Technology news

A group of Thomson Reuters shareholders says the company’s technology databases are being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to “track and arrest immigrants on a massive scale,” potentially causing reputational damage to the company.“Companies are facing scrutiny for contracting with government agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s inhumane family separation and indefinite family detention policies at the US-Mexico border,” states the resol

You wake up and something feels wrong. You can’t smell anything. 
Do you have the coronavirus? You grab your iPhone, head to Google, type “I can’t smell,” and tap the first link that pops up on the page.
What you clicked was a Google Ad. From that one click, Google collects a lot of information about you — demographic data, location, and more. It also shares that data with the person who paid for the ad. In some cases, that is search marketer Patrick Berlinquet

Melinda Sue Gordon The outdoor theater on Fortnite’s new party royale island is finally being put to use. Tonight, at 8PM ET, the virtual space will be home to the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s time-traveling film Tenet. The trailer will air on an hourly basis, though it’s not clear how long it’ll be available.
This isn’t the first time the world of film and TV has come to Fortnite. The battle royale game has been home to a clip from Star Wars: The Rise of

ViacomCBS is licensing John Krasinski’s heartwarming weekly YouTube series Some Good News, making a once totally free and accessible show now locked behind a streaming paywall.New episodes of Some Good News will stream exclusively on ViacomCBS’s streaming service, CBS All Access, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Krasinski, however, will no longer host the show. Instead, he’ll step into a producing role, with a new host to be announced at a later date. After the episodes str

Microsoft is making some improvements to its Windows 10 accessibility features, specifically centered around making the text cursor easier to see and follow using the built-in Magnifier feature. There’s also new text-to-speech functionality being integrated into the Magnifier tool, as well as improvements to Narrator (the built-in Windows screen reader), all set to roll out in the May 2020 Update.
Microsoft had previously offered tools to adjust the size and color of the standard mouse cur

Avatar: The Last Airbender is back on Netflix after a seven-year absence, and if you never caught the show, now is a perfect time. Avatar isn’t just one of the best animated series around; it’s full-stop excellent television regardless of format. This might not be clear from episode 1, though. As premieres go, it’s charming but geared toward hooking children. Skepticism is okay! Just don’t pass it by without diving into one of its best episodes, “Zuko Alone” (

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Some Apple AirPods Pro cases now say the headphones are assembled in Vietnam, according to a Twitter user, multiple reports on the MacRumors forums, and one Verge staffer who recently purchased a pair, indicating the company may be reducing its reliance on Chinese manufacturing (via MacRumors). Typically, AirPods Pro units contain a message on the back of the case that says the device was assembled in China.
Here’s a photo of what the new message looks lik

Spoiler alert: Your glorious return to office life probably won't happen anytime soon. 
Even as some states gingerly lift their stay-at-home orders, "much of corporate America is in no rush to return employees to their campuses and skyscrapers," The New York Times reports. Capital One has reportedly told tens of thousands of its employees they'll be home at least through Labor Day, and Amazon's work-from-home order has been extended until October. Meanwhile, both Google and Facebook have to

Rare’s open-world pirate game, Sea of Thieves, is sailing to Steam on June 3rd, Microsoft announced today. For the past two years, Sea of Thieves was available on Xbox One and the Windows Store.The Steam version will cost $39.99 with cross-play support included between all versions of the game. If you own a copy on either Windows 10 or Xbox One, you will still need to purchase a Steam version to play it on Valve’s digital storefront.At launch, the Steam version will include all of th

Facebook is going remote and, if Mark Zuckerberg has his way, so are you. 
In a livestreamed talk Thursday aimed mainly, but not exclusively, at his employees, the CEO announced his plan to make Facebook a more remote-work friendly company. Notably, Zuckerberg sees the changes wrought by the coronavirus as a business opportunity. 
Who better, after all, to build and sell remote-working tools and services than the company that brought us such all-time hits as its enterprise-collaboratio

Amanda, an intensive care nurse at a New Jersey hospital, woke up exhausted on a recent morning with one more shift left before her week ended. 
She picked up her phone to see that Russ, a man she'd never met before, sent her a video through 6FTCloser, a volunteer-run platform launched as a way to help people deliver messages of gratitude to all frontline workers whose jobs are essential during the coronavirus pandemic.  
Amanda, who requested her last name not be used for privacy reas

President Donald Trump tried to tell reporters on Thursday that he tested negative for the coronavirus — as in he does not have COVID-19 — but somewhere along the way he morphed into everyone's favorite regional manager. I'm talking, of course, about The Office's Michael Scott.
But before we move to Scranton, first Trump.  He really got lost in a morass of negative vs. positive when trying to explain that his health was fine.
"I tested very positively, in another sense," he told

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing most of us to stay at home and in many case unable to work, but it hasn't stopped scammers attempting to steal our valuable personal information. They've simply adjusted their tactics to use COVID-19 to their advantage.
Apple has just released iOS 13.5, and with it unlocked access to the contact-tracing system it co-developed with Google. However, Colleen Tressler, Consumer Education Specialist at the FTC, is warning that scammers are now using contact tracing

FaceTime is now more important than ever and you can finally turn off its most annoying feature: those shape-shifting bubbles.
Instead of cleanly presenting every participant's feed, FaceTime presents everyone in little bubbles that irritatingly change size whenever someone talks. It looks bad and makes any group call that has more than three or four people impossible to look at.
With Apple's newest mobile OS update, iOS 13.5, you can finally, finally, disable those annoying resizing bubbles on

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s Workplace, its Slack-like collaboration and chat tool targeted at businesses, now has more than 5 million paid users, up from 3 million in October, Facebook announced today. That growth in users is due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has required many people to rely more on software tools while working from home.
Many collaboration apps have also seen growth since the pandemic. In March, Slack said that it had surpassed more

Chorus Productions The hyperlink reaches my inbox a few minutes before 10PM on Saturday night. I click the link and enter a password. And at precisely 10PM, a video pops up on the page, welcoming me to Eschaton: part performance art, part nightclub, and all conducted over video chat.
During the next hour, I stumble across some dozen passphrases that allow me into Eschaton’s many rooms, each one launched as a Zoom meeting with a different host. There’s the room where a man in a rat c

Image: Samsung Samsung is a dominant force when it comes to TV market share in living rooms, and now, the company wants to extend that success to the outdoors. Today, Samsung is announcing the Terrace, the latest TV in its “lifestyle” family that includes the Serif, Frame, and Sero. The Terrace is designed for outside viewing: it’s IP55 water and dust resistant, and the screen can crank up to a brightness of 2000 nits to help you see everything even when the sun’s out.If

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is trying to make it easier for people to cancel their service with a new automated prompt that will ask subscribers if they want to continue paying after a lengthy period of inactivity.On May 18th, the company started reaching out to subscribers who haven’t used the service in two years (or within one year of their initial sign-up for newer customers) to let them know they can either keep their membership or have it canceled upon the next b

After getting deluged with unusually extreme rains for two straight days, two critical dams in Michigan failed this week. The failures led to unprecedented flooding in Midland County, and the evacuation of towns submerged in floodwaters. 
"This is unlike anything we’ve seen in Midland County," Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement.
Heavier rains are a well-understood consequence of a relentlessly warming planet. This is especially the case in the Midwest. There, the m

TL;DR: Save up to $400 on a new Leesa mattress during the Memorial Day sale as of May 21. That includes savings on both hybrid and all-foam mattresses plus free, no-contact delivery. Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and that means a complete cascade of mattress sales. We've already highlighted a few of our favorite online mattress stores from Allswell to Purple. But you can't have too many options when buying something as important as a new mattress, so add another option to your shoppi

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Starting today, Google Maps will feature a new mode called Accessible Places that, when toggled on, will more prominently show wheelchair accessibility info, the company announced on Thursday. It will be rolling out gradually, the company says, for both Android and iOS.“When Accessible Places is switched on, a wheelchair icon will indicate an accessible entrance and you’ll be able to see if a place has accessible seating, restrooms or parking,&r

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge For Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is announcing a few updates to its suite of accessibility features for Android. The biggest one is the final, public release of Action Blocks. They let you create big, customized buttons for relatively complex actions like playing music or calling somebody — tasks that might be difficult for people with a cognitive disability. Google is also adding features to Live Transcribe, Bluetooth support to S

When Hulu's adaptation of Sally Rooney's novel Normal People dropped last month, its sex scenes were undeniably arousing. The Cut's advice, for example, was to watch the series with a vibrator. The sensuality of the scenes weren't a mistake, either: The show had an on-set intimacy coordinator to choreograph moves. 
But it's not just (lonely, horny) viewers that took note of Normal People's eroticism. A 22-minute compilation of the show's sex scenes popped up on Pornhub, Variety reports. Whi

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge One year ago today, Facebook released the Oculus Quest, its first headset to deliver a credible standalone VR experience — true head tracking, good motion controllers, and so on. It also marked a split in the Oculus ecosystem: the Quest had its own store, curated with games that had been tailored specifically for the headset’s low-powered mobile hardware.At the time, that made it somewhat of a limited product. “As an Oculus Rift owne

Screenshot: Civilization 6 Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is available free on the Epic Games Store, meaning you can now claim a free copy that’s yours to keep. The offer is available until 11AM ET on May 28th, so you have one week to take advantage. You can grab the game over on its store page.
The deal comes a week after the store was down for over eight hours due to the popularity of its last free game giveaway: Grand Theft Auto V. The popularity of that deal shouldn’t have co

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile’s offer of free mobile service for first responders for 10 years is now available, CEO Mike Sievert announced today. The program, officially called “Connecting Heroes,” provides free access to the company’s network over the next decade for members of state and local public and nonprofit law enforcement, fire, and EMS agencies.We’ve just launched something only the⚡️Supercharged⚡️ #Uncarrier