Technology

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...

This year’s online-only Pokémon Go Fest took place over the weekend, and since it was the first one open to all players regardless of their physical location, it’s perhaps not surprising to hear that it was the biggest one yet. Niantic says “a record number of millions of trainers” took part from 124 countries and regions around the world, catching nearly a billion pokémon in total. The event involved new quest lines on each day, culminating in players battling Team Rocket leaders and catching Victini, a mythical pokémon that was made available in the game for the first time. Other features of the fest included new shiny pokémon and regional pokémon appearing outside their typical habitats, although not as many as might normally be found at an in-person event. The only regional addition I ...

Logitech has announced a wireless version of its 2019 Pro X gaming headset called the Pro X Lightspeed. It’s almost identical to the wired version, complete with the same aluminum and steel design, but there are a few key differences. Going wireless isn’t even the biggest perk; it’s actually the USB-C charging. No other wireless gaming headsets that charge via USB-C come to mind, so in this regard, the Pro X Lightspeed in a league of its own. The other perk, of course, is being wireless. The audio and chat are delivered through its included 2.4GHz USB Type-A wireless receiver, and Logitech claims the headset can remain connected up to 13 meters away — if, for some reason, you find yourself 42 feet away from your PC or gaming console. Like the wired Pro X, Logitech includes a set of velour-...

Spotify’s Mac and Windows apps can now start streaming to Chromecast devices, 9to5Google reports. Previously these apps have been able to control pre-existing Chromecast streams, but they couldn’t start them directly. Instead, you had to start a Chromecast stream on iOS or Android, before it could be controlled through the desktop app using Spotify Connect. You can start a Chromecast stream on the desktop apps the same way as a Spotify Connect stream — by clicking the “Devices Available” button on the bottom right of the interface. From there you can select between your streaming devices, which now include Google Cast as well as Spotify Connect-enabled speakers. The functionality, which arrives with version 1.1.38 of the desktop app, is something users have been asking for for years. There...

Staffers from Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign must remove TikTok from personal and work phones, a campaign official told The Verge. That’s because of security concerns around the popular app. TikTok can access users’ clipboard content on iOS — potentially a problem for anyone using a password manager to log into secure accounts. Some politicians are particularly wary of TikTok because the video-sharing app is owned by Chinese internet company Bytedance. The White House is threatening a ban too The Biden campaign’s policy — first reported by Bloomberg — echoes that of other US government officials. The US departments of State and Homeland Security, the US Army, and the US Navy have already banned TikTok on government issued-devices, and the Democratic and Republican national comm...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Inspector General has opened an investigation into its own agency’s role in the Trump administration’s replacement of an Obama-era rule that curbed greenhouse gas emissions in cars. The Inspector General’s office will examine whether there were any “irregularities” during the process of crafting the new rule — dubbed the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient Vehicles rule, or SAFE — which holds automakers to weaker fuel economy standards through 2025. Those potential “irregularities” were flagged in May by Sen. Tom Carper (DE), who asked for an investigation in a letter to the EPA Inspector General at the time. “I’m pleased that the EPA Inspector General is opening an investigation into this rule, which was the product of the most procedurally problematic pr...

On the list of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s most-pressing problems right now, porn is nowhere near the top. But that doesn’t mean the agency, which operates New York City’s subway and bus systems as well as its commuter rail systems, isn’t irked that obscene language keeps showing up in its search results on Google. The problem was first noticed by the Queens Daily Eagle newspaper, which published its findings in an article titled “The MTA has a porn problem.” It turned out that if you searched for a Metro-North station name in Google, you’d get some, shall we say, less-than-delicate-sounding language among your results. And the description kept showing up for at least 13 stations along Metro-North’s Hudson line. This was no isolated incident. As you can see, as of Monday, J...