Technology news

Graphic by James Bareham / The Verge The United Kingdom has finally scrapped a plan to require age verification for accessing porn online, following years of tortuous debate and setbacks. Nicky Morgan, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media, and sport, says the government “will not be commencing” Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 — which would have required internet users to prove they were over 18 before viewing pornographic sites. Instead, it will focus on p

Hey, Lady Gaga! You’ve asked a great question — who is Ninja, really? — and I’m here to explain in a blog post, because that’s how the content sausage gets made, baby. (I am not being forced to do this, but I am getting paid to, and, honestly, isn’t that just about the same thing?)
In any case: your question. Ninja is a guy who was born in Detroit, MI, with the name Richard Tyler Blevins. Now he’s a 28-year-old who lives somewhere else, presumably, who s

An ocean exploration team just discovered a whale skeleton on the seafloor, and it’s live-streaming the bone-eating worms and other critters gnawing away at what’s left of the carcass.“What an amazing find in preparation for Halloween,” one of the scientists on board the ship said during the broadcast.Even in death, the whale has a lot to give to its fellow sea creatures. When it dies, its remains — called a whale fall — provide food and important nutrients to

Image: Yahoo Yahoo Groups, like much of Yahoo, are a relic of a previous internet age. Although they aren’t widely used now, groups once served as a watering hole for discussion on wonderfully niche interests, such as TV show fan communities and extremely geeky computing topics — almost like Reddit does now. Looking through the directory today, you can still find groups with thousands of members, and some groups have been active as recently as this year.Sadly, it seems that almost a

An influential member of Congress has expressed doubt over NASA’s ambitious plans to put humans on the Moon by 2024, arguing that 2028 might be a safer time frame for the next lunar landing. The concern seemingly spells trouble for NASA’s Artemis program, which may now be in jeopardy of not receiving the funding it needs from lawmakers.
In a hearing on Wednesday, Rep. José Serrano (D-NY), chairman of the House subcommittee that appropriates funds for NASA, cited the potential

Ore Huiying/Getty Images It turns out Stranger Things isn’t just a popular show, but a key player in Netflix’s growth.Netflix bounced back from a disastrous second quarter, adding 6.8 million subscribers and bringing in $5.2 billion in revenue over the past three months, up from 6 million subscribers and $4 billion the same time last year. The company now has more than 158 million subscribers worldwide. The numbers suggest that Netflix is seeing a rebound in subscriber growth, even

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge I recently picked up a Chromebook that hadn’t been used for a while in order to try out a relatively new Chrome OS feature: virtual desktops. But when I hit the key that was supposed to bring those desktops up on my screen, I didn’t see anything. I did some checking around, and I found that the feature was expected to be available as of version 77 of Chrome OS — several iterations after the version I was running.
While Chromebooks pretty much

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge The story of Uber’s messy, meteoric transformation from tech startup to dominant player in the global transportation industry is being developed into a limited television series by the co-creators and showrunners of good television show Billions. The new show will be adapted from New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s recent book, Super Pumped, and it will focus on former Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick.If the series roughly traces the ar

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will deliver an “unfiltered take” on freedom of speech tomorrow via live Facebook video. “I’ve been writing a speech about my views on voice and free expression that I’m giving tomorrow,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It’s the most comprehensive take I’ve written about my views, why I believe voice is important, how giving people voice and bringing people together go hand in hand, how

Photo by Ben Rothstein / Paramount Pictures Around halfway through the new Ang Lee science fiction / action thriller Gemini Man, super-assassin Henry Brogan (Will Smith) learns some details about Junior, his equally skilled super-assassin clone (also Smith, in digitally de-aged form). Junior was born around 1995, meaning he preceded Dolly the cloned sheep by a year or so. This is the perfect time period to pinpoint as the birth of Will Smith (or at least a Will Smith) because it corresponds alm

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg Google’s recently announced Pixel 4 is reportedly skipping out on a launch in India — one of the largest phone markets in the world — due to a spectrum licensing issue with the Motion Sense radar technology that powers the phone’s gesture and face unlocking features, according to NDTV’s Gadgets360.Per the report, the problem is that Motion Sense (previously known as Project Soli) works on the 60GHz band of the spectrum, for which Go

Skydio makes one of the most incredible drones on the market, and while we haven’t gotten to review the new Skydio 2 yet, the tiny California startup is already setting its ambitions higher than prosumers and videographers. For industrial and commercial entities, it wants to remove humans from the equation entirely, letting them rely on its obstacle-dodging, self-flying technology for automated mapping and surveillance.
To that end, it’s announcing the Skydio 2 Dock, a drone-in-a-box

Image: Rolf Klatt Popular Barcelona festival Primavera Sound has become the first major music festival to completely ditch paper tickets in favor of mobile-only ticketing, as reported by the BBC. It’s partnered with digital ticketing platform Dice, which will service Primavera Sound and all other Primavera events, like Primavera tours and the club night Nitsa at Sala Apolo, in Barcelona, starting in 2020.
The hope is that using Dice will curtail ticket scalping, as the platform locks ever

Blizzard has suspended three college Hearthstone players for six months after they held up a sign that read “Free Hong Kong, Boycott Blizz” while participating in an official competition stream.
The ban, which was first reported by VICE Games, comes just over a week after Blizzard suspended a professional Hearthstone player, Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung for six months. Chung was suspended for showing support for Hong Kong protesters in an interview after Hearthstone’s

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission formally approved the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, an FCC official told The Verge. The vote comes months after the Justice Department green-lighted the deal.
In May, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai first signaled that he would vote to approve the merger after the commission and the companies struck a deal that Republicans believed would help foster a faster 5G rollout. The other Republican commissioners, Br

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Google may have introduced a lot of new Pixel camera tech at its 2019 fall hardware event this week, but it quietly retired a camera product as well: the Google Clips camera has been removed from Google’s online store (via 9to5Google). Google hasn’t responded to The Verge’s request for comment to confirm.
The idea for Clips was an intriguing one: it was a tiny AI-powered wide angle camera designed to automatically capture short videos of prec

A United States grand jury has indicted the alleged operator of a massive child pornography website, as law enforcement arrested hundreds more in a global crackdown.
More than 300 arrested and charged
Justice Department prosecutors said in a statement today that a 23-year-old South Korean man, Jong Woo Son, was indicted for running Welcome To Video, which officials described as the largest market for child exploitation by “volume of content.” In the statement, prosecutors said more t

The Libra keyboard connected to an iPad Pro. | Photo: Sam Byford / The Verge The team behind the Libra keyboard says it will change the product’s hinge design to avoid a patent owned by Brydge, which is known for making iPad keyboard attachments. Libra’s creator, Sentis, said it “would like to apologize publicly” in response to Brydge’s complaint, and that it does not expect product delays because of the redesign. But after reviewing mock-ups of the changes, Brydge

Image: Hulu Not long after rolling out a long-awaited feature (offline downloads), Hulu is today announcing a slew of improvements to the experience of actually using Hulu. First up, it’s changing the method by which subscribers give feedback on the service’s recommendations. Hulu is introducing a like and dislike system, letting you give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to individual movies and TV shows that the algorithm suggests.Disliking a piece of content will prevent it from being r

When Apple Arcade launched last month, it included a lineup of more than 70 games, with a number of standout hits like Card of Darkness and Sayonara Wild Hearts. For players, it was a great deal: $4.99 a month for interesting new releases from some of the most exciting game developers around. But there’s another notable aspect of Apple Arcade beyond the scale and quality of the games. One of Apple’s requirements is that titles on Arcade must be available in more than 14 languages, wh

Mobile virtual reality headsets helped millions of people try out VR, but as of yesterday, they’re all but officially a thing of the past. Oculus CTO John Carmack offered a “eulogy” last month for the phone-powered Gear VR mobile headset, saying that the headset’s days were numbered. And Google just revealed that it’s discontinuing the similar Daydream View mobile headset, in addition to omitting Daydream support from the new Pixel 4 phone. The app will still work o