Technology

If you’re looking to score a great deal on an Amazon device ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’re in luck. Amazon is already offering up to 50 percent of some of its most popular products, including the latest Echo Show 5 and Fire HD 10. The company is also offering a number of deals across several categories, ranging from Kindles and Fire TV sticks to Blink devices and even the Halo View, which has yet to be released. For your convenience, we’ve curated a list of the best deals currently to be had on Amazon devices. We’ll be continuously updating this post as well as more deals arrive, so be sure to check back. And, of course, if you want to save even more, check our comprehensive Black Friday hub and our coverage of the best early Black Friday deals. Echo deals Amazon Echo (four...

Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of disgraced blood-testing company Theranos, took the stand in her own defense late Friday, in a surprise move by the defense team. Holmes is being tried on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, for allegedly misleading investors and patients about Theranos’ blood testing device. Holmes took the stand just after 6PM ET on Friday, to the surprise of most in the courtroom. Verge editor Liz Lopatto, who has been covering the trial, said Holmes seemed relaxed as she answered questions about her background and the company. holmes has been smiling a lot on the stand. she seems relaxed. a lot of you have been asking me about her voice. it doesn’t sound that low to me? but when she punches a syllable for emphasis, she drops her pitch. — El...

A group made up of 17,437 cryptocurrency investors raised over $40 million USD to buy an ultra-rare copy of the U.S. Constitution auctioned off by Sotheby’s this week. The group, which calls itself Constitution DAO, said it received donations “from museum curators and art directors to our grandmothers asking us what ETH is when they read about us in the news.”  Within days, the group broke the record for the most money raised within a 72 hour period. Notably, a significant portion of its donations came from first-time crypto investors with wallets that were initialized for the first time. Organizers told donors that in exchange for their funding, they would receive governance tokens called $PEOPLE and would be able to collectively decide where the document should be housed. The a...

Since the Nest Learning Thermostat launched in 2011, no other smart thermostat has emulated its core function — learning your schedule and adapting to it automatically, so you don’t have to lift a finger. This feature has made the Nest one of the best smart thermostats (lots of) money can buy for years. But just a decade on, Amazon has finally done it. The online shopping giant’s $60 Amazon Smart Thermostat can intelligently determine if you’re home, away, or sleeping and automatically adjust your climate to keep you comfortable and potentially save you money. And you don’t have to program anything. Amazon worked with Resideo (owner of the historic thermostat brand Honeywell Home) to develop the thermostat, and its internals are very similar to the Honeywell T9 and T5 smart thermostats. It...

NZXT has introduced an interesting pre-built PC for the age of the graphics card shortage — one that’s powered by a Ryzen 5600G, a CPU with a built-in GPU that can reasonably be used for gaming. While, in normal circumstances, NZXT’s $800 Foundation PC might not be the first pick for those looking to get into PC gaming, the low availability and inflated prices of dedicated GPUs (and machines that include them) make it an interesting option for budget-minded buyers. The AMD processor / graphics card combo is the centerpiece of the build, but its other specs are also respectable: it comes with a 500GB NVMe SSD and 16GB of RAM. And while its 650W Bronze power supply won’t be winning any efficiency awards, it should be able to power something like an RTX 3060 if you’re able to get your hands o...

A new investigation from Wired describes a shocking lack of concern for customer data at e-commerce giant Amazon, where employees took advantage of the faulty system to look up celebrities’ purchases, among other breaches. It seems that despite Amazon’s professed customer-first mentality, company officials failed to prioritize securing its customers’ most personal information. Customer purchase histories were available to Amazon’s global customer service team, with little security or supervision to prevent the employees’ snooping. One former service rep, who requested anonymity, said he remembered colleagues looking up the purchases of Kanye West and movie stars from the Avengers films, even scoping out a few dildos in a particular celebrity’s purchase log. Other staffers recalled coworker...

You pissed off people by somewhat breaking your app, and they’re leaving angry reviews. How can you salvage your reputation? Apple just found one incredibly effective way — get listeners to submit better reviews by interrupting their podcast experience with an in-app prompt to submit a rating. That’s how the Apple Podcasts app went from a publicly embarrassing 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a little over a month without any actual fixes, as developer and App Store watchdog Kosta Eleftheriou points out. And it’s still going up: according to AppFigures data, the app has been getting thousands of ratings every day since November 9th, with the vast, overwhelming majority of them issuing a 5-star score. The app has made it to 4.7 stars overall as of this writing and is firmly the No...

A worker at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, is accusing the automaker of creating a hostile work environment where sexual harassment was “rampant.” As first reported by The Washington Post, Jessica Barraza, who was hired as a production associate in 2018, said in a lawsuit filed this week that she was subjected to constant harassment at the factory, including catcalling and inappropriate physical touching. “Nearly every day for three years, my female coworkers and I were objectified, threatened, touched, and propositioned on the factory floor,” Barraza said in a statement emailed to The Verge. “I wanted to come to work, do my job, and support my family without having to endure constant sexual harassment. I felt degraded, humiliated and traumatized.” The complaint filed in Californi...

Halo Infinite’s co-op campaign and Forge mode, which won’t be in the game when it officially releases on December 8th, are going to launch even later than previously expected. In an interview with Eurogamer, Halo Infinite head of creative Joseph Staten reiterated that campaign co-op would launch with season 2, but since season 1 was extended by three months to May 2022 this week, that means the second season is at least half a year away. Forge is still set to launch with season 3, according to Staten, but we don’t know when that might arrive. And those timelines are still only goals; things may change if other priorities come up, Staten says. Here’s Staten own words on the matter, from Eurogamer’s interview: So our goal still remains what I said before, which is to ship campaign co-op with...

We are seven days away from the actual Black Friday, but if you have been paying any mind to our ongoing coverage for this shopping season, you know there are excellent deals happening every dang day. We have all kinds of excellent early Black Friday deals, including some retailer and brand-specific roundups, and there’s still a whole lot more to come. For now, let’s take a quick peek at some select deals that just popped up today. First off, Amazon’s latest version of its acclaimed Kindle Paperwhite — released just last month — is $45 off for the Kids version at Amazon and Best Buy. This is a killer deal on the new Paperwhite, complete with its better screen that adjusts color temperature, wireless charging, and USB-C port. Since it is the kids version, it has no ads and comes bundled wit...

Rockstar has published a blog post apologizing for the rocky launch of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition, which packages together remastered versions GTA III, GTA: Vice City, and GTA: San Andreas. The company is promising a “Title Update” in the coming days that will “address a number of issues” and plans to make the original PC versions of the three games available as a bundle “shortly.” “Firstly, we want to sincerely apologize to everyone who has encountered issues playing these games,” the company wrote in a post attributed only to Rockstar Games. “The Grand Theft Auto series — and the games that make up this iconic trilogy — are as special to us as we know they are to fans around the world. The updated versions of these classic games did not launch in a state that meet...

The Food and Drug Administration opened booster shots for the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to all adults today, the companies announced, expanding eligibility outside of the initial, vulnerable groups they were cleared for earlier this fall. Although the COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are still highly effective protection against severe cases of the disease, hospitalization, and death, protection against any infection or symptoms appears to be weakening. A third, booster shot of the vaccines could restore that protection: Pfizer showed in a clinical trial that the shot was around 95 percent effective compared with people who only had two doses, essentially restoring the same efficacy seen in the initial clinical trials. Analysis out of Israel and the Uni...