Technology

Google is testing a new feature in its Messages app that lets you react to messages using emoji. First spotted by Reddit users in a thread that was picked up by Android Police, the feature reportedly lets you react to a message by long-pressing on it. Then, you can select from emoji including thumbs up, thumbs down, anger, and crying with laughter. The feature appears to only work over RCS, and is not available in SMS-only conversations. Messages isn’t the first chat app to get emoji reactions, which are also available in Facebook Messenger, Twitter direct messages, and Apple’s iMessage. Similar to iMessage, if you’re phone doesn’t currently have the feature (because you’re not a part of the test, for example) you’ll receive a standalone message to tell you if someone has used an emoji to ...

Tesla is fully reopening the Gigafactory in Nevada, where it makes batteries for its electric cars and energy storage products, as well as parts for the Model 3, according to an internal email viewed by The Verge. The full reopening is more aggressive move than what the company told employees to expect last week, when Tesla said it would only resume “limited operations” as the state began the first phase of its plan to restart some businesses during the novel coronavirus pandemic. Tesla remains in negotiations with Alameda County, which issued a shelter-in-place order in March that forced the company to shut down its Fremont, California car factory. Tesla has already resumed production there in violation of the county’s public health order. CEO Elon Musk received support for reopening that...

Esports organization Cloud9 and health care company Kaiser Permanente have announced a new initiative focused on increasing awareness about mental health. This initiative will aim to help Cloud9’s players work on their own mental health and leverage Cloud9’s large fan base to shed light on ways to address mental health and reduce stigma about the topic. The initiative has three parts: providing mental health training to Cloud9 players, coaches, and staff; airing a Twitch series focused on increasing awareness of mental health; and educating community moderators so they can facilitate positive discussions on mental health topics. The multiyear initiative is called Presence of Mind. Cloud9’s ‘League of Legends’ team will get the training first Cloud9’s League of Legends team will get the tra...

After years of drama with the SEC, Telegram is calling it quits on its crypto-focused subsidiary, Telegram Open Network (TON). “Telegram’s active involvement with TON is over,” wrote Pavel Durov, founder and CEO, in an announcement on his channel. “You may see – or may have already seen – sites using my name or the Telegram brand or the ‘TON’ abbreviation to promote their projects. Don’t trust them with your money or data.” TON was a blockchain platform designed to offer decentralized cryptocurrency to anyone with a smartphone, in a similar fashion to Facebook’s Libra project (which has also faced significant scrutiny). Last October, the SEC ordered Telegram to halt sales of its cryptocurrency (called Gram) after it failed to register an early sale of $1.7 billion in tokens prior to launch...

Some Apple employees will return to the company’s global offices soon, according to Bloomberg. Apple’s decision to bring employees back to its offices — including its Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California — contrasts with some other large tech companies, many of which have extended work from home polices due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Apple is planning to have employees to return in phases over a few months. The first phase focuses on employees who are unable to do their jobs from home or who are “facing challenges working from home,” reports Bloomberg. This will likely include employees who work on the company’s hardware products, and some employees who are part of this phase have apparently already started working at Apple’s offices again. More employees will return to ...

No, it’s wasn’t just you. Slack indeed went down due to an outage of some sort that appeared to have begun some time around 7:30PM ET. User-reported issues spiked on DownDetector.com, and the app was largely inaccessible, with posts not getting marked as read or not going through at all. The issues affected both the mobile and desktop versions of the app. Slack says it’s in the process of resolving the issue, but connectivity problems remain for some users. Slack confirmed the outage on its status website, writing, “Users have reported general performance issues such message sending failures and timeouts. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and will provide an update shortly,” at 7:53PM ET. Shortly after at 8:02PM ET, the page was updated with, “Users are unab...

GM has killed its first electric bike. The automaker’s Ariv e-bikes, pronounced like “arrive” and stylized as “ARĪV,” were released last year in a handful of countries in Europe. But thanks to COVID-19, the company said it has decided to wind down its e-bike production. The website where customers previously could place orders now redirects to GM’s main site. GM was the latest automaker to try leverage its experience in manufacturing, batteries, and powertrains to build an amazing electric bike. And early reviews suggested they may have done it. The Verge’s Thomas Ricker tested out both available models last year — the Ariv Meld and the foldable Merge — and came away impressed. “Ariv has generated significant insights about micromobility for General Motors” In a statement to The Verge, GM ...

On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled their latest coronavirus response bill, including a number of measures to keep families and businesses online through the duration of the pandemic. “With schools closed and millions out of work, Congress must use its powers to keep Americans connected,” Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) said in a joint statement. “We’re hopeful that this legislation will garner strong, bipartisan support so we can stand up for children and families who are struggling during this pandemic.” The over 1,800-page HEROES Act would bolster the health care system and the economy with $3 trillion in additional funding, with around $5.5 billion of that going toward closing the digital divide at least until the pandemic is over. If approved, the bill would “imm...

Hot on the heels of updating the foldable Razr to Android 10, Motorola has announced that the soon-to-be-released Edge Plus will also get at least two future Android OS updates, ensuring that the new flagship will run both the pending Android 11 and next year’s Android 12 (assuming Google sticks with its naming scheme). The Motorola Edge Plus is set to ship with Android 10 when it releases on May 14th. While the promise of two software updates isn’t exactly a generous one — Google offers at least three years of updates for its Pixel phones, to say nothing of Apple’s support for its phones — in the world of Android where any OS updates can be hard to come by, it’s better than nothing. And given that Motorola is selling the Edge Plus as a top-tier Android flagship, complete with the $999 pri...

Google’s new Nest Aware pricing model is rolling out starting this week, the company announced today. The new model means that a single subscription now covers all of your Nest devices, rather than asking you to pay on a per-device basis. It’s available in each of the 19 markets where Nest Aware is available, including the US, UK, Australia, France, and Germany. The new Nest Aware subscription now costs $6 a month or $60 a year to cover all of your devices. That gets you 30 days of “event video history,” meaning you get the recordings from whenever the camera detects motion or sound. Jumping up to $12 a month ($120 a year) for Nest Aware Plus doubles your event history to 60 days and also gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording history. Or pay $12 a month for up to 60 days of recordings I...

Twitter has added a new way to see how many people have retweeted a tweet and added a comment, the company announced today — but it’s only available on the iOS version of the app. The new feature organizes all of the retweets with comments into a handy list. To access it, tap on a tweet and then tap on the word “Retweets.” You’ll see retweets broken out into two columns — ones commenting on the retweet (or a “quote tweet”) and a list of retweets with no comment. Here’s a video from Twitter showing off the feature: You can already see quote tweets, but you have to copy and paste a tweet’s URL into Twitter’s search box to do so. (Here’s what that looks like when searching for the above embedded tweet, for example.) The feature rolled out today seems to be a much easier way to see retweets wi...

In a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work. Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. The settlement covers 11,250 moderators, and lawyers in the case believe that as many as half of them may be eligible for extra pay related to mental health issues associated with their time working for Fa...