Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Huawei may face a major roadblock for its next flagship phone, the Mate 30 — it won’t be able to launch with Google apps and services due to the White House banning US companies (like Google) from doing business with the Chinese telecommunications firm, according to a report from Reuters.That means that the Mate 30 — and presumably, other upcoming devices like the now-delayed foldable Mate X — could be severely limited at launch. T

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon’s Ring security service has partnered with more than 400 law enforcement agencies across the United States, the company disclosed today in a blog post.
In the post, Ring said that it had created an extension of its Neighbors app, called the Neighbors Portal, which police can use to submit a request through Ring to users for video recordings related to investigations, or to make public announcements as “a verified law enforcement officer.&rdquo

AMD has agreed to a $12.1 million settlement in a class action lawsuit for some customers who bought its FX-8000 / 9000 CPUs built on its 2011 Bulldozer architecture, ending a years-long dispute that claimed AMD falsely advertised the chips as eight-core processors when they in fact only possessed half that number, via The Register.According to the lawsuit, the Bulldozer-based chips weren’t truly multicore processors to the extent that AMD claimed. AMD advertised the CPUs as eight-core chi

Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Spotify wants as many podcasts on its platform as possible, and it’s now testing a new button within its app that’ll encourage people to create one. Code leaker Jane Wong spotted a new button in Spotify’s podcasts library that says “Create podcast,” and if tapped, will either send people over to the Anchor app, if it’s already installed, or send them to an informational webpage about the app.
Spotify acquired Anchor, a podca

Yesterday, a number of high-profile men in the video game industry were accused of sexual assault, including Alec Holowka, a composer and designer behind the indie hit Night in the Woods. Today, Holowka’s development partners announced that they’re cutting ties with him, which will include canceling a current in-development project. Scott Benson, co-creator of the game, describes the cancelled project as “a small thing for our Night in the Woods Kickstarter backers.” The

Yesterday, a number of high-profile men in the video game industry were accused of sexual assault, including Alec Holowka, a composer and designer behind the indie hit Night in the Woods. Today, Holowka’s development partners announced that they’re cutting ties with him, which will include canceling a current in-development project. The team will also be postponing launch of the physical release of Night in the Woods, though the upcoming iOS port, which is being handled by an outside

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge On October 13th, 2018, two men walked into a Great Midwest Bank in a suburban strip mall outside Milwaukee. They were the first two customers when the bank opened, barely recognizable behind sunglasses and heavy beards — but it soon became clear what they were after. One man jumped onto the teller counter and pulled out a handgun, throwing down a garbage bag for the tellers to fill with money. They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes aft

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Microsoft’s Xbox Live service is experiencing issues today, preventing a large number of users from signing into Xbox consoles. The issues appear to have started around 3PM ET today, and many Xbox users report that they’re unable to sign in to Xbox One consoles and access some apps and games.
Apps like Spotify, Plex, or Amazon Video require you to be signed into an Xbox One console, and The Verge has been unable to access these apps during this Xbo

Flickr is adding a new feature to its website today: the ability to order prints of the photos you’ve posted there, directly from the site.The new options include metal and canvas art prints, 4 x 6 paper prints to send out to relatives, and photo books (printed in partnership with Blurb and Chatbooks). You’ll only be able to print out your own photos — meaning that you won’t be able to buy prints from another photographer, or use Flickr as an ad-hoc storefront to sell pri

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Tesla has finally announced its car insurance offering that CEO Elon Musk teased back in April. The company describes it as a “competitively priced insurance offering designed to provide Tesla owners with up to 20 percent lower rates, and in some cases as much as 30 percent.” Tesla’s insurance will be available in California to start, and it will “expand to additional US states in the future,” the company says, though no timetable

Photo credit should read JOAO LAET/AFP/Getty Images Record-breaking fires are ripping through the Amazon — an ecosystem on which the whole world depends. The Verge will update this page with news and analysis on the fires and the effects that could linger once the ash settles.
Table of Contents:
Why is the Amazon burning?Why is this a big deal?
Why is this a hot topic politically?How are the fires being fought?
Why is the Amazon burning?
An unprecedented number of fires have raged through

Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images It’s common sense that you shouldn’t bring replicas of firearms or explosives onto a flight, but now, that rule also applies to fictional weapons. The Transportation Security Administration confirmed to a Twitter user earlier this month that souvenir Coke bottles shaped like thermal detonators from Disneyland’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park would not be allowed in carry-on or checked bags.
Star Wars: Galaxy&rsqu

It’s safe to say that few technologies have changed personal fitness more than wearable fitness trackers. These devices collect data to provide in-depth tracking of many different exercise parameters for coaching, analysis, record-keeping, and other purposes. But with all that data, how can you be sure your privacy won’t go flying out the window?
What data is being collected?
The first key to securing data from a tracking device is understanding precisely what is in that data. The ca

Allodium The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) puts out lots of public requests for scientific research, including high-profile competitions involving robotics and space launch tech. But today, the agency tweeted a very simple plea: it needs a massive, maze-like underground facility for running experiments, and it needs it right now.
What kind of facility, exactly? Well, “the ideal space would be a human-made underground environment spanning several city blocks [with] comp

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. Peloton files publicly for IPO
Pelotonpreviously filed a confidential S-1, but now its IPO documents have been revealed publicly, showing that the fitness tech company brought in $915 million in revenue during its most recent fiscal year, with losses of $245.7 million.
Co-founder and CEO John

Photo: Netflix Hey, remember when writer-director Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking back in 2013? Remember how it didn’t take at all? After a series of complaints about how badly Hollywood treats its directors, he revitalized his career with a series of experiments, from shooting entire feature films on a series of iPhones to self-distributing his film Logan Lucky in an attempt to bypass traditional gatekeepers.
His latest gambit to get around Hollywood is one an increasing number

So, you’ve heard a bunch of hype about the Ninja Foodi in your search for an air fryer and/or pressure cooker, but now you’re wondering if it actually lives up to it. You could pore over countless reviews online, but that gets overwhelming real quick. So, we did it for you.
Here you’ll find an aggregation of Ninja Foodi reviews, letting you know the important takeaways like functionality, price, and how it compares to competitors. If you want to see why the Ninja Foodi made our

The final trailer for Todd Phillips’ Joker has arrived, and it reveals the gritty, dark take on the iconic Batman villain.
The Warner Bros. description of Joker says, “Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night… but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence

Everyone in the auto industry is trying to capitalize on skyrocketing SUV sales, from legacy marques like Ford (which is essentially ditching sedans altogether) to longtime luxury holdouts like Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, even Ferrari. The result is it’s harder than ever to stand out from the crowd. So what has BMW done? It made an SUV you can hardly see.
At next month’s Frankfurt Motor Show, BMW will display a one-off version of the forthcoming third-generation X6 SUV that&rs

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Sony has announced two new APS-C mirrorless cameras: the flagship A6600 and the lower-tier A6100. The A6600 has several high-end features that position it as the successor to the A6500, which was introduced in October 2016.Like the A6500, the new A6600 features 5-axis in-body image stabilization, a 24.2-megapixel APS-C Exmor CMOS image sensor, and super fast autofocus (AF), which can find the subject in 0.02 seconds. It also has Real-Time AF tracking and th

An animation of NASA’s future Europa Clipper spacecraft. | Image: NASA NASA’s inspector general is urging Congress to reconsider a mandate specifying which rocket the space agency’s upcoming mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa must fly on. Right now, NASA is legally obligated to fly the mission on the next big rocket that the space agency is developing, known as the Space Launch System or SLS. But that vehicle is years away from being ready, and the inspector general argues

Photo: Lioness Samsung says it was wrong to have asked the CEO of Lioness, a smart sex toy company, to hide her product at a women’s tech event it was co-hosting. But Lioness’ CEO says the apology doesn’t go far enough, and it doesn’t signal to her that Samsung will actually make changes to be more inclusive.
At the event last Thursday, a senior director at Samsung requested that Lioness CEO and co-founder Liz Klinger remove her product, the Lioness Vibrator, from displa

Microsoft revealed that it was working on a dark mode for Outlook on mobile devices nearly a year ago, and it’s starting to arrive today. Both Outlook apps for iOS and Android will include a new switch to turn on the dark mode, and the Android version will also automatically switch to the mode when you enable the power saver mode. The new option will match Apple’s work in iOS 13 for a system-wide dark mode, and Outlook on iOS and Android will start getting updated today.
Outlook isn&

Pinterest Pinterest will now give visitors accurate information about vaccines and their safety when they type in a relevant search term. In an update today, the company says it will now surface reliable information sourced from various scientific organizations whenever someone searches for vaccine-related terms, like “measles” or “vaccine safety.”
Among the organizations whose information will show up is the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Contr

Eero is adding a cheaper tier of service to its premium subscription with the introduction of the $2.99-per-month Eero Secure plan. It offers the same security, site filtering, and ad-blocking features of the old Eero Plus plan without the additional bundled products like 1Password, MalwareBytes, and the Encrypt.me VPN service. The new subscription tier marks one of the first major changes to come to Eero since its Amazon acquisition earlier this year.
The existing $9.99-per-month Eero Plus subs

T-Mobile has a new “Test Drive” deal that’s meant to entice customers on other carriers to switch over. It’s a free hot spot that will let people try out T-Mobile’s network for 30 days (or up to 30GB of data, whichever comes first), so they can see how T-Mobile’s data speeds and coverage work on their existing devices.The company started rolling out the free 30-day hot spot test program last year, but it was far more limited and offered in only Atlanta, Austin

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google is working to move the production of its Pixel smartphones from China to Vietnam as the company seeks to avoid higher Chinese manufacturing costs as well as the looming concern of Trump-issued tariffs on Chinese goods that would raise prices on its phones, according to a report from Nikkei.
This isn’t Google’s first move out of China. The company was reportedly working to move Nest and server hardware production for devices bound for the US t

Photo: Faze Clan Like most celebrities, Offset — one-third of hip-hop trio Migos — can’t really enjoy himself in public like the average person. There are too many prying eyes at the grocery store or the mall. So when he needs to relax, he plays games like Call of Duty and NBA 2K with random people online. Recently, his virtual teammates haven’t been able to stop talking about e-sports and competitive gaming. Stories of teenagers winning millions of dollars playing Fortn

Telltale Games is getting a second life. After a tragic and well-publicized decline, the game studio — best known for adaptations of series like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones — is coming back after a group of investors purchased the company’s assets with plans to relaunch. The new Telltale Games will be helmed by Jamie Ottilie and Brian Waddle, two industry veterans with experience primarily in mobile gaming and the technology side. “We believe there is still so mu

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Fitbit has announced the Versa 2, and it’s a big step forward in the company’s quest to make a smartwatch that you might, for at least a few seconds, confuse for an Apple Watch. The glass covering Versa 2’s watchface spills elegantly over its sides, the number of side buttons has been reduced from three to one, and fewer complications on watchfaces give it a more premium look. Fitbit also (finally) got rid of its logo on the bottom b

Fitbit Fitbit Premium is a new subscription service that will offer personalized goals, challenges, coaching, and guidance for paid users when it launches in 17 countries this fall. It will cost $9.99 per month, or $79.99 for a year, and it will work with all Fitbit fitness trackers and smartwatches. If Fitbit’s free app just isn’t quite enough data for you, or if you’re just not feeling enough encouragement to stick to your goals, the Premium service may be worth trying out.F

On August 14th, a drone weighing 1,215 pounds took off from the tarmac at an air base in Camp Roberts, California. It reached a height of 10 feet, hovered for 64 seconds, and then landed. It was the first successful test flight for Elroy Air, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to put its heavy-lift cargo drones in the air, delivering larger-than-average payloads by 2020.It’s a modest beginning to what could eventually become a trillion-dollar business, if you believe the analysts who

ThoughtSpot was started by a bunch of ex-Googlers looking to bring the power of search to data. Seven years later the company is growing fast, sporting a fat valuation of almost $2 billion and looking ahead to a possible IPO. Today it announced a hefty $248 million Series E round as it continues on its journey.
Investors include Silver Lake Waterman,Silver Lake’s late-stage growth capital fund, along with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capita

The flagship Reno 2. | Image: Oppo Oppo has announced three new phones under the Reno 2 banner, following the original Reno release earlier this year. All three devices — the Reno 2, Reno 2 Z, and Reno 2 F — are launching in India first and have four rear-facing cameras in various configurations paired with processors of varying power.
The top-end Reno 2 actually isn’t as high-end as the previous flagship, the dubiously named but excellent Reno 10x Zoom — that phone rema

Vizio is one of the three manufacturers who are interested in the new mode. | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge The UHD Alliance, a collection of companies who work together to define display standards, has announced Filmmaker Mode, a new TV setting that’s designed to show films as they were originally mastered, with as little post-processing as possible. Although the mode will affect multiple settings like frame rate, aspect ratio, overscanning, and noise reduction, its most important e