Technology news

Facebook is acquiring Beat Games, the developer of popular (and excellent) virtual reality rhythm game Beat Saber. TechCrunch reported that Beat Games will keep operating independently, but it will become part of Oculus Studios, Facebook’s VR gaming group. In a blog post, Oculus content director Mike Verdu said the game will keep releasing across all platforms, and the studio won’t prioritize Oculus headsets for updates or new content like music packs.
Oculus basically describes this

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google today announced that its Stadia Pro premium subscription tier is getting two more free games starting in December. The titles are Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition and Farming Simulator 19. You can purchase both titles right now on Stadia if you so choose. That puts the Stadia Pro free game offering at four games now, as the service launched alongside Stadia earlier this month with Destiny 2: The Collection and Samurai Shodown.To be clear, every

Image: iFixit via Creative Electron Last week, Apple surprise-launched its lineup of Smart Battery Cases for the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max, and the cases have an intriguing new addition this year: a physical camera button. How the new button works was a bit of a mystery, as iPhones themselves don’t have a button dedicated entirely to being a camera shutter. But now we know a little more about the mechanism, thanks to an X-ray of one of the cases done by iFixit and Creative Electro

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is sending out emails to owners of inactive accounts with a warning: sign in by December 11th, or your account will be history and its username will be up for grabs again. Any account that hasn’t signed in for more than six months will receive the email alert.“As part of our commitment to serve the public conversation, we’re working to clean up inactive accounts to present more accurate, credible information people can trust acro

Image: Sean Hollister / The Verge The Steam Autumn Sale has begun, allowing you to nab a copy of Resident Evil 2 for a mere $20 among other savings, but there’s one deal that stands out from the pack — a $5 farewell to Valve’s weirdly wonderful Steam Controller gamepad.Yes, you can now buy the Steam Controller for just $5 plus shipping ($13 total for me), and Valve confirms that this is the last batch of these gamepads that will ever be made.And while I can’t recommend i

Image: Sean Hollister / The Verge The Steam Autumn Sale has begun, allowing you to nab a copy of Resident Evil 2 for a mere $20 among other savings, but there’s one deal that stands out from the pack — a $5 farewell to Valve’s weirdly wonderful Steam Controller gamepad.Yes, you can now buy the Steam Controller for just $5 plus shipping, and Valve confirms that this is the last batch of these gamepads that will ever be made.And while I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly li

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Facebook is now operating without a third-party fact-checking service in the Netherlands. The company’s only partner, Dutch newspaper NU.nl, just quit over a dispute regarding the social network’s policy to allow politicians to run ads containing misinformation.
“What is the point of fighting fake news if you are not allowed to tackle politicians?” asked NU.nl’s editor-in-chief Gert-Jaap Hoekman in a blog post announcing the

There are many reasons why Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is good: challenging combat, interesting platforming and exploration, the extremely Star Wars-y sheen over the entire production, or the deep dive into a new area of the Star Wars lore. But what escalates Jedi: Fallen Order isn’t just the story and gameplay, but the smaller things, too. In particular, Jedi hero Cal Kestis’ lightsaber. It’s the best video game lightsaber in recent memory.The best video game lightsaber in re

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals for Apple products aren’t usually found at the company’s stores but at several other retailers. Apple is offering up an Apple Store Gift Card worth up to $200 on select products during its four-day shopping event. Meanwhile, Best Buy, Target, Amazon, B&H Photo, and Walmart are also hosting some noteworthy deals on Apple products.
We’re seeing the best-ever pricing on the new seventh-generation i

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is turning its Outlook.com and Outlook for the Web mail services into Progressive Web Apps (PWA). This allows any Outlook user to install the web app into Windows, macOS, Chrome OS, and other platforms that natively support PWAs. It’s a useful alternative to the cluttered Outlook Windows desktop app or the Windows Mail client that ships as part of Windows 10.
PWAs, by their nature, are essentially still websites, but they include better caching, n

Enter the Mootrix.| Credit: Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Moscow Region Let’s just be up front here: yes, these pictures seem to show a cow wearing a virtual reality headset, and no, we don’t really know what’s going on here.You may have seen these images floating around social media followed by a trail of comments like “this is the dystopian future we were warned about” and “enter the mootrix.” They purportedly show an experiment being conduc

Transporting a large space capsule around Earth can be a daunting process, but NASA has its own various equipment for such jobs — one of which is a very big plane with a very big belly. Known as the “Super Guppy,” NASA’s cavernous plane is capable of carrying large loads from point A to point B, and the aircraft just transported the space agency’s next-generation passenger spacecraft to Ohio for a round of testing.
The Super Guppy’s precious cargo was NASA&rsq

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg In a lot of ways, Black Friday is already happening — even if the shopping holiday won’t officially kick off until this Friday, November 29th. Yesterday, we highlighted a few of the best deals we’d seen so far (all of which are still happening), including $200 off the Pixel 4, $70 off of Sony’s WH-1000XM3 wireless noise-canceling headphones, and more. You can find those below.
Today we’ve found a few new, great deals that you should

Disney+ has been updated to add a missing “continue watching” section, making it easier to resume content that viewers started watching at an earlier point. It’s a small update — Disney is adding it server-side, so you won’t even have to update your apps — but it’s a useful one that was oddly absent from the service when it launched earlier this month (as spotted by 9to5Google).The feature is available across the various platforms on which Disney+ is off

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sony has released a firmware update for its excellent noise-canceling WF-1000XM3 earbuds that allows you to control volume directly instead of adjusting it with your phone or relying on Siri / Google Assistant. Aside from their lack of sweat resistance, the inability to change volume via the earbuds was among my criticisms when reviewing the 1000XM3s, so it’s good to see Sony rectifying that.The new update also lets you see the battery level for the chargi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This year, TikTok became one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. The shortform app finally reached over a billion active users worldwide and, in the US, it provided a launching pad for the biggest song of the year. But while influencers have struck it rich on smaller platforms like Pinterest and Snapchat, TikTok’s sponsorship marketplace has been slow to develop.
To help meet that challenge, a new industry of marketing agencies and i

Image: Gigabyte Gigabyte’s latest eGPU is the Aorus RTX 2080 Ti, a $1500 external graphics box containing one of Nvidia’s most powerful consumer graphics cards. Rather than relying on air-cooling, this is the first external graphics card to use an all-in-one water-cooling system, and it includes a 240-mm radiator equipped by two 120-mm fans. The result is an accessory that should give a Thunderbolt 3-equipped laptop or desktop a decent graphics boost, all without producing too much

Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic Welcome back to our discussion about platforms and democracy! I had a great time meeting Interface readers last week at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay and the Conference on New Media and Democracy at Tufts University. I also made great progress on a special report I plan to have for you here before the end of the year. But enough prelude — on with today’s update.
“I’m one of the last people you’d expect to hear war

All’s fair in love and tug-of-war?A few days after Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s new Cybertruck, he posted a video of the truck taking part in a tug of war with a Ford F-150, which showed the electric Cybertruck easily overpowering the Ford pickup. But after accusations that the competition was unfair, Musk has agreed to a re-match, saying he’ll aim to record a new video next week.
A number of blogs pointed out the apparent disparity in the match-up. The F-150 seems to be a rear-

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A new investigation has claimed that Amazon attempted to dodge workplace safety regulators for years up until 2015. The investigation, which lead to a joint report published in The Atlantic and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting is well worth reading in its entirety, and catalogs a series of safety failings across a number of Amazon’s US warehouses, as well as the company’s attempts to minimize the amount of injuries reported.

Honor V30 Pro | Honor Honor has announced the V30 and V30 Pro, the latest in its range of generally impressive upper-mid-range phones. The Honor V range is usually released globally as the View series and offers competitive specs based on parent company Huawei’s latest technology: this year’s View 20 debuted with a 48-megapixel camera, Kirin 980, and hole-punch selfie camera, for example.
The V30 Pro has a 6.57-inch 1080p screen with a double-wide hole-punch cutout that’s remi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On November 22nd, roughly 200 Google employees and supporters rallied to protest the suspension of two colleagues, Rebecca Rivers and Laurence Berland, for allegedly accessing internal information they shouldn’t have in the course of their worker activism. Now, it appears Google has fired both those workers, as well as two other employees who participated in the rally.
Bloomberg reports that Google sent out a company-wide memo today confirming that

Image: Google Google posted a new video today showing its upcoming Ambient Mode feature for Google Assistant in action on an Android device. The company first announced Ambient Mode at IFA in September. The mode shows onscreen items like calendar info, notifications, weather, and smart home controls on your lock screen when your phone or tablet is plugged into a charger. It effectively turns your phone into a smart display and until now, we didn’t know how it would actually function in re

Photo credit should read MARCO BERTORELLO/AFP via Getty Images In October, Fiat Chrysler CEO Mike Manley told investors that he’s open to making cars powered by other companies’ electric vehicle technology. But Fiat Chrysler (FCA), which owns brands like Jeep and Dodge, is doing more than just considering the idea. The Verge has learned the automaker is in talks with at least two distressed EV startups about leveraging their technology to build electric Fiat Chrysler vehicles &mdash