Technology

The organizers of Fyre Festival — think: The Hunger Games, but for influencers — have agreed to a settlement with 277 attendees for $7,220 apiece, The New York Times reports. Tickets for the 2017 “luxury” music festival on a remote island in the Bahamas that actually turned out to be a beach full of FEMA tents and some pathetic cheese sandwiches, cost anywhere from $1,000 to as much as $12,000 — more if you bought a package deal. Yes, really, because Fyre Festival organizers, while apparently not adept enough to coordinate hotel bookings and a caterer, did enlist big-name Instagram stars to sing the praises of the inaugural event, including Kendall Jenner, who received $250,000 for a post she’s since deleted. Organizers also (falsely) claimed that the island was once owned by notorious Col...

During today’s Resident Evil Showcase, Capcom announced that a second demo for its upcoming survival horror game, Resident Evil Village, will release on May 1st. That’s six days before the game’s official release date. Unlike the previous “Maiden” demo, this demo will be playable on all platforms the game will releases on, including PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X and S, Windows PC (via Steam), and Stadia. The demo will allow you to play for 60 minutes and explore both the village and castle areas, regardless of the platform. PS4 and PS5 users will have the option to preload the demo beginning today via the PlayStation Store. Additionally, players on these two platforms will receive early access to the demo on two separate weekends — April 17th at 5PM ET through April 18th at 4AM ET, and April 24t...

Resident Evil 4 will be rereleased in virtual reality on the Oculus Quest 2 headset. Resident Evil 4’s VR remake will be a collaboration between series publisher Capcom, Oculus parent company Facebook, and the independent studio Armature. While Capcom didn’t offer much detail, some early footage shows a first-person adaptation of the classic third-person shooter. Capcom announced its news during a Resident Evil showcase that also included a new trailer for the non-VR Resident Evil Village. Oculus and Facebook Reality Labs will reveal more about the game on April 21st, when Facebook is holding its own VR showcase for the Quest. The Resident Evil series has tried VR before. The 2017 first-person game Resident Evil 7 let you play through the entire game with a PlayStation VR headset, which ma...

In popular culture, access to an illicit gambling den is as easy as stumbling into the right shop and saying the password — or greasing some palms. Apple’s App Store apparently has a real-life parallel: today, app developer Kosta Eleftheriou discovered a terrible kiddie game that’s actually a front for gambling websites. The secret password isn’t one you’d be likely to guess: you have to be in the right country —or pretend to be in the right country using a VPN. But then, instead of launching an ugly monkey-flipping endless runner game filled with typos and bugs, the very same app launches a casino experience: This @AppStore app pretends to be a silly platformer game for children 4+, but if I set my VPN to Turkey and relaunch it becomes an online casino that doesn’t even use Apple’s IAP. p...

Silicon Valley might seem like a shining beacon of technological progress to some onlookers, but natives know it can be weirdly hit and miss — like how the San Francisco Bay Area has long had a physical tap-to-pay card that’ll let you onto practically every form of public transit, and yet never let you simply tap your phone or smartwatch to do the same. Until today — because starting today, the Clipper Card supports Apple Pay, including its Express Mode where you don’t need to wake the device or open an app first. You can now use almost any recent iPhone or Apple Watch to board BART (which serves the East Bay and San Francisco), Muni (San Francisco’s bus and light rail system), Caltrain (which connects San Francisco to the peninsula and South Bay), VTA (South Bay buses and light rail), and...

Dawn Hallson has tried nearly every dating app you can think of — Tinder, Bumble, eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, and Match, just to name a few. So when a friend told her about Facebook Dating, she figured, why not give it a shot? She filled out her height, whether she has kids, where she lives, and her sexual orientation, and then looked around at who might be available on the world’s largest social network. “It was exactly the same as all the other apps,” she says. “You match with someone. They don’t contact you. If they do contact you, they just pass the time of day with you — never much with anyone that’s attractive unless they actually want just sex, basically.” She only met up with one person from Facebook Dating, which fizzled out when he tried to hook up on the first date. After that, sh...

The event kicks off at 1PM ET / 10AM PT on April 20th Contributors: Verge Staff Spring has sprung and with it, the first Apple event of the year. The company successfully brought custom Arm chips to its Macs last year, and now it’s continuing its product updates with an event called “Spring Loaded.” Outside the obvious coiled metal connotation, the name suggests another jam-packed day of announcements. And Apple does have a lot of products to address. The Apple TV was last updated in 2017 but is rumored to get support for 120Hz displays, a new processor that could make it a more capable Apple Arcade machine, and a redesigned remote. The iPad mini is also expected to finally receive some love after sitting idle since 2019. Reports point to a larger display and updated internals for the smal...

Arcade Fire has a new single out — sort of. The Canadian indie rock band has released a new 45-minute instrumental composition called “Memories In The Age Of Anxiety,” but the new song is actually a collaboration with meditation app Headspace, and you can only listen to it there. The new track was created in collaboration with John Legend and, as Stereogum notes, is one of the first new pieces of music from the group since its cover of “Baby Mine” in the 2019 live-action version of Dumbo. (It’s the band’s first original song since its 2017 studio album Everything Now.) Unfortunately for frugal Arcade Fire fans, it’s also locked behind a paywall in Headspace as part of the app’s Headspace Plus subscription, which costs $12.99 per month or $69.99 per year. You can listen to a snippet in the ...

As online publishers grapple with how to replace dwindling ad revenue and find new ways to bring in money, Reuters, one of the largest news organizations in the world, is using a strategy that’s been around for years and putting its online content behind a paywall. Reuters.com draws 41 million unique visitors monthly, according to the company, but it has not charged for access like other news sites in its business-centric niche have done for some time. It will let users read five stories a month for free and plans to charge $34.99 a month for a subscription. That’s a bit pricier than a sub to The New York Times ($18.42 / month) but closer to similar news organizations of its type, including The Wall Street Journal ($38.99 / month), which put its paywall up in 1996, and Bloomberg.com ($34.9...

Twitter is starting a new initiative, Responsible Machine Learning, to assess any “unintentional harms” caused by its algorithms. A team of engineers, researchers, and data scientists across the company will study how Twitter’s use of machine learning can lead to algorithmic biases that negatively impact users. One of the first tasks is an assessment of racial and gender bias in Twitter’s image cropping algorithm. Twitter users have pointed out that its auto-cropped photo previews seem to favor white faces over Black faces. Last month, the company began testing displaying full images rather than cropped previews. The team will also look at how timeline recommendations differ across racial subgroups and analyze content recommendations across political ideologies in different countries. Twit...

The layoffs happened suddenly. One day, Jose Abalos was employed, working on Disney Infinity 4. The next day, he was not. “It was something that upended everything, everything, all kinds of security,” he tells The Verge. “Everything just went belly-up in a single day.” In May 2016, Disney Interactive shut down its internal studio, Avalanche Software, putting almost 300 employees out of work. For Abalos, there was an extra complication. He was working in the states on an H-1B1 visa, a limited program for workers in Singapore and Chile, that requires renewal every year. Abalos only had a month until his visa expired. Not only would he not get the padding of unemployment benefits for anything beyond that date, like his colleagues, but his visa would soon be void, forcing him to leave the coun...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in his final letter to shareholders as CEO that the e-commerce giant has to “do a better job for our employees.” The letter comes amid ongoing reports of untenable conditions for Amazon workers. And it outlines a strategy that seems odd for a company that has been accused of treating workers like robots: a robotic scheme that will develop new staffing schedules using an algorithm. Bezos pushed back on the idea that, according to news reports, Amazon doesn’t care for its employees. “In those reports, our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots. That’s not accurate,” he wrote. To address concerns about working conditions, Bezos said the company will develop new staffing schedules “that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate em...