Tech News – Page 49 – by Arlin Schaffel

Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban

The Supreme Court has upheld the law that will effectively ban TikTok on Sunday, January 19. The decision marks the end of TikTok’s months-long legal fight against a law that essentially forces the ByteDance-owned app to shut down unless it divests its U.S. operations on national security grounds. As of Sunday, it will be illegal for app stores and internet hosting services to distribute the social network. TikTok has warned that the app will simply “go dark” on Sunday, but it’s unclear what exactly will happen once the ban takes effect.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/17/supreme-court-upholds-tiktok-ban/

Even a PDF File Can Run Doom

In the latest edition of “can it run Doom?” a high school student has discovered a way to port the classic PC game to a PDF file. Taking advantage of this, Allen created the Doom PDF, which can run the game if it’s viewed in a Chromium-based browser, such as Google’s Chrome.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/even-a-pdf-file-can-run-doom

Adobe Brings Live Co-Editing to Photoshop

What blew people away about Google Docs was that multiple people could be editing the same document live in real-time. It’s one thing to do this for simple text input, but drawing and image editing are a different story. So, Adobe is bringing that same gee-whiz capability to its category-leading image-editing software, Photoshop, in a beta you can apply for now.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/adobe-brings-live-co-editing-to-photoshop

Gentrified Doom remake trades chainsaw for cheese knife

Doom: The Gallery Experience, created by Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone, transforms the iconic E1M1 level into a virtual museum space where players guide a glasses-wearing Doomguy through halls of fine art as classical music plays in the background. The game links each displayed artwork to its corresponding page on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/01/doom-marine-crashes-art-gallery-politely-sips-wine/

The weirdest tech at CES 2025

CES is home to some of the coolest, cutting-edge, and most innovative technology around. But within this sea of tech are always some pretty strange gadgets. This year’s conference was no different, packed with a whole bunch of wacky devices, some of which might have a chance of taking off, and others… maybe not so much. Highlights include Mirumi, the shy sloth-like robot, A phone battery charger that resembles a toaster, A retractable keyboard, An even more portable LG StanbyME display, SwitchBot’s modular, multitasking robot, An 18-karat gold smart ring, LG’s air purifier your cat can sit on, The “world’s first wearable solar panel”, LG’s indoor gardening side table, Encapsulated anime girls that talk to you…
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/8/24338251/ces-2025-weirdest-tech-gadgets-robots