The Senate today approved legislation that would keep companies from requiring forced arbitration in cases of sexual misconduct or harassment. The passage is a significant victory for the #MeToo movement, essentially allowing millions of women to take workplace sexual misconduct cases to court rather than settling matters internally. The legislation, which passed unanimously on Thursday, is now headed to President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature.

“No longer will survivors of sexual assault or harassment in the workplace come forward and be told that they are legally forbidden to sue their employer because somewhere in buried their employment contracts was this forced arbitration clause," said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in a news conference. Gillibrand, a vocal champion in the realm of sexual harassment law, authored the bill along with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). 

Notably, the bill had unanimous support among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress; a rare feat in this current political climate. As Politiconotes, many GOP lawmakers have warmed up to the issue of workplace sexual harassment following a surge of interest in the #MeToo movement. Former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson even urged Republican lawmakers to support the bill. 

Many companies have forced arbitration clauses in their employment contracts, which requires employees to give up their right to appear in court if they are harmed by their employer. Instead, the worker and the employer must settle the disputes in a process known as arbitration, which is often private and run by a third party.

More public awareness of the male-dominated, sexist culture in Silicon Valley, as well as activism by employees, has forced many tech companies to re-evaluate their sexual harassment policies. A number of Big Tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft have ended forced arbitration in recent years after facing backlash. Major video game developers such as Riot Games and Activision Blizzard have followed suit. Microsoft even lobbied in support of legislation to end forced arbitration.

Many in favor of forced arbitration believe it allows companies and employees to save money on court costs. But proponents of the practice argue that it inherently benefits the perpetrator, basically barring plaintiffs from speaking publicly about workplace harassment and keeping any testimony, evidence or documents used in the arbitration process completely secret.

Dynamic colors and a wave of new Google-centric design changes are on their way to most Android phones. First unveiled at I/O last year, Google’s Material You appeared to be Android’s most dramatic redesign in years and offered users a wave of new customization and accessibility features. Users could tweak their phone’s color palette, adjust the placement of widgets and make other adjustments for aesthetic and accessibility purposes. But Google’s Material You was only available for Pixel phones and a few Samsung devices.

Soon though Material You will be available for a much wider swath of new Android 12 phones, including those by Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, realme, Xiaomi and Tecno. The exact dates haven't been announced just yet and will depend on the manufacturer, but the release windows are likely to occur within the next few months. The new Galaxy S22 and S22 Ultra, both unveiled by Samsung this week, will include Material You.

While cosmetic enhancements are nice, Material You also makes it far easier for Android phones to be integrated into Google’s ecosystem. Color palette selections and other visual changes to the phone's themselves appear across Google’s apps, including Gmail, Meet and Drive. Much of Google’s product library has already gotten a Material You makeover.

In Engadget’s review of Material You and Android 12, we noted that the redesign was easy on the eyes and helped declutter Android’s interface. It also includes a host of quality-of-life changes, including a Privacy Dashboard. That feature breaks down which apps have been granted specific permissions, as well as what kind of data they're able to access.

Splitting a restaurant bill or dividing the costs of a group trip can be tedious. Meta is attempting to make this easier by rolling out its Split Payments feature to all Facebook Messenger users. The feature, which was previously in testing, will likely be perfect for occasions when you are dividing the cost of something with two or more people. For example, dividing the purchase of a new microwave with your three roommates, the cost of a new birthday gift for grandma with your siblings, or even this weekend’s Super Bowl party. 

If you or your friends are new to using Facebook Payments in Messenger, the feature will ask for payment details (either a debit or credit card or Paypal).

Here’s how it works. First, put all the payers in a group chat on Messenger. Then either tap the plus icon on the very bottom of the screen or tap on the name of the group and then tap “Split Payments”. You’ll see a prompt labeled “Get Started”.

From there, you can select whether you want to split payments with everyone in the group or exclude certain people (including yourself). You’ll then be asked to enter the total amount of the bill or the payment. The feature then automatically splits the cost equal between the number of people you selected. If one or more people owe slightly more, you can also manually enter in a different amount.

Meta rolling out a bill-splitting function for Meta is no doubt another way to keep up with payment apps like Venmo, Block (formerly known as Square) and Splitwise. But given that many people already use Messenger for coordinating group activities or relaying communications within a group, a messaging app may have an advantage here.

Apple will expand benefits for all of its retail employees in the US, beginning April 4th. Bloomberg reports the new benefits include increased vacation and sick days, paid parental leave and more. It will impact both full-time and part-time employees across all 270 Apple Stores nationwide.

The tech giant’s offer of more generous benefits didn’t come out of the blue. Apple, like many corporations, is having a tough time recruiting and retaining hourly workers in a tight labor market. A number of media outlets, including The Verge, Gizmodo, 9to5Mac and others have reported on the grim realities of Apple’s retail operations, which include low pay, stressful workloads and low employee morale. Staffing shortages due to Covid-19 led to many stores operating on reduced hours or closing altogether. Dozens of Apple employees staged a Christmas Eve walkout in order to protest their working conditions. The testimony of these workers presents a stark contrast to Apple's financial standing during the pandemic, which has produced several consecutive record-breaking quarters.

Apple will double the number of paid sick days for both full-time and part-time employees. Full-time retail employees will receive 12 sick days instead of six. The company will also be more lenient in granting sick leave, allowing workers to use sick leave for mental health days or in order to take family members to the doctor. Part-time workers will also receive paid vacation days and paid parental leave for up to six weeks.

The company’s benefits expansion follows similar moves by Amazon, Walmart and Fedex to retain hourly and front-line employees. Thousands of frontline workers have since quit or retired due to stressful and dangerous working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic. But labor rights advocates point out that many of these improvements, such as bonuses or hazard pay, are either temporary or have since been rolled back.

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father’s death followed a “two-year battle” with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke.

Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film’s Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick’s high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull’s ad hoc technique “was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do,” he said during a lecture at TIFF.

Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. “Today, the motion picture visual effects industry has almost entirely given way to computer graphics. We’re able to do things that were absolutely inconceivable in the old days like water effects, fire, explosions, smoke. But, almost everything in the visual effects industry today is created on computers. There’s a certain commoditization that has resulted that I’m not comfortable with myself. I like miniatures and physical effects and what I call organic effects,” said Trumbull in a 2018 interview for The Hollywood Reporter.

He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today’s film industry. “What interests me is being able to create profound personal experiences for audiences,” Trumbull toldMIT Technology Review in 2016. “Whatever it is, I want you to feel like what’s happening on the screen is actually happening in real-time, to you, in this theater.”

Electronics giant Samsung announced that its upcoming Unpacked event, to be aired this Wednesday, will be accessible in both virtual reality and actual reality. Metaverse-minded fans can watch the event at 837X, a recreation of Samsung’s flagship New York City store location, recreated within virtual reality platform Decentraland.

What makes Samsung’s venture into the metaverse so interesting is how little the company has had to say about VR in recent years. The South Korean giant was one of the first companies to make strides in the world of augmented reality and virtual reality when it released Gear VR, a smartphone-based virtual reality platform. Once known as one of the cheaper and more popular options for a VR headset Samsung announced it was planning on retiring Gear VR last December with no plans for a replacement.

It’s prudent for any company to tread lightly in the metaverse, especially since a great deal of experts in business and tech think it’s just a gimmick. Facebook parent Meta’s stock fell more than 26% last week after an earnings call last week where it also revealed it lost over $10 billion on Reality Labs, its AR and VR division. Still the considerable hype behind the metaverse doesn’t seem to be dying down. A number of companies including Walmart, Microsoft, Nike and Disney are investing heavily in the metaverse. While interest in VR is greater than ever (sales of AR and VR hardware nearly doubled in 2021), it’s still widely considered a niche product.

Broadly, the issue with the metaverse writ large is that no one seems entirely sure what problem it exists to solve. Other than a vague tweet alluding to the unveiling of some new feature, Samsung has not given much indication of how watching this week's Unpacked in VR is better than, or even meaningfully different from, just streaming it on any of the eight other places it will be available. Those platforms include Samsung's various accounts on YouTube, TikTok and Twitter, as on Twitch and Reddit. 

The event is expected to include the debut of the Galaxy S22, Samsung's new flagship phone.

The co-producer of The Matrix Resurrections, in a new lawsuit, is blaming the film’s lackluster box office numbers on a same-day streaming release. According to The Wall Street Journal, Village Roadshow Entertainment Group filed a lawsuit today against Warner Bros., the owner of streaming platform HBO Max. The suit alleges that both the same-day release of The Matrix Resurrections and pushing up the film’s release date was a breach of contract. The suit also claims that moving the movie’s release date from 2022 to 2021 was a bid by Warner Bros. to drive up subscriptions to HBO Max.

Last year’s decision by Warner Bros. to release an entire slate of new films concurrently on HBO Max and in theaters raised many eyebrows. In addition to The Matrix, the 16 other films in Warner Bros’ simultaneous release strategy included Dune, Godzilla vs. Kong, Mortal Kombat, King Arthur, and others. The experiment likely doomed their box office fates, as The Wrapnoted. Only two of the 17 films made more than $100 million in domestic box office sales.

The Matrix Resurrections, which was released in December, normally a peak time for box office earnings, has grossed over $37.2 million in domestic box office sales, according to BoxOfficeMojo. This is a noticeable decline compared to a number of other blockbusters with theater-only releases from last winter, such as Spider-Man:No Way Home, which has made more than $748 million in the domestic box office and the James Bond film No Time To Die, which has earned more than $160 million in the domestic box office.

Village Roadshow also alleges that Warner Bros. is attempting to keep the company out of future movie and TV deals. “WB has also been devising various schemes to deprive Village Roadshow of its continuing rights to co-own and co-invest in the derivative works from the films it co-owns,” the suit alleged.

The Matrix lawsuit is the latest conflict between Hollywood studios and the media companies that own the streaming platforms. Black Widow actress Scarlett Johansson last year sued Disney over the film’s simultaneous release strategy, which she claimed harmed its box office prospects and her own earnings. Johansson subsequently received an undisclosed settlement from Disney last fall.

The NFT marketplace is rife with people buying their own NFTs in order to drive up prices, according to a report released this week by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. Known as “wash trading”, the act of buying and selling a security in order to fool the market was once commonplace on Wall Street, and has been illegal for nearly a century. But the vast, unregulated NFT marketplace has shown to be a golden opportunity for scammers.

The report tracked instances of the same traders selling the same NFTs back and forth at least 25 times, a likely incident of wash trading. It identified a group of 110 alleged NFT wash traders who have made roughly $8.9 million in profit from this practice. Researchers also discovered significant evidence of money laundering in the NFT marketplace in the last half of 2021. The value sent to NFT marketplaces by addresses associated with scams spiked significantly in the third quarter of 2021, worth more than $1 million worth of cryptocurrency, according to the report. Roughly $1.4 million dollars of sales in the fourth quarter of 2021 came from such illicit addresses.

“NFT wash trading exists in a murky legal area. While wash trading is prohibited in conventional securities and futures, wash trading involving NFTs has yet to be the subject of an enforcement action,” wrote the authors of the report.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a new asset class of digital tokens that exist on the blockchain and are primarily purchased with Ethereum, a form of cryptocurrency. The crypto collectibles can consist of anything from a two-dimensional image to a GIF to a song. The NFT marketplace is estimated to be worth anywhere from $7 billion to $44.2 billion. The digital assets skyrocketed in popularity in 2021, and have been embraced by celebrities like Mark Cuban, Tom Brady, and Reese Witherspoon.

Skeptics have questioned the legitimacy and necessity of NFTs as the still relatively new space has spiked in popularity. High-profile NFT sales, such as last year’s record-breaking $69 million purchase of the artist Beeple’s collection, have been increasingly frequent. But since the digital tokens are not a security, they’re not subject to the same US laws and regulations governing stocks, for example. Numerous scams have cropped up in the NFT space in recent months, including counterfeit NFTs and money laundering.

Democrats in Congress on Thursday renewed a push to hold tech companies accountable for bias in their algorithms. Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), along with House representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) introduced an updated version of a bill that would require audits of AI systems used in areas such as finance, healthcare, housing, education and more. First introduced by Wyden in 2019, the Algorithmic Accountability Act has never passed the committee level in either the House or Senate.

“If someone decides not to rent you a house because of the color of your skin, that’s flat-out illegal discrimination. Using a flawed algorithm or software that results in discrimination and bias is just as bad. Our bill will pull back the curtain on the secret algorithms that can decide whether Americans get to see a doctor, rent a house or get into a school,” said Wyden in a press release.

A wave of studies found evidence of racial and gender bias in AI tools and automated systems used in everything from approving mortgages and credit cards to prescribing pain medication. Civil rights groups in recent years have lobbied Congress to hold companies accountable for flawed and biased algorithms.

The bill would require companies to perform an audit of their AI systems and report their findings to the Federal Trade Commission. It would also require the FTC to force companies to make high-profile AI decision making public. Under the bill, the FTC would create a public database where consumers can review critical decisions that have been automated by companies.

The legislation would require companies that use AI tools in “critical decision making” to evaluate the outcomes of such tools and regularly report their findings to the FTC. According to an analysis of the bill released by Wyden’s office, this includes any decisions by businesses that are related to the “cost, terms, or availability of education and vocational training, employment, essential utilities, family planning, financial services, healthcare, housing or lodging, legal services, or any other service, program, or opportunity that has a comparably legal or similarly significant effect on a consumer’s life as determined by the Commission through rulemaking.”

The bill has been endorsed by a handful of civil liberties and digital rights groups, including EPIC, Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Fight for the Future, and others. “Color Of Change commends Sens. Wyden and Booker and Rep. Clarke for advancing racial justice equities in tech regulation. We hope Congress will pass this instrumental legislation,” said Arisha Hatch, Vice President of Color Of Change, in a statement.

Both the House and Senate versions of the bill will next need to be reviewed and voted on by their relevant committees in Congress. The date for this vote has yet to be scheduled.

Engadget has reached out to the bill’s co-sponsors for further details on the legislation and its next steps in Congress, and will update when we hear back.

Given the steep costs, it's easy to see why some customers forgo AppleCare+, Preferred Care or similar protection plans. Dropping your phone down a stairwell or spilling liquid on it is no longer the end of the world – the newest devices are more resilient. But accidents still happen, and an out-of-warranty fix can set you back several hundred dollars. As an alternative, Zagg, a smartphone case company, unveiled a plan this week that covers repairs on most mobile devices for $99 a year.

Zagg Protect includes a $49 deductible, which you will need to pay any time you take it in for repairs. It covers both accidents and internal failures, including cracked screens, liquid damage, battery failure, power failures and more. 

But the third-party plan is still much cheaper than other such device protection plans, such as AppleCare+ and Samsung Care Plus. Samsung offers one year of Samsung Care Plus for free after you purchase your device; after that the cost ranges anywhere from $4 to $13 per month. Even with that plan, a cracked screen for any Samsung mobile phone will set you back $249. The free year of AppleCare that comes with any new iPhone is extremely limited and essentially only covers malfunctions that are the manufacturer’s fault. Two years of AppleCare+, which offers screen repairs on most iPhones for $29 and other accidents for $99, can still set you back anywhere between $149 to $199 for the latest models.

While Zagg’s plan is significantly more extensive than most, it’s not unlimited. The coverage only covers two repairs per 12-month period. You can also only use the plan at a list of authorized repair providers. Finally, the plan only covers repairs up to $500 and requires that you use a phone case.

Is a protection plan for phone repairs worth it? Thanks to the right to repair movement, consumers can opt for cheaper options like third-party repair shops and self-repair kits. While it’s harder nowadays to completely obliterate your phone (see this video of a still-functioning iPhone X found in the bottom of a river), any eventual mishap can pose a serious annoyance to your daily life. 

That $1,000+ device that most of us carry on our person at all times became our credit card, transportation access and vaccine passport, not to mention our sole means of contacting other humans. All told, whether or not you cough up the extra bucks for AppleCare+ or another protection plan like Zagg largely depends on your lifestyle, as well as how often you plan to upgrade.