Technology news

Image: Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution is releasing 2.8 million high-res images from its massive collection into the public domain, putting them online for anyone to use and download for free. The open-access online platform will include 2D and 3D images from its 19 museums, nine research centers, archives, libraries, and the National Zoo, Smithsonian Magazine reports.“Being a relevant source for people who are learning around the world is key to our mission,” Ef

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Valve is adding new features to its Steam storefront’s search system, letting users filter out games they already own, set a maximum price, and avoid seeing VR-only games if they don’t have a virtual reality headset. The updates are part of its ongoing Steam Labs experiments, and they’re a small but potentially positive tweak to the gaming storefront.
As Valve explains in a blog post, the new options are supposed to winnow down results a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system was one of the probable causes of a fatal 2018 crash into a concrete barrier. In addition, the safety board said the driver was playing a mobile game while using Autopilot before the crash, and investigators also determined he was overly confident in Autopilot’s capabilities.The safety board arrived at those probable causes after a nearly two-

Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic Disney CEO Bob Iger will be replaced by Disney Parks, Experiences and Products chairman Bob Chapek as CEO effective immediately. Iger will stay on as executive chairman through the end of 2021.Chapek’s current role is described by the company as overseeing “the global hub where Disney’s stories, characters and franchises come to life.” Chapek assumed leadership of the new job in March 2018. Chapek was one of the leading candidates to repla

AirBands | Kickstarter If you have a habit of misplacing your AirPods, this new Kickstarter campaign might have the answer: stick them on your Apple Watch band.
The AirBand is a new silicon band for the Apple Watch that doubles as a holder for your AirPods, with two loops located below the Apple Watch screen. It’s supposed to work with both the AirPods and the AirPods Pro.
The design and concept sound silly. When using it, your AirPods are just dangling there out in the open for everyone

Photo by Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images Amazon is warning third-party sellers on its Marketplace platform against exorbitant price hikes to face masks amid the coronavirus outbreak that continues to expand across the globe, Wired reports.The company demands Marketplace sellers abide by its Fair Pricing Policy, a rule set to protect against “pricing practices that harm customer trust” that dictates that you may not set “a price on a product or service that is significantly hig

Being taken for a ride by scammers isn't fun, but getting money from the government is.
The FTC announced its latest refund program for scam victims on Tuesday. Anyone who got swindled by an outfit best known as Click4Support should get a check from the government as part of a $1.7 million settlement. The refunds will average about $30 and go out to a little less than 58,000 people.
Click4Support's scam operation was devious, but not especially complicated. The original FTC lawsuit from 2015 acc

When it comes to securing the vote, officials keep pushing for the latest and supposedly greatest in election technology. According to cryptography experts at the annual RSA conference in San Francisco, that approach might just do more harm than good. 
In fact, one warned, when it comes to elections, depending on technology can be "dangerous." Thankfully, ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we already have a good (if not perfect) toolset to secure the vote — we just have to

Better Call Saul was always going to be a show about a man dying in slow motion. At the start of the series, Saul Goodman — best known as Walter White’s huckster lawyer in Breaking Bad — goes by another name, the one given to him at birth. Jimmy McGill is a different, more earnest person than Saul Goodman, someone who does not exist in Breaking Bad. Unlike Walter White, we know exactly what’s going to happen to Jimmy, and Better Call Saul is a better show for it.In the sh

Photo by Brennan King, animation by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge It’s already been a few years since Instagram allowed you to post multiple photos simultaneously in a single post. This small change enabled a lot of creative options. One of my favorites is creating seamless panoramas by simply slicing your photo in two — like this one.If you want to take advantage of this neat little hack, here’s a quick, simple tutorial on how you can pull it off.Before you start, you’ll nee

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Waging battle in the ongoing streaming wars means spending a lot of money to gain even a slight edge over the competition, sometimes even on services and products most everyday TV watchers have never heard of. For instance, Comcast announced on Tuesday that it’s acquired Xumo, an over-the-top streaming service with a paid and ad-supported free tier for both live and on-demand programming.
Where did this company come from, why is it at all valuable,

Photo by Matt Dunham - WPA Pool/Getty Images The internet is a place where everyone meets everyone else. It is the site of a billion different micro- and macro-cultures; it is a space where you can find out anything you want, provided humans have come up with it; it is a weirdly temporary repository of our species’s history, which will end when the server lights finally wink off.In historical terms, it’s also very new. The World Wide Web debuted to the general public in August 1991,

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Tesla ignored safety recommendations made by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) about its Autopilot driver assistance system, the board’s chairman Robert Sumwalt said on Tuesday.The NTSB recommended in 2017 that Tesla and five other automakers working on advanced driver assistance systems should add safeguards that make it harder to misuse those systems. The board also recommended that automakers should place limits on where and whe

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images This morning, President Trump seems to have wished a vaccine for the new coronavirusinto existence. “I think that whole situation will start working out,” he told reporters at a press conference in India. “We’re very close to a vaccine.”
At a Senate hearing that same day, Trump’s acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf took a similar line, promising a vaccine would be ready within “several months.”
&ldq

Netflix isn’t hiding its ambitions to push further into the world of interactive storytelling, and a trailer for its Carmen Sandiego Choose Your Own Adventure-style special teases what’s to come.In Carmen Sandiego: To Steal or Not to Steal, the iconic spy is tasked with doing the Villains International League of Evil’s (V.I.L.E.) bidding after they capture professional thief Zack and his sister Ivy during a heist. If Carmen Sandiego doesn’t succeed, Zack and Ivy will have

Photo by Nick Otto for the Washington Post A San Diego judge issued a preliminary injunction last week saying that Instacart is likely misclassifying its California-based shoppers by calling them independent contractors, reports NBC News. It’s an important milestone following the signing of Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that makes it more difficult for companies to define workers as contractors as a way to avoid providing health insurance and other workplace benefits.Instacart s

Photo by Nick Otto for the Washington Post A San Diego judge ruled last week that Instacart has been misclassifying its California-based shoppers by calling them independent contractors, reports NBC News. It’s an important milestone following the signing of Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), a California law that makes it more difficult for companies to define workers as contractors as a way to avoid providing health insurance and other workplace benefits.Instacart says it will appeal the decision. &

A whole new generation is about to fall in love with The Office thanks to a delightful new children's book.
The Office: A Day at Dunder Mifflin Elementary, written by Robb Pearlman and gorgeously illustrated by Melanie Demmer, follows a young, suit-clad Michael Scott on his journey to become the "World's Best Line Leader."
He and his fellow students in Ms. Levinson's class (yes, as in Jan) spend the day brainstorming in a meeting, planning and attending a party, and working together to make the

This year Mashable is celebrating the season of love with Horny on Main, an exploration of the many ways that thirsting for sex affects our lives.It started as so many stories do: with a bag of Fleshlights in the office.
It was around lunchtime, and they sat out in the hallway by the elevator closest to my desk. As people came in and out, they caught sight of the bag and did a spectacular double take while exclaiming, “Shit, did you see that bag of Fleshlights?”
And, dear reader, eve

The same city that converted a used Tesla Model S into a police car is shuttling its city employees to work in self-driving cars.
China-based Pony.ai launched a self-driving car pilot program in Fremont, California, on Tuesday. If that city sounds familiar, it's where Tesla built its very first factory. One of Fremont's police cars is actually a Model S. 
Now the city's employees can snag a driverless ride to and from the city's Amtrak and train station to city hall and other city offices.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Juul has applied for a patent regarding a device, supposedly powered by artificial intelligence, that the company says could help users quit nicotine by restricting daily consumption and gradually weaning them off the product. The e-cigarette company applied for the patent last summer, and the application was recently made public, according to The Logic.The patent application describes a device that would work “in communication” with a vaporiz

The CBD industry is booming, but how much of it actually works? 
From CBD bath bombs to CBD lattes to CBD-infused workout gear, the questionable wellness trend is everywhere. Unlike THC, the molecule in cannabis that induces the "high" feeling weed is known for, CBD is being studied for its impact on sleep, anxiety, and inflammation without THC's psychoactive effects.
Because of interest in its to-be-determined powers, CBD is marketed as a cure-all. Consumer products, like CBD shots added t

Silicon Valley air purifier startup Molekulewas born out of an idea Dr. Yogi Goswami had back in the ’90s using photo-voltaic technology to kill air pollutants. His son, a young boy at the time, suffered from severe allergies and Dr. Goswami wanted to build something those like him could use in their home to clear the air. But the sleekly designed Molekule took a bit of a blow last fall when Wirecutter called it “the worst air purifier we’ve ever tested.”
Molekule has sin

There’s no questioning the benefits of Twitter. It’s a convenient way to get your memes, world news, and pop culture hot takes all in one place.But being an active Twitter user requires sifting through a daily deluge of toxic characters, including white supremacists, bots, deepfakes, the president of the United States, and more. Plus, there’s no denying the stress and anxiety that the fast pace of Twitter’s news cycle, and the strain of constantly debating reply guys, can

Back in the heady days of 2016, when VR hype was at its peak amid hardware launches from Oculus, HTC, and Sony, it felt entirely natural for the killer app to be the transformative PlayStation VR conversion of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez. Here was a cult classic that just so happened to be about delving into the very depths of technology itself, with graphics perfectly suited to the high-contrast, low-resolution panels of early VR headsets, and propulsive game design that didn’t have to

Qualcomm Qualcomm has revealed a reference design for its new virtual and augmented reality platform. The headset offers a rough guide for building with the Snapdragon XR2 — a 5G-enabled chipset designed for VR/AR hardware.
The design is a prototype from electronics company Goertek, which has worked with Qualcomm before. It looks a lot like Qualcomm’s earlier XR1 reference design, as the company’s VR/AR (or collectively, “XR”) head Hugo Swart admitted to reporters.

Two cubs, each weighing about as much as a can of tomato soup, became the first cheetahs to be born through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to a surrogate mom. They came into the world on Wednesday, February 19th, 2020, at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, the zoo announced on February 24th.IVF has been difficult to achieve in big cats. Three tiger cubs born in 1990 were the last reported success, according to the Columbus Zoo. The cheetahs’ births are a hopeful sign that IVF could help the spec

In one very creepy corner of Reddit, a war over content theft is raging.
On Monday morning, r/NoSleep – a fiction-based, first-person horror subreddit with almost 14 million subscribers – went private for a week. At the time of writing, anyone visiting the sub is greeted by the following message.
NoSleep has gone private in support of its authors.
Image:reddit
It's no exaggeration to say that a huge number of people will be affected by this closure.
According to the tracking tool Red

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is preparing for the possibility that the new coronavirus will spread through the United States — and it’s using its guidelines for pandemic influenza as a starting point. The new coronavirus isn’t influenza, so the recommendations probably won’t match what may happen during a coronavirus outbreak. But they’re a useful starting place for US public health agencies.“Because we have done a lot of planning aroun

Let's cut right to the chase, here: Amazon is having a gigantic sale on all sorts of PC gaming gear, but only 'til midnight tonight (Feb. 25). 
If you act fast, you can score savings of up to 31% on devices and accessories from brands like HP, Acer, Asus, and HyperX. Whether you desperately need a new laptop, want to upgrade your crappy old monitor, or feel like dabbling in streaming, this is one of those can't-miss, shouldn't-miss, seriously-don't-sleep-on-this-or-else sort of promotions t

Anyone who watched '90s horror classic Candyman knows that the one thing you don't do is say Candyman's name five times. Unless, of course, you want to summon a vengeful, hook-handed ghost who wants to kill you. 
With the sequel to Candyman coming out this year, producer and screenwriter Jordan Peele asked Twitter to tempt fate by tweeting #Candyman five times in one post to reveal a sneak peek of the soon-to-be-released trailer.I dare you to say his name
Click below to tweet #Candyman 5 ti