Technology news

James Bond may have been the last straw for Regal and Cineworld, but analysts I spoke to agree: the only thing that will truly save movie theaters in the United States is a COVID-19 vaccine.On Thursday, Regal Cinemas — the second-largest theater chain in the US with 536 theaters and 7,076 screens — will officially shut all its doors in the United States for the second time during the global pandemic. Its parent company Cineworld is closing 127 theaters in the UK as well. Over 45,000

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook has banned all forms of content related to the radical fringe conspiracy group QAnon, marking its most dramatic escalation in the fight against misinformation and what Facebook is calling “militarized social movements.” The company announced the change on its website as an update to its previous moderation sweep in August that banned close to 1,000 QAnon groups.“Starting today, we will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and I

The Arlo Pro 4 mounted outdoors.| Arlo Arlo has announced two new security cameras: the Pro 4 Wire-Free Spotlight Camera and the Ultra 2 Wire-Free Spotlight Camera System. You can preorder both cameras now; the Pro 4 starts at $199.99 and the Ultra 2 starts at $299.99.Both cameras are wire-free. That makes them easier to set up and more convenient to place than many other cameras, since you’re not limited by the location of your outlets.The Arlo Pro 4 connects directly to Wi-Fi — no

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube has changed the way it tests new features: it’s now allowing its Premium subscribers access to experimental products in the development pipeline, according to XDA-Developers. Previously, those features were tested by Google users picked at random to beta test.Currently, the new features available for Premium subscribers to test include watching videos with sound and seeking on your YouTube homepage on iOS; voice searching for YouTube videos

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The House Judiciary Committee has released its conclusions on whether Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google are violating antitrust law. Its 449-page report criticizes the companies for buying competitors, preferencing their own services, and holding outsized power over smaller app developers, news publishers, and other businesses that use their platforms. Among other things, it recommends restricting future mergers and resetting the terms of US antitrust p

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is testing a feature that I am referring to as a “sick day function” — an option to turn off that pesky pop-up that appears after watching three episodes in a row of something to ask if you’re still watching.The new feature looks like it’s been in testing for a while in certain regions, and a Netflix spokesperson confirmed to The Verge today that the feature is still in testing mode. Over the recent weeks, however, ex

What is more 2020 than a sweet, romantic trend turning into a meme for life falling apart? 
The "How it started vs. How it ended" meme is taking over Twitter feeds. Users post side-by-side photos showing the beginning of a scenario, and compare it to where the scenario is now. In the first renditions of the meme, couples shared screenshots of their first conversations with their engagement photos. How It startedvs.How it’s going 💍 pic.twitter.com/fmQqQ02tOZ
— Justus

AT TC Sessions: Mobility, we heard from Tortoise co-founder and president Dmitry Shevelenko, Elemental Excelerator director of Innovation, Mobility, Danielle Harris and Superpedestrian VP of Strategy and Policy, Avra van der Zee about the next opportunities in micromobility.
“Thinking about how micromobility could expand, and the accessibility of it in terms of getting people on board, getting people to opportunities in terms of education and employment, I think there’s still a need

Image: Vizio At the start of 2020, Vizio announced it would be joining LG and Sony in the OLED TV ranks, and now the company’s first models have begun shipping. Available in 55- and 65-inch sizes, Vizio’s 4K OLED TVs support Dolby Vision HDR and include both Chromecast and Apple AirPlay functionality built in.The Vizio OLEDs also offer 4K gaming with variable refresh rates up to 120Hz — a key factor as shoppers eye potential TV upgrades for the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

Now’s the time for sustainable investments to shine. There are billions of dollars in funding in both public and private markets dedicated to new sustainable investing and demand for consumers for a more conscious capitalism has never been stronger.
As founders and investors reawaken to a sustainable morning in America a few areas are going to demand hardware, software and business model innovations.
Some of these sectors have been on the investment radar for the past year or two and other

The news last week that NextEra Energy, a U.S. utility and renewable energy company, briefly overtook ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco to become the world’s most valuable energy producer shows just how valuable sustainable businesses have become. It’s yet another proof point that there are billions of dollars available for companies focused on renewable energy alone — and a sign that, finally, the floodgates may be about to open for companies that build their businesses to service a

As investing whirlwind Chamath Palihapitiya continues to make headlines with his full-court press to take private tech companies public via SPACs while markets are hot, one of his targets has disclosed financial information that helps us better understand the transaction it is undertaking.
Palihapitiya’s Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp. II (a public, blank-check company, or SPAC) is combining with Opendoor, a San Francisco-based tech startup that facilitates real estate transaction

After demonstrating scale, growth and financial improvement, one founder of a two-year-old agritech startup based in India told me that he’s now confronting a new challenge: Unlike his peers in edtech, fintech or e-commerce, there are very few investors he could approach for raising funds, he told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity. He suggested that a startup of a similar scale solving a similar problem would have little issue raising more than $50 million. But for his startup, seeking a $1

Twitteris testing a new way to follow accounts. The company announced today it’s rolling out a new feature, “Suggested Follows,” that will pop up a list of other accounts you may want to follow on the profile page of someone you had just followed. The feature will be tested on Android devices, for the time being.
The feature offers a tweak to how following currently works on mobile. At present, when you tap “Follow” on a user’s profile page, you’re prese

Kurt Nelson ContributorShare on Twitter Kurt Nelson is a mobile engineer at Uberbased in San Francisco. These are his personal views.I’ve been a software engineer at Uber for two years, and I’ve also been a ride-hail driver. I regularly drove for Lyftin college, and while my day job involves writing code for the Uber Android app, I still make deliveries for app-based companies on my bike to understand the state of the gig economy.
These experiences have made me realize a crucial fact

The UK’s data watchdog has sent a letter to parliament In lieu of a final report on a wide-ranging investigation into online political advertising which saw it raid the offices of Cambridge Analyticain 2018 after it emerged that the disgraced (and now defunct) data company had improperly acquired data on millions of Facebook users.
In the letter the regulator says the material that it reviewed included:42 laptops and computers;
700 TB of data;
31 servers;
over 300,000 documents; and
a wide

Mike Linksvayer ContributorShare on Twitter Mike Linksvayer is Head of Developer Policy at GitHub, leading the company's efforts to advocate for developers globally.The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow in Googlev. Oracle. This case raises a fundamental question for software developers and the open-source community: Whether copyright may prevent developers from using software’s functional interfaces — known as APIs — to advance innovation in software. The court should

After all those years of startups not going public, 2020 is a little bit different. It feels like more companies are filing, and more companies are seeing their debuts through. We’re even seeing direct listings and SPAC-led deals, along with a trove of traditional IPOs.
Data backs up how we feel about this year’s IPO market. Notably, however, the year did not start out too hot.
Quite a lot of 2020’s IPO results came in Q3, with the quarter’s IPO tally setting a record in

SpaceXhas secured a contract valued at just shy of $150 million by the U.S. Space Development Agency, a branch of the U.S. military that is tasked with building out America’s space-based defense capabilities. The contract covers creation and delivery of “space vehicles,” aka actual satellites, that will form a constellation offering global coverage of advance missile warning and tracking.
Alongside SpaceX, the SDA also granted a contract for the same capabilities valued at near

Snap,the social media platform for Gen Z, launched its latest slate of Snap Originals today, in a sign that not every media company has failed to capture the imagination of an audience with short form content.
Even as Quibi’s billion dollar gambit continues to falter, Snap is forging ahead with a slate of new short form series with episodes averaging no longer than five minutes.
Taking their talent from social media, sports, music, and traditional entertainment, Snap’s shows feature

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Eero is moving beyond consumers and partnering with internet service providers. The Amazon-owned router company has announced Eero for Service Providers, an offering that includes hardware and software tools for ISPs. It will be available in the US and Canada starting in November, with more features coming in December and throughout 2021. Eero says it’s offering the tools at “attractive price points.”
The platform includes three comp

When Salesforce Ventures launched the first $50 million Impact Fund in 2017, it wanted to invest not only in promising cloud businesses, but startups with a socially positive mission. Today, the company launched the second Impact Fund, this time doubling its initial investment with a new $100 million fund.
The latest fund is also designed to help bring more investment into areas that the company feels need to be emphasized as a corporate citizen beyond pure business goals, including education an

When Alexa launched six years ago, no one imagined that by today there would be hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices or that Alexa would become part of so many lives. For people who are blind or visually impaired, voice assistants are a huge convenience, whether you are calling a loved one, cooking a meal, checking a sports score or asking for the weather or time. This fall, Alexa introduced personalization and conversational capabilities that are steps toward a more human-like, digital

Facebookand Twitter took action against a post from President Trump Tuesday that claimed that COVID-19 is “far less lethal” than the flu. Trump made the tweet and posted the same message to Facebook just hours after arriving back at the White House following a multi-day stay at Walter Reed medical center, where the president was treated after testing positive for COVID-19.
Facebook took down Trump’s post outright Tuesday, stating that it “[removes] incorrect information a

Google has quietly refreshed its original Google Wifi router as a $99 entry-level option for the company’s wireless networking setup.According to Google, the main update here is the new $99 (for a single unit) and $199 (for three devices) pricing — a drop from the original $129 and $299 prices that the product originally launched for back in 2016.The same hardware, but much cheaper
It’s also not here to replace the more recent Nest Wifi that Google launched last year and which

Googleannounced today it’s introducing a Stories feature to its Google app for iOS and Android, which now reaches more than 800 million people per month. In a new carousel within the app, users in supported markets will be presented with a row of tappable visual Stories from participating publishers. These Stories can include full-screen video, photos and audio, and can link out to the publisher’s other content, if desired.
The company has been developing its own Stories product for

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists Tuesday for their discoveries around one of the most fascinating and mysterious parts of our known universe: black holes.
Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez were jointly awarded half of the annual Prize for their discovery of a compact, supermassive object indicative of a black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Richard Penrose was awarded half of the Prize for mathematical methods proving that black holes are indeed a consequ

Sometimes you just have to know which song it was where Fred Durst said, "L-I-M-P Bizkit is right here!" Take heart, Spotify's newest little feature will help you out in those dire circumstances.
As of Monday, Spotify users can now type lyrics into the music streaming app's search bar and expect to find which song the lyrics are from. We've all been there: Sometimes you can remember a line from a song, but no other information about it. With lyric searching on Spotify, you no longer need to turn

Facebook Facebook’s Portal TV, its screen-less camera device you plug into a big screen, is getting Netflix. The company announced the update today, further rounding out what streaming apps are available through its family of video chat devices and making the Portal platform even more of a streaming stick competitor. (The Portal TV already supports Amazon Prime Video, Showtime, and Sling TV.)Along with the Netflix news, Facebook says it’s introducing a new remote for Portal TV that

While many companies are using chatbots and other forms of automation to manage their communication with customers, Boston-based Tone is betting that humans will remain a key part of the equation.
“The traditional models of bots and humans is, ‘Hello, I’m a bot, now you get to battle with me to finally get to a human,’ ” said ToneCEO Tivan Amour. “Our version of that is, ‘I’m a human using AI to get you the answers you need more quickly.’ &rd

Mini projectors on sale on Amazon ahead of Prime Day as of Oct. 6:
FAN FAVORITE: VANKYO Leisure 3 mini projector — save $15
MOST SAVINGS: APEMAN 4500L mini projector — save $61
BEST FOR KIDS: Anker Nebula Astro Portable Projector — save $40A projector is a fun, space-saving investment for movie nights — and a mini projector (aside from being very cute) is a great option for kids' rooms, cramped apartments, and even small outdoor spaces. 
One note: They won't sub in f

Every Tuesday this month, Vergecast co-host Dieter Bohn is hosting a series of discussions diving deep into tech review season, each focusing on a specific product.
This week, Dieter talks with Judner Aura, aka UrAvgConsumer on YouTube, about how the recently announced Google Pixel 5 shares some common ground with an older Google smartphone project: the Nexus 5.
The Nexus 5 came out in 2013 at an affordable of $349 and eventually became a much-loved device among tech enthusiasts at the time. Mad

It’s finally here: Apple has announced that its iPhone event will take place on October 13th, with the invitation teasing the announcement with the phrase “Hi, Speed.”It’s no surprise that this year’s iPhone event is a bit later than normal, as Apple said back in July that the iPhone would miss its usual September launch window. The later launch is likely due to delays created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Apple hasn’t totally sat out fall hardware season, though,

Welcome to Fat Bear Week 2020! Katmai National Park and Preserve’s brown bears spent the summer gorging on 4,500-calorie salmon, and they've transformed into rotund giants, some over 1,000 pounds. The park is holding its annual playoff-like competition for the fattest of the fat bears (you can vote online between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6). Mashable will be following all the ursine activity.  Two hugely successful bears will meet in the Fat Bear Week finals on Tuesday, Oct. 6So exercise the

Photo: Google Google has partnered with leading accessibility firm Tobii Dynavox, best known for creating speech synthesis and eye-tracking devices, to integrate Google Assistant into the company’s Snap Core First line of dedicated tablets and mobile apps. That way, people who have trouble speaking can now use Assistant to control home appliances and other smart home products.Tobii is perhaps more broadly known in the tech industry for its eye-tracking software for consumer electronics de