Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

The Fyre Festival gave us an incredible opportunity to watch rich people who paid as much as $400,000 for an exclusive concert meltdown on social media when they were greeted with cheese sandwiches and no plumbing. Now, the festival’s founder has pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, with each count carrying a maximum 20-year prison sentence Billy McFarland is the young, enterprising founder of Fyre Media Inc.

Under late capitalism, date night is now data night. Mitch Lowe, the CEO of Moviepass, told an audience last week that the app tracks user location, both before and after the movie. In his imaginatively titled keynote speech at the Entertainment Finance Forum, “Data is the New Oil: How will MoviePass Monetize It?” Lowe boasted about the “enormous” amount of data the “Netflix for movie theaters” app has on customers.

You’ve been here before. You’ve read this article already. Every word feels familiar. Even the room you’re sitting in feels the same. You know exactly what happens next. Actually, you don’t—you just think you do. A pair of researchers form Colorado State Researchers dug into the feeling of premonition that often accompanies déjà vu, using lab experiments that tried to induce the sensation and tracked whether subjects really did know what would come next.

Vero was supposed to be the better Instagram. It was supposed to save social media. It was supposed to do loads of things that other blip-on-the-radar social networks like Ello and Peach promised. Turns out Vero doesn’t do very much of anything, and its CEO is genuinely awful. At first blush Vero is a sort of night-mode Instagram that doesn’t force crop photos, and it has a whole bunch of ancillary features for sorting various interests its users might have.

A drunk New Jersey native reportedly went out with friends in Morgantown, West Virginia, last Friday, and then called an Uber to take him home. Kenny Bachman says he thought he was going back to the place he was staying during his trip, near the West Virginia University Campus. Except, the Uber driver took Bachman to his home in Gloucester County, New Jersey. That 300-mile drive cost Bachman 1,635.93, according to a report from NJ.com.

Sony just announced a brand new, super cheap (for what it is) full-frame mirrorless camera that could make every high-end micro 4/3 camera, like the Panasonic GH5 and GH5s, look like complete garbage. The news came at the Wedding & Portrait Photographer International trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Sony, like Canon, was there to court the professional photographers and people with enough money to pretend they’re professional photographers.

There’s a black hole called Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy. It has 4 million times the mass of the sun, but is only around the size of Mercury’s orbit. It’s 26,000 light years away, but let’s say some unfortunate mishap brought you within a light year or two of that behemoth. What would happen? An international team of researchers collected data on a property called the polarization of light coming from the center of the Milky Way.

We might not just get a new iPhone X this fall. Apple reportedly has two additional new devices planned: A big phablet that borrows design elements from the iPhone X and might be called the iPhone X Plus, and a cheaper phone that sacrifices some of the iPhone X’s premium features to make it more affordable, according to Bloomberg. Rumors of Apple’s newest phones have persisted for months—basically since the iPhone X launched. Over the weekend, however, an alleged photo of a 6.

Apple’s iTunes service may be 17 years old and in dire need of a redesign, but it’s still hanging in there as one of the most popular ways to download media. However new security changes from Apple mean that some users will either have to upgrade their aging devices or find a new media library. It’s been more than 11 years since the first-gen Apple TV was introduced and if you’re still using it, well, congratulations, it was a good run.

No one is safe from being replaced by a robot in 2018. Not even fashion models, it seems. Dolce & Gabbana made a splash this weekend at Milan Fashion Week with an army of drones that hovered their way down the catwalk. The drones carried handbags, but the stunt wasn’t without its share of technical difficulties. Apparently the 600 people in the audience had to wait for about 45 minutes before the crew behind the scenes finally got the drones to work.