Technology news

US Vice President Mike Pence yesterday gave a speech at NASA’s Langley research center in Virginia where he told employees that President Donald Trump was committed to putting humans back on the Moon by 2024 through “any means necessary.” We’re not sure exactly what that means. It was likely intended to be an inspirational quip indicating that the employees of NASA have the President‘s full support. But it feels a bit ominous coming from the administration that had

Image: Twitch Twitch debuted a new extension for the League of Legends community this week, allowing viewers to keep track of streamers by displaying details on their overall performance in matches and how they use their favorite champions. League of Legends is famously complicated to watch (and play), and this tool could help to make the gameplay clearer to new audiences.If a League of Legends streamer installs the tracker, it will give viewers an interactive panel displaying the match’s

March 2 is the planned launch date for SpaceX’s20th ISS resupply mission, which is bringing the usual supplies and goodies, plus a payload of interesting experiments from partners and paying customers. And a big expansion to Europe’s Columbus Module.
The most ridiculous has to be Adidas’s “BOOST in Space” effort. The company creates its midsoles by fusing together thousands of tiny foam spheres. But sadly, this is generally done on Earth, where there’s gravity

Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images Russia is already interfering in the 2020 campaign to help President Donald Trump toward reelection, according to a briefing given to the bipartisan House Intelligence Committee last week. The briefing, as reported in paired articles from The Washington Post and The New York Times, suggests many of the same tactics used in 2016 could be employed in the months to come, including troll campaigns and targeted hacking attempts.
The day after the briefing was giv

During the days when Snapchat’s popularity was booming, investors thought the company would become the anchor for a new Los Angeles technology scene.
Snapchat, they hoped, would spin-off entrepreneurs and angel investors who would reinvest in the local ecosystem and create new companies that would in turn foster more wealth, establishing LA as a hub for tech talent and venture dollars on par with New York and Boston.
In the ensuing years, Los Angeles and its entrepreneurial talent pool has

Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service from Jeffrey Katzenberg, is now open for pre-orders. The company declined to fully show off its app only a month ago during demos of its “TurnStyle” technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it appears the app is ready nonetheless. Quibi is listed on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play, where it’s been given a pre-order date of April 6, 2020 — the date Quibi’s new service goes live.
The app was ac

Amazon may have a market cap of more than $1 trillion, but Finbarr Taylor, CEO of Y Combinator-backed startup Shogun, said the e-commerce giant is “kind of dropping the ball.”
Specifically, he argued that the experience of shopping on Amazon — not what happens after you buy something, but browsing the website itself — is pretty bad, full of sponsored results and fake products.
“What we’re seeing happen is that all this vast wave of direct-to-consumer bran

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A leaked Twitter demo showed that the platform is considering labeling tweets from politicians and other public figures if the tweets have lies or misinformation in them, NBC News reports. “Harmfully misleading” tweets would have red or orange labels applied, and include corrected information from fact-checkers, journalists, and other users in “one possible iteration” of a Wikipedia-like anti-misinformation effort Twitter plans to

The new Windows 10 icons. Microsoft has started rolling out new colorful app icons in Windows 10 today that overhaul the look and feel of the operating system. Changes to many of the built-in Windows 10 app icons have started rolling out today, but more are coming in the months ahead. It’s part of what the company describes as a “multi-year effort across Microsoft’s design teams to redesign our icons.”
Windows has always suffered from a variety of different icons that ar

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nearly five years ago, reporter Alison Parker was murdered live on television. That video was clipped, published, and seen all across the internet over the years, including thousands of times on YouTube alone.On Thursday, Alison’s father Andy Parker filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Google, YouTube’s owner, alleging that the company’s handling of the content deceives consumers. Since Alison’s death, conspi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nearly five years ago, reporter Alison Parker was murdered live on television. That video was clipped, published, and seen all across the internet over the years, including thousands of times on YouTube alone.On Thursday, Alison’s father Andy Parker filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Google, YouTube’s owner, alleging that the company’s handling of the content deceives consumers. Since Alison’s death, conspi

“The Mandalorian” was a pretty good show. On that most people seem to agree. But while a successful live-action Star Wars TV series is important in its own right, the way this particular show was made represents a far greater change, perhaps the most important since the green screen. The cutting edge tech (literally) behind “The Mandalorian” creates a new standard and paradigm for media — and the audience will be none the wiser.
What is this magical new technology?

A new deepfake puts Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the pilot episode of the original Star Trek, “The Cage” — and I kind of love it. In this particular AI-powered face swap, Bezos plays a Talosian alien with a huge bald head, while Musk plays Captain Christopher Pike (who is the captain of the USS Enterprise before James T. Kirk).
Here’s a very short version of what’s going on in this scene, if you’re wondering: in this episode, the Talosian a

Eli Roth Director Eli Roth has signed onto a film adaptation of Gearbox’s Borderlands games, joining Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin and producers Avi and Ari Arad. Roth offered little detail about the project, which has been in the works since 2015. He celebrated the news by tweeting a picture of his face cropped onto one of Borderlands’ shirtless and heavily muscled “psycho” bandits.
In a press release quoted by Deadline, Roth said he looks forward to “bringing [his

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook will offer to pay some users for voice recordings that will be used to help improve its speech recognition technology, the company announced Thursday. The move comes after Facebook — as well as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft — was caught listening to and transcribing voice recordings to improve speech recognition systems without informing customers it was doing so.
Facebook will let you make voice recordings as part of a new pro

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has removed almost 600 “disruptive” Android apps from the Play Store and banned their developers in its latest effort to rein in mobile ad fraud, the company announced on Thursday. Google’s policy does not allow ads that display when an app is not in use or that trick users to click on ads by mistake.The company says it defines disruptive ads as “ads that are displayed to users in unexpected ways, including impairing or inte

One of the most impressive parts of The Mandalorian (other than Baby Yoda) was the production design, with the varied locations, sets, and effects despite the comparatively lower budget for television as opposed to a blockbuster film.As it turns out, that’s because most of it wasn’t real. Rather, more than half of the season was shot using Industrial Light & Magic’s new StageCraft technology, which uses giant 20-foot-tall LED video screens to create fully digital environmen

If you’ve been following cryptocurrency news for the past few months, there’s one word that keeps coming back — DeFi, also known as decentralized finance. As the name suggests, DeFi aims to bridge the gap between decentralized blockchains and financial services.
The original purpose of bitcoin hasn’t changed; it’s a crypto asset that lets users transfer money digitally without any bank in the middle. During the early days of bitcoin, people claimed that the blockcha

French cloud-hosting company Scaleway is updating its lineup of dedicated servers and giving it a new name. Dedicated servers might not be the hot new thing, but many customers still rely on dedicated servers for predictable performances and pricing.
Scalewayoriginally started as Online.net as the hosting and data center division of Iliad. Its original dedicated servers were an instant hit back in 2005. You could rent your own server for €30 per month, with 1GB of RAM, unlimited 100Mbps ban

A bold mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency(JAXA) to Mars’ two moons, including a lander component for one of them, is all set to enter the development phase after the plan was submitted to the Japanese government’s science ministry this week.
Dubbed the “Martian Moons Exploration” (MMX) mission, the goal is to launch the probe in 2024, using the new H-3 rocket being developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is expected to launch for the first time some

Scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar, Senegal, research the new coronavirus. | Photo by SEYLLOU/AFP via Getty Images A handful of countries in Africa are at a high risk of importing the new coronavirus because of the volume of air traffic between those countries and China, a new model shows. But some aren’t well-prepared to deal with infections if they arrive.
Right now, Africa only has one confirmed case of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, after a person in Eg

The first season of Westworld focused on the idea of artificial intelligence and humans co-mingling in one epic theme park. The second season saw those same artificially intelligent beings lead a revolution against their human counterparts. Now, a new trailer for Westworld’s third season, premiering on March 15th, pits AI against AI.In Westworld’s third season, Dolores has escaped from the Delos-owned park she called home — or perhaps prison is the more correct word choice. She

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Peloton for iOS app now supports Chromecast so you can stream your workouts from a larger screen. Previously, this feature was only available to Android users while the Peloton bike was only able to cast classes to a supported device via Miracast, which meant that iOS users were left out of the functionality entirely.
With the update, iOS users can now cast their classes to a screen that supports Chromecast or a TV with the Chromecast dongle plugg

Ryder Ripps Grimes’ new album, Miss Anthropocene, comes out this week. I’m excited! As such, she’s put out a bunch of photos, a new music video, announced a baby with Elon Musk, and, generally, has gone on a media hype blitz.
Of particular note to me, though, as a fan of glasses, is a photoshoot Grimes did with Ryder Ripps, an artist and Kanye West collaborator. In it, Grimes poses as her digital self, known as WarNymph, but also as her regular, human self. She’s wearing

An artist’s impression of Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration mission near Mars. | Image: JAXA Japan is moving ahead with plans to land a spacecraft on Phobos, one of Mars’ moons. If successful, the mission would mark the first time any country has touched down on the surface of the Martian moon and potentially the first round-trip mission to the Mars system.
Japan’s space agency, JAXA, announced today that the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) project had officially moved i

Since its major update last year, Vizio’s SmartCast TV platform has included most of the major streaming services you might need, including Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Vudu. But if you wanted to watch Disney+, you had to stream it from another device using Chromecast or AirPlay 2. Good news: Disney fans need cast no longer. Vizio has announced that it’s adding Disney+ to its smart TV platform.The update will come to all Vizio SmartCast TVs from 2016 and later. Note that you need to be

Photo by Ethan Miller / Getty Images The controversial sourcing of lithium-ion batteries briefly took center stage at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Wednesday night in a question directed at Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).“The tension here in this state is between people who want renewable energy and people who want conservation on public lands,” said moderator Jon Ralston. He pointed out that Warren had pledged to sign an executive order to stop drilling

Hector Balderas, attorney general of New Mexico, is suing Google for violating children’s privacy through its free Chromebook for schools program.| Photo By Brent Lewis/The Denver Post via Getty Images Google is facing a new lawsuit filed by the state of New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas on Thursday, alleging the company violates the privacy of students who use free Chromebooks provided to schools through the company’s G Suite for Education platform.
“Student safety

HBO is one of YouTube TV’s most notable absences, but a new agreement between Google and WarnerMedia will bring the prestige network to Google’s streaming TV subscription service.Customers who use YouTube TV can get linear and on-demand access to HBO and Cinemax this spring as add-ons, WarnerMedia announced today. It’s similar to how Showtime and NBA League Pass operate on YouTube TV. The new deal means customers can watch shows live or dig into HBO’s catalog to rewatch o

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An artificial intelligence tool Google provides to developers won’t add gender labels to images anymore, saying a person’s gender can’t be determined just by how they look in a photo, Business Insider reports.The company emailed developers today about the change to its widely used Cloud Vision API tool, which uses AI to analyze images and identify faces, landmarks, explicit content, and other recognizable features. Instead of using &ldqu

CD Projekt Red One of the most anticipated titles of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077, is coming to Nvidia’s cloud gaming service this year.
GeForce Now members who purchase CD Projekt Red’s upcoming title through Steam will be able to stream the game to Windows or Mac computers, Android devices, or Nvidia’s Shield TV streaming players starting September 17th, the same day it officially launches on console and PC, Nvidia confirms in a recent blog post. Nvidia further notes that GeForce No

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Buzzy EV startup Rivian has lost its first chief technology officer just nine months after he started the job. Mike Bell, a longtime Apple executive who helped start the iPhone project, left Rivian this month, the company confirmed to The Verge.
Rivian hired Bell in June 2019, as The Verge first reported last year. He previously spent five years as an executive at Intel, where he ran the company’s mobile division, and three years at Palm, where

DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider targeting smaller business and younger companies, announced today that it has secured $100 million in new debt from a group of investors, bringing its 2016-era debt raise to a total of around $300 million. The company’s nearly $200 million debt raise in 2016 was preceded by an $83 million Series B in 2015.
TechCrunch spoke with DigitalOcean’sCEO Yancey Spruill (hired in 2019, along with a new, IPO-experienced CFO; the company added a new