Technology news

Image: Bloodhound LSR For sale: a rocket-powered car named Bloodhound built specifically to break the land speed record. Theoretical top speed of 1,000 miles per hour. Seats one. Price? A paltry $11 million.The tortured saga of the Bloodhound Land Speed Record project has reached a sadly predictable impasse: the current owner is done spending money trying to set a new record after saving the project from bankruptcy in 2018. It’s hard to blame him. The Bloodhound program has been going for

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is continuing to attract people to its Xbox Game Pass service. The “Netflix for video games” service now has 18 million subscribers, up from the 15 million previously reported in September. Xbox Game Pass is a subscription service that offers access to a growing selection of more than 100 Xbox games for $9.99 per month.
Microsoft has been pushing Xbox Game Pass for more than a year now, and it’s clear the company is heavily inve

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple just released iOS 14.4 and iPadOS 14.4, and the update notes contain some worrying language (via TechCrunch). Under kernel updates, Apple notes that “a malicious application may be able to elevate privileges,” and under WebKit updates, it says “a remote attacker may be able to cause arbitrary code execution.” After both statements, the update notes say, “Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively e

Tweetbot has long been one of the best third-party Twitter applications around for the iPhone and Mac, and today sees the launch of the latest version for iOS: Tweetbot 6, which converts the app into a paid subscription service instead of the single-time purchase that was previously offered.
The new app makes the change to Twitter’s new API that the company introduced last summer, enabling some long-missing features in the premium Twitter app like Twitter cards and polls. That change does

Image: Google Google is ending development on the virtual reality painting app Tilt Brush — one of the most well-known VR applications — and making it open source. Tilt Brush was acquired by Google in 2015 after launching for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and it was soon folded into the company’s larger VR plans, like its Google Cardboard and Daydream headsets.
Tilt Brush’s main feature is three-dimensional painting in VR, but the app received interesting updates over its

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon has big 5G plans for 2021 after formally launching its next-gen network in October of last year, and close to the top of its list of priorities is expanding coverage of its ultra-fast mmWave coverage. That flavor of 5G is currently restricted to select areas within select cities in the US, and it’s highly dependent on your proximity to a Verizon 5G site due to the inherent technology that powers it.Marketed under the name 5G Ultra Wideband (5

Asus’ first Intel Iris Xe graphics card. | Image: Intel Intel is launching its first Iris Xe desktop graphics cards today. Originally codenamed “DG1,” these new desktop GPUs are primarily aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses and mainstream desktop PCs. Intel is teaming up with Asus and other partners to sell these cards to system integrators who will bundle them with prebuilt systems.
Much like the Iris Xe Max graphics cards that debuted in laptops back in October, these

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Gaming laptops that have Nvidia’s powerful RTX 30-series graphics chips inside are now shipping. I have a first-look at MSI’s 2021 GS66 Stealth with the RTX 3080, and my colleague Monica Chin published two reviews for launch day: the Asus ROG Flow X13 (with its detachable RTX 3080 eGPU) and the MSI GP66 Leopard with the RTX 3070.
We discovered something strange: an RTX 3070 can now be faster than an RTX 3080 in some cases. We saw this first-hand

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon says that it has resolved issues with Fios, its fiber optic network, that affected many locations in the Northeastern US for hours on Tuesday. The company says that things should be returning to normal, but a fiber cut in Brooklyn may mean that some might still be without service.Users began reporting problems with Verizon on Downdetector shortly after 11AM ET, and the volume of reports peaked at more than 22,000 on Tuesday. Hotspots for problems o

Image: Byte Byte, a TikTok competitor, has been purchased by Clash, another TikTok competitor. It sounds as though Clash may be merged into Byte, but the details are vague for the time being. Clash’s website now directs visitors to download Byte, and the company says Clash won’t be available on the iOS App Store for “an extended period.”
Clash co-founder Brendon McNerney told The New York Times that the two apps will be released “together as one product” withi

AMD is firing on all cylinders these days: it’s the guts of every modern PlayStation and Xbox, it has the desktop CPUs to beat, it’s nearly caught up to Nvidia in GPU performance (if not availability), and it’s about to challenge Intel in laptops as well — with its Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs and RDNA 2 GPUs due later this year.It turns out all of that can translate to eye-popping dollar signs, too. The chipmaker just announced its Q4 and full-year 2020 earnings, and it&rsquo

S’More, a dating app that’s focused on helping users find more meaningful relationships, announced today that it has raised $2.1 million in seed funding.
S’More (short for “something more”) ensures that users can’t focus on physical appearance, because photos are  initally blurred — they gradually un-blur as you interact with someone. The startup has introduced new features like video chat (also blurred initially), and it launched a redesigned

Microsoft posted the second quarter of its 2021 financial results today, reporting revenue of $43.1 billion and a net income of $15.5 billion. Revenue is up 17 percent, and net income has increased by 33 percent.
We saw some impressive growth for Surface, Xbox, and cloud-related services in Microsoft’s previous quarter, and it’s very much the same this time around.
The PC market just had its first big growth in 10 years, with around 300 million shipments of devices during 2020. The

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Google has released the latest version of Chrome OS, with a few new features for Chromebook owners to try out. If you’re a Chromebook owner, your device should have the newest version now or very shortly.
First off, your Chromebook can now function as a smart display (like Google’s Nest Hub Max) when you’re not actively using it. Like the Nest Hub, it can act like a digital photo album and display pictures on its lock screen. You can select a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Three weeks after Google promised it would add Apple’s mandatory app privacy labels “as soon as this week,” none of the company’s main apps have the labels, including Gmail, search, Photos, Docs, and YouTube.There have been some questions about whether Google is purposefully not updating its apps to avoid the labels, so I looked through every Google app in the iOS App Store to find out whether the updates have been coming.Some have:

Image: Apple Apple has officially released iOS 14.4 and a matching update for its HomePod mini speaker, adding the long-promised ultra-wideband (UWB) handoff feature that will allow newer iPhones to more seamlessly transfer music, calls, and podcasts between the two devices.
While both the original HomePod and the HomePod mini have supported handing off music for some time, the smaller device features a U1 ultra-wideband chip that promises to make it even easier to transfer content over from an

Image: Vizio Vizio’s P-Series Quantum X remains the company’s flagship line of QLED televisions. If you are in the market for a new TV and have room to fit a 75-inch device on your entertainment station, Vizio’s P75Qx-H1 model is $1,600 at Best Buy, B&H Photo, and Vizio. This is $400 off its usual price and the lowest we have seen this TV go for yet.Released last fall, the P-Series Quantum X TVs can hit up to 3000 nits of peak brightness and support a variable refresh rate

Mealco, a startup promising to help chefs launch new restaurants designed around delivery, is announcing that it has raised $7 million in seed funding.
It’s probably not news to anyone reading this that opening a restaurant can be an expensive, risky proposition — and of course, many restaurants have gone out of business during the pandemic.
But founder and CEO Daniel Simon (who was previously a developer and product lead at Applicaster, and has also worked with Tel Aviv restaurant g

Illustration by Alex Castro Twitter on Tuesday announced a significant shift in the type of data it makes available for free to third-party academic researchers interested in studying user behaviors and trends related to online discourse. Now, Twitter says it will no longer require researchers pay for premium or enterprise developer access and will instead make the “full history of public conversation” — what the company refers to as its full-archive search endpoint — ava

An American real estate investor, a Canadian investor and a former Israeli Air Force pilot are paying $55 million each to be part of the first fully private astronaut crew to journey to the International Space Station. The trio will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule early next year, with a veteran NASA astronaut as the commander.
The Ax-1 mission, arranged by Houston, Texas-based space tourism company Axiom Space, is a watershed moment for the space industry as companies race t

Plex, well known as a service for streaming movies, music, and TV shows from your own computer, is now adding another thing you can stream: video games (via Protocol). Plex announced the new service, called Plex Arcade, on its blog and also launched a website for it. The service will cost $3 a month if you’re a Plex Pass subscriber, and $5 a month if you’re not.Instead of focusing on modern console or phone games like its competitors, Plex lets you play Atari games. It’s takin

A Cypriot man pleaded guilty to hacking and blackmailing several US companies. Joshua Epifaniou admitted to computer fraud and paid $600,000 in restitution to his victims. He was extradited from Cyprus and will be sentenced on March 3rd.
Epifaniou operated what he described as a “hacking, extortion, blackmailing, [and] bluffing” scheme from 2014 to 2016. Going by aliases that included “Charley Sullivan” and “Richard Charley,” he picked targets based on their

Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images In a hearing on her nomination for Commerce Department secretary on Tuesday, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo told lawmakers that she will pursue changes to Section 230 if confirmed.Responding to questions posed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Raimondo said that she would use the tools available through the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to convene stakeholders, industry leaders, l

Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles was the biggest COVID-19 testing site in the United States, with the ability to test over 10,000 people each day. But two weeks into January, amid a chaotic and slow-moving COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the city shut down the site in order to convert it into a vaccination site. The city closed another testing site, as well, temporarily slashing government-run COVID-19 testing capacity by one-third.It’s a pattern pla

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In Apple and Epic’s ongoing court battle over App Store fees, one of the key sticking points has been Apple’s insistence on maintaining a 30 percent cut as a cornerstone of the storefront.
But newly revealed Apple executive emails from the case show that the App Store rules that Apple flouts as essential to the fairness of the app economy were carefully negotiated into existence over time in a way that ensured Apple wasn’t “leaving

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon Fios, the company’s fiber optic network, appears to be experiencing outages in many locations on the US East Coast.
There are more than 22,000 user reports of problems with Verizon on Downdetector, and there appear to be hotspots on Downdetector’s outage map for Verizon in Boston, New York City, Washington, DC, and more. A few Verge staffers are experiencing outages as well.
A screenshot of Downdetector’s outage map for Verizon, c

Club Feast, a startup with a more affordable approach to meal delivery, is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst.
The company was founded by Atallah Atallah, Ghazi Atallah and Chris Miao. The basic concept is pretty simple: Restaurant delivery that only costs $5.99 per dish — cheaper than almost anything you’d find on other delivery services. (The startup also charges diners a $2 delivery fee, as well as a $1 fee for single meal orders.)
A

Image: Sony Sony has today announced its most advanced mirrorless camera yet: the $6,500 Alpha 1 features a new 50.1-megapixel full-frame sensor, is capable of continuous photo shooting at 30 images per second, and can record 8K video at 30fps. It’ll ship beginning in March.
The powerhouse camera is priced significantly above the highest-end mirrorless cameras from Canon and Nikon, but Sony promises that customers who buy in will be rewarded with “the most technologically advanced, i

Late last week, independent journalist Eric Newcomer reported that Databricks is raising new capital at a valuation of “about $27 billion.” A few days later, another publication chimed in, saying that they had heard the round could be worth $29 billion at a slightly higher valuation.
Well, well!
Last year, The Exchange covered Databricks’ financial progress as a private company. Databricks, as a refresher, provides its customers with analytics and data science tooling and&

Years ago, Uber had a problem. With millions of users and tens of thousands of drivers scattered across a widening expanse of the globe, the fast-growing mobility startup wanted to display more accurate maps to users about where their ride was coming from and where it was intending to go to reach its destination. The challenge is that geospatial datasets can easily reach into the petabytes, so how do you transmit and visualize such data — particularly on mobile?
“We were tasked with

This morning Fast, a startup that provides online checkout and identity products, announced that it has closed a $102 million Series B. The new funding event was led by Stripe, a previous investor in Fast.
Stripe, an online payments giant, also led Fast’s Series A last year, a deal worth $20 million. Fast has raised $124 million to date, it said in a release.
TechCrunch reached out to Fast for comment regarding its growth pace. The company shared that gross merchandise volume (GMV) process

The Xperia Pro can be used as an external monitor for a camera. | Image: Sony The Xperia Pro, Sony’s first smartphone with 5G in the US, is launching today for $2,499.99. Sony is targeting the device at professional users, who it hopes will use its HDMI input to turn the phone into an external camera monitor and its 5G connectivity to quickly upload or live-stream footage. Sony says it currently has no plans to release the Xperia Pro in Europe.
Outside of its HDMI input and US 5G support,

Disney has released the second trailer for Raya and the Last Dragon, giving the best look yet at the upcoming animated fantasy film, which is set to hit both theaters and Disney Plus’ Premier Access program on March 5th.The new trailer sees Raya (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran) putting together a crew of warriors and con artists (including a surprisingly nimble baby) to join her on a quest to find the titular “last dragon,” which legends promise can save her people. But, as the tr

Apple is launching a limited-edition Apple Watch for Black History Month, with a unique watch band, new watchface, and some of the proceeds going toward civil rights organizations.
The watch, part of a new Black Unity Collection of products, comes with a black, green, and red striped band and face, meant to reflect the Pan-African flag. It otherwise appears to be the standard aluminum version of the Apple Watch Series 6, with pricing starting at $399. The band will also be available separately

Photo: Vizio Super Bowl Sunday is less than two weeks away! Sure, the game itself won’t be streaming in 4K resolution, but that doesn’t mean you can’t spoil yourself with a new UHD television for your bedroom or living room.Over at Best Buy and B&H Photo, you can pick up Vizio’s 65-inch M-series (M65Q7-H1 model) 4K television for only $600. It’s not the lowest price we have seen it go for ($580), yet this is still a great deal given the TV’s specs and size

The next in-game event for Animal Crossing: New Horizons will bring a little more color to your island. Today, Nintendo revealed its next big update, the highlight of which is Festivale, a carnival-like event that will take place on February 15th. Here’s how Nintendo describes it:
Dancer Pavé will arrive to your island’s plaza to usher in some confetti and carnival spirit. On the day of the event you can capture colorful feathers floating on your island with your net and trad

Francois G. Durand/Getty Images YouTube has paid out more than $30 billion to creators, artists, and media organizations over the last three years, according to a new letter published by CEO Susan Wojcicki.In Wojcicki’s first letter to creators of 2021, the CEO spent some time addressing YouTube’s growth. The number of new channels that joined the company’s Partner Program, which allows creators to earn advertising revenue, more than doubled in 2020. YouTube also “contrib

Stacker, a company that helps non-developers create software from spreadsheets, announced that it has raised $1.7 million in a seed round.
Stacker fits inside the growing no-code, and low-code niche that TechCrunch has explored at length over the last year. But its approach to the topic is worth examining, as is its new funding round.
According to Stacker CEO Michael Skelly, the idea for his company came from his time at an asset management company where he had helped build internal apps using S

Pinterest now displays a row of stories at the top of its home screen when you open up the app. It’s an interface that should look familiar to anyone who has used a social media app in the past few years: it’s the same tack taken by Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, and plenty more. The change will start appearing today on iOS and Android.
“Story Pins” were introduced to Pinterest in September. They worked like pretty much any other story format, with short videos

Bloomreach, an API company that helps eCommerce customers with search and web site creation, announced a $150 million investment today from Sixth Street Growth. Today’s funding values the company at $900 million.
At the same time, the company announced it has acquired Exponea, a startup that gives Bloomreach a marketing automation component it had been missing. The two companies did not reveal the acquisition price, but along with the pure functionality, the company gains 200 additional em

Photo: Lego Lego is launching a new, augmented reality social video service called Vidiyo that will let users create their own music videos and dance clips and share them with friends, all while applying their own effects and styles to the videos.It sounds a lot like TikTok but aimed at younger children with strict moderation built in, and a Lego twist that makes most of the UI built in real-world Lego bricks instead of toggles in an app.
To create a Vidiyo, users will have to download the app a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is acquiring Revue, an email service that lets writers publish newsletters. The move allows Twitter to capitalize on its user base of writers, journalists, and publications that regularly use the service to reach readers and grow their audiences.
“With a robust community of writers and readers, Twitter is uniquely positioned to help organizations and writers grow their readership faster and at a much larger scale than anywhere else,” ex