Technology news

Berkeley Seismological Laboratory Seconds before an earthquake hits anywhere in California, people nearby will now get a warning on their smartphones to duck and cover. The first state-wide early warning system in the nation launched today, on the 30th anniversary of the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake that killed 63 people in the San Francisco Bay Area.The early warning system will reach people in two ways: through an app called MyShake and through the existing wireless emergency alerts tha

Overwatch has finally made its way to the Nintendo Switch, fulfilling the endless requests from me that Blizzard port its popular team shooter to Nintendo’s portable console.It’s not the first mainstream shooter to make the jump to the Switch: Bethesda has ported Doom and a few Wolfenstein games, and of course there’s Nintendo’s own Splatoon series and the ubiquitous Fortnite. But as an exclusively online, multiplayer-based competitive team shooter, Overwatch might be the

If you were saddened to hear that you will no longer be able to post to Yahoo Groups starting next week, cheer up — you’ve now got an extra week to post.
Yahoo’s plan to largely shut down Groups was widely publicized on October 16th, just days before the company was going to freeze uploads on October 21st. But today, the company told us that date is actually going to be a bit later, on October 28th. (It has also added the new date to its support document about the decision.) Ho

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is just days away from its October 25th release date, and Activision has finally announced how it’ll be running the in-game economy for the upcoming shooter. Specifically, Modern Warfare will be the first Call of Duty game to use a battle pass system, instead of the much maligned random loot boxes, to dispense content and cosmetics to players.
Popularized by Fortnite, the battle pass system allows for players to buy the pass at the beginning of the season, and

Nvidia can’t be very happy with its online retail partners today. After Amazon leaked every detail about the upcoming Shield TV Pro, Newegg has now spoiled the reveal of a seemingly more mainstream Shield TV that also supports 4K playback with Dolby Vision. 9to5Google managed to save everything before Newegg wised up and removed the listing. Both streaming devices run Google’s Android TV software.The first thing you’ll notice about this one is definitely the form factor. Wherea

Image: rLoop Reddit-born hyperloop and engineering collective rLoop has bought the intellectual property of Arrivo, a fellow hyperloop startup that went out of business last December, The Verge has learned. rLoop co-founder Brent Lessard confirmed the sale, but he would not disclose how much the group paid.
Lessard said rLoop might try to revive some of the deals that Arrivo had been working on, like a test track outside of Denver, Colorado, and that it may hire back some of Arrivo’s form

In a speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s approach to moderation in terms of an ongoing commitment to free expression — and in one particular section, drew a sharp contrast with Chinese companies that may not share those values.
As Zuckerberg described it, regulators and technologists face the question of “which nation’s values are going to determine what speech is going to be allowed for decades to come,” China or the US.

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s policy of letting politicians lie in political ads — along with free speech more broadly — in a speech today at Georgetown University. “I don’t think it’s right for a private company to censor politicians” he said.
Zuckerberg’s speech, which amounted to a rallying cry for the First Amendment during a time when speech rights are under siege globally, acknowledged the fact

Image: Razer Razer’s new Blade 15 Studio Edition laptop is now available in the US and Canada. Its design fits right into the company’s lineup of gaming-focused laptops, but this one is built specifically for creative professionals who demand especially high-end specs and who have a lot of money to spend.The only configuration that’s currently available costs $3,999 and comes in “mercury white,” which looks silver. Its 15.6-inch touchscreen is a 4K OLED with a 1ms

On Tuesday, Google held their annual hardware event in New York City to announce all their upcoming products under the Pixel and Nest line. Vergecast hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn attended and were able to record an interview with Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh, the company’s senior vice president of devices and services.Osterloh talked about the new products Google announced, including the Pixel 4, the Pixelbook Go, the Nest Mini, and the all-new Pixel Buds. The conversat

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Google came up with its own face unlock system for the Pixel 4 and 4 XL using those advanced sensors in the phone’s top bezel. The technology behind it is similar to Apple’s Face ID, and aside from just letting you into your phone, Google believes face unlock is secure enough to serve as an authentication method across Android. (There’s no more fingerprint sensor on the Pixel 4, remember.) And it’s very fast. But BBC News reporter Chris

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Thursday, e-cigarette manufacturer Juul Labs announced that it would be suspending the sale of all fruity flavored vape pods until the products are fully reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration.“We must reset the vapor category by earning the trust of society and working cooperatively with regulators, policymakers, and stakeholders to combat underage use while providing an alternative to adult smokers,” Juul CEO K.C. Crosthwaite said i

If you signed up for a free trial for Apple Arcade when it launched on September 19th, that trial runs out tomorrow, so you might think about canceling your subscription today if you don’t want to pay for it going forward. If you stick with it, you’ll be charged $4.99 per month.
I suspect a lot of people are going to stay subscribed, because, as it turns out, Apple Arcade is already pretty good. It’s chock-full of great games like Assemble With Care, Card of Darkness, and Grind

Image: Meetup Meetup’s CEO has apologized for “confusion” after the event organization platform faced backlash for testing a fee to RSVP to events. David Siegel, the company’s CEO, said the $2 per RSVP was a “limited test,” but indicated that the test would continue.
Meetup replaced the page explaining this payment test with Siegel’s apology letter. In it, he says Meetup is not in the process of shifting over to a “massive payment change” an

The entire Studio Ghibli catalog, including award-winning and beloved animated titles like My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Spirited Away, will stream exclusively on HBO Max beginning in 2020.
This marks the first time that movies from Japan’s most famous animation house will be available on a streaming service. The announcement comes just a couple of days after Polygon reported that Ghibli films weren’t going to be made available on any streaming platform. GKid

Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images General Motors has reached an agreement with the United Auto Workers to end a month-long strike, and the automaker’s idling manufacturing facility in Lordstown, Ohio will officially close as part of the deal. But a planned sale of the facility to a new electric truck startup called Lordstown Motors, which is partially owned by struggling electric vehicle maker Workhorse Group, is still on, The Verge has learned.
“It’s still our intention to s

Venmo announced today its plans to launch its first-ever credit card. The card is being issued partnership with Synchrony,already the issuer behind Venmo parent company PayPal’s Extras Mastercard and Cashback Mastercard, in an expanded relationship. The move is meant to help Venmo, a still unprofitable arm of PayPal’s larger business, generate more revenue.
PayPal’s plans in this space were reported in April of this year by The WSJ, which said the company had been taking meetin

IBM has been working with a number of different industries to help improve food safety with the help of blockchain technology. Today it announced its latest effort, a partnership with Massachusetts firm, Raw Seafoods, Inc, to bring this approach to seafood starting with scallops.
While business blockchain buzz has quieted recently, the supply chain still seems like a solid use case, allowing various stakeholders to trace a shipment from farm, factory or fishing boat to market. The challenge has

A popular video downloader app for Android has been found generating fake ad clicks and unauthorized premium purchases from its users, according to a security firm.
Snaptube, which boasts some 40 million users, allows users to download videos and music from YouTube, Facebook, and other major video sites. The app, developed in China, is not on Google Play because the app maker claims Google will not allow video downloader apps on the store. Some third-party app stores estimate Snaptube has been d

Logitechrecently introduced a new mouse and keyboard, the MX Master 3 ($99.99) and MX Keys ($99.99) respectively. Both devices borrow a lot from other, older hardware in Logitech’s lineup – but they build on what the company has gotten really right with input devices, and add some great new features to make these easily the best option out there when it comes to this category of peripherals.
Logitech MX Keys
This new keyboard from Logitech inherits a lot from the company’s prev

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Earlier this week, a report published in The Sun claimed that the Samsung Galaxy S10’s in-display fingerprint sensor has a security flaw. Apparently, certain “gel cover”-style screen protectors can confuse the ultrasonic sensor, and if you register a fingerprint while the cover is applied, then the phone can start unlocking itself for anyone’s fingerprint, not just those you’ve registered.After initially issuing a stateme

Photo: Walt Disney Studios In retrospect, cinephiles didn’t fully appreciate what they had with 2014’s Maleficent, a live-action retelling of a Disney animated classic that actually added something new to a tale as old as time. In addition to the pitch-perfect casting of Angelina Jolie as Maleficent, the horned villain from Disney’s 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast screenwriter Linda Woolverton added a daring feminist spin to the source material. Sin

Amid a slew of updated hardware, Clips has gone missing from Google’s online store. Odds are you probably don’t remember what Clips is. If you do, odds are you’re not surprised by this turn of events.We’ve reached out to company to confirm whether this is, indeed, definitively the end for the niche device. All I can say for now is that the future doesn’t look bright for a product neither reviewers, consumers nor Google itself figured out. One the company knew for su

Snaptoday is announcing a new kind of advertising product, Dynamic Ads, that will help it to better attract ad dollars from retail, e-commerce, and other direct-to-consumer brands — a group that today thrives on Instagram. With Dynamic Ads, advertisers can now automatically create ads in real-time based on extensive product catalogs that may contain hundreds of thousands of products. These ads are then served to Snapchat users based on their interests using a variety of templates provided

As handset makers continue to work on ways of making smartphones more streamlined and sleek, while at the same time introducing new features that will get people buying more devices, a startup that is pioneering something called “software-defined” surfaces — essentially, using ultrasound and AI to turn any kind of material, and any kind of surface, into one that will respond to gestures, touch and other forces — is setting out its stall to help them and other hardware mak

Galaxy S10 users should turn on some alternative security features as Samsung works to address a major flaw with the device’s in-screen fingerprint sensor. The consumer electronics giant noted the issue today after a British user reported the ability to unlock her device with unregistered fingerprints.
The flaw was discovered after placing a $3.50 screen protector on the device, confirming earlier reports that adding one could introduce an air gap that interfered with the ultrasonic scanne

The story behind ArsenalBio begins with Sean Parker’s Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
Founded in 2016, the Institute has been instrumental in providing a space for the top researchers into cancer across different fields to collaborate and communicate on the latest breakthroughs in settings that range from formal meetings to informal retreats.
It was at one of these informal retreats that luminaries like: Dr. Bradley Bernstein, a professor of pathology and researcher at the Broad Instit

The tech world has a lot to offer those with disabilities, but it can be hard to get investors excited about the accessibility space. That’s why Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility grants are so welcome: equity-free Azure credits and cash for companies looking to adapt AI to the needs of those with disabilities. The company just announced ten more, including education for the blind startup ObjectiveEd.
The grant program was started a while back with a $5 million, 5-year mission to pump

Work management platform Asana today announced the launch of a new feature that will take the work out of some of the most mundane and repetitive tasks on its platform. AsanaAutomation, as the new feature is called, allows users to create their own “if this then that” rules, but also features a new voice transcription service, as well as an OCR tool and new smart templates that integrate some of the service’s machine learning smarts.
“Earlier this year we launched Workloa

Image: Game Freak / Nintendo If you’ve never played a Pokémon game before, you’d be forgiven for thinking the opening 30 minutes or so of the series’ latest installments, Sword and Shield, were those of a standard Japanese role-playing game.There’s a flashy cutscene that introduces the games’ most powerful pokémon trainer, Leon, alongside a gigantic stadium in the new Galar region, where pokémon battling is paramount to the culture and trainers

Ekos, a Charlotte, NC startup that creates software to help craft breweries and other beverage companies organize their businesses, announced an $8 million Series A today led by Noro-Moseley Partners, an Atlanta  venture firm.
Prior to taking this funding, the company had bootstrapped for the previous five years, building a business with 1700 customers in 40 countries. The company has created an entire suite of tools to track everything from what’s in the tank, to recipes, raw materia

Clay Wilkes had already been retired for six years when he launched Galileo Financial Services in 2000.
The serial entrepreneur who had been an early pioneer in telecommunications technologies (like voice over internet protocols) saw the need for better connectivity between secondary services and financial institutions 19 years ago, just as new digital services around payroll processing, transit vouchers, store cards, and other services were launching.
Now the company runs the backend integratio