Technology

In a move that illustrates how swiftly the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the global economy, Facebook said today that it would eventually begin allowing most of its employees to request a permanent change in their jobs to let them work remotely. The company will begin today by making most of its US job openings eligible for remote hires and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among its workforce later this year. “We’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with The Verge. “We need to do this in a way that’s thoughtful and responsible, so we’re going to do this in a measured way. But I think that it’s possible that over the next five to 10 years — maybe closer to 10 than five, but somewhere in tha...

The hyperlink reaches my inbox a few minutes before 10PM on Saturday night. I click the link and enter a password. And at precisely 10PM, a video pops up on the page, welcoming me to Eschaton: part performance art, part nightclub, and all conducted over video chat. During the next hour, I stumble across some dozen passphrases that allow me into Eschaton’s many rooms, each one launched as a Zoom meeting with a different host. There’s the room where a man in a rat costume reads quietly in a corner, stopping occasionally to stare at the audience. The one where a violinist alternates playing songs and delivering a wry standup routine. The one with a woman performing a Cabaret number in what looks like a cramped New York apartment. The man in the rat costume sits quietly Midway through, I stumb...

Facebook’s Workplace, its Slack-like collaboration and chat tool targeted at businesses, now has more than 5 million paid users, up from 3 million in October, Facebook announced today. That growth in users is due in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has required many people to rely more on software tools while working from home. Many collaboration apps have also seen growth since the pandemic. In March, Slack said that it had surpassed more than 12.5 million concurrent users, for example, and Microsoft Teams hit 75 million daily active users in April, a jump of 70 percent since the month before. However, those metrics indicate both Slack and Teams have more users than Facebook’s Workplace, even if they aren’t comparing apples to apples, as Teams is bundled into Microsoft’s broader...

When Nate Fox was working on Sly Cooper, a series of stealth games about a master thief who also happens to be a raccoon, he looked around for inspiration on how to make anthropomorphized animals feel more real. This led him to the comic Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai, which followed a wandering samurai who also happened to be a rabbit. “I loved it,” Fox, now a creative director at Sucker Punch Productions, tells The Verge. “It really struck me as this beautiful, very reserved adventure series that would translate very well into a video game.” It also rekindled Fox’s interest in classic samurai movies from the likes of Akira Kurosawa. So when the studio began brainstorming new ideas after launching the superhero game Infamous Second Son, he knew exactly the direction they should go. “For me, ...

Amazon may delay its Prime Day promotional event until September as it tries to regain its footing amid a surge in demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported. Usually held over the summer, Prime Day has become a cash cow for Amazon; the 2019 event brought in an estimated $7 billion. But like many online retailers, Amazon has had challenges keeping up with customer demand for home delivery during the pandemic. In March, the company said it would “temporarily prioritize” shipments of essential items like medical supplies and household products to help keep up with orders. Amazon has also come under scrutiny for how it has been treating workers during the pandemic, with work stoppages and widespread complaints from warehouse workers that say the company has no...

T-Mobile’s offer of free mobile service for first responders for 10 years is now available, CEO Mike Sievert announced today. The program, officially called “Connecting Heroes,” provides free access to the company’s network over the next decade for members of state and local public and nonprofit law enforcement, fire, and EMS agencies. We’ve just launched something only the⚡️Supercharged⚡️ #Uncarrier can, something that gives BILLION$ back to our nation’s First Responder Agencies. Introducing #ConnectingHeroes! Now, first responders can stay connected with service, including #Nationwide5G access! #5GforGood — Mike Sievert (@MikeSievert) May 21, 2020 The offer of free service, which includes unlimited talk, text, and 4G / 5G data, was part of a set of promises th...

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is available free on the Epic Games Store, meaning you can now claim a free copy that’s yours to keep. The offer is available until 11AM ET on May 28th, so you have one week to take advantage. You can grab the game over on its store page. The deal comes a week after the store was down for over eight hours due to the popularity of its last free game giveaway: Grand Theft Auto V. The popularity of that deal shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise given that it’s one of the best-selling paid games of all time (Minecraft is number one, before you ask), but it’s still remarkable that there are so many people out there who have yet to play it on PC. Civilization VI is the latest release in the long-running turn-based strategy game series that dates back to 1991....

One year ago today, Facebook released the Oculus Quest, its first headset to deliver a credible standalone VR experience — true head tracking, good motion controllers, and so on. It also marked a split in the Oculus ecosystem: the Quest had its own store, curated with games that had been tailored specifically for the headset’s low-powered mobile hardware. At the time, that made it somewhat of a limited product. “As an Oculus Rift owner, I’m deeply tempted by the Quest,” Adi Robertson wrote in our review. “I’d love having a self-contained headset with all of the Rift’s core features and none of its wires. I just wish I didn’t have to pick between a design I love and the games I want to play.” A year into the Quest’s life cycle, that’s no longer a compromise you have to make. Some of its lim...

On the afternoon of May 27th, two veteran NASA astronauts will make history when they strap themselves into a newly developed spacecraft on the east coast of Florida and blast off to the International Space Station. They will be the first people to launch on a truly private spacecraft — the Crew Dragon, built and operated by SpaceX. It’s a launch that could mark the beginning of a new era of spaceflight in the United States. The mission is the culmination of nearly a decade of development and partnership between SpaceX and NASA. If successful, it will mark the first time that Americans have launched to orbit from the United States since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. For the last nine years, all of NASA’s astronauts have launched to the International Space Station on Russian...

Twenty-something Kasio, star of new game If Found, is struggling. Over the period of a month, she fights with her family, falls in and out of love, bounces around different couches, and is just generally fighting through the awkward stage of becoming who she really is. As a player, you learn all of this in a novel way: flipping through her diary and erasing her memories. It’s a unique twist on the standard visual novel, one that makes a sometimes static genre feel more dynamic and alive. It’s a coming-of-age tale that’s both comforting and uncomfortable — oh, and it’s also a game about a black hole swallowing the planet. If Found was developed by Dreamfeel, a small Dublin-based studio headed by writer and designer Llaura McGee, best known for the short, low-fi game Curtain. After that proj...

Last month, before Google and Apple announced their joint effort to enable COVID-19 exposure notifications, I wrote about the trouble with using Bluetooth-based solutions for contact tracing. Chief among the issues is getting a meaningful number of people to download any app in the first place, public health officials told me. And now that such apps are being released in the United States, we’re seeing just how big a challenge that is. Here’s Caroline Haskins writing Tuesday in BuzzFeed: Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said on April 22 that the app, Healthy Together, would be an integral part of getting the state back on its feet: “This app will give public health workers information they need to understand and contain the pandemic and help Utahns get back to daily life.” The state spent $2.75 mill...

As students around the world continue to study from home as a result of the pandemic, Google’s Classroom software has fast become an invaluable remote learning tool. But as many are discovering, Google’s software is far from perfect. Adobe Principal Designer Khoi Vinh has used his blog to weigh in on where he thinks Google’s software goes wrong. It’s fascinating and well worth a read. As you’d expect from someone who works at Adobe, a lot of Vinh’s arguments are about the software itself. Vinh describes obvious design missteps in Classroom like its lack of customizability, its poor integration with Google’s other services, and its general sluggishness. When I saw Google Classroom for the first time, my immediate thought was, “This is clearly an under-funded product that ranks fairly low on...