Technology news

Photo: XDA Developers Details surrounding Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S20 are starting to pick up ahead of the planned debut on February 11th, and a new leak from XDA Developers has confirmed tons of new information about the flagship, including the rumored 120Hz display, the fact that the S20 will still use an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, and the loss of a headphone jack.The new leak comes from the S20 Plus, which will feature a 3200 x 1440 pixel display at a 20:9 aspect ratio (taller th

Image: Aston Martin Aston Martin might have killed the Rapide E, its first electric car, before it ever shipped according to an Autocar report from late last week. But Aston Martin won’t say if this is true or not, as a spokesperson tells The Verge that the company “can’t comment on product speculation.”“Everybody is asking...” the spokesperson said in a text message, before repeating the line about speculation. “Can’t say any more than that I&rsq

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re looking to trade in your Apple product — be it a MacBook, iMac, Mac desktop, iPhone, or iPad — you stand to get a pretty good return. Apple’s tech has a reputation on the secondhand market for retaining value long after release. This speaks to build quality, but mostly to Apple’s long-lasting software support for its older products. The trend is positive both for buyers who will end up with a product that could

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Microsoft has released a new tool for identifying child predators who groom children for abuse in online chats. Project Artemis, based on a technique Microsoft has been using on the Xbox, will now be made available to other online companies with chat functions. It comes at a time when multiple platforms are dealing with child predators targeting kids for sexual abuse by striking up conversations in chat windows.
Artemis works by recognizing specific words and

Sony Pictures It’s kind of amazing that Jeopardy! still makes news. Maybe someone is in the middle of a 70-game winning streak, or a robot is playing, or someone is making an insane amount of money on the show. Somehow, you can still become a minor celebrity on Jeopardy! On Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time, three contestants are competing in a seven-night gauntlet. Three nights in, and it’s one of my favorite TV shows right now.
Jeopardy! is fun to watch because it’s a game

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon and its subsidiaries, including Yahoo, have become known for massive data breaches, privacy blunders, and oddly named web entities, but now the internet service provider has launched a whole new search engine without Yahoo branding, one that it says will definitely not share your search results with advertisers or tailor results based on your search history.On its ad-supported OneSearch platform, users can “search the internet with increased

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon and its subsidiaries have become known for massive data breaches, privacy blunders, and oddly named web entities, but now the internet service provider has launched a new search engine that it says will definitely not share your search results with advertisers or tailor results based on your search history.On its ad-supported OneSearch platform, users can “search the internet with increased confidence, knowing your personal and search data i

Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images Boeing ended the year with negative commercial airplane orders for the first time in decades, CNBC reports. At the end of 2019, the aerospace giant lost orders for 87 airplanes, meaning it had more cancellations than new orders.The high rate of cancellations is the latest sign that the crisis surrounding the 737 Max — the airplane involved in two fatal crashes that took the lives of 346 people — is continuing to affect Boeing’s bottom line. It

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge If you were recently gifted a new iPhone, you may be wondering about the best way to sell your old phone for the best price. (As opposed to trading it in, which could be more convenient, but it also often means you won’t get as much for it.) This guide can help walk you through that process.
Back up your phone
Since you’re going to wipe your phone (you definitely don’t want anyone else getting their hands on your stuff), first, you’ll w

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is expanding its grasp on retailers. In a blog post today, Google announced that it’s purchased Pointy, a Dublin-based startup that helps local retailers sell their products online. The deal is expected to close in the weeks to come.Currently, Pointy allows sellers to either use an app or special bar code scanner to keep up-to-date inventory information on in-store products. That way, a shopper could more easily purchase a product online and

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has lifted its ban on FedEx Ground and Home shipping services after initially prohibiting its third-party Marketplace sellers from using the company over the holiday season. The news, which was reported on Tuesday by CNBC, means Marketplace sellers will be able to use the potentially cheaper options from FedEx over Amazon’s own shipping platform and UPS starting today, January 14th, at 5PM ET, according to a notice sent out by Amazon.
Amazon

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The disastrous Democratic National Committee hack in 2016 was a wakeup call for anyone worried about international chaos campaigns — and Monday night, we got a new reason to be worried about 2020. The New York Times and cybersecurity firm Area1 broke the story of a new hack by Russian intelligence services targeting Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company at the center of Trump’s ongoing impeachment. For months, Republican operatives have b

Photo by Brennan King / The Verge Official “pro” controllers for Sony’s PlayStation 4 are in a perplexing category. While Microsoft’s Xbox Elite, and its second-generation version released last year, have offered all of the benefits of a high-end gamepad in a best-in-class package, Sony has stubbornly refused to do the same for its console, leaving the market up to a smattering of third-party companies with varying degrees of quality.None are really all that great. Even

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge After nearly a decade, Oracle’s copyright lawsuit against Google is close to settling an important question: can you own the basic commands of a coding language? The Supreme Court will reach an answer over the coming months, but a long list of academics, advocacy groups, and businesses — including some of Google’s competitors — are urging it to throw out Oracle’s claims.
Outside groups filed over two dozen supporting briefs

Image: Sony Sony today announced a new camera grip, the GP-VPT2BT, which connects to many of the company’s recent mirrorless cameras over Bluetooth and will cost $140 when it ships this month in North America.Unlike camera grips that use a wired connection, the Bluetooth approach prevents any cables from getting in the way and leaves your camera’s ports sealed and protected. This design should give you a little more flexibility to nail the perfect angle (or get a great shot for your

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is patching a serious flaw in various versions of Windows today after the National Security Agency (NSA) discovered and reported a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s handling of certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in Windows. The flaw, which hasn’t been marked critical by Microsoft, could allow attackers to spoof the digital signature tied to pieces of software, allowing unsigned and malicious code to masquerade as l

Apple’s new Mac Pro has been available in a standard desktop tower configuration since December, but starting today, Apple is selling its promised rack model that’s designed to be mounted in server rack setups — starting at $6,499, an extra $500 over the regular model.
From a specification perspective, the new rack Mac Pro is virtually identically to the tower model. Apple offers the same configuration options at the same prices (down to the included mouse and keyboard, which a

GoDaddy via FastCompany Web services company GoDaddy has unveiled its new logo: a generic, sans-serif type accompanied by a heart shape that looks like an upside-down version of the Airbnb logo.At first glance, I thought the other half of the heart opposite of the “G” was a poorly shaped “D” as initials for GoDaddy, but it’s actually supposed to be an “O” so the logo spells out “GO.” That’s very confusing, but the company says the logo

As drivers, we typically think of our blind spots as being to the left and right of the vehicle, not in the front underneath the bumper. But as this investigation by a local Indiana television station reveals, many of the most popular vehicles in the US today have shockingly huge front blind spots — and that could spell danger for a lot of people, most notably small children.
It’s a problem that’s getting worse as American car buyers trend toward larger and larger vehicles, WTH

Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images Grindr is sharing personal user data in violation of the EU’s GDPR data protection legislation, a new series of complaints is alleging. The app shares data including location and device information with more than a dozen companies, according to The New York Times. The Norwegian Consumer Council has filed three complaints against Grindr, as well as five adtech companies that received personal data through the app.
Grindr describes itself as “the world&

Image: TCL TCL’s 65-inch Series 6 TV is seeing a hefty price drop at Best Buy (via Slickdeals). Normally $699.99, it’s now $594.99 if you use the offer code TCLDOLBY15 at checkout (underneath where you put in your credit card number for the payment). This is the 2019 version of TCL’s 6 Series; its 2018 version was considered by my colleague Chris Welch to be the best 4K TV that you could buy for under $1,000. We haven’t had a chance to extensively test this newer model,

Last week at CES 2020, The Verge’s Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn sat down with OnePlus CEO Pete Lau on The Vergecast for his first official podcast appearance.OnePlus debuted a new concept phone, the OnePlus Concept One McLaren Edition, at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, so Lau came on the show to discuss what the design of the phone means for the future of the OnePlus smartphone line as well as his thoughts on newer technologies in the mobile world, like 5G and folding phones.In th

Illustration by Ana Kova Sending genetic material from detained immigrants to an FBI database could have consequences for both immigrant privacy protection and criminal justice in the US more generally, experts say. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the FBI’s national genetic database would house immigrant DNA, as part of a program that will collect DNA samples from people who are detained at the border. Those additions will fundamentally change the FBI’s

Image: Netflix There are two big problems that arise when you decide you’re going to tell a story about Dracula. The first one is simple: he’s the most famous vampire in all of fiction, perhaps the most widely known horror villain in the world. This makes surprising people difficult. The other is that everyone thinks they know what Dracula is about, so each take is battling against dozens of other ideas at any given moment that range from goofy cartoon characters to Hollywood legend

Instagram Instagram is finally bringing direct messages to the web. Starting today, a “small percentage” of the platform’s global users will be able to access their DMs from Instagram’s website, which should be useful for businesses, influencers, and anyone else who sends lots of DMs, while also helping to round out the app’s experience across devices. Today’s rollout is only a test, the company says, and more details on a potential wide-scale rollout will co

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google will join Safari and Firefox in blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser. However, unlike those browsers (which have already started blocking them by default), Google intends to take a phased approach. Justin Schuh, the director at engineering for Chrome, writes that Google’s “intention is to do this within two years.”
In those cookies’ place, Google is hoping that it can institute a new set of technical soluti

Some of Coral’s hardware products, including an AI accelerator (far right) and dev board (center). | Image: Coral AI allows machines to carry out all sorts of tasks that used to be the domain of humans alone. Need to run quality control on a factory production line? Set up an AI-powered camera to spot defects. How about interpreting medical data? Machine learning can identify potential tumors from scans and flag them to a doctor.But applications like this are useful only so long as they&r

I hate time zones. I manage to screw up my time zone math every time I call someone in a different part of the country, to say nothing of calls abroad. True story: in reporting the very video I’m introducing here, I scheduled a call with a source on the East Coast of the United States. I’m on the West Coast. I missed the call by six hours.
In truth, though, time zones are a modern necessity. Globally, they facilitate communication and commerce; regionally, they synchronize our work a

Microsoft’s free upgrade offer for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users ended a few years ago, but you can still technically upgrade to Windows 10 free of charge. While Microsoft has removed the special upgrade offer sites, the company continues to activate Windows 10 licenses for people who upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1.
ZDNet’s Ed Bott has been testing this method for years, and the free upgrade still works. It’s also really simple for anyone to upgrade from Windows 7, esp

Image: Epic Games Epic has some new metrics for the Epic Game Store a little over a year after its launch. The Fortnite developer now says the store has amassed 108 million users, thanks in part to the software doubling as the official PC launcher for the hit battle royale game. That means it’s on par with, and perhaps even larger than, Valve’s competing Steam store, which had 90 million users as of January of last year. (Valve has yet to release a more recent stat.)
But Epic says i

Square Enix has announced delays for two of its most anticipated 2020 games: Final Fantasy VII Remake has been pushed from March 3rd to April 10th, while the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers has been delayed from May 15th to September 4th.Both games’ development teams are explaining their respective delays as needed to give the developers more time to polish the gameplay experiences.“We are making this tough decision in order to give ourselves a few extra weeks to apply final polish

Photo by Erin Schaff for The Verge On Tuesday, one of the Senate’s fiercest tech critics, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), called on regulators requesting that they investigate the ad-blocking industry for anti-competitive behavior.For years now, some of the largest tech firms have paid ad-blocking companies like Eyeo, which owns Adblock Plus, to avoid the software’s restrictions and have their ads displayed on devices. In 2015, a report from the Financial Times showed that companies like Mic

via Ajunews and Samsung Now that CES is over, we turn our attention to the next big tech unveiling — no rest for the wicked! Samsung announced its February 11th “Unpacked” event ahead of CES and is widely expected to have two phones: an update to the Galaxy S10 and a new, clamshell-style folding phone.
Because nothing can ever be simple, Samsung has decided to change the naming scheme for the Galaxy S series away from sequential, incremental numbering to the year of release. O