Technology news

Photo: The Walt Disney Company Disney’s CGI remake of its 1994 film The Lion King has crossed $1.3 billion at the international box office, officially beating out Frozen’s $1.27 billion to become the top-grossing animated film of all time, per CinemaBlend. That is, it’s sort of the biggest animated film ever since Disney has been loath to call it an animated film at all. While it’s entirely computer-generated footage (save for one shot), Disney continues to refer to it a

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge The Trump administration is supposedly drafting an executive order to stop “bias” on sites like Facebook and Twitter — an unprecedented government push to control how platforms moderate content. CNN reported some broad details on the proposal, supposedly called “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship,” last week. It says the White House wants federal agencies to start policing social media moderation by “clarifyi

Last week when Salesforce announced it was buying ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion you might not have realized it, but the law firm Shearman & Sterling was advising Salesforce throughout the deal. In fact, there are lawyers involved in every transaction of this sort, from the initial call to the closing.
As you would expect, there are hundreds of tiny details involved in bringing a deal to fruition, from checking the validity of the offer to checking the financial health of the target company

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge The GLAS smart thermostat, which is built by Johnson Controls, is losing its key Cortana integration. Once touted as the only Cortana-powered thermostat, Johnson Controls says it’s now removing Microsoft’s digital assistant from its device. A new software update is rolling out to the thermostat soon, and it removes Cortana completely.“The Microsoft Cortana voice assistant will no longer work on your device,” reads an email to GLAS custome

MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images Verizon has agreed to sell Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic Inc. for an undisclosed amount, The Wall Street Journal reports.Verizon, which first acquired Tumblr in 2017 after it purchased Yahoo, started to explore a sale earlier this year. Automattic reportedly bought Tumblr for less than $20 million, according to Axios, a stunning drop in value from the $1.1 billion Yahoo paid for it in 2013.Although it makes sense. Tumblr was once a hugely influential force

Minecraft developer Mojang is officially canceling the game’s anticipated “Super Duper Graphics Pack,” originally announced back at E3 2017 as a downloadable update for the popular crafting game.The graphics pack promised a massive overhaul for Minecraft, bringing features like realistic lighting and shadows, reflective water surfaces, and more lifelike flora and fauna, along with the promise of full 4K resolution for some devices like the Xbox One X. According to Mojang’

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge The new hardware revision of the Nintendo Switch is now making its way to retail stores. It features a newer, more efficient CPU than the original launch console, which results in significantly longer battery life ranging between 4.5 and nine hours. (The original Switch can last between 2.5 and 6.5 hours.)Otherwise, the Nintendo Switch “v2” — not to be confused with the upcoming Switch Lite — hasn’t changed much: it’s got th

The LG G8 may have landed with more of a whimper than a bang when it came out earlier this year, but LG isn’t letting that get it down, with a successor — the G8X — set to be revealed next month at the annual IFA show in Germany. And it’ll apparently offer an in-display fingerprint sensor, a first for LG, if the first renders from OnLeaks are to be believed.The switch to an in-display scanner is a big change for LG, coming off the G8, which boasted no less than three diff

Photo by Bob Riha Jr. / Getty Images On the evening of August 12th and early on August 13th, the Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak, with streaks of light zooming across the skies up to once every minute or so. Unfortunately, stargazers may have a tough time seeing these shooting stars this year, thanks to the light of our pesky Moon.
The Perseid meteor shower occurs every August whenever Earth passes through the tail of a comet called Swift-Tuttle, a big rock about 16 miles (26 kilomete

Photo: Universal Pictures Last week, The Verge’s editorial staff gathered in New York for an annual summit, and we roundly agreed that the only acceptable after-hours staff outing was a trip to see the new Fast & Furious movie spinoff Hobbs & Shaw. The Fast & Furious movies have been a longtime addiction for Verge contributors, going back to the days when we created our own F&F Dungeons & Dragons hack and played it for the site. So of course we wanted to see Jason Stat

Earlier this year, Google agreed to settle a class action lawsuit that claims the company knowingly sold first-generation Pixel phones with defective microphones. Now, the final approval has gone through, meaning if you bought an original Pixel or Pixel XL before January 7th, 2017, you’re probably eligible for some money.The settlement is surprisingly inclusive: while most of the cash will be given to those who can document that they experienced microphone issues, the settlement will pay o

Microsoft Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is a subscription service that offers on-demand access to dozens of games. It’s a great value if you like to play and discover new games, and now that it’s on PC instead of solely being a console experience, your subscription can follow you from your Xbox One to your Windows 10 computer.However, the expansion to Windows PCs hasn’t been seamless. While an Xbox One lets you easily access your Game Pass right on the home dashboard, findi

Image: Amie DD Tesla’s Model 3 doesn’t come with a physical key. Instead, it can be unlocked and turned on with a smartphone, a car-shaped key fob, or a keycard that comes in handy if you don’t have a fob or your phone dies. One creative driver figured out a way to make sure that she can always unlock and start her Model 3: she implanted the RFID tag from the keycard into her forearm.Amie DD is a software engineer and self-described “maker of things.” In a video, s

Postmatesplans to make its IPO paperwork public in September, TechCrunch has learned. Despite previous reports indicating the on-demand delivery company is seeking an M&A exit, sources close to the matter say Postmates is on track to go complete an initial public offering this year.
With the S-1 dropping in September, San Francisco-based Postmates is expected to debut on the stock exchange by the end of the third fiscal quarter of 2019. The company has tapped JP Morgan Chase and Bank of Amer

Attentive, a startup helping retailers personalize their mobile messages, is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding.
The startup was founded by Brian Long and Andrew Jones, who sold their previous startup TapCommerce to Twitter. When they announced Attentive’s $13 million Series A last year, Long told me the startup is all about helping retailers find better ways to communicate with customers, particularly as it’s harder for their individual apps to stand out.

Europe and Russia’s joint robotic mission to Mars has hit a snag after the parachutes needed for landing the spacecraft on the Red Planet failed in two back-to-back tests. There isn’t much time left to fix and test the issue before its scheduled launch in the summer of 2020. If the mission team cannot meet the 2020 deadline, they’ll have to wait until 2022 to try again.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Roscosmos, Russia’s national space corporation, have been working t

Photo by Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other tech companies have ignored recommendations from federal safety authorities to add rail crossings to their respective digital maps, according to a report in Politico. The initial request was made in 2016, after a commuter train crashed into a truck in California, killing an engineer and injuring dozens. But in the years since, the big map providers have failed to take action, the report states.The inaction b

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google now lets you sign in to some of its services on Chrome on Android using just your fingerprint, rather than having to type in a password. The feature is available starting today for some Android phones, and it will be rolling out to all phones running Android 7 or later “over the next few days.” According to a Google help page, the feature also allows you to log in using whichever method you have set up to unlock your phone, which can in

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Were you excited about the possibility of 20x zoom on the Google Pixel 4? Sadly, it’s not true. Though Google director of design Claude Zellweger claimed he’d taken a shot on a Pixel with that level of telephoto prowess, he’s since clarified that the photo was actually taken on a current-gen Pixel 3A — and that he cropped the image rather than actually zooming with a phone.
Originally, we were pretty stoked by the report (via 9to5Google)

In order to compete in the upcoming streaming wars, Apple needs big names and flashy dramas for its new Apple TV Plus service. Its drama The Morning Show is shaping up to be one of those series.
A new teaser for the show, which stars Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Reese Witherspoon, makes it look like Apple’s version of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series about a team of journalists at a CNN-like organization, as they fight trends that affect the coverage of major political

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge NIO has replaced all of the affected battery packs it recently recalled for fire risk, and it did so ahead of schedule, the company announced in a press release on Monday. But the recall’s completion has come at the expense of overall sales: the high-profile Chinese EV startup delivered just 837 vehicles in July, making it the company’s third-worst full month since it started deliveries in June 2018.NIO recalled nearly 5,000 electric ES8 SUVs at th

TP-Link no longer plans to update its Kasa smart plug with support for Apple’s HomeKit system, despite announcing plans to support the smart home feature back in January. It’s not clear what’s changed, but Apple Insider spotted a note posted to TP-Link’s website this morning saying that its Smart Plug Mini would no longer get the update.
HomeKit support is being canceled “due to changes in our roadmap,” TP-Link writes. The note doesn’t say whether HomeKi

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge How many steps did you take today? Are you sure? How do you know?
If you’re one of the many people who wears a fitness band or smartwatch to count your steps, you may not be aware of one inescapable fact: they lie. Just because they tell you that you’ve reached your daily goal doesn’t mean that you actually took that many steps. The sad truth is that these devices can undercount or overcount the number of steps that you take in a day. In fact,

Dami Lee / The Verge I’ve always preferred working with Wacom tablets on the desktop over drawing on tablets like the iPad Pro, as I could never get used to drawing directly on a screen. But a week with the beta version of Fresco, Adobe’s latest drawing and painting app for the iPad Pro, has rekindled a lot of the muscle memory I’ve forgotten from art classes since I started working digitally. This can be attributed to what Fresco excels at, which is mixing oil paint colors an

Only five years ago, Netflix seemed like it was rewriting the rules of television, making huge deals for bold projects that would have been unthinkable on network TV (BoJack Horseman, What/If, and The Order are just a few examples.) Creators were lining up to work with the company, which promised a laxer working environment and a place to experiment. The first major streaming service was making a name for itself as a safe haven for serious, ambitious television.
In 2019, that haven looks a lot l