Technology news

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Sonos CEO Patrick Spence just published a statement on the company’s website to try to clear up an announcement made earlier this week: on Tuesday, Sonos announced that it will cease delivering software updates and new features to its oldest products in May. The company said those devices should continue functioning properly in the near term, but it wasn’t enough to prevent an uproar of complaints and anger from longtime customers. That frustration

Arguably the most important characters in Splatoon 2 are Pearl and Marina, a pair of aquatic DJs who host the show that airs each time you boot up the game. Outside of a few rare events, you don’t really get to see them perform, though. That’s what makes this new video from Nintendo so cool. It features the two virtual performers on a real stage with real musicians for close to an hour of wonderfully incomprehensible music.
The concert actually took place last October, at an event ca

Time to break out your best pink outfits because Mean Girls — the popular 2004 Tina Fey cult comedy film, which is based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes and has since become a Broadway stage musical — is now being turned back into a movie. This time, it’s adapting the musical, which, again, is already based on an existing movie. In other words, Mean Girls is pulling a Street Fighter: The Movie (the video game). You can thank Variety for bringing us

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you use a PC, Xbox, or other Microsoft device, chatting with Cortana can be an easy way to get things done while your hands are occupied.But as with all voice assistants, beware of corporate snooping. In August, Motherboard discovered that Microsoft contractors listen to recordings of Cortana voice commands, sometimes from personal computers and browsers with little security.Cortana recordings are now transcribed in “secure facilities,” acc

Image: 王奔宏 via Weibo We first heard last month that Samsung’s rumored new foldable, possibly called the Galaxy Z Flip, will apparently fold clamshell-style similar to Motorola’s upcoming Razr and might have a glass screen. Today, leaker Max Weinbach of XDA Developers shared a few more rumors about that glass screen on Twitter.According to Weinbach, the phone’s OLED screen will use a type of glass that Samsung may call “Samsung Ultra Thin Glass.&

Contrary to popular opinion, Valentine's Day doesn't have to be just for your significant other. That's right, it's totally OK to give a gift to a loved one whom you're not currently dating (and never will) — because doing a nice thing for someone is... well, nice. 
That doesn't make shopping for them easier, though. Getting a good gift for the guy in your life is a tough task nonetheless, especially with every brand under the sun practically screaming at you to buy their stuff. 

Image: Pysonix Today, Epic Games-owned Psyonix announced that it will stop supporting Rocket League on macOS and Linux starting in March. Psyonix says it will release a final patch on both platforms that month that will turn off online features, which means you won’t be able to play online multiplayer anymore. You’ll still be able to play matches with your friends sitting in front of your computer, though.
According to a support document, here is what will still work after the patch

Meet Jean-Luc Picard, space dad. He was, for 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and four theatrical films, the captain of the starship Enterprise; an inherently trustworthy father figure who pushed everyone around him to be more noble, understanding, and empathetic. Eighteen years after his last appearance in the movie Star Trek: Nemesis, Picard is back in Star Trek: Picard — a CBS All Access show that plays surprisingly well for people who have not seen a moment of Star Trek a

Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Last week, the House Antitrust Subcommittee held a unique hearing where executives from Sonos, Tile, Basecamp, and PopSockets laid out the challenges of working and competing with big tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. It felt like a turning point in the conversation about big tech platforms and the power they have over competition, something PopSockets CEO David Barnett called “bullying with a smile.”“Help u

Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images Home DNA-testing company 23andMe is laying off 100 employees, which is around 14 percent of its workforce. The layoffs primarily affect the operations team, according to a CNBC report that was published on Thursday.The downsizing reflects a shrinking market for DNA kits. Illumina, which makes genetic-sequencing technologies and counts 23andMe among its customers, reported that sales were down across the industry in an earnings call last summer. Genome

Uber’s self-driving cars will soon be jockeying for space on the streets of Washington, DC, with the ride-hailing company announcing it will begin collecting data to support the development of its fleet of autonomous vehicles. The vehicles will not be operating in autonomous mode, though. They will instead be operated by human drivers to start out, collecting mapping data and capturing driving scenarios which Uber’s engineers will then reproduce in simulation.
That said, the company

Photo by Getty Images The World Health Organization (WHO) said today that it’s too early to declare an international public health emergency in response to the rapid spread of a new coronavirus from China. The virus is in the same viral family as SARS, which circulated throughout the world in 2002 and 2003. There are currently over 500 confirmed cases in five countries of the virus, which causes fever and respiratory distress, and 17 confirmed deaths, according to data cited during the pr

Photo by Arif Hudaverdi Yaman/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images This week, The Guardian posted a huge story reporting that Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’ phone in May 2018 after he received a message from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A report published by the security forensics firm FTI Consulting concluded with “medium to high confidence” that was the case.
If you want to read the report yourself, you can do so right here, thanks to Vice, which obtain

Image: Swiss Post A Switzerland drone delivery service run by the Swiss Post is set to resume on January 27th, following a suspension of the program in August 2019 after two drone crashes, including one where the drone’s parachute failed to deploy.
In that time, Swiss Post and Matternet — the US company that operates the drone fleet — set up an “independent board of experienced aviation specialists” to review the companies’ safety procedures and operations an

Image: Google Every year, Google launches a game or puzzle that people can play to eventually learn the dates for the company’s annual I/O conference, and this year’s game is now live (via 9to5Google).
It’s a space-themed game where users have to work collaboratively to restore an intergalactic satellite network. When you first visit the game’s site, you’ll see the “map” of the galaxy I’ve included at the top of this post as well as a message abou

Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for WIRED Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram and a longtime Facebook employee, became a target of an anonymous online attacker who called in a fake hostage situation at his San Francisco home last November. The phone calls eventually led a SWAT team to Mosseri’s door, according to a new report in The New York Times that was published on Thursday.The practice, known as swatting, has long been a particularly extreme form of online attack, and in some s

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok has signed a deal with the digital rights agency Merlin that will give the platform access to a huge selection of independent music. Effective immediately, the agreement includes licensed music from tens of thousands of indie record labels worldwide.TikTok, home to parody videos, memes, lip syncing, and more through clips that last for only a matter of seconds, has steadily grown in popularity over the last few years. Music is a crucial part of the

Photo by VIVEK PRAKASH/AFP via Getty Images Public health experts around the globe are scrambling to understand, track, and contain a new virus that appeared in Wuhan, China at the start of December.You can see where and how many cases have been reported in this real-time map created by US researchers. So far, there have been over 550 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. The majority of the illnesses are in Wuhan, but cases have been reported in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Macau, Hong Kong,

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’re a Comcast cable subscriber, get ready to pay more. The company said on Thursday that rate “adjustments” are planned for 2020, as cable customers continue to shed their bundled cable / internet packages in favor of streaming channels.
The company’s cable division continued to lose subscribers at a faster rate than expected in the fourth quarter, even though those losses slowed somewhat from a year ago. But the company is s

Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service is incredibly easy to set up, but this easy setup process means that your account is open to abuse if you’re not careful. Thankfully, it’s fairly simple to enable an extra layer of security on your account, which means that you won’t lose it if your six-digit activation code gets compromised.These security options unfortunately won’t stop you from a serious hack such as the one that hit Amazon

Humanity is now 100 seconds away from the apocalypse, according to the Doomsday Clock, which was updated today. That’s 20 metaphorical seconds closer to the moment humans destroy the planet, at least according to a group of scientists who keep track of the many ways humanity might bring about its own end.it’s the closest humans have been to the end of days
This is the closest humans have been to the end of days — aka midnight — according to the nonprofit Bulletin of the A

Image: Alienware Alienware’s previous-generation m17 gaming laptop is usually $1,999.99, but it’s steeply discounted right now from Dell. This 17-inch model houses Intel’s 9th Gen i7 processor (the hexa-core 9750H with a base clock speed of 2.6GHz and a maximum clock speed of 4.5GHz) and Nvidia’s midrange RTX 2060 graphics chip. It also comes with 16GB of DDR4 RAM installed and a fast 512GB PCIe M.2 SSD. One note about the RAM: you can add more if you’d like, unlik

Photo by Antoine Gyori/Corbis via Getty Images France and the United States have reached a truce on a debate over a controversial French “digital tax” that was set to hit some of America’s biggest tech companies.This year, France passed a law requiring large digital service companies to pay a 3 percent tax on total annual revenue generated by providing services to French users. The US immediately pushed back on the plan, saying the tax was aimed squarely at major American tech

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google’s search engine for datasets, the cunningly named Dataset Search, is now out of beta, with new tools to better filter searches and access to almost 25 million datasets.Dataset Search launched in September 2018, with Google hoping to slowly unify the fragmented world of online, open-access data. Although many institutions like universities, governments, and labs publish data online, it’s often difficult to find using traditional search.

Waymo is hitting the open road and bringing some of its self-driving minivans and long-haul trucks to two new states. The Alphabet subsidiary said in a tweet on Thursday that it would deploy a portion of its fleet in Texas and New Mexico as it seeks to learn about new road conditions and environments. It also feeds into Waymo’s ultimate quest to gain a toehold in more markets for the eventual launch of a commercial business.Waymo didn’t specify in which cities it will start testing i

On Wednesday night, a fire broke out at Firefly Aerospace in Austin, Texas, while the company tested out the main engines on its newly developed Alpha rocket. The fire prompted a brief evacuation of people living within a one-mile radius of the test as well as road closures, but Firefly ultimately suppressed the flames, and no one was hurt. The company says its rocket and test stand are intact.
Firefly Aerospace is the resurrected version of Firefly Space Systems, a small satellite launch compan

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re an iPhone user who is steadfast about retaining your privacy, you’re probably not very happy about the recent news that Apple is retaining the ability to decrypt most of what’s in an iCloud backup at the request of government entities, such as the FBI.
In that case, you may want to pay attention to the adage that sometimes the best ways are the old ways. While it’s more convenient to use iCloud to back up your phone,

Just days after EA announced that its mobile Tetris games will shut down on April 21st, new Tetris developer N3twork released an officially licensed version of the popular puzzle game for both Android and iOS. It’s already available to download today for free.
The new N3twork app isn’t the 100-player Tetris Royale app that the developer is also working on; rather, it’s an extremely basic mobile Tetris game. “We’re launching Tetris with a traditional solo gameplay mo

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Boston Dynamics, the creator of the internet’s favorite robot dog, is announcing a new CEO and developer conference as it begins selling its robots more widely.Marc Raibert, who founded the company in 1992 and served as CEO until late last year, is taking on the role of chairman, while Rob Playter, the former chief operating officer, is moving to CEO.Advanced robots like Spot are moving into new industries and rolesRaibert, a veteran engineer, has been t

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple is launching a partnership program for gyms today called “Apple Watch Connected” that’s meant to highlight chains that integrate with its wearable and offer perks for owners. In some cases, perks include discounted membership fees and gift cards for people who regularly work out, according to CNBC.
For a gym to get the Apple Watch Connected branding, it’ll have to offer three things:An app for iPhones and Apple Watches that offers

Bad Boys For Life pulls off one of the most unlikely tricks in blockbuster moviemaking: It’s the rare good third entry in a franchise, a successful soft reboot that introduces a small squad of new faces to carry the Bad Boys name into the future. It does all this while also coming nearly 20 years after the last film in the series and being the Hollywood debut of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, a Belgian directing duo known for gritty crime dramas on a much lower budget.
Over a phone call j

Adobe Adobe is previewing a new feature for Premiere Pro called Productions that’ll help teams work together on projects. Announced today at the Sundance Film Festival, the new panel was designed with filmmakers in mind, and was created with input from the production teams behind Terminator: Dark Fate and Dolemite is My Name. Adobe says a special build of the feature is also currently being used in editorial on David Fincher’s Mank.
Productions is essentially a new panel that acts a

The blurring of ads and search results. | Screenshot by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Last week, Google began rolling out a new look for its search results on desktop, which blurs the line between organic search results and the ads that sit above them. In what appears to be something of a purposeful dark pattern, the only thing differentiating ads and search results is a small black-and-white “Ad” icon next to the former. It’s been formatted to resemble the new favicons that now a

Tinder Tinder is launching new safety features today, including a photo verification system that’ll place a blue check mark on daters’ profiles, a partnership with the safety app Noonlight to give daters an easy way to call emergency services, and a feature that flags potentially offensive messages.The photo verification system requires daters to take a selfie in real time that matches a pose shown by a model in a sample image. Those photos are then sent to Tinder’s community

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Welcome back to Processor, a mostly daily newsletter mostly about computers, by which I mostly mean the consumer electronics industry at large. I’m Dieter and if you already know all of the above, thanks for sticking around. If you’re new, welcome!
I’m going to leave the analysis of the truly bonkers story of Jeff Bezos’ phone hack to Casey Newton’s newsletter, The Interface. Go subscribe now. He’s drafting it as I

Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Bay Area! I’ll be talking with Anna Wiener about Uncanny Valley, her brilliant new memoir of a life in tech, on February 4th at Manny’s in San Francisco. It’s our second-ever Interface Live event, and it would mean the world to me if you came to say hello and talk tech and democracy with us. Get your tickets here!
Some days, when you write a column about the latest interactions between big tech platforms and the government, you try to make a

For as long as I can remember, money has burned a hole in my pocket the moment I cross the threshold of a clothes shop. As a teenager, I would pore over catalogues and fashion magazines, dreaming of the day my shopping budget would exceed my meagre pocket money allowance.
Since then, my relationship with fashion since has been beset with ups and downs. A fruitless day trying on clothes that didn't fit my body would send me into a spiral of self-loathing. But, one good run of outfits would make m