Technology

I didn't have an interest in playing Genshin Impact at first. I kept hearing it described as a clone of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I didn't really feel like playing a crummier version of a game I've already played.

How long does it take to charge an electric vehicle? The question is more complicated than it seems, and that's a challenge for the auto industry.

Vehicles have different battery sizes, and charge at different speeds. The same vehicle at different chargers will experience wildly varying charge times.

And no matter what charger a driver uses, an electric vehicle requires a change in habits. That may be an obstacle for automakers who need to persuade sometimes skeptical car buyers to try their first electric vehicle.

The Salvation Army's bell ringers, a longtime fixture outside malls and stores around the U.S., are a staple holiday tradition. But this year, with the coronavirus pandemic raging and many stores closed, people won't be hearing as many of those bells ringing.

After a three-year pause, Twitter is going to let you ask for those little blue check marks again.

The company said Tuesday it will start reviewing applications in 2021 under newly released guidelines.

The blue check, which means Twitter has verified a user's identity, is seen as a status symbol on the platform but the process by which the checks were issued has long been murky and inconsistent.

Now that the coronavirus pandemic has transformed Zoom from a corporate videoconferencing app into a ubiquitous tool for governments, schools, karaoke parties and even "Zoomsgiving" celebrations, the company is having to do the dicey work of deciding what is permitted on its platform.

And not everybody is allowed on it.

Just over a decade ago, the American Farm Bureau Federation declared war on legislation to slow down global warming. The organization, a lobbying powerhouse, argued that a "cap-and-trade" proposal making its way through Congress would make fuel and fertilizer more expensive and put farmers out of business.

Updated at 5:19 p.m. ET

Facebook users saw hate speech about once in every 1,000 pieces of content they viewed on the social network between July and September, the company said on Thursday.

This is the first time Facebook has publicly estimated the prevalence of hate speech on its platform, giving a sense of scale of the problem. It published the new metric as part of its quarterly report on how much content it removed from Facebook and Instagram for breaking rules ranging from violence to child exploitation to suicide and self-harm.

When Gennadiy Korol, lead engineer at Moon Studios, booted up Ori and the Will of the Wisps on his Xbox, his eyes lit up. He and his team of developers at Moon Studios had worked tirelessly: coding, testing, and optimizing. Finally, after months of chugging espresso, a thing of video game beauty beamed back at him.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps was ready.

For the Xbox, that is. Another console told a different story. The Nintendo Switch version of Ori looked, well ... different.

On Election Day, Geoff Brown watched lines of text flow by on monitors at New York City Cyber Command in downtown Manhattan.

Brown, the head of the city's cybersecurity operation, was plugged into a bank of virtual conference rooms, checking in with partners at the local, state and federal levels working together to monitor election systems for any security breaches or disinformation campaigns that might target the voting process.

After all the waiting, after months of hardening defenses, the serious threats never came.

Updated Thursday at 11:02 a.m. ET

More than 200 Facebook workers say the social media company is making content moderators return to the office during the pandemic because the company's attempt to rely more heavily on automated systems has "failed."

Apple on Wednesday agreed to pay $113 million to settle consumer fraud lawsuits brought by more than 30 states over allegations that it secretly slowed down old iPhones, a controversy that became known as "batterygate."

BTS is Bang Si-hyuk's greatest strength and biggest vulnerability.

They're unavoidable — corporate buzzwords and gobbledygook.

Put a pin in it. Circle back. I'll loop you in. Deep dive. Best practice.

These words are the audio wallpaper that surrounds the American workplace. Mind-glazing wallpaper, slightly oppressive.

Synergy. Moving forward. Touch base. Ping me.

This mode of expression has been ridiculed brilliantly for years — in the comic strip Dilbert, the TV show Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

The chief executives of Facebook and Twitter defended on Tuesday the steps they took to limit election misinformation before lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who have grown increasingly critical of Big Tech.

Twitter wants you to think twice before sending a tweet to drafts.

The social platform, with more than 330 million users, on Tuesday debuted a new sharing feature worldwide called "fleets." Users can share photos, text or even repost tweets in posts that vanish after 24 hours.

The fleets are pinned to the top of the timeline and are only available via mobile apps. The company has not shared plans to roll out the feature on desktop.

Amazon has launched a pharmacy business, offering to fill prescriptions for delivery by mail.

The retail giant barging in — its biggest foray into health care yet — reverberated through the industry on Tuesday. Shares of CVS were down about 8% at midday, while Walgreens tumbled 9% and Rite Aid 15%.

Prescription drugs are an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars — and more people have turned to ordering medications by mail during the coronavirus pandemic. Analysts say Amazon's move could particularly affect smaller drugstores.

In a year when it's tempting to view every piece of pop culture through the lens of the pandemic, Hades, a video game literally about being unable to escape stultifying domestic confines, is particularly well-suited for this new genre of corona-inflected close reading.

Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business host, declared herself done with Twitter two days after the election.

She tweeted a link to an article that falsely claimed Democrats were trying to steal the election. Twitter hid the post behind a label warning that it contained misleading content. Twitter also notified Bartiromo that someone had complained about her account (even though it did clarify that she had not violated any rules and it was taking no action against her).

For Bartiromo, the label was the last straw.

Updated at 12:13 p.m. ET

TikTok has, yet again, caught a break. This time, it's because the Trump administration has failed to enforce a deadline it set for the app to sever ties from its China-based parent company.

Instead, on Friday, the Trump administration gave TikTok 15 more days to find an American buyer.

Twitter said on Thursday that it would maintain some of the changes it had made to slow down the spread of election misinformation, saying they were working as intended.

Before Election Day, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks had announced a cascade of measures billed as protecting the integrity of the voting process.

Twitter said on Thursday it would maintain some changes it had made to slow down the spread of election misinformation, saying they were working as intended.

Before Election Day, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks had announced a cascade of measures billed as protecting the integrity of the voting process.

For Twitter, those included more prominent warning labels on misleading or disputed claims and limiting how such claims can be shared.

The next generation of video game consoles is now here.

Both Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's Playstation 5 hit stores this week — the newest chapter in an ongoing face-off between Microsoft and Sony.