Technology

Samsung has released a new website to give iPhone users “a little taste of Samsung” from their mobile browser. When visited on an iPhone, the site prompts users to add it to their phone’s home screen, after which it turns into a shortcut to a simulated Samsung Galaxy device. The site appears to be the work of Samsung New Zealand, MacRumors reports. The experience might be limited, but it’s a neatly designed bit of marketing. Open up the camera “app” and a video will automatically play featuring influencer Logan Dodds, who describes Samsung’s camera app features in the interface around him. Poke around the other “apps” in the home screen and Samsung happily markets its phone’s other features and accessories, while text messages and even a fake phone call outline others. A tooltip from the s...

Facebook and Instagram were down on Thursday afternoon. The outage appeared to start around 5:30PM ET, with several thousand people reporting outages on DownDetector. The outage is the second one in less than a month from the social media giant; an outage on March 19th took its sites offline for several hours. Facebook returned a “sorry something went wrong” error message: The company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on the cause of the outage; it’s unclear at this time when service will be fully restored. The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, first noted in a tweet from developer Jane Wong. Even Facebook’s outage dashboard appeared to be having problems. Shortly after 6PM ET, Facebook and Instagram appeared to be coming back fo...

Apple knows that iMessage’s blue bubbles are a big barrier to people switching to Android, which is why the service has never appeared on Google’s mobile operating system. That’s according to depositions and emails from Apple employees, including some high-ranking executives, revealed in a court filing from Epic Games as part of its legal dispute with the iPhone manufacturer. Epic argues that Apple consciously tries to lock customers into its ecosystem of devices, and that iMessage is one of the key services helping it to do so. It cites comments made by Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddie Cue, senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi, and Apple Fellow Phil Schiller to support its argument. “The #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the ...

Nike and the internet collective MSCHF have settled their trademark dispute over a run of unofficially modified Satan-themed Nike sneakers. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal. But it apparently includes an offer to let customers return their $1,018 “Satan Shoes” — or a pair of MSCHF’s earlier “Jesus Shoes” — for a full refund. In a statement to The Verge, MSCHF’s attorneys said they were “pleased” with the settlement over the shoes, which were designed in collaboration with rapper Lil Nas X. “With these Satan Shoes — which sold out in less than a minute — MSCHF intended to comment on the absurdity of the collaboration culture practiced by some brands, and about the perniciousness of intolerance,” the attorneys said. They said that the artistic message was also “powerfully” com...

After being delayed for almost a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Avengers Campus will finally open at Disneyland, specifically at the Disney’s California Adventure park in Anaheim, California on June 4th, according to the company (via CNBC). The new area will bring Marvel Cinematic Universe characters into the physical space. CNBC reported the Avengers Campus will include character meet-and-greets with Thor, Black Panther, Black Widow, and other MCU heroes (and villains). It’ll feature a new Spider-Man ride as well as the existing Guardians of the Galaxy rescue mission — plus the debut of the flying Spider-Man stunt double robot the company has been teasing for years. [embedded content] Here’s the company’s extremely brief video tour: [embedded content] “We’ve got the ultimat...

Many digital eyes and ears are on us as we move about our daily lives. Surveillance cameras watch us on the street and smart devices listen for us in our homes. What if some of that watching happened through an expressive simulacrum of a human eye? Researcher Marc Teyssier took it upon himself to craft such a device, giving a webcam synthetic flesh and a moving eyeball, complete with brow and lashes. Observe: the Eyecam. Hello.Image: Marc Teyssier You can see it in action – blinking, glancing, emoting – in the video below, which also commands us to use our imaginations: Imagine Eyecam waking up on its own. Imagine Eyecam observing every one of your steps. Imagine Eyecam always being there … … even when you don’t want it to be there! [embedded content] If you can get past the un...

You might still be reeling from the news that personal information from 533 million Facebook accounts has been made freely available online. But now there’s another huge batch of people’s data floating around the web — including data from LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network confirmed. And the potential scope of the leak is huge: an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles, according to CyberNews. In a purported sample of two million of the profiles for sale, LinkedIn members’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, and more were visible, CyberNews found. LinkedIn, however, says the data includes information from many places and wasn’t all scraped from the professional-focused social network. “No private mem...

Proctorio, a piece of exam surveillance software designed to keep students from cheating while taking tests, relies on open-source software that has a history of racial bias issues, according to a report by Motherboard. The issue was discovered by a student who figured out how the software did facial detection, and discovered that it fails to recognize black faces over half the time. Proctorio, and other programs like it, is designed to keep an eye on students while they’re taking tests. However, many students of color have reported that they have issues getting the software to see their faces — sometimes having to resort to extreme measures to get the software to recognize them. This could potentially cause the students problems: Proctorio will flag them to instructors if it doesn’t...

Hello, yes, it has come to my attention that Matt Gaetz left his Venmo feed public and The Daily Beast has used this public feed to report a salacious story about his transactions. Yeah, you read that right. His Venmo feed was public. A public Venmo feed, especially one with questionable transactions, is a powerful way to amass personal information People have been warning about Venmo’s public feeds for quite some time. You can figure out a lot about a person by monitoring their financial transactions through Venmo! In Gaetz’s case, we found out he sent money — $900, in two transactions— to Joel Greenberg, who is accused of sex trafficking. The morning after Gaetz sent money, Greenberg sent three young women sums of money that totaled… $900. I didn’t think this need to be said, but h...

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company focused on developing brain-machine interfaces, has posted a video to YouTube that appears to show a monkey navigating an on-screen cursor using only its mind. Pager, a 9-year-old macaque monkey, had a Neuralink implanted about six weeks before the video was shot, the video’s unnamed narrator says. He was first taught to play video games with a joystick for a banana smoothie reward, delivered through a metal straw. While he was doing this, the Neuralink device recorded information about which neurons were firing — learning, essentially, to predict hand movements by recording which regions fired. After learning the patterns, the joystick Pager used to play was disconnected from the computer. The monkey appears to go on playing the game using only his mind — pl...

Ordering delivery through an app like DoorDash or GrubHub saves the trouble of cooking and lets you be a little picky — you can order from your favorite restaurant. But imagine receiving your food, sitting down to eat, and it tasting… different. And then, following your gut, you learn that you’ve been duped by a fake, an imposter restaurant that stole its name. For many people ordering from two Japanese restaurants in San Francisco, that exact thing may have happened, The San Francisco Chronicle reports. One restaurant, now styled as an izakaya called Chome, originally opened for delivery and takeout in the former location of Blowfish Sushi. Except it didn’t bother to change the name, awning, or logo at the start. Chome, operating as if it were Blowfish Sushi, served sushi to people ...

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has begun publicly tallying votes for a proposed Amazon workers’ union in Alabama, which would be the first of its kind nationwide. The count, conducted over Zoom, may not include all potentially eligible ballots, but it will offer an early look at the results. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) announced yesterday that 3,215 ballots were received from the roughly 5,800 workers at BHM1, a fulfillment center located in Bessemer, Alabama. Amazon workers at Bessemer cast their ballots by mail in February and March, and the official counting process began on March 30th. Representatives can challenge individual workers’ eligibility to vote, and those ballots won’t be counted during this tally — but they could be deemed eligible lat...