Technology news

It looks like Twitter’s finally had enough of US President Donald Trump‘s abuse of its platform. Today, keen observers may have noticed the president‘s @realDonaldTrump Twitter account has been splashed with a couple of fact-checking embeds on tweets where he’s attempted to misinform the US voting public by lying about the mail-in ballot process. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time Twitter’s embedded links in the president’s tweets. The result

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has been successfully feeding talking points, video footage, and other corporate messaging to local television news stations ahead of its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday. The footage and script are designed to paint Amazon in a positive light as it faces a torrent of bad media coverage and criticism from activists and politicians over its handling of workplace safety issues during the coronavirus pandemic.As Zach Rael, an anchor for ABC aff

On the heels of a furor over his tweets accusing MSNBC host Joe Scarborough of murder, Twitter has quietly begun to fact-check the president.
A new label prompting Twitterusers to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” appeared on a series of tweets in which the president baselessly claimed ballots received through mail-in voting methods are “fraudulent.”In a statement to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson said the pair of tweets from the president “contain potential

Photo by Andrej Sokolow / Picture Alliance via Getty Images Google will begin reopening offices starting on July 6th for a limited number of employees. In a blog post published on Tuesday, CEO Sundar Pichai said that, while returning to work will be optional for the rest of the year, those who need to come in will be able to on a rotating basis — one day every couple weeks. The company is also giving workers a $1,000 stipend for home office equipment to make remote work easier.
In Septemb

YouTuberesponded to reports that it is automatically deleting comments criticizing the Chinese government, explaining that the seeming censorship is actually an error in its automated moderation systems.
As the Verge reported, comments on the platform using the Chinese phrases for “communist bandit” or “50-cent party” — two terms tied to criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party — were taken down almost instantly, even if those comments were positive. The latt

Photo By Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call On Tuesday, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) introduced a bill that would upend political advertising on platforms like Facebook and Google.The Banning Microtargeted Political Ads Act would bar platforms like Google and Facebook from allowing advertisers to target messages based on the demographic or behavioral data of their users. The Federal Elections Commission would act as the primary enforcer of these proposed rules, but the bill leaves room for individuals to br

Scott Orn ContributorShare on Twitter Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.More posts by this contributorHow to approach (and work with) the 3 types of corporate VCs Bill Growney ContributorShare on Twitter Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup companies thr

Image: Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment will not host its annual BlizzCon event this year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The event is usually held later in the year, with BlizzCon 2019 kicking off on November 1st and concluding on November 2nd. In early April, Blizzard announced that it was uncertain about hosting BlizzCon this year.Despite canceling the convention, Blizzard may be looking to hold a virtual event in its place. “We’re talking about how we might b

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitch has re-signed popular streamers Jaryd “Summit1G” Lazar, Brett “Dakotaz” Hoffman, and Josh “JoshOG” Beaver, ensuring they will stay with the service at a time when others are taking deals to stream elsewhere (via The Washington Post). The terms of the contracts were not disclosed, though they are “multi-year content deals,” according to a press release from Loaded, the talent agency that represents all

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. HBO‘s parent company WarnerMedia is launching its streaming platform, HBO Max, this week. With this launch, WarnerMedia can join the rest of the massive media companies vying for attention in the streaming wars. But how does HBO Max relate to HBO Now, or HBO Go, for that matter? What do these services have in common, besides the name? Whoever in Wa

Photo: Apple Apple will reopen around 100 retail stores in the US by the end of the week, the company confirmed to The Verge. That will put Apple’s active retail locations in the country at 130 out of 271 spread out across 21 states. The company is reopening each location in phases, so some stores will support only curbside pickup, while others will allow in-store service and sales.The states that will soon have active Apple Stores are: Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kans

Sony has filed a patent for a soundtrack generator that matches music to a gamer’s emotions, sparking speculation that the tech could find its way into the PlayStation 5. The patent, which was first spotted by Gaming Intel, describes an AI-powered system that adapts background music to game scenarios and a player’s activity. The feature maps emotions such as tension, joy, and fear to musical components including rhythm, melodic structure, and

‘Planet of the Humans’ executive producer Michael Moore with director Jeff Gibbs and producer Ozzie Zehner at the Traverse City Film Festival. | Photo: Planet of the Humans The controversial film Planet of the Humans, produced by Michael Moore, was taken down from YouTube on Monday because of a copyright infringement claim. The complaint was filed by photographer Toby Smith, who was alarmed that his work was used in a film that he doesn’t support, The Guardian reports.“I

Poolside.fm, an online radio station, might be the chillest place online: a place where it’s perpetually the summer of 1997, and where, as the intro copy says, “safety comes second and drinks come first.” And that feels true, when you boot up the page — it looks like an Apple desktop from the late ’90s, and retains mostly the same functionality. Curated audio is piped in via SoundCloud, and it’s matched with equally considered video streams. The effect isn&rsq

Lenovo Yoga Duet 7i. | Image: Lenovo Lenovo is adding two new devices to its Windows 10 lineup — the Yoga Duet 7i and the IdeaPad Duet 3i — both of which are detachable 2-in-1 devices that support LTE. They both feature a design similar to Microsoft’s Surface tablets but have the bonus of coming bundled with the keyboard, which, this time around, supports Bluetooth for use while detached.
The Yoga Duet 7i is the top-of-the-line of the pair. This 2-in-1 features up to a 10th Ge

Photo by Presley Ann / Getty Images for WarnerMedia At launch, new streaming services prompt the same question: what can I watch? But HBO Max also elicits a different line of questioning: how is this different from HBO Now? From HBO Go? From AT&T TV Now? Do I have to pay extra for this, or is it wrapped into my HBO package?
HBO Max, which is set to launch tomorrow, May 27th, is AT&T and WarnerMedia’s new crown jewel in the streaming space — a general entertainment platform t

Photo by Xavier Bonilla / NurPhoto via Getty Images Audi has dropped driver Daniel Abt in the all-electric racing series Formula E after he had a pro sim driver surreptitiously race for him during a virtual competition over the weekend. He has also been told to pay €10,000 to charity as a result.Abt said Tuesday that he thought the idea would be funny and that he had planned to release a video about the whole ruse.
Abt was supposed to be competing in the fifth round of Formula E’s on

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 Earthlings, A few months back, when our beards were shorter and our fuses were longer, we collectively took solace in Netflix‘s “Tiger King” and Nintendo’s Animal Crossings: New Horizons. Remember that? Those were simpler times. We identified with the tigers in their c

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An internal Facebook report presented to executives in 2018 found that the company was well aware that its product, specifically its recommendation engine, stoked divisiveness and polarization, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.Yet, despite warnings about the effect this could have on society, Facebook leadership ignored the findings and has largely tried to absolve itself of responsibility with regard to partisan divides and other fo

Photo by Paul Chinn / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, Sandra Quinn asked hundreds of Americans if they’d be willing to take a hypothetical vaccine that was authorized for emergency use but wasn’t formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Most were hesitant: Quinn, the senior associate director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, found that only around 8 percent of people said that they&rsquo

On the surface, Diablo isn’t exactly what most people would call comforting. It’s a series about exploring dark realms and fighting all manner of undead and demonic monsters. But there’s something about its formula of exploring dungeons, gathering loot, and steadily becoming immensely powerful that makes it easy to jump into, despite the dark subject matter. That feeling of comfort is even more pronounced when you take that formula and apply it to a familiar world, like, say, t

Microsoft created a fun Easter egg for its Edge browser to reveal the new logo last year, and it’s now available for everyone to play. The Edge surf game is very similar to SkiFree, a classic game that was released as part of Microsoft’s Entertainment Pack 3 for Windows back in 1991. While it was used as part of an elaborate Easter egg hunt, where Microsoft employees posted cryptic clues to a series of puzzles and images, it’s now an official offline game inside Microsoft Edge.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile subscribers can now send RCS messages to people on other phone networks, so long as everyone involved has an Android phone and support for the new messaging standard.
There are still a bunch of caveats here, but this appears to be a big step forward for RCS. The messaging standard is meant to be the successor to SMS, but its rollout has been slow and messy. Many carriers — T-Mobile included — began supporting RCS years ago, but it gen

How many cyclists does it take to charge a Tesla? No, this isn’t the start to a bad joke, it’s a legitimate question. It’s also one that Finnish record breaker show Ennätystehdas (or The Record Factory) managed to answer. Whether you actually should charge your Tesla using captive cyclists is another question entirely, though. [Read: Engineer finds Tesla Model 3 is secretly equipped with hardware for powering homes] Given how little power the average cyclist generates com

J.K. Rowling will stagger the release of her new children’s novel The Ickabog over the next seven weeks, publishing the book in tiny chapters online and making it available to readers for free.Rowling is hosting The Ickabog on a new website with anywhere from “a chapter (or two, or three)” being published at a time, according to Rowling’s note. The first two chapters are available to read now, and although there’s no description of what the story entails, The Ickabo

DJI’s first action camera is almost as good as the best GoPro, says reviewer Brent Rose. | Photo by Brent Rose for The Verge Today’s deals are a mix of low-priced gadgets made even more affordable as well as some high-end products that don’t usually see a discount. The biggest price cut is on DJI’s Osmo Action 4K HDR camera. It usually costs $500, but today at Amazon, you can get it for $288. The price reduction is impressive, but what makes this deal extra special is th

As the world watched the coronavirus (COVID-19) threat spread across the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was making big Wall Street bets — pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into US tech giants like Apple, Twitter, and Amazon. Gates‘ fund also built fresh positions in Google’s Alphabet and China’s ecommerce darling Alibaba, worth $107 million and $100 million respectively. [Read: US tech execs have dumped $3.6 billion in company stoc

Image: Facebook Facebook is renaming Calibra, the digital wallet it hopes will one day be used to access the Libra digital currencies, Novi. In a blog post the company said that the new name was inspired by the Latin words “novus” and “via,” which mean “new” and “way,” respectively. Novi Financial is the new name of the Facebook subsidiary that will develop the company’s digital wallet.
A new name is just the latest in a series of changes Fa

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield claimed earlier this month that Microsoft Teams isn’t a competitor to Slack. In an interview with The Verge, Butterfield has revealed that, inside Slack, the company feels that “Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that.”
Butterfield sat down with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel for a wide-ranging interview that discusses Slack’s battles with Microsoft Teams, the future of Slack, new S

Illustration by Alex Castro / Th Slack is exploring a wide variety of new features that could be making their way to the popular messaging platform, including scheduled messages, Instagram-style stories, and short video and audio messages.According to CEO Stewart Butterfield in a recent interview on The Vergecast, the company has already “implemented APIs for scheduled sending of messages, and I think we’re going to end up putting that in the product at some point.” He also no

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Niantic Labs is adding a new augmented reality feature to Pokémon Go next month that will make the virtual creatures look even more realistic. The new feature will let real-world objects obscure parts of the pocket monsters or let them hide entirely behind environmental fixtures like trees or furniture.The company calls the feature “reality blending,” and it’s based on the AR technique known as occlusion, which uses a mix of hardware and

Image: OnePlus The OnePlus 8 series can now run Fortnite at 90fps, thanks to a collaboration between OnePlus and Epic Games. The update makes these devices the first phones to run Fortnite at a smooth 90 frames per second.
Most Android phones run Fortnite at a maximum of 60fps, similar to the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game. Nintendo’s console, the Switch, falls behind with a maximum of 30 frames per second. Most Apple devices, including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, have the optio

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Spotify has finally removed its 10,000-song cap on library sizes, allowing users to add as much music as they’d like to their personal libraries without any limits at all, fixing a problem that has plagued music-lovers on the service for years.
While Spotify has more than 50 million songs available to customers to stream at any time, until today, there was a hard limit of 10,000 songs that users could save to their own“Your Music” collections o