Technology news

NASA has ordered a second mission from SpaceX to send astronauts to the International Space Station. The order is part of the Commercial Crew Program, which was started by NASA six years ago as a way of making sure the United States continues to have human access to space. NASA ordered a first mission from SpaceX back in November of 2015, and it ordered two from Boeing — the other company involved in the CCP — in May and December of 2015.
NASA initially embarked on this program becau

Foreign attackers may have gained access to the Clinton campaign’s private, according to a new report from Reuters. It’s unclear what data was lost in the attack, although the Department of Justice is currently investigating the case.
The news comes on the heels of a similar attack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which may have compromised sensitive donor information, as well as a massive theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee, the result of which

Mercedes has discontinued a television ad for its new E-Class sedan. It comes after criticism from a number of consumer groups over a comparison the company made between its autonomous F 015 concept car and the advanced driver-assist systems in the E-Class.
The ad shows the F 015 and the Mercedes E-Class side-by-side and asks if the world is "truly ready for a car that can drive itself?" It goes on to say "the future is here... a Mercedes-Benz concept car that’s already a reality."
Though

New fossils discovered in the southwest African country of Namibia reinforce a theory that Earth's first mass extinction was caused by the planet's earliest animals, known as metazoans. These animals, which comprise most common forms of life today including vertebrates and arthropods, arrived on the scene roughly 540 million years ago. The effects of the diversification and spread of animals across the globe is known as the Cambrian explosion, and scientists now think it may have also led t

The day after the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the hilarious Jesse McLaren celebrates the best fad from the 1996 DNC. The writer and comedian’s video shows delegates, politicians, and Hillary Clinton herself performing the former dance craze and current cruise ship anthem "The Macarena."Ok but the 1996 DNC was lit pic.twitter.com/nuHp1lBND8
— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) July 29, 2016
Because we’re talking about a presidential convention, the moment is well documented.

SpaceX has landed five Falcon 9 rockets since the company started trying in 2015, but yesterday it put one of them through the first major test to see if it will ever fly again. The company posted a video to YouTube last night that shows the tied-down rocket firing at full thrust for just under three minutes — essentially the same amount of time that they would fire during a normal trip to space.
This particular 14-story-tall rocket was used to send a Japanese communications satellite to s

Instagram has been building a series of anti-harassment tools and plans to roll them out to all users in the coming weeks. According to The Washington Post, Instagram will let each user create their own banned words list, which will stop unwanted comments from being posted on their photos. Users will also be able to turn comments off on a photo-by-photo basis, so someone could disable comments entirely if they wanted to.
While harassment on Instagram hasn't been as much of a story as harass

Tesla will stream its Gigafactory launch party on its website, according to a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The party, for Tesla vehicle owners who referred five other buyers as well as VIP guests, follows a press preview earlier this week that The Verge attended.
The Gigafactory is an enormous battery factory that is the culmination of Musk’s vision for his company. It will, when fully online, be able to build enough batteries to supply more than a million Model 3 cars per year. It shou

People use SwiftKey because it helps predict the words they’re trying to type, and usually, the service works pretty well. However, over the past week, some users reported that their keyboards were populating with other people’s email addresses and searched phrases. The bug relates back to SwiftKey’s cloud sync service, which has since been suspended.
The incorrect predictions spawned multiple Reddit threads. In one, an English speaker was getting someone else’s German su

I adore the Fast and the Furious films as much as the next Vin Diesel Fan Club member, but none feature a practical stunt that I find as gutsy or hypnotic as Maut ka Kuan, or "The Well of Death," in Northern India. The concept is simple as it is dangerous: a handful of drivers speed motorcycles and cars around the walls of a large wooden barrel at an incline that approaches 90 degrees. The spectacle of colorful lights, zipping metal, and fearless humans spitting in the face of physics has, natur

 You probably aren’t trying to set a land speed record for an all-electric, street legal car, but if you are, I have bad news: The goalposts just got moved further out. Genovation‘s Extreme Electric (GXE) car, which uses a Corvette Z06 chassis with a custom electric drive under the hood, broke its previous record of 186.8 mph by a margin of nearly 20 mph. The new record now stands… Read More

Facebook has launched a new SDK that lets developers embed 360 photos and videos into their apps. The VR Deep Link sample SDK has been open sourced, offering code samples on how to construct an experience from which users will be able to view 360 immersive content that are shared on Facebook, Oculus Video, or Facebook for Android.
Open sourcing this technology comes days after Facebook released code for its Surround 360 camera that it debuted at this year’s F8 developer conference. In

Soon to be found in a Brookstone near you, the OvRcharge is a wireless charger than can levitate your smartphone using magnets. Of course as a third-party product it's not true wireless charging — it requires a special case to charge your device — but it can levitate and rotate "most phones" using a magnet that you'll need to attach to the back of your phone.At $177 — which is a Kickstarter early-bird price and less than it will retail for — the OvRcharge is far too

Tim Cook is planning a fundraising event for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, according to an invitation obtained by BuzzFeed News. The fundraiser is scheduled for August 24th and will be undertaken by Cook as a private citizen, rather than as a representative of Apple.
Cook also hosted a fundraiser for Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan earlier this summer, indicating support for both parties. Thus far, he has not made any such gesture to Republican nominee Donald Trump, wh

Breaking Bad was never planned as a national conversation starter about sexist double standards in media, but the broad public reaction to Anna Gunn’s character, Skyler White, rapidly turned it into one. Skyler drew so much vitriol that Gunn wrote a New York Times op-ed about the response, and the way it became a referendum on her personally. And a thousand thinkpieces followed, dissecting the Breaking Bad fandom’s rabid response to Skyler, and making the case for and against her. Me

Last night at the Democratic National Convention, we learned a number of things. Chelsea Clinton kind of sounds like Mia Thermopolis from The Princess Diaries if you close your eyes and squint your ears. "Believing in science" is somehow not a given for a presidential candidate in 2016. And most importantly, Bill Clinton, possible future First Gentleman of the United States, loves balloons.
Bill Clinton loves balloons truly, madly, deeply. He loves them like they are the morning sun an

If you own a virtual reality headset, Valve is holding a sale that showcases games and experiences for it. The VR Weekend Sale isn’t the first time Valve has discounted games for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive — a number of them showed up in the big summer sale — but it’s the first time that it’s based a whole weekend sale purely around VR.
The centerpiece of the sale is a 20-game bundle that’s discounted by 32 percent, to $251.42. It includes some HTC Vive favo

AT&T is matching Comcast and raising the ceiling of its monthly home internet data cap to 1TB. Beginning August 21st, all U-verse customers on speed tiers up to (and including) 300Mbps will receive the higher monthly allowance. If they somehow still manage to exceed 1TB, they'll be charged $10 for each additional increment of 50GB.
Currently, customers on U-verse's lower speed tiers are limited to an allowance of 300GB / month, so this change gives those users a lot more to wo

Gionee launched its new M6 and the M6 Plus in Beijing this week. The phones are pretty ordinary with unexceptional specs, like a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, a headphone jack, and a MediaTek MT6755 eight-core processor. But they do each have one feature worth noting: massive batteries. The M6 has a 5,000 mAh battery and the M6 Plus includes one with 6,020 mAh.
Teens will probably want this battery so they can Snapchat all the time, whereas the rest of us just want it to power our Poké

Kanye West unexpectedly dropped a video for "Wolves" featuring Sia and Vic Mensa from his album The Life of Pablo. The seven-minute clip is directed by Steven Klein and is essentially an extensive Balmain commercial with the fashion house's boss and Kardashian family friend Olivier Rousteing acting as creative director. Kim Kardashian, Kendall Jenner, and a slew of fashion models also make appearances in the clip. It's safe to say this will be far less controversial than West's&nb

Niantic Labs’ John Hanke will be delivering a fireside chat for AR/VR day (augmented reality/virtual reality) at GamesBeat 2016. Get a ticket here!Welcome to another GamesBeat weekly roundup! This time, we check out the new Xbox One S Bluetooth controller, reports shed new details on Nintendo’s NX console, and we get ready for our conference in Los Angeles next week, GamesBeat 2016.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend! Maybe we’ll see you in L.A.!
Pieces of flair and o

Smartphone season is rapidly upon us, with the new versions of Samsung’s Galaxy Note and Apple’s iPhone rumored to be just around the corner. Unfortunately for those two companies, Chinese OEM Akyumen (Pronounced like "acumen," probably) has just announced that its Holofone Phablet, which I assume is going to be the only phone anyone will ever need to buy ever again, will be available September 1st. Continue reading…

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has suffered a security breach, and the FBI is investigating, writes Reuters. The incident, reported by four anonymous sources and later confirmed by the DCCC, comes shortly after WikiLeaks released a trove of damaging emails from the Democratic National Committee’s servers. The sources told Reuters that like the DNC hack, this new attack could have exposed information about Democratic donors, including credit card and social security informa

Niantic Labs’ John Hanke will be delivering a fireside chat for AR/VR day (augmented reality/virtual reality) at GamesBeat 2016. Get a ticket here!Maybe we can learn about gaming’s future by looking at its past. That’s why we’re excited to announced that our closing speaker at our GamesBeat 2016 event in Los Angeles next week will be Tom Kalinske, the chairman of online game firm Gazillion and the former president of Sega of America. Kalinske is best known for introd

For the first time, the Zika virus might have been transmitted from mosquitoes to humans inside the United States, according to Florida Governor Rick Scott. Scott confirmed that four cases under investigation in his state were not brought in from outside the country.
The four cases, which occurred in Miami-Cade and Broward Counties, were "the result of local transmission," and are "likely mosquito-borne," according to the Florida Department of Health. However, health officials have yet to l

At this point it's clear that Samsung is fond of curved displays on its Galaxy smartphones, and the upcoming Galaxy Note 7 is expected to receive a dual-edge display when its announced next week. But a new video floating around Wiebo shows what appears to be a working version of a Galaxy Note 7 with a flat display. The video shows the apparent prototype working with the S Pen, Samsung's home screen and setting apps, and even the rumored Iris scanner interface.The specs on the device li

The past few episodes of Vergecast have been lengthy, and this week is no exception. But we have an excuse! It's earnings week and there are a lot of thoughts. Nilay, Dieter, Paul, and Lauren bring the news right to your ears.
01:55 – Apple earnings
22:52 – Apple car
25:33 – The trolley problem
29:09 – Apple TV
44:45 – Paul's "Gadget Flavor"
50:31 – Google earnings
53:51 – Facebook earnings
54:53 – Twitter earnings
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