Technology news

After months-long negotiations between Netflix and major theater chains, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, will get a November 1st theatrical debut before coming to Netflix on November 27th.
The film is just one of the latest to highlight the ongoing struggle between Netflix and the traditional film industry, as theater chains like AMC and Regal insist on a 90-day period of exclusivity before movies go to home streaming services. Theaters, which want to

Photo credit should read JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images Hundreds of Uber and Lyft drivers rallied in San Francisco on Tuesday in support of a state bill that would make it more difficult for companies to classify workers as independent contractors. The rally, which convened outside Uber’s headquarters on Market Street, was organized by a group called Gig Workers Rising, which is partly supported by labor giant SEIU.The bill in question, AB5, is an outgrowth of a May 2018 decision by the

Airship announced today that it has acquired Apptimize, an A/B testing company whose customers include Glassdoor, HotelTonight and The Wall Street Journal.
Formerly known as Urban Airship, the more concisely named Airshiphas built a platform for companies to manage their customer communication across SMS, push notifications, email, mobile wallets and more.
It says that by acquiring Apptimize,it can help customers test the impact of their messages. That means integrating Apptimize&rsquo

Peloton, the well-funded maker of internet-connected stationary bikes and treadmills, has finally revealed documents for its upcoming initial public offering. The business previously submitted a confidential draft submission of its S-1 statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June.
The New York-based company, which plans to raise $500 million in its Nasdaq offering, will trade under the ticker symbol PTON.
Peloton reported $915 million in total revenue for the year ending June

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge We’re just two weeks away from September 10th, the day Apple is likely to announce the iPhone 11 to the world — which means there isn’t much time to finish its iOS 13 operating system before launch. But what if Apple wasn’t actually planning to finish it by then, and will just admit that iOS 13 isn’t done? That might explain why today, the company released a beta for iOS 13.1.
Yes, it’s really iOS 13.1 beta. Enjoy your testi

Image: Ninja Fresh off of a well-publicized split from Twitch, streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins today announced a partnership with Adidas, which the apparel company now tells The Verge is a multi-year deal. There aren’t any shoes or apparel for sale right now, but on his Mixer stream, Blevins said, “I can’t say specifically what is in the works with Adidas, but use your imagination.” Adidas says that the partnership might lead to products “in either the p

Image: Ninja Fresh off of a well-publicized split from Twitch, streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins today announced a partnership with Adidas. There aren’t any shoes or apparel for sale right now, but on his Mixer stream, Blevins said, “I can’t say specifically what is in the works with Adidas, but use your imagination.”
Apparel companies signing deals with gaming stars is a relatively new phenomenon. Nike signed a deal earlier this year to make jerseys for the Lea

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge You’re sitting in your office and decide to find out when your next appointment is. You pick up your phone and murmur quietly, “OK Google, when’s my next appointment?” And then, loud enough to be heard over the entire room, your Google Assistant announces, “Next up, you have an appointment with your urologist on September 3rd at 9AM.”You don’t have to hide under your desk anymore. Google has now made it possible t

NASA is currently investigating what could be considered the first crime perpetrated in space, after one of the agency’s astronauts was accused of illegally accessing her wife’s bank account during her stay on the International Space Station. Investigators have yet to decide if the event actually constitutes a crime, but this case does raise questions about how we should handle criminal activity in space in the future.
For the last 50 years, the majority of people who have flown to s

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has long positioned itself as a place where communities can share information during a crisis. Today, the company said it will start giving local governments and first responders the ability to send alerts to their communities during an emergency. Facebook already offers tools like Safety Check, which lets you tell others that you’re safe during an emergency, and Community Help, which offers aid during disasters.
When a Facebook page operat

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Back in 2018, Guardian editor Keza MacDonald wrote that “the video games industry isn’t yet ready for its #MeToo moment.” But whether or not that’s still true, people are attempting to hold abusers and their enablers accountable. Over the past day, multiple high-profile men in the video game industry have been accused of sexual assault. Many of the accusations are years old — in some cases, more than a decade — and they

Photo credit should read ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images Anthony Levandowski, the controversial self-driving car engineer whose shenanigans helped spur a multimillion-dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber, was charged by federal prosecutors with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, according to The New York Times.The criminal charges from the US Attorney’s Office of Northern District of California mirror those complaints made by Waymo, the self-driving division of Al

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube must leave up some videos that are “controversial or even offensive” in order to remain an open platform, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said today.
In her quarterly letter to creators, Wojcicki addressed YouTube’s perpetual struggle with troubling content and how to moderate it, saying that it’s worthwhile for the platform to allow videos the company disagrees with. “A commitment to openness is not easy,” Wojcicki

When my colleague James Vincent tried out Double Robotics’ first telepresence robot in 2015, slowly wheeling around our New York office from his London home base, he described the experience as like playing Doom, but in an office. The company’s latest version of the robot, the Double 3, adds mixed reality video to let users click on the spots they want to drive to instead of having to use a control pad, making the experience closer to controlling a Sim.
The Double 3 now has an array

Home Wi-Fi speeds can be difficult to understand at the best of times, but as I’ve been testing Three UK’s new 5G home broadband package this week, I’ve been getting especially superstitious. I’ve tried using different Wi-Fi access points, I’ve moved my modem around, and I’ve been switching between my phone, laptop, and desktop to run speed tests. I’ve even become pretty obsessive about checking which server Ookla’s SpeedTest service is accessing,

Apple Watch | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Tech companies will usually do their best to keep customers from using their gear with a competing company’s software. Let’s face it, you’re probably not going to be using iMessage on an Android phone anytime soon. But sometimes, you can get around these limitations. If you recently acquired an Apple Watch but would like to use it with the Fitbit app, there is a way you can do that, even though the two companies’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This week on the interview episode of The Vergecast, Nilay Patel chats with Alex Stamos, director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory and former chief security officer for Facebook.Stamos was at Facebook during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, so the discussion covers a lot of what was going on at Facebook and how the scandal has changed Facebook since. They also get into the trade-offs big platforms have to make between issues like end-to-end encryp

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is holding a special Surface hardware event in New York City in October. The event, which will be held on October 2nd, could serve as the first unveiling of Microsoft’s dual-screen Surface device. Microsoft has been building a new dual-screen device, codenamed “Centaurus,” for more than two years, and it’s designed to be the hero device for a wave of new dual-screen tablet / laptop hybrids that we’re expecting to see throug

Google Maps is going multimodal. The navigation app announced the launch of a new feature today that pairs transit directions with biking and ride-sharing options so customers can get directions from point A to point B using a variety of transportation modes.
Both features work by inputting your destination and then tapping the “transit” tab in the app. If you’re interested in taking a ride-sharing vehicle, you’ll see information about each leg of your trip, including how

Image: Texas A&M Texas A&M University is modifying its self-driving pilot program in the city of Bryan, Texas, to have humans remotely monitor and operate the shuttles starting in September, making it one of the first commercial deployments of teleoperation technology in the country.The teleoperation technology is being provided by a Portland, Oregon-based startup called Designated Driver. It will allow humans at Texas A&M to remotely control the shuttles in situations where the sel

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Asurion, an insurance company for phones and other devices, has reportedly acquired uBreakiFix, the official phone repair company for Google Pixel devices and Samsung Galaxy phones. The immediate plans for the merger aren’t clear, but it’d be relatively simple for Asurion to push its customers over to uBreakiFix locations to get their insured devices immediately repaired. uBreakiFix operates more than 500 stores in the US, and Asurion offers its cus

WeWork, now known as The We Company, announced this morning the acquisition of a rival co-working business, Spacious. The three-year-old, New York-based startup turns restaurants that sit empty during the day into co-working spaces, and is one of several niche co-working startups — like Convene, Knotel, Industrious, The Yard, The Wing and Alley, for example.
Spaciouswas co-founded in 2016 by CEO Preston Pesek, whose background is in commercial real estate. The company’s goal was

Tesorio, a startup that helps businesses aggregate and analyze their cash flow data, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group. Existing investors First Round Capital, Floodgate, Y Combinator, Fathom Capital and Fuel Capital participated. This brings Tesorio’s total funding to $17 million. Madrona’s Hope Cochran will join the company’s board.
The company is tackling an interesting market that is surprisingly und

In other recent exoskeleton news, Harvard scientists have been developing a prototype that improves a wearer's performance while walking AND running.https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/08/15/751096093/these-experimental-shorts-are-an-exosuit-that-boosts-endurance-on-the-trail?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=alltech&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20190827 …