Hasta La Gadget!

Yelp is sharing new stats on the backlash some businesses have faced due to pandemic safety measures like mask requirements. The company says it took down more than 15,500 reviews for violating the company’s COVID-19 guidelines in 2021. That’s a 161 percent increase compared with the same period (March through December) in 2020, when the company first implemented new policies regarding COVID-19 related content.

The stats, which the company published in its 2021 Trust and Safety report, offer a glimpse into how the pandemic has affected the review site. Since the start of the pandemic, the company has implemented rules to mitigate COVID misinformation and encourage businesses to follow public health requirements. For example, reviewers are prohibited from criticizing businesses for implementing pandemic safety measures, like mask and vaccine requirements. The company also allows businesses to indicate vaccine requirements and other safety precautions.

At the same time, though, Yelp has had to navigate a big spike in “review bombing” due to pandemic-related restrictions. In all, nearly 25 percent of all “unusual activity alerts” — when a business’ page sees a sudden influx of reviews that “appear motivated by a recent news event rather than actual consumer experiences” — in 2021 were related to the pandemic, according to the company.

The pandemic wasn’t the only source of review bombing Yelp dealt with over the last year. The report notes the company placed alerts on more than 80 businesses, and removed more than 2,800 reviews, for “incidents related to the Capitol insurrection,” after reviewers targeted businesses owned by alleged rioters. The company also placed alerts on 90 businesses due to review bombing stemming from TikTok.

Tesla is issuing an over-the-air update to recall a “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta feature that allowed cars to roll through stop signs, ABC News has reported. The function first appeared in FSD 10.3 with the addition of the so-called Assertive profile. It allows vehicles to illegally roll through stop signs at 4-way intersection at speeds of up to 5.6 MPH, according to ABC.  

Tesla reportedly agreed to the recall after two meetings with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) officials. It affects nearly 54,000 vehicles including 2016-2022 Model S and X EVs, 2017-2022 Model 3s and 2020-2022 Model Ys. “Failing to stop at a stop sign can increase the risk of a crash,” the NHTSA wrote in the recall report. Tesla said it doesn’t know of any injuries or crashes caused by the feature, however.

Tesla previously reverted its FSD 10.3 software due to “some issues” including a regression with left turns, phantom forward-collision warnings and auto-steering bugs. The company was also forced to recall 300,000 cars in China due to Autopilot issues, while issuing recalls elsewhere for camera and trunk defects, separating suspensions and other issues.

As we’ve previously mentioned, the name “Full Self-Driving” is misleading because that term generally refers to true Level 4 self-driving, while Tesla’s system simply offers Level 2 advanced driver assistance. An OTA release to disable rolling stops is expected to be sent out by early February. 

President Biden set a new goal for the “moonshot” initiative against cancer that was announced in 2016 when he was vice president.

Bloodborne, a game famous for being notoriously difficult to beat, was released in 2015 for the PS4 with modern graphics and visuals. Over the past 13 months, though, game programmer Lilith Walther created a version of the title that makes it look like it was released way back in the 90’s for the first PlayStation. Bloodborne PSX reimagines the Victorian city of Yharnam in the art style commonly seen in games from that console era. The blocky and pixelated graphics with the colored health bars would sure look very familiar to a generation of gamers who used to play on the PS1. 

The demake only covers some parts of the whole game, but it does give players access to 10 hunter weapons they can use to slay enemies — some even slow down the game’s frame rate as one would expect to happen on a real PS1 title. As Polygon notes, Walther posted updates about the undertaking on Twitter for over 13 months, including one wherein she revealed that the music creator for the project remade the Cleric Beast boss music using a real Roland SC-88 Pro for authenticity. 

Bloodborne PSX is now available as a free download for Windows PC. Players can use a keyboard and a mouse for controls, but they can also dust off their old PS1 controllers and use that instead. Those interested can get a glimpse of the demake below.

One of the features that Apple has built into iMessage are message reactions. These are similar in concept to Facebook’s reactions where instead of replying a “haha” or “ok”, you can simply react to the message instead. This might be better than one-worded replies, which we know some people do not like.

However, these reactions had a problem in which they did not display properly when viewed on an Android device. Back in the past, reacting to a message and viewing the reaction on Android would display a description of the reaction which was a bit silly, but the good news is that Android Messages will now display those reactions properly.

It was previously reported that Google was working on fixing this issue a while ago, and now it looks like the latest update for the Google Messages app has addressed this problem. The update is said to be in the process of being rolled out to users as we speak, so if you don’t see it yet, don’t worry because it should eventually make its way to your phone.

While it’s not a particularly groundbreaking update, it does help to clean up messages a bit easier and make the messaging experience more consistent even though the messages are being sent cross-platform.

Android Messages Will Now Display iMessage Reactions Properly

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