Technology news

The Atlantic keeps breaking records.  
Tropical Storm Gonzalo formed in the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday, the earliest time on record for the seventh named storm of the season to form (a tropical storm, which earns a name, has wind speeds of at least 39 mph). The Atlantic's seventh named storm doesn't usually occur until around September 16. The earliest third, fifth, and sixth storms also formed in 2020, though none reached hurricane intensity.
The major storm culprit this year has been war

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Microsoft’s AI-powered “eye contact” feature for the Surface Pro X is finally starting to roll out, months after it was originally announced for the ARM-powered Surface laptop last year.The new feature is rolling out now as part of Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20175, which means that it likely isn’t too far from a broad release.According to Microsoft, the new feature relies on the “artificial intelligence capabilities of the Mi

You know that chumbox of weird garbage that appears at the bottom of most news sites, including this one? You know the one! It’s labeled “Promoted stories” or “Around the web.” It’s got headlines like: “1 Weird Trick to Lose Weight,” “You Won’t Believe What [STAR NAME HERE] Looks Like Today!,” and “Throw this vegetable out!” There are two major players in the field — Taboola and Outbrain — and the Justice D

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Tesla will build its next US factory in Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced today, wrapping up a months-long search for a location to build the upcoming Cybertruck. Construction work is “already underway,” Musk said. “It started this weekend.”Tesla was recently granted tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks from the county in Texas where the factory will be built, and from a local school district. The company was also consider

Influencers are acting like the pandemic is over. It's not. 
Jake Paul threw a massive house party last week at his Calabasas mansion amid soaring COVID-19 cases in California. Videos from the party show dozens of attendees crowded in the controversial YouTuber’s living room, with no regard for the recommended six feet of distance to limit potential virus spread. Nobody visible in the videos wore a mask. NEW: The mayor of Calabasas & neighbors tell me they’re outraged a

Slack is accusing Microsoft of breaking antitrust law in the European Union by bundling its competing business chat service, Microsoft Teams, with Office, and is calling on European regulators to investigate.
“Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force-installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers,” San Francisco-based Slack said in a statement. 
Slack's accusation

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla turned a profit of $104 million in the second quarter of 2020 despite shutting down its electric vehicle factory in Fremont, California, for roughly seven weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Tesla has now been profitable for four straight quarters for the first time in company history — an elusive benchmark the company has long sought.But perhaps more importantly, Tesla says it has a “site selected” for its next Gi

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft posted fiscal fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations on both sales and profit for the past three months amid the downturn caused by COVID-19. In fact, it appears many of Microsoft’s various divisions are in fact benefiting from the effects of the pandemic, with the shift to remote work and shelter-in-place orders around the world pushing people toward gaming, video conferencing, and other virtual pastimes.“Th

There are no good choices for parents right now. Thanks to a recent surge in coronavirus infections in the U.S., it's unsafe to send children and teachers back to school. Faced with the daunting prospect of juggling work, caregiving, and distance learning, parents are scrambling for solutions. 
That's evident in the frenzy on Facebook. Private groups have popped up in an effort to coordinate "pandemic pods" that supplement or replace distance learning. Parents are assembling small groups of

Image: Evan Blass (Twitter) Samsung’s August Unpacked event is getting closer, and today, there’s a thorough spec dump for the standard Galaxy Note 20. We’ve already gotten the full rundown for the top-tier Note 20 Ultra, but now we can get a fuller picture for just what differences there are between the two — and the sacrifices Samsung made on the “smaller” phone. WinFuture has published the specs, just as it did for the bigger upcoming Note.The most signifi

AT&T just sent out an email to some customers that scared the crap out of them. But what they were actually trying to convey is not as bad as it seems. 
My family's cellphone plan includes my father, who uses an archaic iPhone 3GS. (It's from 2009.) So, on Tuesday, when the the telecommunications company emailed him and other users with older phones announcing, "UPDATE NEEDED," in huge font, it was clearly because of my dad's elderly handset. 
The email explained, "we will soon be

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If AT&T sent you an email telling you to upgrade your phone — or else — would you write it off as a scam? Well, that’s just what the company did this week, according to Android Police.
Under the big, blue, bold, all-caps heading “UPDATE NEEDED,” the carrier is telling some customers that their devices are “not compatible with the new network” and that they “need to replace it to continue receiving servic

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If AT&T sent you an email telling you to upgrade your phone — or else — would you write it off as a scam? Well, that’s just what the company did this week, as reported by Android Police.
Under the big, blue, bold, all-caps heading “UPDATE NEEDED,” the carrier is telling some customers that their devices are “not compatible with the new network” and that they “need to replace it to continue receiving serv

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If AT&T sent you an email telling you to upgrade your phone — or else — would you write it off as a scam? Well, that’s just what the company did this week, as reported by Android Police.
Under the big, blue, bold, all-caps heading “UPDATE NEEDED,” the carrier is telling some customers that their devices are “not compatible with the new network” and that they “need to replace it to continue receiving serv

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ubisoft has publicly committed to keeping prices for new games released on next-gen consoles this fall at $60, the company said in an earnings call on Wednesday. That diverges from the strategy of fellow video game publisher Take-Two Interactive and its subsidiary 2K Games, which are planning to charge an extra $10 for next-gen PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the upcoming NBA 2K21.
“We plan to come with the same price as the previous gen

Back in 2016, Mobalyticswowed the judges at Disrupt SF with its data-based coach for the exploding competitive gaming world, winning the Startup Battlefield. The company is building on the success of the past few years with a new funding round and a compelling new collaboration with Tobii that uses eye-tracking to provide powerful insights into gamers’ skills.
Mobalytics began with the idea that, by leveraging the in-game data of a competitive esport like League of Legends(LoL), they could

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ubisoft team leads will now be given bonuses according to “their ability to create a positive and inclusive workplace environment” following widespread harassment allegations. The company announced the changes today during its Q1 sales call as part of a larger initiative to address systemic problems within its studios. “Each time we have been made aware of misconduct, we made tough decisions and we made sure that those decisions had a cl

It looks like many of us are going to be pretty much stuck at home for the foreseeable future, and it’s possible that you’ve already binged all of the series that your friends and family have recommended. Don’t despair! If you’re still looking for series to lose yourself in, there are still plenty out there.
We went to the staff of The Verge to ask what they recommended for a solid week, month, or (gulp!) year of indoor viewing. Here’s what we came up with.
Bunheads

Following his surprise campaign announcement for the 2020 election, Kanye West has been drumming up controversy with statements on race and politics. But West has also been speaking out about his private life with his wife, Kim Kardashian. 
West posted a series of now-deleted tweets in which he said he's been trying to divorce Kardashian for two years. Hours later on Wednesday, Kardashian released a statement via Instagram stories concerning her husband:Kim Kardashian’s statement just

The Long March 5 rocket at the Wenchang Space Launch Center that will launch Tianwen-1. | Photo: Xinhua via Getty Images Early on July 23rd, China is slated to launch its most ambitious space mission yet, sending a trio of spacecraft to Mars — including a rover to explore the planet’s surface. If successful, China will become the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.
The mission is named Tianwen-1 — after the long poem “Tianwen,” which means

WalkingCat A picture of a new Oculus Quest virtual reality headset has seemingly leaked online. The image was posted by Twitter user WalkingCat, who has produced credible leaks in the past. It shows a headset very similar to the existing Oculus Quest, but with a black-and-white color scheme, a potentially slimmer design, and a possibly controversial feature tweak.
The Quest is Facebook-owned Oculus’ flagship product, and the leaked image seems to show an iterative update rather than a new

"I think the American Dream sometimes becomes nightmare." 
These words — spoken in Spanish, by an immigrant entangled with ICE, encapsulate the United States' ongoing humanitarian migrant crisis, the focus of Netflix's upcoming Immigration Nation.
Filmmakers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau helm the six-part docuseries, which follows activists, lawmakers, attorneys, immigrants, and even ICE agents. It was filmed over the course of three years to give insight into the fraught immigr

SaaS is hot in 2020. Tooling that helps facilitate remote work is hot in 2020. And we all know that anything related to video chatting in particular is on fire this year. In the midst of all three trends is Kudo, which just raised $6 million in a round led by Felicis.
But Kudo’s video chatting and conferencing tool with built-in support for translators and multiple audio streams wasn’t initially constructed for the COVID-19 era. It got started back in 2016, so let’s talk about

Growing up Latinx, I was raised with a couple of things that, upon going to school and learning how my white friends lived, weren’t as common as I thought. Sometimes it just didn’t come up. I, for example, never talked about the caped, androgynous man who appeared on Spanish-language news and delivered daily horoscopes with great theatricality. That was my normal, and I never really registered how less... dramatic the news was on English-language networks. This caped astrologist of m

Alex Castro / The Verge As I write this, the top channel on Mixer right now is broadcasting a stream of Pokémon Yellow played by whoever’s in chat — á la Twitch Plays Pokémon. It’s titled “YouPlay presents: Mixer Doomsday party. Let’s go one last time! (Day 19/19),” and there are 1,337 people watching. Just about every other stream on the site is titled similarly. It’s mostly reruns of earlier streams exhorting viewers to follow bro

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is working on a new feature for its Alexa voice assistant that will let the software launch Android and iOS apps using voice commands, a first for Amazon’s assistant and a bold expansion of its strategy to position Alexa as a platform-agnostic alternative to Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. Called Alexa for Apps, the new feature is launching today in preview form, meaning Amazon is working with select developers on how they’d li

Gaming is an excessive and exacting hobby, and few things epitomize that more than the ASUS ROG 3.
This is a smartphone for gamers, but not just any gamers. Plenty of folks idly tap away at their favorite mobile games whenever they have a free moment to do so without ever thinking about resolution and frame rates. The newest gaming phone from ASUS is not for those people. If you're the type of person who wants to play PUBG Mobile for hours at a time at settings that would melt most other phones,

Asus Asus’ new ROG Phone 3 aims to be the pinnacle of smartphones if you’re serious about gaming and having the fastest specs. The device features a 6.59-inch OLED HDR color-calibrated screen that has a fast 144Hz refresh rate with a 1ms response time. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 865 Plus chipset with 5G support, and it can be configured with up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of UFS 3.1 ROM storage. Both of those specs push the boundaries of what we’ve seen so far in

TL;DR: Enjoy hands-free navigation with a Garmin GPS for as low as $99.99 as of July 22. Everyone has cabin fever these days. Since our travel options are limited, a quick road trip may give you the fix you need. And, believe it or not, there's something to see in every state. Driving just a few hours away from your hometown can be just as fun as hopping on a plane overseas. 
So, get packing and get on the road — but not without your GPS. A car GPS can make a world of difference

Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which came out as Yakuza 7 in Japan early this year, is getting a Western release in November. While every core game in the series since Yakuza 2 had Japanese voice acting and English subtitles for its Western release, Yakuza 7 is getting a full English dub like last year’s spin-off title Judgment. The cast is headed by George Takei, who plays yakuza patriarch Masumi Arakawa.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a departure for the series in many ways, which perhaps explains why