LG’s display division will showcase two flexible OLED concepts at CES 2022 – assuming the pandemic doesn’t claim the annual trade show as its latest victim. The first one is the “Virtual Ride” stationary bike. It features three vertical 55-inch OLED displays that form one continuous screen in front and above the rider. The topmost panel has a 500R curvature radius. According to LG Display, that’s the most extreme curve among large screens to date.

LG

The second concept is the “Media Chair.” It’s a recliner with a 55-inch OLED TV attached to it. It features a 1,500R curvature, which LG says is ideal for a use case like this one. It also includes the company’s Cinematic Sound OLED technology, allowing the display to create sound without external speakers. Lastly, the display can alternate between portrait and landscape orientations with the touch of a button located on the armrest of the chair.

Like with most CES concepts, the likelihood we’ll see LG commercial either the Virtual Ride or Media Chair is slim. That’s not to say the company hasn’t brought some of its past concepts to market (the OLED R comes to mind), but it’s better to see these latest ones as a showcase of how much LG’s display technology has advanced in recent years.

The FDA has issued an emergency authorization Pfizer's antiviral pill Paxlovid, making it the first oral method for treating mild to moderate cases of COVID-19. The treatment is meant for high-risk people 12 and older who could progress to a more serious COVID infection. The best part? The FDA says it could be available to use within a few days, making it another tool as we face the Omicron variant wave.

Paxlovid is available by prescription only, and it's meant to be taken within five days of first noticing COVID symptoms. According to Pfizer's tests, it can prevent hospitalization or death by 88 percent in high-risk patients. The treatment, which can be prescribed to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, consists of 30 pills taken over five days. It includes the protein inhibitor nirmatrelvir and rotinavir, which keeps that inhibitor from breaking down in your body. Side effects include an impaired sense of taste, high blood pressure, diarrhea and muscle aches. 

“This authorization provides a new tool to combat COVID-19 at a crucial time in the pandemic as new variants emerge and promises to make antiviral treatment more accessible to patients who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19," Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

So far, the US has ordered enough pills to treat 10 million people, the New York Times reports. The company plans to deliver enough pills to cover 65,000 Americans within a week. And after that, production is expect to ramp up, with 150,000 courses delivered in January and 150,000 in February. It also won't be the only antiviral pill around: Merck's competing treatment is expected to be approved soon, and it'll likely be more readily available than Pfizer's. Merck's option is far less effective, though—tests show it can only prevent hospitalization or death by 30 percent. (Still, that's better than having no treatment.) 

Just weeks after Facebook rebranded itself to “Meta,” the longtime owner of @metaverse Instagram suddenly found herself locked out of the account she had run for years. A message told Thea-Mai Baumann she was suspended for impersonation, though she had never pretended to be anyone else. Her account was returned after The New York Timeswrote a story about the ordeal, but the company never offered an explanation for how the mistake was made.

While what happened to her was unusual, one aspect of Baumann’s story is more common: that people who are wrongfully suspended from their social media accounts often have little or no recourse for getting them back (at least, not without media attention).

Now that group may have another option. The “robot lawyer” company DoNotPay, which offers automated legal services, has a new offering: getting social media accounts unbanned.

The new service, which is included with DoNotPay’s $36 monthly subscription, offers users an alternative to emailing companies’ help center bots or wiring appeals that may never get answered. Instead, DoNotPay asks users for information about what happened to them, and sends a letter to the relevant company’s legal department on their behalf.

DoNotPay

“These platforms prioritize legal cases,” DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder tells Engadget. “When you're just writing into customer service, they don't really take it seriously.” Legal departments, on the other hand, are much more likely to respond, he says.

In the appeal, the company also tries to “match” your appeal with a “legal reason why they can't ban you,” using state and federal laws that may apply. The letter also includes a deadline for the company to respond. He says that so far PayPal and Instagram have been among the most-requested services for unbanning. But the service will work with other platforms as well, including Twitter, Snapchat, Uber, Tinder, YouTube, Twitch and others.

Crucially, Browder points out that the service is not intended for people who were banned from a platform for legitimate reasons, like violating its terms of service. And even for those who were wrongly suspended, he estimates the odds of actually getting an account back as the result of this process are around 20 percent.

But even if the appeal isn’t ultimately successful, Browder says there are other benefits to the process. For one, companies are required to turn over users’ data regardless of whether their account was suspended. So even if you are unable to, say, regain access to your Instagram account, DoNotPay can ensure the company hands over your account details. There’s also the fact that sending a legal demand letter can cause a much bigger headache for a company than ranting to customer service agents.

“In general in America, they do have the right to ban you,” Browder says. “We don't overstate that we can make miracles happen, but we can punish them a lot and get your data.”

Steam’s Winter Sale is now underway. From today until January 5th, Valve is offering steep discounts on some of the best PC games you can buy right now. For instance, Arkane’s thrilling immersive simDeathloop, which only came out this past September, is currently 50 percent off, making it $30 at the moment.

Another recent highlight, Sony’s Horizon Zero Dawn, is currently $25, down from $50. If season two of The Witcher has made you want to experience more of Geralt’s adventures, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is 80 percent off. You can pick up the Game of the Year edition, which includes the game’s fantastic Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions, for just under $10.

If indies are more your jam, one of my personal favorites from the past year, Death’s Door, is 25 percent off until the new year. For $15, you can’t get a much better Zelda-inspired title than that. Eastward, an action RPG with one of the most beautiful pixel art styles in recent memory, is 10 percent off, marking the first time it’s been on sale. If you want to catch up on some older gems, may we suggest Disco Elysium and Hades? They’re currently priced at $18 and $16.24, respectively.

We’ll also note here both GOG and the Epic Games Store recently kicked off their own winter sales, so if you prefer those storefronts, make sure to check them out too.

OnePlus is gearing up to show off its next smartphone, and it seems we won't have to wait long to get our eyes on it. It will reveal the OnePlus 10 Pro next month, according to co-founder and CEO Pete Lau. “OnePlus 10 Pro, see you in January," Lau wrote on Weibo, as spotted by Gizmodo.

If OnePlus does reveal its next phone in January, it will mark a shift in the brand's usual timeline. Over the last few years, it has announced its flagship handsets in March or April, typically after Samsung debuts the newest Galaxy S series phones.

Rumors suggest OnePlus will only reveal a single phone this time around, instead of the usual approach of having a base model and a pro device. In the past, OnePlus has followed up the flagship devices with a T-series model as well, but it decided not to release a 9T this year.

Lau previously said 10-series devices will have a new Android 13-based operating system that OnePlus is sharing with Oppo. The two formally merged this year under the ownership of BBK Electronics, with OnePlus becoming a sub-brand of Oppo.

Leakers have already offered a peek at the next OnePlus phone through unofficial renders. It seems OnePlus will again use Hasselblad cameras, while the OnePlus 10 Pro screen is slated to be a 6.7-inch QHD+ display with a 120 Hz refresh rate. Lau confirmed earlier this month that the upcoming device will use the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset.

Weird West, the new immersive sim from Arkane co-founder Raphael Colantonio, won’t come out this year. On Wednesday, Colantonio’s Wolfeye Studios said it was delaying the title to March 31st, 2022. In an email Weird West publisher Devolver Digital sent to Engadget, Wolfeye said it needs more time to address various bugs and other issues.

As part of the game’s closed beta, players have found accidental deadends that can come up as part of gameplay, making it impossible to complete a playthrough. Those types of issues are not unusual for an immersive sim where a player’s choices can have a dramatic effect on the state of the game world. In Weird West, there’s the added complication that time moves forward even if your character dies. To that end, Wolfeye said it wants to create the best possible experience, even if it means fans have to wait another three months to experience its first project. 

Workers in Amazon's considerable warehousing operations will be required to wear masks, again. The shift comes as US cases have spiked again due to the highly-transmissible Omicron variant, and will apply to all "operations facilities, FCs [fulfillment centers], sort centers, and delivery stations," effective today, according to an email shared with Engadget.

Amazon made temperature checks and masking a requirement in April of last year. It allowed individuals who were 14 or more days past their final dose of the vaccine to unmask in May. That decision was seen, at least by some workers, as premature.   

"You may choose to wear your own two-layered, reusable and/or disposable cloth face covering, as long as it complies with site safety requirements (e.g. no long scarves, bandanas, or gaiters)" the email reads, "If you do not have one, face coverings will be available for you to wear upon entering the building." The company wrote that it hopes the requirement will only last the winter.

While laudable that the company is attempting to reduce transmission of the virus during its busiest season, Amazon does not have the sunniest track record where COVID precautions are concerned. Workers at several locations raised concerns that they were not being informed when positive case were discovered at their facilities. In California, the company was fined $500,000 for "concealing" cases from workers. 

Are you a tech worker with concerns about your job, safety, or the work you're required to do? I'd love to hear from you. Reach out confidentially on Signal at 646 983 9846.

Square Enix has rolled out the first Final Fantasy XIV patch after the ultra-popularEndwalker expansion arrived in November. Along with adding more quests, items and a raid dungeon, the update addressed various issues. One of those was a so-called bug fix that targeted some delightfully janky-looking grapes in one of the new areas.

"An issue wherein the polygon count of grapes in Labyrinthos were reduced in excess to alleviate system memory usage in the area," Square Enix wrote at the end of the latest patch notes, perhaps in an attempt to bury the biggest news from the update. "They have been adjusted to be comparable to those found at the Crystarium."

The low-poly model quickly became a meme after the expansion went live, as PC Gamer notes, with some players embracing the blocky aesthetic and other, more foolish players incorrectly deriding the grapes as ugly. So, not everyone may be on board with the smoothed-out edges of the model.

It's hard to call this a fix, since it's a shame Square Enix changed the look of the grapes. They looked fine as is. The previous version felt like a refreshing throwback to some 3D games from the '90s, like the original Tomb Raider. In any case, the latest twist in the saga of the grapes goes to show developers can't please everyone all the time, even when they're tackling apparent bugs. 

A group of 13 Democratic senators led by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Jack Reed of Rhode Island has called on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to answer how Facebook handled misinformation enforcement ahead of the January 6th US Capitol attack. Citing documents and testimony shared by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, they say they want to know why the company "prematurely" removed safeguards it had in place before the 2020 presidential election.

"This action allowed misinformation, disinformation, and violent rhetoric to return to the platform immediately following Election Day and in the lead-up to the January 6th insurrection," the group said.

Many of the questions center around Meta's defunct Civic Integrity team. During her testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security, Haugen said that the company dissolved shortly after the 2020 election. That's a claim Meta has consistently disputed.

"We did not disband Civic Integrity," Guy Rosen, Meta vice president for integrity, told Time in October. "We integrated it into a larger Central Integrity team so that the incredible work pioneered for elections could be applied even further, for example, across health-related issues. Their work continues to this day."

To that point, the group asks Zuckerberg when Meta made the decision to disband the team and who ultimately made it. They also want to know what part of Meta is currently responsible for overseeing its efforts to prevent election-related misinformation, in addition to details like how many employees the company has assigned to that division. Beyond those questions, the group says they want to know how Meta plans to protect the integrity of future elections.

"While we acknowledge the efforts Facebook took to prevent the spread of election-related misinformation and disinformation, violent rhetoric, and harassment prior to the 2020 elections, it clearly was not enough to prevent lies about the election from taking root on the platform and fueling violence against our democracy," Klobuchar, Reed and the 11 other senators said.

The group stops short of threatening regulatory action against Meta. It's possible the Senate could call on Zuckerberg to testify much like Instagram head Adam Mosseri was asked to do earlier this month. While most US lawmakers agree more needs to be done to regulate Facebook and other social media platforms, Democrats and Republicans have found little common ground on how to approach the issue.

Tesla came under fire earlier this month following reports that certain games are playable on dashboard infotainment systems while an EV is in motion. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now investigating Tesla over the so-called "Passenger Play" function.

The preliminary evaluation from the agency's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) covers around 580,000 Model 3, S, X and Y vehicles sold since 2017. While the feature prompts players to acknowledge they're a passenger before they start a game, the NHTSA said Passenger Play "may distract the driver and increase the risk of a crash."

A report from the New York Timesindicated that an update Tesla rolled out in the summer made three games playable while a car is moving. Before then, Passenger Play was only available when the EV was in park. The NHTSA told Engadget earlier in December that it was speaking to Tesla about the feature.

The ODI said the preliminary evaluation will assess the driver distraction potential of Passenger Play while the EV is moving. It will look into various aspects of Passenger Play, including use scenarios and how often it's used.

In announcing the investigation, the NHTSA cited a report that was filed with the agency in August. "Tesla is now making interactive video games and live internet web searching possible on the main front seat display while the car is driving," the complaint reads. "Why is a manufacturer allowed to create an inherently distracting live video which takes over 2/3 of the screen which the driver relies on for all vehicle information? Creating a dangerous distraction for the driver is recklessly negligent."

Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The company no longer has a PR department.