit different this year thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. The hosts and presenters will be in different locations in the US and around the world.

Streaming services have finally come into their own at the Globes, with Netflix leading the pack of with 20 total nominations for its television shows; Hulu has six total nominations, Apple TV Plus has two, and Disney Plus has one. In the motion picture categories (the Globes honor films and TV shows), Netflix leads the way with 22...

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Social media bots may have fuelled the GameStop stock frenzy

The GameStop stock frenzy appears to largely have been the product of Reddit users and trading apps like Robinhood, but some of its contributors might not have been human. According to Reuters, cybersecurity firm PiiQ Media has determined that people...

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The best Michael Kors smartwatches you can buy: Bradshaw 2, MKGO, and more


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Verizon support says you should turn off 5G to save your phone’s battery

In this photo illustration the Verizon Communications logo seen displayed on a smartphone with the 5G inscription background.
Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Despite its relentless promotion of 5G phones and the fact that it spent more than $45 billion bidding on a new faster spectrum, Verizon support now is advising people on Twitter to turn off their phones’ 5G access to preserve battery life.

In a Sunday morning tweet, Verizon support helpfully suggested that “one way to help conserve battery life is to turn on LTE” if users found their batteries were “draining faster than normal.” That step would, of course, turn off 5G in a phone that has it available. It’s also worth pointing out that you don’t actually “turn on LTE” when doing this step — LTE is always enabled as a fallback for the 5G network. But Verizon is obviously being cautious so as not to actually tell its customers to “turn...

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Watch Rivian test its R1T electric truck in extreme cold weather

If Rivian's R1T is going to live up to its electric adventure truck image, it's going to have to survive conditions that could leave other EVs crying for mercy... and it might just manage that. As Electrek notes, the startup has shared detail...

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PlayStation Plus: Everything you need to know


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Samsung’s shiny red Galaxy Chromebook 2 is now available at Best Buy

Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Samsung’s latest Chrome OS laptop, the Galaxy Chromebook 2, is now available for purchase at Best Buy. The Chromebook 2 was first announced at CES in January and features a new QLED display, 360-degree hinge, and a striking red paint job. It starts at $549.99 for a Celeron model and goes up to $699.99 for a Core i3 version, putting it at the higher end of Chromebooks.

That price is the most significant thing about the Chromebook 2 because it’s considerably less than the Galaxy Chromebook that debuted a year ago. The older Chromebook had an 4K OLED screen and came with a stylus — neither of which you’ll fine with the new model — but it also cost just under $1,000 when it came out. In our review, we found despite the gorgeous screen and...

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Disinformation experts aren’t happy about the trailer for HBO’s QAnon series

Supporters of former President Donald Trump flew a US flag with a QAnon symbol outside the Capitol on January 6th.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump flew a US flag with a QAnon symbol outside the Capitol on January 6th. | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

The teaser video for Q: Into the Storm, an upcoming documentary series from HBO about the QAnon conspiracy movement has a lot of deplatforming experts concerned; it looks more like a preview for a spy thriller than a careful examination of the umbrella group of conspiracy theories.

The breathless tone might be effective at building hype, but it has many disinformation experts concerned. Ben Collins, one of the leading journalists covering online radicalization, tweeted that the trailer was “being marketed in a way that could recruit more people.” Promoted by HBO as a series that “charts a labyrinthine journey to unmask the mastermind behind QAnon,” critics pointed out that the trailer felt a lot like “a recruitment video for Q.”

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5 best free LastPass alternatives and how to transfer


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Saturday, 27 February 2021

10 best NEW Android games from February 2021


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Microsoft is testing 1080p Xbox Game Pass streaming

The 720p resolution for Xbox Game Pass cloud streaming (aka xCloud) is decent on a phone, but that's clearly not going to cut it when the service comes to PCs and iPads. Thankfully, a resolution bump appears to be in order. Windows Central and T...

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The UK government will reportedly buy stakes in tech startups

The UK might have a new way to achieve technological supremacy: throw money directly at companies. Financial Times sources say the country is establishing a "Future Fund: Breakthrough" effort that would spend up to £375 million (about $522...

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Microsoft’s unreleased Xbox Game Streaming app for Windows includes touch controls, gyro, and more

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft is finalizing its Xbox Game Streaming app for Windows PCs, which includes access to streaming games from the company’s xCloud service. We’ve managed to get access to the latest version of the Xbox Game Streaming app for Windows, an unannounced and unreleased app. Once released, the app will let Windows users stream games from their Xbox Series S / X consoles, and from xCloud.

Currently, you can’t stream games from the new Xbox consoles to Windows PCs, as this is unsupported in the existing Xbox Console Companion app. This new app will solve that, and also bring xCloud streaming to Windows PCs for the first time. We first got a look at this xCloud app for Windows last year, and it has improved a lot since then.

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Judge approves $650 million Facebook privacy settlement over facial recognition feature

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A federal judge on Friday gave final approval to a $650 million Facebook class action privacy settlement and ordered the 1.6 million members of the class in Illinois who submitted claims to be paid “as expeditiously as possible.”

Chicago attorney Jay Edelson sued Facebook in Cook County Circuit Court back in 2015, alleging that the platform’s use of facial recognition tagging was not allowed under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The lawsuit claimed that Facebook’s Tag Suggestions tool, which scanned faces in users’ photos and offered suggestions about who the person might be, stored biometric data without users’ consent in violation of the Illinois law.

The case became a class action lawsuit in 2018. In 2019, Facebook m...

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Nissan's improved hybrid car system reduces CO2 emissions

Nissan has announced that it has achieved a 50 percent thermal efficiency for its next-generation e-Power hybrid technology. As RoadShow explains, most modern gasoline engines have a thermal efficiency of around 40 percent — in other words, only 40 p...

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ICYMI: We check out Lenovo’s lightest ThinkPad yet

This week we spent some time testing Lenovo’s Thinkpad X1 Nano — the company's thinnest and lightest ThinkPad at under two pounds. As usual, slimming things down comes with some trade offs, and Cherlynn Low tells us where the X1 Nano might leave...

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Apple AirPods Max vs Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700: Who wears the crown?


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So you want to start reading comics?

WandaVision’s first season is just about to end, but Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Widow, Loki, Justice League, Suicide Squad, The Batman, GCPD, and Peacemaker are just around the corner — and that doesn’t account for other series outside of the main Marvel and DC Universes like MODOK, Titans, or Harley Quinn.

There are more superhero TV series and films debuting in 2021 than seemingly ever before, and it might have some people wanting to dive into comics. WandaVision has led a few people on staff to dig into past Vision and Wanda Maximoff-centered storylines, for example. I’ve started reading Kieron Gillen’s Eternals run leading up to Marvel Studios’ film. Whatever reason people may have for wanting to begin reading comics,...

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Hitting the Books: The Brooksian revolution that led to rational robots

We are living through an AI renaissance thought wholly unimaginable just a few decades ago — automobiles are becoming increasingly autonomous, machine learning systems can craft prose nearly as well as human poets, and almost every smartphone on the...

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OnePlus will reportedly launch its '9R' phone and watch in March

OnePlus may have a particularly busy March. Well-known tipster Ishan Agarwal told 91Mobiles that OnePlus will reportedly unveil at least four devices in March, including a lower-cost 9R smartphone (you're looking at the 8T above) as well as the s...

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The Morning After: MSI's latest gaming laptop targets the 1440p sweet spot

Years after 3D's last invasion has receded from the public sphere, it’s notable that some of the most favorable implementations happened on mobile devices. To mark the ten-year anniversary of the Nintedo 3DS launch in Japan, Engadget editors chim...

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Vaccine centers embrace stickers and selfie stations 

US-HEALTH-VIRUS-VACCINE
Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images

The best picture I’ve seen this week was a selfie from my father-in-law who just got his first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Along with the shot, they gave him a sticker that says “I got vaccinated!”

As the vaccine rollout continues, clinics and distribution centers across the country are embracing things like stickers and even selfie stations decked out with colorful backgrounds to help people celebrate getting the shot.

The selfie stations are set up as colorful backgrounds, often with pro-vaccine messaging tiled with the name of the healthcare provider. It’s good branding. And hey, if social media-friendly backgrounds helped make some trendy restaurants popular, there’s no reason they couldn’t work for vaccine sites too.

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Which manufacturer updates its phones the fastest: Android 11 edition


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Sony’s PlayStation Network experiencing outage Saturday

PlayStation controllers
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

An outage of Sony’s PlayStation Network that began Friday afternoon appeared to be persisting on Saturday morning. According to an update on the status page timestamped 6:33PM (not clear what time zone that is) on February 26th, the affected platforms are PS Vita, PS3, PS4, and PS5.

“You might have difficulty launching games, apps, or network features. We’re working to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience,” the update reads.

Engadget reported that the outage may be affecting some games but not others; Fortnite appeared to be accessible but Minecraft and Call of Duty: Warzone were not.

The PlayStation Network outage began a day after Microsoft’s Xbox Live service suffered a global outage for five hours. On...

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Here are this week’s best gadget deals all in one place

Image: Square Enix

This week’s batch of deals runs the gamut of gadgets and games. Whether you’re a music fan who’s looking to outfit their tech repertoire with new headphones or a big, powerful Bluetooth speaker, or a gamer, this roundup is for you. There still aren’t any deals on hard-to-find graphics cards, but the good news is at least AMD’s powerful Zen 3 processors are in stock right now (but perhaps not for long).

If you aren’t finding what you’re looking for in today’s roundup, keep a lock on our Verge Deals coverage throughout the week and follow us on Twitter for the moment-to-moment deal alerts.


Get the best-ever price on Beats Solo Pro on-ear headphones

Beats Solo Pro noise-canceling headphones are still available for $150 through Woot. You...

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Xiaomi Mi 11 review: One cool customer, but is it a Galaxy S21 killer?


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Volkswagen is using its electric ID.Buzz van to test self-driving tech

Volkswagen at one time said its electric ID.Buzz van would reach dealerships by 2022 (that announcement has been removed but you can view it in the Internet Archive), but news from its commercial division confirms that at least an unveiling is still...

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Roku not working? Common Roku problems and how to fix them


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Friday, 26 February 2021

Facebook's BARS is an experimental TikTok-like app for rappers

Facebook's R&D division, the NPE Team, has introduced another experimental app that's centered around music. It's called BARS, and it's meant to give aspiring rappers a way to record their rhymes with the app's studio quality...

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A PlayStation Network outage is affecting certain games

Just a day after a massive Xbox Live outage, Sony's PlayStation Network has been experiencing issues for several hours. The problem on this end is a bit different, and based on reports may only affect certain games. Sony's PSN Status page rep...

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NASA’s Perseverance rover carried a family portrait of its robotic siblings to Mars

Like any good piece of high-tech hardware, NASA’s Perseverance rover features an Easter egg hidden in plain sight. Since landing on Mars on February 18th, NASA has been sharing thousands of photos captured by the rover. And if you look close enough,...

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Go read this report about how selling safe masks online is surprisingly hard

Subway Train in New York City
Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

A new report from The New York Times’ Andrew Jacobs digs into how mask policies on tech platforms that have allowed novelty masks like scrunchie masks to flourish while some mask-makers making high-filtration masks have had trouble selling their wares.

Even if you’re vaccinated, wearing a mask is still recommended. It seems like a problem, then, that many masks widely advertised on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon are novelty varieties that might be less safe than medical-grade N95s. Facebook and Amazon say they are following guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Facebook prevented mask sellers from advertising and selling masks to the masses early in the pandemic, when they were in short supply. The idea was to...

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'Terraria' will hit Stadia after all

Terraria will come out Stadia after all. In a state of the game post spotted by Android Police, developer Re-Logic said it had resumed work on the port after settling its differences with Google. “After a month of pushing (and with the immense suppor...

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Report: PlayStation 5 to gain SSD expandable storage support this year


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Apple forced to add iPhone and MacBook repairability scores to comply with French law

The repairability score can be seen on the lower right of the product page. | Screenshot: Apple.com

Apple has added iPhone and MacBook repairability scores to its online store in France to comply with a new French law that came into effect this year. MacGeneration reports that the rating takes into account features like how easily a device can be disassembled and the availability of repair manuals and spare parts. Links to each product’s final score, with details for how they were calculated, are available on this support page.

The ratings for Apple’s products vary between products and generations. Its iPhone 12 lineup all have scores of six out of 10 for example, while the previous year’s iPhone 11s are rated lower at between 4.5 and 4.6. The improvement, according to the detailed scoring assessment, is due to the newer iPhones being...

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PlayStation 5 SSD expansion will reportedly be unlocked this summer

Considering the bloated sizes of recent games like Call of Duty and Cyberpunk 2077 (250GB just for those two), the PlayStation 5's 825GB internal SSD seems pretty miniscule. Now, there's word that you'll finally be able to put another dri...

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Sony will reportedly enable PS5 SSD expansion this summer

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Sony will allow the PlayStation 5 to make use of expanded SSD storage from this summer, according to a report in Bloomberg. The functionality is said to be coming in a firmware update that will activate the PS5’s M.2 expansion slot, which is currently disabled. Sony told The Verge ahead of the PS5 launch that the feature was “reserved for a future update.”

Bloomberg’s sources say that the firmware update will allow for an increase in the speed of the PS5’s cooling fans. The PS5 has an extremely fast built-in SSD, and any compatible third-party drive will need to be equally fast in order to store and run PS5 games; that’s going to generate some extra heat.

The PS5 comes with an 825GB SSD right now, leaving users with only 667GB of usable...

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EA's upcoming Dragon Age game won't feature multiplayer after all

The next Dragon Age game will no longer have any multiplayer components as originally planned, according to a report from Bloomberg. Electronic Arts (EA) and its developer, Bioware, have reportedly made a U-turn and transformed it into a single playe...

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Oculus Quest 2 and Portal devices now respond to 'Hey Facebook'

You can now issue voice commands for the Quest 2 and the Portal video chat devices by prefacing them with "Hey Facebook." Oculus launched voice commands for the Quest last year, but you'd still have to press the "Voice Commands&quo...

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