Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Following a ransomware attack against foreign exchange company Travelex earlier this year, the company reportedly paid a hefty, multimillion-dollar sum to hackers in the form of hundreds of bitcoin.

Citing a source familiar with the details of the transaction, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the London-based company paid hackers 285 bitcoin for a ransom worth roughly $2.3 million after the attack on New Year’s Eve. Reached for comment by email, a company spokesperson told Gizmodo there was “an ongoing investigation and we have taken advice from a number of experts and will not be discussing this at this time.”

Just days into the new year, Travelex confirmed that it was experiencing service disturbances as a result of what the company described at the time as a “software virus.” The company later identified it as a malware referred to as Sodinokibi. The company initially said that while it didn’t have any indication that customer data had been compromised, it had taken its systems offline. It was able to restore some consumer-facing services shortly after, but international money transfer services were affected for most of January.

“We regret having to suspend some of our services in order to contain the virus and protect data,” Travelex chief Tony D’Souza said in a statement at the time. “We apologise to all our customers for any inconvenience caused as a result. We are doing all we can to restore our full services as soon as possible.”

According to Reuters at the time, the issue so pummeled the company’s operations that Travelex employees were forced to calculate exchange rates with pen and paper. The BBC, reporting in January that it had communicated with the hackers behind the attack, priced the ransom at $6 million. And while Travelex said no data had been hijacked in the attack, the hackers reportedly told the BBC they’d stolen 5 GBs of “valuable” consumer data. A spokesperson did not return a request for comment about whether customer data had been stolen.

Cybersecurity experts and government agencies advise against paying ransoms, both because there’s no way of ensuring stolen data will be fully recovered as well as because it can perpetuate further targeting of organizations—and put a target on the back of an institution that does so.

As convenient as getting the morning news through an app, a podcast, or even a website can be, there’s something aesthetically pleasing about the precisely laid out design of a printed newspaper’s front page. Feeling nostalgic for the medium, Max Braun used a giant E Ink panel to turn the front page of the New York Times every morning into a piece of wall art. Simply called Paper, Braun’s prototype uses a 31.

Discord’s testing a new noise suppression tool to help prevent background noise like barking dogs or the deafening clatter of a mechanical keyboard from drowning out people’s voices. In a blog post Friday, the popular chat service announced its partnership with Krisp, a service and standalone app that uses machine learning to recognize and quiet distracting background chatter.

The coronavirus pandemic has already been wrecking release schedules for everything from blockbuster movies to new operating systems. But now, even something that’s been helping people stay connected in this time of social distancing is running into issues: emoji.

In a recent blog by the Unicode Consortium (the organization responsible for approving new emoji), the group says that due to covid-19, it has “decided to postpone the release of version 14.0 of the Unicode Standard by six months, from March to September of 2021.” The UC also added that this delay in the release of version 14.0 will also impact related specs and data, including new emoji.

Sadly, the big impact of this delay means that we might not get to use the next new set of emoji until sometime in early 2022; while the Unicode Consortium could release a new batch in September 2021, there’s usually a lag between when new emoji are announced and when they actually become available.

Because a large part of the Unicode Consortium’s work comes from volunteers, the UC has been hit harder than other organizations. As consortium president Mark Davis says in the blog, “Under the current circumstances we’ve heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date. This year we simply can’t commit to the same schedule we’ve adhered to in the past.”

On the bright side, the delay Emoji 14.0 will not affect the release of the new emoji in Unicode Standard version 13.0, which was announced back in March and includes bangers like the beaver, polar bear, tamale, and ninja emojis. All the emoji in version 13.0 are expected to become available later this fall.

There is also a chance that Unicode Consortium could release new emoji sequences as part of Emoji 13.1. Instead of relying on all-new characters, emoji sequences are made up of existing emoji—like making a black cat emoji out of the regular cat emoji and the black large square emoji—and don’t require the coding of new characters. There’s no guarantee that they will be included as part of the Emoji 13.1 release, but if they are, we could see some new versions of existing emoji in 2021.

The Unicode Consortium says it will also be pushing back the submission date for new Emoji 14.0 proposals to September 2020, which may be enough time for someone to think of something that represents the global pandemic—although hopefully by then, we won’t need to use virus-related emoji anymore.

WeWork has bailed on April rent on some of its locations as the beleaguered coworking space company goes into a financial spiral amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, according to a report from Bloomberg. Citing sources at the company, Bloomberg wrote that it has reached out to some landlords to open discussions on “rent abatements, revenue-sharing agreements and other lease amendments,” though it is paying others as scheduled.

Internet service providers have waived late fees and overage charges for customers to help ease the economical impact of covid-19, and some have even gone so far as to offer free internet for homes with students. But Charter, parent company of Spectrum, has loaded its free internet offer for K-12 and college students with so many caveats as to make most people ineligible.

If you want the best wireless earbuds out there, we recommend the Jabra Elite 75t. If you want an equally excellent pair that also works great with the iPhone, you can’t go wrong with the Apple AirPods Pro. But if you want to charge and carry around your earbuds in a replica Poké Ball, you’ll need to opt for Razer’s new wireless headphone offerings.

As Amazon buckles under the increased demand presented by social distancing guidelines and shelter-at-home orders, the company now says that new customers to its Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market grocery delivery services are being waitlisted. An Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo by email that the waitlist is a result of both “restricted capacity due to social distancing as well as unprecedented demand.

If you want to score some bells and pay down your debts in Animal Crossing: New Horizons as quickly as possible without spending hours catching individual bugs and fish, one way to do it is by playing the highly volatile Stalk Market and hawking turnips at a premium.

If new streaming service Quibi’s show “Memory Hole” looks familiar to you, you’re not alone. According to the video and performance collective Everything Is Terrible (EIT!), which has been around since 2007, Quibi’s show bears more than a coincidental resemblance to its 2014 show by the same name.