Technology news

Lil Yachty is an award-nominated rapper whose songs have generated him millions of fans around the world. He’s also the newest member of FaZe Clan, a gaming collective that is quickly becoming the Supreme of e-sports.The team officially welcomed Lil Yachty to FaZe Clan during the rapper’s performance at the Rolling Loud festival this past weekend. Yachty invited a number of FaZe members, including RiceGum (a YouTube creator with more than 10 million subscribers) and leader Richard &

Uber has been given the green light by Pennsylvania officials to restart its self-driving car tests on public roads. The program was shut down last March after a self-driving Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The crash was the first death attributed to a self-driving car, and it was seen as a significant setback for the industry, which is racing to get autonomous vehicles into commercial use.
Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation approved Uber’s re

Multiple Tinder employees who sued the dating app’s parent company, Match Group, for $2 billion were fired this week, a source close to the employees tells The Verge. Among them is Rosette Pambakian, VP of marketing and communications, who, in the original lawsuit, claimed that former Tinder CEO Greg Blatt sexually assaulted her. Match spokeswoman Justine Sacco wouldn’t confirm the names of the employees affected, but did say a “number” of employees, including Pambakian,

Google has a pretty sweet deal for any PC users eager to try its new, experimental Project Stream, a video game streaming platform built by the search giant’s cloud computing division. If you play just one hour of Ubisoft’s recently released Assassin’s Creed Origins, you’ll get a free copy of the game for PC / Mac through the publisher’s Uplay platform, via Eurogamer. (The game retails for around $20 on Uplay right now, but it costs around $35 on console.) The prom

Google has a pretty sweet deal for any PC users eager to try its new, experimental Project Stream, a video game streaming platform built by the search giant’s cloud computing division. If you play just one hour of Ubisoft’s recently released Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you’ll get a free copy of the game for PC / Mac through the publisher’s Uplay platform, via Eurogamer. (The game retails for around $20 on Uplay right now, but it costs around $35 on console.) The prom

Shipt, the same-day grocery delivery service acquired by Target last year, has announced plans to expand into more cities and offer a wider product selection starting in 2019. The company told TechCrunch that the service will begin deliveries of “all major product categories” next year, expanding from groceries and home goods into clothing, beauty products, and more.
Shipt employs shoppers to pick up items and deliver them to customers in as little as one hour. The service currently

More often than not, gaming laptops aren’t a great value. But sometimes there are exceptions near the holidays, and HP’s 15-inch Pavilion gaming laptop is one of them. It’s on sale for $599.99 on eBay, which is hundreds off of its original price. Inside of this machine is just about enough to power through the latest PC games on low to medium graphical settings at playable frame rates. Though if you enjoy playing, say, Fortnite, this will run it smoothly on higher settings.Loo

The mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds now has just as many players as Fortnite at over 200 million users. Both games now have around 30 million daily active users.(PUBG was also named best game of the year in Google Play. But Fortnite, whose parent company pulled out of the Google Play store in August in favor of distributing the app itself, was never eligible for that matchup.)Bloomberg reported that Fortnite hit the 200 million player mark by November 26th, so it is possib

After a brief pause in Space Force talk from the administration, President Trump signed a memo today directing the Department of Defense to create a new separate combatant command, called Space Command. Additionally, Vice President Mike Pence announced this morning that President Trump plans to sign a directive related to the establishment of the Space Force — a new branch of the military — in the coming days. While the President can create the US Space Command, Congress must still

Earlier this month, some Facebook users noticed something odd: bitcoin mining company Bitmain seemed to be posting in the comments of one of its posts, advertising some sort of “partnership” tied to bitcoin and requesting a cryptocurrency transfer. The post was suspicious; some wondered whether the company had been hacked.
But the post wasn’t from Bitmain at all, the company explained in a follow-up comment on Facebook. Instead, a savvy imposter had set up a fake account, then

iPhone users are finally getting a convenient and powerful feature that’s long been available on Android phones: the ability to tap an NFC tag and have their phone automatically perform certain actions, like opening an app or playing music. Support for NFC tags arrived with the latest iPhones, and Launch Center Pro is the first major app to take advantage of it, allowing users to activate basically whatever action they can think of — with a few catches.NFC triggers come to the iPhon

Between Netflix, PBS, and premium pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime, the market for documentaries has become much more robust over the past decade, giving filmmakers genuine hope that their movies might find an audience. But something unusual happened in 2018: A lot of people actually went to see documentaries in theaters… and not just at film festivals, but in arthouses and multiplexes. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Three Identical Strangers, RBG, and Free Solo have all made m

Our distinct skill sets and shortcomings mean people and robots will join forces for the next few decades. Robots are tireless, efficient and reliable, but in a millisecond through intuition and situational awareness, humans can make decisions machine can’t. Until workplace robots are truly autonomous and don’t require any human thinking, we’ll need software to supervise them at scale. Formant comes out of stealth today to “help people speak robot,” says c

The UE Boom 2 is no stranger to discounts. We’ve seen it go as low as $59.99, though today’s deal at Amazon is nearly as good for a Bluetooth speaker that’s still easy to recommend, despite that it’s an older model. Normally $199 (though these speakers are rarely listed at full cost) the limited edition color scheme that mixes black and charcoal tones is $63.99, and if you purchase it today, Amazon says that it will arrive before Christmas.
If you’re chasing after

1More is making it a bit cheaper to buy your loved ones a solid set of in-ear headphones. Currently $149.99, its Quad Driver wired headphones are discounted when you use the offer code VERGE50 at checkout. As their name suggests, these boast four drivers per bud, and until the promo code expires on December 20th, they’ll cost $99 — or as much as 1More’s excellent Triple Driver headphones.
1More hosted a site-wide discount in the lead-up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but in

Twitter is offering users another escape hatch from its ranked timeline. The company said today that it will introduce a prominent new toggle in the app to switch from the ranked timeline to the original, reverse-chronological feed. The company says the move comes in recognition of the fact that Twitter is often most useful in real time, particularly during live events such as sports games or the Oscars.
Twitter began ranking the timeline almost four years ago. It was an effort to increase usag

Instagram is bringing some new features to its Stories format, including a new countdown sticker, and question stickers that can be used in Live videos and to share music recommendations. The latter are best described as “all of the current Instagram Story features remixed into each other,” which seems inevitable given how many there are now.
The question sticker becomes more versatile today, as users can now respond to questions with music. Tapping on a viewer’s response will

Anthony Levandowski, the infamous self-driving car engineer whose shenanigans helped spur a multimillion-dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber, is back with a new project. According to The Guardian, Levandowski designed a camera-based advanced driver assist system (ADAS) called Co-Pilot, which is aimed at the long-haul trucking industry. And to help sell his new product, Levandowski took it for a test drive: a 3,000-mile journey from San Francisco to New York without any human intervention.The

Earlier this year, I wrote about the long-awaited Surface USB-C adapter that finally added a versatile USB-C port to Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Surface Laptop computers. The adapter works as advertised, but it’s large, heavy, clumsy, and expensive. I outlined three ways that Microsoft could have designed a better cable, hoping that the company would listen.
Turns out, someone was listening to at least one of those suggestions because you can now purchase a cable that lets you direc

Jump, the bike and scooter rental company owned by Uber, is getting a facelift. On Tuesday, the bike-share company unveiled the next generation of its electric-powered bikes. The hope is that these new, high-tech bikes will spur Uber’s effort to dominate the micromobility space, which is growing increasingly competitive and more expensive to navigate.The new bikes, which will be introduced in January 2019, have swappable lithium-ion batteries, fancy new displays, retractable mounts for sm

Tidal is finally offering its subscribers personalized playlists that are similar to Spotify’s Daily Mix and Apple Music’s For You compilations. Tidal’s version is called My Mix, and it offers six “custom curated collections,” according to a press release. Each playlist will carry a maximum of 50 songs that are chosen through a combination of human curation from Tidal’s team and machine learning algorithms.The playlists will include newer and older tracks, al

Apple’s iMacs have made a conscious choice to hide all of their ports on the backs of the computers for over a decade. And while it looks lovely, anyone who has had to go through the acrobatics of blindly trying to get a USB cable plugged in knows that it’s not always the most functional move.Satechi’s new Stand Hub looks like it might be a pretty good solution for anyone who struggles with the backward ports. Designed as a simple aluminum stand, the Stand Hub connects through

It’s been a choppy few years at GoPro. The company that defined the action camera industry skyrocketed shortly after it went public in 2014, buoyed by the immediate success of the Hero 4 lineup. But it stumbled when it didn’t release a new flagship in 2015. Then GoPro’s entry into the drone market was delayed for months, leaving the product well behind what DJI had on offer when it hit the market in 2016. Then the drone was immediately recalled (on election night, no less) bec

An ounce is an ounce, and a kilogram is a kilogram, but how are these units actually measured? How do your scales know how much a pound or a gram weighs?Since 1889, the kilogram’s definition has been based on a metal artifact stored under lock and key in a vault near Paris. It’s called the International Prototype Kilogram, or Le Grand K, and it is the world standard. What it weighs, the kilogram weighs. No more, no less.Le Grand K was created (along with the rest of the metric syste

AT&T says its 5G network went live in parts of 12 cities this morning, making it the first wireless carrier to launch a mobile network based on the 5G standard. A small number of customers will be able to use the network starting on Friday when AT&T will begin distributing its first 5G device: a mobile hot spot that can connect to the network’s much faster airwaves.
But it’ll be a slow launch; you won’t be able to go out to a store and buy AT&T’s 5G hot spot

Charter Communications, the parent company of Spectrum, has agreed to a $174.2 million settlement with Attorney General Barbara Underwood, following the 2017 lawsuit that saw the AG’s office sue the internet provider over misleading internet speeds. The lawsuit, led by then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleged that speeds were up to 80 percent slower than advertised.According to the New York Daily News, the $174.2 million payout will come in two forms: $62.5 million that will be ref

Dirac, a Swedish company that licenses out its audio-processing tech to big-name brands like BMW, Volvo, Xiaomi, and OnePlus, is today unveiling a new feature for mobile devices that it’s calling Dirac Bass. Aimed for use in smartphones and tiny portable speakers, Dirac Bass gets around the physical limitations of those small devices with a deft trick of psychoacoustics. Instead of trying to reproduce the deepest bass notes with micro-speakers that simply can’t operate at such frequ

As networks get put under increasing pressure from ever-growing amounts of data, network equipment manufacturers are facing huge challenges to increase data transmission speeds over farther distances. As a premier networking equipment company, Cisco wants to be prepared to meet that demand. Today, it opened up its checkbook and announced its intent to acquire Luxtera for $660 million.
Luxtera, which was founded in 2001 and raised more than $130 million, will give Ciscoa photonic solution for tha

After decades of soaring cable TV prices, the streaming revolution has finally arrived. Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, and Amazon are all fully stocked services, entirely capable of competing with cable on content, and they’re all rated far higher in customer satisfaction than the companies they hope to supplant.The result is new competition for cable companies that’s pushing them into the streaming business. Nearly every broadcaster that’s currently in the cable TV lineup will offer

Vine’s spiritual successor is slated to launch in 2019, yet it already faces two immense and conflicting expectations: that it will be a launching pad for another era of huge stars, and that it’ll recreate the low-key, relaxed, and goofy atmosphere that made Vine so fun.
The app, called Byte, comes from Dom Hofmann, one of Vine’s co-founders. It’ll allow users to create similarly short-form videos, and ideally, find a community of like-minded creators.
But the landscape

Phone design got a little eccentric this past year. Reciting a mantra of “more screen is always better” under their breath, smartphone manufacturers did their utmost to kill the bezels around their displays, with most of them opting for the notch as the primary solution. Some copied the iPhone X’s wide notch, others boasted of their narrower notches,and Google went the other way by putting the biggest notch ever on the Pixel 3 XL.
Apple chief designer Jony Ive has long express

2018 has been a good year for video games. From blockbuster epics to smaller indie experiences to inventive takes on VR, the breadth and variety of games that came out over the last 12 months is astounding. To celebrate, Verge staff members are writing essays on their own personal favorite games, and what made them stand out above the crowd.
I’m about to tell you about my favorite game of 2018, Beat Saber — even though I’m a little worried it will ruin my favorite part.
Beat S

Update December 18th: 8:56AM ET: And then there were two: Blue Origin also delayed its flight due to issues with the rocket’s ground infrastructure.
Update December 18th, 8:21AM ET: Already this Rocket Tuesday is down to three launches instead of four. Arianespace’s Soyuz launch has been delayed 24 hours due to high-altitude winds above the launch site.
Original Story: The space industry is rocketing through the last few weeks of 2018. Today, there are four rockets slated to launch

Sling TV, ESPN, and Fox Now are now available on the Oculus Go virtual reality headset (via Engadget). You’ll be able to watch the content inside of a virtual room, where it can be viewed on the equivalent of a large projector screen. Subscriptions will be required to access each streaming service, but Oculus is including $80 of Sling TV credit with the purchase of any Oculus Go headset until January 15th.Sling TV packages include access to dozens of live channels including AMC, CNN, and

Microsoft has resolved a number of blocking bugs that prevented some Windows 10 users from installing the latest October 2018 Update. The software giant originally re-released this update last month, following some file deletion issues after its original release in October. Microsoft has since been working on ensuring all PCs can get the update, after blocking it on some systems that had incompatible software or hardware drivers.
Some of those blocking bugs included compatibility issues with iC

On Monday morning, I did something I often do when testing a new device: I took it off the charger to see how long it’ll last under regular use. This time around it’s an obscure phone called the Doogee S80, and at the time of writing this on Tuesday afternoon, the battery has just hit 30 percent left.
Not bad, right? What if I told you I was talking about last Monday?
The S80 belongs to a niche class of Chinese phones with really, really big batteries. This particular unit is built