What's Tech?

When I started at The Verge in 2014, I needed an excuse to learn about technology. My background was in covering video games, television, and pop culture, and I lacked the basic cognitive functions to hold a phone above my head without dropping it on my face. So I launched a podcast called What’s Tech. For two years, the show was an opportunity to learn the fundamentals about the technology that supports everyday life. Free to ask silly, obvious, and embarrassing questions, I learned a ton. I hope you did, too. After all, my favorite takeaway from the podcast was that I wasn’t alone. We often take tech for granted, like a magical apparatus that does everything we need, not a massive collection of moving parts designed and programmed by women and men with their own dreams, ambitions, and motives. Technology is immensely confusing, but understanding how it functions and who creates it is a worthwhile and rewarding pursuit. I sincerely hope that through this show, tech became more accessible and less mysterious, without losing its fun and that special power to fascinate us. Recently, I took on more responsibilities with our Culture team. I’d love for you to check out our work. Right now, I want to give the section and its writers the time and support they deserve. But to focus on Culture, I need to let What’s Tech go on indefinite hiatus. I won’t go so far as to say the show’s done forever. We’ll leave the RSS feed open, and hopefully we’ll have something new to take the show’s place in the coming months. Which is to say, I’d encourage you to stay subscribed. Now for the final episode. For my guest, I invited my buddy Ross Miller, with whom I co-launched The Verge’s TLDR section. We talk about life on the internet. And also, breakfast. I hope you enjoy. Thanks for listening. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Snapchat Spectacles, the mysterious and incredibly hyped hardware from Snap, Inc., have arrived. Vending machines for the video camera sunglasses are springing up around the country, first in California and Oklahoma, and who knows where else next. Verge senior reporter Bryan Bishop joined me this week to talk about his experience hunting down Spectacles and whether we’re all going to feel like olds wearing them. Also, what’s the deal with this circular video format? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the early 2000s, the digital photography revolution made it possible for miniaturized camera hardware and image sensors to be packed into cell phones without adding a significant amount of weight. Then the iPhone was announced. As the smartphone war began, the camera became an important part of the ongoing spec race. Competitors tried to beat Apple in making an excellent camera (and app) that was easy to use — and it took until this year for that to start happening. Now, two-thirds of adults in the US own a smartphone. The average smartphone user takes at least 150 photos per month. Instagram has half a billion monthly users. Even if it’s just selfies or pictures of lunch — nothing has familiarized people with photography like smartphone cameras. It’s now a part of our everyday lives. I joined Chris on this week’s What’s Tech to talk about my first camera phones, why the newest smartphones have such equally excellent shooters, and where it all goes from here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the past couple years web security has become a staple of the nightly news. The stories usually hinge on government leaks, foreign hackers, or web encryption. There’s menacing subtext that practically everything put online is vulnerable to “cyber attacks.” Though one might wonder what steps are being taken to protect not just the government and giant corporations, but you, the individual. What keeps you safe when you stumble your way into a Wikipedia hole or click a strange link sent from a friend? To find out, I invited my colleague Russell Brandom to talk about web security, and particularly HTTPS. As Russell explains, while your information isn’t necessarily less vulnerable, websites themselves are becoming safer. This is a dense topic, but fortunately Russell brought a helpful metaphor. It involves pie. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our most sacred and special task as human beings is to document our own existence with a single-minded dedication. That's why we have massive iCloud photo libraries, 15GB of video of that really cool Springsteen concert on our phones, Instagram accounts for ourselves, our pets, and our alter egos, and dusty yearbooks stacked up in our closets. The latest in this personal digital archive: personal GIFs. Apps like Boomerang, Motion Stills, Giphy, DSCO, and more help us make GIFs and other short, looping videos of life's most precious moments. And of course, of life's most 'grammable sammies. The Verge tech reporter and gadget blog queen Ashley Carman joined me (Kaitlyn Tiffany, your friendly Chris Plante stand-in) in the single-stall What's Tech recording booth this week to compare sweat mustaches and GIF-creation techniques. We had a nice conversation about art, technology, ourselves, and the utility of acronyms. If you tune in, you'll also learn a little something about the future of keepsakes! It's a good, emotional time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Here at The Verge, we love Halloween and everything about it. Horror movies, non-horror seasonal movies, seasonal beverages, seasonal bots, this Pumpkin Guy, horrifying makeup tutorials, poop-shaped candy — bring it on. In particular, we love to be scared. It gives us a sweet little adrenaline burst to get us across the daunting dark tundra of November to April. This Hallo-season, senior entertainment reporter Bryan Bishop has embarked on a journey to find the most immersive, creative, and high-tech scares in all of Los Angeles. In a new series called "The Future of Fear," he's taking us all where we're too East Coast or too chicken to go. These aren't your grandma's haunted houses (although Bryan and I will both stan for the original Haunted Mansion at Disney World, may it live forever). I love Halloween so much I, Kaitlyn Tiffany took over the seat usually warmed by your friendly neighborhood What's Tech host Chris Plante. You can't tell from the audio, but I wore a blazer to the recording because I take Halloween very seriously! Bryan told me about all the terrible things he's subjected himself to this fall, and it was delightful even while it shook me to my core. Basically, it's a haunted house of a podcast and don't listen to it before bed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Samsung has officially recalled the Galaxy Note 7 worldwide, after more than 90 of the large smartphones in the US overheated due to defective batteries. Overheating is, in this case, an understatement, as some owners have claimed their smartphones outright exploded. Exploding lithium-ion batteries actually aren’t so uncommon. As my colleagues Angela Chen and Lauren Goode noted earlier this month, there are many ways for a lithium-ion battery to become dangerous, and they aren’t limited to any one smartphone or electronic device. “An exploding phone seems like a freak accident,” write Chen and Goode, “but the same chemical properties that make batteries work also make them likely to catch fire.” To learn more about the lithium-ion batteries, I invited The Verge’s science reporter Angela Chen to the show. We talk about how manufacturers are pushing the battery to its limit, and what alternatives we may see in the future. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I didn’t take many selfies until I downloaded Snapchat. But like so many people I’ve fallen in love with lenses, the optional tools that make my face look like a dog or an emoji or an advertisement for junk food. Now, a day doesn’t go by that I don’t mug into my front-facing camera. The magic of lenses is how they erase the perception of the selfie as an act of narcissism — an insipid criticism that comes from a certain clump of people who feel the need to bash people for showing a fleck of confidence. Why didn’t I take selfies? I was too embarrassed. Anyway! I digress! I’m clearly fascinated by the popularity and power of lenses, so I invited my friend and colleague Ashley Carman to the show. We talk about the potential of the lens, and the possible future of a would-be gimmick that has birthed a broader pop culture trend. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Late last month, news broke of the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. Orbiting the closest star to our Solar System, there’s a lot to love about Proxima b since it shares a few key traits with our own home planet. But before we start making intergalactic vacation plans, let’s pump the space-brakes: half the planet is locked in darkness, it’s pelted by radiation from close proximity to its sun, and the rock is 25 trillion miles away. Our current best option for sending a probe there involves a laser-propelled space-sail, which would reduce travel time from tens of thousands of years to 20. Which is to say, while potentially astonishing, even the best case scenario seems like a long-shot for our lifetime. To explain Proxima Centauri b, I invited my friend and colleague Loren Grush onto the show. This is, I think, the first episode in which we don’t talk about the Nic Cage film Knowing, so just keep that in mind. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The first trailer for No Man’s Sky, published in December 2013, promised a universe with enough planets, creatures, and vegetation that it could not be fully explored by one player in a lifetime. The hype was immediate, and it only continued to build with each month between the game’s announcement and its release this summer. This, some fans speculate, could be a game that lasts forever. My buddy Austin Walker concisely dismantled that logic at Vice before the game’s release, but No Man’s Sky has nonetheless attracted a good deal of controversy. To explain the game, and the community’s reaction, I invited my colleague Andrew Webster to the show. Andrew wrote a great series on his time in the game that I encourage you to enjoy along with the podcast. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine if grocery shopping was just another online subscription service, like Netflix or Spotify. You complete a survey, sharing your likes and dislikes, and the platform sends, week after week, precisely measured portions of proteins, veggies, fruits, oils, and spices required to make dinner and the necessary recipes to alchemize these ingredients into Food Network-level dinners. My friend and colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany lived this modern spin on the home cook life this past spring, after she volunteered to review the many "fresh box" food delivery programs currently available. Plated, PeachDish, Blue Apron, Purple Carrot, Hello Fresh: a neighbor has probably tried to convince you to adopt one of the platforms, claiming the over-packaged nourishment saves precious hours each week. But are the services all they cracked out to be? Or is the future life in our home pleasure prisons, never leaving, always waiting for deliveries? Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new round of video game consoles has began last week with the release of Microsoft’s One S. The slim, white hardware is a minor upgrade to the original Xbox One, and the predecessor to next year’s flashier upgrade, codenamed Project Scorpio. Next month, Sony is expected to announce its own update for the PlayStation 4, codenamed Neo. If it feels a little early in a generation of consoles to be talking about dropping cash on the next great thing, you’re right. But these consoles don’t follow the traditional cycle of new video game hardware, which last around seven years. They’re more iterative. Microsoft’s hardware is built around backwards compatibility with Xbox One, and its expected that PlayStation Neo will play PlayStation 4 games. The new era of game consoles is closer to smartphones: a variety of annually updated hardware with a variety of features that shares same large, ongoing collection of apps. To talk about the ways these new game consoles are similar and different from the hardware of the past, I invited my friend and colleague Megan Farokhamnesh to the show. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listenon Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I had never heard of Nextdoor when I lived in New York City. Social media services catering to individual neighborhoods weren’t useful in an apartment building where most tenants lasted a year, and longtime residents kept to themselves. In my first year in Texas, however, I’ve regularly relied on Nextdoor, along with my neighborhood’s private Facebook group and the handful of sites that provide hyper-local support. I’m not the first to say local online forums are the bulletin boards and community papers of our times. They allow neighbors to promote garage sales, find babysitters, or request help to find a lost dog. They’re far from perfect, but in my experience they have helped lower the barrier between me and my community. To talk about online neighborhood groups, I invited my colleague Ben Popper to the show. Popper is our business editor and has covered Nextdoor a few times, but he’s also a member of his own share of local online communities. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, orsubscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For 72 episodes, What’s Tech has invited guests to explain technology and its cultural periphery — from drones and fan fiction to ASMR and biohacking. We were bound to make a podcast about podcasts eventually. This was inevitable. For this momentous occasion, our guest is Alex Goldman, co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, Reply All. After you listen, visit Reply All’s publisher Gimlet Media, which is responsible for a number of the best examples of the podcasting form. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pokémon Go had a week unlike any video game I’ve covered in my career. Here’s a collection of the posts we penned last week, ranging from players finding dead bodies to Craigslist entrepreneurs selling pre-played accounts. My friend and former boss Chris Grant wrote about the staggering demand for coverage at our sister-site Polygon. In "Some thoughts on Nintendo’s big week," Grant contextualized the game within Nintendo’s unusual year. And he noted how Pokémon Go inspired the most popular posts not simply on the video game outlet, but across Vox Media, from The Verge to Racked to Vox.com. But why? And how? And when will this moment pass, or has it already? I invited our Games Editor and Pokémon expert Andrew Webster onto the show to provide background on the phenomenon, and speculate as to what its future might look like. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a teenager, my only interaction with the world of webcomics was Achewood. Launched in 2001 and published sporadically ever since, Achewood is like Seinfeld crossed with Adult Swim. It felt for me in the early 2000s like this lone, weird thing. A few years later, around when I got my first writing gig, I realized how much bigger webcomics were than the stories of Téodor and Cornelius. I inevitably came across Penny Arcade and the rush of video game-inspired webcomics its inspired. And after that, I found people on Twitter and Tumblr and other platforms, all of whom created beautiful, weird, powerful art. It took me awhile to get into webcomics, but the gradual epiphany is one of the internet’s great pleasure. You look at one star in the sky, and as your eyes adapt to the darkness, you discover this dot is part of a crowded constellation. This week, I invited my friend, colleague, and webcomic artist Dami Lee to talk about the format. Webcomics literally changed the direction of her life. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

"Is The Bachelor tech?" You might ask this question while listening to this week’s episode of What’s Tech, a podcast that provides introductory explainers into the many pockets of technology and the culture around them. I believe the answer is yes. The Bachelor series has aired for over 14 years and spun-off numerous programs, totaling over 35 seasons, but its most recent surge of critical significance stems from the rise of social media. Who watches The Bachelor and how they watch it have changed dramatically since the first episode has aired. Credit belongs to an expanding ecosystem of critics, fans, and former participants that meet any given Monday. To explain, I invited my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany to the show. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My entire body clenches when I hear the word doxxing. Each time I write something that, for whatever reason, upsets a corner of the internet, I wonder if my personal information — phone numbers, address, social security number, credit card information — will be made public, or doxxed. And if it is made public, then how will it be used? Even though our identities on the internet are more public than ever, we are still individually afforded a certain amount of privacy. Our passwords, our forum names, our Google habits: these are, for most of us, secret. And because they are secret, people on the internet can threaten their reveal as a form of harassment. That’s the sticky core of doxxing; the erasure of one’s sense of privacy, and with it, safety. This method of publishing personal information has become more mainstream, alongside the ubiquity of the internet. So, to spread awareness, I invited my colleague and security expert Russell Brandom to discuss the origins of doxxing, how it has evolved, and why people use doxxing today. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was a teenager in the days of Napster and LimeWire, when illegal files flowed through the internet like free hamburgers through a freshman dormitory orientation session. I didn't understand the legality of file sharing, let alone the technical explanation of how it worked. Peer-to-peer file distribution has changed over the years. Though I feel more savvy to the legal issues, I am no less dumbfounded by how it all works. That’s why I invited my colleague Ashley Carman onto this week’s show. She provides a brief history of file sharing, then explains how torrenting works in the present. Is it legal? Who does it hurt? Why do people use it? We have answers to all that and more. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, or subscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices