The Verge

Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge When Viana Ferguson was a content moderator for Facebook, she came across a post that she immediately recognized as racist: a photo of a white family with a Black child that had a caption reading “a house is not a home without a pet.” But she had a hard time convincing her manager that the picture was not just an innocent photo of a family.“She didn’t seem to have the same perspective, there was no reference I could use,” Ferguson said. She pointed out that there was no pet in the photo, but the manager also told her, “Well, there’s also no home in the picture.”Ferguson said it was one of several examples of the lack of structure and support Facebook moderators face in their day-to-day jobs, a vast majority of which are performed for... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon received a “blistering” letter last Thursday about copyright infringement and Twitch’s nonexistent licensing deals with major music rights holders, Variety reports. The letter was signed by organizations including the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the American Association of Independent Music, SAG-AFTRA, and more.The document accuses Twitch of allowing streamers to play copyrighted music without getting the proper licensing to do so. (Music copyright is a thorny, complicated subject; if you want to play music to audiovisual content, you need at least two different licenses to do it legally: a synchronization license and a mechanical license.)... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is facing a lawsuit from a group of channel owners who say their rights were violated by the platform’s recent moderation actions against QAnon accounts. The users, many of whom boasted hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform, are seeking a temporary restraining order to restore their accounts.“YouTube’s massive de-platforming, which occurred just three weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, worked to the severe detriment of both conservative content creators and American voters who seek out their content,” the complaint alleges. “YouTube took this draconian action so swiftly that the Plaintiffs... received no advance notice and were not able to download their own content.”Section 230 of the Communications... Continue reading…

The Mandalorian’s second season is fast approaching, and Star Wars: Squadrons is getting a small content update to celebrate. More to the point: the game is adding a Baby Yoda bobblehead that you can put in your in-game cockpit, which immediately catapults to the top of the “best cosmetic DLC added to a game in 2020” list. (Sorry, Marvel Fortnite skins.)The “Mysterious Creature” statue isn’t the only thing being added to the space flight simulator game. Each of the two factions is getting a new hologram, decal, dashboard statue, and hanging item, for a total of eight new items. (You can see a few of the new options in the image below.) And yes, that does mean that Baby Yoda will be exclusive to New Republic ships like the X-wing or... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last year, Google pledged that, by 2022, it would include recycled materials in all of its Made By Google products, a list that includes Pixel phones, Pixelbooks, Google Home speakers, Nest devices, and accessories like phone cases and charging stands.Today, the company announced it hit one of its goals ahead of schedule: all new Pixel and Nest products are now designed with recycled materials, according to Google sustainability systems architect David Bourne. That’s not to say its products are made entirely of recycled materials, but they at least include recycled materials somewhere in the product.According to Google, the back cover of the Pixel 5 is made with 100 percent recycled aluminum, and the new Nest Audio has 70 percent... Continue reading…

A Verily drive-through test clinic in California. | Photo by Santiago Mejia / The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images Two California counties are no longer using Google sister company Verily’s COVID-19 testing system, Kaiser Health News reported. The counties, home to San Francisco and Oakland, stopped using the company’s testing platform over concerns that it doesn’t adequately protect patient data and that it doesn’t help low-income residents who have the greatest need for testing.Verily’s platform screens people for symptoms, books appointments, and reports test results. (It contracts out to lab companies that do the actual testing work.) California has around $55 million in contracts with Verily for its testing program, which launched in March with a limited number of sites before expanding to at least 28 counties.The program was controversial... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Microsoft is bringing mouse and trackpad support to its Office for iPad apps today. The software maker promised it would update its Office iPadOS apps earlier this year, and the updates are now live in the App Store for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.Office for iPad now lets you use the built-in trackpad on Apple’s Magic Keyboard to navigate around text, photos, and other objects in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The cursor is context aware, like other apps that have taken advantage of the Magic Keyboard, so you can highlight text in Word, resize images and charts in PowerPoint, and select multiple cells in Excel. It’s very similar to using Office on a PC or Mac. Image: Microsoft Office for iPad cursor support. A... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft If there is anything Xbox excels at better than the competition, it’s having almost every conceivable special edition take on its game consoles and controllers, regardless of whether they’re really worth buying. And just in time for Friday’s premiere of The Mandalorian season two on Disney Plus, Microsoft has taken the wraps off a new themed controller based on the Star Wars spinoff series. The catch: it costs $160.The controller, which is compatible with existing Xbox One systems and the upcoming Xbox Series X / S systems (as well as PC and mobile), features some of the series’s signature iconography with a design and pattern “reminiscent of beskar steel.” That’s the material out of which Din “Mando” Djarin’s bounty hunter armor is... Continue reading…

Image: Sony Destruction AllStars, a vehicular combat game originally slated to launch alongside the PS5 on November 12th, has been delayed to February 2021 as a free PlayStation Plus title, Sony announced today. The game will be free on PlayStation Plus for two months.The game was already available for preorder for $70 ahead of release, but Sony confirmed in a recent blog post that if you preordered the game on the PlayStation Store, the PlayStation direct website, or through a retailer, you will be refunded.Destruction AllStars is a new intellectual property developed by Lucid Games. Not much is known about the gameplay, but it reminds me a lot of Twisted Metal in some ways.

Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge A bunch of Asus’ latest laptops featuring Intel’s 11th Gen processors are now available for purchase.The one I’m most excited about is the ZenBook Flip S, which Asus says is the world’s thinnest OLED convertible laptop and the first Asus laptop to be verified by Intel’s Evo platform. The Flip S has a gorgeous OLED screen as well as excellent speakers and a light, convertible build. It’s a good choice if you’re looking for a great streaming or multimedia experience.Another solid buy here is the ZenBook 14 UX425EA. This one doesn’t have a touchscreen like the Flip S, but it has shown better performance and better battery life. (There’s a 1W screen option with increased power efficiency.) Both of these models have a cool feature called... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro Twitter will add an app banner offering information about election results and voting by mail. The banners will appear on the home timelines of all US-based users, and they’ll pop up when people search for election-related phrases or hashtags.Twitter says the new pop-ups “preemptively address topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation.” One of the two banners reassures users that voting by mail is safe and secure. The other informs people that election results may not be announced right away. Both link to Twitter Moments that Twitter will populate with up-to-date information about voting and results. Neither banner addresses specific false statements. Instead, Twitter warns users broadly about... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Chrome OS may finally be getting a dark mode, but so far it’s only been spotted in its experimental Canary channel, Android Central reported. Before you go tinkering with Canary just be advised: Canary is Google’s “bleeding edge” Chrome OS path, which receives daily updates of features before they’ve been widely tested. It can only be accessed from Chromebooks switched into a special developer mode (not to be confused with the Chrome OS Developer channel). Google warns that Canary can be “unstable.”But at the moment, to activate dark mode on your Chromebook, you need to have the Canary channel installed. Once you’ve done that, Android Central says you just open Chrome and type in chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark and c... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge PayPal has terminated the account of domain registrar and web hosting company Epik for violating its “risk controls,” prompting angry letters and blog posts from Epik alleging conservative bias was to blame, Mashable reported.Seattle-based Epik is perhaps best known for its support of right-wing social media site Gab. The site was banned by its hosting company, domain registrar, and PayPal in 2018, after it was discovered that the alleged shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue had written anti-Semitic tirades on Gab. In a 2018 blog post, Epik CEO Robert Monster criticized what he called the “digital censorship” by other sites.According to Mashable, the issue that got Epik kicked off PayPal has to do with Epik’s digital “alternative... Continue reading…

Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images Samsung Electronics has announced the death of its chairman, Lee Kun-hee. The company says he died on October 25th with family including his son, vice-chairman Lee Jae-yong, at his side. He was 78.A cause of death was not given, but Lee had been incapacitated for many years after suffering a heart attack in 2014, causing him to withdraw from public life. Lee Jae-yong, also known as Jay Y. Lee, had been widely assumed to take over upon his father’s passing and has been viewed as the de facto leader in recent years.“The motivating driver of the company’s vision”Lee Kun-hee was a controversial figure who played a huge part in pushing Samsung from a cheap TV and appliances maker to one of the most powerful technology brands in the world.... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge In its latest teardown video, iFixit took apart an iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, and found that the devices look pretty similar to each other on the inside. The displays are interchangeable, iFixit found, and so are the 10.78 Wh batteries. iFixit The iPhone 12 is on the left, the iPhone 12 Pro is on the right. When they removed the camera shield on the iPhone 12, iFixit found a plastic spacer where the iPhone 12 Pro has its telephoto lens and LiDAR sensor. Both devices have 12 MP wide and ultra-wide cameras.iFixit also examined an X-ray (courtesy of Creative Electron) of the insides of the phones, which show the MagSafe wireless charging array. The X-ray of the iPhone 12 Pro appears to have a black border, but... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games fired back against Apple yet again in a new court filing, saying the iPhone maker “has no rights to the fruits of Epic’s labor,” the latest salvo in the ongoing battle between the two companies.A quick recap: Back in August, Epic introduced a new direct-payment system in its wildly popular Fortnite game to bypass Apple’s 30 percent fee. Apple kicked Fortnite off the App Store for breaking its rules, and Epic responded with a civil lawsuit against Apple, alleging that Apple was violating antitrust law. Epic also revealed that Apple threatened to terminate the developer account used to support the company’s Unreal Engine platform, which would prevent Epic from developing future games for iOS or Mac.Earlier this month, US... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Food delivery platform DoorDash has partnered with a restaurant for the first time to build a new brick-and-mortar store, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Burma Bites, a spin off of Oakland, California-based Burma Superstar, was designed for delivery and takeout, and will offer versions of menu items from the parent restaurant as well as new items in environmentally-friendly to-go containers, DoorDash said. According to the Chronicle, all menu items are priced between $12 and $19.DoorDash did not disclose the amount of its investment in Burma Bites, but told The Verge in an email it has been working on the project for about a year. The restaurant was originally supposed to open in March, but that was delayed by the coronavirus... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Patreon has updated its policies and will no longer support creator accounts on its platform that “advance disinformation promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory,” the company announced in a blog post.A “small number of creators” on Patreon have supported QAnon with their work, the platform says, adding it’s taking action because “a number of other online platforms become overrun with pages and groups actively focused around QAnon disinformation.”QAnon-dedicated creators identified by Patreon’s policy and trust & safety teams will have their accounts removed, the blog post added. The policy update “applies only to creators engaged in spreading QAnon-supporting disinformation,” the company said; while just “mentioning, entertaining,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Italian Data Protection Authority has started an investigation into the widespread use of bots that generate fake nude images on messaging app Telegram. The news follows an investigation by security firm Sensity, which found that as of July 2020 more than 100,000 faked images had been generated and shared in public Telegram channels.The bots can generate fake nudes that have watermarks or that show only partial nudity, and users pay to “reveal” the whole image. Users could submit a photo of a woman to the bot and receive a version of the photo back with clothing “removed” and no indication that the image had been altered. And according to Sensity, a limited number of the bot-generated images, most of which are pulled from social... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you take the typical death toll in the United States in a typical year and add the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or the population of St. Louis, Missouri, you’ll end up with the number of people who died this year. There were nearly 300,000 more deaths than there would have been during a normal year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without a pandemic, that many more people would still be alive.Most of those deaths, about two-thirds, were from COVID-19. But around 100,000 people died as a consequence of the pandemic, even if the virus didn’t directly kill them. They may have died because they avoided a hospital, despite their symptoms of — for example — a stroke, because of a... Continue reading…

Kerry Brown / Netflix In 1939, Alfred Hitchcock came to Hollywood. The English master of suspense would ply his trade in sunny California, and Rebecca, his first American film, would win him his first and only Oscar. Despite the acclaim, Hitchcock hated Rebecca, as it was his first encounter with American censors and their stodgy Production Code, which made it nearly impossible to accurately adapt the Daphne du Maurier book on which it was based. Still, Hitchcock found a way, and we remember Rebecca now as a classic.Like other classics, Rebecca has been reinvented many times. Director Ben Wheatley’s 2020 adaptation is the latest, and it’s new on Netflix this week. Being shot in the modern era, Wheatley’s film has significantly fewer hurdles to clear, given... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Welcome to the weekend. In tech deals world, this week consisted mostly of a few notable Prime Day 2020 leftovers that hung around after Amazon’s big shopping event. Even those are mostly done now, but in their place are some fresh, new deals you might not have seen before — that is, unless you’ve been deal-hunting on The Verge earlier this week. With every week that goes by, we’re getting closer to Black Friday, so expect the deals to start ramping up. Continue reading…

Photo: Riot Games The League of Legends World Championship still feels special, even without a crowd Continue reading…

Samsung Samsung would like you to believe its new 85-inch Interactive Display can bridge the gap between students in the classroom and students studying at home, now that blended-learning is the new normal across the country. In reality, it’s just a slightly bigger digital whiteboard — but assuming it doesn’t cost too much, the tweaked vision does sound intriguing.Now that COVID-19 has swept the country, some students are huddling around tiny Chromebook screens at home while others stay in class, and Samsung’s internet-connected digital whiteboard promises to let students and teachers collaborate with each other, whether they’re in that classroom drawing on the board or adding to it in real-time from their laptop at home. The goal here isn’t to... Continue reading…

The end of OSIRIS-REx’s sample collector, showing asteroid sample leaking out into space | Image: NASA NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did its job a little too well on Tuesday, when it tried to scoop up a handful of rocks from an asteroid named Bennu more than 200 million miles from Earth. The vehicle actually grabbed too much material with its robotic arm, jamming the lid at the end of the arm open — and letting part of the asteroid sample escape out into space.“We were almost a victim of our own success here,” said Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission at the University of Arizona, in a press conference.OSIRIS-REx’s mission is to bring a sample of asteroid material back to Earth so that scientists can study the rocks in a lab. But because OSIRIS-REx bit off more than it could chew, its mission team is... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook wants a New York University research project to stop collecting data about the social platform’s political ad-targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program is violates its terms of service, which bar scraping.A Facebook official sent a letter to the Ad Observatory researchers October 16th, saying that “scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us.” The letter also threatened further enforcement action if the project did not shut down and delete the data... Continue reading…

Photo by Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 17th. “The hearing will focus on the platforms’ censorship and suppression of New York Post articles and provide a valuable opportunity to review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election,” according to a press release.Last week, the New York Post published a story claiming that Hunter Biden introduced his father, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, to an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Reporters at other publications disputed the allegations in the story, and Facebook and Twitter both took action to restrict the story from spreading.Facebook reduced the story’s reach and said it was... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A judge in California has rejected a request from the Department of Justice to reverse a previous decision allowing WeChat to remain active in US app stores. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said new evidence the government presented did not change her opinion about the messaging app, owned by Chinese company Tencent app. WeChat will remain active in US app stores for the time being.“The record does not support the conclusion that the government has ‘narrowly tailored’ the prohibited transactions to protect its national-security interests,” Beeler wrote in her decision. The evidence “supports the conclusion that the restrictions ‘burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government’s legitimate interests.’”... Continue reading…

Image: InnerSloth The developer of Among Us, a social intuition murder mystery game that’s fast become one of the most popular multiplayer titles of the year, is currently battling against a particularly pernicious spam attack. The spam is promoting a mysterious online handle, “Eris Loris,” and it became bad enough that Among Us studio InnerSloth had to perform emergency maintenance starting late last night.Hacking and other forms of cheating in Among Us has grown considerably since the game emerged as a popular online pastime during the pandemic this past summer, according to a report from Kotaku. And Among Us has only grabbed more of the spotlight just these past few days, following a hugely successful Twitch stream from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez... Continue reading…

A Fortnite player fighting the new Fortnitemares ghosts. | Image: Epic Games Fortnite kicked off its annual “Fortnitemares” Halloween event this week, and this year, you get to play as a killer ghost.In this year’s Fortnitemares mode, the Fortnite island is packed with spooky touches — a foreboding fog can hang over the island, houses have Halloween decorations, and I’ve even found a witch’s hut surrounded by rideable brooms. But the real twist in Fortnitemares happens when you die: after your untimely demise, you’re returned to the island as a ghost so you can hunt — and troll — the surviving humans.As a ghost, you can consume materials, health items, guns, and even the Marvel-themed superpowers littered around the map so that the humans can’t use them against you. If you stand still, your purple body... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Federal regulators are keeping their eye on the rollout of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” experiment. This week, the automaker began beta testing its latest advanced driver assist software with a select group of customers, and so far, the government is taking a wait-and-see approach.In a statement, a spokesperson for the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it would “monitor the new technology closely and will not hesitate to take action to protect the public against unreasonable risks to safety.” The statement also included some footnoting of Tesla’s decision to describe its driver assist feature as “self-driving” (emphasis ours):

You might have seen that many journalists have just received PlayStation 5 units for review, but today we also got our closest look yet at the PS5’s new DualSense controller thanks to an unboxing video from YouTuber Austin Evans.We already knew that the DualSense has some familiar PlayStation hallmarks — a D-pad and four face buttons on the top half, two analog sticks on the bottom half, four triggers, and, like the PS4’s DualShock 4, a touchpad in the middle — and Evan’s video gives a good look at all of those features and the controller’s new design.But Evans didn’t use the controller with a PS5, so we don’t get to see things like the DualSense’s new haptic feedback and adaptive triggers in action. And despite the DualSense’s box... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two and a half years after Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea on a podcast, and several months after organizers said it would be ready to hear cases, Facebook’s independent Oversight Board is now up and running. In a call with reporters today, the board’s co-chairs said that they are now prepared to hear appeals from the billions of people who use Facebook and Instagram each day. The ability to appeal to the board will roll out gradually around the world over the next several weeks. And when it’s complete, one of the bolder experiments in platform governance will have finally begun.Let’s begin by taking a step back. One of the more striking things about our social networks, I have argued, is how terrible they are at customer service. If... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Facebook moderators working as independent contractors in Dublin say they’re required to work in the office, despite a new nationwide lockdown across Ireland, The Guardian reports. The moderators, employed by contractor CPL, say they were told they’re considered essential workers and therefore not bound by Ireland’s Level 5 restrictions, which require people to work at home unless they’re “providing an essential purpose for which your physical presence is required.”Earlier this week, Ireland became the biggest country to implement a strict lockdown to try to contain a new spike in coronavirus cases. As of Thursday, the country has had more than 54,000 cases of COVID-19 and more than 1,871 deaths, Ireland’s Department of Health reported.... Continue reading…

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge It’s Friday, which means there’s a new episode of The Verge’s flagship podcast The Vergecast. Hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk to the various Verge reporters who have been closely following the three biggest tech stories this week for an in-depth discussion.First up, Quibi, the short-form video streaming service, announced it was shutting down after only debuting six months ago. Verge reporter Julia Alexander stops by to discuss the many possible reasons for Quibi’s demise and who is taking the blame.Senior reporter Adi Robertson then joins in to talk about the antitrust charges Google is now facing from the Department of Justice. Adi breaks down what the specific charges are, Google’s reaction, and what it means for the... Continue reading…

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge The OnePlus 8T, the latest device from the Chinese phone manufacturer, is now on sale in the US. You can grab it unlocked from OnePlus directly or third-party retailers like Amazon for $749. The T-Mobile version is available for the same price, but it comes with an additional IP68 rating for dust and water resistance that the unlocked model doesn’t have.Meanwhile, if you’re in Europe, the phone went on sale earlier this week on October 20th. While the US has just the one variant with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, Europe has two: one with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for €599 / £549 and another with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for €699 / £649.If you missed our review from last week, or just need a catch-up, the OnePlus 8T... Continue reading…

Nintendo is dropping the price of buying a single Joy-Con controller down to $39.99. That’s $10 less than the $49.99 the company originally charged for single controller replacements. The newly priced Joy-Con will be available starting on November 9th.Interestingly, Nintendo appears to only be discounting two very specific models of its controllers: a right Joy-Con in red and a left Joy-Con in blue — exactly matching the two controllers that are included in Nintendo’s default blue / red Switch SKU.

Instacart users in some states can use their SNAP benefits to pay for groceries at Aldi stores | Instacart Grocery delivery platform Instacart is launching a pilot program to begin taking food stamps as payment in its app. The program will only be available at Aldi stores and only in a few states, starting with Georgia, then expanding to California, Florida, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.Instacart said in a statement it is “committed to being a long-term solution for EBT SNAP households nationwide.” Brent Laubaugh, co-president of Aldi US said in a statement that the company was “eager to roll out this update broadly as quickly as possible,” hinting at possible future expansion.During the pandemic, demand for grocery delivery has skyrocketedCustomers can use the Instacart app to shop for SNAP-eligible products at Aldi. Once items are added... Continue reading…

Remarkable tech for a steep price Continue reading…

A lot has changed with Windows on ARM Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge OnePlus’ Buds usually cost $79, but they’re just $59 today at Amazon and B&H Photo. That’s a great price for a set of wireless earbuds that have good battery life with IPX4 water and sweat resistance. Check out my colleague Chris Welch’s review (and very fun video review by Becca Farsace above) to find out all of the details about these earphones.At $59, that price puts them at $10 above OnePlus’ latest model, the Buds Z. The biggest difference to form and fit is that the Buds Z use ear tips for better sound isolation than the standard Buds, which are rigid like AirPods and may not fit will in every type of ear.Currently, the Buds worked best when paired with OnePlus phones, but apparently an update is coming to the app in Google’s... Continue reading…

Saplings being planted in the Willamette River Basin. | Image: Arbor Day Foundation A year after YouTubers launched a campaign to raise enough money to plant 20 million trees, the campaign is in a critical phase: planting the trees and ensuring their survival. Even though fundraising was a resounding success, making sure the planet gets its bang for that buck will be harder. The charity coordinating the tree planting, Arbor Day Foundation, says it’s on track to reach its goal of having all 20 million trees in the ground by the end of 2022. But it faced some bumps in the road this year as the ongoing pandemic and historic wildfires unfolded.Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson got the campaign, dubbed #TeamTrees, rolling last October as a way to commemorate his YouTube channel reaching 20 million subscribers. More than 600... Continue reading…

ClipDrop, a new app that lets your phone’s camera quickly grab objects from your environment and place them into desktop apps, is now available to try. It’s a neat twist on AR, that makes the physical world digital, instead of projecting digital images onto the world around you. Promotional videos of the beta app show it being able to photograph everything from plants to TVs and then quickly imported into documents as cropped objects.Digne says the tool lets you import images and even text from books, for example, into a variety of software and websites, including Photoshop (where ClipDrop has a plugin available to allow objects to be dropped in as a new layer with an editable mask), Google Docs, PowerPoint, Figma, Canva, and Pitch.... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple’s newest iPhones — the iPhone 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max — were announced earlier this month, and they’ve generated a lot of interest from iPhone fans. In fact, with this many iPhone models, it can be a bit overwhelming to decide which iPhone 12 model is best for you. (To make things easier, my colleague Chaim Gartenberg wrote an in-depth article detailing key differences between the each model in the iPhone 12 line.)The iPhone 12 and 12 Pro are available today. Below, we tell you where you can order them and what deals you can get from each vendor.And if it’s the iPhone 12 mini or the 12 Pro Max that you’re after, preorders for both phones start on Friday, November 6th with shipments slated for Friday, November 13th.... Continue reading…

Microsoft’s head of gaming and Xbox, Phil Spencer, has hinted that the company is planning TV streaming sticks for its xCloud cloud gaming service. In an interview with Stratechery, Spencer discusses the potential for additional tiers of Xbox Game Pass, which could include a free bundled TV stick to play xCloud games.“I think you’re going to see lower priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via xCloud,” says Spencer. “You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the Game Pass subscription that gave you an ability to stream xCloud games to your television and buying the controller.”Spencer... Continue reading…

One diagram shows how the tags could be attached to a set of keys. | Image: Apple / USPTO As well as letting you find lost items, Apple has considered allowing its unannounced, but heavily leaked AirTags to do everything from measuring your posture to helping your phone display information relevant to the building you’re in. The details have emerged in a pair of patent applications that were filed a year ago and were found by Patently Apple after they were made public yesterday.Since there have been so many leaks about Apple’s Tile-like tracking pucks, we already have a good idea about their features, which involve helping you to keep track of your belongings. So what’s most interesting in these patent applications is the other use cases Apple has been thinking about. One series of diagrams shows how the trackers could be... Continue reading…

Huawei announced the Mate 40 Pro yesterday, and now we have one in hand. It might not be easy to recommend Huawei phones outside of China, since the Trump administration’s targeted sanctions have prevented it working with US companies like Google, but devices like the P40 Pro Plus and last year’s Mate 30 Pro have had hardware as impressive as anything else on the global smartphone market.The situation shouldn’t be any different with the new Mate 40 Pro. It’s likely to be Huawei’s most advanced device yet — even if there are still questions over the extent to which the company is actually able to manufacture it.I thought the Mate 30 Pro was the best-looking phone released in 2019, and the Mate 40 Pro builds on that design. The unit I... Continue reading…

Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images Uber and Lyft were ordered by California’s court of appeals to classify their drivers as employees. In a 74-page opinion, the court affirmed the injunction that was issued on August 10th requiring Uber and Lyft to classify their drivers as employees within 30 days.But it’s unlikely this ruling will go into effect before California voters weigh in on a ballot measure, Prop 22, that would exempt Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies from the state law making it more difficult to classify workers as independent contractors.The injunction won’t go into effect until 30 days after the appeals rulingThe injunction won’t go into effect until 30 days after the appeals ruling. Still, it’s a sign that Uber and Lyft have a lot riding on... Continue reading…

Photo by Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images We’ve all been there. You’re craving a McFlurry, or a Shamrock Shake. You drive to McDonald’s, excited to fill yourself up with cold and sugary goodness. But when you finally make it to the counter, you hear those dreaded, devastating words: “The ice cream machine is broken.”A few hours ago, a 24-year-old software engineer launched McBroken, a website that aims to end such incidents once and for all. The site displays a map of every McDonald’s location in the US, denoted by clusters of dots. Locations with a working ice-cream machine get a green dot; locations without one, a red dot. A column on the right compiles statistics — currently, 7.54 percent of McDonald’s ice-cream machines in the US are broken, as are 15.22 percent of those... Continue reading…

You can now buy the Pixel 4A from Google for just $9 per month over 24 months as part of the new Google Fi phone subscription program. That monthly cost means you’d pay just just $216 for the phone, a substantial savings over its $349 upfront price. After you’ve made all 24 payments, you own the phone.You can also elect to add in a $6 per month device protection plan, meaning your monthly subscription cost is $15. That protection plan covers up to two incidents of accidental damage and one loss or theft claim in a year. (Loss and theft replacement isn’t available to New York state residents, however.) At $15 per month over 24 months, you’d pay $360 for the Pixel 4A over the course of the subscription, which is only $11 more than the... Continue reading…