Technology news

Sony's upcoming PlayStation event, where it's expected to unveil its upgraded PlayStation 4 console, is set for September 7th, according to invites sent out this afternoon. The event will be held at the PlayStation Theatre in New York City at 3PM ET. The company is being elusive about the details, saying only that it will "share details about the PlayStation business." It's unclear if Sony will announce a release date or price for the new console.
The new device, referred to internally

I started playing No Man’s Sky yesterday after years of anticipation and hype, and while I’ve only scraped the crust of this universe-sized enigma, it has its hooks into me.
Developer Hello Games’ impossibly large space-exploration game is out now on PlayStation 4, and I’ve put around 8 hours into it after staying up until dawn this morning. I couldn’t pull myself away. While my review is still a long ways off, I want to give you my early thoughts about one of

If you’ve ever binge-watched YouTube makeup tutorials, then you probably know South Korean beauty brand and distributer Memebox thanks to its peeling masks.
K-Beauty favorite Memebox — think Sephora for South Korean products — announced today that it scored a $66 million investment led by Formation Group. With this series C capital, Memebox plans to venture into new markets and “link its digital platform to additional offline retail experiences.”
“[M

Last month, we found out that Kobo still exists, and that it's planning on releasing a new e-reader, called the Aura One. Now thanks to a product listing from a Dutch retailer that went live a bit early, we have a few more details on the upcoming e-reader.
Featuring a 7.8-inch Carta e-ink display with a 1872 x 1404 resolution, the Kobo Aura One is going to be one of the larger e-readers on the market when it becomes available (the current line of Amazon Kindle devices all come in at six inc

 Intel announced Tuesday that it is acquiring deep learning startup Nervana Systems in a move that looks to bolster the role of AI solutions within the company. Recode reports that the price tag of the deal is north of $350 million, adding to what has been a pretty active (to put it mildly) last few weeks in tech M&A. In a blog post, Nervana CEO and co-founder Naveen Rao specified that… Read More

Netflix launched an internet speed test at Fast.com back in May, and this week it rolled out dedicated apps for the tool on iOS and Android. While the apps are identical to the website, Fast's launch as an app could go a long way toward getting people to use it. And that's a big part of the goal here: the more people using Fast, the more data Netflix has on where internet service providers are doing a poor job.
There's good reason to pick Fast over other speed tests, too. Service

Donald Trump probably didn't donate to the North American Man/Boy Love Association. I say probably because there's absolutely no proof that he did, and he doesn't really seem to donate to anyone. But there's no proof that he didn't donate to NAMBLA either. So how can we really know?
By most standards, the above question is horribly irresponsible, given that it has absolutely no basis in fact. But that's the way that Donald Trump frequently approaches his own questions about the world &mdash

How to cover the planet in pokémon. Step 1: wrangle the pokémon into a herd. Step 2: load the herd onto military transport planes. Step 3: fly above different locations across the planet. Step 4: open plane hatches and jettison the living cargo. Step 5: repeat.
The micro-mockumentary above documents the fictional process behind Pokémon Go's global poké-population. The clip comes from YouTuber Nixolas, Chris Burgoyne, and Alex Khisaf, and was created in part with Goale

Gadget makers love the Internet of Things. Just look at connected refrigerators, connected tampons, and connected pregnancy tests as some examples. As I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, the security of these devices is often inadequate. This week at DEF CON, two researchers, Anthony Rose and Ben Ramsey, emphasized this point by demonstrating how they easily compromised 12 different Bluetooth Low Energy smart locks using cheap hardware that cost around $200 altogether.
Some devices

I’m a millennial and I still pay for cable. I feel like I should apologize.
Cable isn’t cheap — plenty of beat reporters have explained as much, including The Verge’s own — but it is easy. With cable, I can watch whatever I’d like when it airs, on-demand, or recorded onto DVR. All of my favorite shows are in one place, not spread across a handful of apps. Cable never buffers.
For years I figured that when I scrapped my cable plan, it would be because an even e

Finally, a video game for deciding who your self-driving car should kill! MIT’s Moral Machine is an open field study on people’s snap judgments about how self-driving cars should behave, released earlier this summer as part of a larger study. But it’s weird enough that, finding it on the web randomly, you might be confused about exactly what the point is.
The scenarios are all versions of the classic trolley problem, which has itself become something of a joke. Do you swit

Google is adding new third-party integrations to its Inbox email app for project management service Trello and code repository GitHub. Now, when users receive emails related to projects from either of those companies, Inbox will format the messages as it does with travel, event, and newsletter emails. For Trello, you'll get a bulleted summary of recent activity on a project card, while GitHub emails will now display code changes and filed issues. Messages from either service will also inclu

No Man’s Sky is a game that lets you live out your wildest science fiction exploration fantasies, and it does so without falling into traditional gaming categories. It doesn’t have realistic guns, scripted action set pieces, or a Super Bowl-ready marketing campaign. This game, created by a comparably small team of artists and coders, has captured the interest of large swaths of gamers and non-gamers alike based almost solely on its unprecedented premise: there are 18 quintillion plan

George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, the source material for HBO's Game of Thrones, sits at 1.8 million words right now by most estimates. The wealth of writing around and about it on Reddit, mainstream content outlets, tiny blogs, and Tumblr undoubtedly has surpassed that number. Brynden B Fish, one of the web's foremost ASOIAF theorists, has alone written dozens of essays with word counts numbering in the five digits. Most famously, he's penned a treatise on the yet-untold-in-the-

Online harassment is nothing new, but it is new when it comes to VR environments. Users can get extremely close to one another, and that can lead to an uncomfortable infringement of space and a bad experience that drives people away from VR. Google’s Daydream Labs is experimenting with ways to combat abuse in VR and one successful test involved the creation of virtual poker dogs. The dogs demonstrate that one way to deter users from harassing fellow players is by creating personal space. (

The TV Academy opened up its Emmy Awards to include shortform categories this past March, which expanded potential nominees to YouTube producers, artists at AdultSwim, and elsewhere in the land of new media. Among the nominees for an Emmy in Outstanding Short Form Variety Series is the Honest Trailers series from ScreenJunkies.
Honest Trailers is a consistently hilarious YouTube series that nails all the clichés in today's movie trailers, complete with the perfect growly narrations of the

Back in July, Google began testing a new feature that would allow users to enable a Wi-Fi-only mode for Maps, which would help those with limited or expensive data plans avoid overages. Well apparently the tests went well, as Google has started rolling out the addition to Google Maps on Android.Wi-Fi-only mode can be toggled on in settings and will limit the app to only working with your saved offline areas unless you're connected over Wi-Fi, while the rest of your device operates as normal

I've been excited for No Man's Sky since I saw that first trailer with the soaring score from 65 Days of Static, but it turns out my favorite part of the game has nothing to do with what that first glimpse promised. Like my friends at Polygon, the game overall isn't exactly what I expected, and there are plenty of unnecessary frustrations, like punishing inventory management, that muddy the experience. But the unexpected can also be joyful, and I found joy in a part of the game I didn'

Fossil’s Q Marshal and Q Wander smartwatches, which it introduced earlier this year, are going to be available for preorder starting on Friday. They’ll be in stores on August 29th. The watches start at $295.
Both come with always-on touchscreen displays and are compatible with both Android and iOS. The Wander comes with a gold finish and "soft curving." It’s pictured below:FossilThe Marshal, pictured above, has a "rugged case" and "vintage-inspired" leather straps. Though both

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting the Red Planet for a decade, sending photos back to Earth every month as it goes around. This month's batch contains more than 1,000 photos of Mars' dunes, craters, mountains, ice caps, and other surface features. And they're particularly exciting for a couple of reasons.Every 26 months, the Sun and Mars are on opposite sides of the Earth's sky — a phenomenon called opposition. During opposition, the MRO has unobstructed communicat

We've seen more than a few products that offer customers the chance to grow fresh fruit, herbs, and vegetables in their own home with minimal effort, but a device named Grobo from a Canadian startup looks like it might be the most straightforward yet. Its creators describe it as a "Keurig for plants." You simply fill its reservoirs with water and nutrients, drop some seeds into its base, and then hit a button on a connected app to start the growing process. A couple weeks later, y

Suicide Squad is a fascinating, funny, and above all, frustrating mess of a movie. With a weekend in theaters behind it, it made a temporary mark at the box office, setting a record for biggest August debut with $135 million domestic take ($268 million worldwide). But just like Batman v Superman, the film dropped sharply from Friday to Saturday, losing more than 40 percent of its box-office momentum. That brings the film’s long-term earning potential into question, and the blistering revie

It’s the time of year that stargazers have been waiting for: the Perseid meteor shower. On the night of August 11th and the morning of August 12th, hundreds of tiny meteors will dart through Earth’s night sky, putting on a spectacular light show for late-night viewers. And those who stay up for the shower this year may be rewarded with a particularly special cosmic performance. Experts suspect there will be even more shooting stars than average in this year’s shower. Conti

It must be hard to kick ass, decade after decade. It puts a giant target on your back, after all — you’re the one everyone else is trying to knock down, year after year.In the car world, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG has been that leader for a long time. BMW created the sports sedan segment with the M3, released an early luxury SUV with the X5, and is now focusing on the future with its "i" sub-brand. It’s even promised a self-driving car by 2021.Which brings us to Cadillac, an A

Virtual Reality Los Angeles has been holding seasonal conventions to introduce people to VR for more than four years. Usually the shows have focused on evangelizing on behalf of the technology — touting its transformative potential in gaming, storytelling, and industrial applications. But this year’s VLRA Summer Expo found itself addressing an industry that has transitioned from theoretical to actual, with retail versions of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive landing in living rooms, and S

Aaron Puzey says it started out of boredom. He'd been toiling away on his exercise bike for half an hour a day for years, and things were beginning to get tedious. "I'd been day dreaming for a while about the possibility of using VR to make it a bit more fun," Puzey told The Verge by email. "And now of course the technology has arrived to make it happen." His solution? Hooking a Galaxy Gear up to Google Street View and cycling the length of the UK — 1,500 kilometers from Land's End to John