Technology news

In case you were wondering how Piers Morgan is spending his Thursday, he's doing what he does best — being a troll.
On what seemed to be a relatively quiet day for social media platforms, Morgan decided to shake things up in the Twitter universe by posing a ridiculously controversial question related to race.Should white girls be allowed to sing 'niggas'?New column posting very soon.
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 21, 2017Why tho. WHY?!
SEE ALSO: Cher destroys obnoxious Twit

Apple’s new Apple Watch software, WatchOS 4, includes several updates to the health and fitness tracking features of the Watch, the most interesting of which are new heart rate monitoring features. With the new software, the Watch will show resting heart rate, walking heart rate, and recovery rate, and flag abnormal spikes even when wearers aren’t working out.But it turns out that not all Apple Watch users will experience those. As pointed out both in 9to5Mac’s WatchOS 4 writeu

Netflix already streams HDR video on the new Apple TV 4K, so it only makes sense for the company to add support for Apple's HDR-ready iOS devices as well. The latest update for Netflix's app does just that, so you'll be able to watch movies and TV shows with high dynamic range on the iPad Pro (10.5-inch and 2017 12.9-inch) and the upcoming iPhone X.
If you're unsure of what content is available in HDR, the easiest way to find something to watch is to just search for "HDR" right in Netflix. The s

Instagram is the latest social media platform to have its algorithms accidentally promote hate speech and fail to filter it out. The social media platform used an offensive photo that read, “I Will Rape You” to advertise itself on Facebook, according to The Guardian.Guardian reporter Olivia Solon recently learned that Instagram was advertising itself with a screenshot she had taken of a hateful email she had received that read, “I will rape you before I kill you, you filthy who

Tesla will stop making the rear-wheel drive Model S 75 after this coming Sunday, September 24th, as was first reported earlier today by Electrek. The car, which starts at $69,500 and is currently the cheapest Model S available, will be on the company’s website through the weekend. It will also sell out the rest of the inventory around the country, and then it will be gone.At that point, the dual-motor Model S 75D will become the cheapest Model S at $74,500. That also means every Model S an

Imagine an airplane neck pillow, but instead of a cushioned place to rest your head, it's a speaker that wraps around you. Bose made that thing, and it's called the SoundWear Companion Wearable Speaker. The device pairs over Bluetooth to your phone, meaning it can take calls and work like any other Bluetooth speaker, except for the fact that you're wearing it. It can also be controlled through the company's companion iOS / Android app.
Bose says the idea behind this gadget is that you might want

Apple executive Craig Federighi has apparently confirmed that a popular 3D Touch gesture for the iPhone that was removed in iOS 11.0 will be returning in an upcoming software update. The gesture was a quick way of getting to the multitasking screen, and required just a firm press on the left edge of the screen and a flick right to bring up the app switcher.According to an email published by MacRumors, Federighi said that Apple had to temporarily pull the useful shortcut “due to a technical

A Twitter user found himself perplexed today when he opened an older electrocardiogram measurement instrument and found the components belonged to a Game Boy Advance.
The instrument is made by German company Medical Imaging Electronics and uses a wave produced by the ECG to electronically control a separate recording or imaging apparatus. At first look, it seems like any standard medical device. When opened, it’s revealed that the device’s screen and electronic parts belong to a Game

In an announcement on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said the company would make changes to ensure political ads on its platform are more transparent.Zuckerberg said it was “maybe the most important step we’re taking”
Calling it “maybe the most important step we’re taking,” Zuckerberg pointed out that political ads online are not regulated to the same extent as ads on mediums like TV. The Facebook CEO said, in those cases, you still can’t be sure if you&rsquo

Spoilers for season 1 finale of The Good Place.
When The Good Place premiered last fall, it arrived in the form of a sort of spiritual My Fair Lady. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is dead and has ascended to the show’s equivalent of Heaven, aka The Good Place. But Eleanor’s placement is a clerical error, and the existence she lived back on Earth was hardly worthy of a paradisiacal afterlife. With the help of her assigned soulmate, former moral ethics professor Chidi (William Jacks

In a major reversal, Facebook agreed today to share with Congress more than 3,000 ads linked to a Kremlin-linked group believed to attempted to influence the 2016 US election. The company had previously shared the ads with Robert Mueller, the special counsel currently investigating Russian interference in the presidential election. Facebook had resisted sharing the information more broadly, saying it would threaten advertisers’ privacy.
“Disclosing content is not something we do ligh

Today, Hyperloop One announced it raised an additional $85 million in financing, bringing its total haul to $245 million and a likely valuation of more than $700 million. That’s a lot of scratch for a transportation startup with no commercial product, no revenue stream, no government approval, and no proof that its ultrafast transit system would even be safe for human passengers. Nonetheless, the company has managed to convince a variety of wealthy backers and governments to buy into their

“From as early as I can remember, I wanted to swallow the world whole,” first-time filmmaker Jennifer Brea declares at the start of her documentary Unrest.As a young woman, she attended Harvard and then Princeton to study political science. She traveled widely and fell in love. And then she became incredibly, inexplicably tired, often unable to get out of bed and unable to get herself up off the floor if she fell. She was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic

Hollywood’s weaknesses involving diversity and representation have increasingly come under fire in recent years, and no single flashpoint exemplified these issues like the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. In 2015, activist April Reign called out the Academy Awards on Twitter when all 20 acting nominees were white. The hashtag went viral, and essentially defined the way many view the entertainment industry’s awards ceremonies: as bellwethers for its larger, institutional issues when it com

This fall, The Verge is making a choice. The choice is fear! We’ve decided to embrace the season by taking in as many new horror movies as possible and reporting back on which ones are worth your time. We’re calling this series Hold My Hand, as we look at films you might want to watch with a supportive viewing partner. Get comfortable, put the kettle on, check the closet for ghosts, then find a hand to squeeze until the bones pop.
The most interesting thing about any teen movie is wh

Scientists have created a more realistic fake finger that they hope will help them improve fingerprint ID technology.Fingerprint ID is almost ubiquitous now, but they remain the phone’s biggest security vulnerability. Fake fingers already exist, but researchers at Michigan State University have created a more advanced version that can be used to test fingerprint scanners and make them harder to hack. A technical report detailing the process has been submitted to arXiv, a repository of non-

A Neanderthal boy of around eight who died almost 50,000 years ago still has things to tell us: mainly that our extinct human relatives grew up at a pace similar to our own. Knowing that can give us clues to Neanderthal social structure, as well as how our hominid cousins raised their children.
The surprisingly well-preserved specimen, dubbed El Sidrón J1, was found in a Spanish cave of the same name in the 1990s, along with a dozen other family members. His bones — at least the one

Too much pee and too little fresh air probably made employees of an indoor water park sick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. Public health departments should keep a close watch on the growing indoor water park industry, the agency says — because you never know what could be in the water.This time, it was most likely pee, along with sweat, dead skin cells, and lotions, the CDC reported today in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The agency was called in to inve

Astronomers have finally solved a long-standing mystery about the origins of cosmic rays, the highly energetic particles that zoom throughout space. For half a century, scientists haven’t been able to pin down where the most energetic rays in our Universe come from. But thanks to more than a decade of detecting cosmic rays from South America, astronomers have confirmed that these super energetic particles are coming from outside our galaxy.
Space is filled with cosmic rays — tiny fra

Two weeks ago, a pair of researchers from Stanford University made a startling claim. Using hundreds of thousands of images taken from a dating website, they said they had trained a facial recognition system that could identify whether someone was straight or gay just by looking at them. The work was first covered by The Economist, and other publications soon followed suit, with headlines like “New AI can guess whether you're gay or straight from a photograph” and “AI Can Tell

The Volvo XC40 may be just another small SUV for people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a sedan these days, but the company’s approach to sharing and selling the car might be how they get potential customers to pay attention.
The XC40 will compete with cars like the Audi Q3, BMW X1 and Mini Countryman, as well as higher-end versions of the Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4. Volvo’s been on a bit of a hot streak lately, turning out strikingly cool cars, but the XC40 adds trendy stuff li

Tasha Robinson and Bryan Bishop just spent more than a week at the Toronto International Film Festival, mainlining as many movies as they could manage. Here’s one set of reactions, based on a miniature horror festival they programmed for themselves at TIFF.
Tasha: TIFF traditionally has a wide slate of programming. Some of the year’s biggest upcoming prestige pictures premiere there, but they play alongside indies looking for distribution, international releases looking for attention

Corvus Prophecy was a man with a plan... and also a wrench. The plan: steal the Salt-Vasser Object, then retire off the money from selling it, and finally leave behind the space mercenary life. Unfortunately, information on its whereabouts costs money — money Corvus doesn’t have, but money he could make by sneaking onto spaceships.
This is the core of Heat Signature, the latest release from Gunpoint creator Suspicious Developments. First, you pick a randomly created character with a

Bojack Horseman, everyone’s favorite show about depressed, anthropomorphic animals coexisting with aimless, ennui-affected humans, will return for a fifth season. Cool! But even better than Netflix’s formal, PR-type news, is the tweet from the official Bojack Horseman account.
The account, which features “my real thoughts & emotionsbbbbbbbbbbb” from the (fictional) failed actor, shared a peek at the news as it was delivered to Bojack himself. “Clingy netflix exe

Kodak Moments, the consumer printing division of Kodak has a new way to encourage you to print photos: a Facebook Messenger chatbot. It works just like you’d imagine. You start a chat thread with the Kodak Moments Assistant on Facebook Messenger, allow it access to your Facebook account, and it will root through the photos you’ve stored there over the years and suggest ones that you might have forgotten about — and that you might want to put in a frame or on a mug.
Kodak Moment

After launching around the world last month, Motorola’s Moto G5S Plus will come to the US on September 29th, with preorders for the phone beginning today.
The phone is an enhanced version of the Moto G5 Plus, which came out earlier this year for $230. The G5S Plus will sell for the same price, which is nice since it’s full of minor upgrades, too: it has a 5.5-inch 1080p screen instead of a 5.2-inch 1080p screen; an 8-megapixel front camera instead of a 5-megapixel front camera; and d

Experian's online PIN-recovery system could let attackers undo a credit freeze just by figuring a few easy facts. In the weeks following the Equifax breach, consumers have been told to freeze their credit, thereby blocking possible attackers from opening new lines of credit under their names. It makes sense as a defense strategy, but as cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs reports today, the protections around those freezes are easy to subvert.
Experian makes it easy to undo a credit freeze, reset

The Asus Chromebook Flip C101, a smaller version of the C302 profiled here as the best Chromebook you can get this year, can now be preordered on Amazon and the Asus website for $299. It’s available on September 25th.
The C101 has a 10.1-inch touchscreen, is 0.6 inches thick, and has an ARM-based Rockchip RK3399 quad-core processor. It flips into tablet mode like the larger C302 model, but, unfortunately, it lacks the backlit keyboard that C302 has and the resolution remains low at 1280 x

LIFX just announced HomeKit compatibility for its Wi-Fi smart lighting devices. Not just for new LIFX and LIFX+ lighting that you can buy from today on, but for existing LIFX products already in homes. It’s a trick that comes courtesy of a software update available now that makes existing LIFX products compatible with Apple's smart-home platform. But LIFX is just the latest in a series of companies to have made older products HomeKit compatible, thanks largely to Apple loosening the restri

The first trailer for Wes Anderson’s upcoming stop-motion animation project, Isle of Dogs, is here, and it looks like a very Anderson-esque mix of sci-fi and twee.The movie is set in a futuristic Japan, where an outbreak of “dog flu” has necessitated a mass canine quarantine by the government. A young boy pilot named Atari Kobayashi flies to the island to find his sequestered dog, while the evil Mayor Kobayashi tries to stop him. You can also expect to see a raggedy one-eyed pu

At San Diego Comic-Con this summer, MGM dropped a big announcement: it was bringing back the long-running Stargate franchise with a new show: Stargate Origins, a 10-episode prequel web series. Along with that news, it also announced a new website called Stargate Command, which will become the de facto online home for fans of the franchise. That site launched yesterday, and it’s a dedicated streaming service for all things Stargate.Huge back catalogs of content have helped bring streaming s

One of the biggest changes in iOS 11 for most users is the new Control Center, which Apple has completely overhauled with a new design that puts everything from the old, multi-pane system in one central location.But the biggest addition might be the fact that after years of waiting, Apple is finally letting users customize parts of Control Center.Confused by the new design? Crippled by choice with all the options? To help out, we’ve put together some of the best ways to make the most of th

The reviews are out for the new Apple TV 4K, and while the box is priced as a luxury product, it doesn't yet support the highest-quality AV standards. The new Apple TV, as The Verge's editor-in-chief Nilay Patel reports, isn't yet compatible with the Dolby Atmos surround sound format, a must-have for modern home theater setups. Apple confirmed to The Verge, however, that it'll eventually support Atmos, although it didn't provide a timeline.You should read Nilay's full review because he explains

One of the last flagship phone lineups scheduled for release this fall has just leaked. No, not that one. I’m talking about Huawei, which we now know is readying to unveil three new Mate smartphones on October 16th, according to VentureBeat’s Evan Blass: the Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, and Mate 10 Lite. And while we’ve known about the first two for a few weeks, new information about the $455 Mate 10 Lite shows Huawei is angling for a new kind of advantage in mobile photography by usi