Technology news

Year after year, Amazon brags about selling more things than ever, and now the company has added turkey sales to its leaderboard. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Jeff Bezos celebrated the milestone made possible by its takeover of Whole Foods. “Our Prime member exclusive promotion broke Whole Foods’ all-time record for turkeys sold during the Thanksgiving season,” Bezos wrote.In accordance with Amazon’s tradition of congratulating itself for vaguely-defined excellence,

Keeping a clean house is a job that never ends. Having a great vacuum cleaner that can handle it all is absolutely essential. (Especially if you have pets.) After you've decluttered your junk drawers, reorganized your closet, and wiped down months of outdoor water buildup from your windows, it's time to focus on vacuuming the rugs, carpets, cushions, and everywhere else dust, dander, and debris has been hiding. (Can't stand the thought of vacuuming? Check out these robot vacuums instead.)
If you

Keeping a clean house is a job that never ends. Having a great vacuum that can handle it all is absolutely essential. After you've decluttered your junk drawers, reorganized your closet, and wiped down months of outdoor water buildup from your windows, it's time to focus on vacuuming the rugs, carpets, cushions, and everywhere else dust, dander, and debris has been hiding.
SEE ALSO: Tons of vacuums are on sale today, including the Roomba and the Dyson Ball bagless upright
If you haven't introduc

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has revealed in his annual shareholders letter today that his company has over 100 million Prime members, marking the first time in the 13-year history of Amazon offering its Prime membership that the company has ever revealed its number of subscribers.
Analysts have speculated for years as the scope of Amazon’s premium service, which Amazon has kept secret for years. According to Bezos, Amazon Prime also saw its best year ever in 2017, with the company shipping over

Whole Foods will shut down its rewards program, digital coupons, and customers’ online accounts on May 2nd and fold everything into Amazon Prime, according to an email to customers this week. The email, as spotted by Marketwatch, says unused rewards will not roll over to Amazon Prime, so customers should try to use their benefits before the program officially sunsets.
No other details were provided, but the online retailer did hint that additional announcements are forthcoming. Since Amaz

Savedroid, a German company that purportedly raised $50 million in ICO and direct funding, has exited with a bang. The site is currently displaying the above image and the founder — one Dr. Yassin Hankir — has posted a tweet thanking investors and saying “Over and out.”Thanks guys! Over and out … #savedroidICO pic.twitter.com/PMRtjlbEdD
— Yassin Hankir #savedroidico (@YassinHankir) April 18, 2018A reverse image search found Hankir’s photo on this page f

App developers won’t be able to use Google to get around internet censorship anymore. The Google App Engine is discontinuing a practice called domain-fronting, which let services use Google’s network to get around network blocks in countries like China and Iran.
A recent change in Google’s network architecture means the trick no longer works. First spotted by Tor developers on April 13th, the change has been rolling out across Google services and threatens to disrupt services

In a strange way, dick pics have defined this weird, at times beautiful, but mostly horrifying place we call the world wide web.
I mean is there any online experience more universal than encountering a penis you never expected nor wanted to see? It's perhaps only surpassed in its pervasiveness by trolling.
A 2017 market research survey by YouGov, an online polling company, found that 53 percent of millennial women have received one. (The online survey was weighted to represent U.S. adults over 1

The Iranian government appears to be preparing to institute a nationwide ban of Telegram, only days after Russia banned Telegram. Earlier this year, Iran temporarily banned Telegram and Instagram during widespread protests in January. Telegram — an encrypted messaging app that also features channels often used by official bodies like news organizations or even government entities — has 40 million users in Iran, a country where approximately 50 million people have internet access.
In

Although the ability to publish pre-recorded video to Facebook Live has been an option for some time, it’s required the use of third-party programs like OBS and Wirecast. Now, Facebook is testing a feature called Premieres, which will let creators publish already-made videos to Facebook Live, as reported today by Engadget.
While there isn’t much information on Premieres yet, it appears to be angled toward content like movie trailers, Facebook Watch shows, and music videos, and it wo

On Sunday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned his Twitter followers that he had an idea that was “gonna sound crazy:” his company might use a “giant party balloon” to recover the upper stage of its Falcon 9 rocket from orbit.
How could a party balloon help SpaceX bring back a rocket that’s traveling thousands of miles per hour through space? Well, Musk has made bizarre SpaceX decrees before, which have later become reality: The company did launch his Tesla into deep space

Snapchat has slowly but surely been building out Lenses, its augmented reality face filter platform, both as a way to keep users hooked on taking selfies and as a way to earn money from advertisers. Starting this week, Snapchat will introduce its new Shoppable AR feature, which will let advertisers display and sell products through the app’s Lenses, according to TechCrunch. The new feature builds on one Snapchat first introduced nearly three years ago when it first let companies create br

Warning: major spoilers for Avengers: Age of Ultron and the comics crossover event House of M ahead.
In 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel Studios introduced the speedster hero Quicksilver — and then promptly killed him off. There are a lot of potential reasons for Pietro Maximoff to die in the film series, rather than joining the Avengers with his sister Wanda, aka the Scarlet Witch. Marvel Studios may have wanted to avoid confusion with the version of Quicksilver appearing in

It can be difficult to keep track of the progress being made in robotics, but one useful (if informal) marker is how good machines are at assembling Ikea furniture.Why? Because putting together your average Billy bookcase involves skills that are intuitive for humans but challenging for robots. Figuring out how a number of components fit together to make a finished product is basically one big 3D puzzle involving complex movements and the manipulation of delicate items like pins and screws. For

When David Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard, first saw the trailer for the latest Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson movie Rampage, he rolled his eyes. Liu has been working with the gene-editing tool CRISPR for about six years, developing a gene therapy that might one day treat human hearing loss, among other things. In Rampage, a rogue CRISPR experiment is responsible for turning a gorilla, a wolf, and a crocodile into huge, savage monsters. When Liu saw the tra

Silicon Valley is going to have to work through its qualms about providing AI services to the military, said Alphabet board member and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Schmidt said that AI would be useful for “defensive and perhaps offensive purposes” in warfare, and developing the technology would have to be done with the help of the private sector. When asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) how this would work considerin

Solo: A Star Wars Story — and, more specifically, Donald Glover — will pay homage to one of the more puzzling aspects of the original trilogy: Lando Calrissian and his unexplained ability to make everyone mispronounce Han’s name.Since the original trilogy, there’s been some debate on the true pronunciation of “Han.” Lando consistently uses a version that rhymes with “can,” while characters like Luke doggedly stick to “hon.” Last year,

Universal Pictures has released its final trailer for J.A. Bayona’s upcoming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.In the first pair of trailers for the film, we saw that the park’s location, Isla Nublar, is also home to an erupting volcano, which threatens to wipe out both the abandoned park and the dinosaurs that live there, four years after the events of 2015’s Jurassic World. This new trailer shows that we can expect more from the film than an elaborate air rescue: there are peop

Volkswagen wants to sell more electric cars in the US, but to do that, it needs to spend millions of dollars on building out the country’s underdeveloped charging infrastructure. Toward that end, the auto giant’s subsidiary, Electrify America, announced today that it plans to install EV charging stations at more than 100 Walmarts in 34 states by mid-2019. The announcement came a few days after Porsche, which is owned by VW Group, hinted at plans to build 500 of its own EV charging s

Microsoft is planning to launch Office 2019 later this year, and the company is changing the way OneNote is bundled. The note taking app currently has a desktop version included in Office 2016, and a separate Universal Windows App for Windows 10. Microsoft is replacing the desktop version of OneNote with the Windows 10 version in Office 2019, along with making the entire Office suite only work on Windows 10. Microsoft is also creating a Mac version of Office 2019.
The existing desktop app, OneN

Filings from the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) database suggest new iPhones might be coming, potentially sooner than we thought. Consomac, a French website, first spotted the filing which mentions model numbers A1920, A1921, A1984, A2097, A2098, A2099, A2101, A2103, A2104, A2105, and A2106. None of these models already exist in the database.We figured Apple would introduce new phones at its usual September event. Three new devices are rumored to be coming this year, including two OLED mode

French company Enhancia’s MIDI ring, which The Verge first saw at this year’s NAMM show, has debuted for preorder on Kickstarter. Now called Neova, the ring is an accessory for musicians to wear on the index finger of their right hand. Specific movements tell the ring to trigger effects while performing, like pitch bend and vibrato.
The ring contains a total of nine sensors, and it captures movements made while performing. These movements are then sent to a hub that’s connecte

MoviePass is reportedly burning through its funding, even as it continues to grow. An independent auditor for MoviePass’s owner, Helios and Matheson Analytics, said it had “substantial doubt” about the company’s ability to remain in business, according to a report from Business Insider.In Helios and Matheson’s annual report, the auditor writes that MoviePass has “negative cash flows from operating activities,” according to BI. While it’s very comm

This week’s slate of new releases for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One serves as an illuminating indicator of the state each console is in. The PS4 has two new exclusive titles in major series that date back to the PlayStation 2 days: God of War, by all accounts a masterpiece, and Yakuza 6, a satisfying final chapter for a much-loved character. The Xbox One, on the other hand? Well, now you can play a bunch more old Xbox 1 — as in the original Xbox — games.
I don’t mean fo

Disney is letting people play Star Wars’ Dejarik holochess game for free on iOS in augmented reality through ARKit, via 9to5Mac. The new game actually comes as an update to last year’s Star Wars: Jedi Challenges AR game, which originally included holochess but required the purchase of hardware accessories.The ARKit holochess variant seems to be the same version from the original Jedi Challenges, just ported over so that users don’t need to buy the headset or lightsaber attachm

Android P is finally fixing its Bluetooth volume settings with an update that will allow the mobile OS to remember volume preferences on a device-by-device basis, according to Android Police.
Now, Android will store the last volume used on each device in a preference file and automatically set back to that the next time you connect to that device. It’s not exactly a big change, but as someone who regularly switches between blasting music through a Bluetooth speaker and listening to music

Have you ever wanted to fly a drone with your body? How about while wearing a VR headset that shows you a first-person perspective from the drone and where it’s flying in real time? This is now a reality, thanks to a drone and exosuit developed by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne University in Switzerland. It’s called the FlyJacket, and the user controlling the drone wears a VR headset and a soft upper-body exoskeleton that syncs their movement with

Amazon is partnering with Best Buy to release a new wave of Fire TV Edition smart TVs that will exclusively be sold at Best Buy’s stores and website as well as on Amazon.com through Best Buy as a third-party seller. It’s the first time that the two retailers have teamed up in such a direct fashion.
The multiyear partnership starts this summer with a TV from Toshiba, and Best Buy is pledging to sell more than 10 Fire TV Edition sets from Insignia and Toshiba (with both 4K and regular