Technology

Joseph Staten, a veteran of the Halo series, has returned to the franchise and will work on the campaign for the upcoming Halo Infinite. The news was first reported by Bloomberg, and Staten confirmed the move on Twitter. “I’m thrilled to join @Halo to help them ship Halo Infinite,” Staten says. “As the project lead for the Infinite Campaign, I will be supporting the team’s existing, great leaders and empowering them to do their best work.” Halo Infinite was planned to launch alongside the Xbox Series X in November, but was delayed into next year following an underwhelming demonstration during Microsoft’s Xbox games showcase. “We have made the difficult decision to shift our release to 2021 to ensure the team has adequate time to deliver a Halo game experience that meets our vision,” studio...

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer has left the company amid ongoing disputes with the Trump administration and sale talks. The news was first reported by the Financial Times. “We appreciate that the political dynamics of the last few months have significantly changed what the scope of Kevin’s role would be going forward, and fully respect his decision,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “We thank him for his time at the company and wish him well.” Mayer announced his departure in an internal email viewed by the Financial Times. TikTok’s general manager Vanessa Pappas will take over the position in the interim, according to the newspaper. “In recent weeks, as the political environment has sharply changed, I have done significant reflection on what the corporate structural changes...

Joe Budden, one of Spotify’s biggest exclusive podcasters, is leaving the platform. He and his show will no longer be exclusive to Spotify after September 23rd, he says in his most recent episode while also seemingly suggesting it might not be available on Spotify at all. “September 23rd, I cannot tell you where this podcast will be,” he says. “But as it stands, I can tell you where it will not be, and that is Spotify.” He takes the announcement as an opportunity to scorch Spotify and detail his history with the company, which, in the years since he signed his deal, has become a sizable competitor in the podcast field. He claims his show exceeded Spotify’s audience reach expectations by 900 percent to the point that his listeners crashed the platform. Still, he says he never received a bon...

Empire Market, one of the biggest dark web marketplaces, has been offline for three days, Bloomberg reports. It’s unclear what has happened to the site’s administrators, whose identities remain unknown. According to a cybersecurity expert interviewed by Bloomberg, there are typically two outcomes for marketplaces like Empire Market. Either the admins are arrested, or they steal users’ deposits. Empire Market was popular for drug deals. It also offered fake documents, such as passports, and malware. After other sites, such as the Silk Road and AlphaBay, shut down, Empire Market was the most-trafficked dark web marketplace, Bloomberg reported. The goods on Empire Market were exchanged for cryptocurrency. In order to operate on a market like this, anyone wishing to sell has to make a deposit....

Dota 2’s The International, one of the biggest esports tournaments in the world, has broken its own record as the most lucrative esports event, with this year’s prize pool already totaling more than $34,396,000. The previous record was a prize pool of $34.3 million from last year’s event. Dota 2 developer Valve was forced to indefinitely delay this year’s iteration, The International 10, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That delay was announced in April. Valve hasn’t yet announced a new date. It’s not clear if the tournament will even be taking place during 2020 at all. Valve said that it “can’t yet commit” to a new date for The International 10 or the return of the Dota Pro Circuit, a series of events that determine who qualifies for The International, in a tweet on Monday. In following how ...

A COVID-19 test that takes 15 minutes and can be run without lab equipment was just granted emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. It will cost $5, and runs on a simple card that uses the same technology as a pregnancy test. The test, called BinaxNOW, is produced by the health care company Abbott. The company is also launching an app that syncs up with the tests, and gives people who test negative for the virus a “digital health pass” that they can display on their phone. CEO Robert Ford said in a statement that the combination of the test and the app offer a “comprehensive testing solution.” The company said in a press release that it plans to produce 50 million tests per month by October. “Due to its simpler design and the large number of tests the company antic...

Quibi means “quick bite.” Seriously, that’s the meaning behind the name. The entire idea behind the streaming service is that it should fit into your daily schedule, on your phone, on the go, in chunks that take under 10 minutes to watch. Every single show is filmed in a format that supports portrait and landscape viewing at the same time, encouraging you to flip your phone around. So you might be surprised to learn: Quibi just screened one of its entire shows, stitched together as a feature film, at a drive-in theater. Not exactly a quick bite The Hollywood Reporter says that The Americana theater in Los Angeles played host to the dinner-and-a-movie spectacle, which saw Quibi’s thriller series The Stranger played in a way it was absolutely not meant to be played before. As series creator ...

Over at The Markup, reporter Jeremy B. Merrill discovered that discriminatory advertisements still turn up on Facebook, despite the company agreeing to end some targeting options for housing, job, and credit ads last year. In its report, The Markup identified several job listing ads that leveraged Facebook’s platform to discriminate against users of specific ages or “multicultural affinity”: In May, a Wisconsin health care agency, Tenderness Health Care, posted a job ad on Facebook looking for personal care workers. According to Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this ad” pop-up, when the agency purchased the ad, it asked Facebook to not show it to anyone over 54 years of age. And they asked Facebook to show it specifically to people who have “African American multicultural affinity.” Facebook, a...

Google are making it easier to move images directly from your camera to Google Photos, Owners of recent Canon cameras can now upload photos and videos directly to the popular photo management platform over a wireless connection. This auto-backup to Google Photos feature works with both the iOS and Android versions of the image.canon app, but you’ve got to make sure your camera is compatible. If it is, just make sure you’ve got the latest image.canon app update installed and you’ll see the new option for transferring photos to Google Photos. You don’t have to worry about losing any quality from your shots, either: all images are synced to Google Photos at their original quality. In February, Canon launched its own version of a cloud backup service But there is one asterisk here that might i...

More than 2,400 police agencies have entered contracts with Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition firm, according to comments made by Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That in an interview with Jason Calacanis on YouTube. The hour-long interview references an investigation by The New York Times published in January, which detailed how Clearview AI scraped data from sites including Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo to build its database. The scale of that database and the methods used to construct it were already controversial before the summer of protests against police violence. “It’s an honor to be at the center of the debate now and talk about privacy,” Ton-That says in the interview, going on to call the Times investigation “actually extremely fair.” “Since then, there’s been a lot of co...

Fall Guys’ total world domination continues as Sony on Wednesday morning announced the game has become the most downloaded PlayStation Plus title of all time. The goofy and playful battle royale platformer, released earlier this month by UK studio Mediatonic, has had about as successful of a launch as an indie game can get, blasting to the top of the Steam charts on PC and enjoying what sounds like an unprecedented number of downloads on Sony’s PlayStation 4, where it’s available for free. The game’s official Twitter account has more than 1.2 million followers, and the game has been a constant on the Twitch viewership charts. According to publisher Devolver Digital, the game has sold more than 7 million copies on PC. Sony won’t disclose just how many copies of the game have been downloaded...

A bill in the California state legislature that shared bike and scooter companies feared would have ended their businesses has been amended. A previous version of the bill, AB 1286, included language that would have prohibited companies like Bird, Lime, and Uber from using liability waivers — a provision these companies claimed would essentially force them to shut down if enacted. Without these waivers, shared mobility companies could be held liable for all kinds of injuries and accidents, including those resulting from poor road infrastructure, reckless driving, or negligent riders. But after a massive outcry from the bike and scooter industry, the bill has been amended to remove the language regarding liability waivers — thus eliminating the main threat posed to shared mobility providers...