Technology

X Labs, formerly known as Google X and now operating under parent company Alphabet, is employing robots it created to clean its facilities. Hans Peter Brøndmo, the research and development facilities’ Chief Robot Officer, said in a press release on Friday that X is now “operating a fleet of more than 100 robot prototypes that are autonomously performing a range of useful tasks around our offices.” The project, termed Everyday Robots, is working to expand its pilots to some of Google’s Bay Area campuses. “For the last several years, my team and I have been working to see if it’s possible to teach robots to perform useful tasks in the messy, unstructured spaces of our everyday lives,” Brøndmo said. “We imagine a world where robots work alongside us, making everyday tasks — like sorting trash...

El  Salvador, the first country in the world to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender, is now building a “Bitcoin City” that is being funded by Bitcoin-backed bonds. President Nayib Bukele, a vocal supporter of the cryptocurrency, said during the “Feel The Bit 2021” event in the town of La Libertad that the ambitious project will initially be funded by $1 billion USD in Bitcoin bonds. Part of the money raised will go towards infrastructure costs while the other half will be reinvested in Bitcoin. ¡El Salvador será el primer país del mundo en tener una #BitcoinCity!Estará entre la ciudad de La Unión y Conchagua. Las personas podrán vivir en La Unión pero trabajar en la #BitcoinCity. Pronto empezarán a ver todos los beneficios, cuando el desarrollo y la inversión llegue. pic.twitter.com/21b...

Meta — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp’s parent company — doesn’t plan to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default on Messenger and Instagram until 2023, first reported by The Guardian. The company merged Messenger and Instagram chats last year, as a part of its plan to create a unified messaging system across all of its platforms. And while messages sent through Messenger and Instagram can be E2EE, that option isn’t turned on by default — and likely won’t be — until sometime in 2023. WhatsApp already supports E2EE by default. Meta wants to keep users safe while still “assisting public safety efforts” In a post in The Telegraph, Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of safety, attributes the delay to concerns about user safety. Since E2EE means only the sender and recipient will see their ...

Welp, The Morning Show season two finale was a messy disappointment much like the rest of the season. I think Linda Holmes’ recap at NPR really nailed why a season that seemed full of promise never hit the mark, mostly because it couldn’t quite figure out what it wanted to be. The latest season of Succession has yet to steer me wrong, however(and we learned this week that there is a fun Verge-related Succession backstory). This week’s round up is heavy on the sci-fi, which was unplanned but makes for some nice symmetry. [embedded content] The Expanse The sixth and final season of the sci-fi drama is on the horizon, and is a disappointingly short six episodes. It has a lot of work to do and from the looks of the trailer, wastes no time getting down to business, and the episodes must be jam ...

Spotify has stopped shuffling albums by default following a request from Adele, according to a report by BBC. Previously, when viewing an album on Spotify, you’d see a small shuffle icon within the larger “Play” button. This indicated that Spotify would begin playing the album’s songs in a random order, which isn’t always what users would expect (or want) it to do. Now, when you hit “Play” in Album View, songs will play in order — that is, as long as you have a Premium subscription. You can still enable shuffle mode by toggling on the “Shuffle” icon when viewing an individual track. This was the only request I had in our ever changing industry! We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened...

This story is part of a group of stories called Only the best deals on Verge-approved gadgets get the Verge Deals stamp of approval, so if you’re looking for a deal on your next gadget or gift from major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and more, this is the place to be. The Oculus Quest 2 standalone VR headset is a great value at its regular $299.99 price. It comes with 128GB of onboard storage, and once you log in with your Facebook account, there’s little else standing in your way of finding some amazing virtual reality experiences and games. It’s even more of an appealing holiday gift idea right now because you can get one with a $50 gift card tossed in at no extra charge through Black Friday until Tuesday, November 27th. Several retailers are honoring this promo...

Nintendo’s early Black Friday deals kicked off on Sunday, November 21st, and they’ll last until November 27th. Like last year, the main attraction is the standard Nintendo Switch console that includes Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and a three-month individual membership to Nintendo Switch Online. It all costs $299.99. Nintendo confirmed that the Switch console included here is the V2 model with improved battery life. Altogether, these items would cost around $370, so the $299 price point is stellar. Several games are seeing big discounts, including ones that don’t commonly see such a big price drop. GameStop is hosting the best deals of any retailer right now (plus, these are the lowest prices of all time for these titles) on new physical editions of games, and notably, their digital editions, too. ...

In recent years, Netflix has started to specialize in live-action adaptations of anime. So far, the streaming service has released film adaptations such as Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Rurouni Kenshin. The next anime to receive the live-action treatment is Cowboy Bebop, a show considered to be one of the greatest anime ever made. The original Cowboy Bebop anime ended in 2001, but it’s seeing a surge in popularity thanks to the new Netflix show. That popularity can be seen on Reddit in the r/cowboybebop subreddit. For nearly a decade, fans have flocked to this community to post their thoughts on Spike Spiegel and his past, funny memes, cosplay pics, and fantastic fan art. “I created the subreddit in 2012, so a little over nine years now,” said MarshallBanana_, head moderator and cre...

A leaked video suggests that Resident Evil 4 VR may be getting a free update that adds The Mercenaries mode in 2022, first spotted by UploadVR. According to the report, a trailer for the highly-requested Mercenaries mode briefly appeared on the Oculus YouTube channel before getting taken down. However, users still managed to save the trailer and repost it on YouTube. The leaked trailer says that The Mercenaries DLC is “arriving in 2022” as a “free update on Meta Quest 2.” Some fans of the series were disappointed to find out that Mercenaries wasn’t included in RE4VR, which challenges you to kill hordes of enemies and rack up as many points as possible before the timer runs out. As UploadVR notes, The Mercenaries mode has been present in all versions of RE4 — except for RE4VR. You could als...

Hoping to prevent a repeat of what wiped out the dinosaurs, NASA and SpaceX are now planning on crashing a satellite directly into an asteroid. Currently scheduled for November 23, the two space agencies will be launching SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as part of their Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which involves “intentionally [crashing] the DART spacecraft into an asteroid to see if that is an effective way to change its course, should an Earth-threatening asteroid be discovered in the future.” The targeted asteroid is a binary type with two bodies dubbed Didymos, or “twin” in Greek. Didymos A is roughly 780 meters wide and is orbited by Didymos B, which itself measures roughly 160 meters across. The two are scheduled to pass by our planet in 2022 and swing back around in 2024, and ...

The Samsung Odyssey G9 gaming monitor is on sale right now for $999 on Amazon, down $400 from its original $1399 price tag. The 49-inch 5120 x 1440 monitor comes with a fast 240Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time, and supports both G-Sync and FreeSync 2. As noted in our review of the Odyssey G9, the curved monitor offers an immersive gaming experience, stretching around your entire field of vision as you game. It produces incredibly vivid colors thanks to its QLED display and emits 1,000 nits of brightness. My colleague, Sean Hollister, pretty much sums up what it’s like to game on this behemoth of a screen in his review: I’m not kidding when I say I have to avert my eyes when I launch Destiny 2 in HDR, and I could swear I felt the flames the first few times my Star Wars: Squadrons’ TIE Bom...

Several retailers are getting started early with Black Friday deals in advance of the hectic, no-holds-barred weekend that kicks off right after Thanksgiving. Best Buy is one of a few — aside from Amazon, Walmart, and Target — that got things started particularly early this year. If you’ve been paying attention to our Black Friday coverage, you’ve likely noticed dozens of deals peppered in, but that’s just a sampling. There’s more where that came from. Before we get into it, we’ve included some resources below that should make your Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping experience a little better. And to make things more fun, you can also enter our sweepstakes for a chance to win a mystery bag filled with stuff from The Verge’s tech closet. Headphones and earbuds You currently can’t throw ...