Technology

India’s government has sent notices to social media platforms ordering them to take down content that refers to an “Indian variant” of the COVID-19 virus, Reuters reported. The letter from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology sent Friday was not made public, but was viewed by several news outlets. It was not clear which social media outlets received the letter, but India’s government has recently ordered Twitter to remove tweets and Facebook and Instagram to take down posts that were critical of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “There is no such variant of COVID-19 scientifically cited as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). WHO has not associated the term ‘Indian Variant’ with the B.1.617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports,” the letter stat...

The Kyocera DuraForce Ultra 5G is a rugged phone that doesn’t require you to give up too many modern conveniences to gain the benefits of extreme durability. It’s common for rugged phones to feature older processors and lack modern features — these phones often have specialized uses, like barcode scanning or taking payments, and more or less just need to keep working in harsh environments. The DuraForce Ultra 5G includes both the durability of a rugged phone and modern features like 5G, wireless charging, a high-quality processor, and dual rear cameras. At $899, it’s an expensive phone — you can buy a very nice non-rugged phone for that much — but if durability is a must and you don’t want to sacrifice performance or convenient features, the DuraForce 5G is (quite literally) a solid choice...

Securing a PS5 is not easy, and it feels like it could be. With a combination of greed and incompetence, the stores selling PS5s in the United States have transformed the process into a weirdly dramatic affair where you’re forced to join Discords and follow overly exuberant guys on Twitter in the hopes that they’ll give you a heads-up on a PS5 “drop” — a store making a big shipment of PS5s available for purchase. These stores have turned every drop into an event, when really, buying a PS5 should be as easy as buying a pepper grinder. The other day, a package was sitting in the vestibule of my apartment building. I noticed my name on the label and mentally cataloged any recent purchases I may have made or packages someone mentioned sending. This didn’t match anything I was expecting, and I ...

Starting next week, streaming platform Twitch will add more than 350 new community tags to its platform related to gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, and mental health, the company said in a new blog post. The list of tags will include transgender, Black, disabled, veteran, and Vtuber, Twitch said, and it will remove the “ally “ references from its LGBTQIA tag, in favor of a new standalone ally tag. The platform thanked its trans community for pushing for a transgender tag, and admitted “the simple truth is we should have done this sooner.” Twitch reportedly had resisted adding a transgender tag over concerns about targeted harassment. “When we launched tags in 2018, we did so to boost discovery, to help creators describe their content and to help viewers find streams ...

In the US, COVID-19 vaccines are free, but it turns out that money is still a big barrier to vaccination. See, even though the vaccines don’t cost a thing, it still takes time to go and get a shot and potentially recover from any side effects. For working adults, that may mean taking time off work — and that isn’t something that everyone can afford to do. Black and Hispanic people are particularly concerned about the tradeoff between missing work and getting the vaccine, according to new results from research published by the Kaiser Family Foundation this week. People in both demographics are more likely than their white counterparts to work lower-paying jobs, which may not offer as much paid leave for things like illness. Those results provide a pretty clear way forward for pushing the va...

At The Verge, we strive to bring you the best deals we can find — after all, not everyone has the time to comb through endless product listings and retailer pages. The past week has seen some good buys, including deals on the iPhone 11 Pro and the best noise-canceling headphones you can buy, but many of the week’s top deals will continue through the weekend. Right now, for instance, you can save $24 on the second-gen Apple Pencil and score Tile’s latest Bluetooth tracker at its lowest price in months. It’s the weekend, y’all. Have at it. The Android-friendly Tile Mate is now $5 off across the board Lately, it feels Apple’s AirTags have stolen all the thunder when it comes to Bluetooth trackers. And while they might be a better fit for iOS users than the Tile Mate, they’re also more expensi...

Virgin Galactic completed its first successful space flight in more than two years on Saturday, with its crewed VSS Unity spacecraft carried to an altitude of more than 44,000 feet before gliding safely back to Earth. It marked the first spaceflight from New Mexico, making it the third US state to launch humans into space. The Zia sun symbol of New Mexico’s state flag was displayed on the outside of the ship. Virgin’s VMS Eve carrier aircraft took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at about 10:35AM ET with Unity aboard. About 10 minutes before its release, Unity switched to its own battery power, and conducted flight control and electrical checks. Once released by Eve, Unity’s pilots C.J. Sturckow and Dave Mackay ignited the rocket motor, then shut it down a few minutes later, with t...

Chinese autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai has received a permit from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to test its driverless cars without human safety drivers behind the wheel on specified streets in three cities. Pony has been authorized to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in California since 2017, but the new permit will let it test six autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on specific streets in Fremont, Alameda County; Milpitas, Santa Clara County; and Irvine, Orange County. According to the DMV, the vehicles are designed to be driven on roads with speed limits of 45 miles per hour or less, in clear weather and light precipitation. The first testing will be in Fremont and Milpitas on weekdays between 10AM and 3PM. A total of 55 companies have active permits t...

Aerion Supersonic, which had plans to build silent business jets that would travel twice as fast as most commercial airplanes, is shutting down operations. First reported by Florida Today, Aerion, which had backing from Boeing, said it was unable to raise the money to build its AS2 supersonic jet. “The AS2 supersonic business jet program meets all market, technical, regulatory and sustainability requirements and the market for a new supersonic segment of general aviation has been validated with $11.2 billion in sales backlog for the AS2,” the company said in an statement emailed to The Verge on Saturday. “However, in the current financial environment, it has proven hugely challenging to close on the scheduled and necessary large new capital requirements to finalize the transition of the AS...

Comics have never been bigger: with Marvel TV shows, DC movies, and indie adaptations growing by the day, comic books have never been more prominent in pop culture. This biweekly Verge column recommends comic series new and old, whether you’re a longtime fan or a newcomer. Haunted house stories are usually pretty dreary. It helps with the horror: a bleak old house covered in shadows so that you can’t see what’s around the corner. But Home Sick Pilots goes in a different direction. It’s still dark and spooky, but it’s also incredibly vibrant — thanks in large part to its punk rock edge. What is it? Home Sick Pilots is an ongoing series from Image Comics — the run is currently five issues deep — about a girl named Amida, her band, and a sentient house. It’s a period piece, set in 1994, and A...

The 2021 League of Legends World Championship will be held in Shenzhen, China, Riot Games announced late Friday. The Worlds Final will be at the Universiade Sports Centre, a 60,000 capacity stadium that’s home to the Shenzhen FC football (soccer) club, on November 6th. “We’re extremely excited to push the boundaries of entertainment and sport this year with Worlds 2021 and define the next 10 years of LoL Esports,” John Needham, Global Head of Esports for Riot Games said in a statement. “Shenzhen is China’s most competitive and innovative city with thousands of high-tech startups and entrepreneurial pursuits, so we felt that it was the perfect landscape to host our Finals.” The event usually rotates year-by-year among host countries in Asia, North America, and Europe, but 2021 is the second...

The Epic v. Apple trial was bookended by Tims. Epic Games called its CEO Tim Sweeney as the first witness nearly three weeks ago. Yesterday, Apple called Tim Cook as the last to take the stand, before both sides make their final case to a judge on Monday. Cook was supposed to bring home Apple’s defense of its ecosystem. He did it by laying out Apple’s most high-minded principles — but also its hard financial calculations. Epic v. Apple covers two separate issues: whether the market for in-app purchases within the App Store is unfairly monopolistic, and whether iOS itself is a monopoly that should be opened up to third-party stores and side-loaded apps. Cook addressed both with an appeal to user safety and privacy. “Privacy from our point of view is one of the most important issues of the c...