Technology news

The 2016 election seemed like a tipping point for marijuana legalization. Almost 60 percent of Americans support legalizing the drug, and voters in California — the state with the largest economy — decided to approve recreational weed, effectively tripling the scope of the national industry overnight.But a permanent path toward legalization is unsure, says scholar Emily Dufton. Her book Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (out now from Basic Books) chronic

Instagram Stories are fantastic. We all love watching short movies about every person we’ve ever met or cared about, all day, in the middle of anything. But because there’s almost nothing left that doesn’t involve money in a loud, tacky way, there are often ads in the middle of Instagram Stories. Usually you can skip them and it’s fine.
Usually! Not today. Today on the web, a self-proclaimed, confusingly young venture capitalist named Blake Robbins brought the world&rsquo

Google just announced three new photography applications: Storyboard (Android only), Selfissimo! (iOS and Android), and Scrubbies (iOS only). The releases are part of a new “appsperiments” program that Google just launched.
The new program was inspired by the company’s Motion Stills app, which was released last year with the goal of taking technology in development from Google and turning it into actual apps. Like Motion Stills, the trio of new apps are fully functional softwar

President Donald Trump is officially directing NASA to send astronauts back to the Moon, as a pit stop to eventually send people to Mars. The move is part of a new order, Space Policy Directive-1, which Trump signed today during a very brief ceremony at the White House. The directive is meant to reorient NASA’s focus from the Red Planet to the Moon, at least in the short term, shifting away from the priorities set forth by the Obama administration.
The signing appropriately coincides with

If “the customer is always right” is the golden rule of customer service, then “treat each customer as an individual” should be the golden rule for brand marketing. Every consumer wants to feel as though the brands they support view them as a unique entity, rather than another customer identification number. For years, brands were able to get by delivering mass communications and services to their buyers, but those days are gone. Today’s consumers want assurance th

Microsoft is now allowing its Cortana digital assistant to access Google Calendar data. The software giant has added a new Gmail connection to Cortana, which will enable the digital assistant to access Google Calendar data. If you’re a Windows 10 user that primarily uses a Gmail account, this new feature will make it easier for the assistant to access calendar appointments and trigger reminders across multiple calendars.
The new Google Calendar support also means you can use commands on Co

Just over a year ago, Square Enix released the long-awaited Final Fantasy XV. The game was a weird and wonderful mash-up of worlds; part futuristic, while still retaining the fantasy elements so intrinsic to the series; part typical role-playing epic, but set against the backdrop of a heart-warming road trip. The end result was a bit of a mess, but compelling nonetheless, and the experience has continued to grow over the months with multiple expansions and updates.
If you’re curious how th

Remember Google’s AR Stickers? Months after they were first announced as a headlining feature on the Pixel 2, they’re finally rolling out to the public – including an exclusive set of Star Wars stickers. They work pretty much like you expect: you can place a variety of 3D characters into your videos or images. Of course, this isn’t anything new: AR Stickers are a pretty direct response to Apple’s AR Kit features on iOS, and Snapchat’s been doing something sim

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), the megapopular arena multiplayer game, is coming out on Xbox One in various regions tomorrow. If you don’t already have the game in your region, there is a way around the restrictions. According to VG247, you need to have pre-ordered the game for this to work. You’ll also need to have purchased your game key from somewhere other than the Xbox Store. With me so far? Now you set your Xbox as your Home Xbox — do this by going to Person

China’s equivalent of Google, Baidu, is now offering a service that can evaluate whether your website is optimized to be used in China, as reported by Nikkei Asian Review. The new service is aimed at Japanese businesses interested in expanding into China but daunted by the prospect of braving the “Great Firewall.”
Other English-language services like one offered by Comparitech and Great Firewall of China already show which sites are censored, but this service is significant bec

After announcing them back in October, Google is launching its augmented reality stickers on the Pixel and Pixel 2 this week. The stickers are cute 3D creatures that appear inside of photos and videos taken in Google’s camera app using new AR tech to appear like they’re really in the scene.
To make the whole thing a bit more fun, Google is launching the feature with two branded sticker sets: Stranger Things and Star Wars. You’ll be able to pull up cartoon versions of the Strang

The Walking Dead is back, and for us here at The Verge, that’s an opportunity to examine just how effective the show can be in creating a complex villain. As played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, big bad Negan has always been violent. But thanks to his man-baby antics, he’s stubbornly remained a comic book thug, never becoming the nuanced character the show so sorely needs.
Each week, I’ll be analyzing the show through its presentation of Negan: how he acts, how he delivers his jokes

Airbnb is developing virtual and augmented reality features to help guests find and navigate rental listings, the company announced on its blog today. Three-dimensional scans and 360-degree photos would allow users to get a better sense of a listing, and augmented reality overlays could help guests better understand the homes on a smaller scale once they’re in it. The company has been looking into VR to build trust between guests and hosts since last year, and this announcement confirming

It was only a matter of time before HQ Trivia had competitors. The live mobile trivia game show for iOS has skyrocketed in popularity in the four months it’s been around, seeing hundreds of thousands of people log into the twice-daily game to win as much as $10,000. Now, The Q — short for “The Question” — has arrived to try and cement its position as a competitor before HQ makes it to Android.
The Q was founded by Will Jamieson, the CEO of video platform Stream. Ori

Amazon announced today that Alexa has been updated to include support for music alarms. So instead of just asking Alexa to set an alarm for you, you’ll be able to request specific songs, playlists, artists, or genres to get you out of bed in the morning.The new feature supports a variety of music services to use as alarm tones, including Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, SiriusXM, and iHeartRadio. You’ll be able to request songs in the same way that you can for regular playback

Comcast believes it’s acceptable to inject hundreds of lines of code into any web page you visit if it thinks you’re in need of a hardware upgrade. And even if you don’t need an upgrade, you’re wrong. A user recently took to the company’s forums to complain of its practice of running its own code on webpages customers visit in order to prompt them with special Comcast messages. Posting under the name “bham3dman” on the company’s official foru

Apple has acquired Shazam, the company announced today. The deal was first reported by TechCrunch last week and is worth $400 million, according to Recode. Shazam lets users identify songs, movies, TV shows, and commercials from short audio clips.
“We are thrilled that Shazam and its talented team will be joining Apple,” an Apple spokesperson told The Verge. "Apple Music and Shazam are a natural fit, sharing a passion for music discovery and delivering great music experiences to our

A fledgling lidar startup is launching out of stealth today, backed by more than $30 million in investors’ money. San Francisco-based Ouster has officially unveiled its OS1 lidar, which it said represents a “step-change in lidar sensing technology” compared to what is currently available elsewhere on the market, with “marked improvements in mass, form factor, and power requirements.”
Ouster said that in addition to improvements in form factor and power req

 Angus Pacala has had a lifelong passion for autonomous cars going all the way back to high school. A little more than a decade ago, he followed the launch of the DARPA Grand Challenge, a Department of Defense competition that pitted research teams against each other over who could build the best autonomous car. Stanford won the challenge in 2005, which is “one of the reasons I went… Read More

An Australian startup called Alauda came out of stealth mode this week to announce its plans to host the world’s first “flying car” race in 2019. It built its own scaled-down prototype, a racecar-shaped quadcopter called the Alauda Mark 1 Airspeeder, that it plans on testing in 2018. And naturally it’s taken to Kickstarter to raise money to fund all its efforts.It’s a twist on the typical story we hear these days about flying cars. While most engineers and developer

The nominations for the 2018 Golden Globes were announced this morning. Let’s see if you can spot the commonality among your options for Best Director!Here they are: Guillermo del Toro (Shape of Water), Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk), Ridley Scott (All the Money in the World), Steven Spielberg (The Post). Great, yes. They are all men.Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut Lady Bird is nominated for Best Musical or Comedy at the awar

Laser League, a unique team-based multiplayer game where players have to avoid lasers in an arena, is hosting a closed beta this weekend on PC via Steam. It will start on December 15 and go on until December 17. You can sign up for the beta here.
We had the chance to check out Laser League at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. We were impressed enough to give the game the Unreal E3 Award for Most Addictive.
Betas give developers a chance to test a game before launchi

American Express has announced that it will no longer require signatures for credit card purchases beginning in April 2018, joining Discover and Mastercard, which have also announced similar changes.According to Jaromir Divilek, an executive VP at American Express, the company is making the change because its “fraud capabilities have advanced so that signatures are no longer necessary to fight fraud.” The company also cites advances in contactless payments, the explosion of popularit

Facebook is experimenting with privacy settings that apply to individual comments. This means that you could write a reply to a thread, but only pre-approved individuals can see it. Here’s what it looks like: Clicking the padlock icon brings up the security settings. This has four options: friends and post owner only; friends only; post owner and commenter only; and everyone else. From what we can tell, this is a small-scale test that’s only available to a handful of users. That&rsq

It’s been a shockingly packed year for great new video games. Over the course of the last 12 months, it seemed like there was never really a pause, or a moment when there wasn’t something interesting to play. To celebrate, this week Verge staff will be publishing essays on their favorite releases of the year, the games that spoke to us personally. Expect to see a new one each morning, culminating in a list of our collective 15 favorite games of 2017 on Friday.
I knew it was love just

PRESS RELEASE:On-demand, full-access in-home vet care focuses on extending preventive pet healthSAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–December 11, 2017– Fuzzy Pet Health, the subscription-based pet healthcare company, announced the close of $4.5M in seed round financing today, along with the launch of its mobile app and expanded in-home vet care options. Co-led by Eniac Ventures and Crosscut Ventures, with participation from Precursor Ventures, SV Angel, Accelerator and FJ Labs, this f

Republic Wireless has announced two new communication devices called the Relay and Anywhere HQ. The Relay is a screen-less, water-resistant device that works like a walkie-talkie, but has the added ability of being able to locate children with GPS, so you can check on them whenever you want.To talk, you just push the button and hold the device close to your face and speak. It connects over 4G LTE and Wi-Fi networks, and also features music, games, and Google Assistant. Other hardware features in

A group of early internet and computing pioneers have called on the Senate’s FCC oversight committee to censure next week’s net neutrality vote. In an open letter to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, 21 signatories said that FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s “rushed and technically incorrect” plan to repeal net neutrality “is an imminent threat to the internet we worked so hard to create.” They want the c

Almost two dozen high-profile technologists have penned an open letter requesting that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cancel an upcoming vote to repeal existing net neutrality rules.
December 14 could prove to be a key day for internet freedom in the U.S., after FCC chair Ajit Pai scheduled a vote he hopes will remove the regulations that currently prevent telecommunication companies from creating a “tiered internet,” or one that would treat various kinds of online conte

The gaming world got a bit of a surprise back in July, when Atari teased it was creating a new console called the Ataribox. Today the company announced you’ll be able to pre-order in just a few days – December 14 to be precise – when it will presumably launch its crowdfunding campaign. But why in the world would you? So far, we know almost nothing about the Ataribox. The last major update we got was in September, which revealed the console would run on Linux and be priced arou

If you’ve been patiently waiting for Google to release its Home Max speaker, well today is your lucky day. Best Buy has begun selling the Google Home Max speaker, with both the chalk and charcoal colors in stock, as first spotted by Phandroid. The $400 Home Max is designed to compete against high-end speakers like Sonos and Apple’s HomePod, whenever that gets released.
Google tells The Verge the Home Max will be available in its store today, but currently it still has an option to jo

Cybersecurity startup Menlo Security has closed a $40 million series C round of funding from American Express Ventures, Ericsson Ventures, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, General Catalyst, Sutter Hill Ventures, Osage University Partners, and Engineering Capital.
Founded out of Menlo Park, California in 2013, Menlo Security seeks to protect organizations from cyberattacks by blocking malware from the web, documents, and email. The Menlo Security Isolation Platform (MSIP) basically sits betwe

Lyft announced today that all Lyft drivers who have completed 10 rides in the last three months will receive discounts of 5 to 20 percent off courses from Guild Education. The online education company works with more than 80 universities to deliver thousands of courses, ranging from GEDs to bachelor’s and master’s degrees, as well as certifications, vocational courses, and English as a Second Language offerings.
Each prospective Guild Education student receives coaching and coun

IBM today announced two new ways for developers to quickly get things done, with the launch of code patterns and IBM Bot Asset Exchange.
Code patterns were made for quickly launching projects in areas like AI, blockchain, and cloud computing. Each package comes with a one-click GitHub repository, documentation, and a collection of resources to get the job done. More than 120 code patterns are available at launch.
The IBM Bot Asset Exchange is a place for third-party developers to share and build

Verizon has long held exclusive rights to mobile streaming of live NFL games, offering the content as a lure to its own subscribers. Today, the telecoms company announced a new deal with the sports league which will see games streamed to mobile devices regardless of carrier.From the 2018 playoffs in January onwards, customers with any mobile carrier will be able to access NFL games through the official NFL Mobile app, Yahoo Sports app, and go90, Verizon’s on-demand streaming service. (Watc

Microsoft’s Xbox One consoles are finally getting 4K YouTube support this week. It’s been a long time coming for the Xbox One S, which launched with 4K Blu-ray support but no 4K YouTube back in August 2016. Google has been slow to add 4K support for the Xbox One, but it’s arriving with a new app update for both the Xbox One X and Xbox One S.
The new YouTube app includes support for 4K resolution videos and 60 fps, ideal for watching gaming footage or sports events. Unfortunatel