Tuesday’s top tech news: a trio of breakages

The PlayStation VR2 headset can track the accompanying Sense controllers thanks to a bunch of IR LEDs hidden in the orb-shaped controllers, according to new teardown videos Sony posted Tuesday evening.

Under the Sense controller cover, the controller itself has a ring of 14 IR LEDs and three placed elsewhere for tracking, as shown in the Sense teardown video. “These infrared lights are used by the VR headset’s tracking camera to detect the controller’s position and orientation,” Sony’s Takeshi Igarashi, who also designed the DualSense controller, explains in the video. “The LEDs have been placed in optimal locations to ensure they are accurately detected no matter what direction the controller is facing.” And the cover on the controllers is even made with a material that “transmits the infrared light emitted internally to track the movement of the controller,” he says.

This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer.

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers. 

Zoox, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Amazon, said that its toaster-shaped driverless vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals was approved to drive on public roads with passengers in California. The company celebrated the milestone as the “first time in history a purpose-built robotaxi — without any manual controls — drove autonomously with passengers.”

Zoox is one of dozens of companies currently testing AVs on public roads in the Golden State. And while it trails behind competitors like Waymo and Cruise in the race to commercialize the technology, it is making advancements by introducing a new kind of vehicle to the road — one that lacks traditional controls and could hardly be described as a “car” in the modern sense of the word.

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I hope you all had a great weekend. Today, we have the final lineup for Hot Pod Summit next week, including a new headliner. Plus, Spotify’s new activist investor and Rihanna’s post-Super Bowl streaming spike. Let’s get into it!

Meta is updating Facebook’s ad transparency tools to better explain how it uses machine learning to decide which ads you see you.

Starting Tuesday, when you tap the “Why am I seeing this ad?” message on an ad, you’ll see the following information, according to a blog post from Meta’s Pedro Pavón:

This year’s Super Bowl LVII was the most-streamed Super Bowl yet, hitting an average of 7 million streams across the services showing the game. According to data Fox Sports obtained from Adobe Analytics, Super Bowl streams increased 18 percent from last year’s 6 million streams — and 103 percent over 2020, which saw just 3.4 million streams.

The 7 million streams included viewers watching the big game on NFL’s TV and mobile apps, NFL’s website, the NFL Plus streaming service, as well as on Fox’s apps and website. This data doesn’t account for co-viewing, or when multiple people watch a stream on the same device, and still represents a small fraction of the 113 million average viewers the game raked in on traditional TV.

The European Parliament has given its formal approval to new vehicle emissions standards that would effectively ban the widespread sale of combustion engine cars and vans in the 27-country bloc by 2035, the organization announced today. Three hundred forty members voted in favor of the rules, versus 279 against, and 21 abstained. An initial agreement on the new rules was reached last October, which calls for all cars and vans sold in the EU to emit zero CO2 emissions by the middle of next decade.

The rules still have a couple more stages to go through before becoming law. They need to be formally endorsed by the Council of the EU and be published in the EU Official Journal. But Reuters notes that final approval is expected to be given by March, meaning the world’s largest trading bloc and home to key automakers including Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz will soon officially be on track to almost completely phase out vehicles powered by combustion engines. 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, from director Peyton Reed, wants to make you laugh. But it also wants you to think it’s cool — kind of like a dad who doesn’t know how to relate to you now that you’re both adults who can recognize that he’s always sorta only had maybe one or two good bits. Quantumania knows those bits have worked in the past, and it gamely whips them out as part of the Ant-Man series’ most visually imaginative stories yet. But rather than coasting on its sense of dad-focused humor, Quantumania tries to switch things up a bit by mainlining a few doses of whatever psychedelics Doctor Strange has been brewing and inviting you to partake in a little madness that doesn’t always make sense.

Quantumania knows that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) has come such a long way since he first popped up in the MCU back in 2015 that more than a few people are going to need refreshers about who he is and where he’s been. But as it’s doing its best to fill you in on what Scott and Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) have been up to since becoming Avengers, you can immediately tell that Quantumania’s story is best experienced with its predecessors fresh in your mind.

Around this time last year, Google revealed it was working on a multiyear initiative to improve privacy and remodel ad tracking on Android phones, bringing the mobile platform in line with Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature for iOS. Following the release of an early developer preview last April, Google says the first beta for Privacy Sandbox on Android will start rolling out tomorrow to a limited number of Android 13 devices, allowing users and developers to test the new technology in the real world. Access to the beta will expand “over time,” and devices selected to participate will receive an Android notification informing users of their eligibility.

The Privacy Sandbox on Android is a set of tools that aim to create a new standard for how advertisers and websites access information about consumers without compromising user privacy. Android devices are currently assigned a unique user-resettable “Android Advertising ID,” which is used to track user behavior and build a personal advertising profile that can be used by app developers. The Privacy Sandbox aims to replace this advertising ID with privacy-preserving APIs, which Google claims will limit user data being shared with third parties and remove cross-app identifiers, while still supporting personalized ads.

Discord is already a beloved communications platform for YouTube and Twitch’s livestreaming communities, but now the company is taking its own first significant step into the livestreaming industry. Announced today, Discord has updated its Stage Channels feature to support video, screen sharing, and a text chat for viewers to interact with hosts and each other. The update is available now and is supported across all Discord desktop and mobile applications.

Stage Channels were first introduced as a live audio feature in March 2021, enabling users to broadcast conversations between designated speakers and moderators to a room of virtual listeners, much like Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse. Where Stage Channels were initially limited to audio-only broadcasts, this update brings the feature more in line with the interactive livestreaming experiences provided by platforms like YouTube or Twitch.

Hyundai and Kia are offering free software updates for millions of their cars in response to a rash of car thefts inspired by a viral social media challenge on TikTok.

The so-called “Kia Challenge” on the social media platform has led to hundreds of car thefts nationwide, including at least 14 reported crashes and eight fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Thieves known as “the Kia Boyz” would post instructional videos about how to bypass the vehicles’ security system using tools as simple as a USB cable.

Mitchell Baker is the chair and CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird email client, the Pocket newsreader, and a bunch of other interesting internet tools.

Now, as you all know, Decoder is secretly a podcast about org charts — maybe not so secretly — and Mozilla’s structure is really interesting. Mozilla itself is a nonprofit foundation, but it contains within it something called the Mozilla Corporation, which actually makes Firefox and the rest.

The Chromebook screen doesn’t rotate in tablet mode.

Hit Ctrl > Shift > Refresh, or fix it in Settings.

Who among us didn’t pick up a new pandemic hobby only to lose interest a couple of years later? Only OnePlus didn’t pick up furniture upcycling — instead, it’s spent the last few years trying to reinvent itself as a flagship phone maker rather than a flagship killer.

That didn’t really work, so the company is coming back around to a familiar formula: a phone with a big screen, a top-tier chipset, and a price low enough to undercut most of the flagship competition. 

Geekbench, the popular cross-platform benchmarking software, is getting a big update. According to its developer, Primate Labs, Geekbench 6 has new and updated tests that are meant to fully test modern hardware and apps using datasets that are more representative of the workloads you’ll see in the real world.

A lot of the changes from Geekbench 5, which was released in 2019, involve testing your computer with more data. Test photos have more megapixels, and there will be more of them for import tests. The maps and PDFs are bigger, and the device being tested will have to compile more code with Clang. The data has gotten some updates too, with the HTML and PDF workloads feature more modern designs.