Technology news

GUEST: Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are generating excitement in financial circles lately due to their potential for increasing privacy and security for blockchain participants. The concept itself is not new, as cryptographers have been working with zero-knowledge/interactive proofs for years. But the protocols are now being incorporated into “establishment” blockchain platforms as financial companies look at new ways to use blockchain technology and address its current shortcomings.
M

GUEST: We’ve spent so long wringing our hands and worrying about artificial and virtual intelligence that we forgot to roll out the welcome mat when they finally arrived.
Now, when major tech companies give their annual keynotes, they can’t help but pepper the narrative with phrases like “machine learning.” What does it all mean, though? Should we crank up the worry now that it looks like every tent-pole feature of self-learning software could also be a critical flaw?
The

The internet’s most hated man, Ajit Pai, was taken down from YouTube for seven hours after a copyright complaint from the record label Mad Decent. Earlier this week, The Daily Caller posted a video of the FCC chairman dismissing concerns over net neutrality by while dancing around in a Santa suit to “Harlem Shake” and swinging a lightsaber. The flippant tone he took to the hot button issue of net neutrality was unpopular, and as of writing, the video currently stands at 7k like

The Washington Post reports that the Trump Administration has prohibited the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from using seven words in official documents used for next year’s budget.The agency was informed of the prohibition at a meeting on Thursday by those who oversee its budget. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-ba

GUEST: We’re at a precipice when it comes to the internet of things. Everyone loves prognosticating about the implications, but many are still unclear about how exactly IoT will impact their businesses. Still, it’s clear the tide is turning quickly. In a July McKinsey survey, 98 percent of respondents said most companies in their industry are planning enterprise IoT initiatives. And the two main areas where those companies plan to use IoT is in optimizing service operations and impro

In September, publisher Kroncker Wallis Kickstarted its new edition of influential math text Euclid’s Element. The publisher has a new project that’s now funding on the platform: Illustrating Nature: The World Through the Eyes of Alexander von Humboldt is a book that collects the illustrations and notes of one of the world’s greatest scientific explorers.Born in 1769, von Humboldt was a scholar and explorer who traveled the world studying geography and biology. An early advocat

Today’s business climate is fraught with a justified sense of existential dread. Its source is not new – competition and disruption have existed since the beginning of commerce. But today that anxiety is aggravated by bigger stakes, readily available funding, rapid information flow, and an unprecedented speed of technological advance. Taken together, those factors and others are depriving startup founders and Fortune 500 CEOs alike the respite of a good night’s sleep. But apar

The new year is just around the corner, and that means a whole new slate of movies and TV shows to watch on your streaming service of choice will soon be on their way. Netflix will be kicking the new year off in a big way, and it comes down to four words: Tim Burton’s original Batman.
Okay, that might not be a huge slam dunk for everyone else, but I’m certainly excited about it. The service will also be adding a wide selection of new original movies, like Mike Flanagan’s thrill

Each year, tech consulting giant Accenture makes predictions about the kind of technology we’ll see at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. I interviewed Greg Roberts, managing director for Accenture’s North American high-tech industry practice, about the predictions for CES 2018, the big tech trade show that will take place in Las Vegas in the second week of January.
(Here’s Accenture’s CES predictions for CES 2017 and CES 2016). Roberts sees five major storie

Since the week before Thanksgiving, I’ve been using the iPhone X. Prior to that, I was using the iPhone 8 Plus, which Apple loaned me. During the busy fall reviews season, I also used the Google Pixel 2 and briefly used the Essential smartphone.But this article isn’t a round up of these new phones or a direct comparison of all four. It’s about the iPhone X.Some of my fellow Verge writers determined that iPhone X is “easily the best smartphone ever made.” There are a

GUEST: The Equifax breach, which impacted an estimated 145.5 million U.S. consumers, was in many ways the enterprise security story of 2017. That’s why so many of us were shocked when, during (now former) Equifax CEO Richard Smith’s Congressional testimony, we repeatedly heard him blame the company’s breach on a single IT person failing to install a patch. On the surface, this sounds like an error so easily avoidable as to be a travesty of incompetence or neglect. Indeed, Equif

I haven't seen The Last Jedi yet (I'm going Saturday night!), but I'm excited to catch it this weekend. That's not something I would have expected two years ago: I've never been a big Star Wars fan, but The Force Awakens is such a perfect start to the new trilogy that it was able to change that.
What I love about The Force Awakens (and what I suspect longtime Star Wars fans dislike about it) is that it treats Star Wars as myth in order to usher a new generation into that world. The movie is buil

Yesterday, Firefox users noticed a strange new plug-in popping up in their browsers. A new plug-in called Looking Glass found its way into each instance of the new Firefox Quantum browser. It was disabled by default, but users were still alarmed to see a plugin they hadn’t installed. When they checked to see what Looking Glass did, they found a vague and ominous description — “MY REALITY IS JUST DIFFERENT THAN YOURS” — which did little to quiet suspicions.
“I

Virtual reality may be stalled with consumers, but it might be catching on with enterprises. That’s one of the messages delivered recently by the “extended reality” team at Accenture, the big tech and business consulting company.
Extended reality applies to augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality applications. To see a company like Accenture embracing extended reality is encouraging for the fledgling technologies, as Accenture is the largest digital agency in

Christmas is nine days away, which makes this weekend the perfect time for last minute holiday shopping, either for yourself or loved ones. There’s a lot of great tech on sale that make excellent gifts including the Google Home Mini and Kindle Paperwhite. For more gift ideas, check out The Verge’s 2017 Holiday Gift Guide.
Highlights include discounts on Amazon devices, matching most Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing, and Sennheiser’s holiday sale offering $100 off the HD1 o

It’s been close to five years since Google decided to shut down Reader, the ubiquitous and beloved RSS news client. At one point, I used to do almost all my internet reading through RSS. I kept my feeds meticulously clean, poring over personal blog entries and tabbing quickly down the news, opening stories that piqued my interest. The loss of my favorite platform felt like a personal betrayal.
After Reader died, I switched to Feedly, which I’m still using today. But my relationship w

I’m sure you haven’t been able to escape the media’s endless gloomy predictions about the fate of the app. We’ve been told that new apps are a waste of money. Growth rates are sluggish. Nobody is downloading apps anymore (beyond the few we can’t live without like WhatsApp and Facebook). But all you need to do is take a look at the statistics: the app bubble is showing no signs of bursting. On a global scale, as more people around the world own mobile devices, the a

At some point, most science fiction readers come across the “Big Three” authors from its so-called Golden Age: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Over the course of his lifetime, Clarke witnessed the birth of the space age, and helped push science fiction from a nascent literary movement into a modern vision for humanity’s future with grounded, realistic stories that drew on science and technology—themes that are more relevant than ever today, on the

In February 2015, journalist Kate Dawson was browsing the Getty Images website when she stumbled upon an enigmatic black and white photo of a woman with four strings of pearls around her neck and a chiffon scarf around her nose and mouth. The woman was surrounded by an ominous gray haze. “I was just struck by the photo,” Dawson tells The Verge.That image was taken in December 1952, when London was trapped in a deadly cloud of fog and pollution for five days. At the time, the city ran

Science fiction and virtual reality go together like medieval fantasy and LARPing. Two intergalactic peas in a space pod, if you will. So naturally, the popularity of the latest and greatest form of interactive entertainment – VR headsets – means it was only natural that one of the largest and beloved sci-fi properties on the planet  – Star Wars – got in on the action.
But despite that obvious overlap, we still don’t have a comprehensive, commercially

By now you may either know an influencer, or have heard of influencer marketing. You may even be following a few and have seen them promote products which may have at one point piqued your curiosity and even helped you trust their recommendations more… or stop following them because you’re annoyed. Either way, influencer marketing has become a mainstream strategy for driving earned media via trusted experts within niche categories like beauty, fitness, and food.    The so

A new “Big Rooms” update to desktop sharing app Bigscreen will allow a host to share their computer screen with dozens of people in VR.
Since it launched in March 2016, Bigscreen offered rooms where up to four people could share their desktops with each other. Some major updates shipped since then, including high quality video streaming and a giant theater screen so people could enjoy better movies and TV shows together. The “Big Rooms” update, though, represents a major

(Reuters) — Facebook Inc on Friday struck back against scientific researchers and tech industry insiders who have criticized the world’s biggest social media network and its competitors for transforming how people behave and express emotion.
Facebook, in a corporate blog post, said that social media can be good for people’s well-being if they use the technology in a way that is active, such as messaging with friends, rather than passive, such as scrolling through a feed of othe

GamesBeat Decides hosts Jeffrey Grubb and Mike Minotti pop in for a quick catch up. The crew is busy picking the best games of the year, so that means time is running short for your normally scheduled program.
But on this week’s episode, Jeff and Mike talk about Hellblade, Gorogoa, and Hearthstone. They then dive into a news appetizer with some NPD numbers, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Xbox One, and more.
Games discusses:
Hearthstone
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Gorogoa
Wha

Defying the facts, the law, and the will of millions of Americans, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to repeal net neutrality protections. It’s difficult to understate how radical the FCC’s decision was.
The Internet has operated under formal and informal net neutrality principles for years. For the first time, the FCC has not only abdicated its role in enforcing those principles, it has rejected them altogether.
Here’s the good news: the fight is far from over, a

Gamers today can get an itemized breakdown of their biggest achievements as well as total hours spent in front of their Xbox over the past year. Microsoft’s new 2017 Xbox Year in Review site is basically a litmus test for couch potatoes. After visiting the site and logging in with your Xbox Live Gold account, the page shows off a variety of stats. I would presume the display would be much more meaningful if I weren’t measuring my own stats (I typically game on PC or Nintendo’s

Google announced today in a blog post that Google Maps can now give step-by-step instructions to public transportation riders getting around on the bus and train. This is for the Android version of the app. To keep you on track toward your destination, navigation instructions — including bus and train transfers — now appear in push notifications that appear on smartphone lockscreens along with expected time of arrival (ETA) and the number of stops before it’s time to

Threatened by House Republicans last month, the latest version of a bill with sweeping tax cuts preserves a massive federal credit for electric cars — and the bill looks to have the necessary votes to pass. By Friday afternoon, Republican senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) agreed to this version of the $1.5 billion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
A bill passed in the House of Representatives last month would have killed the electric vehicle tax credit that ranges between $2,500 and $

Last month, details emerged about a secretive unit within Uber dedicated to stealing trade secrets, surveilling competitors, using self-destructing messages, and dodging government regulators. The accusations came from a former member of Uber’s security team, Ric Jacobs, whose 37-page letter detailing all of Uber’s shady behavior was sent to Uber’s management earlier this year. Prior to today, only snippets of the letter have been read aloud in court. Now, a redacted copy of th

GUEST: Hey Alexa, play some music.Ok, Google, turn on the lights.
Five years ago, these commands would have made no sense. But for the past two and a half years, voice-enabled speakers have steadily gained traction, introducing the world to voice-activated technologies. As we approach 2018, there’s no sign of slowing down the smart speaker revolution.
For as much as we use our smartwatches, phones, tablets, and laptops, we will soon begin using smart speakers with the same frequency. Alrea

 (Bloomberg) — More than eight years since the birth of bitcoin, central banks around the world are increasingly recognizing the potential upsides and downsides of digital currencies. The guardians of the global economy have two sets of issues to address. First is what to do, if anything, about the emergence and growth of the private cryptocurrencies that are grabbing more and more attention — with bitcoin now sitting above $16,000 and futures trading this week heralding a

GUEST: For years, esports has developed and grown organically and without much structure, a real Wild West of teams and leagues and sponsors. Game publishers were so happy that people were buying, playing, and talking about their games that they were satisfied to sit back and enjoy the profits. But as the esports industry continues to explode, publishers are reining in some of that power so they can reap even more financial benefits.
A great example of this shift in power is Blizzard Entert