Technology

TikTok and parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit late Friday against the Trump administration to try to fend off a ban on new downloads of the app set to take effect Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported. TikTok says in the lawsuit that the Trump administration’s decision to ban new downloads of the app, announced Friday, violates free speech protections. The administration, which includes the Commerce Department, “took this extraordinary action of prohibiting a popular communication and information-sharing platform without affording its owners … due process of law, and for political reasons rather than because of any ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to the United States,” according to the suit. It’s not the first time TikTok has argued that the Trump administration acted against i...

This week, I got to talk about vaccines and vaccine information with Natalie Dean, and The Verge’s Nicole Wetsman and Nilay Patel on The Vergecast. It was a great conversation with Dean, who is an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida and an expert in infectious disease epidemiology who has worked on designing vaccine trials. After the podcast, I got to ask something that had been on my mind: how did she — a person who works with scientific data every day — feel about the flood of early versions of scientific studies being posted online? And how much attention should the general public be paying to them? Before we get to her answer, let’s take a quick step back to talk about what these early studies are. Scientists call them preprints, and they are studies that ...

A judge in Nevada has dismissed a defamation case by a former Tesla employee, who claimed the company spread a false rumor about him after he admitted leaking internal company information to a reporter in 2018. Tesla argues in court documents that former employee Martin Tripp violated trade secrets and computer crimes laws when he told a Business Insider reporter that Tesla was wasting a significant amount of raw materials during production of its Model 3. Tesla identified Tripp as the source of the leaked information, which Tripp later confirmed. He was fired, and Tesla filed a lawsuit claiming he had “unlawfully hacked the company’s confidential and trade secret information.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk emailed Tesla staff telling them an employee had tried to “sabotage” company operations. Musk...

In the ongoing Epic Games vs. Apple saga, Epic says in a new legal filing that Apple made incorrect statements in its own legal filing earlier this week, asserting that Apple “cherry picked” Google search results about the popularity of Epic’s Fortnite game. Apple had suggested that Epic started the legal fight over Fortnite in the App Store as a publicity stunt, and that Fortnite had already started to decline in popularity: “For reasons having nothing to do with Epic’s claims against Apple, Fortnite’s popularity is on the wane. By July 2020, interest in Fortnite had decreased by nearly 70% as compared to October 2019. This lawsuit (and the front-page headlines it has generated) appears to be part of a marketing campaign designed to reinvigorate interest in Fortnite.” Apple kicked Fortnit...

Sony has apologized for PS5 preorders being a bit of a mess. “Let’s be honest: PS5 preorders could have been a lot smoother,” says Sony from the official PlayStation Twitter account. “We truly apologize for that.” Preorders for the new PS5 console began on Wednesday, a day earlier than Sony had said retailers would take orders. It led to a scramble as Walmart and others started randomly opening up their PS5 preorder slots. Some preorders even disappeared after around a minute. Sony now says it will release more PS5 consoles for preorder “over the next few days,” promising that retailers will share more details. It’s not clear if these preorders will be delivered on launch day, and Sony is also promising “more PS5s will be available through the end of the year.” Amazon also started warning ...

Sony’s upcoming PS5 hardware has appeared at the FCC, providing us with the first close up photos of the next-gen console. The FCC has published a variety of images, showing the standard PS5 laying horizontally, the included cables, and the removable base that holds the console in both vertical and horizontal positions. The photos also show just how big the PS5 truly is. We learned earlier this week that the PS5 is the biggest game console in modern history, even topping the Xbox One VCR-like shape and Sony’s own PS3. Sony released official dimensions during its PS5 event this week, but they don’t include the “largest projection” or the optional base measurements. PS5 laying horizontally. It’s clear from these FCC photos that it’s going to be a challenge to fit a PS5 into entertainment cen...

Amazon’s fall Alexa hardware event is scheduled for September 24th at 1PM ET. It’s not clear exactly what might be revealed at the event — an invite sent to The Verge only said that Amazon’s Devices and Services team would be sharing “some news.” An Amazon spokesperson specified that the event is invite-only, however, which suggests it won’t be live streamed for the public. It seems likely we’ll see new smart speakers and smart displays of some kind. At last year’s event, for example, Amazon launched the high-end Echo Studio speaker, the Echo Show 8 smart display, and a third-generation Echo speaker. But Amazon could also show off some more surprising hardware; the company revealed the Echo Frames glasses, which had Alexa built in, and the Echo Loop, a smart ring, at its hardware event las...

Cyberpunk 2077 will be released in a few months, but ahead of its mid-November launch, developer CD Projekt Red unveiled the system requirements needed to run the PC version of the game, and shockingly, you don’t need to upgrade your computer to play the game. The game’s recommended specs are not too heavy, requiring only an Intel Core i7-4790 or an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G processor, and either an Nvidia GTX 1060 or an AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics card. So if you have not upgraded your rig in a bit, you’ll likely still be able to run the game at 1080p. However, if you are looking to run the game at 1440p or 4K resolution or take advantage of the game’s technical features like ray tracing, you will need to upgrade to an RTX 20-series or RTX 30-series GPU. C:\>systeminfo /u 2.0.7.7\cyberpunk /p ...

Procreate’s next big update, Procreate 5X, adds new filters and adjustments that’ll be really helpful for those who are trying to do more in Procreate and less in Photoshop. The update will be available starting September 21st. The new filters include halftone, gradient map, chromatic aberration, glitch effects, and more. The iPad illustration app has also added a reference companion window, allowing you to view your whole canvas or another image on the side while you work. While overall this feels less flashy than the Procreate 5 update (which added Animation Assist, a tool that adds a timeline to the app for looping GIFs and animated videos), it includes some great features that help to close the gap with Adobe’s more powerful desktop software. The updates that might be most exciting to ...

One of iOS 14’s big new features is picture-in-picture mode, which lets you watch a video in a small window while you’re doing other things on your iPhone. That could be handy if you, say, wanted to watch a YouTube video in Safari while chatting with your friends or checking email. But unfortunately, it seems YouTube has done something to stop videos from continuing to play when PIP mode is activated — unless you pay for YouTube Premium, that is. See for yourself. Pull up a video on YouTube’s website in Safari on your iPhone and take it full screen. If you tap to pull up playback controls, you should see a picture-in-picture icon in the top-left corner of your screen. Tap that, and the video briefly goes into its own window before returning to its usual spot on YouTube’s site. And if you t...

Comcast and Roku have come to an agreement months after NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service launched. Peacock will be available to stream on Roku in the coming weeks. “We are pleased to have reached an agreement with Comcast that will bring Peacock to Roku customers and maintains access to NBCU’s TV Everywhere apps,” a Roku spokesperson said. “We look forward to offering these new options to consumers under an expanded, mutually beneficial relationship between our companies that includes adding NBC content to The Roku Channel and a meaningful partnership around advertising.” The decision comes after Comcast and Roku got into a public argument over the status of dozens of NBCUniversal apps. Comcast threatened to pull the apps as negotiations over Peacock continued; this included 11 net...