Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is slowly but steadily opening its Stadia cloud gaming service to more interested customers, with a new promotion starting this month that offers three months of its Stadia Pro subscription to new buyers of Chromecast Ultra devices.Google confirmed to The Verge that this is the first promotion of its kind for Stadia and it works like the platform’s buddy pass system. It’s not clear if it’s restricted to a certain country, but

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is slowly but steadily opening its Stadia cloud gaming service to more interested customers, with a new promotion starting this month that offers three months of its Stadia Pro subscription to owners of Chromecast Ultra devices. It’s not required that you buy a new device. Rather, you just have to opt to receive promotional emails from Google, and the company is sending out the offer to known Chromecast Ultra-owning customers.Google confi

Photo by Adi Robertson / The Verge SXSW, the annual tech, music, and film meetup held in downtown Austin, is the latest major conference to be canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak, and just one week before it was slated to start. It is the first time in the event’s 34-year history that it’s been canceled. The festival was scheduled to take place from March 13th to March 22nd, yet Austin Mayor Steve Adler festival today announced that, amid a increasing number of high-profile spe

Stephen Brashear/Getty Images Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter have all pledged to pay hourly workers their regular rate even if those staffers are asked to remain at home due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.All five of those tech companies and many others have asked employees to work from home to help prevent the spread of coronavirus, but being forced to work from home could affect hourly employees like cooks and shuttle drivers with jobs that aren’t possible to perf

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge As COVID-19 spreads within the United States and across the globe, public health officials are calling for fewer public gatherings — which is pushing many activities online. The issue is particularly severe for schools, where the risk of spreading the disease is high. But as many US schools try to shift to online lesson plans, they’re running into the limitations of our threadbare broadband networks, which leave many students unable to connect to their

Photo: Emerald City Comic Con Seattle’s annual comic book convention, Emerald City Comic Con, has been postponed amid growing concern surrounding the coronavirus outbreak. The event, which has run since 2003, was set to take place from March 12th–15th at the Washington State Convention Center. It will now be hosted sometime this summer, making it one of the many major cultural events to be canceled or delayed as a result of the COVID-19 virus.“We did everything that we could t

Photo by May James/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Restrictions on flights in and out of China wouldn’t have prevented the novel coronavirus from circling the globe, a new model shows. Even if the amount of international travel in and out of China had been cut by 90 percent after February 1st, the trajectory of the epidemic would not have changed significantly — not without other efforts made to stop the spread of infection, like the isolation of people who were sick.The mo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon disrupted the books, grocery, and shipping business, and now it’s set its sights on viral infections. The tech company has apparently tasked a team of employees to research and develop a cure for the common cold, a CNBC report indicates today. Under an effort called “Project Gesundheit,” three people familiar with the effort tell CNBC that Amazon is specifically looking to develop a vaccine that would stave off cold infections. Th

Today, whales are a beloved icon right up there with polar bears when it comes to mascots for protecting the planet. That wasn’t the case in 1966 when biologist Roger Payne came upon a dead, beached dolphin with a cigar butt carelessly shoved in its blowhole — which shocked him enough to make it his mission to “try to find out things about them that would capture the fancy of humanity,” he says in the most recent episode of NPR’s Invisibilia.
Payne’s eventual

Walt Disney Pictures Disney Plus is reportedly getting a new Beauty and the Beast prequel series based on the 2017 live-action remake, which will see Luke Evans and Josh Gad reprise their roles from remake as Gaston and LeFou, respectively, according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter.The TV series is said to be a six-episode musical limited series set before the events of the movie, with iconic composer Alan Menken reportedly in talks to join the show to provide songs (Menken composed the

Image: eBay eBay is escalating its fight against online price gouging during the coronavirus outbreak with a new outright ban on all sales of face masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes. The new policy, outlined in a notice to sellers posted Friday, applies both to new listings and existing ones. eBay says it is in the process of removing current listings for these items as well as listings that mention the coronavirus, COVID-19 (the illness it causes), and other popular variations of th

It’s a bit overwhelming to think of how many famous people we’re bombarded with every day. Ten years ago, I was content to keep a Facebook profile connected to my aunts and friends from math class, and to chill on obscure message boards where my avatar was a Neopet. Now that the internet has largely centralized, I’m constantly surrounded by photos, videos, and opinions of famous people who are more financially successful than I am. It’s as if my entire high school gym cla

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A well-hidden feature in macOS Catalina makes it simple to resize and arrange your windows without having to clumsily drag them around. Thankfully, it’s easy to find and even easier to use. You can use it with any app that you have open and want to shift around, be it to one side of your display or to another display entirely.
Here’s what you do:
Move your mouse cursor up to the top left corner of your display where the buttons to close, m

What is Quibi? Is it the final frontier in the streaming wars? Is it vaporware that’s managed to secure nearly $2 billion in investment funding before it’s even launched? Is it going to be the next big thing people spend time watching while in the bathroom?
No one really knows. Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg sees it as the next step in mobile entertainment. Quibi has teamed up with an impressive number of celebrities to make some high quality movies and shows for launch. But it’s a

Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images LGBTQ dating app Grindr has been sold by its Chinese owners, reports the Financial Times and Reuters. The sale comes after a US government committee expressed national security concerns about Beijing Kunlun Tech’s ownership of the app last year. Kunlun is now selling Grindr to San Vicente Acquisition for about $608.5 million.
Kunlun originally bought Grindr in 2018, but the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) reportedly informed Kun

An artistic rendering of NASA’s Starliner vehicle| Image: Boeing NASA still doesn’t know if it wants Boeing to perform another test flight of its new passenger spacecraft without people on board — three months after the vehicle’s first test flight failed to go according to plan.Today, NASA announced that it had finished an investigation into the botched debut flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, a new crew capsule designed to take NASA astronauts to and from the I

Photo by Kena Betancur/Getty Images Only 1,895 people have been tested for the novel coronavirus in the US, according to reporting by The Atlantic. That’s a shockingly low number: the UK has tested over 18,000 people, and South Korea is testing around 10,000 people a day.
There are over 200 people in the US with confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But the number of people actually infected with the disease around the country is likely much higher. Researchers pre

Photo: Teami UK The Federal Trade Commission alleges that “detox tea” company Teami misled consumers with outrageous health claims and advertisements from influencers who failed to clearly disclose they were being paid.Teami earned more than $15 million in sales for its products, which it claimed would cause weight loss or treat diseases “without reliable scientific evidence,” according to the FTC complaint. The FTC ordered Teami to stop these practices and return $1,000

Philips’ original model Hue Bridge — used by the company’s popular Hue bulbs to interface with smartphones and digital assistants — is losing support for all internet connected services on April 30th, 2020, including Google Assistant and Alexa.Once that date passes, customers will still be able to use the Hue Bridge v1, but only when connected to the same local network using the legacy Philips Hue Bridge v1 app. However, Philips won’t be offering any new software up

illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A yearlong analysis of Facebook’s Ad Library has revealed “significant systemic flaws” in the way the platform monitors and enforces its political ad rules, according to researchers at New York University.
The issues were uncovered as part of the NYU team’s audit of the Ad Library between May 2018 and June 2019, which found some $37 million worth of ads did not accurately disclose who was paying for them.
Researchers Laura Edelson,

Quibi doesn’t have the same immediate brand recognition as Disney and HBO, or YouTube and Instagram, but the latest entrant in the war for people’s attention is preparing to jump into battle headfirst with its launch day slate.
There are 50 shows and movies to watch beginning on April 6th. 25 of those shows are “daily essentials,” referring to the regular series coming from a number of content partners including ESPN, Rotten Tomatoes, and the BBC. There are 19 “unsc

Quibi is finally almost here, and in an effort to entice people who are probably already spending too much on content every month, the short form video streaming service is giving people a 90-day free trial for a limited time.
The company is also planning to pump an impressive amount of content into the app within that time. Quibi is set to launch on April 6th with 50 shows and movies, half of which consists of “daily essential” programming that’s constantly being updated. More

Image: Nreal Nreal is adding hand tracking to its upcoming mixed reality headsets. It’s partnering with a company called Clay AIR, which makes a camera-based system for tracking gestures like pinching, pointing, grabbing, and swiping. That gives the Nreal Light glasses a feature that’s standard in headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens, but in a smaller and (somewhat) less attention-grabbing package.
The Nreal Light will still support handheld controllers, including a 5G-enabled s

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Twitter’s non-chronological timeline was always a bit controversial. After all, the beauty of Twitter is that things are happening in real time, and what’s the point of reading through Twitter if you’re not discovering things as they are occurring?
Whatever reasons Twitter had for implementing this policy, it decided to reverse its course back in late 2018 and allowed users to opt back into a chronological Twitter feed. The keyword h

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge After weeks of teasing out our purchase of Apple’s new redesigned Mac Pro, The Verge’s reviews of the computer and the Pro Display monitor have been published.This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul tackle both reviews and discuss how powerful the machine is for the price, the quality and features of the Display screen, and who these products are actually best fit for.There’s also a lot of other tech news throughout the show &mdas

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images After funneling over half a billion dollars into his failed presidential campaign, Mike Bloomberg dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Wednesday. But while he’s out of the race, Bloomberg now has the opportunity to become even more valuable to Democrats, as the party moves to build out an aggressive social media operation for the general election.
On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Bloomberg has formed a new independent expenditure c

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Sony’s WH-1000XM3 wireless, noise-canceling headphones are $100 off right now at Newegg. This model is among the best that you can buy, and they usually aren’t this affordable. The standard price at most retailers is $350.
This price is for the black model only. If you want the silver model, it’s $260 at Newegg. Around $249 is a good deal for this model, and frankly, it’s about all you should be paying on headphones released in 2018 sin

Image: Konami The TurboGrafx-16 Mini, a retro revival of the classic Japanese gaming console originally set to be released on March 19th, has been delayed due to the coronavirus outbreak, Konami announced today.The miniature console, also known as the PC Engine Core Grafx Mini in Europe and PC Engine Mini in Japan, includes more than 50 games from the 16-bit era such as Bomberman ‘93 and Ys I & II built into the hardware. Konami said in a statement that the coronavirus outbreak led to