Hawkeye, the next live-action Marvel Cinematic Universe series, will debut on Disney+ on November 24th, with new episodes to follow every Wednesday thereafter. Disney shared the news in an interview Entertainment Weekly published with series star Jeremy Renner. The article also includes a first-look screencap (below) showing Renner opposite co-star Hailee Steinfeld, who plays Hawkeye’s protégé Kate Bishop in the series.

Marvel Studios / Disney

With Hawkeye, Disney looks to continue the recent success it’s had with Marvel content. In June, Loki had Disney+’s most-watched premiere, beating out an already impressive debut showing from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier earlier in the year. At the start of July, Black Widow brought in more than $60 million in revenue solely from people willing to pay $30 each to watch the film from the comfort of their homes.

Facebook will require that its workers get immunized against the coronavirus before they can return to its Menlo Park headquarters and other offices across the US. "As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our US campuses to be vaccinated," Lori Goler, Facebook vice president of people, said on Wednesday. "We continue to work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone's health and safety."  

Much like Google, which announced a similar policy earlier in the day, the company said it would have a process in place for workers that can't get inoculated for medical and "other" reasons. It also says how it implements the requirement in different areas around the world will depend on local conditions and regulations.

In June, Facebook announced it was on track to reopen most of its US offices at 50 percent capacity by early September. Earlier in the year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said employees could apply for permanent remote work positions. In the same post, he noted that within the next five to 10 years, up to half of the company's workforce could be made up of remote workers.

A new robot known as the Dominator has set a Guinness World Record for placing 100,000 dominos in just over 24 hours. Created by YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober, the Dominator is the result of more than five years of work. Rober had help from two freshmen from Stanford University and a Bay Area software engineer in creating the googly-eyed robot. The group programmed more than 14,000 lines of code, and outfitted it with components like omnidirectional wheels and 3D-printed funnels to create what Rober says is a “friendly robot that’s super good at only one thing: setting up a butt-ton of dominos really, really fast.”

Up against professional domino artist Lily Hevesh, the Dominator used its ability to lay down 300 tiles all at once to work about 10 times faster than a human. It took the robot about two hours to put down over 9,000 dominos.

While the Dominator is the face of the project, a lot of its efficiency comes from a separate sorting mechanism that consists of a Kuka robotic arm and almost three miles of Hot Wheels tracks. A series of conveyor belts ferry the dominions by color before the Kuka arm deposits them in the appropriate chute. When the Dominator visits the station for a refill, the lower platform slides away, instantly loading its 3D-printed funnels with all the dominos it needs to lay down 300 at once. In this way, downtime is kept at a minimum.

To put its final achievement in context, it would take a team of seven skilled domino builders about a full week to make the Super Mario Bros.-like mural the Dominator needed a little more than a day to complete.

The National Basketball Association is teaming up with iHeartMedia for a significant new push into the podcast market. In all, the two organizations plan to co-produce more than 20 shows together as part of a new multi-year partnership, with the first one to debut sometime this fall. 

In addition to content devoted to the latest news from the league, analysis and player commentary, it sounds like iHeart and the NBA want to replicate the success of projects like The Last Dance. They say they’ll use material from the NBA archives to retell stories of “some of the greatest moments in sports history.” What exactly they have planned on that front, we don’t know yet, though iHeart and the NBA promised to share more information soon.

“The partnership provides the NBA and its teams access to iHeartMedia’s massive reach across multiple audio platforms including podcasts, streaming and broadcast radio, as well as the opportunity to develop a new slate of groundbreaking shows each year,” iHeart said.

Podcasts, in particular ones related to sports, have become big business in recent months. At the end of April, DraftKings spent $50 million to secure distribution rights to The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz.

Google will require its employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus before they’re allowed to return to the company’s offices. “Anyone coming to work on our campuses will need to be vaccinated,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in an internal email the company shared on Wednesday. “Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead.”

Google will implement the policy in the US in the “coming weeks,” with other regions to follow in the months to come. The requirement won’t apply in an area until vaccines are widely accessible there, and the company says there will be an exception process in place for employees who can’t get immunized for medical or “other protected reasons.” Google hasn’t said what percentage of its employees are already vaccinated, but Pichai notes in the letter it’s been “encouraging to see very high vaccination rates for our Google community in areas where vaccines are widely available.”

In the same email, Pichai also announced Google is pushing back its return-to-office date. The company now hopes to have employees on a hybrid workweek by October 18th instead of September as previously planned. The announcement follows a similar decision from Apple in light of increasing COVID-19 caseloads in the US and many other parts of the world due to the spread of the more contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus. “This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it,” Pichai said. “We’ll continue watching the data carefully and let you know at least 30 days in advance before transitioning into our full return to office plans.”

Following nearly a week of internal unrest, Activision Blizzard has published a letter from CEO Bobby Kotick addressing the company’s original response to the sexual harassment lawsuit brought against it by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) on July 20th. “Our initial responses to the issues we face together, and to your concerns, were, quite frankly, tone deaf,” Kotick says in the letter addressed to Activision Blizzard employees. “It is imperative that we acknowledge all perspectives and experiences and respect the feelings of those who have been mistreated in any way. I am sorry that we did not provide the right empathy and understanding.”

Kotick claims Blizzard Activision is taking “swift action” to ensure a safe, respectful and inclusive working environment for women and other minority groups. The company has hired law firm WilmerHale to review its policies, and Kotick says Activision Blizzard will implement changes to its hiring practices. It also plans to make personnel tweaks and remove content from its games employees and players have said is “inappropriate” in light of the allegations against the company. On Tuesday, the World of Warcraft development team said it would remove specific references from the MMO. While the team didn’t elaborate, those references may involve items and non-playable characters named after Alex Afrasiabi, one of the former Blizzard employees singled out in the DFEH lawsuit for repeated inappropriate behavior.

Notably, the letter doesn’t make mention of forced arbitration, saying only the company “will continue to investigate each and every claim and will not hesitate to take decisive action,” nor does it promise greater transparency when it comes to employee compensation. Those are two issues Activision Blizzard employees who are staging a walkout to protest for better working conditions highlighted in a statement of intent they shared on Tuesday.

In its initial public response to the lawsuit, Activision Blizzard said the allegations from DFEH included “distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past.” In a separate email to employees, Frances Townsend, executive vice president of corporate affairs at the company, claimed the lawsuit presents “a distorted and untrue picture of our company, including factually incorrect, old and out of context stories — some from more than a decade ago.”

At the start of June, Vivaldi released its 4.0 update, which added features like a translation tool to the privacy-focused browser. Its new 4.1 update is a smaller release but still adds a handful of handy features, including a new way to organize tabs.

Like Chrome, Vivaldi allows you to group multiple tabs to restore some semblance of order to your tab bar. In Vivaldi, those groups are called stacks. Before 4.1, you had two ways of using them. You could opt for either the compact view or the two-level one. In the latter case, the browser adds a bar that displays the tabs you have in that stack. The compact view, by contrast, only hints at the number of websites you have pinned to the same group.

Vivaldi

The new "Accordion" stacks Vivaldi is introducing today give you a third option that is something of a compromise between its two siblings. The icon that represents the group will automatically expand when you click on it. Instead of on a second bar, you’ll see all the included tabs to the right of that icon. In that way, you can get context about your tabs without them taking up an entire extra element of the interface.

The other major feature the company is adding with 4.1 is called command chains. In Vivaldi, you can press “F2” (or “Command E” on Mac) to bring up a command-line interface, allowing you to quickly access most features without digging through the menu for the relevant option. Command chains allow you to group multiple actions and assign a name to them. Typing the name of the chain in the command interface will execute the included actions in a sequence. With more than 200 actions available, you have a lot of flexibility. For instance, you can create one that enables both fullscreen and reading modes at the same time. You can also assign the sequences you make to a custom keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture.

Outside of those features, 4.1 adds a timer in reader view that estimates how long it should take you to work your way through an article. Lastly, the browser’s Windows client will now install new features in the background automatically. There’s an option to turn off “silent updates” in the settings menu. You can try Vivaldi 4.1 today.

Twitter is testing a new way to inform individuals who may have broken its rules that their account has been suspended or locked. With the start of this latest test, a small group of users will see a banner appear at the top of their timeline informing them that they can’t tweet, retweet or like content due to their previous behavior on the platform. In the instance of a locked account, the notice currently says most users regain access within a week. Meanwhile, with permanent suspensions, the banner points the individual to the company’s appeal process.

A spokesperson for Twitter told The Verge the notices come in response to feedback the company has received from people who said they only realized their account was inaccessible after they tried to tweet or follow new accounts. Should Twitter decide to implement the banners, they could get a lot of work. In the second half of 2020, the company removed more abusive content than ever before on the back of more effective automated moderation tools and policies against hate speech.

One day after sharing an open letter decrying the company's "abhorrent and insulting" response to a harassment lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), Activision Blizzard employees plan to hold a walkout. According to Kotaku, at least 50 employees will protest the company's recent actions in person and call on it to improve working conditions for women by at least temporarily leaving their posts on Wednesday, July 28th. The Activision Blizzard Walkout will take place in person at Blizzard's main office in Irvine, California, and online, with the former scheduled to take place between 10AM to 2PM PT.

"We are encouraging employees to take whatever time off they feel safe to do," a spokesperson for the group told Kotaku. "Most of us plan to take the full day off (without pay), but we understand some people like contractors and associates, and those who are paid less than they deserve, might not have the ability to do so."

In a statement of intent the group shared with the outlet, they call on Activision Blizzard to end the use of forced arbitration for all current and future employees, adopt new hiring policies designed to increase representation across the company, publish transparency data on compensation and hire a third-party firm to conduct a review of the studio's HR department and executive staff.

Tech and video game industry employees have increasingly turned to walkouts to advocate for change at their companies. In talking to Axios, the workers who are taking part in tomorrow's action cited the protest Riot Games employees held in 2019 to end forced arbitration. They said they're "following along people who have come before us, especially Riot, and what worked for them and what didn't."

Walkouts have shown to be effective at pushing companies to change. However, they're not without risk to those organizing them. In 2019, following a protest staged by some of its employees over its inaction on climate change, Amazon announced its first-ever climate pledge. However, in the aftermath of the announcement, the company fired the two employees who led the action, an action the National Labor Relations Board found was illegal earlier this year.

If you want to support those protesting tomorrow, you can do so by using the #ActiBlizzWalkout hashtag on social media.

Working with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission and Health Canada, Facebook has issued a voluntary recall for a component that comes with its latest VR headset. According to a blog post from Andrew Bosworth, head of Facebook’s Reality Labs, “a very small percentage” of Quest 2 owners have experienced some amount of skin irritation after using the removable foam face insert that comes with every Quest 2 headset and Fit Pack.

Bosworth says Facebook conducted a review of its manufacturing process and found no unexpected or hazardous contaminants in the insert. Still, out of a desire to create “safe and unbelievable experiences for all,” the company is introducing a new silicone cover that fits over the component. Whether you’ve had issues with the insert or not, you can request that Facebook send you the silicone cover for free. To do so, go to the “My Devices” section of your account page and click the dedicated button that’s there.

Facebook is also halting sales of the Oculus Quest temporarily while it works with distributors to add the silicone cover to every Quest 2 package. The company anticipates the headset will be back on store shelves by August 24th. As part of today’s recall, Facebook is also introducing a new 128GB variant of the Oculus Quest 2. It will replace the existing 64GB model, and feature the same $299 price tag as its predecessor. The 128GB model will go on sale on August 24th, the same day the company plans to restart Quest 2 sales.