Technology

Gaming platform Rec Room is now a unicorn, valued at $1.25 billion during a recent funding round of $100 million. It appears to be one of the first, if not the first, virtual reality-focused startup to achieve unicorn status, a notable feat since Facebook’s landmark acquisition of Oculus VR for $2.4 billion in 2014 helped established the modern VR business. Founded in 2016, Rec Room is a free app that lets players build custom virtual spaces and games that can be played across various platforms. The Seattle-based company launched on Steam as a VR-focused platform, and in 2018, expanded to non-VR platforms. It’s now available on Xbox, PlayStation, iOS, and PC. CEO Nick Fajt said in an interview with The Verge that VR usage on the platform climbed over the holiday season due in part to sales...

People who missed out on the first 3D-action Ninja Gaiden games released in the aughts (and that other one that we don’t really talk about from 2012) will have a chance to play all three this coming June in Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection, announced for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PS4. But sadly, the first two entries in the trilogy will be based on the Sigma re-releases that originally came out on PS3 and PS Vita, not their definitive versions (Ninja Gaiden Black for the original Xbox and Ninja Gaiden II for the Xbox 360) because the team says their source code went missing. Citing a recent Famitsu interview (via Kotaku), a staffer from developer Team Ninja told the publication that “there are only fragments of the data that remain. We couldn’t salvage them.” So, it’s not that the comp...

Etsy shoppers browsing the site for Asian artwork this afternoon may been greeted with something else: recommendations for topless photos of Asian women. The issue was first pointed out by an Asian American artist on Twitter, who The Verge is not naming due to harassment concerns, who had erotica recommended above one of their listings. The Verge was able to find several listings where Etsy placed recommendations for erotic photos of Asian women above or below entirely unrelated products with “Asian” in the title. A cute black-and-white illustration of a girl in bed has a row of erotic photos placed above it as recommendations. A collage of illustrations of Asian women has a section beneath it titled “You may also like” that features two rows primarily containing erotic photos of Asian wom...

Tesla must tell CEO Elon Musk to delete an anti-union tweet from 2018, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided Thursday. The order came as part of Tesla’s appeal of a 2019 ruling by an administrative judge in a years-long legal battle between the company and the United Auto Workers union. Below is Musk’s tweet in question, which is included as a screen instead of a Twitter embed in case the tweet is deleted. This is the direct link to the tweet, which was in response to this tweet, if you want to see the conversation in context on Twitter. Tesla will also have to post a notice at its factories nationwide addressing the “unlawful tweet.” This is actually a change from the decision from the 2019 ruling, where Musk or someone with the labor board would have been required to read a n...

There’s a giant cargo ship stuck in the Suez Canal. I’m sure you’ve heard, but in case you haven’t, welcome to the first major spectacle the internet has collectively rubbernecked to this degree since those llamas cavorted around an Arizona town in… 2015? Really? Woof. Anyway, the whole internet loves the stuck boat, especially since it also appears to have charted a very phallic course into the canal before it drifted into its current position. Sure, it’s causing hundreds of other ships to bottleneck, and sure, that will probably inevitably cause some headaches for an already-strained global supply chain. Yes, oil prices are up, and there may be another run on toilet paper as a result, but for now, let us just have this moment, okay? Stuck boat memes abound, but if you want to keep ...

Amazon is trying a new tactic in its endless PR battle against stories of its exhausting and exploitative working conditions: outright denial. It’s not working. When replying to a tweet from Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) complaining about the company’s union-busting tactics and the fact that some of its workers are forced to “urinate in water bottles,” Amazon’s official Twitter account responded: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.” But people do believe these stories and for a very simple reason: there are numerous accounts of it happening, documented by employees and journalists around the world. Indeed, after Amazon sent out its ill-judged tweet, reporters who cover the company’s labor practices practically lined up to soa...

YouTuber Shane Luis has tweeted some amazing photos of a new-in-box game development kit for the Nintendo 64’s Disk Drive (64DD), a very rare peripheral never released outside of Japan that played games off proprietary floppy disks. You can (and should!) read look through the whole thread starting with this tweet, but I’m going to share some of the photos here in this article. Here’s what the box looks like — nothing flashy. I was asked to verify and photograph a Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD) Development Kit from a private video game collector. The system was new in box and needed to be carefully documented. This is what it looks like to unbox one. pic.twitter.com/X2PflhtemW — Shane Luis (@RerezTV) March 24, 2021 Inside that dark blue box on the top right were five 64DD Development Disks, ...

Porsche is adding its all-electric Taycan sports car to its subscription service. For as little as $2,500 a month, you can burn rubber in a 522-horsepower, 390-kW Taycan 4S with rear-wheel drive. The 4S normally retails for around $103,800. The German automaker’s subscription service, Porsche Drive, first launched in October 2017 as a pilot program in Atlanta, Georgia. It has since grown to eight other cities, including San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Monterrey, Irvine, Houston, and Phoenix. As a subscriber, you can get access to up to seven different models for a month-to-month subscription or for as little as a day. “Think of Porsche Drive as sports car-as-a-service, a convenient digital way to access the Porsche experience,” said Kjell Gruner, president and CEO of Porsche Cars Nor...

I usually prefer to highlight the best deals you can get on new tech, but sometimes a refurbished deal is good enough to make the grade. Sony’s 1000XM4 noise-canceling headphones haven’t slipped below $278 new (down from their usual $349 price), but a well-rated eBay seller is offering them in “like-new” condition with all original accessories included for $208. And with eBay’s offer code PICKCR5 used at checkout, you can knock an extra 5 percent off, totaling $198 before tax. If you’re in the US, buying refurbished tech from eBay isn’t such a bad idea, as the retailer backs it with a two-year warranty through Allstate. If you encounter a problem with your purchase outside of the seller’s return window or warranty, you can file a claim to get a repair or a replacement if repair isn’t possi...

Qualcomm has announced its latest 7-series processor, the Snapdragon 780G, which trickles down features from the company’s flagship Snapdragon 888 chipset, while still offering manufacturers (and, by extension, consumers) a more affordable phone. The 780G takes the new top slot in the 7-series lineup, replacing the 765G / 768G (the latter being largely a frequency-boosted version of the former). Obviously, there’s the usual boost in performance: the 780G features Qualcomm’s Kryo 670 CPU, which the company says offers a 40 percent boost in performance, and a new Adreno 642 GPU for up to 50 percent faster graphics compared to the 765 model. But the 780G also enables some new functionality, like the Spectra 570 triple ISP (image signal processor), which, like the Snapdragon 888, allows for ph...

Motorola has added support for two new indigenous languages spoken in the Amazon as part of a larger effort to make technology more accessible. Beginning today, Kaingang and Nheengatu will be among the language options available on Motorola Android devices. Any Motorola phone updated to Android 11 will be able to access the new language options, not just its most expensive models. “We believe that this initiative will raise awareness towards language revitalization, not only will impact the communities that we’re working directly with, but right now we’re in the process of open sourcing all that language data from Android into Unicode,” Janine Oliveira, Motorola’s executive director for globalization software, said in an interview with The Verge. “And by doing that we believe that we’re go...

The oft-forgotten Final Fantasy VIII has made its way to smartphones, just a few decades after it originally debuted. Today, Square Enix launched the classic roleplaying game on both iOS and Android; it’s available for $16.99 right now, but that price will jump to $20.99 starting on April 5th. Final Fantasy VIII first launched on the original PlayStation back in 1999, though this version is the more recent remaster, which hit consoles like the Xbox One, PS4, and Switch in 2019. The game is also available on Steam. In addition to improved visuals, the remaster includes some quality-of-life tweaks, like the option to speed up combat and world exploration. “We decided to take on the challenge to focus on ‘love’” And while Final Fantasy VII tends to garner much of the franchise’s nostalgia — a...