Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales/The Verge Space tourism venture Virgin Galactic is now a publicly traded company, thanks to a reverse merger. The company’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson, was on hand at the New York Stock Exchange Monday morning to celebrate the public offering, along with firework shows and a giant banner of his eye adorning the outside of the building.
For its first day of trading, the company’s stock — under the ticker SPCE — was on the rise for

Alex Castro This weekend, Cory “King Gothalion” Michael became the latest massively popular Twitch streamer to depart the platform for Microsoft’s competitor, Mixer. In a video posted to Twitter on Sunday, Michael called his decision to leave “easy-peasy.”“It just made sense to have a partnership like this one, where I get to have the potential of having, you know, platform-level input, as well as the backing of one of the biggest names in gaming,” Mich

Image: Emojipedia Apple released iOS 13.2 earlier today, and the update includes 398 new emoji. There’s a bunch of brand-new ones (I love the otter) as well as emoji to represent people with disabilities, gender-neutral emoji (following in Google’s footsteps), and a new way to select the skin colors of each individual in the holding hands emoji.
Here are images of all of the new emoji, from Emojipedia:Image: EmojipediaAll of the new emoji in iOS 13.2. Image: EmojipediaAll of the red

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The current iPhone upgrade to iOS 13.2 brings a variety of features, not the least of which is improved privacy for those who use Siri. Responding to the outcry over how it handles the data collected by its voice assistant, Apple has offered users a way to delete all of the recordings that Siri collects during use. The company has also stopped sharing audio recordings with human staffers in order to improve its service. Instead, it asks you to opt in to t

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images Tesla is offering a discount on solar panels and batteries to people who are affected by wildfire power outages, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted today. More than 2 million people across California have been affected by power outages since October 25th as utility companies try to prevent their power lines from sparking new blazes. A fire just north of San Francisco has already consumed more than 66,000 acres and is only 5 percent under control.
If you’re direc

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple finally has added the option to change the resolution and frame rate of video recordings in the camera app in the newly released iOS 13.2, fixing one of the single biggest annoyances about shooting video on an iPhone. There’s just one catch: the new feature is only available on the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.
It’s not the biggest camera update in iOS 13.2 — that crown still goes to the new Deep Fusion “sweater mode

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook employees are urging Mark Zuckerberg to rethink his stance on allowing politicians to lie in political ads. In an open letter to company executives obtained by The New York Times, more than 250 people said the policy — which exempts such ads from Facebook’s third-party fact-checking standards — threatens what the company stands for:
Misinformation affects us all. Our current policies on fact checking people in political office,

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Spotify announced today that it beat expectations for third-quarter revenue and posted an operating profit of €54 million (about $60 million). This marks the third time in its history that the company has turned a profit, but one of those profits was the result of a tax windfall in 2018 that pushed it into the black.
Spotify’s shareholder letter outlines a variety of reasons for this turn to profitability — a faster new subscriber rate th

Facebook Starting today, Facebook will let users choose to get personalized reminders about health care tests and vaccines. The company’s new Preventive Health tool focuses on getting people information about cancer screenings, heart checkups, and flu vaccines — all measures that could hopefully help people catch deadly conditions long before they become lethal.The tool is simply called Preventive Health, and is now available to Facebook users in the United States. It takes a user&r

Uber is creating a new division called Uber Money to handle its growing financial services business. The group will oversee everything from the company’s credit and debit card offerings, to digital wallets for riders, to products used by drivers to get paid in a timely manner.To start out, Uber drivers will have an improved way to get the money they earn on rides instantly, the company says. Typically drivers either wait for weekly payments or cash out using a feature called Instant Pay.No

We all know Trump uses an iPhone, but does Tim Apple actually wear his own wireless headphones? I’m not sure what to believe in anymore — because the photographic evidence direct from Apple’s fearless leader has clearly been Photoshopped!
Above, see Tim Cook’s Twitter profile picture before — and after — today’s AirPods Pro reveal. Below, find the before / after from back in March when Apple launched the AirPods 2:
I can only draw two possible conclusion

Image: 9to5Mac A photo of what looks to be a new, unreleased Smart Battery Case for an iPhone with a square camera bump — in other words, the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro — has been discovered by 9to5Mac, buried in the code for the newly released iOS 13.2.The newest iPhones already have pretty solid battery life, largely because the phones are thicker so they can house larger batteries. A new Smart Battery Case would, in theory, make the devices’ battery life even better.9to5Ma

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images On Monday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the agency will vote on an order to ban carriers from using federal subsidies to purchase equipment or services from Huawei or ZTE, the two most prominent Chinese providers.The proposal comes as politicians on Capitol Hill continue to scrutinize American companies that do business in China, like Activision Blizzard and even the National Basketball Association. If approved, any te

InSight’s heat probe sticking out of the ground on Mars | Image: NASA NASA’s latest Mars lander is having problems with one of its main instruments — a self-hammering probe that just can’t seem to hammer itself into the interplanetary dirt. Over the weekend, the probe was attempting to dig itself into the Martian soil when it popped out of the ground unexpectedly. Now, NASA engineers are trying to troubleshoot to see if they can get this instrument to burrow underneath M

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Apple has finally released the promised fall update for its HomePod smart speaker with iOS 13.2, adding the ability for the speaker to tell different voices apart for proper multiuser support. The new features were originally supposed to ship alongside iOS 13 but were delayed back in September.
Once you’ve updated your HomePod, the speaker will be able to tell up to six different voices apart, providing personalized music, calendar, reminders, and messag

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple has been rumored to be launching a Tile-like item tracker for months now, and it appears the device could be named AirTag. 9to5Mac has spotted references to AirTag within the iOS 13.2 update that shipped to devices today, hinting that this Tile-like device may even appear very soon.
References to Apple’s potential location tracking tags first appeared in early iOS 13 beta code, and rumors suggested Apple would introduce the devices alongside t

Apple Apple’s iOS 13.2 and iPadOS 13.2 are now available for download, bringing new features like the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro’s Deep Fusion camera mode as well as compatibility for the upcoming AirPods Pro and Beats Solo Pro. The company also released tvOS 13.2 as well. It’s been a hard road since iOS 13 first arrived on September 19th, which has widely been reported as buggy and unfinished, and it has since issued a slew of updates at a rapid pace.Users who are on the fence abou

Uber is revving up to test its new drone delivery service for Uber Eats in San Diego in 2020. Today, the company unveiled a new look for its drone, which utilizes “innovative rotating wings with six rotors” to better enable the transition between vertical takeoff and forward flight.Rotating wings is a feature more commonly seen in flying car prototypes and rarely in drones. Uber explains that the rotors are positioned vertically for takeoff and landing, but can then rotate into the f

Adobe Customers in Venezuela can now access Adobe services, like Photoshop and Illustrator, again after the company obtained a license from the US government to continue operating in the country. The announcement comes after a tumultuous month in which the company first notified Venezuelan customers that their accounts would be deactivated in order to comply with a US executive order that prohibits trade with the country.“After discussions with the US government, we’ve been granted

Apple is focusing on its HomeKit initiative with a series of new hires, despite the fact that it’s falling behind Amazon and Google in the smart home space. Bloomberg reports that the company has posted 15 job listings for engineers to work on HomeKit since last month, and it has also been privately seeking out potential new hires in the internet-connected devices industry. The publicly available listings note that prospective employees should have supply chain expertise as well as experie

Photo by Win McNamee / Getty Images AT&T is set to announce the launch date, price, and first offerings for its upcoming HBO Max streaming service on October 29th, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has a message for investors: it’s not like those other services.Stephenson addressed investors’ concerns about HBO Max, one of the largest entertainment undertakings AT&T has ever conducted, making its entry into a heavily saturated streaming space during an earnings call on Mon

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Step counting is all well and good, but the Apple Watch offers a number of important emergency- and health-related features that could keep you alive and are worth utilizing.The Emergency SOS function is designed to notify people that you’re in trouble and what your location is, so that someone can come to the rescue. “Show When Locked” will allow important medical conditions to be seen on your home screen even if your phone is locked. You can

Image: Apple Apple has just launched the rumored noise-canceling AirPods Pro — not with an October product event, but via a press release. The premium earbuds are set for release on October 30th for $249. They’re up for preorder starting today. And yes, they still only come in white.Apple has built microphones into the AirPods Pro that detect external sound, and the earbuds then cancel it out. The system used here sounds very similar to the noise cancellation in the new Beats Solo P

Xinhua/Xu Jinquan via Getty Images Heated negotiations will begin in Egypt this week that could decide the future of 5G and weather forecasting. More than 3,000 delegates, hailing from nearly every country in the world are expected to resolve an ongoing turf war over highly prized radio frequency bands used by meteorologists and coveted by cellphone companies. It’s all going down at the World Radiocommunication Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where guidelines on the contested freque

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google parent company Alphabet is in talks to buy wearable company Fitbit, Reuters reports. There is currently no confirmation that the deal will definitely take place, according to sources familiar with the talks, nor is it known how much Alphabet has offered to acquire the US-based company. The news follows a report last month from CNBC that Fitbit was in the process of exploring a sale.
Google has played a part in the wearable market for years with its

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Volkswagen is stepping up its efforts to develop fully driverless cars by spinning off its own startup that it claims will be among the “best-funded” in the world. Volkswagen Autonomy, or VWAT, plans to bring robot taxis and cargo vans to three continents by 2025, according to the Financial Times.The news comes less than three months after VW announced that it would invest $2.6 billion in Argo AI, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle so

Trump Ads Alongside Russian Propaganda: It's Not Collusion. It's An Algorithmhttps://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773186206/trump-ads-alongside-russian-propaganda-its-not-collusion-it-s-an-algorithm?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=alltech&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2057 …