Technology news

We continue to be stuck inside, and video games continue to sell well. It’s pretty much as simple as that, honestly. I mean, there’s more nuance than that, obviously, but that’s really the top line takeaway from NPD’s June gaming numbers.
More specifically, last month saw $1.2 billion total spent on gaming, up 26% from the year prior. That marks the highest figure for June since 2009. With June included, the first half of the year saw $6.6 billion total spent for the indu

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored.
Early reports suggested Google DNS may also have been affected, but this turned out not to be the case – Google Cloud confirmed it had no outages yesterday.
Update: Cloudflareat 2:46 says “the issue has been identified

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Electronic Arts has decided to pull all references to the Washington Redskins name and logo from its upcoming Madden NFL 21 game releasing next month. The move follows the landmark decision from team leadership earlier this week to change the Redskins name and overhaul its brand in response to years of protests and criticism from activists and corporate sponsors over its racist history. The news of EA’s plans to update Madden for its August 25th release

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Popular chat service Discord experienced widespread server outages today. The issues started at around 5PM ET, and lasted nearly an hour. Patreon, Deliveroo, GitLab, Zendesk, Medium, and many other sites were also down, and Cloudflare acknowledged issues with its network affected various apps and sites.“The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” says Cloudflare. Discord also had “all engineers on deck investigating th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Popular chat service Discord is experiencing widespread server outages today. The issues started at around 5PM ET, and appear to be affecting all users of Discord. The company’s status page isn’t even online right now, but Discord says it’s investigating the issues.
“Users are currently having trouble disconnecting to Discord due to an upstream internet issue,” says a Discord tweet. “We’ve got all engineers on dec

Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images American Airlines announced on Friday that it is making the check-in process completely touchless, even for passengers who have to check bags. But the company continues to book passengers into middle seats, so it’s ultimately a small gesture that only slightly reduces the chance of exposure to the novel coronavirus.
Starting Friday, passengers flying with American Airlines will have to set the number of bags they’re bringing ah

From a partnership with the Russian company 3D Bioprinting Solutions to make chicken meat replacement using plant material and lab-cultured chicken cells to an expansion of its Beyond Fried Chicken pilots to Southern California, KFC is aggressively pushing forward with its experiments around the future of food.
In Russia, that means providing 3D Bioprinting with breading and spices to see if the company’s chicken replacement can match the KFCtaste, according to a statement from the company

Kittu Kolluri— who in late 2016 stepped down as a general partner with NEA after 11 years with the investing giant to form the much smaller, much earlier-stage outfit Neotribe — has closed on $216 million for the outfit’s second fund, a sizable jump up from its $130 million debut fund. (Kolluri and his team separately kicked in enough money to bring those funds to $138 million and $220 million, respectively.)
We talked yesterday with Kolluri — a longtime operator whose ea

Image: Marvel / Disney The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was supposed to kick off Marvel Studios’ big television universe on Disney Plus in August, but the show’s debut has officially been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic.The delay comes after the show was forced to pause production back in May because of the pandemic, The Verge has confirmed. Disney does not have a new premiere date for the show, but it’s hoping to share updates on it soon. The Falcon and the Winte

AutoX,the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Alibaba, has been granted a permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads in a limited area in San Jose.
The permit will allow AutoX to test its autonomous vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel. This is the third company to receive a driverless testing permit. Waymoand Nuro also have driverless testing permits. Unlike the other two companies, AutoX’s permit is limited to one vehicle and restricted to surfac

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributorAssessing the potential for a gig economy in education Generative algorithms are redefining the intersection of software and music
Over the past few years, personalized learni

For most of my years being an audio enthusiast, there was one truth held by the wider community to be self-evident: Bluetooth headphones sucked. Slowly but surely, however, things started to change. Bluetooth protocols got better. Battery life improved. And wireless headphones actually began to sound good. In any case, the transition to Bluetooth headphones was all but inevitable, considering almost every high-end phone now omits a headphone jack. Now, even audio brands firmly entrenched in the

Welcome to the latest article in TNW’s guide to the AI apocalypse. In this series we’ll examine some of the most popular doomsday scenarios prognosticated by modern AI experts.  In this edition we’re going to flip the script and talk about something that might just save us from being destroyed by our robot overlords on September 23, 2029 (random date, but if it actually happens your mind is going to be blown), and that is: artificial stupidity. But first, a few words abou

Image: h0x0d (Twitter) All indications point to Samsung introducing its next set of true wireless earbuds at the company’s Unpacked event next month. We’ve already seen them, and they’ll reportedly be branded as the Galaxy Buds Live. (It’s truly foolish of Samsung to not just own the design and call them the Galaxy Beans, but I digress.) Now, new images and a video posted by Twitter user h0x0d give us an even closer look at the Buds Live — and how they’ll loo

Photo: Alcon Entertainment Netflix has announced its most expensive movie yet: a $200 million spy thriller called The Grey Man, starring Ryan Gosling (as the titular assassin / former spy) and Chris Evans (as the villainous CIA agent tasked with hunting him down) and directed by Joe and Anthony Russo (in their first film since Avengers: Endgame, the most lucrative film ever made), via Deadline.The film is based on Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man series of books about Court Gentry (aka “

Photo by Jasin Boland / Netflix Netflix’s last decade turned a video rental startup into streaming’s king. The next decade will see executives doing everything in their power to keep the crown.Yesterday, Netflix announced its second quarter earnings to investors, and executives spent much of the call addressing what they have planned for the next few years, including continued international expansion and ambitious bets on new content. While some executives might play coy about their

Paper Mario: The Origami King came out on July 17th, but user reviews won’t be available until July 18th Metacritic wants people to actually play a game before reviewing it, so the site now requires users to wait 36 hours from when a new game is released before leaving a score. The intention is to prevent review-bombing campaigns, where people leave negative scores on a title sometimes as a way to punish the developer. Heading to a review page for a recently released title on Metacritic w

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Russell Brandom, and Julia Alexander discuss the unprecedented Twitter hack that occurred this week — who was affected, how this attack could have happened, and why this is so important for the future of regulating tech companies.In the second half of the show, the crew discusses yet another streaming service launch this year — this time, it’s NBCUniversal’s Peacock. Julia deta

It’s not hard to see why Russell Quinncalls 2017 the worst year of his life. That was the year he moved back to the United Kingdom to take care of his mother, and the year in which both his mother and grandmother died within a month of each other.
Quinn recalled returning to Los Angeles afterwards and “trying to unpack all of this trauma that had happened.” During that time, he said he was “reading a lot about how other creative people dealt with grief” and realized

Earlier this month, venture capitalist and former Spotifyglobal director of marketing Sophia Bendzannounced that she was leaving London-based Atomico to join Berlin’s Cherry Ventures.
Her stated reason for leaving the London VC firm — which mainly does Series A and Series B rounds — is that, having made the difficult transition from seasoned operator to venture capitalist, she wants to focus on seed stage where she can do more deals and work closely with founders and their team

OpenCV, an open source computer vision library, recently announced the crowdfunding launch of two OpenCV AI Kits (OAK-D and OAK-1). While it’s a bit unusual for a library to launch products, and on Kickstarter at that, these intriguing little gadgets could be the answer to many a DIY robot enthusiast’s prayers. The onset of the “smart” device era has led to some fascinating DIY builds. We’ve seen modified Echo Dots host demonic versions of Alexa, and we even tried

Image: NASA NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are tentatively scheduled to return to Earth inside SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule on August 2nd. It’s the same Crew Dragon vehicle that launched the astronauts to space at the end of May — marking the first time a privately made spacecraft had carried people to orbit.
For now, NASA plans for the duo, currently on board the International Space Station, to board the Crew Dragon on August 1st. They’ll then be back o

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Samsung has announced that its latest Galaxy Book S is now available to purchase. It’s the first device to offer Intel’s new “Core processors with Intel Hybrid Technology.” Previous Galaxy Book S models have run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform.
The new Intel processors (referred to as “Lakefield”) are designed to power ultralight devices; we’re also expecting to see them in the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold and the dua

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google will ban ads promoting coronavirus conspiracy theories, remove ads from pages that promote these theories, and demonetize entire sites that frequently violate the policy starting on August 18th. CNBC reported the news earlier today, noting that it supplements an existing ban on monetizing harmful medical misinformation.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the new policy will cover pages contradicting an “authoritative scientific consensus&rd

FedEx has flirted with robotic technologies before, most notably in the case of Roxo. The delivery robot made its debut in New York City last year, only to get the boot from Mayor Bill de Blasio. These days, however, the prospect of increased automation seems all the more pressing, as COVID-19 has left many reconsidering the human element of the supply chain.The logistics giant reached out to TechCrunch this week to note that it has been using robots in another matter for a few months now. In Ma

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will be available for people in suicidal crisis under a new easier-to-remember phone number in two years.On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to finalize 988 as the number Americans can call to be directed to the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline hotline. As of right now, individuals in suicidal crisis can reach that hotline by dialing 1-800-273-8255 (TALK), but that number wi

In the wake of yesterday’s landmark ruling by Europe’s top court — striking down a flagship transatlantic data transfer framework called Privacy Shield, and cranking up the legal uncertainty around processing EU citizens’ data in the U.S. in the process — Europe’s lead data protection regulator has fired its own warning shot at the region’s data protection authorities (DPAs), essentially telling them to get on and do the job of intervening to stop people

The venture capital world is constantly changing, and its evolution can sometimes flip pieces of conventional wisdom on their heads. For example, a recent flurry of extension rounds from Silicon Valley’s hottest startups like Stripe and Robinhood seem to signal that the investment type has suddenly become cool.
Extensions evolving from unloved to hot is not the first time that a type of VC deal has gained, or lost luster. In past times, for example, raising consecutive rounds from the same

Every PlayStation 5 console will include a pack-in copy of Astro’s Playroom, a lighthearted platforming game based on the Astro Bot Rescue Mission PS VR game. But a new gameplay demo from Geoff Keighley shows off the game’s real purpose: to introduce players to the console’s new DualSense controller, which adds a pile of innovations on top of the DualShock 4’s already lengthy list of features.Keighley’s hands-on marks the first public demo of the new controller outs

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. Zoom, unlike the rest of us, is having a pretty banner year. As we’ve all become very familiar with the concept of self-quarantining, isolation, and social distancing, video-calling software has become very familiar to many who would otherwise never use it. But, understandably, there are some who haven’t quite mastered the subtleties —

If X-Men came out today, people would probably hate it. There isn’t a single good action sequence in the film, it has no fleshed-out characters that aren’t named “Wolverine,” and its gestures at drama mostly fall flat — all of which combine to make its astonishingly brisk hour and 45-minute runtime feel much longer. In X-Men’s defense, it had a whole host of problems that virtually no blockbuster movie has now that the MCU reigns supreme, and that makes it int

I’ve previously written a guide on how to detect facial features using Python and I got many questions on twitter asking how to do the same using JavaScript. So today, I’m going to be answering that and we’ll add some extras: masking your face with a Spiderman filter, or the classic, dog filter. It’s been really fun to work on this project and I hope you enjoy it too. The article will cover two main topics: Face features recognition Adding filters So,

Even the world’s second largest smartphone market isn’t immune to COVID-19.
Smartphone shipments in India fell 48% in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, the most drastic drop one of the rare growing markets has seen in a decade, research firm Canalys reported Friday evening.
About 17.3 million smartphone units shipped in Q2 2020, down from 33 million in Q2 2019 and 33.5 million in Q1 2020, the research firm said.
You can blame coronavirus, more than a millio