Google Meet will soon make it easier for you to see all of your co-workers or friends properly on video calls. The web version of the app can detect when someone is underexposed due to bad lighting. Meet will then increase the brightness so it's easier to see your cohorts and perhaps make your feed clearer if you have a terrible webcam.

The low-light mode hit the Google Meet iOS and Android mobile apps last year. It uses AI to examine light levels and tweak the brightness. There's no admin control for the feature, though users will be able to switch it off — Google says having it enabled might slow down your device.

The feature is coming to all Workspace and G Suite basic and business users. Google is rolling it out to Rapid Release domains starting today and Scheduled Release domains on October 4th. The rollout will take up to 15 days in both cases, so by mid-October, bad webcam feeds could be a thing of the past on Meet calls.

Twitter has agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a class action suit filed by shareholders in 2016. Investors alleged that Twitter masked the company's slowing growth while executives including former CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey (the current CEO) sold stock “for hundreds of millions of dollars in insider profits.”

The plaintiffs said Twitter was tracking daily active users (DAU) as the key metric for engagement in early 2015, but it was still reporting monthly active user figures. The DAU measurement indicated engagement was dropping or staying flat, according to the lawsuit.

Twitter says the proposed settlement, which a court has yet to approve, "resolves all claims asserted against Twitter and the other named defendants without any admission, concession or finding of any fault, liability or wrongdoing by the company or any defendant." Twitter and all of the individuals named as defendants in the suit have denied any wrongdoing. The lawsuit accused Twitter and executives of violating the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The company plans to use cash on hand for the settlement. It's expected to pay the sum by the end of the year.

In its Q4 2018 earnings report, Twitter started reporting average monetizable daily active users (mDAU). It said that was the only engagement metric it would disclose to investors going forward, partly because it's a more accurate reflection of how it's making money from users.

The next time you have friends over and you happen to run out of one guest's favorite tipple, you'll have another way to order another bottle quickly — as long as you live in a place where DoorDash supports alcohol delivery. You can now use the app to order booze to your doorstep in 20 states, the District of Columbia, Canada and Australia. The company says more than 100 million people now have access to booze delivery through the app.

Users in those markets can view a selection of drinks from restaurants, grocery stores, retailers and convenience stores through the Alcohol tab. Depending on where you live, you may be able to bundle alcohol with your restaurant order using the DoubleDash feature, which lets you add items to your order from nearby stores without paying a separate delivery fee.

You'll need to be of legal drinking age to order alcohol through DoorDash. Couriers will verify your age at dropoff. You can upload a copy of your ID to the app. Couriers will only be able to see your photo and date of birth on the app — DoorDash says it blurs out all of the other information for security and privacy reasons.

Over the last few years, DoorDash has enabled merchants to deliver alcohol through DoorDash Drive, its white-label delivery service. DoorDash Drive couriers fulfill orders made via a merchant's own website, app or third-party platform, not the DoorDash app. The company previously let users in southern California add alcohol to their restaurant orders.

Alongside the expansion of hooch deliveries, DoorDash announced partnerships with alcohol responsibility organizations. Students Against Destructive Decisions and Responsibility.org focus on drunk driving and underage drinking. DoorDash also teamed up with two organizations Down Under, Drinkwise and Retail Drinks Australia, "to further expand our commitment to responsible service of alcohol in other countries."

DoorDash is playing catch up a bit with its rivals when it comes to alcohol. Uber bought booze delivery service Drizly earlier this year for $1.1 billion. Instacart and Postmates both added alcohol delivery options over the last few years.

A US district court has sentenced a man who unlocked 1.9 million AT&T phones to 12 years in prison. Muhammad Fahd continued the seven-year scheme to defraud the company even after learning of an investigation against him, according to the Department of Justice. At Fahd's sentencing hearing, Judge Robert S. Lasnik said he committed a “terrible cybercrime over an extended period,” with AT&T said to have lost $201.5 million as a result.

Fahd contacted an AT&T employee through Facebook in 2012 and bribed them to help him unlock customers' phones with "significant sums of money," the DOJ said. Fahd, a citizen of Pakistan and Grenada, urged the employee to recruit co-workers at a Bothell, Washington call center for the scheme too.

The DOJ says the employees unlocked phones for "ineligible customers," who paid Fahd a fee. In spring 2013, AT&T rolled out a system that made it more difficult for the employees to unlock IMEIs. Fahd then recruited an engineer to build malware that would be installed on AT&T's systems to help him unlock phones more efficiently and remotely. The DOJ says the employees gave Fahd details about the company's systems and unlocking methods to aid that process. The malware is said to have obtained information about the system and other AT&T employees' access credentials. The developer used those details to modify the malware.

AT&T claims Fahd and his associates unlocked just over 1.9 million phones through the scheme. The company says because of the unlocks, customers didn't complete payments on their devices, leading to the nine-figure loss.

Fahd was arrested in Hong Kong in 2018 following a 2017 indictment. He was extradited to the US and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in September 2020.

Facebook has handed over virtual reality illustration and animation tool Quill to Iñigo Quilez, the developer who created the app. Quilez has formed a company called Smoothstep and rebranded the tool as Quill by Smoothstep, which is now on the Oculus Store.

The original Quill app will be removed from the Oculus Store on October 18th. It'll still work for those who downloaded it, but Oculus won't support the app any longer. Users will need to manually upload creators to Oculus Media Studio manually rather than through Quill as well.

Facebook says Quill content shared on Oculus Media Studio or Oculus TV will still be available on Oculus for now. The Quill Theater app will remain on the store — it will be renamed as VR Animation Player next month. The Oculus team also noted that Smoothstep has open sourced both Quill Theater’s IMM immersive content distribution file format (IMM) and an IMM player.

Quilez built the first version of Quill during a 2015 hackathon to aid production on Oculus Story Studio's VR short, Dear Angelica. The film was the first to be hand-painted completely inside of a VR environment. Other filmmakers have adopted Quill, with works createdusing the tool being screened at major film festivals such as Sundance and Venice.

Some major companies are expected to enter or push deeper into the VR and mixed reality space in the coming years, such as Apple and Sony. As such, developers of VR creation tools such as Quill have a big opportunity for growth in the medium term.

Elektron might have a reputation for making expensive digital instruments, but it's hard to look past the Model lineup if you're in the market for a groovebox. The Model:Samples and Model:Cycles devices are currently on sale at both Amazon and Sweetwater. They're down from $299 to $249, making them an even better option for beatmakers, newbies and veterans alike.

Elektron brought much of its knowhow to the entry-level Model:Samples in 2019. You can add your own samples via the microUSB port. In our review, in which we gave Model:Samples a score of 86, we called it a "best-in-class sequencer" with lots of controls and "tons of opportunity for happy accidents." However, we had reservations about the lack of onboard sampling and "mediocre" quality of the pads.

On the whole, though, it's a great groovebox. Given that Model:Samples cost $449 just a couple of years ago, $249 is an excellent price.

Model:Cycles, meanwhile, is a more recent model. It too is a six-track sequencer, but it adopts some of the features of Elektron's Digitakt sampler. It uses FM synth sounds rather than samples. In giving Model:Cycles a score of 88, we found that it offers an "incredibly fun hands-on playing experience." We found the lack of filter and arpeggiator a little disappointing, but it's still a terrific groovebox. On its website, Elektron notes the two devices are on sale until September 30th.

Netflix has locked down several high-profile creators to TV and movie deals over the last few years, including Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhimes, David Fincher and Game of Thrones duo David Benioff and Dan Weiss. The latest talent to join Netflix's stable is Dan Levy, the star and co-creator of Schitt's Creek who won four Emmys for the hit Canadian sitcom last year.

Levy's first Netflix project is a romantic comedy movie that he'll write, produce, direct and star in, according to Variety. He can't work on any shows for Netflix until his TV deal with Disney studio ABC Signature expires next summer.

Netflix played an important role in Levy's rise to stardom after it started streaming Schitt's Creek in 2017. “Netflix offered Schitt’s Creek a second home at just the right time and opened the doors to a whole new audience for us,” Levy said in a statement. “Watching the show thrive there has only enhanced my excitement about continuing to tell specific, meaningful stories with them in both TV and feature film.”

Levy has some other projects in the works elsewhere, including through his ABC deal. Hulu ordered a pilot last month for an animated comedy called Standing By from Levy and fellow Schitt’s Creek writer Ally Pankiw.

Since it blew up last year, Among Us has inspired a wave of copycat games. The latest is ReVamp, a Snapchat-exclusive title made by Zynga. It's the first social deception game on Snapchat, Zynga says.

ReVamp doesn't seem as egregious of an Among Us clone as Fortnite's Imposters mode. The basic formula is intact, but it shakes up the format a bit.

A group of six players (rather than 10) will carry out tasks like demolition and building to renovate an old mansion. However, there's an enemy lurking in their midst. One player is a vampire, who completes fake tasks and takes out other members of the group. The human characters will try to suss out who the vampire is and vote them out.

"We are excited to continue our partnership with Snap to create fun new snackable games that fit seamlessly with their platform’s highly social mechanics," Bernard Kim, president of publishing at Zynga, said. "ReVamp reimagines the social deception game genre for Snapchat’s human and vampire players of all skill levels."

ReVamp will be available in select markets soon. It's Zynga's third exclusive game for Snapchat. The developer previously released Bumped Out and Tiny Royale on Snapchat. The latter is a top-down take on the battle royale genre popularized by the likes of PUBG: Battlegrounds and Fortnite.

Pre-orders have only just opened for Apple's latest lineup of products, but you can already find some discounts on the hardware. Along with a price cut on the base iPad, Walmart is offering some savings on the new iPad mini. The 64GB WiFi-only option is $40 off at $459, while the retailer has dropped the price of the 256GB variant by $50 to $599. Walmart isn't offering any price reductions on the 5G iPad mini, though — the 64GB version costs $649.

It's the first new iPad mini in two and a half years, and Apple has given the tablet a major overhaul. It runs on the A15 Bionic chip (the same SoC as in iPhone 13), with Apple promising a big jump in performance compared with the fifth-gen iPad mini. The 8.3-inch screen runs closer to the edge of the device, and there's no more physical home button. The Touch ID sensor is now built into the power button.

The volume buttons are now at the top to make space for an Apple Pencil 2 that you can attach magnetically to the side. The Lightning port is a thing of the past on iPad mini, with Apple switching to a USB-C port. The cameras have been upgraded, and there's support for Apple's Center Stage feature, which keeps you in the center of the frame during video calls. Walmart says it will ship the tablet by September 24th if you pre-order now.

OnePlus started using camera tech from Hasselblad in its latest flagship smartphones, the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro. It'll be some time before we see the full impact of that partnership in the form custom camera hardware. In the meantime, OnePlus is looking to bring more of a Hasselblad feel to its current phones. The latest software update for the 9-series handsets, which OnePlus has started rolling out, includes a setting that aims to replicate the look of Hasselblad's XPan film cameras.

The Xpan Mode includes an aspect ratio of 65:21 and a very wide mode with two focal lengths (30mm and 45mm). The image preview has the frame lines that you'd see through the lens of an XPan camera, OnePlus says, and after you take a shot, you can see an animation of negative film developing. There are two film simulation effects too — color and black and white — with Hasselblad working with OnePlus to create the latter.

The update looks to improve the phones' camera systems in other ways. OnePlus says it has updated the memory optimization solution and shortened the time it takes to launch the camera app by up to half. The company says it has reduced lag in previews and fixed over-sharpening in various auto mode situations. It also claims to have improved dynamic range in low-light conditions and bolstered the success rate when it comes to shooting moving objects, while reducing noise and optimizing HDR frame retrieving algorithms for some scenes.

OnePlus says the update includes some other improvements for OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro, including wireless charging optimization and the latest Android security patch. The latest firmware also addresses some known issues and improves stability.