Technology

Disney has debuted the first look at The Mandalorian’s second season just days after announcing the show will return on October 30th. The trailer seems to pick up where the first season of The Mandalorian left off, with the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda (or “the Child”) traveling across the galaxy. A voice over ominously talks about “stories of eons past” describing great battles between the Mandalorian and “an orderer of sorcerers known as Jedi.” Exciting! Fans of The Star Wars live-action series have been concerned the show wouldn’t hit its previously announced October release date. The coronavirus pandemic shut down production on a plethora of TV shows and films around the world. But Disney CEO Bob Chapek has reiterated multiple times over the last few months that The Mandalorian was still ...

Razer’s Opus wireless, over-ear headphones with active noise cancellation are 10 percent off their usual price. Normally $199.99, this brings them down to $180. It’s the first time we’re seeing these headphones discounted, and Verge readers can get this exclusive deal over at Razer by adding the Opus to your cart, then putting the offer code VOXOPUS10 in at checkout. I reviewed the Opus, and for a company that doesn’t have much experience in the consumer headphones space, I was impressed with the performance and value. Their design is understated, and the sound quality was better than I expected. Their long battery life with USB-C charging is an extra perk. If you don’t want to spend upward of $400 on noise-canceling headphones, these are a solid place to start. The OnePlus 7T is $400 at W...

On the eve of the deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok, there was much movement and little certainty. The whole thing seemed to come down to three words — “trusted tech partner” — and no one I’ve spoken to seems to know what they mean. The most recent events were set in motion on Sunday afternoon, when ByteDance announced that it had rejected Microsoft’s bid to acquire TikTok in favor of an extremely vague partnership with a 43-year-old enterprise software company. The gist seems to be that Oracle would store American TikTok users’ data and keep it secure, but the app itself would continue to be owned and operated by ByteDance. It could also include voting control over by TikTok by its US-based investors, the New York Times reported. Oracle and Walmart are both separately negotiating for ...

Adobe is updating both Premiere Pro and After Effects today with some pretty nice quality-of-life features, but the most exciting are the new 3D transform tools for After Effects. The new feature will combine position, scale, and rotation into one easy-to-use tool, mimicking what other professional 3D applications like Cinema 4E, Maya, and Blender have been providing users for years. Users can also focus on one type of property for greater precision. GIF: Adobe As someone who has worked in After Effects for over a decade now, these updated 3D tools (aka gizmos) are long overdue and appreciated. Having all three tools directly accessible in the viewport is fantastic. Besides being easier to use and more precise, matching the UI philosophy of other applications will make switching between pr...

Facebook today pledged to slash greenhouse gases and purchase enough renewable energy and offsets to cancel out carbon dioxide emissions from its global operations this year. Facebook is, however, still pumping out greenhouse gases. The social media giant is also setting a more ambitious target for 2030 The company’s new pledge to reach “net zero” carbon emissions puts it on track to offset its global power consumption and planet-heating pollution by investing in renewable energy projects and initiatives that capture and store carbon dioxide. The social media giant is also setting a more ambitious target of reaching net zero emissions for its supply chain, employee commuting, and business travel by 2030. That puts Facebook in the middle of the pack when it comes to climate commitments from...

Sony has cut its expectations for PlayStation 5 production by four million units and now expects to manufacture about 11 million units by the end of March, according to a new Bloomberg report. Bloomberg had previously reported that Sony planned to boost production to around 10 million units by the end of December, but now says that the company has run into manufacturing problems. The PS5’s system-on-a-chip, its core processing component designed by AMD, is said to be a particular issue with yields as low as 50 percent at one point, meaning that half the parts produced weren’t fit to ship. While that figure has been improving, according to Bloomberg, the yields are “yet to reach a stable level.” The revised figure is still well above what Sony was said to have been originally planning for t...

A fired Facebook data scientist has written a 6,600-word memo condemning the company for ignoring evidence the platform was wielded to sway public opinion and manipulate elections around the world, according to a report from BuzzFeed News, which obtained a copy of the memo. The data scientist, Sophie Zhang, was fired earlier this month and posted the memo on her final day, the report reads. Zhang implies she was fired after bringing her concerns to upper management and being told to stop focusing on issues beyond the scope of her role, which involved analyzing the platform to identity “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook’s phrase for bot networks and other malicious activity with ulterior motives like influencing election outcomes and promoting or undermining various political cand...

Actor and comedian Paul Rudd is a certified young person. He wants to give you some extremely relevant, very timely, and completely appropriate words of advice. Just… just watch it. Trust me: Here are some additional links, also provided without context: You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a dating should be. It begins with giving you back power. Get to meet Beautiful people, chat and make money in the process. Earn rewards by chatting, sharing photos, blogging and help give users back their fair share of Internet revenue.

Deep within the acidic clouds of Venus, astronomers have detected a tantalizing gas never found on the planet before — a gas that, remarkably, could be a sign of life on the hellish world. The gas’s presence isn’t enough to say for sure that Venus hosts life forms, but the fact that it exists in the planet’s clouds indicates that something is going on there that we don’t fully understand. The gas in question is a nasty one called phosphine, a toxic and explosive molecule with a lingering odor of garlic and dead fish. Astronomers discovered the putrid gas lurking within a layer of clouds on Venus, where temperatures are pretty close to those on our planet. They didn’t find much — just small traces in the swirling mix of sulfuric acid clouds that surround the planet. “It’s equivalent to a fe...

Sony has announced the A7C, a new camera that is by far the smallest model yet in its Alpha range of full-frame mirrorless cameras. The A7C looks more like one of Sony’s APS-C models like the A6400 than an A7, adopting a more compact body with the electronic viewfinder on the top left corner of the camera’s back panel, rangefinder-style. The A7C measures 124.0mm x 71.1mm x 59.7mm and weighs 509g. It has a 24.2-megapixel full-frame sensor with in-body image stabilization and a standard ISO range of up to 51,200. It can shoot up to 10fps with autoexposure, and it’s capable of 4K/30fps or 1080p/120fps video, both at up to 100Mbps. The body has USB-C, Wi-Fi, and a vari-angle 3-inch 921,000-dot LCD. Sony has developed a new kit lens designed to pair with the A7C; when used together, the company...

AMD’s last batch of new graphics cards, the midrange Radeon RX 5700 series, didn’t wow with their designs or high-end performance — but the new Radeon RX 6000 looks like it could actually be the long-awaited answer to Nvidia’s flagship graphics cards. When I say “looks like,” I mean it quite literally, though: AMD revealed the design of its new card on Twitter today, and its triple-fan, giant shroud, and twin 8-pin power connectors show it’s visually ready to play the part. Take a first look at the design of the new Radeon RX 6000 series. Our upcoming @AMD #RDNA2 graphics cards will feature a brand new cooler design, and you can study every angle yourself on our Fortnite Creative Island. 8651-9841-1639. pic.twitter.com/KGQAOXDivZ — Radeon RX (@Radeon) September 14, 2020 It’s a more refined...

Sen. Josh Hawley is publicly calling on the Treasury Department to reject Oracle’s proposed partnership with TikTok, saying the arrangement is unacceptable on national security grounds. The deal is currently awaiting a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but it has received praise from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who chairs the committee. In an open letter to Mnuchin, Hawley calls on the secretary to take a more skeptical look at the proposal. “CFIUS should promptly reject any Oracle-ByteDance collaboration, and send the ball back to ByteDance’s court so that the company can come up with a more acceptable solution,” Hawley writes. “ByteDance can still pursue a full sale of TikTok, its code, and its algorithm to a U.S. company, so that...