Technology news

Researchers at the University of Washington have found a way to track a person’s location and app use through serving ads on mobile apps. The result opens the door for significant privacy invasions through the app-based advertising system.
The researchers obtained the information by purchasing a series of ads targeted to specific locations and apps, then checking which mobile subscribers fit the targeting. In experiments conducted on Android devices, the team was able to pinpoint a person&

GUEST: Whether it’s self-driving cars, robotic hotel concierges, or Amazon’s intelligent delivery drones, it’s easy to see why business leaders are aflutter about the promise of artificial intelligence. Here’s what most don’t realize: As exciting as AI and its potential may be, it’s only as good as the data and training methods used to fine tune it, and that process currently requires humans.
In other words, all AI needs human input to function successfully. A

Nissan will make its ProPilot Assist technology available on its most popular car in the US. While the 2018 Leaf was announced as the first Nissan to get ProPilot Assist, that model won’t be available in the US until February. Therefore, the 2018 Rogue will be the first to get what is the company’s platform for future self-driving technology.
ProPilot Assist in the Rogue is a Level 1 self-driving system, allowing the vehicle to control speed, distance from other cars, and keeping the

Snap hasn't had the best year. After going public, its share prices have continued to fall. But the team has a comeback plan for the last quarter of 2017: an $80 dancing hot dog Halloween costume. It's available on Amazon and fits best on people below six feet four inches tall. Sorry, Casey Newton.This could be you:AmazonSnap notes that this is an all-beef hot dog, which I appreciate as a Chicagoan.Go ahead and get as meta as possible this year:
pic.twitter.com/xTKTsAZpDf— Casey Newton (@C

PRESS RELEASE: SÃO PAULO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–October 18, 2017– The Brazilian startup GuiaBolso has raised $39 million from a group of specialized fintech investors, led by Vostok Emerging Finance and including existing backers such as Ribbit Capital, IFC, and QED Investors. Endeavor Catalyst and Omidyar Network also contributed to the round. This largest-announced venture capital funding of 2017 in Latin America is a testament to increasing investor perception of the potenti

Is Texas senator and former candidate for the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination Ted Cruz the Zodiac Killer? The question lingers in the minds of the American people, but today we must gather to discuss his involvement in a crime that took place on Twitter. Here’s what we know:The victim: “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer” meme
The evidence: In 2013, a theory began circulating online that Ted Cruz may, in fact, be the unmasked Zodiac Killer — a mass murderer who

A new company called ElsiePic understands the mind of an influencer who needs a constant stream of fresh photos. The company's idea is simple. Whenever you need a photo taken, like when you're on vacation with your family and want a group pic in front of the Statue of Liberty, you can use ElsiePic to find photographers in the area who are available to take your photo. I'm not making up this use case; it's something ElsiePic directly says in a press release announcing the service.This is the stor

ANALYSIS: At some point last century, someone at the U.S. Department of Defense plugged a network cable into a computer. Cut to a few decades later, and Electronic Arts says it is canning a game because it doesn’t function as an online service. The publisher announced yesterday that it is closing Dead Space developer Visceral and canceling its linear, single-player Star Wars game. We talked about this bombshell news on the GamesBeat Decides podcast this week, and you can hear that by

iPad apps don’t have access to a single physical button, so an app developer found a way to hack one on. Astro HQ, the company behind the drawing app Astropad, uses its latest app to turn the iPad’s camera into a button: you tap the camera, and an on-screen panel slides out; tap again, and it’s gone. It’s a really clever idea that allows controls to be taken off the screen, freeing up space.
Of course, this approach comes with a major downside: the camera has to be on and

GUEST: CEOs, CIOs, CMOs, and CXOs alike are increasingly focused on creating customer experience (CX) that is more responsive, intelligent, versatile, and accurate. What’s proving a potent way to ensure a continual positive customer experience for your hard-won customers is to leverage automated conversational interfaces (chatbots) in your CX ecosystem.
Consumers are increasingly using AI voice assistance devices (Amazon Echo and Google Home) and text-based communications apps (Facebook Me

Today, Samsung and Google announced a partnership to bring Google’s new ARCore framework to Samsung’s line of Galaxy smartphones, uniting the two giants’ augmented reality efforts as the market is starting to really crowd. The news is a big boon for Google’s ARCore, which Google announced earlier this year as a competitor to Apple’s ARKit. It is effectively a software platform for building out AR apps that make use of both advances in cloud software and on-device ha

DeepMind, a division of Google that’s focused on advancing artificial intelligence research, unveiled a new version of its AlphaGo program today that learned the game solely by playing itself.
Called AlphaGo Zero, the system works by learning from the outcomes of its self-play games, using a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning. As Zero was continuously trained, the system began learning advanced concepts in the game of Go on its own and picking out certain advantageous

Tencent announced today that it has opened North American registration for Arena of Valor, its multiplayer online battle arena that is coming out for Switch, iOS, and Android.
Arena of Valor has been a huge hit in China, which is also the country that Tencent calls home. Tencent is the biggest gaming company in the world with stakes in Epic and Riot. Arena of Valor has over 160 million registered users. Expanding to North America will open the MOBA up to a new audience.
MOBAs are some of the mos

Digital Sun’s debut game Moonlighter is all about pulling a double shift in a fantasy role-playing world. As a shopkeeper by day and an adventurer by night, you’ll be slaying creatures, selling wares, and getting those gold pieces. It’s published by 11 Bit Studios, and it’ll be coming to Nintendo Switch along with PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. It’s slated for a Q1 release in 2018.
Moonlighter takes inspiration from such games as Carpe Fulgur

Samsung launched a new camera today called the 360 Round. It shoots, as you can likely infer from its name, 360-degree footage. It's equipped with 17 lenses, including eight stereo pairs that are positioned horizontally and a single lens positioned vertically. The camera and its lenses are water and dust resistant for outdoor shooting and live-streaming. The 360 Round builds on Samsung's prior work with its Project Beyond camera.
Samsung's particularly proud of the fact that the camera doesn't r

Samsung today announced a second-generation version of its digital voice assistant Bixby: dubbed Bixby 2.0, it’s geared toward smart home devices. The news, announced at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco, means that Samsung wants to position Bixby as even more of a competitor to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant, both of which are racing to lock consumers into their own respective hardware and software ecosystems. Samsung says the new Bixby will also be more

Samsung is combining its various Internet of Things services under a single banner called SmartThings Cloud, the company announced today at the 2017 Samsung Developer Conference.While in the past various Samsung IoT devices have used SmartThings, Samsung Connect, and ARTIK platforms, going forward the company will be uniting them into SmartThings Cloud. Samsung says that SmartThings Cloud will provide “a single, powerful cloud-based hub,” and that SmartThings Cloud will be a new open

Apple Maps on iOS 11 now features indoor maps for a few more airports around the United States. Ars Technica reports that Apple has very recently added interior layouts for a handful of locations including Chicago’s O’Hare International and Midway International, plus Las Vegas's McCarran International airport. Baltimore–Washington International, Miami International, Minneapolis-St. Paul International, Oakland International, and Portland International are also now available if y

Yesterday, Pixar released two new clips of its upcoming animated film Coco, a musical inspired by Mexico’s traditional Day of the Dead celebrations. One is a teaser, and another is a behind-the-scenes look at the film.
In recent years, Disney has ramped up its diversity efforts, producing films like Moana, derived from Polynesian culture, and Queen of Katwe, the based-on-real-life story of a Ugandan chess champ. But Pixar, acquired by Disney in 2006, hasn’t followed the same trends:

GUEST: While the world may know Orlando for its theme parks, what they don’t know is that tech predates tourism in the region. The Central Florida region was responsible for sending the first man to the moon — and since then, innovation hasn’t slowed down in Orlando.
Today, the Orlando region is a hotbed for creating and testing new technologies ranging from game development to smart sensor research. These technology clusters, along with the city’s ideal conditions for en

Media publisher Steel Media is seeking nominees for its first annual Mobile Games Awards. Anyone can nominate games or studios for consideration before the November 6 deadline, and there is no submission fee. It will announce the winners January 23 at Pocket Gamer Connects London 2018, an annual industry event for mobile games.
Steel Media owns a number of media sites that focus on the business of gaming, such as Pocket Gamer, an industry site that covers mobile. The Mobile Games Award

Sennheiser is updating its audiophile IE 800 earbuds, debuting a new model called the IE 800 S. This next generation of the IE 800 not only has improved acoustics, but has been given a face-lift to the design, as well. This follows Sennheiser’s recent announcement of the over-ear HD 660 S, which succeed the HD 650.
The IE 800 S earbuds have a tweaked version of the company’s Extra Wide Band (XWB) driver, which promises to up the ante when it comes to distortion-free listening. There&

Samsung today announced its AI assistant Bixby will begin to incorporate Viv Labs technology for third-party integrations. Viv was acquired by Samsung a year ago for about $215 million. Before Viv, co-creators Adam Cheyer and Dag Kittlaus also made Siri before it was acquired by Apple.
“Bixby 2.0 will be available on a variety of devices including Samsung Smart TV and Family Hub refrigerator,” Samsung said in a statement shared with VentureBeat. “Bixby 2.0 will introd

Kongregate announced today that Office Space: Idle Profits is now available for PC via Steam. The clicker game, based on the cult classic 1999 comedy, first came out for iOS and Android in April.
Idle Profits is the No. 115 ranked game in the U.S. Apple App Store, according to App Annie. Moving to PC can introduce the title to a new audience.
“Developed by San Diego-based developer Ultrabit, a Kongregate-owned development studio, Office Space: Idle Profits lets players take on the rol

Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind has unveiled the latest version of its Go-playing software, AlphaGo Zero. The new program is a significantly better player than the version that beat the game’s world champion earlier this year, but, more importantly, it’s also entirely self-taught. DeepMind says this means the company is one step closer to creating general purpose algorithms that can intelligently tackle some of the hardest problems in science, from designing new drugs to more a

First thing’s first: if you want to read The Verge’s canonical opinion on Google’s new Pixel 2 phones, read Dieter Bohn’s authoritative and comprehensive review. Dieter’s judgment is something I rarely question, but on this one occasion, he and I diverge on how we feel about a very important aspect of Google’s new flagship pair. Dieter thinks the Pixel 2 XL’s screen is imperfect but can be lived with; I think it’s an inexcusable disaster.
I have be

Remember in Minority Report, when Tom Cruise’s character tries to lose some pursuers in a crowded mall, but the sophisticated advertising technology of 2054 keeps identifying him by name and trying to sell him things? It’s a funny gag, and a useful plot point, since it means he can’t go anywhere without wall-holograms ratting him out to his enemies. But it’s also meant to be the sign of a dark future dystopia, where privacy has disappeared, and facial-recognition scanners

Microsoft originally unveiled its Surface Dial accessory for its Surface Studio all-in-one PC almost a year ago. App support has been fairly limited so far, but Microsoft did promise that Photoshop would start supporting the accessory. That support is finally arriving today, beyond the basic zoom options that have existed for the past year.
Adobe is updating its popular software to Photoshop CC today, and it includes Surface Dial integration to tweak brush settings. I’ve tested the Surface

Andrew Ng, one of the cofounders of the Google Brain project, will be the new chairman of Woebot, a company that operates a chatbot of the same name.
The bot is designed to help people work on their own mental health issues using techniques that originate with cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s a sort of therapy that focuses on helping people manage their moods by developing personal coping strategies for mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
A study from Stanford University showed

Gmail and Microsoft Outlook plugin Boomerang comes to iOS today, and it’s got a built-in AI voice assistant. The app syncs your email so that you essentially have two different apps to view your mail in, but it gives you tools Gmail and Outlook have yet to offer, like the ability to pause your email notifications for hours or weeks and send an email chain back to yourself as a reminder to follow up when needed. It’s taken Boomerang over four years to release its iOS app after launchi

Hello! It's your good friend and confidant, Paul Miller. It's my pleasure to inform you that Circuit Breaker Live, the live show we do every Tuesday on Twitter, was live. Yesterday. On Twitter. But we get it, not everybody can catch the live broadcast, so we’ve posted the recording here for your viewing pleasure.
This week Dieter Bohn was on (in person!) to talk about Google's new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL phones, Ashley Carman introduced us to some enormous and aggressive Bluetooth speakers,

A new video of what would appear to be one of Apple’s “Project Titan” self-driving cars was posted to Twitter last night, and it looks much different than it did the last time we saw it. The car appears to be outfitted with standard third-party sensors and hardware, including (count ‘em) six Velodyne-made LIDAR sensors, several radar units, and a number of cameras — all encased in Apple-esque white plastic.The video was captured by someone who knows his stuff about

Final Fantasy XV is a game, but it’s also the center of a steadily growing universe. Even before the long-awaited RPG made its debut last November, it was preceded by a feature-length CG movie and a five-part anime series. Since launch, we’ve seen a number of updates, multiple story expansions, and a handful spinoffs. Like most blockbuster games nowadays, FFXV is a title that lives well beyond its initial release date.
As we approach FFXV’s anniversary next month, it doesn&rsqu

The summer of 1982 was an extended cinematic Christmas for science fiction, horror, and fantasy fans. Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial dominated the summer’s box office, and the canon of classic genre movies added many more entries that summer, with Conan the Barbarian and George Miller’s The Road Warrior in May, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and John Carpenter’s The Thing in June. But right around the July 4 holiday that year, two visually groundbreak

Episode 2 of Mr. Robot season 3 airs tonight, which means our digital after show won’t be far behind. Tune in after the episode at 11PM to watch Nilay Patel, Russell Brandom, and me, Megan Farokhmanesh, break down the episode. This week, we’ll be chatting with actor Jeremy Holm, as well as cryptocurrency expert Peter Van Valkenburgh to talk us through ecoin.
Catch us here on The Verge, or on the Mr. Robot Facebook page. If you missed our show last week, don’t fret! You can watc