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It’s been nearly two years since we wrote that New York City would finally be upgrading its transit system to take “tap-to-pay” contactless payments, but Apple’s Tim Cook says it’s finally coming true — on the company’s Q2 earnings call today , the CEO told investors that Apple Pay will begin rolling out to New York City’s MTA transit system starting in “early summer” of this year, letting you tap a phone or watch to pay instantly. But it probably won’t just be Apple Pay, because a few quick web searches show that NYC has actually already announced a specific date for a contactless payment system that should support other phone-based wallets (perhaps rival Android Pay?) and even contactless credit cards. It’s called OMNY (you know, like “omni” spelled with NY for New York), and it’s scheduled to launch May 31st — though admittedly only on Staten Island buses and the 4 5 6 subway lines between Grand Central-42 Street and Atlantic Av-Barclays Ctr to start. The full system won’t rol

Eric Schmidt will depart Alphabet’s board this June, after holding a seat for 18 years. His departure comes just over a year after Schmidt stepped down from his role as Alphabet’s executive chairman — it also comes as Google struggles with internal turmoil over its involvement with US military contracts , potential business in China , and reported cover-ups of sexual misconduct . Schmidt has been a key presence at Google during his time with the company. He initially took a board seat in 2001, when he was made CEO of Google — a role he was given essentially to lend business expertise to what company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had been building. In 2011, he left the CEO position and become Google’s executive chairman. At the beginning of 2018, he stepped down from that role and became a regular board member. ...DIB, NSCAI, @SchmidtFutures , teaching & more, to help coach and develop extraordinarily talented leaders, and to build more free, prosperous societies https

The National Academy of Sciences took a major step today to oust sexual harassers when members at its annual meeting voted to approve a new amendment that would allow the organization to kick out people who badly violate its new code of conduct . This vote isn’t the final verdict, however: the entire membership of the NAS still needs to weigh in — a process that’s expected to be wrapped up by mid-June. The National Academy of Sciences, or NAS, was founded in 1863, and is one of the three academies that make up the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Together, they conduct massive research analyses and produce reports to help “solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions,” according to their website . One of these, published last year, reported that women in scientific, engineering, and medical fields face rampant sexual harassment in academia. According to Nature , this amendment is only for the National Academy of Sciences. And it comes almost

Google employees say they will hold a sit-in tomorrow to protest the alleged retaliation against workers. In a tweet, the organizers of last year’s walkout of Google employees said the sit-in was scheduled for 11AM. From being told to go on sick leave when you're not sick, to having your reports taken away, we're sick of retaliation. Six months ago, we walked out. This time, we're sitting in. 11am tomorrow. #NotOkGoogle #GoogleWalkout pic.twitter.com/GCq0x1O8cZ — Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) April 30, 2019 “From being told to go on sick leave when you’re not sick, to having your reports taken away, we’re sick of retaliation,” the organizers said in the tweet. “Six months ago, we walked out. This time, we’re sitting in. 11am tomorrow.” More than 20,000 Google employees walked out in November to protest the company’s handling of sexual harassment allegations. In response, Google leadership made some concessions, but internal controversy has sti

Facebook announced at its annual F8 developer conference today that its Portal and Portal Plus video calling devices will soon be available in Canada and Europe, starting this fall. The device will also support WhatsApp calls, and all calls will have end-to-end encryption. The $199 Portal and the larger $349 Portal Plus launched last year at a time when consumer trust in Facebook was waning after a string of privacy scandals, and the product had to be delayed for several months in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Despite this, Facebook shared onstage today that Portal sales have exceeded expectations, and it’s notable that the company is expanding distribution for the product. Among some of the other features announced today are Superframes, which let you display photos from your Facebook feed and Instagram. The feature is available now, and users will be able to add photos from their camera rolls through the new Portal mobile app this summer. You’ll also be able

After announcing plans to reshape Facebook around privacy last month, Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual F8 conference to outline more of what that might look like. Zuckerberg opened the conference stating, “The future is private ... So today, we’re going to start talking about what this could look like as a product.” The initiative is still in very early stages, though, and so many of the announcements hint at that direction without actually taking the large steps needed to offer a truly private experience.

Instagram announced at its F8 developer conference today that it’ll start testing a new feature later this week that’ll hide users’ public like counts on videos and photos. The test will only be in Canada, and likes will be hidden in the Feed, permalinked pages, and on profiles. Instagram says it wants followers to “focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.” Only the person who owns the account will be able to see how many likes their content received. We thought a feature like this might be in the works. Code hunter Jane Wong published screenshots of this test earlier this month, and at the time, Instagram said it hadn’t tested the feature. Now, we can see it was prepping for the test to run after F8. A spokesperson at the time said, “We’re not testing this at the moment, but exploring ways to reduce pressure on Instagram is something we’re always thinking about.” It’s unclear if the company will roll the test out more broadly, but I would love to test

Facebook Messenger’s mobile app for iOS is about to shrink. The company said today that it is working on a new version of Messenger that will be fewer than 30MB (or about 20 percent the size of the current app). The new version of Messenger, which is expected to arrive later this year on iOS, was rewritten from the ground up, the company said. It should launch in two seconds or under, the company said. There are currently no plans to bring it to Android where Messenger Lite has been available since 2015. The move represents Facebook’s latest step to return Messenger to its lightweight roots. After years of expanding into bots, payments, games, and areas, the app had become cluttered and slower to navigate than rivals like iMessage and Signal. It grew so large that it was unusable in countries where data is still prohibitively expensive, leading Facebook to introduce Facebook Lite on Android. Last year, the company introduced a redesign intended to streamline the app. Speed is amon

Facebook Dating still isn’t available in the United States. But in the five countries where it launched already — and the 14 more that are joining the service today — there’s a new way to see which friends might be romantically interested in you. “Secret Crush,” as the feature is called, lets you express interest in up to nine friends. If that friend has opted into Facebook Dating and likes you back, they get a notification saying someone likes them. If they pick you as one of their secret crushes, you both get notified. You won’t be able to add anyone who hasn’t created a Dating profile, the company said. That could entice more reluctant Facebook users to give Dating a shot — who isn’t curious to see whether a friend secretly likes them? For those who haven’t seen it yet, Facebook Dating closely resembles its competitor Hinge . Unlike Tinder, it doesn’t ask you to swipe on potential matches. Instead, you answer question prompts and initiate conversations based on a photo or writte

Spring is a time of change and gift giving. Lots of people are graduating from high school or college, and either heading into the workforce by getting a job or continuing their education. So as it is customary to gift these individuals for their graduations, we have pooled The Verge staff’s expertise into a list of great gift ideas. These things have either served the staff well, or are things they wish they had when they graduated and moved into new periods of their lives. And so, compiled below is a list of 47 things from Ikea’s Frakta bags at around $5 to the Apple Macbook Pro at $1,799 that would be a great gift for any graduate at any price point. Credits Editorial lead: Michael Moore Art direction: James Bareham Photography: Amelia Holowaty Krales Retouching and stop-motion animation: Michele Doying Copy editing: Adia Watts Contributors Cameron Faulkner, Chaim Gartenberg, Natt Garun, Barbara Krasnoff, Dami Lee, Shannon Liao, Andrew Liptak, and Kevin Nguyen. Vox

Most of the giant platforms have an easy pitch for developers. Apple developers make apps for iOS and Mac, then sell them for money. Google developers make Android apps and ChromeOS hardware, then sell them for money. Amazon developers launch businesses on AWS or Amazon’s storefront, and then sell goods and services for money. Today Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference kicks off in San Jose, and it’s worth noting how complicated its pitch to developers has become. There once was a time when it was relatively straightforward — developers like Zynga once printed money selling virtual cows through Facebook’s popular gaming platform. But that part of Facebook has withered to near-nothingness, and in the meantime developers became one of the company’s biggest headaches. Cambridge Analytica is, at its root, a developer story — one that Facebook responded to, out of necessity, by shutting down wide swathes of the platform to prevent anything like it from ever happening again. So wha

Samsung Electronics warned investors it was going to make a lot less money this quarter, and sure enough, the company just reported first-quarter earnings that show profits slid 60 percent compared to last year, from 15.64 trillion won (roughly $13.4 billion) to just 6.2 trillion won (about $5.3 billion). But unlike Google earlier today , the company’s not blaming its expensive phones for anything whatsoever — Samsung says the Galaxy S10 lineup actually sold well, with the company shipping 78 million phones overall (as well as 5 million tablets) in the quarter, and that any weakness in phones can be explained by its low and mid-range models — a big part of Samsung’s new phone strategy is differentiating mid-range phones — cannibalizing sales for last year’s Galaxy models. Samsung’s expecting to ship slightly more phones next quarter, too. Instead, the stated reasons for the decline are primarily the same as last quarter : falling demand for memory chips, which is Samsung’s tru

Apple’s had a few public embarrassments in recent years — AirPower , the MacBook’s unreliable butterfly keyboard , and the iPhone slowdown saga come to mind — but it’s been a minute since since the original tech scandal of “Antennagate,” when the iPhone 4 had a tendency to drop calls if you held it in certain ways. Today, The Information is reporting (and AppleInsider is corroborating) that Apple VP of engineering and wireless specialist Rubén Caballero has left the company, which is notable for a couple of reasons. First, The Information reports he was the driving force behind Apple’s in-house 5G modem efforts — because yes, it seems that Apple is trying to design its own 5G modem to compete with Qualcomm. We can’t read too much into his departure because 5G is ridiculously messy right now and Apple’s at the eye of the storm , so there could have been any number of reasons for him to get pushed out or decide to move on. According to Reuters , he may have actually lost his le

Google has a simple, yet subtle, reason for its anticipated push into the midrange smartphone market: there’s too much competition in the high-end one. Next month, on the first day of its I/O developer conference, Google is expected to show off its new, cheaper Pixel 3a and 3a XL . And on an earnings call with reporters today, Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer of Google parent company Alphabet, said that industry-wide pressure on high-end phones led to fewer Pixel sales last quarter compared to this time a year ago. Porat specifically cited “some of the recent pressures in the premium smartphone market.” Maybe making $1000+ phones isn't such a great idea after all? — Janko Roettgers (@jank0) April 29, 2019 While Porat didn’t specify what those pressures are, we can assume she’s referring to increased competition from Apple and Samsung, as well as high prices driving down consumer demand and leading smartphone owners to hang onto their devices for longer than the annua

Last April, T-Mobile and Sprint announced their plans to merge , yet one year later neither the US Federal Communications Commission nor the Justice Department have approved the deal — and the telecommunications companies just opted to extend the deadline an extra month. On Monday, T-Mobile and Sprint announced a deadline extension for the $26.5 billion merger in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The two companies will now have until July 29th to convince officials at both the FCC and DOJ to approve the transaction that would combine the third and fourth largest telecommunications companies in the country into one. Makan Delrahim, who heads the antitrust division of the Justice Department, says that he had not decided whether to approve the deal. “I have not made up my mind,” Delrahim told CNBC on Monday. “The investigation continues. We’ve requested some data from the companies that will be forthcoming. We don’t have a set number of meetings or a timeline.” M

Back in March, we heard that a New Jersey drama club was adapting Alien as a high school production. Now there’s a recording of the production making the rounds that shows the play straight through, including their take on the Space Jockey, the Chestburster, the Xenomorph, and a guy playing Harry Dean Stanton in an accurate Hawaiian T-shirt. Since the video could potentially get taken down for being an unauthorized adaptation of Alien (it already has several music-related copyright claims), it’s better to watch it now while it’s up, so you can see how well the drama club did adapting a film built on an $11 million budget for the high school stage. The students say they raised their own money for the play and made costumes out of recycled material. The show has now seen support from some of the cast and crew from the original Alien. The film’s director, Ridley Scott, donated $5,000 to the school for an encore performance. Sigourney Weaver, who played Ellen Ripley in the Alien

Burger King is rolling out the Impossible Whopper nationwide, after a successful trial run testing the meatless burger in St. Louis . The chain announced in a statement today that it plans to test in more markets before distributing the burger nationally by the end of this year. The Impossible Whopper is made with startup Impossible Foods’ plant-based patties, which are designed to look and taste like meat. The patties are also designed to “bleed,” just like the real thing, which can be attributed to the use of heme, a soy-based compound found in plants and meat. The burgers have 15 percent less fat and 90 percent less cholesterol than regular Whoppers, and Burger King’s taste test experiments claim that customers and employees can’t tell the difference. Meatless options are gaining popularity at more fast food restaurants. White Castle offers Impossible Burgers, which uses another meat-free patty recipe from Impossible Foods, and Carl’s Jr. sells a veggie burger made by Beyond Meat

On Monday, Facebook announced a new set of research projects that will look into social media’s impact on democracy. The projects will give more than 60 academics access to “privacy-protected Facebook data” to help conduct research into a range of topics, including the impact of IRA-trolling on Germany’s 2017 election and the spread of fake news during the Chilean elections in the same year. Facebook will provide the researchers with data from the platform’s APIs for CrowdTangle, its Ad Library, and, eventually, an anonymized URL dataset. Researchers around the world competed for the grants, although Facebook was not involved in determining which projects were approved. The company has also pledged not to interfere in the research going forward. “To assure the independence of the research and the researchers, Facebook did not play any role in the selection of the individuals or their projects and will have no role in directing the findings or conclusions of the research,” Elliot

Google employees are organizing a phone drive to press lawmakers to legally end forced arbitration. In February, Google said it would end its use of forced arbitration clauses. The clauses, which are widely used in many industries, funnel employee complaints to a private legal system instead of the courts. Critics of the policies say they give employers an advantage over workers in disputes. But while Google dropped the policy, some employees are looking for national legislation to ban the practice across the United States. Employees recently appeared alongside Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to urge Congress to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (FAIR) Act. The employees are organizing a phone bank for May 1st and asking for people to make three calls to lawmakers — two to the caller’s senators and one to their representative — pushing for the FAIR Act, which was recently reintroduced in the House of Representatives. The workers are also publishing a guide , which i

Press renders claiming to show the unannounced Motorola RAZR V4 have appeared online in a now-deleted post on Weibo . The images were later reuploaded to SlashLeaks . If real, the renders are our first look at the phone’s design outside of a patent, and they appear to confirm its notched folding screen design. GSMArena notes that the images show a wireless charging stand that’s included with the phone alongside a typical range of accessories, all housed within a neat triangular prism-shaped package. The look of the RAZR shown in the renders lines up with the design shown in a patent spotted back in January , although it’s impossible to see if it confirms a separate rumor about a second display on the front of the device. Unlike its competitors from Samsung and Huawei, the RAZR appears to fold vertically rather than horizontally. The design means it’s a phone that folds to become more portable, rather than a tablet that folds to be the size of a phone. According to The Wall Street J

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones, season 8, episode 3, “The Long Night.” As we head into the second half of the final season of Game of Thrones , our heroes have braved one of two large wars that have been set up over the course of the series. With the great war against the undead over, there are more major survivors than expected, but the heroes’ numbers have been significantly reduced by the incredible onslaught of wights. Now, Daenerys will presumably march south on King’s Landing to claim the Iron Throne, but her forces (and her claim to the rulership of Westeros) have been severely weakened over the past few episodes. In the epic fight against Cersei that’s still to come, who has numbers on their side? Thankfully, some industrious Redditors have paid a lot of attention in the past seasons, and tracked what we know about Daenerys’ and Cersei’s army sizes. Prior to the Battle of Winterfell, Daenerys had approximately 10,000 Northerners, 10,000 from the Vale, less than 8,000

Vimeo announced (via TubeFilter ) that it is releasing a new toolkit called Showcases that will allow creators to show off their videos, including customizable portfolio sites and Smart TV channels. The company describes Showcase as a new way for users to highlight their portfolio online, and brings three tools to the table: a customizable portfolio / video site, the ability to embed video playlists on existing websites that creators might have, and TV apps for Pro users, which will allow creators to build their own Smart TV channels, which can be distributed via Roku and Amazon Fire TVs. The feature will replace Vimeo’s Album feature (it says that it’ll update the design and keep “all the features that you love while adding new ones.”) Vimeo also says that there are a bunch of features in the works for Showcases — additional layouts, support for live-streaming, Showcase-specific statistics, and more.

Overcast is one of the best podcasting apps out there, and it’s introducing a new feature that should make it even more useful to listeners: the ability to share clips of episodes to share online. The app’s latest update allows users to converts an excerpt of a podcast into a short video, which can then be shared on social media, (or by email or text message). Developer and Overcast founder Marco Arment notes in a blog post that people have long been able to share podcast episodes, but that it’s been a cumbersome process, and that it’s easier to share a short video than it is an audio link. To share a clip in the app, click on the share icon in the top right-hand corner, and select the “Share Clip” option. That will bring you to the interface to select the desired segment of the episode you’re listening to. You can then customize it a bit to share it as straight-up audio, a vertical, landscape, or square video, and add on a “Shared from Overcast” badge, if you so wish. .⁦ @cart

Following the introduction of Apple’s iOS Screen Time feature , a number of app developers who created screen-tracking and parental control apps have been asked to change their products, or have been booted from the App Store completely, according to a new report in The New York Times . The Times says that “Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps,” as well as a number of others. The report cites users who point out that Apple’s Screen Time app has some drawbacks that the popular third-party apps came with, like the ability to shut down certain apps, less-granular scheduling, and that children were able to work around Apple’s web-filtering tools. They also pointed out that third-party apps could be used across iOS and Android platforms, making it difficult for parents to oversee Android devices. The report features interviews with developers who found their apps pulled from the store abruptly, faced unclear and vagu