Technology news

Photo by NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP via Getty Images The Chinese government is tracking down people on social platforms like Twitter and WeChat who share what officials consider to be negative information about the coronavirus outbreak, Vice reports. The regulation of protest and dissent is not new in China, but people who have shared information about the virus that originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan describe relatively tame social media interactions that nonetheless resulted in both direct and

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge Apple’s Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR have been out in the world for a while now, but Apple is just now publishing its white papers for the two new devices, which go into far greater detail about the high-end hardware.The fact that Apple waited months to offer this information is odd, given that there are some important details about the two products, including caveats for third-party compatibility and explanations for some of the design and spec choices App

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Uber inked a deal to place ads on the roof of some of its vehicles, in a move that will likely generate some new revenue for the notorious cash-burning company and comparisons to Uber’s original adversary, the old-school taxi industry.Adweek is reporting that Uber struck a deal with out-of-home ad-tech company Adomni that will introduce ads to some of its vehicles in three cities starting April 1st. While Uber drivers could place ad displa

Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic Billionaire Warren Buffett is finally the proud owner of a smartphone. The 89-year-old business magnate, who just so happens to own 5.6 percent of Apple’s stock, told CNBC that he recently upgraded from his Samsung Haven flip phone to an iPhone 11.After using the flip phone as recently as 2019, Buffett notes that he has officially parted ways with it and is embracing smartphones, though he did not mention which model of the iPhone 11 he is using. “My f

Intuit has reached a deal to acquire Credit Karma, a company known for offering free credit score checks. The acquisition gives Intuit — which owns TurboTax, Quickbooks, and Mint — another set of consumer-oriented financial products. It also knocks out a potentially serious competitor: Credit Karma has been offering free tax filing services since 2017, possibly taking away customers from TurboTax.
That’s a serious consequence of this merger. Over the past year, Intuit has been

An artist’s illustration of NASA’s InSight lander. | Image: NASA NASA’s InSight lander has detected hundreds of “marsquakes” on Mars, including about 20 tremors that were relatively significant. Compared to quakes here on Earth, the marsquakes were pretty puny, but the new data could provide planetary scientists with more information about the interior of Mars.The initial results of the mission were published on Monday in the journals Nature Geoscience and Nature C

Netflix is trying to make it easier for subscribers to keep up with what people around the country are watching by introducing a Top 10 row to its homepage.A new blog post from the company published today notes that the Top 10 row will be updated every day with the most popular titles within a subscriber’s country, and the position of the row will also change depending on how relevant the shows and movies in the list are to their interests. Netflix also notes that subscribers can get an ev

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla’s Autopilot is about to be in the government’s spotlight once again. On February 25th in Washington, DC, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will present the findings of its nearly two-year probe into the fatal crash of Wei “Walter” Huang. Huang died on March 23rd, 2018, when his Tesla Model X hit the barrier between a left exit and the HOV lane on US-101, just outside of Mountain View, Californ

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Huawei will unveil its next flagship phones, the P40 and P40 Pro, on March 26th at an event in Paris, the company announced today (via Android Central). Unlike their impressive P-series predecessors, however, the P40s will not have access to Google’s various apps and services (including the Google Play Store) since the White House has banned US companies from doing business with the Chinese telecom giant. Huawei’s Mate 30 Pro launched under si

Last month, Blizzard announced plans to make Overwatch a bit more experimental through limited time modes that may — or may not — eventually become permanent fixtures of the hero shooter. Today sees the announcement of the first such “experimental card,” and it puts a major focus on the game’s damage-dealing characters.
It’s called “triple damage,” and it changes the default team composition to three damage characters, two supports, and one lone ta

The View 30 Pro will be Honor’s first 5G phone released outside of China. | Image: Honor Honor has announced that its first 5G phone, the Honor View 30 Pro, will be launching worldwide during a live stream earlier today. Powered by a Kirin 990 5G chipset, the phone has a 6.7-inch 1080p display with a hole-punch selfie camera and a 4,100mAh battery.Alongside it, Honor has announced that the pop-up selfie camera-equipped 9X Pro will be releasing in select European markets starting in March

Photo by Katie Falkenberg / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images More and more older adults are using some form of marijuana, according to new survey data, and their doctors aren’t prepared to talk with them about it.The percentage of adults over the age of 65 who said they’d used some form of cannabis in the past year was 75 percent higher in 2018 — when 4.2 percent said they’d used it — than it was in 2015, according to new data published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Purdue University Global will let some graduates join its 2020 commencement ceremony through virtual reality. Around 75 students will get a Google Cardboard-style VR viewer and watch the ceremony through a 360-degree camera feed alongside around 400 other students who will attend the ceremony in Los Angeles later this week.
The project was conceived with help from Purdue’s Research Computing Envision Center, which works on VR training simulations and similar projects. And it sounds more el

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple may release its very first ARM-based laptop without an Intel processor as soon as next year, according to reputable KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (via 9to5Mac). Kuo, who often correctly predicts Apple trends before they take shape, says the new Mac is coming sometime in the next 12 to 18 months and will feature an in-house processor not developed by Intel.Kuo made a similar prediction in 2018, shortly after a series of news reports published r

GIF: Waymo I saw a tweet today that jolted me out of my self-imposed cynical journalist mindset as it relates to self-driving cars.
It was a short video of two guys trying to catch up to a fully driverless Waymo vehicle in Chandler, a town outside Phoenix, Arizona. “There’s no one in this car!” one guy yells exuberantly, before urging his companion to drive “faster. I need to get to the front seat.” They accelerate and, lo and behold, there is indeed no one in this

Photo by John Lamparski / Getty Images for Advertising Week New York John Stankey, president and COO of AT&T, a mega-corporation forged from multiple big acquisitions, is worried about tech companies’ power. In an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Influencers with Andy Serwer, Stankey said he’s “really concerned about the concentration of economic power” in big tech companies and how they approach their “platforms’ influence on society.”Stankey&r

Photo by John Lamparski / Getty Images for Advertising Week New York John Stankey, president and COO of AT&T, a mega-corporation forged from multiple big acquisitions, is worried about tech companies’ power. In an interview with Yahoo Finance’s Influencers with Andy Serwer, Stankey said he’s “really concerned about the concentration of economic power” in big tech companies and how they approach their “platforms’ influence on society.”Stankey&r

Photo by Scott Olson / Getty Images Over the last couple of decades, the US technology industry has become one of the dominant global forces shaping the ways we connect with each other; it’s easy to think about how much different and perhaps atomized the world would be if Facebook, for example, didn’t exist. Less discussed, however, is the effect the rest of the world has on Silicon Valley.Today, the Medium technology publication OneZero published the results of a survey it conducte

A group of Japanese companies is developing a suitcase-shaped robot that uses AI to help visually-impaired people to travel independently. The small navigation robot will scan the user’s location and map data to identify the best route to their destination. It will then guide them there through voice and haptic technology that transmits vibrations transmitted through the suitcase handle. While they travel, the suitcase will analyze data from video cameras and distance sensors to

Image: Google Google Stadia’s cloud gaming service offers wide access to titles, but it still requires players to have access to a controller. Rather than using the traditional Stadia controller, however, Reddit user SmashShock created a workaround that enables touch gaming on an Android phone — no additional app required.
Android Central spotted the subreddit thread, which popped up over the weekend. TouchStadia adds a controller directly to your phone’s screen, essentially t

Questions about where Parasite would stream flooded Twitter after the movie won Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, and now people finally have an answer: Hulu.Hulu announced today that Parasite would be available to stream exclusively on its service beginning on April 8th. The streamer has an overall deal with studio Neon, which produced Parasite. Their partnership also landed Hulu streaming rights to I, Tonya, Three Identical Strangers, The Beach Bum, and Honeyland following thei

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The European Commission has told its staff to switch to the encrypted Signal messaging app in a move that’s designed to increase the security of its communications. Politico reports that, earlier this month, a message on the commission’s internal messaging boards notified employees about the change. “Signal has been selected as the recommended application for public instant messaging,” the message to the EU’s executive branch

Image: Wyze Wyze, best known for its inexpensive cameras and smart home gadgets (and an unfortunate server breach last year), is planning several new products for 2020, including the Wyze Band. Part fitness tracker, part smart home controller, the Wyze Band will have built-in Alexa capabilities, according to a blog post from the company. Dave Zatz gave some deeper insights on ZatzNotFunny with details gleaned from a Federal Communications Commission filing and a publicly available beta app (via

Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose calculations helped get the first Americans to space and back safely, died today at the age of 101. Among her many accomplishments, she completed the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s 1961 suborbital flight, which was the first time the US sent a human into space.Her work propelled many of America’s breakthroughs in space exploration
Johnson’s work over 33 years propelle

X-Box One S | Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge If you still use discs in your Xbox One, you might be happy to learn that the console will soon gain the ability to eject them from your controller (via VG247). According to the screenshot above, shared by an Xbox Insider tester who posted to the Xbox One subreddit, ejecting discs from the drive will be bound to the “X” button.
It’s okay to have a laugh about a console getting such an elementary function patched in so late into it

US treasury secretary Stephen Mnuchin warned G20 members of retaliatory tariffs should negotiations for a global tax on tech giants fail, Reuters reports. “We’ve been very consistent in saying we think the digital services tax is discriminatory in nature against digital companies, and specifically a handful of US companies,” Mnuchin told reporters attending a G20 meeting in Saudi Arabia on Sunday. “The president was clear that we were proceeding with […] reciproca

As we browse the internet each day, we consume hours of video content, share silly GIFs with friends, and send ridiculous selfies. It’s safe to say our brains are hardwired to love images – we are visual creatures after all! That’s what makes Vimeo, Giphy, and Snapchat some of the tech world’s most successful companies – and they’re all coming to our tech festival on June 18 and 19.  The speaker lineup is filling up nicely for TNW2020 – with m

Photo by Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images Six public health labs in the US plan to start monitoring the general population for the new coronavirus this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that the risk of the virus still remains low for the general population. But activating the disease surveillance network will allow the CDC and other public health officials to find any undetected virus circulating through the country.
“It’s important

Police in the UK are using AI to identify future criminals in a pilot of a system that the government wants to roll out nationwide. The system uses a machine learning algorithm to predict which low-level offenders on a database of 200,000 criminals are likely to commit “high harm” crimes in the future. Risk scoring is already used operationally to assess the probability of individuals reoffending. The new system “seeks to do so in a far more rigorous and reliable way,” r

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Transportation Security Administration told employees to stop posting to TikTok on Sunday, according to CBS News.The TSA’s announcement to ban employees from using TikTok came shortly after Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) penned a letter to its administrator, David Pekoske, requesting that the agency halt its use. According to The Hill, TSA employees have used TikTok to create and post videos explaining some of the agency’s boarding processes an

Photo: Suzanne Tenner / Showtime February 24th is a special day for Twin Peaks fans. It’s the day when protagonist Dale Cooper first entered the town of Twin Peaks, kicking off the cult classic TV series that saw a reboot in 2017. If you haven’t seen the show or the prequel film, or you are obsessed with the idea of owning physical copies of them, you can save a lot today.
For Twin Peaks fans who can’t get enough, the Twin Peaks: From Z to A collection is down to its lowest pr