Technology news

Are you running Firefox version 67.0.3 or Firefox ESR 60.7.1? If the answer is “no,” or you’re not sure, maybe just update your web browser now. Firefox maker Mozilla is warning (via ZDNet) that the browser has a zero-day flaw that’s actively being exploited in the wild — you don’t see that every day — and it has issued an emergency patch that can let you plug that hole right now.
Here’s the full description of the issue:
A type confusion vulnerab

Microsoft recently announced Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, a new subscription service that bundles Xbox Game Pass (for console and PC) and Xbox Live Gold for $14.99 per month, saving you $15 per month compared to paying for these services separately.If you want to try it out, there’s a promotion happening that gives you a one-month trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $1. But before you redeem it, you should know that it’s possible to use the trial as a way to save a lot of money on Game

Major augmented reality hardware startup Magic Leap has sued competitor Nreal — which was founded by a former Magic Leap employee — for allegedly ripping off its technology and design. In a lawsuit filed yesterday, Magic Leap accuses Nreal founder Chi Xu of “blatant copying” and an attempt to “free ride on Magic Leap’s business, image, and confidential information” with its upcoming Nreal Light glasses.
Xu worked at Magic Leap for roughly a year between

Hours after Facebook announced its plans for a global cryptocurrency project, a top House Democrat is calling for Facebook to halt its plans until Congress and regulators have had a chance to investigate potential risks.
“With the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,” House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) said in a statement. “Given

The pearl-clutchers at the MTA have a big, sex toy-shaped problem on their hands.
Dame, which makes precisely engineered sex toys for women, is suing New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) for rejecting its advertising campaign. 
"The vague and sexist reasons behind the MTA's refusal to show our ads are not only barring many businesses like ours from growing their companies, but their censorship is a violation of First Amendment rights," Alexandra Fine, CEO and co-founder of Dame P

Google today responded to an ongoing controversy involving lyrics provider and annotator Genius Media, which has accused Google of copying its song lyrics and reposting them as part of a feature in its search engine.Now, Google is claiming it receives all of its song lyrics through third-party providers, and its asked the provider in question, LyricFind, to “investigate the issue to ensure that they’re following industry best practices in their approach.” Google says it will a

There are few things more nostalgic — and often, wildly grotesque — than combing through dated recipes.
Maybe the thought of Milk Chicken, a vintage recipe involving roasted chicken, banana, milk, and eggs, gives you joy, not nausea. Perhaps you long for the days when your grandmother made Lime Cheese Salad, a delightful combination of Jell-O, cottage cheese, and seafood.  
Either way, your most debased and nostalgic food favorites now have a home on r/Old_Recipes, a new and pop

Soon you can try out the exact lipstick your favorite beauty gurus wears without even leaving your couch.
Buying makeup is a commitment — how do you know if you really want to spend upwards of $40 on lipstick if you aren't even sure you look good in it? No matter how hard makeup tutorials will try to shill holy grail products, you never know if a color will work on you without seeing it on your face first. 
Google announced Tuesday that this summer, YouTuber viewers will be able to tr

Dish is negotiating a deal to buy wireless spectrum and Boost Mobile from T-Mobile and Sprint, as the latter two companies look to finally receive approval for their huge, industry-reshaping merger. According to Bloomberg, Dish has emerged as the company most likely to purchase the assets that T-Mobile and Sprint are currently trying to offload in a bid to assuage the Justice Department’s concerns with the merger. The satellite TV provider is reportedly willing to pay “at least&rdqu

Dame is suing New York’s public transit agency for refusing to run subway ads for its women-focused sex toys.
The lawsuit, filed today, points out that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has regularly approved ads focused on sexuality in recent years, including erectile disfunction drug ads from Hims and Roman, posters for the Museum of Sex, promotion ofPrEP and condoms from the New York City Health Department, and more. Dame says the rejection of its sex toy ads is ro

Battle royale has come for Mario. The winner-takes-all genre, popularized by the likes of Fortnite and PUBG, is now also a free web game starring Nintendo’s famous plumber.
The aptly titled Mario Royale has a pretty simple premise: 75 people, all playing as Mario, try to make their way to the end of a classic Super Mario Bros. stage at the same time. It sounds easy, but since everyone looks identical, it’s incredibly chaotic, and you’ll likely find yourself dying because you m

The top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee blasted Facebook’s Tuesday announcement that it would be launching a new cryptocurrency. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) warned the company that any new plans should be subject to strict oversight.
“Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy,” Brown said. “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank acco

Significant spoilers ahead for season 1 of Jessica Jones.
The horror and superhero genres approach the world from opposite directions. Horror is meant to make the audience feel disempowered and terrorized. Superhero stories, by contrast, make viewers feel empowered and triumphant. Both genres often set out to give the audience the same thing — a big, satisfying burst of catharsis — but in different ways, and for different reasons.
But at the same time, the genres draw liberally from

In 2014, The Verge reported how Google had effectively created its own island in Silicon Valley, something akin to a company town, exacerbating a housing and traffic crisis that now characterizes much of the San Francisco Bay Area — the place with the highest housing costs in the nation.
Now, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is announcing the company’s biggest commitment by far to fix its broken backyard: a $1 billion investment over the next 10 years to build some 20,000 units of housing.

From the beginning, cryptocurrency was about trust. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work,” Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in the first public announcement of the bitcoin system. “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust.” Most of what we associate with cryptocurrency — the dense technology, the mining gold rush, the alarmin

Nearly every video game publisher wanted to talk about subscription services last week at E3, but some top executives know some will inevitably fail. In an attempt to stand out, however, more game publishers may rely on developers to make innovative, experimental games designed for these services.Mike Blank, EA’s senior vice president of player networks and the man who oversees the game publisher’s subscription service, is one of those executives thinking about the industry’s

Early investments from a government agency, like NASA or the Air Force, can be a crucial step in the evolution of commercial space companies from scrappy startups to successful businesses. That’s according to a new report from Space Angels, an investment firm focused on the space industry, which quantified how much money government agencies have invested in private aerospace firms over the last 18 years.The analysis reveals just how important a role the government still plays in the priva

Music publishing company Wixen has sued Pandora for displaying lyrics from Wixen artists — who include Tom Petty, Rage Against the Machine, and Weezer. Wixen’s suit claims that the internet radio service knowingly used the lyrics “without any valid license or authorization.” It’s the second major lawsuit that Wixen has recently filed against a streaming music company, following a now-settled $1.6 billion lawsuit against Spotify.
As explained on its website, Pandora

Is the advertising model that allows our use of Facebook to be free actually the thing that’s wrong with Facebook? If we all just paid a subscription fee each month, would that solve some of the issues and concerns with privacy, data, and so on?Here is a lightly edited excerpt of Verge senior editor Casey Newton speaking with Facebook executives Adam Mosseri and Andrew Bosworth onstage at Code Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, about whether a subscription model would solve anything for Face

For the past few years, game developers have increasingly sought to unionize amid growing concerns over layoffs and burnout in the industry — and, today, Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders applauded their efforts.
“The video game industry made $43 billion in revenue last year. The workers responsible for that profit deserve to collectively bargain as part of a union,” Sanders said in a tweet. “I’m glad to see unions like @IATSE and the broader @GameWo

In the world of tech, privacy has become a selling point. Apple promises that “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” Google claims it’s making privacy more than a “luxury good.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims “the future is private.” But consumers are often still at the mercy of companies. We have to trust that platforms aren’t secretly tracking us or using our data to train facial recognition algorithms — and that their p

As Facebook unveiled its cryptocurrency project today, European officials quickly called for scrutiny of the plan, raising concerns over whether the project was sufficiently regulated.
According to comments reported by Bloomberg, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Facebook’s cryptocurrency, called Libra, must not “become a sovereign currency.”
Must not “become a sovereign currency”
“It can’t and it must not happen,” he told Europe 1 radio

Fujifilm’s X-T2 mirrorless camera body is $799 at B&H Photo and Amazon as the company (most likely) clears out its remaining stock of the 2016 model. The X-T2 regularly sold for $1,599 sans lens, though in months past, it briefly found its way down to around $900.Now that it’s selling for $799, and likely to remain at that price until stock runs out, this might be a good time to consider it. The Verge’s Chris Welch reviewed the X-T2 when it was first released, and though i

Microsoft is adding an artificial intelligence-powered assistant to PowerPoint, to help improve people’s presentations. The new feature, dubbed Presenter Coach, will appear during a rehearsal mode for PowerPoint slides and offer feedback on your presentation skills by listening to audio from your computer’s microphone. Presenter Coach will pop up with tips about pacing and filler words so you’re not muttering or stuttering through a presentation, and also help presenters be mo

Simone Giertz was tired of waiting for Elon Musk to unveil his new Tesla pickup truck, so she decided to make one herself. The popular YouTuber and self-described “queen of shitty robots” transformed a Model 3 into an honest-to-god pickup truck, which she dubs “Truckla” — and naturally you can watch all the cutting and welding (and cursing) on her YouTube channel. There’s even a fake truck commercial to go along with it.Giertz spent over a year planning and d

It took a YouTube video, a walk-in freezer kept at negative 20 degrees Celsius, and some very cold-tolerant engineering students for researchers to finally figure out why freezing soap bubbles resemble glitter in a snow globe. The trick itself is a popular winter science experiment when temperatures dip below freezing: head outside, blow a soap bubble, gently plop it onto some snow or ice, and watch as crystals dance around on the film until the entire thing is a delicate ice ball. It’s v

Google Calendar is down for users around the world. Currently, trying to access the calendar generates a 404 error message through a browser. When contacted for comment, a spokesperson from Google pointed us toward the service’s dashboard, which contains a message from Google posted at 10:22AM ET confirming that users are unable to access Google Calendar.“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar,” the message reads. “We will provide more informa

Verizon is getting another 5G phone for its fledging network: LG’s V50 ThinQ, which will launch on June 20th, via Android Police.The V50 released in the US last month as Sprint’s first 5G phone, and while we’ve known since it was first announced that it would be making its way to Verizon at some point over the summer, today’s announcement has finally given us the official release date.The Verizon model appears to be nearly identical to the Sprint version, although it app

Youper, a mental health app with a chatbot it calls an “emotional health assistant,” has raised $3 million in seed funding from Goodwater Capital. The funds will be used to accelerate development of Youper’sartificial intelligence-based capabilities and grow its user base.
Based in San Francisco, Youper was co-founded in 2016 by Dr. Jose Hamilton. For a decade, Hamilton worked as a psychiatrist in clinical settings, seeing more than 3,000 patients. While talking to them, he rea

TikTok users have been dueting with an apology video from one of the platform’s biggest creators in response to allegations of sexually inappropriate interactions with underage fans.
Sebastian Kretzmann, a member of the popular creator collective Strawberry Milk Gang who’s known by fans as “RadicalSeb,” was accused last week of sending graphic sexual messages to underage fans, including suggesting sexually explicit acts they wanted to perform. In response, fans have used

No Man’s Sky fans have raised over $4,800 to post a “thank you” message to Hello Games on a billboard outside the game developer’s office. The money was raised using a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe that was started by Reddit user Cameron G, and will also buy lunch and beer for the development team after it concludes on July 14th. After hitting its initial target of $1,750, to pay for the billboard itself, the goal was subsequently raised to $6,000, with the extra fun

The diminutive Palm phone is now getting an unlocked version sold directly through the resurrected Palm, making it available to everyone — not just Verizon customers.The move marks the latest expansion for the shrunken down Android device, which launched first as a companion device meant to be used alongside your regular smartphone. Verizon would then go on to sell it as a standalone, $350 smartphone a few months later, and now, with an unlocked model, customers on AT&T, T-Mobile, and

Many people try to learn an instrument at one point or another in their life, and for a lot of us that instrument is the piano. But when you give up learning there’s no easy way back — not without paying for expensive lessons at least.
Music hardware startup Roli wants to change this with the launch of Lumi: a 24-key, light-up keyboard and companion app that teaches users how to play the piano from scratch, before transforming into a tool for jamming and even composition.
The keyboa