Technology news

The Syfy Channel dropped a new trailer for the next season of The Expanse, as well as a new release date for when we get to catch up with the crew of the spaceship Rocinante. The footage is a solid reminder that you really should be watching this show.
Last season dropped viewers two centuries into the future in a colonized solar system. A detective named Joe Miller and a ship’s captain, James Holden found themselves on opposite ends of a conspiracy, one that ended up with a horrifyin

The Verge relaunch is a project like no other for Vox Media. This was the first time we’ve taken a brand that our company originally builtand given it a full redesign.We’re not just talking about the website, either. This redesign covers everything from the logo to event spaces to distributed platforms to YouTube thumbnails.It was born out of the definition of a new mission statement. Simultaneously, we also migrated The Verge to a new version of our publishing platform, and introdu

Since its release in 2015, the thinking face emoji has been ubiquitously used as a symbol for sarcasm or response to ironic statements. It replaced the shruggie when we had no words to better describe absurdity; Max Read described it as the “perfect non-response.” But with 51 new emoji added to added to the shortlist for Unicode 10, we’re about to get the emoji we deserve for the year to come.
Introducing the “shocked face with an exploding head.” This was the emoji

Verizon has been selling its own Ellipsis-branded line of budget Android tablets for a while now, and today the company announced its latest offering, the Ellipsis 8 HD. It’s an updated version of the earlier Ellipsis 8, upgrading the 8-inch display from 720p to 1080p, the camera from 5-megapixels to 8-megapixels, and the operating system from Kit-Kat to Android 6.0 Marshmallow.Hardware-wise, the Ellipsis 8 HD runs off a 1.5GHz octa-core Snapdragon 617 processor, with 3GB of RAM, 16GB of s

Recreational marijuana is now legal in California — and that’s a game changer for public health. Though many other states have already legalized weed for medicinal purposes and four for recreational purposes, the size and population of California puts its decision in a different league and it could lead the way to figuring out policy around the drug.Maine, Nevada, and Massachusetts also legalized recreational marijuana, though the initiative failed in Arizona.Medical marijuana was al

Oculus has launched the feature that establishes a new minimum spec for its Rift headset, making it accessible on cheaper PCs. In a blog post, the company announced the addition of asynchronous spacewarp, which lets VR titles run smoothly at half the normal frame rate. While the technical process is explained in more detail here, the upshot is that as of today, the Rift is officially supported on a wider range of computers.
Oculus officially announced the existence of asynchronous spacewarp at i

Over the past 24 hours, top executives at Apple, eBay, Box, LinkedIn, and Microsoft have sent company-wide memos urging employees to try to move forward and expressing the belief that people are inherently good. Others, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have posted public statements about having to find new ways to work together. It’s the kind of messaging that a company leader would send after a natural disaster, an attack on the nation, or a looming crisis within the compa

“I hear so much about the NIH, and it’s terrible,” President-elect Donald Trump told conservative radio host Michael Savage last year, using the acronym for the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is the federal agency that shelled out $32 billion for biomedical research in fiscal year 2016. This federal money is a key source of funding for academic research — on anything from cancer to Alzheimer's.
“I hear so much about the NIH, and it’s terrible.”
B

An international trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has hit the web, giving us our best look yet at the franchise’s iconic villain, while also providing a bit more of a glimpse into Jyn Erso’s backstory.
The new trailer includes new footage from the upcoming film, giving us some additional details about the Erso family, from their separation to Jyn's desire to try and find her father as they're working to locate the plans for the space station.
While this film is supposed to st

No-fly zones have been put in place around President-elect Donald Trump’s residence at Trump Tower in New York City and Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s home in Indianapolis.
The FAA directives, officially called Notice To Airmen or NOTAM, is routine following a presidential election and extends no-fly zones that had been put in place around the homes of all four candidates, including Hillary Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, and Tim Kaine’s home in Richmond, Virgin

Google announced a new milestone for its Chrome browser today: 2 billion active installs between desktop and mobile since its September 2008 release. The news was made public onstage at the Chrome Dev Summit conference by Chrome Engineering VP Darin Fisher. Of course, this stat differs from active use — just because you installed Chrome doesn’t mean it’s your primary daily browser. That’s especially true of mobile, where a company like Apple makes it easer to use its buil

The same group that hacked and leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee during the campaign is focusing on a new set of targets, according to research from security firm Volexity first reported by Brian Krebs. The group, dubbed “The Dukes” by Volexity researchers, has been sending malware-laced emails to think tanks and non-governmental organizations throughout Washington, presumably in an effort to steal and publish email archives. According to Volexity, two of the email

GoPro recalled the Karma drone the other night. You may have missed that news because it was announced in the middle of the 2016 election. Whether or not that was an extreme case of hilarious timing, a shrewd move by the PR team, or 2016 being 2016, it’s important to spread the word that the Karma has been recalled — because the reason for the recall is that the drones have been losing power mid-flight and falling out of the skies. And what happens after a GoPro drone falls out of th

My vigil has been long and lonely, but finally there's a VR backback that can be acquired for cold hard cash. MSI's VR One PC-as-a-backpack, announced back in May and refined in September, just went up for sale on Newegg. The PC, which includes an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 card, a 2.7GHz Core i7 processor, 256GB SSD, and 16GB of RAM, has a November 30th ship date and costs $1,999.
the fact that I don't have a vr backpack in the office right now makes me feel like this vr thing was all hype maybe&m

Periscope may have helped jumpstart the live video trend, but until now it’s been difficult to specify which audience direct your content toward without blindly going live for everyone to see, or manually inviting users to a particular stream. Today’s update will now let you choose who to share your broadcast with by narrowing it down to two options: Superfans and Groups.
Superfans are 10 of your most engaged viewers, a group Periscope automatically creates for you based on how often

When Miitomo launched in the US back in March, it was more like a kooky social network than a video game. It combined the weirdness of Tomodachi Life with Nintendo’s Miiverse social hub. Players used their Mii avatars to ask and answer personal trivia with their friends, buy new outfits, take photos, and so on. It was, for a moment, a hit.
But the novelty of Miitomo wore off quickly. By May, many players had begun to abandon the app. Miitomo suddenly felt like staying too late at a bad par

Instagram has confirmed that it’s working on adding a live video feature to its app. CEO Kevin Systrom discussed the company’s live video ambitions in an interview with the Financial Times today. This comes just a few weeks after we got our first glimpse of the feature being tested thanks to Russian news site T Journal.
“Live is really exciting for us. I think it can enhance what we’re doing,” Systrom is quoted as saying. “If I’m trying to strengthen rel

Earlier this week, Deadline revealed that New Line Cinema would be revisiting the worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien. Rather than adapting one of his many novels or stories, director James Strong will be helming a film about the author himself, which has the potential to give viewers an entirely new way of looking at the works that he’s most famous for.
Middle Earth is described as following Tolkien’s "early life and love affair with Edith Bratt," as well as his service to the British Army dur

WhatsApp users are beginning to see an option for two-factor authentication their account settings folder. According to Android Police, the feature is live in the most recent betas of the app (2.16.341 and above), and has also been spotted in the Windows Phone beta. Once activated, the app will prompt a user for a static six-digit passcode every time a new phone is registered to the account.
The new code might seem inconvenient, but it provides a crucial line of defense against criminals who mig

After this week's unexpected election of Donald Trump to the presidency, some have pointed to Facebook's enabling of misinformation as one source that fed his success. Now, Facebook is admitting it must try harder to fight the problem.
In a statement first provided to TechCrunch, VP of product management Adam Mosseri said Facebook works to combat misinformation, but admitted "there's so much more we need to do."
The statement:
We take misinformation on Facebook very seriously. We

Augmented reality startup Occipital first burst on the scene in 2013 with a successful Kickstarter campaign for the Structure Sensor — a strip of cameras and sensors you strap to your iPad that can be used to scan, measure, and project things into the world around you. Today the company is pushing that tech forward by releasing its first iOS app called Canvas. It’s an app that is capable of capturing and processing 3D scans of entire rooms, and it will even let you take accurate meas

Nintendo's NES Classic officially goes on sale tomorrow, November 11th, in the United States. And after this week’s election, the timing of this glorious distraction machine really couldn’t be any better. The mini-console includes 30 retro games and will be available from retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, Target, and others. But stock is expected to be very, very hard to come by.The NES Classic's appealing $59.99 price — the cost of a single game for modern consol

“A gang of secessionist rebels go to war with their paternal superpower” is the narrative backbone within two of this fall’s biggest video games: Titanfall 2 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It’s also a rather on-the-nose metaphor for a long and troubled relationship between both games’ creators.
The Call of Duty franchise was launched in 2003 by the video game developer Infinity Ward, rapidly growing in popularity and scope. The massive success of 2009’s C

“A gang of secessionist rebels go to war with their paternal superpower” is the narrative backbone within two of this fall’s biggest video games: Titanfall 2 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It’s also a rather on-the-nose metaphor for a long and troubled relationship between both games’ creators.
The Call of Duty franchise was launched in 2003 by the video game developer Infinity Ward, rapidly growing in popularity and scope. The massive success of 2009’s C

Microsoft unveiled its Surface Studio PC last month, alongside a crazy-looking Surface Dial puck. The new accessory is, perhaps, the most surprising and unique part of the Surface Studio. It's a big puck that is designed to be placed on the Studio's screen to produce radial menus and act as another form of input. Microsoft is selling the Surface Dial separately to the Surface Studio, so you can use it with any Windows 10 PC. I got a chance to try one out for a few days, to see whether you'd want

Best Buy just announced their huge slate of Black Friday discounts this year, with deals in almost any particular category of tech product you care to name. Of particular note are the discounts on 4K HDR TVs and flat $125 discount on Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad Pro and iPad Air 2 tablets.The deals will be available online from November 24th through November 26th, with doors opening on Thanksgiving day at an almost ridiculously early 5pm in stores.We’ve put together the best deals for your

Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos congratulated Donald Trump this morning for winning the presidency. “I for one give him my most open mind and wish him great success in his service to the country,” Bezos wrote on Twitter.
The statement says basically nothing, neither condemning Trump’s racist, sexist, xenophobic, vitriolic language and, presumably, future policies, nor expressing much support for him, beyond an implicit hope that he won’t tank the country.

A teaser trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has arrived, and it looks as though it’ll be 2017’s most amazing-looking thrill ride through space.
Based on a series of French graphic novels Valérian and Laureline, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the latest film from Luc Besson, who’s best known for The Fifth Element and Lucy. The film will follow Valerian and Laureline, a pair of government operatives who are sent to the city of Alph

The day after the election, Walt and Nilay sat down to discuss what the tech industry might have in store for the next four years under the new president.
We love your feedback on the topics of the show and suggestions on how to make our show better and more fun — you can tweet at Walt at @waltmossberg and Nilay at @reckless. And of course, we'd love it if you subscribed in iTunes (here's the direct RSS feed, if you like), along with The Verge's other great podcasts like What's Tech, and T

Android is the crown jewel in Google’s vast empire of software and web services, and its unprecedented success has inevitably attracted the scrutiny of European Union regulators. Today, Google steps up its public efforts to diminish European concerns over its mobile market dominance, and it’s doing it with the power of GIFs.GoogleYou don’t think we offer choice, says Google, but have you seen how little choice iPhone buyers are getting? All the preloaded apps on an iPhone come

Sevenhugs’ new Smart Remote is going to solve your remote problems. Or at least that’s what the company says it will do. It’s designed to make it easy to control all of the devices in your home from one place. And it’s not like any other universal remote you might have seen before.
A compact, oval-shaped device, the Smart Remote does away with all of the buttons and complexity of other universal remotes. It uses a simple touchscreen interface and a neat trick I’ve n

Three months after they were introduced, Instagram stories are beginning to separate themselves from the Snapchat stories they are derived from. Today Instagram is introducing mentions, links, and an inline version of its Boomerang tool into stories. The result is a product that feels livelier than before, and truly distinct from Snapchat for the first time.
The new features represent the biggest update to stories since their launch. But only two of them will be available to everyone to start wi

Snap Inc. made waves a few weeks ago when it announced Spectacles, a pair of $130 sunglasses with a camera on it that connect to your smartphone to take and send Snaps. Now the company has revealed how you’ll actually be able to buy a pair: from bright yellow vending machines — called “Snapbots” — that will travel around the country selling the device.
pic.twitter.com/ECQhbYZBPa— Spectacles (@Spectacles) November 10, 2016Each Snapbot will be in place for about

Microsoft is starting to roll out its holiday update to Xbox One owners today. The update brings two big new features to Xbox One and Xbox Live: looking for group (LFG) and Clubs. LFG has been used for years as a way to find fellow gamers to play multiplayer titles, and Microsoft is bringing its own take on LFG to the Xbox.
LFG for Xbox will let gamers find people to complete quests, achievements, and other activities by posting on Xbox Live. The result is like a forum post that others can filte