Technology news

Image: XDA Developers Lenovo’s first gaming phone, the Lenovo Legion, has leaked in a series of promotional videos showing off the device. A “trusted” anonymous source provided the unreleased material, in addition to some new specs, to XDA Developers. There’s no guarantee that these videos will reflect the product’s final design, but they offer an interesting look at some features we may have to look forward to.Per XDA, the videos indicate that the phone will featu

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge :Slack’s mobile apps have always valiantly tried to replicate the desktop and web experience with a single home screen and a reliance on swipe-based navigation and cumbersome menus. But a new update the company is rolling out on its Android beta channel is introducing a “simpler, more organized” Slack with major visual and user interface changes.The update’s biggest new feature is the navigation bar at the bottom that now lets

Space tourism venture Virgin Galactic lost $60 million in the first quarter of 2020, down from the $73 million net loss it suffered at the end of last year, according to the company’s earnings statement today. The company says it earned revenue of just $238,000 this first quarter by “providing engineering services.”
Along with these earnings results, Virgin Galactic is announcing that 400 people put down refundable deposits to fly on the company’s tourist spaceplane in th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tinder is going to launch its own in-app, one-on-one video chats later this year. Match Group, the brand’s parent company, announced the feature in its earnings release today. Details are scarce, but the fact that Tinder is even going to release this feature is big news. This would be one of the largest feature introductions for the brand, and an especially impressive undertaking considering Tinder has millions of users, and video calls can be place

Polk Audio today announced the Signa S3, an affordable soundbar that offers a compelling collection of features with its $250 price tag — including Google Assistant support and a wireless subwoofer included in the box. The device supports Chromecast out of the box, allowing you to easily send music to it from any device or app that can cast via the standard. And though the soundbar itself odes not serve as a Google Assistant device, it can be operated via another such device, like a Googl

Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Disney was at the top of the world at the end of 2019: a record-breaking year at the box office, the launch of Disney Plus, and a release of the biggest movie in history. Now, just five months into 2020, Disney is in for a bumpy ride.“While the COVID-19 pandemic has had an appreciable financial impact on a number of our businesses, we are confident in our ability to withstand this disruption and emerge from it in a strong position,”

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Airbnb is laying off around a quarter of its employees today, or about 1,900 people. The company has been struggling over the last couple months as stay-home orders led to mass cancellations of bookings and as future bookings look likely to return very slowly as the United States and other countries carefully lift restrictions. Airbnb currently has 7,500 employees.
The virus has led to a steep drop in revenue for Airbnb. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says 2

A worker at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York, fulfillment center has died of COVID-19, the company confirmed. Workers at the facility, called JFK8, have been calling for greater safety precautions since early March. While Amazon has made changes, the number of workers diagnosed with the virus continues to climb. According to alerts viewed by The Verge, at least 29 workers have fallen ill.Managers notified several workers at JFK8 of the death yesterday. Amazon says the employee was last on

A worker at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York, fulfillment center has died of COVID-19, the company confirmed. Workers at the facility, called JFK8, have been calling for greater safety precautions since early March. While Amazon has made changes, the number of workers diagnosed with the virus continues to climb. According to alerts viewed by The Verge, at least 29 workers have fallen ill.Managers notified several workers at JFK8 of the death yesterday. Amazon says the employee was last on

NASA NASA is working with Tom Cruise to film the first movie shot in space, according to NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. The details of the project aren’t clear, but Bridenstine says the film will take place aboard the International Space Station.
NASA is excited to work with @TomCruise on a film aboard the @Space_Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make @NASA’s ambitious plans a reality. pic.twitter.com/CaPwfXtfUv— Jim

This afternoon Airbnb, a well-known private company that connects travelers with places to stay, announced that it was laying off around a quarter of its workforce. The company cited revenue declines and a need to curtail costs in a memo that TechCrunch viewed.
In the note, written by AirbnbCEO and co-founder Brian Chesky, the company said that 1,900 employees will be laid off, or 25.3% of its 7,500 workers. The layoffs will impact a number of internal product groups, including Transportation an

Facebook removed a small cluster of groups and pages promoting the QAnon conspiracy in April, calling it part of a “coordinated inauthentic behavior” campaign around the 2020 US elections. It appears to be one of Facebook’s first announcements about cracking down on QAnon-related content, and it suggests Facebook views at least a few corners of QAnon as deliberate manipulation — not just false information.
QAnon is an expansive conspiracy theory that claims President Dona

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images California’s attorney general and a group of city attorneys sued Uber and Lyft Tuesday, alleging that the companies misclassified drivers as independent contractors in violation of a recent law that classifies them as employees.
In their lawsuit, the attorneys allege that Uber and Lyft have run afoul of Assembly Bill 5, a law that enshrines the so-called “ABC test” for determining whether someone is a contractor or employee. The law offici

Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s Forza Street, a free-to-play racing title from Forza creator Turn 10 Studios, is available now for iOS and Android after launching for Windows 10 last year. The game takes the standard Forza formula of collecting, customizing, and racing cars and redesigns it for mobile, which means it has a fair amount of micotransactions and other ways to spend money if you’re into that.Forza Street is technically a Miami street racing game, so it differs quite a bit f

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is bringing Halo 2: Anniversary to Windows 10 PCs on May 12th, as part of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the company announced today.
Halo 2: Anniversary is an HD remastered version of Halo 2, which came out on the original Xbox in 2004. It includes a major overhaul to the game’s visuals in addition to the soundtrack and sound effects. Halo 2: Anniversary also allows users to switch back and forth from the original graphics to the updated visuals in the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Countries around the world are scrambling to create contact-tracing apps that will help track the spread of COVID-19. But a beta app launched by the UK this week shows the huge challenges they face and, crucially, the difficulty in designing an effective app without the help of the tech giants that make our phones.
The UK is one of the few countries that has chosen to create a contact-tracing app that is incompatible with the contact-tracing API currently

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Twitter is experimenting with a new moderation tool that will warn users before they post replies that contain what the company says is “harmful” language.Twitter describes it as a limited experiment, and it’s only going to show up for iOS users. The prompt that is now supposed to pop up in certain situations will give “you the option to revise your reply before it’s published if it uses language that could be harmful,&rd

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Half of all COVID-19 cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths due to the disease in the US occurred in counties that are disproportionately back, according to newly released data that is still being reviewed by scientists. The numbers of COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths are also higher in counties with a bigger proportion of black residents, the new analysis shows.Only 22 percent of counties in the United States are disproportionately black, but the people with

An AI tool that scans reams of scientific literature for promising COVID-19 research could speed up the search for a coronavirus vaccine. The system provides an automated alternative to human review, which many COVID-19 researchers are starting to bypass so their colleagues can immediately provide feedback on their work. [Read: Drug discovery might be the best use of AI to tackle the pandemic] This approach sacrifices safety for speed, which can lead to low quality work reaching

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 quarantino-rinos, Depending on where you’re at, we’re about six weeks into the general global shelter-in-place order and I gotta tell you: I’ve had about enough of it. I know, I know. We’ve all got to chin up and see this thing through so that we can return to whatever the

Apple today revealed the exact date of its virtual 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference. The event, which will be entirely online for the first time in order to accommodate the social distancing protocols necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, will begin on June 22. WWDC will be free this year for all developers through the Developers website and the app of the same name. That makes it somewhat more accessible than previous WWDCs, which required developers to purchase tickets. Apple’s

Image: 2K Games ESPN will air live NBA 2K League matches on ESPN2 on three Tuesdays in May, the sports network announced today. It’s the first time that the NBA 2K League, which is operated by the NBA, will have matches aired live on TV in the US, according to ESPN. Some league matches will also be shown on the ESPN app and ESPN.com, depending on the day of the week and when in the season you’re watching.
On Tuesdays at 7PM ET, starting today through May 19th, you can watch NBA 2K L

The Long March 5B lifting off from Wenchang on May 5th. | Photo by STR / AFP via Getty Images Early this morning, China launched a pivotal new rocket, carrying a prototype deep-space spacecraft. China declared the launch a success, and it now paves the way for a slew of critical launches over the next year.This latest launch from the Wenchang launch site in southern China sent a new rocket called the Long March 5B into orbit. A variant of China’s Long March 5, it’s a massive vehicle