Apple Music Voice Plan Apple today announced the Apple Music Voice plan, which is basically a $5 discount to try to get people to actually use Siri. For $4.99 a month, users can access Apple Music’s entire catalog of music, podcasts, playlists, and stations — including unlimited skips. The caveat is… you have to ask Siri to play the music. Voice Plan aside, Apple says it’s adding a bunch of playlists curated to for different moods; you can say stuff like “play something chill” or “play the dinner party playlist....

If you’re unaware, the AirPods Max are Apple’s new over-ear headphones. They caused a bit of a stir when they were first released, but people have calmed down — probably because they realized that, yes, Apple products are expensive. Enough of that. We’re here today for a quick chat about the changing headphone emoji in iOS 14.5, something noticed by those glorious people over at Emojipedia. I’m sure you’ve already seen this change in the header image, but we may as well share another version of the design: My first thought was simple… “eww....

The lawsuit began in 2015 when Illinois-based Facebook users sued the company for violating the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which mandates that companies develop a public “written policy” before such data is collected and stored, and establish a retention schedule after which the said biometric identifiers will be destroyed. Facebook’s contravention stems from its “Tag Suggestions” feature that lets you automatically tag your friends in photos uploaded to the service....

The social network announced on Tuesday that it had removed 155 accounts, 11 Pages, nine Groups, and six Instagram accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.” The fake accounts predominantly focused on Southeast Asia, where they posted about events including Beijing’s interests in the South China Sea and developments in Hong Kong. But a smaller cluster posing as Americans posted content that both supported and criticized then-presidential candidates Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump....

According to a press release, Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital, Spotify, Coinbase, Uber Technologies, Vodafone, and Xapo are among those who signed the Libra Association’s charter. Additionally, the Libra Association also appointed its board of directors and its consortium executive during the same meeting, held in Geneva, Switzerland. Interestingly, Facebook will continue to play a key part in the project, as David Marcus, Calibra’s CEO and the tech giant’s former blockchain lead, is taking a seat on the five-person board....

According to a report by The Verge, the social networking firm is planning to release its first smartwatch next summer. The device will have all the usual fitness stuff, including a heart rate sensor. And then there’s the whole two-cameras thing. The report notes that one camera will be on the front of the watch for video calling. That sounds horrible because why would you hold your wrist upright for several minutes, and endure crappy video quality on a tiny screen?...

However, given Facebook’s handling — or mishandling — of their current social responsibilities, we should be cautious about how much control a single company should have over the potential metaverse. We have an opportunity to be proactive regarding the construction of social worlds within virtual reality rather than the reactive state we find ourselves in regarding Meta’s current social products. As a scholar exploring social interaction within virtual reality spaces, I have concerns about Facebook’s control of the metaverse....

The highlight of the new setup is the Chora 826-D, which is basically the existing 826 tower with an extra driver at the top to bounce sound off the ceiling and give you that enveloping Atmos effect. Granted, having separate speakers mounted in or near the ceiling almost always provides a better effect – especially if your ceilings are uneven – but the ceiling bounce method is certainly most convenient....

All this preamble is to warn you upfront that I’m a huge fan of Focal’s speakers. The company’s Chora 806 speakers have been my living room reference since their launch, and very few speakers have made me want to replace them. That made me curious to see what Focal could do with its professional speaker line — its monitors aimed at studio use. The Focal Solo6 Be is one of the company’s premium nearfield studio monitors....

Presentations are a business fact of life. At some point, you’re going to have to explain your vision to a large group of people — and that means having visuals to better flesh out that idea. Of course, most of us hate giving presentations — and public speaking is only part of the reason. The other part is the hours spent assembling all those presentation slides, tinkering with layers and shapes and colors on a granular level to get them just right....

Work-life debaters generally fall into two main camps: the separators (or balancers) and the integrators. Separators tend to want strong boundaries between work and life, like keeping set hours and “clocking” out of the office at the end of the workday. Integrators, on the other hand, go for a more blended approach and may compromise by taking work calls during family time or bringing their kids to the office. Crucially, both of these perspectives have been largely based on in-office work....

Most notably, part of this investment will fund the creation of a new business unit, Gordon Murray Electronic (GME), that will develop advanced electrified powertrains for global carmakers and tech companies. “The automotive future will be increasingly electrified and it’s essential that we design the world’s lightest, most efficient, and advanced EVs,” Murray said. And that’s exactly GME’s goal. Lightweight architecture has been Murray’s philosophy throughout his career and, as he told Autocar, he sees many lightweight opportunities in the electric vehicles he’s envisioning....

True to the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” adage, the Japanese manufacturer has changed little about the camera on the outside — not that this is a problem, factoring in the excellent built quality of its predecessor, the X-T3. That said, there are some minor tweaks, like sleeker, sharper edges, similar to the path Fujifilm took with the X100V. The biggest improvements are on the inside. The X-T4 finally gets built in image stabilization, which should make the device a lot more useful for video....

In an unusual event, video gaming company GameStop’s shares touched a record-high price of $76.76 — thanks to a battle between Redditors and short sellers. Just to give you an idea of this bizarre growth, GameStop’s shares were trading between $3-$4 this time last year. All of this began when short selling company Citron was scheduled to explain its stance on Gamestop on a live stream last Thursday. However, the company said it had to cancel the event because of too many hacking attempts on its Twitter account....

Duplex was previously only available in the US and New Zealand. But VentureBeat spotted that a support page for the product now includes phone numbers for calls from Duplex in the three new countries. The system uses AI to mimic a human voice that calls businesses to make restaurant reservations, book appointments, and find out opening hours. Google first unveiled Duplex at the company’s annual I/O developer conference in May 2018....

The lawsuit, which was filed in the federal court in San Jose, California on Tuesday, accuses the company of collecting information about what people view and what pages they visit online despite claiming incognito mode is private, Reuters reports. The complaint further alleges gathering data through Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, and various mobile apps helps the company learn about users’ closest contacts, hobbies, dieting habits, and even the “most intimate and potentially embarrassing things” they search for online....

The news of Google’s potential withdrawal from China has seen this share price tumble $49 to its current price [at the time of writing] of $580 per share. This strong growth in share price, cumulating in the 52 week high of $629.51 in early January put the market capitalisation at $199 bn, almost four times its market capitalisation of $50 bn in 2004 and still more than 8 times Yahoo’s current cap....

If you’re not an avid reader of social media company blogs, let me clear things up for you: Google banned 210 accounts that the People’s Republic of China was using to spread disinformation and propaganda about the protests and protesters in Hong Kong. This week has been rife with revelations that China’s engaged in a massive global disinformation campaign encompassing both Chinese and US social media companies. Twitter and Facebook independently released statements indicating they’d found their own platforms had been used in the propaganda efforts and outlined steps they would take to ensure such coordinated efforts would cease to occur....

Apple iCloud, Snapchat, Nest, Discord, Vimeo, and a number of third-party applications that host their services on Google were affected as a result. Several of Google’s own apps like Admin Console, Google Sync for Mobile, and G Suite were also impacted. The issues started around 12PM PT / 3PM ET, before being completely resolved around 5PM PT / 8PM ET. Google’s G Suite Status Dashboard showed that there were problems with almost every single service at some point, barring Google+ and Google Cloud Search....

The app has been around since February, but it just received a small update today and we thought it was worth highlighting for the folks who might’ve not been aware of it. The app uses your phone or headphone’s microphone to sift through ambient sounds and enhance frequencies related to speech while reducing unnecessary noise. You can use this to hear conversations in a noisy restaurant or more clearly make out dialog on the TV without having to raise the volume, etc....