Technology news

As social media platforms move to crack down on deepfakes and misinformation in the US elections, an Indian politician has used artificial intelligence techniques to make it look like he said things he didn’t say, Vice reports. In one version of a campaign video, Manoj Tiwari speaks in English; in the fabricated version, he “speaks” in the Hindi dialect of Haryanvi.
Political communications firm The Ideaz Factory told Vice it was working with Tiwari’s Bharatiya Janata Par

Photo by Ryan Manning / The Verge Bill Gates bought an electric car. But while he’s given Tesla credit for pushing other carmakers to go electric, it does seem notable that he didn’t buy from the company that pushed the innovation. He bought a Porsche Taycan.Someone alerted Elon Musk to this development, of course. And that got us a bitchy tweet from Musk: “My conversations with Gates have been underwhelming tbh.” It’s true that Musk likes beef; after all, he&rsquo

A new startup called Arize AI is building what it calls a real-time analytics platform for “observability” in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The company is led by CEO Jason Lopatecki, who has also served as chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer at TubeMogul, the video ad company acquired by Adobe. TubeMogul’s co-founder and former CEO Brett Wilson is an investor and board member.
While Arize AIis only coming out of stealth today, it has already rais

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to see all artificial intelligence better regulated, even at his own company, he tweeted Monday (via TechCrunch). He made the remark in response to a piece about OpenAI by MIT Technology Review, which claimed that the AI organization, co-founded by Musk, has shifted from its mission of developing and distributing AI safely and equitably into a secretive company obsessed with image and driven to constantly raise more money.All org

Tony Stark may have destroyed his Iron Man suits in Iron Man 3 (only to bring out a whole new line in Avengers: Age of Ultron), but Jetman Dubai’s Iron Man-like dreams of autonomous human flight are realer than ever.A new video published by the company shows pilot Vince Reffet using a jet-powered, carbon-fiber suit to launch off the ground and fly 6,000 feet in the air. The video, seen above, was taken in Dubai, heading south toward Jumeirah Beach Residence, according to the company. Jetma

More people are becoming video editors, but it’s increasingly happening inside of apps like TikTok and Instagram where creators and influencers can take advantage of the unique video editing tools and filters without going anywhere else. So how does traditional photo and video editing software like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere fit into this new wave of content creation?
Adobe’s chief product officer, Scott Belsky, sat down with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Verge reporter Dam

“I don’t feel good about that. That sucks,” Chrys Bader-Wechselerreflects when asked about the bullying that went down on the anonymous app Secret he co-founded in 2013. After $35 million raised, 15 million users and a spectacular flame out two years later, the startup was dead. “Since I left Secret I feel alive and aligned with my values and my purpose again.” 
But there was one bright side to Secretletting you post without a name or consequences. People opene

Jaguar Land Rover is the latest automaker to unveil an electric and “autonomy ready” shuttle pod designed for shared use in urban settings. “Project Vector” is just a concept, but the UK carmaker said it hopes to have some version of the vehicle on the road for testing by 2021.For now, the automaker is keeping most of its specs under wraps. The vehicle is four meters long, with a motor and battery pack built into a flat floor, but JLR won’t reveal the size of the ba

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google announced today that Stadia will work on some Android phones from Samsung, Asus, and Razer starting on February 20th. Up until this point, Stadia only worked on certain Pixel phones.
Here’s the full list of the 19 newly supported phones, which includes the Samsung Galaxy S20 line that’s releasing on March 6th:Samsung Galaxy S8
Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus
Samsung Galaxy S8 Active
Samsung Galaxy Note 8
Samsung Galaxy S9
Samsung Galaxy S9 P

Video editing startup InVideo has new funding and a new product.
The San Francisco-headquartered company bills itself as the easiest way for anyone to create professional-quality videos, using a drag-and-drop interface along with a library of templates and stock photos and videos. The resulting videos can then be optimized for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms.
InVideo’snew assistant does even more to help with the process. As demonstrated for me by co-founder and CEO Sanket

Photo by Jerod Harris / Getty Images Patreon, the site creators love because it helps them make money off their work, has started a program called Patreon Capital, which grants micro-loans to creators. It’s essentially a cash advance: you get money now in exchange for some of your future earnings plus a small premium. It’s different from Patreon’s usual business — which is enabling direct subscriptions to people whose work you like, then taking a cut off the top —

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After months of rumors and speculation, it looks like Apple will produce tens of millions of its ultra-wideband trackers (tentatively called AirTags or Apple Tags) by the end of the year, possibly by the third quarter, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts (via 9to5Mac).The existence of Apple Tags / AirTags was leaked by numerous outlets last year. Images showed a Bluetooth tracker similar to Tile devices that would use the same ultra-wideband radios as App

Kickstarter employees voted to unionize today with 46 people voting for the union and 37 against. The decision makes Kickstarter employees the first at a major tech company to unionize. The employees are represented by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), and the unit is made up of 85 engineers, directors, analysts, designers, coordinators, and customer support specialists.
“The tech sector represents a new frontier for union organizing, and OPEIU is excited t

Image: Federico Viticci Apple Music has tweaked the way it organizes different versions of the same album, as spotted by Federico Viticci of MacStories. Now, if you tap on an album in Apple Music, any alternate versions will appear below the tracklist in a section called “Other Versions.”
Viticci points out a few specific examples in a tweet. Tap on Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, for example, and two other versions of the album are available: Transatlanticism Demos an

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge An all-electric Porsche Taycan in Florida caught fire on Sunday, the company has confirmed to The Verge. It’s the first known case of a Taycan catching fire, and Porsche says the cause is unknown at this time. No one was hurt in the fire, though significant damage was apparently done to both the car and the garage.
Porsche would not specify where the fire took place in Florida, but it said that the car belonged to a customer and that it was informed

Apple’s Smart Battery case shown on the iPhone XS, XR, and XS Max. Today’s deal excludes the iPhone XR’s case | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge If you’ve been putting off buying a case for your iPhone 11 Pro, Pro Max, iPhone XS, or iPhone XS Max, Best Buy has knocked 50 percent off of a few of Apple’s leather cases, folio cases, and Smart Battery cases. Starting with the latest phones, you can currently find cases available for both the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max

In the wake of the $5.3 billion sale of banking API provider Plaid to Visa — a deal generally lauded as intelligent for the larger company — fintech became an even hotter part of the venture capital and startup landscape.
While companies in the broad fintechand finservices spaces were already attractive bets for private investors, Visa made them all the more attractive — a facet of the market that we presume has a great impact on startups that are working along similar lines to

SpaceX is planning to send up to four private citizens into space to take a trip around Earth sometime at the end of 2021 or in early 2022. The spaceflight company announced an agreement on Tuesday with Space Adventures, a space tourism business that has helped seven different private citizens take trips to (and from) the International Space Station aboard Russia’s Soyuz rocket and spacecraft.
There’s no word on how much the experience will cost, and the two companies were light on o

Photo by Dharma Sadasivan for The Verge German aviation startup Volocopter is teaming up with Grab, the predominant ride-hailing app in Southeast Asia, to launch an air taxi experiment. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding to “look into the most suitable cities and routes to deploy air taxis in Southeast Asian cities; evaluate the best use cases for air taxis; and explore the possibility of joint flight tests, among other things.”
Volocopter recently demonstrated i

Marshall Marshall has added active noise cancellation to its new Monitor II ANC headphones, a feature its other models have had for some time, but a first for the company’s over-the-ear model. An ANC button lets users switch between active noise canceling and “monitoring mode” or turn off active noise cancellation altogether.
The Monitor II also has made the upgrade to a USB-C charging port, and like other recent recent Marshall headphones, it offers built-in support for Googl

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Heading into the new year, it wasn’t known that the coronavirus, known as COVD-19, would shutter much of China, slowing its industrial output, its services industry and more. But heading into 2020, China’s venture capital world was already in steep decline. This morning we’re exploring the country’s Q4 2019 venture capital results and pulling in fresh dat

Image: Ring Amazon’s home security company Ring is changing the way users log into their accounts to increase security and control privacy, the company announced today. Starting this week, Ring will mandate a second layer of security by requiring users to enter a one-time six-digit code sent via email or SMS whenever they try and log in to see the state of their indoor and outdoor cameras. The company which makes the popular Ring Video Doorbell is also introducing new options for users to