After months of incremental price increases, Tesla appears to be reversing course with some massive price cuts. With Tesla having dissolved its PR department, no official reason for the cuts was given, but the company’s recent disappointing financial performance could provide some clues.
Elsewhere, British postal service Royal Mail is continuing to deal with an ongoing cyber incident, which now appears to be a ransomware attack. The carrier says it’s currently unable to send deliveries abroad, and is warning customers to hold onto their packages for now.
And finally, Nvidia has released an interesting new feature for use with its graphics cards that can make it look as though you’re looking into your camera when your eyes are actually pointed elsewhere. It’s beta software and a little buggy in our experience, but for the low, low price of “free” (well, I guess technically “included with the price of an Nvidia GPU”) it’s worth having a play around with.
For now, here’s a silly tweet:
Example: Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Friday, January 13th, 2023.
Jan 14, 2023, 4:27 AM UTCRichard Lawler
Spotify says it’s recovered after an outage
For a few hours on Friday night Spotify couldn’t make the music play.
- R
Jan 13, 2023, 11:43 PM UTCRichard Lawler, Dan Seifert and 1 more
What can we expect if Apple adds touchscreens to the MacBook Pro?On the Vergecast we discuss the possibility of touchscreen Macs, and what it all really means for pressing confirmation buttons, zooming in on maps, or maybe using an iPad app or two.
Jan 13, 2023, 11:36 PM UTCTom Warren
Microsoft’s fix for disappearing Windows application shortcuts doesn’t bring them back
A Microsoft Defender for Endpoint attack surface reduction (ASR) rule tagged real app shortcuts in the Start Menu and taskbar as malicious. It’s fixed now, but the shortcuts won’t come back automatically.
Jan 13, 2023, 9:48 PM UTCMitchell Clark
YouTube’s testing free ad-supported TV channels
The feature could help the company compete with other free or low-cost streaming services.
Jan 13, 2023, 9:27 PM UTCVictoria Song
Strava knows its messy price hike is confusing
While this is the first price hike for the platform in over a decade, the rollout is unnecessarily convoluted.
- RTwitter’s “open source” algorithm could be revealed next month.
According to its owner, without commenting further on API issues, Tesla pricing, or the new “for you” look for timelines.
Adi Robertson has explained the potential issues already:
Twitter’s algorithm also won’t explain how any given tweet was prioritized unless Twitter releases a huge amount of supplementary data, nor would it necessarily illuminate the rationale behind any human moderation that intersects with it. And it would be incredibly vulnerable to people who want to make bad-faith claims by taking pieces of it out of context, willfully misinterpreting them or sowing conspiracy theories about them.
Jan 13, 2023, 8:05 PM UTCJustine Calma
A Swiss company says it has pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere and stored it underground
Climeworks says a third-party auditor has verified its carbon removal for Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify.
Jan 13, 2023, 7:09 PM UTCJay Peters and Mitchell Clark
Twitter’s For You timeline appears on desktop browsers now, too
Twitter just rebranded the algorithmic timeline on iOS, but now that change is available on desktop browsers as well. The star icon, sadly, is gone.
Jan 13, 2023, 7:05 PM UTCAndrew J. Hawkins
Judge rejects Elon Musk’s request to move his upcoming securities fraud trial to Texas
Musk’s lawyers claim that a jury pool from San Francisco will be biased against the billionaire in the aftermath of his $44 billion takeover of Twitter. But the judge didn’t find that argument persuasive.
- RFrom “Popeyes kid” meme to Popeyes NIL athlete.
At nine years old, Dieunerst Collin entered meme immortality via this 2013 Vine clip comparing the side-eyeing youth to Lil Terrio, and since he was at a Popeyes, he became the “Popeyes Kid.”
Now Collin is a redshirt freshman at center on the football team for Lake Erie College, and — with a little pressure from social media — has signed a “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL) sponsorship deal with Popeyes.
- RSome good Snap juice.
As Ash Parrish describes this interview with Marvel Snap project lead and former lead designer of Hearthstone, Ben Brode.
Other than commenting on item prices and the upcoming PvP mode, he also discussed its rank system and how it delevels players every four weeks:
You know... I’ve never worked on a game that did not completely redo the rank system multiple times during live development. I imagine we will continue to tweak our rank system.
Jan 13, 2023, 5:54 PM UTCMitchell Clark and Jess Weatherbed
YouTube creators are ducking outraged by its swearing policy
The company says it’s ‘making some adjustments’ to address the concerns.
Jan 13, 2023, 5:09 PM UTCAllison Johnson
Clear Calling on the Pixel 7 is like noise cancellation for hard-to-hear phone calls
The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro recently got a new calling feature that makes it easier to hear the person on the other end when they’re somewhere noisy. And it actually works.
Jan 13, 2023, 4:23 PM UTCBarbara Krasnoff
How to use your phone to find hidden cameras
If the camera is using an infrared light, your phone can pick up what your eyes can’t.
Jan 13, 2023, 3:30 PM UTCCharles Pulliam-Moore
The Last of Us’ co-creators say a TV show was always ‘lurking inside the game’
HBO’s The Last of Us is a faithful adaptation, but co-creator Neil Druckmann and showrunner Craig Mazin say that the game’s story was truly made for TV.
Jan 13, 2023, 3:00 PM UTCVictoria Song
Apollo Neuro review: a case study in the wellness Wild West
I can’t prove or disprove whether this wearable impacted my stress levels, but wellness gadgets need to be better about using science in marketing.
- R
Jan 13, 2023, 2:47 PM UTCRichard Lawler, Alex Cranz and 1 more
The touchscreen Mac, and other Rumours.With Nilay roaming the wilderness of upstate New York, I talked to Alex and Dan as we imagined the possibility of Macs with OLED screens that you can touch and tried to figure out what MicroLED would do for us.
We also previewed Samsung’s next Unpacked event and attempted to use unlicensed music with some help from Siri.
Jan 13, 2023, 1:53 PM UTCAndrew Webster
Get a crash course in horror in the new trailer for Netflix’s Junji Ito anime
The show premieres on January 19th and features adaptations of a number of Ito classics.
Jan 13, 2023, 10:20 AM UTCJon Porter
Royal Mail’s ‘cyber incident’ appears to be a ransomware attack
The British postal service has been unable to send items internationally since Wednesday, after an attack which appears to have used tools from infamous Russia-linked group LockBit.
Jan 13, 2023, 9:46 AM UTCTom Warren
Tesla cuts prices in the US and Europe by up to 20 percent
There are steep discounts on the Model Y, with five-seater versions now qualifying for the federal tax credit.
Jan 12, 2023, 11:48 PM UTCMitchell Clark
Nvidia Broadcast can now deepfake your eyes to make you look at the camera
The Eye Contact feature relies on AI to simulate what your eyes would look like if you were looking at the camera instead of elsewhere.
