Ok, let’s try this again. Elon Musk’s Twitter will attempt to relaunch its premium Blue subscription today, allowing users to pay $8 a month ($11 if you subscribe on iOS) for early access to new features and, of course, a blue checkmark. The social media network had attempted to roll out the new subscription offering last month, but pulled it after a wave of fake-yet-verified accounts flooded the platform.
Elsewhere, NASA’s Orion spacecraft successfully returned to Earth over the weekend, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday. Although this Artemis I mission was uncrewed, NASA hopes that will change with an upcoming 2024 flight that’ll send a group of astronauts around the Moon.
Finally, although 16GB has long served as the default amount of RAM recommended for most PC games, Returnal’s upcoming port looks set to buck the trend if its Steam listing is to be believed. The listing lists 32GB of RAM as the recommended amount for decent performance, though you should be able to scrape by with 16GB as a minimum.
And now, here’s a silly tweet:
Stay tuned, as we continue to update this list with the most important news of today: Friday, December 12th, 2022.
Your iPhone 14 can now make your Sonos speakers sound better.
If you’ve ever used Sonos’ Trueplay feature to tune your speakers for the best sound quality, you know what a difference it can make. But since the process relies on microphone measurements from supported iPhones, Sonos is often slow to include new models.
Case in point: the company only just today added Trueplay support for Apple’s iPhone 14 lineup — nearly three months after the phones went on sale. Recent iPad buyers are still out of luck, and the tuning feature remains unavailable on Android altogether. Sometimes the best option is just borrowing a friend’s iPhone.
A years-long copyright lawsuit over Taylor Swift’s 2014 hit “Shake It Off” has come to a close.
In a dispute with two songwriters, Swift argued she’d never heard the song “Playas Gon’ Play” by 3LW, cited in 2015 by a judge dismissing another claim against “Shake It Off” over the same lyrics.
With a jury trial set to start on January 17th, Variety reports the parties settled and the credits of the song unchanged.
Compare that to Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams paying Marvin Gaye’s family $7.3 million for “Blurred Lines.” That result, and this episode of Decoder, shows why artists like Olivia Rodrigo have opted to hand out credits instead of fighting in court.
Stanford University is having a bad time…
… and it’s not just because of the Bankman-Frieds or Elizabeth Holmes.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Stanford, is also under investigation for scientific misconduct. There are also lawsuits around student deaths and a person who posed as an undergrad on campus for a whole year.
New York’s saddest club is T-Mobile.
T-Mobile’s latest stunt is this “ATM” that gives people free money and looks like it’s the VIP section of the world’s lamest club. It’s almost 10 years since T-Mobile became the “Uncarrier”, which came with some genuinely good ideas about disrupting the mobile industry.
But its classic silly stunts are only getting sadder as the company slowly becomes the thing it once hated.
Just thinking about the time Facebook lied to us about its internet drone crashing.
Meta is shutting down its connectivity division, which tried to give away “free” internet access around the world that zero-rated Facebook and put data caps on competitors. Makes sense, times are tight.
Anyway, one time Meta invited us to write an entire feature about the Aquila connectivity drone but did not disclose the drone had actually crashed. Memories!
The boos that cost $44 billion.
If you weren’t at the Dave Chappelle / Chris Rock comedy show in San Francisco on Sunday night, then you missed this event. Chappelle brought Elon Musk on stage, only for Twitter’s billionaire owner to receive so many boos he couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
Presumably, this isn’t the reception Musk usually gets on the 10th floor of the Twitter HQ from any of the software engineers who still work there.
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