Technology

Streaming platform Roku has removed a channel dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory movement after facing criticism for letting it slip through its review and moderation processes last month. The show, called “Q Channel – QAnon Channel,” was hosted by popular QAnon supporter Dave Hayes and advertised as a “opinion based shows for getting the truth out, as we know it, about the Qanon movement.” A Roku spokesperson tells The Verge, “The channel is no longer on our platform.” But the company would not elaborate on why it allowed the show to launch last month. The Verge has asked for more information about measures in place to review and moderate questionable content users post through its channel creation feature. The link to the channel now leads to a blank page. Roku is best known ...

With the success of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon launch this weekend, NASA now has the capability to launch its own astronauts from the US once again — and that means changes are in store for the future of the International Space Station. Soon, a new suite of vehicles could be regularly flying people to the station from the Florida coast, along with the Russian Soyuz rocket that has been solely responsible for taking humans to the outpost since 2011. This will be a new era of human spaceflight where private vehicles and state-operated vehicles fly along aside one another, getting humans into space, and to the ISS. Here’s how traffic to the space station will evolve as SpaceX and NASA’s other commercial partner, Boeing, start sending people to and from the ISS on a regular basis. The Russian relati...

Activision is postponing new content updates for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Call of Duty: Warzone. “Right now, it’s time for those speaking up for equality, justice, and change to be seen and heard,” the company announced on Twitter. Activision’s message refers to the widespread protests happening across US cities in response to the death of George Floyd. Season 4 of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was supposed to launch on June 3rd, while Call of Duty: Mobile’s seventh season was originally planned to release sometime this week. New seasons in both games introduce free content drops, including new multiplayer maps, modes, and weapons for both game’s online multiplayer modes. This move follows similar decisions by other companies in the gaming industry. Sony annou...

Peloton is making its app available on one more device: Apple TVs. The company announced the news today, which will bring the workout streaming app to Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD devices. New members can access the app on their TV for a free 30-day trial, too. The app is already available on iOS devices and the Apple Watch but is missing a desktop app. (The company does offer streaming through users’ browsers.) The COVID-19 pandemic has been marked with remarkable growth for Peloton. It gained 600,000 new members in one quarter and grew revenue by 66 percent in a year. When the pandemic first started, the company gave new users a 90-day free trial and briefly broadcasted its live workout classes from its New York studio until an employee was diagnosed with the virus. After that point, Pelo...

Facebook is launching a new feature called Manage Activity that lets users delete their old posts. It can be used to delete individual posts or in bulk, and Facebook says it will offer filtering options to help find posts with specific people in them or in a certain time range. The feature will come to Facebook’s mobile apps first. According to Facebook, the feature is meant “to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today.” As an example, it suggests that someone might want to delete old content when they’re about to start working full time after college or remove posts that remind them of an old relationship. Posts can be filtered by category, date, or people, and then deleted individually or in bulk.Image: Facebook There are a cou...

Lenovo’s C740 14-inch laptop is one of the best laptops you can buy, and it’s also the most affordable option in our buying guide. Now, at Best Buy, it costs even less than usual. The standard configuration with a quad-core 10th Gen Intel Core i5-10210U processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD is just $600 instead of its regular $800 price. This laptop has a 2-in-1 design that lets its display flip nearly 360 degrees around, so you can use it as a tablet. It also features two USB-C ports, a USB Type-A port, and a headphone jack. In my colleague Monica Chin’s review, she says that the C740 doesn’t stack up to some pricier 2-in-1 laptops when it comes to performance, battery life, or having a standout feature, though it’s reliable for everyday purposes and has a sturdy aluminum build. Its grea...

Some Google Pixel owners have received the Android 11 Beta early, revealing yet more details about this year’s version of Android. In a tweet, Mishaal Rahman from XDA Developers said that two Pixel 4 XL users reported having received the update, revealing new details about Android 11 features like the power button menu, three new icon shapes, and auto-generated app suggestions in the home screen dock. Google planned to announce the Android 11 beta on June 3rd but decided to delay the launch. “Now is not the time to celebrate,” the company said without linking it directly to national protests about police violence that have since gone global. The company is yet to set a new date for the announcement, so it’s unclear when this beta software may be more widely available. The beta software sho...

As part of a Blackout Tuesday protest originally organized by workers in the music industry, users on social media, particularly Instagram, are sharing images of black squares in solidarity with black victims of police violence. But many are tagging their posts with the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #BLM, obscuring a channel that’s being used to share vital information about protests, organization donations, and document police violence. The singer Kehlani and rapper Chuck Inglish were among those to call out the problem, retweeting a video of an Instagram feed of black images shared under the #BLM hashtag. As the video’s original poster noted: “once you click on the blm hashtag you’re directed to an overflow of black images, instead of other more useful content people could look at for i...

Microsoft is crediting a developer after he accused the company of copying the core mechanics of its new Windows Package Manager. AppGet developer Keivan Beigi provided a detailed account of Microsoft reaching out with interest about his package manager, inviting him for interviews, and then ghosting him for months before unveiling its own package manager that he felt was inspired by his work. Beigi claimed the “core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure” of Microsoft’s Windows Package Manager (winget) are all heavily inspired by AppGet. Microsoft only briefly mentioned AppGet once in its announcement, in a throwaway line that lists other Windows package managers. A variety of Windows package managers exist, and are used t...

Grindr, a popular gay dating app, will remove ethnicity filters from its app, the company tweeted today. The decision is meant to show solidarity with protests in the US over police brutality against black women and men. The filters, which allow people to pay to avoid seeing people of certain ethnicities, will be removed in the next app update. The ethnicity filters have been controversial for years, but they went unchanged even as Grindr launched an anti-racism campaign on the platform in 2018. That same year, Landen Zumwalt, Grindr’s former head of communications, told The Guardian that the company discussed removing the ethnicity filters but wasn’t ready to get rid of them. The team wanted to talk to its users first, he said, and the filters gave people in minority groups a chance to ma...

In order to comply with local curfew orders, food delivery platform DoorDash and ride-sharing companies Lyft and Uber are temporarily suspending service in some cities across the US, CNBC reported. More than three dozen cities have implemented curfews following demonstrations protesting the May 25th death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Police in several cities used tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters, and some businesses were vandalized. A Lyft spokesperson said in an email to The Verge that the company is following the direction of local government. She did not provide a number of cities or offer details about which specific cities were affected. An Uber spokesperson told The Verge it had suspended operations over the weekend during curfew hours in Minneapolis, Oakland, San Fr...

An apparent Twitter joke got out of control this weekend, falsely convincing some users — and possibly even the leader of the QAnon conspiracy theory — that MSNBC ran a broadcast with World War Z shots instead of real protest footage. Over the past day, an image and video clip have spread around Twitter comparing a news broadcast with a scene from the Brad Pitt film World War Z. The clip seems to show MSNBC reporting on the weekend’s nationwide protests, narrating over an aerial view of Philadelphia dotted with fires and smoke plumes. If you look up World War Z’s trailer, you can see the same shot midway through the video, suggesting the news outlet either badly screwed up its reporting or deliberately falsified the story. But if you look back at the MSNBC video, you’ll see something else:...