Technology

The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) has announced that its members are voluntarily suspending operations out of US ports through September 15th, 2020. Its members include Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian Cruise line and as CNBC notes, the extension goes beyond the CDC’s July 24th “no-sail” order. Carnival had previously announced it intended to resume operations in the US on August 1st. The CLIA’s statement says in part that “although we had hoped that cruise activity could resume as soon as possible after that date, it is increasingly clear that more time will be needed to resolve barriers to resumption in the United States.” It’s reflective of the harsh reality that the US has not made as much progress as other countries in tamping down the spread of COVID-19. On Ma...

In its latest filter blunder, Snapchat has debuted a Juneteenth filter that allows users to “smile and break the chains.” The filter was panned by critics on Friday morning for its tone deafness. Atlanta-based digital strategist Mark S. Luckie demonstrated the filter on Twitter, calling it “interesting.” The filter shows what appears to be an approximation of the Pan-African flag, and prompts the user to smile — a common trigger for animated Snapchat filters — causing chains to appear and then break behind the user. Juneteenth is the anniversary of the day in 1865 when a group of enslaved people in Texas finally learned that slavery in the US had ended, more than two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The Juneteenth filter arrives just over a week after repor...

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: A.I. Artificial Intelligence The future: A.I. begins with a brief summary of the sorry state of the world: climate change has melted the polar ice caps, wiping out coastal cities and severely reducing the human population. With regulations in place for reproduction on a resource-starved planet, corporations developed Mecha — androids that appear human but lack emotions. They’re seen as objects — useful for labor or sex work, just human enough to not be strange but machine enough to not mistake them for people. The story kicks into gear when Professor Allen Hobby (William Hurt) p...

If I had to sum up my condition over the last few weeks, it’d be exhaustion. I’m tired. I told a friend this week that my soul feels like it needs to hibernate. Not only in grieving for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade but also in viewing what feels like hundreds of accounts of hotheaded police officers violently attacking protesters who are demonstrating against police violence. Once again, I’m forced to confront the reality that I’m not as free as I’ve been led to believe. That our system is broken. That people want me dead, due to no fault of my own. Before, during, and after times of hardship, many in the Black community create art to take in the pain and struggle and release a beauty that heals and teaches. Black creatives are always working, trying to find...

The Verge’s flagship podcast The Vergecast is split into two parts this week: WWDC predictions and a discussion on tech policy. First half of the show, co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn run through the most interesting rumors, leaks, and guesses about what will be announced at the 2020 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference next week — from updated Mac hardware to Apple addressing the ongoing noise from developers about their relationship to the App store and its fees. Second half of the show, senior reporter Adi Robertson stops by to update us on new policies being proposed in Congress and at tech companies this week, including the Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act and Google’s back-and forth of revoking access to its ads program for websites publishing racist content...

Twitter has labeled a video tweeted by President Trump as “manipulated media,” as first reported by The Washington Post. The label is primarily cosmetic, but represents a significant escalation in the ongoing feud between the president and his preferred social media platform. “This tweet has been labeled per our synthetic and manipulated media policy to give people more context,” Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough told the Post. The clip edits footage of two children playing into a bizarre warning against race-baiting by the media, presented as a false CNN broadcast with the chyron “terrified todler [sic] runs from racist baby.” Since the presented footage was never actually aired by CNN, the false appearance of a broadcast may have provided the basis for the manipulated media tag. part ...

Japan’s government today released its coronavirus contact tracing app for iOS and Android. The apps rely on Apple and Google’s co-developed exposure notification platform, using Bluetooth to help determine whether users have come into close contact with others who have tested positive for COVID-19. Though the app store listing simply reads “COVID-19 Contact App,” Japan refers to the app as COCOA, a somewhat convoluted backronym that stands for COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application. It was developed by Microsoft engineers, according to Nikkei, who were hired in May after Google and Apple’s conditions reportedly led the government to abandon the work done by a Tokyo-based team in favor of a bigger corporation. COCOA doesn’t store personal information like location data or phone numbers, th...

Google’s Area 120 team, an internal incubator that creates experimental apps and services, has launched Keen: a would-be Pinterest rival that draws on the search giant’s machine learning expertise to curate topics. Available today on the web and Android, co-founder CJ Adams says Keen aims to be an alternative to “mindlessly” browsing online feeds. Google wants to know: what are you keen on? “On Keen […] you say what you want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people you trust to help make that happen,” writes Adams in a blog post. “You make a ‘keen,’ which can be about any topic, whether it’s baking delicious bread at home, getting into birding or researching typography. Keen lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find...

You can now trade-in your old Mac at Apple Stores in the US and Canada. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman notes that Apple’s site has been edited to remove a disclaimer that says Mac trade-ins are online-only, and a representative from the company confirmed the policy change to Gizmodo. The change means the computers are accepted in-store along with other Apple devices like iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. This follows a Bloomberg report which said the new policy was coming this week. The change theoretically makes it much easier to get money for your old computer towards a gift card or new device. Rather than having to mail in your old machine, if it’s eligible for a trade-in then you should now be able to take it directly to a store and get instant credit for it. In contrast, Apple’s site notes ...

If you’ve been wondering what could knock out one of the United States’ three big cellular carriers’ ability to deliver calls and text messages — and keep it that way for most of an entire day — T-Mobile now has a partial answer that pertains to its extensive nationwide outage Monday. The short version, if we’re reading this correctly: a fiber-optic circuit failed, and its backup circuit also failed, which caused a chain reaction that strained the network to the point that many calls and texts couldn’t make it through. The longer version: June 16th, 2020 6:23pm PST Update on T-Mobile Voice and Text Performance Every day we see the vital role technology plays in keeping us connected, and we know T-Mobile customers rely on our network to ensure they have connections with family, loved ones a...

Logitech announced today that it plans to put labels communicating the carbon impact of products on all product packaging and on its website. The company says it expects labels will appear first on its gaming products later this year. The goal is to include labels across its full product portfolio by 2025, Logitech tells The Verge. “Just like calories went on the packaging in the food industry years ago, we believe that carbon content level should be a choice factor for the consumers who are interested in it,” said Logitech’s CEO Bracken Darrell in an interview with The Verge. The number you’ll see on the label represents the total carbon life cycle of the product. That indicates the amount of carbon emitted in the entire life of the product, including the sourcing of a product’s materials...

A new study analyzing COVID-19 contact tracing apps conducted by Amnesty International has found that Bahrain and Kuwait are using their public health apps as mass surveillance tools. The study analyzed a collection of contact tracing apps, which are designed to inform and monitor physical contact between people in the event someone contracts COVID-19, from 11 countries: Algeria, Bahrain, France, Iceland, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Norway, Qatar, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates. It found three particularly egregious apps that collected satellite location data from users, instead of relying simply on Bluetooth signals, and matched accounts with real identities. In one extreme case, some citizens who downloaded the BeAware Bahrain contact tracing app became contestants on a televised game sh...