Technology news

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum is leaving the company amid arguments with parent company Facebook over data privacy and the messaging app’s business model, according to a report from The Washington Post. Koum, together with his fellow co-founder Brian Acton, sold WhatsApp to Facebook in 2014 for an eye-popping sum of $19 billion, $3 billion of which consisted of Facebook stock granted to both Koum and Acton, who left the company back in September. Koum confirmed his departure in a p

Larry Harvey,founder of the counterculture festival Burning Man, passed away this weekend. He was 70.
Harvey created a movement and contributed to the flowering both of counter-culture and, ultimately, of tech culture.
Both he and John Perry Barlow,who also passed in February this year after a long period of ill health, were huge advocates of free speech. Barlow wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead, and then became a digital rights activist in later life.
In 2013 I caught up with both of them and

“It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee,” WhatsAppco-founder, CEO and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote today. The announcement followed shortly after The Washington Post reported that Koum would leave due to disagreements with Facebookmanagement about WhatsApp user data privacy and weakened encryption. K

Solving complex data-driven problems requires a lot of teamwork. But, of course, teamwork is typically restricted to companies where everyone is working under the same roof. While distributed teams have become commonplace in tech startups, taking that to the next level by linking up disparate groups of people all working on the same problem (but not in the same company) has been all but impossible. However, in theory, you could use a blockchain to do such a thing, where the work generated was co

One of the several ways opponents of the FCC’s new net neutrality rules plan to push back is to use the Congressional Review Act to nix the Commission’s order before it has a chance to take effect. Although Democrats in the Senate are currently one vote short of success, they plan to force the vote soon anyway, perhaps as early as mid-May.
As explained in other posts about the steps that can be taken to combat the unpopular Restoring Internet Freedom order, the CRA allows for a quick

Breakthroughs in HR tech are not only giving employers game-changing tools with which to enhance processes and attract the best talent, they’re also solving longstanding labor gremlins, such as gender pay parity and blind hiring. At the same time, they’re giving employees novel means by which to accrue and auto-tag prequalifying skill sets for job scenarios far beyond their current positions. But there are opportunities in matching current/future employee needs with what employers ca

The pond-dwelling Hydrais not a very complex little animal but it does have a complex repertoire of moves that aren’t clear until after extensive human observation. Examining these moves took a long time and scientists were never sure that they had seen all of them. Now, thanks to an algorithm used to catch spam, researchers have been able to catalog all of the Hydra’s various moves, allowing them to map those moves to the neurons firing in its weird little head.
“People have u

The Democratic National Committeeis trying to help Democrats regain the pole position as the tech-savviest political party in the U.S.
After getting Trumped in the 2016 election (pwned on security, data analysis and at the polls), the DNC is launching I Will Run, a marketplace for software, services and training to upgrade the campaigns of Democratic candidates.
Announced today by Sally Marx, the tech program manager for the DNC, the new marketplace will have a host of tech tools that campaigns

FCC filings submitted by Sonos in March suggest that the company is working on a new speaker, potentially a follow-up to the Playbar. The filings, which were first spotted by Variety, reference model number S14. The device will reportedly incorporate an HDMI port, which would be new for the Playbar. (It previously relied on an optical in port.) The label filing, which you can see below, depicts a microphone. This probably means the mysterious speaker will ship with support for Amazon’s Al

To paraphrase a saying popularized by countless dorm room stoners: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you use the hype around decentralized crypto economies to sell bacon.” The latest example of this age-old adage comes to us from Oscar Meyer and involves their exciting new cryp-faux-currency, Bacoin.
The currency can be redeemed for bacon and you “mine” it by sharing the good news of bacoin with your friends. Instead of taking up ma

Chinese authorities revealed over the weekend that they have the capability of retrieving deleted messages from the almost universally used WeChatapp. The admission doesn’t come as a surprise to many, but it’s rare for this type of questionable data collection tactic to be acknowledged publicly.
As noted by the South China Morning Post, an anti-corruption commission in Hefei province posted Saturday to social media that it has “retrieved a series of deleted WeChat conversations

Logan Paul announced in a 16-minute vlog over the weekend that he is ending regular updates on his popular daily vlogging channel, which launched less than two years ago and currently has over 17 million subscribers.
According to the video, Paul is abandoning the daily model because he “wants to exercise his creativity in different ways... If anyone is going to end my career, okay, it’s going to be me,” he added. He then launched into a 10-minute segment in which he and his fr

Summer movie season kicked off early this year with the release of Avengers: Infinity War, but in spite of its history-making performance at the box office, audiences no doubt have an appetite for things other than Marvel superheroes. Fortunately, May will bring a lot of new alternative options to television screens.
Netflix is adding several films and TV shows to its original content lineup, including the zombie movie Cargo on May 18th, the Amanda Seyfried and Clive Owen science fiction film A

One of the big issues T-Mobile will have to fight back against if it wants to successfully merge with Sprint is market consolidation. If the two companies merge, the US will go from four major wireless service providers to three, therefore reducing competition. Given how aggressive (and successful) T-Mobile has been over the last several years — ever since its proposed merger with AT&T failed — you can see why this might be an issue.
But if you ask T-Mobile, that isn’t wha

Oculus VR is developing an immersive theater experience to debut next year that will feature real-world actors who perform in virtual reality using motion capture. The experience is being billed as indie game Journey meets interactive theater show Sleep No More, according to Yelena Rachitsky, an executive producer of experiences at Oculus who detailed the project in an interview with CNET.The central idea is to use trained actors who perform live while viewers interact with them from the comfor

After two earlier attempts failed to materialize, T-Mobile and Sprint announced on Sunday that they’ve reached a $26.5 billion merger agreement. If approved, it would combine the third and fourth largest carriers in the United States. The new business would instantly become a much more formidable rival to Verizon and AT&T. Both companies claim that a successful merger would make the United States a leader in the formative early years of 5G mobile networks. But there are very legitimat

Trump still hasn’t appointed a science adviser — but he did offer the job to Bill Gates, who said it was “not a good use of my time.”At a meeting between the president and Microsoft founder last month, Gates suggested to Trump that he actually appoint someone to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. At this point, Gates told STAT, Trump asked Gates if he himself wanted the job. Gates did not.Gates isn’t a scientist himself, but he is sort of

LG’s next flagship smartphone, the G7 ThinQ, is debuting in just a couple days, and another teaser has been dropped. Speaking with Engadget, LG says that the phone will have a Boombox Speaker that “increases the base sound level by more than 6dB with twice the amount of bass.”
According to LG, the Boombox Speaker will use a resonance chamber within the phone, which supposedly has more than 10 times the resonance space found in traditional smartphones. Additionally, bass can be

A growing number of U.S. adults no longer view the internet as a largely “good thing” for society, according to a new report from Pew Research Center out today. To be clear, a sizable majority –  70 percent – continue to believe the internet’s development has been mostly good. But that number has dropped by 6 percentage points since 2014, the study finds. Meanwhile, more adults now perceive the internet – perhaps more accurately – as something of a

Vehicular terrorism is on the rise, but technology under development by the U.S. Department of Defensecould save lives by disabling a weaponized car before it ever reaches its target. The Pentagon’sJoint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWD) is working on a device called a Radio Frequency Vehicle Stopper to address the prevalence of vehicle-based attacks targeting civilians, Defense One reports.
To prevent this kind of violence and other kinds of vehicular attacks (an unauthorized car rushing

After years of back and forth, Sprint and T-Mobile have finally announced plans to merge. And while there’s plenty of steps that the two companies will have to go through to convince regulators they should be allowed to merge, if you ask T-Mobile and Sprint, the main reason is that the two companies together will be better equipped to roll a next-generation 5G network.It’s such an important part of the rhetoric behind the merger, in fact, that T-Mobile and Sprint have made an entire

Chinese authorities are able to retrieve deleted WeChat messages from a suspect’s phone to catch criminals, a government watchdog admitted on Monday in social media posts spotted by South China Morning Post. The stunning admission confirms what many have believed for years: WeChat can be used as a government surveillance tool, and even once-deleted messages can be retrieved by authorities.WeChat’s parent company Tencent denied any wrongdoing, saying in a social media post, “We

Amazonis famous for its hard-charging work culture, and Charlie Kindel, an Amazon executive who helped shape the rise of Alexa, is ready to hit the pause button after a five-year stint with the company and three years with the team at work on the company’s smart home division.
Writing on his personal blog earlier today, Kindel shared the memo that his colleagues received last week to explain his decision. In a nutshell, Kindel told them, he’s burnt:
The pace of the past 5 years has f

Adi Shankar has an idea to help The Simpsons deal with the criticism surrounding Apu. The Castlevania producer just launched a screenwriting competition that asks competitors to write a new Simpsons episode centered around Apu in a way that “subverts him, pivots him, intelligently writes him out, or evolves him in a way that takes a mean spirited mockery and transforms him into a kernel of truth wrapped in funny insight aka actual satire.”
The contest,called “Crowdsourcing the

The first person has been charged and found guilty under Malaysia’s Anti-Fake News Act, less than a month after it was passed into law, as reported by Gizmodo.
Salah Salem Saleh Sulaiman, 46, posted a YouTube video claiming Malaysian police took 50 minutes to respond to emergency calls in Kuala Lumpur after the shooting of Palestinian lecturer and Hamas member Fadi al-Batsh on April 21st. Malaysia’s inspector general of police, Mohamad Fuzi Harun, says the response time was eight mi

Is it better to have one or two spaces after a period? The first study investigating this hotly contested issue is here, and it supposedly gives the win to the two-spacers. But a closer look at the research suggests that the only reasonable interpretation is that double spacing after a period remains bad. It’s ugly, it doesn’t help when it comes to what matters most (reading comprehension), and the experiment that supports its benefits uses an outdated font style.
The “two-spa

Microsoft’s Windows 10 April 2018 Update is available today and ready to download. After months of testing, Microsoft is making its latest Windows 10 update available for anyone to install today. Like previous updates, Microsoft is rolling it out in stages and you’ll have to manually update today to get it early, or wait until it’s more broadly available on Windows Update on May 9th.
The Windows 10 April 2018 Update includes a number of new features. Timeline is the biggest ad

The hyperloop seems like one of those things that’s always just “three years away.” Last year, the head honchos at Hyperloop One told The Verge they expect to see “working hyperloops around the world... by 2020.” Now here comes Richard Branson, chairman of the recently rebranded Virgin Hyperloop One, to push that deadline to 2021, the year he believes the hyperloop will be ready for human passengers.taken with a giant grain of salt
All these deadlines should be tak

This weekend’s announcement of a proposed merger between T-Mobile and Sprint has been years in the making. In 2014, the companies bailed on a deal after concerns that Obama-era antitrust regulators would intervene, as the Federal Communications Commission also expressed skepticism of huge mergers. But the two telecoms seem to think that, despite some aborted attempts, their time has finally come.New regulators are in charge
What’s changed? For one thing, a new administration —

Twitter is giving more prominence to links tweeted by your network, and it’s starting to group tweets that mention a link together on your timeline. The feature has come to iOS and Android devices as well as Twitter’s web platform, the company confirmed to BuzzFeed.
The move comes as part of Twitter’s shift in focus to surface more news through your timeline and Moments. Twitter started getting listed under the news category in the App Store in 2016 instead of the social netwo

Samsung announced today that it’s releasing both 128GB and 256GB versions of its Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus in the US this month. Preorders open May 1st on Samsung.com with the devices actually coming out on May 18th. (They’ll only be for sale through the company’s website.) The new storage options will be available in all three of the phones’ color choices: purple, blue, and black.The 128GB Galaxy S9 will cost $769.99, while the 128GB Galaxy S9 Plus will cost $889.99. The 25

Etsy, Tumblr, Postmates, and Foursquare will be among thousands of other websites expected to post “red alerts” on May 9th ahead of a vote to block the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules. The “go red” campaign is being run by BattleForTheNet.com, and it’s designed to promote awareness about the vote and plaster websites in alerts highlighting the Senate vote. The hope is that this will spur constituents to flood lawmakers with phone calls and emails calling

When the Turkish government suddenly banned Wikipedia in late April last year, it came as little surprise to many people in the country. Access to platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and WhatsApp have been periodically restricted in Turkey numerous times since 2014, particularly after tumultuous events like mass demonstrations, suicide bomb attacks, or the failed coup attempt in July 2016. What’s strange is that the ban stayed. As of this Sunday, Wikipedia has been

For the first time since advocating for the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein, the Time’s Up collective has singled out an alleged abuser: R&B star Robert Kelly. Women of Color of Time’s Up, a subcommittee of the larger group specifically organizing around issues that affect women and girls of color, released a statement this morning announcing their support of #MuteRKelly, an online campaign asking Live Nation and Sony Music to cancel R. Kelly’s tour dates and drop his reco

Amazon still sells plenty of counterfeit goods even though it’s tried to crack down on fake sellers for years, according to The Guardian. By ordering goods that were listed as legitimate on Amazon, the report uncovered a number of fake items sold by third-party sellers, including a pair of knockoff AirPods that were supposed to be from Apple, used iPhone chargers that were sold as new, counterfeit Kylie Jenner lip gloss, and a fake Supreme x Louis Vuitton iPhone case.
In some cases, Amazo

On March 12th, France.com suddenly went offline. For 24 years, it had been a tourist and travel booking site, but now it was redirecting to the English version of the government’s official site at France.fr.No one was more surprised than Jean-Noel Frydman, previous owner of the domain and trademark holder for France.com. Overnight, his website had disappeared, with all associated email addresses suddenly bouncing back. In a matter of minutes, a unique and lucrative asset had gone up in sm

Facebook is making fake news posts in the News Feed harder to see by shrinking the size of the links to content that has been verified by third-party fact-checkers as inaccurate, according to a report by TechCrunch. “We reduce the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked false,” a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to the news site.
According to screenshots shared by TechCrunch, content deemed to be inaccurate show up on mobile as a headline and image in one small row, w

Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, the design duo behind the republished MTA, NASA, and EPA standards manuals, are back with a new book: Emoji, a collection of the original 176 emoji characters.
The original emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese telecommunications company DoCoMo in 1999 to use on pages in Japan. Those small, pixelated 12-by-12 grid images only bear a passing resemblance to today’s far more detailed emoji, but there’s a clear line that can be drawn between K

Graduation season is a time to celebrate those graduating high school and college, but it’s also when people start thinking about what’s next. This is especially true if you are gripped with indecision about what to get as a gift for graduation, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or any special occasion in between.Whether they’re transitioning into the workforce or heading back to school, we’ve consulted experts here at The Verge for some great gift ideas that they&r