Technology news

Levi Strauss is introducing a digitizing technique that uses lasers to ethically create designs on its jeans in place of manual labor. Called Project FLX (which stands for Future-Led Execution), the technique will cut out harmful chemicals and reduce labor-intensive steps in producing jean finishes from between 18 to 24 steps to just three. Levi is also planning to scale this across the company’s denim supply chain.
“Our first step in the new process is to photograph the jean, and t

Microsoft is rolling out an updated version of Skype for Android, one that’s optimized for devices running older versions of the OS, providing better audio and video quality for lower-end devices.The new update will optimize the app for Android devices running versions 4.0.3 to 5.1. Microsoft says that this version “is lighter on both disk and memory consumption,” and that it’ll provide better audio and video for those devices, in addition to better performance when the

The first time I merged a kitty cat into another, I was immediately rewarded with a new type, the kitten. But it took two kittens to make a sneaky cat, and four kittens to make a Japanese bobtail. By the time I reached the 20th cat, the elusive Egyptian Mau, it took merging 262,144 kitty cats together.
It’s been weeks since I began playing Cat Condo, a mobile game on iOS and Android, created by a Taiwanese start-up called Zepni Ltd., and progress has definitely stalled. It’s an idle

Many years ago, in a moment of candid honesty, Nilay Patel described how his childhood was somehow defined and irrevocably ruined by an attempt to set up and use an IR blaster. It might also have had something to do with being a Packers fan? I can’t remember clearly, it was so long ago. The important takeaway was that IR blasters are in some way disastrous and evil.
It’s 2018. Nilay is now my boss, and seems relatively chill for someone who struggled so mightily with a glorified TV

Smart lighting company LIFX has produced a range of products that you can control from your phone or with a virtual assistant such as Alexa or Siri. Now, Microsoft users can join them: the company announced that users can now control their smart lights with the company’s virtual assistant, Cortana.The lights connect directly to your home’s Wi-Fi, and LIFX says that users can ask Cortana to turn the lights on and off (specific lights or the entire house), set the lights to a certain

This year’s Geneva Auto Show is shaping up to be a blockbuster event, with a whole slate of supercars, ultra-fast racers, and bold concepts for us to feast on. Moreover, this is going to be the European auto industry’s chance to shine, with major electric cars coming from Jaguar, Audi, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz.It’s a sign that the European automakers are beginning to take Tesla more seriously, especially after wrestling with the fact that the Model S outsold both the Merc

The Nintendo Switch and one of its flagship games, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild turned one year old this weekend. To commemorate the occasion, Nintendo announced (via GameSpot) a five-disc, limited edition soundtrack containing hundreds of tracks used in the game. Unfortunately, it’ll only be available in Japan, and it’s pretty expensive.The company has already released a soundtrack for the game, bundling a “Sound Selections” CD with the Master and Special edition

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our new biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.
Digging through Facebook or Twitter to figure out a friend’s birthday isn’t something you’d normally think twice about. Even if you aren’t especially close, it’s a fairly normal thing. But in Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You this everyday activity tak

The biggest night in Hollywood is finally here. It’s time for the 90th Academy Awards ceremony, aka the Oscars, the magical evening when the biggest names in show business sit down to see who got the industry’s biggest awards, and hope for some timely humor to break up the scripted award speeches and “This show is sooooo long” jokes.Who’s up for awards?
The Shape of Water leads the pack this year, with an impressive 13 nominations, including Best Picture, Guillermo

Amazon has unveiled (via Engadget) a new toolset for skill developers: the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) sound library. It’s a free repository of sound clips that developers can use to add enhance the skills that they are creating for the company’s smart assistant.The skills come in 14 categories: Ambience, Animal, Battle, Cartoon, Foley, Home, Human, Impact,Magic, Musical, Nature, Office, SciFi, and Transportation. Each category features a variety of stock sounds, along with an SSML code

There are a ton of podcasts out there, but finding the right one can be difficult. In our new column Pod Hunters, we cover what we’ve been listening to that we can’t stop thinking about.
A couple of years ago, Verge listener David Carlson wanted to help his wife. She had a new job with a long commute, and he wanted her to read some of his favorite articles at The Verge, like All Queens Must Die and Welcome to Uberville, so he recorded audio versions for her to listen to en route. He

I want to hate the HomePod. Apple’s new $350 speaker symbolizes everything backward and compromising about the iPhone maker’s walled garden: the speaker requires you have an iOS device to use it, and it demands an Apple Music account to make use of Siri-powered voice control playback. It is antithetical to platform-agnostic Sonos and unabashedly so, as if Apple is daring its competitors to try and compete with its hardware prowess and platform lock-in.And yet, I find myself mulling

When Star Trek: Discovery launched on CBS last September, it went where no Star Trek show had gone before. Instead of focusing on standalone episodes like its predecessors, its first season was a single, extended story arc about a war between the Klingons and the Federation. Rather than scientific exploration, cultural exchange, and diplomatic missions, the USS Discovery’s captain, Gabriel Lorca, was hell-bent on defeating the Klingons, even when it meant venturing into ethical gray areas

On August 24th, 1928, a 17-year-old high school kid jumped into the Hudson River and snuck inside a ship that was soon headed to Antarctica. Billy Gawronski, the son of Polish immigrants, wanted nothing more than to go to the ice continent with his hero, explorer Richard Byrd. But he was caught — and sent back home.So Gawronski tried again, and again: the third time he stowed away on one of Byrd’s ships, all part of the same fleet heading to the South Pole in 1928, he was again foun

Last week, YouTube said that some of the warnings and bans handed down to some right-wing channels might have been mistakes from human moderators, but despite the walk back, some companies have begun pulling ads from Infowars’ The Alex Jones Channel.CNN reports that numerous companies, including Nike, Moen, Expedia, Acer, ClassPass, Honey, Alibaba, and OneFamily, have pulled their ads after learning that their ads were running on Jones’ channel.
Jones has risen to notoriety in recen

I’ve been coming to Mobile World Congress for close to a decade now, and I’ve never seen the iPhone copied quite so blatantly and cynically as I witnessed during this year’s show. MWC 2018 will go down in history as the launch platform for a mass of iPhone X notch copycats, each of them more hastily and sloppily assembled than the next.
No effort is being made to emulate the complex Face ID system that resides inside Apple’s notch; companies like Noa and Ulefone are in s