Category: Technology

The original AirPods Pro and AirPods Pro 2 are popular among iPhone users for their convenience and compelling mix of features. However, your options are limited if something happens to the charging case, and your earbuds aren’t under warranty. Apple will replace the case for a fee. If you own a first-generation pair of AirPods Pro, you’re probably better off buying the new model to get a fresh set of batteries. In any event, there’s no easy way to repair a set of AirPods Pro and limit your electronic waste. Replacement parts are either hard to find, expensive or non-existent, and Apple didn’t design any of its earbuds with repairability in mind.

Robotics engineer Ken Pillonel, who became internet famous in 2021 for creating a working USB-C iPhone, is trying to fix that. With his latest DIY project, Pillonel has effectively created an end-to-end solution for those who want to swap the battery in their AirPods Pro case rather than replace it altogether.

Pillonel designed a replacement USB-C PCB he says is possible to install in an undamaged case without milling. If you’ve been following Pillonel for a while, you likely know that he also designed a USB-C PCB for the first- and second-generation AirPods and uploaded the design to GitHub. This time, he’s selling the AirPods Pro part to make the repair as easy as possible for anyone who wants to attempt it. You can get a single PCB from his online store for about $38.

If you damage your AirPods Pro case trying to access the internal battery, Pillonel has thought of that too. He’s uploaded a schematic to GitHub that you can use to 3D print a replacement. The USB-C PCB and case are fully compatible with one another. The only part you need to source independently is a replacement battery. You can find those online for about $20. “The goal of this project is to maximize the number of successful repairs to minimize the quantity of electronic waste,” Pillonel said in a statement. Obviously, most people won’t have the patience or confidence to service their AirPods Pro charging case, but a project like this is invaluable for those who do.

 

If you like Squid Game but not enough to brave the real-life version, you’ll soon have a VR option. Netflix has partnered with Sandbox VR to produce a game based on the Korean TV series, and from “late 2023,” you’ll be able to enter this gruesome dystopia at any of the Sandbox VR arcades around the world. The game developer has over 30 locations globally — 26 of which are in North America — at the time of writing, which is a much needed rebound after lying dormant throughout the worst part of the pandemic.

According to Sandbox VR, its upcoming experience will have players “transported to iconic Squid Game locations, where they become contestants in a variety of pulse-pounding challenges inspired by the Netflix series.” You’ll “compete against each other to be the last one standing” — presumably without anyone actually dying. As with all Sandbox VR games, players will be able to immediately rewatch, share and even download a personalized mixed-reality highlight reel.

The San Francisco-based VR company didn’t share further details on its Netflix collaboration, but judging by my recent experience with its latest zombie-shooter, Deadwood Valley (pictured above), the upcoming Squid Game title shouldn’t disappoint. All Sandbox VR games allow up to six players to roam around freely in each room, while wearing wrist and ankle trackers for full-body motion capture, as well as a bHaptic TactSuit to feel gunshots or zombie scratches. Players also hold a prop weapon that matches the size of its virtual counterpart, thus making these VR games more immersive than they already are.

I’m anticipating the likes of Red Light, Green Light, hopscotch and Squid making their way into the Squid Game VR experience, but I’m less keen on the idea of licking a prop to solve the dalgona candy puzzles.

 

A former Twitter employee has shed new light on the company’s dealings with the White House while former President Donald Trump was in office. Anika Navaroli, a former senior member of Twitter’s US Safety Policy, testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing that her team had received a request to remove a tweet making fun of the former president.

She revealed the previously unreported interaction during hearing with former Twitter executives’ over their handling of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Republicans on the committee have equated Twitter’s initial decision to block links to the story with “censorship,” and criticized the company for its interactions with government officials.

But Navaroli revealed that Twitter had also received at least one request, in 2019, from the Trump White House regarding a tweet they wanted removed. The tweet came from Chrissy Teigen, who had called the president a “pussy ass bitch,” in response to comments he had made about her and her husband. According to Navaroli, someone from the White House “reached out to ask that this tweet be removed” and that her team had to evaluate whether the tweet violated the company’s “insults policy.” She said they ultimately determined the tweet did not, and it remained up.

Earlier in the hearing, Navaroli also revealed that Twitter had on at least one occasion changed its policies in order to avoid taking action against a tweet from Trump. She said that the company had removed internal “moderation guidance” that used “go back to where you came from” as an example of language that would break its rules after Trump had used the phrase in reference to New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and other lawmakers. She said a more senior executive, former trust and safety head Del Harvey, “overrode” her assessment that the tweet broke Twitter’s rules.

The hearing wasn’t the first time members of Congress have heard from Navaroli. She previously spoke with the committee investigating the January 6th attack about her efforts to warn Twitter officials about threats leading up to the attack. “Twitter leadership bent and broke their own rules in order to protect some of the most dangerous speech on the platform,” she said in her opening statement.

 

Netflix’s fight against password sharing is expanding in earnest. The company is rolling out paid account sharing in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain after trialing the effort in Latin America. If you live in one of these countries, you’ll need to set a primary location to have unfettered access at home. If you have any friends or family who want to share your account, you’ll have to subscribe to either the Standard or Premium tier and pay a fee ($8 in Canada and New Zealand, €4 in Portugal and €6 in Spain) for up to two extra users outside of your home.

You can still watch on your phone or sign into the service on a device elsewhere, like a smart TV at a hotel. Netflix also lets you convert a profile into a new account. The company promises to tweak paid sharing based on feedback, and to continue the deployment over the “coming months.”

The streaming pioneer isn’t shy about its rationale. As it has argued in the past, Netflix claims account sharing is hurting its bottom line. The 100 million-plus households sharing accounts are “impacting [Netflix’s] ability” to invest in new content, according to product director Chengyi Long. In theory, paid sharing improves the company’s revenue without forcing affected users to pay full price for a completely separate account.

It’s not clear how new regions will take to the policy. Many rival services don’t have account sharing restrictions, and some sharers may be averse to paying anything to use someone else’s access. While we wouldn’t expect users to switch services in droves, there may be some who simply forego Netflix altogether to avoid paying a fee.

 

Of all the once-unthinkable changes Elon Musk had made since taking over Twitter, pulling the rug out from under developers might seem relatively minor. After banning third-party clients without warning, Twitter announced that it would no longer allow any developer to use its APIs for free.

So far, Twitter has communicated very little about the changes, other than confirming a February 9th cut-off date. Musk has suggested Twitter could charge $100 a month “with ID verification,” but hasn’t elaborated. What we do know, is that once free access is shut off, thousands of apps, research projects, bots and other services will stop functioning (or, at the very least, be interrupted). If you’re a Twitter user, chances are this will affect you in some way, and you shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to prepare.

Change logins for apps where you’ve signed in with Twitter

If you’ve ever used your Twitter credentials to sign into another service, the coming API shutoff could prevent you from being able to access your account. That means you’ll want to double check which services you’ve used Twitter as a login for, and change your account info while you’re still able to.

You can check which services have access to your Twitter account via Settings -> Security and Account Access -> Apps and sessions -> Connected Apps (or, clicking here). Depending on the service, you may have to create an entirely new account with different credentials.

Nuke your tweets

There are a lot of good reasons to delete your old tweets. But if you haven’t already, your window for easily doing so is rapidly closing. If you want to wipe your tweet history, check out TweetDelete, TwitWipe, TweetDeleter, or another similar service. Note that there are a handful of subscription-based tweet deletion services. It may be a good idea to hold off on using a paid service for now until it’s clear whether any of these apps will continue to operate after the API changes go into effect.

Find your mutuals on Mastodon

Whether you’re new to the Fediverse or not, now would be a very good time to find all your mutuals from Twitter over on Mastodon. Services like Movetodon and Twitodon enable you to easily find familiar accounts on Mastodon. Rebuilding your following graph on a new platform can be one of the biggest hurdles to getting started, so even if you’re not sure about switching, it’s not a bad idea to use these tools while you still can.

Everything else

Unfortunately, the effects of ending the free API will be much more far-reaching than just these services. The future of Twitter’s bots — the automated accounts that share everything from weather updates, helpful reminders, jokes and emergency alerts — is now very much uncertain. While Musk has indicated that he may allow some bots with “good” content to access the Twitter API for free, it’s not at all clear how this will work, or if paying for Twitter Blue will be a requirement. So far, a number of bot developers have said they will not pay for use of Twitter’s API and are planning for their accounts to go dark on the 9th.

The API changes will also have a disastrous impact on the research community. Currently, there are scores of journalists, nonprofits and academic institutions that use Twitter’s API to research misinformation, public health, education and numerous other issues. Requiring these researchers to pay could effectively end these projects, particularly for organizations that are smaller and not as well-funded. For now, it’s not clear if these organizations will have any other options available to them. 

 

It wouldn’t be February without a peek at Google’s next mobile OS. Sure enough, the company has released the first Android 14 developer preview (DP1) to help app creators target the new platform. This time around, the initial priorities are accessibility, battery life and security. You can scale fonts to a much larger size (200 percent versus the earlier 130 percent), and smarter scaling makes text more readable. It’s easier to set preferred languages for apps, and developers can be more accommodating to people who speak gendered languages like French.

Android 14 DP1 also includes some under-the-hood improvements that can make the most of your battery and screen. There are tighter controls on alarms, foreground tasks and internal broadcasts, all of which can reduce power consumption. It should also be easier to build apps for foldable phones and tablets, so you may see software that makes better use of your hardware’s visual real estate.

And yes, Android 14 can block users from sideloading very old apps. Google will require that apps target at least Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), as some malware is written for older versions to avoid a permissions system introduced in 2015. This won’t prevent you from running apps that are already installed when you upgrade the OS, and you can use command line instructions to force installations. However, you may have to look for alternatives if there’s an ancient app you’d hate to give up.

This first preview is available through the desktop Android emulator as well as the Pixel 4a, Pixel 5 and newer Google phones. The first Android 14 beta should arrive in April, and Google expects “platform stability” (read: release candidates) in June. As always, the developer previews don’t represent the sum total of what the new platform will bring. We’d expect Google to reveal more conspicuous changes at its I/O conference in the spring.

 

Turkey may be blocking access to Twitter, two days after a pair of catastrophic earthquakes struck the area. Thousands of people are still trapped in buildings in Turkey and Syria, where the death toll is approaching 12,000.

According to Bloomberg, people in Turkey started having trouble accessing Twitter on Wednesday afternoon. Some have resorted to VPNs to use the service. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, has accused the government of blocking Twitter.

It’s not clear why the Turkish government might want to prevent access to Twitter amid such devastation. The social media service is still a valuable disaster response tool and users have also been sharing images of the destruction caused by the earthquakes. Twitter does not have a communications team that can be reached for comment.

This would not be the first time that Turkey has stopped residents from accessing social media services. It has also done so during cross-border military operations and terror attacks. In 2014, Turkey temporarily banned Twitter. Users were sharing voice recordings and documents that purportedly showed corruption within then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sphere of influence. Erdoğan became Turkey’s president later that year and he remains in power. His government has faced criticism for its response to this week’s disaster.

 

Months after a successful vote, Apple Store employees in Glasgow have become the company’s first retail workers to form a union in the UK. Apple and the trade union GMB Scotland have signed a collective bargaining agreement that theoretically gives staff at the Buchanan Street store more clout when pushing for improved working conditions.

The Glasgow employees voted to unionize in November. They sought better pay, increased wage transparency and improved shift scheduling. Union negotiators characterized talks with Apple as positive, but it took several months before workers cast ballots.

GMB organizer John Slaven calls the union vote “historic.” In a statement to The Herald, Apple says it’s one of the “highest paying” retail brands in Scotland, and offers “industry-leading benefits” to employees. Apple raised starting wages for store workers last year in response to mounting labor action, but it also faces formal complaints over alleged union busting tactics.

These aren’t the first Apple retail employees to create unions. In addition to teams in Europe, some stores in the US voted to unionize last year. The Glasgow move adds to the momentum, however, and may help other UK store workers pursuing their own unionization efforts.

 

Last September, Google began rolling out Search with Live View, a feature within Maps that adds search functionality to the app’s augmented reality layer. At the time, that feature was only available if you found yourself in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Paris or Tokyo. Today, Google announced it’s bringing Search with Live View to Barcelona, Dublin and Madrid within the coming months. The company is also greatly expanding the availability of Live View within indoor locations. Google said Wednesday it’s bringing the functionality to more than 1,000 new airports, train stations and malls across cities like Barcelona, London, Madrid, Paris and Singapore. The expansion will take place over the next few months.

Separately, Google (via The Verge) showcased some of its other work in AI-augmented search. In one demo, the company asked for a summary of the best constellations to look for when stargazing. Notably, the demo Google showed wasn’t as polished as the one Microsoft brought to its “new Bing” showcase yesterday. In that instance, Bing provided the user with footnotes and links to the material it used to summarize its findings, something that was missing from Google’s demo. 

 

If the unofficial debut of Google’s Bard chatbot is any indication, misinformation is about to get a lot worse. The company posted an ad to Twitter this week showing off the natural-language AI model displaying false information about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

In the advertisement (via Reuters), a short GIF shows an example of a Q&A with Bard. “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year old about?” the query reads. The machine quickly spits out three ideas, including the last one that says, “JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system. These distant worlds are called ‘exoplanets.’ Exo means ‘from outside.’” Although the bit about exoplanets is spot-on, the first part saying the JWST took the first pictures of them is false. That honor belongs to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Although incorrect information in a Twitter ad won’t likely hurt anything directly, it’s easy to view the mistake as an omen of the risks of releasing natural-language chatbots into the wild. It parallels CNET’s decision to write financial advice articles with an AI chatbot; they were also riddled with errors.

Because chatbots get so much right — and spit out answers with such supreme confidence — anyone who doesn’t fact-check their responses may be left with false beliefs. Considering the chaos that (non-AI-powered) misinformation has already let loose on society, releasing this often mind-blowing technology before it can be trusted to produce factual information reliably and consistently — even escaping Google’s copy editors — may have us in for a wild ride.