Technology news

New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced over the weekend that a new executive order allowing New York citizens to circumvent social distancing and wed their sweethearts via video call. It’s not much, but at least it’s something pleasant to do while things are looking grim and we’re all having to stay home. NEW: I am issuing an Executive Order allowing New Yorkers to obtain a marriage license remotely and allowing clerks to perform ceremonies via video conference. — Andr

Facebook can’t seem to help trying to infiltrate every possible iteration of social media, and since its acquisition of Oculus, the company has been keen on capturing a corner of the gaming market too. Today the company is making one of its largest pushes into gaming, debuting the Facebook Gaming app in the United States to take on the likes of Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer. The New York Times first reported on the news Sunday. The company has been testing a Facebook Gaming app in Southeast

Hot off the soft launch of its Peacock streaming service, NBCUniversal is welcoming another streaming service into its family, but this one is designed to help movie ticket seller Fandango expand its digital reach.Fandango, which is owned by Comcast, has purchased digital movie retailer and streaming service Vudu from Walmart for an undisclosed amount. A representative for Fandango told The Verge that more information will be announced in the coming months, after the deal is closed. Vudu is curr

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The day is upon us; the hour draws near. Today is the 20th of April, 2020. Today, stoners the world over will gather as best they can, spark up some bud, and celebrate one of the more enduring drug traditions we’ve got. The coronavirus pandemic won’t stop people from Doing Weed, though it will probably stop them from gathering in person; even so, virtual weed-a-thons are happening across the country because nothing can kill these particular vibes. (

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit is currently experiencing an outage. The site returns an error page when you try to access subreddits. I have been able to access the front page, but clicking on a link to a subreddit takes me to an error page.Reddit said the site is “degraded” on its status page, though noted at 3:02PM ET that “issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”Identified: The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit experienced an outage on Monday, and while the site was experiencing issues, it would return an error page when you tried to access subreddits. I was able to access the front page during the outage, but clicking on a link to a subreddit took me to an error page.Reddit said the site is “degraded” on its status page, though noted at 3:02PM ET that “issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”Identified: The issue

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Electric vehicle startup Faraday Future has obtained a $9,176,800 loan from the Small Business Association’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which was recently launched to help small businesses keep people employed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company tells The Verge.That’s close to the $10 million maximum allowed in the program, and the loan will be 100 percent forgiven as long as Faraday Future uses it for payroll, interest on mortgag

Photo by Beata Zawrzel / NurPhoto via Getty Images With limitations on COVID-19 testing making it hard to know how many people actually havethe disease, some public health experts are turning to the sewer systems for a clearer snapshot.“Sewage is a source of information on human health, and can really be transformed into a public health observatory,” says Newsha Ghaeli, president and co-founder of Biobot, a startup that analyzes wastewater.Wastewater-based disease monitoring is a re

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, is using a heat map to track stores that may be at risk of unionization, according to report from Business Insider.
The heat map apparently uses more than two dozen different metrics to track which Whole Foods stores may unionize. The heat map focuses on monitoring three main areas: “external risks,” “store risks,” and “team member sentiment,” according to Business Insider.
Her

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Kickstarter announced in an internal memo today that it’s likely going to lay off employees. CEO Aziz Hasan writes that the crowdfunding company has already seen a significant drop in crowdfunding projects being listed on the site, which is how Kickstarter makes its money. Projects are down by about 35 percent, the memo states, with “no clear sign of rebound.”
Conversations are now starting with Kickstarter’s union organizers a

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite — the Pokémon Go-esque augmented reality Harry Potter game — is a game uniquely unsuited to the current world of self-quarantining people looking to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Unlike most video games, which are thriving right now due to the captive audience of bored people stuck inside, Wizards Unite (much like Pokémon Go) is a game almost entirely based around exploring outdoors and meeting up with other players in pub

Mark Zuckerberg today revealed Facebook has teamed up with Carnegie Mellon University to help track the spread of potential COVID-19 cases around the world – even situations where there hasn’t been an explicit diagnosis. The company today revealed an interactive map that tracks where people are experiencing symptoms from the novel coronavirus throughout the US, based on data from an ongoing survey the company is running with Carnegie Mellon. The map is granular enough to let you see

Warner Bros. is delaying Matt Reeves’ highly anticipated Batman movie by four months as the studio shuffles its broader DC film lineup.The Batman was originally supposed to hit theaters on June 25th, 2021, but it will now open on October 1st, 2021, according to Deadline. Much like what happened with Disney’s Marvel Studios slate, various upcoming movies under the DC Comics umbrella are shifting to accommodate necessary changes due to the pandemic.Similar to what happened with Disney&

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The 2019 iPad mini is $70 off today at Best Buy, marking the lowest price that we’ve seen yet for the 64GB model. It usually retails for $400, and the price to beat was $350. The gold, space gray, and silver color options are all currently available for delivery or via curbside pickup at one of Best Buy’s participating locations. If you want to quadruple the amount of space to 256GB, you can do so at Best Buy for $450. This is $100 of the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is launching a self-screening tool for people to check whether they qualify to donate their plasma in the hopes of creating a treatment for those with COVID-19, according to a company blog post. The tool is part of the company’s work with a group called the CoVig-19 Plasma Alliance.When someone is infected with a virus, their immune system produces antibodies to fight it. Once the infected person recovers, they have these antibodies in the

Movie ticketing company Fandango has agreed to buy Walmart’s on-demand video streaming service, Vudu,for an undisclosed sum. The video service today reaches more than 100 million living room devices across the U.S., including smart TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles and other over-the-top streaming devices, as well as Windows 10 and Mac computers, and iOS and Android mobile devices.
To date, the Vudu app on mobile has been installed more than 14.5 million times.
As a part of the agreement

Soccer fans craving a return of the English Premier League (EPL) can see the sport’s stars back in action this week, in a FIFA 20 tournament that starts on Tuesday. All 20 top-flight clubs will participate in the ePremier League Invitational, with footballers and musicians representing their teams in the knock-out competition. Every match will be streamed on nbcsports.com and the EPL website. The semis and finals will also be televised on NBCSN in the US and Sky Sports

It would be easy to assume that Verizon’s purchase last week of video-conferencing tool BlueJeans was an opportunistic move to capitalize on the sudden shift to remote work, but the ball began rolling last June and has implications far beyond current work-from-home requirements.
The video-chat darling of the moment is Zoom, but BlueJeans is considered by many to be the enterprise tool of choice. The problem, it seems, is that it had grown as far as it could on its own and went looking for

Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images Facebook is banning promotions for protests that violate social distancing rules, the company has confirmed. CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan wrote this morning that promotions for anti-quarantine protests in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska had all been removed after Facebook consulted with state governments. The company is also reportedly seeking guidance for whether New York, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania protests violate current shelter

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is getting ready to unveil its Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2 hardware. Recent retailer leaks have hinted that Microsoft is planning to use Intel’s latest 10th Gen processors on the Surface Book 3, alongside potentially up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Rumors also suggest that Microsoft is switching to Nvidia’s Quadro graphics chips in some Surface Book 3 models. The switch will mean the Surface Book 3 will better cater to 3D animators

SteelSeries has unveiled a fleet of Cyberpunk 2077-inspired gaming headsets as well as a lineup of themed accessories made for its Arctis Pro wired and wireless headsets. First up, though, is a headset that is actually brand-new to the company’s lineup. It’s the Arctis 1 Wireless for Xbox, and it follows a similar design and feature set as last year’s excellent Arctis 1 Wireless.
The big difference with this Xbox-specific model is that the USB-C dongle can switch between wirele

Welcome to Hard Fork Basics, a collection of informative guides to keep you up to date with the personal finance and investment world. This one is Bitcoin-themed. There’s a “sextortion” email scam going around that demands Bitcoin to keep steamy videos of you masturbating to pornography off the internet. It’s fake. Relax. It’s also very old. While there are many variants, recent reports show an email that suggests a crafty hacker has “placed ma

Astroworld is heading to a virtual world. Today, Epic Games revealed that the next in-game Fortnite concert will be headlined by rapper Travis Scott, and it’s set to take place across several days this week. The concert even has a name: Astronomical. Epic describes it as “an other-worldly experience inspired by Cactus Jack’s creations, built from the ground up in Fortnite.” It will include the debut of a brand-new song.
Whereas previous Fortnite events have been one-off s

A good webcam, let alone any webcam, is tough to find these days. Just to put a time marker on this post: the coronavirus pandemic has moved much of America’s workforce into a work-from-home environment. With so many people in need of basic tech supplies, demand for webcams has surged, and as supplies dwindle, prices have unsurprisingly skyrocketed.My colleague Chris Welch has reported on the trend, and many of us here at The Verge have spent more time (and money) than we’d have like

Photo by Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images With the league on indefinite hiatus, England’s Premier League is making a return of sorts with a weeklong FIFA tournament that will air on NBC. Officially called the ePremier League Invitational Tournament, the event will begin on April 21st and feature representatives from all 20 teams competing in a single-elimination tournament. The league says that all prize money from the tournament will be donated to the National Health Service.

The gadget discounts you need to know about today range from Vizio’s P-Series Quantum X TV and handy USB hubs to microSD cards. For the most part, we’re leaning on practicality for the deals today, but these can help you have some fun, too.Starting with the least expensive deal, Anker’s four-port USB 3.0 hub is $6.99 today at Amazon with the offer code AKUSBHUB used at checkout. It’s $3 less than it usually costs. Since I’ve been working from home, I’ve found

There’s something soothing about watching a bunch of vampires be absolute morons on television every week. They’re undead, capable of incredible feats, dark magic, and, in most cases, have been alive for hundreds of years. They should possess at least a little more finesse than Michael Scott. And yet, the bloodsucking clowns of What We Do in the Shadows are so very bad at being immortal monsters, which means they are excellent at comedy.FX’s TV series, based on the Taika Waitit

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Late last week a Chinese company called Kingsoft Cloud filed to go public in the United States. The cloud infrastructure business intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “KC,” with J.P. Morgan, UBS and Credit Suisse helping out with running the deal.
KingsoftCloud has a $100 million placeholder figure in its F-1 filing, giving us an idea of its expectations fo

YouTube’s lo-fi hip-hop community has for years offered a place to virtually gather, do homework, and find comfort in the random messages of strangers that populate in live chats. Now, as we’re all stuck inside due to the pandemic, those streams have become more popular than ever — not just as background music, but as ways to find community in a difficult time.
Over the past month, viewership of lo-fi live streams has grown rapidly. The lo-fi channel Nickolaas has seen a &ldquo

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. From your weight to your money, there’s a tracking app for everything nowadays. Sure, they can make our lives more convenient, and they give us a sense of control, but just the fact that they exist doesn’t mean we should actually use them. In fact, some are simply abusing our laziness to gather personal information for commercial purposes. Previou

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber is launching a pair of new services called Uber Connect and Uber Direct as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic minimizes demand for its traditional ride-hailing business. They are focused on moving items rather than people. Uber Direct will offer deliveries from shops like pharmacies and pet stores, while Uber Connect is a same-day courier service to let Uber users send items to one another.
In New York, Uber says it will offer deliveries of over-the-count

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding. In fact, last week’s show (with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas) was a blast, and you should check it out.
This morning, however, we had a lot to get through, so let’s go over the show’s rundown:Change