When was the last time you've read an amicus brief? If you're not involved in the legal profession, chances are you may have never actually spent precious time reading one. This amicus brief (PDF) could change that. It was submitted by The Onion, which describes itself in the brief as "the world’s leading news publication" with "4.3 trillion" readers that maintains "a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires." In addition to running a highly successful news publication, The Onion said it "owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, stands on the nation’s leading edge on matters of deforestation and strip mining, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily." Oh, and its motto is "Tu stultus es." That's "you are dumb" in Latin. 

The Onion, of course, is the popular parody website that once named Kim Jong-un as the sexiest man alive. Its team has filed a very real amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Anthony Novak, who was arrested and jailed for four days after briefly running a Facebook page parodying the police department of Parma, Ohio back in 2016.

According to The Washington Times, Novak had suggested that the cops were racist and lacked compassion in about half a dozen posts within 12 hours that the page was up. Parma's police department claimed back then that people were confusing its posts with real information from law enforcement. Novak filed a civil suit against the officers that arrested him and the city of Parma, arguing that his constitutional rights were violated. After a federal appeals ruled that the officers were protected by what's known as "qualified immunity" for law enforcement, he took the battle to the Supreme Court. 

Despite writing the brief in the same voice its publication uses, and despite filling it with outlandish claims and hilarious quips, The Onion made a very real argument defending the use of parody and explaining how it works:

"Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original. The Sixth Circuit’s decision in this case would condition the First Amendment’s protection for parody upon a requirement that parodists explicitly say, up-front, that their work is nothing more than an elaborate fiction. But that would strip parody of the very thing that makes it function.

The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks."

As Bloomberg notes, Supreme Court Justices have yet to decide whether to hear the case.

Twitter has started rolling out some changes for its Android app that gives people sliding into DMs a more visually appealing interface. The social network's Android app has remained largely the same over the years, but this update, while pretty minor, was meant to give users "a smoother, more consistent experience overall." Twitter says it set to work redesigning its DMs on Android after its teams evaluated the experience on the OS and determined that it needed an improvement. 

As you can see in the screenshots below, the messages view on the app look cleaner now, with rounder speech bubbles and text box at the bottom. The inbox itself also looks much less cluttered and is devoid of line breaks. Ditto for the message requests view, which now also shows an "x" button for each request that makes it easy to delete them. 

Twitter

Twitter didn't just give DMs on Android a shiny new veneer, though. The company said it also worked on its back-end and rebuilt it with proper architecture, improving its responsiveness and its scrolling performance. Twitter said it also redesigned the message composer, as well as the app's tweet forwarding capabilities. 

The company has historically been slow to bring new features to the Android app — search, for instance, had been available on iOS and the web for almost a couple of years before it came to the mobile platform. Earlier this year, Twitter expanded search's capability to make it easier to find the exact conversations users are looking for. That feature is available for both iOS and Android users.

Twitter

Mobileye, the self-driving tech firm that Intel had purchased for $15.3 billion back in 2017, has filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission. When Intel first announced its plans to take Mobileye public late last year, the autonomous driving firm was expected to have a valuation of over $50 billion. Now according to Bloomberg, Intel expects Mobileye to be valued at around $30 billion, due to soaring inflation rates and poor market conditions. Regardless, it's still bound to become one of the biggest offerings in the US for 2022 if the listing takes place this year. 

Intel intends to retain a majority stake in Mobileye, but Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger previously said that taking it public would give it the ability to grow more easily. He also said that the company plans to use some of the funds raised from the IPO to build more chip factories. Intel revealed its big and bold foundry ambitions in 2021 when it announced that the company is investing $20 billion in two Arizona fabrication plants. Back then, Gelsinger even proclaimed that he was pursuing Apple's business. Earlier this year, the CEO revealed earmarking another $20 billion to build two fabrication plants in Columbus, Ohio. The company expects that facility to eventually become "the largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet."

Mobileye didn't specify how much a share would cost in its filing with the SEC. It did say, however, that it will use portion of the proceeds it will get from the IPO to pay debts. The firm also talked about its history in the filing and how its revenue grew from $879 million in 2019 to $1.4 billion in 2021, representing a growth of 43 percent year-over-year. 

Amazon's most powerful streaming stick is on sale yet again for Amazon's second Prime Day sale in 2022. You can grab the Fire TV Stick 4K Max for $35, or $20 off its regular price. That's how much it went for at this year's first Prime Day event back in July, and it's also the lowest price we've seen for the device on the website. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max supports Dolby Vision, HDR and HDR10+ content, as well as Dolby Atmos audio. It can also join WiFi 6 networks, and Amazon says it can start apps faster and has more fluid navigation than the basic Fire TV Stick 4K.

Like other models, this one comes with a remote control that has preset buttons for Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Hulu. Said remote is also powered by Alexa and can search content and launch them with just voice commands. You can even ask Alexa through the remote to dim your connected lights or check the weather. And if you have a compatible doorbell or security camera around your home, you can use its picture-in-picture capability to view its live feed on your screen without having to pause or remove whatever it is you're watching. 

Out of all the Fire TV streaming devices, only the Cube set-top box is more powerful than the 4K Max. The Fire TV Cube is also on sale for $60 at the moment, or half off its original price. But if you want something cheaper, you can also get the non-Max Fire TV Stick 4K for $25 or the base Fire TV Stick for $20.

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NASA and SpaceX have signed an agreement to study the possibility of using a Dragon spacecraft to lift the Hubble telescope to a higher orbit. The Hubble telescope's orbit decays over time due to atmospheric drag, and reboosting it to a more stable one could add more years to its life. SpaceX proposed the idea several months ago in partnership with the Polaris Program, the human spaceflight initiative organized by billionaire businessman, Jared Isaacman. If you'll recall, Isaacman funded Inspiration4, the first mission to launch an all-civilian crew to orbit back in 2021. 

The space agency said it's not going to spend any money for the study and there are no plans to fund a mission to reboost the Hubble with a Dragon spacecraft at the moment. According to The New York Times, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science, said during a news conference: "I want to be absolutely clear. We're not making an announcement today that we definitely will go forward with a plan like this." NASA and SpaceX didn't even enter an exclusive agreement, which means other companies can propose studies with their spacecraft as the model. At this point, this partnership is all about looking at the possibilities. 

The teams will spend six months collecting technical data from both Hubble and the Dragon spacecraft. They'll then use that information to determine whether it's safe for the capsule to rendezvous and dock with the telescope, as well as to figure out how it can physically raise Hubble to a higher altitude. At the same conference, SpaceX VP of customer operations Jessica Jensen explained: "What we want to do is expand the boundaries of current technology. We want to show how we use commercial partnerships as well as the public-private partnerships to creatively solve challenging and complex problem missions such as servicing Hubble." In addition to potentially adding years to the 32-year-old telescope's life, the servicing solutions the study finds could also be applied to other spacecraft in near-Earth orbit.

Twitch is testing a new feature that gives viewers a way to make sure their favorite streamer (and their fellow fans) can see their message in the chatbox. The livestreaming platform has given select channels access to an experimental feature called "Elevated Chat," which pins a viewer's message for visibility if they're willing to pay for it. Similar to YouTube's Super Chat, the more people pay, the longer their message stays highlighted. A payment of $5 will elevate their message for 30 seconds, while $10 will get them a minute. If they want 1.5 minutes, they'll have to pay $25. Two minutes? That's $50. And if they want their message to stay highlighted for 2.5 minutes, they better be prepared to pay $100 for it. 

Paying $100 on YouTube's Super Chat is typically enough to highlight a message for an hour. That said, while the features are similar, their implementations aren't exactly the same. YouTube adds markers to the top of the chatbox for each Super Chat, and clicking on them will take viewers to the donor's message. Meanwhile, Twitch is testing two potential locations for elevated chats. Streamers who've been chosen to participate will see the highlighted messages appear either at the top of the chatbox or at the bottom of the video. Also, it sounds like there can only be one highlighted message at a time, since Twitch said in the feature's support page that viewers will enter a queue if multiple people pay for elevated chats at the same time.

Twitch

Of course, $100 for 2.5 minutes of visibility sounds pretty outrageous no matter what — especially if you can just pay for five 30-second elevated messages for $25. The experiment will last for four weeks, after which Twitch will likely look at data from the test to decide whether to give the feature a wider rollout.

Meta is done rolling out support for non-fungible tokens or NFTs in the US. The company first started giving select creators in the country the option to display their tokens on Facebook and Instagram earlier this year. But now everyone in the US can display their collections on both platforms, whether they're NFTs they've created and are selling or something they've purchased from creators. Those who have both social media apps can also cross-post their digital collectibles from either app so they don't have to share them twice.

In addition, the ability to post NFT collections on Instagram is now live for users in 100 countries. The social network first announced that it was going to expand the feature's availability back in August to countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and the Americas. This probably doesn't sound like good news for people who aren't fond of NFTs or are concerned about their environmental impact. But it looks like Meta is set on making them a part of its platforms in its journey towards creating the metaverse it envisions. 

To be able to display their collection, a user must have a supported digital wallet, which includes Rainbow, Trust Wallet, Dapper, Coinbase Wallet and MetaMask, installed on their device. They then have to link their wallet to either or both apps by going to the "digital collectibles" tab in their app settings. Once they've linked their wallets, they'll be able to view their collectibles through the Facebook or Instagram app and share their NFTs to their feed. 

Two of the eBay executives who were charged for staging a cyberstalking campaign against the creators of the eCommerceBytes newsletter have been sentenced to prison. The Justice Department says that these execs, along with five other former eBay employees, worked together to intimidate David and Ina Steiner. They apparently hatched a scheme targeting the Steiners shortly after Ina published an article in their newsletter about a lawsuit eBay filed accusing Amazon of poaching its sellers. David said the people involved in their harassment made their lives "a living hell."

James Baugh, eBay's former senior director of safety and security, was sentenced to almost five years in prison and was ordered to pay a fine of $40,000. Meanwhile, David Harville, eBay's former Director of Global Resiliency and the last person in the case who pleaded guilty, got a two-year sentence and was ordered to pay a $20,000 fine. 

According to the DOJ, the group sent disturbing deliveries to the couple's home, including "a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig, a funeral wreath and live insects." They also sent the couple threatening Twitter messages and posted on Craigslist to invite the public to partake in sexual encounters at the victims' home. Authorities also said that Baugh, Harville and another eBay employee monitored the couple's home in person with the intention of attaching a GPS tracker to their car. 

Based on the case's court documents, David Wenig, who was eBay's CEO at the time, sent another top exec a message that said "If you are ever going to take her down ... now is the time" 30 minutes after Ina's post was published. In turn, that executive sent Wenig's message to Baugh, adding that Ina was a "biased troll who needs to get BURNED DOWN." As The Washington Post notes, Wenig was not charged in the case but is facing a civil lawsuit from the Steiners, who accused him of attempting to "intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence them." He denied any knowledge of the harassment campaign. 

As for Baugh and Harville, both asked the Steiners for forgiveness, according to The Post. "I take 100% responsibility for this, and there is no excuse for what I have done. The bottom line is simply this: If I had done the right thing and been strong enough to make the right choice, we wouldn’t be here today, and for that I am truly sorry," Baugh said.

Square has publicly launched its Tap to Pay solution for the iPhone after running an early access program these past few months. That means sellers across the US can now use the company's Point of Sale app to receive payments from customers using just their iPhones anywhere they are. Sure, they need to have a newer iPhone — the oldest model that can run the feature is the iPhone 11 — but they don't need to buy additional hardware to access the feature.

Like with any other point-of-sale system, sellers only have to ring up the sale on Square's app and then have the customer pay using contactless credit and debit cards or Apple Pay and other digital wallets. Square is hoping that the solution could provide even small merchants an easy way to conduct in-person business. In its announcement, the company also addressed a potential security concern and said that Apple doesn't store card numbers on the sellers' device or on its servers.

Square first announced that it was going to support Apple's Tap to Pay on iPhones, which the tech giant was seen testing at its visitor center in May, back in June. It opened its early access program at the same time to give select sellers and retailers the chance to try it out. One of the participants said it allowed their business to better accommodate younger customers who preferred paying with their digital wallets and contactless cards. 

In an interview with Bloomberg, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky has reassured worried Figma users that the online collaborative design platform's acquisition will not change its pricing model and ease of use. If you'll recall, Adobe announced in mid-September that it's purchasing Figma for roughly $20 billion in cash and shares. Users understandably raised concerns about the merger, seeing as Adobe's programs are quite expensive. 

Belsky said in the interview that Figma will remain a "freemium" offering with a basic tier that's available at no cost. Figma co-founder Dylan Field added that Adobe isn't planning any price increase and that the platform will remain free for education. Adobe does have changes planned for the platform, of course, including integrating features from its software portfolio, as well as its library of fonts and stock images. 

According to Belsky, though, any update Adobe rolls out won't be obstructive and won't make it difficult to navigate the platform's interface. Perhaps most importantly for those who use Figma for collaborations, it will continue allowing file sharing without additional fees — users won't have to get a Creative Cloud subscription to work on the same document. 

Adobe's suite of programs will undergo changes due to the acquisition, as well. The company plans to adopt Figma's collaborative features and may build multi-user web platforms for its programs. Adobe Express and Acrobat might also get their own versions of Figma's whiteboard and presentation functions. "We would only want to amplify and continue and learn from the things that Figma has done to become a viral product in the enterprise and throughout the world," Belsky said. 

There is one Adobe program that might not survive the acquisition: Figma's direct competitor Adobe XD. The company has no immediate plans to kill the software, but it will "reevaluate where [it] want[s] to shift [its] resources and focus" once Figma comes in. Both parties expect the deal to close sometime in 2023, so long as it gets approval from both regulators and shareholders.