A lack of technical knowledge may have just influenced an important court case. The New York Timesreports the defense for shooter Kyle Rittenhouse incorrectly claimed that an iPad's pinch-to-zoom function could modify footage of the incident, "creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there." That sparked a debate between lawyers and Judge Schroeder, who maintained the burden was on the prosecution to show the imagery remained in its "virginal state," not on the defense to prove manipulation.
The judge may have accepted the argument. He denied the prosecution's request for an adjournment and instead called for a 15-minute recess, suggesting the team could find an expert to support their claim in that space of time. They didn't, and The Vergenoted that the trial resumed with the jury watching zoom-free video on a Windows PC connected to the courtroom TV.
As you might imagine, the defense's claim played fast and loose with the truth. Pinch-to-zoom on all devices may use algorithms, but only to scale the image — it doesn't change the content itself. This was an attempt to prevent the jury from getting a clearer view of the action, not a genuine challenge to the integrity of the video.
The court scene underscored a recurring problem with technical inexperience in criminal cases. When judges and law enforcement don't understand how technology works, they may set unrealistic expectations or even skew the outcome of a case. Police have repeatedly asked for Alexa recordings on the unfounded assumption that smart speakers are always recording, for instance. While it's not clear if the inaccurate pinch-to-zoom claim will significantly affect Rittenhouse's fate, it certainly didn't help jurors.
Whether you’re serious about snow sports, or a weekend resort-goer, there’s always more ways to get the most out of your time on the mountain. Apps and gadgets that keep track of your laps around the resort can help you up your game, no matter your skill level. And gear to protect your phone and can keep an epic powder day from turning into “the day you dropped your phone off a chairlift.”
Or, you can give my favorite gift: the gift of heat. Because as much as I love a day on the mountain, I hate being cold. You can layer up all you want, but some gear really benefits from an extra, battery-powered boost of heat.
Burton Toaster boot liners
Will Lipman Photography for Engadget / Burton
The only thing worse than cold fingers are cold toes — especially when you're strapped into snowboard bindings. Burton’s Toaster boot liners might look like the typical boot lines, but they have tiny built in heaters that can keep your toes warm and, even more importantly, dry, for up to five hours at a time. The liners come in mens and women’s sizes, and are meant to be compatible with any existing Burton boot, so you can upgrade your existing setup without buying a whole new pair.
Will Lipman Photography for Engadget / Hangtime Gear
At least half my time spent on the mountain is riding chairlifts (thanks, Slopes), which means I inevitably pull out my phone on the lift against my better judgment. I have yet to drop it, though I’ve had a few uncomfortably close calls. That’s where Hangtime Gear’s Koala harness comes in. Simply strap your phone into the harness and clip the leash to a pocket or backpack strap. The extendable leash will give you plenty of slack to take a selfie or pick up a call but will keep your phone from plummeting to an icy death if you accidentally let go.
This may not be the most attractive accessory, but I like this cheap fleece mask better than any other ski mask I’ve tried. The half-mask design means it’s easy to get on and off without messing with your helmet, and the built in ear flaps keep it in place while keeping your ears nice and toasty. I started wearing mine last year when many resorts were requiring guests to mask up in lift lines due to COVID-19. I wasn’t disappointed: the fleece was way more comfortable than the standard cloth or surgical mask, which are pretty miserable in cold or wet conditions. But after wearing it for an entire season, I’m ready to ditch all my other ski masks for good and keep this in my ski bag for seasons to come.
At $500, Ministry of Supply’s Mercury Jacket is definitely one of the pricier pieces of outerwear you can buy, but it’s much more than just a jacket. The Mercury has three, strategically placed carbon fiber heating elements woven into the lining of the jacket. Plug in the included battery back, turn the power switch on — yes, the jacket has a power switch — and they’ll warm up to provide a steady source of cozy heat. That may not sound like something you need every day, but the Mercury is surprisingly versatile. It’s insulated and looks good enough on its own that you can wear it on warmer days, but the heater means you can keep it on even when conditions get colder.
If you’re looking for a high-performance winter glove, it doesn’t get any better than the wind and waterproof Gore-Tex. But while Gore-Tex can keep you dry, it’s not the warmest material, which is why Gore-Tex gloves often come with extra liners for added insulation. But double gloving can be a pain, and sometimes even two gloves isn’t enough to keep the tips of your fingers from going numb. Outdoor Research’s Gripper gloves provides the best of both: Gore-Tex gloves with built-in, adjustable heaters. If that’s too spendy, or you just need a lighter-weight spring glove, we’re also big fans of TrailHeads’ Convertible Mittens. Part fingerless glove, part mitten, the gloves are surprisingly warm considering their lighter weight, and the unique hybrid design makes them easy to get on and off in a pinch.
We all know cold weather is hard on our batteries, and sometimes, even your warmest pockets aren’t insulated enough to save them. Enter Phoozy’s Apollo thermal case: the insulated pouch will keep your phone from getting too cold and should significantly extend your battery life in cold conditions. Better yet, the reflective material — supposedly inspired by the spacesuits worn by astronauts — can also protect your phone from excessive heat so it can be a year round accessory.
If you’re serious about leveling up your skiing abilities, Skeo’s Snowcookie sensor can help you get there. The kit comes with three battery powered sensors: one to wear on a chest harness and one for each ski. The sensors pair to an app on your phone and measure a range of metrics from the angles of your skis and your hips to how your weight is distributed across your skis. When you’re done on the mountain, the app will break down your technique with a detailed analysis and tips for improving.
Slopes has been my go-to app anytime I’m on a mountain for years. Start the ski-tracking app before your first chair and the app records stats like speed and elevation as you ski or board. At the end of the day, the app creates a summary of your day with all your stats. If you want to go deeper, you can even watch a replay of all your runs overlaid onto a resort map so you can see exactly what you did. Even if you only make it out a few times a year, Slopes is a great way to track your season and relive your best days on the mountain year-round.
If you're looking to take your smart home to the next level, a smart thermostat can do the trick. Google makes a few reliable ones, including the Nest Learning Thermostat, which is a tad bit smarter and sleeker than the standard model. Normally $249, the Nest Learning Thermostat is on sale for $179 at Wellbots right now when you use the code THERMOENGADGET. While not an all-time low, it's the best price we've seen on the gadget in months.
Most people are drawn to smart thermostats because of the energy savings they provide. In the case of Google's device, it uses a feature called Savings Finder to learn about your home system and make temperature suggestions and set schedules based on how you live. And since it syncs with Google's companion app, it can use your phone's location to know when you're away, automatically entering an Eco Temperature mode to save energy. The app also lets you set schedules manually and make adjustments from anywhere — so if you want your home at a certain temperature when you get home from work, you can set that before you even start your commute.
The Nest Learning Thermostat has a few perks that the standard device doesn't have. First, it works with the Nest Temperature Sensors so you can control the environment in certain rooms of your home more easily. It also has a metal ring deals and comes with a trim plate, so it'll look sleeker on your wall. The actual display on the device is nicer, too — it's a high-res panel that can show the time, temperature and the weather as well, depending on the settings you choose. Overall, it's a capable device that can make controlling the temperature of your home easier while saving you some money on energy costs in the long run.
The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S debuted one year ago this month. To celebrate, we’ve made a 20-minute video conversation about the pros, cons and future of both consoles, hosted by PS5 enthusiast and Engadget Senior Editor Jessica Conditt, and Xbox Series X fan and Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.
There may not be a clear-cut winner of this generation yet — in fact, the conversation tries to steer clear of most of the drama — so we’re focusing on what both PlayStation and Xbox have done right (and wrong). DualSense! Game Pass Ultimate! Halo! The Horizon sequel! Debate!
Judges were unimpressed by the attempt to create a class-action suit.
Google has escaped the risk of a lawsuit after violating the privacy of around 5.4 million iPhone users in the UK. The UK’s Supreme Court has ruled it cannot allow a US-style class action suit to be filed against the search giant after it deliberately created a workaround to track Safari users. The judgment focused on procedural matters, like the intersection between Google, based in the US, and the UK’s data protection laws.
The battle began in 2017 with consumer rights champion Richard Lloyd, and many others, forming a group called Google You Owe Us, which attempted to sue the company. It alleged that Google had illegally collected data on iPhone users between June 2011 and February 2012.
While the group lost at the High Court, the UK’s Court of Appeal overturned this initial decision, saying it was fair for Google to face a courtroom after the intentional misuse of personal data without consent.
Apple is introducing another way to ensure its AirTags won't be used for stalking when iOS 15.2 comes out. According to MacRumors, the just-out beta version of the mobile platform has a new feature to let users scan for AirTags that may be tracking their location. Beta users can find the feature under the Items tab in the Find My app. Any trackable item nearby that belongs to someone else will be detected and show up as an unknown item. Apple will then point users to a set of instructions on how to disable the device being used to track them.
Another interesting feature that showed up in the beta is Digital Legacy. It will let users designate people as Legacy Contacts, who'll be able to access their account and digital information when they pass away.
We review smart speakers, robotic vacuums and Instant Pots all year long, and for the holiday season, we’ve compiled a list of our recent favorites in the home-tech space. Whoever’s getting the gift doesn’t have to be tech-savvy to use all of them either — plenty of our recommendations amount to baby steps into the smarthome world. Start with a smart plug and work your way up?
The move could reduce harassment and targeted attacks.
YouTube's experiment with hiding dislikes was apparently successful. The service is rolling out a change to make dislike counts private for videos across YouTube. The button will still exist (and affect your recommendations), and producers can still see the count — you just won't see the numbers as a viewer.
The Google-owned brand is aware that some people used the counts to make viewing decisions, but it feels secret counts would help the community at large. New and smaller creators are more often targeted by dislike campaigns, YouTube said, and the test reduced that harassment.
The new 'Forza' had three times as many active players as its predecessor.
Microsoft’s gaming head Phil Spencer has revealed that Forza Horizon 5 had the best launch day of any Xbox Game Studios title. There have been over 4.5 million people playing the arcade racer across all platforms (Xbox, Windows and cloud) to date, and its peak concurrent players were three times those of its predecessor.
Congress is making its biggest push ever to stop drunk driving with President Biden's huge infrastructure bill. As previously reported, it includes a mandate for anti-drunk driving technology in new cars. Now, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has passed Congress with the measure intact, and it's expected to be signed by the president soon. As part of the legislation, carmakers will have to include technology to detect and stop drunk drivers by as early as 2026.
A number of Instant Pot pressure cookers, air fryers and other cooking gadgets are on sale for one day only on Amazon, including the 8-quart Duo Crisp for $119. That's $81 less than what it usually sells for and is the lowest price we've seen for the larger Duo Crisp. The model comes with a removable air fryer lid you can use to make crispy chicken wings, fried vegetables and more. It has 11 functionalities in all with air fry included, as well as pressure cook, slow cook, roast, bake and sterilizer.
The 6-quart Instant Pot Max is also on sale for $110, or $40 less than its retail price. It's capable of providing sustained 15psi pressure cooking and has a large touchscreen display you can use to set the time, temperature and pressure level. That's where you can set the time for a delayed start and where you can access the setting to make sure any cooked food inside stays warm.
If you'd rather get a slow cooker, though, the 6-quart Instant Pot Aura is currently listed for $70, which is $60 lower than its regular price. That's a bit more than its all-time low, but the model hasn't been this price since earlier this year, and it's still a 46 percent discount. The Aura does not have a pressure cooker function, but it does have 10 modes that include slow cooking. While not all Instant Pot models are on sale, Black Friday isn't that far off, and it's traditionally rife with deals for the brand.
Instant's air fryers are also on sale in case that's what you really want to buy. You can get the 4-quart Instant Vortex Plus for $64, which is $36 lower than its retail price and the lowest the model has ever been sold for on the website. It's a solid (and now an affordable) entry point into air frying if you haven't given it a shot yet. Meanwhile, the Instant Omni Pro 14-in-1 Air Fryer is currently available for $200. That's also an all-time low for the $300 model that can also serve as a convection and rotisserie oven. The model can broil, bake, roast, dehydrate, reheat, toast, warm and slow cook, as well.
In addition to the pressure cookers and air fryers we've listed above, Instant's Accu Slim Sous Vide Precision Cooker is on sale for 20 percent off at $80. It promises even cooking with its immersion circulator that's designed to uniformly heat water with no hot or cold spots. Finally, you can get the Instant Blend Ace Cold and Hot Blender for 43 percent off at $40, or $30 less than its usual price. It has a 1.6 liter capacity and can help you make smoothies, purée, crushed ice, frozen desserts and soups.
HTC has updated its excellent but expensive Vive Focus 3 business-focused headset with a much larger play area, WiFi 6E and more, the company announced. The software update comes with no change in hardware as HTC "secretly built in the 6E required hardware from Day 1," tweeted HTC's global head of hardware products, Shen Ye.
You also don't need new hardware. We secretly built in the 6E required hardware from day 1 😬. They're going through certification right now and we'll begin eabling as soon as they get approved.
WiFi 6E capability brings a "wide range of benefits," according to Vive. That includes low latency and higher bandwidth for VR streaming with less WiFi interference. The wider frequency range also allows double the number of devices with their own dedicated channels. The headsets already had the hardware needed for the standard, "so there's no added cost to the headset owner to leverage this functionality," the company said.
Vive also introduced a feature called Location Based Entertainment (LBE) mode, designed for businesses that use the Focus 3 headset. It increases the size of the play area from a 15m x 15m space (225 square meters or 2,422 square feet) to 33m x 33m (1,089 square meters or 11,722 square feet). That's the size of four tennis courts, compared to a size just under a tennis court, the company noted.
HTC
On top of the increased area, you can create a boundary in any custom shape like a polygon or L-shape. You'll only need to do that once, as the Focus 3 will "constantly re-localize in the known play area." The new setting is designed to create large spaces for "VR arcade, arena experiences or large training areas," according to HTC.
The update also includes Map Sharing, a feature that allows accurate co-location tracking among multiple users in a shared space. Other types of headsets that use outside-in tracking (rather than inside-out like the Focus 3), require "users to carry a PCVR backpack and play in a limited space with the Lighthouse system," HTC notes. With the Focus 3, Map Sharing and LBE, "users can finally run around in the field, provide cover for each other in shooting games or share their different perspectives in escape games," HTC said.
Other features include a Visual Odometery (VO) mode that lets you skip the usual 5-minute environment setup, an LBE Hybrid Mode that uses both VO and LBE for 6DoF tracking, and a Space Calibrator that allows accessories like a tennis racket to be more accurately tracked. The updates are now available — for more, check out Vive's blog post.
Early last year, Netflix started using a new codec called AV1 on a select set of titles on Android. Now, the streaming giant has enabled AV1 streaming on the PS4 Pro and a limited number of smart TV models. Netflix was a key contributor to the development of AV1, which is available for use royalty free under the Alliance of Open Media. It shared this list of supported TVs with The Verge:
Select Samsung 2020 UHD Smart TVs
Select Samsung 2020 UHD QLED Smart TVs
Select Samsung 2020 8K QLED Smart TVs
Samsung The Frame 2020 Smart TVs
Samsung The Serif 2020 Smart TVs
Samsung The Terrace 2020 Smart TVs
Any TV connected to a PS4 Pro streaming with the Netflix app
Select Amazon Fire TV devices with Fire OS 7 and above
Select Android TV devices with Android OS 10 and above
The company explained that deployment on TVs took sometime because playback on TV platforms depend on hardware. It was only over the past year that the industry released models capable of AV1 streaming. Netflix conducted comparison testing before rollout and found that AV1 delivers videos with better quality than other codecs, especially when there's network congestion. It also noticed fewer noticeable drops in quality due to changing network conditions and lesser time to start streams. In addition, since AV1 has higher compression efficiency than the codecs Netflix is currently using, it needs lesser bandwidth. That could lead to longer streaming sessions in 4K resolution.
A team within the company created a rollout strategy to minimize associated costs with encoding its whole catalogue. Netflix will consider a title's popularity into consideration and start with well-known shows like La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) to make sure the AV1 streaming reaches the most number of viewers. The streaming giant also said that it's working with more manufacturers to develop more devices with AV1 playback capability.
Sony's PlayStation 5 may not be able to beat the PS4's first year sales record due to an ongoing component shortage, according to Bloomberg. The company has reportedly cut its previous production forecast of 16 million down to 15 million, putting its target of 14.8 million PS5 sales by March in jeopardy, if the report is accurate. It also makes a bad situation worse in terms of consumers being able to pick up a PS5 over the holidays.
Sony is supposedly having trouble with not just parts supply but shipping logistics as well, according to Bloomberg's sources. The problems are due in part to uneven vaccine rollouts in nations where Sony builds chips, and shortages of essential parts like power chips.
The situation has affected other console makers like Nintendo and even affected the launch of an entirely new console, Valve's Steam Deck — pushing the date back until some time in 2022. It's got to the point that publishers are reportedly saying that sales are gradually shifting over to PC versions of games due to a lack of consoles.
March is still a long ways off, so Sony might still be able to pull off the sales record goal. But it's rather ominous that this report is arriving just ahead of Christmas, so if you're looking for a PS5 as a gift and see an opportunity to get one, better snap it up quick.
After doing so on mobile, Twitter has stopped automatically cropping images on the web, The Verge has reported. It now leaves full sized images across platforms, after researchers and users discovered that its cropping algorithms tended to be biased based on race and gender.
This is now available on web!
Pic looking good in the Tweet composer? That’s how it will look on the timeline.
If you post, for example, a portrait format photo along with a tweet, it'll now show in its full vertical glory rather than being cropped wherever the algorithm decides. However, Twitter images embedded into a website are still cropped to be more square, as shown below. And if you link a web article with an image, regardless of the aspect ratio or platform, it will automatically be cropped to 16:9. This is one reason many news sites (Engadget included) tweet links to articles with the main (lede) image embedded separately.
Twitter changed the way it displayed photos following a controversy over automatic cropping. Some users noticed that when presented with a photo that displayed both black and white faces, it tended to automatically crop to the white face. Researchers effectively proved that it had a slight bias toward white people and women, though Twitter decided to phase out cropping shortly before that.
Cropping was good in one way, in that it can make you click on the image or link to better see what's going on, boosting a website or person's engagement. No one can deny that fewer uncropped images will make for a better experience on Twitter, though.
Even though Apple announced its third-generation AirPods last month, the second-gen earbuds are still around and some may prefer them if they like the fit of Apple's old-school EarPods. You can pick up the previous-generation AirPods for only $89 right now at Walmart, which is $70 off their normal price and $10 cheaper than they were last Black Friday. You'll have to sign in with your Walmart account before you can make a purchase, and we expect these to go quickly. While Amazon isn't currently matching the deal, we expect it to if the AirPods come back in stock soon.
If you're (somehow) unfamiliar, AirPods are Apple's true wireless earbuds that have become some of the most popular buds in the space since the first came out. One of the biggest reasons why many prefer them is how easily they pair and switch with Apple devices. Setup is super quick as your iOS device will recognize the earbuds as soon as you open the case, and then audio playback will switch based on which device you're using. That means you can go from taking a call on your iPhone to listening to music from your MacBook without hassle.
The second-gen AirPods have a similar design and fit to Apple's EarPods, and they have decent sound quality, too. We liked their improved wireless range and good battery life as well — you'll get around five hours of use before needing to recharge. Despite not being the newest AirPods anymore, these buds are a much better buy at this $89 sale price. But if you're willing to spend a bit more, Apple's latest AirPods offer a lot of improvements including a better fitting design, improved audio quality and a longer battery life.
