Новости за 15.03.2022

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In the days since The Walt Disney Company first came under fire for giving money to the politicians behind Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, CEO Bob Chapek has apologized for initially having nothing to say, and he subsequently announced the corporation’s plans to “pause” its political donations in Florida for an undetermined amount of time. In the eyes of many of Disney’s queer employees, those steps are simply not enough, and now they’re taking action... Читать дальше...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Within the last year, Microsoft not only revealed a new generation of Windows, it fully dived in by launching Windows 11 last fall, and now it’s scheduled another preview event to discuss the “exciting future” of “Hybrid Work, Powered by Windows.” Set to take place on April 5th at 11AM ET, it will feature Windows exec Panos Panay showing off Microsoft’s security, productivity, and management features, both in the client and the cloud.

Astra’s LV0009 rocket ahead of today’s flight from Alaska. | Image: Astra

Space startup Astra successfully returned to launch today, a little more than a month after its last launch failed mid-flight. Taking off from Kodiak, Alaska, Astra’s LV0009 rocket deployed the satellites it was carrying into orbit for three commercial companies, marking the company’s first successful commercial mission.

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft says it has improved the performance of its Xbox Cloud Gaming service on the iPhone and iPad. The cloud game streaming service, formerly known as xCloud, first launched fully on iOS and iPadOS nearly a year ago, accessible from the Safari web browser. While the web browser version isn’t as fully featured as a dedicated app, Microsoft is now improving its performance for Apple’s mobile devices despite being unable to launch a standalone xCloud app.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Samsung is bringing some of the camera features that come with the flagship Galaxy S22 to older devices, the company announced on its site. The One UI 4.1 update will extend to a wide range of phones, including the Galaxy S20, Galaxy S21, Galaxy S10, Note 20, and a portion of the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip families.

Image: Google

Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service didn’t stick the landing, and it’s been a rough ride since. But today, at the Google for Games Summit, it feels like Stadia might be moving in a promising direction — one that gives both gamers and game developers a reason to pay attention. And the magic word is “free.” Free demos, free trials, free for developers to offer, and hopefully free of the friction that made Stadia a difficult investment to start.

Netflix

Former President Barack Obama is the surprise narrator of the upcoming Netflix documentary Our Great National Parks, a five-part series looking at wildlife around the world. The series was announced last February as part of a slate of programming that Barack and Michelle Obama are producing for Netflix via their Higher Ground Productions company — although the announcement didn’t mention that the former president would serve as host and narrator.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

You’re sitting in your office and decide to find out when your next appointment is. You pick up your phone and murmur quietly, “OK Google, when’s my next appointment?” And then, loud enough to be heard over the entire room, your Google Assistant announces, “Next up, you have an appointment with your urologist on September 3rd at 9AM.”

David Mamet, at the Rome Film Festival in 2016. | Photo by Ernesto Ruscio / Getty Images

David Mamet is known for plays like Glengarry Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow, films like The Spanish Prisoner and Heist, books like On Directing Film and The Wicked Son, and as of last week, a short story about a lost airplane pilot filed as a legal brief supporting social media regulation in Texas.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands, joined Vimeo 13 years ago as a student studying animation, back when it was still an indie creator platform. When van Baarle started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020, Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos — Patreon itself didn’t offer video hosting, and YouTube didn’t have the same features to protect her work, like controlling where her videos could be embedded. Читать дальше...

“I want to be the new mascot for The Verge.”

Rifftrax: The Game is a new party game that’s all about creating the most crowd-pleasing text-to-voice dub to overlay B-movie footage. It’s launching for the current and previous generation Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Nintendo Switch, and on Steam (for PC and macOS) for $9.99 on May 5th. This game was made in collaboration with RiffTrax, a group of expert B-movie commentators consisting of former Mystery Science Theater 3000 stars Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy. Читать дальше...

Marvel Studios

Unlike her fellow Jersey teens who insist that superheroes aren’t cool, Kamala Khan, the heroine of Marvel’s upcoming Ms. Marvel series, thinks capes are the flyest thing in the world. Naturally, she wants to become one of them herself, and in Ms. Marvel’s first trailer, the young girl’s wish starts to come true.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Howdy, team! I’m here, on a Tuesday. And what a day to have a platform, because now I can tell you to go watch / listen to the premiere of MUNA’s new song at 11:45AM ET. May we sob together. (The teaser made the music sound somewhat upbeat, but you really never know.)

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

There are few things as enjoyable as local multiplayer gaming, and nothing beats saving some coin on tech that doesn’t usually go on sale. The Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers are a prime example, costing $69.99 at Woot instead of its regular $79.99 price. Woot is running this deal until Sunday, March 20th, or until it sells out. The neon blue and red controller combo is not currently available, but the matching gray set is still for sale at this discounted price. Читать дальше...

CEO Matt Mullenweg on why he bets big on small companies

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DeepWell Digital Therapeutics

Devolver Digital founder Mike Wilson is partnering with medical device expert Ryan Douglas to launch DeepWell Digital Therapeutics, a video game company that will both develop games that can treat health conditions. The company will also help outside companies identify existing games that have therapeutic value, the founders say.

Power cords for bitcoin mining machines are plugged into electrical outlets at a mining facility operated by Bitmain Technologies Ltd. in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, on Friday, Aug. 11, 2017.  | Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A de facto ban on Bitcoin and Ether died in the European Union Parliament today. The controversial proposal attempted to clean up pollution from the most energy-inefficient cryptocurrencies. But even though the proposal failed, cryptocurrencies are still... Читать дальше...

One of many fast NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market. | Samsung

18 months ago, Microsoft revealed that one of the most important advancements in its new Xbox Series X console would be coming to PC — the ability to stream tremendous amounts of data from a blazing fast NVMe solid state drive to your GPU, instead of relying on your pesky CPU to decompress it first. The so-called “DirectStorage API” would let games load more detailed worlds, and load them more quickly than before.

“Facebook itself is not an innovative company,” said the former Nintendo boss. | Image: Bloomberg

Reggie Fils-Aimé (who led Nintendo of America before Bowser took over) isn’t impressed with the company formerly known as Facebook, or its idea of the metaverse. He lobbed a few fireballs in Mark Zuckerberg’s direction during an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang at South by Southwest over the weekend, saying that Meta isn’t innovative and that it bought or copied almost all of its interesting ideas. Читать дальше...

Playing Destiny on multiple platforms? Here’s what you need to know | Image: Bungie

If you’re playing Destiny 2 on more than one platform, enabling cross-save allows you to maintain your progression regardless of which platform you’re playing on, meaning you can finally move your Guardians, with all of their loot, to a different platform and freely jump between console and PC at your leisure. Here’s how to do it, whether you want to transfer your account data between a PC and console or vice-versa. Читать дальше...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is facing a lawsuit from a Florida restaurant chain owner that accuses the company of directing users to “unauthorized” Google-branded food ordering webpages, where it uses restaurants names “without their approval,” as first reported by Ars Technica.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Researchers have discovered a new type of destructive wiper malware affecting computers in Ukraine, making it at least the third strain of wiper to have hit Ukrainian systems since the Russian invasion began.