Month: February 2022

Enlarge / The new Gmail design. It has tweaked colors and an additional sidebar on the left for Google Chat and Google Meet. (credit: Google)

Google will finally start rolling out the Gmail redesign it first showed off last year. The company is calling the interface in the update the “integrated view” because the goal is to integrate Google’s latest messaging service, Google Chat (a Slack competitor and the successor to Hangouts) and Google Meet (a Zoom competitor) into Gmail. The main section will remain mostly the same, but there are plenty of changes coming to Gmail’s navigation sidebar.

Currently, the Gmail sidebar houses the sections you would expect, like the Inbox, Drafts, Trash, and your list of labels. The redesign will add a second, new higher-level navigation panel to the left side of the page, letting users jump between Gmail, Google Chat, Spaces (Google Chat group chats), and Google Meet. Besides the four app-navigation options, the new sidebar also has a stack of icons at the bottom, and it’s not entirely clear what they are. They look like chat profile pictures, so they could be either active chats or starred contacts. Since no one has tried this interface yet, we don’t know many details.

Google’s blog post has a detailed timeline for the rollout. Starting next week, February 8, the new interface becomes opt-in, and you can revert to “classic Gmail” in the settings (Google notes the update will take 15 days to roll out to everyone). In April, users will be automatically enrolled in the new interface. By “the end of Q2 2022,” the interface will become the standard for Gmail, with no option to use the classic interface. Google says there will also be a “new streamlined navigation experience on Chat web (mail.google.com/chat),” which I assume means you’ll get a similar sidebar setup where you can jump to Gmail right from Google Chat.

Enlarge / Spotify is in the middle of a transformation—it just may not realize it. (credit: Cindy Ord/Getty Images)

Spotify probably didn’t realize it, but it ceased being a tech company a few years ago.

It was excelling at all the tech startup things—attracting users and losing money—but like most businesses, it eventually wanted to make a profit. The company was having a tough time doing that simply by streaming music, which proved to be expensive since the labels demanded a hefty fee to access their catalogs. Without another product to sell alongside music, Spotify was hemorrhaging money.

So the company started looking afield, searching for a product that would complement its existing music offerings. It found one in podcasts.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Tesla’s controversial hands-free driver-assistance system is the subject of yet another safety recall. In November, the automaker had to recall nearly 12,000 cars after a software update affected some of the cars’ forward-looking safety systems. Now, Tesla wants to recall 53,822 cars to remove a “rolling stop” feature that flouts traffic laws.

The issue affects Models 3, Y, S, and X running firmware 2020.40.4.10 or newer and participating in the “full self-driving” beta program. This software allows selectable moods for the car’s driving style—chill, average, and assertive. And it’s the last of those that’s the problem.

In assertive mode, if a Tesla approaches a four-way stop intersection at less than 5.6 mph (9 km/h) and it detects no other road users or pedestrians near the intersection, it will carry on traveling at that speed instead of coming to a complete stop at the stop sign.

Enlarge (credit: Financial Times)

The world’s largest technology companies are pouring money into the biggest foreign policy think tanks in the US, as they seek to advance the argument that stricter competition rules will benefit China.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are behind an increase in funding to four of Washington’s most prestigious research groups: the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for a New American Security, Brookings, and the Hudson Institute.

Total donations from Big Tech companies to the four think tanks have risen from at least $625,000 in 2017-18 to at least $1.2 million in 2019-20, according to a Financial Times analysis of financial disclosures. These figures could be as high as $1.2 million in 2017-18 to $2.7 million in 2019-20.

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  Launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation satellite on January 31. [credit:
  SpaceX ]

For a few days there, it sure seemed like a previously flown Falcon 9 rocket carrying a satellite for the Italian air force would never get off the ground from Florida.

On January 27 and 28, poor weather scrubbed the rocket’s launch during the countdown. On January 29, foul weather precluded pre-launch activities from taking place. Finally, the skies cleared on Sunday, January 30. But there was another issue—Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas cruise ship had moved into the marine exclusion zone beneath the Falcon 9 rocket’s flight path.

Harmony of the Seas thereby caused discord on land as SpaceX had to scrub the launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation at T-33 seconds. Weather was good again on Monday evening, and this time, there were no wayward cruise ships to scuttle the flight. Instead, there was harmony on the launch pad, harmony on the seas, and ultimately harmony in space as the Italian satellite successfully made it to orbit.