Technology news

YouTube Music — the new YouTube Music, I mean — is Google’s big push to finally create a subscription streaming music service that catches on and can legitimately challenge Spotify and Apple Music. It’s currently rolling out on Android and iOS, but the staggered launch means it’ll be awhile before everyone can actually use YouTube Music. Google Play Music, the company’s existing premium music app, isn’t going away in the meantime. “Nothing will ch

With Bluetooth speakers, it's simply a matter of pairing your device of choice with your speaker, and you're ready to blast that awesome playlist from anywhere. No more being tethered by an aux cable or worrying that your CD will skip. As long as you're within range (and the connection range is pretty generous), your music will always be at your fingertips.
But there are a ton of different Bluetooth speakers out there. Some can connect to multiple devices at once, and others can even connect to

We knew Tinder Places — the dating app’s new way to connect people through location sharing — was coming, but Tinder officially announced today that it’s testing the service in Australia and Chile. Places will let users find potential matches based off of the places they travel, whether that be a dog park, restaurant, coffee shop, or movie theater. The idea, Tinder says, is to give users a mutual interest. It’s powered through Foursquare, which has already done all

Giving smokers free electronic cigarettes may not help them kick the habit, according to new research. What helps is giving them money instead.For a study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers gave over 6,000 smokers different tools to quit smoking, like free nicotine patches, motivational texts, free e-cigarettes, and free medication or e-cigs plus a total of $600. Overall, only 1.3 percent of smokers had quit after six months. Those who received money fared much

The LG G7 ThinQ will be even more expensive on Sprint than Verizon or T-Mobile. Today, Sprint announced its price for the LG G7 ThinQ will be $792. That’s $42 more than other major carriers. Verizon and T-Mobile are both charging $750, which is already a little too much.
Verizon’s payment plan will be $31.25 a month for 24 months, while T-Mobile’s plan requires you to put $30 down and pay $30 a month for 24 months. Sprint’s payment plan is $33 a month for 18 months, and

Two years after the release of Battlefield 1, EA is ready to add a new entry to its storied shooter franchise, announcing today the first details and the release date for Battlefield V. Returning to the grand and ghastly stage of World War II, this new game will focus on squad-based gameplay, eschewing the explosively popular battle royale competitive modes of games like PUBG and Fortnite. I attended a preview event for Battlefield V today, and though it isn’t quite ready to play yet, the

BBC and Twitch Presents have partnered to bring the majority of Doctor Who’s classic episodes — the ones that aired between 1963 and ‘89 — to the live-streaming service’s platform, starting on May 29th and ending seven weeks later. If you missed out on the show or have been interested in the hype around it, now’s a good time to catch up on its earliest seasons and meet the older doctors.Doctor Who has been around for 55 years, which is an astonishing feat for

Facebook announced it’s changed how to set up two-factor authentication. The new process is intended to make setting up 2FA more streamlined and eliminates the need to register a phone number.
Where Facebook previously required a phone number in order to activate two-factor authentication, it will now also accept apps like Duo Security and Google Authenticator. The company also says the setup process has been refined, resulting in a more simple, guided experience when enabling 2FA.
This u

Hopefully you’re spending the long weekend enjoying warm weather, but if you’re also in the market for some new gadgets, you may want to block off a few hours to check out all of the tech deals happening this weekend. It’s no Black Friday, but the internet’s next big sale event won’t be until Amazon Prime Day, which takes place in July (probably).Many retailers have already started discounting some of our favorite tech, from TVs to laptops to headphones. We’l

Facebook is asking academics to help measure the volume and effects of misinformation on the platform, the company said today. The move, which comes a month after the company said it would ask researchers to help it understand the effect of Facebook on elections, illustrates how the company is working to restore trust after revelations that Russian agents spread misinformation and during the 2016 US presidential election.
The same commission established last month to analyze Facebook and electi

Uber and Lyft fail to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles in New York City 70 percent of the time, a scathing new report found. The evidence underscores the long-running battle between disability rights groups and the ride-hailing companies over the availability — and economic viability — of wheelchair-accessible vehicles.Researchers with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest made dozens of requests for wheelchair-accessible vehicles (WAV) on Uber and Lyft in New York City

It is unconstitutional for public officials, including the president, to block Twitter followers who criticize them, a court ruled today in a legal dispute over President Trump’s account.Twitter’s “interactive space” creates a public forum
The lawsuit, brought by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, argued that Twitter users blocked by @realdonaldtrump had their First Amendment rights violated. In a decision released today, a federal judge hearin

Uber has shuttered its self-driving testing program in Arizona and laid off close to 300 workers there — most of them test drivers, or “vehicle operators” — two months after one of its autonomous cars killed a pedestrian, the company said on Wednesday. The company had been testing its self-driving technology in the state since 2016, but halted operations in the wake of the March crash. The company’s testing was also indefinitely suspended by the Arizona governor&rs

In January, The Verge revealed a new contract that gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) access to a nationwide network of license plate readers maintained by Vigilant Solutions. The contract put a powerful surveillance tool to work specifically for immigration cases, raising troubling implications for immigration and privacy groups. Those groups have been pushing for more data on the program ever since, and now, one of them is taking ICE to court.
In a lawsuit filed today, the America

The Marshall Islands made its own cryptocurrency, doing away with the US dollar. The government has signed the change into law, making the “sovereign” its new official cryptocurrency, as spotted by CNBC Africa cryptocurrency trader host Ran Neuner on Twitter yesterday.
The bill was signed into effect on March 1st, but the news is making waves again this week. The Marshall Islands’ population is 53,066, so the change doesn’t affect many, but it is significant for citizens

Acer has just announced a new, updated version of its Swift 5 laptop, which follows the trend of 2018 laptops by cutting down on bezels. The company is swapping out the old 14-inch screen from previous models for a new 15.6-inch 1080p display that offers an 87.6 percent screen-to-body ratio.Also new on the updated Swift 5 is the latest eighth-generation Intel processor, and a slimmed-down design, built from a magnesium and aluminum alloy. As for specs, the Swift 5 is configurable with up to 1TB

The YouTube video titled “Best Diamonds in the Sky – Jewelry of life Life insurance, Diamond of God #21” opens on what looks to be a poor-quality jewelry ad, panning slowly over diamond-encrusted cat figures, rings with enormous purple stones, and even Titanic’s flashy blue diamond. Then, around the two-minute mark, everything changes. The video inexplicably cuts to a shaky-cam clip overlooking a boat and then to videos of several young women undressing. While there&rsqu

Slow WiFi and an exposed Google history are an avid internet user's worst nightmares, but the Obama-era rules that protect from these are under attack. 
If you weren't curious about the benefits of a VPN before, you definitely are now.
Regular people and presidential candidates alike have been obsessing over online privacy (or lack thereof) since June 11, 2018: the date that the FCC officially burned Net Neutrality to the ground. In April 2019, the House voted to pass the Save the Net Act,

“There are lots of things on the internet that are popular but not good,” says Meredith Broussard, “like racism or ramen burgers.” Yet we are increasingly being offered the popular and not the good, and that’s just one negative effect of believing that the technological solution is always better one.
Broussard has been a data journalist and software developer, and she is now the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, out now fro

Twitter has announced that it’ll apply a new label to US election candidates’ profiles. The badge will also show up below a candidate’s name on tweets in users’ timelines. For now, the labels will only apply to accounts of candidates running for state governor, the US Senate, or the US House of Representatives during the 2018 midterm election.The company says it’s partnering with nonprofit Ballotpedia to identify candidates’ accounts once they’ve qualif

Chatbot startup Hugging Face has raised a $4 million seed round led by Ronny Conway from a_capital. Existing investors Betaworks, SV Angel and Kevin Durant are also participating.
I already reviewed Hugging Face so I won’t write the same thing again. But the startup has been building a chatbot app with a strong personality for bored teenagers. Instead of focusing on customer support or convenience, Hugging Faceis focusing on emotions and entertainment.
It’s been available in the App

With every month that goes by, it seems like another electric vehicle startup comes along and promises to disrupt the auto industry. This month, it’s Rivian, a California-based startup, emerging from stealth for the first time this month with aspirations to be something of a Land Rover for souped-up EVs. The company is intent on launching an all-electric five-passenger pickup truck in 2020 and a seven-passenger SUV after that, though it will show them off later this year at the LA Auto Sh

Now that those of us brave enough to install the Android P beta have had a week or two to kick the tires, I wanted to revisit them again. Chaim Gartenberg has rightly pointed out that the combination of swipes and buttons means that the core navigation is a set of mixed metaphors. Others have called them “bad” and “a hot mess.” A gentler way to characterize the new system would be “polarizing,” but for Android users a better way might be to call it “rej

Google and LG’s high-res prototype VR display is official and nearly ready for future VR headsets. It’s an incredibly pixel-rich, 18-megapixel OLED display at 1443 ppi, with a 120Hz refresh rate contained on a 4.3-inch screen with a 120 x 96 field of view.For reference, Google says the upper bounds of human vision exist at 9600 x 9000, 2,183 ppi, and 160 x 150-degree field of view — so it’s not too far off, which is both fascinating and terrifying. If you want to compare

When The Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof brings his version of Watchmen to HBO, it will be as an original story with new characters, not a retelling of Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel. “We have no desire to ‘adapt’ the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago,” Lindelof wrote in a lengthy letter on Instagram. “Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced not rebooted.”The five-page

Converge is an interview game show where the biggest personalities in tech come on to tell us about their wildest dreams. It’s a show that’s easy to win, but not impossible to lose — because, in the final round, I finally get a chance to play and score a few points of my own.On the premiere episode of Converge, Houseparty co-founder and chief operating officer Sima Sistani comes on to tell us about her big idea: Tupperware parties for marijuana — or, as she puts it, &ldq

Each week, our team of designers and freelance illustrators creates a ton of custom art for The Verge, including illustrations for our articles, motion graphics for our reviews and series, and designs that spread across all of our platforms. So, we’ve made an Instagram account to compile and share all of our custom art in one place to showcase our wide breadth of work.
Follow us to see all the latest looping animations, thoughtful illustrations, and (from time to time) new wallpapers!Foll

Apple has launched a privacy portal where users can download all of the information and data the company has that’s associated with their Apple ID. The portal allows you to receive information including: your activity on the App Store, iTunes Store, iBooks Store, and Apple Music; your activity at Apple’s online store and retail stores; any AppleCare support history and repairs you may have requested; and other data like iCloud bookmarks, calendar entries, reminders, photos, and othe

Comcast really wants to own 21st Century Fox. The company announced today that it’s planning and is in the “advanced stages of preparing” an offer for Fox in the hopes that it’ll reject Disney’s existing bid to acquire the company’s entertainment arm. Comcast says: “Any offer for Fox would be all-cash and at a premium to the value of the current all-share offer from Disney.” This move has been expected and rumored. It doesn’t affect Fox&rsqu