Technology news

Photo Illustration by Chesnot/Getty Images Tensions continue to grow over a GitHub contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as employee activists pressure the company to cut ties with the agency.In a standing-room-only meeting yesterday, executives answered questions from employees on the controversial contract. CEO Nat Friedman fielded questions from employees and attempted to explain why the company would renew a $200,000 contract with the immigration agency. The Verge has obtained

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nearly 1,300 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 over 200 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 f

Photo: Sam Byford / The Verge iPad keyboard maker Brydge is suing the apparent creator of a very similar-looking competitor called Libra. Not only that, but Brydge is suing Kickstarter, too, for hosting a crowdfunding campaign in support of the Libra keyboard.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a federal court in New York, accuses the company it believes is Libra’s creator, OGadget, of violating a patent owned by Brydge. That patent covers the key features that make a Brydge keyboard work: pri

Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures If recent pop culture fans know The Addams Family at all, they probably remember it as a 1960s TV show, a 2010 Broadway musical, or a set of 1990s movies directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. But the “creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky” family actually started life as a series of satirical cartoons drawn by Charles Addams and published in The New Yorker between 1938 and 1988. The hook of the glossy new animated feature about the macabre family is tha

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The blockbuster T-Mobile / Sprint merger was approved the Department of Justice in July, along with a complicated set of conditions aimed at turning Dish Network into a national wireless carrier. Instead of blocking the merger and maintaining all four major wireless carriers, the government is essentially trying to manufacture a fourth carrier to replace Sprint, by requiring T-Mobile to run a new Dish Network-branded wireless service for seven years while

Photo by Visual China Group via Getty Images/Visual China Group via Getty Images Apple CEO Tim Cook has sent an email to employees with a lengthier explanation for why the company chose to remove HKmap.live from the App Store yesterday. Similar to Apple’s statement last night, Cook claims that the app — a crowdsourced mapping tool that’s become useful amid the ongoing protests in Hong Kong — was being misused in ways that could threaten public safety.“The app in qu

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images On Thursday, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers called out Apple and its CEO Tim Cook for the company’s decision to remove an app from its store that allowed Hong Kong protesters to trace the movements of law enforcement.“An authoritarian regime is violently suppressing its own citizens who are fighting for democracy,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said. “Apple just sided with them.”
Earlier this month, Apple rejected the app,

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images Scooter startups are being temporarily banished from the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota, ahead of a rally tonight by President Donald Trump.The city’s Department of Public Works sent a notice to scooter companies on Thursday about the temporary ban:
Please be advised that the City of Minneapolis is planning for a major event scheduled for Thursday, October 10, 2019. In order to protect and promote public safety and welfare, t

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s promised Siri recording opt-in feature is starting to roll out with the latest beta for the upcoming iOS 13.2 update, as spotted by TechCrunch, allowing customers to decide if they’d like to give audio recordings of requests to Apple to improve Siri.The new feature comes after a scandal over Siri recordings earlier this year when Apple (as well as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft) was caught using third-party contractors to

Valued at $535 million, autonomous retail startup Standard Cognition has emerged as a soon-to-be tech giant and the best hope for merchants to compete with AmazonGo. Cashierless checkout is poised to transform brick-and-mortar commerce, and shop owners fear having to battle Amazon’s technology alone or partner with it, exposing data it could use against them.
The $86 million-funded Standard Cognition is racing to equip storefronts with an independent alternative using cameras to track what

I haven’t read Mike Monteiro’s new book Ruined by Design, so I can’t say whether it’s any good. But let’s judge a book by its cover for a moment — because this cover cleverly encourages Amazon workers to form a labor union.
This past Thursday, Monteiro tells The Verge, he realized he could change his self-published book’s cover as easily as uploading a new PDF, and used it to add a new message to Amazon workers they’ll presumably see as they print

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has removed a pro-Hong Kong protestor game called The Revolution of Our Times from the Play Store, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. It marks the latest Hong Kong-related app to be pulled after Apple removed a crowdsourced mapping app used by protestors and Quartz’s news app.
While the game has been removed, a cached version of the Play Store page is still available on Google search (at least for now). As an actual game, the

Canon’s Ivy Rec portable camera will start shipping on October 16th for $129.99 in the US. You might remember this little camera from our post back in July, when Canon launched its Indiegogo campaign for the device. The main appeal here is that it’s a clippable, shockproof, and waterproof camera that, on paper, sounds like a good alternative to pulling your expensive phone out for every opportunity to snap a picture. Canon says that an empty square space on the clip acts as a viewfin

French video game company Ubisoft is continuing its foray into animated television with several new shows, including a tamed Watch Dogs tale and a franchise built around Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
The Watch Dogs series is described as a toned-down version of Ubisoft’s popular game franchise about hackers. The series is aimed at tweens, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It’s unclear where the show will take place, but the Watch Dogs gaming franchise has brought players to Chicago, Sa

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Today Tidal launched a new “Community Heroes” program that offers a 40 percent discount to first responders in the US, including people who are firefighters, police officers, and EMT / EMS. The discount applies to both Tidal’s Premium and HiFi plans, knocking a Premium membership down to $5.99 and a HiFi membership to $11.99 (originally $9.99 and $19.99).
To redeem the discount, qualifying members can make a new account on Tidal and

Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge With the OnePlus 7 released earlier in the year, OnePlus has started producing two models of each of its flagship phones. Six months ago saw the release of the OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro, and today OnePlus has announced the OnePlus 7T Pro, the high-end sibling to the OnePlus 7T that the company first revealed last month. The new phone costs £699, and will be available to buy in the UK starting on October 17th, but there’s currently no US release plan

Image: Waymo Waymo, the self-driving division of Alphabet, is about to put more passengers its fully driverless Chrysler Pacifica minivans. The company emailed its customers in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, to let them know that “completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way.” It’s a sign that Waymo is growing confident enough in its technology to increase the frequency at which it allows passengers to ride in autonomous vehicles without a safety driver behind the wheel.T

Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Dyson James Dyson is terminating his electric car project. The British entrepreneur announced the news in an all-staff email on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, saying that he and his board of directors decided to stop the effort after unsuccessfully trying to find a buyer. Going forward, Dyson says his company will “concentrate on the formidable task of manufacturing solid-state batteries” as well as other “fundamenta

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A year ago, navigation app Waze made a risky bet on carpooling, a type of commuting that has waned since its heyday in the 1970s. It launched Waze Carpool, a dedicated app that lets nonprofessional drivers offer rides to people who are traveling on a similar route for a nominal fee. So how’s it been going? Pretty good it seems, according to some statistics the company released on October 10th to celebrate its first year in the carpooling busines