Wednesday’s top tech news: Section 230 on trial

Netflix is getting into football. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced a new sports docuseries, Quarterback, that will focus on three NFL quarterbacks: Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs (who just collected his second Super Bowl win and second Super Bowl MVP award); Kirk Cousins of the Minnesota Vikings; and Marcus Mariota of the Atlanta Falcons. The series is set to debut this summer.

“For the first time ever, the NFL allowed quarterbacks to be mic’d up for every single game of a season,” Netflix wrote in a post about the series. “The upcoming show will feature behind-the-scenes access to some of the biggest moments of the season, as Mahomes set an NFL record for total offense on his way to winning the league and Super Bowl MVP awards; Cousins engineered the greatest comeback in NFL history and led the Minnesota Vikings to an NFC North Division title; and Mariota took over as the starting quarterback in his first season with the Atlanta Falcons.”

The US Copyright Office has reconsidered the copyright protection it granted last fall to Kristina Kashtanova for her comic book Zarya of the Dawn, reports Reuters. It featured pictures created by feeding text prompts to Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generator.

According to this letter (PDF) sent to her lawyer by Robert Kasunic, the associate Register of Copyrights, the US Copyright Office has decided that Kashtanova “is the author of the Work’s text as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements.”

If you typically access your Hotmail or Outlook account using the Gmail app, there’s a reason you probably didn’t see any new emails last night: Google had an issue syncing with Microsoft’s servers. According to Google’s status page, the company had been working to figure out what was wrong since around noon ET on Wednesday, before fixing it several hours later.

At 9:57PM Wednesday evening, Google said it had resolved the issue. “The Gmail sync issue with Microsoft servers when using IMAP is now resolved. Thank you for your patience while we resolved the problem.”

You can now try out the AI features of the Notion note-taking app, which are meant to help you write and refine text, summarize key points in existing notes, and generate task lists, according to an announcement from the company. Notion started testing its AI offering in November, but now it’s available to anyone with an account, and there’s no waitlist required.

While the AI integrated into the app can write articles from whole cloth (I asked it to write a blog post about the Notion AI announcement, and it spat out 385 words, only some of which were accurate), the company is pitching it more as a “thought partner.” In its announcement post, the company says one of the features alpha testers used the most was asking it to improve text they had written. For example, you can highlight text and ask Notion to rewrite it in a different tone, use simpler language, or simply pad out or cut down a sentence.

Nvidia just reported its fourth quarter and full-year earnings, and it’s not exactly rosy — at least compared to pandemic highs. Last year, Nvidia had record quarterly revenue of $7.64 billion, including $3 billion in pure profit. For Q4 of its fiscal 2023, the company forecast that it would see just $6 billion in quarterly revenue in today’s earnings results, and that’s just about where it landed: $6.05 billion in revenue, down 21 percent, of which $1.4 billion was profit, down 53 percent. For the full year, it raked in $26.92 billion, almost identical to last year, though profit was down 55 percent.

Remember: in 2021, $5 billion in revenue a quarter was a new Nvidia record. Now it’s the status quo: the company says it’s expecting to see $6.5 billion next quarter, too.

Realme, a subbrand of Chinese phone maker Oppo, might be the first Android OEM to clone Apple’s Dynamic Island, a deleted tweet from a company executive and a leaked animation suggest. It comes at a time when Apple seems like it might prove that Dynamic Island is worth copying, as the mostly ornamental UI fixture is finally getting some real third-party support.

This doesn’t come as a major surprise. As 9to5Google points out, Realme basically told everyone it wanted to clone Dynamic Island back in September. It appears that a feature called the “Mini Capsule” has been in the works since then. A photo in the removed tweet indeed shows a pill-shaped UI element at the top of the screen with Oppo’s SuperVOOC charging logo displayed. The animation, shared by reliable leaker OnLeaks via Smartprix, shows the capsule expanding and collapsing to display charging status information. Cute!

Razer has launched a new Blade 15 model refreshed with Intel’s 13th Gen processors and Nvidia’s RTX 4000 GPUs.

The company announced a 16-inch Razer Blade a few weeks ago, and some assumed that it would replace the 2022 Razer Blade 15. The Blade 16 threw a number of new features into the Blade 15’s formula — most notably, a 16:10 Mini LED dual-mode display.

Tesla announced a new engineering headquarters in California, saying it would take over office space in Palo Alto formerly occupied by Hewlett Packard. Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the announcement Wednesday alongside California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who called the announcement “another proof point of the renewable energy vibrancy that is California.”

Tesla was founded in San Carlos, California in 2003 and has called the state home for most of its 20 years of existence. In October 2021, the company abruptly moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in recognition of its new Gigafactory that was under construction in the state. Tesla also has Gigafactories in Nevada, Berlin, Buffalo, and Shanghai.

NBA Top Shot developer Dapper Labs and its CEO, Roham Gharegozlou, will face a lawsuit accusing the company of selling unregistered securities in the form of its “Moments,” which are non-fungible tokens for sports fans.

Despite Dappers’ lawyer’s claims that “Basketball cards are not securities. Pokémon cards are not securities. Baseball cards are not securities. Common sense says so. The law says so. And, courts say so,” Judge Victor Marrero decided to let the case go forward.

Mercedes-Benz unveiled the 2024 E-Class’ interior, and while its cabin is not a radical departure in design from existing Benzes, the new E-Class is packed full of interesting and advanced features that will influence the rest of the lineup — like a selfie camera and built-in apps for TikTok and Zoom.

One of the major upgrades in the 2024 E-Class is the Superscreen, which combines the large standard central touchscreen with a second display in front of the passenger. (Unlike the EQS’s Hyperscreen, the digital gauge cluster remains a standalone display.) It looks beautiful, with slim air vents that curve around the top of the screen and a row of touch-capacitive buttons sitting below the center display.

Over the last few years, video games have penetrated pop culture in a big way. Everyone seems to want a piece: the most popular franchises, like Halo, The Last of Us, and League of Legends, all have hit TV shows, while Netflix is trying to make gaming a pillar of its future. So many gaming properties are being adapted for film and TV that it can be hard to keep track. Nintendo, too, has gotten in on the action. With Switch sales still going strong, the company just opened its second theme park attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood and will soon be releasing the first Super Mario Bros. animated movie. For Nintendo’s leadership, this shift into broader entertainment was a natural one.

“I think people view Nintendo as a gaming company,” explains Shinya Takahashi, Nintendo’s senior managing executive officer. “But we have always thought of ourselves as an entertainment company.”

Amazon has closed its $3.9 billion acquisition of membership-based healthcare provider One Medical, which was originally announced last summer. For the subscription (usually $199 annually but currently discounted to $144 per year), One Medical offers members an app, 24/7 access to on-demand telehealth services over video, and guaranteed same- or next-day appointments available through more than 125 offices.

The FTC, which is reportedly considering leveling an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, has been investigating this deal as well as others (like iRobot) made by the company. FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar said to CNBC that the investigation into this acquisition is ongoing, and “The commission will continue to look at possible harms to competition created by this merger as well as possible harms to consumers that may result from Amazon’s control and use of sensitive consumer health information held by One Medical.”

Microsoft is expanding the availability of its Friends & Family plan for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to six additional countries following its initial pilot in Ireland and Columbia last year. The Friends & Family plan is now also available in New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Hungary, Israel, and Sweden and allows Xbox Game Pass members to share benefits with up to four other friends or family members.

Each individual on a Friends & Family membership receives their own unique access to the entire Game Pass Ultimate library across Xbox and PC, EA Play, and other benefits like exclusive member discounts. Pricing for each new region will vary and has not been publicly disclosed by Microsoft. For context, though, the plan is currently available in Ireland for €21.99 per month (roughly $23) compared to the typical cost of €12.99 per month ($14.99) for a standard Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. That works out to less than €5 per month per person to share all the usual Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefits.

At this point, it’s fair to assume that something went wrong with Spotify HiFi. Two years ago today, during the company’s Stream On event, Spotify announced a new streaming tier that would let customers enjoy lossless, CD-quality audio from the leading subscription music service.

Spotify felt the news was worthy of some star power and filmed a promotional video for HiFi with Billie Eilish and Finneas. It remains on the company’s YouTube page, and you can still read the blog post saying upgraded sound would arrive “later this year” — meaning by the end of 2021.

No Man’s Sky is one of many titles you can play on the now-released PlayStation VR2, but the game’s virtual reality mode on all VR platforms is getting a big overhaul as part of the new 4.1 “Fractal” update, developer Hello Games announced Wednesday.

One of the biggest changes with the Fractal update is that the game’s HUD and UI have been redesigned for VR. That means you’ll be able to look through your multitool’s options in a menu embedded in the multitool, for example, or look at your inventory on a wrist-mounted display.

Today, Sony is officially launching its PlayStation VR2 headset. It costs $550, and you can read our PSVR 2 review right here. But there are a few key experiences that Sony didn’t distribute to reviewers ahead of time — like a day-one patch for Gran Turismo 7 that makes almost the entire racing game playable in virtual reality.

I’m beginning to think that was a mistake, because GT7 is easily one of the best things I’ve tried in this headset, and I’m saying that having never played GT7 before. I’m certain a number of gearheads will buy a PlayStation VR2 for this game alone — and quite possibly a PS5, a steering wheel, and a set of pedals to go with it.

On November 21st, Elon Musk gathered Twitter’s remaining employees at its San Francisco headquarters to tell them that, after forcing out roughly two-thirds of the workforce in a matter of weeks, layoffs were over. He keeps laying people off anyway.

Dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering departments were laid off last week, including one of Musk’s direct reports who was managing engineering for Twitter’s ads business, according to company sources and social media posts from affected employees seen by The Verge. This means Musk has done at least three rounds of layoffs since his promise to stop doing them in November. Meanwhile, he has given a directive internally to revamp how ads are targeted in Twitter’s main feed within a week — part of his plan to fix what he has publically called “the worst ad relevance on Earth.” (The Information first reported that fresh cuts hit the sales team last week.)