Technology news

Yesterday morning, The Verge broke the story that Peter Thiel appeared to be teaching a course on “heterodox science” at the Berkeley Institute starting in January. The Institute identified the course’s “guest instructor” as “Author and Founder of IMITATIO.” Of IMITATIO’s three founders, only Thiel is still living.Since the story’s publication, the “heterodox science” course has been deleted from the Berkeley Institute’s web

Airlines aren’t taking the ban against Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 lightly. A clever but highly irresponsible troll by a passenger aboard a Virgin America flight out of San Francisco nearly resulted in the plane being grounded and searched for the recalled smartphone. According to BBC News, someone switched the name of their portable Wi-Fi hotspot to “Galaxy Note 7_1097,” which gave other passengers (and the flight’s crew) the impression that Samsung’s device was

Lawsuits from the Chicago Tribune and Better Government Association have forced Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to release thousands of pages of email correspondence from a private account, and the documents are providing an unusual glimpse at how influential Silicon Valley figures get work done.
A notable email from November 2015
One notable email dates back to November 2015. At the time, Airbnb was facing the possibility of new regulatory scrutiny in the city, and was concerned about the possible e

Uber is relocating its San Francisco self-driving car fleet to Arizona, where it says it has the support of Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. The fleet of cars were hauled away on flat-beds towed by Uber’s Otto self-driving big rigs, though the trucks do not appear to have been autonomously driving to Arizona.
“Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck,” said an Uber spokesperson in an email to The Verge. “We’ll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the

Spoilers ahead for Man In The High Castle seasons one and two.
The Man in the High Castle seemed like the perfect TV show for dark times. For anyone worried that the next four years will herald a crackdown on civil liberties or the empowerment of groups who believe only certain lives have value, Amazon’s alternate-history drama gave us a group of people trying to survive a world that seemed truly hopeless. But now that The Man in the High Castle has returned for a second season, it’s

Half a year after its initial release back in May, BitTorrent Live is finally making its way to iOS. BitTorrent Live is already available on the Fire TV, Apple TV, and macOS, and is now coming to its first mobile platform after a delay following plans to launch on iOS in June.And while the service still offers a somewhat lackluster offering of 16 channels — the highlights of which include NASA, One World Sports, and France 24 — it's the technology behind BitTorrent Live that makes it

Om Telolet Om. That three-word phrase is currently sprinkled across the Twitter mentions and Instagram comments of celebrities around the word. But what does it mean?As Billboard points out, Om Telolet Om doesn’t quite mean anything. It’s a noise. The onomatopoeia was created by kids in Indonesia. “Telolet” is meant to represent the sound city buses make when they honk: it’s a complex, carnival-like beep. And “Om” is an Indonesian word that loosely trans

You can now hatch pokémon eggs on your wrist: today developer Niantic announced that the Apple Watch version of Pokémon Go is finally available. The smartwatch version of the game was first announced back in September.
Naturally, the Apple Watch version of Pokémon Go isn’t the full game, but instead connects to the mobile game and lets you perform certain in-game activities without having to pull out your phone. You won’t be able to actually catch pokémon

Google will be launching two new flagship smartwatches in the first quarter of next year, according to Jeff Chang, product manager of Android Wear at Google. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Chang said that the new watches will be the flagship Android Wear 2.0 devices and will be the first ones to launch with the new platform.
The new smartwatches had been rumored before, but Google confirmed the upcoming launch today as part of a larger effort to convince consumers that wearables &mdas

LG will expand its K Series smartphone lineup at CES with four new devices, and the debut of its LG Stylo 3, which features a new stylus. The phones really aren’t all that exciting, although some of the models do launch with Android Nougat, so that’s appreciated. The K Series phones’ displays range from 4.5 inches to 5.3 inches. The smallest device, while probably adorable, is lacking specs-wise: it has a two-megapixel front-facing camera, a five-megapixel rear-facing camera, a

Tesla cars are limited to the posted speed limit when Autopilot is engaged on an undivided road, thanks to an update now rolling out. Previously, Autopilot was limited to five miles per hour over the speed limit on roads where cars travel in both directions without a physical divider between them. The update was first reported by Electrek and confirmed by The Verge.
The update is the latest in a series of tweaks Tesla has made to the Autopilot system following a fatal crash in May of a vehicle t

Forget solar roofs. The world’s first solar road is here, in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France. The 1 kilometer road was opened yesterday by French Ecology Minister Ségolène Royal and could generate enough electricity to power the street lights.
That might not sound very impressive for 30,000 square feet of solar panels — and it kind of isn’t, especially for its $5.2 million price tag. The panels have been covered in a silicon-based resi

President Obama will officially end a controversial Bush-era registration program that largely affected travelers from Muslim-majority nations, the Department of Homeland Security has announced. Donald Trump’s advisers have suggested the program could be revived under his administration, but the preemptive move by Obama may partially head off those efforts.
The program was established in 2002
The program, known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, was establi

In the beginning of the year, Walt wrote his column about what he thought the giants in tech should achieve in 2016. Now, with the year almost over, Walt revisits his original piece to take stock of where each company stands. On the Ctrl-Walt-Delete Holiday Spectacular, Walt and Nilay go over the 2016 hits and misses from companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.
We love your feedback on the topics of the show and suggestions on how to make our podcasts better and more fun f

The HTC Vive, the iPhone 7, and now the whole Tesla range — all products that have increased in price in the UK thanks to “currency fluctuations,” aka the pound losing value relative to the dollar following the Brexit vote.An internal email sent to Tesla’s UK showrooms and published by The Guardian says: “We have just received some information that we need to share with you — due to currency fluctuations we will be increasing our UK prices for custom orders by

If you want to condense Apple’s 2016 down to a pithy mission statement, it’s this: war on wires. Along with the traditional spec upgrades of iPhones and MacBooks, the Cupertino company this year ditched the headphone jack from its flagship smartphone and the equally universal USB port from its laptops. For any peripheral devices to survive in this brave new Apple world, they pretty much have to be wireless — which is where the $299.95 Beats Solo 3 come in.The new flagship headp

If you are not a child, don’t have a child, or don’t know anyone with kids, there’s a chance you’ve never heard of a Hatchimal, the must-have toy for Christmas this year.
Allow me to introduce you: the Hatchimal is a plush little robot that comes trapped in a sealed, football-sized plastic egg. As soon as you take it out of its packaging, it comes to life — you can see its eyes glow through the shell, and hear it make cooing sounds. After you warm it up, move it aro

Death wins Wikipedia pretty much every year. Since 2007, the page on everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia listing annual deaths has topped its yearly ranking of most-edited articles. (Pre-2007, that spot was taken by such non-controversial topics as “George W. Bush” and “Creationism.”) This year was no different, and “Deaths in 2016” has been declared the most-edited page of 2016, followed, somewhat predictably, by the article for “Donald Trump.

The year 2016 was a dynamic time for spaceflight and space science, marked by major technological achievements in rocketry and scientific discoveries that will completely alter our understanding of the Universe for decades to come. Scientists announced the first detection of gravitational waves and rockets landed after launching to space. New missions took off to learn more about the history of our Solar System and we’ve inched ever closer to answering that ultimate question: are we alone

Christmas is coming soon, and if you’re a little behind on any gift shopping, December 22nd (today) is the last day that anything ordered with Amazon Prime’s free two-day shipping will be guaranteed to arrive by end of day on December 24th.So whether you’re still scrambling for a last-minute present, need some holiday supplies, or just really would like to avoid the general chaos of the malls this week, today’s your final chance to get things on time with free shipping fr

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! You know, the time when the darkness lasts longest, the air is the coldest, and you’re forced to spend hours, days, even weeks with people you normally spend much of the year avoiding: your extended family.That might sound like a horrible ending to a horrible year, but all the festive free time you’re about to have does at least leave room for plenty of fun activities. If you can slip away from the family then you’ve got a surfeit

Canada has recognized the obvious and declared high-speed broadband internet access a “basic telecommunications service” that every citizen should be able to access. Previously, only landline telephone services had received this designation from the country’s national telecoms regulator, CRTC, and the change is supported by a government investment package of up to $750 million to wire up rural areas.“The future of our economy, our prosperity and our society — indeed

Do you remember the ‘90s? Of course you remember the ‘90s. We had Friends. Tamagotchi. Grunge. Pogs. Everyone ran around in flannel shirts, bleaching each others’ hair and singing Spice Girls. And because the ‘90s were so great (you were young, your back didn’t hurt, you felt alive,), why not relive that decade every day of your damn life for ever and ever with this SNES-themed mechanical keyboard. Radical, right?Okay, so, ‘90s nostalgia is definitely overplay