Technology news

Photo by Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images Elon Musk has promised to donate $1 million worth of trees ($1 per tree) to YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, who’s currently campaigning to raise $20 million from fellow YouTube celebrities for a climate change fundraising effort. There’s just one hitch: Musk said in sworn testimony recently that he’s financially illiquid.
Musk told the YouTuber he would make the donation on Twitter after some nudging by Marques &ld

Photo by Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto via Getty Images Elon Musk has donated $1 million worth of trees ($1 per tree) to YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, who’s currently campaigning to raise $20 million from fellow YouTube celebrities for a climate change fundraising effort. That’s intriguing, because Musk said in sworn testimony recently that he’s financially illiquid.
Musk told the YouTuber he would make the donation on Twitter after some nudging by Marques “MKBH

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The live-streaming wars aren’t really about streaming at all: they’re about the future of live television. The combatants — Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine, at the moment, although Facebook and YouTube shouldn’t be counted out just yet — have their own visions for what that looks like, and what it should mean for consumers. To that end, Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine have begun to compete in earnest over exclusive deals for big name

Last year, when I was planning to fly to Japan with my fiancée, we downloaded movies to my iPhone so that we could watch them together on the plane. Shortly before we left, though, we realized we wouldn’t be able to use our AirPods on the same phone. Instead, to share audio, we had to cobble together a Lightning-to-headphone jack adapter, a cheap headphone splitter from our local pharmacy, and two pairs of Bose headphones that we borrowed from family. It was a lot of cords — a

Apple’s new AirPods Pro will hit stores beginning tomorrow, October 30th, and today, I got a chance to give them a try and put the company’s active noise cancellation to the test. As someone who has never been able to fully enjoy the regular AirPods — they just don’t fit my ears securely — the in-ear design of the AirPods Pro is super appealing.Three silicone tip sizes come in the box, and iOS has a built-in fit test that briefly plays a bit of music to check whethe

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’re already looking for Black Friday 2019 deals, Walmart is among the first of the major retailers to serve them up. It’s hard to consider them as true Black Friday deals since they’re launching in late October. Nevertheless, the deals are good, and they are likely a strong sign of what other sale prices are expected in the next few weeks.As for what’s discounted right now, we’re seeing the best prices yet on the Apple Watch

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge WhatsApp is suing notorious spyware vendor NSO Group, saying the company was actively involved in hacking users of the encrypted chat service.
Attack targeted journalists and human rights advocates
In May, a major software vulnerability in WhatsApp was revealed. Using the flaw, hackers could load spyware onto a phone through a video call, even if the person never answered the call. Citizen Lab, the organization that discovered the vulnerability, said

Image: HBO HBO’s first Game of Thrones spinoff reportedly isn’t moving past the pilot stage, according to a report from Deadline. The prequel, which shot a pilot over the summer starring Naomi Watts and written by showrunner Jane Goldman, was set “thousands of years before the events of Game of Thrones” and would have portrayed “the world’s descent from the golden Age of Heroes into its darkest hour.”
Deadline doesn’t give a direct reason for HBO&

Microsoft is allowing Xbox One testers to access the company’s latest Console Streaming feature. It’s a new feature that lets you play your own Xbox One games from your personal console on a mobile device. While Microsoft is also testing its Project xCloud game streaming preview, Console Streaming uses your own Xbox One to stream any game to a mobile device instead of using a cloud-based Xbox instance.Project xCloud is also currently limited to just four games during the initial prev

Samsung has teased a new foldable phone concept onstage at the company’s developer conference today. The new concept, which Samsung didn’t name, looks more like a traditional flip phone thanks to a foldable display that allows the device to fold in half.“This brand-new form factor that we’re now exploring will not only easily fit in your pocket, but it also changes the way you use your phone,” explained Hyesoon Jeong, head of Samsung’s framework R&D group,

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon today just fixed one of the more inexplicable holes in Alexa’s feature set with the addition of new sleep timers and wake-up lighting, as well as more robust routine features for smart lights. Until today, you could use Alexa to control compatible smart lights, and you could use Alexa to set timers. But you couldn’t use both features together, and you could only get approximately close using a pre-programmed routine that involved tinker

Photo credit should read JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images A group of drivers and couriers for Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash launched a new group called Protect App-Based Drivers and Services, which is aimed at passing a ballot initiative in California to counteract the effects of the state’s recently passed gig worker bill. The effort is being supported by the companies, which have vowed to spend $90 million to get the measure passed in 2020.Assembly Bill 5, which was signed into law by Californi

Photo by Kevin Haube/ESPAT Media/Getty Images Professional Call of Duty is changing in a big way, and today Activision revealed that its upcoming city-based Call of Duty League will be kicking off in January. The debut weekend will take place from January 24th to the 26th at the 8,400-seat Minneapolis Armory, hosted by CDL team Minnesota Røkkr. All 12 teams in the fledgling league will compete over the three-day-long event.
The CDL will be Activision’s second foray into the world o

Last year, at the League of Legends World Championship in Incheon, the biggest moment of the event arguably wasn’t the competition itself: it was a virtual K-pop group called K/DA that performed an AR concert during the opening ceremonies. The group’s song became a hit, inspiring a deluge of memes and fan art, and players could even dress up as the members in-game. Now developer Riot is following that up with another in-game musical act: a hip-hop group called True Damage. The studio

YouTube Music is getting a pair of small but helpful updates today: full support for Siri, and support for being installed as a desktop web app.
If you’re on an iOS device, you’ll now be able to ask Siri to play songs straight from YouTube Music. For the longest time, Siri only supported Apple’s own music sources. But in iOS 13, Apple added the ability for Siri to tap into third-party apps with a long-overdue update. Spotify added support for this feature earlier this month, an

Remember when Razer announced a sleek sliding gamepad for your iPhone called the Junglecat? I bet not, considering how the company axed that idea without ever releasing it to the world. But today, it’s launching a $100 mobile gamepad called the Junglecat yet again — this time reincarnated as a set of two Nintendo Joy-Con-like gamepads that snap onto either side of your handset.
The catch is you’ll need to stick your phone in a specific case to make that trick work, and Razer on

Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images The fight between the city of Los Angeles and scooter companies over location data is heating up. On Monday, Uber filed a lawsuit against LA’s Department of Transportation (LADOT) pushing back against the requirement that scooter operators share anonymized real-time location data with the city.The suit, which was first reported by CNET but has yet to be filed in LA Superior Court, centers on LADOT’s use of a digital tool ca

Photo by Jane Tyska/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images For days now, a cloud of acrid smoke has settled over the Bay Area, blown down from the Kincade Fire in the north. More than 200,000 people have been evacuated from that fire alone, while the lingering effects of a long drought and high winds have turned the region into a tinderbox. On Sunday, a sudden fire in Vallejo stopped traffic on a bridge across the northeast side of the bay, forcing workers to abandon toll booths as t

Illustration by Alex Castro This week on the interview episode of The Vergecast, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel interviews cryptocurrency expert Amber Baldet, co-founder of blockchain startup Clovyr and a board member of the financial privacy nonprofit Zcash Foundation.
Nilay and Amber discuss where cryptocurrencies on the blockchain are going, the potential of Facebook’s Libra project, and how the blockchain can revive our trust in putting our data online.Below is a lightly edited exc

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge The LG G8X ThinQ, LG’s new phone that can snap into a case that gives it a second screen, will be available in stores starting on November 1st, AT&T announced. Sprint also shared that it will support the G8X on its network, though the carrier won’t launch it until November 8th, a week later than AT&T.
This phone costs $699 unlocked if you don’t want to be tied down to a carrier, and for a limited time, it comes bundled with the second d

One of the worst things about using wireless headphones while gaming on an Android phone is the latency. Whether the fault lies with the OS or the manufacturing (or both), I’ve found that most headphones — even expensive ones like the Sony WH-1000X M3s — aren’t able to keep up with what’s on the screen. It’s infuriating, and it’s a situation that Razer’s $99 Hammerhead True Wireless earbuds aim to take on.
These new truly wireless earbuds, which Ra

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you want to leave your iPhone at home without missing out on iMessages, calls, and other notifications, now you can — if you have the right Apple Watch. Specific Apple Watch models are able to connect via 4G LTE, enabling you to go on a run or an errand without needing to carry your phone.
So far, three models of the Apple Watch support this feature:
Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + LTE)
Apple Watch Series 4 (GPS + LTE)
Apple Watch Series 5 (GPS + LTE)These

Few of the viewers tuning into Netflix’s animated series BoJack Horseman in 2014 could have anticipated how the series would evolve over the course of its six seasons to date. What began as a pun-filled send-up of celebrity culture and the media circus, set in a world full of anthropomorphic animals, soon presented a nuanced take on mental illness and the cycles of trauma. Before long, series creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg was turning this critical eye to his own perceived failings.
From the