Technology

Legendary chiptune composer Hirokazu “Chip” Tanaka just released a new solo album, and the accompanying music video for the song “Hammerhead Shark Song” is extremely fitting. Tanaka is best known for the soundtracks to classic games like Metroid, Mother, and Donkey Kong, and the video — directed by Toby Fox, creator of the retro-infused RPG Undertale — maintains that vibe while adding in a hefty dose of surrealism. The black-and-white video looks a bit like a 16-bit era game, with Tanaka walking to a performance where he’s joined, naturally, by some hammerhead sharks onstage. Things only get stranger after that: there are walking UFOs, floating faces, and all manner of odd imagery. The fact that it resembles a video game shouldn’t be too surprising; Fox says a lot of the scenes were made u...

Twitch has intervened to stop the US Army using fake prize giveaways on its esports channel to redirect viewers to army recruitment pages. The practice was brought to light by a report from The Nation on the use of esports as a recruitment tool by the American military. The US Army, Navy, and Air Force all field esports teams comprised of active and reserve personnel who stream on Twitch and chat with young viewers about life, video games, and the opportunities afforded by military service. “Esports is just an avenue to start a conversation,” Major-General Frank Muth, head of the army’s recruiting command, told ThinkTech Hawaii recently. “We go out there and we have a shared passion for esports … and it naturally devolves into a conversation, ‘What do you do?’, ‘I’m in the army.’” “T...

To mark World Emoji Day today, we’re getting our first official look at some of the new emoji that are coming to smartphones later this year. Emojipedia has compiled some of the emoji designs coming to iOS and Android, and 9to5Google has some additional details on the designs coming to Android specifically. Below you can see Apple’s take on some of the new emoji: a ninja, an all-gender sign, a coin (which has “The Crazy Ones” embossed on the top, a sneaky reference to Apple’s famous “Think Different” ads), bubble tea, a dodo, and a piñata. There’s also a pair of lungs, as well as an emoji which Unicode has called an “anatomical heart” to differentiate it from the traditional heart emoji. Apple’s new emoji include bubble tea, a dodo, and pinched fingers.Image: Emojipedia Oh, and we’ve also ...

It’s been such a newsy week that we’re ending it with two columns — enough to last you the whole weekend. First, we have what we hope is the ultimate Twitter hack FAQ, in response to this week’s catastrophic security breach. Yesterday’s issue was the most-read in Interface history, and we wanted to make sure you had all the latest developments. Second, I’m excited to share a conversation I had this week with Facebook’s chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, on the occasion of the company releasing its annual diversity report. I wanted to know why progress on the issue has been so hard to come by, what it means that she reports to Sheryl Sandberg now, and much more. Williams is a dynamo; I hope you’ll enjoy our chat. * * * On Wednesday, Twitter had the worst security incident in company ...

Microsoft has updated its Launcher app for Android to version 6, giving the software a big visual overhaul and a performance upgrade on top of its existing functionality. Version 6 of Launcher has a new app icon, dark mode, daily wallpaper feature (provided by Bing), customizable icons, and it now works in landscape orientation, too. There’s also a personalized news feed that updates throughout the day, and general performance improvements, including faster loading and reduced battery drain, thanks to a new codebase. The app is available to download here from Google’s Play Store, and you can read more about the changes in Microsoft’s blog post about the launch here. The main purpose of the Launcher app is to make it easier to transition between tasks on Android and Windows devices. Image: ...

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened an investigation into Wednesday’s unprecedented Twitter attack that resulted in numerous takeovers of high-profile accounts belonging to politicians, business leaders, and corporations, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The FBI is concerned that the coordinated attack and the vulnerabilities it exposed in Twitter’s systems may pose serious security risks, due to the widespread compromising of sensitive accounts, including those of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. President Donald Trump’s account was not affected, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tells the WSJ, but it’s unclear if Trump’s account has special protections. Twitter tells The Verge it is in communication with t...

NASA has once again delayed the launch of its new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, mostly due to disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Most recently slated to fly in March of 2021, the massive telescope is now scheduled to launch on October 31st, 2021. The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, had already predicted this delay. NASA came up with the new date after doing an extensive review to see if the March 2021 timing was actually possible. The agency attributes about three months of the delay to social distancing and other precautions that had to be put in place to keep people safe from the coronavirus. “Much of the impact, of course, comes from people not being at work, right?” Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of the Science Missio...

On Thursday, DoorDash announced that it’s introducing on-demand delivery services from Walgreens to provide “everyday essentials” to your doorstep. Customers in Atlanta, Chicago, and Denver can now order over 2,300 items from the pharmacy chain, including over-the-counter medication, groceries, snacks, and beauty products. DoorDash and Walgreens did not mention whether users can also have their prescription medication delivered, so you’ll probably still need to go to the store for that. DoorDash says it plans to expand to other cities with “major markets” this summer, including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Seattle. If Walgreens isn’t your drugstore of choice, DoorDash announced a similar partnership with CVS in June, along with convenience sto...

Everything you need to know about the July 15th Twitter hack Contributors: Verge Staff On July 15th, multiple verified Twitter accounts associated with public figures and companies were hijacked and tweeted out a bitcoin scam. Several accounts impacted by the breach include Apple, President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, rapper Kanye West, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Uber. The takeovers lasted more than two hours, and Twitter took extreme measures to prevent other verified accounts from being compromised, such as disabling the ability for some users to send new tweets and locking some users out of their accounts. Twitter is continuing to look into the incident, and the FBI has launched its own investigation, so there’s sure to be mor...

In yesterday’s massive attack on Twitter, some of the highest-profile accounts on the service, including President Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates had their accounts hijacked to peddle bitcoin scams. Notably, however, Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous Twitter user of all, was untouched by the attack, and it could be because Twitter has implemented extra protections for his account. In a deeply-reported article on the attack, The New York Times writes that Trump’s Twitter account has extra protection after “past incidents,” citing two anonymous sources — a senior White House official and a Twitter employee. The New York Times didn’t specify what those past incidents were, but they could refer to the November 2nd, 2017 incident where a rogue employee deactivated Trump’...

Longtime Netflix executive Ted Sarandos has been named co-chief executive officer alongside co-founder Reed Hastings, the company announced today as part of its second quarter earnings release on Thursday. “Ted has been my partner for decades. This change makes formal what was already informal — that Ted and I share the leadership of Netflix,” Hastings said in a letter to shareholders. The letter does not state if the move is effective immediately. Hastings added in a blog on the company’s website that he doesn’t expect much to change “in terms of the day-to-day running of Netflix.” Hastings added that “our key executive leadership groups are unchanged,” and he further characterized as the move as “Ted’s well deserved promotion formalizing how we already run the business today.” “Ted’s wel...

Netflix is still growing as people continue to shelter in place around the country, but the company is now seeing the slowed subscriber growth executives predicted would arrive three months ago. On top of announcing that longtime chief content officer Ted Sarandos would join CEO Reed Hastings as co-CEO, the company made a few impressive announcements. Netflix added 10.2 million subscribers in its second quarter, beating the company’s own estimates that it made in its first quarter, which suggested it could add around 7.5 million. Netflix noted that it added 26 million paid new subscribers in the first two quarters of 2020 alone; in 2019, the company added 28 million subscribers in total. The company’s revenue grew 25 percent year over year, but missed its revenue goals for the quarter. The...