Technology news

As part of HBO Max’s launch, WarnerMedia included a list of titles currently available to stream on day one, but after discrepancies were discovered between what WarnerMedia advertised and what was actually streaming, the company has pulled the list.The Dark Knight, 13 Going on 30, The Matrix, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug are just some of the titles originally advertised on WarnerMedia’s website but aren’t actually on HBO Max. A spokesperson for the company told The

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DoorDash on Thursday launched a new initiative called Storefront to help restaurants create websites and directly manage online pickup and delivery orders.As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced restaurants to pause their sit-down service, many have become increasingly reliant on delivery platforms like DoorDash, as well as competitors Grubhub, Postmates, and Uber Eats. These partnerships, of course, saddle restaurants with all kinds of commissions and fees,

Image: Apple During a group call, FaceTime automatically enlarges the window of whoever’s speaking. This means when you have four or more people on a call, the windows will resize, float, and bounce around during a group call. It can be distracting and confusing.
If you’d rather keep all of your FaceTime windows static and the same size during a call, there is quick way to do that in the latest iOS and iPadOS versions, as well as the latest version of macOS.
On iPhone
These instruct

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google will soon let G Suite customers with Google Voice licenses make Google Voice calls right from their Gmail inbox. The new feature seems like a handy way to make a Google Voice call without needing to jump to a second tab to do so.
If the feature is rolled out to you, you’ll be able to access Google Voice from the toolbar on the right side of your inbox, which is where you might currently see icons for Google Calendar, Keep, and Tasks. Here&rsq

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Facebook will now require people behind individual profiles with “high reach” to verify their identity, the company announced today. Facebook hopes this will ensure users are seeing more authentic posts from people, instead of ones from bots or users concealing their identity. The change follows a similar move two years ago in which Facebook required viral page owners to disclose their identities and locations, following numerous accounts of

Photo by Doug MIlls-Pool / Getty Images President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday targeting tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google and the pivotal internet law that provides them broad legal immunity over content posted by their users.
“We’re fed up with it,” Trump said in the Oval Office Thursday before signing the order, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The official executive order has not been released, but a draft order circulated earlier t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon.com was down for many people in the US for a short while Thursday afternoon. A number of Verge staffers were unable to access the site, and countless user reports of an outage across the country poured in on Downdetector.
It’s exceedingly rare for Amazon’s main e-commerce site to have an outage that was as extensive as today’s, but it’s not unprecedented for Amazon’s internet services to go down. In 2017, Amazon’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon.com appears to be down for many people in the US. A number of Verge staffers are unable to access the site, and there are countless user reports of an outage across the country pouring in on Downdetector.
It’s not unprecedented for Amazon’s internet services to have an outage. In 2017, Amazon’s widely used cloud computing division, AWS, had an outage that took down many other services and websites that relied on it. But it is exce

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Owners of the excellent Jabra Elite 75t (and Elite Active 75t) earbuds can now customize controls for the physical buttons on each earbud. With a new update to the company’s Sound Plus smartphone app available today, you can pick what you want a single, double, or triple press to do for each earbud.For example, I’ve now customized mine so that a double press of the right earbud button will skip forward a track and a double press on the left will go b

What does a global mindset look like in a world where most of us no longer travel? And what does it mean to be local when everyone is connected?
Those are the first questions we had in mind when we read GGV Capital’s Twitter bio, which asserts that the investing shop with offices in five cities is a “global venture capital firm that invests in local founders.”
Certainly, some of its investments are far from home, including Khatabook (based in Bangalore), Keep (Beijing), Coder,

Image: Netatmo Netatmo has released an updated version of its outdoor security smart camera with a powerful alarm to scare off uninvited guests. The revised security camera remains mostly unchanged from Netatmo’s previous outdoor model. However, this version includes a built-in 105dB siren, meant to scare off any intruders. The siren can be manually activated by using the Netatmo app after you receive an alert that a person or vehicle has entered your property.Of course, not every person

Photo by Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images The internet is a magical place, somewhere where you can, for the right price, get anything you want. And if that something is a decommissioned nuclear reactor control panel — well, have I got some good news for you!Today, author Warren Ellis posted on his blog about an auction being held in England where one of the lots for sale was a decommissioned nuclear reactor control panel. Yes, this thing:
If you’ve seen the hit mi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google announced on Thursday that it will bring its SameSite cookie update back starting July 14th, alongside the launch of Chrome 84. The update will roll out gradually to Chrome 80 and later versions.
When Chrome 80 launched in February, Google started rolling out its SameSite update, which is intended to change how cookies are handled by the browser. In April, Google announced it would be rolling back that update in order to keep essential websites wor

As promised, Disney now gives subscribers of Disney Plus the option to watch over 19 seasons of The Simpsons in the show’s original 4:3 aspect ratio. When the subscription streaming service first launched, it only presented The Simpsons in a remastered, 16:9 aspect ratio — and this resulted in audiences missing out on some visual gags that were near the top or bottom of the frame.It didn’t take long for Disney to address viewer complaints by announcing it would give subscribers

Photo by Erin Schaff for The Verge Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is calling Donald Trump’s proposed executive order “plainly illegal” in a new statement on Thursday. The draft executive order would pare back platform liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a bill Wyden coauthored in 1996 with Sen. Chris Cox (R-CA).
Under Section 230, internet companies have broad immunity from liability for the content created by their users. The draft order, announc

Elon Musk often brags about how he’s built up Tesla with “zero advertising spend.” But advertising is just one form of marketing, and the billionaire CEO sure knows how to market his companies. The latest example comes from a new episode of Jay Leno’s show on CNBC, where the former talk show host and notorious car collector visits SpaceX headquarters to drive a prototype of Tesla’s Cybertruck through the mile-long “test tunnel” Musk dug under Los Angeles

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube sparked widespread speculation about its moderation policies this week after it admitted to accidentally deleting comments that contained phrases critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Today, the company told The Verge that the issue was not the result of outside interference — an explanation for the error floated by many.The phrases that triggered automatic deletion included “communist bandit” and “50-cent party,&r

Vast monoculture farms outstripped the ability of bee populations to pollinate them naturally long ago, but the techniques that have arisen to fill that gap are neither precise nor modern. Israeli startup BeeHero aims to change that by treating hives both as living things and IoT devices, tracking health and pollination progress practically in real time. It just raised a $4 million seed round that should help expand its operations into U.S. agriculture.
Honeybees are used around the world to pol

Earlier seasons of The Simpsons are finally available to stream in its proper 4:3 aspect ratio, a task Disney Plus’ product team had to spend some time figuring out.Aspect ratios are a big deal in The Simpsons. Fox originally aired the show in 1989, and at the time used a 4:3 aspect ratio. The show, as any fan will explain, relies heavily on visual gags — an aspect of joke-telling that wouldn’t become an issue until near the end of 2009, about a third of the way through The Sim

Illustration by Alex Castro / Th The American Civil Liberties Union is suing controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI for violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), alleging the company illegally collected and stored data on Illinois citizens without their knowledge or consent and then sold access to its technology to law enforcement and private companies. The full complaint is available here.“Unbeknownst to the public, this company has offered up this m

On mobile, YouTube’s new chapters feature provides haptic feedback when you reach a new chapter | Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge YouTube is releasing its new video chapters feature today to all users on desktop, phones, and tablets. The chapters, which soft-launched in early April, make it easy to skip to precisely where you want to go in a video, like a book. It’s not rocket science. It helps me get exactly where I want to go, then it gets out of the way.On desktop, a video

Data, the cliché goes, is the new oil of the digital economy. But Truth{set} co-founder and CEO Scott McKinley wants to know: “Why does no one care about the quality of that fuel?”
That’s an issue McKinley saw in his seven years as an executive at Nielsen, where he said he realized that marketing data products are “all built on massive error.” As evidence, he pointed to recent studies showing that bad data leads marketers to waste 21 cents of every dollar, an

Hulu Watch Party | Image: Hulu Hulu is starting to test a Watch Party feature that’ll allow subscribers to simultaneously watch a show or movie while hanging out in a group chat room.
Watch parties have grown increasingly popular over the past couple of months as friends and family who are social distancing look for new ways to connect. The services that enabled those watch parties have tended to be third-party offerings, though. There isn’t a built-in way to stream Netflix or Disne

Image: Epic Games Fortnite’s upcoming end-of-season live event has been delayed by one week, Epic Games announced today. It will now take place on June 6th at 2PM ET.
Epic began teasing the event, which it is calling “The Device,” last weekend. Ominous countdowns appeared in the game’s lobby and in a screen in the game’s battle pass menu. Mysterious hatches have also appeared in the water near the Agency building in the game, which sits on a central island on the m

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images There’s a growing divide at the Federal Communications Commission over a proposed executive order by the Trump administration to regulate speech on social media platforms.In statements made Thursday, Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr took opposing sides over an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Democrat Rosenworcel said that the order “is not the answer” while Republican Carr suggest

Starling Bank, the U.K.-based challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, has raised an additional £40 million in funding, TechCrunch has learned.
The round is led by existing backers Harry McPike’s JTC and Merian Chrysalis Investment Company Limited, and adds to the £60 million raised in February this year.
Now boasting 1.4 million accounts, including 155,000 business accounts, Starling Bankhas raised a total of £363 million since its launch in 2014. Noteworth