Tech Talk

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A sophisticated spyware campaign is getting the help of internet service providers (ISPs) to trick users into downloading malicious apps, according to research published by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) (via TechCrunch ). This corroborates earlier findings from security research group Lookout , which has linked the spyware, dubbed Hermit, to Italian spyware vendor RCS Labs. Lookout says RCS Labs is in the same line of work as NSO Group — the infamous surveillance-for-hire company behind the Pegasus spyware — and peddles commercial spyware to various government agencies. Researchers at Lookout believe Hermit has already been deployed by the government of Kazakhstan and Italian authorities. In line with these findings, Google has identified victims in both countries and says it will notify affected users. As described in Lookout’s report, Hermit is a modular threat that can download additional capabilities from a command and control (

The company says it could suffer “irreparable harm” if it can’t sell its products while the court considers its case. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Juul can continue selling its e-cigarettes despite the Food and Drug Administration ordering them to be removed from sale on Thursday, according to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ( via TechCrunch ). In its order on Friday, the court says it’s issuing the temporary stay to give Juul time to file an emergency motion, which it can then consider along with a response from the FDA. The FDA says the reason for the ban is that there’s “insufficient evidence to assess the potential toxicological risks of using the Juul products.” Juul had petitioned for clearance to sell its tobacco and menthol flavored vape products, but the FDA turned down the application. The regulator notes that it’s only illegal to sell the products, not to own or use them. The court says its order “should not be construed in any wa

Image: Marshall B. Mathers III The last couple of weeks have had a lot of bad news for some in the “web3” space, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at announcements in and around the recently-ended NFT.NYC and ApeFest 2022 events. The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s (BAYC) annual event in particular brought in musicians like The Roots, LCD Soundsystem, Haim, Lil Baby, Lil Wayne, and others to perform for its members. On the final day of the event, guests saw the premiere of this video from two of the celebrities who’ve purchased tokens, Eminem and Snoop Dogg. The video is for a new song, From The D 2 The LBC , that isn’t the most memorable of collaborations and is mostly about smoking weed, but it constantly splices in images of the cartoon apes. Many BAYC members were disappointed in February when both men performed in the Super Bowl halftime show, and despite appearing during an event that featured crypto ads seemingly every few minutes, failed to highlight their web3 endeavors.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade , Google’s chief people officer Fiona Cicconi sent a staff-wide email to employees on Friday informing them of Google’s response to the ruling. Among other things, the email states that Googlers that they can “apply for relocation without justification,” and that people in charge of the relocation process “will be aware of the situation” in assessing their requests. The Supreme Court’s ruling does not make abortion illegal throughout the US — instead, it leaves the decision up to individual states. A number of states have immediately restricted abortion rights , including Louisiana, Missouri and Kentucky. Other states, including California, where Google is headquartered, have vowed to protect abortion rights within their borders. Here’s the letter in full: Hi everyone, This morning the US Supreme Court issued a ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organiza

Patch management for the latest versions of Windows might the concern of most of us located here on Earth, but meanwhile, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft has received the first update to its Window 98-based system in 19 years. The mission was first launched to discover of signs of liquid water on Mars , including a suspected 20x30km lake of salty water buried under 1.5 km of ice in the red planet’s southern polar region. The updates were conducted by engineers from the  Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica  (INAF), Italy, and were fully funded by the  Italian Space Agency  (ASI). What does this mean? The agency said the upgrade will enable the spacecraft to view Mars and its moon Phobos with better levels of detail. The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding ( MARSIS ) instrument on Mars Express sends low-frequency radio waves down towards the planet using its 40-metre long antenna. Most of these waves are reflected from the planet’s

T-Mobile knows what apps you’re using. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile’s advertising business is offering a new way for marketers to pry into your app-using habits. Ad Exchanger reports that the un-carrier’s new program is called App Insights, and it’s now fully operational after spending a year in beta . The program allows third-party marketers to buy T-Mobile customer data and centers around a key piece of information that it has unique access to: what apps you use. Customer data is anonymized, and it’s pooled together with others of similar interests and behaviors, so companies can’t buy a specific user’s app history. Still, it’s creepy. The company’s advertising segment touts this offering loud and clear on its website , with the phrase “Apps speak louder than words” splashed across the top of the page. It also invites prospective clients to “leverage app insights, the strongest indicator of consumer intent.” That’s gross. Thankfully, you can opt out. Ima

Meta and a group of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) are working on bringing realistic audio to the metaverse. As Kristen Garuman, Research Director at Meta AI, explains , there’s more to augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR, respectively) than just visuals. Audio plays a very important role in making a world feel alive. Garuman says “audio is shaped by the environment that [it’s] in.” There are various factors that influence how sound behaves like the geometry of a room, what’s in said room, and how far someone is from a source. To achieve this, Meta's plan is to use AR glasses to record both audio and video from one location, then using a set of three AI models, transform and clean the recording so it feels like it's happening in front of you when you play it back at home. The AIs will take into account the room that you're in so it can match the environment.  Looking at the projects, it appears Meta is focusing on AR glasses. Meta

Decide whether you want to see captions or not. Twitter has announced that a button to toggle captions for its video player is now available for everyone on iOS and Android. The button, which shows up in the top-right corner of the video if it has captions available, lets you choose whether you want to see written descriptions. Twitter started testing this feature in April , but it was only available to a limited number of iPhone users. For years , whether subtitles show up or not on your mobile device has been determined by a variety of factors, like if you’ve turned closed captions on in your phone’s accessibility settings, or if you’re watching the video with your sound off. While those are still taken into account, now you can easily turn them on or off whenever you want, just like you already could on Twitter’s website and many other video platforms. The choice is now yours: the closed caption toggle is now available for everyone on iOS and Android! Tap the “CC” button o

Chris Pratt, the voice of Mario. And Garfield . | Image: Nintendo I know it’s been nine months, but I’m honestly still reeling from the announcement that Chris Pratt will be voicing Mario in the upcoming Mario movie . What on earth is that going to sound like??? Pratt, at least, seems to think it’s going to be something special. “I worked really closely with the directors and trying out a few things and landed on something that I’m really proud of and can’t wait for people to see and hear,” Pratt said in an interview with Variety . “It’s an animated voiceover narrative. It’s not a live-action movie. I’m not gonna be wearing a plumber suit running all over. I’m providing a voice for an animated character, and it is updated and unlike anything you’ve heard in the Mario world before.” Nintendo, please, release a trailer That last sentence appears to mean that Pratt won’t be imitating Charles Martinet’s iconic take on Nintendo’s famous plumber. While we kind of already knew that

On Wednesday, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) found a surprising way to develop her upcoming cryptocurrency regulation bill: she put it on GitHub . “As promised, you can now contribute comments on my bill establishing a framework for digital assets with [Sen. Gillibrand],” Lummis wrote in a tweet sharing the news . “Civil comments and criticisms welcome. Please share widely. We want to get this right. Help us iterate publicly on policy.” Best known as a repository for open-source code, GitHub includes a number of tools for that could be useful in developing public proposals — particularly the ability to publicly comment on, revise, and fork the text into different versions. As of press time, Github users have commented on 24 issues in the bill and made eight pull requests – some of which have proposed meaningful additions to the bill. One user asked the senators to “increase the value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies with a tax on mining.” Another thread raised concerns about algorit

As part of its twentieth anniversary, the Google News redesign has officially launched adding a bigger emphasis on accessibility and customization. Google states the redesign “was inspired by feedback [they] received from readers” as the desktop site aims to make catching up on the news easier. Major stories will have a bigger thumbnail and adjacent articles next to them for different types of coverage. The new Google News (Image credit: Google) Rearranged sections Immediately upon opening Google News on the desktop, you’ll be greeted with the top stories of the day with a Local News section (no longer tucked behind menus) and personalized picks to the right. You can add multiple locations to Local News if coverage for one city isn’t enough for you. And the menu bar that was on the left-hand side now makes its home at the top of the page. Scrolling down past the initial sections, you’ll come across Your Topics which are six different categories that you can select out of

Fitbit has introduced a new Sleep Profile feature for Fitbit Premium users, a feature that collects long-term Sleep Metrics to tell you more about your bedtime habits.  The feature is compatible with the best Fitbit devices including the Fitbit Sense , Versa 3 , Versa 2 , Charge 5 , Luxe , and Inspire 2 devices, and is set to launch during the week of July 4. The feature is designed to offer “a new longitudinal analysis of your sleep patterns” after a minimum of 14 days of use, and is used to help “calculate trends and compare them to what is typical for your age and gender”. It does this by collecting different sleep metrics over those two weeks, including sleep schedule variability, time before sound sleep, disrupted sleep, sleep duration, restfulness, and REM sleep. Once it has all this data, it will assign you to one of 10 kinds of sleep categories, represented by illustrations of very cute animals. Do you sleep like a giraffe in short bursts, in need of a quality sleep sched

“Cash-flow is the lifeblood of any business” - we have all heard the phrase, to the point that it has become accepted common wisdom bordering on a cliché. It is easy to understand why when you break it down to the most basic business principle. No matter how great your business is, if you run out of cash the game is up.  Add to this that virtually every business decision culminates in the transfer of value, usually represented by the need to collect or pay out money, and it becomes clear why cash flow is so closely correlated to the health and well-being of any business. Whether you are selling the latest smartphone , purchasing stock from a supplier, acquiring a new office block, or funding a subsidiary in a foreign market, every transaction needs a way to get settled. Yet markets are complex, global, and competitive. There is a vast ecosystem of suppliers and a myriad of payments and financial services solutions catering to this most simple problems: How to move money from A to B

If, like this writer, your Google TV  recommendations have been sullied by your kid’s viewing habits, the great news is that your next suggested show to watch will likely be something more fitting than Puppy Dog Pals or Blippi. Much to the relief of parents and apartment sharers alike, Google TV is at last rolling out multiple user profiles to people in a free update. The software upgrade now enables every member of a household to have their own profile, meaning each person will be shown relevant recommendations based on their previous individual viewing on that profile. It’s been one of the most requested features from users, and had been initially announced as being added to the platform all the way back in October last year, before being shelved a couple of months later.  During the wait, Google did add kids' profiles, but today’s update at last brings the platform into line with the likes of Netflix and Disney Plus which have offered multiple user profiles pretty much sinc

Image: Brave Brave Search has launched a new feature that gives you a way to create or apply custom filters that change the way its results are ranked. It’s called “Goggles,” and it could potentially help uncover sources you might not find right away on traditional search engines like Google. Brave has some demos ready for users to try today , including ones that prioritize posts from smaller tech blogs and filter out posts from the 1,000 most-viewed sites on the web. There’s even a Goggle to exclude posts from Pinterest — because Brave clearly knows the frustration of trying to find an image and getting a Pinterest post with no source. Brave says these Goggles are just for demonstrative purposes, and developers can expand on or fork them. It will start deleting these Goggles once users start coming up with their own, but I’m hoping the Pinterest one sticks around. While Brave says its engine, which is independent from entities like Google and Bing , “doesn’t have editorial biase

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple will no longer let you use an iPad as a home hub to control HomeKit accessories starting with iOS 16, MacRumors reports . Text apparently found in iOS 16’s second developer beta by MacRumors contributing writer Steve Moser spells out the change. “A home hub is required to take advantage of features like receiving accessory notifications and allowing other people to control your home,” text in the Home app reportedly reads. “You will not be able to view shared homes until those homes are also upgraded to the latest HomeKit. iPad will no longer be supported as a home hub.” “Only Apple TV and HomePod are supported as home hubs.” If the change goes into effect as the found text suggests, it means you’ll need to use a HomePod, HomePod mini, or Apple TV as your home hub when you upgrade to iOS 16. Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. But as MacRumors points out, the company’s iOS 16 preview webpage says that “o

Micron has unveiled the world’s highest-capacity microSD card , the i400, with storage space of up to 1.5TB, 50% more than the former champion, the C200 . The semiconductor giant reached that capacity by using its 176-layer 3D NAND technology (similar to that used in SSDs ) and will target the enterprise market, especially anything that has to do with video storage at the edge. In other words, don’t expect the card to be cheap or easy to source, especially as it is designed to handle five years of continuous 24x7 high-quality recording and a whopping MTBF of two million hours. No details have been provided about its performance, but this is clearly an industrial-grade product - unlike the C200 - which means that write and endurance are likely to be at the top end of the spectrum. The C200 used a 96-layer 3D NAND technology and the i400 (also available in capacities as small as 64GB) is likely to have some spare capacity for wear leveling. Analysis: What comes next for microSD? To

The Volvo FH Fuel Cell Electric semi at a hydrogen fuel station. | Image: Volvo Volvo’s commercial trucking division is testing hydrogen fuel cell semi trucks in the hopes of getting ahead of the maturing technology. With fuel cells built by CellCentric, a joint venture between Volvo and Daimler Truck Automotive Group, Volvo claims its trucks are capable of 1,000 kilometers of range (about 621 miles) and can be refueled in under 15 minutes. Volvo Trucks has been “developing this technology for some years now,” said company president Roger Alm in a statement this week . Hydrogen fuel cells will be suitable for long-distance hauling and could work in countries with limited battery charging infrastructure, Alm said. The company started building battery-electric trucks in 2018, but they still aren’t widely in service in the US. Now with hydrogen fuel cell trucks, Alm says he expects growth in the supply of clean hydrogen in the next couple of years. Image: Volvo Volvo claims refu

The company was accused of letting advertisers exclude protected groups from their campaigns. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US government and Facebook parent company Meta have agreed on a settlement to clear up a lawsuit that accused the company of facilitating housing discrimination by letting advertisers specify that ads not be shown to people belonging to specific protected groups, according to a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ). You can read the full agreement below. The government first brought a case against Meta for algorithmic housing discrimination in 2019, though accusations about the company’s practices go back years before that . The company took some steps to address the issue, but clearly, they weren’t enough for the feds. The department says this was its first case dealing with algorithmic violations of the Fair Housing Act. Meta’s changing how it selects audiences for housing, as well as credit and employment opportunity, ads

The new social tags might make it easier to find a good group. | Image: Epic Games Fortnite can be an absolute blast to play with your friends, but being matched up with random players is more hit-and-miss. In some of the randomized groups I’ve been in, coordinating any sort of effective strategy can be a challenging endeavor, particularly if some team members want to rush into battle while others would prefer to play it slow. To help you find better squadmates, Fortnite developer Epic Games is testing new social tags for profiles that let you indicate how you like to play and can be used to match you up with other like-minded players. According to a blog post , tags will include things like your favorite game modes and whether you want to use a mic or not. If you have added at least one social tag, you’ll be able to send and receive party invites from people with matching tags who are in your server region using a new “Looking for Party” section in the sidebar menu. You can fli