Technology news

Facebook wants to empower you to make the world more open and connected as you suppress your workers' legal right to form a union. 
The social media giant that seemingly goes out of its way to be awful set a new bar Wednesday, when, according to reporting by the Intercept, it showed off a new Workplace tool designed to prevent certain words from trending on the enterprise-focused platform. And, to make things as clear as possible during the internal meeting, it chose an example word: "union

Dieter Bohn / The Verge There’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and a rotation of other reporters and editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are:Android 11 beta: here are all the announcements
PlayStation 5: all of the news from Sony’s next-gen game showcaseAmazon, IBM, and Microsoft stop selling facial recognition technology to policeDuring the first part of the

The coronavirus pandemic, protests over police killings and systemic racism, and a contentious election have created the perfect storm for misinformation on social media. 
But don't expect AI to save us.
Twitter’s recent decision to red-flag President Donald Trump's false claims about mail-in ballots has reinvigorated the debate on whether social media platforms should fact-check posts. 
The president suggested Twitter was "interfering" in the 2020 election by adding a label that

As protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement continue, people across the country are calling for the removal of statues of known slaveholders and other racist figures.
In response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a white police officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, protests against police brutality and systemic racism have erupted around the world. From rallying around Black victims of police violence to exposing abusive and racist work envir

The National Emergency Library is one of those well-intentioned ideas that was destined to get pushback. The brainchild of Internet Archive, the platform made north of 1.3 million books available for checkout, free of charge. The system was designed to supplement the book needs of educators, as libraries across the country remained closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.Book publishers, on the other hand, weren’t having it. A consortium of four publishers filed suit against Internet Archive e

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Light, the company behind the Nokia 9’s unique array of five rear cameras, has given up on its unconventional effort to revolutionize the cameras in our pockets. In a statement to Android Authority, Light said it’s “no longer operating in the smartphone industry.”
Light set out to overcome the limitations of small camera sensors — like those in our phones — by cramming a ton of cameras (each with different focal lengths) ont

Just weeks after the launch of HBO Max, which added to the already confusing HBO product lineup of HBO, HBO Go, and HBO Now, WarnerMedia is making some changes in an attempt to reduce some of the confusion about which app is for which purpose.
A short primer on HBO Max, before I go further: HBO Max is AT&T’s new streaming service that lets you access the entire HBO library plus additional content like Cartoon Network shows and the Studio Ghibli movies. You can subscribe to HBO Max dire

APX is an early-stage accelerator in Berlin, but it’s not quite your average accelerator — it’s essentially a joint venture between giant European publishing house Axel Springer and Porsche, the German automaker. Earlier this month, we sat down with APX managing director Jörg Rheinboldt to discuss what makes APX different and how it’s weathering the coronavirus pandemic.
Rheinboldt has quite a bit of experience as both an entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Alan

WarnerMediais hoping to make things simpler for anyone wondering whether to get HBO Max, HBOGo or HBO Now.
Back in simpler times, there were only two HBO streaming apps — Go for cable subscribers, and Now for viewers who wanted a standalone streaming subscription. Then the company launched launched HBO Max last month.
Content-wise, Max encompasses the HBO library plus a bunch of additional movies and shows. Meanwhile, from an app perspective, it was released as an update to HBO Now &hellip

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images Elon Musk’s Boring Company is already looking to dig more tunnels in Las Vegas, Nevada, after it finished excavating the first two under the city’s convention center last month.
Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom tweeted a map last week that shows a proposed set of tunnels that would run west from the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to the Wynn and the Encore, hotel casinos owned by Wynn Resorts. This week, Wynn Resorts announced that, wor

NASAhas selected a new top official to oversee all of its efforts regarding human spaceflight — Kathy Lueders, who previously led NASA’s commercial crew program starting in 2014 and culminating in the successful first crewed demonstration launch of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft last month.
Lueders also previously worked on NASA’S Commercial Cargo program, which has led to the long and successful relationship between SpaceXand the agency to fly regular cargo supply missions u

Mars Rover Curiosity has been on the Red Planet for going on eight years, but its journey is nowhere near finished — and it’s still getting upgrades. You can help it out by spending a few minutes labeling raw data to feed to its terrain-scanning AI.
Curiosity doesn’t navigate on its own; there’s a whole team of people on Earth who analyze the imagery coming back from Mars and plot a path forward for the mobile science laboratory. In order to do so, however, they need to e

Image: Sony Sony has finally shown off what the PlayStation 5 will look like, but there’s one very big question about the design that’s still unclear: just how big is the PlayStation 5?We’ll likely have to wait until Sony gives official dimensions (or shows the physical box next to something else for scale) of the controversial design to know for sure, but that isn’t stopping fans on the internet from doing their best to estimate things. And based on early guesses, the P

Facebookis reportedly getting into the venture capital game, but for young entrepreneurs working in social media, ignoring or deleting that particular friend request could be the right call.
According to a report in Axios, the company is building up a corporate fund under the auspices of its “New Product Experimentation” team, which launched last year. The company posted a job opening looking for a “head of investments” for the new division and now has new job openings in

Insomniac Games has confirmed that the newly announced Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be a standalone title for the PlayStation 5, quashing rumors that the title was simply a remastered version or an expansion of the original PS4 Spider-Man that have been swirling since the reveal. Spider-Man: Miles Morales will reportedly be smaller in scope than the original, though, per a Bloomberg report that compared it to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in scope.
Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the next a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The state of New York has the most confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19, and a new report by The Wall Street Journal details how the state’s policies and missed warning signs made residents more vulnerable to the virus, leading to more deaths and a higher risk of contraction.The Wall Street Journal spoke to nearly 90 frontline medical professionals, from doctors to hospital administrators and government officials, to understand what went wrong. Im

Photo by Ezra Shaw / Getty Images Peloton enjoyed huge demand for its high-end exercise bikes in the first quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, which kept gyms closed and antsy homebound people seeking exercise. The company continued streaming live classes from its New York City set well after competitors had halted live classes, but it finally closed its studios on April 3rd after an employee tested positive for COVID-19.
But a new report from BuzzFeed News says the workers who del

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has announced the results of its first Deepfake Detection Challenge, an open competition to find algorithms that can spot AI-manipulated videos. The results, while promising, show there’s still lots of work to be done before automated systems can reliably spot deepfake content, with researchers describing the issue as an “unsolved problem.”
Facebook says the winning algorithm in the contest was able to spot “challenging re

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon has a new student discount offer for college students, offering a $10-per-month discount on a single line or $25-per-month discount on two lines for subscribers to its various unlimited plans. The new offer will be available starting on July 2nd.As of last August, Verizon offers four different “unlimited” plans that all offer a variety of perks, features, and limitations. Prices start at $70 per month for a single line for the entry-le

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge The Beats Solo Pro wireless on-ear headphones with active noise cancellation are $230 at Best Buy and Amazon, which is $20 cheaper than the best deal we’ve seen. This is Beats’ latest model, and it’s just about as capable as Sony and Bose’s flagship model in terms of build quality and battery life, despite now costing considerably less. It’s worth noting that these charge via Lightning port, so while you can connect them wirelessly

COVID-19 testing at a pop-up site in New York City. | Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images In January, early reports out of China started to hint that people infected with the coronavirus were contagious before they started to show symptoms. That’s unusual for a respiratory virus like this one, and it worried public health experts all over the world: it’s much harder to control the spread of a disease if someone who has it can pass it along before they know they’re sic

via IMDb 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: Rollerball (the 1975 original, not the 2002 remake)
The future: Corporate nations and their supercomputers rule humanity, shaping digitized historical records to their liking. The masses are pacified by watching rollerball, a professional sport that’s like footba

The unicorns are still at it, Vision Fund 2 or no Vision Fund 2.
This week, Instacart announced that it has raised fresh capital at a valuation north of $13 billion. And, on the tail of that news item, DoorDash is looking to add more cash at a valuation that could stretch to a pre-money valuation that exceeds $15 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Both announcements make it plain that late-stage unicorns are still able to attract huge sums despite a putatively uncertain, if recently

Image: Sony Sony finally revealed its PlayStation 5 console hardware this week, and while the console design will undoubtedly be labeled divisive, the real surprise was Sony’s plans for two PS5 models. There’s a PS5 Digital Edition that will ship with the same hardware specs as the main model, without the 4K Blu-ray drive. Sony didn’t mention pricing for either variant, but the PS5 Digital Edition will obviously be priced below the model with the optical drive. It sets Sony up

Extra Crunch Live, TechCrunch’s chat series for Extra Crunch members, is tacking toward founders after bringing on a host of investors: on Thursday, June 18, Plaid CEO Zach Perret will join us for a conversation.
Plaid,known for APIs that connect fintech applications with users’ bank accounts, came to prominence in late 2018 when it closed a massive $250 million Series C. The round — TechCrunch’s coverage from the time is here — brought the value of the company to $

Image: Sony Ahead of the long-awaited arrival of the next generation of video game consoles, Microsoft had clearly grabbed the initiative. Its reveal of the Xbox Series X at the Game Awards came out of nowhere, and Sony’s weak response at CES a few weeks later was to show off the PS5 logo. (It’s a PS4 logo with a 5 in it.)
Then the coronavirus hit, and all plans went out of the window. Sony stumbled by hyping a dense, tech-heavy presentation, which was intended to be a Game Develope