Technology news

The White House is pushing to dedicate an additional billion dollars to fund artificial intelligence research, effectively doubling the budget for that purpose outside of Defense Department spending, Reuters reported today, citing people briefed on the plan. Investment in quantum computing would also receive a major boost.
The 2021 budget proposal would reportedly increase AI R&D funding to nearly $2 billion, and quantum to about $860 million, over the next two years.
The U.S. is engaged in

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge More than 41 million videos of child sexual abuse were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2019, partly because the videos have become easier for technology platforms like Facebook and Snapchat to detect, The New York Times reports.Just five years ago, the number of videos reported was less than 350,000. A record-breaking 70 million total images and videos were reported to the center last year; many of them were reported

SoftBank,the technology conglomerate that transformed the venture capital industry and made waves in the technology world with its $100 billion Vision Fund, may not be able to repeat the performance or sustain its revolutionary approach to tech investing, The Wall Street Journal reports.
According to the Journal, SoftBank may only be able to raise half of the $108 billion target it had set for its sequel to the Vision Fund — with most of that money coming from the Japanese company itself.

I expected to hate this video — it recreates a key Back to the Future scene, replacing the iconic DeLorean with a Tesla Cybertruck. Then I watched it. It’s actually sort of cute and really well done.A team from Toronto-based Fort York VFX created the 52-second video, which reimagines the scene where Doc Brown first tests the time machine he has built. In the original, of course, Doc uses a DeLorean — but instead, we see Elon Musk’s blocky truck as the vehicle that will wh

Photo credit should read ANDER GILLENEA/AFP via Getty Images Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines are banning passengers from their cruise ships who hold passports from China, Hong Kong, or Macao “until further notice” because of the coronavirus outbreak, the companies announced Friday. Norwegian tells The Verge it is also banning crew members who hold any of those passports.
In addition, Royal Caribbean says it won’t allow any guest or crew member on board one of its sh

Feature China/Barcroft Media via Getty Images The tech sector is currently feeling the impact of the coronavirus, with companies closing offices, stores, and factories in China as well as restricting employees from nonessential travels to the country. The closures, which were initially expected to last through the Lunar New Year holiday week in late January, have now extended to February 10th, though it is still unclear whether most companies will be back up and running by Monday.
Multitudes of

B Capital Group, formed in 2015 by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Raj Ganguly, formerly of Bain Capital, has been quietly building its business since closing its first fund with $360 million in capital commitments, anchored by the management consulting giant Boston Consulting Group.
Already the firm, which is investing out of its second $410 million fund, employs 50 people, and we hear a much bigger fund could be coming. Among its newest additions is a general partner, Rashmi Gopinath,

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge For a brief, blissful period of time, Twitter was in the midst of an outage for its most basic function: sending your thoughts into the ether via tweeting. On DownDetector, the service showed a spike in problems over the last hour or so. Tweets sent bounced right back; retweets are also limited.
But there’s still a secret way to tweet: we discovered that scheduling tweets lets you successfully get your message out there. (You may need to use Twitter

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is in the midst of an outage for its most basic function: sending your thoughts into the ether via tweeting. On DownDetector, the service is showing a spike in problems over the last hour or so. Tweets sent bounce right back; it appears that retweets are also limited.
But there’s still a secret way to tweet: we discovered that scheduling tweets lets you successfully get your message out there. It’s unclear what the cause is, but a Twit

Video games are a hard thing to love. The medium rarely translates well outside of its own little island — think of all the bad video game adaptations we’ve seen, or how “video game” is usually used as a shorthand for “shallow” when used to describe stories in other media. Games culture does not advocate for itself terribly well. So it’s natural, then, to cringe when you hear of a show like Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, an Apple TV comedy about a

A photo of women supposedly using giggle, as seen on the company website A new social app called Giggle is pitching itself as a girls-only networking platform. To sign up, users have to take a selfie. And while that might not sound too invasive, the app then uses “bio-metric gender verification software” to determine whether that person is a woman. If that wasn’t already bad enough, the technology doesn’t work if you’re trans.
“[G]iggle is for all girls,&rdqu

Four senators, including Ted Cruz(R-TX), have asserted that, as a consequence of sanctions placed on Iran, Twittermust cease providing its services to Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders in the country. “The Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights,” he wrote in a letter to the company.
Although the move comes as relations between Iran and the U.S. grow ever more strained following a series of violent incidents connected with the country, it is also an

Fredrick Lee ContributorShare on Twitter Fredrick “Flee” Lee is chief information security officer at Gusto, the people platform for 100,000 small businesses nationwide. He previously led security at Square after holding senior security roles at Bank of America, Twilio and NetSuite.When the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) rolled out on January 1st, many companies were still scrambling to become compliant with the data privacy regulation, which is estimated to cost businesses $

With Casper’spublic offering earlier this week, we’ve closed the book on the first two venture-backed IPOs of note in 2020. Casper, joined by One Medical, carried over $870 million of private capital, venture and otherwise, across the finish line.
Even though each IPO featured an unprofitable tech-enabled business that had posted sub-30% growth and gross margins under 50% (far more, in the case of One Medical),they wound up miles apart in terms of their market reception and resulting

Photo by STR / AFP via Getty Images Countries around the world are actively searching for cases of the new coronavirus in an effort to stop its spread around the world. But if they can’t contain the virus, public health officials may need to start fighting a different battle. Right now, countries are relying on measures like quarantine and isolation and hoping that they’re enough to beat back the outbreak. If those don’t succeed, the virus might transition from being the cause

The Reuters news company and an AI startup named Synthesia today unveiled a new project they’ve partnered on that uses Deepfakes-style technology to generate automated news reports in real time. Designed as a proof-of-concept, the system takes real-time scoring data from football matches and generates news reports complete with photographs and a script. Synthesia and Reuters then use a neural network similar to Deepfakes and prerecorded footage of a real news anchor to turn the scrip

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images A new video promoted by President Trump is testing the altered media limits put in place at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, offering a provocatively edited version of an incident at the end of the recent State of the Union.
At the close of Tuesday night’s State of the Union, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly tore up her copy of the president’s speech as a symbolic rebuke. The action has incensed Republicans who see it as disrespectful to t

A French regulator today revealed it’d fined Apple €25 million (just over $27 million) over its throttling of older iPhones. Since Apple didn’t warn customers, the ruling goes, it essentially lied by omission to get users to buy new devices. The fine comes from the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Prevention (DGCCRF), a competition and fraud watchdog. It accused the company specifically of failing to warn users that iOS versions 10.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Microsoft is releasing Edge version 80 today, and the most significant addition is ARM64 support for devices like the Surface Pro X. We’ve been waiting for a native ARM64 version of Edge or Chrome for the Surface Pro X, and our initial review of Microsoft’s tablet showed how it struggled with browsers running in software emulation. We’ve been testing the ARM64 version of Edge since November, and it has had a big impact on improving the Surface

Photo by Ramin Talaie/Corbis via Getty Images New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order yesterday banning the sale of single-use plastic beverage bottles on city-owned and -leased properties — which means the bottles could vanish from an area nearly equivalent to a quarter of the city. The move also bars city agencies from purchasing or selling beverages packaged in single-use plastic containers.The move would eliminate at least 1 million single-use plastic beverage bot

Photo by Julia S / 5Seven Records The Oh Sees’ latest release is a 12-album box set in an unexpected format: 8-track tapes. It’s the culmination of a year-long effort by Seattle-based DIY label 5Seven Records, which restored vintage 8-track tapes and transformed them into albums from musician John Dwyer’s bands, variously known as Oh Sees, Thee Oh Sees, and OCS.
8-track tapes are a long-retired magnetic tape audio format that predates the cassette and was used as a more portab

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Wacom has responded to reports of its tablets collecting app usage data from its users and sharing it with Google Analytics, clarifying that the company does not have access to personal data. Earlier this week, software engineer Robert Heaton pointed out that Wacom’s privacy policy let the tablet collect “aggregate usage data, technical session information, and information about [his] hardware device” as well as recording the name of

Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP via Getty Images The spread of contagious diseases is an exceedingly complex phenomenon influenced by everything from the science behind a virus, the sociology that governs how it spreads, the pubic policy that dictates the medical and political response, and the transportation measures taken to blunt exposure.Oftentimes, it’s boiled down to a silly montage in a movie that makes it seem inevitable that a fast-moving illness can and will spread across the globe

Instagram might finally be allowing its stars — its IGTV stars, that is — to make money directly from their content. It’s internally testing a Partner Program that lets IGTV creators run ads on their videos. If it works on Facebook, then why not give it a try on Instagram? It’s better than nothing, which is basically what creators have had up to this point. Instagram is working on IGTV Ads to let influencers monetize their content by running short ads on their IGTV Video

Ernesto S. Ruscio/Getty Images / Netflix Since Netflix was founded almost 25 years ago, the company has removed nine titles from its service around the world in compliance with government requests, including Night of the Living Dead in Germany and Full Metal Jacket in Vietnam.Netflix laid out the nine takedowns it’s received from various companies relating to certain parts of its film and television catalog in a new environmental social governance report, first spotted by Axios. Netflix&r

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Yesterday was the official release date for the Motorola Razr on Verizon Wireless. Or was it? By the end of an entire day spent searching for this nostalgia-inducing phone, I was feeling pretty duped.The Razr is arriving not long after Samsung’s Galaxy Fold fiasco, so there are naturally going to be questions about how it’ll hold up over time. The Verge decided to try to buy one, and I traversed much of Manhattan and hit over a dozen Verizon stores

Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images It’s been a wild week with the Iowa caucuses mess, the State of the Union, and impeachment, but we’re closing it out with the last Democratic debate ahead of the New Hampshire primary. On Friday, seven familiar faces will take the stage at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, to make their cases to US voters for the eighth time.
How do I watch tonight’s Democratic debate?
ABC News, Apple News, and WMUR are all hosting toni

There are plenty of examples of AI models being fooled out there. From Google’s AI to detect images mistaking a turtle for a gun to Jigsaw’s AI to score toxic comments tricked to think a sentence is positive by including words like love. Now, researchers at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, have developed a new system called TextFooler that can trick AI models that use natural language processing (NLP) — like the ones used by Siri and A

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple’s new 16-inch MacBook Pro is up to $200 off at Best Buy for My Best Buy rewards members. Starting with the most affordable configuration at $2,249 (usually $2,399), it comes stocked with a six-core Intel Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, AMD’s Radeon Pro 5300M graphics chip, and a 512GB SSD. This model is available in silver or space gray.
If you deal with a more demanding workload, you might want to consider the upgraded configuration of the 16-inch

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge A French regulator has hit Apple with a €25 million fine over its controversial software update that slowed down older iPhones. The General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control’s announcement, which was first spotted by AppleInsider, notes that Apple has agreed to pay the fine and will display a press release on its website for one month. The fine is the result of a probe that began at the beginning of 2018.
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