Month: April 2022

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Electronic signs are a common sight on US highways. These dot-matrix displays date back to at least the 1950s and were first used to alert drivers to changing speed limits or hazards ahead; they now usually exhort us to drive safely.

But targeting drivers with safety messages when they’re driving may actually be counterproductive, according to a study published this week in Science. In fact, giving drivers an update on the current year’s road death total actually led to an increase in crashes.

Jonathan Hall and Joshua Madsen used Texas to study the impact of safety messages on highway safety, thanks to a unique feature of the state—it only displays the state-wide road death count on electronic highway signs in the week leading up to each month’s Department of Transportation meeting. That allowed the researchers to compare crashes downstream of an electronic sign during those weeks with the rest of the month, and to look back to crashes on the same stretch of road during the years before the safety campaign started in 2012.

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CNN+, the streaming-only fork of CNN with a mix of exclusive content and the news network’s Video on Demand archives, will shut down at the end of the month—only 31 days after it debuted.

The service launched on March 29 as a $5.99 standalone service, despite coming from the same corporate family that’s loudly pushing HBO Max—and, thanks to a recent massive acquisition, also controls Discovery+. In a Wednesday statement on the CNN+ shutdown, current Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO J.B. Perrette appeared to acknowledge the market reality of one-too-many streaming options: “In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in[-one] service which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings.”

While CNN+ launched with high-profile exclusive hosts like former Fox News host Chris Wallace and NPR vet Audie Cornish, and reportedly met internal expectations with a subscriber count as high as 150,000, it also began life as part of the old AT&T Time Warner corporate structure. In the wake of Discovery’s acquisition of all things Time Warner from AT&T, Perrette and new CNN CEO and Chairman Chris Licht have repeatedly gone on the record expressing their interest in creating a single megaton streaming option for its combined media properties.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

Google has announced a bizarre policy that effectively bans call-recording apps from the Play Store. As part of Google’s crackdown on apps that use Android’s accessibility APIs for non-accessibility reasons, Google says call recording is no longer allowed via the accessibility APIs. Since the accessibility APIs are the only way for third-party apps to record calls on Android, call-recording apps are dead on Google Play.

NLL Apps—the developer of a call-recording phone app with a million downloads on the Play Store—has been tracking the policy change. The Google Play support page lays down the new law, saying: “The Accessibility API is not designed and cannot be requested for remote call audio recording.” Google’s ban kicks in on May 11, the first day of Google I/O, oddly.

There’s no clear reason why Google is banning call recording from the Play Store. Many jurisdictions require the consent of one or more members of a call in order to start recording, but once you meet that requirement, recording is entirely legal and useful. The Google Recorder app is a product built entirely around the usefulness of recording conversations. Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with call recording when it comes to its own apps, either—the Google Phone app on Pixel phones supports call recording in some countries. Google just doesn’t provide the proper APIs to let third-party app developers compete with it in this market, and now it’s shutting down their attempted workarounds.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk won’t be subject to a gag order in the court case over his infamous “Funding secured” tweets, but a federal judge confirmed that the jury will be told Musk’s tweets were false. District Judge Edward Chen denied the gag order requested by lead plaintiff Glen Littleton in a ruling issued Wednesday, in part because of the instructions Chen plans to issue to the jury.

“[T]hough ‘jury instructions are often an ineffective remedy,’ the Court finds that unlikely to be true for the instant case where the jury will be told that the Court has already found that the August 2018 tweets were false and made with the requisite scienter [knowledge of wrongdoing],” Chen wrote.

Musk and Tesla face a class action lawsuit in US District Court for the Northern District of California over Musk’s August 2018 claim that he had secured funding to take Tesla private. Musk made the claim over several tweets, starting with one that said, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”

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Best Buy announced on Wednesday a new haul-away recycling service for technology products and appliances. For $200, the company will come to your home and take away your unwanted TVs, PC monitors, kitchen appliances, and more.

Best Buy’s Standalone Haul-Away service takes up to two large items, like all-in-one computers, TVs of various types, cooktops, and refrigerators. They also take an unlimited number of smaller pieces of tech and appliances, like laptops, hard drives, video game consoles, keyboards, calculators, and curling irons. But there are some things even Best Buy doesn’t want, like your old 8-tracks, DVDs, Blu-rays, software, instruments, toasters, and waffle makers. You can see a full list of what Best Buy will and won’t take here.

Best Buy will give a 20 percent discount on the service to members of Best Buy Totaltech, which includes services like 24/7/365 Geek Squad access and free 2-day shipping for $200 a year.