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On Tuesday, Facebook reached a historic settlement with civil rights groups that had accused the company of allowing advertisers to unlawfully discriminate against minorities, women, and older people by using the platform’s ad-targeting technology to exclude them from seeing ads for housing, jobs, and credit—three areas with legal protections for …
Read More »Google will give Android users a choice of browser and search engine in Europe
Google has announced that it will start asking European Android users which browser and search engine they would prefer to use on their devices, following regulatory action against the company for the way it bundles software in its mobile operating system. Last year Google was fined a record $5 billion …
Read More »Apple's iMacs are getting major power upgrades
Apple (AAPL) is giving its iMac line of desktop computers a serious power boost. The company on Tuesday announced that it’s bringing high-powered, 8th-generation and 9th-generation Intel (INTC) processors to the all-in-ones, marking the first major updates for the systems since 2017. In addition to their new processors, the iMacs …
Read More »Google unveils Stadia video game streaming service
Google (GOOG, GOOGL) is getting into gaming with a new cloud-based streaming service. The tech giant on Tuesday announced the offering, called Stadia, at the Game Developers Conference 2019 in San Francisco. Stadia will allow you to stream games online to any compatible internet connected device. The tech giant just said …
Read More »Disney now owns 21st Century Fox, X-Men, and most of Hulu
After more than a year of working to get final approval, Disney’s lengthy process of acquiring 21st Century Fox is finally done. The merger went through at 12:02 am ET, giving Disney full control over a number of 21st Century Fox entities including the company’s entire movie studio division, its …
Read More »NASA spacecraft discovers its target asteroid is spewing material and is much more rugged than expected
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made an astonishing discovery about the asteroid it has been orbiting since December: the rock is actively spewing material out into space. The asteroid, named Bennu, has ejected materials up to 11 times since the spacecraft has been there. But no one is sure what exactly is …
Read More »Pandora now lets you change its algorithm for selecting music
Pandora is giving listeners more control over what songs their customized radio stations play with a new feature called Pandora Modes. Pandora’s classic algorithm has long chosen what plays when you start up a new artist station, but these alternative modes let you switch to other types of curation for …
Read More »Facebook’s former chief security officer on how to protect content moderators
Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos joined The Verge’s Casey Newton onstage at SXSW to discuss the difficult issues that plague Facebook and democracy. You can listen to their discussion in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from this interview between Stamos …
Read More »The Google Stadia game controller feels surprisingly great
Google today took the wraps off its Stadia cloud gaming platform, showing off a bold but largely untested vision of the future of gaming that involves distributing and playing software in real-time over the internet. We still don’t know a lot about how Stadia will work, how much it might …
Read More »Facebook, YouTube, and others asked to brief Congress on New Zealand shooting response
Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), penned letters today to tech executives from companies like Facebook and YouTube requesting a briefing on March 27th regarding their response to the New Zealand shooter’s live stream and the subsequent reuploads across multiple platforms. Thompson’s letter was …
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