News broke this morning that PayPal will spin off from eBay into a separate publicly traded company, ending a 12-year union between the online merchant and the payments processor. At the most basic level this creates two simpler, more focused companies — but the real impetus for an independent PayPal is more likely the rapidly maturing ecosystem of digital wallets and mobile payments, especially Apple Pay, which threatens to eat PayPal’s business from the inside out.
For series 8 of Doctor Who — the first series starring Peter Capaldi — Ross Miller and Kwame Opam will be sounding off on each episode in a series of emails we'll be publishing on the site. It's mostly about the show but often just their own lives.
Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 10 this morning, and the company is planning to distribute a Technical Preview of the new operating system tomorrow. At Microsoft's event today there were a number of machines running the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and I got an opportunity to briefly explore the new OS. While Microsoft pushed hard with touch on Windows 8, Windows 10 is the complete opposite. If you mouse into the corners to find the tricky Charms Bar they no longer trigger and frustrate. Instead, you're greeted with the familiar Windows desktop and Start Menu from the moment you use Windows 10. It's Windows 7 right now and very early in its development, but it has some interesting improvements waiting inside.
Fox wants to remake Big as a television series. Finally, we have show to decode the mystery that is the man-child!
The 1980's comedy Big, starring Tom Hanks, is being developed as a half-hour comedy by writers Kevin Biegel and Mike Royce, the creators of the underrated workplace comedy, Enlisted. That show — canceled by Fox in May after playing outs its first season at 9:30 PM on Friday nights, also known as viewership wasteland — was a heartfelt and funny take on life at a rear detachment U.S. Army base. In fact, the show felt too warm and kind for Fox, which for years has trafficked largely in gritty, bloody, loud and snarky programs.
But Big seems to continue a shift in a gradual directional shift for Fox, a networks that's...
Pharrell's latest music video, "It Girl," is out and it's very weird, guys. Just very weird. Here he is, Arby's hat and all, singing inside what looks like a Japanese Super Nintendo dating sim crossed with an extremely fan-service-y shojo anime. While he sings — the song is kind of catchy — you can watch him leer at his It Girl from afar, with extreme closeups of his eyes thrown in every now and then. It's bright, unsettling, and might even induce seizures in some. But most concerning of all, I'm left with that damn Pharrell sprite dancing in my head. Proceed with caution.
The Apple Watch went on display this morning at Colette, a high-end Paris boutique that consistently attracts swarms of the hipper-than-thou. The event marked the first time that the watch has been shown to the public since company CEO Tim Cook unveiled it at a media event in California earlier this month, though it remained a decidedly hands-off affair. The watches were kept behind glass displays on the ground floor of the store, and visitors were not allowed to touch them.
Yet the chance...
During its big unveiling of the new Windows 10 operating system, Microsoft demonstrated a feature called Continuum, which is designed to make it easy for users to switch between touch interfaces and non-touch environments. One of the biggest criticisms of Windows 8 was that it was difficult for users of mice and keyboards to navigate the interfaces designed for touch, and touchscreen users had trouble navigating the traditional desktop that works so well with a mouse and keyboard.
With Continuum, Microsoft appears to be taking that criticism to heart, and it says the new interface design smoothes those transitions. Microsoft says this interface was built specifically for devices such as the Surface Pro 3 and Lenovo Yoga, which have...
Surely the crowd-pleaser at today's event, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore unveiled Windows 10's biggest improvement yet: the command prompt. Your mom is probably very excited to hear about it. Power users will now be able to use CTRL+V to paste in directories, which is actually a welcome change. Copy and paste is important. (Especially for those of us who've been able to do this in command prompts for years on other OSes). But don't worry, it still looks exactly as you'd expect it to look. It's also probably not touch-enabled. Sorry.
The extended trailer for Taken 3 — henceforth, Tak3n — is here. It literally does not matter what I write here, so here are the best Liam Neeson quotes from the trailer."Listen carefully, Kim. Something terrible has happened to your mom. Don't trust anyone"
"There are things I have done in my life and I was always ready to face the consequences. To protect my family."
"My first priority is to protect the only one I have left... I'm going to finish this."
"Good luck."
Reactions from the staff:
For superheroes to stay alive, they have to change with the times. It’s a dilemma the comics industry has struggled with for decades, here and there resisting and elsewhere confronting head on. It's also one of the best parts about loving comics. When I was a kid, few of the characters I loved looked much like me. The few that did weren’t exactly marquee characters, the icons like Spider-Man and Wonder Woman that fans could rally behind outside their local comic book shops. Today, however,...
It isn't often you see airliners flying in formation. There's a good reason for that, of course: they're too busy earning money for the airlines that own them to engage in any sort of photogenic tomfoolery.
Occasionally, though, it all comes together. Airbus is in the midst of launching its A350 XWB, a next-generation hauler that will replace the A330 and A340 while doing battle with Boeing's 777 and 787 Dreamliner. In celebration of achieving certification from the European Aviation Safety...
The FCC today unanimously voted to end its sports blackout rules nearly four decades after they were first implemented in 1975. Despite stiff objections from the NFL, the Commission has put an end to the rules that barred cable and satellite providers from airing games blacked out on local broadcast stations because they failed to sell out. But it only ends the government's rules. The NFL still has its own, private blackout rules in place with broadcasters like FOX and CBS, and those may still prevent fans from watching local games when tickets remain at the box office.
If virtual reality is as successful as its proponents hope, hotel chain Marriott is playing a dangerous game. As of earlier this month, it’s touting what it calls the "first-ever virtual travel experience." Without ever leaving your home city, you can visit tourist hotspots thousands of miles away. You can have a beach all to yourself or stand at the very top of a tower without fear of falling. In other words, Marriott has decided to dip its toes into virtual reality with a demo that seems to defeat the entire purpose of hotels.
The day I step into its Times Square branch, that feels like a good thing, because it’s a terrible time to be stuck in a real-world hotel. Compared to the crystal-clear late-summer sky, the artificial lights...
Come along with The Verge for the second season of Detours. We’ve traveled across the country to find the people, groups, and companies that are solving America’s problems in new and unconventional ways. Check in for new dispatches every Wednesday.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy laid waste to Manhattan, leaving much of it underwater. Now, a group of architects is building a $335 million protective barrier around the island's southern tip to spare the Big Apple from the next big one.
The US government made history on September 18th when President Obama signed an executive order establishing a task force to combat antibiotic resistance at the federal level. The order outlined general goals such as tracking the use of antibiotics and creating incentives for drug development. Some applauded the announcement, while pointing out other countries’ continued failure to do the same.
Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to humans worldwide, according to the...
I'm sitting across the table from two Parrot representatives, who are telling me about the impressive adaptive capabilities of the company's new Zik 2.0 headphones. I'm wearing a blue pair, listening to Lou Reed, holding a connected Android phone in my hand. As they talk, I'm swiping up on the Zik app on the phone, increasing the noise cancellation on the black Ziks I'm wearing. The Parrot reps' voices disappear in a sea of smooth Lou Reed jams. I swipe down a bit and their voices re-appear, the cancellation replaced with audio passthrough. Then I start messing with the equalizer. It all sounds pretty good, but I keep tweaking. There's too much to tweak.
Parrot's last set of Zik headphones were big, bold art pieces, great-sounding...
It's a tricky security problem: how do you let your wedding guests take photos, but make sure none of the photos leak? If you're George Clooney, you collect everyone's phone and give each of them a burner phone just for the occasion, to be tossed away once the big day is over. It's an expensive way around the problem, sure, but if you're a movie star, it's a small price to pay.
The bigger question, tossed around in security circles, is how all this actually worked. Supposedly, Clooney's people had access to all of the photos taken with the burner phones, so they would know who took which photos and would be able to trace back any leaks that came out. Vogue had bought exclusive photography rights to the wedding (donating the fee to...
Earlier this year, the world was shocked by the high-profile breakup of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, one of the world's most prestigious typeface foundries. The firm was responsible for some of the most widely used typefaces of recent times, most notably the Gotham and Surveyor families, and served clients including GQ, Esquire and The New York Times. While many had assumed the business was an equal partnership between Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, it emerged that Hoefler had negotiated sole ownership of the firm. Frere-Jones sued for half of the business, and the pair descended into one of the most closely watched lawsuits the design world has seen in years.
Now, it appears that fight is over. According to documents filed today...
We wasted little time once iOS8 launched before we started deliberately trying to break Apple's new QuickType feature, and XKCD took things a step further with today's cartoon. That idea inspired us to test just how good the iPhone can be at butchering other famous phrases, quotes, and lyrics.
Could one of the best phones ever be as eloquent as John F. Kennedy Jr., or as lyrically smooth as Cee-Lo Green? Before long, each attempt wound up in a pattern of the same suggested pronouns and...
Product placement in music videos is about to get even more annoying: new sponsors are going to start getting edited into old videos. Universal Music Group, the music giant with artists including Kanye West and Taylor Swift, is going to start using a technology that will allow music videos to be continually updated after their release — for instance, a soda can in a video might read "Pepsi" one week and "Coke" the next. Aside from allowing advertisers to sponsor a video for limited periods of time, the technology will also allow UMG to target different versions of a video to viewers with different interests.
I have a plan to fix The Simpsons.
This plan assumes that The Simpsons needs fixing, so I ask you to play along. Don't worry: I promise I'll talk about how The Simpsons isn't actually so bad by the end of this piece, but for now, let's assume it's downright awful and desperately needs a big change.
Here's the plan: Surrender the 27th Season to twenty-two artists and allow them do whatever they'd like with the characters and universe for their allotted 23 minutes.
Because The Simpsons needs more of this:
And less of this:
The show's producers have already made steps in the right direction, allowing some of the world's best animators to create their own unique version of the opening couch gag. The shorts have been...
The big knock against Google's Chromebooks is that they can't run true desktop-class software, with Photoshop a commonly-cited example. Google and Adobe are now looking to close that gap: the companies have just announced that Adobe's Creative Cloud software will soon be available for Chromebooks. The first release will be a "streaming" version of Photoshop, but it's a fairly limited release for starters. It'll only be available to Adobe's education customers who have a paid Creative Cloud membership, and it sounds like you'll need to apply for access to the beta.
For those who do have access to this beta release, Google and Adobe are saying it'll be the same Photoshop "you know and love." Unsurprisingly, it'll integrate directly with...
Sometimes I feel that video game glitches are more surprising and interesting than the video games themselves.
I've been trying to unpack this idea for a couple months. Surely my feelings stem from writing about video games for 40 hours a week, every week, every year for the past half decade. I confess that all of the AAA shooters and sports titles and action-adventure hybrids begin to blur together at a certain point; that the tropes and mechanics feel like a pool of shared ideas. And yes, sometimes I have to make a conscious effort to differentiate one uninspired shooter from another.
I don't think that's why I love glitches, though.
I believe, at least in terms of big budget gaming, we've been in an era of safety, an era built upon...
What if everyone in Tiananmen Square had been carrying a smartphone? Among civil society groups, it's a common question, and one with far-reaching implications. Would technology make the people's movement stronger or easier to control? Does interconnection strengthen a crowd or distract it?
“I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
‘This could be Heaven or this could be Hell’
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say…”
Welcome to Dota 2, the Hotel California of online gaming. Late last December, I was naïve enough to dip a toe in its beguiling waters and today, 1,399 hours of gameplay later, I return as a semi-functional human to regale you with tales from its realm.
The US government has been continually criticized for how it operates its drone program, which is being used to kill militants in the Middle East using standards that are unclear and loose at best. The government's unwillingness (or inability) to clarify all of this can make the entire situation fairly muddled, so this weekend John Oliver tried to trudge through it all. In the latest of his long and pointed segments, Oliver sorts out just how troubling the US drone program is. "When children from other countries are telling us that we made them fear the sky," he says, "it may be time to ask some hard questions."
Last year, the web optimization network CloudFlare promised it would double SSL usage on the web in 2014 — and last night, the company made good on its promise. Overnight, CloudFlare deployed its Universal SSL feature, offering free SSL encryption to any site that opted in. All told, that meant two million new sites with the feature, effectively doubling encryption on the web overnight.
"I know men like him. I've served under them. They push you and make you stronger until you're doing things you never thought you could. I saw you tonight, you did exactly what he told you. You weren't even scared, and you should have been."
For this season of Doctor Who, Ross Miller and Kwame Opam will be sounding off on each episode in a series of emails we'll be publishing on the site. This week it's "Time Heist" (warning: spoilers ahead). Check out our previous recaps: "Deep Breath," "Into the Dalek," "Robots of Sherwood," "Listen," and "Time Heist."
The Piano Guys are probably having more fun than anyone else in the classical music business. The group — composed of a pianist, cellist, a videographer, and a music producer — has just released a music video that celebrates nearly 50 years of Batman. The video perfectly matches the group's new "Batman Evolution" composition, which travels through the classic ‘60s TV show, Tim Burton's 1989 take on the Dark Knight, and Christopher Nolan's most recent trilogy.
The result is not just some impressive piano and cello work (the two instruments alone were used to make every sound in the composition), but a music video that displays some incredible attention to detail. Each of the three eras gets its own location, Batmobile, and visual style...
After a tumultuous offseason, Saturday Night Live returned last night with the first episode of season 40. None other than Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt guest starred, and as you'd expect, the show wasn't short on superhero gags. The show poked fun at Marvel's seeming inability to make a dud with a list of Guardians of the Galaxy remixes — one more preposterous than the next. One of the other more memorable skits explores the same territory as Watchmen by imagining what would happen if superheroes lived in the real world. The result is a little more... juvenile.
Yahoo Directory, a site that was once the center of Yahoo's internet dynasty, is being shut down at the end of the year. However, unless you've been using the internet for a couple of decades, you've probably never heard of the site. Let's hop in an internet time machine and set the dial back to 1994, when Jerry Lang and David Filo founded Yahoo. The site, "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," was little more than a hand-curated list of sites on the internet, sorted by category.
At the time, fast, efficient, and accurate search engines like Google were little more than a dream — navigating the internet relied on such lists of interesting websites. The site was later named Yahoo (an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical...
Welcome back to The Weekender, First Weekend of Fall Edition. The weather is getting a bit cooler here on Mars, so it's time to take a breath and look back on a long week back on Earth. But don't worry; there's still plenty for you to do if you're not staying inside your little fallout shelter.
Daniel Radcliffe is intent on letting us know he's more than his wizarding world persona. He's performed to critical acclaim on stage, most recently on Broadway in The Cripple of Inishmaan, and on television, playing alongside Jon Hamm in the dark comedy A Young Doctor's Notebook. So we're a little disappointed that Horns, due out later this fall, got such middling reviews when it premiered earlier this year, because, based on costuming alone, the guy really went for it. Take a look.
In Spokane, Washington, one of the authors of the state's successful marijuana decriminalization bill has proposed a novel way to track drug use: by monitoring sewage.
Being a fan of a television show or a film these days means more than showing up once a week, whether that includes following your favorite actor's every publicized move (even though it's probably not them) or listening to your favorite series' showrunners' podcast immediately after each new episode. Even better than that, though, is finding out that the people involved in making your favorite on-screen stories come to life often have passion projects of their own.
Take the above for example, writer and director Tony Elliott's short film Entangled. In it, Elliott — a screenwriter for the well-regarded sci-fi drama Orphan Black — tells a story of a woman whose lover is suffering debilitating side effects of a quantum device he's...
Apple's newest phones sold 10 million units last weekend—strange reports of bending aside, they're breaking records left and right. In 2013, the 5c and 5s sold nine million units in their opening weekend, while the 4s sold a paltry four million the year before. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus outdid that in pre-sales alone.
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein has made something chilling and beautiful. He took all of the badge photos of the people who devised the atomic bomb during World War II at Los Alamos, and he built a mosaic.
The badges are an amazing piece of history, but with this mosaic, they've been turned into something functional. You can actually see the name of each individual at the bottom as you move your cursor over the pictures. But you know what’s even more striking?
This woman.
Mary T. Healy.
In June, researchers discovered an unexpected feature in iOS 8 that seemed to offer new protections against location-tracking. But now that the new operating system is trickling out to customers, many marketers are saying it won't even slow them down. As it turns out, Apple's big privacy win isn't as big as we thought.
You want games for your new iPhone.
You spent a lot of money on this phone slash mobile game console and you hope it will entertain you to its maximum potential, pushing the hardware so hard it warms your hand, validating your lavish investments. A new game is visual evidence of your new phone's awesomeness. Apple knows we want these flashy, "console quality" games to show off our new iPhones. Their marketing machine regularly parades graphic showpieces across the best real estate on the App Store.
But before you stuff our mobile hard drives with pretty but boring shooters and mindless click-click-click rubbish, I have an alternative to consider. My pitch goes against everything your gut says to do with this expensive, future-facing...
I have an iPhone 6 Plus and a fully customized 2014 Moto X sitting on my desk. They’re making me want to cry.
The indecision becomes more painful each and every time this happens. I flop between an iPhone and an Android device at least once per year, sometimes more. (Okay, usually more.) On a very rare occasion, a Windows Phone finds its way into the mix, but for me — as it is for most people I deal with personally and professionally — the battle really comes down to Apple and Google. The last year was spent evenly divided between an iPhone 5S and a Nexus 5; now, in September 2014, the best iPhone ever and the best Android phone ever have been released within a few days of one another. Mobile industry, you’re not making my life any...
I'm stuck between a group of Australians and a gigantic death worm. The worm is hundreds of feet long, covered in huge spines, and crushes buildings with a single swish of its tentacled mouth, but the Australians have been really annoying.
I to decide to go with the worm.
I'm playing a preview version of Civilization: Beyond Earth, the next video game from strategy game supremo Sid Meier's studio, Firaxis. Like its much-loved predecessors, Civilization: Beyond Earth is still turn-based,...
The latest Super Smash Bros. game features just about everything you would expect from the series. The roster of characters is absurdly huge, featuring everyone from series mainstays like Mario and Link to new characters like Pac-Man and even the ghostly trainer from Wii Fit. You'll be fighting across stages pulled from Nintendo's rich history, including a green-hued stage that looks like a GameBoy and Mario Kart's infamous Rainbow Road. There's a whole bunch of modes to play through, both solo and with friends, and at the end of the game you still fight that weird giant hand.
But the newest Smash Bros. differs from past games in one key regard: it's on a handheld device for the very first time (a Wii U version is expected later this...
I've never been able to get into the Lord of the Rings franchise. I've tried, many times, but the movies are just way too long (I've fallen asleep during The Two Towers at least twice) and the books are too dense for me to get into. I understand that it's a deep, fully realized universe with thousands of years of history, and that sounds really cool. I just haven't been able to find that one starting point I can grasp onto before immersing myself in Tolkien's universe.
It turns out all I...
Apple has responded to the controversy over whether its new iPhones are unusually susceptible to bending: the company called the issue "extremely rare" with only nine customer complaints so far, and invited The Verge and others to see its facility where it stress-tests each new model for durability. And senior VP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller, the man who introduced the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on stage this month, has advice for anyone worried about their phone failing to retain its shape.
"As we expected, it's extremely rare to happen in real world use," Schiller tells The Verge. "In this case, as in many things, we tell customers that if you think something's occurred that shouldn't have with your device, go to AppleCare, go to the...
Apple has released an iOS update that promises to fix some issues introduced in iOS 8.0, but more importantly, quite the mess it left behind with iOS 8.0.1. That update went out earlier this week, and was quickly yanked by the company after iPhone 6 owners discovered their phones no longer connected to cellular networks, and that their Touch ID buttons no longer scanned for fingerprints. Workarounds let people revert back down to iOS 8.0, but required access to a computer with iTunes, and a copy of Apple's iOS firmware file, leaving many in a lurch.
A few blocks away from Apple's bustling campus in Cupertino is a rather nondescript building. Inside is absolutely the last place on earth you'd want to be if you were an iPhone. It's here where Apple subjects its newest models to the kinds of things they might run into in the real world: drops, pressure, twisting, tapping. Basically all the things that could turn your shiny gadget into a small pile of metal and glass.
“We’ve designed the product to be incredibly reliable throughout all your...
Marc Andreessen is a venture capitalist. He tweets from the altar of disruption, calling forth lost souls to drink the sanguine blood of the disrupted. He is the poet laureate of Silicon Valley.
After defeating Malekith in Svartalfheim (and while waiting for Tony Stark to "jumpstart a dormant peacekeeping program"), Asgardian thunder god Thor has returned to earth and assumed the identity "Chris Hemsworth" to pursue a career in theater.
Thor's latest is Blackhat, a global thriller written and directed by Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice). Thor will portray a super-muscular-convicted-hacker-turned-gun-toting-hero who teams up with both American and Chinese forces in order to stop a a group of dangerous gun-toting cybercriminals. How high are the stakes? Some quotes from the trailer:
What would you do with a billion dollars? If the answer is, "I would design a yacht-shaped hospital," then you are Russian banker / architect / future space tourist Vasily Klyukin — hi there! Big fan. Thanks for reading The Verge.
I suppose you know everything I'm about to write here, but just for everyone else's sake: Klyukin has revealed designs for White Sails hospital & spa, four-skyscraper beast that looks like the world's biggest yacht (each tower is a sail) trapped in a very tiny...
