Technology

BMW is developing an all-electric version of its 5 Series and 7 Series sedans as well as its entry-level X1 SUV, the company announced Monday as it detailed a renewed effort to reduce its overall emissions. That means almost all of the German luxury automaker’s most popular cars will soon have all-electric variants. A fully electric version of the 3 Series, BMW’s most popular car in the US, has already been spotted in testing camouflage, and the forthcoming BMW i4 is expected to slot into the 4 Series lineup. Earlier this month, the company revealed the production iX3, the all-electric version of its top-selling X3 SUV. BMW has also teased the iNext SUV, which appears similar to the slightly larger X5. To be sure, BMW won’t only sell these all-electric variants. The company will still make...

Facebook has prided itself on thorough moderation and removal of COVID-19 misinformation posted to its social network since March, but the company is now under fire for having failed to take action for several hours against a fast-moving viral Breitbart News video promoting dangerous coronavirus conspiracy theories and treatments over the weekend. The company now says removal of the video “took longer than expected,” in a statement given to The Verge, and the company is going to investigate why. Before Facebook took action, the video — featuring non-experts refusing to wear masks while touting unverified virus cures — had been widely shared tens of millions of times, including by President Donald Trump and his son on Twitter. After it began gaining traction, Facebook and other social netwo...

If you’ve ever wanted to invite giant beetles or hornets into your living room without fear, Google has got you covered. The search giant is adding 23 creepy crawlies to its growing roster of augmented reality search results that also include dinosaurs, cats, scorpions, bears, tigers, and more. The full list of insects includes: rhinoceros beetle, Hercules beetle, Atlas beetle, stag beetle, giant stag, Miyama stag beetle, shining ball scarab beetle, jewel beetle, ladybug, firefly, Rosalia batesi, swallowtail butterfly, morpho butterfly, atlas moth, mantis, grasshopper, dragonfly, hornet, robust cicada, brown cicada, periodical cicada, Walker’s cicada, and evening cicada. You’ll be able to see the AR insects by searching for the name of the insect and selecting the “View in 3D” option. Andr...

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says apps and websites aren’t legally liable for third-party content, has inspired a lot of overheated rhetoric in Congress. Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have successfully framed the rule as a “gift to Big Tech” that enables social media censorship. While Democrats have very different critiques, some have embraced a similar fire-and-brimstone tone with the bipartisan EARN IT Act. But a Senate subcommittee tried to reset that narrative today with a hearing for the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, a similarly bipartisan attempt at a more nuanced Section 230 amendment. While the hearing didn’t address all of the PACT Act’s very real flaws, it presented the bill as an option for Section 230 defenders ...

I was standing inside Virgin Galactic’s tourist spaceplane with three translucent green heads floating in front of me. One of the heads was explaining how the white-and-teal passenger seats that dotted the walls of the cabin were made out of aluminum and carbon fiber materials. White disembodied hands gesticulated in the air as the head — which belonged to Jeremy Brown, Virgin Galactic’s design director — spoke. In reality, Brown’s head is neither green nor detached from his body. Brown, the other two virtual tour guides, and I were all wearing Oculus Quest headsets, which allowed us to meet virtually and peruse the cabin interior of Virgin Galactic’s spaceplane called VSS Unity. It’s the company’s primary spacecraft, designed to take paying customers to the edge of space and back for a qu...

Drugstore chain Rite Aid secretly deployed facial recognition software across a network of security cameras in hundreds of locations in the US, according to a new investigation from Reuters published on Tuesday. The company had been doing so for more than eight years, and it only recently stopped using the technology, it told Reuters, following a “larger industry conversation” around facial recognition and the grave concern over privacy risks and racial discrimination it presents. Yet, Reuters says Rite Aid initially defended its use of facial recognition as a deterrent against theft and violent crime, having nothing to do with race. The investigation found that not to be entirely true. “In areas where people of color, including Black or Latino residents, made up the largest racial or ethn...

The nominations for the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards are in, and once again, streaming services dominated the nominees. Netflix led the pack with 160 nominations, with Amazon and Hulu making waves, too. But there are also some big new names on the list this year, with Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, and even Quibi picking up their first nominations for the coveted TV awards. Apple TV Plus picked up a total of 18 nominations across various categories, including two major nominations for prestige series The Morning Show: Steve Carell was nominated for Best Actor in a Drama Series, and Jennifer Aniston was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama Series. Billy Crudup and Mark Duplass were also nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for their roles in the series. The Emmy nominations mar...

In this week’s Vergecast interview series, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Wired senior editor Andy Greenberg, author of Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. As the title describes, Greenberg’s book is all about a group of hackers inside the Russian government called Sandworm, who were responsible for damaging cyber warfare attacks in various countries over the past few years and forever escalated what we think of as “cyberwar.” Andy and Nilay discuss the origins of Sandworm, the intricacies and ramifications of their attacks, and what mysteries and situations are still left unsolved. Listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear the entire conversation. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from the conversation. Nilay P...

Never has an electric bike caused more commotion as I rode it through Amsterdam, the world’s bicycling capital, and home to a culture known more for practicality than flash. “Where’s the battery?” a passerby would ask, admiring the stunning simplicity of the carbon fiber Gogoro Eeyo electric bike. “It’s in the wheel,” I’d say, motioning to the Smartwheel, a brilliant bit of Gogoro engineering that houses the motor, computer, and electrons required to power the lightweight bicycle. The Eeyo 1S bike, which goes on sale today in the US and begins shipping in limited quantities August 10th, is exactly what you’d expect from the mind of Horace Luke. Gogoro’s CEO was the former head of design at HTC back when the company was showing competitors like Nokia, Ericsson, and Samsung how to maximize t...

On July 30th, a six-wheeled NASA rover the size of an SUV will embark on its journey to Mars — the beginning of a quest to decode the secrets of the Red Planet’s past. Equipped with a suite of instruments and a sophisticated drilling system, the rover is tasked with answering a question that has confounded scientists for centuries: has Mars ever hosted life? The rover, named Perseverance, is one of NASA’s most ambitious planetary missions to date. Not only is the bot designed to analyze Martian rocks for signs of past life, but the rover will also cache dozens of samples to leave somewhere on the Martian surface. These samples will weather the next decade on Mars, awaiting the day that another robotic spacecraft arrives, picks them up, and blasts off. The samples will then travel back to o...

The biggest question about the Blade Stealth 13 isn’t actually about the Blade Stealth 13. It’s about the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, the best ultraportable gaming laptop ever made. For a while, that title belonged to the 2019 Blade Stealth 13. Prior to last year, it was highly unusual to see any GPU more powerful than an MX 150 in a thin and light machine. (The reason rhymes with “schooling.”) That Razer crammed an Nvidia GTX 1650 into a chassis that was just 3.13 pounds and 12 x 8.3 x 0.6 inches was astonishing to see. There was nothing like it on the market. That’s not true anymore, thanks to the Zephyrus, which not only houses a powerful GPU (up to an RTX 2060 Max-Q) and CPU (up to AMD’s eight-core Ryzen 9 4900HS) in a chassis that weighs just over 3.5 pounds, but it’s also aggressively pri...

The promised second summer update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is coming very soon, and it brings with it some exciting changes. According to Nintendo, the two big gameplay additions are the ability to dream and new fireworks shows. Meanwhile, for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, a cloud backup system is also coming so you won’t lose your island. For dreaming, Nintendo says players will be able to take a nap in any bed in their house. “While dozing off, you may find yourself in a strange realm where you’ll be greeted by Luna,” the company explains. “Luna offers visits to other islands as a dream, and with her help, you can share your island as a dream with others too. She will grant those who share their island a ‘Dream Address’ which players can exchange and use to visit each othe...