Technology news

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge You’ve probably been caught off guard by videos that play automatically on Facebook, Twitter, or just across the internet in general. They begin playing as soon as you load a page or (if they’re more deviously implemented) when you start scrolling through a page.Automatic video play is a feature that, while nice to have when it’s surfacing content that’s related to your interests, can be pretty annoying. Autoplay videos can be

Gerrymandering is one of the most insidious methods out there of influencing our political process. By legally changing the way votes are collected and counted, the outcomes can be influenced — even fixed in advance for years. The solution may be an AI system that draws voting districts with an impartial hand.
Ordinarily, districts that correspond to electoral votes within a state are drawn essentially by hand, and partisan operatives on both sides of the aisle have used the process to cre

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Following an investigation by the Pentagon, the Department of Defense says it is standing by its decision to award a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft, not Amazon, the latest in an ongoing legal battle over the lucrative infrastructure project.
On Friday, the Department of Defense said in a statement that it had completed its investigation into the awarding of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, an investigation it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Friday, Apple published a new human rights policy committing to “freedom of information and expression” after facing years of criticism over the company’s willingness to follow mainland China’s censorship laws.
As first reported by the Financial Times on Friday, Apple’s four-page policy document commits to “respecting the human rights of everyone whose lives we touch — including our employees, suppliers, contra

We have seen a lot of action this week as the DoD tries to finally determine the final winner of the $10 billion, decade-long DoD JEDI cloud contract. Today, the DoD released a statement that after reviewing the proposals from finalists Microsoft and Amazon again, it reiterated that Microsoft was the winner of the contract.
“The Department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’sproposal continues to represent the best

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last year, T-Mobile announced a plan to provide 10 million low-income households free broadband internet to close what then-CEO John Legere called “the homework gap,” pitching it as one of the reasons that the company should be allowed to merge with Sprint. The company has now revealed that it has allocated $10.7 billion for that “Project 10Million” program over the next decade, with the goal of making it available to K-12 students

You might have playlists loaded up with your favourite artists on Spotify or Apple, but how much do you know about how the song was made, and why it was made? And what was happening in the world for the artist to need to create that particular track, or that concert that became a cultural moment?
Whether you’re joining recording sessions with Taylor Swift, Quincy Jones, Lady Gaga, BLACKPINK, or Travis Scott, or sitting in on rehearsals for Beyonce’s iconic Coachella performance, gett

Newly released teaser images of Volkswagen’s upcoming all-electric ID.4 compact SUV reveals an interior that leans in on tech, such as touchscreens and ambient lighting used to talk to the driver, without erasing every toggle or knob from automotive’s yesteryear.
In short: the ID.4 appears to have struck a balance between stark minimalism and a shepherd’s pie of toggles, switches and touchscreens. Could this be the Goldilocks story of the EV world? A few images can’t answ

Evan Kohn ContributorShare on Twitter A digital marketing and customer experience leader, Evan Kohn is chief business officer at Pypestream, where he created PypePro, an AI onboarding methodology used by Fortune 500 firms. More posts by this contributorConversational analytics are about to change customer experiences forever
When people reach out to customer service, they’re seeking more than a solution to their immediate problem. They want empathy and understanding. What they’re oft

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, the Trump administration released its fifth Space Policy Directive, this one designed to come up with a list of best practices for the space industry on how to protect their spacecraft from cyber threats. The goal is to encourage the government and space industry to create their space vehicles with cybersecurity plans in place, incorporating tools like encryption software and other protections when designing, building, and operating their vehicles.

For many investors, the coronavirus has effectively taken geography out of the equation when it comes to vetting new opportunities.
While this dynamic opens up startups to more investment opportunities, venture capital firms that focus on a specific region are in a thornier spot. The competitive advantage they once had when raising — the notion that they’re focused on an area no one else is — is potentially threatened.
Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and Alex Wilhelm of the

People are fed up with the latest release of Madden. 
The 2021 version of the NFL video game has a historically low user-rating of just 0.3 — out of 10 — on Metacritic. People have long been upset with the game's focus on microtransactions and weak upgrades from year-to-year.  But a reason people are especially upset at Madden '21: The game appears to be chock full of hilariously dumb glitches. 
Videos of the glitchy madness have spread throughout Twitter. And, while I

TL;DR: As of Sept. 4, several gift card deals are live for Labor Day weekend — you can get a free $10 e-gift card when you buy a $100 Apple gift card from Best Buy and save 10% on select Xbox gift cards at Dell with code GAME10.Two words: Free money. 
That's basically what you're getting when you buy a gift card on sale, whether its incentive comes in the form of a discount or bonus. And now just in time for this weekend's plethora of Labor Day sales, we found two amazing gift card de

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is finally hitting theaters in the United States, but not really. The film’s limited release in cities and states where theaters are allowed to operate means that many people — like those living in New York City or Los Angeles — can’t watch the movie. If you’re feeling bummed out about not being able to watch Tenet, may I offer you the excellent, safer alternative of streaming the movie’s score?
Composed by Ludwig Goransson &mda

Bob Ainsbury ContributorShare on Twitter Bob Ainsbury is the Chief Product Officer at Granicus.It has been a hard year. We wake up every morning to new developments in the tragedies of the moment spanning a pandemic, the greatest unexpected loss of life since 9/11, national civil unrest, natural disasters and a looming economic collapse.
In the face of these developments, a completely understandable message from government agencies to the public might be: We can’t serve you right now. Plea

Mashable’s series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures.
Will a storm probably hit my town? Will it be a terrible day for a barbecue? Will driving be too dangerous? The absolute limit on this type of weather prediction is between two and three weeks. Mashable's science reporter Mark Kaufman explains why.
Read the full story here. Read more...More about Science, Mashable Video, Weather, Hurricane, and Algorithms

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Some Facebook users have recently noticed that they can now watch their Instagram stories right from within the main social network app. Facebook has long allowed (and encouraged) cross-posting of Instagram stories to Facebook to help build momentum for its own version of the format — but a new test brings Instagram stories right into Facebook for direct viewing.You’ll know whether you’re looking at a Facebook or Instagram story based on

For the past few weeks, a new influencer has steadily grown in popularity. She has long pink hair, posts about her cat Bao and her clueless dad, has lots of fan art, and frequently retweets pieces of music that she loves. Her Instagram bio reads: “aspiring songwriter, professional feeling catcher.” Oh, and she also isn’t real.
Seraphine is a virtual influencer, though as her growing fan base quickly noticed, there’s something different about her. Her posts are filled with

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Removing Chinese equipment will cost small carriers as much as $1.8 billion, according to a new report from the Federal Communications Commission. The report estimates that as much as $1.6 billion of the cost would be eligible for federal reimbursement — but Congress has yet to appropriate the necessary funds.
Significant national security concerns have been raised about the use of Huawei and ZTE equipment in US networks — but many small carri

Marvel’s Avengers is something of a superhero take on the Destiny formula. It’s a game where you can play as your favorite comic book hero, team up with friends for various missions, and uncover lots and lots of loot. You gain new powers and outfits and just generally keep grinding away. I’ve been playing the game for the past week and have hardly experienced any of that — instead, I’ve been focused entirely on the single-player campaign, which is surprisingly great

It was just days ago that cries of “stocks only go up,” and “no it makes sense that Teslais going up because it split” and other bits of unironic stupidity were the only thing you could read online about the equities markets. Today, and yesterday, that all went to hell.
Stocks, it turns out, can go down, and they can do so very quickly. And, yes, even Tesla can endure a strong slump, giving up tens of billions of dollars in market capitalization at the same time.
Wha

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images The Joe Biden campaign is partnering up with the celebrity video platform Cameo in a new fundraising effort ahead of the November election.
Cameo is a video-sharing platform where users can pay celebrities and influencers to record personalized messages. According to the Biden campaign, this new partnership with the platform allows participating celebrities to earmark some payments for the campaign. Andy Cohen, Mandy Moore, Tituss Burgess, Dule Hill, and Melissa

Volkswagen’s ID 4 will make its global debut at the end of September, but before then the German automaker is giving a sneak peek at the new electric SUV’s interior. Unsurprisingly, it has a sparse, minimalist look that appears inspired by Tesla and other electric vehicles on the market.VW didn’t offer any information about the vehicle’s touchscreens or infotainment system. But from the pictures, we can see that the ID 4 will have two screens, a trapezoidal one behind the

The long-awaited weekend is finally upon us, and you know what that means: Another healthy dose of cheap laptop deals just for you.
This time around, the deal on the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 ($300 off!) caught out eye, but there are plenty more great sales to consider. Check out what we found below, and we'll see you again next week.
Asus VivoBook
The Asus VivoBook is a favorite amongst the budget laptop crowd — it's speedy and great to travel with for work, and has a really nice display

While wearable fitness devices saw an uptick in shipments in North America for Q2, the overall dollar amount of the market remained steady, according to new numbers out of Canalys. The discrepancy can be chalked up to a decline in the average selling price of the products.
Continuing an overall trend for 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased interest in wearable devices, as consumers look to both monitor their health and track step counts, as mass closings have made many more sedentary. Perh

Looking to make your TV setup more colorful? Philips Hue has a new smart lightstrip that will do the job – if you have at least $200 to spare.
The Philips Hue Play is a gradient lightstrip that you stick to the back of your TV. The lights can shift their color, brightness, speed, and intensity in sync with whatever you're watching. You can also customize their responses via an app. 
The lightstrip works with the Philips Hue bridge, which lets you control up to 50 smart lights at once,

TL;DR: The Samsung Galaxy Fit fitness tracker is 50% off at Best Buy — as of Sept. 4, you can snag the fitness tracker for $49.99.On the heels of Samsung's announcement of the Galaxy Fit 2, the first-gen Galaxy Fit is seeing a major discount: As part of Best Buy's Labor Day sale, you can snag the Samsung Galaxy Fit for $49.99 — a 50% drop from its usual retail price of $99.99. That is unprecedented. 
Home fitness — rather, fitness that doesn't require entering a

A Chinese Long March 2F rocket launching a space station back in 2011. The same vehicle was used to launch a reusable spacecraft on August 4th. | Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images Early this morning, China launched some kind of reusable spacecraft into space — possibly a spaceplane — a mysterious vehicle that is drawing comparisons to the US’s classified X-37B spaceplane currently in orbit around Earth. Similar to the X-37B, China’s spaceplane will remain in orbit &ldqu

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Something was off about the memorial service for the anonymous anthropology professor who’d died of COVID-19. For one, only four people showed up. The facilitator of the service, BethAnn McLaughlin, co-founder of the support network MeTooSTEM, had recently been accused of harassment herself. When Michael Eisen, a genetics professor at UC Berkeley, tried to search for information about the anthropologist online, he couldn’t find any. Her distin

A few days ago I wrote down a few notes making a bullish case for Palantir, searching to find good news amidst the company’s huge historical deficits.
Heading into the next phase of Palantir’s march to the public markets, I was very curious to see how the company would hone its S-1 filing to give itself the best possible shot during its impending debut.The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter ever

Augmented reality (AR) glasses promise a science fiction future, in which the visual reality around you is "augmented" with digital objects. But what if AR glasses could also give you hearing superpowers?
Facebook is working on something like that, and by the sound of it (sorry), the company isn't exaggerating when it says this technology will be akin to magic. 
In a blog post Thursday, the audio team at Facebook Reality Labs Research shared some insights on what it's been up to lately. The

All film criticism is personal. Every review requires revealing something of a critic’s own experiences, their knowledge, their tastes, their values, their interests and obsessions.
But writing about a Charlie Kaufman movie feels, at least for this critic, even more personal than most. It feels deeper and more specific, like really digging into this movie might reveal more than I'd like to you about how I see and understand the world.
Like his 2008 masterpiece Synecdoche, New York, I&rsquo

We’ve got a gadget-heavy episode of The Vergecast this week, with the announcements of Intel’s new 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPU’s, Nvidia’s Geoforce RTX 3080 and 3090, and a whole bunch of stuff coming out of the virtual version of IFA’s 2020 showcase.Nilay, Dieter, Chaim, and Chris dive deep into all that gadget news that dominated this week, including the products revealed by Nintendo.I’ll leave some links here for you to take a look at while listening to the sho

Is your teenage son falling in with a bad crowd? Does your tween daughter have low self-esteem and serious impulse-control problems? Are your family dinners brief and poorly attended? If this sounds familiar, your household may be a victim of… social media.
We’ve seen years of escalating (and reasonable) fears that Facebook, YouTube, and other big social networks are bad for their users. The Social Dilemma, a docu-drama that debuts on Netflix next week, is meant as a vivid cautionar

Another pandemic week down and we've arrived at the unofficial end of summer is here. You know what that means: Time to read some good tweets, baby! 
We've been collecting the best posts of the week for a while now because we can and why not? Sometimes it's nice to look at dumb, funny posts and have a laugh. So, here we are. These are our favorite 16 tweets of the week. 
1. Pajamazon is just good pun funJeff Bezos can't sleep until he puts his pajamazon
— He Called Me Greenhorn (