Technology news

In honor of Stranger Things’ upcoming second season, which premieres this Friday on Netflix, Spotify has hidden a spooky little gem in its web player: a re-skin that turns the black-and-green media player into The Upside Down. It won’t affect the music you’re playing, but it will add some floating spores and a flashlight beam to make your listening experience a little creepier.
Triggering the Easter egg is pretty simple: just open the Spotify, play the Stranger Things soundtrac

After CEO Elon Musk extended an offer to help Puerto Rico earlier this month, Tesla is following through on a pledge to contribute to rebuilding the power grid devastated by Hurricane Maria, leaving thousands of people without electricity.
In a tweet Tuesday, Tesla posted photos of Hospital del Niño and the solar and power storage project that’s beginning there using the company’s Powerwall batteries. Musk has also donated $250,000 to relief efforts in Puerto Rico.Hospital del

Livestream, which is now owned by Vimeo, has announced an upgraded version of its Mevo live-streaming camera, logically named the Mevo Plus, via Engadget.The Mevo Plus, like the Mevo before it, can live stream video to services live Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, Livestream, and Vimeo Live (those last two make a lot of sense, considering the companies involved).The headline feature on the Plus is the same as that on the original Mevo: a “Live Edit” function, which lets you cu

Episode VIII of the Star Wars film series, The Last Jedi, will open in theaters December 15th, but a featurette released today offers fans a look at what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s focused on writer and director Rian Johnson, first as a fan, then as a director. And it features short thoughts from Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Mark Hamill, and the late Carrie Fisher about working with him.
“First time shooting with Mark. First time shooting with Daisy. First time shooting a

In the original Switch marketing campaign, Nintendo revealed a bold vision of the device as a truly portable console, with people bringing the Switch to friends’ houses or bars and enjoying Nintendo games together.
OJO is a Switch accessory from YesOJO Studios that builds on that idea, combining a portable projector, speaker, and a backup battery into a mobile dock for your Switch, via TechCrunch. It’s the kind of thing that seems almost blindingly obviously once you see it: the Swit

Spaceflight startup Vector — which specializes in micro-rockets — plans to launch its first orbit-bound vehicles from Virginia in mid-2018. Last week, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that Vector would be conducting its first three commercial missions from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, a launch site at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. These will be the first Vector flights that carry satellites to space for commercial customers, and will help the company furthe

Wink, an app and hub that aims to connect all the smart things in your home in one centralized place (while working with both Alexa and Google Home), has just debuted a new security products bundle, according to Engadget. Wink’s hub has been offered as part of a bundle in the past, but with products made by other companies that are compatible with Wink’s platform. This time, all the products included are made by Wink.
The Wink Lookout package includes two sensors that can be used for

It’s late at night, and I’m standing with seven other people on a loading dock in downtown Los Angeles. We’re masked, our faces hidden by bandanas that bear a single word: CREEP. A nearby door opens, and we walk single file into a darkened room. There, an empty chair waits, and a timer tick-tick-ticks the moments away. Crumpled balls of paper are piled against the wall, and when I reach down to unfold one, I discover a portentous warning: Your wife may not be who she seems.
Tha

Soylent is no longer available in Canada after running afoul of food regulation standards. Rosa Foods CEO Rob Rhinehart wrote today that Soylent doesn’t meet “a select few” of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s requirements for meal-replacement products. No more Soylent will be shipped to Canadian customers until it’s able to come to an agreement with the CFIA, something Rhinehart says will happen “as quickly as possible.”
Rhinehart didn’t speci

A year ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stunned the automotive world by announcing that henceforth, all of his company’s vehicles would be shipped with the hardware necessary for “full self-driving.” By 2019, Tesla drivers would be able to sleep in their cars, he suggested. Musk one-upped that a few months later, vowing to demonstrate a completely autonomous, cross-country trip in a Tesla by the end of 2017.But since then, the company has fallen behind in updating its flagship semi-aut

Extreme weather events like hurricanes and wildfires have already cost the US more than $350 billion over the last decade, and climate change is only going to make things worse, according to a new government report released today.
The study by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal agency that does audits on behalf of Congress, warns that climate change will impact various sectors and regions differently. For instance, storm losses from sea level rise, more intense storms, and inc

Mark Zuckerberg has committed $45 million from his philanthropy organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), to help curb mass incarceration and improve affordable housing options in American urban centers, according to a report today from Vice News. The issues mark some of the first causes Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have targeted through political means, including donations and ballot support, beyond Facebook’s role in the immigration debate with the industry lobbying g

 Most young adults don’t have credit cards these days. Many of them are concerned about accruing debt. Others are finding it difficult to build credit.
A handful of startups are now focused on building alternatives. One of these is Deserve, which recently changed its name from SelfScore.
The Menlo Park-based startup had been working with international students to assess credit. Now… Read More

The Phoros PS10 is a new home speaker that features support for Amazon’s Alexa assistant, which would ordinarily relegate it to a pile of similar, Alexa-infused products if not for one thing: it’s the first Alexa device to support DTS Play-Fi for multi-room audio.While DTS’s Play-Fi may not have the brand power of larger companies like Sonos, it’s still one of the more widely used wireless home audio standards around. So if you’ve already been building out your soun

Tracking gadgets can be really useful when you can’t find something at home, but they aren’t too much help once you run out of Bluetooth range. A new tracker called Fynd wants to fix that, claiming to be the world’s smallest cellular tracking device and the first to use 4G LTE. It certainly is small.  I had the change to check one out in person, and it’s a bit smaller than a Fig Newton (1.77″ x 1.22″ x 0.35″). It has a couple of loops so you can sl

Harvard Business Review yesterday released the results of a study which determined women don’t behave differently than men at work. Despite the fact that they’re clearly treated differently, promoted less, and work for lower wages – the obvious biological differences between men and women aren’t the problem. The real culprit is bias. Yes people, here we are in 2017, and we’re still trying to prove that women should be treated as individuals — not members of a

Earlier this year, Google announced it would allow add-ons for Gmail, and the time has finally come. Launching today, add-ons will allow third-party developers to integrate their services with Gmail directly. The first partners include Asana, Trello, DialPad, Intuit QuickBooks, and Wrike. The addition will help enterprise users save a bit of time by not requiring them switch apps constantly. A DocuSign add-on is coming soon, which should be pretty helpful. Right now, Google has only added busine

Google is adding a bunch of new games and activities to the Google Assistant today as a way to keep kids entertained. The update, which was previewed earlier this month, includes “more than 50 new games, activities, and stories,” ranging from things like musical chairs and freeze tag to science trivia, Disney-themed games, and original kids’ tales. They’ll work on Android phones and the Google Home.
So that kids can use these games on their own (and to sign up some new Gm

In 2015, game studio Supermassive released Until Dawn, a title that looked and played out much like a typical, almost cliche, horror movie. But there was one aspect of the game that made it feel different: choice. Horror movies are filled with people making seemingly inexplicable decisions that lead to death, and Until Dawn was your chance to show how smart you are by making the right choices and keeping everyone alive. Though it was a single-player game, Until Dawn became something of a social

Following a test this past summer, Instagram is now letting users broadcast live with a friend. Users can invite anyone who's currently watching their broadcast to join, although only two people can broadcast simultaneously, which is visualized through a split screen. The owner of the broadcast can remove their guest and add someone else whenever they want.The actual stories will look different in Instagram's feed, too. Instead of a single live circle, you'll see two circles stacked on top of ea

There’s a joke that circulates online every few years. It’s a picture of a floppy disk, accompanied by the claim that a kid thought it was a real-life version of the “save” icon. Every time it pops up, people laugh, hit “like,” and marvel both at their own age and the cluelessness of kids today.
Over the last week, this gag has been making the rounds on Twitter yet again, thanks to a user under the name Bill Gross. His tweet went viral, with more than 174K ret

At the start of this year, Chinese search giant Baidu introduced a new system called DeepVoice. It uses deep learning, a popular artificial intelligence technique, to build a system that can convert text-to-speech. The first version was able to produce short sentences that, at least on a cursory listen, were nearly indistinguishable from a real person. That system could learn one voice at a time, and required hours of data to master each one.DeepVoice 2, which debuted in May, could imitate a voi

Oh, to be a web developer in 2017. We’ve long passed the “bad old days” of Flash (RIP), Silverlight, and ActiveX. It’s now possible to build gorgeous, engaging, animated websites using the holy trinity of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript — no plugins required. If there’s a downside, it’s that it can be time-consuming, and requires a fair bit of know-how. WebFlow is a service that lets users visually create websites, simply by dragging-and-dropping and fillin

Uber is adding a bunch of new fees to sweeten the pot for drivers who may be reluctant to wait for slow passengers, drive longer distances for more out-of-the-way pickups, or get hit with trip cancellations at the last minute. That means some trips may become a little more expensive for passengers — especially those who live far away or take a little longer than usual to get in the car.It’s an acknowledgment that the job of driving begins long before the rider gets into the car, and

Late last year, Annapurna — the film production company behind movies like Her and American Hustle — announced that it was getting into games with a new interactive division, with a slate that included the next release from Ken Wong, lead designer on the original Monument Valley. (Wong had just recently set out to launch his own studio, called Mountains.) Now Wong is finally ready to reveal the studio’s first release: Florence, a visual novel about relationships and love. While

Smart. Everything is smart these days: refrigerators, televisions and yes, even cameras. But for some reason smart seems less so when you slap a $20 price tag on it. I mean, how smart can a $20 device really be? Yet for some reason I still agreed to try a camera that costs less than a fill-up at the local gas station. And I’m glad I did. Wyze Cam is a smart home camera designed for, well, whatever you want. It’s easy to find uses for a $20 camera that fits in the palm of your hand,

Amazon may have just announced a new flagship Kindle, but it knows a lot of people do the bulk of their reading on their smartphones. The company today announced an extensively redesigned version of its Kindle app for Android and iOS. It’s largely a cosmetic overhaul, but one that has important changes for usability. The most obvious change is a new a light theme, meant to better replicate the physical reading experience when browsing your library (don’t worry, you can still pick a

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 trailer for American Satan was emailed to me in a

When Stranger Things debuted in 2016, it became an unexpected, massive hit that captivated legions of fans around the world. Now, with season 2 set to begin streaming on October 26th, it will be the end of a year of waiting to see what happens next. Netflix will make all nine season 2 episodes available at once, which means ambitious or addicted subscribers can take a day off work and get caught up with the entire story in a single day. But should they?
Andrew: When Stranger Things first hit, it

You'll soon no longer be chained to using "OK Google" to access the Google Assistant on your phone. As first reported by Android Police, Google is slowly giving Android phone owners the ability to activate the Assistant with "Hey Google." Google Homes already respond to both phrases, but phones had yet to gain the functionality.
Users will have to retrain the Assistant once prompted to update, as you can see below:The update isn't available to everyone just yet, but it seems to have started roll

In an attempt to provide more transparency on how Facebook’s News Feed ranks content, the company today announced a new set of guidelines for publishers.
“We don’t want to say something that’s going to change over time.”
Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s head of the News Feed, said during an announcement at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism that the guidelines were meant to provide standards that were “more clear about what works and what doesn’t on ou

Anime series Urahara is dreamy, but it’s also outright ridiculous to watch. Its characters are drawn and written like cutesy young Japanese fashionistas, the kind of costume-and-style mavens who hang around Tokyo’s Harajuku district. But the show also has insanely wacky elements, like an alien who’s also a talking piece of fried shrimp tempura, and who doubles as a scarf. (He introduces himself as Ebifuya, a Japanese pun on shrimp.)
Urahara’s plot begins in a relatively n

Google is going through a rough patch this week – and things just got a little worse for the Mountain View company. In its latest monthly software review, independent antivirus testing firm AV-TEST inspected Google’s Play Protect – the Google Play antivirus system put in place to guard your phone from malicious apps – and found it to be significantly less reliable than most third-party alternatives. In fact, the research suggests that, on average, Play Protect

Facebook has apologized after a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police for a post saying “good morning” that its automatic-translation service erroneously translated as “attack them” in Hebrew and “hurt them” in English, reports Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The man is a construction worker near Jerusalem, reports The Guardian. He posted a photo of himself last week leaning against a bulldozer with the caption “يصبحه

Rescue robots could be incredibly useful tools in the future, diving into situations too dangerous for humans. But if you’ve seen current-generation robots try to tackle these sorts of scenarios, you’ll know even the most advanced lack the coordination and flexibility of movement required. To fix this, a group of researchers from Japan are trying a new method of robot-control, letting a human operate a bot essentially like a giant puppet.This sort of remote control system isn’t

Delphi, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, is acquiring Boston-based self-driving car startup NuTonomy for an upfront purchase price of $400 million as well as $50 million in earn-outs, the companies announced today.Delphi isn’t as well-known in the self-driving space as its much bigger rivals Uber, Waymo, and Tesla. A GM spinoff now based in the UK, the company has been showing off its autonomous technology for over three years, mostly in Pittsburgh and Singapore. And

In the world of online commerce, we hear a lot about to how to sell more and earn more. We worry about website design, testimonials, product descriptions and great graphics. We stress about copywriting and customer security and the color of our “buy now” buttons. All of this is important, to be sure, and it all comes down to one thing: creating that elusive “delighted customer.” Yet customer delight isn’t always created on the customer side of the website. There&rs

Getting earbuds to fit snug and comfortably in people’s ears is a challenge that has its own market of solutions, from expensive to occasionally odd. Sure, most earbuds come with multiple tips these days, but there are also earbuds that you boil, and even ones that harden with electricity and heat. Now a Japanese startup called Vie Style has a much simpler take on the solution: soft, squishy earbuds.
Vie Fit are $149 truly wireless earbuds that hit Kickstarter today for $74 with an adverti

As Australians agonizingly await the final results from the same-sex marriage survey (which doesn’t even guarantee a change in the law), gay couples continue having to tie the knot elsewhere, as it’s insanely the only way. A dedicated group from Sydney have done their best to try and change this with an event they termed Virtual Equality. The project gives Australians the possibility to experience a same-sex wedding the only way legally possible in Australia – through vir

Amazon is set to release its new 4K Fire TV streaming device just in time for the holidays. I’ve spent the last week putting one through the paces to determine if it was a worthy challenger among streaming media gadgets. I’m happy to report it’s a silky smooth operator that’s perfectly priced to take its place near the head of the pack. The Fire TV isn’t a revolutionary leap ahead – if you’re anything like me you’ll just use it to watch Netflix an