Technology news

Photo: Stewart Volland / Blizzard Entertainment Last month, Blizzard announced that all of its scheduled Overwatch League games in China during February and March were canceled in the wake of the coronavirus. Now the publisher has revealed its plan to reschedule the games — and it involves moving them out of the country altogether.
According to Blizzard, all of the canceled matches — which were set to take place in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou — will now take place in a s

The International Astronomical Union has issued the preliminary results from a study on the potential effects of multi-thousand satellite constellations like that being built by StarLink. Finding that Earth-based astronomical observations may be “severely affected,” the body warned that mitigations and rules had better be formed sooner rather than later.
The group expressed its concerns last summer, but undertook a broader study and survey of possible effects, asking various observat

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The faculty at the University of Michigan’s computer science and engineering department wrote a letter calling for professor Jason Mars to take a leave of absence, following an investigation from The Verge into his behavior as CEO of Clinc, an AI startup with ties to the school.“On behalf of the entire CSE community, we vehemently condemn the alleged conduct, which violates not only the high standards to which we hold ourselves at Michigan but

Image: HQ HQ, which made the once-popular HQ Trivia app, is shutting down and laying off its 25 employees, according to CNN Business.
HQ CEO Rus Yusupov reportedly sent a note to employees announcing that HQ would cease operations. In the note, he said that there had been an offer “from an established business” to acquire HQ that had a closing date of tomorrow, but that the potential acquirer “suddenly changed their position.” You can read the full note below:
HQ CEO Rus

The price of .com domains could be about to go up and you can thank President Donald Trump.
Thanks to a new contract, Verisign can now jack up prices on .com domains — and companies could pass those higher costs onto consumers. 
First, here are the organizations you need to know about. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a not-for-profit corporation that has authority over the internet’s domain name system. The registry, Verisign, manages all .com

HQ Trivia is dead. Today the company laid off its full staff of 25 and will cease operation of its trivia, sports and word guessing games, a source close to the company confirmed.
HQ Trivia had a deal in the works to be acquired, but the buyer pulled out yesterday and investors aren’t willing to fund it any longer, CEO and co-founder Rus Yusupovsaid in a statement attained by CNN Business’ Kerry Flynn:“We received an offer from an established business to acquire HQ and continue

The gig economy of ride-sharing and grocery delivery has become notorious for exploiting and mistreating workers — and now, Motherboard has an inside look at one particularly bad example. A new piece digs into Target-owned grocery delivery company Shipt, examining all the extra work drivers feel pressured to do just to stay active and keep receiving work on the platform. It’s a thorough investigation of a company culture that seems based on fear and intimidation.Workers say Shipt cus

Launch startup Rocket Labhas been awarded a contract to launch a CubeSat on behalf of NASAfor the agency’s CAPSTONE experiment, with the ultimate aim of putting the CAPSTONE CubeSat into cislunar (in the region in between Earth and the Moon) orbit — the same orbit that NASA will eventually use for its Gateway Moon-orbiting space station. The launch is scheduled to take place in 2021.
The CAPSTONE launch will take place at Rocket Lab’s new Launch Complex 2 (LC-2) facility at Wal

Shares of VodafoneIdea fell by more than 23% on Friday after India’s apex court ordered the country’s second-largest telecom operator and Airtel, the third-largest telecom network, to arrange and pay billions of dollars in dues in a month.
In a strongly worded judgement, the Supreme Court rejected telecom networks’ application to defer paying historic $13 billion levies to the government. “This is pure contempt, 100% contempt,” Justice Arun Mishra told lawyers.
The

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple is widely expected to debut its first 5G iPhones this fall, powered by Qualcomm’s X55 modem — thanks to Apple and Qualcomm’s surprise settlement last year that saw the two companies resume business. But a new report from Fast Company indicates that Apple is looking to limit its reliance on Qualcomm, with the iPhone maker said to be exploring designing its own 5G antenna rather than relying on Qualcomm’s existing hardware.

Get ready to storm Area 51 all over again — Alienstock is coming back for round two. 
Hopefully, at least. 
The Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada announced "Rachel Alienstock 2020" on its website recently. Aside from dates announced — Sept. 10, 11, and 12 — there are no other details. The "clickable link" is only an email address. 
Image:screenshot via the little a'le'inn
SEE ALSO: 'Storm Area 51' was supposed to be a disaster. It was actually kind of beautiful.

In our Love App-tually series, Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating. It is cuffing season after all.
Leigh & Steve Greathouse met online in 1999 and hit it off immediately. While they were together, Leigh got diagnosed with stage 4 uterine cancer, but Steve stuck by her side until she recovered completely, and is with her to this day. Read more...More about Mashable Video, Online Dating, Valentine S Day, 90s Nostalgia, and Love App Tually

Photo by David Zorrakino/Europa Press via Getty Images Giant corporations, governments, and individuals are all making decisions that they hope will reduce the risk of spreading the new coronavirus — but not all of those tough calls are solely based on the latest health information. The factors that led people to enact two-week travel restrictions, or stock up on face masks, or cancel the Mobile World Congress are far more complex, and are based just as much on what scientists don’t

Just two weeks ago Facebook settled a lawsuit alleging violations of privacy laws in Illinois (for the considerable sum of $550 million). Now controversial startup Clearview AI, which has gleefully admitted to scraping and analyzing the data of millions, is the target of a new lawsuit citing similar violations.
Clearview made waves earlier this year with a business model seemingly predicated on wholesale abuse of public-facing data on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so on. If your face is visib

Narcos started as a show about Pablo Escobar, a real-life gangster who outdid even the most outrageous fictional ones. The show built a compelling two-season crime thriller around his astonishing life and death. But while Escobar died, Narcos — a hit that premiered in 2015, when Netflix was rapidly building its streaming empire — needed to go on. A third season followed another Colombian cartel. Then a spinoff, Narcos: Mexico, tracked a parallel cartel in Central America. The first s

Want to spice up the bedroom without paying for pills or awkward visits to a sex therapist? A new app called Lover lets you take a sexual personality quiz, explore carnal knowledge tutorials and discretely figure out which turn-ons you share with your partner. Built by board-certified sexual medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Britney Blair, Lover launches today on iOS with $5 million in seed funding from Tinder founder Sean Rad and other investors.
“It is strange that there are such taboos

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The film industry has the Oscars, and the music industry has the Grammys, so the podcast industry wants its own awards show. A group of industry leaders spanning networks, including from Spotify, NPR, Wondery, and Sony Music, announced today that they plan to launch a new awards show: the Golden Mics. The group has also formed the Podcast Academy, a membership-driven not-for-profit organization whose members will vote on Golden Mics winners. The group

Smartphones are becoming even more powerful gaming machines as time goes on, with the latest devices capable of pushing some incredible graphics on a pocket-sized device. But what if you’ve got an old or budget device that doesn’t have the huge amounts of processing power or RAM? Well, Google’s hoping the answer is GameSnacks — the latest project from its Area 120 incubator — a series of lightweight HTML5-based browser games that are meant to be easy to load and pla

Whether your favorite show is Friends, you’re in love with Wonder Woman, or simply want to binge South Park for a few weeks, the first commercial for HBO Max is a reminder that you can only do so in one spot.It’s a not so subtle reminder that AT&T’s WarnerMedia has spent the last 18 months spending billions of dollars on some of the most popular IP in entertainment to draw subscribers away from Netflix and Hulu, and over to HBO Max. The commercial opens with Friends, then B

SpaceXhas moved its Crew Dragon commercial astronaut spacecraft to Florida, the site from which it’ll launch in likely just two to three months if all goes to plan. The Crew Dragon capsule is now going to undergo final testing and checkouts in Florida before its departure from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where it’ll launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket, with NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley onboard.
Behnken and Hurley will be taking a trip to the International Space Station

In case you haven’t heard, VCs are loving on workplace software as of late, and productivity tools that help teams collaborate seem to be a particular frothy area of investment. A smattering of top VC firms and angels, including General Catalyst,First Round Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Biz Stone and Ellen Pao, are throwing their confidence behind a new productivity startup called Range.
The tool is focused around helping small teams collaborate, grow closer and track their work together. There

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An Australian court has ordered Google to identify an anonymous user who gave a negative review to a Melbourne dental surgeon, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. Dr. Matthew Kabbabe says a reviewer’s comment posted about three months ago urged others to “stay away” from his practice, which damaged his business.Under the judge’s ruling, Google has to turn over any identifying details including location metadata and IP

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The last chapter of the WeWork saga closed with our hero — its founder, Adam Neumann — being ousted from his company (with a payout of $1.7 billion) and loosed upon the world. Its next chapter opened with a question: is the business sustainable? The answer is still unclear. Employees across WeWork are organizing in the face of massive potential layoffs, as the company began to divest itself of its “non-core” business; they couldn&r

One of the internet’s most beloved webcomics is back in The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack’s 10th anniversary edition, featuring a new foreword from Michael Cera, undiscovered comics and sketches, and strips that have been reformatted to read like they would on a phone screen. Nicholas Gurewitch’s book — a gorgeous collection of every PBF comic published between 2004 and 2007 — is a warm, nostalgic look back at the “internet’s golden age.” The boo

“If I was running Clearbanc by myself, it probably would have gone off the cliff eight times at this point,” says Clearbanc co-founder Andrew D’Souza. 
“If I were running the company by myself, it would be half its size,” adds Michele Romanow, Clearbanc’s other co-founder.In addition to starting the $420 million-backed fintech company together, D’Souza and Romanow are in a relationship.
The two initially met at an event in San Francisco, and fo

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge The first thing you notice about Civilized Cycles’ first electric bike are those enormous, fully integrated panniers on the rear rack. They’re impossible to miss: massive, dual saddle bags encased in a seemingly tough carbon fiber shell. You could carry a whole load of groceries in those things, while also transporting a passenger (or two) on the padded rear rack. But this is not a cargo bike. It’s something else.One of the things that excit

Portrait of a Lady on Fire takes its name from a painting. You see it early on in the film, which is from Girlhood director Céline Sciamma. Marianne, an art instructor in 18th century France, keeps it in the studio where she teaches young women. When asked about its significance, the film flashes back years prior to a time when she found the inspiration to make the painting and fell in love. And for two hours, you do, too.There are endless reasons for this. The most readily apparent is th

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you were an early adopter of Google Stadia who purchased the Founder’s Edition in November 2019 and promptly activated your service, your complimentary three-month trial of Stadia Pro will soon come to an end. And depending on when your Buddy Pass was activated, that might be expiring soon, too.
Unless you want to start paying $10 per month to keep it going, you might want to cancel it instead. But here’s a question that might be runnin

Seed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would write the terms of the deal in a term sheet and then pass that document to their friends to flesh out the funds and eventually close the round. That universe of investors was small and (unfortunately) often cliquish, but everyone sort of knew each other and founders always knew at least who to star

Photo by Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images One of the biggest airlines in the world, Delta, has just committed to going carbon neutral. Its pledge — to cancel out all of the greenhouse gas emissions it produces — is one of the most ambitious climate commitments ever made by an airline.Delta will spend $1 billion over the next 10 years to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and invest in ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Starting next month, the airline wi

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
As I write to you, SaaS and cloud stocks are busy setting fresh all-time highs and as we’ve seen, venture interest in modern software companies is pushing more money into the sector. But despite it appearing to be an incredibly good time to raise equity funding, venture debt and revenue-based financing appear to be having a moment.
So why are more folks talking about

Teslahas priced its secondary common stock offering at $767, a 4.6% discount from Thursday’s share price close, according to a securities filing Friday.
Tesla said in the filing it will sell 2.65 million shares at that discounted price to raise more than $2 billion. Lead underwriters Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have the option to buy an additional 397,500 shares in the offering.
Tesla shares closed at $804 on Thursday. The share price opened lower Friday, jumped as high at $812.97 and

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is chatting with publishers about potentially paying to include their content in a news product, according to The Wall Street Journal. Most of the talks are with publishers outside the US, the paper says, including in France and Europe more broadly.
“We want to help people find quality journalism—it’s important to informed democracy and helps support a sustainable news industry,” Google said in a statement to the Journal. &l

Image: UPSTO / Amazon A newly published patent from Amazon has outlined a new method of launching objects into the air using a miles-long whip attached to a fleet of aerial craft. The patent, which was spotted by GeekWire, was filed back in March 2017 but only became public earlier this week. It muses that the method could offer an energy-efficient way of launching a payload, potentially sending it into low Earth orbit.
It’s a pretty wild idea. Amazon’s patent shows the whip attache