Technology news

SaaS stocks are at it again, and I think I’ve got it figured it out.
More precisely I think I’ve figured out what other people think is going on. After rigorous fact-checking by both reading tweets, making VCs talk to me on the phone, and chatting with the CEO of a $27 billion cloud company this morning, it all makes sense.
Some background to start, I think.
Today, Friday the 21st of May, the day after the economy shed another 2.4 million jobs, bringing the COVID-19 jobs-lost tally t

Organizers of the New York International Auto Show, once hoping to hold the rescheduled event in August, have decided to scrap the entire year. The show has been officially canceled for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, organizers announced Friday.
The next show will take place April 2 to April 11, 2021. Press days will be March 31 and April 1.
The New York Auto Show, which is organized by the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, was scheduled to begin April 10 at the Jacob K. Javit

Glitch laid off “a substantial number of employees” on Thursday in an effort to cut costs and ensure “long term viability,” the company confirmed in an email to The Verge. Glitch said it had to “significantly cut operating costs” due to market conditions.
At least 18 people were laid off, according to two former employees who asked to remain anonymous. Glitch had about 50 employees before the layoffs, the sources said. Glitch declined to comment on how many em

Riana Pfefferkorn ContributorShare on Twitter Riana Pfefferkorn is the associate director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.The debate over encryption continues to drag on without end.
In recent months, the discourse has largely swung away from encrypted smartphones to focus instead on end-to-end encrypted messaging. But a recent press conference by the heads of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) showed th

After two days of intense reviews, NASA is giving its commercial partner SpaceX the thumbs-up to launch its first astronauts to space next week. There’s still more work to be done by both the agency and SpaceX, including another review on Monday, but officials decided there were no major issues standing in the way of the launch.
“It was a good review, great discussion,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a press conference. “I think everybody in the room was v

A new leak hints at what to expect from Sony’s WH-1000XM4, the upcoming successor to the WH-1000XM3, one of the best wireless headphones on the market.
The details come from Twitter user justplayinghard, who tweeted out information they obtained from a recent teardown of Sony’s Headphones Connect app. The code hints that the M4 headphones may be able to simultaneously pair with two devices, a feature not present in its predecessor. On the current model, you have to reconnect if you w

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft’s Xbox Live service experienced issues today, marking the fourth time in recent weeks. Xbox One users were reporting problems earlier today with signing into Xbox Live, accessing friends, and joining parties. The issues started at around 3:15PM ET, and also affected some multiplayer games. The outage was not isolated to Xbox Live; Microsoft says it was an issue persisting throughout its platforms, including Microsoft 365.“We are awar

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft’s Xbox Live service is experiencing issues today, marking the fourth time in recent weeks. Xbox One users are currently reporting problems with signing into Xbox Live, accessing friends, and joining parties. “We are aware that some users may be experiencing issues when attempting to sign in on Xbox One & Windows 10,” explains Microsoft. “Our teams are aware & working on a fix. Please follow here & on our statu

Working from home isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and a slew of companies just announced longer-term initiatives to make their remote work practices either extend or permanent. That means for some it’s the perfect time to take their at-home videoconferencing setup even further, so we’re going to take a closer look at various core elements to build on our initial exploration of what can help you improve your video call or live broadcasting game. Today, it’s all about au

High-quality data is the fuel that powers AI algorithms. Without a continual flow of labeled data, bottlenecks can occur and the algorithm will slowly get worse and add risk to the system.
It’s why labeled data is so critical for companies like Zoox,Cruise and Waymo,which use it to train machine learning models to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles. That need is what led to the creation of Scale AI, a startup that uses software and people to process and label image, lidar and map data

Another tech company is joining the list of those planning on going remote for the long haul: Box .
Box CEO Aaron Levie announced this morning that the company will “remain a digital-first organization” moving forward. While it sounds like they’re still working out exactly what that entails, one key aspect is that Box employees will be able to work “from anywhere” until at least January of 2021.
Box isn’t planning to ditch the office outright. In a blog post a

Square Enix today announced that the Final Fantasy XIV Online: Starter Edition, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game set in the Final Fantasy universe, is free to download on Playstation 4 from now until 26 May, after which you can keep it forever. If you have a Playstation 4 and an account already, all you need to do is head to the Playstation store, either here or on your console, and navigate to the game’s page. You’ll notice the Starter Edition is free

The lead data regulator for much of big tech in Europe is moving inexorably towards issuing its first major cross-border GDPR decision — saying today it’s submitted a draft decision related to Twitter’s business to its fellow EU watchdogs for review.
“The draft decision focusses on whether Twitter International Company has complied with Articles 33(1) and 33(5) of the GDPR,” said the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) in a statement.
Europe’s General Data

Minecraft is one of the most popular games on the planet, so it’s natural that Microsoft,after buying creator Mojang some years back, would attempt to apply the genre’s playful, blocky aesthetic to other genres. After modest success with the Story Mode adventure game and Pokémon GO-like Minecraft Earth, they’ve tried their hand at a light action-RPG à la Diablo — and unfortunately come up rather short. For now, that is.
Minecraft Dungeons is a sort of my-fir

The year is 2012. Square Enix reveals a gameplay trailer of its upcoming action-adventure title, Tomb Raider, at E3. At a pivotal moment, gaming legend Lara Croft has been discovered in a hiding place during a dramatic escape from an enemy encampment. A grizzled, armed man grabs her by the shoulder, then proceeds to run his hands down the sides of her body. The camera pauses as he’s doing so to allow the viewer to process what they’re seeing: one of gaming’s strongest and most

The global pandemic has halted travel, shunted schools online and shut down many cities, but the future of college-town America is an area of deep concern for the startup world.
College towns have done exceedingly well with the rise of the knowledge economy and concentrating students and talent in dense social webs. That confluence of ideas and skill fueled the rise of a whole set of startup clusters outside major geos like the Bay Area, but with COVID-19 bearing down on these ecosystems and man

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge They’re pulling the plug on the New York Auto Show.The show, which is typically held in April and draws over 1 million attendants, was delayed until August due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But organizers are now saying they won’t be able to meet that deadline and are focused on reviving the auto show in spring 2021.The Javits Center, which houses the auto show, is still being used as a field hospital
The Javits Center, which houses the auto s

A team of scientists from Canada have identified at least 13 strains of cannabis sativa they believe can aid in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. The President of the United States of America has spent the past few weeks touting a dangerous drug called hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic treatment for COVID-19. Unfortunately, the president’s expertise is in reality TV, not medicine. Several studies have shown that hydroxychloroquine, a drug designed to treat malaria, has dangerou

Netflix Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish are returning for a new season of Tuca & Bertie, set to air on Adult Swim two years after Netflix’s decision to cancel the series.The network announced on Twitter today that a new season of the animated series, created by former BoJack Horseman producer and artist Lisa Hanawalt, will air in 2021. Adult Swim has ordered 10 episodes, according to The Wrap. The show follows two best friends as they navigate their adult lives, dealing with anxiety, rel

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Security researchers, hackers, and bloggers have had access to an early version of iOS 14 since “at least February,” according to Vice. There have already been many iOS 14 leaks over the past few months, and it seems possible the information came from this early version of the operating system.
It’s common for small tidbits about Apple software updates to leak in the months and weeks before Apple officially unveils them. But it&rsquo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A large-scale study suggests chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine don’t help treat COVID-19, and it may even be harmful. Today, peer-reviewed journal The Lancet published a paper analyzing data from thousands of patients who took the drugs. Their outcomes were no better than those of people who didn’t — in fact, they were more likely to die or develop an irregular heartbeat.
The analysis covers a registry of roughly 15,000 patients across

Avaamo, a company that specializes in conversational AI, recently built a virtual assistant to translate natural language queries about the COVID-19 pandemic into reliable insights. In other words, it’s an AI-powered chatbot that can answer just about any question you have about the pandemic. Avaamo’s Project COVID uses a deep learning system called natural language processing to turn our questions about the pandemic into website and database queries. It works a lot like Google or B

Image: CW Here’s something that can be easy to forget about comic book superheroes, given how popular they’ve become over the last decade: they’re really quite old. This is especially true for DC Comics characters like Batman and Superman, who were created in the 1930s. Comic books were extremely different then, and many superheroes of the Golden Age were specific to their era in ways that don’t necessarily translate to modern success outside of the odd period piece. Sta

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge It’s Friday, which means there’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay, Dieter, and a rotation of other editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are:
Microsoft’s Build developer conference
Elon Musk’s... active month
Spotify getting exclusive streaming rights to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast
During the first part of the show, Verge seni

Joe Rogan is largely moving on from YouTube, a site that helped transform his podcast into a viral video-making factory, earning him nearly 10 million subscribers in the process. It’s the latest sign that creators who found success on YouTube see other platforms as the next step, but it doesn’t mean that YouTube is anywhere close to being cut out of the podcast game.
Later this year, Rogan will bring his mega-popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, exclusively to Spotify. It&rsquo

Disney released a surprise new series on its Disney Plus streaming service today: Zenimation, an ASMR-style series of short videos that take clips from classic animated Disney movies and replace the usual dialogue, songs, and score with the realistic ambient noise that they would have in real life.
The first season of Zenimation features 10 episodes, centered on themes like “Water,” “Nature,” “Discovery,” and “Flight.” Each episode is about five to

Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge The Verge is a place where you can consider the future. So are movies. In Yesterday’s Future, we revisit a movie about the future and consider the things it tells us about today, tomorrow, and yesterday.
The movie: Wall-E (2008)
The future: In Wall-E, waste is what does us in. The first third of Pixar’s ninth film is among the best 30-minute stretches of cinema the studio has ever produced: a mostly silent experience where Wall-E, a cut

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft is finally bringing cloud support to Outlook for Windows email signatures. It’s a feature that Outlook users have been requesting for more than a decade, and it has remained at the top of Microsoft’s most-requested feature list for Outlook for Windows for nearly three years.
Microsoft originally acknowledged that it was planning some type of sync support for Outlook signatures back in September, and the company says it will now roll this out

Wool means robot in Rocos’ video of a Boston Dynamics Spot unit herding sheep. | Image: Rocos It’s certainly an arresting image: a four-legged robot trots across a grassy hillside, steering a herd of sheep without a human in sight. The apparently seamless fusion of the futuristic and the agrarian feels refreshing — even hopeful — at a time when so much progress relies upon the destruction of the natural world.But is it realistic? Could a robot actually take on the job of