Technology news

Photo by Tom Brenner/Getty Images President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook are reportedly expected to tour the company’s Texas-based manufacturing facilities together soon, CNBC reported on Tuesday.Neither the White House nor Apple have officially announced the trip, but the tour would emphasize Cook’s amicable relationship with Trump and the current administration as the US’s trade war with China continues to drag on.The Verge reached out to the White House about the tri

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google has reportedly fired an employee believed to be leaking to the media, as it placed two others involved with internal activism at the company on leave, according to a new report from Bloomberg News.
Terminated employee sent names and personal information
The publication writes that the terminated employee provided names and personal information of other employees to reporters. One of the suspended employees was believed to have accessed document

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Best Buy has shared its Black Friday ad, and one of the big surprises was that some of its best deals are already happening. Some of them are exclusive to My Best Buy members (Best Buy’s free membership service), but others are open to the general public.
The selection of deals is constantly changing, so we’ll be adding and removing products as savings surface or expire. Also, we’ve included a mix of deals that are happening now, as

NASA A snowman-shaped object that NASA probe New Horizons flew by in early 2019 now has a brand-new name. On November 12th, NASA officials announced that the item formerly known as MU69 — and once nicknamed Ultima Thule — would now have the name Arrokoth, which is the word for “sky” in the Powhatan / Algonquian language.
Arrokoth remains the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft — located approximately 4 billion miles away from Earth in a distant region

Richard Plepler is best known as the man who helped shape HBO into the prestige network it is today, and now he’s in final negotiations to bring those talents to Apple.Plepler is looking to sign an exclusive production deal at Apple that will see him produce “the kind of high-quality series he championed as a top executive at HBO, including Game of Thrones,” Deadline first reported. The Verge can confirm those details. Focusing on just a few projects centered around talented ac

Photo by Christopher Furlong / Getty Images The site of the most recent high-profile nuclear disaster is reinventing itself as a renewable energy leader in Japan. Land that became too toxic for people to farm and live on after the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station will soon be dotted with windmills and solar panels.
By 2024, 11 solar and 10 wind power plants on abandoned land in Fukushima Prefecture will generate 600 megawatts, which is roughly two-thirds of the ener

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images Over the past couple of years, courts have ruled that politicians like Donald Trump can’t block people for yelling at them on Twitter or Facebook. But thin-skinned elected officials aren’t the only government figures on social media, and experts have wondered how these rulings will affect official agencies’ accounts, which are increasingly used to communicate with the public. Now, a Twitter fight involving the US Department of Veterans Affairs

Tesla’s first Gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that his company’s fourth Gigafactory will be built just outside Berlin, Germany.The announcement comes as Tesla is finishing up construction on the third Gigafactory outside Shanghai, China, and just a few days after New York State wrote down the value of the company’s second Gigafactory, a repurposed SolarCity facility in Buffalo, New York, by more than $800

Photo by Jinitzail Hernández/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images While officials have broad powers to screen travelers at the border, they can’t search electronic devices without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, a court ruled today in a closely watched privacy case.Plaintiffs filed suit in 2017
In 2017, a group of people whose devices were searched at the border, including a NASA engineer, filed suit against US Customs and Border Protection. They said officials had taken their de

Image: Microsoft Minecraft Earth (think Pokémon Go, but Minecraft) was first revealed in May, and following its beta, it’s been slowly rolling out in early access across the world, first hitting Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, the UK, and other countries. Now, it’s available in early access in the US, and you can download it for iOS and Android.The app worked when I downloaded it for iOS (my colleague Sean Hollister confirmed that it worked on Android), but there were a few step

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitch Studio — the broadcasting software the live-streaming site debuted back in August to a select group of users — is now open to the public. (Though it is, for the moment, PC-only.) Developed as an easier way to stream and aimed at users who are just starting out on Twitch, the software is both functional and aesthetically appealing. It’s for people who have a vague desire to broadcast themselves to the internet but aren’t quit

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook might have another security problem on its hands, as some people have reported on Twitter that Facebook’s iOS app appears to be activating the camera in the background of the app without their knowledge. Facebook says it’s looking into what’s happening.
There are a couple ways that this has been found to happen. One person found that the camera UI for Facebook Stories briefly appeared behind a video when they flipped their phone

Disney+ arrived with seven chapters of the Skywalker saga, but people have started to notice something strange about the first Star Wars film, A New Hope: it has an entirely different edit than the ones fans have seen before.The change was “made by George made prior to the Disney acquisition,” a Disney representative told The Verge. The new edit, which was first spotted by the Star Wars Visual Comparisons Twitter account, features an entirely new insert of the Rodian bounty hunter Gr

Within the next two years, the US and Europe will require all new electric and hybrid vehicles to make noise at low speeds so pedestrians hear them coming. But automakers and regulators are still not settled on what that noise should sound like. Nissan thinks the car should “sing.”Others think the sounds should be customizable. Now, Ayax — an independent Toyota manufacturer and distributor in Uruguay — has an even wilder idea: make the cars emit a sound that encourages pl

All 30 seasons of The Simpsons are available for fans to stream on Disney+ starting today, but there’s one glaring problem: the aspect ratio is off.Every episode of The Simpsons is currently streaming in a 16:9 ratio, meaning it looks stretched and shots are cropped to fit a widescreen format. There isn’t an option to change the aspect ratio, either. This ultimately means there’s a plethora of gags from the first 20 Simpsons seasons that don’t land because the cropping pr

Microsoft is releasing its latest Windows 10 November 2019 Update to devices today. While most of Microsoft’s significant Windows 10 updates usually come with a host of new features, this one is much more like the service packs you’d find with previous versions of Windows. Most of the changes are minor, and you won’t see a lot of them as they’re behind-the-scenes improvements focused on stability, performance, and more.
That doesn’t mean nothing has changed, though.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) raised concerns over the US Army’s use of the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to find recruits in a letter directed to the military branch’s top official last week, as first reported by BuzzFeed News.
“While I recognize that the Army must adapt its recruiting techniques in order to attract young Americans to serve,” Schumer wrote. “I urge you to assess the potential national s

Lyft is bringing its rentable, pedal-assist electric bikes back to San Francisco five months after several battery fires forced the company to pull them from service.The e-bikes were only in service for two months when Lyft pulled a thousand of them from service to investigate a handful of reported battery fires. The bikes were also pulled from San Jose and Oakland. Lyft had previously been forced to ground its fleet of e-bikes in New York and Washington, DC after a braking malfunction injured s

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Rad Power Bikes makes some capable e-bikes, like the RadWagon Electric Cargo Bike that The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins calls “a legitimate car replacement” for his needs. This model and several other electric bicycles are up to $200 off ahead of Black Friday, and you can take advantage of these deals online and at Rad Power’s Seattle location.
These bikes are rarely discounted, but starting today you can save $200 on the following m

Facebook is launching a new payments system today, appropriately named Facebook Pay. It will be available across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and it’s designed to facilitate payments across Facebook’s popular social networks and apps. You’ll be able to use Facebook Pay to send money to friends, shop for goods, or even donate to fundraisers. The service will be separate from Facebook’s new Calibra wallet and the Libra network, and it’s “built o

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal accused Google of stealthily collecting sensitive patient data from millions of Americans without their consent. The New York Times soon followed with its own report, offering more detail on “Project Nightingale” and noting how it was likely to rile up privacy advocates. Forbes then published its own story, followed by another article from Business Insider, each drip-feeding more details about this initiative

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge As of today, Podcasts on Pandora are now available for all users on the Pandora website and on its desktop app for Mac and Windows. The company first launched podcasts on its app last year, leveraging its Podcast Genome Project, an offshoot of Pandora’s Music Genome Project, which can personalize podcast recommendations down to an individual episode level.
Pandora is banking on this hyper-personalization, and says its system uses more than 1,500

Photo: Complexity Gaming Herman Miller, the furniture company perhaps best-known for the iconic Eames Lounge Chair, is getting into gaming. Today the company announced a partnership with Complexity Gaming — an e-sports organization with teams in Dota 2, Call of Duty, and more — that will see the famed furniture design firm expand into competitive gaming. As part of the deal, Herman Miller will become Complexity’s “official seating partner,” and the company will als

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Costco is hosting a few “pre-pre-Holiday” deals, and it has shared some of its plans for the big shopping holiday that kicks off on Thanksgiving Day (November 28th) and continues through Black Friday (November 29th). Unlike some other retailers, Costco locations will be closed in observance of Thanksgiving in the US and opening up for business on Black Friday. However, it’ll be open for business via its online store around the clock.

Disney+ arrived with seven chapters of the Skywalker saga, but people have started to notice something strange about the first Star Wars film, A New Hope: it appears to have an entirely different edit than the ones fans have seen before.The new edit, spotted by the Star Wars Visual Comparisons Twitter account, reportedly features an entirely new insert of the Rodian bounty hunter Greedo saying something while talking to Han Solo in the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine. A Disney representative told

Do you pay for your own Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or HBO Now accounts? A simple truth of today is that many of us share access to streaming services. Maybe you split the cost with friends or family. Maybe you’ve managed to cling to an ex’s streaming account (and they’ve been nice enough not to change the password). Disney is aware that this is the reality of consumer behavior as it launches Disney+, and the company acknowledges that its new service is in for the same treatme