Technology news

This year’s Google I/O will take place from May 17th through the 19th at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, Google revealed today through an elaborate puzzle. The company tweeted a cryptic link, as first spotted by 9to5 Google, on its developer Twitter account. That tweet linked back to a save the date page, which then redirected users to a GitHub page. The GitHub repository contained five puzzles that, when solved, confirmed the details.
Around the world, from here t

Fox has officially ordered a pilot for its untitled X-Men series. According to Variety, the new series will involve Burn Notice creator Matt Nix as showrunner, and X-Men series director Bryan Singer is on board as executive producer.
Mutants on the run
Word that 20th Century Fox was developing a series in the X-Men universe first got out last summer, and little has changed about what we know about the series since then. The show will reportedly follow a couple who discover that their children ar

Amazon is launching a new STEM Club subscription service for monthly, STEM-related toys. For $19.99 a month (plus tax), Amazon will deliver a “hand selected” educational toy that will theoretically both entertain and educate a child in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.The subscription is split up into three different versions: one for children aged 3–4 years old, one for those aged 5–7 years old, and one for 8–13 year olds. Once signed up, th

“Demoralized” is how one government source described the feeling shared by 15,000 EPA coworkers after President Donald Trump today banned them from using Twitter.
The sudden prohibition was part of a larger media blackout and a freeze on any new contracts or grants. “There are news outlets that cover EPA,” the source said, predicting defiance to the gag order. “They are getting their fill of leaks.”
The order effectively defenestr

What happens when a car teaches you to drive?
That’s a question I started asking when I tested out the 2017 Buick LaCrosse (base price $32,065), a vehicle that uses the new OnStar Smart Driver telematics system.
Buick made significant design changes to the LaCrosse for this model year. The LaCrosse was one of the first “high tech” cars, providing blind spot monitoring, rain-sensing wipers, and other safety features long before they became common on most new vehicles. This

Scary movie makers like to juxtapose beauty and horror. That’s a good way to describe the beginning of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, the new video game from Capcom that debuts today on consoles and PC.
Ethan Winters, the protagonist, views a video message from his beautiful girlfriend Mia. She’s happy and can’t wait to get back to him. Then he views a second video, and she’s afraid and warns him not come looking for her. So begins a game that takes the Resident Evil se

Warner Bros. and Disney are keeping it all in the family.
Last year, Disney shut down Avalanche Software, the maker of the Disney Infinity Games. Warner Bros. picked up some of the team and its leadership, and today the companies announced the studio will make a Cars 3 game for Disney. The deal is consistent with the strategies of Warner, which has built a billion-dollar games business with studios that it owns; and Disney, which has shifted more of its development to partners in recent yea

Internet service provider Cox Communications has rolled out its 1TB home internet data cap to five new locations around the US, the company confirmed to The Verge. While a trial began last year in Cleveland, Ohio before moving on to Florida and Georgia, the data cap policy has expanded to all customers in Connecticut, Arkansas, and Kansas, as well select regions in and around Sun Valley, Idaho and Omaha, Nebraska. A Connecticut customer, who told The Verge he just began receiving data usage aler

There’s been speculation for weeks that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is been preparing for a political run, perhaps even with eyes on the presidency in 2020. But today Zuckerberg said that isn’t the case, telling BuzzFeed News that, “No,” he has no plans to run for the United States’ top office.
Instead, Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed that he was “focused on building our community at Facebook and working on the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.” The interview appear

Apple is planning on adding a new Theater Mode to the Apple Watch in the upcoming watchOS 3.2 update. According to Apple’s developer guide, Theater Mode easily allows users to mute sound and disable waking the screen when raising your wrist, making it ideal for those looking to avoid interrupting fellow theatergoers at a movie or play. Notifications will still arrive on the Watch with haptic feedback, which can be viewed by pressing the digital crown or tapping the screen when they arrive.

Get ready for another mad dash for new skins, Overwatch fans.
Blizzard has launched the newest holiday event for its team-based shooter. Year of the Rooster celebrates Lunar New Year by adding cosmetics like skins and voice lines that players can unlock from special loot boxes (which you can earn in the game or buy with real money). It also adds a new mode, Capture the Rooster, which follows the Capture the Flag archetype made famous in other shooters (notably Team Fortress, which Overwatch has

The Leftovers is coming up on its last season, and HBO has just released a very small glimpse of what’s ahead. The final eight episodes will see Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) leave Texas and head to Australia in search of his father, Entertainment Weekly reports.
The series, which is set in the years following a vaguely spiritual mass disappearance called the Sudden Departure, has always explored existential themes surrounding the mystery of being alive. Last season, Kevin ended up in a ho

Vive Studios and Grab Games are launching Knockout League today to bring arcade boxing to virtual reality.
Grab Games made the classic boxing game for VR, and Vive Studios is publishing it today on early access on Steam for the HTC Vive. HTC is investing heavily in VR, which could be a $25 billion market by 2021, according to tech adviser Digi-Capital.
Vive Studios is the VR content development and publishing initiative at HTC, the company that created the HTC Vive based on Valve’s SteamVR

Amazon and Netflix are not only rivals when it comes to original streaming projects: now more than ever, the platforms are at loggerheads during awards season. That rivalry reached a new pitch today: Manchester by the Sea, a critical darling with numerous accolades to its name, is now a Best Picture nominee at the 89th annual Academy Awards. The distinction puts it a notch above Netflix when it comes to a certain kind of Hollywood prestige, and will likely have real ramifications as competition

Xbox One is getting an upgrade later this year similar to Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro, and Microsoft has provided a small update about how that system is progressing.
The company has early versions of the Xbox One Scorpio up and running, according to a post from Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer on social media. The device will launch during this year’s holiday season, and it will enable games to run at a 4K resolution for UHD television displays. But while Xbox fans will have to wait

Reviews on Apple’s iOS and Mac app stores are about to get more conversational. Apple has informed developers that beginning with iOS 10.3, they’ll be able to reply to reviews and have those responses stay publicly visible to other users. If you’ve seen companies reply underneath reviews on Amazon, for instance, this is a similar concept. The same will be true of the Mac App Store. Currently, developers have no way of directly responding to reviews on the app stores and instead

Young women carrying out harsh vigilante justice have cropped up in pop culture only a handful of times in recent memory — see Ellen Page’s calculated killer in Hard Candy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, or the vengeful girls of The Craft. But they have limits. They’re painted either with petty concerns and narrow targets or the physical inability to carry out their vendettas long-term.MTV’s Sweet / Vicious is different. In the very first episod

Less than a week after the inauguration, the Trump administration has already gagged employees at two federal agencies. Memos obtained by various media outlets show that scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture are now blocked from communicating with the public and the press.At the EPA, whose grants and contract budget have also been frozen, employees are not allowed to talk about this change to reporters or on social media. The EPA is responsible for passi

I’ve played the beginning of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, the new Capcom game debuting today on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. I was spellbound by the quality of the graphics that do such a good job of depicting the imagery of fear.
Shadows, creaky doors, ladders that go down into the dark. This is the atmosphere of a horror game, and it’s a departure from previous Resident Evil games where action and blowing the heads off zombie-like creatures were the norm. This is mor

President Trump signed executive orders this morning intended to restart construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline and Keystone XL Pipeline projects, the Associated Press reports. Both of these pipelines stalled under the Obama administration after ongoing protests.The text of today’s executive order has not yet been released on the White House website or in the Federal Register. The executive orders that Trump signed on Friday did not appear in the Federal Register until today.According

More than 200 people have been arrested and charged with felony rioting after the inauguration protests on Friday — and now, police are looking to their phones for evidence.
According to lawyer Jeffrey Light, who represents many of the protestors, police have held on to nearly all the phones confiscated as part of the arrests. “Everybody who was arrested who had cell phones on them, the police have kept the cell phones,” Light told The Verge in an interview. “When people

Apple today started rolling out the first developer beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.4, an update to its desktop operating system that will become available to everyone in the coming weeks. While it won’t carry massive changes, it does pack a meaningful one: the Night Shift feature for adjusting the color temperature of the display during certain hours, which can help sleep.
This feature — which generally makes displays easier on the eyes during later hours and is thought to perhaps make i

Electronic Arts announced Battlefield 1’s first expansion pack will be They Shall Not Pass, debuting in March.
In this expansion, the French Army “joins the battle in a brutal defense of their homeland.” Players can engage in the largest French tank assault of the Great War and take control of new weapons and vehicles.
The expansion features the Char C2 tank, a new behemoth vehicle, as well as a new mode and two new operations playable on “the fiery furnace of Verdun, und

PRESS RELEASE: DENVER–(BUSINESS WIRE)–January 24, 2017– On January 24th iConnect, the leading Cloud-based point-of-sale system for modern franchises, has announced the “Franchise Upgrade Program.” Companies will now have the opportunity to transition into the modern Cloud POS platform by applying for hardware subsidies in return for system-wide rollouts. iConnect has dedicated half a million dollars towards the initiative. “We’ve been getting many inquir

I can’t stop listening to the theme music from new Zelda trailer.
Nintendo released one of the best game trailers ever earlier this month when it showed off a new preview for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for its upcoming Switch console. That device launches with the new entry in Nintendo’s long-running fantasy adventure series March 3, and I’m planning to spend the intervening weeks listening and relistening to the trailer’s score. The music is soaring and

The Sundance Film Festival is finishing up this week, and Amazon Studios and Netflix have once again descended upon Park City, Utah. The annual fest is an opportunity for the companies to pick up new films and documentaries to bolster their streaming services.
Purchases in January can pay off by Oscars season. Amazon picked up Manchester by the Sea for a relatively high (Sundance-wise, anyway) $10 million at last year’s festival, a move that’s delivered (Casey Affleck controversy not

KontrolFreek seemingly wants to become the Under Armour for e-sports players. Today the company released its “Performance Gaming Wear,” which it says is the first apparel line specifically designed to make gamers better at gaming. The line, which debuted at the December Major League Gaming Vegas tournament, consists of a hoodie and a pair of “gaming shorts.” While athletes require breathable shorts, or temperature-controlled shirts, e-sports players have different needs.

Less than a month after its Winter Wonderland event, Blizzard is already back with a new seasonal celebration for players to enjoy. Teased last week on the Overwatch Twitter account, the latest event will celebrate the Chinese New Year from January 24th through February 13th with a host of new game modes and unlockable cosmetics.The biggest addition is a “Capture the Rooster” brawl, which marks the first time that the classic capture the flag game type has made its way to Overwatch.

It was a truly glorious day when Netflix announced offline downloads, but maybe less impactful for those of you with limited storage on your smartphone or tablet. Today Netflix is taking a step to help Android users stuck in that situation; you can now store those downloaded movies and TV shows on microSD cards.The latest version of the Netflix app gives you a choice of saving things to internal storage or, if your phone supports SD, picking the external option instead. Until now, Netflix only l

Pokémon is a lot of things. It’s a long-running portable RPG series, a collectible card game, a safari simulator, and the biggest augmented reality sensation to date. Now you can add strategic digital board game to that ever-growing list with today’s release of Pokémon Duel.
Duel is a free-to-play title on both iOS and Android, and it’s one of those games that seems really simple at first, but offers a surprising amount of depth and complexity once you get into. (

Call of Duty‘s first downloadable content map pack for Infinite Warfare arrives on the PlayStation 4 on January 31. And the Zombies co-op mode will feature a new character played by Kevin Smith, the actor and film director who created the movie Clerks.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Sabotage has four new multiplayer maps and a new 1990s-themed Zombies co-op mode, dubbed Rave in the Redwoods.
The Rave in the Redwoods is set in an abandoned lakeside summer camp, with a spooky horror vibe. Th

Before I'd ever heard of how LCD-originated blue light is slowly killing all of us maybe, I downloaded this weird little app for my Mac called F.lux, which pegged my screen's color temperature to the time of day. The result? Less eye strain, and a lot of orange-tinted Netflix. Then last year Apple added a feature called "Night Shift" to iOS, which mirrored this functionality, after shutting down a version of F.lux for iOS.
Well, now Apple’s Night Shift is coming to macOS. It just popped up

The Trump administration has frozen grants and contracts by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to ProPublica, and blocked employees from providing updates on this change via social media. This could have big effects on the agency’s budget and severely undercut its efforts.In an email obtained by ProPublica, one EPA contractor writes that: “The new EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately. Until we rece

The Fallout series has always had a love affair with old-school art styles, from Raygun Gothic architecture and signage to art deco-inspired iconography and font styles. So it’s only fitting that someone transplanted the titular character from Warner Bros. classic The Iron Giant, itself a kind of love letter to ‘50s animation, into the retro-futuristic wasteland of Fallout 4.The mod, courtesy of 3D artist Matthew Swanton, replaces the Brotherhood of Steel’s 40-foot-tall Liberty

If you own a pair of AirPods, inevitably, one is going to go missing. Fortunately, Apple is releasing some basic measures to help you find a lost earbud, if not the entire case.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is adding AirPods support to the Find My iPhone app with the release of iOS 10.3, which is supposed to launch to the public in the coming weeks.
There’s a good chance AirPods owners will need this
Inside the app, AirPods owners will be able to see either the current or las

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While AI is having significant impact with the consumer market — witness the explosion of AI-driven bots and digital assistants — businesses are realizing the important ways they can take advantage of AI. One of the biggest areas of growth is in AI Marketing (AIM).
Start with the fact that computers are great at crunching numbers, quickly providing results from complex math formulas, and handling repetitive tasks without complaint. Add in sof

The choice for “best Android Wear watch” usually has two answers: people either pick the Huawei Watch or the second-generation Moto 360. But with Moto sitting it out on smartwatches for the time being, we’re only going to see one of them get a sequel — and it might not be too far off. VentureBeat reports that Huawei is aiming to unveil the Huawei Watch 2, with a “sportier” design than the original, at Mobile World Congress next month. Ideally it’ll be le

Google has announced that the final Android Wear 2.0 developer preview is now available, ahead of the public launch of the new platform expected next month. Developer Preview 5’s big new feature is compatibility with iOS devices, which means that third-party app developers will be able to make their apps available to iPhone users with Android Wear watches for the first time. Prior to this, Android Wear watches could only access watchfaces and apps that Google distributed through the Androi

Instagram’s Live Stories, the social network’s take on live ephemeral video, is officially coming to users outside of the United States. The company plans to roll out the feature to users around the world over the next week.
The feature, which lets users broadcast videos that disappear after 24 hours, initially launched in the US last December. To start a live video, users simply swipe right to open the Stories feature. One more swipe to the right gives them to option to go live. A s

Apple originally announced integrated support for standardized game controllers back in 2013 with iOS 7. Since then there have been plenty of companies that have taken up the challenge to make Apple-approved controllers through the official MFi (Made for iPhone) accessory branding. But despite that, iOS gaming has never really had the same kind of button-based successes that, say, Nintendo’s 3DS has.
But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, which is why Gamevice announced today it

Microsoft cemented a major legal victory today, as a federal appeals court declined to hear the government’s appeal in a landmark cloud computing case. The government sought to search data stored on Microsoft servers in Ireland as part of a US drug case, arguing the servers were still subject to US warrant laws. A lower court dismissed the government’s case in July, and today’s en banc ruling means that ruling will not be overturned.
The ruling is a significant precedent as US

The team behind mobile hit Alto’s Adventure is shifting from slopes to the streets for its new game: today developer Snowman announced Skate City, a mobile skateboarding title coming to both iOS and Android.
Skate City is being developed in collaboration with Norwegian studio Agens, and has been in the works for close to a year. The team says that they’re attempting to capture “the nostalgia, artistry, and experimentation we love most about skateboarding, while taking players t

Today, Meryl Streep received her 20th Academy Award nomination, a Best Actress nod for her performance in Florence Foster Jenkins. With this latest mention, Streep broke the record for most Oscar nominations, again, and she chose to respond to this historic moment in the most appropriate of ways: a perfectly memeable, memorable GIF.This is Meryl Streep's #Oscars nomination statement. Seriously, she sent a gif. pic.twitter.com/wa18Jix6Vf— Chris Harnick (@chrisharnick) January 24, 2017Streep

Amazon’s Alexa has a head start in terms of smart home functionality, but Google is keen to catch up. Today, the company announced that Google Home now supports Belkin WeMo and Honeywell smart devices, allowing users to control these products through the Google Assistant on their Home speaker. Belkin’s smart products include cameras, lightbulbs, and power switches, while Honeywell’s range from thermostats to home security.
Google isn’t offering a comprehensive list of whi

When director Jovanka Vuckovic introduced XX at its Sundance premiere, she made the origins of the project clear. A horror anthology that brings together installments from four female directors, Vuckovic said it was created “directly in response to the lack of opportunity for women filmmakers, particularly in the horror genre.” Horror, of course, is a genre that’s often touted as an easy first step for upcoming filmmakers, but sexism runs deep within the film industry, and for

Love’s a game and this year we’re playing. For the full rules and intellectual justification of The Verge Bachelor Fantasy League please see this explanatory post. For a little background on why this is poised to be the best-ever season of The Bachelor, see this essay by culture editor Chris Plante:
Kaitlyn Tiffany: Welcome back to another exciting week at your favorite “people who wear leather jackets indoors” convention!This week on The Bachelor we learned some interest

The idea of paying over $1,000 for a motorized plank of composite wood might naturally put people off. That’s why some manufacturers are making a race for the bottom in the electric rideables space with less than stellar products like the $299 SwagBoard. Luckily, Yuneec — a Chinese firm known for its Typhoon line of drones — opted to shoot for the middle with its latest electric skateboard, the E-Go2.
The most important thing to know about the E-Go2 is that it’s not a per