Month: November 2023

Enlarge / Hulu content may do a not-so-secret-invasion of Disney+. (credit: Marvel)

An app combining the libraries of Disney+ and Hulu will launch in late March 2024, Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger said in a Q4 2023 earnings call on Wednesday night. The full app's release will follow the beta that launches in December.

Iger told investors that the beta will be available to US subscribers bundling their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions and will give "parents time to set up profiles and parental controls that work best for their families ahead of the official launch," as per a transcription from The Motley Fool.

We first learned that Disney was planning a combined Disney+ and Hulu app in May when Disney owned two-thirds of Hulu. At the time, Iger called the unified app a "local progression" of Disney's consumer portfolio that would streamline content, boost audience engagement, and impress advertisers. Disney also pointed to potential cheaper customer acquisition costs. Wednesday's update follows Disney's announcement last week that it's buying the last third of Hulu, giving Disney total ownership.

Enlarge / Mood lighting orb not included. (credit: Valve)

Given the 2021 launch of Nintendo's Switch OLED, it might seem a little weird that we've had to wait nearly two years after the original Steam Deck launch for today's announcement of an OLED-equipped version. In interviews surrounding that announcement, though, Valve says an OLED screen was never in the cards for the original Steam Deck, given the timeline involved.

Valve designer Jeremy Selan tells IGN that "the display technology for the HDR display, we kicked that off prior to even having shipped the first [Steam Deck]." Selan added to Rock Paper Shotgun that work on this OLED update started "basically immediately" after the original unit was released.

"We knew we needed a better display, even from day one," Selan told RPS. "It just takes multiple years, it takes a lot of money."

Enlarge / People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on June 23, 2022 in New York City. Sunglasses would have been a good idea for this year's ApeFest. (credit: Getty | Noam Galai)

Lamps emitting ultraviolet light in the corner of a Bored Ape NFT event in Hong Kong last Saturday are the likely cause of severe eye and skin injuries among attendees, according to Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and host of the event.

The injuries reportedly occurred during "ApeFest," a three-day annual meet-up of people who own Bored Ape NFTs—which sell for tens of thousands of dollars and, amid the 2021 NFT craze, saw highly inflated prices of hundreds of thousands of dollars. However regretful, owners of the cryptocurrency-backed, digital images of nonchalant cartoon primates are automatic members of the BAYC. This year, their annual club event ran from November 3–5 and promised "mayhem" and "One big night full of surprises."

Soon after an ApeFest party Saturday night, some attendees reported severe pain and burning sensations in their eyes, as well as vision problems and skin irritation, according to Yuga Labs. Doctors and others on the Internet quickly speculated that the cause was UV exposure and photokeratitis (aka snow blindness, arc eye, or welder's flash), which is akin to a sunburn on the cornea (the clear tissue covering the front of your eye) due to exposure to UV light. The New York Times reported as of Tuesday that the number of attendees injured was over 20.

Enlarge / Infotainment system in a 2016 Ford Escape. (credit: Getty Images | Todd Korol )

A federal appeals court rejected lawsuits that alleged five major carmakers violated a Washington state privacy law. The lawsuits centered on car infotainment systems that store text messages in a way that potentially allows the messages to be retrieved by law enforcement using specialized hardware and software. The rulings in the carmakers' favor came in cases against Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

A three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit unanimously upheld US District Court rulings that dismissed the five class-action lawsuits, which were almost identical. The appeals court ruled in Ford's favor on October 27, then issued rulings upholding the dismissals of the other four cases on Tuesday this week.

We'll cover the Ford ruling here since the other decisions don't go into the same level of detail, and the arguments were similar in all five cases. The simple version is that the cases failed because the plaintiffs' data stayed in the car systems and apparently was never transmitted to law enforcement, Ford, or anyone else.

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  Gmail's reply bar. A very strange interface for email. [credit: Android Police ]

Does Gmail want to be an instant messaging client? Last month the popular webmail app shipped an emoji reactions bar in the mobile app, where a single tap would send a new email with your emoji response. Now, a wild new UI experiment spotted by Android Police goes another step further: a quick reply bar that looks just like instant messaging input.

Rather than the usual input block you get for writing paragraphs of overly formal text, this new Gmail experiment has a one-line input bar at the bottom for replies. A drop down just above it lets you pick from the usual "reply," "reply all," or "Forward" options. Besides that you get an attachment and send button. An "expand" button will presumably launch the usual compose interface.

So far this seems to be an extremely rare test that only one person has gotten, so it's not necessarily going to roll out to everyone. Given the recent emoji launch, though, Gmail certainly seems jealous of its instant-messaging cousins.

Enlarge / Lumafield's blog shared this image showing CT scans of three earbuds. The left is a real AirPods Pro (2nd Gen). The wire-riddled two on the right are fakes. (credit: Lumafield)

Whether they're products pretending to be made by a brand or devices claiming to be something they're not, (like a microSD card posing as an SSD), fraudulent electronics pose a threat to unsuspecting shoppers' wallets and, at times, their safety. With their popularity and high prices, scammers often target Apple products. But what's actually inside those faux Apple devices?

To find out, Lumafield busted out its $75,000 CT scanner to illustrate what people get when they end up with counterfeit MacBook chargers or knockoff AirPods Pro.

Lumafield makes industrial CT scanners and software. Lately, it has been using its Neptune scanner to examine electronics, like Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable. This week, Lumafield provided CT scans (which you can play with via Lumafield's online Voyager software) of the AirPods Pro 2nd Generation (here), two counterfeits (here and here), as well as a look at Apple's 85 W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter (here) and a fake (here).

Enlarge / Lumafield's blog shared this image showing CT scans of three earbuds. The left is a real AirPods Pro (2nd Gen). The wire-riddled two on the right are fakes. (credit: Lumafield)

Whether they're products pretending to be made by a brand or devices claiming to be something they're not, (like a microSD card posing as an SSD), fraudulent electronics pose a threat to unsuspecting shoppers' wallets and, at times, their safety. With their popularity and high prices, scammers often target Apple products. But what's actually inside those faux Apple devices?

To find out, Lumafield busted out its $75,000 CT scanner to illustrate what people get when they end up with counterfeit MacBook chargers or knockoff AirPods Pro.

Lumafield makes industrial CT scanners and software. Lately, it has been using its Neptune scanner to examine electronics, like Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable. This week, Lumafield provided CT scans (which you can play with via Lumafield's online Voyager software) of the AirPods Pro 2nd Generation (here), two counterfeits (here and here), as well as a look at Apple's 85 W MagSafe 2 Power Adapter (here) and a fake (here).