Technology news

One of Twitter’s best accounts, the Emoji Mashup Bot — which smushes together two or three random emojis to generate a hybrid emoji every hour — has just released a free iMessage sticker pack. Although the bot, created by 18-year-old student Louan Bengmah, has created countless combinations since it was created in July, the iMessage sticker pack is limited to a select choice of 29 very good emoji.Here’s one for when you’re crying in the club: partying + in-tears = p

Photo: Sony Pictures Entertainment Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has pulled out of producing future Spider-Man movies, due to disputes between Sony — which still holds the rights to the character — and Marvel’s parent company Disney over revenue sharing from films starring the web-slinging hero, according to a report from Deadline.The news means that Spider-Man’s appearances in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe films — as well as crossovers from chara

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge YouTube is “finalizing plans” to end targeted advertising on its main site for uploaded videos that children are likely to watch, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The move could be meant to appease regulators at the Federal Trade Commission who have examined whether YouTube has violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) through data collection and a failure to protect young users on the platform.A study by Pe

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Malfunctioning Tesla solar panels started fires at “no fewer than” seven Walmart stores, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, the retail giant alleges in a new lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court Tuesday. The lawsuit was first reported by Bloomberg.
Walmart alleges that “years of gross negligence” and “failure to live up to industry standards by Tesla” sparked the blazes and led at least sev

Photo: Warner Bros. Warner Bros. has just announced a fourth film in the Matrix series, with original stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss set to reprise their iconic roles as Neo and Trinity, respectively. Lana Wachowski is set to write and direct the sequel, via Variety.
The news comes after rumors earlier this year from John Wick: Chapter 3 director Chad Stahelski that the Wachowski sisters were working on a new installment in the franchise. But rumors about a new Matrix film have been sw

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge More US towns have been hit by ransomware. Last Friday, 23 small Texas towns were affected by a coordinated ransomware attack that appears to have been pulled off by “one single threat actor,” according to the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR). A Texas DIR spokesperson told The New York Times that the majority of the targets were specific departments in the towns. In a statement to Gizmodo, the Texas DIR declined to specify which

Netflix Netflix doesn’t want people to forget about shows they plan to watch in the future. The company is updating its TV app with a “Latest” section that’ll list movies and TV show seasons that’ll be released that week and the one following, according to Variety. Listed titles will have a trailer, and users can ask to be reminded when a program they want to watch becomes available, meaning people will likely receive a notification when they open the app. The list

Image: Apple Apple is reportedly spending $6 billion on its initial lineup of TV shows, documentary series, and other originals that will land on its streaming service, Apple TV Plus. That’s about $5 billion more than what Apple was originally slated to spend, according to a Financial Times report. It’s also about 25 percent of Disney’s entire 2019 content budget.
Unlike Disney — which will allocate just under $7 billion of its estimated $24 billion content budget this y

There are a number of aspiring electric vehicle startups in and around Silicon Valley, but very few have shipped actual cars, let alone established a steady business. A new startup called Drako Motors is the latest company to try to change that, and it wants to do so with a 1,200-horsepower $1.25 million supercar called the GTE.Unveiled at Monterey Car Week, Drako Motors showed off what it says is the first production version of the GTE. The startup pulled no punches in how it described the car,

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Services like Grammarly are trying to up the quality of your email copy, but now Google is taking some initiative itself by bringing improved spell check capabilities and grammar suggestions to Gmail. The company says that G Suite users will soon notice inline suggestions, powered by machine learning, that appear as you type out an email. And Gmail will some autocorrect “common spelling mistakes” without you having to click anything or take any extr

Chase Ross started his YouTube channel to talk about his experience as an out-and-proud trans person in 2010. The friends he found through YouTube, he told The Verge, saved his life. Now, nine years later, Ross feels like the platform that he once called a supportive home is unrecognizable and actually harmful to his community.
Ross is one of eight creators — alongside Amp Somers, Lindsay Amer, Chris Knight, Celso Dulay, Cameron Stiehl, and Chrissy Chambers — attempting to fight YouT

Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein / Getty Images The Justice Department is working alongside state attorneys general to investigate whether tech platforms like Facebook and Google are stifling competition in the industry, the department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, said.
The statement came only a day after The Wall Street Journal reported that a group of states would be moving forward with an antitrust investigation into the tech sector that could be formally announced later this month. T

Petra Appelhof Today, I was nearly killed no less than three times while biking from my apartment in Brooklyn to my office in Lower Manhattan. But don’t worry! This is pretty normal for America’s largest city, where a staggering 19 cyclists have been killed in just 2019 alone.So you can imagine my bafflement when I finally sat down at my desk, sweaty and stressed out from my close brushes with death, and the first thing I see when opening up Twitter was this video of a newly finishe

So you’ve heard about Apple’s new credit card, and you want to give it a try. Before you sign on the dotted line, there is at least one aspect of Apple’s agreement (besides any fees and percentage rates) that you’ll want to pay attention to: the arbitration clause.
Arbitration clauses have become extremely popular in agreements between companies and consumers — and for good reason. When you agree to arbitration, you are basically putting most of the advantages in th

Poly isn’t the most likely candidate to make a gaming headset. The company was formed by the merger of Polycom and Plantronics, both of which boast long pedigrees in the corporate communication technology sphere. It’s for that reason why, when I got my hands on the RIG 700HX, I kept my expectations tempered. I shouldn’t have bothered. The Poly/Plantronics RIG 700HX (for some reason, the company decided to use its older branding with this headset) is a genuinely competent bit o

To address the rapid growth of the commercial space industry, the Trump administration has vowed to streamline the licensing process for rocket launches. But as the government has taken steps to fulfill this task, some in the commercial space industry are crying foul, arguing that the administration is poised to make changes that may make regulations more demanding than they were before.
To launch a rocket, companies must get a series of licenses, including one from the Federal Aviation Administ

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is making a beta version of its Chromium Edge browser available to download today. The Microsoft Edge beta will be available for all supported versions of Windows and macOS, and the software maker is encouraging businesses and regular enthusiasts to take a closer look at the new browser. So far, there have been more than 1 million downloads of preview builds of Edge, and Microsoft says it has received more than 140,000 individual pieces of feedback.
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A year and a half after it had a limited launch in India and Indonesia, the lightweight Google Go search app is now available worldwide. At just over 7MB in size, the app is meant as a way to find information online for low-powered devices, and is also able to remember your search results when you’re back online if your connection drops. The app is available now on the Play Store, and Google says it will run on all Android devices running on Lollipo

We’re just a few weeks away from kicking off our flagship event, Disrupt SF 2019, that takes place on October 2-4. If you’re an investor looking to increase your portfolio, it’s the perfect time to start planning your Disrupt strategy. Never fear, we’re here to help you make the most of your valuable time. But first, a housekeeping item. If you haven’t already done so, buy your pass to Disrupt right here.
You’re no doubt familiar with Startup Alley, our exhibi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is taking another shot at news curation by hiring a “small team” of journalists to select stories for its upcoming News Tab, a section of its mobile app that’s due to begin testing later this year. Although The New York Times notes that most of the articles in the News Tab will be generated algorithmically, the top stories each day will come from this team of under 10 veteran journalists. The News Tab will be separate from Faceb

It was nearly a year and a half ago that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, standing onstage at the company’s annual developer conference, announced that the company would begin letting users sever the connection between their web browsing history and their Facebook accounts. After months of delays, Facebook’s Clear History is now rolling out in Ireland, South Korea, and Spain, with other countries to follow “in coming months,” the company said. The new tool, which Facebook co

Last year, FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be creating a “Clear History” feature that deletes the data that third-party websites and apps share with Facebook. Today, the company is actually launching feature in select geographies.
It’s gotten a new name in the meantime: Off-Facebook Activity. David Baser, the director of product management leading Facebook’s privacy and data use team, told me that the name should make it clear to everyone &ldq

Half a year after launching its managed PostgreSQL service, upstart hosting and cloud services platform DigitalOcean today announced the launch of its managed MySQL and Redis database offerings, too.
Like most of the company’s latest releases, this move exemplifies DigitalOcean’sambition to move beyond its discount hosting roots and to become a more fully-fledged cloud provider. Besides the database service and its core hosting products and infrastructure, the company now offers obje

H2O.ai‘s mission is to democratize AI by providing a set of tools that frees companies from relying on teams of data scientists. Today it got a bushel of money to help. The company announced a $72.5 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs and Ping An Global Voyager Fund.
Previous investors Wells Fargo, NVIDIA and Nexus Venture Partners also participated. Under the terms of the deal, Jade Mandel from Goldman Sachswill be joining the H2O.aiBoard. Today’s investment brings the total

We need a new category for this sort of Netflix activity. Robert De Niro’s company has filed a $6 million lawsuit against a former employee who purportedly binged Netflix while on the clock, Variety reports. Canal Productions, the actor’s loan-out company, alleges that – in addition to binging – Chase Robinson also put exorbitant restaurant and hotel charges on the firm’s tab, and used lots of De Niro’s frequent flyer points for personal trips. Robinson got h

Imagine shining a flashlight on a black surface and seeing... nothing. This happened to me back in June outside a small coastal town in the UK. I was at Surrey NanoSystems, the company that makes the black material I was marveling at. It’s called Vantablack, and it’s one of the darkest substances on Earth.
Vantablack is made from carbon nanotubes, which are tiny carbon cylinders with walls as thin as one atom. These structures absorb any light that touches the surface by trapping the

A pair of digital news companies are teaming up, with PressReader acquiring News360.
PressReaderwas founded back in 1999 as Newspaper Direct. It now operates a platform that converts newspapers and magazines into digital formats, while offering a $29.99 monthly subscription that provides unlimited access to more than 7,000 of those titles.
News360,meanwhile, is relatively youthful, having been founded in 2010. It’s also created a news aggregation app, but the announcement makes it sound li

The Chandrayaan-2 Vikram lander and rover before launch | Image: Indian Space Research Organization India’s mission to the Moon, known as Chandrayaan-2, successfully entered lunar orbit on August 20th, ahead of the country’s first attempt to land a vehicle on the lunar surface. The maneuver was a critical move for the mission that could enable India to become the fourth country to put a spacecraft intact on the Moon.
The Chandrayaan-2 mission began with its launch on July 22nd on to

Waymois taking some of its autonomous vehicles to Florida just in time for hurricane season to begin testing in heavy rain.
The move to Florida will focus on testing how its myriad of sensors hold up during the region’s rainy season as well as to collect data. All of the vehicles will be manually driven by trained drivers.
Waymowill bring both of its autonomous vehicles, the Chrysler Pacificas and a Jaguar I-Pace, to Naples and Miami, Florida for testing, according to a blog posted Tuesday

Apple this morning announced its highly anticipated new credit card, Apple Card, is launching today for all customers in the U.S. Customers will be able to apply for the Apple Card through the Wallet app on the iPhone, then immediately begin using it by way of Apple Pay — before the physical card arrives in the mail.
Powered by Goldman Sachs and Mastercard, the card will work both as a traditional credit card and through Apple Pay anywhere that Mastercard is accepted. In lieu of points, wh

NurseFly, a startup that’s created a job marketplace for short-term nursing positions, is announcing its acquisition by holding company IAC.
While the companies aren’t disclosing the deal terms, a source with knowledge of the acquisition said the price was $15 million.
Co-founder and CEO Parth Bhakta told me that hospitals often hire travel nurses (signed for contracts of 13 weeks or a few months) when there’s a staffing shortage, or just because of seasonal needs. He said job

A drug dealer ordered to forfeit millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero, has been sentenced to 70 months in prison for distributing drugs including carfentanil and fentanyl. Sky Justin Gornik previously pled guilty to the charge and also admitted that he tried to launder drug proceeds using cryptocurrencies, which he held on US-based exchanges Bittrex and Poloniex. As part of his plea, Gornik admitted he bought and sold controlled substances on the da

Somewhere in space, a mannequin wearing a SpaceX spacesuit and driving a cherry red original Tesla Roadster that once belonged to Elon Musk is celebrating its first trip around the sun. The absurd ‘Starman’ and Roadster combo was launched last year aboard the first Falcon Heavy test flight from Kennedy Space Center, and has now completed a full orbit of the Sun, baed on tracking info monitored by the site whereisroadster.com (via Space.com).
The Roadster and its fake driver were sele

Apple launched its Apple Card as a “preview rollout” earlier this month, and the company is opening it up to everyone today. As promised, all qualifying iPhone owners in the US will be able to apply for the Apple Card through the Wallet app on iOS. “We’re thrilled with the overwhelming interest in Apple Card and its positive reception,” says Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay. “Customers have told us they love Apple Card’s simplic

Apple launched its Apple Card as a “preview rollout” earlier this month, and the company is opening it up to everyone today. As promised, all qualifying iPhone owners in the US will be able to apply for the Apple Card through the Wallet app on iOS. “We’re thrilled with the overwhelming interest in Apple Card and its positive reception,” says Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay. “Customers have told us they love Apple Card’s simplic

Image: FogCam.org FogCam, which is believed to be the oldest webcam on the internet, will be shut down at the end of August after 25 years of near-continuous operation. Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong, who set up the webcam while students at San Francisco State University back in 1994, announced the decision via Twitter, where they thanked their viewers and the university for their support over the years.
In an interview with SFGate, Schwartz provided more details on the decision to take the webcam

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! If you’re a photography nerd, you surely want to have a good DSLR camera in your arsenal. But deals for top quality cameras aren’t easy to come to by. Don’t worry, though, today’s your day. The Canon EOS 5DS DSLR Camera (body only) is on sale for just $1,305.99, down from $3,699. The camera packs some pretty impressive hardware from a 50-megapixel full-frame sensor to&n

The quintessential college experience of getting pizza delivered to your dorm room is about to get a high-tech upgrade. On Tuesday, Starship Technologies announced its plan to deploy thousands of its autonomous six-wheeled delivery robots on college campuses around the country over the next two years, after raising $40 million in Series A funding.It’s a big step for the San Francisco (née Estonia)-based startup and its robots, which have been tested in over 100 cities in 20 differen

Starship Technologies invented the category of rolling autonomous sidewalk delivery robots, and to date, the company has made over 100,000 commercial deliveries on behalf of customers. The milestone comes as Starship adds $40 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to $85 million. When it announced an additional $25 million in June 2018, Starship was also piloting its first university deployment – and now the company has a plan to expand to 100 university campuses over the