Technology news

A new accessory for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL could give Alexa devices a run for their money. The Pixel Stand, as its reportedly known, is an upright dock that effectively turns your smartphone into a Google Home hub.   For those unwilling to shell out $400 for the Home Max, or $49 for the Home Mini, this provides a capable alternative. For those that already have Google Home devices, it’ll provide an easy way to link and control them from a central hub, your smartphone. While Googl

Stay awhile … and listen. A few months back gaming juggernaut Blizzard updated its job openings page with some tantalizing evidence we’d be hearing about a new or remastered Diablo game soon. But, as it turns out, the rumored “unannounced Diablo project” might instead be an “R-rated” animated Netflix series. This was semi-confirmed when Andrew Crosby, the writer who penned the upcoming Hellboy reboot, tweeted out that he was in final talks to write and show-

From its glass-lined offices in San Francisco’s leafy Presidio national park, six-year-old Mithril Capital Management has happily flown under the radar. Now it’s leaving altogether and relocating its team to Austin, a spot that, among others the firm had considered, has “enough critical mass of a technical culture, an artisanal culture, an artistic culture, and [is] not necessarily looking to Silicon Valley for validation,” says firm cofounder Ajay Royan.
The move isn&rsq

In the days leading up to TechCrunchDisrupt SF 2018, The Economist published the cover story, ‘Why Startups Are Leaving Silicon Valley.’
The author outlined reasons why the Valley has “peaked.” Venture capital investors are deploying capital outside the Bay Area more than ever before. High-profile entrepreneurs and investors, Peter Thiel, for example, have left. Rising rents are making it impossible for new blood to make a living, let alone build businesses. And acco

Chris Taylor, like any Nintendo fan, is hyped to see that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is shaping up to be mashup fighter of epic proportions, but unlike most of us, the 21-year-old is not sure he’ll live long enough to see the Switch game on store shelves. Taylor has terminal cancer and has been given months to live, so his friends started a social media campaign to get Nintendo’s attention.
Over the last week, Smash Bros. fans on Twitter and Reddit have lobbied Nintendo to let Taylo

This past week, Nilay reviewed the new iPhone XS and XS Max while Dieter reviewed the Apple Watch series 4. Paul, Dieter, and Nilay dedicate half the show to their review and whether it’s worth upgrading to the new model.Second half of the show, the crew tries to cover all of the insane amount of gadgets that Amazon announced this week, including a DVR for over-the-air channels.There’s a whole lot more in between that — like deputy editor Liz Lopatto’s “This week i

Audi is the latest luxury automaker to launch a subscription-based service to get customers who want to have access to a fleet of fancy cars but don’t necessarily want to own or lease one. The German car company’s service is called Audi Select, and it launches exclusively in Dallas-Fort Worth this week.For the set monthly price of $1,395, subscribers can chose from a range of vehicles, including the Audi A4 sedan, A5 Cabriolet, Audi Q5 and Audi Q7 SUVs, and S5 Coupe. The subscriptio

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
The Gate, a kid-friendly horror film that was modestly successful at the box office

Beddit, the sleep tracking product acquired by Apple last year, will no longer support cloud service, as spotted by 9to5Mac. The news was announced in an App Store update for Beddit, which says that new users will no longer be able to use Beddit Cloud, and existing users have access until November 15th.
The company’s Beddit 3 Sleep Monitor is a sensor-equipped strip that slides under your bedsheets to track movements through the night. The acquisition seems at odds with Apple’s effo

The Eternals, a tale of cosmic beings created by Jack Kirby in the 1970s, now has a director: Chloé Zhao, a Chinese filmmaker who is known for working on indie projects, says The Hollywood Reporter. It will mark the first time that a woman of color has directed a film for the superhero studio, which has largely relied on white men to helm its films.
The Eternals is a comic about an Earth with two races that eventually led to mutants. Eternals can live for a long time, yet they are not im

Sennheiser is getting involved in the augmented reality space. The headphone and audio gear company announced today that it’s partnering with Magic Leap to develop spacial audio accessories for the AR headset’s platform.It’s specifically joining the “Works with Magic Leap” certification program, which is basically just Magic Leap’s way of ensuring that accessories and tools work as they’re supposed to when interacting with its headset. Sennheiser also h

Amazon’s new Echo Auto — a $50 credit card-sized box that sits on your dashboard and brings Alexa to your car — is a lot of things at once. It’s a relatively cheap way to smarten up a car that might not have a snazzy infotainment system. It’s a new beachhead for Amazon in the automotive world, which the company has focused increasing attention on over the years. It’s also another place for you to yell at Alexa to order more toilet paper.What the Echo Auto rea

The biggest actual threat faced by humans, when it comes to AI, has nothing to do with robots. It’s biased algorithms. And, like almost everything bad, it disproportionately affects the poor and marginalized. Machine learning algorithms, whether in the form of “AI” or simple shortcuts for sifting through data, are incapable of making rational decisions because they don’t rationalize — they find patterns. That government agencies across the US put them in charge of

Telltale Games, creators of episodic adventure games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman: The Enemy Within, laid off a large number of its staff today. The company will retain a small team of around 25. According to multiple sources The Verge spoke with, employees were let go with no severance.
The final season of Telltale’s award-winning series, The Walking Dead, kicked off last month. The second episode is slated to launch next week.
The layoffs come a few months after

Telltale Games, creators of episodic adventure games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman: The Enemy Within, laid off a large number of its staff today. The company will retain a small team of 25. According to multiple sources The Verge spoke with, employees were let go with no severance.
“Today Telltale Games made the difficult decision to begin a majority studio closure following a year marked by insurmountable challenges,” the company said in a statement. “A

Telltale Games, creators of episodic adventure games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Batman: The Enemy Within, laid off a large number of its staff today. The company will retain a small team of 25. According to multiple sources The Verge spoke with, employees were let go with no severance.
“Today Telltale Games made the difficult decision to begin a majority studio closure following a year marked by insurmountable challenges,” the company said in a statement. “A

In addition to all the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL leaks we’ve seen so far, we’ve also been hearing rumors of a Pixel Stand. More evidence of the stand, which is supposed to be a wireless charger that docks your phone in portrait mode, was found by 9to5Google today hidden within a beta version of the Google app.There’s not a lot of details yet, but based on the animations found in the app, it’s possible that the dock might let users display their photos in a slideshow

Google is trying to close the technology gap between its mobile virtual reality platform Daydream and the capabilities of more powerful, PC-based headsets. To do that, it’s launching software support for new, experimental motion controllers it’s developed in-house that are capable of what’s known as six degrees of freedom, or 6DoF. That lets you move more realistically through the physical world while immersed in a virtual environment because the controllers help track where y

A bug in how Twitter’s platform is accessed by third-party app developers may have exposed certain direct messages of select users to developers who do not work for Twitter, the company disclosed in a blog post today.Twitter says the bug was active starting sometime in May of 2017, and Twitter issued a fix within hours of discovering it on September 10th, 2018. It affected less than 1 percent of users, and the direct messages affected were those between users and accounts or businesses th

Earlier this week, the Linux community got an unusual message from Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds. “This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions,” wrote Torvalds in a Linux update email. He apologized for “flippant” and sometimes personal attacks on community members, and announced that he would be temporarily stepping away from Linux. “I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the peo

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributorLiquid Telecom goes long on Africa’s startups as future clients African experiments with drone technologies could leapfrog decades of infrastructure neglect
Polestar debuted its first production EV and previewed its electric car line in New York with the CEO squarely taking aim at Tesla.
The Volvo subsidiary pulled the cover off its Polestar 1

Twittersaid that a “bug” sent user’s private direct messages to third-party developers “who were not authorized to receive them.”
The social media giant began warning users Friday of the possible exposure with a message in the app.
“The issue has persisted since May 2017, but we resolved it immediately upon discovering it,” the message said, which was posted on Twitter by a Mashable reporter. “Our investigation into this issue is ongoing,

On the 21st of September, writer and comedian Demi Adejuyigbe releases a video of himself dancing to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” It’s become a hotly anticipated web tradition since 2016, after Adejuyigbe went viral with his first rendition, a goof recorded from a bedroom. Last year, he returned with better lighting and presentation.
Adejuyigbe’s credits include The Late Late Show and The Good Place, not to mention the best Ready Player One theme Warner Br

Amazon just threw its big Echo event, and while the company announced a massive slate of hardware that touches almost every aspect of our connected lives, the most interesting part was what wasn’t there — new Alexa hardware. Instead (with a few exceptions, which we’ll get into) most of Amazon’s event was focused on either enhancements to existing Echo products, or offering new ways to expand or extend the Echo into new areas or fields.The era of new Echos is over
And tha

Instagramtells me Regramming, or the ability to instantly repost someone else’s feed post to your followers like a retweet, is “not happening”, not being built, and not being tested. And that’s good news for all Instagrammers. The denial comes after it initially issued a “no comment” to The Verge’s Casey Newton, who published that he’d seen screenshots of a native Instagram resharing sent to him by a source.
Regramming would be a fundamental shift

Best Buy if offering Apple’s official leather folio for the iPhone XS at $49.99 — half the cost you’d find it for at an Apple Store. Either a pricing mistake or just a well-hidden goodie, 9To5Toys sniffed out this deal that you should hop on sooner than later.
In case you were more interested in the other color options, this deal only appears to cover the black model. And if you purchased the iPhone XS Max, well, Best Buy isn’t currently offering prices that are any lowe

PayPal will no longer do business with Infowars, according to a post on the conspiracy theory site this morning. PayPal broke the news in an email to Infowars yesterday, saying the company had conducted a comprehensive review of the Infowars site and found that it “promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions,” a violation of PayPal’s acceptable use policy. Infowars had used PayPal to process transactions for its on-site store; the sit

Role-playing games can be intimidating. Figuring out how combat or character customization works can be confusing, and they can demand upward of 100 hours of your time just to see the story through to the end. Tetsuya Takahashi knows more about the genre than most. After getting his start as an artist and designer working on classics like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII, he went on to form his own studio, Monolith Soft, which specializes in sprawling, complicated RPGs. Most recently, Takah

A new imaging strategy is responsible for capturing a hellish menagerie of creatures: a skeletal frog that’s crawling out of the frame, a dead red fish that stares back at you, and a crouching shrew with a cavernous, empty ribcage. How did scientists take these shots? By making them glow red and by essentially embedding some of them, like the fish, in Jell-O.Scientists have been imaging skeletons for decades by stripping dead creatures of their flesh, staining the bones red and the cartil

TC Sessions: AR/VR on October 18 at UCLA is gearing up to be a great show.Early-bird sales end after today, September 21. Don’t miss out on the biggest savings for this event — book your $99 tickets here before prices go up by $100.
The stage will feature some of the industry’s most groundbreaking companies and thought leaders from Oculus, Emmy-winning Baobab Studios,Facebook, Survios and more.Why attend TC Sessions: AR/VR?
Big ConversationsHear today’s innovators, leader

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
In October of last year, just days after several women accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, his frequent collaborator Woody Allen expressed fears of a “witch hunt atmosphere” for men. Countless people have since called the #MeToo movement that followed a “witch hunt,” a piece of

Welcome to our weekly column, in which YouTuber NimbleThor brings you a short list of the best new mobile games for your Android device, released over the past week. Whether you’re into casual time wasters or hardcore shooters, you’ll find something in here to exercise your thumbs with. You really should do your laundry: Those shirts are starting to develop quite a funk. But we’re all prone to procrastination, and if you’re going to shirk your responsibilities, you might

Switzerland is offering a leg up to fledgling blockchain businesses in an attempt to affirms itself as a global cryptocurrency hub. The European banking haven is facing an exodus of blockchain startups due to uncharacteristically tough banking conditions, Reuters reports. Today, the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) issued guidelines for the nation’s 250-plus banks to follow when doing business with cryptocurrency or blockchain-based startups. The guidelines outline a list of checks banks s

Just over one month after the official release of Android Pie, OnePlus is rolling out its version of the update to the OnePlus 6. OxygenOS 9.0, the company’s fork of Google’s operating system, delivers many of the same improvements as stock Android, including a tweaked interface, gesture navigation, and adaptive battery functionality.
The speed at which OnePlus has rolled out this update is impressive given that many manufacturers can take months to update to the latest version of A