Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is set to dispute the Pentagon’s decision to give a massive, $10 billion contract to Microsoft for cloud services.Evidence has pointed to Trump’s involvement
The Federal Times reported today that the CEO of Amazon’s cloud services branch said at an internal meeting that the company would “protest the decision and push the government to shine a light on what really happened.” Amazon has reportedly already filed the pape

Rich Communication Services (RCS) has been a long time coming. Billed as the future of text messaging and the technology that will eventually replace SMS and MMS, it’s been Google’s pet project as the way to ‘fix’ messaging on mobile devices ever since the company gave up on Hangouts and Allo. Instead of using a separate messaging app, RCS works just like regular old texting, except it adds a bunch of features usually only available in apps like WhatsApp or Messenger. Un

With the launch of iOS 13, Apple added perfectly timed live lyrics to its Apple Music app. Now Spotify may do the same. Several users in international markets are now seeing a similar synced lyrics feature in their Spotifymobile app, where lyrics scroll by in time with the music. The feature is powered by Musixmatch, according to the screenshots. Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch the feature is a test in a limited number of markets.
While Spotify didn’t confirm which regions have access, we&

TL;DR: Buy a cutting-edge Dell or Alienware monitor for up to 57% off during Dell's Black Friday Sneak Peek sale. That includes plenty of better options than what's available at Walmart or Amazon. The clock continues to tick down to Black Friday, but there are plenty of deals to go around right now. Walmart already has incredible discounts live on their site, and other retailers such as Dell are ready to show that Black Friday is no longer just a single day of deals. 
The Dell Black Fr

Following a shooting at California's Saugus High School, presidential candidate Kamala Harris went on MSNBC to poignantly lament the ways in which the government has failed to act on gun control. 
"It is pathetic that people yield to a gun lobby on an issue that affects all our children," Harris explains. "And by the way, these babies — and I mean those elementary, middle, and high school kids — could care less who their parents voted for in the last election. They are terrified

People with acid reflux are familiar with a certain fiery, internal hell known as heartburn.
Different foods, drinks, and even high stress levels can bring on the dreaded acid-induced pain and lead to discomfort in the throat, chest, or upper stomach that's far from pleasant. 
Those who suffer from acid reflux are often left looking for one thing: relief. And while it's not always easy to come by, there are definitely things out there that can help make living with acid reflux significantly

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The 50 attorneys general investigating Google for potential antitrust violations are expected to expand their probe and examine the company’s Android and search businesses, not just its advertising practices, CNBC reported on Thursday.Last September, nearly every attorney general in the United States announced that they would take part in an antitrust investigation of Google led by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. At the time, Paxton sa

Instagram today announced it’s expanding its test of hidden likes to users around the world. This means that a significantly higher number of people will be logging into Instagram today and seeing their friends’ posts sans numbers. The test was run in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand earlier this year. Now it’s been expanded to the rest of the world. So if, all of a sudden, you can’t see the number of likes on another user&rsquo

Microsoft isn’t going to repeat its mistakes from the Xbox One with its next-generation Xbox console. “I would say a learning from the Xbox One generation is we will not be out of position on power or price,” says Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s Xbox and gaming chief, in an interview with The Verge. “If you remember the beginning of this generation we were a hundred dollars more expensive and yes, we were less powerful. And we started Project Scarlett with this leadership

Earlier this year Facebook said it would crack down on ads from groups peddling misinformation about vaccines. The announcement was heralded by medical professionals and pundits as a capstone in their efforts to fight the pro-disease movement. However, in the time since the announcement, Facebook‘s done the exact opposite. A recent study from researchers at the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins shows that Facebook blocked pro-vaccination ads on the ba

People dramatically proclaim all the time that they don’t think they could survive without their smartphones, but a new series from the forthcoming streaming service Quibifrom Jeffrey Katzenbergand Meg Whitman approaches smartphone survival in a much more literal way. The scripted series, which will premiere on Quibi at launch in April 2020, stars Tye Sheridan from “Ready Player One,” and counts Steven Soderbergh as an executive producer.
The series, called “Wireless,&rdq

David Teten ContributorShare on Twitter David Teten is a Venture Partner with HOF Capital. He was previously a Partner for 8 years with HOF Capital and ff Venture Capital. David writes regularly at teten.com and @dteten. More posts by this contributorShould you raise equity venture capital or revenue-based investing VC? Why are revenue-based VCs investing in so many women and underrepresented founders?
I recently wrote Should you raise venture capital from a traditional equity VC or a Revenue-Ba

Representation in gaming just took a significant step forward, with a brand new title featuring the first-ever playable transgender protagonist.
Announced at Microsoft’s X019 event in London, Tell Me Why is the newest episodic narrative adventure game from DONTNOD Entertainment, the studio behind Life Is Strange.
Set in a small-town in Alaska, the three-chapter game lets you play as both 21-year-old twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan, who come together after 10 years of separation. Unlike most r

It's been two years since we've heard bloody anything about Age of Empires IV, since it was announced at Gamescom back in 2017.
Finally, at Microsoft’s X019 event in London on Thursday, newly named studio World’s Edge revealed the first ever gameplay trailer for the anticipated upcoming real-time strategy game.
And the Mongol Empire is coming, people! 
Studio head Shannon Loftus sent in the trebuchets unveiled the awaited launch trailer on the very same day the painstakingly rem

Have you ever looked at your own sprawling backyard and thought, imagine if classic 1989 movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids actually happened and I had to furiously battle my way through towering grass blades, drink actual water droplets, and avoid now-enormous insects to survive?
Look, I did a lot of daydreaming, and apparently so did Obsidian, because their brand new game, Grounded, is for all the Rick Moranis fans out there.
Announced at Microsoft’s X019 event in London, Grounded is a new f

Another podcast, another example of Elon Musk opening his mouth and stepping in it. 
This time, as noted by Business Insider, it was a Musk appearance on Lex Fridman's Artificial Intelligence podcast that's resulted in some backlash for the Tesla and SpaceX chief. 
At one point in the discussion, which you can watch here, Musk says of his Neuralink project: "So Neuralink I think, at first, will solve a lot of brain-related diseases. So, could be anything from, like, autism, schizophren

Among the 50-plus new games that Microsoft is bringing to its Xbox Game Pass subscription service over the next year are ten Final Fantasy games. The list encompasses every single-player mainline game released in the series since 1997’s Final Fantasy VII, including select spinoff games like Final Fantasy X-2, and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. Microsoft included the games in a list of titles that will start appearing “this holiday,” and said that they’ll be added

American intelligence agencies quietly stopped the warrantless collection of US phone location data last year, according to a letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released today.“Significant constitutional and statutory issues,”
Last year, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled against authorities looking to search through electronic location data without a warrant. Citing the ruling, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a privacy hawk in Congress, wrote a lette

Teslagained ground and moved up four spots in the latest Annual Auto Reliability Survey from Consumer Reports, thanks largely to improvements with the Model 3.
Reliability has improved in the Model 3 and Model S enough that Consumer Reportscan now recommend the two models.
Consumer Reports announced Thursday the results of its Annual Auto Reliability Survey, which is based on data collected from the organization’s members about their experiences with more than 400,000 vehicles. The survey

Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic Pornhub said on Wednesday that PayPal would no longer support payments to Pornhub performers (via Vice). In a blog post, Pornhub said that it was “devastated” by the decision, which cuts off the primary way it pays “over a hundred thousand performers.”
In a statement given to Vice, PayPal said that the company discovered that “Pornhub has made certain business payments through PayPal without seeking our permission. We have taken act

Facebookis copying Instagram while simultaneously invading its acquisition with branding and links back to the mothership. TechCrunch has spotted Facebook testing a feature called Popular Photos, which affixes an endless scroll of algorithmically selected pics from friends beneath the full-screen view of a photo opened from the News Feed. The result is an experience that feels like the Instagramfeed, but inside of Facebook.Popular Photos could offer users a more relaxing, lean-back browsing expe

Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it’s bringing its classic Halo game collection to PC, and adding Halo: Reach to the entire Halo: The Master Chief Collection. While the company has been running beta tests for Halo: Reach on PC in recent months, it’s now arriving on PC on December 3rd.
Microsoft is taking its time to get Halo on PC right, and that means games will appear in stages. Halo: Reach is the first, and the rest will follow in chronological order. Microsoft is also tw

Xbox One S | Photo by Tyler Pina / The Verge Microsoft has announced its Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals at its XO19 conference in London. The company will be offering the biggest discounts yet on Xbox One consoles, as well as price cuts on controllers and several games.The deals will run on the Microsoft Store from November 24th to December 2nd (that’s a few days earlier than other retailers will kick things off), but Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Live Gold members will be able to

In the interim between Disney's final traditionally animated princess flick, The Princess and the Frog (2009), and the overwhelming, current era of Disney+, mystical, CGI-animated female empowerment got the spotlight in both Brave (2012) and Frozen (2013). However, only one of those movies got a highly anticipated sequel six years after its release: one starring Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel as duo-female leads, backed by the goofy Josh Gad and Jonathan Groff.
Frozen 2 follows the original's pro

Microsoft is planning to launch its xCloud game streaming service in 2020, and the company is expanding it to Windows 10 PCs next year, too. “My expectation is that it will be generally available in 2020,” says Phil Spencer, Microsoft’s head of gaming, in an interview with The Verge. Microsoft is planning to integrate Project xCloud with Xbox Game Pass next year, allowing players to stream games from the company’s subscription service direct from the cloud.
While Microsof

Microsoft is expanding its Project xCloud preview today, with the addition of 50 games. The software maker originally launched the xCloud preview with just five titles exactly a month ago, and it’s now working with more than 25 partners to launch 50 games today. Titles include Madden NFL 20, Devil May Cry 5, Tekken 7, and Forza Horizon 4. This will give xCloud testers a lot more games to play, but also provide us with a better understanding of how the service will run for more demanding ti

Dontnod Entertainment, the developer behind award-winning episodic series Life is Strange, is working on a new narrative-based, “true-to-life” game called Tell Me Why. The game focuses on a pair of twins, Tyler and Alyson, untangling the memories of their troubled childhood.
Tyler and Alyson’s relationship will act as the backbone of the game as they navigate life in small-town Alaska. It will also tell the story of Tyler’s life as a trans man. The developer worked closel

The Linux Foundation today announced that ONNX, the open format that makes machine learning models more portable, is now a graduate-level project inside of the organization’s AI Foundation. ONNX was originally developed and open-sourced by Microsoft and Facebook in 2017 and has since become somewhat of a standard, with companies ranging from AWS to AMD, ARM, Baudi, HPE, IBM, Nvidia and Qualcomm supporting it. In total, more than 30 companies now contribute to the ONNX code base.
It’s

British video game developer Rare, creator of classics like Battletoads, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie, is revealing its next big game, Everwild, at Microsoft’s X019 event today. Rare is only providing a small glimpse at Everwild, but the brief trailer makes it look like it’s going to be some type of action adventure game.
Banjo-Kazooie fans will have been hoping for a sequel, or at least a new Banjo game, but Everwild looks more like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The world

Stealing someone's cryptocurrency is bad enough, but being an aggressive dick about it? That's just mean.
Two Massachusetts men stand accused of a years-long scheme to gain access to cellphones and email accounts in order to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. And, according to the Department of Justice, along the way the men threatened their victims' family members.
Real gems, these two. The accused Massholes, Eric Meiggs, 21, and Declan Harrington, 20, allegedly wen

Obsidian is a studio best-known for deep, intriguing role-playing games like Fallout: New Vegas and, most recently, The Outer Worlds. But the studio’s next release moves in a completely different direction. At X019 in London, Obsidian revealed Grounded, a survival game set in a suburban backyard where a group of four friends has to fend for themselves after being shrunk down to the size of an ant. “It’s a little different than what you’re used to seeing from Obsidian,&rdq