Technology news

Back in September, Google said Chrome 64 would address several user concerns around content that autoplays, most notably, the ability to have autoplay videos go silent by default. Now, if you’re really keen on testing it out, you do so today by downloading the Chrome 64 beta, as spotted by Engadget. The company said the full autoplay video blocking feature, which is part of a broader ad blocking effort in Chrome that’s been in the works for quite some time, would arrive in the consum

GUEST: Blockchain-based virtual reality universe Decentraland is holding its first property auction today. The virtual world is a social space linked to crypto coin-based transactions. You can buy a patch of virtual land, build something on it, share that experience with friends and family, or even turn it into a profitable business.
Decentraland’s launch is emblematic of a kind of showdown happening in the VR world at the moment. As virtual reality headsets and mobile VR become more readi

GUEST: Self-driving cars were once thought of as a far-off, and maybe even impossible, concept, but they’re here now. At the end of November, General Motors announced its plan to launch a fleet of driverless cars — without backup drivers — across several major U.S. cities, beginning in 2019. In doing so, the auto industry signified that it’s prepared to lead a dramatic shift in how both humans and commercial goods move from place to place.
Of course, powering th

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is now out in theaters. Many of you will be coming home with a hunger for more Star Wars. Luckily, you’ll be able to find a lot of new content for current games and some deals on the classics.
The Last Jedi characters have invaded Star Wars’ mobile efforts. You can now unlock Finn, Rose, Hux, Terex, and more in games like the strategy-based Commander, the card-based hero brawler Force Arena, and the role-playing game Galaxy of Heroes.
Apple is also holdi

It wouldn’t be a new Star Wars film without an adorable and yet equally divisive pet-like character from which Disney can launch a merchandising gold mine. The Force Awakens gave us the stoic and circular R2-D2 successor BB-8, but Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, which hits theaters today, is all about the porg. To celebrate the puffin-like bird species of planet Ahch-To, on which Luke Skywalker has exiled himself, Disney is launching a Facebook Instant Games mini-game today called Porg

Google today launched ARCore Developer Preview 2, which you can download now from developers.google.com/ar and use to create AR experiences on Android. At the same time, the company announced it is ending support for Tango, its first augmented reality platform.
ARCore is an Android software development kit (SDK) that brings augmented reality to existing and future Android phones without requiring additional sensors or hardware. The first preview was released in August,with support for the Google

Product tie-ins for Star Wars: The Last Jedi seem to have hit the market just in time for the holidays — along with the movie you’ve probably just seen — but there’s already a car that pays homage to next year’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. This is the creatively named Renault Zoe Star Wars edition.The Renault Zoe is an electric car sold primarily in Europe (Boston-based nuTonomy has used them for autonomous test cars), but its maker seems to think it has the right name

Google said today that it’ll be shutting down Project Tango next year, on March 1st. Project Tango was an early effort from Google to bring augmented reality to phones, but it never really panned out. The system was introduced in 2014 and made it into developer kits and even a couple consumer devices as recently as last year.
But those devices required special sensors. And in the meantime, Google (and competitors, like Apple) figured out ways to bring AR features to phones with just the ha

On Wednesday, T-Mobile announced that it plans to launch an internet TV service sometime in 2018. The carrier is in the process of acquiring Layer3 TV for an undisclosed sum to help jumpstart the new offering.
In typical T-Mobile fashion, CEO John Legere vowed that this TV service will radically disrupt the traditional cable / satellite industry, and the company is also touting it as a superior option to other streaming TV competitors like Sling TV, DirecTV Now, PlayStation Vue, Hulu, and YouTub

Samsung is reportedly planning to announce its next flagship phone, the Galaxy S9, in February, according to a report from Bloomberg, with the phones launching as early as March.If true, it’d be one of the earliest announcements for a new model of Samsung’s main Galaxy line, which have typically been announced in March and released in April in years past. As was rumored earlier, the S9 and the accompanying S9 Plus will be more of an iterative update than the drastic redesign of the S

Earlier this year at Microsoft’s Build conference, the company revealed it was working with Apple to get iTunes included in the Windows Store. The promise was that it would be available by the end of 2017, but now it looks like that won’t be happening.
In a statement emailed to ZDnet, an Apple spokesperson said, “We have been working with Microsoft to deliver the full iTunes experience to our customers and we need a little more time to get it right." So at least there’s s

You can now block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. What a Friday. Up until now, you've been unable to block Zuckerberg or his wife Priscilla Chan on Facebook. You'd receive an error message that said something like, “Block Error. Sorry, there was a problem blocking Mark Zuckerberg. Please try again." This wasn't intentional, Facebook told BuzzFeed News a few months ago. Instead, the company says its system got too busy to handle these block requests. Okay then.
Apparently the system has gotten

Did you know you can block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook? What a Friday. Up until September of this year, it was a little-known secret that anybody, including Zuckerberg, could be blocked on the site. But after the company acknowledged this, it was discovered that high-frequency profiles — like the one owned and operated by the creator of Facebook — couldn’t be blocked due to an error that tripped up the feature if a page had been blocked by a large number of users in a short per

Steam has removed icons featuring Matt Furie’s cartoon frog Pepe from its platform, part of Furie’s larger legal battle to wrest the character away from the far right. As reported by Kotaku, users began complaining yesterday that Pepe and Pepe-like emoticons had disappeared from their inventory. The developer of a game called Make America Great Again: The Trump Presidency wrote that they’d removed their emoticons after Steam received a legal order. “If we sign a thing tha

Google Maps is adding a helpful new feature for travelers and commuters who tend to daydream or lose track of time during their train, subway, or bus ride. The app will now send a push notification when you’re approaching your stop.This tiny-but-useful addition is something that some other navigation apps (like CityMapper) already do, and can go a long way in pulling you out of a podcast or Spotify haze so that you get off at the right place.Maps has always done turn-by-turn notifications

I see a lot of movies. I moved to the Bay Area from New York nearly five years ago, knowing not a single person living in San Francisco, and I found going to the movies to be a solitary, almost meditative experience. Even as my friend group expanded, I kept up on the cherished cinematic ritual: the exorbitantly priced snacks, the ticket-taking and seat-selection process, the previews, and then the movie itself, with its sense of experiencing something new and unseen. There’s an antiquated

No parent today should need to be told their kids are at risk every time they go online, use a cellphone, or engage in internet activities. It may be difficult for some to imagine that their child could get involved in something dangerous, but it happens. Even to good kids. To get some insight, we spoke with Dr. Matt Phillips, who is a brain surgeon, a father, and the creator of an AI-powered parenting app called Social Judo. He told us he was worried about his kids “I’m a brain sur

Using Facebook without contributing, in the form of messages and comments on your friends’ posts, makes you feel bad, the company said today. In a remarkable blog post, citing both internal and academic research, the company said “in general, when people spend a lot of time passively consuming information — reading but not interacting with people — they report feeling worse afterward.” At the same time, actively communicating with friends “is linked to improve

For centuries, massive, critical components of our global economy have been organized around legacy infrastructure. Vastly important industries, like government and finance, continue to stagnate behind the capabilities of modern technologies, a demonstration of how complex and regulated systems breed inefficiency. Enter blockchain, an adaptable technology that, if implemented by entrepreneurs and industry leaders effectively, can solve for some of our most fundamental challenges that we face as

Apple has ordered a space drama from Battlestar Galactica creator Ronald D. Moore, Deadline reports. Moore will write the currently untitled series, while Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi (Fargo) will serve as executive producers.
Moore’s show is predicated on the idea that the space race of the Cold War never ended, according to Deadline. It’s the third original scripted show to get a series order from Apple. Last month, Apple ordered the Steven Spielberg anthology series Amazing Stories

Getting battle royale sensation PUBG on the Xbox One was a major coup for Microsoft, and now the company is exploiting that by bundling the game with the Xbox One X over the holidays. According to the company, every purchase of the new 4K console between December 17th and the 31st will include a copy of PUBG (though the promotion is only available in select regions).
PUBG made its Xbox debut this week through the console’s “game preview” program, and while it’s clunkier t

Hagfish are jawless, eel-like creatures that are known to spray huge quantities of goo when attacked. Now, scientists have found another defense mechanism that protects these slimy monsters: their flaccid, squishy skin.Researchers attached mako shark teeth to a guillotine to replicate how a real shark would bite down on a hagfish. The hagfish’s loose skin allowed the shark tooth to cut through skin but never through the underlying muscle. That allows hagfish to squish away, escaping shark

A new electric truck startup came out of stealth this week to announce its plan to bring its heavy-duty electric vehicle to market before the Tesla Semi hits in 2019. Thor Trucks’ prototype, the ET-One, is a “Frankenstein” built from parts cobbled together from other tractor-trailers. It has a range of 300 miles, a full load capacity of 80,000 pounds, and will eventually retail for $150,000. It’s also working on a 100-mile-range version.It seems that everyone from tiny st

We all have that one Facebook friend. You know the one I mean — they post oodles of updates on one particular topic, usually one which doesn’t interest you, or might if they weren’t saturating your entire Newsfeed with the stuff. (I plead the fifth when it comes to my own friends.) You don’t want to unfriend them, or even unfollow them. You just, you know … need a break. Facebook today introduced Snooze with exactly that idea in mind. If you hit Snooze on a friend

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for ho

Aurora Flight Sciences, an aviation and aeronautics research company, recently demonstrated a fully autonomous military helicopter that can be controlled remotely with just a tablet. During a demonstration at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia, an old UH-1H Huey helicopter flew three missions to deliver cargo without a pilot on the controls and with two infantrymen providing minimal instructions from a small hand-held tablet and a laptop.
The helicopter was fitted with onboard LIDAR and

The FCC voted to put an end to net neutrality, giving internet providers free rein to deliver service at their own discretion. There’s really only one condition here: internet providers will have to disclose their policies regarding “network management practices, performance, and commercial terms.” So if ISPs want to block websites, throttle your connection, or charge certain websites more, they’ll have to admit it.
We’re still too far out to know exactly what discl

I’m crap at Christmas. My Achilles heel is finding gifts for people. Some people are good at it. I am not. Typically, one week before Christmas, I’ll go on Amazon and buy a few bottles of bourbon and gin (whatever is cheap in a lightening deal), and dole them out like a booze-soaked Santa Claus. Thankfully, sites like MiPic exist to give people like me a helping hand. In short, MiPic lets you use photos you’ve taken as the basis of a variety of products. You can upload photos

The Vergecast three-piece is back together, with Nilay leading the flagship podcast. The biggest news this week is something we’ve seen coming for a while: on Thursday, the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality rules. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul sit down to discuss the action and their viewpoints on what this means going forward for the internet.Also, the iMac Pro is now available to order and Dieter got to write about it. There’s quite a bit of talk about whether this computer is worth the

Khalil Shreateh, a self-professed IT expert from Palestine, hit the headlines four years ago when he hacked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wall. Shreateh was frustrated that Facebook was ignoring a big security flaw, so demonstrating it on Zuckerberg’s own Facebook wall was an easy way to get the company to act. Shreateh discovered a security flaw in LinkedIn last month, and he reached out to The Verge after becoming frustrated that the company was ignoring his report — just li

I’m never entirely sure how it happens, but my email is constantly filling up with messages from companies from which I don’t remember requesting newsletters or offers. But they somehow keep popping up anyway.I usually tend to just delete these as soon as they arrive to triage the damage, but Google is releasing a new feature for Inbox to help solve this problem. A new card will help you unsubscribe from senders whose emails you haven’t opened in the last month, as reported by

Facebook is now rolling out its Snooze feature to all users after a period of testing in September. The tool lets you mute a friend, page, or group for 30 days so you can temporarily purge their updates from your News Feed.The controls are similar to the current Unfollow / Hide tool that lets you permanently remove a user or page’s updates from your timeline entirely without unfriending them. Instead of Unfollow or Hide, you’ll now see the option to snooze the account for about a mon

Bethesda has really gone all-in with virtual reality. Whereas many developers and publishers have toyed with the medium, releasing smaller experiments to test the waters, over the last few weeks Bethesda has released three of its biggest games in VR. On the surface, it sounds great. With a VR headset, you can become fully immersed in the thrilling horror of Doom, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout, or Skyrim’s picturesque fantasy realm.
In practice, though, the games don’t wor

Since its creation, artificial intelligence (AI) has found use in many different industries, including healthcare. The amount of medical data is astronomically huge and the problem of systematizing, storing, and, above all, using such data is of the utmost importance. People have long hoped that someday, computers will make accurate diagnoses and eliminate medical errors. But no one has created an effective AI doctor yet. The Skychain project promises to revolutionize the healthcare industry, u

Avengers: Infinity War’s Russo Brothers have added a new project to their slate: an adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s recently Kickstarter-funded art book The Electric State.Joe and Anthony Russo won a bidding war for the book, says Deadline, and will act as producers for the project. The brothers are looking to bring on It director Andy Muschietti to direct. They will also bring on the Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the screenwriters behind Captain America: Winter Soldi

A decade from now, there’s a good chance we’ll look back at 2017 as one of the best years ever for new game releases. Just think about it: some of the medium’s most iconic names — like Zelda, Mario, and Resident Evil — came roaring back to prominence, while new names like Horizon Zero Dawn and Cuphead forced their way into the spotlight.
From blockbuster to indie games, console and PC to mobile, the wealth of experiences on offer has been incredible. And narrowing d