Technology news

After spending 50 years on display in a museum, the world’s largest steam engine is finally getting to stretch its wheels and blow the cobwebs out of its steam whistle for a journey across the Midwest. Big Boy, as the locomotive is known, is sparking delight in all the towns he visits. The Union Pacific Railroad restored the historic train engine to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.I have a two-year-old son, so as you can imagine I read a l

Millions of people have been signing up to receive what they think is a $125 cash reimbursement from Equifaxfor its criminal mishandling and exposure of their personal and financial data. But the FTC warns that you may see only a small fraction of that, if any, because of the way the $575 million settlement with the company actually breaks down.
In the settlement, Equifax set aside $300 million to pay for credit monitoring for everyone affected by the historic hack (rivaled perhaps only by this

Hyperloop, the futuristic and still theoretical transportation system that could someday propel people and packages at speeds of more than 600 miles per hour, has been designated a “public infrastructure project” by India lawmakers in the state of Maharashtra.
Wrapped in that government jargon is a valuable and notable outcome. The upshot: hyperloop is being treated like any other public infrastructure project such as bridges, roads and railways. In other words, hyperloop has been pl

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The race is on for who will be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. Once again, 20 candidates are spending two nights trying to convince US Democrats that they are the right person to run against Donald Trump.This time, CNN is sponsoring the event, which is taking place at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, Michigan. Things were lively on the first night, as front-runners Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren made nice with each other while most of the oth

Get ready to dive into the fiercely competitive waters of enterprise software. Join more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 onSeptember 5 to navigate this rapidly evolving category with the industry’s brightest minds, biggest names and exciting startups.
Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play, which saves you $100. But one is the loneliest number, so why not take advantage of our group discount, buy in bulk and bring your whole team? Save an extra 20% when you b

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge AirPods, Apple’s truly wireless headphones, are $25 off of their regular $159.99 price at Rakuten until tonight at 11:59PM ET, July 31st. To get in on this deal, you’ll need to create a free Rakuten account, then paste HND24 in at checkout.
These AirPods are Apple’s latest model and come in the standard, non-wireless charging case. If you’re looking for what sets these apart from the first-generation model, it’s the H1 wi

LightSail 2’s solar sail, as seen from the spacecraft’s onboard camera | Image: The Planetary Society The Planetary Society’s experimental LightSail 2 spacecraft — designed to fly on light coming from the Sun — has lived up to its namesake. The nonprofit today announced that the satellite has successfully raised its orbit around Earth thanks to sunlight pushing on the vehicle’s large, reflective solar sail. It marks the first time a spacecraft in Earth’

The dreaded 10x, or, how to handle exceptional employees
The reality (myth?) is that there are engineers who are ten times more productive than other engineers (some would argue 100x, but okay). Jon Evans, who is CTO at HappyFunCorp, dives into the strengths and weaknesses of these vaunted people and how to manage them and their relationships with other team members.
The anti-10x squad raises many important and valid — frankly, obvious and inarguable — points. Go down that Twitter th

CRV, formerly known as Charles River Ventures, has hired Anna Khan as its 10th general partner. Khan joins from Bessemer Venture Partners where she’s served as a vice president since 2016.
CRVinvests across industries, with a portfolio that includes Bird and Airtable,among others. The venture capital firm is currently investing out of its 17th fund, a $600 million vehicle that closed in 2018.
Founded in 1970, CRV is amongst the older VC firms. While Khan isn’t the firm’s first

Space exploration nonprofit The Planetary Society is celebrating a stack of wins today, after announcing that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was funded in part through a crowdfunding campaign, has managed to successfully fly on the power of sunlight alone. It raised its orbit after initially being put into position by a Falcon Heavy launch and its own conventional thrusters, climbing by about two kilometres (about 1.2 miles) from its initial orbit using only the force exerted by photons from

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Federal Trade Commission said today there’s been “overwhelming” interest in a settlement agreement with Equifax, and that consumers looking for a previously announced payout of up to $125 may be disappointed.FTC is tempering expectations
The agency said this month that it had reached a $700 million agreement with the credit reporting agency over a massive breach of private data in 2017. As part of the settlement, consumers whose data

There is no fully functional hyperloop in the world, but that could soon change, as officials in India have recently designated the ultra-fast, futuristic transportation system a “public infrastructure project” and will soon be taking bids on its construction.There are still many hurdles to overcome, such as certifying the hyperloop as safe for human passengers. But Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the handful of companies working to turn Elon Musk’s dream of supersonic travel thro

Photo: Universal Pictures The Fast and the Furious series has undergone some profound changes since 2001 when the franchise launched with a film about LA car enthusiasts who fund their passion for illegal street races by boosting DVD players. (It was a different era.) The original film wasn’t exactly a low-key indie, but nothing about it suggested that it would eventually evolve into a globetrotting action franchise that pitted Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his ever-expanding crew against

JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images On Monday night, Capital One and its customers got some very bad news. The company had been breached, spilling hundreds of thousands of social security numbers and account details into public view. The New York Attorney General is already investigating whether Capital One is negligent, but the broader story is familiar: a big company let a lot of sensitive data go missing, and customers bore most of the risk.
But the closer you look, the stranger the story is. T

Amazon announced today that it’s launching a new fashion-oriented service that’ll send Prime subscribers curated clothing options every month. The service, called Personal Shopper by Prime Wardrobe, allows Prime members to answer a survey about their fit and trend preferences and then receive clothing that fits their desires. The survey questions cover patterns they like, their measurements, budget preferences, and the clothing styles they prefer. That survey goes directly to Amazon&

Lively, a lingerie business founded and led by former Victoria’s Secret executive Michelle Cordeiro Grant, has sold to intimate apparel brand Wacoal for $85 million.
The deal includes up to an additional $55 million in performance-based payouts.
Lively, headquartered in New York, had raised $15 million in venture capital funding, including a $6.5 million Series A investment from GGV Capital, NF Ventures and former Nautica CEO Harvey Sanders announced late last year. The Series A valued the

@aniacopian Updated 2:22PM ET, July 31st: We heard back from Ani Acopian. She does not own any cats. That explains it!
This door-mounted setup can charge every device at the same time — and it’s one of the most elegant charging stations I’ve laid eyes on.
This setup, built by filmmaker Ani Acopian, provides more than just a tidy home for headphones, camera batteries, a drone and its controller, portable battery packs, and AirPods. This station can charge all of it at the same

Broadcast TV streaming app Locast had hoped that qualifying itself as a not-for-profit might be enough to avoid the wrath of the major networks and the same demise as Aereo.
It was wrong on the first part. We’ll have to see about the second.
Today, all four of the big broadcasters — ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — filed a lawsuit against Locast under the argument that the free service is violating copyright law by retransmitting their also-free over-the-air television signals to its c

We’re just a day away from season 10 of Fortnite, and it looks like things are going to get... explosive. In a short video, developer Epic teased an event many fans have been expecting: the glowing orb in Loot Lake appears primed to blow up. Cracks have been appearing on the orb over the past few days, leading to speculation that a cataclysmic event is in the works. The teaser was accompanied by the phrase “zero in.”Not long after that tease, the developer went ahead and releas

Few designs can be called timeless and iconic enough to translate well into miniature versions of themselves. Horses is obviously the main one, but the ThinkTiny, a miniature version the Lenovo ThinkPad comes pretty close. Created by Paul Klinger, the ThinkTiny uses the laptop’s iconic red TrackPoint nub as a joystick for classic arcade games like Snake, Tetris, and Lunar Lander.The tiny laptop runs on an ATtiny1614 microcontroller and features a 128 x 64 OLED screen. It’s all housed

Monument Valley 2. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge One of the most beloved mobile game series is getting even bigger. Today, Ustwo Games revealed that Monument Valley 3 is in the works. Though, aside from the name, we know absolutely nothing about the experience. The news comes via a job posting, as the studio is looking for a creative director for the project, suggesting it’s still pretty early in development.The original Monument Valley launched in 2014, and its combinatio

Photo by Zach D Roberts / NurPhoto via Getty Images A federal judge dismissed Democrats’ lawsuit against Russia, WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign on Tuesday, saying that Russia was the main culprit and could not be sued under federal law. The Democratic National Committee filed the lawsuit last year, claiming that those three parties, and others related to them, had violated hacking and racketeering laws in connection with the 2016 breach of the DNC’s computer systems and the subse

Photo by Micah Martello / Twitter Twitter has a new ad campaign running in San Francisco and New York City, featuring tweets from the “Me on Twitter” memes, in which users post two photos (of themselves or otherwise) or statements highlighting how differently they behave on different social networks.
The campaign, as reported by Creative Bloq, seeks to embrace the platform as a place where quirky, funny, viral things happen. And they do — along with all of the other nonsense t

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge There’s no indication that Facebook’s Portal video chat devices have been a hit for the company, but that hasn’t stopped its development of other products. According to The Information, Facebook is continuing to work on a camera that can plug into a TV and double as a video-streaming device a la Roku or Fire TV. Facebook has reportedly approached Netflix, Disney, HBO, and Hulu about potentially including their subscription services on

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Congress is calling on stakeholders in the self-driving car industry to help reignite their efforts to draft a bill aimed at speeding up the adoption of autonomous vehicles and deploying a regulatory framework, according to a new letter obtained by The Verge.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee are pairing up to draft a bipartisan, bicameral “self-driving car bill,” according to the letter. The letter

Image: Little Brown and Company WarnerMedia is set to launch its forthcoming streaming service, HBO Max, later this year. While the service will feature major existing shows, like Friends, the company is also beginning to develop its roster of original content for subscribers. One of those new original projects is an adaptation of Circe, Madeline Miller’s take on The Odyssey.HBO Max gave the project an eight-episode straight-to-series order, according to Deadline (via Tor.com). Rise of th

Image: Netflix Netflix has released the first look at one of its biggest original films to date: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. The film stars Robert De Niro as mob hitman Frank Sheeran and Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa.De Niro has been attached to the project for more than a decade, and Netflix picked up the film in 2017 as part of a larger strategy to buy up prestige-style dramas for its platform. Netflix wants to show that it’s a legitimate player in Hollywood, which has looked at th