Technology news

As wildfires raged in California this summer, one fire department’s response was impeded by an unexpected problem: data throttling.In documents filed this week as part of a legal challenge to the FCC’s net neutrality repeal, Santa Clara County Fire Marshal Anthony Bowden explains how Verizon slowed device speeds during the crisis, hindering firefighters’ response.The throttling hindered firefighters’ response
In the documents, flagged by Ars Technica, Bowden writes that

HTC has announced that its Vive Wireless Adapter will be available to preorder beginning on September 5th for $300. The Adapter, which HTC announced back in January, allows Vive headsets to operate without having to connect up cables directly to your PC. It uses Intel’s WiGig technology, operating in the 60GHz band to prevent any interference and run at low latency.The T-shaped Adapter sits on top of the user’s head with a cable that connects to a battery pack. HTC says the Adapter&

Following the debut of the GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards, B&H Photo is offering steep discounts on Nvidia’s high-end GeForce GTX 10-series cards exclusively to Verge readers. Limited quantities of EVGA’s GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti are available for the lowest prices that you’ll currently find.For $399, the GTX 1070 Ti can easily power gaming on a 1440p monitor. At $50 more, the GTX 1080 is a more powerful match if you’re interested in 4K gaming, th

Trying to keep up with the news might be aspirational, but these days, it can also be depressing. Between our impending ecological disaster, ever-rising racial and class tensions, sexual harassment accusations, and a government more suited for reality TV, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of terrible stuff out there. Google’s attempting to tackle this fatigue with a new tool for its Assistant that makes meaningful good news easier to find.Designed to dole out a daily

Facebook may be testing speech recognition again with a new “Aloha” voice feature, spotted by frequent app investigator Jane Manchun Wong and reported by TechCrunch, in the latest development in the company’s voice interaction ambitions.The company was originally said to be planning a smart speaker (also codenamed “Aloha,”as well as “Portal”), but plans were apparently put on hold earlier this year ahead of the company’s F8 conference in May follo

Less than a month after Mayfield Robotics said it was stopping production on its Kuri home robot, the company announced today on its blog that the company will be shutting down. Mayfield Robotics launched in 2015 as part of Bosch’s Startup Platform, but struggled to integrate with and find a business fit within Bosch. Since the cancellation of its Kuri robot, Mayfield Robotics had been looking for external partners for long-term technology development, but was unable to find investment to

Nintendo Labo, the system of DIY cardboard accessories for the Switch released this past April, is adding a Vehicle Kit to its current lineup of the Robot Kit and Variety Kit. At a press event in New York today, Nintendo gave us an opportunity to build and play with the new kit, which includes materials to create cardboard controllers for a car, submarine, and plane.We were given a few minutes to build the controller key, which can be fitted into the car steering wheel; the dials to shift the d

FiftyThree, the app developer of the popular iOS sketching app Paper, has had its assets acquired by WeTransfer, a cloud-based file transfer company. Details regarding the acquisition and terms weren’t disclosed, but WeTransfer announced in its newsroom that the deal includes FiftyThree’s entire patent portfolio, assets, and the executive team, which will remain on board. The company itself will be phased out.For a quick refresher: Paper was crowned by Apple as the iPad App of the Y

Netflix is testing an experimental feature that bypasses Apple’s App Store for sign-up fees. Some users are seeing that the iOS app won’t display a sign-up page to open a new account. Instead, Netflix will direct these users to pay via mobile webpage, eschewing Apple’s percentage cut of subscription fees, as spotted by TechCrunch.Netflix and other apps currently pay Apple 30 percent of a user’s first subscription and 15 percent for renewals. The test began in June in ten

In an effort to fortify the fossil fuel industry, the Trump administration announced a new energy policy today that would lighten regulation on coal-fired power plants.Called the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, it would replace the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which the White House called “overly prescriptive and burdensome” in a statement. Had it gone into effect, the Clean Power Plan would have given power plants until the year 2030 to cut their carbon emissi

Facebook’s latest attempt at placating activists and lawmakers who say its advertising platform permits discrimination is to remove 5,000 options that can be used to exclude certain religious and ethnic minority groups.The company’s response, outlined in a blog post today, arrives just a few days after the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed an official complaint against the company alleging it violated the Fair Housing Act. The HUD investigation findings were

Forza Horizon 3 first introduced the ability to drive Halo’s famous Warthog nearly two years ago, and Forza Horizon 4 (due October 2nd) is taking that Halo combination a step further. Playground Games has worked closely with current Halo developers 343 Industries to create a miniature Halo experience inside of Forza Horizon 4. It’s essentially a side quest that teleports you into a drivable Warthog, while Banshees chase you along the beautiful route of the British countryside.
I got

Google is preparing to release a new Chrome Material Design refresh next month. “Chrome Browser will have a new design across all operating systems,” reveals Google in its latest Chrome enterprise release notes. That new design will debut in the Chrome 69 release, which is currently scheduled to release on September 4th.
Chrome’s new desktop design will include a more rounded and whiter appearance, but the mobile version of Chrome has been majorly redesigned on iOS. Google is

Michele Gelfand used to be “a sheltered Long Island kid who only saw New York and the world through a cartoon lens.” In college, she went to London for the first time and, surprised by the culture shock, decided to learn more about what makes cultures so different around the world. Today, Gelfand is a cultural psychologist at the University of Maryland and author of Rule Breakers, Rule Makers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World, which is out on September 11th from Scribner.

The concept of “deepfakes” hit the internet late last year like a weirdly rendered bombshell after amateur coders discovered that they could use AI to quickly and easily face-swap celebrities into pornographic clips. The phenomenon raised important questions about consent and revenge porn, but advocates for the technology have always maintained it can have non-harmful uses, too.
One of these is porn company Naughty America. This week, it launched a service that lets customers pay to

Facebook has started rating its users’ trustworthiness in order to help the social network know how much to value user reports that a certain news story might be fake. The Washington Post has details on the system and confirmation from Facebook that it’s been put in place. The system certainly sounds a touch dystopian, but Facebook sees it as a valuable tool for weeding out disinformation.
The trust ratings went into place over the last year, according to the Post, and were develope

An experimental unit within Google has been quietly developing a new app for discovering and playing podcasts. Called Shortwave, the new app was revealed by a trademark filing embedded below, which describes it as “allow[ing] users to search, access, and play digital audio files, and to share links to audio files.”
Nothing in the trademark filing specifies the kind of audio being accessed, but a Google representative said the focus of the app was on spoken word content. There is lit

FiftyThree, the app developer of the popular iOS sketching app Paper, has been acquired by WeTransfer, a cloud-based file transfer company. Details regarding the acquisition and terms weren’t disclosed, but WeTransfer announced in its newsroom that the deal includes FiftyThree’s entire patent portfolio, assets, and the executive team, which will remain on board.
For a quick refresher: Paper was crowned by Apple as the iPad App of the Year in 2012. In December that year, the studio f

The Xbox One version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds will leave the Game Preview program on September 4th, its developers have announced at Gamescom 2018, marking the battle royale game’s progression from early-access beta to official full product. The 1.0 update will bring the smaller Sanhok map with new weapons and dynamic weather changes, War Mode deathmatch, and in-game microtransactions for cosmetic items as well as the recently introduced Event Pass. There’ll be limited

Tinder officially announced today that it’s launching a service called Tinder U, a version of Tinder that’s only available to college students. To log in to the feature for the first time, users must have a .edu email address and be geolocated on campus. The functionality is exactly the same as regular Tinder, although the UI looks slightly different: a badge depicting users’ universities will be displayed on their main profile image.The service will be rolling out to iOS devi

Microsoft has seized six phishing domains that belong to Russian government hackers, the company announced today. The domains were registered by Russia’s GRU intelligence agency, which is also alleged to have stolen and leaked emails from the Clinton campaign in 2016.
The domains appear to be aimed at spoofing government targets, including addresses like “senate.group” and “adfs-senate.email.” Others mimic the domains of the International Republican Institute and t

An Imax spokesperson has confirmed to Variety that it will no longer be building a VR camera in partnership with Google. In the emailed statement, Imax said, “We’ve currently paused the development of the Imax VR camera while we continue to review the viability of our pilot program.”
Imax and Google’s VR project first began in 2016. The two companies had plans to develop a cinema-grade VR camera “to enable today’s leading filmmakers and content creators to de

Nvidia has announced a new lineup of powerful gaming GPUs, the GeForce RTX 20-series, that claim to power 4K gaming beyond 60 frames per second and real-time ray tracing for more realistic lighting and reflection effects. You’ll pay a lot for the latest tech, though, with pricing for Nvidia’s Founders Editions reference cards starting at $599 for the RTX 2070. The RTX 2080 is the next step up and will cost $799. The new high-end card, the RTX 2080 Ti, sits at $1,199.
For prospective

Mockumentary series American Vandal is turning into a shit show. The Emmy-nominated series returns this fall with its second season, which will focus on a mysterious new vandal known only as the “Turd Burglar,” after students at private Catholic high school St. Bernadine are poisoned in an incident known as “The Brown-Out.” The trailer features footage of the mass chaos — and mass defecation — the incident inspired, so consider this your warning.
The first se

Braavo, a startup that provides financing to mobile app developers, is announcing that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
The might not seem like much compared to the $70 million that Braavo announced raising last year, but that was debt financing, used to loan money to developers. This new round is equity financing, used to fund Braavo’sown operations and growth.
Co-founder Mark Loranger told me Braavo was founded in 2015 in response to the “new dynamics” of mobile

Attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia asked a federal court to reinstate net neutrality, saying the Federal Communications Commission failed to properly consider the issues when removing the policy in 2017.
In a brief filed last night, the attorneys general argue that the FCC’s decision “will cause [inevitable harms] to consumers, public safety, and existing regulatory schemes” and that the commission “entirely ignored many of these issues