Technology news

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google’s largest smart display yet, the Nest Hub Max, will launch on September 9th in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. The Hub Max was announced back at Google I/O, which was also where Google formally announced that it would rebrand its smart home products under the Nest name.
The $229 device has a 10-inch display — significantly bigger than the existing Nest Hub. Like that product, the Max automatically adjusts its screen’s

Graphic by Michele Doying / The Verge Sleep usually leaves people feeling rested and refreshed, but for the patients of clinical neurologist Guy Leschziner, their non-waking moments are generally anything but peaceful. One realizes that she’s been taking her motorcycle out for a ride while fast asleep only after her landlady asks her where she went. Another moves around in his sleep, acting out his dreams — and terrifying his partner in the process. Still others suffer from insomnia

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Snap continues to rebound, adding 13 million daily active users to Snapchat this past quarter. Those added users bring the total number of people using the app around the world every day to 203 million, which is the highest it’s been since Snap went public. The growth indicates that Snap’s investment in product features for a more global user base is paying off and that its luck in creating viral face filters is helping it grow, too. Snap esti

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images After months of heightened tech scrutiny from both Republicans and Democrats, the Justice Department is opening a new antitrust investigation into large tech firms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
“Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsive to consumer demands,” said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Antitrust Division. “The Department’s a

Image: WinFuture As we get closer to Samsung’s August 7th event for the Galaxy Note 10 and larger Note 10 Plus, more details and photos of the devices continue to make their way out. The latest development is images and specs for the larger Plus model, posted by WinFuture. These largely line up with what’s been reported previously: the Note 10 Plus will feature a 6.8-inch display but in a form factor similar to that of today’s Galaxy Note 9. Samsung’s progress with shrin

The Pokémon Company is expanding its selection of mobile games with a new title out today called Pokémon Rumble Rush. Like past Pokémon Rumble games, it’s a simplified version of even the easiest pokémon battle: you tap or hold the phone’s screen to initiate attacks in linear dungeons that typically clock in under a minute. It’s a low-stakes beat ‘em up that’s as forgettable as it is easy to play.
Rumble Rush was soft-launched on Android

Starbucks is aiming to expand its delivery service nationwide by early 2020 by partnering exclusively with Uber Eats. The two companies first piloted the Starbucks Delivers program last fall in Miami, and have since expanded to 11 markets in the US. According to a press release, Starbucks and Uber Eats will also collaborate on “innovation and technology integration,” though it’s unclear exactly what that entails.Currently, Uber Eats charges a $2.49 booking fee for Starbucks del

UPS is seeking permission from the federal government to operate an extensive network of commercial drones in the US. If approved, the delivery giant could be permitted to fly drones over populated areas, at night, and out of the operator’s line of sight.UPS is seeking what’s known as Part 135 certification under the Federal Aviation Administration, which applies to “air carriers and operators.” Since they’re considered aircraft under federal law, drones from delive

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge New York City might effectively ban the controversial practice of selling consumers’ phone location data, if a new bill proposed this week passes the city council.Fines up to $10,000
The bill, believed to be the first of its kind, would require wireless carriers and apps to get explicit permission before giving third parties geolocation data collected within the city. Under the plan, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Tele

In 2017, Amazon offered its customers the chance to get packages delivered inside their homes with its new Key service. What if you’re nervous about giving Amazon the right to open your front door, but you’re also tired of having your purchases left out in the rain? Well, in 2018, Amazon offered an alternative: the company will deliver your package to the trunk of your car, where it can sit in relative security.
The service is available for specific types of cars (most recently, cars

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, appears to have acquired a startup that develops AI-generated music software. The company, Jukedeck, made a tool that could automatically generate music and then let users adjust the length, tempo, and where it climaxed.
While breakout TikTok videos tend to be based around licensed music — like “Old Town Road” or “Good as Hell” — it’s obvious how a tool like Jukedeck’s c

An artistic rendering of Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 with its sail deployed | Image: Planetary Society On July 23rd, a tiny spacecraft in orbit around Earth unfurled a thin sheet of mylar that’s the area of a boxing ring. The result is a reflective sail that rides not on wind, but on light from the Sun to propel the vehicle through space.
The spacecraft that’s now sporting a shiny new accessory is called LightSail 2, which is operated by The Planetary Society, a nonprofit

FaceApp Florida Senator Rick Scott has introduced a bill that would make online retailers — including app stores — prominently list every product’s country of origin. According to Scott, it’s partly addressing recent privacy controversy over the Russia-based photo app FaceApp. It’s also supposed to push consumers away from certain foreign goods. “There are nations around the world, like China, that are trying to compete with America,” said Scott in a st

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge Apple is asking the Trump administration to exclude parts for its Mac Pro desktop from tariffs, as first reported by Bloomberg.
Apple filed a series of exemption requests with the Office of the US Trade Representative (first made public on July 18th), asking that the government exempt a series of specific products from a proposed 25 percent tariff on goods imported from China. The tariffs have not yet been fully implemented, but the plan would include electronic

Ford promised us an electric version of its F-150 truck was on the way back in 2017, but it’s been mostly silent on the matter since. Though the vehicles is still years from launch, today the company came out in a big way, showing a prototype electric F-150 towing a train weighing over a million pounds. In the video, Ford invites some current F-150 owning-men to a train yard. They are apparently unaware of the company’s plans until the electric F-150’s chief engineer, Linda Zh

If you’ve been on the hunt for a deal on the Bose QC35 Series II wireless noise-canceling headphones, Drop (formerly Massdrop) is selling them for $289 for a limited time. These usually sell for $349, and are worth considering if Bose’s new (and excellent) $399 Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 are a little too expensive.While these have been bested in the sound quality department by the Sony 1000X M3, the QC35 II headphones still hold their own when it comes to effectively canceling o

The first trailer for Jojo Rabbit, the new “anti-hate satire” from director Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok, What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople), has arrived. It follows a young boy who befriends an imaginary Adolf Hitler, and it’s pretty bonkers.
The trailer is relatively short, coming in just under a minute, but that’s all it really takes to get a taste of Waititi’s new story. The trailer introduces a young boy named Jojo who creates an imaginary f

Perhaps we should feel sorry for Boris Johnson. He just attained a long-held ambition of his, ascending to the office of Prime Minister following a tight competition with his Conservative rivals. And now he has to figure out Brexit, with a deadline of October 31. Thank you all for the incredible honour you have done me. The time for campaigning is over and the time for work begins to unite our country and party, deliver Brexit and defeat Corbyn. I will work flat out to repay your confidence &md

Over the past couple of years, YouTube’s been in hot water over a myriad of issues that would give any CEO sleepless nights. The list of offenses includes failing to police problematic videos appearing on its platform, toxic comments that have pushed it to disable the feature for some content, and troubling recommendations delivered to unwitting users, including children. Naturally, the company has been lambasted over these shortcomings – rightly so, many people would argue. I&rsquo

Enterprise search engine Elasticsearch is under threat of being turned into a sophisticated cryptocurrency mining botnet to be used in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro describes a new malware strain that launches multi-stage attacks on publicly accessible databases and servers that run old versions of Elasticsearch software. “[…] Many of the malicious traffic or attacks that we see targeting Elasticsearch are relatively str

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Uber is dabbling in an Amazon Prime-style monthly subscription service that rolls together all of its major services: ride-hailing, Uber Eats food delivery, and bike and scooter rentals. For now, the company is testing different iterations in Chicago and San Francisco, but it could start rolling out to other markets soon.The all-in-one pass is available for $24.99 a month. For that price, customers get price protection or a fixed discount on every ride-hail tr

The issue affects older iOS devices including the iPhone 5 (pictured).| Photo by Anthony Devlin/PA Images via Getty Images If you’re using an iPhone or iPad introduced in 2012 or earlier, you should check your device for an iOS update if you want it to keep reporting the correct time, date, and location.Apple is pushing a software update to a selection of older iOS phones and tablets to fix an issue affecting global GPS. The problem is known as the Week Number Rollover issue, and its caus

Image: Epic Games We’ve seen game developers in the past build tools that let you watch its e-sports competitions from a viewer within the game itself, most notably Blizzard for Overwatch League. But Epic is going one step further for its upcoming Fortnite World Cup event this weekend with a full picture-in-picture (PiP) streaming feature going live in the next few days. That way, you can keep a live feed of the competition running while you play Fortnite, if the 100-person battle royale

Image: Daimler AG Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, and Bosch, a global auto supplier, received approval from local authorities in Stuttgart, Germany, to test an autonomous parking valet system, the companies announced on Tuesday.The testing will take place in the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage, which has been fitted with sensors to guide and monitor the vehicles as they park themselves autonomously. A car owner simply taps an app to send their vehicle away to its parking space

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Apple is reportedly planning to release three new “iPhone 11” models this fall that will include the existing Lightning connector. 9to5Mac reports that these new iPhones will include Apple’s latest A13 chip and a new Taptic Engine that’s codenamed “leap haptics.” There aren’t many details about what this new Taptic Engine will provide, but it’s clearly going to replace the 3D Touch feature that looks like it&rsqu

Fujifilm has announced a new long-range surveillance camera that can spot vehicles’ licence plates from a kilometer away. To accomplish this, the so-called Fujifilm SX800 packs a built-in lens capable of 40x optical zoom, boosting the focal length from 20mm to 800mm. It also supports a 1.25x digital zoom for a maximum focal length of 1,000mm. To put this in simpler terms, the Japanese camera-maker says this equals about a kilometer in distance. And, indeed, it has included samples of the

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. If you’ve used any modern Android devices, you’ll have come across the current unlocking trend: the in-screen fingerprint scanner. Over the past decade of smartphones, one of the clearest usability evolutions has been how we unlock our devices. We’ve moved from typing in passcodes, to fingerprint scanners, to facial recognitio

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! Sometimes headphones or a home stereo won’t do — you need a portable sound system. I mean, how on earth else are you meant to get all your friends to listen to those carefully crafted playlists? This is where Marshall’s Stockwell portable Bluetooth speaker comes into the picture. This device is on sale for just $109.99, down from its original price tag of $199.97 (44% off). Marshall is

Image: Honor Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has announced its first phones to feature pop-up selfie cameras. When combined with their side-mounted fingerprint sensors, this means the Honor 9X and 9X Max have almost entirely bezel-less displays, with no display notches or hole-punches in sight. Android Authority reports that the Honor 9X will release in China on July 30th with prices starting at 1,399 yuan (around $203), while the 9X Max will come later on August 9th starting at 2,199 yuan (arou

Mumbai-based Haptik,which operates a conversational AI platform, has already won several high-profile clients in India. Now the five-year-old firm, with newly found significant capital in the bank, is attempting to replicate its success in international markets.
On Tuesday, Haptik announced it has acqui-hired Convrg, a Los Angeles-based startup that develops chatbots, to serve customers in North America. The move is part of Haptik’s broader strategy to both expand its technology expertise

For the ongoing series, Code Word, we’re exploring if — and how — technology can protect individuals against sexual assault and harassment, and how it can help and support survivors. In April 2019, police in the UK introduced new consent forms asking sexual assault survivors for permission to access their personal information stored on their phones. If survivors refuse to hand over phone data in this “digital strip search,” police will allegedly stop investiga

It’s barely been a month since Facebook unleashed its cryptocurrency Libra into the wild and published its whitepaper. But already, the social media giant has been forced to address a growing number of fake communications associated to its digital asset. Around a dozen “fake accounts, pages, and groups,” claiming to be official Libra outlets, have sprung up on Facebook and Instagram, The Washington Post reports. This is on top of the growing list of websites claiming to alread

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge An investigation by The Washington Post has uncovered a dozen accounts, pages, and groups across Facebook and Instagram which misleadingly claim to be official hubs for Libra, Facebook’s proposed digital currency. In some cases these pages, which were only removed after WaPo reported them to Facebook, offered to sell Libra at a discount through third-party websites.
Given the proliferation of cryptocurrency scams seen in recent years, it’s no

In 2017, Ford announced that it would sell an all-electric version of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck. It plans to start selling a hybrid version in 2020, and as a way to start priming the pump (or plug, as it were) for a vehicle that will no doubt be a very big deal, the company released a video Tuesday demonstrating the electric truck’s remarkable towing capacity.An all-male retinue of fluorescent vest wearing truck owners are brought in to gawk and shout “no way”
The ele