Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple is hunting for software engineers to help the company build media apps for Windows. The iPhone maker revealed its plans in a job listing earlier this month, spotted by Neowin, inviting potential candidates to “join us and build the next generation of media apps for Windows.”
Apple maintains existing Windows apps like iTunes and iCloud, but these are both old traditional desktop apps that are showing their age. Apple revealed earlier this

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon’s Ring home security company lets police ask users for videos that are up to 45 days old and 12 hours long, Amazon said in a letter released today.Sen. Markey released Amazon’s responses
Ring has been the source of privacy concerns for months, as the company, which offers doorbell cameras, faces questions about how it works with law enforcement. The home security business has partnered with hundreds of police agencies around the United

Image: iFixit Apple’s new 16-inch MacBook Pro not only has a bigger screen, but it returns to a scissor switch keyboard, has louder speakers, a better mic, and a... lid angle sensor?
MacRumors found the mention of the new sensor in a service document that was sent to Apple Authorized Service Providers. It shared the info with iFixit, which found the small sensor inside the computer and also noticed that the MacBook Pro’s hinge has a magnet inside it with an arrow that indicates the

Image: ABC 15 Federal investigators split the blame for the fatal Uber self-driving crash between the ride-hailing company, the safety driver in the vehicle, the victim, and the state of Arizona in a blistering official report that also took the federal government to task for failing to properly regulate the industry.In a hearing of the National Traffic Safety Board in Washington, DC on November 19th, the three-member panel heard from a team of investigators who had been sifting through the det

Photo: Apple TV Plus Early reviews for The Morning Show weren’t exactly positive, and executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Mimi Leder believe a lot of the feedback was an “attack on Apple.”“When those reviews came in, I didn’t know what show they were watching,” Leder said during a talk at Code Media in Los Angeles. “I thought they were nuts. I thought there were a lot of Apple haters who just wanted Apple to fail. The reviews felt like an attack on Appl

Alex Castro / The Verge Mixer is changing the way it does its clips: it’s letting its verified Partners control who gets to make them, along with adding better editing functionality to the clipping feature itself. Streamers will be able to choose who can clip their streams, based on their channel progression rank — basically a loyalty program that you enter by watching a channel’s streams.
“We know that having clip creation available to every viewer can sometimes produce

Google is rolling out a new service for Google Assistant that it’s calling “Your News Update.” It takes the idea of an algorithmically determined news feed — the kind you get from Facebook or on Google’s news feed — and turns it into an audio stream. To play it, you simply ask a Google smart speaker or Assistant on your phone to “listen to the news.”
Google uses the information it has learned about you over the years alongside your location to cust

Photography by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Smart speakers are always a popular choice for gifts: you can use them to play music, tell you the weather, and even order packages. If you’ve been holding out for even cheaper prices, Black Friday deals are on the way. But in the same way that there are so many different types of smart speakers, there are also so many different deals on smart speakers. Whether you prefer Amazon or Google, you can find deals on speakers of all sizes and price points

The geoglyph spotted by AI tools is a human figure about five meters (16 feet) tall. | Image: Yamagata University / IBM Japan Scientists from Japan have used machine learning for the first time to identify a new figure among the ancient motifs of Peru’s Nazca Lines.The illustration, known as a geoglyph, is thought to date to between 100 BC and 500 AD, and was made by removing the dark stones of the Nazca Desert to reveal the white sand beneath. It’s small, just five meters in height

Image: Vizio Right now, if you want to watch Disney+ on a Vizio SmartCast TV, you can only do so by sending it to the TV from an Apple device with AirPlay. That will change soon, though, as Vizio announced today that it will be rolling out a SmartCast TV update in early December that will also let you cast Disney+ to your TV with Chromecast, a feature that’s built into the company’s recent TVs.If you don’t have an Apple device, it might be frustrating that you’ll have to

Kickstarter Kickstarter wants creators on its platform to be more transparent with backers about how their money is being used. The crowdfunding platform is launching a feature today called Project Budget that’ll allow creators to display their budget as a pie chart on their campaign page.
Although it’s optional for creators, Meg Heim, who leads Kickstarter’s system integrity team, says projects that use it will be more likely to be featured on Kickstarter’s homepage. Th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a new lawsuit against e-cigarette company Juul, alleging that the company misled consumers about the risks of vaping through deceptive advertising.
In its lawsuit, New York alleges that Juul’s marketing of its products downplayed their health risks and used “colorful images of attractive, young models” to appeal to minors.
“There can be no doubt that JUUL’s aggress

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Bird says it will start giving out free rides to customers who take selfies of themselves wearing helmets in an effort to promote safety while riding electric scooters.How to get customers, who often take scooter rides impulsively, to wear helmets has been one of the more intractable problems of the shared electric scooter industry. According to a recent study, only one in 190 people injured while riding e-scooters was wearing a helmet. Researchers ca

A slippery new coating could make the crappiest place in your home a little cleaner. Developed by researchers at Penn State University, this two-part product promises to keep your toilet bowl clean, stink-free, and — potentially — set the stage for toilets to use less water in the future.
Worldwide, about 37 billion gallons of fresh water are flushed down toilets every day, say the inventors of the new product who published the results of their work this week in the journal Nature Su

Ojo, a California electric scooter company, announced its intention to acquire Gotcha, a scooter and bike rental service. It’s another sign that the shared micromobility industry is oversaturated and needs to consolidate.
Ojo says its acquisition of Gotcha, a 10-year-old company based in Charleston, South Carolina, that rents electric scooters, tricycles, and bikes, will put it on “a path to become a top [three] player in the North American rideshare market, right behind Lime and Bir

The Verge In the winter of 2005, I was so severely underweight and starved of energy that I went to great lengths to provide my body with any source of sugar. That included chugging a brilliant cocktail of Skittles dissolved in warm water. My sisters thought it was gross. As I sipped my drink, we watched Law & Order: SVU on television, but my vision was so blurry that I could barely make out which characters were which. Their voices helped. Later that night, I was jerked awake in my bed by

Amazon’s new Fire TV Blaster. | Image: Amazon Amazon has announced a new Fire TV accessory called the Fire TV Blaster. It’s a $34.99 IR blaster that’s designed to let you control hardware like your TV set or cable box using Alexa in concert with your existing Fire TV setup.
The added IR blaster allows you even greater control over your TV setup through Alexa, allowing you to switch inputs and control things like power, volume, and playback through Echo voice controls.
The $35

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge Spinciti is the latest company to offer a mid-priced electric bike with impressive specs and an attractive design. The Amsterdam, Spinciti’s first model, comes in two different frames, with a choice of three different motors for each. And like many of its competitors, Spinciti is turning to crowdfunding to get its first bikes into production.The three rear-hub motor types are 250W, 350W, and 500W. I got to ride the 350W and 500W versions on a recent chi

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Mesh router system Eero has announced the biggest update to its mobile app since its launch in 2016. The new Eero app, which is available for iOS devices starting today and will be arriving for Android early next year, offers a simplified design and cleaner visuals than the prior version. It’s available as a free upgrade for the existing app.
The biggest change is the move to a tabbed layout with four distinct pages, as opposed to the slide-out

The League The League, a dating app that requires LinkedIn verification to join, is launching its version of speed dating next month: two-minute video dates that take place within the app. It’s called League Live, and the company will allow people to opt in to the video dates, which take place at 9PM local time on Sundays starting on December 1st.At that time, the app will automatically pair people up based on their preferences and location. Everyone will get three “dates” dur

Photo by Henrique Casinhas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images The New York Times has just published a lengthy interview with Margrethe Vestager, the head of the EU’s antitrust division. Over the past five years, Vestager’s team has been behind some of the biggest fines doled out to US tech companies, thanks to the EU being one of the few authorities with the political clout to stand up to the likes of Apple (fined $14.5 billion for dodging taxes) and Google ($9 billion over a