Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Streamers seem to have flocked to Twitch from Mixer after the Microsoft-owned live-streaming service announced plans to shut down in June. A new report shows that Twitch’s share of hours broadcast on major live-streaming platforms jumped up by over 14 percentage points this quarter, taking away the nearly identical just over 14 percent market share that Mixer previously held.
With Mixer out of the picture, Twitch ended up with 91.1 percent of all ho

With the proclamation that “a new journey begins,” AMD is announcing its new lineup of Ryzen 5000 processors for desktops, featuring its new Zen 3 architecture. The new chips are, if you go by AMD’s website, going to be focused specifically on gaming and content creation and could be a powerful new competitor to Intel’s 10 gen desktop lineup. While we can’t give you much more information, gamers and creators can definitely look forward to an interesting look at what

Image: Epic Games Fortnite creator Epic Games is partnering with carmakers, starting with General Motors, to use its Unreal Engine game development platform to build in-car software in what Epic is calling its “human-machine interface” (HMI) initiative. The first car to use Unreal Engine, which is the primary software toolset with which developers make Fortnite and countless other big-budget video games, will be GMC’s upcoming Hummer EV, set to be unveiled on October 20th.The

Netflix has been indicted in Texas on charges that the film Cuties contains lewd depictions of children. The indictment follows controversial backlash from conservative groups over certain scenes in the film where young girls dance provocatively.A grand jury in Tyler County, Texas, is charging Netflix with “Promotion Of Lewd Visual Material Depicting A Child,” a criminal act in Texas that was introduced into state law in 2018, Reuters reported. The charge alleges that Cuties, a movie

Image: Valve To help shine the spotlight on independent game developers, Valve’s Steam Game Festival is back with an autumn edition.Now through October 13th at 1PM ET / 10AM PT, PC gamers will have the opportunity to access a slew of indie games coming out within the next six months, free of charge. Some notable titles included in the fall game festival are Alpaca Ball: Allstars, Cake Bash, Ghostrunner, Garden Story, and Smash Ball.Valve held a Spring Game Festival earlier this year to fi

A new algorithm that predicts the susceptibility of different animals to COVID-19 suggests that horses and camels are at increased risk of catching the virus. The project was initiated by Jacquelyn Brown, a staff scientist at Vanderbilt University and avid equestrian, after she learned that dogs and cats could be infected with COVID-19: I became worried about other animals that might act as reservoirs for the disease or be at risk. Since MERS infects camels, I was concerned about what would hap

Resident Evil is getting its hundredth film adaptation (or at least that’s what it feels like) and this time they’re adapting the game’s story, for better or for worse. Specifically, they’ll apparently be adapting the first two games, bringing some classic characters to the screen — properly this time. Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen and Robbie Amell will star in #ResidentEvil, the official origin story for the movie franchise based on the horror video game

Photo by Hunter Martin / Getty Images This year has been a tumultuous one for the Overwatch League. It wasn’t supposed to be this way: the 2020 season was slated to be a breakout year, a chance to finally realize the ambition of having a truly global league with teams traveling all over the world to compete against one another.That dream was halted due to the ongoing pandemic and the inability for teams and players to travel. To make matters worse, viewership dropped after a shift from Tw

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google is announcing a few security-related updates today, including new cross-app alerts that will tell you when there’s a security issue with your Google account. The idea is that you’ll be notified when Google detects a potentially serious security issue with your account no matter what Google app you’re using at the time.
Here’s a GIF provided by Google to give you an idea of what the new alert looks like:The alerts are rolling o

Ten years ago today, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released Instagram into the world. Less than a year and a half later, Facebook acquired it, in what is widely regarded as one of the shrewdest acquisitions in the history of the tech industry. It is now one of the most popular apps in the world and has thrived during the pandemic. But regulators and competitors continue to nip at its heels — TikTok has reportedly now surpassed it as the second-most popular app for teens, after Snapchat &m

Image: YouTube YouTube is unveiling the first slate of shows to come out of its $100 million fund dedicated to amplifying the voices of Black creators, newly named the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund.
The shows include Resist, a 12-episode documentary series about injustice in policing, bail, and incarceration; Onyx Family Dinner, a kids series about families sharing “different perspectives” and “thought provoking stories”; Barbershop Medicine, which examines how race impacts

Sensors on the Apple Watch Series 6 monitor heart rate and blood oxygen levels.During the announcement of the Apple Watch Series 6, the company heralded the newest element — a blood oxygen monitor — as an addition to its existing slate of health features.
“Apple Watch is already a powerful health tool with apps that measure heart rate and heart rhythm,” said Sumbul Ahmad Desai, Apple’s VP of health. “And now adding blood oxygen brings in another valuable heal

Chris Ferguson, after NASA announced his assignment to the Starliner mission | (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Boeing employee and former NASA astronaut Christopher Ferguson will no longer command the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s new passenger spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner, slated to carry its first human passengers next year. NASA astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore will take Ferguson’s place on the flight, riding along with the two other NASA astronauts already assigned to

Intel has confirmed that its 11th Gen Rocket Lake desktop processors will be out sometime in the first quarter of 2021, with PCIe 4.0 support on board.The timing of Intel’s announcement is likely not a coincidence. AMD is about to unveil its first CPUs based on its next-gen Zen 3 architecture for desktop computers tomorrow, in what will almost certainly provide the most competition for Intel’s dominance for high-powered PCs yet. Intel’s confirmation that it has its own new chip

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Wednesday, October 7th, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Vice President Mike Pence will take the stage for the first and only vice presidential debate of the 2020 campaign. Held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, the event is the second in a series of four debates arranged by the Commission on Presidential Debates, and the first since President Donald Trump’s alarming coronavirus diagnosis last week.
Pence has repeatedly tested negative fo

Investors seeking to capitalize on the world’s rising online presence found huge returns in esports and gaming stocks in the first three quarters of 2020. In fact, the two most prominent ‘esports and gaming’ Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) on the market, HERO and ESPO, are respectively up 64% and 59% this year, while the tech-heavy NASDAQ 100 index has risen just 29%. Even Bitcoin, often pegged as a “safe haven” asset during times of global unrest, hasn’t benefi

Etsy has pulled merchandise related to radical conspiracy group QAnon from its platform. Insider reported the news today. An Etsy spokesperson told the publication that seller policies prohibit items “that promote hate, incite violence, or promote or endorse harmful misinformation. In accordance with these policies, we are removing items related to ‘QAnon’ from our marketplace.”
As of publishing, searching QAnon or its corresponding acronym WWG1WGA (“where we go one

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images The Trump administration on Tuesday outlined new rules tightening restrictions placed on guest worker visa programs, including the H-1B program favored by tech industry firms.The rules tighten eligibility around foreign workers, so employers must meet more stringent criteria around the jobs they’re hiring for and how much they’re paying. That may make it harder for companies to receive H-1B visas as part of the annual lottery that awards 60,000 slot

This morning Zira raised $3.1 million in a seed round. The startup provides software that helps businesses schedule their hourly workforce in a more intelligent manner.
Software often fails to reach non-information workers, so it’s nice to see a startup focus on a somewhat forgotten demographic. General Catalystand Abstract Ventures led the round, which also saw participation from a number of angel investors.
This is the company’s first known investment, according to Crunchbase data.

A GPT-3-powered bot has been caught posing as a human on Reddit after more than a week of rampant posting on one of the site’s most popular subreddits. Under the username of thegentlemetre, the bot had been churning out a post per minute on /r/AskReddit, a sub with more than 30 million users. That behavior raised the suspicions of writer Philip Winston. “I read through some of the posts and they reminded me of text I’d seen from OpenAI‘s lan

This week, Unqork, a startup that helps other companies build business apps with a no-code platform, raised a $207 million Series C. The new capital valued the firm at around $2 billion.
Even given how much attention 2020 has brought to no-code startups and their low-code relatives, the investment stood out as outsized — and rapid. Previously, Unqork added $51 million to its Series B earlier this year, bringing that round to a total of around $131 million.
To see the company raise even mor

Anyone who has ever consulted with Reddit on the matter of picking a gaming headset that gives you the best bang for your buck knows there’s only one reasonable piece of advice: each pair of headphones can be a gaming headset if you slap a mic on it — and it will probably sound better than any gaming headset marketed as such. I’m being deliberately hyperbolic, but this argument actually holds water: there’s a marketing “penalty” to the price of almost ev

Cattle graze on a dry meadow at a livestock farm, on August 5, 2020, in northwestern France as a heatwave is forecast for the coming days. | Photo by JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP via Getty Images Cows with tummy troubles could be a big problem for the climate, a new study finds. That’s because cattle and other livestock with worms and other parasites produce more of the super potent greenhouse gas, methane, than healthy animals. Methane is 28 to 36 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when

Boom Supersonic, an aviation startup, unveiled today a full-scale demonstrator of a supersonic passenger jet that aims to be the next-generation Concorde. The XB-1 demonstrator won’t take flight until 2021, but Boom unveiled the prototype to a group of aviation and aerospace executives at Centennial Airport in Denver.
At 71 feet long, the XB-1 is a scaled-down version of the full production model that Boom hopes to have ready for passengers by 2029. The prototype only has room for the pilo

TLDR: IzzBie Smart Private Internet is a safe, fast, secure method to access home or office digital networks from anywhere in the world. For years, you’ve been hearing that having a VPN subscription is one of the smartest, most secure ways of protecting yourself and your sensitive information from scammers and cybercrooks online. And that’s true.  Yet like any technology, improvements and new ideas come along to modify and often even replace the old. If IzzBie Smart Private Int

When the Critical Role show started in 2015, the simple but charming Dungeons & Dragons series didn’t seem to have much ambition beyond being an entertaining web show that tapped into a game millions of people around the world play. Critical Role soon found a group of dedicated, and growing, fans — more than 22,000 subscribers on Twitch and 1 million subscribers on YouTube — and decided to use their newfound platform to try charity streaming from time to time, beginning wit

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge If you just got a Nintendo Switch, or are still looking for ways to get your own, you should check out some of the deals happening on a few of the best games available for the system. Best Buy and Amazon are offering them, and this time, games that rarely see a price drop have been discounted. It’s worth noting that these sale prices are for the physical cartridge editions of each game, not digital downloads.Lastly, there’s an early Prime Day 2020

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge If you just got a Nintendo Switch, or are still looking for ways to get your own, you should check out some of the deals happening on a few of the best games available for the system. Best Buy and Amazon are offering them, and this time, games that rarely see a price drop have been discounted. It’s worth noting that these sale prices are for the physical cartridge editions of each game, not digital downloads.Lastly, there’s an early Prime Day 2020

Slack will soon let anyone DM each other. A new Slack Connect direct messages feature will launch for businesses in early 2021 that expands on the idea of shared channels, and allows employees to directly connect with people from other organizations. If you’re a Slack Connect user, you’ll be able to share a private link with other Slack users to direct message you.
Slack has been building towards this ease of messaging between businesses for months. Slack Connect launched back in Jun

Every year at the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC) in Shenzhen, China, the company reveals its latest innovations, shiny new products, and upcoming strategy. If you love Huawei products (and may even be reading this from your own beloved P30 Pro) this is the place to be. But if you missed this year’s livestream of HDC2020 (September 10-12), not to worry! We’ve put together two handy recap videos and articles of the company’s latest advancements in its line of hardware and sof

Slack Slack is getting ready to introduce Instagram-like stories and push-to-talk audio into its communications software before the end of 2020. Both additions are born out of the shift to remote working during the pandemic era we’re all adjusting to. Slack is hoping these features might cut down on constant video calls or inefficient text conversations, and bring back the impromptu office interactions most people haven’t experienced for months.
While Instagram stories are designed