Technology

The ’90s are back in Netflix’s latest horror movies. A trilogy of movies based on R.L. Stine’s classic Fear Street book series is coming to the streaming service in July. Plan your spooky movie nights accordingly: part one will debut on July 2nd, followed by sequels on the 9th and 16th. Here’s the basic premise, according to Netflix: In 1994, a group of teenagers discovers that the terrifying events that have haunted their town for generations ​may all be connected — and that they may be the next targets. Based on R.L. Stine’s best selling horror series, the trilogy follows the nightmare through Shadyside’s sinister history. Each film will cover a different time period. The first will take place in 1994, while the sequels will explore 1978 and — of course — 1666. The Fear Street books orig...

Twitter is phasing out its image cropping algorithm in favor of showing larger previews, and the company has announced that it’s been looking into accusations that the system was biased. It found that the crops were slightly biased towards certain races and genders, but Twitter’s main gripe seems to be that the algorithm doesn’t give users control. Starting in 2018, Twitter started using the algorithm to crop images so they fit in its image preview boxes. The algorithm tries to determine what will be most visually interesting to a user so it can include it can include it in the preview, but some have accused it of favoring white faces over black ones. To determine if that’s the case, Twitter had some of its researchers produce a report analyzing the choices it makes when determining crops....

Slack is now rolling out a new field for profiles that will let you list your preferred pronouns right under your name and job title. Once filled out, your pronouns will appear both on the mini-profiles you see when you click on someone’s name and in their full profiles. Note that your Slack profile may already have a pronouns field, if an administrator created a custom field for your company’s employees. (When I went to check The Verge’s Slack, I found we already had one.) Slack says administrators can continue using that custom field or choose to turn on this new one, though the new dedicated pronouns field has the benefit of appearing more prominently in your profile. Here’s how your pronouns will appear in Slack.Image: Slack This new field will be hidden by default, however — Slack adm...

Ford is getting ready to pull the curtain back on its latest electric vehicle. The F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the automaker’s bestselling pickup truck, will take center stage at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, MI, at 9:30PM ET on Wednesday, May 19th. Ford says there will be “30+ ways to watch across physical and digital destinations,” including live streams on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The event will also be broadcast in several public locations like Times Square in New York City and Las Vegas Boulevard. “30+ ways to watch across physical and digital destinations” It’s a lot of hoopla for a truck that’s been in the works for over four years and has already been seen publicly, with and without camouflage. We got our first real look at the F-150 Lightning during Presiden...

Early Monday morning, AT&T announced a sudden change in direction: it reached an agreement to spin off WarnerMedia — the conglomerate of Warner Bros., HBO, CNN, DC Comics, and more — into a new company to be merged with Discovery. While Discovery’s roster of the Cooking Channel, Travel Channel, and Food Network is a whole lot less exciting than WarnerMedia’s lineup of Batman, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones, the combined company brings together the components needed to build a new streaming giant. And it’s already clear that this new Discovery-Warner hybrid has Disney in its sights. “It’s a combination of bulking up both sides of the business, creating a more compelling direct-to-consumer offering for HBO Max or Discovery Plus,” Neil Macker, an equity analyst at Morningstar, tells Th...

HBO Max is getting a pair of new animated DC shows: Batman: The Caped Crusader and My Adventures with Superman, WarnerMedia announced today. The two shows appear pretty different in tone. The Caped Crusader, coming from a team that includes J.J. Abrams, Matt Reeves (the director of the upcoming The Batman), and Bruce Timm (one of the co-creators of the fan-favorite Batman: The Animated Series) promises a noir-ish “reimagining” of the character. “The series will be thrilling, cinematic and evocative of Batman’s noir roots, while diving deeper into the psychology of these iconic characters,” Abrams, Reeves, and Timm commented in a joint announcement. The teaser poster showcasing the art style for the series seems to back up the darker tone, with a grim-looking Batman (with an old-school poin...

Yesterday brought the momentous news that Google and Samsung will merge together their Wear OS and Tizen-based smartwatch platforms into a single operating system. The new software is currently being referred to as Wear, but that name could change as we get closer to the first devices that will ship with it. The unified platform is intended to give Android smartwatches a huge boost and much simpler strategy. It will also allow developers to create apps and widgets for a single OS instead of splitting their efforts between Wear OS and Tizen. A lot of this is spelled out in more detail in the below video, but let’s also focus on the big highlights. [embedded content] It’s going to be faster than Wear OS Speed and responsiveness were one of the major talking points when Google and Samsung mad...

Summer Game Fest is back this year, and it will start on June 10th with an event called “Kick Off Live!” that’s billed as a “spectacular world premiere showcase” with “more than a dozen” world premieres and announcements. The show, which will begin at 2PM ET, will be hosted by Geoff Keighley, who you might also know as the host of The Game Awards. Kick Off Live! is just the first of many events that will be part of Summer Game Fest. Some of the publishers confirmed to be participating in Summer Game Fest include 2K, Activision, Blizzard, Capcom, Epic Games, Sony PlayStation, Riot Games, Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Microsoft Xbox. This first event will also feature a performance by Weezer, “who will debut a brand new, stream safe game soundtrack song that can be freely streamed on Twitch, You...

Deathloop is a game about, well, death loops. The next release from Dishonored developer Arkane Studios, Deathloop puts you in the role of a man named Colt who wakes up in a strange-yet-stylish 1960s-inspired place called Blackreef. Like the studio’s past work, the game is a first-person action / adventure where players can use different weapons and supernatural skills in order to tackle problems — which usually involve murder — in different ways. But there’s a twist when Colt discovers he’s stuck in a time loop. As soon as he dies, he goes right back to the start of the same day. In order to break that cycle, he’s told, Colt must kill eight characters called “visionaries” before the day is over. It’s an interesting premise, but also one that raises a few questions. Namely: how do the loop...

After two and a half weeks in court, Apple is taking aim at one of the central elements of Epic’s antitrust case. In a filing Tuesday night, Apple asked the court to dismiss one of the 10 counts alleged in the initial complaint, arguing Epic had failed to establish any evidence for the charge that Apple had violated the essential facilities doctrine by failing to provide access to software distribution tools on iOS. “At trial, Epic adduced no proof in support of this claim,” Apple’s filing reads. “On the contrary, Epic’s principal expert expressly disclaimed any opinion on essential facility, and (in response to a direct question from the Court) rejected the notion that iOS should be treated as a public utility. The Court should enter judgment for Apple on this claim.” “It sounds to me lik...

China’s Zhurong rover has beamed back its first images from the surface of Mars after landing on a vast plain called Utopia Planitia. The rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere last Friday, bundled together with a lander after separating from China’s Tianwen-1 probe. The new images released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) show the two robots meticulously executing their first post-landing steps: the lander extended a tiny ramp to help Zhurong put its six wheels on the Martian surface for the first time. And Zhurong unfolded its four wing-like solar panels and a communications antenna, as seen from one of the rover’s navigation cameras. A shot of the backside of Zhurong taken by a navigation camera, showing the rover’s antenna and solar panels deployed.Image: CNSA Th...

Google is aiming to build a “useful, error-corrected quantum computer” by the end of the decade, the company explained in a blog post. The search giant hopes the technology will help solve a range of big problems like feeding the world and climate change to developing better medicines. To develop the technology, Google has unveiled a new Quantum AI campus in Santa Barbara containing a quantum data center, hardware research labs, and quantum processor chip fabrication facilities. It will spend billions developing the technology over the next decade, The Wall Street Journal reports. The target announced at Google I/O on Tuesday comes a year and a half after Google said it had achieved quantum supremacy, a milestone where a quantum computer has performed a calculation that would be impossible...