Technology news

Microsoft is releasing the final version of its Windows 10 May 2020 Update today. While the update won’t roll out automatically to machines until next month, Windows 10 testers can get it early today by opting into the Release Preview ring of testing to get the final build. Like the previous November 2019 Update, this new update is a relatively small one that includes some improvements to Cortana and Windows search.
Cortana can now be undocked from the Windows 10 taskbar, and it includes t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is introducing a new speaking style for Alexa and adding some speaking styles for other AI voices, the company said today. The longform speaking style is available for US developers who want a reading voice that sounds more natural when reading long pieces of content, like articles or podcasts.Amazon says the longform style is “powered by a deep-learning text-to-speech model,” and allows Alexa-voiced devices to speak with more natural c

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said that conspiracy theories linking the rollout of 5G to the spread of COVID-19 are false in an interview with CNBC today.
“There’s no correlation at all between 5G and coronavirus,” Vestberg said. “It’s just fake news.” He said Verizon planned to combat the conspiracy theories with “our communication, and the industry’s communication, and with health organizations’ communic

In a message posted to its internal communications channel earlier this week, the massive startup accelerator Y Combinator said it will change the terms of its own PPP (the YC pro rata investment program) and investing in companies raising seed and Series A rounds on a case-by-case basis.
The company began a policy of investing in every seed and Series A round for its portfolio companies back in 2015.
Since then, it has taken a 7% stake in every company that raised a priced seed and Series A rou

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google’s wireless network, Google Fi, can now be activated on an iPhone via eSIM, as spotted by 9to5Google. That means you can use a Google Fi number on your iPhone in addition to your phone number that’s hooked up to the physical SIM card that sits in the SIM tray in your iPhone. It also means you can get a Google Fi number without having a SIM card mailed to you or having to buy one at a retail store like Best Buy.
However, there are two cavea

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google says it saw more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 scams just in the past week. That’s on top of the more than 240 million daily spam messages it sees related to the novel coronavirus, the company says.The phishing attacks and scams “use both fear and financial incentives to create urgency to try to prompt users to respond,” Google says. In other words, same email scam, different subject line.Th

Microsoft has signed a multiyear deal with National Basketball Association (NBA) to become the official AI, cloud, and laptop provider for the league. The deal will see the NBA using Microsoft’s Azure platform to broadcast live and on-demand basketball games, with personalized content.
The NBA will also use Microsoft’s Surface products, although the company isn’t revealing in detail how these will be used. Microsoft struck a similar deal with the National Football League (NFL)

Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge Facebook is canceling any physical events with more than 50 people through June 2021. CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted the news as part of an update on Facebook’s COVID-19 pandemic response, where he also said the “vast majority” of Facebook employees would work from home until at least the end of next month. The cancellations include the Oculus Connect 7 virtual reality conference in San Jose, which is being replaced by an online-only event.
“W

Couch gags play an instrumental role in each episode of The Simpsons, and this Sunday’s episode is one of the most ambitious in the show’s 31-season history.The new couch gag is a nod to the situation people around the world currently find themselves in: stuck at home and looking for any kind of entertainment to pass the time. For The Simpson family, that means using VR headsets to go on a series of different adventures around Springfield. Homer is flying a plane, Marge is surfing, B

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google plans to add a Zoom-like gallery view to its business- and education-focused Meet videoconferencing service and let users take calls right from Gmail, Google’s GM and VP of G Suite Javier Soltero told Reuters in an interview. The additions come amid huge growth for Meet as families, students, and workers use the service while at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The upcoming gallery view will let users display up to 16 meeting participants i

Image: Apple Yesterday, Apple announced that it’s now selling individual wheel kits for its Mac Pro — and like the computer it’s used for, these are some pricy rims.If you are like me, you are probably thinking that these wheels are not only expensive, but are not worth the money (they don’t even have locks to stop your fancy computer from rolling away), so I decided to look up a bunch of products that also have four wheels and are significantly cheaper than $699 wheels

Blade Runner: The Lost Cut is described as “a radical re-envisioning of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic,” it’s created by filmmaker Leon Chase, and it’s about 20 minutes long. A commenter on Metafilter, where I found the film, describes it as “a fine use of pandemic energy.” I strongly encourage going in without knowing anything else, because watching its conceit slowly unfold is so much fun.
If you want some more detail...
Okay. The Lost Cut is a rec

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple is introducing a new feature in most modern MacBooks called “Battery health management.” It’s going to be available today for developers and will roll into the future macOS Catalina 10.15.5 update.On by default, the new feature is intended to extend the overall lifespan of your laptop battery by reducing the rate of chemical aging. It does so by not charging the battery all the way up to the maximum in certain cases. Fully charging a bat

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple said on Thursday that it would reopen its retail store in Seoul, South Korea, this week as part of a broader push to resume physical retail operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Bloomberg. There are no concrete plans yet to reopen stores elsewhere, although Apple has said in the past that it could start reopening stores in the US sometime in May.Apple initially closed its retail stores in mainland China earlier this year, and then

Photo by Samir Jana/Hindustan Times via Getty Images There’s yet another new study out this week on hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug championed by President Trump (without evidence) as a cure for COVID-19. Bottom line: the hospitalized patients who took it didn’t seem to be any better off than patients who didn’t take the drug. Some patients had to stop taking the drug because of cardiac side effects.The report isn’t published yet, and hasn’t gone through

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has announced a series of new policies to make Android’s in-app subscriptions more transparent to users. Starting on June 16th, apps will have to be clear about the terms of their paid subscriptions, and free trials and will need to provide a transparent way for users to cancel them. In addition to the rules for app developers, the Google Play Store is also providing more information to users directly, notifying them when free trials end or w

Image: Samsung Samsung’s Galaxy S10 Lite will be available in the US starting tomorrow, April 17th, and it will cost $650, the company announced today. You’ll be able to buy it unlocked in one color, Prism Black, from Samsung’s online store, Amazon, and Best Buy’s website.The Galaxy S10 Lite is a budget version of the Galaxy S10 flagship, and it has a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED Infinity-O display at 2400 x 1080 resolution, a Snapdragon 855 processor, and a triple-lens rear ca

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images One of the few bright spots during the pandemic has been the outpouring of support for hospital and other frontline workers, like in Spain, where citizens kicked off the practice of cheering out their windows every night last month. Now, Amtrak — which has seen its ridership obliterated by the pandemic — is asking train and bus operators to honk their horns today to honor transit and other essential workers who are on a different kind of frontline

Riot is continuing to expand beyond League of Legends with the acquisition of a new studio. Today, the developer announced that it has acquired Hypixel Studios, the team behind Hytale, an upcoming Minecraft-like adventure game. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
“Over the last 18 months, we’ve been fortunate to advise Hypixel Studios as they build toward their vision for evolving a game genre that reaches an incredibly diverse range of players around the globe,” Riot

The new HP Envy 13. | Image: HP Today, HP announced several new laptops in its Envy lineup, adding affordable alternatives to the company’s more expensive Spectre lineup. This includes a redesigned 13-inch version of its Envy ultrabook, which is now equipped with Intel’s 10th Gen i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processor with Iris Plus graphics. The design improvements made to the Envy 13 echo similar changes made in late 2019 to the excellent Spectre x360, such as a smaller footprint, taking up

On Thursday afternoon, three astronauts on board the International Space Station will load into a Russian Soyuz capsule and embark on the more than three-hour journey back home to Earth — just a week after another crew of three joined them on the ISS. The trio is set to land in the Kazakhstan desert after 1AM ET on Friday, April 17th, where a smaller-than-usual welcoming committee will be on hand to greet them.
The returning astronauts include NASA’s Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan as

Photo by Brennan King / The Verge An in-depth analysis of the iPad Pro’s camera array has given us our best idea yet of what Apple’s first LIDAR-equipped device is capable of right now — and what it might be able to do in the future. While it’s unlikely to be of much use for portrait photographs, the analysis points toward some intriguing augmented reality use cases for LIDAR. The analysis was done by Sebastiaan de With, one of the developers behind the Halide and Spectr

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon announced on Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire videoconferencing and event platform BlueJeans Network. The companies did not announce the terms of the deal in a press release, but The Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon will pay less than $500 million for the company, which has some 15,000 business clients.The move comes as rival videoconferencing app Zoom has soared in popularity as more people work from home. But Zoo