Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Elon Musk at a press conference at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in Texas on February 10, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Jim Watson)

Twitter’s board of directors has agreed to sell the company to Elon Musk for $44 billion, the company announced Monday.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the purchase announcement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential—I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

The deal, pending shareholder approval and expected to close later this year, comes just 10 days after the Twitter board approved a poison pill to prevent a hostile takeover in response to Musk’s attempt to buy the company. Board members started taking Musk’s offer more seriously after he lined up $46.5 billion in financing. The sale agreement was announced hours after reports that a deal between Twitter and Musk was close.

Enlarge / The first Meta Store won’t necessarily be your one-stop shop for all things sold by Meta—as this artistic interpretation points to one thing not sold by the store until further notice. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On May 9, Meta will double down on its metaverse sales pitch by… making people drive to California to sample its wares at a single physical location.

The uncreatively named Meta Store will showcase every physical product the company sells under its various branded umbrellas, particularly the Meta Quest 2 VR system (formerly Oculus Quest 2). The company’s first retail store will be housed in a 1,550-square-foot space on Meta’s Burlingame, California, campus, which houses a number of Meta’s VR- and AR-specific development efforts, and it will allow the public to test and purchase any of Meta’s physical products.

A photo of the first Meta Store, as provided by Meta. (credit: Meta)

But it’s not a comprehensive Meta sales location, as its shelves will not include access to the reams of user data accumulated by the company’s network of criss-crossed sites—though we’ll keep our eyes peeled in case the Meta Store decides to unveil a Cambridge Analytica-themed aisle in the future.

Enlarge / The Pixel Watch. This bootloader is the only thing the watch would display. (credit: Android Central)

The watch bands don’t have pogo connectors, but the watch does? (credit: Android Central)

The Pixel Watch had an iPhone 4 moment over the weekend. Just as Apple’s 2010 flagship leaked after being left at a bar, Google’s upcoming Pixel Watch was apparently lost and found at a restaurant. Android Central got ahold of photos of the leaked device first, and the person who found the watch did a Reddit AMA as the user “Tagtech414” and shared more pictures. Sadly, the device doesn’t actually work. No one knows how to charge it, and it might be remotely wiped anyway. Keep in mind that these are pictures of a prototype, not the final model, and this watch was sitting in the lost and found for “several weeks” before the Internet got ahold of it.

We do get a good look at the hardware, though. Google’s smartwatch is a plump little glass circle. The top glass cover is the widest part of the watch circle and seems designed to look like the top “half” of the watch. It actually only makes up about one-third of the watch depth, which makes the watch seem thinner than it is.

The top and bottom watch band connectors. One has a set of four pogo pins, one doesn’t. (credit: Android Central)

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

An unfortunate byproduct of the arguments over climate change has been the publication of some truly awful books. Think tank staff members, disgruntled scientists, and self-appointed experts have produced page after page of arguments we knew were wrong decades ago, framing them as earth-shattering revelations that will cause the entire scientific community to collapse. It wouldn’t be news if another one was produced.

But it was intriguing when I saw that a print ad was proudly trumpeting a “new” book that promised to explain “why there is ZERO evidence linking carbon dioxide to climate change.” The intrigue arose from the fact that the book’s author has been dead for over two years.

A quick search revealed that the supposedly new book was a not-quite-new edition of one originally published in 1997. Figuring out why it was being advertised now took me down a rabbit hole of domain registrations and paid newsletters that all led back to an unexpected source: Newsmax, best known for operating one of the Trumpier broadcasting outfits in the US.