The Verge

Image: Staples The worst part of most Zoom meetings is the end. Not because it’s the moment when we have to lose human connection after being isolated for months during the COVID-19 pandemic. The end of a Zoom meeting is the worst because it’s so dang hard to quickly and gracefully end a call.With a typical not-Zoom call on a smartphone, you bring the phone down from your ear and tap the end call button. That’s it.On a Zoom meeting, you say your goodbye pleasantries, put your hand on your mouse, find your mouse on your screen, move it in the right direction toward the end call button, overshoot said button in your desperation to leave the meeting as soon as possible, and then finally click the button, all on video, where anyone who is still in the... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate and the creators of Netflix movie Enola Holmes have agreed to dismiss a copyright lawsuit over Sherlock Holmes’ emotions. Copyright Lately reported on the outcome today, noting that the court didn’t rule on the merits of the case, possibly indicating that the parties settled. So unfortunately, we don’t know if Enola Holmes’ take on Doyle’s famous detective violated copyright by showing a wider range of feelings and greater respect for women.The Enola Holmes case hinged on Sherlock Holmes’ complicated copyright status. Most Holmes stories sit in the public domain, and stories like Enola Holmes — which reimagines Holmes (played by Henry Cavill) having a younger sister — can freely repurpose their elements.... Continue reading…

Eero’s top-shelf mesh router is advertised for gigabit speeds, but it doesn’t quite deliver Continue reading…

Image: Evan Blass With its upcoming Galaxy Buds Pro, Samsung is planning to counter one of the differentiating features of Apple’s AirPods Pro (and now AirPods Max): spatial audio. Spatial audio crams an immersive, surround sound-like experience into a set of earbuds or headphones. And it accurately keeps the sound source anchored to your iPhone or iPad, so if you turn your head, you’ll notice that the audio stays in front of you. Wherever you move the device, that’s where it’ll sound like the audio track is coming from.But Samsung seems to be readying its own take on spatial audio. As is becoming oddly common, the company’s mobile Galaxy Buds app has prematurely spilled some of Samsung’s latest earbud tricks. As noted by 9to5Google, an updated version... Continue reading…

Photo by Jonathan Newton /The Washington Post via Getty Images After spending the fall in their bedrooms, students say their mental health has suffered Continue reading…

Image: GKIDS Films It is shockingly hard to find a new movie that’s interested in an old-fashioned adventure. You know what I mean: the globe-trotting Indiana Jones kind, with riddles to solve and death traps to avoid, featuring a hint of romance and a strange treasure at stake. Thankfully, Lupin III: The First is exactly that. Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki and streaming on-demand, the film is a gorgeously animated romp around the world starring an iconic manga character. Also, some Nazis get their asses handed to them.Depending on how familiar you are with the manga, The First is either a triumphant return or modern introduction to Arsène Lupin III, one of manga and anime’s most storied characters. Created by artist and writer Monkey Punch... Continue reading…

Somehow, it’s the end of December. What is there to say about 2020? This year has felt like a turning point, a cliff, the end of one world and the beginning of another. For us on The Verge’s science desk (and so many others), it’s been a year we want to both lock away forever and also never forget.As 2020 wound down, we decided that we wanted to commemorate this unreal year with a time capsule, so that whatever happens in 2021 and beyond, there will be a small, resilient snippet of 2020 that future historians, scientists, or space aliens can unearth and wonder about. So we took a whack at distilling a year’s worth of science memories into a handful of digital files. It’s far from comprehensive, but it tells some intriguing stories.T... Continue reading…

The Verge assembled a digital time capsule to immortalize 2020. The files were encoded into synthetic DNA to be preserved for thousands of years.The following files were selected by Verge staff in November 2020. The stories contained are by no means exhaustive; they are a few snapshots of life in 2020.Within this file folder are the original assets included in the time capsule, as well as a video exploring the capsule’s storage medium: synthetic DNA.View the files on TheVerge.com. Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew Caballero / AFP via Getty Images After months of deliberation, congressional leaders reached a $900 billion coronavirus relief deal on Sunday, including billions in funding for broadband internet access.Congress’ latest relief measure provides $7 billion in funding for broadband connectivity and infrastructure. That figure includes $3.2 billion for a $50-per-month emergency broadband benefit for people who are laid off or furloughed during the pandemic, according to a press release from Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) office on Sunday.“Broadband connections are essential for Americans seeking to get new jobs, and to access school, health care and other government services,” Wyden said in a statement Sunday night. “Ensuring working families can stay online will pay massive... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The year 2020 likely kept many of us inside for most of it, and it looks like that situation may last at least into part of 2021. One of the few positives is that many great movies and TV shows were released on streaming services such as Netflix. The streaming service has made available a plethora of movies and TV shows, some original to Netflix.Netflix currently offers three plans: Basic ($8.99 / month) lets you watch content on one screen at a time; Standard ($13.99 / month) brings it up to two screens and adds HD content; and Premium ($17.99) offers a total of four screens and Ultra HD content.Whether you need a new show to binge-watch once The Office leaves Netflix or something for a movie night with your loved ones, here’s a list... Continue reading…

After years of speculation about whether Boba Fett would get his own spinoff of some kind, The Mandalorian’s season 2 finale confirmed that a new Boba Fett series, titled The Book of Boba Fett, will hit Disney Plus in December 2021.Executive producer Jon Favreau appeared on Good Morning America on December 21st to confirm The Book of Boba Fett as a new series (following some speculation that Book of Boba Fett was some sort of subtitle for The Mandalorian’s third season.) The new show will be an original series set within the world of The Mandalorian, with Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Robert Rodriguez set to produce the series. Favreau and Filoni already produce The Mandalorian, while Rodriguez directed the Boba Fett-centric season two... Continue reading…

Image: OnePlus OnePlus has a new concept phone to show off, which is its way of teasing tech that maybe, just maybe, might make it into one of the company’s future phones. The OnePlus 8T Concept is a similar phone to the OnePlus 8T that was released a couple months ago, but it’s got a pretty unique rear design that changes color alongside a motion-tracking radar module.According to OnePlus, this color-changing effect is achieved with a film that contains metal oxide, which sits underneath the phone’s glass back and changes color as different voltages are applied to it. At its most basic, it could change color to show off the phone’s notifications, like an incoming phone call, much like the notification light that it has included on its phones in the... Continue reading…

Image: Adobe Adobe has released an Arm version of Premiere Pro for macOS, allowing owners of new Apple Silicon M1 Macs to run the video editing software natively. The program is still very much in beta for now, however, and the Adobe post announcing its availability lists a host of known bugs and missing features. News of its release was spotted by The 8-Bit, and MacRumors adds that Adobe’s Premiere Rush and Audition have also been updated to run on the new machines.Adobe says it’s porting Premiere Pro’s features over in phases, starting with its core editing functions and workflows, as well as popular codecs like H.264, HEVC, and ProRes. Third-party integrations will need to be updated by their respective developers to work on Apple Silicon. Adobe... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge 36 personal phones belonging to Al Jazeera journalists, producers, anchors, and executives were hacked in a spyware campaign between July and August 2020, a new report from Citizen Lab alleges. The attacks reportedly used Pegasus technology provided by the Israeli firm NSO Group, and are thought to be the work of four operators. Citizen Lab says it has “medium confidence” that one is working on behalf of the UAE government and another for the Saudi government.The attacks are worrying not just because they appear to show politically-motivated targeting of journalists, but also because they’re part of a trend of using increasingly advanced methods that are harder to detect. According to Citizen Lab, the attacks seem to have used a... Continue reading…

ZTE’s Axon 20 5G is a better phone if you don’t care about selfies Continue reading…

Image: CD Projekt Red I can barely go anywhere on the internet without seeing yet another wild, hilarious, or downright odd bug from Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a buggy game, and developer CD Projekt Red has already released two hotfixes to try and shore up some of the problems. One issue that’s starting to pop up, though, isn’t funny at all: some players are reporting that their Cyberpunk 2077 save files are becoming corrupted if they exceed a certain file size (via Eurogamer).If your Cyberpunk 2077 save is corrupted, you’ll apparently see this prompt when you try and load up the game: “saved data is damaged and cannot be loaded.” Here’s what it looks like: Image: GOG.com support document The prompt shown for corrupted saves in Cyberpunk... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Hi, I’m Jay! I’m subbing in for your usual trailers guide Kim Lyons while she takes a well-deserved holiday break. I’ve really been looking forward to writing this post. Trailers are fun! They’re like bite-sized movies.Unfortunately, there weren’t a ton of trailers to choose from this week. I suppose studios don’t want to launch big trailers for upcoming blockbusters shortly before everyone takes off for the holidays. But there were still a few good ones to watch, including a trailer for a series launching on Netflix later this week. Enjoy.BridgertonBridgerton is Shona Rhimes’ upcoming British period drama for Netflix, the first series resulting from her mega-deal with Netflix. It looks like it should hit a lot of the expected high... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Frontline essential workers and people 75 years of age and older in the United States should get COVID-19 vaccines in the next wave of immunizations, an independent committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended. That group includes about 49 million people.After those groups are vaccinated, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) said doses should go to people between 65 and 74 years old, people between 16 and 65 years old with underlying health conditions, and other essential workers not in groups considered frontline.Vaccines will be in limited supply through at least the next few months. The CDC expects that there should be doses available to vaccinate 20 million people in December, 30... Continue reading…

The Ninja Fall Guys skin. | Image: Mediatonic Fall Guys developer Mediatonic has added a skin based on the hugely-popular streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins to the game. The skin’s arrival follows a two-week charity bidding war in August to have a custom skin added to the game. Blevins, G2 Esports, Aim Lab, and Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson pledged a combined $1 million to Special Effect, which helps people with physical disabilities find ways to play video games.Here’s a couple photos the Ninja skin in-game, courtesy of the Fall Guys Twitter account. It looks kind of like a jelly bean-sized version of the Ninja skin that was added to Fortnite in January.

Photo by Hugh Hastings/Getty Images An algorithm determining which Stanford Medicine employees would receive its 5,000 initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine included just seven medical residents / fellows on the list, according to a December 17th letter sent from Stanford Medicine’s chief resident council. Stanford Medicine leadership has since apologized and promised to re-evaluate the plan.“We take complete responsibility for the errors in the execution of our vaccine distribution plan,” a Stanford Medicine spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “Our intent was to develop an ethical and equitable process for distribution of the vaccine. We apologize to our entire community, including our residents, fellows, and other frontline care providers, who have performed... Continue reading…

Early one morning, a week after the pandemic started, chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt strapped a GoPro to his head and filmed himself making breakfast. In the video, you can see López-Alt rummaging through his fridge, slicing and frying bacon, and peeling a bit of egg off a pan to give to his excited dog. There’s no recipe beneath the video, no voice-over instructions detailing what we’re seeing — it’s just a guy in a kitchen making breakfast.Videos like these became both much-needed entertainment and valuable educational resources early in the pandemic, as a world of people realized they would be stuck at home indefinitely with their own (not necessarily stunning) cooking, and a little extra time to put into it. Food and drink... Continue reading…

Time may have felt sluggish in the real world, but Animal Crossing’s seasons have kept changing. | Image: Nintendo I broke ground on my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island, Honkland, just three days before the UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the country was going into lockdown. I’d pitched up my tent, and I was just about to deliver a pile of materials to Timmy Nook to help him build the island’s general store.I was enjoying my first Animal Crossing, but I hadn’t quite hit that point of “getting it” just yet. The menus were slow to navigate, and I wasn’t really sure what I was working toward. Mining the most material out of each of my island rocks involved a convoluted process of digging two holes and then hitting them repeatedly over the course of several seconds. Picking fruit involved first shaking a tree and then picking up... Continue reading…

The cover art for KMRU’s 2020 ambient record Peel | Courtesy of Editions Mego In the early days of despair, I looked at Spotify and decided that everything sounded bad. All songs were boring, and I was sick of everything. What that really meant was I was sick of myself. But by the summer, I’d found the solve: ambient music. The best music I heard this year was barely music at all.The notion of “ambient music” is pretentious, sure, but the concept is simple. If most music is centered around some alchemy of melody and rhythm, ambient music eschews that for whatever else: tones, moods, atmosphere.I’ve listened to Peel by Nairobi-based artist KMRU roughly once a day since I first heard it in July. Like most music in the genre, the album is concerned with timbre and texture — a lot of shapeless, ambiguous noise that... Continue reading…

A24 We didn’t go to the movies much this year, but the movies still came to us. While the convenience of home viewing can’t match the experience of watching a spectacle in the dark with others, the other joy of movies — talking about them — is easier than ever, thanks to our connected world. And 2020’s pandemic sidelined a lot of big blockbusters, leaving smaller, more interesting movies to take center stage. As silver linings go, this one isn’t that bad.Here, in no particular order, are ten incredible movies from a year where movies still rallied to offer experiences that were provocative, compelling, and fun.The AssistantOne of the best films made in response to the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and the subsequent #MeToo movement, The... Continue reading…

Is your internet service provider charging you every month for the cable modem or router that you purchased with your own money? Or, perhaps, have you never bothered to buy those items because you couldn’t escape the fee? That fee will be illegal starting Sunday, December 20th, and you should tell your ISP that you’ll no longer tolerate it.Last year, Congress passed a law that should have fixed this ridiculous loophole as of June 20th, 2020 — and though the FCC managed to extend the deadline six months by spinning up some bullshit about how cable companies didn’t have the resources to stop charging you money, the law should take full effect tomorrow.Do note that the actual text of the law still allows some BS to occur. If your ISP... Continue reading…

As a lowly Wired Magazine intern, one of my first assignments was reviewing 2007’s The Simpsons Game: a groundbreaking self-referential parody of the entire gaming industry that, sadly, suffered from as nearly as many tropes as it lampooned. But it turns out Fox had been interested in a three-dimensional Simpsons game long before that — one that could have appeared on the Sega Dreamcast if things had worked out.Today, the DreamcasticChannel on YouTube (via Kotaku) is showcasing an unreleased tech demo from the year 2000 for a title tentatively called “The Simpsons: Bug Squad!” It’s from the long-defunct Red Lemon Studios, and it’s remarkable how much the game’s cel-shaded graphics look like the show. Apparently, a Dreamcast-Talk forum... Continue reading…

Photo by John Stillwell - WPA Pool/Getty Images “Alexa, play the Queen’s Christmas Day message” will soon be a thing — even if you don’t live in the UK. Starting December 25th at 3PM GMT (or 10AM ET, 7AM PT), that phrase will deliver the Queen’s traditional Christmas Day broadcast, according to The Guardian.If you’re curious what the Queen’s message might contain, you can check out transcripts of all her previous Christmas Broadcasts (going back to 1952!) at The Royal Household’s website. No doubt this one will spend some time on the COVID-19 pandemic, whose latest variant is currently forcing London to impose its harshest lockdown yet, but perhaps it’ll be a bit of an escape from the harsh reality, too.Amazon seems to think it might be: “After a challenging year, millions of... Continue reading…

9to5Mac’s Michael Steeber noticed a interesting coincidence today: the company has temporarily closed every single retail store in California, many more across the US, both stores in Mexico, both stores in Brazil, and is about to close 16 additional stores across the UK. As Steeber points out, that’s nearly 100 stores if we include ones it closed in Germany and the Netherlands last week, leaving nearly a fifth of the company’s locations now closed worldwide.I checked Apple’s complete list of stores to confirm, and sure enough: every California store, all four in Tennessee, all three in Utah, all four in Minnesota, two in Oklahoma, and the stores in Portland, Oregon; Anchorage, Alaska; Omaha, Nebraska; and Albuquerque, New Mexico are all... Continue reading…

Photo by CBS via Getty Images If you read my previous post, you might have noticed a brand-new Twitter label on Trump’s latest wildly misleading tweet: “Election officials have certified Joe Biden as the winner of the U.S. Presidential election.” Yes, Twitter is now calling the election for Joe Biden on Trump’s own tweets.Twitter tells us it’s simply an update to its existing label, designed to “reflect the latest information.”But there’s a staggering difference between this label and Twitter’s previous one, which simply said “Multiple sources called this election differently.” That left room for doubt. Now that the Electoral College has voted, Twitter not only accepting the result, but using it to visibly challenge the president’s ongoing lie that he won the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” — President Donald Trump on COVID-19, January 22nd, 2020.“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.” — Trump on COVID-19, February 24th.“It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.” — Trump on COVID-19, March 15th.Here’s Trump today, on the massive SolarWinds hack that targeted federal agencies and could have exposed 425 of the companies on the Fortune 500: “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control.”You don’t say. Here are a few perspectives on the SolarWinds hack from entities that do not currently have negative credibility:

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge For the second time in two months, Apple is putting one of the companies it hires to build the iPhone on notice for violating labor laws. Reuters, Bloomberg and others are reporting that Apple has put Taiwanese manufacturing giant Wistron on “probation” — meaning it won’t receive any new business from Apple until it sorts things out — after the supplier was found exploiting workers at a plant in India.The reason we’re hearing about this at all is rather incredible: on December 12th, some 2,000 workers decided to protest unpaid wages by rioting at one of Wistron’s offices, smashing up the lobby and overturning vehicles. There’s video:

Taylor Hill/FilmMagic for YouTube YouTube started the last few years off with nothing short of catastrophic headlines about some of its creators.2017 saw Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg receive global criticism for a video in which he displayed anti-Semitic imagery; 2018 found Logan Paul uploading footage of a dead body to YouTube; 2019 ushered in loot crate controversies and dangerous stunts by top personalities like Jake Paul who took part in the Bird Box challenge by driving while blindfolded, leading to fundamental policy changes at the company. Those events were only within the first few weeks of each year, too.2020 was much quieter. The year has gone by without a cascade of egregious misdeeds and public relations disasters. That’s not to suggest YouTube had a perfect... Continue reading…

A pandemic makes pushing your players outside impossible Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The holidays can be overwhelming — even during years like this one when most of us aren’t actually traveling to visit family and friends. If buying gifts is still looming on your to-do list, you certainly aren’t alone. It’s tough to find the right kind of gift for everyone, especially people who have an affinity for tech. That’s where we come in.Below, there are a few great deals you can take advantage of now, and better, they’ll get where they need to be by December 25th. If you’re mailing packages yourself, we’ve pulled together all of the crucial shipping dates for USPS, UPS, and FedEx right here.Deals on noise-canceling headphonesSony’s WF-1000XM3 wireless earbuds with noise cancellation slipped $10 below its best-ever price... Continue reading…

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images Antivirus will be taking a break over the holidays. We’ll be back on January 9th.When healthcare workers started administering the first shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the US this week, they noticed something strange. There was an extra dose lingering at the bottom of the small glass vial.“They initially thought that they had incorrectly done it because there was so much left in the vial after they pulled up the five doses,” Erin Fox, Senior Pharmacy Director at the University of Utah told The New York Times. “They sent us a picture and were like, can we use the extra?”On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration announced on Twitter that yes, the pharmacists can use the extra. They can use every single full dose in a... Continue reading…

Spiders, swords, starships, and a whole lot more Continue reading…

A man wearing a facemask walks along a street amid smoggy conditions in New Delhi on October 30, 2020. | Photo by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP via Getty Images Pollution was still a problem in 2020 Continue reading…

Many of us were not commuting as usual during 2020, so our podcast listening time may have been somewhat lessened. However, podcasts are still popular. They’re great to listen to while driving, cleaning your home, exercising, or just hanging out. There are podcasts to suit every taste, including topics like politics, history, music, and comedy. In fact, there are so many out there that it may be difficult to choose where to start. We asked the staff at The Verge what their current favorite podcasts were. Here they are — try them out and see what you think.Lost Notes 1980 Photo: David Corio / KCRW Lost Notes 1980 Last year, this podcast told about music’s untold stories. This season focuses on the year 1980... Continue reading…

Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation Plus are great gifts for early adopters of next-gen consoles. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The holiday season has arrived — but don’t panic. If you forgot to buy a gift for someone, you can’t decide what to give your loved one, or the item you wanted to give can’t be delivered on time, it’s not a problem. Digital gifts are the most convenient and easiest gifts. And with so many digital gifts to choose from — like a subscription to a popular streaming service, some extra cash for iTunes or a new game, or a gift card from your favorite retailer — we made a list of a few quick gift ideas. Image: Disney A streaming service like Disney Plus could be the perfect gift for a stay-at-home friend or relative. For movie / TV show streamersWith the pandemic continuing to keep most of us inside, there’s never... Continue reading…

Josh Gad’s Reunited Apart brought together the cast of the Lord of the Rings movies The year that brought us the coronavirus pandemic, murder hornets, and the deaths of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Alex Trebek is probably one most people won’t be sad to bid adieu. Parents and kids were stuck together during lockdowns, trying to manage remote school and work, and everyone’s feeling good and frayed at this point.At the start of the pandemic, media was abuzz with the notion that this pandemic and the resulting lockdowns would be a boon for the creative process. Suffering and isolation, the logic goes, beget great works of art and literature: just look at Shakespeare, who apparently cranked out Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra while quarantined during an outbreak of bubonic plague.While we may not yet know if... Continue reading…

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge DJI says people in the US will still be able to buy and use its drones and other products despite being named to the Commerce Department’s Entity List. The Chinese drone giant was named to the blacklist on Friday for “enabl[ing] wide-scale human rights abuses within China through abusive genetic collection and analysis or high-technology surveillance” — most likely a reference to how DJI provided drones and other technology to the Chinese government to be used in its Muslim detention camps in the Xinjiang province.“DJI is disappointed in the U.S. Department of Commerce’s decision. Customers in America can continue to buy and use DJI products normally,” the company said in a statement to The Verge. “DJI remains committed to developing... Continue reading…

Cyberpunk 2077’s listing on Microsoft’s digital games store now includes a label warning of potential performance issues on Xbox One. “Users may experience performance issues when playing this game on Xbox One consoles until this game is updated,” the warning reads.Players have observed numerous bugs and performance issues with Cyberpunk 2077 since its launch last week, especially on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The dissatisfaction led the company to quickly issue a statement suggesting that unhappy players try to get refunds for the game. Many players had trouble actually getting refunds, though, given Sony and Microsoft’s typically strict policies for issuing refunds of digital games.Since Thursday evening, though, that has... Continue reading…

Image: CD Projekt Red Cyberpunk 2077’s second promised hotfix is out for Xbox and PlayStation platforms. The PC version will follow “soon,” according to developer CD Projekt Red. You can read the extensive list of fixes here.While there doesn’t seem to be anything quite as significant as the changes to reduce epilepsy risk made in last week’s 1.04 hotfix, hopefully this new update will make what has been a very buggy game have a few less issues.The game has been out for a little more than a week, and players have been criticizing the game for its numerous bugs and performance issues, particularly on older consoles. The outcry led to Sony offering full refunds of digital copies of the game and taking the unprecedented step of yanking the game from the... Continue reading…

Image: United States Space Force Members of the United States Space Force will officially be called “Guardians”, according to an announcement Vice President Mike Pence made at an event celebrating the military branch’s one year anniversary.The organization traces the name “Guardians” back to an old Air Force Space Command motto from 1983, “Guardians of the High Frontier,” according to a short post on the US Space Force website. While a distinct entity, Space Force is part of the Air Force per its establishment with the National Defense Authorization Act.As it exists today, Space Force is mostly a rebrand of Air Force Space Command, but with the authority to make decisions independent from the Air Force. Space Force personnel also mostly come from the Air Force, but... Continue reading…

Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images The Food and Drug Administration authorized the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Moderna, which joins the Pfizer and BioNTech product as the second shot available for use in the United States.The vaccine can now be given to adults 18 years of age and older in the US. It was 94 percent effective against symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials. The Moderna vaccine also protects against cases of severe disease: there were 30 cases of severe disease among trial participants, and all were in the placebo group. Initial data on the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine also indicated that it could protect against severe disease, but data was too limited to reach a definite conclusion.“With the availability of two vaccines now for the prevention of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge 90,000 Google employees have just received access to free weekly COVID tests. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news that every US Google employee (and its subsidiaries, including YouTube) will be eligible to sign up for a free at-home test. This differs from other companies, like Amazon, which are only offering tests to employees who still have to work in a physical location, like a retail location or warehouse.This is apparently something Google employees are interested in, as the vendor’s website crashed after going live. Employees are promised that they’ll receive the test within two to four days of requesting one, and that they’ll get the results back within two days of the lab receiving it.According to the Wall Street... Continue reading…

Image: Nintendo Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto led a video tour of the company’s Mario-themed Super Nintendo World attraction at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka during the company’s latest Direct livestream.The theme park looks to be packed with Mario iconography that will be familiar to Nintendo fans. Even the entrance Mario-themed: you enter the park by walking through a giant pipe that spits you out in the atrium of Princess Peach’s castle that first debuted in Super Mario 64.A smart wristband lets you interact with elements of the parkMiyamoto showed how you can you use a special smart wristband, called the “Power-Up Band,” to interact with different parts of the zone. In one example, he punched a question mark block with the hand wearing the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge When signing up for an Instagram account, the service promises that your email and birthday won’t be publicly visible. A bug discovered by security researcher Saugat Pokharel, however, made it so that an attacker could easily get that private information. The bug, which was patched after being reported to Facebook, was exploitable by business accounts that were given access to an experimental feature the company was testing.The attack worked on private accounts, and ones that don’t accept public DMsThe attack used Facebook’s Business Suite tool, available to any Facebook business account. The experimental upgrade meant that if a Facebook business account was linked to Instagram and was included in the test group, the Business Suite... Continue reading…

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. | Photo: WinFuture Today, we have another Galaxy S21 leak, which seems to confirm some of the specs that have been floating around, published by WinFuture. Information about and images of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S21-series phones have been landing almost daily in the run-up to Samsung’s January event. With this newest leak, we now have a better idea of what to expect — especially in the camera department. In short, the hardware appears to be a big part of Samsung’s plan to take on the highly capable iPhone 12 Pro Max.The S21 Ultra will reportedly offer 3x and 10x telephoto cameras (72mm and 240mm equivalent focal lengths, respectively), both with optical image stabilization. That’s one additional rear-facing camera compared to the S20 Ultra’s three rear... Continue reading…

Photo by Mike Siegel / Pool / Getty Images Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worked together to manipulate 737 Max recertification tests following two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019, according to a damning new Senate report. Boeing “inappropriately coached” some FAA test pilots to reach a desired outcome during the recertification tests, and some were even performed on simulators that weren’t equipped to re-create the same conditions as the crashes.In doing this, the Senate report’s authors say the “FAA and Boeing were attempting to cover up important information that may have contributed to the 737 MAX tragedies.”The FAA is also accused of retaliating against whistleblowersThe FAA is also accused of retaliating against whistleblowers, possibly obstructing... Continue reading…