Technology

Pedro Pascal, who you might recognize as The Mandalorian himself, has been cast as Joel in HBO’s TV adaptation of The Last of Us, as first reported by Deadline. The casting was confirmed shortly after by The Last of Us creative director (and an executive producer and writer for the show) Neil Druckmann. Pascal’s confirmed casting comes just hours after the news that Bella Ramsey, who played the fan-favorite ruler Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones, will play Ellie, Joel’s surrogate daughter. (Pascal also had a role on Game of Thrones — he played Oberyn Martell, the Red Viper of Dorne.) It also comes shortly after the news that Lucasfilm has severed ties with one of Pascal’s co-stars on The Mandalorian, Gina Carano. Joel and Ellie, as seen in PlayStation exclusive The Last of Us.Image: Naugh...

NASA chose SpaceX’s heavy-lift Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the first two elements of the agency’s Lunar Gateway, a planned outpost orbiting the moon. The two Gateway pieces, a propulsion module and astronaut living quarters, were originally designed to launch separately, but NASA picked SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy as a one-trip solution for $332 million. Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s strongest operational rocket, will send both Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) and its Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) to space as one integrated payload “no earlier than May 2024,” NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. NASA originally planned to have the PPE, built by Maxar, and HALO, built by Northrop Grumman, mate in space after launching atop two separate rockets, but the agency decided last year...

HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation is set to feature a familiar face: Bella Ramsey, the actor who played the young ruler Lyanna Mormont on Game of Thrones, will star as Ellie in the upcoming TV series, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The prestige TV take on Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us game has been in the works for a while and has already accrued some impressive talent, with Chernobyl’s Craig Mazon attached as a writer and Kantemir Balagov, the director of the indie WWII drama Beanpole, directing the pilot. Neil Druckmann, the creative director behind the game series and co-writer of the television series, confirmed Ellie’s casting on Twitter. While Ellie isn’t the character you play in the first The Last of Us game, she’s arguably the star of the entire series, as the entire plot of th...

Sony’s PlayStation Network experienced a global outage on Wednesday evening that appeared to last for more than an hour. On the PlayStation Network status page, every service except PlayStation Video was marked as experiencing issues. Tens of thousands of users reported issues with PlayStation Network as shown by DownDetector, where Call of Duty, Apex Legends, and Rocket League and many other games all saw spikes in user reports as well. We saw reports in a wide variety of languages on Twitter, and PlayStation Japan officially confirmed the outage as well. Multiple publishers, including Bethesda, Fortnite maker Epic Games, Rockstar, and Sega, posted tweets alerting players about the outage while it was happening. PSA: We are aware that PSN is down and players are unable to connect to Rocke...

Disney has severed ties with Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune on The Mandalorian, the company announced on Wednesday evening. “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson told The Verge. Carano has recently come under scrutiny for several posts published on social media, including an anti-Semitic post on her Instagram. Some of the content from Carano’s tweets are captured in screenshots, seen below in this tweet. Lucasfilm’s spokesperson denounced Carano’s social media posts, telling The Verge, “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.” This isn’t the first time Carano has been criticized for posts made on social media. In ...

You should change your Slack password if you used the app on Android, according to an email sent out by the company and published by Android Police. Apparently, from December 21st to January 21st, the Android version of the Slack app would store users’ credentials in plain text, which theoretically means any other apps on your phone could have access to them. If you’ve got the popular communications tool installed on your Android phone, the first thing you’ll want to do is update to the latest version from the Play Store since changing your password won’t do any good if you’re still running the old version. Then, if you got the email from Slack, you can click on the link to change your password. Otherwise, you’ll have to reset your password from a desktop computer using Slack’s instruction...

Security researcher Alex Birsan has found a security vulnerability that allowed him to run code on servers owned by Apple, Microsoft, PayPal, and over 30 other companies (via Bleeping Computer). The exploit is also deviously simple, and it’s something that many large software developers will have to figure out how to protect themselves from. The exploit takes advantage of a relatively simple trick: replacing private packages with public ones. When companies are building programs, they often use open-source code written by other people, so they’re not spending time and resources solving a problem that’s already solved. For example, I’ve worked on websites that had to convert text files to webpages in real time. Instead of writing code to do it ourselves, my team found a program that did tha...

Wearing a mask is one of the easiest things individual people can do to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is partnering with WarnerMedia in the hopes that fan-favorite characters like Harry Potter, Wonder Woman, the Joker, and Imperator Furiosa can convince people to mask up. The ad, which was created by a partnership between WarnerMedia, the Ad Council, and the CDC, features a wide variety of WarnerMedia characters from iconic films — but with digitally inserted masks. Whether it’s heroes (like members of the Fellowship of the Ring or the Justice League) or villains (like the Joker doing his iconic stair dance), everyone masks up. Even the murderous clown demon Pennywise from It sports a mask — albeit, a creepy, clown-faced one. Accord...

Toyota will finally introduce its first mass-market all-electric vehicles in the United States later this year, the world’s leading automaker announced Wednesday, though it offered no further details about vehicle type or pricing. Toyota has previously said it’s developing an electric SUV on a new flexible platform that can power multiple EVs, following in the footsteps of Volkswagen, General Motors, and others. The two new EVs will be announced alongside an unspecified Toyota hybrid. “We continue to be leaders in electrification that began with our pioneering introduction of the Prius nearly 25 years ago,” Bob Carter, Toyota North America’s executive vice president of sales, said in a statement. “Toyota’s new electrified product offerings will give customers multiple choices of powertrain...

Google appears to be rolling out a dark mode for desktop search, but only some people have it right now. If the change has rolled out to you and your system is set to dark mode, the background of Google’s search pages will be a very dark gray. Here’s an example of what the new dark mode looks like: A couple of Verge staffers had their search pages automatically switch to dark mode, and 9to5Google and some people on Twitter have seen the new dark mode, too. But it doesn’t seem to be something that everyone has just yet. Google’s search pages are still white for me, for example, even though I have dark mode turned on right now on macOS. This isn’t the first time a desktop search dark mode has appeared: 9to5Google reported in January that some people were seeing dark mode then. It’s unclear i...

A new bill introduced in the North Dakota Senate might have far-reaching consequences for app store operators. The bill, Senate Bill 2333, seeks to ban stores like Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store from mandating developers only use those app stores and their respective in-app payment systems. It also bans retaliation against developers in the event they choose an alternative distribution channel or payment system. “The purpose of the bill is to level the playing field for app developers in North Dakota and protect customers from devastating, monopolistic fees imposed by big tech companies,” said Sen. Kyle Davison (R-Fargo), who introduced the bill before a Senate committee on Tuesday, told reporters in a press conference yesterday, as reported by The Bismarck Tribune. Davison sa...

HP announced today that it has refreshed its Pavilion x360 line of 14- and 15-inch convertible laptops, making them smaller, lighter, and more geared toward streaming entertainment. The 15-inch version is available today. With an 11th Gen Intel Core i3 processor, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage, it starts at $750. The 14-inch version will be available later this spring; no pricing was available. In view of marketing to “Gen Z” during a streaming-heavy pandemic, HP says it has optimized the new line for entertainment. The bezels have been reduced — something you’ll likely appreciate when watching videos — and HP has included a simplified version of its Omen Gaming Hub, which allows you to customize your keystrokes, lighting, and other features. The two new Pavilion x360 laptops also hav...