Technology news

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every day this week I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this in

New emoji are on the horizon, and Emojipedia is here to provide some idea of what they might look like. The site created mockups of 69 samples, including a few that will prove useful to anyone looking to spread a little playful disrespect.Throwing shade with emoji requires a little creativity. You can go the obvious route with an eye rolling emoji, but that’s basic. The nail care emoji (a personal favorite) is a classic, yet subtle, dig. Still, what’s the best way to politely recomme

AT&T and Verizon today joined a growing list of companies in both the US and Europe that are pulling advertising from YouTube and millions of Google-partnered websites. The reasoning stems from the potential for big-name brands’ ads to appear next to videos and other content containing hate speech, including white nationalist, sexist, and homophobic content and videos and sites created by and designed for the purpose of promoting terrorism. Similar to how Facebook has moved to reduce t

A designer named Kosho Tsuboi has conceived a beautiful gadget idea. His product, the Magic Calendar, is an e-paper calendar that syncs with a smartphone to display your schedule. The project is associated with Google’s Android Experiments, which appears to be a Japanese program in which creators can pitch ideas for Android-centered gadgets. In this case, the calendar relies on a custom Android app, and, judging off the below video, uses Google Calendar for syncing.There aren’t many

Super Mario Run — Nintendo’s first Mario game for smartphones — is now available on Android, following its launch on iOS last year, in a surprise launch ahead of the originally announced March 23rd release date.Like the iOS version, Super Mario Run on Android is a free download that comes with a trial of the World Tour, Toad Rally, and Kingdom Builder modes, with courses courses 1-1 to 1-4 included for free. The full game is available through a single in-app purchase of $9.99,

Medium has just launched its subscription service, which for $5 per month will give subscribers access to... something, eventually.
At the moment, the service isn’t offering subscribers much beyond the knowledge that their money is going directly to writers. Medium says it will direct all revenue from “those who sign up in the first few months” straight to writers and publishers, so the company won’t be taking a cut for the time being.
Subscribers will get exclusive stori

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the cameras, particularly the front-facing cameras, are the most important part of a phone. With dual cameras slowly becoming more popular and a thing that people want, why shouldn’t we also have a dual-camera system on the front of our devices? Our selfies need love, too. Oppo is set to announce its new F3 and F3 Plus phones this week, which includes dual selfie cameras.Although the devices aren’t supposed to be revealed until

Ever since the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series brought back Darth Maul from the grave, the horned Sith has had a bone to pick with Obi-Wan Kenobi — rightfully so, given that Kenobi famously cut off Maul’s legs and dumped him into a reactor shaft after Maul murdered Obi-Wan’s teacher, Qui-Gon Jinn, in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. (Star Wars character names are really something.)Spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels below.
Over the course of The Clone Wars, the pair have clashed o

Want the White House to tell you whether or not it’s pardoning a whistleblower? Or take a position on modifying the technology you own? Or explain why America can’t build a Death Star? For the past six years, you could do all these things through We the People, an imperfect but valuable petition system that gave ordinary people a direct line to the president. But we’re over two months into the Trump administration, and it’s not clear whether the system is still active, or

There are lots of ways to build a website these days, between services like Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and a whole host of other solutions. Universe is a new startup looking to make that process even easier, with a platform that’s built entirely around an iPhone app that promises to “make a website in under a minute,” as detailed TechCrunch.
To build a site, users are directed to first choose a domain name (URLHERE.onuniverse.com, for example). Domains that include Universe&r

Rapper and Wu-Tang vet Raekwon has a new album coming out this week, and a few fans will get a chance to “feel” the music through a pretty strange marketing stunt. Raekwon’s label is supposedly sending a small vibration backpack to 15 fans, though there’s basically no information about how they’re choosing them. The backpack is the SubPac M2, which I actually tried out in late 2015:
It’s about as niche a device as you’ll find, but it worked well and was

What if you took Kitchen Nightmares and removed Gordon Ramsay? What if, instead of basing your restaurant improvement show around your host’s expertise, can’t-look-away vulgar tirades, and non-stop hustle, you centered everything around fussy Yelp customer reviews? Wonder no more, friends, because Yelp and the Food Network are partnering to put just such a series on your TV screen. It’s called Help My Yelp and premieres April 10th.
The show is hosted by Monti Carlo, herself a s

There are few things I love more than mechanical watches and whiskey. In a very expensive twist, a Swiss watch and the world’s oldest whiskey will combine to create the Whisky Watch, a $45,000 piece of liquid-infused luxury that Vox Media will not let me expense.Swiss watchmaker Louis Moinet has partnered with Wealth Solutions, a Polish company that specialized in luxury collectibles to add a drop of Old Vatted Glenlivet 1862 — the oldest whiskey in the world — into a glass cha

Nintendo has finally admitted to connectivity issues with the Switch’s left Joy-Con controller, but it says that a fix is in place to make sure all future units are working properly.
“A manufacturing variation has resulted in wireless interference with a small number of the left Joy-Con,” a Nintendo of America spokesperson said in a statement. “Moving forward this will not be an issue, as the manufacturing variation has been addressed and corrected at the factory level.&r

Last year in Los Angeles, a mysterious cult began recruiting people through emails, phone calls, and one-on-one consultations. For nine months individuals were drawn into the group’s web of intrigue, discovering that a young woman from Ohio had been taken in and brainwashed. In September, the cult finally opened its doors, and people had the chance to walk its halls and try to find the young woman inside — or die trying.
The only thing was, none of it was real.
The Tension Experience

At heart, every post-apocalyptic movie is a bit of a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Apocalypse stories let us revel in the idea of replacing all the burdens of modern society with simpler, more visceral problems, like avoiding zombie bites or fighting off road-warrior gangs. But most apocalypses keep the survivors pretty busy. For every quiet apocalypse film like On The Beach, there are dozens of manic ones like 28 Days Later or 2012, where the world comes apart abruptly and explosively, and the prot

In 2015, Congress extended NASA’s operations of the International Space Station through 2024 — but as that deadline approaches, lawmakers are trying to figure what should happen to the orbiting lab beyond that date. This morning, the House Subcommittee on Space held a hearing to discuss just that, and one thing is clear: there’s no consensus yet.
A variety of suggestions came up at the hearing, and most of them focus on transitioning the ISS from NASA to the private space indus

Remember when Facebook used to routinely change its website layout around and confused / incited anger in everyone every few months? These days it’s sticking to a pretty standard look, but the company does test a few format changes here and there to see what might be worth updating.
The latest update appears to be in the comments section on the Facebook mobile app, which swaps the flat line-by-line format with Messenger-like chat bubbles. Replies also look similar to Messenger, with indivi

Casio announced a new model in its G-Shock Gravitymaster line at this year’s Baselworld 2017 watch show, and it brings a new feature to the company’s line of high-end pilot’s watches: Bluetooth connectivity to sync flight data to your smartphone.The original Gravitymaster GPW1000 was a pilot-focused watch that included the ability to track latitude and uses a hybrid GPS and radio system to automatically update the time zone, even when in flight. The updated Gravitymaster GPW200

Since the Switch launched there have been reports of issues with the left Joy-Con controller, which have been plagued by connectivity problems. Nintendo addressed the problem at the time by recommending that users avoid nearby sources of interference and moving any obstructing objects (including fish tanks), but a report from CNET’s Sean Hollister seems to indicate that a more permanent fix may be on the way.Enterprising Switch fans have disassembled their controllers to discover that whil

Facebook Live is making the jump from phones to computers, as Facebook announced today that it’s opening up its live-streaming service to desktop and laptops in addition to smartphones and mobile devices for all its users.
It’s a feature that’s been available to Pages for a while, but Facebook is opening it up to anyone with a Facebook account. Users will be able to simply broadcast straight from a built-in webcam. More advanced streamers can use external camera hardware or str

Death Note has been adapted from its manga origins into an anime, video games, a musical, and several Japanese live-action movies. Now it’s getting the English-language film treatment via Netflix. The live-action adaptation will premiere on August 25th. If the teaser trailer released today looks puzzling or even a little cheesy to you, then let me give you this one nugget of advice: go watch the anime on Hulu.Unlike Western teen-centric shows, which often focus on romance or petty drama, D

Last weekend, Marvel premiered Iron Fist, its latest live-action Netflix show. To the disappointment of many fans, the series isn’t very good. Fortunately, there’s a solution if Iron Fist’s dull plot, poor characters, and Finn Jones’ single confused facial expression left you with a craving for some serious martial arts mayhem: AMC’s Into the Badlands. While it may have gotten lost in the hype surrounding Marvel’s new series, Badlands, which returned for its s

A LastPass security vulnerability could have allowed malicious attackers to steal users’ passwords, a researcher revealed this week.
A hacker could have accessed “obviously bad” LastPass commands
On Monday, Google researcher Tavis Ormandy reported the vulnerability in the popular password management tool. In an outline of the problem, Ormandy explains that a coding flaw allowed anyone to “proxy” unauthenticated messages to a LastPass browser extension. By exploiting

New York City Police Department documents obtained by The Verge show that police camera teams were deployed to hundreds of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011–2013 and 2016. Originally acquired through a Freedom of Information Law request by New York attorney David Thompson of Stecklow, Cohen & Thompson, the records are job reports from the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) that document over 400 instances in which the unit’s video te

Earlier this week, OnePlus paired up with the French retailer Colette to release a limited edition all-black version of the OnePlus 3T phone. The device was only for sale at a single pop-up store in Paris and only 250 units were available, making it limited indeed. Today, the company is making it a little bit easier to get your hands on a black version of the phone, as it’s releasing a midnight black version of the OnePlus 3T to online sales.
This black 3T lacks the Colette logo on the bac

If you’ve been admiring hair transformations from salon Instagram accounts, you might soon be able to book an appointment with a stylist straight from the app, according to Bloomberg. The Facebook-owned app tells Bloomberg that it’s adding an appointment-booking feature in the “next couple of months.”
The ability to make appointments via Instagram will take on services like Yelp and OpenTable, which offer crowdsourced reviews and photos from the business before letting us

Jeremy Renner — the actor best known for a series of Marvel films and loving one swear word the most — has launched a fan app called Jeremy Renner. When you launch the app, it autoplays a 42-second sample of Jeremy Renner’s cover of “House of the Rising Sun,” loudly, no matter where you happen to be. (For me: office. Got yelled at.)
Here is the launch screen photo and the home screen photo, respectively:The app is free, but it has in-app purchases and, according to

At an event in São Paulo, Brazil today, Google announced a slew of updates to its various apps. On top of implementing location sharing in Google Maps, the company also added new features to Google Allo, Google Duo, and Google Photos.
Google Allo for Android has gained the ability to share documents and other files (.pdf, .docs, .apk, .zip, and mp3). For users in Brazil, Allo now we’re also rolling out Smart Smiley in Portuguese. When the feature first arrived in November, it was En

A live-action version of Death Note is coming to Netflix later this year, and we’ve just gotten the first teaser trailer. Here, Light Turner (The Fault In Our Stars’ Nat Wolff) finds the titular Death Note, and soon discovers that whoever is named in the supernatural notebook will die. It’s at that point that he decides to use the book to kill criminals — all while being watched by the bored shinigami Ryuk (Willem Dafoe).
Based on the popular manga series
Death Note, dire

 With traditional television no longer the powerhouse it once was, today’s kids grow up on a diet of Netflix and YouTube and other digital content. A new startup aiming to be the next big kids brand to tackle this space, Pocketwatch, announced today it has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Machinima co-founder Allen DeBevoise’s Third Wave Digital, a firm that invests… Read More

Netflix’s Los Gatos employees will soon be working behind so-called “smart glass,” as the developers behind its newly built campus have enlisted the services of View to ensure workers can enjoy a bright and airy environment.
In a nutshell, View’s Dynamic Glass serves to maximize the amount of natural light that enters a building, while also reducing the glare and energy usage from lighting and air-conditioning through automatically “tinting” in 

Google is announcing today the launch of location sharing right within Google Maps.
Once the feature goes live on Android and iOS, Google Maps will let you share your location for just a set period of time, like half an hour. You can turn off location sharing for a specific person at any given time. And while you’re going somewhere, you can opt to share your location — and then stop sharing it once you’ve arrived at your destination. Plus, if someone is sharing their location w

Dating app Coffee Meets Bagel today launched a premium membership for $35 per month. The option is rolling out to Android users today and to iOS users “in the next few weeks.”
Coffee Meets Bagel has offered in-app purchases from the very start (coffee beans are the in-app currency to unlock various features), but “the introduction of premium membership is our first step toward a freemium subscription model,” Coffee Meets Bagel cofounder Dawoon Kang told VentureBeat. The d

Augmented reality is generating a lot of excitement, particularly with rumors that Apple will enter the market sometime soon, alongside others such as Microsoft and Google.
Digi-Capital, a tech advisor, believes that the combined market for AR and virtual reality could be $108 billion by 2021. 2016 was a critical year for AR, with new device announcements, major acquisitions and massive adoption by consumers and enterprises alike.
Super Ventures has sorted out the landscape of AR startups,

In sales, it’s all about getting leads, and Lynkos, which today announced funding of $2.5 million, has a novel approach to finding them. The startup uses artificial intelligence to join CRM software with data on companies around the world.
Using Lynkos, sales people can import their own leads or set criteria to find them using the online service. The leads can be prospected using the product’s email marketing tools and tracked throughout the sales process.
“We have a lot of aut