Thursday’s top tech news: Another Theranos exec sentenced to over a decade in prison

It’s almost time for gaming’s annual end-of-year awards and announcements extravaganza. The 2022 edition of The Game Awards takes place on Thursday, December 8th, and the opening act kicks off at 7:30PM ET / 4:30PM PT. While the show itself takes place live at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, you can stream the event for free on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. For a more detailed list of where to stream the show, check The Game Awards website.

We don’t know exactly how long The Game Awards will be, but host Geoff Keighley said in a Twitch stream that the main show will last about two and a half hours. That’s a good thing, if you ask me; the 2021 Game Awards, including pre-show, was a nearly four-hour event.

The FTC has filed a legal challenge to try and block Microsoft’s plan to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, according to a press release from the regulator. The lawsuit was filed today after weeks of back and forth between Microsoft, Sony, and regulators over competition concerns and the future of Call of Duty. The FTC argues that the acquisition would “enable Microsoft to suppress competitors to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.” You can read the FTC’s redacted complaint here or embedded at the bottom of this article.

The vote from the FTC commissioners today means Microsoft now faces significant hurdles to getting its Activision Blizzard deal complete. Regulators in the UK and EU are also scrutinizing the deal closely, despite Microsoft’s repeated attempts to appease regulators.

It’s an easy bet that most new phones announced in 2023 will come with 5G, but there’s going to be at least one LTE-only device on shelves next year: the $169 Motorola Moto G Play (2023). It’s the latest edition of Motorola’s budget-tier phone since the 2021 G Play, and it comes with an updated screen and camera array — but nary a 5G band on its spec sheet.

The 2023 Moto G Play sticks with a 6.5-inch LCD screen but increases the refresh rate to 90Hz. It’s still a low-res 720p panel, which is likely to have more of an impact on viewing experience than a slight boost in refresh rate. The main camera gets a meaningful boost to 16 megapixels (up from 13 megapixels) with a brighter f/1.22 lens (compared to f/2.0).

Nothing can possibly prepare us for the all-encompassing funk of a movie starring ToeJam and Earl. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a ToeJam & Earl movie is currently in development at Amazon Studios in partnership with Unanimous Media and Story Kitchen.

ToeJam & Earl is just the latest video game franchise getting a movie tie-in. In addition to bigger names like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog getting contemporary adaptations, we’re also slated to see an anime version of Tomb Raider coming to Netflix as well as a live-action version of It Takes Two, which are also being handled by Story Kitchen.

New leaks appear to reveal what to expect from Google’s long-rumored foldable phone. Leaker OnLeaks has teamed up with the website HowToiSolve to share renders, a 360-degree video, and measurements of the foldable Pixel device.

According to OnLeaks and HowToiSolve, the phone will apparently have a 5.79-inch cover screen and a larger 7.69-inch inner screen, meaning it will function more like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 4, which has a cover screen, than Microsoft’s Surface Duo phones, which do not. Unfolded, the Google’s device will be “roughly” 158.7 x 139.7 x 5.7mm. For comparison, the Z Fold 4 is 155.1 x 130.1 x 6.3mm, so the Pixel foldable could be a bit bigger than Samsung’s.

Big tech companies including Microsoft, LexisNexis, and Palantir have helped fuel the militarization of local police forces and the Department of Homeland Security’s demand for high-tech surveillance, according to a new report from The Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE), LittleSis, MediaJustice, and the Surveillance, Tech, and Immigration Policing Project. Researchers working on the project dug into how these companies benefit from a hidden and misunderstood source of funding, which requires states to dump money into law enforcement activities if they want to receive money for things like emergency medical and response services.

The report is specifically concerned with FEMA’s Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grants, which the government has spent billions on in the years since 9/11. “The way that the grant program actually works is that DHS has an approved list of equipment that can be bought with the grant funding, but at least 30 percent of that money has to be used on law enforcement activities,” said Aly Panjwani, a senior analyst who worked on the report. And as Panjwani and his colleagues point out in their analysis, those activities usually have a disproportionate and negative impact on people of color.

Amazon is the latest tech company to take a page out of TikTok’s playbook. The e-commerce giant announced it was launching a new feed in the Amazon app with photos and videos of items users can purchase, first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The feed, which Amazon is calling Inspire, is the company’s attempt at getting app users to make purchases as they’re seeing products in online content — something other tech companies are also attempting to do. TikTok has long been working on its own in-app shopping features, including livestream shopping, and YouTube added affiliate marketing and shopping to its TikTok copy, Shorts.

F8 (pronounced like “fate”) is an eight-member, all-male K-pop band signed to RBY Entertainment. A look at their official Instagram page shows the group performing in concerts, posing for shoots, and smiling on rooftops in eclectic but color-coordinated outfits. The group advertises an upcoming show and profusely thanks its fans, which it refers to as “F8 Nation.” It looks very much like the Instagram page of many other K-pop groups that a scrolling fan might stumble across.

Except: F8 isn’t real. It’s a fictional band from KPOP, a musical that opened on Broadway on November 27th and is now, following mixed reviews and low ticket sales, set to close after just two weeks. In the month leading up to its opening and in the weeks since, KPOP has marketed its characters over social media, leveraging some of the same tools and tactics that brought K-pop’s biggest names to widespread fame. Unfortunately, KPOP’s fictional groups haven’t yet reached the same success. Creating internet fandom, it turns out, is hard to do.

Google’s Chrome desktop web browser has two new performance modes —  Memory Saver and Energy Saver — available starting today. The new modes allow users to reduce Chrome’s memory usage by up to 30 percent and extend battery life when a device is running low on power, according to Google.

Memory Saver mode frees up memory from tabs that aren’t currently in use, which should provide a smoother browsing experience. You can also mark important websites as exempt from Memory Saver to keep them operating at max performance.

While Razer, Logitech, and other companies are working on their 2023 gaming headsets, Audeze has announced its new Maxwell wireless model that starts at $299 with support for PlayStation, Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch, and mobile — everything but Xbox. There’s an Xbox version that costs $30 more and makes up for some of the cost increase with a Dolby Atmos license that activates automatically. It’ll start shipping in late December 2022.

Audeze typically makes big promises about great audio quality, which is fine because the products usually back them up. The Maxwell has 90mm planar magnetic drivers, which are slightly smaller than the ones in its 2021 Penrose headset. Through them, you can listen to hi-res audio when connected via the included USB-C cable or when you’re wirelessly tethered to its USB-C dongle.

Google is merging the team it has working on the navigation app Waze into the same group that oversees Google Maps, the company has announced. The Wall Street Journal reports that the move is not expected to mark the end of Waze as a separate service, and no layoffs are planned as part of the reorganization. However, Waze CEO Neha Parikh is expected to leave the role after the transition, and the move is expected to reduce overlapping work, the WSJ notes.

Going forward, Waze’s 500 employees are expected to be a part of Google’s Geo organization, which oversees Maps alongside Earth and Street View.

Dyson has released additional details for its Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones, the company’s first audio product we got to test earlier this year. On a new webpage dedicated to the unreleased headphones, Dyson has officially provided the full specifications, alongside a March release date for the US market and an eye-watering price of $949.

So, what are you getting for your money? The Dyson Zone supports Bluetooth 5.0 and features a 3.5mm audio jack and USB-C port for charging. Dyson claims the headphones can achieve up to 50 hours of battery life for audio-only operation, which is reduced to a maximum of four hours for combined air purification and audio. Dyson does not specify if these runtimes are with ANC enabled. The headphones are wireless and feature a 2,600mAh lithium-ion battery, with Dyson claiming that the device can be fully charged in three hours.

Depending on how you look at it, this is either a cautionary tale about how small and entwined the crypto world is or a cautionary tale about employing journalists. 

When CoinDesk published a blockbuster scoop on Alameda Research’s balance sheet, it also shot its own parent company in the foot. That story kicked off a series of events that led to FTX filing for bankruptcy. The amount of missing money was so big that the story breached the containment wall around crypto shenanigans and became a genuine mainstream news story, the kind my landlady asks me about. The problem for CoinDesk is that some of the money that’s locked in FTX belongs to their sister company, and that’s just adding to their parent company’s woes.

Ramesh Balwani has been sentenced to 155 months, or just under 13 years, in prison, according to The New York Times. Like his former business partner, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, he’s due another three years of supervised release after he gets out. Balwani will have to surrender to custody on March 15th.

In July, Balwani, also known as Sunny, was convicted on 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his actions while he was president and COO of Theranos. Unlike Holmes, who was found guilty of only defrauding investors, Balwani was found guilty of deceiving both investors and patients.

It’s a dangerous endeavor to boot up Elden Ring right now. There’s a short lull in the holiday release season, so it would be very, very easy for me to be lured back to the Lands Between, where I spent over 100 hours mastering katanas and the art of glintstone pebbling things to death from a great distance. In fact, Elden Ring wasted no time reminding me why it will likely be named Game of the Year tomorrow at the Game Awards because the second I loaded in after months of neglect, I almost got myself killed in the dumbest, funniest way. As I was reacclimating myself to the controls, I accidentally aggro’d one of those Ohioan T-rex dogs off-screen and had to quickly remember which button was dodge, then remember the nuances of dodging properly before the thing could eat me to death. There is no equivalent to the chaotic joy that comes with hilarious near-death experiences in this game.

But that joy soured immediately once I got into my true purpose for booting up the game: Elden Ring has added new hairstyles (and a new PVP combat arena, too). My antipathy for Elden Ring’s lack of diverse hairstyles is well noted. And I thought, with this patch, Bandai Namco and the folks at FromSoftware would throw me a nice 4c-style bone so my Astrologer can at least have a decent ’do when she — eventually — takes down the Elden Beast.