Amazon is giving its premium smart speaker a camera. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera, announced today as part of Amazon's big blast of announcements, has a built-in camera for monitoring a room while you're away, showing things to Alexa, and, soon, to use with video calls on Fire TV devices. It's an iteration […]
Kroger's $1.65 billion proposed acquisition of Giant Eagle might not only consolidate the grocery market, but also a vast surveillance network that includes Flock cameras, a new report warns. Beyond standard concerns that a merger could decrease competition and increase prices, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), which advocates for competition policy reforms, says that […]
Amazon's screen-equipped smart speakers have long been able to display your family's photos, but its new Alexa Photo Frame is purpose-built for that task. It's designed to compete with other digital picture frames from companies like Aura, and Amazon's incorporates a smart speaker with access to Alexa Plus' capabilities through voice commands. However, unlike the […]
Ask Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe what it's been like to see data center developers descend upon Austin and its surrounding suburbs and he can rattle off project after project facing opposition from locals. There's the fight in Taylor over plans to build a data center at a site that's supposed to be a park. […]
As Meta was feeling public pressure over teen mental health, and facing an impending onslaught of kids safety trials, the company considered a campaign to discredit a key critic: social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Newly filed court documents show that in March 2023, Meta discussed a "Whisper strategy" to "turn academics against Haidt," a thought leader […]
Meta has launched a "tamagotchi-style" pet game called Waddle World, with virtual creatures that chat with users and create doodles to illustrate conversations. According to its Apple and Play Store listings, the "16-bit pet care game" is not really a game, but "a daily journal disguised as a pet." Users should talk, not type, with […]
Within hours of the iPhone Duo launch last Friday, people reported that the inner screen on some brand new foldable phones was already broken. The issue was similar across many photos shared on social media: some kind of issue or crack would appear in the middle of the screen above the hinge, with lines appearing […]
On Monday, OpenAI announced impressive breakthroughs in mathematics, computer science, and physics, along with what the company says is an evolving approach to communicating its findings. But despite its apparent course correction, researchers who spoke to The Verge are growing increasingly tired of the company's antics. It has been a turbulent few months between OpenAI […]
Elon Musk claims Ukraine violated Starlink's terms of service before the recent slowdown, as reported earlier by Ars Technica. According to Musk, "Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week," however Ukrainian officials have denied that happened, or that it […]
In its latest gift to oil and gas companies, the Trump administration is expected to announce plans today to weaken rules that guard against methane leaks. Methane is a smog-forming pollutant and a powerful greenhouse gas that's up to 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide on a 20-year horizon. It's the primary component of […]
In Marvel's VisionQuest, a superpowered robot tries to better understand humanity by getting lost in elaborate, digital daydreams in which he and other artificial intelligence-powered beings live together in a home. The series is deeply fantastical, yet it plays with some of the ideas that have come to dominate the conversation about real-world generative artificial […]
A company called Arctic Fox Technologies has announced a new multifunction mouse that forgoes a myriad of customizable shortcut buttons peppered across its surface for a compact touchscreen sitting beneath your hand. The Super Mouse may not prioritize ergonomics with its boxy design, but it can replace other peripherals on your desk, like a trackpad, […]
