Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge More than 1,080 people have come down with a serious lung injury related to vaping, as government researchers continue to investigate the cause of the outbreak. That’s an increase of 275 reported cases since last week.“We are concerned — with hundreds of new cases reported each week — that we’re looking at a very concerning outbreak, very difficult to control,” Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for

Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images On Thursday, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Rudy Giuliani, was locked out of his Twitter account for a brief period of time after posting a Ukrainian official’s phone number.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge that Giuliani’s tweets, which included screenshots of text conversations with Andriy Yermak, violated the platform’s rules on posting private information. Those screenshots did not censor Yermak&r

Google has launched a redesign of Google Shopping in the US across both the online and mobile sites, featuring a new personalized homepage, price tracking, and new Google Lens features for building outfits.The new homepage is now more personalized to your specific shopping preferences, and will automatically suggest reordering products you’ve previously bought and recommendations based on your Google activity.The redesign also integrates Google’s local delivery service, Google Expres

Marvel Studios Avengers: Endgame gave Marvel Cinematic Universe diehards plenty of reasons to not want to be Tony Stark, but that film can’t entirely dispel the fantasy of taking on the Iron Man role. Avengers: Damage Control is a new VR experience from ILMxLAB and Marvel Studios that was produced for The Void, a high-powered virtual reality experience that has also been the platform for Ghostbusters and Star Wars VR experiences. In the new experience, Marvel fans take control of a new su

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Earlier this week, a District of Columbia appeals court said the Federal Communications Commission could legally repeal net neutrality — removing rules that prevented internet service providers from throttling specific sites or services. The ruling was a blow to activists who have been fighting to preserve the internet’s status as a telephone service-like “common carrier.” But it handed them one major victory: the FCC can’t p

Image: Dell Ahead of IFA 2019 in August, Dell announced a refresh of its XPS 13 laptop with Intel’s 10th Gen Core processors — and now the Intel Core i7 model with six cores is available for purchase starting at $999. With those six cores, you can likely expect to see better performance while multitasking, though apps will need to be optimized to take advantage of the additional processing power.
It’s impressive to see a six-core processor in a laptop of this size. Apple, for

Photo by Andreas Hoenig/picture alliance via Getty Images Self-driving startup Zoox announced it is testing its fleet of autonomous vehicles in Las Vegas. It’s the second test city for the five-year-old company, which has been testing its self-driving cars exclusively in San Francisco and the surrounding communities.Zoox, which is based in the Silicon Valley town of Foster City, Calif., will start by testing its vehicles on Las Vegas roads, with the goal of ultimately launching an autonom

GIF: Hulu Today, Hulu announced that it’s adjusting the text opacity and backgrounds of its app to make everything easier to read and navigate. The company says these changes are part of its focus on accessibility, but the text legibility improvements will probably be appreciated by just about everyone who subscribes to the service.The shift to colorful gradient backgrounds was made as part of Hulu’s big visual redesign in 2017, and the company also added a translucency effect to no

Photo by Andrew Burton / Getty Images Former Tinder CEO Greg Blatt is suing Tinder co-founder Sean Rad and the company’s former VP of marketing and communications Rosette Pambakian for defamation after Pambakian went public with sexual assault allegations against Blatt. The lawsuit seeks at least $50 million in damages.
The allegations of sexual assault first showed up in a separate lawsuit Rad is currently pursuing against Match Group and its parent company IAC. In that case, Rad claims

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has evaded a request from a group of senators demanding that it disclose the names of the third-party companies it contracts to deliver packages all across the United States.In September, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) along with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) penned a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. The letter was in response to a report by BuzzFeed News and ProPublica that uncovered the company’s use of contractors

A lot of talk has been made about verifying valuable items on an immutable blockchain, but the main pioneer in this space has been Verisart, which appeared a few years ago to use a blockchain to create certification for the fine art and collectibles market. But despite the blockchain hype of the last few years, Verisarteschewed the fundraising bonanza, preferring instead to perfect its model and build partnerships.
That changes today with the news that it has raised $2.5 million in seed financin

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1. Publisher adtech startups Taboola and Outbrain merge in $850M deal to take on Google and Facebook
The content recommendation rivals — who are, shall we say, not exactly known for the high quality of their recommendations — are merging to form a single company.
While the companies d

Image: Bird Bird, a startup that rents out electric scooters, is being valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round led by CDPQ and Sequoia Capital, the company announced at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday. The company says it raised $275 million in its Series D round, which it claims is a testament to the company’s effort to improve its unit economics.Bird’s new pre-money valuation was first reported earlier this summer by TechCrunch and The New York Times. It’s a slight incr

Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures TV creator and writer Noah Hawley made his name working on shows that try to stretch the medium’s boundaries. Even given the cinematic style of much buzzy 2010s television programming, his series Fargo and Legion both clearly have a foot in the film world, from their source materials (Coen Brothers movies for Fargo; X-Men lore adapted into blockbusters for Legion) to their movie-star casting and their widescreen / split-screen / big-screen style. Watching a

A fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, where workers went on strike earlier this year. | Photo by Ackerman + Gruber for The Verge A day after The Verge reported on Sacramento Amazon workers protesting Amazon’s strict time-off rules, more than 60 Amazon workers in similar roles in an Eagan, Minnesota, warehouse walked off the job. During the two-and-a-half-hour protest, workers demanded the lifting of the 30-hour-per-week cap, a more respectful work environment, and a less strenuous

New episodes of Sesame Street are going to stream exclusively on HBO Max as WarnerMedia shifts the popular kids show over to its upcoming streaming service.
The new deal means parents will have to sign up for HBO Max in order to get access to new Sesame Street episodes as they air, according to Vulture. Episodes will air for free on PBS “at some point” after the episodes debut on HBO Max, Vulture reports, but WarnerMedia plans to use Sesame Street to build out its family content offe

Aniplex This fall season, there are at least 44 new anime series starting, which is a significant challenge for even the most dedicated viewer. It’s time to prioritize. So here are eight of the most intriguing new series from this season, worth checking out for newcomers or longtime anime fans. Most of these shows will be available for viewing internationally within a day of their Japanese air date, thanks to streaming services like Amazon, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Netflix. We’l

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge On a special episode of The Vergecast, chief product officer of Microsoft, Panos Panay, joins Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and senior editor Tom Warren a few hours after Microsoft’s Surface hardware event to talk about the new Surface lineup — including the company’s upcoming dual-screen devices.Panay also talks about why Microsoft is using Android for its Duo device, the company’s relationship with Google, and the future

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a ton of new Surface devices, but one thing you might have missed is that a couple of them are upgradable. Most Surface devices haven’t been easy to upgrade or fix, scoring rather poorly on iFixit’s repairability scale. For example, the Surface Pro 6 got a one, and the Surface Laptop 2 got a zero. However, Microsoft is trying to make things better in the repairability department with the new Surface Pro X

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s Fire TV is at risk of being the only major streaming platform without Disney+ at launch, as the two companies remain locked in a dispute over advertising, according to The Wall Street Journal.If Disney doesn’t agree with Amazon over advertising space, the company could also possibly see a number of its apps removed from Fire TV, including sports streaming service ESPN+. As Disney tries to enter the direct-to-consumer streaming video m

Photo By David Fitzgerald / Sportsfile via Getty Images Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has created an autonomous battering-ram drone. As reported by Bloomberg and NBC News, Luckey’s Anduril defense company is now offering a self-piloted drone called the Interceptor, which is designed to destroy other drones midflight by ramming them head-on.
As photographed by Bloomberg, the Interceptor resembles an off-the-shelf quadcopter on the scale of a Parrot drone, but Anduril has programmed the I

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Thursday, the European Union’s top court ruled that lower court judges could order Facebook to remove illegal comments from its platform, expanding on the power individual countries have to extend content bans across the world.The European Court of Justice came to its decision after an Austrian politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, requested an order that would force Facebook to remove comments that were “harmful to her reputation.” G

Image: WalkingCat Microsoft could be preparing to release its Surface Headphones in a new black color scheme, according to a new promotional video leaked on Twitter by WalkingCat. The video shows off many of the features that can already be found on the existing gray Surface Headphones, including dials that control volume and active noise cancellation, suggesting you’re not getting any new functionality alongside the new color scheme.
The new promotional video has emerged a year after Mic

The original Sony A9 from 2017. | Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Sony has updated the A9, one of the highest-end cameras it sells. The new Mark II model doesn’t change much, keeping the same 24-megapixel full-frame sensor and bananas-fast blackout-free 20 fps continuous shooting speed, which positions it as suitable for challenging situations like sports and wedding photography. But there have been a few meaningful tweaks that make the A9 II less of a compromise over other Sony ca