Technology

Simone Giertz, the self-described Queen of Shitty Robots, has created a selfie photo booth out of Legos for her dog Scraps and yes it’s as cute as it sounds. It helps that the dog is a VERY GOOD GIRL and extremely photogenic. Giertz used a Lego Mindstorms kit and Lego bricks (the video is sponsored by Lego) to build the little booth, and rigged a pedal, distance sensor and circuit board to connect to a dispenser that drops a treat and snaps a photo whenever the dog presses the pedal. “She goes in there, there’s a little pedal that she can push with her paw, it triggers a camera that triggers a treat dispenser,” Giertz explains. “She gets a treat, I get a photo, everyone’s happy.” She says she got the idea for the dog photo booth when she was trying to teach Scraps to scroll on a phone with...

Audio media has been an important part of our lives ever since the first news reporters crackled their way into homes in 1920. For a while, it was assumed that visual media and then the internet would be the death of audio-only entertainment, but it turned out that this obit was premature. Podcasting has brought new popularity to audio. From book readings to investigative reporting to political opinion to interviews to theatrical productions, podcasts offer a wide range of entertainment and information. And what’s even better: podcasting is a creative form available to anyone who has a computer, a microphone, and an internet connection. We spoke to Andrew Marino, audio engineer and producer at The Verge, to find out what he recommends for those who want to try this out as well. What follow...

This story is part of a group of stories called Only the best deals on Verge-approved gadgets get the Verge Deals stamp of approval, so if you’re looking for a deal on your next gadget or gift from major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and more, this is the place to be. In case you paid no attention at all to what happened this week in tech, you missed out on the iPhone 12 announcement along with Amazon Prime Day 2020. You can preorder an iPhone 12 right here, but in regards to Prime Day 2020, some of those deals are still happening. It’s a far cry from what we covered on Tuesday and Wednesday, with 80-something of the best tech deals we’ve seen recently. But what’s left is still worth checking out. First off, Daily Steals is selling the second-generation AirPods wi...

Google said in a new blog post that hackers linked to the Chinese government have been impersonating antivirus software McAfee to try to infect victims’ machines with malware. And, Google says, the hackers appear to be the same group that unsuccessfully targeted the presidential campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden with a phishing attack earlier this year. A similar group of hackers based in Iran had tried to target President Trump’s campaign, but also was unsuccessful. The group, which Google refers to as APT 31 (short for Advanced Persistent Threat), would email links to users which would download malware hosted on GitHub, allowing the attacker to upload and download files and execute commands. Since the group used services like GitHub and Dropbox to carry out the attacks, it made...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) reelection campaign as his company closed in on a coveted position as TikTok’s US technology partner. FEC documents show that Ellison made the $250,000 donation to the Security is Strength PAC on September 14th. The Security is Strength PAC has bought ads exclusively in support of Graham’s political ambitions, including his 2015 presidential campaign and his current reelection bid for the US Senate. It’s an unusually large donation for Ellison, who also donated $5,200 to Graham’s Majority Fund in January. The timing of the larger donation is also remarkable, coming mere hours after Oracle officially announced that it had been chosen as TikTok’s technology partner for its US operations, beating ...

For the first time in nearly 20 years, there are multiple new Star Trek shows you can watch at once. There’s the Next Generation sequel series Picard for those feeling nostalgic; for fans looking to undo a few buttons on their Starfleet uniforms and maybe even drink a beer, there’s the off-kilter animated comedy of Lower Decks. But the series I’m most interested in is Star Trek: Discovery, because it boldly goes where no other Star Trek series has ever gone before. I know. Tall order. But Discovery hits real good. Its third season begins with a clean break from the 23rd Century — and yes, you can start there. The season 2 finale ended with the crew of the eponymous U.S.S. Discovery leaping forward 950 years into the future, from the 23rd Century to the 32nd, which is to say an era where no...

This week’s US Food and Drug Administration approval of an Ebola drug is a big milestone in drug development — one that’s closely tied to our current efforts to fight COVID-19. Before COVID-19 started sweeping across the world, Ebola was one of the most high-profile viral diseases on the planet. “Everyone was ready to speed up and contribute and do things with Ebola that they don’t routinely do because Ebola is such a dire situation,” virologist Daniel Bausch told The Verge’s Justine Calma last August. “There are a lot of bad diseases in the world, but there’s not many that provoke the same sort of response and kind of an all-hands-on-deck approach to things.” More than a year later, and the Ebola experiments have finally paid off in more ways than one. The drug is an antibody treatment ca...

Facebook designed changes to its news feed algorithm in 2017 to reduce the visibility of left-leaning news sites like Mother Jones on its platform, the Wall Street Journal reported, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had personally approved the plans. But Mother Jones editorial director for growth and strategy Ben Dreyfuss wrote that in multiple meetings with Facebook executives in 2017 and 2018, they reassured him that while traffic might go down, “not in a way that favored or disfavored any single publication or class of publisher.” According to the WSJ, some policy executives at Facebook voiced concerns in 2017 about pending changes to the news feed algorithm that they thought might have a larger impact on right-leaning news sites like the Daily Wire. So engineers made changes to the algorithm tha...

I stepped away from my computer for dinner, halfway through writing a story for The Verge. When I got back, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Windows 10 had restarted my computer without permission yet again — to install yet another forced OS update onto my solid state drive. The craziest part: When my machine finished rebooting, it now contained the exact thing I’d been writing about before I was rudely interrupted. Microsoft had installed unsolicited, unwanted web app versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook onto my computer. Seriously, the story you’re reading right now started off as a news post about this happening to other people. Screenshot: Sean Hollister/The Verge OK, it’s not as bad as when my entire computer screen got taken over by an unwanted copy of Microsoft Edge. That was ...

It’s been tough to talk about OnePlus as a scrappy smartphone startup ever since its close ties with Oppo, Vivo, and electronics giant BBK came to light, but it’s still hard to overstate the impact of Carl Pei, the longtime public face of the company, who confirmed his departure today. As a marketer and brand builder, he used a combination of bold promises, real talk, and unconventional marketing campaigns to turn smartphone enthusiasts simply looking for a good deal into a community of OnePlus fans. In a blog post on the OnePlus forums, Pei says he’s “looking forward to taking some time to decompress and catch up with my family,” without addressing why he’s doing so now. Rumors suggest that he had a falling-out with fellow co-founder and CEO Pete Lau, and / or that Pei left to start his o...

I will never look at a cantaloupe the same way again, thanks to Vann Newkirk II’s latest story in The Atlantic, “Earth’s New Gilded Era.” The fruit brings back some of my favorite summer memories with my mom, who makes a juice with it that Filipinos lovingly call “melon” — pronounced with a long, rolling L (“mell-lown”) so that the name is as satisfying to say as the juice is to drink on a hot day. Newkirk’s story is a tale of two cantaloupes: he follows the fruit’s journey from the fields where it’s harvested by people working in scorching heat, to a hotel breakfast buffet where the melon is a refreshing snack for summer vacationers. The contrast is just one illustration of the many ways heat will draw the lines between the world’s haves and have-nots as climate change wreaks havoc on the...

Tesla has reportedly canceled an audacious return policy in which new buyers of its electric vehicles could return them for a full refund within seven days. The news, reported on Friday by Electrek, marks an end to one of CEO Elon Musk’s flashier marketing strategies. Musk has used the seven-day return policy as a way to boast about Tesla’s high customer satisfaction rates, with the company so confident new buyers would be happy with their purchase that they wouldn’t take Tesla up on its bold offer, which is practically unheard of in the standard automobile industry. The policy also bolstered the idea that Tesla cars are like consumer electronics products — you could order and customize them online and have them delivered to your door, like an Amazon package, and then return it if you were...