The Pirate Party's popular Pirate Bay Proxy has been shut down amid claims that the music industry was threatening litigation. The proxy was created to circumvent the UK ban of The Pirate Bay, and the latest traffic stats reveal it was the 133rd most-visited site in the country. It's not clear...
Other services remain operational
RIM's new wave of smartphones will be sold on the UK's top three carriers. EE (which encompasses both T-mobile and Orange), O2, Vodafone, and Three have all announced they intend to carry BB10 handsets early next year. BlackBerry is still a...
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a conductive wire that can be stretched up to eight times its original length without impeding functionality. The malleability was achieved by filling an extremely thin elastic polymer tube with a liquid metal alloy consisting of gallium and indium. By keeping the plastic and metallic materials separate, researchers have been able to...
More than a century ago, a man named John T. Daniels photographed the most iconic moment in aviation history, when he captured the Wright brothers' first flight in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. History remembers Daniels as an "amateur photographer," but as PetaPixel explains, that's something of an understatement. Because although his black-and-white image is now widely recognized as the world's first photograph of manned flight, what's lesser known is the fact that it was also the first photo Daniels had ever taken.
In fact, Daniels had never even seen a camera before December 17th, 1903, when he accompanied Orville and Wilbur Wright on their trip to Kill Devil Hills. Prior to launching their Flyer aircraft, Orville perched his Gundlach Korona five-by-seven-inch glass plate view camera on a tripod, focused it accordingly, and...
Capturing history on his first attempt
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Terms on Terms on Terms on Terms
Somewhere near the intersection of music, motion, and metaphysics is where you'll find "Firewall" — an interactive media installation from Aaron Sherwood and Mike Alison. At first glance, the piece may look somewhat underwhelming, consisting of nothing more than a spandex sheet stretched across a large frame. Once pressed, however, this membrane suddenly comes to life with fiery visual...
Fruit Ninja may be one of the simplest games that you could play on a smartphone, but slicing and dicing fruit in real life isn’t quite as straightforward. Filmmaker Scott Winn — no stranger to producing slow motion footage — has managed to capture what we’ve all dreamed of doing: cutting down a barrage of fruit to accompanying dubstep. The hero of the video puts up a valiant fight against pineapples, bananas, and even pumpkins, all while avoiding those tricky bombs in the process. In the end, though, everything comes crashing back down to brutal reality, but this may very well be the closest any of us ever get to becoming a true...
NORAD may have decided to hand official Santa-tracking duties over to Bing this year, ending a five-year contract with Google, but the engineers in Mountain View will not be swayed. Google is announcing that it will continue on with its own Santa Tracker regardless, developing a "new route algorithm" that lets you follow the Claus’s location with up-to-the-minute precision.
Beginning at 2AM PT on Christmas Eve, you’ll be able to track...
At least it wasn't Apple Maps
Earlier this week we saw reports that the FTC would let Google avoid antitrust prosectution by making voluntary changes to its search practices, but now it appears that the agency’s final decision on the matter will be coming down next year, rather than within the week as originally rumored. B...
Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata has addressed some of the issues faced by the Wii U upon its launch. In a Nintendo Direct video posted to the company's Japanese site, Iwata acknowledges the inconveniences caused by the system's slow performance for tasks like switching between applications, as...
National Geographic has announced that it will stop posting pictures to Instagram. The move comes after the photo-sharing social network introduced a controversial new terms of service agreement that sparked fears it would be able to sell users'...
I still use a DSLR. Unlike my colleague Dan Seifert (and a handful of other staffers at The Verge), I've never been willing to sacrifice the speed and control of my Nikon D7000 to get a smaller, lighter camera. It's really not an image quality issue — Sony's NEX lineup...
It's been a wild first year for us at The Verge — and you can check out many of our best and favorite stories here. For a broader view, though, here's our perspective of the world in 2012. We hope you enjoy it, and here's looking forward to 2013.
New York Magazine just recently listed its top 10 albums for the year. I only had heard one of them; in fact, I’d only heard of one of them.
The album is called good kid m.A.A.d city, a Short Film by Kendrick Lamar. It’s by some fella named Kendrick Lamar. I bought it on a recommend from my good friend and editor Thomas Houston, the unofficial tastemaker / GIF-tracker around the Verge office. I asked...
Vince Cable, the United Kingdom's Business Secretary, announced a set of new intellectual property initiatives yesterday aimed at improving the way IP is approved and protected in the UK. Speaking at The Big Innovation Centre in London, Cable...
Popular photo sharing service Instagram is facing a user backlash after the company revealed new terms of service this week. The fine print, that takes effect on January 16th, is the first big policy change to Instagram since Facebook acquired the service earlier this year. The new ToS grants...
The UK has announced new guidelines that could see less social media users prosecuted under the country's abusive speech laws. Director of public...
Earlier this year, I made a pretty drastic change in my camera set up. I left behind my trusty Canon DSLR, and the lenses and accessories that had served me well for six years, and I picked up a...
Apple has caught a lot of flak for the dearth of local data in its iOS mapping application, but that could get measurably better if rumors of a partnership with Foursquare Labs are true. According...
Three weeks ago, a Texas-based geneticist created a media spectacle by claiming to have sequenced the DNA of the mythical Bigfoot, in what is most certainly either an act of purposeful deception or...
Google has released a new version of Google Play Books for Android that brings one very interesting feature to the table: the app will now read books to users on its own. Dubbed "read aloud," the...
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is donating half a billion dollars in Facebook stock to a Silicon Valley charity in his largest donation to date....
Building a great to-do list app is hard — we want them to be easy to use but impossibly powerful, with every feature imaginable but no friction or clutter. Wunderlist, the product of Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder, found a sizable audience thanks to both simplicity and ubiquity – from desktops to mobile, there's basically no platform with which you can't use Wunderlist, and it's incredibly easy...
Did you hear that? That low hum rising off in the distance? What could it be? Oh, of course, it's The Verge Holiday Gift Guide! The holiday shopping season — and deep dread of finding that perfect gift for everyone on your list — kicks off now, and we're here to help. This year, we're...
