Technology news

Google says it’s shipped 10 million of its Cardboard virtual reality viewers since they first appeared in 2014. The company celebrated the number in a blog post today, along with a couple more statistics: people have made 160 million downloads of Cardboard apps on Google Play, and 30 Cardboard titles have over a million downloads apiece. The shipment numbers also presumably don’t include mobile VR viewers that aren’t official Cardboard headsets, but could still be used with Car

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hits theaters later this year, and part of the oncoming wave of toys and tie-ins that Disney will be launching is this truly spectacular Star-Lord replica helmet. For $100, you’ll get a light-up version of the glowing helm from the film complete with sound effects. Oh, and it’s also a fully functional Bluetooth headset. So you can not only look like Star-Lord, but rock out in true Peter Quill style. Do they sound good? Probably not. At the end of the da

Amazon has brought its hosting services back online after more than four hours of errors that took down sites and services across the web. Hosting services are now “operating normally,” Amazon says, and the errors that had been popping up throughout the day are supposed to have been resolved.
A huge number of companies rely on Amazon’s S3 hosting service for their websites and apps, so when Amazon began experiencing errors earlier today, a much larger part of the internet felt

I keep hoping we’ve reached peak vulnerable gadgets, only to hear about another unsecured device. Toys in particular continue being exposed as privacy and security nightmares that anyone with a slight desire to investigate can uncover. This week in toy privacy nightmares, a company called Spiral Toys was found to have exposed 800,000 user account credentials online, as well as 2 million voice message recordings.The company’s CloudPets line, which includes internet-connected teddy bea

The Switch is days away from launch, and in preparation Nintendo announced a massive list of indie titles that will be coming to the console at some point in 2017. While many of the titles announced won’t be out until later on in the year, the huge amount of indie support is still a sign that Nintendo is taking indie developers seriously on the Switch. Additionally, despite the fact that many of these titles are ports from other consoles, hopefully Nintendo will be able to keep this moment

Donnie Darko, the 2001 cult classic sci-fi film with incredible historical significance (it jump-started the career of the world’s most talented living person Jake Gyllenhaal), is returning to theaters in honor of its 15th anniversary, Entertainment Weekly reports.The screenings will use a 4K restoration of the film that was released on Blu-ray last December — cool! Some theaters will show the director’s cut — I’ve read that it’s bad. A mixed bag, like all eve

Bloomberg has obtained video of an Uber driver berating the ride-hailing company’s CEO Travis Kalanick for lowering prices and putting the squeeze on him and other drivers around the world. It’s a tasty bit of revenge drama at a time when Uber is under fire for, well — what isn’t Uber under fire for these days?
In the video, Uber Black driver Fawzi Kamel takes Kalanick to task for slashing fares for Uber’s luxury service, complaining to the pugnacious CEO that he&rs

On Sunday night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, amazingly, named Moonlight the Best Picture of 2016. It was a victory made all the more stunning by the circumstances: after La La Land was initially announced as the winner, producer Jordan Horowitz told a shocked audience that Moonlight had actually won the award. A hush passed over the crowd, before eventually giving way to raucous applause. Jimmy Kimmel cracked a joke about Steve Harvey, Warren Beatty meekly apologized, and Bar

Google announced this week that it’s partnering with mobile carriers by providing new software platforms to help them build out their cellular networks. It’s a move that makes a lot of sense: after all, Google builds a lot of internet products, so it probably knows a thing or two about building a good network.
India's Bharti Airtel and South Korea's SK Telecom are the first two carriers to sign up to use Google’s new network platform. Google claims that its platform will allow

The Pixel laptop is no more. At Mobile World Congress, Google’s senior vice president for hardware Rick Osterloh said the company will stop making Chromebooks under the Pixel name, which has recently become more synonymous with the company’s flagship smartphone. According to TechCrunch, Osterloh said Google may still use the Pixel branding for future products that integrates Google’s software with its own hardware, but that is unlikely to come in the form of a laptop computer.

President Donald Trump just signed an executive order to roll back President Barack Obama’s clean water rule. That environmental regulation was issued in 2015 to give the federal government authority to limit pollution in major bodies of water, rivers, streams, and wetlands.
The executive order directs the Environmental Protection Agency’s leader Scott Pruitt to initiate the lengthy legal process of rescinding and rewriting the rule, called Waters of the United States. That process c

At an event in Los Angeles this afternoon, YouTube announced its own streaming TV service. The offering will mix live-streams of broadcast and cable television programming with the wealth of online video found on YouTube. It’s the latest in a surge of over-the-top (OTT) services trying to woo consumers who never bought into traditional cable television.
For $35 a month, subscribers get all four major networks - ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC - and around 30 of the biggest cable channels. That pric

A female Tesla engineer is suing the electric carmaker for “unwanted and pervasive harassment,” alleging that she and several other female employees were denied promotions, paid less than their male peers, and retaliated against after making their concerns known to human resources.AJ Vandermeyden, 33, filed her lawsuit against Tesla last fall, but only spoke out publicly this week in an article published in The Guardian. Notably, she is still employed at Tesla, but told the publicati

For generations now, AWSome Day has been one of our most cherished holidays. In a time of turmoil and strife, AWSome Day offers us all a chance to take a step back, relax, and undergo essential training to get our cloud businesses off the ground. For as long as anyone can remember, AWSome Day has passed without incident. And today looked to be just like any other AWSome Day, as you can see from this tweet.
The #AWSomeDay has just kicked off in Edinburgh! pic.twitter.com/arwKpKnjkP— AWS UK

The Super Bowl has ended, the Oscars are done, and now it’s time for the season’s next big event: the 2017 Amazon S3 web server outage. Don’t want to miss out on the internet’s biggest event? Don’t worry, we’ve put together a list of the best places to watch so you can make sure that you’re not missing any of the action.When is the Amazon S3 outage?
Right now! Amazon’s web servers power a whole bunch of sites, including images here at The Verge, so

Is It Down Right Now, a website that tells you when websites are down, is down right now. With Is It Down Right Now down, you will be unable to learn what other websites are down — at least until it’s back up. At this time it’s not clear when Is It Down Right Now will be back up.
Like many websites, Is It Down Right Now has been affected by the partial failure of Amazon’s S3 hosting platform, which is down right now. While we can’t tell you everything that is down r

Amazon’s web hosting services are among the most widely used out there, which means that when Amazon’s servers goes down, a lot of things go down with them. That appears to be happening today, with Amazon reporting “high error rates” in one region of its S3 web services, and a number of services going offline because of it.
Trello, Quora, IFTTT, and Splitwise all appear to be offline, as are websites built with the site-creation service Wix; GroupMe seems to be unable to

There is plenty of justified concern over the Nintendo Switch’s anemic launch lineup of games, but the consensus seems to be that Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be enough to sell the system in its early months. Well, if “classic but slightly difficult Nintendo games” is the sort of thing that hits you right in your nostalgic heart, let me give you the best news: Blaster Master Zero launches on March 9th on the Switch.
The legend returns! Blaster Master Zero launches exclusively

Self-driving race cars sounded ridiculous to me the first time I heard about the idea. Why not just televise CPU vs CPU Gran Turismo races while we’re at it? But at Mobile World Congress this week, Formula E boss Alejandro Agag and Roborace CEO Denis Sverdlov unveiled the Robocar with a compelling pitch: it’s all about trust.If we’re ever to get to a point where all cars are electric and autonomous, demonstrating that robots can drive themselves around complex tracks at 200mph

Two mystery space tourists put down a “significant deposit” with SpaceX to take a round-trip around the Moon, CEO Elon Musk announced yesterday. Musk didn’t say much about the two unidentified passengers, let alone how much money they’re shelling out for their Moon voyage. Turns out, it’s remarkably difficult to guess the costs of human spaceflight.“There’s not just a line item that says, ‘Send this person to space.’”
That’s becau

Studies have shown that foods taste different when you’re up in the air. The combination of low air pressure and humidity apparently combine to effect your sense of taste and smell by up to 30 percent, according to some studies, leading airlines to invest in new techniques and recipes to try and make airplane food more palatable.Cathay Pacific is applying that idea a little farther with Betsy Beer, a custom craft brew that the company says is the first in the world to be designed and calib

Yesterday, Elon Musk announced a bold new SpaceX mission for 2018, flying two as-yet-unnamed passengers in a full orbit of the Moon. This will be the first entirely private passenger flight that’s ever been attempted, without the benefit of broader government support — an achievement with new possibilities and new dangers.
People have paid for the privilege of reaching orbit before — seven of them, in fact. Musk’s passengers will be going farther, slingshotting around the

Weird doesn't even begin to describe the Protruly Darling.
Billed as the world's first "VR mobile phone", the Darling and its built-in 360-degree "VR" camera is the type of phone you'll only find from some obscure Shenzhen-based company you've never heard of before.
SEE ALSO: It's embarrassing how much I suck at playing 'Snake' on the new Nokia 3310
I discovered the Protruly Darling at Mobile World Congress after getting lost through the convention center halls en route to another meeting. And t

James Cameron’s largely theoretical pop culture universe built around his 2009 movie Avatar just got theoretically bigger. Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft's studio based in Malmö, Sweden, is partnering with Lightbox Entertainment and Fox Interactive to create a new Avatar game. The developer announced the project today during GDC 2017.
Ubisoft has already made one game based on the movie; Ubisoft Montreal released James Cameron's Avatar: The Game in 2009. The new game, due out for PC a

Ubisoft's already made an Avatar game, back in 2009. But now Massive Entertainment, the development studio behind The Division, is tackling one of their own.
We don't know much about the game, save for some flowery language about its pretty world and themes that you can hear in the video Ubisoft released this morning from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The developers are working on the game with Fox and James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment, and it will be set in the world

We are not yet 40 days into the Donald Trump presidency and Kellyanne Conway may have instigated the absolutely dumbest controversy of the young administration thus far, which is saying something for the woman who coined the phrase "alternative facts."
SEE ALSO: Merriam-Webster subtweeted Kellyanne Conway on behalf of feminists everywhere
Yes, I'm speaking of #Couchgate, in which Conway was photographed with her feet on the Oval Office couch during a photo opp, incurring so much misguided wrath.

Today, Netflix streams to TVs, computers, tablets, phones, game consoles and more—but what about in the future?
During a keynote at Mobile World Congress on Monday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the streaming video service will adapt to whatever the hot new video-viewing technology is in 10, 20, or 50 years. 
SEE ALSO: I can't believe how much I love this Samsung stylus that looks like a Staedtler pencil
"Five or ten years from now, the quality of Netflix on all of your devices will

A deer that got itself stuck between two trees found a helping hand from a group of hunters.
In November, a truckload of hunters were out driving on a hunting trip in Oregon when the car in front of them stopped suddenly. After spotting some commotion in the trees, the hunters discovered a doe, stuck between two trees.
After multiple attempts, one of the men decided to grab a hatchet to make the job easier. The doe was less than pleased, but after several minutes the hunters managed to free the

The most frustrating thing about David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s 2016 documentary Tickled is that it has no real resolution. Although the pair of New Zealand filmmakers ultimately made contact with David D’Amato, the strange, reclusive man responsible for publishing hundreds of “competitive endurance tickling” videos online, he never admitted to any wrongdoing, or agreed to have a real conversation unless it was about legal threats.That’s where HBO’s new 20-mi

SpaceX shocked the spaceflight community yesterday by announcing a new ambitious goal for 2018: sending two people around the Moon. The two passengers are not NASA astronauts; they are, instead, wealthy tourists, who have already put down a “significant deposit” for the trip. If SpaceX pulls this mission off, it will be the first private company to take civilians beyond Earth orbit.
The mission also mimics a possible NASA plan. A few weeks ago, the White House asked NASA to look into

Microsoft surprised the world with its Surface Book hinge design, but it’s not the only company capable of creating a unique Windows-powered 2-in-1 laptop. Porsche Design unveiled its Book One at Mobile World Congress this week, and it took me by surprise. At first glimpse it looks very similar to Microsoft’s Surface Book, and side-by-side there are obvious similarities, but I got a chance to spend some more time with the Book One and discover exactly how it blows past Microsoft&rsqu

It may be early in the year, but the best YA novel of 2017 is likely already in stores.
The Hate U Give, the debut novel of author Angie Thomas, hit shelves today and is the buzziest non-sequel to hit the YA world in some time.
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, The Hate U Give follows sixteen-year-old Starr Carter, a girl caught between two worlds. One is the poor black neighborhood where she lives, the other the rich suburban prep school she attends. But when Starr's childhood best f

Dogs are good. They are nice. They are the internet's saving grace.
And they're at the heart of the pure new "zoom in on the nose" meme from @SNCKPCK, which blesses you with a delightful photo of a dog, then whisks you away on a fun scavenger hunt for a compliment. What's not to love?
SEE ALSO: This salty reaction GIF is the internet's new favorite meme
Take this good friend, for example. Zoom in on his nose, and you'll see a message: "Look in the top left corner." 
In the top left corner,

Chancellor Bennett is a father, independent artist and Grammy award winner—but that doesn't mean he also doesn't have tattoos he regrets. He is human after all.
The rapper recently sat down with Katie Couric, who he's mentioned in his rhymes before, and the two talked everything from gun violence in Chicago to his iconic '3' hat. While they chomped on food from Harold's Chicken Shack, Chance showed off his rarely seen tattoo and shared the story behind the phrase inked on his chest.
SEE AL

In the wake of Twitter's decision to give up on Vine, there's a question that is hanging over Periscope: Could it be next? 
"It’s funny that people keep saying that. Everything we’ve done demonstrates that we’re doubling down on the platform," Periscope CEO and cofounder Kayvon Beykpour said last month during an hourlong meeting in the basement of Twitter's New York City office.
Periscope is still relevant to Twitter for the same reasons Vine wasn't. Twitter says it wants