Technology

Facebook’s annual Oculus Connect conference will be held online-only on September 16th — and it’s being rebranded as Facebook Connect, part of the social giant’s gradual assimilation of its virtual reality subsidiary. Connect 2020 will be publicly streamed online, a change Facebook announced in April. Like the past few years’ events, it will cover a mix of virtual and augmented reality news from Facebook. But unlike previous years, it’s not being framed as a VR conference. Instead it’s the first outing for “Facebook Reality Labs,” a name that now covers all Facebook’s VR and AR efforts. That includes Oculus, which focuses on VR games and headsets; Spark AR, Facebook’s phone-based AR system; and the Portal videophone. Oculus, Spark AR, and Portal are all part of Facebook Reality Labs Facebo...

Verily Life Sciences, the health care company owned by Alphabet, is getting into insurance, the company announced today. Verily is launching a new subsidiary for the effort called Coefficient Insurance Company, which will be backed by the commercial insurance unit of Swiss Re Group. Coefficient plans to offer stop-loss insurance. The explanation for stop-loss is a little technical, but it boils down to this: Employers that pay for employee health claims out of pocket buy stop-loss insurance. Once they hit the predetermined point of money they pay for their employees’ health, the stop-loss insurance company pays the rest. Historically, Verily has been a turbulent company Insurance is something of a departure for Verily. A previous project from the company is Project Baseline, a massive medi...

As it predicted would likely happen, YouTube removed more videos in the second quarter of 2020 than it ever has, as the company leaned more on its algorithm in place of most of its human content moderators. That’s according to the Community Guidelines Enforcement report the company released Tuesday (via Protocol), which shows it took down more than 11.4 million videos between April and June. In the same period last year, YouTube removed just under 9 million videos. “When reckoning with greatly reduced human review capacity due to COVID-19, we were forced to make a choice between potential under-enforcement or potential over-enforcement,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Because responsibility is our top priority, we chose the latter — using technology to help with some of the work normal...

Data-mining firm Palantir has filed its prospectus to take the company public, and its S-1 confirms leaked information that showed the company has not turned a profit since its founding in 2003. Palantir plans to debut with a direct listing rather than selling shares in an initial public offering. It’s among a handful of tech companies that have taken this route to go public in recent years; Slack did last year, Spotify did in 2018, and Asana did earlier this week. The company lost $580 million in 2019, the filing shows, and in the first half of 2020 it has lost $175 million. The S-1 shows the company had 125 customers in the first half of this year, “including some of the largest and most significant institutions in the world,” the filing states, and its software “is used by customers acr...

Facebook is planning to expand its dedicated news section and says it is “considering” the UK, Germany, France, India, and Brazil as possible recipients, it announced Tuesday. The company’s timeline is vague: “within the next six months to a year,” so it’s curious why Facebook would announce something not yet imminent. But given Facebook’s volatile history with the news industry, and the trend toward requiring platforms to pay news outlets for their content, it’s possible the company is simply testing the waters for its next move. Facebook launched its News tab to US audiences in June, with plans to pay publishers that participated. To qualify as a partner, Facebook required publishers to pass its integrity standards and to have large enough audiences. It said it would rely on third-party ...

Two years after being unexpectedly pulled from a flight to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps is now assigned to a new mission to the ISS. Rather than flying on the Russian Soyuz rocket as first planned, Epps will join the first operational crew of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, a new private capsule developed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the station. Epps was originally supposed to fly on the Soyuz back in June 2018 Epps was originally supposed to fly on the Soyuz back in June 2018, as one of three crew members headed to the ISS for a six-month-long stay. That would have made her the first Black crew member of the ISS to live on the station long term. But in January 2018, NASA took Epps off the flight, providing little justification for the change. “A numbe...

Location tracking can be very handy — it’s convenient when an app can tell you, say, where the near restaurants or gas stations are — but it’s also a privacy issue. Do you want all your wanderings registered by Google? Are you comfortable knowing that Mark Zuckerberg’s minions know where you are at all times? (Well, not that Mark Zuckerberg has minions, but you know what I mean.) In this article, we’ll take a look at how to stop location tracking on your Android phone and how to delete your location history from your OS and from some of the more popular apps. As always, note that versions of Android can differ, and many manufacturers use overlays as well, which can change the locations of various commands — but they should be similar enough for you to be able to find your way. For these in...

In October 2016, a startup named Vue promised Kickstarter backers a pair of prescription eyeglasses that could double as wireless earbuds, a fitness tracker, and a smartwatch all at once, plus bone conduction speakers so nobody can eavesdrop on your music and calls. Two years and $3 million later, the company hadn’t shipped a single pair. But fast-forward another two years, and Vue is now ready to sell you on the idea again. The new $179-and-up Vue Lite glasses ditch some of the fancier features to focus on Bluetooth audio, with standard speakers instead of bone conduction, a microphone for calls and your phone’s voice assistant, touch controls, and an estimated 3.5 hours of music playback on a charge. The snap-on magnetic charging cable.Image: Vue In other words, they’re a lot like the di...

Facebook is doubling-down on its e-commerce business and attempting to make shopping a destination in its main app, similarly to how it’s already done inside Instagram. As a test in the US today, the company is launching Facebook Shop, a tab within the main Facebook app where people will be able to find products to buy and then purchase within the app. At the same time, the company is expanding its Shops product, which launched earlier this year and lets people sell products on Facebook and Instagram, to all eligible businesses globally, along with new customization options, messaging, and insights to measure results. Sellers will be able to communicate with their customers through Messenger, Instagram Direct, and eventually WhatsApp, too. Sellers will also be able to host Live Shopping ev...

Vader Immortal is available now on PlayStation VR. The three-part series was previously an exclusive for the Oculus Quest and Rift, but has now arrived on the PlayStation for $29.99. Each episode of Vader Immortal takes about an hour to play and is narrative heavy, with writing by David S. Goyer (best known for his work on the Blade and Dark Knight trilogies). The story is set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, with the player taking on the role of a small-time smuggler. You become tangled in a plot by Darth Vader himself and — not to spoil too much — but you end up discovering your Force powers, training with a lightsaber, and dueling Star Wars’ biggest bad. As The Verge’s Adi Robertson wrote in her review of the game last year, the whole experience plays out rather...

Edison Mail has announced a new paid subscription service, Edison Mail Plus, which adds a variety of anti-phishing and security-focused features to the email app for either $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year. The primary addition is a new “verify sender” feature, which flags suspicious emails when they arrive in your inbox and tries to provide better information around whether the person or company messaging you is legitimate. The system checks for standard email authentication markers like DMARC, does server tests to make sure that the email address can actually send and receive emails (and isn’t a spoofed address), and checks the email against a variety of existing spam databases. Edison also uses a local, device-based scan of your existing email and contacts to validate your contacts a...

The story of video games is too often told by the same kind of person. Reports have extensively detailed the ways the video game industry has centered its orbit around men and boys — particularly white men and boys — and that homogeneity often extends to the people who are allowed to tell the story of games. Writers who were there at the medium’s nativity and made a career of chronicling video game history are also frequently from the same background, blind to the ways in which they are treated as the default and, in turn, further that narrative. Netflix’s High Score sets out to amend this. It’s a (very) brief history of the video games that spans the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when games leapt from arcade cabinets to home consoles, ending just as 3D games arrive on the scene. Creator France Cos...