Technology news

Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge Google is working on another communications application, this one for workplaces, that will combine several different platforms it already operates, according to a new report from The Information. This new product is designed to unify different Google services the company sells to businesses, including parts of its G Suite like corporate-grade Gmail and Google Drive.It would also bundle together the various, somewhat confusing variants of Hangouts. Once a con

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge Barely over a year ago, we pointed out how dystopian it seemed when Chinese schools added “smart uniforms” to track their students’ attendance. But US colleges are already testing out a similar tactic with a location tracking app, which students are now apparently expected to install on their phones.
I say “apparently” because there’s some confusion over whether the schools are actually forcing this on their students. The Kansas

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple reported its first quarter results for fiscal year 2020 this afternoon, offering an important look into the company’s holiday sales quarter and momentum of Apple’s various services. The company posted earnings of $4.99 per share and revenue of $91.8 billion. Both outperformed analyst expectations, which were $4.54 earnings per share and revenue of around $88.43 billion. “We are thrilled to report Apple’s highest quarterly

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A popular Iranian ride-sharing app that was kicked off the App Store appeared to return this week under a new name, despite American sanctions.Iran has faced years of sanctions from the United States, most recently after the country responded to the killing of General Qasem Soleimani by firing missiles on military bases in Iraq that housed US troops.In 2017, after a round of US sanctions were placed against the country, Apple removed several Iranian apps

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 map created by US researchers. So far, there have been more than 4,600 confirmed cases and more than 100 deaths. The majority of the illnesses are in China, but cases have been reported in 17 other countries, including the US. No deaths

The social media accounts of several NFL teams and one belonging to the NFL were hacked, the NFL said in a statement today. Nearly half of the teams in the league had their Twitter accounts hacked on Sunday and Monday, and the hacker group OurMine has taken responsibility for the hacks, according to the BBC. Over the past hour, OurMine has apparently hacked Twitter accounts owned by ESPN and UFC, and may not be finished yet.
Many of the hacked tweets promoted OurMine, announcing that the hacking

It took a few years, but the end of Kentucky Route Zero is finally here. Today sees the launch of Act V of the haunting, surreal adventure game, closing out a protracted saga for both players of the game and the characters in its world. KRZ originally debuted in 2011 as a Kickstarter project, and its first act launched in 2013. The plan was to release subsequent acts — for a total of five — every few months. But the scope of the game proved a bit larger than that schedule. Ultimately

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Nintendo has crossed over $1 billion in revenue from its mobile games for Android and iOS according to a new report from SensorTower — largely carried by the popular free-to-play Fire Emblem Heroes, which was released in 2017. It has since gone on to earn $656 million, more than every other Nintendo mobile game combined.
Fire Emblem Heroes is a “gacha” game, where players spend in-game items to randomly pull new characters with diffe

The mother of “Success Kid” Sammy Griner has sent a cease-and-desist notice to to Rep. Steve King, who she called a “vile man” for using the viral image of the toddler with a clenched fist as part of fundraising efforts. Laney Griner is threatening to sue the Iowa Republican for copyright infringement. But copyright law around viral memes is a gray area that still has not seen its day in court.
“Representative King and his campaign staff appropriated ‘Success

Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The head of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department, Charles Lieber, was charged Tuesday with making false statements about his involvement with China’s program to recruit foreign researchers. Lieber’s contract with the program, Thousand Talents, afforded him a monthly salary of up to $50,000 and annual living expenses of more than $150,000 over three years, according to an affidavit supporting the criminal

Image: SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, which manufactures key products for countless tech companies including Apple, says it will not be adjusting any manufacturing timelines or closing its factories due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. The company, which is based in Taiwan and operates numerous factories in mainland China, said in a statement that it is monitoring the situation, but it’s not expecting it to affect any of its “manufacturing obli

Photo by Daniel Slim / AFP via Getty Images United Airlines is suspending some flights to and from China because of a “significant decline in demand” brought on by the emerging coronavirus outbreak, the company announced on Tuesday. Flights between major US hubs and Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong will be suspended between February 1st and February 8th, CNBC reports.United offers more flights to and from China than any other US airline. It provides about 12 flights per day between

When it premiered in 2014, it was one of Netflix’s earliest, best shows — and it would have failed in 2020.
BoJack Horseman, one of Netflix’s longest-running shows, comes to an end this Friday. But it’s unclear if BoJack Horseman would have succeeded if it was ordered today. It’s a show that needed time to breathe, and that’s a luxury most shows don’t get on Netflix anymore.
BoJack Horseman feels like the end of an era for Netflix, one that produced long

Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu via Getty Images As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread, the Chinese government and health officials around the world are counting on an intangible factor to help them contain the virus: trust.“I think of it as the ‘because I said so’ theory of governance,’ says Rob Blair, assistant professor of political science and international and public affairs at Brown University. To prevent the spread of disease, governments ask people to comply with pub

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google plans to add a live transcription feature to its Google Translate app for Android at some point in the future. The feature will allow users to record audio in one language and have it rendered in another in real time. It’s still in the prototype stage, but Google gave a demonstration of the technology during a series of artificial intelligence demos at its San Francisco office on Tuesday.The feature will likely require an internet connection

Facebook expects its long-simmering oversight board to begin hearing cases this summer, with board members to be announced “in the coming months.” The announcement came on Tuesday, as the company released a set of recommended bylaws for the body and gave new details about how it will be structured.According to Facebook governance director Brent Harris, the board selection process has focused on representing the full diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints found on Facebook and Instag

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple today released iOS 13.3.1, and the new update contains two important fixes. First, it eliminates a Communication Limits workaround that allowed younger iPhone users to add contacts without first having to enter a Screen Time passcode. That’ll come as a relief to parents.For the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, you’ll also now find a new toggle to disable location tracking by the U1 Ultra Wideband chip. Apple ran into

Image: Scroll A new subscription service called Scroll is offering ad-free access to hundreds of websites — not by blocking the ads, but by working with an expanding group of publishers to take the ads down in exchange for a slice of the subscription fee.
Scroll launches today with support for a number of major websites and networks, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, G/O Media (which includes websites like Gizmodo and Kotaku), and Vox Media, which — important disclosure here &m

The social media accounts of several NFL teams and one belonging to the NFL were hacked, the NFL said in a statement today. Nearly half of the teams in the league had their Twitter accounts hacked on Sunday and Monday, and the hacker group OurMine has taken responsibility for the hacks, according to the BBC.
Many of the hacked tweets promoted OurMine, announcing that the hacking collective is “back” and that “everything is hackable.” NFL reporter Dov Kleiman collected man

Anna Kooris / Sundance Institute Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
In 2015, a little-known Twitter user named Aziah King posted the first words of a 148-tweet saga: “Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this here bitch fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.”
The tale that followed — a stripper road trip

Photo by David McNew / Getty Images The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expanding its enhanced health screening to 20 airports as part of its efforts to identify people with the new coronavirus who are traveling into the United States, the agency said in a press conference today.For the past week, the agency has been actively checking travelers from Wuhan for symptoms at five airports: San Francisco International Airport, John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Los Ange

Former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has revealed his perspective of being on the Windows team when Apple unveiled the iPad 10 years ago this week. Microsoft tried to make tablet PCs a thing with Windows XP, but the company didn’t get the timing, hardware, and software right in order to succeed. So when Apple unveiled its iPad in 2010, it surprised many people inside Microsoft.
Sinofsky admits that the iPad was “as much a challenge as magical,” especially as Microsoft had been

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
While the IPO cycle reprices former unicorns and concern imbues the private market with profit warnings, it turns out that there is still appetite for scooter startups. Even more, there’s hunger for both combinations in the space (not a surprise), and for scooter startup shares (which may be).
As TechCrunch reported yesterday, Bird, an American scooter startup worth severa

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google announced today that two new games are coming to Stadia Pro, the subscription plan that lets customers of its Stadia cloud gaming service play a small selection of titles for one flat monthly fee.
Metro Exodus and Gylt will be available in the Stadia Pro library on February 1st. However, Samurai Shodown and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration will no longer be free to claim on January 31st, so you may want to add those to your Stadia P

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google announced today that two new games are coming to Stadia Pro, the subscription plan that lets customers of its Stadia cloud gaming service play a small selection of titles for one flat monthly fee.
Metro Exodus and Gylt will be available in the Stadia Pro library on February 1st. However, Samurai Shodown and Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration will no longer be free to claim on January 31st, so you may want to add those to your Stadia P

Image: Facebook Facebook’s Clear History tool is now available in all countries, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post today. It’s part of a new section in your settings called “Off-Facebook activity,” and it lets users see which third-parties have shared user interactions with the social network — even when they’re not using Facebook directly.Off-Facebook activity is the information that businesses and websites share with Facebook based on your intera

Image: WinFuture Rumors about Samsung’s next foldable, the vertically folding Galaxy Z Flip, have been swirling for weeks. But thanks to a new leak, the full details for the upcoming foldable phone have been revealed. WinFuture’s leak is the biggest yet for the upcoming device, with official renders from Samsung and a full spec sheet for the Galaxy Z Flip.As expected, the Z Flip will feature a 6.7-inch, 22:9 aspect ratio foldable OLED display with an FHD+ (2636 x 1080) resolution. U

Moment announces its first Variable ND filters for DSLR cameras and drones | Image: Moment Moment, a company that’s well-known for its smartphone and drone accessories, has announced a first: a lineup of filters for full-blown mirrorless and DSLR camera lenses.“We’ve shot with a lot of Variable ND filters. They were either too expensive or the quality wasn’t there,” reads a statement on the company’s website.“We’ve shot with a lot of Variable ND f

The Moto G8 (pictured) will have a hole-punch notch and a triple-camera array on its rear. | Image: Motorola / 91Mobiles Motorola’s upcoming Moto G8 and G8 Power have been detailed in a pair of leaks from XDA-Developers and 91Mobiles, and they reveal much of the unannounced phones’ specs and design. Both phones feature displays with hole-punch cutouts, a first for Motorola’s G-series lineup, and are powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 that Motorola used in last year&rs

Image: Nintendo / Game Freak The Pokémon Company is making it easier for players to keep all of their pokémon from every game in one place with a cloud storage service known as the Pokémon Home. The tool will launch in February.Details about how Home will work were released in a new blog post from the company today. Essentially, people can use their phones and mobile devices to store pokémon from the old Pokémon Bank and transfer them into Pokémon Switc

Nomad has released a new AirPods Pro case, and, like the company’s previous AirPod cases, it’s thoughtfully designed for something that’s effectively just a case that you put on top of another case.Like nearly all of Nomad’s cases, the AirPods Pro cases are plastic shells wrapped in leather (sourced from the Horween Leather Company), which feels slightly worse than if the entire thing were made of leather. It’s here where most cases would have called it a day, but N

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Some products are worth buying at full price, but Google’s Nest Hub smart display shouldn’t be one of them. This device launched for $129, but it’s not difficult to find one for around $70. Best Buy’s offer today takes the cake, though: you can get two of them for $100.
Considering that Google’s Nest Mini smart speaker usually costs around $50, getting a Nest Hub for the same price is an incredible value. It can handle all of the us

Super Cruise, the hands-free driver assistance system from General Motors, is getting a major upgrade. An enhanced version of the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) will be introduced starting on the 2021 Cadillac CT5 and CT4, followed by the all-new 2021 Escalade, the automaker announced on Tuesday. Among the improvements will be an automated lane-change functionality, which enables the hands-free system to change lanes when conditions are appropriate.
Launched in 2017, the Super Cruise d

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge When your Fitbit dies in the middle of a workout or fails to register an excellent night’s sleep, it can be a frustrating experience.Batteries deteriorate over time, which is an unfortunate fact of the tech-enthusiast lifestyle. But there are some settings you can change to squeeze as much juice out of your fitness tracker as possible. Here are some tricks to try.Switch to a simple watchface
A Fitbit’s watchface can impact its battery in a

These days, building and launching your own satellite means creating a sophisticated piece of technology — and then flinging it into space where you’ll never see it again. That means if anything breaks on the satellite, there’s not much you can do to fix it.
“Once you launch a mission, as soon as it leaves the pad, it’s never going to be touched again by human or robotic hands,” Jonathan Goff, president and CEO of Altius Space Machines, tells The Verge. &ldquo

These days, building and launching your own satellite means creating a sophisticated piece of technology — and then flinging it into space where you’ll never see it again. That means if anything breaks on the satellite, there’s not much you can do to fix it.
“Once you launch a mission, as soon as it leaves the pad, it’s never going to be touched again by human or robotic hands,” Jonathan Goff, president and CEO of Altius Space Machines, tells The Verge. &ldquo

These days, building and launching your own satellite means creating a sophisticated piece of technology — and then flinging it into space where you’ll never see it again. That means if anything breaks on the satellite, there’s not much you can do to fix it.
“Once you launch a mission, as soon as it leaves the pad, it’s never going to be touched again by human or robotic hands,” Jonathan Goff, president and CEO of Altius Space Machines, tells The Verge. &ldquo

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Almost two full years after they were released in March 2018, the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are starting to get updated to Android 10, with the update already rolling out to users in Germany and Xfinity Mobile customers in the US, according to SamMobile.The S9 lineup originally launched with Android Oreo, making this the third major Android version available for the two phones. (They were previously updated to Android Pie in late 2018 and early 2019.)As w

ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired Passage AI, a startup that helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform. The companies did not share terms of the deal.
With Passage AI,ServiceNowgets a bushel of AI talent, which in itself has value, but it also gets AI technology, which should fit in nicely with ServiceNow’s mission. For starters, the company’s chatbot

Image: Apple TV Plus According to its Apple TV Plus webpage, Little America is “an anthology of funny, romantic, heartfelt, inspiring, and surprising stories about the lives of immigrants in the United States.” Its first season, released this month on the streaming service, is a collection of eight half-hour stories about immigrants who are trying to make it in the US. It’s the best show Apple has produced so far, but it’s also the most misguided.It almost hurts, conside

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg I’ve been revisiting the Microsoft Surface Pro X ever since the Chromium version of Edge became official — though what I’ve been using is the still-in-Beta version of the browser that runs natively on the Pro X’s ARM chip. My opinion hasn’t changed since November’s review: it’s still an overpriced machine that is nice to look at but frustrating to use because there aren’t enough apps that run natively on its chip.

Musician Neil Young and tech executive Phil Baker have been trying to push the tech industry to make it easier for consumers to listen to high-quality audio for almost a decade now. The duo’s hi-res music player Pono aimed to fix problems they said plagued MP3 players like the iPod and music software like iTunes — including compressed, lossy, and low-fidelity audio files that were not similar enough to their original recordings.But five years after the Pono was released, Young believ

The Galaxy S20 Ultra (left) and S20 Plus (right) | Image: Evan Blass (@evleaks) / Twitter Samsung is expected to announce the Galaxy S20 — the successor to last year’s Galaxy S10, and the company’s next flagship — at its upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event on February 11th.Per the rumors, Samsung will have three new flagship phones this year in the US (internationally, it’s a bit of a different story): the Galaxy S20, the Galaxy S20 Plus, and the Galaxy S20 Ultra. There