Technology

President Donald Trump is prematurely declaring victory in a handful of hotly-contested battleground states via tweets Wednesday, challenging Twitter’s rules against making premature election result claims. “We have claimed, for Electoral Vote purposes, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (which won’t allow legal observers) the State of Georgia, and the State of North Carolina, each one of which has a Big Trump lead,” Trump tweeted Wednesday. Twitter started applying labels to the offending tweets shortly after they were posted. More than 1 million ballots are still to be counted in Pennsylvania, and election officials are not legally required to finish their count before Friday. Most importantly, the president has no authority to certify voting results; that power rests with state election o...

Life is in constant flux, but experiencing change during the extremely uncertain time we’re all going through is especially maddening. Luckily, you can still eke out some semblance of control in your web browser — this new Chrome extension created by designer Claudio Postinghel lets you replace Google’s newly redesigned but confusingly similar icons for the old ones (via Gizmodo). When it was announced in early October, we described Google’s big rebrand of G Suite as a way to set up the search giant’s products to better compete with Microsoft Office. Yet the newly named Google Workspace brought a collection of redesigned, cohesive app icons that — in my opinion, and that of my coworkers — are very difficult to recognize from a distance. The new icons.Image: Google The new icons kept the ba...

YouTube says a video claiming President Donald Trump won the election does not violate any of its policies and has allowed it to stay on the platform, despite the election not being called by major news outlets for either candidate yet. The decision stands in contrast to Twitter and Facebook’s more aggressive attempts to clamp down on misleading claims and misinformation over election results. The video, titled “Trump Won. MSM hopes you don’t believe your eyes,” was published by pro-Trump network One American News Network (OANN) on Wednesday. YouTube says the video violates its advertising guidelines but not its content policies, so it can stay online but will run without ads, the company confirmed to The Verge. The story was first reported by CNBC. In the video, an OANN anchor says Trump ...

Last year’s DJI Mavic Mini might have been the smallest and lightest full-featured drone on the market, but it was also a little compromised out of the gate. Today, the DJI Mini 2 — don’t call it a Mavic — is addressing some of its limitations. While the new $449 drone might look identical to the original, even weighing the same 249 grams (which means you don’t need to register it with the FAA), it now comes with DJI’s OcuSync 2 wireless connectivity for up to 2.5 times the wireless range and more stable connectivity. The original was unusual among DJI’s drones for relying on relatively shaky Wi-Fi, which was definitely a dealbreaker for me. It uses the same controller as the new Mavic Air 2, though of course you won’t get that drone’s advanced obstacle avoidance and tracking because it ha...

GameStop holds an annual conference for its employees, and this year’s event includes a rather unnerving TikTok challenge: make the best dance video, and your store can win the privilege of letting employees work for extra hours during Black Friday. The contest, spotted by TheGamer, has since been pulled from GameStop’s website after the promotion received media attention and press inquiries. GameStop did not respond to The Verge’s requests for comment or clarification. For the contest, GameStop asked employees to upload a video to TikTok showing them dancing to a brief song. The contest is meant for “store leaders,” and the company encourages them to get other employees to help. “Be creative, rope in your team, and have fun with it!” the page read before it was removed. GameStop wanted te...

Denmark plans to cull up to 17 million mink, the country’s entire population, after reports that the animals could pass a coronavirus mutation to humans. The announcement came from Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen at a press conference, and there are currently no published scientific reports on the mutation or its effects. The virus has been found at over 200 mink farms in Denmark, which produces most of the world’s mink fur. Over a million animals were already culled on Danish farms in October. This summer, about 100,000 mink were culled in Spain after similar outbreaks. Outbreaks on mink farms in Utah killed thousands of animals. Denmark’s announcement comes after 12 people in the country were found to be infected with a type of the novel coronavirus that had also been found on mink farm...

Valve is adding a feature to Steam to let developers invite people to test their games right from the Steam client without needing a beta key. The new feature, called Steam Playtest, will let interested testers click a button in a game’s listing on the Steam store to request access and be added to a queue. Here’s what the button looks like, from the Total War: Elysium Steam page. Prodeus and Iron Conflict are also currently running public Playtests, and Valve tells The Verge that all three games are still accepting requests for new testers. The button to request access to a Playtest.Image: Steam Developers will be able to see how many people have access to the test, how many people have expressed interest and are waiting for access, and how many people have been manually invited to a test....

Despite a long history of horror movies succeeding at the box office, Jason Blum struggled to get his movies into the theater. Conventionally wisdom relegated to a few times a year, mostly around Halloween. Horror movies didn’t have the prestige of dramas, or the universal appeal of blockbuster superhero movies, and were seen as risky investments, even if the numbers said otherwise. But after a decade of hits — Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Get Out — Jason Blum’s company Blumhouse Productions finds itself no longer chasing theatrical releases, especially as AMC and Regal struggle during the pandemic. Instead, streamers are coming to him, and the best part: they believe horror is a year-round affair. In many ways, Blum has often been ahead of the curve—and the scary, spooky, and violent m...

A handful of months ago, we wrote about a deal on the OnePlus 7T that dropped its price from $599 to $499. That price has fallen considerably since, and today’s deal at Woot is evidence of that. You can get one for just $370. This is a new, unlocked model in either the “glacier blue” or “frosted silver” colorway, with 128GB of storage and support for a single SIM card. It has a one-year warranty through OnePlus and includes all original accessories. It’s a great value, considering it has the Snapdragon 855 Plus processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 90Hz refresh rate display that makes everything appear smoother on the screen. One caveat here is that it’s the T-Mobile version of the phone, and it comes pre-loaded with T-Mobile applications. That’s obviously not so bad if you’re a T-Mobile user, but ...

In April, a group of astronomers spotted a short, powerful blast of radio waves coming from outer space and then successfully found where it was coming from: a powerful object within our own galaxy. It’s the first time scientists have been able to pinpoint these mysterious radio waves coming from inside the Milky Way, making them the closest of their kind that we’ve ever seen. The radio waves — known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs — seem to have sprouted from an incredibly powerful “zombie” star lurking in our galaxy, according to three papers published in the journal Nature. Called a neutron star, the object is a super dense leftover that forms when a massive star, bigger than our own Sun, collapses in on itself. But this neutron star is what’s known as a magnetar. It hosts an incredibly p...

As President Trump falsely claims victory in the 2020 election, ballots are still being counted across the country — and they will continue to be counted in the days and weeks ahead. (Some deadlines, like for military and absentee voters, have not even passed yet.) We’re headed for record turnout. Despite what the president wants you to think, things are working normally across the country, even despite the extraordinary circumstances brought by the pandemic. States and local governments are running elections like they always do, with teams of carefully observed election officials and volunteers. Widespread voter fraud continues to be an imaginary monster dreamed up by conspiracy theorists. And voting on Election Day seems to have gone pretty smoothly, despite the specter of intimidation a...

Twitter and Facebook have continued to restrict and label posts from President Donald Trump after yesterday’s presidential election, this time addressing a baseless claim that Democratic officials were manipulating vote counts in key states. Twitter flagged the tweet and restricted its reach, saying it was “disputed and might be misleading.” Facebook added a general warning that “final results may be different from the initial vote counts.” Trump triggered a social media crackdown early this morning after accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election. Neither platform has actually removed his claims. Their policies were set before the election. “We placed a warning on this Tweet for making a potentially misleading claim about an election,” said Twitter in a statement to The Verge. Tru...