And you thought hoodies made Mark Zuckerberg sweat. Though Facebook’s overlord did a good job answering questions at two different congressional hearings last month, you can expect the Zuck to have a few things to say about data privacy at the opening keynote for this year’s F8 developer conference.
More than half of credit-card holders don’t know if their credit card charges a foreign transaction fee, according to a survey performed by personal finance website WalletHub. And that can be one costly mistake.
Earlier this month, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the country’s government entities would no longer be using messaging app Telegram, and now, Iran’s judiciary has banned its use altogether, as reported by Reuters.
The news comes on the heels of Russia’s own Telegram ban, enacted by blocking 15.8 million IP addresses on Amazon and Google’s cloud platforms and leading to large-scale “collateral damage.” As for how Iran will deal with its ban, the National Cyberspace Center withdrew Telegram’s license to operate in the country, and judiciary website Mizan quoted a court order saying, “All Internet providers in Iran must take steps to block Telegram’s website and app as of April 30.”
According to Reuters, Iranian...
Hello, and welcome back to What’s Cooking?, the open thread where you get to share your brilliant thoughts, advice, recipes, and opinions on all things food-related. This week I want to talk about buying food—specifically, where you buy it.
Later this year, Amazon plans to launch Prime Book Box, a monthly book subscription service for kids. For $22.99 per month, subscribers will receive a box of four board books (for ages two and younger) or two hardcover picture books or novels (for ages three to 12). This is Amazon’s first monthly subscription service to offer physical books, TechCrunch reports.
Prime Book Box will be available on a one-, two-, or three-month basis, depending on what plan the subscriber chooses. The available books will be divided into four different age groups for readers: birth to two years, three to five years, six to eight years, and nine to 12 years.
Amazon Books editors will choose books for the selected age range, from “classics” to “hidden...
Thousands of videos featuring beloved British cartoon character Peppa Pig have been removed from the Chinese popular short-video app Douyin, according to state media tabloid The Global Times. Douyin is an app that enables users to upload, edit, and share short videos with different effects and stickers. The videos of Peppa Pig reportedly started disappearing over the weekend, and around 30,000 videos have now been removed from the platform.
The British cartoon pig is seen as a subversive “gangster” icon associated with “shehuiren” culture, which refers to people who are poorly educated and unemployed. The Global Times notes shehuiren culture is the “antithesis of the young generation the Party tries to cultivate.” Original cartoons of...
With all the buzz over the recently released Avengers: Infinity War, it’s been easy to forget that Marvel has another superhero movie coming out this summer. To help audiences remember, the studio has just released a new trailer for Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Like the original teaser from January, the new trailer (which Marvel coyly promoted earlier in the week with an Infinity War star-studded video) shows off plenty of shrinking superhero action by Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and his new partner, Wasp (Evangeline Lilly). We also get a good look at Ant-Man and the Wasp’s mysterious new foe Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) for the first time. Luis (Michael Peña) aptly wraps up the current state of things to Hank Pym (Michael Douglas): “She stole your tech....
In all honesty, I had written off Sanrio’s latest character Aggretsuko — a cute red panda with a secret penchant for blowing off steam from her office job via death metal karaoke — as a one-note joke. The company was clearly shifting to a new class of characters that would hopefully resonate with a fan base that grew up with its characters. Coupled with another new character Gudetama, a perpetually listless egg yolk, I was convinced Sanrio had unlocked an impressive profit model by appealing to the disillusioned hearts of millennials.
But Aggretsuko, the 10-episode animated series that recently arrived on Netflix, surprised me. Aside from its liberal use of profanity and booze, the animated series is impressive for its refreshingly...
Despite the backlash over the Cambridge Analytica data abuse over the past few weeks, Facebook is marching forward with its F8, its annual developer conference. How will Facebook continue to push developers to build on its platform while maintaining strict control over how data is shared with app makers? For all the updates regarding data privacy, new tools, Oculus, and more, follow along here.
The UK Parliamentary committee dealing with technology is fed up with Facebook’s lack of answers on data privacy. In a letter to the company today, the chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee more-or-less demanded that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg show up later this month for testimony. If he didn’t, the chairman wrote, the committee would force him to appear the next time he entered the country.
Facebook initially declined to provide Zuckerberg for questioning when the committee asked back in March, shortly after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public. Instead, they provided the committee with Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technical officer, while Zuckerberg went to testify before the US Congress.
The...
“Hurray!” tweets Yale sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis. “Science vindicates my longstanding practice, learned at age 12, of using TWO SPACES after periods in text. NOT ONE SPACE.”
Update: Back in stock for $255, if you missed it last week.
Westworld is back for its second season. Its murdered robots have become murder-robots, and the show’s never-ending timeline trickery and narrative puzzle boxes are still escalating. And while the second season’s second episode “Reunion” may have finally started answering some of the bigger questions surrounding the park, it also may have finally fixed one of the show’s more irksome aspects (for me, anyway): the dinosaur problem.
Spoilers for Westworld season 2, episode 2 below
As we’ve previously noted, Westworld is almost impossibly boring as a theme park. The park’s parent company, Delos Inc, has been shown to have the almost godlike ability to create perfect, biologically accurate replicas of almost every living thing, from fully...
For being a single cell organism without a brain, slime mold can act pretty smart. As it grows, slime mold can keep track of where it’s been, it can solve mazes in search of food, and it can even be trained to take risks in the name of a big payoff. How exactly? We visited the Swarm Lab at the New Jersey Institute of Technology to find out.
Here, assistant professor Simon Garnier studies decentralized systems like colonies of ants — or petri dishes filled with slime mold — to figure out how these organisms make decisions and solve problems together. That’s what’s called “swarm intelligence,” and in the future, this kind of information could help us design an algorithm to create a more efficient network of self-driving cars.
If you want...
I’m calling this week’s episode of Why’d You Push That Button the “politics of unfollowing.” What makes someone click that unfollow button, and why does it hurt our feelings when they do?
Kaitlyn and I talk to two of our Verge colleagues: Managing Editor T.C. Sottek and Senior Features Editor Michael Zelenko about why they unfollow people. T.C. only follows six people on Twitter! And he only started following me and Kaitlyn after we produced this episode. We appreciate that kind gesture. Michael, on the other hand, used to care about his follower versus following ratio and has now reached a point of zen. Who cares!
After all that, Kaitlyn and I take our questions to Jenn Herman, who calls herself “the world’s forefront Instagram...
Atari’s long-awaited Atari VCS finally has a preorder date of May 30th, nearly a year after it was initially teased at E3 in 2017, as reported by Engadget.
The Atari VCS, which uses a design aesthetic inspired by the Atari 2600 Video Computer System, will be offered two different ways: a “time-limited” Collector’s Edition with a wood-front finish, and a black Onyx edition. Atari’s announcement also says that “other packages will include the Classic Joystick and Modern Controller,” hinting that all accessories will have to be purchased separately.
This new console might look retro, but there’s a lot of modern-day additions. Atari has partnered with AMD for the custom processor which runs Linux, making it capable of playing both classic...
Let’s face it, when you shell out upwards of $700 for a flagship phone, a huge chunk of that money is going towards its camera. Some people might say that’s nuts, but for others, who don’t don’t want the hassle or added expense of owning a real camera, it’s really not that ridiculous. However, even for fancy handsets…
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In theory, SPF 50 and SPF 100 are very similar sunscreens: one blocks 98 percent of UVB rays, and the other blocks 99 percent. The problem is, nobody applies the amount of sunscreen that will get you the SPF listed on the bottle. So in reality you’re getting very different protection out of those two bottles.
Google’s Clips camera is on sale right now for $199, a $50 markdown just two months after the camera’s launch. That’s far from fire sale territory, but Google’s willingness to mark the product down so soon might speak to a lack of immediate success for the first gen product.
Clips launched at the very end of February for $249. The tiny camera is supposed to sit around a room and quietly record short, silent videos whenever it detects action. It’s a neat idea, but in his review of it, my colleague Dan Seifert found it to be altogether less useful than just recording things on his phone.
At $249, it’s also pretty expensive for a product that just doesn’t do that much — there are GoPros that sell for less. At $199, it’s getting closer to...
Smart luggage company Bluesmart is shutting down and selling off its technology, and has placed blame on the major airlines that adopted a de facto ban of its battery toting bags. The recent ban on smart luggage with non-removable batteries, which was meant to reduce the risk of battery fires, put Bluesmart “in an irreversibly difficult financial and business situation,” the company wrote in a blog post today.
“After exploring all the possible options for pivoting and moving forward, the company was finally forced to wind down its operations and explore disposition options, unable to continue operating as an independent entity,” the company says. All of Bluesmart’s intellectual property, designs, and branding have been bought by luggage...
Amazon’s Echo is designed to sit and stay inside your home — but accessory companies keep transforming them into portable speakers, just in case you want that, and today we’re getting a battery pack for the redesigned Echo. Ninety7 has made battery bases for the Google Home and Echo Dot, but this is its first one for the updated Echo that was released last October.
The design is kind of wonderful: it’s a giant sleeve with a handle on it that adds so much height that it gets closer in size to the original Echo than to the trimmed-down newer model. It also looks kind of like a novelty mug.
Ninety7 named this battery base “Sky” and says it’ll get about eight hours of battery life on a single charge. It charges using the Echo’s existing...
The Wii U’s library was so small that it was hard not to play most of the best games if you owned one. One of the few I missed out on during the Wii U’s original run was Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, a classic-style side-scrolling platformer that arrived in 2014 to solid reviews. For whatever reason, I never got around to playing. This week the game comes out on the Switch, and while it offers virtually the same experience on a different platform, it’s also a chance for me to rectify that mistake and finally check out the game.
I’m the kind of person who holds onto video game hardware for much longer than I probably should. I keep a DS Lite in my desk for whenever I get the urge to play Final Fantasy V, and my PS2 has remained a...
Today is a big day at The Verge: we’re launching Verge Science on YouTube! YouTube is the center stage of video storytelling. It’s a place that allows us to dive deeper into science, travel farther afield, and get more experimental than we could elsewhere. (That last one is particularly exciting.)
Science is all about experimentation, and we don’t just want to tell you about it, we want to show you. In our first few videos, we’re administering a city-sized eye exam, performing our own blood test, looking inside a beehive, and watching NASA send its next probe to Mars. We’ve got a packed schedule, and we can’t wait to share it with you.
Hopefully, this isn’t the first you’re hearing of Verge Science videos! For the past year, we’ve been...
At long last, developer Epic Games has revealed the nature of Fortnite’s mysterious meteor with the launch of season four today. Now that the meteor has crashed, it has left craters scattered across the island, transforming the game’s iconic map. The reveal brings to a close months of intense and often giddy theorizing among Fortnite’s massive player base, as Epic dropped in-game clues and other hints throughout season three that helped form a cohesive and unlikely narrative for a game that largely centers on competitive multiplayer.
Many had initially assumed that the map’s busy in-game metropolis, Tilted Towers, would be jettisoned via deep impact, while a more popular theory developed in the past few weeks suggested the nearby and...
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, claims he’s on a mission to make science at the EPA more transparent — but scientists have their own ideas about what kind of transparency leads to trustworthy science.
Last week, Pruitt proposed a rule that would require the EPA to release the data behind any studies used for crafting policies to protect the environment and public health, like keeping air and water clean. While that sounds reasonable, in reality the rule would have the exact opposite effect of transparency: It would force the government to spend time and money to redact confidential information like medical records, or — more likely — disqualify research that includes sensitive data from being used in...
There are few, if any, pieces of technology that have endured in their original form quite as long as Koss’ Porta Pro on-ear headphones, which are turning 34 years old this year. Their lasting popularity is testament to the Porta Pros’ quality, but a change has finally been enforced upon Koss with the shift away from headphone jacks on smartphones. And that brings us the new Porta Pro Wireless model being released today.
I’ve had a review pair of the Porta Pro Wireless for a week, and they’re a very literal take on the idea of wireless Porta Pros. Everything about their design above the wire is identical: same soft foam pads, same collapsible design with extensible metal headband, same blue highlights, and same degree of lasting comfort....
Olloclip, a mobile accessory company, is launching a set of iPhone X camera lenses today. The Connect X lens system, as the company calls it, includes a new mount that covers both the dual rear-facing cameras and the front-facing camera. (It also covers the TrueDepth camera, so you’ll have to remove the mount to use Face ID.)
The mount allows for interchangeable lenses, so you can swap them out between the front and back, including over the telephoto lens. It also ships with a little stand that folds into a tripod, although it’s a little tricky to set up. The starter box set, which includes the mount, a fish eye lens, a super-wide lens, and a macro lens costs $99.99. It’s currently available on olloclip.com and Amazon. It’ll eventually...
Amazon’s squeezing prices today with their Yost vise Gold Box deals. Inside, you’ll find both bench vises and smaller, portable clamps marked down to great low prices. Even if you don’t think you need any of the heavy duty stuff, it’s worth picking up a few small spring and bar clamps to add to your toolbox; they…
Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference kicks off this morning, just roughly a month and a half since the Cambridge Analytica scandal completely redefined the conversation around data privacy and social networking platforms.
That means F8’s keynote address, which in years past has focused on the frontiers of new technology like virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence, will also have to reckon with the hard conversations on responsibility and accountability that have made up Facebook’s biggest existential crisis to date. The whole controversy may have even postponed the company’s plans to reveal its rumored smart speaker, known internally as Portal, at F8 amid fears of Facebook’s overreach and concerns over having the...
Microsoft is unveiling a number of new features for its Outlook desktop app, Outlook for iOS / Android mobile apps, and the company’s Outlook.com webmail service this week. The new Outlook features that are now available or coming soon are being detailed by Microsoft less than a week after Google started rolling out a new Gmail redesign. Google’s new Gmail features are mostly aimed at business customers, in an attempt to get more businesses using G Suite. Microsoft’s new Outlook features are also primarily aimed at business customers, an area that Microsoft’s traditional Outlook desktop apps for Windows and macOS specialize in.
Microsoft is adding bill pay reminders to Outlook.com, that will appear as calendar...
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We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.
About a week ago, I was was subjected to check fraud. Someone intercepted a check I mailed to my landlord, altered every line except my signature, and helped themselves to $10,000 I’d saved to pay my taxes. Here’s what I’ve learned.
On Friday, a leader from North Korea crossed the Korean Demilitarized Zone for the first time ever to talk denuclearization and long-awaited peace. It was a truly historic moment, but it’s only the latest event in a complicated conflict that’s lasted nearly 70 years. Here’s everything you should know about the Korean…
Unless you were hiking the Appalachian Trail this weekend, you probably know that Michelle Wolf delivered the standard “roast” at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night and delivered some choice lines skewering the Trump administration and the media. From the reaction, you’d be forgiven for thinking…
Bacon grease and butter are glorious cooking fats. They’re reasonable priced (one comes free with bacon), deeply flavorful, and both promote a good amount of browning. Rather than choose between these two earthly delights, you should combine them to create a fantastic compound butter.
There are no bad places to put down Qi wireless charging pads, but your car might just be the best place. Two of iOttie’s popular wireless charging car mounts are on sale for $34 today, down from their usual $50.
Back in December, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on the existence of Marzipan, said to be an internal project at Apple that would allow for single apps to be designed for both Mac and iOS user interfaces. In January, Gurman followed up to note that the project was on track for inclusion in this year's iOS 12 and macOS 10.14. But according to longtime Apple watcher John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, the initative is unlikely to surface this year — and may be less ambitious than previously assumed.
From his sources, Gruber says the project is no longer codenamed Marzipan and “sounds like a declarative control API,” which doesn't necessarily relate to cross-platform development but would theoretically allow apps to be built for multiple...
A year after the launch of its Velop mesh router system, Linksys is back with a smaller, cheaper model, with one big catch: it’s slower, too.
The new Velop units, first announced in January, are available to preorder today with sales starting May 15th and will be sold in one-, two-, and three-packs, for $129, $199, and $299. That’s a lot cheaper than the old models, which cost $200, $350, and $450 for those same quantities. Because it’s a mesh system, which uses multiple router units working together to blanket a home with Wi-Fi coverage, you’ll presumably want at least two.
There’s one substantial difference between the cheaper and more expensive models. The cheaper models are dual-band routers, meaning they broadcast two wireless...
After years of on-again, off-again discussions, T-Mobile and Sprint finally came to an agreement in April 2018 to merge into a single company. The ultimate product will be a much larger T-Mobile that rivals the size of its biggest two wireless competitors, Verizon and AT&T, and is led by existing T-Mobile CEO John Legere, while Sprint’s leadership takes seats on the board.
What will this mean for consumers and the wireless industry at large? Does the agreement stand a chance of clearing regulatory scrutiny? Follow along here for the latest news and analysis on the long-in-the-making merger.
UNICEF has launched a page that lets you donate to its Australian branch without giving any money at all. All you need to do is give away part of your computing power to let it mine cryptocurrency.
Over 2,600 people have already donated through what UNICEF calls The Hopepage. Users are able to set what percentage of processing power they’re willing to give the website out of a max of 80 percent. (Be careful not to set the percentage too high.) The longer they stay on the site, the more cryptocurrency they’re helping to mine on UNICEF’s behalf. The site says the cryptocurrency will go toward giving children life-saving supplies “like safe water, therapeutic food, and vaccines.”
Once you click Start Donating, a pop-up in the browser...
A week after Google shut down a method for app developers to skirt internet censorship, Amazon is doing the same. In a post last week, Amazon Web Services announced that it would implement a new set of enhanced domain protections specifically designed to stop domain-fronting, a practice that lets developers disguise their traffic to evade network blocks.
In the post, Amazon characterized the change as an effort to stamp out malware. “Tools including malware can use this technique between completely unrelated domains to evade restrictions and blocks that can be imposed at the TLS/SSL layer,” the post explained. “No customer ever wants to find that someone else is masquerading as their innocent, ordinary domain.”
Domain-fronting works by...
WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum is leaving the company amid arguments with parent company Facebook over data privacy and the messaging app’s business model, according to a report from The Washington Post. Koum, together with his fellow co-founder Brian Acton, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for an eye-popping sum of $19 billion, $3 billion of which consisted of Facebook stock granted to both Koum and Acton, who left the company back in September. Koum confirmed his departure in a personal Facebook post today.
Koum’s Facebook post does not mention any inner turmoil at WhatsApp or address any of The Washington Post’s reporting, which suggests Koum took issue with Facebook’s approach to data privacy and encryption:
It’s been almost...
Android: It’s been a little over two years since the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge. If you’re still holding on to yours, you’re probably itching to upgrade to a new device—especially since Samsung still hasn’t updated either S7 smartphone to Android 8.0 Oreo. Don’t toss your older device just yet,…
