Technology news

Uber will begin testing its self-driving cars in Dallas, Texas in November, the company announced Tuesday. The vehicles will be operated by human drivers in downtown Dallas to start out, collecting mapping data and capturing driving scenarios which Uber’s engineers will then reproduce in simulation.This doesn’t mean Uber is planning to offer trips in its self-driving cars or even perform self-driving tests in Dallas. “The data we collect will inform our next steps — we ma

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge Facebook has been working to build its own augmented reality glasses for the past few years. According to CNBC, these glasses (codenamed “Orion”) won’t be supplemental to your phone — they’re supposedly built to replace it entirely. They will reportedly be able to take calls without being tethered to a smartphone, and will show information in “a small display,” which sounds similar to Google Glass. The glasses a

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Facebook has published new documents detailing the company’s plans for a content oversight board, which would serve as a kind of Supreme Court for the platform. In a call with reporters on Tuesday, Facebook said that it hopes to have the board fully staffed by the end of this year, and gave more details on how the board will operate and be governed.
Last November, Mark Zuckerberg penned a blog post laying out his plan to create virtually a Supreme Court

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Warning: this story contains descriptions of sexual assault that some readers may find disturbing.
A woman who says she was raped by her Lyft driver in 2017 is suing the ride-hailing company in California for failure to keep its passengers safe. It is the latest case about safety in the ride-hailing industry, and the latest charge against Lyft, which was sued by 14 women earlier this month alleging rape complaints against drivers.In a statement releas

Amazon-owned Twitchhas made a small but strategic acquisition designed to improve its search capabilities and better direct viewers to exactly the right content. The company is acquiring IGDB, the Internet Games Database (no relation to Amazon’s IMDb), a website dedicated to combining all the relevant information about games into a comprehensive resource for gamers everywhere. As a result of the acquisition, IGDB’s database will now feed into Twitch’s search and discovery featu

Google’s mesh Wi-Fi router — Google Wifi — is nearly three years old, but it may be getting a radically different design next month. 9to5Google is reporting that the company is prepping a new “Nest Wifi” that pairs a single new hub router with two new “beacons” that will double as Google Assistant smart speakers, giving you the equivalent of two additional Google Home Mini speakers to cover additional rooms of your house with both Wi-Fi and sound.
You ma

Image: Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz is known for being a pioneer in the world of automobiles, but until now, it hadn’t ventured into the world of two-wheeled electric scooters. That will change, though, as the company very quietly announced a two-wheeler at the 2019 Frankfurt Motor Show last week.Stuffed inside a press release between news of Mercedes-Benz-branded over-the-ear headphones and a toy version of the company’s EQC electric SUV is a brief mention of the forthcoming e-scooter.

Colorcon, a 58-year-old company that develops, supplies, and supports specialty products for the pharmaceutical industry — think food colorants, nutritional coatings, the film on time-release medications — is getting into the business of funding startups.
It isn’t bringing aboard any traditional venture investors or taping off a corner of its Harleysville, Pa., offices so a team of staffers can meet with startups. Colorcon knows what it doesn’t know, suggests its CEO, Mar

French president Emmanuel Macronannounced in a speech ahead of France Digitale Day that the French government has convinced institutional investors to invest more heavily in late-stage VC funds and asset managers in one way or another. Institutional investors have committed to investing $5.5 billion (€5 billion).
“We’ll have €2 billion that will go in so-called late-stage funds and €3 billion for funds managed by asset managers specialized in tech,” Macron said.

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1. Review: The iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 do Disneyland after dark
Matthew Panzarino continues his tradition of testing out the latest iPhones at Disneyland. This time, he was particularly interested in how well the iPhone 11’s Night Mode works. His verdict: It compares extremely well to o

Photo: Francois Duhamel / Twentieth Century Fox Director James Gray’s lush new space opera Ad Astra is essentially two parallel films. One is a visually inventive science fiction odyssey that imagines near-future space travel as the new Wild West frontier. The other is a tepid father / son drama that Gray and his co-writer, Ethan Gross, don’t even try to elevate above the most threadbare clichés. The latter film doesn’t entirely drag down the former, although it seems t

The latest research from OpenAI put its machine learning agents in a simple game of hide-and-seek, where they pursued an arms race of ingenuity, using objects in unexpected ways to achieve their goal of seeing or being seen. This type of self-taught AI could prove useful in the real world as well.
The study intended to, and successfully did look into the possibility of machine learning agents learning sophisticated, real-world-relevant techniques without any interference of suggestions from the

The Justice Department has filed a civil lawsuit against Edward Snowden that would recover all proceeds of his recently released memoir, the department announced on Tuesday. The charges coincide with the official publication of the book, which is titled Permanent Record.
Snowden’s memoir was allegedly not submitted to the CIA or NSA for pre-publication review, a required practice among former employees of intelligence agencies. As such, the department considers the book a breach of Snowden

Googletoday announced an update to how it handles videos in search results. Instead of just listing relevant videos on the search results page, Google will now also highlight the most relevant parts of longer videos, based on timestamps provided by the video creators. That’s especially useful for how-to videos or documentaries.
“Videos aren’t skimmable like text, meaning it can be easy to overlook video content altogether,” Google Search product manager Prashant Baheti wr

Bharat Vasanis no longer the Chief Executive Officer at Pax Labs, the consumer tech company that makes cannabis vaporizers. A source familiar with the situation said that the board of directors made the decision to remove Vasan from the CEO role. His last day was Friday.
We’ve reached out to Vasan for comment. Pax is declining to elaborate on what drove its decision.
Certainly, it’s a surprising move, given that Vasan was appointed the CEO of Pax not so long ago —  in Febr

When it opened in 2006, Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship quickly became a top destination for New York City residents and tourists, alike. The big, glass cube was a radical departure from prior electronics stores, serving as the entrance to a 24-hour subterranean retail location. Location didn’t hurt either, with the company planting its flag across from the Plaza Hotel and Central Park and sharing a block with the iconic high-end toy store, FAO Schwarz.
Since early 2017, however, the s

Brett Zucker ContributorShare on Twitter Brett is the Chief Marketing Officer of Monotype and is responsible for the company’s worldwide marketing and product strategies.In today’s brand landscape, consumers are rejecting traditional advertising in favor of transparent, personalized and most importantly, authentic communications. In fact, 86% of consumers say that authenticity is important when deciding which brands they support. Driven by this growing emphasis on brand sincerity, ma

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tinder may be expanding from matchmaking into original video content. According to Variety, Tinder has developed a lengthy Choose Your Own Adventure-style series about a group of characters facing the end of the world. It’ll be controlled by swipes, of course, and it’ll reportedly include more than two hours of content.
While this all sounds like a particularly odd move from Tinder, there’s apparently a matchmaking motivation behind it.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon has knocked hundreds off of the cost of Apple’s 11-inch iPad Pro (Wi-Fi) with 1TB of storage. It’s currently $1,149, matching the best deal that we’ve seen yet for this high-end tablet. Last week, Apple officially dropped the price of this model from $1,549 to $1,349, and now it has dropped in price by another $200 if you buy from Amazon. It’s tough to imagine it getting much cheaper, at least in the short term.
This is

Photo by Ryan “Rhondo” Manning for The Verge This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel talks to Dani Deahl, music reporter and host of The Verge’s video series Future of Music.Dani walks Nilay through two episodes of Future of Music season 2 — one about how music sampling has changed the way people are writing music, and the other about how music streaming platforms are reshaping the music industry.
“Advances in technology have not only affected the way people get th

Scott Angelheart/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Lilly Singh is the first queer woman of color to get her own late night talk show on a major network, and at 30, she’s one of the youngest late night hosts in NBC history. That she’s also the first YouTube creator to land such a coveted gig is just further proof of how network television is relying on a younger, diverse, and more online pool of talent to remain vital and relevant in the ever shifting world of entertainment.
Singh

Here’s a fun thing to look forward to next month. Simone Giertz, she of the shitty robots fame, will be appearing onstage at Disrupt SF (October 2-4) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.The U.S.-based Swedish inventor has built a massive online following (currently at 1.92 million YouTube subscribers) with DIY videos that examine technology and art through a whimsical lens.Giertz is probably best known for her “shitty” robotic creations, including arms that serve soup and br

AT&T faked the numbers for its DirecTV Now streaming service ahead of the company’s Time Warner merger, according to a lawsuit filed by investors, Bloomberg reported. The suit alleges the media giant pressured employees to boost DirecTV Now’s numbers by secretly adding the product to existing customers’ accounts. It also claims the company touted DirecTV Now’s user growth, when in reality, subscribers were leaving as their promotional periods ended and the service&rsq

Image: LousyTX (Reddit) Google has been steadily revealing information about its new Pixel 4 lineup almost as fast as the leakers. The company just revealed a new orange color for the upcoming device in perhaps the least-subtle way yet: a massive Time Square billboard advertising the upcoming October 15th reveal, spotted by Reddit user LousyTX (via 9to5Google).
Photos of the orange Pixel had already been floating around the internet (of course), but the Times Square ad marks the first official

A composite image of C/2019 Q4 taken by the Gemini Observatory. | Image: Gemini Observatory / NSF / AURA Astronomers have almost certainly detected a second interstellar comet zooming through our Solar System, but there’s still quite a lot of work to be done to find out more about this alien space rock. In the weeks and months to come, astronomers will continue to observe this visitor with as many ground and space-based telescopes as possible to determine if it is, indeed, interstellar an

Arc, a platform that wants to simplify the process of hiring developers who work remotely, is launching officially today. The new company grew out of Techstars-backed Codementor, an online education platform for software developers. Codementorwill continue to operate as a standalone product under Arc.
While there are already many freelancing platforms, Weiting Liu, the founder and CEO of Arc and Codementor, said Arc is more focused on long-term contractor and full-time employee positions instead

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is announcing a new plan for its MVNO Fi cell service: Unlimited. Like the big four carriers in the US, Google apparently feels the need to use the word “Unlimited” next to its service, whether or not it means what you think it means.
For Google, it means that a single line costs $70 for everything, two are $60 apiece, three are $50 apiece, and you can have four to six at $45 per line. The caveats — and there are always caveats wi

For the longest time, Google Fi didn’t play the unlimited calls, text and data game and instead focused on offering pretty affordable and flexible plans with a price cap of $80 (before taxes and government fees). Today, however, Googleis introducing Fi Unlimited, which, as you’ve probably figured out from the name, is more akin to a traditional ‘unlimited’ plan from other carriers.
Fi Unlimited plans start at $70 for the first line. For families, you can also opt to pay $

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly large role in enterprise software, and Boston’s DataRobot has been helping companies build, manage and deploy machine learning models for some time now. Today, the company announced a $206 million Series E investment led by Sapphire Ventures.
Other participants in this round included new investors Tiger Global Management, World Innovation Lab, Alliance Bernstein PCI, and EDBI along with existing investors DFJ Growth, Geodesic Capital, Inte

When you watch a commercial for one of the major stock exchanges, you are welcomed into a world of fast-moving, slick images full of glistening buildings, lush crops and happy people. They are typically interspersed with shots of intrepid executives veering out over the horizon as if to say, “I’ve got a long-term vision, and the exchange where my stock is listed is a valuable partner in achieving my goals.” It’s all very reassuring and stylish. But there’s another s

“Friends” is getting some new neighbors at HBO Max. The streaming service from AT&T’s WarnerMedia has signed a big deal, reportedly worth over $1 billion, for the exclusive streaming and syndication rights for “The Big Bang Theory” over the next five years.
The deal comes as streaming media services look to shore up their original programming offerings with known quantities that have proven to be enduring hits in syndication. It’s the model that originally

NBCUniversalis sharing a few more details about its new streaming service, due to launch in April 2020, including the service’s name and content lineup. In a nod to the NBC logo, the service will be called “Peacock,” (yes, really), and will offer subscribers over 15,000 of content, including both film and TV, plus original content.
Notably, Peacock will be home to “The Office,” which Netflix will lose as a result of NBCU paying $500 million to pull the hit from Netf

NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock, will launch next April with a substantial number of fan favorites and original series, including a reboot of Battlestar Galactica from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail.
This isn’t a remake of Ronald D. Moore’s Syfy version of Battlestar Galactica that drew in a dedicated fan base in the early 2000s. Still, Esmail’s version of the show will be inspired by Moore’s, according to The Hollywood Reporter, not Glen A. Larson’s o

Image: OnePlus If you can’t beat the leaks, join ‘em. That seems to be the strategy with major phone releases this year. OnePlus is joining Google in an attempt to stymie the flood of leaks by just straight-up revealing the official design of its upcoming OnePlus 7T flagship ahead of schedule.
OnePlus CEO Pete Lau posted the early look at the phone over on the OnePlus forum, and it looks pretty much as the leaks have promised, with a new circular rear camera module that features a t

If you’re a dedicated reader, the internet can provide a treasure trove of free books, short stories, and other reading material. But where do you look? Especially if you want to find free reading material that doesn’t violate copyright?
In this article, we list a variety of sources where you can find novels, short stories, poetry, and more, both old and recent. But first, we’ve got an interesting bit of news for anyone looking for relatively recent books: thousands of works th

SpaceXis making progress assembling its Starship orbital spacecraft prototype, as seen in new photos shared by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk . This full-scale testing version of the Starship will take over for the StarHopper, which was a scaled down version used to test the Raptor engine initially with low-altitude ‘hop’ flights.
The StarshipMk I Prototype and Mk II prototypes, which are under construction simultaneously at SpaceXfacilities in South Texas and Florida, will be used to test fli

Remagine Ventures is a relatively new European VC fund which focuses on investments in entertainment tech, including AI, gaming, sports & eSports, AR/VR, consumer and commerce. It’s now completed $35 million in funding from a number of entertainment and media corporations, including Axel Springer and ProsiebenSat1, Japanese Adways and American Liontree LLC. Last year global media group Sky put $4 million into the fund as part of the launch of its new innovation office in Berlin.
To dat

Amazonhas a new, high-quality streaming tier of its music service called Amazon Music HD. It’s priced at $12.99 per month for Prime members ($14.99 per month for everyone else) and you can add it to your existing Amazon Music subscription for an additional $5 per month, whether you’re an individual or family plan subscriber. What you get for the additional cost is access to over 50 million songs in what Amazon is calling HD (16-bit, 44.1kHz or around what you’d expect from a CD

NBCUniversal’s streaming service finally has a name: Peacock.The name is based on NBC’s iconic logo, the colorful peacock that sits at the bottom of people’s TV screens when shows play. It is also a homage to “NBCUniversal’s rich legacy of creating beloved films, TV series, characters and franchises that have been at the epicenter of pop culture and will continue to define the future of entertainment,” according to a press release.The streaming service will of