Technology

As part of HBO Max’s launch, WarnerMedia included a list of titles currently available to stream on day one, but after discrepancies were discovered between what WarnerMedia advertised and what was actually streaming, the company has pulled the list. The Dark Knight, 13 Going on 30, The Matrix, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug are just some of the titles originally advertised on WarnerMedia’s website but aren’t actually on HBO Max. A spokesperson for the company told The Verge that they are “updating this section and will post again once it’s complete.” Other titles include Man of Steel, Gossip Girl, The Iron Giant, and The West Wing. Missing titles happen. Rights deals are being made up until the last minute, and it’s possible some of the titles originally listed as “available now”...

A sequel to the Sonic the Hedgehog movie is in development, as first reported by Variety. It’s unclear when the film might be released, but Sonic the Hedgehog director Jeff Fowler and screenwriters Pat Casey and Josh Miller are all returning for the sequel. Fowler confirmed that he’ll be back to direct on Twitter. Sonic the Hedgehog was a hit for Paramount, earning $70 million in its first four days in theaters this February, according to Variety. However, the film initially had some controversy because of the design of its titular character. The first design for Sonic’s movie representation was strangely (horrifyingly) humanlike. The backlash to the look was strong enough that Paramount delayed the first movie from November to February to fix Sonic’s appearance. Sonic’s final design looke...

Rony Abovitz, the co-founder and CEO of lavishly funded augmented reality company Magic Leap, will step down from his position, reports Business Insider. Abovitz’s planned departure, which doesn’t yet have a concrete date, marks an unceremonious end to his tenure at the helm of Magic Leap, a once-buzzy startup that earned a high profile for how secretive it was early on about its technology and the eye-popping amounts of venture capital it raised. Magic Leap has so far raised about $3 billion dollars over the last decade, though it has only released one product, the Magic Leap 1 headset. The company raised $350 million of that funding just earlier this month, after laying off about 1,000 employees back in April and ditching its consumer business to focus on selling enterprise-grade devices...

Google and Microsoft have worked together to improve the spellcheck experience in Chrome and Edge. The latest versions of Chrome and Edge are now powered by the built-in Windows Spellcheck feature rather than the previous Hunspell open source implementation. The switch means spellcheck within Chrome and Edge will now have better support for URLs, acronyms, email addresses, and an improved shared custom dictionary. “This feature was developed as a collaboration between Google and Microsoft engineers in the Chromium project, enabling all Chromium-based browsers to benefit from Windows Spellcheck integration,” explains Microsoft’s Edge team. The Windows Spellcheck improvements in Edge. If you’re not seeing the new spellcheck support show up in Chrome, then you may need to enable a flag to get...

Electronic Arts and the National Football League have renewed the exclusivity contract that gives the game publisher exclusive rights to make so-called simulation football games, which is the classification used for photorealistic football games featuring licensed team names and real players. The contract now extends to May 2026, although financial terms of the deal, like past contracts between EA and the NFL, were not disclosed. The deal was voted on and approved on Thursday, although Polygon reports the terms were decided before today’s vote among team owners and that any such vote over NFL’s video game licensing renewal is merely a formality at this point. While some football fans may have been hoping for the NFL to expand its licensing to other sports game franchises like 2K, EA and it...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unlocked the first of 12 possible stock option awards from the massive compensation plan he signed in 2018, and it’s worth nearly $800 million. The company disclosed on Thursday that Musk now has the option to buy 1.69 million of its shares because Tesla eclipsed $20 billion in total revenue over the last four quarters and a market capitalization of more than $100 billion — the first in a series of tandem milestones Tesla must hit for Musk to realize the full value of the plan. Tesla’s stock price was $805.81 when the markets closed on Thursday, meaning those shares are worth about $1.36 billion. But Musk only has to pay a $350.02 per share “strike price” to get them, according to the agreement, or a total of about $591 million — meaning he could net around $770 mil...

Twitter says you can now schedule tweets right from the main web app. When composing a tweet, you should see a little calendar icon on the bottom row of icons at the bottom of the compose window. Click that and you can specify when you want your tweet to be sent. Twitter had originally said it was “experimenting” with the feature back in November, and if you didn’t have access to that experiment, you needed to use Tweetdeck or another third-party service that supported the feature if you wanted to schedule tweets. Twitter says you can also now save draft tweets in the web app. However, drafts you write on the web app will only sync to other instances of the web app, according to Twitter, meaning drafts written in Twitter’s mobile app won’t sync to the web. Here’s a video from Twitter showi...

The internet is a magical place, somewhere where you can, for the right price, get anything you want. And if that something is a decommissioned nuclear reactor control panel — well, have I got some good news for you! Today, author Warren Ellis posted on his blog about an auction being held in England where one of the lots for sale was a decommissioned nuclear reactor control panel. Yes, this thing: If you’ve seen the hit miniseries Chernobyl or ever looked up pics of nuclear reactors online, this should look pretty familiar. And it’s gorgeous! Look at all those CRTs, that industrially gray metal, the huge number of knobs and dials that actually did something, probably, at one time. Who wouldn’t want it? The best part is that bids are currently hovering around 100 British pounds, which is e...

Netatmo has released an updated version of its outdoor security smart camera with a powerful alarm to scare off uninvited guests. The revised security camera remains mostly unchanged from Netatmo’s previous outdoor model. However, this version includes a built-in 105dB siren, meant to scare off any intruders. The siren can be manually activated by using the Netatmo app after you receive an alert that a person or vehicle has entered your property. Of course, not every person entering your property is coming uninvited. You can edit the alerts the camera gives you through the Netatmo app, so the camera will only send you urgent notifications. You can also use the Alert-Zones feature to specify what areas set off motion alerts, so it can focus on someone entering your lawn or a car pulling up ...

Owners of the excellent Jabra Elite 75t (and Elite Active 75t) earbuds can now customize controls for the physical buttons on each earbud. With a new update to the company’s Sound Plus smartphone app available today, you can pick what you want a single, double, or triple press to do for each earbud. For example, I’ve now customized mine so that a double press of the right earbud button will skip forward a track and a double press on the left will go back. (By default, track controls are only on the left earbud.) There’s also now a triple tap option, which I’ve set as a voice assistant shortcut on the right and for hear-through / ambient sound mode on the left. Volume controls remain the same: you press and hold to adjust how loud the audio is. This can’t be changed or customized. Aside fro...

Amazon.com was down for many people in the US for a short while Thursday afternoon. A number of Verge staffers were unable to access the site, and countless user reports of an outage across the country poured in on Downdetector. “Some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping, however it has now been resolved,” Amazon said in a statement to The Verge. It’s unclear how widespread the problems were It’s exceedingly rare for Amazon’s main e-commerce site to have an outage that was as extensive as today’s, but it’s not unprecedented for Amazon’s internet services to go down. In 2017, Amazon’s widely used cloud computing division, AWS, had an outage that took down many other services and websites that relied on it. It’s unclear exactly how widespread the outage was or how...

Earlier seasons of The Simpsons are finally available to stream in its proper 4:3 aspect ratio, a task Disney Plus’ product team had to spend some time figuring out. Aspect ratios are a big deal in The Simpsons. Fox originally aired the show in 1989, and at the time used a 4:3 aspect ratio. The show, as any fan will explain, relies heavily on visual gags — an aspect of joke-telling that wouldn’t become an issue until near the end of 2009, about a third of the way through The Simpsons’ 20th season — when the show’s aspect ratio switched from 4:3 to 16:9. When Disney uploaded all 30 seasons of the show to Disney Plus in November 2019, every episode was only available in 16:9, meaning older episodes looked stretched out, and jokes that relied on visual framing were effectively cut out. The Di...