Month: March 2021

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images)

Twitter is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, alleging that a probe Paxton launched into its business is an act of retaliation against the platform's choice to ban the account of former US President Donald Trump.

The suit (PDF) accuses Paxton of using his office to "intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter's exercise of its First Amendment rights."

The conflict all goes back to the January 6 events at the US Capitol. At the height of the chaos, while a mob was actively storming the building, Trump took to Twitter to reiterate his false claims of electoral fraud and seemingly egg on the violence. In the following hours, Twitter deleted three tweets and suspended Trump's account for 12 hours.

Enlarge / Adobe Photoshop in macOS Big Sur. (credit: Samuel Axon)

After a multi-month beta period, software company Adobe has publicly released a version of its Photoshop image-editing software that runs natively on M1 Macs like the late-2020 models of the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and 13-inch MacBook Pro.

In a blog post announcing the release, Adobe's Pam Clark claims that Photoshop will now run "significantly" faster on M1 Macs. Here's a snippet:

Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems. Our tests covered a broad scope of activities, including opening and saving files, running filters, and compute-heavy operations like Content-Aware Fill and Select Subject, which all feel noticeably faster. Our early benchmarking also shows that some operations are substantially faster with the new chip.

Naturally, Adobe says it plans to continue optimizing and improving the Apple Silicon version of Photoshop. The blog post notes a couple features that didn't make it to this initial public release for the architecture: "Invite to Edit Cloud Documents" and "Present Syncing." There are a few others that aren't named in the post, but the post does point out that they're mostly features that were only recently added to other Photoshop builds.

Enlarge / In 2018, Jeff Bezos' kids taped an Echo to a Roomba. Foreshadowing? (credit: Jeff Bezos)

In a paywalled report released Wednesday morning, Insider broke the news of massive employee teams and an uncertain future for Amazon's Vesta home robot.

Widespread reports of Vesta—named after the Roman goddess of home and hearth—began emerging in April 2018, by which time it was already a years-old project. Its final form is still uncertain, but there are prototypes now—one being described as "the size of two small cats" with multiple cameras, a screen, and a mic. Insider's sources described it as a Fire tablet on wheels, with the ability to move around the house and respond to voice commands.

That design could still be subject to change—which wouldn't likely be the first time, as the project has suffered repeated delays since inception. Insider's sources didn't seem too clear on what the "real" function of Vesta would be and offered a shotgun blast of ideas. One such idea was a "mobile meeting platform for the home office"—allowing the user to wander around their home while followed by the screen, camera, and mic on wheels. They also floated plug-ins to measure temperature, humidity, and air quality, a camera on a waist-high retractable pole that could find lost items using machine-learning vision, and a small compartment to carry things with.