Tech

Unions representing 14,000 workers at Disney properties in Southern California say the vote passed with 99 percent approval, writes NBC News.

The unions, which are bargaining for higher pay and safer working conditions, plan to meet with Disney on Monday and Tuesday to continue talks.

Scientists realized they’d found a field of pure sulfur stones after the Curiosity rover accidentally crushed one of them, exposing the crystals, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote this week.

The rover then collected samples to try to explain them, as elemental sulfur “shouldn’t be there,” according to one of the project’s scientists.

Based on the screenshot below from app researcher Nima Owji, the new checkmark would be in the same menu as other per-post options that let you limit replies. X employee Christopher Stanley confirmed the feature, Engadget spotted.

That’s according to an update made last night to CrowdStrike’s statement on yesterday’s global outage,

Similar to the above-referenced query, a Dashboard is now available that displays Impacted channels and CIDs and Impacted Sensors. Depending on your subscriptions, it’s available in the Console menu at either:

• Next-GEN SIEM > Dashboard or;

• Investigate > Dashboards

• Named as: hosts_possibly_impacted_by_windows_crashes

Open source developers dismissed OpenAI from their 2022 lawsuit alleging that it violated copyright law by reproducing their code without attribution.

As Bloomberg Law writes, the lawsuit will continue against GitHub and Microsoft (although without the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims that the judge dismissed this month).

I nodded a lot at this Max Read piece about how we perceive the world now, particularly the current “vibe shift” in politics but also just... everything. I feel like we’ve been debating “is Twitter really the world?” for 15 years now, but the answer feels more slippery than ever.

One way of thinking about every American election since 2015 is as a referendum on whether or not Twitter is real. Did the “prevailing vibes” on Twitter reflect the electoral choices of millions of Americans?

The watchdog says that Meta violated upon local consumer protection and data privacy laws, reports Reuters. The company has 60 days to pay the fine, according to the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission’s order.

You can read documents associated with the case on the watchdog’s website.

Just when you thought we’d learned (and seen) everything there is to know about the Pixel 9 lineup, Android Authority reveals details about iPhone-like satellite features hinted at within Android 15 beta 4.

There’s notification text saying, “Your Pixel has been updated to support satellite communication,” and other text about two years of free satellite service, although that may be just placeholder text.

The FTC called Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass price hike “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it had predicted ahead of the company’s Activision-Blizzard buy.

Microsoft’s response (PDF) claims that with included multiplayer and the upcoming day-and-date release of Call of Duty, the offering isn’t degraded at all.

In a tweet and blog post, George Kurtz says:

As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.

We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well.

Other updates from CrowdStrike about Friday’s global IT misadventure warn about threat actors impersonating it in phishing attempts and other attacks or advise automated methods (PDF) to track down systems that have been affected.

Google is improving its support for Markdown in Google Docs, including giving users the ability to convert Markdown to Docs formatting when you paste and the ability to copy Docs content as Markdown.

The updates make it possible for developers to “collaborate on software documentation in Docs and then export it as Markdown for use in other Markdown supporting tools,” Google says.

From the latest issue of Command Line:

The once-high-flying AR startup laid off its entire sales and marketing division this week, or about 75 people, several sources tell me. (Amazingly, Magic Leap had about 1,100 full-time employees before this.) The new strategy, sources say, is to become a component vendor for other companies looking to build their own headsets. 

New Magic Leap CEO Ross Rosenberg didn’t respond to my request for comment on the cuts, but a company spokesperson told Bloomberg they were done “to better align with market dynamics and emerging opportunities.”

It’s a “global outage,” according to an Nvidia status message. “We are working on a fix to bring back the service as soon as possible.”

Nvidia’s other GeForce Now services appear to be operational, so perhaps this issue is tied to everything else going on.

Hospital systems from New York to Massachusetts to Pennsylvania impacted by the CrowdStrike outage say they’re canceling appointments and shifting to pen and paper. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC had said it would “pause the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia,” according to NBC News, though it’s site now says most of its systems are back online.

The streaming music service has launched a new Parental Guide detailing its tools for managing your kids’ listening habits as well as its efforts to keep the platform safe.

Spotify’s actual parental controls are limited to filtering out explicit content and controlling the playback of certain artists. For a fully curated experience, you’ll need to spring for Spotify Kids, which is part of the Premium Family package.

House music and technology are my two favorite things, and finally, I’ve found a way to write about them both.

Thanks to the CrowdStrike fail that caused chaos in systems across the globe, a DJ named Chris Lake is facing challenges with his concert in New York tonight. One of the DJs, Andruss, can’t make it, so they’ve had to adjust the lineup to fill his spot.