Technology

Sacha Baron Cohen’s sequel to Borat, his iconic and controversial 2006 satirical documentary, is coming to Amazon’s Prime Video at the end of next month, according to Deadline. Cohen filmed the movie in secret shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began sweeping the US, and Collider reports the British comedian has screened it for select film industry figures. But given the current pandemic-induced shutdowns of movie theaters throughout the country, Amazon has stepped in to acquire the streaming rights. Little is known about the movie except its official title: Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan, according to a leak on a Writers Guild of America website yesterday. It’s likely the film will revolve around ...

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has told employees that six-day workweeks will be mandatory ahead of the game’s November 19th release date, even though the studio has repeatedly and explicitly promised it would never do that, Bloomberg reports. On two separate occasions in 2019, studio co-founder Marcin Iwiński told game journalist Jason Schreier how it would address crunch, once even saying that “we want to be more humane and treat people with respect.” It seemed pretty clear from excerpts like this that mandatory crunch was not going to be part of it! Jason: If I’m a designer at CD Projekt Red and I say you know what I have kids, I have a family, I’m going to work from 10am to 6pm every day, and that’s it. Even until the very end. Am I going to be okay with that? Iwiński: Yes. Ye...

Twitter has just expanded its voice tweets feature, which lets you record a snippet of audio to include with a tweet, to more users on iOS. But perhaps more significantly, Twitter is now saying it plans to add transcriptions to voice tweets to improve accessibility, which could help address criticisms from the feature’s June 17th launch. If you want to get an idea of how voice tweets work right now, just press play on the below tweet to hear a voice clip from my colleague Tom Warren. There’s currently no way to see captions or a transcription of what he’s saying. (Note: Tom is not actually sharing exclusive next-gen console news.) Without any way to see a transcription, voice tweets were quickly criticized for not being accessible. Then it came to light that there wasn’t a dedicated team a...

Many Apple services were hit by outages Tuesday evening, including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, and Apple Arcade, according to Apple’s system status page. For all of the affected services, Apple vaguely says that “some users are affected.” However, as we were writing this article, some of the services were upgraded from being affected by an “issue” to having a full-on “outage.” Here is the full list of affected services: Find My Game Center iCloud Account & Sign In iCloud Backup iCloud Calendar iCloud Contacts iCloud Mail iCloud Web Apps (iCloud.com) iWork for iCloud Photos Apple Arcade Apple Music Apple Music radio Apple TV Plus Radio App Store Apple Books Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. Apple isn’t the only company to experience services outages...

In 2014, after what we described as “frequent failures,” a previous administration’s FCC attempted to change how the United States’ emergency 911 system works, including making it clear who’s responsible when multiple states inexplicably lose the ability to dial 911 at once. Some of that accountability might have come in handy this week — because we still don’t know what caused yesterday’s 911 outage. And it’s not clear anything would change even if we knew. Yesterday, 911 services reportedly disappeared in at least 14 states nationwide, some for as long as an hour and a half. Police departments and public safety agencies across the country had to hand out alternative numbers to call — and in some cases, warn residents not to dial 911 just to test if the systems had started working again. ...

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has beaten out competitor DuckDuckGo and will now be offered as an option for Android users during setup in select European countries, according to the results of Google’s most recent default search engine auction. DuckDuckGo, previously the most frequently offered alternative, was not pleased, and the company slammed Google’s auction process as pay-to-play. “This EU antitrust remedy is only serving to further strengthen Google’s dominance in mobile search by boxing out alternative search engines that consumers want to use and, for those search engines that remain, taking most of their profits from the preference menu,” DuckDuckGo wrote in a blog post published yesterday. “The auction model is fundamentally flawed and must be replaced.” Google hosts the aucti...

Following multiple reports of third-party Nvidia RTX 3080 cards crashing, PC builders are now trying to figure out how many capacitors are in their new GPU. That’s right: capacitors. On Friday, concerned buyers stumbled upon one theory for the crashes: a site called Igor’s Lab speculated that Nvidia’s partners were cheaping out on the capacitors used in their third-party RTX 3080s. And over the weekend, that theory spread: numerous outlets cited Igor’s Lab to publish headlines like “NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Stability Woes Traced To Cheap Capacitors” and “Capacitor issues are causing RTX 3080/3090 crashes.” A day later, it appeared there might actually be some evidence that capacitors could have caused the cards to crash. EVGA weighed in on the RTX 3080 capacitor controversy on Saturday, cit...

Spotify made major headlines last year when it announced an exclusive podcast deal with the Obamas’ production studio Higher Ground. Today, the company made a perplexing about-face. The company says it’ll be releasing the first season of The Michelle Obama Podcast on “a number” of other podcast listening platforms starting tomorrow, September 30th — two weeks after the show’s season 1 finale. The company hasn’t detailed which platforms will have the show, but it’s in conversations with several, including Stitcher, Google, Apple, and iHeart. A Spotify spokesperson says future seasons, if the show’s renewed, will “debut exclusively” on Spotify, but didn’t say whether the show will be windowed or fully exclusive to the service. Obama’s show expansion could help Spotify find a larger audience ...

All indications point to Google announcing its latest Chromecast during tomorrow’s hardware event. And I managed to buy one yesterday even before the “official” unveiling. So I can now confirm that, as the rumors and leaks have made clear over the last few weeks, this isn’t the Chromecast that most consumers are familiar with. Instead of a no-frills TV dongle that plays content sent over from the apps on your phone or computer, the new Chromecast finally has a proper menu system and familiar user interface — and now it comes with an actual remote control. Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge It’s a Chromecast in name, but Google’s latest streaming device is actually powered by Android TV, which more closely resembles a Roku or Amazon Fire TV in how you use it. ...

David Attenborough’s debut on Instagram last week landed him the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to reach 1 million followers. It only took the prolific broadcaster and naturalist 4 hours and 44 minutes to obliterate the record, previously held by Jennifer Aniston. Since then, his followers have more than quadrupled. Aniston set the previous Instagram record in October 2019, gathering a million followers 5 hours and 16 minutes after her debut. David Beckham, Pope Francis, and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have also held the title in the past. But none of them have commanded the world’s attention for as long as Attenborough has in his nearly seven-decade career. “I’m making this move and exploring this new way of communication to me because, as we all know, the world is in troub...

Sonos has filed another patent lawsuit against Google, alleging that the search giant is infringing five wireless audio patents across the entire line of Nest and Chromecast products. The move comes on the eve of Google’s fall hardware event on September 30th, where it is expected to announce a new Chromecast and Nest smart speaker alongside new Pixel phones. Sonos filed its first patent lawsuits against Google in January in California federal court and with the International Trade Commission; the federal case has been put on hold while the ITC reaches a decision on whether to block Google’s allegedly infringing products from market. The new case is filed only in the federal court for the Western District of Texas — an emerging patent lawsuit hotspot — and represents a more aggressive appr...

HBO Max hasn’t been available on Roku devices since the new streaming service launched at the end of May, but with Roku soon adding support for Apple AirPlay 2 to many of its 4K devices and TVs, there will be a workaround. People with an Apple device (iPhone, iPad, Mac) will be able to use AirPlay 2 to stream HBO Max on their Roku devices even though an official app is not yet live, the company confirmed to The Verge. AirPlay 2 support is supposed to roll out by the end of the year to most recent 4K Roku players and Roku TVs, so it’s possible Roku and HBO parent company, WarnerMedia, could reach a deal before then, making the AirPlay workaround unnecessary. If they don’t, however, using AirPlay 2 will be one of the only options Roku owners will have to watch HBO Max. This isn’t the first t...