Technology

It’s not often the humble bicycle finds itself at the center of national upheaval. Images of police officers using bicycles to harass people peacefully demonstrating the killing of unarmed black people this past week, in addition to cops violently seizing and confiscating protesters’ bikes, have prompted an unusually forceful response from the cycling community. One bike company even went so far as to sever ties with police departments. BikeCo, the official distributor of Fuji Bikes in North America, announced it was suspending the sale of its bikes to police departments after viewing videos of NYPD officers using Fuji-branded mountain bikes to threaten and corral protesters. “We have seen instances in the last week where police have used bicycles in violent tactics, which we did not inten...

There’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and a rotation of other reporters and editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are: During the first part of the show, Verge reporter Megan Farokhmanesh and games editor Andrew Webster take over to run through everything announced at Sony’s virtual event on Thursday — from all the games to the long-awaited reveal of the PS5 design. A little over 14 minutes into the show, Dieter and Nilay discuss first impressions of the Android 11 beta that was released this week, Google countersuing Sonos for patent infringement, and the potential announcement at Apple’s WWDC about switching MacBooks to ARM processors. Last but not least, Verge rep...

Wonder Woman 1984 and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet are being delayed as studios grapple with when they can start releasing their biggest movies in theaters around the world. Tenet will now open on July 31st, instead of July 17th. It’s the second delay for Wonder Woman, which was originally slated to premiere June 5th, then August 14th, and will now arrive on October 2nd. “We’re especially thrilled, in this complex and rapidly changing environment, to be bringing Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet,’ a global tentpole of jaw-dropping size, scope and scale, to theaters around the world on July 31,” Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group, said in a statement to Variety. “It’s been longer than any of us could’ve imagined since we’ve seen a movie on the big screen, and to acknowledge Chris’...

Sony has finally shown off what the PlayStation 5 will look like, but there’s one very big question about the design that’s still unclear: just how big is the PlayStation 5? We’ll likely have to wait until Sony gives official dimensions (or shows the physical box next to something else for scale) of the controversial design to know for sure, but that isn’t stopping fans on the internet from doing their best to estimate things. And based on early guesses, the PS5 is going to be huge — perhaps even the biggest mainstream console in years. The image below, created by Reddit user u/GREBO7, shows an estimate of how the PS5 fares compared to other recent Xbox and PlayStation consoles, including the upcoming Xbox Series X. Noticeably, the Playstation 5 is incredibly tall, with a ResetEra thread e...

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is already looking to dig more tunnels in Las Vegas, Nevada, after it finished excavating the first two under the city’s convention center last month. Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom tweeted a map last week that shows a proposed set of tunnels that would run west from the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) to the Wynn and the Encore, hotel casinos owned by Wynn Resorts. This week, Wynn Resorts announced that, working with The Boring Company, it had submitted a land-use application for that project. Resorts World Las Vegas, a new complex being built just northwest of the Wynn and the Encore by Malaysian resort conglomerate Genting, says it has also submitted an application for a similar connector to the LVCC. Late Friday, The Verge obtained the both sets ...

Just weeks after the launch of HBO Max, which added to the already confusing HBO product lineup of HBO, HBO Go, and HBO Now, WarnerMedia is making some changes in an attempt to reduce some of the confusion about which app is for which purpose. A short primer on HBO Max, before I go further: HBO Max is AT&T’s new streaming service that lets you access the entire HBO library plus additional content like Cartoon Network shows and the Studio Ghibli movies. You can subscribe to HBO Max directly for a $14.99 monthly fee, but it’s also offered for free from many cable providers if you subscribe to HBO, and it’s free as part of some AT&T wireless, internet, or TV plans. We’ve compiled a guide for which subscriptions give you access here. HBO Max is really an expanded and rebranded version ...

Light, the company behind the Nokia 9’s unique array of five rear cameras, has given up on its unconventional effort to revolutionize the cameras in our pockets. In a statement to Android Authority, Light said it’s “no longer operating in the smartphone industry.” Light set out to overcome the limitations of small camera sensors — like those in our phones — by cramming a ton of cameras (each with different focal lengths) onto one device and combining the data from all those modules. Its proof of concept for this was the $2,000 L16 camera. In a review, my colleague Sean O’Kane credited the L16 as being an engineering marvel and said it indeed delivered better image quality than most mobile devices. But it still lagged well behind mirrorless cameras and DSLRs, and clearly wasn’t cut out for ...

Facebook has announced the results of its first Deepfake Detection Challenge, an open competition to find algorithms that can spot AI-manipulated videos. The results, while promising, show there’s still lots of work to be done before automated systems can reliably spot deepfake content, with researchers describing the issue as an “unsolved problem.” Facebook says the winning algorithm in the contest was able to spot “challenging real world examples” of deepfakes with an average accuracy of 65.18 percent. That’s not bad, but it’s not the sort of hit-rate you would want for any automated system. Deepfakes have proven to be something of an exaggerated menace for social media. Although the technology prompted much handwringing about the erosion of reliable video evidence, the political effects...

Peloton enjoyed huge demand for its high-end exercise bikes in the first quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, which kept gyms closed and antsy homebound people seeking exercise. The company continued streaming live classes from its New York City set well after competitors had halted live classes, but it finally closed its studios on April 3rd after an employee tested positive for COVID-19. But a new report from BuzzFeed News says the workers who delivered the bikes (which cost between $2,000 and $5,000) to customers’ homes felt unprotected from catching the coronavirus at work: [W]hile Peloton’s leadership was scrambling to keep up with consumer demand and rapidly expanding market share, the warehouse and delivery workers who assemble, repair, and deliver Peloton equipment were...

The state of New York has the most confirmed cases and deaths of COVID-19, and a new report by The Wall Street Journal details how the state’s policies and missed warning signs made residents more vulnerable to the virus, leading to more deaths and a higher risk of contraction. The Wall Street Journal spoke to nearly 90 frontline medical professionals, from doctors to hospital administrators and government officials, to understand what went wrong. Improper patient transfer with some patients being too ill to be transferred between hospitals led to many hospitals not receiving records of prior treatment. Insufficient isolation protocols, with hospitals mixing infected patients with uninfected patients, also caused a domino effect of new virus contractions, according to the report. Although ...

Insomniac Games has confirmed that the newly announced Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be a standalone title for the PlayStation 5, quashing rumors that the title was simply a remastered version or an expansion of the original PS4 Spider-Man that have been swirling since the reveal. Spider-Man: Miles Morales will reportedly be smaller in scope than the original, though, per a Bloomberg report that compared it to Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in scope. Part of the confusion stems from comments from Simon Rutter, EVP head of European business at Sony Interactive Entertainment, who commented in an interview with The Telegraph, “I guess you could call it an expansion and an enhancement to the previous game.” Rutter went on to explain, “There’s a substantial Miles Morales component — which is the e...

YouTube has warned against videos that try to game its Adsense system by encouraging viewers to repeatedly watch the video or click its ads to drive up revenue. The behavior has emerged as YouTubers have attempted to find creative new ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement, with some promising to donate the ad revenue generated by their videos. The hope was that encouraging repeated viewings or ad clicking would allow viewers to contribute to a worthwhile cause even if they didn’t have the resources to donate money directly. Now, however, some of these videos are being taken down, Variety reports. While YouTube says creators are free to donate ad revenue generated from organic views, it says that attempts to artificially inflate a video’s metrics violate its policies. It warns tha...