Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Comcast and Roku have come to an agreement months after NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service launched. Peacock will be available to stream on Roku in the coming weeks.“We are pleased to have reached an agreement with Comcast that will bring Peacock to Roku customers and maintains access to NBCU’s TV Everywhere apps,” a Roku spokesperson said. “We look forward to offering these new options to consumers under an expanded, m

The US government today announced a new initiative to restrict TikTok in app stores, a move which comes after weeks of uncertainty over whether the app would be banned in the US. It’s not banned yet, but the restrictions are very close — and it could be banned outright by November. In case you haven’t kept up, the administration led by President Donald Trump has issued executive orders that would both restrict transactions with the app — which is what this new ban is abo

Most venture capital firms are based in hubs like Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston. These firms nurture those ecosystems and they’ve done well, but SaaS Ventures decided to go a different route: it went to cities like Chicago, Green Bay, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska.
The firm looks for enterprise-focused entrepreneurs who are trying to solve a different set of problems than you might find in these other centers of capital, issues that require digital solutions but might fall out

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One of iOS 14’s big new features is picture-in-picture mode, which lets you watch a video in a small window while you’re doing other things on your iPhone. That could be handy if you, say, wanted to watch a YouTube video in Safari while chatting with your friends or checking email. But unfortunately, it seems YouTube has done something to stop videos from continuing to play when PIP mode is activated — unless you pay for YouTube Premium,

Some of the biggest names in online gaming in the United States have received letters from the U.S. government requesting information about their relationship with the multibillion-dollar Chinese technology company, Tencent, according to reports.
Even as the U.S. Department of Commerce moves to block new downloads of the Chinese company’s popular messaging and payment app, WeChat, it has sent out letters to U.S. gaming companies like Epic Games, Riot Games,and others about their data-secur

Procreate’s next big update, Procreate 5X, adds new filters and adjustments that’ll be really helpful for those who are trying to do more in Procreate and less in Photoshop. The update will be available starting September 21st.
The new filters include halftone, gradient map, chromatic aberration, glitch effects, and more. The iPad illustration app has also added a reference companion window, allowing you to view your whole canvas or another image on the side while you work. While ove

At Disrupt 2020, we got a chance to see some never-before-seen footage from HBO’supcoming documentary The Perfect Weapon.
The documentary, which was executive produced by John Maggio, is based on the book by the same(ish) name written by David Sanger, Washington correspondent for the New York Times.
We got to sit down for an interview with Sanger where we discussed the cybersecurity threats the United States faces, the definition of an appropriate response, and in general, whether or not w

In a case of bizarre timing, Salesforce announced it was laying off 1,000 employees at the end of last month just a day after announcing a monster quarter with over $5 billion in revenue, putting the company on a $20 billion revenue run rate for the first time. The juxtaposition was hard to miss.
Earlier today, SalesforceCEO and co-founder Marc Benioff announced in a tweet that the company would be hiring 4,000 new employees in the next six months, and 12,000 in the next year. While it seems lik

It's a strange world online and Ingrid Conley-Abrams — a school library director in New York City — wanted to prep her students as best she could. 
As a part of a lesson on media literacy and bias, Conley-Abrams created an optional assignment where kids made their own versions of clickbait. The results were delightful, brilliant, and, at times, slightly creepy.
Conley-Abrams tweeted out some of the schoolwork and it went very viral for obvious reasons.Just finished the 4th grade

We started this competition with 20 impressive startups. After five days of fierce pitching in a wholly new virtual Startup Battlefield arena, we have a winner.
The startups taking part in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. It was an unprecedented year as we moved all of the nail-biting excitement of our physical contest to a virtual stage. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving a

Welcome to the fifth article in TNW’s guide to the AI apocalypse. In this series we examine some of the most popular doomsday scenarios prognosticated by modern AI experts. Previous articles in this series include: Misaligned Objectives, Artificial Stupidity, Wall-E Syndrome, and Humanity Joins the Hivemind. We’ve danced around the subject of killer robots in the previous four editions in this series, but it’s time to look the machines in their beady red eyes and… specu

Jacob Eiting ContributorShare on Twitter Jacob Eiting is CEO of RevenueCat, a platform for managing cross-platform in-app purchases, products and subscribers and analyzing in-app-purchase data.
Ever since Apple opened up subscription monetization to more apps in 2016 — and enticed developers with an 85/15 split on revenue from customers that remain subscribed for more than a year — subscription monetization and retention has felt like the Holy Grail for app developers. So much s

Engineers at MIT, in partnership with the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, have devised a way to build a camera lens that avoids the typical spherical curve of ultra-wide-angle glass, while still providing true optical fisheye distortion. The fisheye lens is relatively specialist, producing images that can cover as wide an area as 180 degrees or more, but they can be very costly to produce, and are typically heavy, large lenses that aren’t ideal for use on small cameras like those fo

Image: Sony It seemed a little too good to be true the other night when Amazon successfully processed a bunch of PlayStation 5 preorders after other retailers dropped the ball spectacularly. And, well, maybe it was.Today, the company has sent out an email to many who preordered a PS5 — both the regular and Digital Edition consoles — advising that shipments might not arrive in time for the November 12th release date. “We’re contacting you about your order of PlayStation 5

Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today that individuals who don’t have coronavirus symptoms should get tested, reversing guidance that stirred controversy last month. The reversal follows a report published yesterday by The New York Times which revealed that the initial guidance was pushed by non-scientists in the Trump administration against the objections of public health officials and experts.The new guidan

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge OnePlus released the OnePlus Buds, its $79 true wireless earbuds, back in July. While they have great battery and an affordable price, if you used them with a non-OnePlus phone, you weren’t able to manage some settings or get firmware updates. That should change in the future, though, as a OnePlus Buds app will be coming to other Android devices, according to a Q&A on OnePlus’ Chinese website (via 9to5Google).
The Q&A doesn’t give a tim

More than 13 years ago, America's television screens inexplicably cut to black — The Sopranos was finished, just like that. 
Twitter was barely a thing on June 10, 2007, the day the episode, "Made in America," aired. About a quarter of the country still used dial-up internet. And yet, here we are in 2020, where you'd be hard-pressed to find a show more ubiquitous online than The Sopranos. 
Spend a day on Twitter and try to not see a Sopranos reference. It's everywhere. Ever-ree-w

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you’re an organization junkie and an iPhone user, then iOS 14 has provided you with a new tool: the App Library, which organizes your apps in labeled groups to make them easier to find. In fact, all your current apps can now be found there, and any apps you download in the future will be placed there as well. (You can decide whether you want the apps to also be visible on your home screen; we’ll tell you how later in this article.)
This

It was a trickle at first that has evolved into a slow and steady stream. Now, a wave of new electric vehicles is building, promising to deliver an unprecedented number of models to North America, Europe and China over the next two to three years.
There might not be a better time to dig into EVs, and we have two superstars coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. JB Straubel, co-founder and CEO of Redwood Materials who pioneered the battery powertrain design for Tesla as its longtime CTO, and Celin

CD Projekt Red Cyberpunk 2077 will be released in a few months, but ahead of its mid-November launch, developer CD Projekt Red unveiled the system requirements needed to run the PC version of the game, and shockingly, you don’t need to upgrade your computer to play the game.
The game’s recommended specs are not too heavy, requiring only an Intel Core i7-4790 or an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G processor, and either an Nvidia GTX 1060 or an AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics card. So if you have not up

The tagline from today’s announcement from the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York says it all: “Adam Rogas Allegedly Raised $123 Million from Investors Using Financial Statements that Showed Tens of Millions of Dollars of Revenue and Assets that Did Not Exist.”
Rogas, the co-founder and former chief executive and chief financial officer and board member of the Las Vegas-based fraud prevention company, NS8,was arrested by the Federal Bure

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Amazon’s fall Alexa hardware event is scheduled for September 24th at 1PM ET. It’s not clear exactly what might be revealed at the event — an invite sent to The Verge only said that Amazon’s Devices and Services team would be sharing “some news.” An Amazon spokesperson specified that the event is invite-only, however, which suggests it won’t be live streamed for the public.
It seems likely we’ll see new smart speak

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon postponed its annual Prime Day from July to a date TBD, but new rumors — with a hint of evidence — suggest it may be happening in mid-October. The latest rumor mill was set off after tech site T3 discovered a promotional poster from Braun, titled “Braun x Prime Day,” which reads, “In mid-October Braun will be taking part in Amazon Prime Day.”An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge in an email, however, that the com

Image: Netflix Throughout The Devil All the Time’s sprawling story — which unfolds across generations, families, and two wars that shaped them all — men go to the woods to seek God, and instead find horror, usually of their own making. That horror stretches outward to the small rural towns of Knockemstiff, Ohio, and Coal River, West Virginia, usually under the shadow of a cross or not far from one. In this film, being a god-fearing person is an exercise in futility because thi

Samsung’s latest foldable, the Galaxy Z Fold 2, and its newest tablets, the Galaxy Tab S7 and S7 Plus, are now available to purchase. The Galaxy Z Fold 2 costs $1,999, the Galaxy Tab S7 starts at $649.99, and the Galaxy Tab S7 Plus starts at $849.99.
The Galaxy Z Fold 2 has a number of improvements intended to make the phone more durable than its predecessor, including an ultra-thin glass screen and a stronger hinge. The foldable also has larger inner and cover screens as well as five came

In the midst of IPO week we have to add another name to our future debuts list, namely Chime, which announced a huge new round of capital today. The $485 million Series F values the consumer fintech giant at $14.5 billion, a huge figure given that Chimewas most recently worth $5.8 billion after raising $700 million last December.
Even more stark is the company’s $1.5 billion valuation set in early 2019. From $1.5 billion to $14.5 billion in less than two years is quite a run for any startu

Dieter Bohn / The Verge Apple’s iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 launched this week, introducing a ton of new features to the company’s smartphones and tablets — including the option to change your default browser and default email apps to services like Chrome or Outlook to handle links by default instead of through Apple’s native Safari and Mail apps. Here’s a running list of available third-party browsers on iOS 14.As for email, the available options are slightly slimmer rig

Image: Apple Apple’s new Apple One bundle, which gives customers an assortment of Apple-owned services for a monthly fee, is likely to help out subscriptions for all of its offerings, but few need it as much as TV Plus.
Apple has been relatively quiet about anything related to TV Plus’ metrics in the almost year it’s been out. There are no subscriber numbers, no big displays of bragging about The Morning Show or Ted Lasso’s viewership figures. (In fairness to Apple, the

Unity Software, which sells a game development toolkit primarily for mobile phone app developers, raised $1.3 billion in its initial public offering.
The company, which will begin trading today with the ticker symbol “U,” priced its shares at the top end of its expected range, selling 25 million shares at $52 per share.
The company’s final IPO price came in far ahead of what Unity initially anticipated. The company initially expected to price its public offering between $34 and

Image: WinFuture We might have just gotten our best look yet at the long-rumored new Chromecast and its dedicated remote, thanks to what appear to be leaked marketing renders posted by WinFuture. We already know Google plans to launch hardware, including a new Chromecast, at its September 30th event, so these renders could be showing off a product Google is very close to revealing.The look of the new Chromecast shouldn’t be much of a surprise if you’ve been following other leaks; it

The fall tech season is in full swing, with Apple announcing new Watches and iPads, Sony announcing pricing for the PlayStation 5, and Facebook revealing a sequel to its standalone Oculus headset.The week on The Vergecast, Verge health reporter Nicole Wetsman joins co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn to discuss the newly announced Apple Watch Series 6 and its blood oxygen monitoring feature. Nicole explains how the feature works, how accurate it might be, and what purpose a blood oxygen meter m

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok’s interim CEO, Vanessa Pappas, is asking Facebook and Instagram to “publicly join our challenge and support our litigation,” as TikTok faces a new executive order from the Trump administration that will block people from downloading the app beginning September 20th.
The new order was issued by the Department of Commerce on Friday morning, and it essentially states that people aren’t allowed to download TikTok or WeChat begin

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Trump administration is apparently investigating the data collection policies of American companies linked to Tencent, following sanctions on Tencent app WeChat earlier this year. Bloomberg reports that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has sent letters to League of Legends studio Riot and Fortnite maker Epic Games, asking about “their security protocols in handling Americans’ personal data.”
Tencent owns Rio

Satellite imagery of the Gulf of Mexico on September 17th, 2020 | Image: NOAA The record-shattering 2020 Atlantic hurricane season just ran out of storm names. A storm that developed in the Gulf of Mexico on September 17th was just named Wilfred, the last name on the World Meteorological Organization’s list. With plenty of hurricane season left, any other storms that form this year will be given letters of the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet has only been used once before
The Greek alp