Technology

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple on Monday announced an extension to its deadline for requiring in-app purchases for online events and classes offered within iOS apps to June 30th, 2021. Apple previously adjusted what types of events are subject to its in-app purchase policy and standard 30 percent cut back in September, with the original intention of requiring in-app purchases in all appropriate apps by December of this year. Apple cited the coronavirus pandemic, writing in a developer update posted to its website, “As the world fights COVID-19, we recognize that adapting experiences from in-person to digital continues to be a top priority.” This deadline extension means developers have more time to temporarily reap the full profits of their sales Requiring… Continue re...

US President Donald Trump speaks with General Motors CEO Mary Barra during a meeting with automobile industry leaders in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC on January 24th, 2017. | Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images General Motors announced today that it is abandoning Donald Trump’s effort to take away California’s ability to set fuel efficiency standards. The company, along with Fiat Chrysler and Toyota, previously backed Trump’s efforts to roll back fuel efficiency standards. Under the Clean Air Act, California has historically been allowed to set its own emissions standards, which are tougher than federal guidelines and typically set the bar for the entire auto industry in the US. California is the largest auto market in the US and the 10th largest in the wor...

A California grand jury has indicted Apple’s head of global security on charges that he tried to bribe Santa Clara County officials to procure firearms (CCW) licenses, according to a news release. Santa Clara district attorney Jeff Rosen alleges that Thomas Moyer offered 200 iPads — worth about $70,000 — to Capt. James Jensen and Undersheriff Rick Sung in the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office, in exchange for four concealed firearms licenses for Apple employees. The charges came after a two-year investigation. “In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Money...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter began showing a warning if you tried to retweet a tweet that had been labeled for potentially including misleading information. Twitter is now planning to expand that warning functionality to when you try to like a labeled tweet, the company announced on Monday. The functionality is rolling out on the web and iOS globally this week, and it will come to Android in the coming weeks, Twitter tells The Verge. Adding a warning decreased quote tweets of misleading information by 29 percent, the company said. It seems Twitter is hoping this new warning shown before likes of labeled tweets will reduce the amount of likes on labeled content. Giving context on why a labeled Tweet is misleading under our… Continue readi...

Image: stacksmashing Intrepid developers have done the expected and necessary: Doom now runs on Nintendo’s recently released Game & Watch portable. The Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros. was designed to run three games, but successfully porting Doom shows it can handle others if you have a lot of patience (via Hackaday). This version of Doom is not perfect, of course. In order to get the game to run even at the slower speed shown in the video below, sound had to be disabled and textures had to be simplified to fit the game on the small portable. And getting that far wasn’t easy: programmers stacksmashing and Konrad Beckmann had to trick the Game & Watch to offload its firmware by injecting code into the external storage accessed by the Game & Watch’s tiny… Continue readi...

Photo by VCG / VCG via Getty Images Today, China successfully launched its most ambitious mission to the Moon to date — this one designed to bring a handful of lunar rocks back to Earth before the end of the year. If successful, it’ll be the first time in nearly half a century that dirt from the Moon has been returned to Earth and the first time that China has retrieved materials from another world. The mission, called Chang’e 5, is the latest in a long line of lunar missions that China has been conducting over the last decade. In 2013, the country made its first soft landing on the Moon with Chang’e 3, making China just one of three nations to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface. Then in December 2018, China launched Chang’e 4 and successfully put a lander and rover on… Continue r...

Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images The US government awarded a big transportation contract to Uber and Lyft this week, authorizing the ride-hailing companies to provide transportation to up to 4 million federal employees and their families. The General Services Administration, the procurement arm for the federal government, granted the five-year contract to Uber and Lyft, the companies confirmed. The contract is worth up to $810 million, though it’s unclear how much each company will receive. While individual federal employees have previously been able to use ride-hail services for travel, the new contract allows the companies to formally launch their services within agencies and directly work with officials to promote the service. “a natural next step for us” The… Continue rea...

“Infinite Bad Guy” featuring Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” music video. | Google/YouTube Somehow, perhaps by some cosmic intervention, I haven’t gotten tired of hearing Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” on the radio. Apparently, I’m not the only one because tens of thousands of people have gone to the effort of making covers of the song and uploading them to YouTube. In celebration of its music video passing 1 billion views, YouTube and Google Creative Lab have turned all of those covers into an interactive AI experiment. “Infinite Bad Guy,” which YouTube calls “the world’s first infinite music video,” collects thousands of covers and blends them together, using machine learning to align each one within quarter-beats of the original. Going to billie.withyoutube.com pulls up the original “Bad Guy” musi...

iPhone 12. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge It’s rare that Apple slashes the prices on its own products. Fortunately, other retailers are putting a lot of Apple products on sale for Black Friday. A bunch of retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo, Walmart, and Woot are slashing the prices on everything from wearables to its wireless earbuds. Additionally, Apple’s direct website will mark down prices on several products beginning on Friday, November 27th, and running until Monday, November 30th. If you buy an eligible product during Apple’s Black Friday event, the tech giant will give you up to a $150 gift card. Below, we have listed all of the best Black Friday discounts you can take advantage of if you are looking to buy any Apple device. iPhone and iPad deals … Continue r...

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Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Amazon’s Echo Buds are getting new fitness features that allow the true wireless earbuds to track your workouts. According to Amazon, the Echo Buds now have the ability to track walks, runs, and other workouts, all initiated with Alexa voice commands. The Echo Buds rely on built-in accelerometers for tracking steps, and this is used in combination with personal stats entered into a “workout profile” in the Alexa app for other data. Amazon says using your height and weight, in combination with the steps tracked by the accelerometer, the Echo Buds can calculate the distance of your runs and walks and the amount of calories burned. The duration of your workout is calculated using timestamps, and your overall pace is calculated by the… Continue reading&he...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony’s PlayStation 5 user interface could really use some work, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the simple act of trying to turn the thing off. On most recent consoles, it’s been pretty easy to shut down the device with just the controller. Simply press and hold the PS button / Xbox button / home button, and the UI will helpfully show you an option to power down the console in some way. This is true for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. It takes just a few seconds, and I can happily end a gaming session. But turning off the PS5, for no good reason that I can figure out, is a needlessly cumbersome process. Instead, when I press and hold the PS button — the behavior I have used for years to start the process —… Continue readin...