Technology news

Much like competitors HBO Max and Disney+, Comcast’s streaming service, Peacock, is going to be entirely reliant on hubs.Comcast and NBCUniversal gave an in-depth look at Peacock, which launches on July 15th and will come with three different pricing tiers, during a special investors event this afternoon at 30 Rock in New York City. There are more than 600 engineers working on the platform, according to Matt Strauss, head of Peacock. The streaming platform is based on the infrastructure th

Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Google’s parent company Alphabet ($GOOG) is now the fourth US company to hit a market cap of $1 trillion. It hit the number just before markets closed on Thursday, ending the day’s trading at $1,451.70 per share, up 0.87 percent.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai took over as CEO of Alphabet in December, after Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin relinquished control of Alphabet. It’s been a bumpy coup

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook is “backing away” from earlier plans to sell ads for placement inside its enormously popular WhatsApp messaging service. According to The Wall Street Journal, the team that had been working on building ads into WhatsApp was disbanded in recent months, with their work subsequently “deleted from WhatsApp’s code.”The Journal notes that Facebook still ultimately aims to integrate ads into WhatsApp’s Status feat

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is a friend to public transportation. His Green New Deal plan calls for a big boost in transit spending, a network of high-speed rail, and the phasing out of internal combustion engine vehicles. He is also quite popular with young voters. According to a recent poll, 51 percent of voters aged 18–34 chose Sanders as their top Democratic candidate.
So it should come as little surprise that a very popular transit-themed meme group

Image: Apple The Banker — the first film from Apple TV Plus planned to make a major theatrical release — will be hitting theaters on March 6th, after an initial delay while Apple investigated sexual misconduct allegations surrounding Bernard Garrett Jr., the movie’s producer. Garrett is also the real-life son of The Banker protagonist Bernard Garrett Sr. (played by Anthony Mackie), via Variety.In a statement, an Apple spokesperson commented to Variety that “We created Ap

Shutterstock Comcast’s NBCUniversal is preparing to go head-to-head with WarnerMedia, Disney, and Netflix with the launch of its Peacock streaming service, lining up several big-time showrunners for a slate of new shows. The streaming service is set to launch on July 15th, and will come with three different pricing tiers, including a free option.There is a mix of dramas and comedies within the announcements, including projects from iconic writers like Norman Lear, Mindy Kaling, and Amy Po

Photo credit should read SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images iPhone manufacturer Foxconn is getting into the electric vehicle game, thanks to a planned joint venture with Italian-American automaker Fiat Chrysler (FCA). Foxconn announced on Thursday that the two companies will combine forces to make vehicles for the Chinese market, with FCA handling the manufacturing and the Taiwanese tech giant managing the electronics and software.The two companies have not yet signed a contract, according to a filin

Photo by: Andrew Lipovsky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images Late-night TV is going to start a little earlier thanks to NBCUniversal’s new streaming service, Peacock. Both The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers will air on Peacock hours before the shows air on regular network television, marking the first time a streaming service preempts its own linear broadcasts.“Starting in July on Peacock Premium, NBC’s late night talk shows will be stream

Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images As the 2020 presidential election nears, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced on Thursday that it would start notifying states when local election systems are hacked in an effort to make elections more secure. Before, the bureau would only notify the owners of the breached equipment of cyberattacks, which were typically counties and local governments with less capacity to respond.
The FBI’s announcement comes after m

Photo by: Todd Williamson/Peacock/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock, will cost subscribers anywhere from absolutely nothing to $10 a month, but Comcast is hoping a mix of exclusives and bonus content will convince people to pay.
Comcast and NBCUniversal announced today that Peacock will be available in three tiers: a free option (Peacock Free) that comes with limited programming; an ad-supported complete version that is free to existing Comcast cus

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the latest “keyword targeting gone awry” experiment, the BBC was able to use terms like “neo-Nazi” and “white supremacist” in a Twitter ad campaign, despite the social media platform’s policy that advertisers “may not select keywords that target sensitive categories.”
According to Twitter’s policies, those sensitive categories include genetic or biometric data, health, commission of a crime, s

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon’s Warehouse is the storefront’s little corner reserved for used and refurbished items that it certifies and relists for sale. And today, it’s offering a 20 percent discount on most everything it offers, further marking down these already-discounted products.If you’ve never checked out Amazon Warehouse, the selection of products is vast. As it relates to tech, a few examples of what you can find (which are all eligible fo

Image: Guerilla Games Sony’s once steadfast approach to video game exclusives appears to be giving way to a new, more player-friendly one. According to Kotaku, the PlayStation 4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn is slated to come to PC later this year. The game would be the first Sony-developed PS4 exclusive to launch on another platform after release.Horizon Zero Dawn was released in 2017 to widespread critical acclaim for its immersive world, stunning visuals, lead female protagonist Aloy, an

HTC has cut the price of its high-end Vive Pro virtual reality headset by $200, making one of the most expensive big-name headsets a little more affordable. The price cut applies to three different packages. The Vive Pro headset alone — without the tracking base stations and controllers — has dropped from $799 to $599. The Vive Pro Starter Kit, which includes two SteamVR 1.0 base stations and two Vive controllers, dropped from $1,099 to $899. And the Vive Pro Full Kit, which offers t

Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images Total hours watched on Twitch fell steeply over the last three months, as several of the service’s top streamers signed lucrative deals to move to other platforms. According to the latest report from Streamlabs and Newzoo, total hours watched fell to 2.3 million during the final quarter of the year, down from 2.6 million the quarter before. The figure puts Twitch slightly lower than where it sat in the final quarter of 2018, despite a year of overall grow

There are a lot of questions going into the third season of the Overwatch League, which kicks off next month. How will players cope with traveling around the world? Will teams be able to stage events as slick as Blizzard managed in Los Angeles? What’s going on with the exodus of broadcast talent? Will the San Francisco Shock be able to repeat their incredible 2019 run? One thing that isn’t up for debate, though: the league’s new jerseys are sick.
Today OWL unveiled its new line

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripped into Facebook on Thursday during her weekly press briefing and accused the social media company of “schmoozing” the Trump administration out of tougher regulation.
“They have been very irresponsible,” Pelosi said about the social media giant. “I think their behavior is shameful.”
She continued: “Facebook’s business model is strictly to make money. They don’t care about the i

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Subscription podcast startup Luminary, which is trying to shake up podcasting with its premium model, has lowered its monthly subscription price in the US from $7.99 a month to $4.99, according to podcast news site HotPod and confirmed by the company. The news comes less than a year after the bumpy launch of the venture-backed premium platform, which had many wondering why they would pay for podcasts at all, let alone a monthly fee. The company, which rai

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google said today that it’s on track to bring more than 120 games to its cloud gaming service Stadia in 2020 and is planning to offer more than 10 Stadia-exclusive games for the first half of the year. That would be a pretty massive jump from the 26 games and one exclusive that are currently available, and all in a little more than a year after the service’s launch, if those projections hold true. Previously, Google had only explicitly con

Image: Epic Games Fortnite may no longer be the most buzzed-about video game in the world. But developer Epic Games this week announced a new, rather ingenious, strategy to help its battle royale hit remain relevant. The company is calling this new idea the Icon Series, a collection of virtual costumes (or skins, in gaming parlance) that go beyond borrowing characters in popular media properties and instead use real-life people.For the launch of the Icon Series, Epic turned to Tyler “Ninj

CD Projekt Red CD Projekt Red’s role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077 is being delayed from April 16th to September 17th. “We are currently at a stage where the game is complete and playable, but there’s still work to be done,” the studio tweeted in an announcement explaining the move. “Night City is massive — full of stories, content, and places to visit, but due to the sheer scale and complexity of it all, we need more time to finish playtesting, fixing, and pol

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft plans to remove all of the carbon dioxide it has ever released into the atmosphere by 2050, it announced today. The company committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it plans to draw down more planet-heating carbon dioxide than it emits.The technology needed to make that goal a reality is still expensive and not widely commercially available, so the company also plans to spend $1 billion over the next four years to fund innovat

Photo by Ali Balikci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images Turkey’s two-and-a-half-year ban on Wikipedia was lifted on Wednesday, after the country’s Constitutional Court ruled against it, according to The New York Times.
In December, the court found that the ban violated freedom of expression and ruled 10-6 that it was unconstitutional. The court’s opinion was published on Wednesday, and hours later, access to the site began to come back. By the end of the day, most of the country

Image: Syfy The Magicians is in a very peculiar place. In its fifth season, the Syfy show is pretty much out of material to adapt from the novels. This is something season 4 spent most of its time preparing for, with a big bad — a monster that possessed Eliot (Hale Appleman), perhaps the most charming member of the cast — that was an invention of the series. But it’s also now a show in mourning, and it’s going to take a while to get that out of its system.
Below are spoi

One of the best things about Google Chrome is its robust catalog of extensions. Microsoft’s new version of the Edge browser, which just launched for Windows 10, macOS, and mobile, is built on the same Chromium code base and can also tap into the Chrome web store. This means that it supports the same tremendously large selection of extensions, in addition to Microsoft’s own relatively limited selection of native extensions that are available through its store.
In this article, I&rsquo

There is concern that Yoko Taro might destroy Final Fantasy XIV. And given the Nier: Automata director’s track record of endings to his games requiring players to erase all of their saved data, you can understand why.
It was during the reveal of the MMO’s third expansion, Shadowbringers, last February when it was announced that Yoko Taro would be helping to create a quest line that would cross over the worlds of Nier: Automata and FFXIV. In a video message that was part of the announ

A rendering of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon on top of the Falcon 9 rocket | Image: SpaceX Early Saturday morning, SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida that will most likely break apart in midair just a few minutes after takeoff. The rocket’s demise is part of a planned test flight that’s supposed to demonstrate SpaceX’s ability to handle a catastrophic failure of one of its vehicles. If the test goes well, SpaceX will be closer than ever to putting people on its

The lineup of fighters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate continues to grow. Today, in a lengthy video presentation, Smash director Masahiro Sakurai revealed that Byleth from Fire Emblem: Three Houses will be the next character added to the Nintendo Switch game.
Three Houses first launched last summer, bringing the long-running strategy game to the Nintendo Switch for the first time. The game differed from past entries with a focus on social elements as well as turn-based combat. Byleth was the main

A new Silicon Valley startup is trying to build the “world’s first true smart contact lens,” putting a screen right against your eye that can enhance your vision of the world. The startup, Mojo Vision, showed off a very early prototype in meetings at CES last week and is now ready to start talking about the product’s development.
Mojo Vision hopes to first create a smart contact lens that can assist people with low vision by displaying enhanced overlays of the world &mdas

Actor Chris Evans attends a screening of Marvel’s ‘Captain America: Civil War’ in 2016 | Photo by Ben Gabbe/FilmMagic With our politics increasingly polarized and democracy in retreat, worried Americans are responding in all manner of ways. Some, such as former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, have mounted a fight against voter suppression. Others, such as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, are lobbying social networks to change their products and policies to prom

Image: Apple via Apple Archive A new and completely unofficial archive of all things Apple is attempting to make almost 44 years of the company’s official videos, ads, and imagery available to browse online. 9to5Mac reports that The Apple Archive currently contains just under 1TB of data, comprising over 15,000 files, and it includes everything from print ads, to TV spots, WWDC sessions, internal training videos, and even a collection of macOS and iOS wallpapers.The whole collection is we

Photo by Sam Mooy/Getty Images YouTube has been recommending and serving ads against videos that feature denial of or misinformation about climate change, according to a new report. The identified videos had 21.1 million views between them and might be suggested to users after a search for “climate change,” “global warming,” or the conspiracy theory “climate manipulation.”
The study, from the nonprofit activist group Avaaz, found ads from 108 brands running o

Overhead of the Pioneer DJ DVM-V10 mixer. | Image: Pioneer DJ Pioneer DJ has announced a new professional gig mixer for gear-heads that want more control over how mixes and tracks sound while performing. Called the DVM-V10, it sports six channels (in comparison to the usual four), dual headphone inputs to seamlessly play back-to-back with other DJs, and the ability to EQ the master output.
The release confirms circulating rumors about the mixer, which have been repeatedly popping up on Facebook

Joby Aviation, a California-based aerospace company that has been working on electric aircraft for over a decade, just closed its latest round of financing with $590 million in venture capital funding — and a major new partner.
Toyota will work with Joby to design and build a fleet of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft for use in a ride-hailing service. The Japanese auto giant was part of a previous Joby funding round that closed in 2018, helping the secretive startup raise $100

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, Google shared an updated timeline for when Chrome apps will stop working on all platforms. June 2022 is when they’ll be gone for good, but it depends on which platform you’re on (via 9to5Google). Previously, we knew that Chrome apps someday wouldn’t work on Windows, macOS, and Linux, but today, Google revealed that Chrome apps will eventually stop working on Chrome OS, too.
A Chrome app is a web-based app that you can install in C

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images President Donald Trump has been impeached, and his trial in the US Senate is expected to begin in earnest on January 21st. Don’t expect to see any Senators tweeting @ Trump from the proceedings, though — because they’ll have to leave their phones at the door.
Tablets and laptops can’t come along for the ride, either: according to an official sheet of “Decorum Guidelines” for Trump’s impeachment obtained by CNN, the