Technology news

Venus, one of three possible destinations for NASA’s next Discovery missions | NASA/JPL NASA just gave four teams $3 million each to bring their Solar System exploration dreams closer to reality. Two of the scientific teams have their sights set on Venus, one is focused on Jupiter’s highly volcanic moon Io, and the last is targeting Triton, a moon of Neptune.“These selected missions have the potential to transform our understanding of some of the solar system’s most acti

A former Waymo contractor was arrested after allegedly forcing one of the company’s self-driving cars to crash in Tempe last month, according to AZ Central. Police say 31-year-old Raymond Tang drove his Mazda recklessly around the Waymo vehicle, eventually swerving in front of the self-driving car and slamming his brakes, causing the Waymo vehicle to rear-end him.The collision was captured on video by the Waymo vehicle’s cameras and posted online by ABC15. A dark Mazda can be seen sw

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Tesla has restored the Autopilot driver assistance features it remotely disabled on a used Model S, just days after Jalopnik published a story about the customer’s ordeal.The owner, who Jalopnik simply referred to as Alec, confirmed to The Verge that the features are back after The Next Web spotted new Tesla Motors Club forum posts he wrote earlier this week. Alec said he was contacted by a Tesla customer experience rep who “apologized for

EA says that future games in the Need for Speed series will be developed by Criterion Games, while the series’s previous developer Ghost Games will be rebranded as a support studio to aid in various projects under the EA umbrella, according to GamesIndustry.biz.Criterion Games is best known for creating the Burnout series. However, the studio previously produced two games in the Need for Speed series — 2010’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and 2012’s Need for Speed: Most Wan

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Federal authorities arrested an Ohio man for operating a cryptocurrency laundering service that moved some $300 million in bitcoin via a “tumbling” operation. Larry Dean Harmon of Akron ran an operation called Helix, which partnered with now-defunct underground marketplace AlphaBay, known for illegal activity including drug deals, according to the Department of Justice. The feds shut down AlphaBay in 2017.According to an indictment, Harmon exc

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro is now available through the company’s refurbished store starting at $2,039. This model from late 2019 has an improved keyboard, lots of power, and what The Verge’s Dieter Bohn thinks are the “best speakers on a laptop.” It’s usually very expensive, starting at $2,399 for a new machine and moving up from there. But starting today (via MacRumors) you can decide between several refurbished models thro

Walmart’s experimental personal shopping service, Jetblack, is shutting down, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The service launched in 2018 and allowed customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn to shop at Walmart stores by texting the service. Then employees would receive and fulfill those orders.Jetblack, which was available for $50 per month, will continue to fulfill any outstanding orders through February 21st, according to a note on the company’s website. Customers w

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Deciding what video game to play next can be a daunting task, especially on a huge platform like Steam. But Valve is working to soothe those anxieties with a new Steam Labs experiment it’s dubbed Play Next, an interactive recommendation system that suggests new games to try.
Play Next uses machine learning — the same for Steam’s Interactive Recommender — to choose three games based on what you already own. If nothing strikes your f

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube TV already stopped accepting new signups through in-app subscriptions on the iPhone and iPad a while ago, and now YouTube has decided it’s had enough of splitting subscription revenues from its TV service with Apple. As noted by MacRumors, the company is emailing YouTube TV customers with a warning that it plans to phase out support for in-app payments altogether in March. After that, Apple device owners will have to subscribe to YouTube TV

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Justice Department indicted both Huawei and its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou for racketeering and conspiring to steal American trade secrets on Thursday. Meng was arrested in Canada in 2018, and is currently undergoing extradition proceedings that would move her to the US. This latest indictment adds 16 counts of conspiracy to the trade secrets and racketeering charges already levied against her.
In its press release, the DOJ accuses Huawei

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, has included more than a dozen companies that have reached $100 million ARR, along with a handful more that are close.
Today we’re adding Seismic, Thought

Photo: Apple Apple is reportedly planning to reopen its five Beijing stores on February 14th, albeit with limited hours, via Reuters. The stores will be the first to reopen in China since Apple closed all of its retail stores on February 1st due to concerns about the coronavirus.The company’s five Beijing stores — Sanlitun, Apple Mall China, Chaoyang Joy City, Wangfujing, and Xidan Joy City — are set to reopen on the 14th from 11AM to 6PM, instead of the usual 10AM to 10PM tim

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Oracle has filed its response in an upcoming Supreme Court copyright battle. The company accuses Google of stealing code from its Java language, claiming (as it has for many years) that Google “committed an egregious act of plagiarism” by building support for Java into Android without officially licensing the language. The two rivals will argue their case before the Supreme Court on March 24th.
Google v. Oracle is the latest iteration of an al

Pokémon Home is a new cloud-based storage service available as an app for Android and iOS phones and tablets, as well as the Nintendo Switch. One of its most alluring features is that it allows you to keep your pokédex handy wherever you might be — for a fee. Better yet, it allows you to form a unified pokédex, pulling in the pokémon you’ve caught in previous games so you can deploy them in, say, Pokémon Sword or Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pika

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Here’s a fun number to think about: in 2019, YouTube dominated 70 percent of the total time people spent on their phones watching the top five entertainment apps. It’s also the only one of those apps (measured among Android phones, which dominate 75 percent of phone usage worldwide) that isn’t specific to China — an area where Google doesn’t even operate.
The data from AppAnnie’s latest report shows just how far ahead Y

The long-awaited next Half-Life is coming very soon. Half-Life: Alyx, a VR spinoff that was revealed last year, will be launching on March 23rd. Valve previously said that the game would be available sometime in March.
Announced back in November, Alyx is the first new Half-Life in 13 years, and it’s exclusive to virtual reality platforms. Valve says that it will be a full-length title designed to be played for hours at a time. “Today, we generally see playtesters go for 2-3 hours bef

Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images Jerry Media, the promoter behind the botched Fyre Festival, is working with the presidential campaign of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in an effort to make the 77-year-old candidate look cool, The New York Times reports. The Meme 2020 project, led by Mick Purzycki, executive director of Jerry Media, has enlisted influencers with large followings to create content for the campaign and promote it to their audiences.
A Bloomberg campaign spokesper

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A judge has issued a temporary injunction against the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, preventing the contract from moving forward until a lawsuit from Amazon is resolved.Amazon has claimed that it lost out on the $10 billion contract because of Trump’s personal animosity toward Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Amazon argued that the process of granting the contract had &

New research from a team of MIT engineers has found an alarming string of vulnerabilitiesin a leading blockchain voting system called Voatz. After reverse-engineering Voatz’s Android app, the researchers concluded that an attacker who compromised a voter’s phone would able to observe, suppress, and alter votes nearly at will. Network attacks could also reveal where a given user was voting and potentially suppress votes in the process, the paper claims.
Most troubling, researchers say

Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images More than nine in ten Americans “are willing” to eat more fruits and vegetables, and more than half are open to giving up some red meat and chowing down on more plant-based meat alternatives, according to a new survey of more than a thousand adults in the US by Yale and the nonprofit Earth Day Network.
Why aren’t there more greens on Americans’ plates? Sixty-four percent of survey participants said it was as simple as nobody eve

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An Apple patent published today reveals an idea for a system that could automatically detect smart home devices and potentially configure them for the room they’re in (via Patently Apple).
As Apple points out in the patent, there are a lot of good smart home devices and technologies available now. But it can be very challenging to actually configure those devices to make a fully integrated smart home, due to factors like different types of wireless

Apple Watch users can now directly sync their workouts automatically to Strava without a third-party workaround thanks to a new HealthKit update released this week. In a note on the latest Strava for iOS update, the company says any activity that is recorded on the Apple Watch or an iPhone can now be imported right to Strava.
Previously, Strava users had to download a paid third-party app to sync their workout data. To enable the feature:Open the Strava app and select Settings.
Head to “Ap

Graphic by T.C.Sottek The first of 2020’s big copyright hearings started with a nod to Chumbawamba. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) had looked up which band topped the charts in 1998, the year Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — one of the most influential and controversial laws governing the internet. Then, Tillis paused soberly. “I don’t know if we’re talking a lot about Chumbawamba” these days, he said. And the DMCA itself? “Almost ever

Image: Massive Technologies AR and VR company Massive Technologies has just released an app called AR Pianist which superimposes virtual musicians on pianos to give you “piano concerts from the comfort of your living room.” The app was first teased last December, when a tweet went viral with a video that showed virtual pianists popping up on-screen as the camera scanned across several different pianos.
Here’s the thing: My one colleague, Nilay Patel, says AR Pianist is “

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Version 80 of Microsoft’s Edge browser, now based on the Chromium source code, launched on January 15th, and with it came an increased focus on privacy.
Edge includes tools to block both first-party cookies (used to keep you logged in or remember the items in your shopping cart) and third-party tracking cookies (used to keep track of your browsing activity). Below are instructions on how to change your settings, see what trackers are stored on your

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Samsung’s Galaxy S20 lineup innovates on many fronts. For most consumers, the S20 will be the first 5G device they ever lay their hands on, the first phones with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 865 processor, and the debut of Samsung’s much-hyped 108-megapixel sensor (at least on the S20 Ultra). But the most important feature the S20 lineup is going to introduce to most phone owners might be the one that isn’t actually that new at all: the

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is part of the Google Cloud Platform.
While Kurian was happy to announce that Lookerwas officially part of the Googlefamily, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue

Photo by STR / AFP via Getty Images Tesla has announced that it will sell $2 billion of common stock in a new public offering, just days after CEO Elon Musk said it wouldn’t “make sense” to raise more cash. The company says it plans to use the proceeds from the offering “to further strengthen its balance sheet, as well as for general corporate purposes.”Musk will buy up to $10 million worth of stock in the offering, while billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison &m

Photo by Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images “Invisible oil” escaped the view of satellites that were tasked with measuring the extent of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, according to a new study. In the Science Advances article, researchers argue that updated techniques need to be deployed alongside satellite measurements to track future oil spills below the water’s surface.
BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig spewed more than 200 million gallons into t

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, so time is nearly up for you to think of a nice gift for your significant other, spouse, or close friends. Spending time with them over dinner is always a good bet, but in case you want to buy them something, we’ve found a few last-minute gifts that should make them happy — at least, once the packages arrive in the mail.The Beats Studio 3 wireless noise-canceling headphones in shadow gray (new in box with

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A vast majority of Americans — 96 percent, according to Pew Research — own smartphones. But for that small minority who don’t, or for those who find a smartphone difficult to navigate, Uber is testing out a new way to hail a car: a 1-800 number.
This experiment may be new for Uber, but it’s probably pretty familiar to anyone who remembers calling a car service in the pre-Uber days. The number is only available to people who live in

Image: Microsoft Microsoft loves creating custom Xbox One designs, and this time, it has partnered with Nike to introduce a Jordan-themed console. The Xbox One X includes a custom red finish, with the iconic Jordan elephant print covering the top part of the console. There’s even a matching red controller with the Jumpman logo.
It’s all designed to match the new Air Jordan III Retro U sneaker, which will be released this weekend. Microsoft and Nike are unveiling this today, just as

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation into whether Tesla misled investors with its Model 3 production goals dating back to 2017, according to a new regulatory filing. But another new investigation may be taking its place.Tesla says in the filing that the SEC closed the probe on December 4th, 2019. The company also says that, on the same day, the SEC “issued a subpoena seeking informationconcerning certain financial data