Month: August 2022

Enlarge / The current-model Sonos Sub. The Sub Mini would be smaller and have a cylindrical shape. (credit: Sonos)

The launch of the Sub Mini—an anticipated addition to Sonos' connected audio lineup—appears to have been delayed, the company revealed after its quarterly earnings report this week.

The device was expected just about any day now. But Sonos confirmed to The Verge on Wednesday that it has "decided to push an anticipated product launch from Q4 ’22 into Q1 ’23," and it's all but certain that said product is the Sub Mini. That places its launch in a window between October and December of the calendar year 2022.

The Sonos Sub Mini was apparently first leaked accidentally in the Sonos mobile app. In November, a Reddit user took screenshots of references to its name and general shape. Later, The Verge gained access to images and details about the device, describing it as a cheaper, smaller, cylindrical younger sibling to Sonos' pricy, rectangular Sonos Sub.

Enlarge (credit: Disney)

Since its launch in 2019, Disney+ has only slightly jumped in subscription costs for both monthly and annual fees. If active subscribers don't check their account settings when a major Disney+ change goes live later this year, they won't notice a difference in their bills, as the streaming service's "base" price will remain $7.99 per month.

Starting in December, however, anyone who sticks to that Disney+ tier will see a new "feature" on the service: advertisements. Disney+ will follow the likes of Netflix and HBO Max, which announced post-launch pricing shake-ups to add advertisements to their programming as a way to offer lower-priced tiers while raising rates for other ad-free subscriptions.

That means Disney+ will also see its existing ad-free tier increase in price, starting on December 8, to $10.99 per month or $109.99 per year, a 37.5 percent increase. Technically, long-term Disney+ subscribers will see a price hike at the lowest tier, as well, as the existing $79.99 per year option ($6.66/mo) will be discontinued. If you want to pre-pay to save, you'll have to do so at the no-advertisements tier.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Carol Yepes)

Elon Musk's lawyers want to question the Twitter employees responsible for calculating spam-account estimates, and they claim that Twitter is hiding these potential witnesses, Bloomberg reported yesterday.

Musk on Wednesday filed a proposed order requesting that Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen McCormick compel Twitter "to produce discovery from specific custodians." Musk provided further details on the request in a letter to McCormick that was filed under seal as part of the case in which Twitter seeks to enforce the $44 billion merger contract that Musk is trying to exit.

While the letter isn't public yet, Bloomberg cited "people familiar with the allegations" to describe the letter's contents. "Musk contends the social media company isn't producing the names of employees specifically responsible for evaluating how much of Twitter's customer base is made up of spam and robot accounts... Musk's lawyers have asked the judge in the case to force Twitter to identify the workers so the defense can get their records and question them," Bloomberg wrote.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Through the pandemic, OnlyFans took over the online adult entertainment world to become a billion-dollar top dog, projected to earn five times more net revenue in 2022 than in 2020. As OnlyFans’ business grew, content creators on rival platforms complained that social media sites like Facebook and Instagram were blocking their content but seemingly didn’t block OnlyFans with the same fervor, creating an unfair advantage. OnlyFans' mounting success amid every other platform's demise seemed to underscore its mysterious edge.

As adult entertainers outside of OnlyFans’ content stream looked for answers to their declining revenue, they realized that Meta had not only allegedly targeted their accounts to be banned for posting supposedly inappropriate content but seemingly also for suspected terrorist activity. The more they dug into why they had been branded as terrorists, the more they suspected that OnlyFans paid Meta to put the mark on their heads—resulting in account bans that went past Facebook and Instagram and spanned popular social media apps across the Internet.

Now, Meta has been hit with multiple class action lawsuits alleging that senior executives at Meta accepted bribes from OnlyFans to shadow-ban competing adult entertainers by placing them on a "terrorist blacklist." Meta claims the suspected scheme is “highly implausible,” and that it's more likely that OnlyFans beat its rivals in the market through successful strategic moves, like partnering with celebrities. However, lawyers representing three adult entertainers suing Meta say the owner of Facebook and Instagram will likely have to hand over documents to prove it.

Enlarge / Intel's as-yet-unreleased Arc A750 Limited Edition card. The "Limited Edition" GPUs appear to be reference models along the lines of Nvidia's Founder's Edition cards and AMD's first-party graphics cards. (credit: Intel)

Intel still hasn't announced a release date for its Arc dedicated graphics cards, but the company has conducted a PR offensive over the last few weeks to set expectations and preview how the cards are stacking up. In a video and accompanying post today, company representatives Ryan Shrout and Tom Peterson compared the upcoming Arc A750 card to Nvidia's RTX 3060 in a few dozen DirectX12 and Vulkan games They demonstrated that the card is usually able to keep up with the most popular member of the RTX 3000 GPU family.

In a series of tests at 1080p and 1440p, Intel's tests show that the A750 usually comes within a few percent of the RTX 3060's performance, sometimes overperforming (Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Microsoft Flight Simulator), sometimes underperforming (Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Deathloop), and sometimes roughly matching Nvidia's average frame rates (DOTA 2, Hitman 3, Death Stranding). Average FPS is just one way to measure game performance—crucially, Intel didn't provide any minimum or 1 percent low frame rates, which can have more of an impact on how smooth your game feels when you're playing it. But if you take these tests at face value, the Arc A750 does at least appear to be a viable midrange GPU competitor.

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  Intel ran tests in a series of DirectX12 games and compared their average FPS performance to the Nvidia RTX 3060. [credit: Intel ]

Of course, there is one important metric in which Intel's Arc GPU can't compete with Nvidia's: The RTX 3060 is a graphics card you can go out and buy and install in your PC today, and the Arc A750 isn't. Rumors out of this year's SIGGRAPH conference, where Intel has been giving technical demos of its GPUs and announcing a few workstation-oriented Arc Pro products, suggest that we could still see an Arc hardware launch by the end of the summer. But officially, the company still has no news to share about a concrete launch window.

Enlarge / FTC Chair Lina Khan said the commission intends to act on commercial data collection, which happens at "a massive scale and in a stunning array of contexts." (credit: Getty Images)

The Federal Trade Commission has kicked off the rulemaking process for privacy regulations that could restrict online surveillance and punish bad data-security practices. It's a move that some privacy advocates say is long overdue, as similar Congressional efforts face endless uncertainty.

The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, approved on a 3-2 vote along partisan lines, was spurred by commercial data collection, which occurs at "a massive scale and in a stunning array of contexts," FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a press release. Companies surveil online activity, friend networks, browsing and purchase history, location data, and other details; analyze it with opaque algorithms; and sell it through "the massive, opaque market for consumer data," Khan said.

Companies can also fail to secure that data or use it to make services addictive to children. They can also potentially discriminate against customers based on legally protected statuses like race, gender, religion, and age, the FTC said. What's more, the release said, some companies make taking part in their "commercial surveillance" required for service or charge a premium to avoid it, employing dark patterns to keep the systems in place.