Technology

The Verge is a place where you can consider the future. So are movies. In Yesterday’s Future, we revisit a movie about the future and consider the things it tells us about today, tomorrow, and yesterday. The movie: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow The future: The Terminator movies are, with the exception of Terminator Salvation, more about fighting the future than living in it. What glimpses of it we get are usually bleak: human civilization is leveled, reduced to rubble by the rogue artificial intelligence Skynet, which seizes control of the world’s nuclear stockpile to use in a pre-emptive attack on its biggest threat: humanity. A funny quirk of this film and the one preceding it is that while they are mostly set in “the present,” they do not take place in ...

A new set of Bose sunglasses with built-in speakers could be on the way, as revealed by new filings published by the FCC. You might be looking at the next version of the company’s Frames line of audio sunglasses. Check out this gallery for a few other angles on the glasses, showing where the speakers and hardware are built into the frames and and also revealing that the device will have a USB-C port for charging: Grid View The filings also confirm the glasses will be branded under the Frames line and that they’ll be IPX4-certified for water resistance. Image: FCC Bose already offers two sets of sunglasses, the Alto and the Rondo, as part of the Frames line, but these new glasses revealed by the FCC are of a different style than those existing models. You can see what the Rondo and Alto loo...

Los Angeles city attorney Mike Feuer has charged four people, including TikTok creators Bryce Hall and Blake Gray, for allegedly throwing a series of parties in the Hollywood Hills area in violation of public health restrictions in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. “We allege that these hosts have been incredibly irresponsible with a highly infection disease spreading,” Feuer said during a press conference. He announced that Hall and Gray were being charged with violating the Safer LA health order and the city’s party house ordinance. “These parties can be really out of control night clubs.” The charges follow complaints from neighbors and mayors about the supposedly raucous parties. Hall and Gray are two of TikTok’s most popular creators, with 13.2 million and 5.9 million followers...

If you’re a US resident who bought a pair of wireless Powerbeats 2 earbuds before August 7th, then you could soon get a payout over the allegedly “defective” device, MacRumors reports. Apple has agreed to pay out $9.75 million, after it was accused of falsely advertising the so-called “shoddy” earbuds as “sweat & water resistant” and “built to endure.” However, the plaintiffs say that these claims weren’t true, and that the earbuds would stop holding their charge after “minimal use.” Although Apple has agreed to settle, it hasn’t admitted to doing anything wrong. The legal filing notes that the company decided that settling was cheaper than the expense of going to trial. Although the original lawsuit filing claims that Apple’s 2016 Powerbeats 3 headphones were also defective, the settl...

When the test came back positive, Quinn* felt like he was getting a second sentence. “I believe that they sent COVID here to kill us. Simple as that,” he says. He’s a father living at San Quentin State Prison and one of over 2,200 inmates who’ve tested positive for COVID-19. The correctional facility, located in Northern California, is the center of the largest coronavirus outbreak in the country. San Quentin was likely a preventable tragedy. Since March, experts have been warning that prison outbreaks of COVID-19 would be deadly and calling on federal judges to release inmates and reduce the size of the prison population. That happened too late in California. Instead, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) moved men away from a prison in Chino, which was battli...

Did you forget that Facebook was building the OASIS? The company has been working on its multiplayer virtual reality social space, Horizon, for a while now, which is comparable in concept if not scope to the fantastical VR world of Ready Player One. This week the company announced it’s expanding access and making Horizon an invite-only public beta. As it goes into public beta, Horizon has been kitted out with new games and environments. Facebook is also introducing new tools to combat abuse on the platform, including the option to step away from the VR world into a “Personal Safe Zone” where you can mute, block, and report the people and content around you You can join Horizon’s waitlist here. The app (service? social network? gamespace?) is, in Facebook’s own words, “an ever-expanding uni...

If you’re looking to do some PC gaming at respectable frame rates, Asus’ ROG Strix G15 gaming laptop seems like an affordable way to go about doing that. Usually $1,000, it’s $880 today. Despite its low price, it has some high-end features, like Intel’s 10th Gen Core i7-10750H six-core processor, a fast 512GB PCIe-based SSD, and an 144Hz refresh rate display that will provide a fluid-looking experience in and out of gameplay. The rest of laptop isn’t quite as impressive, but it’s not bad for the price. There’s 8GB of RAM built-in (and you can add more yourself later on), and in terms of graphics, it has Nvidia’s GTX 1650 Ti graphics chip. You’ll likely be able to run most of your games at smooth frame rates on medium graphical quality, though of course that depends on the games you like to...

OnePlus is planning to release an entry-level handset codenamed Clover for around $200 later this year, according to a detailed but unconfirmed report from Android Central. We’ve seen snippets of information about “Clover” floating about the web for a while now, including a purported GeekBench score for the device. But Android Central’s latest report, citing an anonymous “insider source,” includes a full spec-sheet and the suggestion that Clover will launch “imminently” in global markets, including the US. According to Android Central, Clover will have a 6.52-inch 720p (1560 x 720) IPS LCD display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage (expandable via MicroSD), a Snapdragon 460 SoC, 6000mAh battery with 18W fast charging, a rear fingerprint sensor, 3.5mm headphone jack, and three camera array on the...

Xiaomi intends to start mass-producing smartphones equipped with its under-display camera technology next year, the company announced today. This is technically the third generation of the technology Xiaomi has developed, the company says, although the first and second versions it produced have yet to find their way into a mass-market consumer device. According to Xiaomi, its latest version of the technology works by allowing the selfie camera to see through the gaps in the display’s sub-pixels, which are the red, green, and blue dots that combine to make each pixel. Xiaomi says that the area of the display above the camera has the same density of pixels as the rest of the screen, so it can “perfectly disguise” the selfie camera underneath. It adds that the selfie camera itself should matc...

After announcing Chromecast support for Google Meet, Google has now revealed that the company’s consumer video chat app, Duo, will be coming to Android TV in the form of a native app that lets users start video calls from their TV screen. A beta of Google Duo for Android TV will be released “in the coming weeks.” You can launch both one-on-one and group video calls with the app. “If your TV doesn’t have a camera built-in, you can simply plug in a USB camera,” Google said in its blog post — assuming your TV supports such a thing. The move continues Google’s push to bring its video communication apps to bigger screens. By adding Chromecast support for Google Meet, the company gave people more flexibility in where they can have their work meetings. The combo of your couch and the TV screen wi...

Apple blocked Facebook from informing users that Apple would collect 30 percent of in-app purchases made through a planned new feature, Facebook tells Reuters. Apple said the update violated an App Store rule that doesn’t let developers show “irrelevant” information to users. The feature lets Facebook users buy tickets for online events directly through the app. Apple’s rules say that purchases of digital content have to use the App Store’s payments system, giving Apple 30 percent of the total. Facebook says it asked Apple to waive this fee so that all of the revenue could go to event organizers, but Apple refused. The feature is now available, but without the message about Apple’s 30-percent cut. Earlier this month, Facebook released an image showing what the message would look like in th...

Early this week, Robert Robbins, president of the University of Arizona, got a phone call about poop that helped him stop an outbreak of COVID-19. As part of the school’s return-to-campus plan, the university was analyzing the wastewater from on-campus dorms for signs of the coronavirus. The professor heading the project was calling to say he’d found the virus in the sewage from a dorm called Likins Hall. Administrators descended on the dorm, tested every person inside, and found two cases in people who didn’t have symptoms. “This is going to be a very valuable tool to help us get out in front,” Robbins said in a briefing today. Catching people who are infected with the virus but don’t have symptoms is critical to stopping its spread, he said, and wastewater was helping to find them. When ...