If you’re lucky enough to own your home, you undoubtedly have experience the pain of shopping for homeowner’s insurance (if you have a mortgage, you likely had no choice in the matter, since lenders typically require it in the terms of the loan). Considering the money you’ve sunk into what’s likely your largest asset,…
Source: LifeHacker – All the Stuff Homeowners Insurance Doesn’t Cover
After laying off half of Twitter’s employees and issuing a stay-or-leave ultimatum to the rest, Elon Musk sent an email to the remaining staff today seeking responses from “anyone who actually writes software.”
“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 pm today. Before doing so, please email a bullet point summary of what your code commands have achieved in the past ~6 months, along with up to 10 screenshots of the most salient lines of code,” Musk wrote in the first of three emails reportedly sent around midnight PT Friday.
Musk’s emails were published in full by Business Insider and also reported by Fortune, CNBC, and Reuters. His emails requested in-person meetings with coders despite Twitter informing staff that it was closing all office buildings and disabling employee badge access until Monday.
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Source: Ars Technica – Musk emails remaining Twitter staff to find “anyone who actually writes software”
Only the mind of director James Gunn could have light-bulbed the idea to create a new Marvel Studios holiday tradition with his Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
Source: Gizmodo – The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special Was the First Marvel Studios Project Created for Disney+
The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, the parent of Ticketmaster, to determine if the company has abused its power in the live music industry. The investigation is said to have been ongoing over the last several months. The New York Times reported on the investigation after Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen fans had an excessively difficult time trying to buy tickets for those artists’ tours.
The DOJ’s antitrust division has been asking music venues and stakeholders in the ticketing market about the industry and Live Nation’s practices, according to the report. The agency is said to be looking into whether Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music space.
The company owns and/or operates many venues, including the House of Blues, and it runs festivals like Lollapalooza and Download. It sells tickets to those places and events through Ticketmaster. Live Nation also manages dozens of notable artists.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 after gaining approval from the DOJ. The agency imposed some conditions on the deal, such as Live Nation having to sell some parts of its business. For a 10-year period, Live Nation was prohibited from threatening to keep tours away from venues that don’t use Ticketmaster. In 2019, the DOJ determined that Live Nation broke that condition, and it extended the merger agreement provision period to 2025.
Bringing things up to date, Swifties (and bots) crashed Ticketmaster on Tuesday as they attempted to snag tickets for the megastar’s first tour in five years during a pre-sale. Ticketmaster said a load of more than 3.5 billion system requests caused havoc.
“The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans,” Greg Maffei, the CEO of Live Nation’s biggest shareholder Liberty Media, told CNBC. “We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”
Fans waited in queues for hours and when they were finally able to select a seat, many were still unable to grab tickets. In many cases, tickets were essentially snatched out of customers’ hands as they tried to put them in their cart. A general sale for the remaining tickets was supposed to take place on Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled it “due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand.”
The chaos led to calls to break up Live Nation, including from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar expressed concern over ” the state of competition in the ticketing industry,” as Reuters notes.
Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, it’s merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in.
Break them up.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 15, 2022
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” Swift wrote in an Instagram Story on Friday. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
This is far from the first time people had a chaotic experience while trying to get tickets to see a major artist. Blink-182 and Paramore tours sold out almost instantly. Ticketmaster’s controversial dynamic pricing system led to some fans paying thousands of dollars for Bruce Springsteen tickets — even before those sought-after tickets hit secondary markets.
Engadget has contacted Live Nation for comment. The Department of Justice doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations.
Source: Engadget – The DOJ was reportedly investigating Ticketmaster before the Taylor Swift debacle
We’ve been keeping an eye on Samsung to see when their Black Friday deals would hit, and it looks like today’s the day. As of right now, all of the latest Galaxy phones are on sale, with the biggest discount going to the Galaxy S22 Ultra. At $300 off the list price, Samsung’s most premium (non-folding) Galaxy phone is down to $900. We saw the S22 Ultra drop to this price for a few days earlier this month as a sort of Black Friday preview, but then it jumped back to its usual price. For anyone who missed that window, you can once again grab our current favorite Android phone while it’s this low.
We gave the S22 Ultra an 89 in our review, calling it “the best premium Android flagship you can buy.” It’s got a lot in common with Samsung’s discontinued-for-now Note series, especially with its inclusion of the on-board S Pen and the return to a more rectangular shape, but the S22 Ultra is not just a Galaxy Note rehash. It’s got a “sumptuous” screen that keeps things looking smooth with a 120Hz refresh rate and bright 6.8-inch Super AMOLED panel. The cameras are also updated, with a 108-megapixel main sensor, a 12MP ultrawide camera, and a pair of 10MP telephoto lenses in back. There’s a 40MP camera in front, along with new customized video calling software for using Google’s Duo (now called Google Meet).
The S22 Ultra uses Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processors, which handled fairly intensive multitasking in our tests without getting bogged down or even heating up significantly. While the battery didn’t last as long as we were hoping, it gave 17 hours and 16 minutes in our video rundown test.
If you don’t need the S Pen, or quite so many cameras, you might try the Galaxy S22+. It’s also on sale for Black Friday, with $250 off the MSRP bringing it down to $800. We gave it an 87 in our review, particularly impressed by the extra bright display and ability to take rich low-light photos.
The base model Galaxy S22 also earned an 87 from us. Even at the list price of $800, we said the S22 gives you more “phone for the money than anything you can buy from Apple or Google.” Now that it’s down to $700, that statement is truer than ever.
Buy Samsung Galaxy S22+ at Amazon $800Buy Samsung Galaxy S22 at Amazon – $700
Get the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday offers by following @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribing to the Engadget Deals newsletter.
Source: Engadget – Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Ultra is 0 off ahead of Black Friday
Back in 2018, the Switch received one of its worst and most unplayable ports in the console’s history, a remarkable distinction given how many rough games are on the platform. You might know it, as it’s a pretty popular first-person open-world survival simulator called Ark: Survival Evolved. Now four years after its…
Source: Kotaku – The Switch’s Worst Port Was Fixed By Devs Known For Terrible GTA Remasters
Stellantis, Chrysler’s parent company and formerly Fiat Chrysler, is recalling 280,000 Ram heavy-duty diesel trucks worldwide because of a potential fire risk, according to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Source: LifeHacker – These Trucks Are Being Recalled Before They Catch Fire
The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster, whose sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets descended into chaos this week, The New York Times reported Friday, citing sources. The investigation is focused on whether Live Nation Entertainment has abused its power over the multibillion-dollar live music industry. From the report: That power has been in the spotlight after Ticketmaster’s systems crashed while Ms. Swift fans were trying to buy tickets in a presale for her upcoming tour, but the investigation predates the botched sale, the people said. Staff members at the agency’s antitrust division have in recent months contacted music venues and players in the ticket market, asking about Live Nation’s practices and the wider dynamics of the industry, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is sensitive. The inquiry appears to be broad, looking at whether the company maintains a monopoly over the industry, said one of the people. Officials in the Biden administration have spent the last two years trying to push the boundaries of antitrust law. The Justice Department has mounted several challenges to major mergers, successfully convincing a judge to block Penguin Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster but losing some other cases. The Federal Trade Commission has sued to block Meta, Facebook’s parent company, from acquiring a small virtual reality start-up.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Justice Department Said To Investigate Ticketmaster’s Parent Company
The spinoff game has a Christmas, winter setting. [credit:
Sony ]
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the spinoff to the popular and critically acclaimed 2018 PlayStation game Marvel’s Spider-Man, launched on Windows PCs today, just three months after the original game did, too.
The game was developed by Insomniac Games (previously best known for the Ratchet & Clank franchise), PlayStation, and Marvel Games. This port is being done under the stewardship of Netherlands-based studio Nixxes Software, which was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment last year. The studio focuses on ports as well as supporting other studios’ productions in various ways.
The PC port contains all the content from the original game. On top of that, there are several enhancements, including support for Nvidia’s DLSS 2 and DLSS 3, as well as DLAA and Reflex, and AMD’s FSR 2.1. There are expanded settings for ray-traced shadows and reflections, and as with the previous game, strong ultra-wide and multi-monitor support.
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Source: Ars Technica – Sony’s Miles Morales was at least as good as Spider-Man, and now it’s on PC, too
IPv6 is a secure IP addressing scheme; however, there may be times you need to disable it. This tutorial will show you how to disable IPv6 for RHEL, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux distributions.
The post How to Disable IPv6 in RHEL, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – How to Disable IPv6 in RHEL, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux
If you thought Indiana Jones marrying Marion Ravenwood and living with their son Mutt was the end, think again. The team behind Indiana Jones 5 didn’t see that as a proper send-off for the iconic cinema star, and that became the focus of the new movie, out June 30, 2023.
Source: Gizmodo – Indiana Jones 5 Takes Indy to the End of His Journey
As the world faces an unfolding energy crisis and an ongoing climate crisis, a hydropower plant in Spain is going dark because of low water levels at the reservoir that powers it. The country has spent months in a major drought.
Source: Gizmodo – Hydropower Plant Will Go Offline Thanks to Punishing Drought
After a long decade, the iPhone finally added a downloader to Safari with iOS 13 so you can download files and automatically store them on your iPhone in a Downloads folder. But where exactly is the downloads folder? How do you actually access the files that you downloaded from Safari?
Source: LifeHacker – Make This Shortcut for Your iPhone Downloads
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrey Denisyuk)
The Federal Communications Commission took two significant steps toward providing US broadband users with more accurate availability and pricing information.
Today, the FCC released the long-awaited National Broadband Map update based on the most detailed data the commission has ever collected from ISPs. There’s still plenty of work to do, as this first version will undergo a challenge process to correct errors, and there are indications it will have many inaccuracies.
“The map will display specific location-level information about broadband services available throughout the country—a significant step forward from the census block level data previously collected,” an FCC press release said. “This release of the draft map kicks off the public challenge processes that will play a critical role in improving the accuracy of the map.”
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Source: Ars Technica – FCC unveils big update to broadband map—and wants you to help correct errors
After three-and-a-half years of sailing above Earth, the LightSail 2 spacecraft has burnt its shiny metallic wings as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery blaze.
Source: Gizmodo – LightSail 2 Has Burned Up in Earth’s Atmosphere After 3.5 Years in Space
Warzone 2.0 has been out for a few days and it’s a damn good time once you get past the most challenging part of the game: Navigating a UI that seems like it was coded in the fires of digital hell. Aside from being clunky, obtuse, glitchy, and not even remotely helpful for finding what you’re looking for, Warzone 2…
Source: Kotaku – No, You Don’t Need To Buy Modern Warfare II To Play Warzone 2.0
An Italian administrative court on Friday rejected an appeal by Alphabet’s Google against a decision by Italy’s antitrust authority to fine the group, but accepted iPhone maker Apple’s appeal against the watchdog’s ruling. From a report: Last year, Italy’s antitrust regulator fined Google and Apple 10 million euros ($10.36 million) each, claiming that the two tech groups had not provided “clear and immediate information” on how they collect and use the data of those who access their services.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Italy Court Rejects Google’s Appeal Against Watchdog Fine, Accepts Apple’s One
It’s that time of year again. The pumpkins have all been smashed, the peppermint is in the mocha, and all Mariah Carey wants for Christmas is you (and her big fat royalty check from Columbia Records). The holiday pre-season is officially upon us, with deals and discounts on a ton of games, consoles, and accessories.…
Source: Kotaku – Here Are The Best Black Friday Gaming Deals
We are obsessed with DIY-built desktops as a matter of principle around here—we are tech geeks, after all. Nevertheless, we can still appreciate the system builders who do things right and offer beautiful rigs with extra flourish. It seems shroud, a veteran of the professional Valorant and CS:GO scenes, would agree, and has joined with Maingear
Source: Hot Hardware – Shroud Joins Maingear And Launches Next Generation MG-1 Gaming Desktop
With type 1 diabetes, the body attacks itself. A person’s own immune system destroys the pancreas over time, leaving the critical organ unable to produce insulin and regulate blood sugar. Almost 1.9 million people, including about 244,000 children, live with the life-altering illness. It is a disease with no cure or…
Source: Gizmodo – FDA Approves First-of-Its-Kind Drug to Delay Type 1 Diabetes
