Technology news

An expensive experiment in global distribution has been abandoned by Adidas,which has announced that will close its robotic “Speedfactories” in Atlanta and Ansbach, Germany, within 6 months. The company sugar-coated the news with a promise to repurpose the technology used at its existing human-powered factories in Asia.
The factories were established in 2016 (Ansbach) and 2017 (Atlanta) as part of a strategy to decentralize its manufacturing processes. The existing model, like so man

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook is making a wonderful change to its mobile app to ease the pain on our notification-riddled brains: the company is rolling out the ability to turn off notification dots for some icons on the shortcuts bar and will even let you remove some of those shortcuts entirely. The new feature was reported on by TechCrunch.
I tested it on iOS, and hiding notification dots is pretty easy to do. Just tap and hold on an icon on the shortcuts bar, and a men

Nintendo’s original Entertainment System (NES) is now 34 years old. A millennial, in other words. And since the console debuted in North America in the fall of 1985, its design — the familiar boxy shape; that matte gray, black, and red — has been an inspiration to nerds everywhere. The latest entry into this venerable canon, which includes everything from (fly as hell) Jordans to shelving, is the 8BitDo N30: a 2.4GHz wireless mouse made by the mad scientists over at 8BitDo. You

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Monday, Microsoft announced that it would honor the “core rights” provided to Californians through the state’s landmark data privacy law and expand that coverage across the entire United States.In a Monday blog post, Julie Brill, Microsoft’s chief privacy officer, said that the company will extend the main principles of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) across the US just as it did with Europe’s General Data Prote

Ashwin Ramasamy ContributorShare on Twitter Ashwin Ramasamy is the cofounder of PipeCandy, which provides algorithm-generated insights and predictions about ecommerce and D2C companies. His company helps investors, banks, tech firms and governments understand the global ecommerce landscape. @Ashwinizer More posts by this contributorThe different playbooks of D2C brands Waiting for the right professional network
As the holiday season approaches, I can feel the tension in the air: how do I make my

Photo by Mikhail Klimentyev\TASS via Getty Images In an interview with Axios that aired November 10th, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called the murder of the journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia “a serious mistake” — before quickly backtracking and admitting that it was his comments, and not Khashoggi’s murder, that were the actual mistake. But Khosrowshahi’s comments were not made in isolation. There is a pattern emerging of transportation compa

Game launches these days are frequently the very worst time to play them. Plagued by bugs, server issues, balance problems and a lack of content, many “games as a service” titles are best consumed after a month or two. Not so with Hideo Kojima’s long-awaited Death Stranding, which, if you’re going to play at all… you should probably play now.
This type of game comes out once every year or two: A title where the gradual discovery of mechanics and ideas by the player

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They're not a fictional species: Mouse deer still roam the Vietnamese woods. 
In 2017 and 2018, biologists set camera traps in Vietnam's coastal forests to potentially spot the evasive species, not seen in 29 years. The plan worked. Researchers from Global Wildlife Conservation, working with the Southern Institute of Ecology, Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, and the local community, captured 275 photos of the mouse deer, formally called the Silver-backed Chevrotain.
These ar

The latest research out of Facebooksets machine learning models to tasks that, to us, seem rather ordinary — but for a computer are still monstrously difficult. These projects aim to anonymize faces, improvise hand movements and — perhaps hardest of all — give credible fashion advice.
The research here was presented recently at the International Conference on Computer Vision, among a few dozen other papers from the company, which has invested heavily in AI research, computer vi

Disney has apparently worked out multiple deals to get much of the MCU back at launch.
A new Twitter thread from the official Disney+ account lists a number of new Marvel titles that will be available to stream at launch. It explains why there are now several more Marvel titles available on Disney+ than what the company announced less than one month ago. On October 14th, Disney announced that Iron Man, Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, and Captain Marvel would b

Twitter still isn’t sure how it should deal with the looming threat of deepfakes. So, it’s asking its users for help.
In a post on Monday, Twitter shared a link to a survey asking its users for help creating its policies surrounding “synthetic and manipulated media.”As we shape our approach to synthetic and manipulated media, we think it's critical to consider global perspectives. We want to hear from you.Share your feedback by Nov 27#TwitterPolicyFeedbackhttps://t.co/RGT

For all the time I've spent bingeing Succession or revisiting old episodes of Frasier, there's probably no single show I've watched more than the endless scroll of the Netflix menu — to say nothing of the Hulu, and Amazon Prime, and HBO Go ones. 
Some nights, I've even spent so long trying to decide on a title that I run out of time to watch anything at all, and go to bed having seen nothing. 
It's an annoyance Jes Bickhart knows well, and one he hopes his new app, Minnow, will s

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In October, Instagram phased out the “Following” tab. That’s because it shared a lot of information about what your friends and the people you follow were doing on the social network — maybe too much — and Instagram said some people were surprised their activity was showing up there. And now, the company is apparently keeping others from re-creating that idea: Apple has removed Like Patrol from the App Store, according to CNE

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is experimenting with a badge of shame for websites that load slowly in Chrome. “In the future, Chrome may identify sites that typically load fast or slow for users with clear badging,” explains a blog post from the Chrome team. “This may take a number of forms and we plan to experiment with different options, to determine which provides the most value to our users.”
A new badge could appear in the future that’s design

Are those red notification dots on your Facebookhome screen driving you crazy? Sick of Facebook Marketplace wasting your screen space? Now you can control what appears in the Facebook app’s navigation bar thanks to a new option called Shortcut Bar Settings.
Over the weekend TechCrunch spotted the option to remove certain tabs like Marketplace, Watch, Groups, Events, Profile, Friend Requests, News, Today In, Gaming and Dating or just silence their notification dots. In response to our inqui

Ivan Solis The newest season of Netflix’s Queer Eye has the Fab Five bringing their joyful brand of self-love and wellness to Japan, joined by stars Kiko Mizuhara and Naomi Watanabe to act as local guides. In the four-part miniseries, the show handles language barriers and cultural expectations with a refreshing thoughtfulness, and each of the experts in food, fashion, culture, grooming, and design bring new perspectives to help their Japanese heroes, which is what the show calls its make

In our latest step toward becoming a full dystopian nightmare, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has been collecting the health data of millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent.
It's all part of Google's secret "Project Nightingale" that the company has been working on with Ascension, which the WSJ notes is the "second-largest health system" in the country.
Among the personal health data that the two behemoths are sharing are "lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitali

Google is secretly gathering millions of patient records across 21 states, in an effort dubbed ‘Project Nightingale’, reports The Wall Street Journal. Neither doctors nor patients were made aware of the effort, according to the report.
The Wall Street Journal’s Rob Copeland reports that the data amassed in the program includes “lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, complete with patient

Is it the web page that’s slow or is it your network connection? In the future, Google’s Chrome web browser may have an answer for you. Google announced today a plan to identify and label websites that typically load slowly by way of clear badging. The company says it may later choose to identify sites that are likely to be slow based on the user’s device and current network conditions, as well.
Google hasn’t yet determined how exactly the slow websites will be labeled, b

Google’s cloud gaming platform, Stadia, will launch on November 19th. The service costs $130 for a hardware kit; while you can pay $9.99 per month for a subscription plan called Stadia Pro, you’ll need to purchase most of the games from a storefront.
Google has been announcing Stadia games throughout 2019. Its big titles include Destiny 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Baldur’s Gate III. But as Google recently revealed, the selection at launch will be more limited, with more games rollin

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge WeWork is in discussions to hire John Legere, the trash-talking executive who turned T-Mobile around, as its new CEO, according to The Wall Street Journal. WeWork has had a chaotic two months since a very messy attempt to go public revealed bizarre management and behaviors by the company’s founder and now-former leader, Adam Neumann.
Legere seems to be WeWork’s idea of a fixer. When he was brought into T-Mobile in 2012, T-Mobile was in a distant four

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon will be opening a new, full-size grocery store in a neighborhood of Los Angeles, and it won’t be under the Whole Foods brand, the company confirmed to CNET this morning.
Job listings describe the store, which will be in Woodland Hills, California, as “Amazon’s first grocery store.” Amazon also told CNET that the store won’t use the company’s cashierless checkout technology from its Amazon Go stores, so it seems t

Amazonis opening its first non-Whole Foods grocery store in the LA neighborhood of Woodland Hills, the retailer today confirmed. The news of the new store was first reported by CNET, which spotted several job postings referencing the location, including those for a zone leader, grocery associates and a food service associate.
Unlike Amazon’s growing number of cashierless Amazon Go convenience stores, the new store will feature conventional checkout technology, says Amazon. CNBC also noted

In September, SalesforceVentures, the venture of arm of Salesforce, announced a hefty $300 million investment in Automattic, the company behind WordPress, the ubiquitous content management system (CMS). At the same time, the company was putting the finishing touches on Salesforce CMS, an in-house project it released last week.
The question is, why did it choose to do both?
One reason could be that WordPressisn’t just well-liked; it’s also the world’s most popular content manage

Following the merger of CBS and Viacom announced earlier this year, the combined company today confirmed its plans to restructure its content and digital leadership teams in order to streamline operations. Among the changes, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, are the departures of Comedy Central head Kent Alterman and Viacom Networks COO Sarah Levy. Meanwhile, CBS Chief Creative Officer David Nevins will add BET to his responsibilities, while president of MTV, VH1, C

NASA’snext Venusprobe could be an atmosphere-skimming robotic stingray designed by the University of Buffalo. UB’s CRASH Lab, which is the institution’s Crashworthinesss for Aerospace Structures and Hybrids laboratory, has been selected by NASA to get early-stage funding as part of a program the agency devised to come up with new and innovative concept designs.
The stringray-style spacecraft design would have “wings” that can flap in the high winds of the upper atmo