Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge On Tuesday, Apple released iOS 13.3, and one of its key new features was Communication Limits, which lets parents set limits on who their kids talk to or message with... in theory. Due to some bugs related to iCloud’s contact sync feature, it turns out the new privacy controls can be bypassed without much effort, which could let kids call and text people (or total strangers) they might not be allowed to communicate with, as found by CNBC.Apple c

Samsung’s first folding phone may have been fraught with a stumbled launch, reliability woes, and a nearly $2,000 price tag, but that hasn’t stopped the company from finding a million people to buy the Galaxy Fold, according to Samsung Electronic’s president Young Sohn. Sohn revealed the stat onstage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in Berlin, stating that “there’s a million people that want to use this product at $2,000 each.” He then followed up to clarif

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Yesterday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a theoretically huge announcement: he wanted Twitter to stop being a self-contained platform and start delivering content from a decentralized system, changing social media as we know it. He kicked off the plan by announcing a project called Bluesky, which will fund the independent development of that system. But among many people who already work on decentralized networks, the response was a collective roll of the

Next year, NASA plans to scoop up a small batch of dirt from an asteroid named Bennu, located millions of miles from Earth — and now the agency knows which part of the space rock it’s going to steal from. Today, the space agency announced that one of its spacecraft will attempt to grab some particles from a 20-meter-wide crater, called Nightingale, on the asteroid.Engineers picked the Nightingale site from four final candidate spots on Bennu, arguing it could be the best place to fin

I’m an inveterate chatter. I miss the days of AIM and Gchat; I regularly reread n+1’s fantastic essay on the history and rise of chatting. So when I saw Yap — a new chat application built by Postlight, a digital product studio— I was immediately curious. When I booted it up, I immediately got hooked.Yap is pretty simple. It’s a six-person chat room (“Because seven is annoying,” says the official blog), where every message you post erases the one you post

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s release is just a week away, bringing the end of both Disney’s modern sequel trilogy and the overarching episodic Skywalker Saga. But if you can’t wait that long, Disney has released a clip from the new movie that reveals an extremely unexpected actor returning to the franchise.Mild spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker below. (Yes, it’s an official clip, but if you want to go into the film completely free of information, close t

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images We’ve all started a movie only to realize it’s not quite what we were expecting going in, and now Vudu is offering customers a way to bail out and instantly get a refund credit toward another pick. The Walmart-owned video service has launched a new feature it’s calling Rental Redo: you get 30 minutes to determine whether you want to commit to finishing a given movie you’ve rented. If you decid

Netflix’s big-budget TV series adaptation of The Witcher (based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s series of fantasy novels, and not the popular video game series that, confusingly, is also based on Sapkowski’s books) has gotten one final trailer to hype up the show before its December 20th release date. And it looks... pretty great?
It’s no secret that studios have been looking to their bookshelves in search of any fantasy series to adapt in an effort to fill the enormous (and profi

Photo by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images The Federal Trade Commission could force Facebook to back out of its plans to integrate its family of apps, including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.According to the Journal’s exclusive, officials have grown fearful in recent months that any moves to further tie Facebook’s products together could make it more difficult for agencies like the FTC or law enforcement to break the company up in any

Lyft is getting into car rentals. The ride-hailing company announced Thursday that it’s launching a rental service available in its main smartphone app that will work pretty much just like traditional car rental companies, starting in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, California. The company will also provide renters with two $20 ride credits to help cover the cost of taking a Lyft to and from the pickup and drop-off points.Lyft is trying a couple things at launch beyond those ri

Image: Amazon Similar to what Google Assistant has done, Amazon is now giving customers the option to replace Alexa’s default voice with that of a celebrity — and it’s starting off with Samuel L. Jackson. The company announced in September that this was coming, and as of today you can pay $0.99 and have Jackson respond to your Alexa requests for music, the weather forecast, and more. You can also ask questions that are specific to Jackson, including queries about his career, s

Image: Amazon Similar to what Google Assistant has done, Amazon is now giving customers the option to hear some familiar voices in addition to Alexa’s default voice. Today the compay kicked off its celebrity voice program, and it’s starting with Samuel L. Jackson. Amazon announced in September that this was coming, and as of today you can pay $0.99 and have Jackson respond to your Alexa requests for music, the weather forecast, and more. You can also ask questions that are specific

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a nearly $10 million fine against a robocaller who allegedly spread “false accusations” about a California political candidate.According to the FCC, Kenneth Moser and his telemarketing company Marketing Support Systems placed around 47,000 unlawfully spoofed robocalls ahead of the California State Assembly primary election last year. The calls were placed over a two-day period and spo

Microsoft is tweaking its Windows logo and the icons for many of the operating system’s apps. We’ve known for a year that the software maker has been planning an icon overhaul, and the company’s new Office icons were only the start. Microsoft is now redesigning more than 100 icons across the company with new colors, materials, and finishes.
It’s part of a bigger push to modernize Microsoft’s software and services under the Fluent Design set of principles. “Wit

Robinhood today announced Cash Management, a new feature for its investing app that lets users park uninvested cash in a brokerage account where it can earn interest or be spent like cash using a special Robinhood-branded debit card.
The announcement follows Robinhood’s attempt last year to launch no-fee checking and savings accounts and a 3 percent interest rate. The company had to take the feature back to the drawing board after the CEO of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation s

Most electric-powered aircraft being tested today look like mutant helicopters or drones on steroids. So it was with some relief that the all-electric plane that took flight in British Columbia on December 10th had the appearance of a very ordinary-looking seaplane.The plane, operated by Harbour Air and MagniX, is a yellow-and-black six-seater de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver with a 750-horsepower (560 kW) Magni500 propulsion system. The short test flight took place on the Fraser River at Harbour Air S

Photo by Mike Wren / NYS Department of Health THC-containing vaping products sold under the name Dank Vapes are the most common brand associated with vaping-related injuries, according to a new update from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). However, there are regional differences in the brands associated with injury and hospitalization, and officials say that one single brand is likely not responsible for the outbreak of injuries.As of December 3rd, 2,291 patients were hospitalized with vap

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A lot can change in 10 years. When the sun rose on January 1st, 2010, Steve Jobs was still CEO of Apple, and the hottest Android phone was the newly minted Motorola Droid. Facebook was still an upstart, having just recently clawed its way to profitability. Uber hadn’t reached an app store yet, and Spotify hadn’t reached the US. Tinder, Twitch, and TikTok simply didn’t exist.
Taking the long view, the individual stories of the past 10 yea

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge For the 2018 midterm elections, Twitter introduced labels that appeared on US election candidates’ profiles and tweets in order to identify the office they were running for. The company announced today that it will be applying similar labels to candidates’ profiles and tweets for the 2020 US elections.
In theory, when you see the special label on a candidate’s profile or attached to their tweet, you can assume that those posts are genuin

Image: Remedy Entertainment Control is a stylish, cerebral, and just plain fun third-person shooter in which you gain telekinetic powers. If you like good games, it’s easy enough to recommend it at its full cost, but I don’t have to do that today since it’s just $25 at GameStop. This deal is for today only, and it applies to both the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game; the PC version is an Epic Game Store exclusive.
This price matches a deal we saw during Black Friday and C

Small satellite launcher Rocket Lab unveiled the company’s second launch site this morning — a just-finished pad built at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island in Virginia. Dubbed Launch Complex 2, the location will be used along with Rocket Lab’s primary launch site in New Zealand to up the frequency of the company’s launches in the years ahead. That way, operators of small satellites have more options for how to get their payloads into orbit.
Since it st

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Whether you’re hoping to gift a capable gaming laptop to a loved one for the holidays or you just want to get one for yourself, Amazon has some great deals today. Of this batch of sales, the one that sticks out the most is the model equipped with the Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics chip that dips just below the $1,000 mark.If you want to check that one out, it’s the $979.99 Asus TUF (15.6-inch IPS FHD display, quad-core AMD Ryzen 7 processor, 16G

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, Google announced that it’s rolling out two features for its Messages app on Android that are designed to help you weed out annoyances and know that you’re texting with a real person.
One of those features is spam detection for US users, which first launched in select countries in January. If the Messages app detects a suspected spam message, Google says it will show you a warning where you can confirm if the text is spam or not. The fea

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Your iPhone uses information from your cell service, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS to pinpoint its location, and since you almost always have your phone on you, your location as well. That information can be useful for a lot of things, such as letting others know where you are or finding your phone when it’s lost. Other times, it’s just more information that services and companies collect about you, creating privacy concerns.The good news is y

Awesome screen. Awesome camera. Long-lasting battery life. These are three things that Samsung’s influencer-filled ad would like you (or more likely, a social-savvy teen) to know about its Galaxy A series of phones — specifically, the newly announced Galaxy A51 and Galaxy A71.
Awesome screen. Awesome camera. Long-lasting battery life. Awesome screen. Awesome camera. Long-lasting battery life. Awesome screen. Awesome camera. Long-lasting battery life. Awesome screen. Awesome camera. L

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Interpreter mode, the feature that allows Google Assistant to translate your conversations in real time, is coming to phones. Google says it will work with 44 languages and can be invoked by saying commands like “Hey Google, help me speak Thai” or “Hey Google, be my German translator.”
Once you’re in interpreter mode, the Assistant will translate your speech and read it out loud. On phone screens, the Assistant is able to off

Google shows off Project Glass at I/O 2012 To tell the story of the last 10 years at Google, it helps to look at the products that no longer exist.
The decade started with Wave (launched 9/09, deprecated 8/10), then Buzz (launched 2/10, deprecated 10/11). There was also a Wikipedia clone called Knol (launched 8/08, deprecated 3/12), the Groupon clone Google Offers (launched 5/11, deprecated 3/14), and of course, the beloved RSS client Google Reader (launched 10/05, deprecated 3/13), whose absen

Six example images that fool AI from the ObjectNet dataset. | Image: MIT Machine vision has been one of the biggest success stories of the AI boom, enabling everything from automated medical scans to self-driving cars. But while the accuracy of all-seeing algorithms has improved massively, these systems can still be confused by images that humans have no problem deciphering.Just look at the collage at the top of this story. None of these pictures are particularly confusing, right? You can see h

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Robocalls have become unavoidable, flooding phone networks with spam so thoroughly that most people have stopped picking up calls from unknown numbers. It’s a massive and embarrassing technological failure, but the causes behind the problem are more complex than you might think.
The biggest problems are baked into the network itself. As the internet moves to fiber optic cable (the modern broadband network), phones have, too, sharing infrastructure with the

Image: Epic Games Fortnite’s latest update has arrived, bringing a rare feature for modern shooting games: local split-screen co-op. It will allow two players to team up in a match on an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 console.Right now, split-screen gameplay is limited to those two consoles and just Duos and Squads (so you won’t have to worry about your buddy looking at your screen to hunt you down in a Solo match), but Epic Games promises that it’ll “continue to improve the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today we’re going to talk about Jack Dorsey’s surprise tweetstorm about potentially decentralizing the service — but first, some history.
Death came to the Twitter developer community on August 12th, 2012. In an infamous memo, the company’s head of product divided potential uses of the Twitter API into four quadrants. In the past, developers had been able to make any sort of Twitter app they wanted to — including a full-featu

Illustration by Alex Castro / Th Trying to get a handle on the progress of artificial intelligence is a daunting task, even for those enmeshed in the AI community. But the latest edition of the AI Index report — an annual rundown of machine learning data points now in its third year — does a good job confirming what you probably already suspected: the AI world is booming in a range of metrics covering research, education, and technical achievements.
The AI Index covers a lot of grou

Photo: Sam Byford / The Verge Apple’s online and retail stores in North America have started carrying products from Brydge, a company that’s known for producing MacBook-style Bluetooth keyboards for iPads. Models for the 10.2-inch iPad and 10.5-inch iPad Air are available.Apple brought support for its Smart Keyboard to both of these iPad lines this year, suggesting it wants to encourage typing on lower-end iPads and not just the Pro series. Brydge does make a keyboard for the curren

Back at my parents’ house, there’s a couple giant tubs of Lego sitting in my old bedroom closet stuffed with over 20 years of my Lego collection. If I ever had to sort that collection by hand, it would probably take me the better part of the next 20 years — but perhaps I could use this AI-powered Lego sorting machine that’s made in large part out of more than 10,000 Lego bricks (via ExtremeTech).
Dubbed the “Universal Lego Sorting Machine” by its creator, Dani