Technology

Nvidia announced a new policy for its GeForce Now cloud gaming service on Wednesday that means publishers and developers will have to opt into the platform to have titles remotely playable via Nvidia servers. “Response has been strong with over 200 publishers committing to streaming on the service,” reads a blog post from Phil Eisler, Nvidia’s GeForce Now vice president. “Going forward, only the games that are opted in will be available on the service, providing confidence in the GeForce Now game library. Yet some publishers are still figuring out their cloud strategies. Those that haven’t opted in as of May 31 will be removed.” “Those that haven’t opted in as of May 31 will be removed.” The shift is meant to address disputes over licensing, as Nvidia was including games on the platform wi...

HBO Max has arrived, bringing with it a precious few new original shows and an absolutely stuffed back catalog of terrific TV and movies. In addition to HBO’s extremely good library, Max adds a mountain of content produced and / or licensed by parent company WarnerMedia, like Friends and the Harry Potter franchise. It’s enough to please someone of every taste, but the more you dig, the more you find strange holes in the library — and the more you realize it’s not really clear what HBO Max is supposed to offer. These problems are clearest in the big, non-HBO umbrellas you find titles gathered under on HBO Max. DC, for example, is the place you’d expect to find, well, the movies in the DC Extended Universe. They’re mostly there! Except Birds of Prey, presumably because it’s too recent to joi...

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has filed a lawsuit against Google over allegations the company illegally tracked Android users’ location without their consent and even when the location tracking features had been manually disabled, according to a report from The Washington Post. The suit argues Google kept location tracking running in the background for certain features, like weather and for web searches using its search engine and Chrome browser, even after the user disabled app-specific location tracking. Only when a user dug further into the Android system settings and turned off broader system-level tracking did Google stop surreptitiously siphoning location data, the complaint argues. Google has found itself in similar controversies in the past over location tracking of Androi...

Just 17 minutes before its planned launch, SpaceX postponed its first crewed flight to space on Wednesday afternoon due to bad weather over the launch site in Florida. The two passengers on board SpaceX’s capsule — NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — will try again on Saturday, May 30th. “Not quite going to make it for this,” one person said over the mission control audio leading up to the flight. “Unfortunately, we’re not going to launch today.” The biggest concern for SpaceX was electrified clouds in the area around Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the company’s Falcon 9 rocket is meant to take off. Electrified clouds are particularly dangerous for a launch. If a rocket flies close enough, lightning could strike the vehicle, causing damage that could harm the mission. Mission con...

The annual Pokémon Go Fest will be held online from July 25th to July 26th this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The event is usually held in select cities across the globe, allowing players to meet up at physical locations like large parks and play the popular AR title. The first Pokémon Go Fest was held in Chicago in 2017 to celebrate the game’s one-year anniversary, but future festivals would expand to other countries, including Japan and Germany. This marks the first time Pokémon Go Fest attendees will be allowed to attend both days of the event — previously players could only attend one out of the two days. With the event going virtual this year, Niantic plans to increase the number of tickets available. “Since the event is now global, we’re taking steps to make tickets available...

From time to time a really bad post on a social network gets a lot of attention. Say a head of state falsely accuses a journalist of murder, or suggests that mail-in voting is illegal — those would be pretty bad posts, I think, and most people working inside and outside of the social network could probably agree on that. In my experience, though, average people and tech people tend to think very differently about what to do about a post like that. Today I want to talk about why. When an average person sees a very bad post on a social network, they may call for it to be removed immediately. They will justify this removal on moral grounds — keeping the post up, they will say, is simply indecent. To leave it up would reflect poorly on the moral character of everyone who works at the company, ...

Sony and Naughty Dog showed off nearly 24 minutes of new footage for the highly anticipated The Last of Us Part II in a State of Play video today. The Last of Us Part II seems to share a lot of similarities with the first game — you’ll still be spending a lot of time crawling behind cover to hide from people or the zombie-like Infected. But today’s video showed off some new features, including swinging on a rope to cross a chasm, riding a boat through a flooded area, and some improvements to crafting (including visual upgrades to your weapons). The video also showed Ellie swimming — something the character didn’t know how to do (and was actively scared of) in the first game. Image: Sony The video also shed some light on The Last of Us Part II’s story and where you’ll go while playing throu...

Google will soon let businesses add additional descriptors to their listings that appear in Google Search and Maps results to better help potential customers understand what a business offers at a glance. The company is adding these new descriptors and announcing a number of other features today to help businesses better surface important information for customers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The new descriptors, which Google calls “attributes,” are short notes that show up under other business information on a listing. A yoga studio that offers virtual lessons could add an “online classes” attribute, for example. Business owners can add one attribute, though their businesses will have to be verified by Google to use the feature. Here’s a screenshot from Google to give you an idea of what...

Facebook’s experimental app division has a new product out today called Collab that promises to deliver a new approach to collaborative music making. The app, launching as an invite-only beta on iOS, is from Facebook’s NPE division (short for new product experimentation). If it already in that brief description sounds like another swing at the cultural and creative juggernaut that is TikTok, that’s because it is. Collab’s primary pitch is that you can create short-form videos split into three simultaneous sources, so you can perform a single song by playing three different instruments and stitching it all together. Or you and one or two other friends can collaborate together by each supplying one of three parts. Collab will let you edit together three parts into one short-form music videos...

In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like hardware has taken a back seat to the software that drives our devices. Button of the Month will look at what some of those buttons and switches are like on devices old and new to appreciate how we interact with them on a physical, tactile level. Apple’s butterfly keyboard switches are some of the worst buttons to grace a modern device: unreliable, prone to breaking after coming in contact with a tiny bit of dust or grime, and incredibly difficult and expensive to replace. But the deeper issue isn’t that the butterfly switches often break; it’s the flawed design goals that led Apple to make a bad button in the first place. Apple chose to make an entire keyboard full of buttons that resulted in a more aesthetically pleasing design with shorter...

Just like nearly everything else on the internet, streaming services are ruled by recommendation algorithms that are designed to predetermine what people want before they ask for it. WarnerMedia is trying to accomplish the opposite with HBO Max. The company’s new streaming service, which will allow for three concurrent streams, is positing itself as a human-first platform — the opposite of Netflix’s strategy. As streaming becomes more of a centerpiece in people’s homes and more platforms find their way to people’s television sets, focusing on improving the actual curation system subscribers use is just as important as available content, Sarah Lyons, senior vice president of product experience, told The Verge. Lyons walked The Verge through a demo of HBO Max prior to the service’s launch an...

Tesla has reduced the price of the Model 3, Model S, and Model X in North America, Electrek reports. The Model S and X both saw $5,000 price cuts to $74,990 and $79,990 respectively for their entry-level Long Range Plus versions, while their more expensive Performance versions have also been cut by $5k. The Model 3 has received a smaller $2,000 price cut across all versions, with the online entry-level Standard Range Plus Model 3 now starting at $37,990. Pricing for the Model Y, Tesla’s newest car, is unchanged. A Weibo post from Tesla’s official account confirmed that the company will also reduce the prices of the Model S and Model X cars sold in China. However, the Chinese price of its Model 3 cars, which it produces domestically in the country, will not be cut as part of the changes. Th...