Technology news

Photo by NOAA via Getty Images Hurricane Dorian’s projected course has shifted dramatically over the past few days, spreading a menacing uncertainty across the Caribbean, Florida, and the southeastern coast of the US. As the storm continues to lash the Bahamas with deadly force, changing weather patterns have pushed the storm around, leading to mounting frustrations as US residents struggle to prepare for the storm, and meteorologists try to pin down where it will go next.
After a stint a

Android 10 has finally landed, despite my reservations that it’s not named after a dessert. After several betas introducing everything from new gestures (again) to chat bubbles to a more pervasive dark theme, Google‘s latest OS update is rolling out to Pixel devices and a few others right now. Though rollouts are typically gradual, you can get it right now by going to Settings > System > Advanced > System Update on your Pixel device. If it doesn’t show up, a refr

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge Fake accounts violate Facebook’s rules, and even the Department of Homeland Security can’t create them, the social network told the Associated Press today in response to a new policy implemented by the agency.
In one of a series of changes to immigration policy last week, the department said employees at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of DHS, could create fictitious accounts on social media to investigate the social medi

It’s not easy being a student nowadays. Sure, your parents could cover tuition with a summer job, but things are different now. Modern-day university students contend with high fees, overpriced rents, and yes, sky-high textbook charges. You can’t pirate a degree or a dormroom, but you can naughtily download that textbook your lecturer recommended. (You know, the one that you can’t find in the library. The one that coincidentally was written by your professor and costs $70

Apple’s streaming service hasn’t launched yet, but the company has already canceled Bastards, one of the original shows it was planning for Apple TV Plus.It was an issue of creative differences between Apple executives and Bastards showrunners Howard Gordon and Warren Leight, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Bastards was conceived as an eight-episode series about two best friends who served together during the Vietnam War. Their lives take a depressing, monotonous turn after they

Syd Weiler In February 2017, a GIF of a flailing purple dove from a Facebook sticker set called “Trash Doves” was seemingly everywhere, popping up in never-ending chains of comment threads. But after achieving viral fame, the sticker set led to a litany of issues as it journeyed across the web: its creator, Syd Weiler, was doxxed; she dealt with repeated instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement; and at one point, 4chan users coordinated a harassment campaign to pretend the

Tech moguls Elon Musk and Jack Ma took the stage last week at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in China to talk about AI. What ensued was exactly what you’d expect from two of the most celebrated figures in tech: a strange, awkward, passive-aggressive bicker. The 45-minute conversation was billed as a debate, but in reality it was a series of meandering TED-esque talks by Musk on how, like, Earth is totally doomed in, like, millions of years or something. Ma, a guy w

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google says it’s hard at work resolving an issue that allows malicious third parties to hijack your Google Calendar with unremovable spam invites. As noted by Engadget this morning, Google posted to its Calendar Help forums yesterday to say that it’s aware of the issue and “working diligently” to fix it.“We’re aware of the spam occurring in Calendar and are working diligently to resolve this issue. We’ll post updates to

Photo: Amazon Prime Video When Alma, the sharp-witted, deeply troubled protagonist of Amazon Prime’s new animated series Undone, dresses as Dorothy for Halloween at age eight, her physicist father Jacob admits he doesn’t understand The Wizard of Oz. “You’ve got this girl Dorothy, right?” he asks. “She’s living a normal boring life, and she gets a chance to live an exciting life, and all she wants to do is go home. If you had a chance to do something ama

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Essential Phone is getting an update to Android 10 on the very first day of the operating system’s release. This is remarkable for two reasons: for one, Android phone manufacturers are notoriously slow at releasing updates. So any time a phone gets a release day update, it’s a big deal. But on top of that, it’s a wonder that Essential’s sole phone is still being supported. The Essential Phone is now two years old, and the company sup

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One of the ways that connected fitness apps keep you exercising is by using accountability — the ability to share your workouts with friends so you can urge each other onward — but wanting to share with your pals is different than wanting to share with an app developer or some anonymous marketer.How much of your data is shared, and to whom, is usually set out in the privacy policy that most people accept (and don’t bother to read) when t

It took Twitch viewers four hours to figure out the puzzles in Porsche’s latest ad, an interactive playthrough where viewers controlled the IRL actions of two drivers in order to reveal the team’s newest electric car, the Porsche 99X. As Twitch’s Adam Harris told Digiday, the Choose Your Own Adventure-style game was aimed squarely at a younger audience of 18- to 34-year-olds who weren’t already targeted by traditional TV and radio advertising. The ad was a collaboration b

Illustration by Alex Castro US regulatory authorities are preparing to announce a new antitrust probe into Google as soon as next week, according to a new report from The Washington Post. The investigation is said to involve more than half of the nation’s state attorneys general. The Post says the Department of Justice has met with many of those state attorneys general, but it’s unclear whether it will be involved in the final lawsuit.
The news follows comments late last month from

Six people broke into two Australian Apple Stores early this morning, making off with nearly $300,000 worth of products. The group, according to a Facebook post by the Western Australia Police Force, used a sledgehammer to gain entry to both stores. The first attempt was an unsuccessful one. After smashing the front window to gain entry, the group ended up fleeing due to the presence of a nearby taxi. “We know the presence of the taxi caused the group to flee the scene,” Detective S

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Mike Boudet, host of the true crime podcast Sword and Scale, is threatening legal action against another true crime podcast host who claimed Boudet bombarded him with one-star reviews on Apple Podcasts.Justin Drown, the host of Obscura, made the allegations in comments to The Verge that were published last week. Boudet didn’t respond to a request for comment at the time, and Boudet and his lawyers didn’t respond to a request for comment on thi

Logan Paul and JJ “KSI” Olatunji are two of YouTube’s biggest creators, but their upcoming boxing rematch on November 9th is going to completely bypass the platform that helped build their careers due to piracy concerns.Paul and Olatunji’s fight will stream exclusively in the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Brazil via a streaming service called DAZN, which appears to be largely dedicated to fighting events. It’s unclear

Something strange is happening on Twitch. The most-watched gaming on the site in the past few weeks hasn’t been Fortnite, or CS:GO, or League of Legends, or any of the other esports darlings — which is almost unheard-of for the site. Instead, the game everyone’s spent the most time watching, by a significant margin, is a little MMO you may have heard of called World of Warcraft. Well, to clarify, it’s WoW Classic, a recreation of pre-Burning Crus

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is making facial recognition in photos opt-in by default. Starting today, it’s rolling out its Face Recognition privacy setting, which it first introduced in December 2017, to all users. If you have Face Recognition turned on, Facebook will notify you if someone uploads a photo of you, even if you aren’t tagged. You can then tag yourself, stay untagged, or report the photo if it’s something you want taken down. Facebook tells Th

Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images A Stanford University artificial intelligence conference invited former Google CEO and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt to give a keynote speech next month. But a group of academics, activists, and current Google employees are urging organizers to reconsider the decision — citing Schmidt’s acceptance of censorship in China and his handling of sexual misconduct allegations at Google, among other controversies.
Stanford’s Institute for Human-Cen

Bang & Olufsen makes both pricey, high-end speakers and pricey, high-end TVs, so the fact that the luxury hardware company has combined those two passions into a pricey, high-end soundbar — the Beosound Stage — isn’t exactly shocking news. The only surprise here is that it took the company this long to do it.Beosound Stage is B&O’s first soundbar, according to the company (whether or not you count the existing — and extremely soundbar-shaped — Beosound

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge After several months in betas, each of which brought its own fresh teapot tempest about how gestures would work, Google is officially releasing the final version of Android 10 to Pixel users beginning today. In what may be a hopeful sign that this version of Android will come to other phones faster than before, Google is promising that it is “working with a number of partners to launch or upgrade devices to Android 10 this year.”
There are a few hea

The NFL and TikTok have announced a multiyear partnership ahead of the NFL’s 100th season, which kicks off this Thursday. The official NFL TikTok account will be sharing behind-the-scenes footage and highlight reels, and of course, memes (there’s already a “when they hold the door but you’re kinda far away” skit up). The account is part of a strategy to court a younger demographic that’s watching increasingly less football, as well as to open up the sport to a

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge XKCD author Randall Munroe is no stranger to answering strange science questions, but his latest book, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, might be his most practical science guide yet.How To, which hits stores today, is a quasi-sequel to Munroe’s book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which was based on a series of blog posts Munroe wrote as a spinoff of his webcomic.How To aims

The biggest game at E3 this year was a remake of an old one. The much-anticipated, long-in-development remake of Final Fantasy VII seemed like it was everywhere. Fans were able to play it for the first time, Square Enix finally unveiled the release date, and it even turned its show floor booth into a life-sized re-creation of the gritty cyberpunk metropolis Midgar. Fittingly, the massive presence of FFVII Remake largely overshadowed another major announcement: the original game’s successor

Mozilla, the creator of the popular Firefox browser, has announced it plans to block cryptominers by default. The move will ensure that third-party websites are unable to use the computational resources of visitors without consent. The use of cryptominers – which is dubbed “cryptojacking” – allows websites to monetize their users without showing traditional advertising. Although this is visually inobtrusive, these scripts inevitably result in performance slowdowns and re

TV speakers are historically not great, a fact that has fueled the soundbar and home theater audio businesses for years. But the latest details about the upcoming OnePlus TV indicate that it might try to change that conversation: a leaked Amazon listing reveals that the OnePlus TV will offer eight integrated speakers with 50W of power and Dolby Atmos support, via 9to5Google.Those are impressive specs for built-in speakers, at least on paper, the sort that generally only show up on devices like t

A RoomMe Personal Location Sensor (PLS)installed in a home. | Image: Intellithings Imagine a home that’s smart enough to adjust the temperature, lighting, or music based on who’s in a room at any given time. That’s what a company called Intellithings is promising with its new RoomMe sensors, a former Indiegogo campaign that’s now shipping globally.
The big caveat here is that RoomMe works by pairing with a person’s smartphone, not their meat sack. So if members of

If you own a Nintendo Switch, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time researching the best ways to stream game audio to your Bluetooth headphones. Products like Genki’s Audio and Twelve South’s AirFly make it possible to do this, but in my experience, it’s not without introducing a significant amount of lag.
SteelSeries’ new Arctis 1 Wireless headset starts shipping today, and inside of its box comes a metaphorical silver bullet that will make it a must-have for

The Verge YouTube’s teams have removed more than 100,000 videos and 17,000 channels since the company implemented changes to its hateful content policies in June.
Those numbers are approximately five times as many than the company’s last quarter, according to a new blog post from YouTube about the company’s attempts to tackle a growing number of hateful and dangerous videos on the platform. This also includes doubling the removal of comments (more than 500 million) that were f

Carsten Breitfeld, the man who ran the BMW i program and brought the i8 supercar into the world, is taking over as CEO of troubled EV startup Faraday Future, the company announced on Tuesday. Jia Yueting, Faraday Future’s founder, has resigned the CEO role and will become the company’s “chief product and user officer.” Faraday Future is also seeking a new “global chairman” to help the company move forward.
Breitfeld also helped found Chinese EV startup Byton a

Bitcoin‘s market capitalization has exceeded 70 percent of the total cryptocurrency market for the first time since March 2017 — when it was worth just $1,000 per coin. This metric is commonly referred to as its “dominance.” It’s a rather simple estimate that’s typically used to show how popular investing in that particular currency is. To determine the market capitalization of any particular digital asset, simply take its price and multiply it by t

Samsung’s Galaxy Fold phone is set to launch this month. However, there are rumors suggesting the company might be working on a second luxury foldable already. According to a report by Bloomberg, the Korean tech giant is working on a clamshell phone which folds inwards. The report notes that the device will have a 6.7-inch screen that “collapses into a square.” It will apparently use cutting edge screen tech and will have a hole punch display to accommodate the selfie camera.

The internal display on the Galaxy Fold. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Samsung is on the cusp of finally releasing its long delayed Galaxy Fold and already rumors are picking up about a second Samsung foldable set to launch next year. Bloomberg reports that the new Samsung smartphone is built around a 6.7-inch display that folds inward to form an easily pocketable “square.” It’s supposed to be more affordable and thinner than the $1,980 Fold, with a single hole