Technology news

Adding an extra layer of security to your online accounts is a fundamental step to protect your digital life from hackers, but what's the point if the new methods are just as vulnerable as the old ones?
It's a question some Twitter users are asking after discovering that the two-factor authentication on their accounts isn't as secure as it seems. 
SEE ALSO: The software that could prevent ISPs from selling your browsing history could also just make things worse
But let's back up for a secon

Nickel-rolling — or the practice of trolling someone with songs, images, or lyrics from Nickelback — is a time-honored tradition at The Verge. It’s why I have the band’s not-really-seminal album Here and Now on my desk. (No one knows for sure where it came from, only that the troll is strong.) So finding out that a US senator is being nickel-rolled is like seeing a child grow up and hit it big.
Right now, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) is being bombarded with Nickelback promo mate

YouTube revealed that Star Wars: Battlefront 2 got the most views of all the new product announcements at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow in Los Angeles.
Publisher EA first announced on April 15 that developers DICE, Motive, and Criterion are working on Star Wars: Battlefront 2. They showed off new gameplay footage ahead of E3 at the EA Play event on June 10. Like the first Battlefront, which was hugely popular and sold 14 million copies in six month

Does your router have eyes?
You sure?
SEE ALSO: Microsoft says WannaCry ransomware attack is a wake-up call for governments
The CIA can rewrite a part of a router's software in order to let it track the internet activity of those who use it, according to information released Thursday by WikiLeaks. 
If you're reading this at home, you're probably able to do so because of a router. If you're reading this at work or a coffee shop with Wi-Fi, same. 
If the CIA installs it, an agent monitor

Let’s give it up for the dads of the world. The guys who taught us so much we know about, well, everything. While we now live in a time where a simple internet search can quickly and accurately provide the answer to a burning question, there’s a certain brand of wisdom that dads seem to have engrained in their DNA. Sure, you can always read an article about the best way to season a cast iron skillet, but seeing your old man do it first hand seals the lesson and helps you remember lon

After reporting earlier this week that Atari seemed to be working on a new console (and hiring developers) we can now confirm both. CEO Fred Shesnais told GamesBeat today that everyones favorite classic game company is indeed working on a new console. While the company did forego any sort of announcement pertaining to the console at E3 this year, we did get this puzzling teaser video a few days before. There’s not a lot of information to be gained from the video, but the YouTube headline

Once again this year, GamesBeat teamed up with Epic Games and Nvidia to find the best Unreal Engine 4 design teams at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles.
Our staff spent much of our time at the show floor checking out games using Unreal Engine, and we then debated and argued until we could pick nominees and winners for each of our nine categories. And we weren’t just giving out plaques (although those did look pretty nice). Each winning team will receive an Nvidia GeForce GTX

YouTube is rolling out new analytics tools for 360-degree and VR video producers that will include a heat map of where users are actually looking while watching those clips. The heat maps, which will be available for videos that exceed 1,000 views, will clearly highlight “what parts of your video are catching a viewer’s attention and how long they’re looking at a specific part of the video.”
This is YouTube’s latest attempt to help content creators learn how to best

Kim Kardashian is jumping on the hype wave and releasing a fidget spinner. The spinner is a gold money symbol and it says “daddy,” which is apt since it’s called the Daddy Money Fidget Spinner. It can be yours — with a seven-day shipping delay because these things take time — for the low price of $15, plus $4 for shipping
Fidget spinners are apparently still a thing. But since I could not give less of a shit about them, I asked my colleague and noted fidget spinner

The internet can be a beautiful and horrible place at the same time. It’s weird, and sometimes you feel like you want to leave. Sadly, there’s no easy way out — or there wasn’t, until now. Swedish developers Wille Dahlbo and Linus Unnebäck created Deseat.me, a web app that offers a way to wipe your entire existence off the internet in a few clicks. After logging into the website with a Google or Outlook account it scans for apps and services you&rsquo

When learning a new programming language (maybe even your first!), you’re going to have feelings of dread and despair. At some point, you won’t understand what’s going on with anything, and everything will make you want to flip your desk over and quit. You can make it easier on yourself by doing one key thing: take notes. Lots of notes. All the time, every time. Find a method that’s most effective for you, and take notes. You should even be taking notes inside your code!

Whenever a product is updated, there inevitably are people who grumble about change and wish things had stayed the same. Yesterday, Twitter rolled out a hefty redesign that includes a new side tab, generous amounts of white space, and most importantly to the internet writ large, rounded corners everywhere.
Many weren’t ready for the new design — change is scary. Profile photos, once square, are now circles? The compose tweet box now has generous curves? This happened without warning?

Released through 2015, Life is Strange was a successful experiment in episodic gaming, thanks largely to its focus on narrative storytelling that pulled players from one segment to the next. The final, collected story digs into the secrets and trials of Max, a high school student who discovers she has the ability to rewind time.At E3 2017, Square Enix and new developer Deck Nine Games announced a prequel, Life is Strange: Before the Storm. This time, the spotlight is refocused on fan-favorite ch

The YotaPhone 3 has apparently been announced at a conference in Northern China. The successor to the YotaPhone 2, which made some waves when it came with an E Ink display on its back, will also feature a rear E Ink display, with an AMOLED screen on the front.
The dual-screen smartphone will come in 64GB and 128GB versions for $350 and $450, respectively, and will be available in Russia and China this fall. Other than that, Yota Devices hasn’t said much about the device. They did release t

Lorde’s sophomore album Melodrama is out today, marking the 20-year-old pop star’s first release since September 2013. That feels like a very long time ago, and that’s because it was. But at the risk of stretching your brain farther than it wants to go on a Friday afternoon, I’d like to take us back for a minute to the year 2008.That’s when XOXO Festival co-founder and longtime internet fixture Andy Baio asked his pal, Vox Media product design director Ryan Gantz, t

Google handed a new set of intelligent object detection capabilities over to the open source community as part of continued development of its TensorFlow framework.
The TensorFlow Object Detection API gives data scientists and developers access to the same tech that Google uses for its own systems, like the Nest Cam, similar items in Image Search, and street number identification in Street View. The system that Google released won Microsoft’s Common Objects in Context (COCO) object detecti

GUEST: The public is riveted by artificial intelligence, but most people don’t have a clue what “AI” actually is. Media hype and populist stories confuse rather than clarify. How does popular perception affect the vast array of Silicon Valley companies building actual AI products and services? We spoke to leading entrepreneurs and executives to learn their unique challenges with selling and marketing AI.
Not surprisingly, the biggest challenge AI entrepreneurs collectively iden

ANALYSIS: Amazon’s proposed $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Market caught stock market investors off guard. Their initial reaction — bidding up share prices of the two companies and selling off those of grocery chains — suggests a bleak future for an industry being reshaped by on-demand delivery.
Shares of Walmart were down 4.4 percent in mid-day trading after falling as much as 7 percent. Walmart, which has been trying to compete against Amazon by leveraging its retail s

Samsara luggage is betting that the current crop of smart suitcase buyers are more interested in design upgrades than additional (and sometimes unneeded) integrated tech features. Its premiere design is currently 5x overfunded on Kickstarter, and is primarily hype-worthy not for its tech, but for its design and what it’s made of: aluminum alloy.
Aluminum suitcases, while more expensive than hard-top alternatives in other materials, boast a number of advantages, but at the top is durability

 Samsung’s much-touted, but mostly absent, smart assistant continues to amble its way to the U.S. After a big false start during the Galaxy S8’s launch, Bixby Voice is finally making its stateside debut. At least kind of, sort of. The company is positioning this is a “sneak peak” for the feature that was initially planned to debut on its new flagship phones. Starting… Read More

Welcome to our big E3 GamesBeat weekly roundup! We saw many of the show’s biggest games, including Super Mario Odyssey, Far Cry 5, and Star Wars: Battlefront 2. We also covered the big news and game reveals from the big publisher events.
It was a crazy week, so check out our stories below to get caught up before enjoying the weekend.
Above: Mario was the star of E3 2017.Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
Pieces of flair and opinion
The DeanBeat: The memorable and the missing moments of E3 2017
W

The development of music and how consumers listen has changed because of technology Music has long stood as a constant, reliable part of human culture for millennia, but in the rise of the technology era, how music is created and listened to is ever changing. Innovation has always been inextricably linked to music: while artists continued to reinvent the art itself, a demand for more convenient ways to listen developed. Entrepreneurs and music lovers alike are always looking for the next best t

Bungie’s upcoming Destiny 2 is going to be more than just a fresh start when it comes to the game’s quests, multiplayer structure, and expansive list of guns, armor, and other collectibles. In a brutally honest interview with Kotaku’s Jason Schreier this week at E3, game director Luke Smith says the development team is effectively rebooting the core narrative pillar of the Destiny universe. It’s all starting with a complete scrubbing of any mention of The Darkness, the om

OPINION: There are many ways to measure how Netflix has matured in the past three years — but its relationship with net neutrality could be the most telling. In April 2014, the company revealed it was paying Comcast and Verizon to avoid throttling, which at the time CEO Reed Hastings described as “an arbitrary tax.” Later that year, Netflix submitted comments to the FCC in favor of net neutrality. This year, Netflix’s stance has been notably … nuanced.
Net neutrali

Amazon announced what is by far its largest acquisition ever today: a $13.7 billion deal to buy Whole Foods, the popular, pricey, and frequently organic grocery chain. That’s more than 10 times what Amazon paid for Zappos, its prior top acquisition, in 2009. It underscores just to how seriously Amazon values its future role in the grocery business.
By purchasing Whole Foods, Amazon buys its way into a business it’s long been trying to crack, sets itself in a much stronger position fo

It’s rare that a game becomes one of the biggest wins and the biggest losses of E3 at the same time, but The Last Night — a cyberpunk side-scroller made by indie studio Odd Tales — may have done it. The Last Night’s stylish, neon-drenched trailer was a highlight of Microsoft’s annual press conference, overshadowing much bigger games from much larger teams. But not long after the show, a series of controversial tweets surfaced from co-creator Tim Soret, suggesting th

SeaBubbles, the startup that wants to be the Uber of water taxis, was in Paris this week for the Viva Tech conference to show off its prototype and woo regulators and investors. It also released a slickly produced concept video that shows what it would be like to ride in one of the company’s speedy, egg-shaped vessels.Set to some generic indie rock tune, the video depicts a pair of dapper Parisian business types discussing digital spreadsheets while skimming over the surface of the Seine R

The CRTC, Canada’s wireless regulator, has ruled that every cellphone sold in the country must be unlocked, and carriers can no longer charge their customers to unlock their current devices, according to the CBC. The rules will take effect on December 1st, allowing customers to move to different carriers with their device as they wish.
According to the CBC, Canadian carriers charged their customers $50 Canadian dollars ($38) to unlock their devices, which added up to $37.7 million CAD ($28

Yves Guillemot is riding high this week. Ubisoft held a big event at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) where it showed off a lot of big titles.
Those games included a new version of Assassin’s Creed after a one-year hiatus, a disturbing Far Cry 5 that focuses on extremism in the U.S., Just Dance 2018, and three brand new games and two virtual reality titles. It also announced a collaboration with Nintendo, dubbed Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. The biggest surprise was all was the unv

Nearly two months after the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus’ launch, users might finally be getting access to one of the phones’ main selling points: a new virtual assistant called Bixby. Today Samsung announced an assistant preview in which some S8 and S8 Plus owners can test Bixby’s voice features before anyone else.
Only a limited number of people will receive this early access, Samsung says, so there are no guarantees even if you sign up. Still, you can try your luck here. This early

This week, Verizon released a new, dumb flip phone. Called the LG Exalt LTE, it only connects to Verizon’s 4G LTE network — that means no 3G network option for phone calls. This is a first for the company across all its devices, not just flip phones. I’m not entirely sure who the modern market is for this phone, or for dumb flip phones in general. Maybe people who are tired of the internet constantly feeding them bad news and negatively impacting their mental health?
Still, I&r

E3 felt different this year, and not in a subtle way. For the first time, the Entertainment Software Association sold 15,000 tickets to a video game trade show that had previously been accessible only to industry insiders and the press. And E3 transformed to meet them, building physical spaces that served as temples for the digital worlds they represent. Game developers have always built massive structures for E3, but these served a different purpose. The result was an event that felt less like

EXCLUSIVE: What if an application could automatically repel attackers by rotating its access credentials every day, thereby making every stolen password useless in a short amount of time? That’s the idea behind CredHub, a new feature introduced for Pivotal Cloud Foundry today.
The feature is designed to automatically rotate an application’s credentials on a regular basis without disrupting its operation. Developers and operations engineers shouldn’t have to worry about the rota