Technology

Madhappy has partnered with Beats on two new pairs of custom headphones. The collaboration is the Los Angeles-based lifestyle brand’s first foray into wearable technology. Joining Madhappy’s Outdoors line as its latest installment, the Beats Studio3 Wireless headphones are available in two colorways: Ice, a bright white, and Heat, a sleek black with orange details. The headphones debuted with a promotional video that showed users wearing them while exploring a serene, snow-laden landscape. Known for its colorful and comfortable sweat sets, Madhappy first launched in 2017 to create products that encourage honest conversations on mental health. Alongside its product line, the brand produces a publication and podcast and operates a mental health support hotline. “Adding a soundtrack to outdoo...

Yesterday, NASA announced its newest class of astronauts: 10 new candidates who will train to fly to space with the agency over the next two years. The group included plenty of qualified individuals with backgrounds in the military, as well some with more unique professions. One of the candidates was most recently a flight surgeon at SpaceX, while another has worked as a drilling engineer on remote rigs in the Arctic. The Verge spoke briefly with three of the newest astronaut candidates to get a better understanding of their backgrounds and what inspired them to pursue becoming an astronaut. Learn more about the newest members of NASA who could fly to deep space one day. These interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity. Anil Menon Anil is a medical doctor and Lieutenant Colonel in...

Instagram’s algorithms recommend drug dealers’ accounts to minor users, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. The platform also suggests drug-related hashtags, the report found. In the report, published Tuesday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) created seven fake accounts for teen users aged 13, 14, 15, and 17. Instagram did not stop those accounts from searching for drug-related content. In one case, the platform auto-filled results when a user started typing “buyxanax” into the search bar. One suggested account was a Xanax dealer. After following the account of a Xanax dealer, a fake minor user got a direct message “with a menu of products, prices, and shipping options,” the report found. A fake minor account that followed an Instagram dealer got suggestions to...

A jury has ruled that Craig Wright, a man who claims to have invented Bitcoin, won’t have to give up half of his supposed stash of crypto — a stash valued at over $50 billion. The court case has generated a lot of buzz in the Bitcoin community because he would have had to transfer those Bitcoins if the court had ordered him to, and that’s something only the real Satoshi can do. If the name Satoshi Nakamoto rings a bell, it’s because that name shows up on the original whitepaper that described how Bitcoin would work. While Satoshi is a hallowed name in Bitcoin lore (it’s also used as a way to denominate the smallest unit of the currency), Nakamoto’s identity has never been proven — we don’t even know if it was one person or a group of people. While Wright has often repeated the claim that h...

Yesterday, Politico opened its newsletter with an article on Vice President Kamala Harris’ aversion to using Bluetooth headphones. The VP was “Bluetooth-phobic,” the story claimed, “wary” of her AirPods and cautious with her technology use to an extent former aides described as “a bit paranoid.” Proof could be seen in her televised appearances: wires dangling from her ears in an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid or clutched in her hand during the famous “We did it, Joe” call. But for a high-profile public official, this is a lot more reasonable than you might think. As security researchers were quick to point out, Bluetooth has a number of well-documented vulnerabilities that could be exploited if a bad actor wanted to hack, say, the second most powerful person in the US government. The CVE ...

Discord is starting to test a new Premium Memberships feature that will allow creators to monetize their servers. An initial pilot is going live today with around 10 creators who will pave the way for Discord’s 150 million monthly active users to pay to access a range of channels or servers and support creators. Premium Memberships offer what a number of creators have already been experimenting with: a way to offer more content or access to community members. Discord communities will be able to create tiered perks, view analytics on member engagement, and lock channels or even entire servers to paying subscribers. Discord’s new Premium Memberships include tiers for community servers.Image: Discord “We see Discord becoming a home for more creators and communities through products like Premi...

A lot is happening in the world of Destiny 2 today. Bungie is celebrating its 30th Anniversary inside Destiny 2, with a big content drop that includes Halo-like guns. A trailer for Destiny 2’s new Bungie 30th Anniversary pack shows off a Magnum-like sidearm in Destiny 2, alongside a Battle Rifle-like pulse rifle in the looter shooter. Both guns appear to look and feel like the original Halo weapons, but there’s no mention of an official crossover with Microsoft anywhere. It doesn’t appear that Bungie secured the official rights from Microsoft to put the actual Halo guns it originally created in Destiny 2 and has instead done a good job at producing replicas that nod to the past. “Reunite with an Exotic Sidearm that you may recognize from adventures long ago,” reads a description on Bungie’...

It doesn’t take long to realize why Snap’s first true AR glasses aren’t for sale. The overall design is the highest quality of any standalone AR eyewear I’ve tried, and they make it easy to quickly jump into a variety of augmented-reality experiences, from a multiplayer game to a virtual art installation. But the first pair I was handed during a recent demo overheated after about 10 minutes, and the displays are so small that I wouldn’t want to look through them for a long period of time, even if the battery allowed for it. Snap is aware of the limitations. Instead of releasing these glasses publicly, it’s treating this generation of Spectacles like a private beta. The company has given out pairs to hundreds of its AR creators since the glasses were announced in May and has recently made a...

Problems for some of Amazon’s AWS cloud servers are causing slow loading or failures for significant chunks of the internet. The company’s widespread network of data centers powers many of the things you interact with online, including this website, and people started noticing problems at around 10:45AM ET. There are reports of outages for Disney Plus streaming, PUBG, and Amazon’s own products like Kindle ebooks, Amazon Music, or Ring cameras. The Down Detector list of services with spikes in their outage reports runs off nearly any recognizable name: Tinder, Roku, Coinbase, both Cash App and Venmo, and the list goes on. There are reports from network admins everywhere about errors connecting to Amazon’s instances and the AWS Management Console that controls their access to the servers. Am...

Instagram will roll out new parental control features on its platform in March, the service’s head Adam Mosseri has announced in a blog post. They’ll allow parents and guardians to see how much time their teenagers spend on Instagram, set time limits, and get notified if their child reports someone. The controls were announced as a package of new features designed to make the platform a safer place, particularly for its teenage users. Although Mosseri’s post says these safety features have been in the works for “a long time,” their announcement comes in the wake of a series of damaging revelations about the Meta-owned social network. Most notably, internal documents leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen showed Instagram was aware that its service can make body image issues worse for its f...

One-on-one voice and video calls are now rolling out for Google Chat inside the Gmail app on iOS and Android, Google has announced. The feature was first announced in September, but as of December 6th it’s started rolling out for anyone with Google Workspace, G Suite, or personal Google accounts. It’s previously been possible to start calls from within the Gmail app, but until now it’s involved sending an invite to a Google Meet video conferencing call, which feels excessive for a one-on-one conversation. Going forward, however, there’ll be simple phone and video icons in the top right of every one-on-one chat which can be used for calls. It’s a simple addition, but it’s one that furthers Google’s goal of making Gmail the central hub for all its communication services. In fact, Google’s po...

Science fiction movies have prepared us for the distinct possibility that artificial intelligence will walk among us someday. How soon? No one can say — but that isn’t stopping a raft of companies by trying to sell “digital humans” before that whole intelligence thing gets figured out. Ah, but what if you don’t want to buy a digital human because that sounds icky? Rent one, of course! That’s why we now have the regrettable acronym Digital Human as a Service (DHaaS). The actual news here is that Japanese telecom giant KDDI has partnered with a firm named Mawari (which means something along the lines of “surroundings” in Japanese) to create a virtual assistant you can “see” through the window of your smartphone in augmented reality, one who might automatically pop up to give you directions a...