Technology news

Image: Artiphon Nashville-based tech company Artifon has a new music-making gadget up for backing on Kickstarter called Orba. The Orba is a small, handheld device that’s a synth, looper, and controller all in one. It’s shaped like a halved grapefruit, and mimics the gestures used on smartphones and trackpads to let you make beats and play around with sounds with a variety of motions.
The flat top of the Orba is divided into eight segments that let you stack drum, bass, chord, and le

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced an updated drone policy, intended to take the place of a 2015 policy guidance. The new policy maintains a lot of the same language and regulations, with a few key additions addressing concerns about cybersecurity and privacy.
The new version of the policy “requires components to evaluate UAS acquisitions for cybersecurity risks, guarding against potential threats to the supply chain and DOJ’s networks,&

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced an updated drone policy, intended to take the place of a 2015 policy guidance. The new policy maintains a lot of the same language and regulations, with a few key additions addressing concerns about cybersecurity and privacy.
The new version of the policy “requires components to evaluate UAS acquisitions for cybersecurity risks, guarding against potential threats to the supply chain and DOJ’s networks,&

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has followed up with more details surrounding its plan to remove inactive accounts over the coming months. First, the company says the process “impacts accounts in the EU only, for now.” That important tidbit wasn’t made clear when the news broke yesterday. But far more important is that Twitter has recognized that it can’t go around deleting accounts until it finds a way to preserve the accounts of people who’ve died

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge The Department of Justice has decided not to do anything about wireless carriers’ attempts to turn eSIMs into a way to keep customers locked to their network. It doesn’t entirely rule out taking action against anticompetitive behavior in the future. But for now, the DOJ says it’s going to let the issue go because the industry group behind eSIM is going to — not actually fix the problem — change its decision-making process to be less

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge When used within Russia, Apple’s Maps and Weather apps now list Crimea as being a Russian territory. The move, reported by BBC News, is the latest example of Apple kowtowing to a government’s demands to keep its devices and services in good standing. The company faced significant criticism in October for removing the Taiwanese flag emoji from the iOS keyboard in Hong Kong.This latest change stems from Russia’s roundly condemned annexatio

Google is finally adding the ability to manually tag someone in Google Photos, as reported by Android Police. Google Photos has always been able to automatically recognize faces and sort them for you, which makes managing your library far easier than having to tag people manually. But the system misses faces sometimes, and there’s never been a way to correct it. Once this feature rolls out, you’ll finally be able to add in many of the faces it’s been missing.
There’s a fu

Image: Wyze Wyze’s security cameras will temporarily lose their person detection feature in January 2020 after the AI startup it partnered with on the feature abruptly terminated their agreement. In a post on its forums, Wyze said that its agreement with Xnor.ai included a clause allowing the startup to terminate the contract “at any moment without reason.”
Although Wyze admits that it has made “mistakes,” it says that the loss of person detection functionality sho

There are few secrets in Hollywood as sacred as anything involving new Star Wars movies, which is why when an authentic Rise of Skywalker script ended up on eBay, people at Lucasfilm panicked.Director J.J. Abrams told Entertainment Weekly that an anonymous actor left the script under his bed, a housekeeper found it, and gave it to someone who posted it for sale on eBay. A Disney employee saw it, and purchased the script before anyone else could. Though Abrams may have tried to keep the actor&rsq

YouTube rolled out a new layout for its homepage a couple of weeks ago, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s made using YouTube feel like an utter chore.Complaining about YouTube product updates is run-of-the-mill online. Little tweaks usher in frustrated sighs as people try to figure out how to get things back to normal. I usually bite my tongue: sprucing up the platform to keep it feeling new is important, and there are usually deeper reasons behind the changes, such as tweaks

Thanksgiving is almost here, and nothing goes quite as well with a weekend off from work and eating huge amounts of food like hours spent digesting on the couch, binge-watching movies and TV shows.Unfortunately, given the massive amount of content available on the myriad streaming platforms, actually finding something that everyone can agree on to watch can be as miserable as whenever someone brings up politics during Thanksgiving dinner. Here are our suggestions to help make your holiday stream

Photo by Claire Folger Warning: spoilers ahead for major plot points of Knives Out
A wealthy publishing magnate has been found dead in his study. It looks like a suicide, but you and I know better. There’s a mansion full of suspects, a Clue board waiting to be solved. So we play the game. It’s called Knives Out, and it’ll make you wonder how the murder mystery — where death is actually fun — has largely been absent from movies in an era where true crime is a genre

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Black Friday is almost here, kicking off this Friday, November 29th. In the days leading up to the big shopping weekend, we’ve been highlighting a few of the best deals we’d seen so far. Just below, you can find some new picks for today as well as a few other excellent deals you should know about. This list includes the biggest discount we’ve seen on the Apple Watch Series 5, the Pixel Slate bundle, game deals, $200 off the new Google Pixel 4,

Black Friday is almost here, kicking off this Friday, November 29th. In the days leading up to the big shopping weekend, we’ve been highlighting a few of the best deals we’d seen so far. Just below, you can find some new picks for today as well as a few other excellent deals you should know about. This list includes the biggest discount we’ve seen on the Apple Watch Series 5, game deals, $200 off the new Google Pixel 4, and more.
Deals happening now
Popular games for the PS4 an

Lee Se-dol is seen in 2016 during his matches with the AI program AlphaGo.| Photo: Google / Getty Images The South Korean Go champion Lee Se-dol has retired from professional play, telling Yonhap news agency that his decision was motivated by the ascendancy of AI.
“With the debut of AI in Go games, I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts,” Lee told Yonhap. “Even if I become the number one, there is an entity tha

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Black Friday and Cyber Monday are great for saving a lot of money on big-ticket purchases like 4K TVs, gaming consoles, laptops, phones, smartwatches, and more. They’re also great for saving money on tech that didn’t cost a lot to start with.Whether you’re on a budget, or just looking for a gadget or two (or all six of the ones you’ll find below) that won’t set you back too much, we’ve pulled together the very best

The Raspberry Pi Recovery Kit | Image Credit: Jay Doscher Sometimes, certain gadgets speak to you on an intuitive level. They bypass that bit of your brain that demands functionality or value, and make their pitch on pure aesthetics.This custom Raspberry Pi cyberdeck is just such a device for me. With its rugged waterproof case, retro components switches, and compact ortholinear keyboard, it looks like a computer built for the end of the world — and I love it.It’s called the Raspber

Image: The Verge As 2019 dawned and Mark Zuckerberg announced this year’s personal challenge, I suggested it might be time to retire the concept altogether. Zuckerberg’s “challenge,” as he described in a Facebook post, would be to “host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society.”“Every few weeks I’ll talk with leaders, experts, and people in our community from different fields and I’ll try different formats to

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A new initiative has been launched to preserve tweets from deceased loved ones after the social network announced it will begin removing inactive accounts this December. The Twittering Dead project was announced by Internet Archive software curator and digital preservationist Jason Scott, and asks users to provide the Twitter handles of any accounts they’d like to see archived. Unlike Facebook and other services, Twitter does not offer a way to memo

Acer is swooping in right before Black Friday with one of the best PC gaming laptop deals we’ve seen so far: its 2017 Predator Triton 700 is $2,000 off for a final price of $999.99. It’s not the newest of machines, so you won’t find an Nvidia RTX graphics chip or a 9th Gen Intel processor inside, but it has plenty of power nevertheless.
This laptop has a 15.6-inch 1080p display with a 120Hz refresh rate and G-Sync support — the latter spec a rarity in gaming laptops, espe

Image: Williams Sonoma Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is coming out in less than a month, and the tsunami of Star Wars-themed merchandise is finally starting to hit. The latest Star Wars-branded gear you can buy? An Instant Pot, courtesy of an exclusive partnership with Williams Sonoma.This product should be made for me. I love Star Wars. I love my Instant Pot. But I don’t really like these:Image: Williams Sonoma
The R2-D2 and BB-8 ones are kind of fun, I’ll give them that. I can

On Tuesday, Patreon banned the controversial YouTuber Onision, after he allegedly doxxed a woman who says he harassed her and manipulated her into a sexual relationship.
Onision, who is also known as Gregory Jackson and James Jackson, has been a popular creator for nearly a decade on YouTube, often including a rotating cast of fans, friends and girlfriends in his videos. At least six women are now accusing him of harassment and emotional abuse.
“Our Community Guidelines clearly prohibit do

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge You might hear a little more emotion from Alexa’s vaguely-robotic voice some time soon, as Amazon announced today that developers can now have Alexa respond to questions from US users with a “happy/excited” or a “disappointed/empathetic” tone.
Amazon suggests the happy/excited tone could be used when you answer a trivia question correctly, for example, and that the disappointed/empathetic tone could be used when you ask for a sports

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Transcription company Rev updated its Terms of Service agreement today following reports of workers unhappy with low pay and exposure to graphic files without warning. Most of the changes appear to be efforts to solidify its workers’ classification as independent contractors, but there is one notable change: the company now requires transcribers to be at least 18, or older in some states.
Prior to today’s update, Rev’s website explicitly