Technology

The cast of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air reunite for a new HBO Max special | Will Smith TFW you have to work on Sunday but all you want to do is keep bingeing Season 4 of The Crown. I watched the first two episodes and I can’t decide who I love most: Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth, Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, or Emma Corrin as Diana. Also Josh O’Connor’s Prince Charles continues to be a fascinating not-quite-antihero. Can’t wait to dig in for more (literal) palace intrigue. In the meantime, I did warn y’all a couple weeks back that we were sliding into holiday movie szn, and, among this week’s trailers are a holiday rom-com with Kristen Stewart, as well as an update of a classic YA novel, and a Bruce-Willis-kicks-space-alien-ass offering. Plus the cast of the Fresh Prince are b...

The iPhone 12 mini | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Orders for the new iPhone 12 mini have started arriving for customers, and the team at iFixit did a two-part teardown—of both an EU and US model— to figure out how Apple managed to include 5G hardware and the usual iPhone components into such a little device. The first thing you notice looking at the internal images is the smaller battery in the mini, which measures up to similar iPhone models surprisingly well, iFixit finds, with 8.57 Wh. “That’s more juice than the iPhone SE 2020‘s 6.96 Wh, but understandably short of the 10.78 Wh of the standard 12 it’s stacked on top of,” iFixit notes. It’s less than the 10.78 Wh of the iPhone 12 battery, though. iFixitThe iPhone 12 mini is on the left, the iPhone 12 on… Continue reading&hell...

(NASA/Joel Kowsky) This evening, the first operational mission of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is set to take flight, carrying a crew of four to the International Space Station. The mission, scheduled for 7:27PM ET, marks the beginning of regular crewed missions to and from the ISS for SpaceX as the company establishes a route to space for NASA’s astronauts — and eventually private customers. On board tonight’s flight are three NASA astronauts — Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker — as well as Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. The crew is slated to stay on board the ISS for six months, before returning to Earth inside the Crew Dragon in the spring. NASA’s live coverage of the flight will begin at 3:15PM ET, jut… Continue reading… You D...

Photo by Maciej Luczniewski/NurPhoto via Getty Images Samsung’s Galaxy S21 is anticipated to debut in January, and Android Police has a slew of leaked specs for the forthcoming phone. The usual caveats about leaked information apply, but most of it lines up with what you’d expect. Android Police says its leaker confirmed that earlier renders of the S21— which show the same camera bump of the Galaxy S20— are accurate. Steve HemmerstofferRender of the supposed Galaxy S21 There are three S21 models expected— a standard, a Plus and an Ultra. According to Android Police, the S21 will have a 6.2-inch display, the Plus will be 6.7 inches and the Ultra will reportedly have a 6.8-inch display. Android Police says the leaked info confirms that the S21 Ultra will support… Continue reading&helli...

Games Done Quick’s (GDQ) all-women speedrunning community, the Frame Fatales, will be hosting the Fleet Fatales event to raise money for charity this week. It kicks off today at 4PM ET on the Games Done Quick Twitch channel. The schedule is live now, and there are some great runs to look forward to. I’m particularly interested the Hades run on Monday, the run for a game called McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventures for the Sega Genesis on Tuesday (no, I had never heard of that game until now, either, but here’s a video of it), the Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat run on Friday (Jungle Beat is the Donkey Kong platformer played with the GameCube’s bongo controller), and the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time randomizer co-op run on Saturday (I… Continue reading… You Deserve to Make Money...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An Amazon support member trying to help a subscriber on Twitter was apparently not fully up to speed on world geography when they suggested to the user that Northern Ireland wasn’t part of the United Kingdom. Chris Jones was tweeting to the AmazonHelp account on Saturday, asking why he wasn’t able to view the Autumn Nations Cup, an international rugby tournament being live-streamed on Amazon Prime. After troubleshooting some possible technical issues, the helper believed they had found the problem: The match was only available to Prime Members in the UK. Northern Ireland is part of the UK. — Chris Jones (@_chrisjones_) November 14, 2020 As Jones notes in his reply, Northern Ireland is indeed part of the UK, which actually stands for… Continue r...

Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images Social media app Parler receives financial backing from conservative hedge-fund investor Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, The Wall Street Journal reported. The app, founded as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook and bills itself as “viewpoint neutral” saw nearly 1 million new downloads in the days after the US presidential election, rocketing it to the top of the iOS and Google Play app stores. Parler turned into a kind of de facto home for conservatives’ protests against the election— including the persistent “Stop the Steal” campaign— after the race was called for former Vice President Joe Biden. Several high-profile conservative social media personalities encouraged people to abandon Twitter and Facebook because of their… Co...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Qualcomm has received permission from the US to sell 4G mobile chips to Huawei, an exemption to the Trump administration’s ban on doing business with the Chinese company, Reuters reported. Qualcomm didn’t specify which products it’s allowed to sell to Huawei, but told Reuters they were related to mobile devices. In May 2019, the White House issued an executive order barring US companies from doing business with Chinese companies like Huawei due to national security concerns. In May of this year, the Commerce Department tightened the restrictions to require any overseas semiconductor manufacturers to get a license from the US if they used US equipment or technology to make chips for Huawei. And effective in September, the US began… Continue read...

A worker administers a COVID-19 test at a drive through testing site in Texas | Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images This week, COVID-19 headlines were split between cautious optimism and abject despair. On the positive side, Monday morning brought us a scrap of hope — claims from Pfizer and BioNTech that their vaccine candidate was highly effective. Their tests so far showed that it has an efficacy of about 90 percent, though that number could change with time. And before we break out the bubbly, there are still plenty of caveats to the news. Among the downer highlights: the full data hasn’t been released yet, and this happened in a clinical trial where conditions were more controlled than they will be in the real world. It has to be delivered in two doses, weeks apart, and it’s more fragile ...

Netflix Netflix’s The Liberator almost didn’t get made. The four-episode miniseries, now streaming, was initially envisioned as an eight-episode drama for the History Channel. The story — both in that version and the one that exists now — was based on the true story of the “Thunderbirds” battalion, a group of US forces that spent 500 straight days in combat in 1943. Unfortunately, the production costs of staging a grand war epic proved prohibitive for the History Channel, which led to its eventual rebirth on Netflix as an animated series quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. The Liberator is disorienting to watch. Its animation — initially a cost-saving measure, created by the animation house Trioscope — combines live-action performances… Continue reading… You Deserve to M...

Uber autonomous vehicle | Uber Uber is in talks to sell its autonomous vehicle unit to startup competitor Aurora Innovation, TechCrunch reported. If it comes to pass, the sale of Uber Advanced Technologies Group (UberATG), would mark the end of a bumpy road for a division of Uber that was valued at $7.25 billion as recently as last July, but which has been plagued with ongoing problems. In March of 2019, Uber avoided criminal charges in the 2018 death of Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, the first-ever death involving an autonomous car. Federal investigators found that Uber, the safety driver behind the wheel of the car, and the state of Arizona all shared a portion of the blame for the incident. The accident ended Uber’s test program in Tempe, but the company… Continue reading&hell...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Cyberattacks that originated in North Korea and Russia have been targeting companies conducting research for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, Microsoft said in a new blog post. The company says the attacks were aimed at seven leading pharmaceutical companies and researchers in the US, Canada, France, India, and South Korea. “Among the targets, the majority are vaccine makers that have COVID-19 vaccines in various stages of clinical trials,” according to the blog post by Tom Burt, Microsoft corporate vice president of customer security and trust. Microsoft didn’t name the companies, or provide details about what information may have been stolen or compromised, but said it had notified the organizations and offered help where the attacks… Contin...