Technology

The killing of two protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday night may have emerged in response to a Facebook event posted by a self-described militia, which referred to the event as a “call to arms.” The event was also promoted by Infowars, which posted a screenshot of the Facebook event listing. The listing is no longer publicly accessible but, reached on Facebook, the Kenosha Guard account confirmed to The Verge that the screenshots were authentic. The group’s Facebook page has also been taken down, but it boasted more than 3,000 members as of this morning. A Facebook representative said they could not comment at this time, citing an ongoing investigation. However, the platform confirmed to The Verge that the event was in violation of Facebook policies and that it was in the process o...

Amazon has canceled its planned adaptation of Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas, the first novel in the author’s acclaimed sci-fi Culture series. Amazon Studios acquired rights to the book in 2018 as part of an effort to create shows with “global appeal” for Amazon Prime Video, but multiple sources say development is no longer happening. Utopia creator Dennis Kelly, who was adapting Consider Phlebas for the streaming screen, told Den of Geek earlier this week that work on the project had stopped. “We’d talked about it for two or three years and it went a certain way along,” said Kelly. “I’d written probably 20-30 pages of the bible, but once I got a sense that it wasn’t going to happen, I had to stop writing because you become emotionally attached to the work.” “In the end, I just think the ...

Over at the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Mike Isaac spoke to “more than a dozen people” familiar with Microsoft’s plans to buy TikTok in order to tell the full “political soap opera:” What started as discussions about a small investment morphed into a big, messy, political soap opera. Pushed by President Trump, who has ordered TikTok’s U.S. operations to be sold or to cease operating, ByteDance is now discussing selling parts of TikTok’s global operations to several potential bidders. And with so many groups jumping into the talks to get a piece of any deal, all are trying to drive their own interests and agendas. What’s interesting is seeing how TikTok’s initial talks with Microsoft about a small investment back in July have morphed into something far bigger and out of its contr...

The US government is announcing $1 billion in new funding for multidisciplinary AI and quantum computing research hubs today, according to multiple reports. A total of 12 hubs will be funded, each embedded within different agencies of the federal government. Their work will span a diverse range of topics, from using machine learning for atmospheric and ocean science, to speeding up high-energy physics simulations with quantum systems. The investment is part of a slow push from the White House to fund emerging technologies. Many policy advisors have worried that America is falling behind in AI and quantum research compared to rivals like China, and warn that these technologies are instrumental not only for economic development but also national security. Comparing spending on AI and quantum...

Apple is planning to add augmented reality content as a companion to its TV Plus streaming service next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The AR content could be characters or objects from the show itself, which would then be overlaid onto the real-world environment via an iPhone or iPad app. Apple had originally intended to launch the feature this year, before the coronavirus pandemic delayed its plans. Bloomberg reports that the experiences are being designed to draw in and retain subscribers, as well as promote Apple’s AR technology. The report compares it to bonus content, like a director’s commentary for a TV show or movie: Someone watching a moon-walking scene in the Apple show “For All Mankind” might be able to see a virtual lunar rover on their device’s display, seemi...

General Motors is offering a sneak peek of the two new versions of the Chevy Bolt, the automaker’s mass-market electric car that has been on sale since 2017. A refreshed Bolt and a larger Bolt Electric Utility Vehicle were first announced at the automaker’s “EV Day” earlier this year and are expected to enter production in summer 2021. The glimpse we get of both vehicles is only a fleeting one, which makes sense because it was offered during GM’s virtual fleet solutions summit meeting recently. It shows a silhouette of the refreshed Bolt, which then morphs into the Bolt EUV. The refreshed Bolt will feature a sportier look, new seats, adaptive cruise control, and a few other minor changes. GM bumped up the range in this past year’s version of the Bolt, from 238 miles to 259 miles, but no fu...

Earlier this year LG was reported to be working on a dual-screen phone codenamed “Wing” with a swiveling design. Android Authority now claims to have an exclusive video of the phone in action. While a previous Wing mockup showed a smaller screen at the bottom with the larger screen positioned in landscape orientation, this video shows how the device could work with the main screen in portrait and the secondary screen off to the side. In the video, a driver is using the larger screen for GPS navigation with music controls on the second screen. Then, when a phone call comes in, it’s handled on the smaller display without obscuring the driving directions. It’s a neat use case that seems like it would make a lot of sense in this scenario. Of course, the biggest question is what tradeoffs LG ha...

Just over a year after Asus charmed us with the flipping cameras on the Zenfone 6, the company is back with the Zenfone 7 and 7 Pro. Both devices still have rotating camera arrays like last year’s model, as well as the same massive 5,000mAh batteries. But this year, there are a bunch of new features including an extra zoom lens in the camera array and a new OLED display with a 90Hz refresh rate. Asus says the phones are planned for launch in select European markets on September 1st, but not in the US. Exact European pricing is due to be announced on that date. The phone is going on sale in Taiwan starting today. In that country the Zenfone 7’s price starts at NT$21,990 (around $749), while the Zenfone 7 Pro costs NT$27,990 (around $953). <div class="c-imageslider" data-cid=&qu...

In a time when we’re oversaturated with virtual events, it’s impossible not to notice that most of them don’t exactly run smoothly. There are technical issues, sessions that run too long, and people so burned out on Zoom chats that sitting down for another video call on a Saturday afternoon is torturous. It’s for these reasons that the sheer excellence of DC FanDome is so striking. DC FanDome was an eight-hour virtual convention held by DC Comics and Warner Bros. to highlight some of the biggest films, TV shows, game, and comics announcements. The biggest panels — those dedicated to Warner Bros. and DC’s film slate, including The Batman, Flash, Wonder Woman 1984, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League — were sandwiched between short sketches, interviews, rapid Q&As, and little tributes to th...

Facebook’s annual Oculus Connect conference will be held online-only on September 16th — and it’s being rebranded as Facebook Connect, part of the social giant’s gradual assimilation of its virtual reality subsidiary. Connect 2020 will be publicly streamed online, a change Facebook announced in April. Like the past few years’ events, it will cover a mix of virtual and augmented reality news from Facebook. But unlike previous years, it’s not being framed as a VR conference. Instead it’s the first outing for “Facebook Reality Labs,” a name that now covers all Facebook’s VR and AR efforts. That includes Oculus, which focuses on VR games and headsets; Spark AR, Facebook’s phone-based AR system; and the Portal videophone. Oculus, Spark AR, and Portal are all part of Facebook Reality Labs Facebo...

Verily Life Sciences, the health care company owned by Alphabet, is getting into insurance, the company announced today. Verily is launching a new subsidiary for the effort called Coefficient Insurance Company, which will be backed by the commercial insurance unit of Swiss Re Group. Coefficient plans to offer stop-loss insurance. The explanation for stop-loss is a little technical, but it boils down to this: Employers that pay for employee health claims out of pocket buy stop-loss insurance. Once they hit the predetermined point of money they pay for their employees’ health, the stop-loss insurance company pays the rest. Historically, Verily has been a turbulent company Insurance is something of a departure for Verily. A previous project from the company is Project Baseline, a massive medi...

As it predicted would likely happen, YouTube removed more videos in the second quarter of 2020 than it ever has, as the company leaned more on its algorithm in place of most of its human content moderators. That’s according to the Community Guidelines Enforcement report the company released Tuesday (via Protocol), which shows it took down more than 11.4 million videos between April and June. In the same period last year, YouTube removed just under 9 million videos. “When reckoning with greatly reduced human review capacity due to COVID-19, we were forced to make a choice between potential under-enforcement or potential over-enforcement,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Because responsibility is our top priority, we chose the latter — using technology to help with some of the work normal...