Technology news

A contractor for US Customs and Border Protection has been breached, leaking photos and other sensitive data, the agency announced on Monday. Initially described as “traveler photos,” many of the images seem to be pictures of traveler license plates, likely taken from cars at an automotive port of entry.
Customs has not named the contractor involved in the breach, but a Washington Post article noted that the announcement included a Word document with the name Perceptrics, a provider

Ubisoft’s E3 keynote had it all: dogs, roller derby, and a mockumentary about game development. While there were plenty of expected and familiar faces, like Watch Dogs Legion and a tense-looking new Rainbow Six, the publisher also detailed a new TV show from the creator of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a Netflix movie, and even a PC subscription service. If you missed the event live, here are all the biggest announcements.Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is getting a story creato

Infowars will pay the creator of Pepe the Frog $15,000 to settle a lawsuit over the use of the cartoon.The case dates back to last year, when the artist Matt Furie sued the website for selling a poster that included right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Infowars founder Alex Jones, as well as Pepe, which has been co-opted as a symbol of the alt-right. Furie accused the site of infringing on his copyright, and the case had been expected to go to trial soon.Both sides said the settlement repre

Ubisoft is announcing a roller derby game called Roller Champions, and a PC-only pre-alpha preview is available today. Roller Champions is described as a team-based, player-versus-player sports game where players work their way up from street derby leagues to championships. It’s playable until June 14th, and when it officially launches in early 2020, it will apparently run on a free-to-play model.
Roller Champions leaked shortly before E3 began, and here, it looks more or less like what w

Every big game publisher is getting into the subscription business, and the latest entrant is Ubisoft. Today at the company’s E3 2019 press conference, Ubisoft announced UPlay Plus, a PC game subscription service sporting more than 100 Ubisoft-published titles and coming out on September 3rd. The service is designed similarly to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass and EA’s Origin Access for PC and EA Access for console. Effectively, you pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited access to a

Microsoft’s Xbox Elite controller has been the gold standard in the pro gamepad market since its release back in 2015.No pro controller has come close to the level of build quality, design aesthetics, and ergonomics that Microsoft provided with its first-generation version, and the only device to come close in my personal use of these controllers across platforms is Astro’s C40 TR for the PlayStation 4 and PC.Now, Microsoft says it finally has an update to the Xbox Elite, appropriat

Mozilla plans to start offering a subscription service inside of Firefox that offers access to “premium” features like a VPN service or cloud storage. It’s still unclear exactly what the service will offer, but Mozilla CEO Chris Beard mentioned both a VPN service and cloud storage in an interview with t3n. Mozilla intends to begin offering subscriptions starting in October.
The details are all a little vague for now — it’s not clear if this will be a single subscri

The jump from the original Watch Dogs to its sequel was a big one. The initial concept — where you play as a hacker in a GTA-style open world — was fleshed out in Watch Dogs 2, with more open-ended gameplay and a tone and style that felt just right. As big as that leap was, though, the third game in the series is even more ambitious. Watch Dogs Legion, which was officially unveiled today at Ubisoft’s E3 keynote, doesn’t just take place in a sprawling, dynamic world &mdas

Netflix is picking up the live-action adaptation of Ubisoft’s The Division three years after the movie was first announced.
There aren’t too many details about the movie, beyond that it stars Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal and is directed by Deadpool 2’s David Leitch. A Ubisoft developer said more information is expected to be released in the future. A synopsis of the film released by Netflix reads:
In the near future, a pandemic virus is spread via paper money on Black

This was the first year of the UploadVR’s E3 virtual reality showcase, and although we’ve probably seen bigger individual VR announcements at E3, the show was packed with trailers and game reveals. We’ll see a lot of these games get full releases over the next year, but for now, here’s some of the most exciting stuff.
Arizona Sunshine’s creators are back with After the FallArizona Sunshine is one of VR’s best first-person shooters, and at E3, developer Vertig

We’re headed for a revolution in computer-generated speech, and a voice clone of Microsoft founder Bill Gates demonstrates exactly why.In the clips embedded below, you can listen to what seems to be Gates reeling off a series of innocuous phrases. “A cramp is no small danger on a swim,” he cautions. “Write a fond note to the friend you cherish,” he advises. But each voice clip has been generated by a machine learning system named MelNet, designed and created by eng

Microsoft will indeed follow through on its plan to open its xCloud game streaming service to the public later this year. According to Mark Skwarski, a senior product marketing manager at Xbox, xCloud is currently in the hands of Microsoft employees around the world.“We are scaling the program up globally. We have deployed project xCloud blades into data centers in 13 regions around the world. We’ve also started our alpha testing,” Skwarski told a group of reporters at an E3 b

In case you took the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition as a hint that Microsoft might omit an optical drive from its next-generation console due in 2020, fear not: Project Scarlett will indeed have one and support physical media. Confirmation comes on two fronts: GameIndustry.biz interviewed Xbox boss Phil Spencer, and Eurogamer got the same word from Matt Booty, the head of Microsoft Game Studios.
“We know, because we see it, that more and more players are buying digital. We think the exper

Audi has announced a voluntary recall on the E-Tron, the company’s first all-electric car, because of a risk for battery fires. The German automaker says the recall covers around 540 E-Trons in the United States, or about half of what Audi has sold since the car’s launch in April.Audi says that a wiring harness glitch in the affected models can cause moisture to seep into the individual battery cells, which could spark a fire. No such fires or injuries have been reported so far, but

American Airlines won’t use Boeing 737 Max aircraft until at least September, pushing back the expected reintroduction of the troubled plane by at least two more weeks. The airline announced Sunday that, while it “remains confident” that a forthcoming software update and new training efforts from Boeing will be enough to get the 737 Max recertified, it wants to give “customers and team members” ample time to “reliably plan their upcoming travel.”Boeing

Razer, which is widely known for making clicky mechanical things, wireless electronic things, and RGB LED-backlit things, is today getting into the performance-enhancing drinks racket. The new Respawn — stylized as “RESPAWN” because it’s so extreme and gamery — drink from Razer contains 95mg of caffeine per serving, comes in little sachets of flavored powder that you mix with water, and costs $24.99 for a box of 20. You can get the Respawn-branded mixer bottle for

The White House’s acting budget chief is pressing for parts of the US’s Huawei ban to be delayed an additional two years, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The ban could dramatically reduce the number of telecom manufacturers capable of supplying services to the government, says Russell T. Vought, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. He also says it could disproportionately affect telecom companies that serve rural areas.
Vought requested the delay in a letter

Square Enix’s E3 presentation will hopefully fill the giant, superhero-shaped hole in our hearts as the company gears up to debut the first look at Marvel’s Avengers.
The game, first announced in January 2017, is being developed by Crystal Dynamics, the Square Enix-owned studio best known for its work on the most recent Tomb Raider series. Both Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix have been relatively quiet since then, but they confirmed last week that gameplay footage and more details

Ubisoft will once again take the stage at E3 for its annual press conference where the company is expected to show off some of its latest games.One of the only things we know for sure will show up up this year is Watch Dogs Legion, the third game in the open-world hacking series that will reportedly be set in a post-Brexit London. There’s also rumors of a new title called Roller Champions, a roller-derby themed multiplayer game that will probably show up, as well the recently announced Gh

There’s some new consolidation in the mobile event technology space this morning, with news that the meetings, events and hospitality technology provider Cvent has acquired San Francisco-based mobile event app maker DoubleDutch. The deal includes both DoubleDutch’smobile event app technology as well as the team, the company said in announcing the deal on Monday.
Founded in 2011, DoubleDutch created both mobile and web apps that gave event hosts everything they needed to set up and mo

Amazon has temporarily stopped taking orders for the Blink XT2 smart camera that it launched last month. The XT2, which is Blink’s first new camera since Amazon acquired the company, is listed as “currently unavailable” for purchase. That applies to all configurations, including the single camera and multicamera kits. The Verge has reached out to Amazon for comment. Best Buy, which also carries the new camera, simply lists it as “coming soon” online, but some peopl

Waze pioneered the idea of putting a lightweight social layer of reporting traffic and cops on a maps app. That made it super popular around the world — so much so that Google up and bought it in 2013. Since then, Waze features have crept their way into Google Maps from time to time, and vice versa. Today’s news is the second thing: there will now be a Google Assistant button (and “Hey Google” hotwording) on Waze now.Google put the Assistant right into Google Maps earlie

The head of Google’s upcoming Stadia game streaming service, Phil Harrison, has said publishers will be allowed to offer their own game subscriptions through the streaming service. In an interview with Geoff Keighley during YouTube’s E3 Live show, RockPaperShotgun reports that Harrison said he expects publishers to start thinking about their own subscriptions “in relatively short order” and that Google will “support that on [its] platform, and we’ll see some

Microsoft spent almost two hours laying out the future of Xbox games, consoles, and services during its E3 press event yesterday. There were 60 games shown, a redesigned Elite 2 controller, and even a new Project Scarlett console, but Microsoft spent less than two minutes talking about its promised xCloud game streaming service. Many had expected the company to fully detail xCloud, especially as Google is launching its Stadia game streaming service in November. Instead, Microsoft remained suspi