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Logitech will put carbon impact labels on all of its product boxes

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Bracken Darrell, Logitech’s CEO, sees the carbon impact rating as something that’s even more ubiquitous than Energy Star figures. He wants it to be like reading calories on a nutrition label. “What we want to do is bring the choice [for environmental impact] to the same kind of choices you have when you think about the price or benefits of a product,” he said in an interview with Engadget. “We want that choice to be visible… Literally on the package, in your face, so that you can see exactly what kind of carbon the company is contributing when making the product, and all the way through its life.”

Logitech’s ratings aren’t just some made up figures. It’s working with third-parties like the iPoint Group and Nature Capital Partners to ensure it meets DEKRA standards for environmental claims. The initiative also builds on the company’s previous green efforts, like supporting the Paris Climate Agreement and its promise to be powered entirely by renewables by 2030. The company aims to bring carbon labels to all of its products within five years.

Making its carbon impact visible also makes life a bit tougher for Logitech, as the company’s head of operations, Prakash Arunkundrum, describes. If a new mouse gets a larger battery, its engineers will also have to make sure it has a longer lifespan overall to account for that. Otherwise, we’ll all notice if that mouse is somehow much worse for the environment than its predecessor. And of course, the carbon figures are also a way to push the company towards greener packaging with less plastic.

“This is a passion project for a lot of people in our company,” Darrell said. “I’m not going to let up on this, I don’t care what the perception is… I think there’s no such thing as good design without being sustainable now.”

While it’s hard to tell if anyone else will adopt Logitech’s labeling, it’s still a noble effort. All too often, the environmental impact of our gadgets are hidden from view. That just seems irresponsible as we’re careening towards a genuine climate crisis, not to mention dealing with the fallout of a global pandemic. We’ll all be using our devices longer, and thinking a lot harder about how to replace them. So wouldn’t it be great if we actually knew how much our next phone would cost the planet?

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DoorDash faces lawsuit from San Francisco DA over worker classification

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As TechCrunch notes, companies must pass what’s called the “ABC test” (PDF) to be able to legally classify workers as contractors. They must prove that workers are free from their direct control and do other work outside the scope of their business. Their workers must also be “engaged in an independently established trade, occupation or business of the same nature as the work performed” for them. Boudin says DoorDash workers don’t pass the test.

In the lawsuit, the Attorney General’s office stated:

“DoorDash’s misclassification of workers was no mistake, but instead a calculated decision made to reduce the costs of doing business at the expense of the very workers providing the company’s core service of delivery: the delivery of merchandise from merchants to consumers.”

As for DoorDash, Global Head of Public Policy Max Rettig emphasized how the company provides earning opportunities during the pandemic in a statement sent to Mission Local:

“Now more than ever, Californians from all walks of life look to DoorDash for flexible earnings opportunities, working on average a few hours per week. Throughout the pandemic, DoorDash has supported Dashers on and off the road with free safety equipment, telemedicine, earnings replacement, and more. Today’s action seeks to disrupt the essential services Dashers provide, stripping hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, parents, retirees and other Californians of valuable work opportunities, depriving local restaurants of desperately needed revenue, and making it more difficult for consumers to receive prepared food, groceries, and other essentials safely and reliably. We will fight to continue providing Dashers the flexible earning opportunities they say they want in these challenging times.”

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NBA restart plan includes using Oura rings to catch COVID-19 symptoms

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While the NBA continues to move toward restarting its season with players and other personnel isolated at Walt Disney World in Orlando, details of how it hopes to manage the people on site are leaking out. According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, the specifics were laid out in an informational memo dubbed “Life inside the Bubble,” that described testing plans, quarantine protocols and more.

The part that’s specifically interesting to us — other than players only lounges with NBA 2K and bracelets that beep if people are within sx feet of each other for too long — is its proposed use of Oura’s smart rings. Earlier this month, preliminary study results from West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute suggested that physiological data from the rings combined with information obtained from wearers via in-app surveys can combine to detect COVID-19 symptoms up to three days before they become apparent, with 90 percent accuracy.



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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 690 chipset brings 5G to cheaper phones

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“Driving the expansion of 5G into the Snapdragon 6-series has the potential to make 5G accessible to more than 2 billion smartphone users around the world,” said Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon in a statement.

The big potential caveat here is what kind of 5G this chipset supports. Unlike the Snapdragon 765 and 865, the 690 only places nice with sub-6 5G networks, not the mmWave networks that have some wireless carriers have invested heavily in. (Verizon, Engadget’s parent company, owns one such carrier.) This focus on sub-6 is far from unusual, though: The Global Mobile Suppliers Association found in April that only around 30 percent of “all announced 5G devices” support those high-speed mmWave networks.

The world’s 5G networks still have a long way to go, so not everyone will get to benefit from them all at once. Snapdragon 690 phones pack other benefits, however: They’ll be able to shoot 4K HDR video on the cheap, and can capture still images at resolutions as high as 192 megapixels. For those concerned about pure horsepower, the chipset’s octa-core Kryo 560 CPU should be about 20 percent faster than its predecessor, and the onboard Adreno 619L GPU should handily outgun the one found in the Snapdragon 675.

The most notable performance gain comes thanks to the chipset’s improved AI engine, which is reportedly 70 percent faster than the one that came before it. You might be hard-pressed to come up with obvious ways an AI chip could help your daily workflow, but Qualcomm has at least one unexpected example: Zooming and switching between multiple rear cameras while recording video can be noticeably smoother. Throw in support for WiFi 6 and displays with 120Hz refresh rates, and it’s not hard to the line between midrange phones and their more premium cousins starting to blur.

There’s no word on what the first commercially available Snapdragon 690 phone will be, but we at least have a sense of who’s going to make these things. HMD Global — stewards of the Nokia brand — have confirmed they’re working on a mid-range 5G device using the new chipset, as have LG, Motorola, TCL, Sharp, and the low-profile Wingtech. (You might not have heard of that last company, but it quietly produces some of Samsung’s lower-end smartphones.) Don’t expect to wait much longer, though: Qualcomm says the first of these devices will break cover in the second half of 2020.

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Humble’s racial justice bundle offers $1,200 in games and books for $30

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Itch.io’s recent mega-bundle won’t be your only option to buy games in return for contributing to the quests to solve racial inequity and inequality. Humble has launched a Fight for Racial Justice bundle that provides $1,200 in games, books and comics for a pledge of $30 or more. You’ll have until June 23rd to get it, but all proceeds will go directly to justice groups like the Bail Project, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Race Forward. All of the games are available on Steam, and some of those titles (plus all of the books and comics) are free of copy protection — and you’ll definitely recognize some of them if you’re steeped in the gaming scene.

There are some relatively big (if not always current) titles in the mix, including BioShock Remastered, Elite Dangerous, NBA 2K20 and Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. However, this is also an indie gamer’s paradise between titles like FTL, Hyper Light Drifter and Spelunky. If there’s a game you’ve been meaning to try, there’s a good chance it’s on the list. You’ll also get a free month of Humble Choice if you sign up.

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SpaceX plans seaborne spaceports for Mars missions and hypersonic flights

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Don’t think SpaceX is toning down its spaceflight ambitions in light of the pandemic — if anything, the company is ramping things up. Elon Musk has confirmed a SpaceXFleet scoop (via TechCrunch) that SpaceX is hiring staff to help build “floating, superheavy-class spaceports” for Mars and Moon missions, not to mention hypersonic flights for Earth. The private spaceflight outfit had teased the possibility of seaborne ports in concept renders before, but the plans are only really solidifying now.

The focus suggests these ports will be geared around Starship, SpaceX’s reusable rocket intended for everything from hypersonic travel through to deep space exploration. Musk added that the plan “pretty much” lined up with a Twitter follower’s speculation that these ports would be refurbished oil platforms with Hyperloops to carry people to and from the land.



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T-Mobile reportedly plans to lay off hundreds of former Sprint employees

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After the report came out, T-Mobile published a blog post in which it said it plans to hire 5,000 new employees over the next year. In the same post, it confirmed the layoffs without detailing their scope.

“As part of this process, some employees who hold similar positions are being asked to consider a career change inside the company, and others will be supported in their efforts to find a new position outside the company,” the company said. “We will work with all employees and support them.”

As TechCrunch notes, job creation is one of the things former T-Mobile CEO John Legere used to sell the public on the then hotly contested merger. In a blog post published last year, Legere said the new T-Mobile would employ 11,000 more workers by 2024 than what the two carriers would have had combined had they continued to operate as separate companies. Notably, when everything was all said and done on April 1st, new jobs weren’t one of the benefits T-Mobile said would come out of the merger. 

Not knowing whether T-Mobile will hire back more workers than it plans to let go makes it difficult to measure the impact of the company’s plan. But it’s safe to say the optics of the current situation aren’t great. The company is cutting jobs at a time when the current unemployment rate in the US is at 13.3 percent, and the coronavirus pandemic has left the American working class at its most vulnerable in decades.

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Bose shuts down AR development

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The exit has been a while in coming. Senior VP and AR advocate John Gordon left in summer 2019, Protocol said. Bose shut down its public-facing AR developer kit in April, and AR references started disappearing from the company’s site around then.

The AR effort wasn’t helped by Bose’s recent financial troubles. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Bose said it would close many of its retail stores. Its CEO left at the start of 2020, as well. However much this influenced Bose’s decision to back away from AR, the company isn’t in as good a position to experiment with AR as it was in the past.

Bose is the latest casualty in a string of companies that have either had to shut down entirely or scale back their AR ambitiions. Daqri and ODG shut down in 2019, while Meta AR sold its assets. Magic Leap is also refocusing on business following a lack of enthusiasm. AR is challenging, and even well-known names like Bose aren’t guaranteed to have hits.

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Xbox One update streamlines your game library management

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Your Xbox One game collection can come from a variety of services, which can make it a pain to manage your library. Which games can you most afford to delete to free up space? You won’t have to guess from now on. Microsoft is trotting out an Xbox June 2020 update that, among other things, identifies where your games come from — you’ll know if a title is from Game Pass, Live Gold or EA Access. It’s not clear if other services are in the pipeline, but this will at least help you sift through your catalog with little effort.

You’ll also see a Game Pass or Live Gold badge next to your Gamertag on the home screen and in the Guide, and your Game Pass content will float to the top of your dashboard if you’re a new subscriber.

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