Tech Digest daily round up: No fossil fuel boilers from 2025, says IEA
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says that no new fossil fuel boilers should be sold from 2025 if the world is to achieve net-zero emissions by the middle of this century. It’s one of 400 steps on the road to net-zero proposed by the agency in a special report. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars around the world would end by 2035. The IEA says that from now, there is no place for new coal, oil or gas exploration or supplies. The report has been welcomed as an important contribution on the road to COP26 in Glasgow, when countries will attempt to agree the measures needed to put the Paris climate agreement into practice. BBC
Oculus Quest 2 and Oculus Quest users will soon receive a new experimental update to their VR headsets that will allow them to view their iPhone notifications from within the virtual reality device. There truly is no escape from your WhatsApp chats…Push notifications can be re-routed to the Oculus Quest headsets by heading to the settings menu, clicking ‘Notifications’ and then toggling ‘Phone Notifications in VR’ to on. You’ll also need to enable notifications in the Oculus iOS app, and the feature requires you to be using an iPhone 7 handset or newer. Tech Radar
Twitter is calling their upcoming Subscription Service “Twitter Blue”, priced at $2.99/month for now, including paid features like:
Undo Tweets: https://t.co/CrqnzIPcOH
Collections: https://t.co/qfFfAXHp1o pic.twitter.com/yyMStpCkpr
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 15, 2021
Twitter is considering launching a paid subscription service called Twitter Blue, according to unreleased features of the app discovered by an independent researcher. Jane Manchun Wong, who has made a name for herself through uncovering accidentally-public upcoming features of popular apps, shared screenshots of the service, which is pegged at $2.99 a month. Planned features include the ability to save and organise tweets into collections – expanding on Twitter’s bookmark feature – which currently simply stores a chronological list of saved tweets. The service would also come with an “undo tweet” button, equivalent to those on email services such as Gmail, which would allow users to prevent a tweet from being sent for a few seconds after posting. Guardian
Campaigners are “astonished” that the government’s draft Online Safety Bill does not contain long-promised age verification checks for pornography. Companies have invested heavily in the technology in recent years to prepare for legally-required checks. But an earlier law requiring them was never enforced. The government says the new bill will focus on online platforms where children are more likely to find pornography by chance. This includes social media, but the law may not apply to many commercial adult sites because the current draft only covers websites containing user-generated content. BBC
More than half a million Call of Duty: Warzone players have been banned for cheating since the game’s launch in 2020. The figure was revealed by developer Raven Software after a recent wave of bans saw access to the game permanently suspended for 30,000 players. Call of Duty: Warzone is a free-to-play instalment in the popular first-person shooter franchise which incorporates battle royale-style multiplayer modes. On Twitter, Raven Software wrote: “Banned over 30,000 malicious accounts across Call of Duty yesterday… bringing us to over half a million accounts banned in #Warzone. “Malicious” behaviour can include the use of cheats or hacks, which are forbidden under the current Warzone rules. Independent
