Technology news

What if I told you all your favorite time-travel films and books were actually created by big tech in order to wrest control of the time-travel industry from the proletariat? Think about it. Back to the Future, The Terminator, The Time Machine, all of these stories share a central theme where traveling through time is a dangerous proposition that could destroy the very fabric of our reality. It’s called the butterfly effect. The big idea is that you’d step out of your time travel ma

Take one glance at Playground Global’sportfolio and a theme emerges: The firm’s investments are forward-looking, longer-term plays, a strategy that runs counter to the fast-return ethos that permeates certain Silicon Valley sectors.
The Palo Alto-based VC firm is banking on the future with investments in capital-intensive and technically complex pursuits, including robotics, autonomous driving, metallic 3D printing and infrastructure. It’s an investment strategy that isn’

Battletoads, that most nineties of franchises, is returning to the gaming scene in August after lying dormant for a quarter of a century. Specifically, Microsoft and developer Dlala Studios is finally releasing Battletoads 2020. If you’re a youngster and don’t know what you’re in for, I recommend taking a look at the trailer: The new Battletoads game was revealed, rather unexpectedly, at the 2018 Microsoft E3 show. Fans have been calling for an HD remake for yea

Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode will be free-to-play and support up to 120fps, Microsoft has announced. The news comes after a leak from Smyths Toys Superstores, which briefly posted details (Google Cache) about Halo Infinite multiplayer on a promotional page this week before quickly removing them once the internet discovered the references.
“The legendary Halo series returns with the most expansive Master Chief campaign yet and a groundbreaking free-to-play multiplayer experience,&

Rocket Labhas received clearance to launch from the FAA following the failure of its Electron rocket on July 4 and the loss of the half-dozen satellites on board. “This was a very, very sneaky and tricky issue,” said CEO Peter Beck. “However, the issue is well understood by the team. We’re really looking forward to getting back on the pad.”
The failure, Beck explained on a call with press, was nowhere near as catastrophic as many such incidents are. While the payloa

Less than a month after Rocket Lab lost one of its vehicles during a mission, the small satellite launcher has approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to start launching its Electron rockets again. The company plans to launch its next rocket sometime in August from the company’s primary launch site in New Zealand.
On July 4th, Rocket Lab launched its 13th mission to space from New Zealand, carrying seven small satellites, most of which were designed to image the Earth from above.

Artificial intelligence may be the most powerful tool humans have. When applied properly to a problem suited for it, AI allows humans to do amazing things. We can diagnose cancer at a glance or give a voice to those who cannot speak by simply applying the right algorithm in the correct way. But AI isn’t a panacea or cure-all. In fact, when improperly applied, it’s a dangerous snake oil that should be avoided at all costs. To that end, I present six types of AI that I believe ethical

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft isn’t planning to fully reopen its US offices until at least January 2021. Sources familiar with the company’s plans tell The Verge that Microsoft has selected January 19th, 2021, as the earliest possible date for its US offices to be open for employees. The software giant is currently planning a “hybrid workplace” for a phased reopening of its offices, and Microsoft has produced a six-stage dial that illustrates the retu

Illustration by Alex Castro Early this morning, the FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement placed a 17-year-old in Tampa, Florida, under arrest — accusing him of being the “mastermind” behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter’s history, one that took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye and more to perpetrate a huge bitcoin scam on July 15th.But apparently

Illustration by Alex Castro Early on July 31st, the FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement placed a 17-year-old in Tampa, Florida, under arrest. He’s accused of being the “mastermind” behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter’s history, one that took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Kanye West, Apple, and more to perpetrate a huge bitcoin scam on July 15th.Bu

Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren announced today that he has filed 30 felony charges against a 17-year-old resident of Tampa, Florida, who was described by Warren’s office as “the mastermind of the recent hack of Twitter .”
The hack in question occurred earlier this month and involved high-profile Twitter users like Apple, Elon Musk, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whose accounts all posted messages promoting a Bitcoin wallet and claiming, “All Bitcoin sent to the ad

GoogleVice President of Engineering Dave Burke provided an update about the Exposure Notifications System (ENS) that Google developed in partnership with Apple as a way to help public health authorities supplement contact-tracing efforts with a connected solution that preserves privacy while alerting people of potential exposure to confirmed cases of COVID-19. In the update, Burke notes that the company expects “to see the first set of these apps roll out in the coming weeks” in the

Owning one brick-and-mortar business seems complicated enough. But running multiple locations? For many owners, that’s a constant juggling act of phone calls, check lists and driving back and forth from store to store. In the middle of a pandemic, it gets all the more complex.
Delightree, a company out of the previous Alchemist Accelerator class, has raised $3 million to build a tool hyper-focused on helping owners of franchise businesses (think hotels, gyms, restaurant chains, etc.) take

Emoji have become a ubiquitous form of communication. And like any form of language, they can have a social impact. The addition of a hijab emoji has provided some inclusivity to Muslim women, while the mosquito emoji is used by medical professionals to explain diseases like malaria and Zika. The gatekeeper of the emoji world is the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that decides which emoji make it onto our phones. Every year, the consortium releases a selection of new emoji. 

President Trump has plans to order China’s ByteDance, the owner of hit social video app TikTok,to divest from the company, according to new reporting from Bloomberg. The app is increasingly a target of U.S. security concerns over its Chinese ownership.
After the initial news, reports bubbled up that Microsoft is in talks to buy the Chinese social network, which has a massive footprint in the U.S. and beyond. TikTok itself is not available in China and Chinese users instead use Douyin, a si

Illustration by Alex Castro Early this morning, the FBI, IRS, US Secret Service, and Florida law enforcement knocked on the door of a 17-year-old in Tampa, Florida, and placed him under arrest — accusing him of being the “mastermind” behind the biggest security and privacy breach in Twitter’s history, one that took over the accounts of President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and more to perpetrate a huge bitcoin scam.
H

Nearly 500 pages of evidence were made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing this week on potential anti-competitive actions by Amazon,Facebook,Google and Apple . We’ve collected them here with added context and an omnibus, searchable version for anyone who’d rather not juggle four dozen documents.
The emails, chat logs and other communications listed here trickled out online as the hearings went on. Many are internal documents that were never meant to be exposed

Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge 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: V for Vendetta (2006) directed by James McTeigue
The future: In V for Vendetta, a lot has gone wrong very quickly, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much to be done about it. The film is set in 2020, and London is now un

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge President Donald Trump intends to sign an order that would direct Bytedance to sell its ownership of the US-based video-sharing app TikTok, according to Bloomberg. The order, which could be announced as soon as Friday afternoon, would employ the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to force Bytedance to divest, similar to the process undertaken against Grindr’s Chinese investors last year.
Earlier this month, US Secretary of St

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is rethinking its Cortana assistant, and has announced that it’ll be shutting down the current iOS and Android apps, ending Cortana support for the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker, and removing the original Cortana functionality from the first-generation Surface Headphones starting in 2021.These changes are still a few months away, but it marks another big step for Microsoft in pivoting Cortana away from a Google Assistant or Alexa alte

Amazon and WarnerMedia have struck a new temporary agreement that will allow HBO Nowcustomers to continue streaming on Fire TV while the companies continue negotiations over HBO Max.Before we go any further, let’s break down this situation. In April, WarnerMedia launched its new crown jewel streaming service, HBO Max. The app was made available everywhere except on Amazon Fire TV and Roku. Two weeks after HBO Max launched, WarnerMedia announced it was getting rid of the HBO Go app. This is

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is letting people choose the speed at which they want to watch something on their phone or tablet with new playback controls.Netflix will allow anyone on an Android mobile device to stream at either 0.5x or 0.75x speeds for slowed-down viewing and 1.25x or 1.5x speeds for faster watching. Those are slightly fewer options than YouTube, which allows people to slow all the way down to 0.25x speeds, and speed up by twice the normal playback speed. Pla

As the Internet of Things proliferates, security cameras are getting smarter. Today, these devices have machine learning capability that helps the camera automatically identify what it’s looking at — for instance, an animal or a human intruder? Today, Cisco announced that it has acquired Swedish startup Modcam and is making it part of its Meraki smart camera portfolio with the goal of incorporating Modcam computer vision technology into its portfolio.
The companies did not reveal the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has officially confirmed that it’s exploring the idea of a paid subscription model, and now the company has started to survey users about potential features that might be added as part of a prospective paid service, via reporter Andrew Roth on Twitter.Roth’s thread shows a variety of features that Twitter is apparently considering as part of a paid tier, including the option to quickly undo tweets immediately after they’ve been s

General Motors is working with electric vehicle charging network EVgo to build more than 2,700 new fast chargers in cities and suburbs across the US over the next five years. That is more than triple the 800 fast chargers that EVgo currently has on its network, which is in 34 states and serves “more than 200,000 customers.”The buildout will help EVgo keep pace with other growing fast-charging networks. Tesla boasts 2,000 Supercharger stations (and 18,000 stalls) worldwide, and Volksw

Australia is closing in on a legally binding framework to force adtech giants Facebookand Google pay media companies for monetizing their news content when it’s posted to their social media platforms or otherwise aggregated and monetized.
Back in April the country’s government announced it would adopt a mandatory code requiring the tech giants to share ad revenue with media business after an attempt to negotiate a voluntary arrangement with the companies failed to make progress.
Toda

Lollapalooza moved online this year, and the music festival kicked off in an appropriately online way: with the debut of a new music video from virtual creator Miquela. The video is an entirely CG affair, created remotely, for the single “Hard Feelings.” It depicts Miquela and a dance crew on the back of a flatbed track, as they twist their way through a desert landscape that slowly morphs into something more surreal.
For the uninitiated, Miquela is essentially a digital avatar that

Image: Facebook Facebook is adding official music videos to its service in the US after partnering with major music companies including Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group, the company announced today. The videos can be found through Facebook Watch and via individual artists’ pages. They can be shared, reacted to, or commented on like any other video on Facebook.
It’s a big shift for Facebook, which in the past has only been able to share short previews of musi

Facebook today confirmed it will begin rolling out official music videos across its platform in the U.S., as TechCrunch first reported, as well as introduce a new Music destination within Facebook Watch. The changes, which will go into effect starting this weekend, will allow Facebook users to discover, watch and share music videos from a wide range of artists, including, for example, Anitta, Blake Shelton, Bob Marley, Diplo, Elton John, Jonas Brothers, Josh Groban, Keith Urban, Maren Morris, Ma

U.S. Marshals Service If you’re pining for the innocent days of 2017, when the biggest screw-up was the music festival meltdown known as Fyre Festival, you’re in luck: you can now own a piece of merch from the disaster. The US Marshals Service is hosting an online auction for 126 items, including shirts, bracelets, tokens, and hats. The proceeds will go to a fund for the victims of the fraudulent fest, the Marshals Service says, and the auction runs through August 13th. Some items a

Image: Fisker Inc. Fisker Inc. has hit a snag in the plan to power its electric vehicles with Volkswagen’s modular EV platform, as negotiations over a “cornerstone agreement” that were supposed to end this month are now delayed until at least September.In a scripted presentation to investors filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) early Friday morning, founder Henrik Fisker says his company has “not achieved our goal of signing a cornerstone agreement wit

Oppo has announced international release plans for its first smartwatch, the Oppo Watch. The device was launched in China earlier this year with a customized version of Android, but Oppo is shipping the global model with Google’s Wear OS on board.
Oppo describes the Oppo Watch as the world’s first smartwatch with a dual-curved display, meaning the OLED panel curves on two edges like many of the company’s phones. It’s available in 46mm and 41mm sizes with optional LTE conn

Behold, the Opple Watch. Many have borrowed heavily from Apple’s wearable, but few, if any, have done so as brazenly as Oppo. Sure Fitbit received some guff for the squircle hardware design of its Versa line, but it’s not useful to get too hung up on those vague similarities — there are, notably, relatively few geometrical options for hardware makers looking to move outside the traditional circle watch face.But based on the press material, the Oppo Watch is — to put it ge

If you wanted to buy yourself or someone you loved an Apple gift card, it used to be a bit complicated. Apple offered two separate gift cards: an iTunes card, which you could use for purchases on the App Store, iTunes Store, and / or to increase your iCloud storage; and an Apple Store card, which was used on purchases made at the company’s retail or online stores. But now, Apple has merged the two gift cards into a single card simply called Apple Gift Card
Spotted by MacRumors, the new App

If you wanted to buy yourself or someone you loved an Apple gift card, it used to be a bit complicated. Apple offered two separate gift cards: an iTunes card, which you could use for purchases on the App Store, iTunes Store, and / or to increase your iCloud storage; and an Apple Store card, which was used on purchases made at the company’s retail or online stores. But now, Apple has merged the two gift cards into a single gift card called “Everything Apple.”
Spotted by MacRumor

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube plans to discontinue its community captions feature, which allowed viewers to add subtitles to videos, because it was “rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse,” the company announced. It says it’s removing the captions and will “focus on other creator tools.” The feature will be removed as of September 28th. “You can still use your own captions, automatic captions and third-party tools and services,”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On July 29th, the long-awaited Big Tech antitrust hearing from the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee was held. For several hours, four of the biggest figures in tech — Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai — were grilled by lawmakers.
This week on The Vergecast, The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Makena Kelly, Adi Robertson, and Casey Newson dedicated an e

CRISPR tech startup Mammoth Biosciencesis among the companies that revealed backing from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) program on Friday. Mammoth received a contract to scale up its CRISPR-based SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic test in order to help address the testing shortages across the U.S.
Mammoth’s CRISPR-based approach could potentially offer a significant solution to current testing bottlenecks, because it’s a very different kind of tes