Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The VergeWear OS, Google’s operating system for smartwatches and wearables, now sends periodic reminders to wash your hands, one of the best ways to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
First spotted by Android Police, this new feature appears to be part of the v5.4.0 update for the Google Clock app. The new feature is added into the Clock application and will send alerts every three hours to head to a sink and scrub your hands; once you are ready

There’s a scene in Touchstone Pictures’ 1984 movie Splash where a young Tom Hanks watches a beautiful naked mermaid run off into the ocean from which she came. In the original version, the camera follows Hanks’ gaze, showing a brief glimpse of a naked butt. Splash received a PG rating because of the shot (and the insinuation that came with it), but people watching the movie on Disney Plus are greeted with an entirely different version of the scene.In the re-edited version, whic

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google has given its Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL unlocked phones a big price cut that lasts until May 9th at 11:59PM PT, or until supplies last. Each size and storage configuration is $300 off at the Google Store, Best Buy, and Amazon. Considering that the smaller Pixel 4 usually sells for $799, having it down to $499 for the 64GB version makes taking the plunge a much more reasonable idea if you’re in the market for an upgrade, but don’t want

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The passionate customers who helped lift up electric skateboard company Boosted are now rallying to help each other in the wake of the startup’s collapse.After the company announced it was laying off almost all of its employees and looking for a buyer in March, customers and fans quickly flocked to r/boostedboards and started to organize.
Current (and even some prospective) customers of Boosted’s electric skateboards and e-scooters have de

It looks like Google‘s working on some major upgrades to its autonomous machine learning development language ‘AutoML.’ According to a pre-print research paper authored by several of the big G’s AI researchers, ‘AutoML Zero’ is coming, and it’s bringing evolutionary algorithms with it. AutoML is a tool from Google that automates the process of developing machine learning algorithms for various tasks. It’s user-friendly, fairly simple to use, and c

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A court ruled yesterday that Mashable can embed a professional photographer’s photo without breaking copyright law, thanks to Instagram’s terms of service. The New York district court determined that Stephanie Sinclair offered a “valid sublicense” to use the photograph when she posted it publicly on Instagram.
The case stems from a 2016 Mashable post on female photographers, which included Sinclair and embedded an image from her In

Image: Epic Games Epic is extending the current season of Fortnite by another month, with the third season of Chapter 2 now slated to launch on June 4th instead of May 1st. Epic made the announcement on its website Tuesday morning, offering very little explanation.“We’re extending Chapter 2 - Season 2 of Fortnite beyond the original April 30 date. Our plan is to launch Chapter 2 - Season 3 on June 4,” the announcement reads. “Before then, there’s lots of content co

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google may be developing its own processor that could power the company’s Pixel phones as early as next year, while later versions of the processor could be used in Google’s Chromebooks, according to a report by Axios. Apple has long used its own processors in many of its devices, and it seems Google could be looking to do something similar for its own hardware.
The chip, apparently codenamed “Whitechapel,” may be an eight-core

One of the weirdest things to me about Twitch is how it’s a social site that doesn’t incentivize much community-building. Part of this is obviously because it’s a place for broadcasting, which is a one-to-many application. The other half of it is that the social functions that do exist on the site feel mostly geared toward growing communities around broadcasters instead of between them, which is a little strange!
During this pandemic I’ve found myself wanting more sociali

GameMaker Studio 2 | YoYo Games Making a video game is much less daunting than it might seem. While you likely aren’t going to go from having no experience to making the next Grand Theft Auto, it has actually never been easier to get started making games. Game development tools and resources have become increasingly accessible to the average person, even if they have no programming experience. Often these tools are also available for free.
To try to make things easier for those looking to

Sling is providing free TV from 5PM to midnight each night, as part of a new initiative to encourage Americans to stay home. Starting today, new Sling TV customers can register for the service, which the company is calling “Happy Hour Across America.” Don’t worry — Sling isn’t asking for a credit card, so you won’t have to worry about canceling later on.You’ll get access to Sling’s Blue service, a plan which normally costs $30 per month. Sling Blue

With much of the United States forced to stay inside and looking for any kind of entertainment to make the days go by faster, NBCUniversal couldn’t have picked a better time to launch its new Peacock streaming service — assuming you’re a Comcast customer, that is.Peacock will be available for Comcast’s Xfinity X1 and Flex customers across the country beginning tomorrow. NBCUniversal executives expect it to be available to all eligible customers by the end of April. It doe

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge OnePlus has announced two new phones, the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro. They both have fast refreshing displays, and in the case of the OnePlus 8 Pro, you’ll be getting the first OnePlus phone that supports wireless charging. Both Verizon and T-Mobile will also sell the OnePlus 8 in stores and online. You’ll be able to purchase this model and the OnePlus 8 Pro through Amazon (links are not live just yet) and OnePlus.com.
If you want to learn more abo

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Nintendo just updated the Switch with a useful new feature — namely, you can finally transfer some (though not all) of your game data from your console’s internal memory to the SD card. Here’s how you can do that. The Switch has long lacked — and desperately needed — the ability to transfer data from the console’s syst

Amazon‘s share price has surged to a new all-time high on Tuesday, sending the ecommerce giant’s market cap beyond $1.1 trillion during intraday trade for the first time. Stock in the Seattle-based mega-corp traded for more than $2,280 on Tuesday afternoon. This beats Amazon‘s previous price record of $2,170.22 by 5%, which CNBC notes was set in February. [Read: Amazon warehouse worker tests positive for coronavirus day after Bezos visit] The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandem

Sony is offering two free games to PS4 owners for a limited time as part of an initiative to encourage people to stay at home.As part of PlayStation’s “Play At Home” initiative, PlayStation 4 owners can obtain a digital copy of Journey and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection for free starting tomorrow, April 15th, at 8PM ET until May 5th at 8PM ET. PS4 owners living in Germany and China will be given Journey and Knack 2. Each month, Sony already offers free digital games to

Microsoft Teams While Zoom has had its problems — quite a few problems, actually — the videoconferencing app remains popular for its ease of use and features such as the ability to pop in different backgrounds. Now, Microsoft has added that ability to its own Teams office communications app.
Teams is currently a business application; if you try to sign up and choose the option to use it for “Friends and Family,” you’ll be directed to Skype. But if you are using it

Alex Castro / The Verge Slack was designed to be a place for co-workers to collaborate productively, but now, it’s been converted into a turnip forum. Tom Early, a customer service employee at fintech startup Curve, participates regularly in his company’s growing Animal Crossing: New Horizons turnip channel on Slack, which has 34 people in it this week. It’s become a place to, obviously, discuss turnips, but ideally, also get everyone rich.
To explain turnips simply: they&rsqu

Tamir Kalifa for The Washington Post via Getty Images Two dozen state attorneys general are asking the Trump administration to crack down on Defense Distributed’s Defcad site for selling 3D-printed gun files. In a letter sent today, they urged the Justice Department and State Department to enforce rules against exporting weapons and making undetectable firearms. “If the federal government fails to act, these files will be distributed widely with potentially grave consequences for ou

Microsoft is providing IT admins with an extra six months of support for some older versions of Windows. The software giant has been working with businesses impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and delay the end of support dates that mostly impact Windows 10 versions.“Microsoft has been deeply engaged with customers around the world who are impacted by the current public health situation,” says a Microsoft statement. “As a member of the global community, we want to contribute t

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge Facebook’s NPE Team, its experimental app division designed to play around with new mobile ideas, has a new product out called Kit, short for “Keep in Touch.” In a strange move, it’s a messaging app exclusive to the Apple Watch, and it lets you “send a voice message, your location or an emoji” with just a tap of the Watch screen, according to the app description. Kit was first discovered on Tuesday by TechCrunch.&ldqu

Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli,the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building.
Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, in a meeting, in the zone while listening to Spotify, taking a break at a digital virtual water coooler or done for the day. From there, yo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple and Google have announced a hugely ambitious — and potentially controversial —contact tracing system designed to help users prevent spreading the novel coronavirus by figuring out who has had contact with infected patients.
While details on the system are still slim — given how early in development the project is, not even Apple and Google have figured everything out here yet — we do know a few things, including that the comp

Image: Apple Apple is now sharing aggregated mobility data from Apple Maps to help public health officials better understand changes in how people are moving in their communities, the company announced today. The data is accessible via an online tool, and Apple is making the complete dataset available for download as a CSV. The tool is similar to ones offered by Google and Facebook that show mobility trends using location data taken from smartphones.
Apple’s new website has mobility trend

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon On March 20th, an article about the novel coronavirus started to spread. “Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19” crystallized a viewpoint conservatives had been hawking for some time: the hysteria over the virus was overhyped. The United States needed to reopen the economy.
To a non-expert, the argument sounded compelling. The author, Silicon Valley growth hacker Aaron Ginn, used Johns Hopkins data to make his point. On Medium, the piece blended in

Image: Asus Asus has officially launched its ZenBook Duo, a portable laptop with two screens. The device will MSRP for $1,499. The product is listed on Amazon, but it’s currently out of stock; Asus says you should be able to buy it soon.The ZenBook Duo is essentially a smaller, specced-down version of last year’s 15.6-inch ZenBook Pro Duo, which was 6.4 pounds and sold for a whopping $2,499. This duo has a 14-inch FHD touchscreen as its primary panel as well as a smaller 12.6-inch p

Coronavirus in Context is a weekly newsletter where we bring you facts that matter about the COVID-19 pandemic and the technology trying to stop its spread. You can subscribe here. Hola quarantine compadres! One of the most interesting things about this pandemic is seeing how different countries are handling the details. In Mexico, where I live, the army and the police are patrolling the beaches to make sure people don’t disobey the public gathering order. In the US, people

Remember phone launches? Those events where companies launched new devices and people got excited? Me neither. But today, OnePlus decided to launch two new flagship devices: the OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro. The costlier OnePlus 8 Pro dons a new screen with a 120Hz refresh rate and a quad-camera setup on the back. The company has achieved high framerate through MEMC (Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation) chip, often used in TV for a smoother picture.  However, unlike the OnePlus 7 Pro

As the world unites in the fight against COVID-19, scientists and researchers around the world are studying the novel coronavirus and publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals and pre-print servers. Scattered across these research papers might be the pieces of the puzzle that will unlock the cure or vaccine for COVID-19 or new ways to treat patients and prevent the spread of the virus. Unfortunately, no single person can go through tens of thousands of documents, and the thousands mor

Photo: GitHub GitHub, the Microsoft-owned software hosting site, said on Tuesday it will reduce prices on one of its most popular paid tiers and also moving a key feature of all its paid plans into its existing free tier. Now, GitHub says the “Teams” subscription, which previously cost $9 per user a month, will now be $4 per user a month. All existing paid customers on the plan will move to the new pricing model starting today.And for those who want to use GitHub for private develop

The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and post-grads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances.
Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated, with literally hundreds of variations on loan terms, repayment methods and public interest forgiveness options.