Technology

Happy Saturday and welcome to the inaugural edition of the Verge Weekender, a short recap of some of the stories we covered this week on The Verge. The big event of the week was Disney’s investor day, where the company announced new Disney Plus series WandaVision, showed trailers for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the much-anticipated series Loki; as well as slew of new Star Wars series on Disney Plus, including Rangers of the New Republic, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Star Wars: Lando. There’s also a new Alien TV series in the works. Check out the full roundup of everything Disney announced at its 2020 Investor Day. Perhaps the biggest news of the week/year/pandemic hit late Friday, as the FDA approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use: The vaccine is authorized in the U...

Origin has made a new, limited edition PC that has the guts of a new model but the face of an ancient 1990s machine, complete with a fake floppy drive. In case you want some nostalgia while you wait for Red Dead Redemption to load, perhaps. The RestoMod has a custom Corsair 4000D case, and the standard build has 16GB of memory, a 2.9 GHz Core i5 processor, 250GB of storage, and a 6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, for $2,080. The RetroMod can be customized as desired, Origin says, but they’ve only made 50 of them, so supplies are limited. RestoMod: New but with an old lookOrigin The front face of the machine is where you’ll get the old-school feel, Origin says: By using a custom HD UV print on the steel front panel, the RestoMod PC features a custom design inspired by PCs from t...

It’s a different kind of Cyber week. Cyber Monday is in the past, but the anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 game has finally launched, and it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing buzz about it online. One of this week’s best deals is aimed right at people who don’t have a console or a beastly gaming PC. The game is available on Google Stadia, and until supplies last, Google is offering a complimentary hardware bundle worth $100 to people who buy Cyberpunk 2077 on its cloud game streaming platform. Find details on this and a few more deals below. Get Stadia hardware when you buy Cyberpunk 2077 A few Verge writers found that playing Cyberpunk 2077 is actually a fantastic experience on Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming streaming service that doesn’t require an expensive console or PC — just a controller,...

When researchers at pharmaceutical companies around the world started developing COVID-19 vaccines, experts reminded everyone to temper expectations. Vaccines usually take years. The frontrunners were made using unproven technology, and there were dozens of ways things could go wrong. The Food and Drug Administration said it would be fine with anything over 50 percent effective. Then, last month, Pfizer announced that it had a vaccine, and it was 95 percent effective. Moderna did too. It was better news than anyone dared hope for. Stéphane Bancel, chief executive at Moderna, said he cried when he first heard the data. With the FDA’s blessing, which came in late Friday night, health care workers in the United States could start getting shots next week, less than a year after the first case ...

It looked like Twitter was adding further restrictions to President Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday, as some users noticed the ability to like, retweet or reply to his tweets with “disputed” labels was not working. Copying the URL to one of the disputed tweets also appeared to be disabled, and quote-tweets were not appearing in search results. Some users were able to access and like Trump’s tweets — several Verge staffers confirmed they could engage with “disputed” tweets by clicking through the warning label— but others on Twitter could not. OK Based on my probing, for Trumps election fraud tweets:– like, RT, reply, copy URL actions are disabled– all counts disabled– quote tweets allowed, if you click through warning – maybe most importantly: QTs undiscoverable...

This morning, Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic had to abort its first powered test flight of its spaceplane from the company’s home in New Mexico, bringing the vehicle home before it could reach space. During the flight, the spaceplane’s engine cut out too early and the vehicle’s two pilots had to glide back down to the ground early. The aborted engine ignition was caught live by a Twitch livestream provided by the outlet NASASpaceflight. The video showed the spaceplane, called VSS Unity, dropping away from its carrier aircraft in mid-air as planned. The vehicle then briefly ignited its main engine, according to the video, but the ignition cut out after just a moment. On a typical flight, the spaceplane’s engine will stay ignited for a full minute, propelling the veh...

If you were worried about sending your kids back to school after the pandemic ends (or if you are a kid worrying about going back to school), I’m afraid this Gizmodo article is not going to help. Tom McKay and Dhruv Mehrotra have done a fantastic job reporting about how some US school districts are buying tools designed to break into phones to download texts and photos… even ones that have been deleted. While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students’ personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed—and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored truc...

While many new wireless headphones and earbuds are already equipped with support for virtual assistants, Google has extended that convenience to more users of wired headphones. As 9to5Google points out, it’s now possible to quickly access Google Assistant features on an Android phone using 3.5mm and USB-C headphones that were previously unsupported. Until now, Google Assistant integration was limited to wireless or wired options “optimized for Google Assistant support.” The company’s USB-C Pixel Buds were one of a few wired headphones to offer rich, hands-free integration with Google Assistant. That’s no longer the case: plugging in a set of “non-optimized” wired headphones will now trigger a notification indicating that you can summon Google Assistant by pressing the action button on your...

Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red’s latest game, has been in development for nearly a decade. It was first announced in May 2012, and it’s had a rocky development cycle, with numerous delays and, in the final stretch of development, a required six-day workweek. But despite the long development, the game didn’t review quite as well as CDPR wanted, meaning developers who had been toiling for years could have been on the brink of losing performance bonuses that were tied to review scores. The studio’s developers won’t have to worry about review scores anymore, though: CDPR will now pay full performance bonuses regardless of the critical reception of the game, according to Bloomberg. “We underestimated the lengths and complexity involved to make this a reality” “We initially had a bonus system th...

The Food and Drug Administration has authorized the use of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, a landmark moment in the fight to suppress a virus that has killed nearly 300,000 people in the United States and sickened tens of millions around the world. “Today’s emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine holds the promise to alter the course of this pandemic in the United States,” Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a press release. The vaccine is authorized in the US for people over the age of 16. It was found to be 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials. “That is extraordinary,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disea...

iFixit has released its teardown of the PlayStation 5 and its DualSense controller — and it goes into even more detail than the one Sony did earlier this year. The gadget repair company discovered that the console has a ton of screws holding it together, and that there’s a weird catch to replacing the optical drive. The company also released a always-fun X-ray of the PS5Photo: Creative Electron (via iFixit) It turns out that the optical drive is software-locked to the motherboard. The physical swap is apparently a piece of cake, but any replacement you put in won’t read disks, so if your optical drive fails you’ll be sending it to Sony. It’s a bummer, especially for me: I’ve had terrible luck with PlayStation optical drives, and the only drive I haven’t had to replace is the one on my PS4 ...

Microsoft tweeted a fake commercial for a pretend holiday album called Microsoft Holiday Hits, a not-real, four-CD album that claims it features “60 festive favorites.” I want to reiterate that this is not a real album — but the company actually went to the effort to record tidbits of Microsoft-themed versions of classic Christmas carols anyway for the lols. I dearly love puns, dad humor, and terrible jokes, but even I groaned at some of what Microsoft did here. Here are the lyrics to one eye-rolling carol: Joy to the Word / spellcheck is done It fixed all of my stuff Or how about this classic? I look forward to hearing your collective sighs of despair over the Internet: Please Mute Ye Merry Gentlemen / You’re talking far too loud We’re trying to have a meeting / You’re yelling in a crowd ...