Technology news

WWE has one of the most popular YouTube channels in the world and has become a social media force, and today (as reported by Variety) the company officially joined TikTok. There’s a WWE TikTok channel, sure, but more important to wrestling fans and meme creators is that WWE’s arrival brings with it a slew of licensed entrance music for some of the company’s most recognizable performers past and present.You can now add “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s theme music to

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It’s an awful feeling realizing that your internet speed is far slower than what your provider promised. But according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission could be doing very little to force providers to live up to their customers’ expectations.
According to the WSJ, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have worked to influence the reports and have used a variety of tacti

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It’s an awful feeling realizing that your internet speed is far slower than what your provider promised. But according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission could be doing very little to force providers to live up to their customers’ expectations.
According to the WSJ, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast have worked to influence the reports and have used a variety of tacti

Photo by Donat Sorokin / TASS via Getty Images A new software system that will let people with diabetes customize their treatment and automatically adjust their insulin levels was just approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. It will reach patients in January 2020.The technology, called Control-IQ, is manufactured by Tandem Diabetes Care and connects with blood glucose sensors and insulin pumps to automatically increase, decrease, or stop the delivery of insulin in response to the

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It’s common knowledge that Google has photographed a huge amount of the planet for its Street View and Google Earth projects. But for the first time, Google has revealed how much of the world it has photographed: 10 million miles of Street View imagery and 36 million square miles of Google Earth imagery, according to a report from CNET.That Google Earth number is particularly impressive: Google says that it now covers 98 percent of the places in

In November, Google said that it was starting to roll out RCS Chat, the successor to SMS, as Android’s primary texting platform, and as of Monday, if you are an Android user on any carrier in the US, you should now be able to use it — though you may need to update your Messages app and carrier settings (via Android Central).In theory, RCS messaging should be an improvement over regular SMS, as it supports read receipts, typing indicators, and is better for group chats. Unlike Apple&r

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Billboard has announced that YouTube streams will be factored into the Billboard 200 albums chart starting early next year. Video streams from other platforms will also count, including Apple, Spotify, Tidal, and Vevo, and Billboard says the change will also impact genre album consumption charts, like country, Latin, and others. Billboard’s charts have historically been seen as a barometer of success within the music industry.
Video streams have co

Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images Amazon has been steadily growing its logistics operation over the last decade, and it now delivers more than half of all Amazon packages in the US, according to an estimate from Morgan Stanley published on Thursday and reported by CNBC. That’s a staggering increase over the course of the last few years. It means Amazon, which now operates its own freighters and cargo planes, is accelerating its push to own the entire logistics chain and

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge When Google announced its relatively inexpensive new Pixelbook Go, it said that a more expensive Pixelbook Go configuration with a 4K screen was on the way, and that model is finally available for purchase (via Android Central).
The 4K configuration is more than twice as expensive as the base model — $1,399 for the 4K version instead of $649 for a base Pixelbook Go — and it even eclipses the $999 base price of Google’s Pixelbook 2-in-1. (The G

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is just days away, bringing a promised end to the nine-episode Skywalker saga on December 20th. But if you want to catch up on the earlier movies, you can pick up digital copies of Episodes 1 through 6 for the lowest price they’ve ever been: $42.99 over at the Google Play Store for HD copies of all six films.The deal is also available at iTunes for $49.99, should you prefer to buy through Apple, $48.99 over at Vudu, or $45.99 at the Microsoft Store (if you&

Image: Epic Games Fortnite is about to host another of its now-iconic in-game live events, but this one has a pretty important real-world connection. For the first time, Epic’s battle royale game will host an exclusive film clip, and this one happens to be from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, ahead of its December 20th release. The event is happening on Saturday, December 14th.We’ve known about the clip premiere since last week, but Epic disclosed some more concrete details last n

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge If you’ve been holding out on a deal for the latest iPad Air, the wait is over.
The Wi-Fi-only version of this year’s iPad Air is $100 off at Target and Best Buy. That makes it $399.99 for the 64GB model and $549.99 for the 256GB model. The cellular-enabled models are also $100 off at Best Buy. That brings the price down to $529.99 for the 64GB model and $679.99 for the 256GB model. We didn’t see any deals on the iPad Air over Cyber Monday, so

X-Box One S | Tyler Pina If you’re looking for some good gaming deals, and particularly, if you were hoping to get a deal on Call of Duty, today’s your day, because both Best Buy and Walmart have sales on consoles and games. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Best Buy is continuing its run of day-long deals for the holiday season. The company has discounted the PlayStation 4 to $298.99, down from $399.99. For the same price, you can also get the PlayStation 4 Pro 1TB bundle

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Banking data for 29,000 Facebook employees, which was stored on unencrypted hard drives, was stolen by a thief from a payroll worker’s car, according to a Bloomberg report. The hard drives contained information on thousands of US workers who were employed by Facebook in 2018, including bank account numbers, employee names, the last four digits of their social security numbers, their salaries, bonuses, and equity details. Facebook notified its staff

Watch company Citizen is expanding its (less well known) line of wall clocks today with two new models that add support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, in what are effectively nicer looking versions of Amazon’s existing Echo Wall Clock.
Like the Echo Wall Clock, the Citizen clocks is part of the “Works with Alexa” program. That means that they don’t actually feature Alexa hardware like a microphone or speaker. Rather, they’re meant to augment an existing A

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facial recognition has been heralded as a secure way to confirm your identity on your phone or at payment terminals, and with features like Face ID on your iPhone, it sometimes seems like the tech really is more secure than other options. But the tech isn’t infallible, as public facial recognition terminals can still be fooled with just a mask, as some recent experiments have shown.
An AI company, Kneron, shared a video with The Verge of tests it ra

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge Not only is the year ending, but the decade is ending, too. So The Verge lists the most influential gadgets in the first decade of its existence. Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller discuss how they picked their favorite gadgets of the decade as well as their process for deciding the list.But first, we start the show with the release of Apple’s Mac Pro. The crew talks about what they know so far without having tested the computer, including the lack

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Starting today, Apple Podcasts is available through Amazon Alexa-enabled devices like Echo speakers. People just have to say, “Alexa, play (insert show name here) on Apple Podcasts” to get a program. Apple Podcasts can be set as the default podcast player from the Alexa app, too, so Amazon will default to checking Apple Podcasts first whenever a show is requested. If users link their Apple ID to their Alexa app, they’ll also be able to pick up

Update, 12:52PM ET, December 13th, 2019: After the original publication of this artlce, Samsung has since clarified to Korea’s Yonhap News Agency that it hasn’t actually sold one million Galaxy Fold devices, despite what executive Young Sohn said on stage earlier this week. Yonhap says a company spokesperson “said Sohn may have confused the figure with the company’s initial sales target for the year, emphasizing that sales of the tech firm’s first foldable handset h

Chris Welch T-Mobile wanted to merge with Dish back in 2015, T-Mobile CEO John Legere told a federal court yesterday, but Dish shot the deal down over concerns that T-Mobile would “disintegrate.” The details, reported by CNET, confirm stories from 2015 about a potential tie-up between the two companies and explains why the deal never came to be. A merger would have given T-Mobile access to a trove of valuable spectrum that Dish has long held on to, but not yet put to use, along with

Image: Sony Pictures When Sony first rebooted Jumanji two years ago with the decades-later, new-cast follow-up Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, it was a pleasant surprise even in the long shadow of Star Wars. It was pretty good for a movie nobody was clamoring for.For a movie based on a book about a board game, Welcome to the Jungle found a good premise: four teenagers of varying social positions would be forced to inhabit the bodies of avatars that looked suspiciously like Dwayne “The Roc

Today, live-streaming platform Caffeine is announcing that it has a new group of celebrity creators joining its service, in what the platform is calling a “creator drop.” It has brought on basketball players Collin Sexton and Kyle Kuzma, football player JuJu Smith-Schuster, and musician Doja Cat. Caffeine already has people like Lil Xan, Offset, The Game, and LaMelo Ball. As a bit player in the live-streaming wars, the platform’s strategy is to recruit celebrities — and,

Hulu Runaways could’ve been great. The show’s basic premise, about a group of teens who discover that their parents are all supervillains and run away to fight them, is beautifully on the nose. Teenagers rebelling against parents who are actually evil! Also, there are superpowers and a pet dinosaur? If no one else tries it, Riverdale will.Unfortunately, Runaways, Hulu’s TV series based on the Marvel comic created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, stumbled with the execut

Whether we’re learning to cook an omelet or drive a car, the path to mastering new skills often begins by watching others. But can artificial intelligence learn the same way? A new challenge teaching AI agents to play Minecraft suggests it’s much trickier for computers.Announced earlier this year, the MineRL competition asked teams of researchers to create AI bots that could successfully mine a diamond in Minecraft. This isn’t an impossible task, but it does require a mastery o

Obsidian Parvati Holcomb is everybody’s (or at least, lots of people’s) favorite character in The Outer Worlds. The brilliant yet sheltered engineer has charmed players with her sweetness and determination, and her companion quest offers a rare spot of hope in a dystopian world, letting you help her find love with the captain of a rough-and-tumble colony ship. That’s what I hear, anyway — because when I played The Outer Worlds, I killed Parvati. Thanks to developer Obsid

When Christopher Ayres started as Taco Bell’s creative director, he didn’t realize just how passionately some people loved the fast-food chain. “I didn’t even know how fervent the fandom was,” Ayers says. But that enthusiasm is what allowed the brand to lean into a playful persona that doesn’t take itself too seriously. “I think that’s what gives us the permission to be fun.”Ayres was part of the company’s major 2016 rebrand, which tran

Spotify Spotify wants more people to listen to podcasts, so it’s making the process of finding one that interests you even easier. Starting this week, the company will include a button on free users’ homepages that’ll ask them to pick topics that interest them in order to get podcast recommendations. The button will only show up for people in the US, Denmark, Great Britain, Brazil, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Mexico, Ireland, and New Zealand who have never listened to a podcast

If thrillers tend to follow a narrative arc that looks like a curve, the Safdie brothers prefer one shaped like a coil. Their excellent new film, Uncut Gems, is an unnerving story of spiraling bad decisions and escalating violence. It’s also equal parts about gambling, Judaism, and Adam Sandler’s goatee.
The stakes are set from the movie’s opening scene where a mining accident in Ethiopia (complete with a flash of exposed shin bone) enables two thieves to sneak out a rare opal

Image: Murfie Last month, almost a million CDs stored in Wisconsin seemed to disappear. For years, thousands of people paid a Madison-based company, named Murfie, to rip, stream, and store their CDs, vinyl, and cassettes. But a few weeks ago, Murfie’s website went offline and nearly all communication from the company ceased. Now, customers fear their physical music collections may be lost forever.
Murfie’s main service was digitizing people’s audio CDs for high-fidelity cloud

Microsoft dropped a surprise last night — we got our first look at the upcoming Xbox and learned its name: Microsoft’s next Xbox is Xbox Series X, coming holiday 2020. I’m not sold on the name, but I think I am sold on the shape: instead of a VCR-like traditional console, it’s a square tower. You can use the new Xbox Series X horizontally, thankfully, so there is a better chance you’ll be able to fit it inside whatever home entertainment console you have.
I like thi

For a long time now, Microsoft has been going out of its way to downplay the “box” part of “Xbox.” Whether it’s pledging to bring all of its first-party titles to PC, releasing some of them to platforms like Steam and the Nintendo Switch, launching its Game Pass service for Windows, or pushing xCloud streaming, the message has been clear: you don’t have to buy an Xbox to play Xbox games.“The business isn’t how many consoles you sell,” Xbox ch

Image: eBay eBay Motors is a new app from the auction site aimed at streamlining the process of buying and selling used cars, and it includes a couple of AI-powered features that eBay claims will help sellers list a car in under five minutes. The app is available in the US for both iOS and Android, and replaces the old eBay Motors app that was discontinued back in 2015.
There are a couple of different features that eBay claims will help you list a car in minutes. You start by taking a photo of

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AT&T’s real 5G network is finally launching today, as the company starts to sell the $1,300 Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G and flips the switch for all of its customers within coverage areas (and not just selected business partners) to start using the next-generation network.When AT&T announced the launch last month, it promised its 5G network would be coming to five cities, but in the interim, the company managed to double that list to ten: Birming