Technology news

Nintendo Switch styluses aren’t exactly a common accessory for the hybrid gaming system. Sure, there have been a few attempts, but nothing has come close to making a stylus a practical accessory for Switch owners. The Colors SonarPen, the latest attempt at a Switch stylus, goes beyond hardware to try to transform the device into a proper tablet.
The stylus is an accompanying piece for Colors Live, a digital painting app for the Nintendo Switch that is the successor to the Nintendo 3DS styl

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is working on a new system for verifying users, according to a tweet by reverse engineer and online sleuth Jane Manchun Wong. She discovered a “request verification” field in the Twitter app in the “personal information” section of the app’s settings.
Twitter confirmed Wong’s tweet but declined to comment further. The company’s help page still says its verified account program is on hold, and “we are

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images The American Civil Liberties Union sued Los Angeles Monday over the city’s requirement that electric scooter rental companies provide anonymized real-time location data.
The lawsuit centers on the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s use of a digital tool called the Mobility Data Specification program (MDS), which the agency created as a way to track and regulate electric scooters operating on its streets.MDS provides the city with data on wher

Welcome to 🏳️‍🌈TNW Pride 2020!🏳️‍🌈 All throughout June we’ll highlight articles that focus on representation for LGBTQPIA+ people in the STEM communities. Click here to check out all of our Pride 2020 coverage.  Reports of Pride’s cancellation are greatly exaggerated. The annual celebration may not feature the parades and vivacious crowds it’s become known for, but it’s still here and it’s still queer. You&

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Over the last few days, a furor has been brewing on Twitch: out of the blue, streamers started seeing copyright takedown notices appear in their inboxes. The claimant was listed as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the infringing material was mostly recorded clips of old live broadcasts. And that’s a problem because it’s stated very clearly in the Twitch terms of service that if your account is dinged with three of thes

Lemonade, a heavily-backed startup that sells renters and homeowners insurance to consumers, filed to go public today. The company (backed by SoftBank, part of the Sequoia empire, General Catalyst and Tusk Venture Partners, among others) releasing its financial results helps shed light on the burgeoning insurtech market, which has attracted an ocean of capital in recent quarters.
TechCrunch covered a part of the insurtech world earlier this year, asking why insurance marketplaces were picking up

HP has announced its Chromebook x360 14c, which it says is its most premium Chrome OS product yet. It starts at $499 and will be available in June.The 3.5-pound convertible device has a 14-inch touchscreen with an 88 percent screen-to-body ratio —the largest ever for an HP-made consumer Chromebook. Take a peek at the photos below — it looks nice: Image: HP
Inside, you’ll find up to 10th Gen Intel Core i5 processors, up to 128GB of eMMC storage, and a claimed 13.5 hours of batte

Steve McFly/@OnLeaks OnePlus will release a midpriced phone called the OnePlus Z in India in July, Android Police reports.Several leaks of the phone, first identified as the OnePlus 8 Lite, have shown a device with a 6.55-inch 90Hz OLED display that has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage as well as a 48MP camera with a 16MP wide-angle lens. The device is said to come with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765 processor, according to XDA-Developers.The OnePlus Z will be priced at 24,990 rupees (

Image: Sony Sony announced today that its upcoming PlayStation 5 event has been rescheduled to June 11th at 4PM ET. The event was originally scheduled for June 4th but was postponed due to the protests against police brutality happening around the world.
Sony plans to show off PS5 games during the event, and it will run for “a bit more than an hour,” president and CEO of Sony Interactive Jim Ryan said in a blog post announcing the original event.
See you Thursday, June 11 at 1:00pm

Photo: Joshua Roberts / Blizzard Entertainment The Overwatch League’s third season has been a bumpy one. Like every other professional gaming league, OWL has been forced to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic by shifting to an online format in lieu of in-person games.Meanwhile, viewership is down after the league moved from Twitch to YouTube, star players like Jay “Sinatraa” Won have retired and moved on to other games (most notably Riot’s just-released team shooter Valorant

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube offered more transparency into which videos can run ads and which can’t, including pranks and videos that fall under hateful content, in a breakdown of its monetization guidelines published in May.
One of the most important subjects addressed is when YouTube allows advertising on videos that contain “hateful content.” YouTube will allow ads to run on news videos about topics like homophobia, on “artistic content” like

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google is continuing to build more helpful new features into Google Maps to assist people trying to navigate around cities that have begun emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. When you look for public transit directions, you’ll now see “relevant alerts” from transit agencies about mandatory precautions you’ll need to take — such as wearing a face covering. And if a public transit line is temporarily suspended due to the ongoing

In recent months, the digital product industry has been faced with both challenge and opportunity. Companies and individuals are clambering to find solutions for remote work and life; all freshly reliant on new tools and platforms to collaborate and do business. Behind the scenes, product teams are under pressure to keep pace through innovation and creativity. This is a tall order in a time of disruption, but an extraordinary chance to grow and adapt. At Sprint Couch Conference on June 11, prod

Image: EA Need for Speed Heat will become EA’s first title with cross-platform multiplayer, thanks to an update that will be available tomorrow, EA announced in a blog today. The new crossplay feature will let you play with friends on PC via Origin and Steam, PS4, and Xbox One.
After you’ve installed the update, you’ll be prompted with the option to turn on crossplay, according to patch notes for the update. If you choose not to opt in, you can do so at a later time in the gam

Image: Motorola Motorola has announced the One Fusion Plus, its second phone with a pop-up selfie camera, just six months after first including one on last year’s Motorola One Hyper. Like its predecessor, it has a 6.5-inch 1080p display with no notch or hole-punch cutout, but the new phone features a number of internal and external improvements over the One Hyper.
The most obvious change is on the rear of the device, where you’ll now find a quad-camera array consisting of a main 64-

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sony’s popular noise-canceling true wireless earbuds, the WF-1000XM3, are on sale for $178 today on Amazon. That’s $51.99 off the typical $229.99 retail price. This is close to the lowest we’ve seen these earbuds sell for, which was a few weeks ago at Google Shopping for $70 off.Despite their small size, the WF-1000XM3 offer noise cancellation and a lengthy battery life of six hours between charges. My colleague Chris Welch pointed out in his r

We know that tech’s biggest are stronger than before the coronavirus pandemic — but when it comes to stock market debutants, tech companies have been completely overshadowed by a new wave of public biotech and pharmaceutical firms. The only exception is ZoomInfo, the Massachusetts data software and marketing startup that raised nearly $1 billion with its stock offering last week. As of Friday’s market close, ZoomInfo stock was up a tongue-swelling 85% on its ini

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Last week we noted that the IPO window was open, a seemingly incongruous reality when compared to stark unemployment figures in the country and what they would seem to bode for business health. But as the markets rise to near-record highs, it has become clear that investors are open to buying new, growth-oriented shares.
Our concluding point last week was simple: The open IPOwin

Around two and a half billion years ago the Earth was an alien world that would have been hostile to most of the complex life that surrounds us today. This was a planet where bacteria reigned, and one kind of bacteria in particular – cyanobacteria – was slowly changing the world around it through photosynthesis. The atmosphere of the early Earth lacked oxygen. This began to change during what’s known as the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE. At its broadest definition, the GOE ref

A colossal chess game of immense consequences is being fought in outer space, right now. On March 18 and April 22 2020, two rockets from SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, each put 60 satellites into orbit. Those launches are but the sixth and seventh in a series intended to rapidly make 1,584 satellites available. The aim is to create a satellite network called Starlink. If Musk has his way, by 2025 no less than 11,943 of his satellites will circle the Earth, and if pe

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Brave, the open-source browser designed to prioritize privacy by blocking third-party ads and trackers, is facing criticism from users for redirecting URLs from cryptocurrency companies to affiliate links that Brave profits from, Decrypt reported.A Twitter user spotted the redirect when he typed “binance.us” into the Brave search bar, and the browser autocompleted it to “binance.us/en?ref=35089877.” Both URLs go to the same page, b

BioShock Remastered (Nintendo Switch) | Image: 2K Games It’s still rare for the Switch to get blockbuster games that weren’t made by Nintendo, but there has been a trend in recent months to port older games from the last generation of consoles onto the Switch. Last week’s launches of The Outer Worlds, BioShock: The Collection, and Borderlands: The Handsome Collection were some of the most high-profile games to hit the Switch yet. And the result is a pile of great games that si

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Here at Equity Monday we look at what happened over the weekend, what’s ahead, and a few recent funding rounds. As you’ll hear, we’re heading back into our normal cadence and topics, but if you do want to learn a bit more about what you can do to make your voice heard in opposition to racist policing, last week’s ep is worth listeni

Now weed’s legalized in much of North America (ANYONE IMPRISONED FOR MARIJUANA SHOULD BE FREED IMMEDIATELY), there’s a sea change occuring. Well, capitalistically of course. What I’m talking about is fancy shit. From portable concentrate vapes to leather carry pouches, there’s a lot of it about. And one of the latest is the Stori: a pretty cool way to store weed. If that’s the sorta thing you’re into. So, let’s talk a bit about what makes the Stori a bo

Almost nine months ago, we published episode one of the first-ever TNW podcast, Forensic Finance. This podcast, created along with Dutch bank ABN Amro, is an exploration into how banks can help solve global issues. The inaugural episode discussed how analyzing bank data can help human trafficking victims, who are believed to number 40 million around the world. The second episode is finally here, this time on the topic of how banks detect money laundering. According to the IMF, mo

Welcome to SHIFT Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice to help you navigate the changing world of electric vehicles and mobility tech. Charging an electric vehicle can appear confusing at first, but in reality, it’s not that difficult once you start to get your head around the terminology. We’ve already taken a look at CHAdeMo, another rapid-charging connector; this time we’re taking a look at CCS or Combined Charging System. CCS is another type of connector used fo

It’s clear to anyone in tech that the likes of Amazon and Apple make tons of money, but who’s actually got the most healthy bank account? We set out to find which tech companies are the real MVPs (spoiler alert, it wasn’t Amazon or Apple) — here’s how: The most commonly used metric to evaluate the financial health of publicly traded companies is the debt-to-equity ratio. It indicates a company’s balance sheet, which is how much a company has borrowed to

British cancer doctor Prof Karol Sikora recently claimed that the current COVID-19 pandemic would “burn itself out”. His thinking is that if there are more infections than we realize, and that those milder, unrecorded infections result in robust immunity, then this would quickly lead to “herd immunity”, leaving the virus nowhere to go but extinct. Extend this to the world’s population and the virus eradicates itself. But the idea that letting the virus run wild wou

The Sonos Arc is one of the first products to be released for the S2 platform. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sonos is releasing its new app and S2 platform today. The new app (now with a tan icon) is now available on the App Store and the Google Play Store, and it will be the only way to control the company’s latest speakers: the Sonos Arc Dolby Atmos soundbar, Sonos Five, and new third-gen Sonos Sub. Sonos says the new platform includes support for higher-resolution audio technologi

GIF: Université de Sherbrooke We’ve always had a soft spot for supernumerary robotic limbs here at The Verge, but this latest example of the genre is one of the most impressive we’ve seen to date. Designed by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, it’s a hydraulic arm that sits on the wearer’s hip and uses a three-fingered manipulator to carry out a range of tasks.
The arm can lift five kilograms in weight
As reported by IEEE Spectrum, the a