Technology

Microsoft announced in a blog today that its dual screen phone, the Surface Duo, will be getting an “enhanced” TikTok app that takes advantage of its design. The company also announced the Duo will be available outside the US in early 2021. When The Verge reviewed the Surface Duo, we liked the hardware of the device, but had concerns with its modified Android software. The Duo was buggy at release and didn’t feature many non-Microsoft apps that took advantage of the dual screen setup. The Surface Duo can run normal Android phone apps on either screen, but using the split-screen features Microsoft designed requires specific tailoring. The group of apps that use Microsoft’s “postures” and multitasking features remains small, but TikTok is a major social media addition. The new TikTok experie...

Hark! The blobs sing! Or at least, they do in Google’s latest machine learning experiment, the awe-inspiring Blob Opera, which will see a chorus of four adorable, colorful blobs serenade you with spine-tingling operatic music. Drag a blob up or down, and you’ll change what pitch they sing in; drag them from side to side, and you’ll change the vowel sound. Each blob will also harmonize with the others, in what can only be described as magical. The Blob Opera just sounds beautiful, with soaring harmonies ringing out from each blob. Four actual opera singers — Christian Joel (tenor), Frederick Tong (bass), Joanna Gamble (mezzo‑soprano), and Olivia Doutney (soprano) — recorded 16 hours of singing (Ingunn Gyda Hrafnkelsdottir and John Holland-Avery also contributed), but it’s not their actual v...

Google says that a “significant subset” of Gmail users are running into errors with the service right now. While users can access their inboxes, they may encounter “error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior,” the company wrote in a message on its service status page. The errors come just a day after many Google properties, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs, were hit with a widespread outage. Downdetector, which monitors reports of website issues, shows a spike of problems impacting Gmail starting around 3PM ET. Users have reported being unable to access their inboxes, while others have said they’re receiving bounceback messages when trying to email someone with a Gmail address. Google said it would provide an update by 5:30PM ET on when it expects the problems ...

Elon Musk’s tunneling venture, The Boring Company, is planning a massive citywide expansion of the currently modest underground transportation system it’s building in Las Vegas. The startup now wants to build a 10-mile sub-surface “loop” that serves the famous Las Vegas Strip of casino hotels and reaches the city’s downtown area as well as McCarran International Airport, all with Tesla vehicles. The Boring Company also wants to build an additional loop that connects properties owned by Caesars Entertainment. The proposed new tunnels would make it possible to go from the Las Vegas Convention Center to Mandalay Bay in just three minutes, as opposed to 30 minutes by surface roads during peak traffic hours, the company claims. The plans, first reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, were det...

Among Us, Innersloth’s breakout hit of 2020, is coming to the Nintendo Switch today. The news was announced during a special indie game-focused Nintendo Direct. The game will feature crossplay. Among Us is an online social deduction game, one in which players have to work together to complete tasks around the ship and figure out who the crew’s imposters are. Imposters, meanwhile, attempt to quietly kill as many other players as they can. Although the game first launched in 2018, it’s become a sensation, thanks to a newfound popularity on Twitch, played by streamers and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Among Us has become so popular, in fact, that Innersloth canceled the game’s sequel to focus on improving the original. The game picked up the award for best multiplayer title of the year durin...

At its latest indie showcase, Nintendo revealed a handful of intriguing titles coming to the Switch in 2021. The biggest reveal is that Among Us, one of 2020’s biggest games, isn’t just coming to the Switch, but it’ll be available later today. There were plenty of other cool announcements as well. One of the most notable reveals was that classic rouguelike series Spelunky is coming to the Switch next year. That includes both the original Spelunky as well as Spelunky 2, with local multiplayer for both (and online for the sequel) in summer 2021. Other reveals include: Fisti-fluffs, a physics-based brawler about cats wreaking havoc in an empty house, will launch in early 2021 Tunche, a hand-drawn action game about exploring a fantasy version of the Amazon rainforest, will be out in March 2021...

How do you want to be remembered after you die? A new documentary from Wall Street Journal tech reporter (and Verge alum) Joanna Stern examines the idea of what it means to pass on a digital legacy, and how we think about preserving our identities after death. She interviews Lucy, a young woman with a medical condition who is bound to a wheelchair and needs a feeding tube. Lucy is acutely aware of creating a digital footprint that will outlive her, but her mother Kate is not so certain about what may comfort her if Lucy passes on. Stern also spoke to James Vlahos, a man who recorded interviews with his terminally ill father and created a “Dadbot” to keep his father’s personality traits — as well as his jokes and his singing — alive after his death. Vlahos founded HereAfter AI, which uses c...

If you’ve been using Microsoft Office on an M1 Mac, it’s about to get better — Microsoft is announcing an update today that brings native support for Apple’s new custom chip architecture to the Windows productivity suite. The apps getting the updates are Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Notably absent, however, is Teams. The updates are making the apps universal ones — meaning these versions will run on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, so any upcoming updates or features will be coming at the same time for both platforms. If you’re a heavy user of Teams, you may be disappointed to hear that it hasn’t been included in today’s rollout of updates. Microsoft promises they’re working on that platform in their blog post, but the company hasn’t announced any sort of timeline. Mean...

Today’s episode of Decoder is a fun one, I promise: it’s about advertising. The modern ad industry is an enormous part of the economy that’s been completely reinvented by technology, that all of us experience every day, and to which most of us don’t pay any serious attention. And advertising is now also a data-intensive operation that has way more to do with technology and how it’s deployed than any of the Mad Men-era stereotypes we’re familiar with. When Mark Zuckerberg testifies to Congress that Facebook is free because it sells ads, what he’s really talking about is a massive ecosystem of data collection, user targeting, and sales tracking that operates in every corner of the tech industry. Facebook and Google have taken the old advertising cliche of finding the right customer at the ri...

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has fined Twitter €450,000 (around $546,000) over a data breach it disclosed back in January 2019, the regulator announced today. The security flaw exposed some supposedly private tweets from the service’s Android users for over four years. Twitter was found to have violated the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because it failed to notify the regulator within 72 hours of discovering the breach, The Wall Street Journal reports. The fine is notable because it’s the first time a US tech giant has been hit with a GDPR fine in a cross-border case, meaning one in which the Irish regulator consulted its EU counterparts as part of the decision. The investigation was headed by Ireland’s DPC because Ireland is where Twitter’s international hea...

Samsung’s president of mobile, TM Roh, dropped several hints about the company’s product roadmap in a blog post today. He confirmed Samsung will hold an event in January — presumably for the Galaxy S21. He also implied that S Pen support will come to more phones and that Samsung intends to broaden its line of folding phones with less expensive options. The hint that’s likely to have the biggest impact on the greatest number of customers is stylus support for Galaxy phones beyond the Note line. That’s been rumored for some time now, but Roh also claims that Samsung intends to “add some of its most well-loved features to other devices in our lineup.” It may mean that the other half of those rumors will also come to pass: that the Note line itself may soon be coming to an end, at least as a p...

In early April, I watched a clip of people crying, hollering, and clapping during a scene in Avengers: Endgame. It was the first time I remember missing physically sitting in a movie theater. I thought by May, when Black Widow was scheduled to be released, life would return to normal. I’d be back in a theater on Thursday night with friends, sitting among a packed room full of strangers chatting excitedly about the beginning of a new Marvel Cinematic Universe phase. That never happened. Instead, 2020 has become the first year since 2009 without a major addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s no big introduction of a new superhero, no highly anticipated sequel — there’s not even an entry in Marvel Studios’ MCU TV universe. WandaVision, once slated to premiere this month, won’t hit...