Tech Archive

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

What if The Batman had a plague subplot?

Former DC Comics freelancer Christopher Wozniak sued Warner Bros and DC over allegedly lifting the plot for Matt Reeves’ movie, The Batman, from a Batman story he wrote. Unfortunately, Reuters reports that last week a judge decided that, actually, his story infringed on DC’s characters.

Both stories are summarized in the decision, and sure, Wozniak’s tale has some similar beats, but also old Batman, a viral outbreak, and a Joker reveal at the end. Read for yourself in the gallery below.

Screenshot of The Batman description from the decision.

A summary of the plaintiff’s Batman story.

End of the summary of the plaintiff’s story.

1/3

A plot summary of The Batman.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

Dan Lynch, early internet pioneer, is dead at 82.

The New York Times reports that he died at his St. Helena, California home on Saturday.

Lynch held two management positions at pre-internet ARPANET nodes before later starting workshops to demonstrate the power of the internet for business. From the Times, on his early workshops that became Interop, once a massive computer exhibition:

Mr. Lynch required the attendees to adhere to TCP/IP, a language spoken by computers connected to the internet that was quickly becoming the industry standard.
... Within a decade, it had become one of the world’s largest computer exhibitions, helping to create a global community of specialists capable of supporting a networking standard that made it possible for all the world’s computers to share data. One computer industry analyst called it “the plumbing exhibition for the information age.”

Daniel C. Lynch, Founder of Major Computer Exhibition, Dies at 82

[The New York Times]

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

“Space babies!”

Commenters on the second Doctor Who trailer really love Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor saying, “I will shatter this silly little battlefield into dust.”

I’m sure they’re right and that’s a better line, but I love the exuberance of “space babies!” (even if talking babies still look terrible in the year of our lord 2024). The new season hits Disney Plus on May 10th (or BBC iPlayer in the UK on May 11th).

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

An “urgent” Linux backdoor was discovered entirely by accident this week.

Red Hat urgently warned this week that recent beta versions of Fedora operating systems contained malicious code for backdoor access. Debian issued a similar warning.

A blog post from security firm Deepfactor points out that Microsoft developer Andres Freund notified the Linux security Openwall Project after stumbling on the exploit. On Mastodon, Freund said discovering it “really required a lot of coincidences,” starting with him probing curiously high CPU usage by an SSH process.

Update March 7th, 11PM ET: We have more details on the XZ Utils backdoor attempt right here.

A screenshot of Andres Freund’s post detailing what led him to investigate.

Thank goodness for Freund’s memory.

Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

Lambo’s got a brand new badge.

Lamborghini (the car one, not the tractor one) announced that for the first time in over two decades, it has a new logo, which it says reflects its “new trajectory focused on sustainability and decarbonization” (read: electrification).

The new logo comes almost exactly a year after the announcement of its first plug-in hybrid hypercar, the Revuelto.

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

Nissan is using Formula E as a testbed for its next GT-R.

Motor Authority reports that a Nissan executive told it that if the company is making an all-electric GT-R, it won’t compromise on performance, pointing to the McClaren Formula E team’s recent first victory in São Paulo, Brazil with a Nissan-designed electric racer.

As for what it will look like, an executive seemed to hint that last year’s Hyper Force concept is a preview of GT-Rs to come.

A picture of the Nissan Hyper Force concept.

Is this sort of, kind of the next GT-R?

Image: Nissan

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

The Vision Pro bathes your eyeballs in infrared light.

You can see that in this Slow Mo Guys YouTube Short showing the flashing of the invisible-to-the-human-eye IR illuminators of Apple’s face computer, both on the front and around the lenses’ edges.

At 1,000fps, the Guys show the Vision Pro’s very fancy micro-OLED displays alternating between images and black frames, with a ring of IR lights popping on during the dark moments to help track where your eyes are looking.

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

Happy 29th birthday, Microsoft Bob.

Bob was a short-lived attempt by Microsoft to make then-still-novel PCs approachable. It’s 29 this month, as XDA Developers reminds us today.

That article hauled Bob up from a three-decade-deep memory hole for me — my childhood best friend had it on his Packard Bell computer, and a very young version of me loved it. Until just now, I had assumed it was a digital playscape for children.

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

Is TikTok still TikTok without the algorithm?

Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who’s apparently assembling an investor supergroup to buy the beleaguered app, wants to cut a deal to buy it sans algorithm and rebuild it, according to The Washington Post yesterday.

Now I may be a simple country tech reporter, but I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Matt Perault, former Facebook public policy director, points out why in this quote from the Post:

“All the biggest companies have thrown a lot of money and engineering talent at that issue and have struggled to do it,” Perault said. “If Steve Mnuchin thinks he can do that and succeed where a lot of successful companies have struggled, good luck.”

Mnuchin’s plan to buy TikTok has some insiders bewildered

[The Washington Post]

Wes DavisMar 31, 2024

The latest Garmin beta will let you find your phone with GPS.

The change log for the beta version 17.10 for Garmin watches (including the Fenix 7s Pro, Epix and Epix Pro, and Enduro 2) adds phone-finding “during an activity with GPS.”

If you aren’t part of Garmin’s public beta program, here are the sign-up instructions. (The company notes that public beta testers can’t get this update on the Marq Aviator Gen 2, unfortunately.)

Beta Version 17.10 - 'Check for Updates' only! - Announcements - Fenix 7/Fenix 7 Pro - Epix 2/Epix 2 Pro - Enduro 2 - Quatix 7 - Marq 2 - Garmin Forums

[forums.garmin.com]

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — all the latest on Nintendo’s huge sequel

Verge StaffNov 6, 2025

How the team behind Zelda made physics feel like magic

During a GDC 2024 talk, the developers on Tears of the Kingdom explained how they were able to blow players’ minds with the design philosophy of ‘multiplicative gameplay.’

Ash ParrishMar 31, 2024