Technology news

Pixel buds | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google has been steadily building out its Bluetooth Fast Pair features for the last few years, and the company just revealed the next wave of updates that should make managing compatible Bluetooth devices even better on Android.The biggest update is said to be arriving “later this year” and will add deeper support for truly wireless headphones. Headphones that support fast pair will eventually be able to show the individual ba

The words "permissionless" and "regulated" don't exactly go together. But Facebook's cryptocurrency project, Libra, is promising to adhere to regulations and be open to everyone, which may turn out to be a tough — if not impossible — task. 
That's assuming there will even be a Libra coin, as originally envisioned. 
It's been a nightmarish week for Libra, with U.S. senators (Democrats and Republicans alike) grilling Facebook's David Marcus; President Trump saying Libra coin

Peloton Technology is moving autonomous vehicles along faster than most robo-taxis.
At the Automated Vehicles Symposium in Orlando this week, Peloton unveiled its highly autonomous driving system for trucks — that plural "trucks" is key. This isn't one truck going it alone with just sensors, cameras, and software guiding it across deserted highways. It's a platoon set-up with a lead and follow truck. The follow truck is truly driverless, and that's where the innovation comes in.
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Illustrations by Alex Castro / The Verge Earlier this week, Audible revealed that it was working on a new feature for its audiobook app: Audible Captions, which will use machine learning to transcribe an audio recording for listeners, allowing them to read along with the narrator. While the Amazon-owned company claims it is designed as an educational feature, a number of publishers are demanding that their books be excluded, saying these captions are “unauthorized and brazen infringements

We have our first glimpse at the long-awaited fourth season of Rick and Morty and it's got almost everything you could ask for: Morty, an alien, Jerry, and rage. No Rick this time, unfortunately.
As we learned in May, Rick and Morty is returning with Season 4 in November, and frankly this first clip is pretty grounded compared to some of the things that we've seen in the show thus far.
It looks like in this episode, Morty and Jerry are working with an alien who is an app developer and has develo

Raise your hands if you've ever wanted to fuck a can of Four Loko. 
Nobody? None at all?
Nobody — not a single soul — asked for it, but two deeply cursed brands have teamed up for a historic collaboration that's sure to lead to regrets all around: A Four Loko Fleshlight.
Selling for the perfectly reasonable price of $69, the toy is sure to bring back all the adolescent memories you'd probably prefer to forget. What's more reminiscent of painfully awkward sexual awakenings than s

There’s been a Rick and Morty-sized hole in our hearts since October 2017, but San Diego Comic-Con’s first look at the show’s fourth season promises new hijinks soon.The clip stars an alien intern, voiced by Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi, who has developed an app that Morty and his father Jerry want removed from the internet. It doesn’t exactly go as planned. Although this isn’t a full season trailer, it is one of the longest Rick and Morty clips we’ve

Thatgamecompany co-founder Jenonva Chen, the mind behind wildly acclaimed titles like Journey and Flower, designs games with one simple but seemingly impossible goal: to create virtual worlds where people are nice to each other.
In 2012, the monolithic Journey achieved that seemingly impossible task. The minimalist online game stripped players of all identity, rendering each an identical, anonymous robed figure without a name or any ability to communicate aside from chirps. 
By doing away w

Ahead of the highly-anticipated Veronica Mars Season 4, Hulu surprised fans by releasing the full season a whole week early.
Star Kristen Bell announced the news at San Diego Comic-Con, and sure enough, it's now available on Hulu. Seasons 1-3 of the early-2000s series have been streaming since July 1Veronica Mars achieved cult status after it went off the air in 2007. Then there was a 2014 film Kickstarted by fans.Season 4 finds Veronica investigating a series of murders in her hometown of Neptu

Image: Hulu Well, this is a surprise. Hulu had previously announced that its revival of the mystery series Veronica Mars would debut on July 26th, but the service has bumped the release date up by a week. The eight-episode fourth season is streaming now.The series, which first debuted in 2004 on UPN, followed high-school student Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) as she worked to figure out who murdered her best friend, Lily Kane (Amanda Seyfried), all while trying to navigate the ins and outs of lif

Customer experience management platform Medallia (NYSE: MDLA) rose more than 70% in its New York Stock Exchange debut Friday.
The nearly two-decades-old business priced its shares at $21 apiece, the top of its proposed range, Thursday evening and traded as high as $39.54 the following morning. Medalliaclosed up roughly 76% at about $37 per share on Friday.
Medallia sold a total of 15.5 million shares in its IPO, raising $326 million at a $2.5 billion valuation in the process.
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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images On Friday, President Trump commemorated the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 with a photo opportunity in the Oval Office, where he spent a lot of time questioning his administration’s own policy for deep space human exploration. Surrounded by NASA officials, Moon walkers, and lawmakers, Trump repeatedly asked NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, why astronauts couldn’t go straight to Mars instead of going to the Moon first.
“To get t

Short-form video app TikTok,the fourth most downloaded app in the world as of last quarter, is working on several new seemingly Instagram-inspired features — including a Discover page, a grid-style layout similar to Instagram Explore, an Account Switcher and more.
The features were uncovered this week by reverse-engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong, who published screenshots of these features and others to Twitter.
A TikTok spokesperson declined to offer further details on the company&

Multi-dimensional colors are in again: you see it in smartphones that glisten into different colors as you change angles, game consoles are available in all kinds of color, and now we have shoes that change color when you step outside. The new Converse collection, in collaboration with Chinatown Market, is like a mood ring for your feet: they look like regular white sneakers but change colors when exposed to UV light.
Depending on how much UV light the shoe receives, the intensity also changes f

Hand holding iPhone with Lyft app open Lyft is adding New York City subway directions to its app in the latest bid by the ride-hailing industry to make peace with public transportation.The rollout of transit directions in the app will take place over the next several weeks, according to Bloomberg. With the update, Lyft’s app will show users subway stations and bus stops, as well as docks for Citi Bike, the bike-share system owned by the ride-hail company. The features are designed to keep

We’ve got great news for all the time-strapped female founders out there. Yeah, we’re looking at you, sister. We’re extending the application deadline to apply for the All Raise“ask me anything” (AMA) sessions at Disrupt SF 2019. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to meet with a leading female VC and, well, ask her anything. Apply for an AMA session by August 15.
Not familiar with All Raise? This startup nonprofit, dedicated to accelerating female founder s

Spotting and diagnosing cancer is a complex and difficult process even for the dedicated medical professionals who do it for a living. A new tool from Google researchers could improve the process by providing what amounts to reverse image search for suspicious or known cancerous cells. But it’s more than a simple matching algorithm.
Part of the diagnosis process is often examining tissue samples under a microscope and looking for certain telltale signals or shapes that may indicate one or

Instagram removed Belle Delphine's account on Thursday night for violating its terms of service after users reported her for "nudity or pornography." 
Delphine went viral recently for promising to make a Pornhub account if her Instagram post received one million likes. She followed through with making the account, but trolled her horny followers with titles like "Belle Delphine plays with her PUSSY" and recording herself playing with plush cats. A month later, she continued her grift by sel

Welcome to Small Humans, an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2019 and we have the entire internet to contend with.Pampers has announced a new product called Lumi by Pampers, a “connected care system” to monitor your baby. The package includes a special “smart” diaper, which tracks your baby’s pee and sleep patterns, a mobile app, and Log

The fast-growing Indian hospitality business Oyo has garnered a valuation of $10 billion after its founder, Ritesh Agarwal, purchased $2 billion in shares from venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, the company announced Friday.
Agarwal, 25, founded Oyo in 2013 at the age of 19. Following immense growth of the now global hotel chain business, Agarwal opted to increase his 10% stake to 30% via a Cayman Islands company called RA Hospitality Holdings, according to Th

When you're scrolling through an Insta feed full of vacay pics it's hard not to imagine how much it would cost to get there. It's only when your parent's voice pops into your head — "do you have vacation money?" — that you're snapped back to reality. 
You could always go back to sulking, binge-listening to Jimmy Buffet songs, or swimsuit shopping online when you know damn well you won't be going anywhere near a body of water anytime soon. You could even fake a vacation for clout

Six minutes into the first episode of Queer Eye Season 4, something happens that has never happened on the show before. The Fab Five — Tan, Karamo, Jonathan, Antoni, and Bobby — enter a gymnasium packed with high school students and are greeted with wild, screaming applause. The school is in full pep rally mode, Jonathan performs with the cheerleaders, and the Fab Five take turns hyping the crowd up on the mic before whisking hero Kathi Dooley off for her weeklong makeover. For the r

AutoX, the Hong Kong and San Jose, Calif.-based autonomous vehicle technology company, is pushing past its grocery delivery roots and into the AV supplier and robotaxi business.
And now, it’s taking its business to Europe.
AutoXhas partnered with NEVS — the Swedish holding company and electric vehicle manufacturer that bought Saab’s assets out of bankruptcy — to deploy a robotaxi pilot service in Europe by the end of 2020. Under the exclusive partnership, AutoX will integ

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Superhuman controversy from earlier this month, in which a former Silicon Valley exec blew the lid off a series of controversial email surveillance tools offered by the up-and-coming startup, has prompted a bit of soul searching among those in the tech industry. But in twisted fashion, the public blasting of a company like Superhuman has been the tech equivalent of opening Pandora’s Box, unearthing all sorts of free and easily available tools th

Airbus unveiled a new concept airplane called “Bird of Prey,” which seems fitting because this thing seems designed to prey on your deepest fears. The bird-like conceptual airline design features multiple propellors, a rudder branded with the Union Jack, and something called “feathered wings” which I can’t seem to unsee.The body of the plane is bronze-colored and looks more fish-like than anything else. The addition to the tendril-tipped wings, though, make it clear

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge My first Android phone was the original Motorola Droid, which I purchased and loved using despite its abysmal anti-woman marketing campaign. And one of the things I loved about it was that it had an interchangeable battery. I always kept an extra charged battery on hand, and simply swapped them out when needed. It was a lot more convenient and lightweight than dragging around a heavy battery pack, and kept the phone going strong over the course of the busiest w