PayPal’s credit card will offer up to three percent cashback

PayPal has revealed its upgraded credit card, which will now offer users more cashback, depending on how they make their purchases. As before, users will still get unlimited two percent cashback on anything they buy, wherever a Mastercard is accepted. However, if you check out with PayPal, you’ll get unlimited three percent cashback. This goes for online, mobile and in-store (with the PayPal QR Code) payments.

The new PayPal Cashback Mastercard still has no annual fee and you’ll now get cashback daily, rather than having to wait for a monthly statement. PayPal says it has redesigned the card’s user interface on its app and the web. It promises a more simplified way to access rewards and make payments.

Existing users will automatically get access to the upgraded card, while newcomers will get a bonus of $100 on their first $500 spent. The new PayPal Cashback Mastercard will be available soon, though be sure to look at the fine print before applying.

Offering customers more cashback should help PayPal better compete with rival companies. The Apple Card also has no annual fee. It offers three percent cashback for Apple Store purchases, two percent on Apple Pay purchases and one percent on other purchases.

The Morning After: Elon Musk is now Twitter’s largest shareholder

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey might not like what’s become of the internet. But the internet doesn’t stop moving. Elon Musk now owns part of Twitter, after purchasing $2.89 billion in stock, according to a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing spotted by CNBC. The purchase follows recent criticism by Musk over the social media site’s free speech policies. Musk loves tweeting, so it makes sense beyond those criticisms. His tweets have even set off SEC lawsuits.

Musk is now the platform’s largest shareholder, and he’s already inquiring into an edit button.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

LG’s 2021 C1 OLED TVs are up to 32 percent off right now

No, not my TV!

The worst thing about buying something new, cutting-edge and kinda pricey is when it’s no longer new, cutting-edge and, well, on sale. So my awesome LG C1 OLED has just had substantial price cuts from the 48-inch model through to the 65-inch option. Sigh. Still, they’re great TVs with some notable specs for gamers, like 120Hz refresh rates and support for variable refresh rates.

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A Monkey Island sequel is incoming

From creator Ron Gilbert.

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Monkey Island

One of the best video game series of all time is making a return in 2022 with some of its key original creatives on board. Return to Monkey Island is “a game by Ron Gilbert,” who conceived the point-and-click comedy-adventure saga in the late ’80s.

Gilbert wrote and directed the original game, The Secret of Monkey Island. He was director, programmer and designer on the sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.

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The UK plans to issue an official NFT

The government is moving to embrace stablecoins.

The UK government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has announced the Royal Mint will issue an official NFT sometime this summer. 

Yeah. I’m British and I winced too.

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The DeLorean EV will be unveiled on August 18th

Italdesign helped shape the concept car.

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Delorean

After years of teasing, the DeLorean Motor Company announced it’ll unveil an all-electric vehicle on August 18th, promising to share its official name at the same time. Details on the concept car are scant. The automaker is working with Italdesign, best known for its work with Volkswagen, to design the upcoming car.

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Samsung’s 2022 TV lineup has something for everyone

Including its first new OLED TV in a decade.

The centerpiece of Samsung’s new TV family is the new QN900B, the centerpiece of the company’s Neo QLED 8K family. For 2022, Samsung has added 14-bit HDR mapping (up from 12-bit mapping on last year’s models) to improve picture detail in both bright and dark scenes. When combined with that massive 7,680 x 4,320 resolution, according to Sam Rutherford, the TV looks seriously sharp.

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Apple Watch SE models are $49 off in a big Amazon sale

Following a sale on the Apple Watch Series 7 models, Amazon is now focusing on the more value-oriented Watch SE. All four models are available with discounts of $49, with the 40mm GPS Watch SE starting at just $230, or 18 percent off. That’s near an all-time low price, and the best deal on the Watch SE we’ve seen this year. 

Buy Watch SE [GPS 40mm] at Amazon – $230Buy Watch SE [GPS 44mm] at Amazon – $260

With solid performance, a familiar design and support for numerous apps, the Watch SE scored a solid 88 in our Engadget review. It looks nearly identical to the Watch SE Series 6 and 7, and delivers smooth performance despite the slightly older processor. Most importantly, it offer all the same features you’d get in the more expensive models, like all-day heart rate monitoring, built-in GPS, fall detection, Apple Pay support, sleep-tracking and more. 

Buy Watch SE [Cellular 40mm] at Amazon – $280Buy Watch SE [Cellular 44mm] at Amazon – $310

It doesn’t include a blood oxygen sensor or ECG, nor the always-on display of the Series 6 or Series 7 models. If those things aren’t terribly important, you’ll still get a full Watch experience. The other main drawbacks with all Watch models are sleep tracking that doesn’t quite measure up to the competition, and less than a full day of battery life. 

If you want the latest and greatest models, there’s more good news too. All the Watch Series 7 models are still on sale for $69 off, starting at $330 for the Watch Series 7 41mm GPS model, $360 for the 45mm GPS model, $430 for the 41mm Cellular version and $460 for the 45mm Cellular model.  

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Hulu’s iOS and Apple TV apps now support SharePlay

When Apple rolled out SharePlay with iOS 15.1 last year, it was only supported by a handful of apps. The list has grown a bit over the past months, with ESPN, Twitch and Disney+ updating their apps with the capability to use the group viewing feature. Now, you can add Hulu to the roster. The streaming service’s latest iOS and tvOS update introduces SharePlay as a feature for its iPhone, iPad and Apple TV app, so you can hold watch parties for shows like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Dropout, which tells the story of controversial Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. 

To use SharePlay, all participants in the watch party will have to be on iOS 15.1 or newer and will need to have Hulu accounts and subscriptions. You have to start a FaceTime call before you open the app. After you do, you’ll see an alert at the top of your screen asking if you want to stream your content. Anyone who joins the session will have access to the pause, skip forward and rewind controls to make sure you’re all watching the same thing at the same time. FaceTime will also have a picture-in-picture box at the top, which will show whoever is talking at the moment. SharePlay even comes with a feature called smart volume that automatically lowers the show’s volume whenever somebody in the call is talking. 

In addition to SharePlay support, Hulu’s latest update has also introduced a new feature that gives you a way to easily flip between the live TV channels you’re currently watching. You can now get the update Hulu app from the Apple App Store.  

Google’s Pixel 6 April update arrives with camera and charging fixes

Google’s Pixel 6 and 6 Pro are great phones on paper, but they’ve been beset by bugs and problems that have annoyed a fair number of users. Google’s April update has now arrived (on time, for once) with fixes for several key issues around charging, the camera and security, 9to5Google has reported. 

On the camera side, Google said the update fixes “issues causing front-facing camera preview in certain apps to appear zoomed in.” It’s also addressed an issue that occasionally caused a green screen to appear in the camera preview. On the wireless charging side, there’s a patch for performance issues with “certain accessories,” an issue that popped up on Reddit and elsewhere with various Qi charging stands. 

It also fixed various UI issues and bugs (with all Pixel devices from the 3XL up), including crashes that happen in Picture-in-Picture (PIP) mode, error messages with certain live wallpapers, incorrect animation displays and more. It also includes security fixes, particularly for a “high security vulnerability in the Framework component that could lead to local escalation of privilege,” as detailed in a security bulletin.

After arriving two weeks late, the March security bulletin fixed a number of key bugs related to WiFi connectivity issues, battery management and fingerprint recognition. However, it also made haptic vibration weaker, generating user complaints on various forums. Google acknowledged the issue, but there’s no word yet on a fix or update. Meanwhile, the April update is now rolling out “over the next week in phases depending on carrier or device,” Google said, so you should see it soon.

Elon Musk, Twitter’s largest shareholder, asks users if they want an edit button

Elon Musk, who recently became Twitter’s largest shareholder, has posted a poll on the website asking users whether they want an edit button. His options are a misspelled “yse” and “on,” which might make you think that the whole thing is joke until you see that the poll has been retweeted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully,” Agrawal wrote, hinting that the poll could lead to an actual edit button on the social network. 

Many Twitter users have asked for an edit button over the years, but the website has remained staunchly resistant to those requests. In a video Q&A with Wired back in 2020, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey said the website will “probably never” add an edit button. He explained that the social network started as a text messaging service, and you can’t take back a text once you’ve sent it. Twitter apparently wanted to preserve that vibe and feeling.

Musk, who’s been a prolific tweeter way before he purchased 9.2 percent of the social network, might serve as the catalyst for the company to change that outlook. As of this writing, 74.7 percent out of the 1,439,779 accounts that participated in the poll voted “yse” to an edit button. Whether Twitter will immediately start working on the feature if “yse” wins remains to be seen. That is, if it hasn’t started developing it yet — the official Twitter account recently posted that the company is “working on an edit button,” but that was on April Fools’ Day.

It’s also unclear how an edit button would work on Twitter, where reposting other people’s content is widely practiced. If the person who tweeted the original post edits it, will the retweeted content reflect the change, as well? And will the edit button for a tweet be available indefinitely or only for a short period of time? Dorsey said during the Wired interview that Twitter previously considered giving users a 30-to-60-second window to correct something, which would be more than enough time to edit spelling mistakes and other minor changes.

Hackers breached Mailchimp to target crypto holders

Hackers used internal tools from Mailchimp to target customers from a total of 102 users, including hardware cryptocurrency wallet Trezor, reportedThe Verge. Trezor users over the weekend received emails claiming that their accounts were compromised in a data breach. The email included a purported link to an updated version of Trezor Suite, along with instructions to set up a new pin — though in actuality it was a phishing site meant to capture the contents of their digital wallets.

In a tweet on Sunday, Trezor confirmed that the emails were a part of a sophisticated phishing campaign by a malicious actor that targeted MailChimp’s newsletter database. “The Mailchimp security team disclosed that a malicious actor accessed an internal tool used by customer-facing teams for customer support and account administration,” Trezor wrote in a blog post. “The bad actor gained access to this tool as a result of a successful social engineering attack on Mailchimp employees.”

In other words, the hackers managed to trick employees in MailChimp’s customer support team into handing over their log-in credentials, then used the company’s own internal tools to send the emails. The Trezor attack specifically was planned to a “high level of detail”, according to the company’s blog post. Still, in order for the attack to be successful, Trezor users had to download the fake app and submit their wallet credentials. It’s unlikely many made it that far, as Trezor points out in its post, considering that most operating systems would have notified the user that they were downloading software from an unknown source.

MailChimp first became aware of the breach on March 26th, according to a statement by its chief information officer Siobhan Smith given to The Verge. The hackers were able to obtain audience data from 102 different MailChimp clients, meaning that Trezor is far from the only company likely impacted. Decentraland, the in-browser metaverse platform, confirmed on Twitter that its newsletter was among those caught up in the hack.

We’ll likely find out what other companies were involved in the MailChimp hack in the days to follow. The company has already alerted all of its clients who were involved.

TikTok owner ByteDance scraped content from Instagram and others to push predecessor app

To fuel the rise of its app Flipagram, TikTok parent company Bytedance scraped profiles, videos, usernames and other content from Instagram and other social media platforms. Buzzfeed reported that the Chinese company scraped “hundreds of thousands” of accounts for content without users’ consent. Flipagram, which ByteDance acquired back in 2017, allowed users to create short slideshow videos set to music — sort of a simplified version of TikTok and other short-form video apps. The app has since been rebranded as Vigo Video.

The scraping strategy was meant to be a “growth hack” for Flipagram, allowing it to expand its user base, according to former ByteDance employees interviewed by Buzzfeed. Flipagram was scraping up to 10,000 videos per day from high-priority countries, according to one former employee. The three platforms that Flipagram allegedly scraped content from are Instagram, Snapchat and Musical.ly (which is owned by ByteDance and was later absorbed by TikTok). One former Bytedance employee disputes that Instagram was involved in the scrape due to the incompatible sizing of their videos at the time.

The employees also allege that the scraped content from major US social media platforms was then used to build Bytedance’s “For You” algorithm. TikTok has yet to comment on whether Flipagram’s stolen data was used to build TikTok’s “For You” algorithm.

Scraping publicly available data isn’t illegal by itself. Many social platforms find “creative” ways to boost their audience in their early days, like harvesting external content, creating fake profiles or mass-emailing potential users. But companies can also ban unauthorized scraping in their terms and conditions for users, which Instagram and Snapchat both do. Violating such contracts can often lead to lawsuits. 

There’s an irony to Bytedance in its early days allegedly scraping data from Instagram, since Reels was Instagram’s attempt to capture TikTok’s audience and instead became a receptacle for old TikToks. In order to keep Reels from driving more traffic to its rival app, Instagram recently announced it would no longer promote TikToks. 

DOJ seizes $34 million of crypto from the dark web seller

In what the DOJ calls one of the largest cryptocurrency civil forfeiture filings in US history, the Southern District of Florida has successfully seized around $34 million worth of coins and tokens from a seller on the dark web.

According to a recent release, the illicit crypto was seized from a South Florida resident who used an online alias to sell more than 100,000 illicit items across marketplaces on the dark web. The bulk of the sales is said to be hacked account info from a number of major services including HBO, Netflix, Uber and others.

Prosecutors from the Southern District of Florida say the resident used TOR (The Onion Router) to access the dark web, before using a series of tumblers to convert one cryptocurrency to another in order to hide its source. This series of actions is often called chain hopping and is considered a form of money laundering, which obviously a big no-no at both the federal and state levels. 

Eventually, proceeds from the illicit sales were deposited in random increments at random times in designated crypto wallets, which were later recovered by law enforcement. Between May 16th, 2017 and June 19th, 2017, authorities seized approximately 919.3 Ethereum, 643 Bitcoins, 640 Bitcoin Gold, 640 Bitcoin Cash and 640 Bitcoin SV

The DOJ says the civil forfeiture filing comes as a result of Operation TORnado, which is a joint investigation by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF) across multiple federal, state and local agencies.

However, while that $34 million sum (which was worth as much as $47 million at one point based on court docs) is certainly a lot, given the growing popularity of crypto, it almost certainly won’t be one of the largest seizures for long. 

Valve is increasing Steam Deck shipments

Since Steam Deck went on sale at the end of February, Valve has emailed reservation holders about once a week to tell them they can purchase its handheld PC. That’s meant a lot of people have been patiently waiting to get their hands on the highly sought-after gadget, but that wait could soon be shorter.

On Monday, the company said it was ramping up Steam Deck shipments. By just how much, Valve didn’t specify, but what it did promise is that it would start sending more order availability emails each week. If you’re on the fence about buying a unit, Valve has also updated the Steam Deck’s product page to clarify what timeframes like Q2 and Q3 mean in terms of months. If you were to place a reservation today, the page now says you’ll have the chance to order a unit sometime in October 2022 or later. Bottom line: it sounds like Valve is doing its best to get Steam Deck units to customers more quickly.