Spotify experienced a widespread outage affecting song playback today. The problems first started around 8AM ET and prevented a large number of Spotify users from playing songs properly for more than an hour. Songs only played only for a few seconds before they paused and the Spotify client displayed the error “can’t play the current…
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.Unlike with most phones that come across my desk, it takes me a minute (or a day) to fully remember how to put Samsung’s Galaxy Note phones to full use. These giant, feature-rich phones make me feel like a retired…
In the past few weeks, many Covid-19 hot spots around the country have seen their case counts surge and then begin to turn back down. The result of these fresh outbreaks is a large and growing cohort of Covid survivors who now have antibodies that grant them some measure of immunity. You’d think a major…
Venture outside and you’ll soon see them. Printed on posters and signs, pasted on pub walls and hotel lobbies, taped to picnic tables in beer gardens: QR codes. WIRED UKThis story originally appeared on WIRED UK.As the hospitality industry begins tentatively to open up, restaurants and hotels are turning to technology to deliver a dine-in…
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.A few years ago while visiting my friend, I eagerly watched him go through the entire routine of making pour-over coffee in a Chemex. He weighed and ground the beans, then placed the grounds in the filter and “bloomed” them,…
Sharad Agarwal has a prediction about driverless vehicles: “Autonomous public transportation is going to happen,” he says, “and it’s going to happen sooner than with taxis and cars.”Agarwal leads the North American division of EasyMile, one of several startups offering autonomous vehicle shuttles to cities and transit agencies. He believes the relative simplicity of transit…
We might look back at 2020 as the year of maximum screen time. Severed by the pandemic from face-to-face interactions, we have been chained to our devices, making more video and watching more video than ever before. This ubiquity of moving images—this videocracy that first took shape during the aughts, with the rise of data-connected…
Nitin Alabur is an iOS developer from India who lived in the US and dreamed of creating a tech startup. “I had a zillion ideas,” he tells me. But he’d been hired by a US firm under an H-1B visa, which ties you to your employer. A green card that would make self-employment possible was…
I was looking for an excuse to dip into psychedelic French feminism of the 1970s when a new Karen video barged into my timeline. There she was: Another white woman, shrieking, stabbing the air, berserk over obscure and chronically unmet needs. Bingo. Hysteria in public spaces! A sexist trope to be mischievously “reclaimed”! French feminists,…
It’s a normal afternoon in July. I’m at work in my little corner, speaking into the camera. The children are in their rooms, regressing. I leave the bedroom-office to get more coffee. My spouse is in our small kitchen, kneading dough while on a video call of her own. I eavesdrop for a minute. She’s…
