Technology news

AMC Theaters and Universal have reached a new agreement that dramatically shortens the theatrical exclusivity window — the amount of time that films have to play in theaters before they’re allowed to be sold or rented in other places, like iTunes, Amazon, or AMC’s own On Demand service — down to just 17 days (ensuring that the films will hit at least three weekends in theaters).
The new deal marks a radical shift from the standard theatrical release window, which has typi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren’t legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a “gift to Big Tech” that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN I

If you’ve ever wanted to invite giant beetles or hornets into your living room without fear, Google has got you covered. The search giant is adding 23 creepy crawlies to its growing roster of augmented reality search results that also include dinosaurs, cats, scorpions, bears, tigers, and more.
The full list of insects includes: rhinoceros beetle, Hercules beetle, Atlas beetle, stag beetle, giant stag, Miyama stag beetle, shining ball scarab beetle, jewel beetle, ladybug, firefly, Rosalia

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has prided itself on thorough moderation and removal of COVID-19 misinformation posted to its social network since March, but the company is now under fire for having failed to take action for several hours against a fast-moving viral Breitbart News video promoting dangerous coronavirus conspiracy theories and treatments over the weekend.The company now says removal of the video “took longer than expected,” in a statement given to The

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge BMW is developing an all-electric version of its 5 Series and 7 Series sedans as well as its entry-level X1 SUV, the company announced Monday as it detailed a renewed effort to reduce its overall emissions.That means almost all of the German luxury automaker’s most popular cars will soon have all-electric variants. A fully electric version of the 3 Series, BMW’s most popular car in the US, has already been spotted in testing camouflage, an

Movies Anywhere is rolling out a new “Watch Together” viewing party feature for its movie locker apps, allowing multiple users to sync up and enjoy a film together.
While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise in viewing party apps for streaming services (both third-party and official), Movies Anywhere’s version differs by letting you watch films you’ve purchased, instead of limiting you to the streaming catalogs for which you have subscriptions (something that can

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge If you’ve recently spotted a little secondary box underneath a Google News story that gives you a big-picture understanding of the news, you’re not alone: Google appears to be experimenting with a new “for context” feature in Google News that links to a second, broader story on the same topic.
Spotted earlier by Valentin Pletzer on Twitter, the feature appears to be live on mobile phones for some very specific search results:
new fea

Photo by Franziska Krug/Getty Images Novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, whose ex-husband is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, announced on Tuesday that she’s already donated close to $1.7 billion of her immense wealth in the past year. The causes and nonprofits she has so far chosen include those supporting racial, LGBTQ+, and gender equity, as well as those dedicated to combating climate change and improving public health and economic mobility, among others. Scott has a net worth of more

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge You can now play games on Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service on your Android phone over 4G and 5G connections, though you have to opt in to an “experiment,” Google announced today (via 9to5Google). Since the service’s launch in November 2019, you’ve only been able to play Stadia games on your phone over Wi-Fi — that is, unless you tricked Stadia into playing over a cellular connection by tethering a laptop to a ph

When SAP announced on Sunday that it was spinning out Qualtrics, acompany it bought less than two years ago for an eye-popping $8 billion, it was enough to make your head spin. At the time, then CEO Bill McDermott saw it as a way to bridge the company’s core operations with customer data, while acquiring a cloud company that could help generate recurring revenue for the ERP giant, and maybe give it a dose of innovation along the way.
But Sunday night the company announced it was spinning o

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Television’s most important award might be going to its least important streaming service: Quibi. The service was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, of which it’s almost certain to win at least one.
Quibi — which one estimate claims retained only 8 percent of people who signed up for its three-month free trial — hasn’t suddenly started putting out content on the same level as Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Instead, the shor

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves the Elysee Palace in Paris, France after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on May 10, 2019. Macron and Zuckerberg discussed the spread of misinformation and hate speech. | Photo by Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images A majority of polled voters, 64 percent, think Facebook should be held accountable for failing to warn users about opinion articles that spread misinformation about climate change, according to a survey by the think tank Data for Progress

Whenever I’ve tried using Discord’s mobile app to call a friend, I’ve found the audio quality to be pretty subpar. Sure, Discord’s desktop app gives you a few options, like simply using a better mic, and there are a few ways to add noise suppression — particularly if you have an Nvidia graphics card. But now, Discord has added the same background noise suppression feature to its mobile app that it rolled out on desktop in April, meaning your phone’s built-in m

Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images As Facebook battles mounting regulatory pressure, one of the most powerful judges in the country is facing renewed scrutiny over his ties to the company. On July 24th, a coalition of nine progressive groups, including Demand Justice and Accountable Tech, released a statement calling on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to recuse himself from a case involving Facebook due to his close friendship with the company’s vice president of pub

In this week’s Vergecast interview series, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Wired senior editor Andy Greenberg, author of Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers.
As the title describes, Greenberg’s book is all about a group of hackers inside the Russian government called Sandworm, who were responsible for damaging cyber warfare attacks in various countries over the past few years and forever escalated what we think of a

Today, Priti Youssef Choksiis a partner with venture firm Norwest Venture Partners . But she previously spent five-and-a-half years at Google, where she worked on strategic partnerships, and nearly nine years at Facebook, where she began in corporate development and later focused on M&A.
Because Choksi knows firsthand how some of the biggest companies on the planet think about potential acquisition targets and how deals ultimately come together, we asked if she would share some of those insi

The nominations for the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards are in, and once again, streaming services dominated the nominees. Netflix led the pack with 160 nominations, with Amazon and Hulu making waves, too. But there are also some big new names on the list this year, with Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, and even Quibi picking up their first nominations for the coveted TV awards.Apple TV Plus picked up a total of 18 nominations across various categories, including two major nominations for prestige series

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Drugstore chain Rite Aid secretly deployed facial recognition software across a network of security cameras in hundreds of locations in the US, according to a new investigation from Reuters published on Tuesday. The company had been doing so for more than eight years, and it only recently stopped using the technology, it told Reuters, following a “larger industry conversation” around facial recognition and the grave concern over privacy risks

An artistic rendering of the interior cabin of VSS Unity. | Image: Virgin Galactic I was standing inside Virgin Galactic’s tourist spaceplane with three translucent green heads floating in front of me. One of the heads was explaining how the white-and-teal passenger seats that dotted the walls of the cabin were made out of aluminum and carbon fiber materials. White disembodied hands gesticulated in the air as the head — which belonged to Jeremy Brown, Virgin Galactic’s design

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge As antitrust pressure mounts against Apple’s App Store policies, The New York Times is reporting on how vacation rental company Airbnb and fitness class service ClassPass have run afoul of the policies in recent weeks. According to the report, both companies started offering virtual services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, only for Apple to get in contact to request 30 percent of sales made through their iOS apps.
The Times also reports that b

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge As antitrust pressure mounts against Apple’s App Store policies, The New York Times is reporting on how vacation rental company Airbnb and fitness class service ClassPass have run afoul of the policies in recent weeks. According to the report, both companies started offering virtual services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, only for Apple to get in contact to request 30 percent of sales made through their iOS apps.
The Times also reports that A

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Vacation rental company Airbnb and fitness class service ClassPass have spoken with House lawmakers’ offices about antitrust concerns raised by Apple’s 30 percent App Store commission, The New York Times reports. Both companies had started offering virtual services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, only for Apple to get in contact to request 30 percent of sales made through their iOS apps.
The news that both companies have met with lawmake

Image: Studio MDHR Cuphead, the hard-as-nails run-and-gun platform game, is coming to the PlayStation 4 today. Studio MDHR announced the game’s arrival on Sony’s console with a fun (and kind of creepy) stop-motion trailer featuring Cuphead and the evil King Dice.
Cuphead was already renowned for its hand-drawn art style that made it feel like a 1930s cartoon you could play. But the new trailer put two of the game’s most iconic characters in a whole new style of animation inspi

Photo by Guillermo Gutiérrez / NurPhoto via Getty Images As a writer, it’s always been my job to be extremely online. Now that everything from my office to my friendships is operating remotely, the internet is an even bigger part of my life. And I’ve never been more tired of it.
It seems like so much of my social media feeds are filled with terrible news. Case counts rise. Businesses collapse. The White House impedes efforts at progress. Every time I open Twitter, there&rsquo

Image: Descript Descript, the maker of artificial intelligence-powered audio editing software, is launching a new tier of subscription today called Descript Pro that features access to its Overdub feature.Overdub, first released in beta last year, is a synthesis tool that lets you effectively create an AI voice double for yourself. That way, if you made a mistake in a recording, the software can fix it while the end result still feels natural and organic. It’s a bit like creating an audio

Microsoft is launching a new Family Safety app for iOS and Android today. The software giant has been testing the app in recent months, and it’s designed to allow families to manage screentime and app usage. Parents can use the Family Safety app to receive reports on app usage and overall screentime and even set app time limits with the ability for children to request extensions.
Microsoft Family Safety also syncs across Windows, Xbox, and Android, so time limits for games and apps will be

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Revel is suspending its service in New York City after a man was killed riding one of the shared electric mopeds in Queens, making him the second customer to die while using the service in recent weeks.According to the New York Post, Jeremy Malave, 32, was heading north on Woodhaven Boulevard in Middle Village at 3:15AM ET on Tuesday when he lost control of the Revel moped, slammed into a streetlight on a median, and was thrown from the vehicle. He was fou

Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), long the world’s largest tech trade show, will be all-digital in January 2021, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) announced on Monday. The CTA cited the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about the spread of the virus as its reasoning for canceling the in-person event
CES usually takes place in Las Vegas and involves many large gatherings in tightly packed convention halls, as well as smaller meetings betwe

Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), long the world’s largest tech trade show, will be all-digital in January 2021, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) announced on Monday. The CTA cited the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about the spread of the virus as its reasoning for canceling the in-person event
CES usually takes place in Las Vegas and involves many large gatherings in tightly packed convention halls, as well as smaller meetings betwe

Photo by Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Twitter has forced Donald Trump Jr. — the outspoken son of President Trump — to remove a tweet from his timeline linking to a recent viral video spreading misinformation about COVID-19 that had been posted by right-wing news outlet Breitbart, as first reported by Vice.The tweet shared a video from a group called America’s Frontline Doctors that has been popular in conspiracy circles across social media. Yesterday,

Photo illustration by William Joel / Photos: Getty For decades, the tech industry has skirted scrutiny over mergers, acquisitions, and potential anti-competitive behavior as antitrust crusaders argued their case from the sidelines. But this week, the industry’s biggest companies will be forced to confront that evidence head-on.
On July 29th, lawmakers are set to face the chief executives of the tech industry’s four most powerful players: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Since la

Spotify Spotify is now allowing its paying users to listen to music and podcasts with friends and family at the same time, even if they aren’t in the same location. Through its beta feature called Group Session, any premium user can generate a shareable link with up to five friends, who also have Spotify Premium, that’ll allow them to simultaneously stream content.Any person in the streaming party can pause, play, skip, or select tracks in the queue, and they can add their own choic

Photo by Erin Schaff-Pool / Getty Images Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has introduced the latest of several bills designed to weaken a key online legal shield. The Behavioral Advertising Decisions Are Downgrading Services (or BAD ADS) Act would remove protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for large web services that display ads based on “personal traits of the user” or a user’s previous online behavior. This is defined as “behavioral advertising&rdquo

Sony’s A7S Mark III has a familiar 12-megapixel 4K full-frame sensor. | Image: Sony It’s been five long years since Sony’s last video-focused mirrorless camera, the A7S Mark II, came out. The competition has not stood still since then, and Canon’s latest R5 boasts some seriously impressive video recording chops. So today, Sony is announcing the A7S Mark III, a familiar but refreshed version of its best mirrorless camera for video recording.
Right off the bat, I’m g

Image: Lightricks You might be familiar with Facetune, the hugely popular selfie editing app, but now the makers of that app, Lightricks, are releasing Facetune Video, which is designed to help you touch up selfie videos.To start editing a video, just select one from your camera roll. Once you do, it will start looping in the app so you can start applying changes in real time. There is a variety of options to work with, such as changing the brightness of the video, smoothing out your skin, whit