Technology news

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Justice, the FBI, Macy’s, and Best Buy are among the thousands of government agencies and private companies using the software of facial recognition company Clearview AI, according to a leaked client list obtained exclusively by BuzzFeed News.
The controversial company’s database, which includes more than 3 billion images scraped from social media and other sites, is aimed at helping

Image: Hipster Whale The latest entry in Apple’s mobile game subscription service, Apple Arcade, is Crossy Road Castle, a brand-new endless runner-style game from developer Hipster Whale.The studio made its name creating the Frogger-inspired endless runner Crossy Road back in 2014, which has enjoyed a fair amount of success as both a mobile game and a smart TV one available on Apple’s tvOS platform. Now, Hipster Whale is back with not quite a sequel, but more a spinoff using the sam

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge More than 1.6TB worth of videos and images from OnlyFans has been leaked online. The data dump appears to be primarily comprised of women’s accounts, specifically those who use the site to share pornographic images.
OnlyFans claims it’s not due to a hack, though. Steve Pym, OnlyFans’ marketing chief, said on Twitter that the company has “found no evidence of any breach of our systems” and that the leaked files appear to “be cura

Google has launched a few tools to make it a lot easier to find the right GIF for your conversation.The tools work like this: search for a celebrity or fictional character in the drop-down box, and it displays the type of emotions or reactions that are most associated with them, or vice versa. So if you are searching for a GIF of Michael Scott, you will most likely find GIFs associated with happiness.
Another tool lets you search through various emotions to find the most popular celebrity or fic

Photo by LOGAN CYRUS/AFP via Getty Images The Pete Buttigieg campaign is deploying any army of Twitter volunteers to “digitally door-knock” likely supporters ahead of the important Super Tuesday primaries next week, two members of the Buttigieg campaign told The Verge. It’s just one way that 2020 presidential campaigns are leveraging social media in new and aggressive ways ahead of the primary contest.
As part of its efforts to get out the vote, the Buttigieg campaign has amas

Apple is planning to release a new iPad keyboard with a built-in trackpad later this year, according to The Information. The new accessory is likely going to release alongside the next version of the iPad Pro, said The Information’s source.
Adding a trackpad to an iPad keyboard would be yet another move from Apple to bring functionality typically associated with a laptop to the company’s popular tablet line. iPadOS already has mouse support, but it’s an extension of the iPad&rs

Wheels, a Los Angeles-based startup that rents electric bikes in over a dozen cities, is laying off 6 percent of its staff, The Verge has learned. The company is the latest micromobility firm to shed employees in the quest to find a profitable business model.Wheels was founded in early 2019 by Jonathan and Joshua Viner, brothers who also founded the popular dog-walking app Wag. Since its launch, Wheels has expanded to San Diego, Miami, Dallas, Austin, Scottsdale, Cleveland, Chicago, Tallahassee,

A quick hit as we have a podcast to record, but a few public companies in the broader SaaS market reported earnings in the past week. Their results are worth unpacking as they paint a good picture of what the markets are hunting for in modern software companies.
Of course, we’re covering the firms’ share-price movements in the context of an epic selloff stemming from global conditions that are already impacting earnings.
But, hey, not all the news out there is bad. In fact, for our t

Dyper’s diapers can be shipped back for composting | Dyper Dyper wants you to send in your poop — or more precisely, your baby’s poop. For those who subscribe to its diaper delivery service, Dyper will take back its compostable diapers once the baby’s done their business and handle the composting in its ReDyper program, a partnership with waste management company TerraCycle.
Subscribers get ReDyper hazmat shipping boxes and labels that go to TerraCycle, which sends them

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge YouTube TV is about to lose a decent chunk of sports programming. Today, customers of the streaming TV service received an email alerting them that Fox’s regional sports networks (RSNs) and the YES Network will no longer be available as of February 29th. YouTube TV and Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns all of the networks involved here, have been unable to reach a new carriage deal. Unfortunately, as is usually the case in these situations, t

Apple CEO Tim Cook said today that factories in China that manufacture the company’s products are reopening as “China is getting the coronavirus under control.” The comments came from a preview of an upcoming interview with Fox Business.
Here is a transcript of what Cook said in the snippet shared by Fox Business (Cook’s comments begin at 0:40):It feels to me that China is getting the coronavirus under control. I mean you look at the numbers, they’re coming down day

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Federal Communications Commission plans to fine four mobile phone carriers a total of $200 million for making consumers’ real-time location data available to third parties, Reuters reported Thursday. The companies will be able to challenge the amount of the fines, expected to be announced Friday, before they become final, Reuters reported.
The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
Motherboard reported last year

The first trailer for Amazon’s upcoming retro-futurstic sci-fi show Tales from the Loop has arrived, giving the first look at how Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s fantastical worlds have come to life.
The show is based on the art book by Stålenhag, which imagined an alternate version of our world filled with fantastical machines and creatures juxtaposed against a suburban countryside. Stålenhag’s paintings were set in a shared universe, where a massive particl

Photo by TED ALJIBE/AFP via Getty Images Fredrick Brennan, founder of widely loathed forum 8chan, reportedly faces arrest in the Phillippines over a “cyberlibel” claim. Brennan has become a strident critic of 8chan and its current operator Jim Watkins, whom Brennan transferred ownership to in 2015. Last year, Watkins struck back with a legal complaint, disputing a series of tweets where Brennan said he was “going senile.” Now, according to Philippine news site Rappler, t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One of the most thrown around terms within the YouTube community is “demonetization.” Now, YouTube is piloting a new program that will let creators sell ad space directly to brands they work with regularly.The pilot program is extremely limited and only works for deals between creators and brands that already have a relationship, Tom Leung, director of product management at YouTube, said in a video from January, spotted by Tubefilter today. Th

There was a time when virtually every phone had a removable battery – and then the iPhone was announced. As Apple’s trend-setting powers would have it, in 2020 there are virtually no high-end phones with removable batteries left. But if the EU has its way, those tides may soon be turning – Apple may have to make an iPhone with a removable battery for the first time. In leaked documents seen by Dutch publication Het Financieele Dagblad, the European Commission is show

Photo credit should read MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images LinkedIn is a website that’s effectively a mixture between an interactive resume and a college job fair, but that hasn’t stopped it from aspiring to be a cooler, more social part of the internet. Its latest attempt? Snapchat-style stories, which the company announced it was testing internally to try out “a new conversational format” for business conversations.According to Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s head of co

Facebook today announced the cancellation of its annual F8 developer conference due to fears over the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. The annual conference was scheduled to take place in San Jose, California on May 5-6. Facebook announced the cancellation in a blog post Thursday morning. The company’s platform partnerships director, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, wrote: This was a tough call to make — F8 is an incredibly important event for Facebook and it’s one of our favorite

The annual Game Developers Conference will be “moving forward as planned” in San Francisco next month, despite concerns over the international coronavirus outbreaks. A spokesperson told The Verge that “the California Department of Public Health, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and the San Francisco Travel Association continue to support the convening of public events.”
The new coronavirus has had an unexpected impact on the gaming industry, from delays to g

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tinder has renewed Swipe Night, its in-app Choose Your Own Adventure-style series, for a second season that’s expected to premiere this summer, as first reported by Variety. The first season debuted last October.
Swipe Night is a weekly series, with each episode about five minutes long. In each episode, you have to swipe to select different options about paths and choices presented to you, and those decisions are added to your profile in the hopes t

Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images The internet is so big. Yesterday I saw a javelina running in Tuscon, AZ, set to “Running Up That Hill”; today, I saw merch for SARS-CoV-2, the name for the virus that causes COVID-19 — what we’ve all been referring to, humorously or not, as “the coronavirus.” It’s really only possible to keep up with what’s going on online in your particular corner of the web, though I do think it’s fractal and that loca

Etsy this week revealed a new promoted advertising policy that essentially allows them to take a generous cut of sales, and sellers with successful stores won’t be able to opt out. The new measure will add yet another mandatory fee for sellers — if the advertising works, of course. According to Etsy’s announcement, it’s instituting a new Offsite Ads program, in which it’ll promote items on sites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Whenever a buyer clic

Earlier today, during an eye-popping market selloff, DoorDash announced that it has privately filed to go public. The decision to file privately will allow the high-valued startup to get its S-1 documents in good order with the SEC before showing the rest of us what it has up its sleeve.
The move to announce its private filing is more interesting and could be related to prepping demand for its shares, providing some PR-cover for backer SoftBank,which could use the assist, or, perhaps, to da

Eric Schmidt has called on the US government to “get back in the game in a serious way” so that the country can maintain its lead over China in the AI arms race. In an op-ed for the New York Times, the former CEO of Google argued that Americans had put “too much faith in the private sector” to drive technological advances — giving China the chance to catch up. Schmidt said his time as chairman of both the National Security Commission on AI and the Defense Innovatio

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has repeatedly said that YouTube is trying to be more transparent with creators about changes that will affect their day-to-day lives. The next evolution in that plan is appointing the company’s first ever “head creator liaison” to help keep the peace.
That person is Matt Koval, a former YouTube creator who started uploading videos in 2008 and then joined the company full time as a lead content strategist in 20

Spotify is rolling out a new design for its mobile app today, starting with iOS. Though the changes are relatively minor – don’t expect a major redesign – they should make the app a little simpler to navigate. The key aesthetic change is that Spotify is foregoing text on its buttons for larger, more prominent buttons. This makes the app a little more accessible and language-independent while looking a little cleaner too. For example, instead of the big ol’ ‘shuffle

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has canceled the in-person portion of F8, the company’s annual developer conference, due to concerns surrounding the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. F8 was originally scheduled to take place on May 5th and May 6th later this year.Instead, Facebook says that it will replace the main F8 conference with “locally hosted events, videos and live-streamed content.”The full statement is below:
In light of the growing concerns arou

Leading Chinese electric vehicle startup Nio has struggled over the last year or so, and recently warned shareholders that it needs new outside investment in order to make it through 2020. This week, the Tencent-backed company announced a potential $1.4 billion deal with a local government that just might fit that bill. And with the coronavirus cratering car sales in China, it couldn’t have come at a better time — if the deal closes.
Nio said Tuesday that it has entered a “fram

Photo by ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP via Getty Images The popular game Plague Inc., where you create a disease with the goal of spreading it across the world, has been removed from the App Store in China amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
“We’ve just been informed that Plague Inc. ‘includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China’ and has been removed from the China App Store,” said Ndemic Creations, the game’s devel

Jordan Peele has defined a new voice within the horror genre over the last few years with movies like Get Out and Us, and his new project with director Nia DaCosta teases a similar take on the classic boogeyman story Candyman.The first trailer for Candyman, a “spiritual successor” to the 1992 movie of the same name and Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” brings artist Anthony McCoy (Watchmen’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend Brianna (If Beale

Photo by Brett Costello / Newspix / Getty Images Steven Seagal, best known for fighting off bad guys with roundhouse kicks in movies like Above the Law, has settled a case with the Securities and Exchange Commission over promoting a cryptocurrency on social media. The action star will pay $314,000, and won’t be allowed to promote any security — digital or otherwise — for three years.
Seagal “failed to disclose he was promised $250,000 in cash and $750,000 worth of B2G to

Photo by Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images It’s going to be a long time before a vaccine for the new coronavirus is available. But when it is, there’s no guarantee that it will be affordable for all Americans, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
Azar, a former drug company executive and pharmaceutical lobbyist, told Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) during a congressional hearing on Wednesday that, although he would want to make it affordable, he won’t promise th

Researchers have developed a new personalized learning robot for autistic children that uses machine learning to adapt its lessons to each kid’s changing needs. The University of Southern California team put a “socially assistive robot” called Kiwi in the homes of 17 autistic children and set the two-foot-tall, green-feathered robot to give each child personalized classes. Over the course of a month, the children played space-themed math games on

Photo by Senate Television via Getty Images Congress has postponed a planned vote to reauthorize controversial surveillance programs. As Politico reports, the House Judiciary Committee intended to renew parts of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before they expire on March 15th. But the committee canceled a vote set for today after learning that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) would offer new amendments — ones that Democrats feared would hurt the bill’s chances in a House-wid