Technology news

Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network, according to an Access Now report citing activists within the country. Coming just months after a new round of web blocks within the country, the latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks.
According to network metrics, Tor access in Venezuela had recently spiked in response to recent web blocks placed on local news outlets. Unlike previous blocks

CBS has extended its streaming deal with the NFL to 2022 and expanded the terms to include access on mobile devices through its CBS All Access subscription service. Now, users who pay for All Access, which starts at $5.99 a month, or have an existing cable login supported by CBS will have access to NFL season games plus the Super Bowl on iOS and Android via the CBS app. The games will also be available on the web via CBS.com and a number of set-top boxes, smart TVs, and game consoles.While All

If you’re feeling bold and want a summer full of software bugs, you can now download the iOS 12 public beta through Apple’s public beta website. From there, you’ll want to navigate to the iOS tab, download the profile, and install it. The new OS features a few intriguing features that you’ll want to try, including Memoji (for iPhone X users), a Screen Time function that will tell you how long you spend on your device, and a completely reorganized group notifications syst

B&H has a MacBook Air deal that is about as good (and cheap) as you can find for a new macOS computer.
Until the discount ends at midnight eastern on June 28th, you can snag a 13.3-inch MacBook Air with 128GB of storage for $799. A savings of $200 off its original price, your money will get you the latest model in the Air family since Apple has yet to unveil a refreshed version for 2018.
The MacBook Air lags behind what you’ll find in the MacBook Pro in terms of its low-resolution scr

At first glance, the new Jurassic Park franchise sequel Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom might not seem to have a lot in common with Rampage, the April 2018 feature adaptation of the arcade and console game about monsters smashing buildings. Fallen Kingdom features protagonists trying to rescue the revived dinosaurs of Jurassic World, now trapped on the volcanic island that used to be a theme park. Rampage features mutated animals flattening buildings across the United States, on their way to a r

T-Mobile is launching a new subscription plan today as an add-on for subscribers to its T-Mobile One and Simple Choice cell plans called FamilyMode. It’s designed to let parents monitor their kids’ screen time and internet use, both on mobile when using a cellular connection and at home through Wi-Fi, regardless of the type of home internet service you use. It provides real-time location updates, browser and app history reports, internet-free scheduling, and app and internet time li

Microsoft’s Surface USB-C dongle will be available to business customers later this week. A Microsoft spokesperson tells The Verge that it’s pricing the dongle at $79.99 for commercial users, and it will be available through typical business purchasing channels on June 29th. The dongle will plug into the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices, and provide USB-C support for accessories.
Microsoft’s existing range of Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices do not currently su

Samsung wants to add an in-display fingerprint scanner and 3D facial recognition to its Galaxy S10 flagship device, according to a Korean news report from The Bell.The company has not requested that its suppliers make iris scanners for the new phone, the report says. Instead of scanning irises, the Galaxy S10 would use facial recognition, while an in-display fingerprint scanner would offer an easier way to unlock the phones. Samsung Galaxy smartphones currently have fingerprint scanners on the

Zoosk
View ProductWith the number of dating sites and apps out there in the wild, you might think it’s never been easier to find someone special. And in some ways, it is. Options are good, right? Thanks to technology, there are loads of options for connecting with someone online. Love is now just a swipe away. 
But with each new dating app or dating site that hits the market, there is the potential for new dating sites to dilute the dating pool, thus making it more challenging to fin

YouTube fan conference VidCon has announced it will distribute $2,000 grants to a new emerging YouTuber each week for a year, totaling $104,000 in grants to up-and-coming creators. The money doesn’t have any strings attached — you can spend it however you’d like. “Nothing is out there making this easier,” wrote Vidcon founder Hank Green on the project’s site, “and a lot of things are out there making it harder.” You can apply here. Green announced

For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug made from cannabis. Epidiolex treats severe forms of childhood epilepsy — but the Drug Enforcement Administration will need to reclassify this form of cannabis before the drug can be put on the market.For almost half a century, the DEA has classified cannabis as a Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD. (For context, cocaine and meth are Schedule II drugs.) Schedule I drugs are considered to have “no cur

Industrial manufacturing company Cemtrex has taken the idea of an all-in-one workstation to an entirely new level. Its sit / stand SmartDesk has everything from three monitors to a scanner built into a minimal setup that it says “combines and reimagines all the needs of a modern office.”
The desk has three 24-inch IPS touchscreen displays, which, combined, is a total of 72 inches. The company says that it uses a proprietary touch gesture system, so you can flip through images and do

Oculus is officially launching Oculus TV, its dedicated hub for watching flatscreen video in virtual reality, on the standalone Oculus Go headset. Oculus TV was announced at last month’s F8 conference, and it ties together a lot of existing VR video options, highlighting Oculus’ attempts to emphasize non-gaming uses of VR. The free app features a virtual home theater with what Oculus claims is the equivalent of a 180-inch TV screen. It offers access to several streaming video servic

The Pax Era, a design-heavy, rectangular cannabis vape that’s positioned as an alternative to the standard pen-battery-and-cartridge setup, didn’t sell me when it came out in January. It has proprietary cartridges with a selection of extracts from a curated group of vendors. That seems to counter the versatility that made the flagship Pax product (which can be used with any dry herb or concentrate) so appealing.
An app and firmware update was released last week, however, so that han

Sites that employ WordPress as their content management system account for about 30% of websites online right now. Simple to set up, keep secure, and use on a regular basis, it makes sense it's such a popular content management system to use. Even those only accustomed to using word processing tools can quickly get to grips with what's expected of them with WordPress. 
Initially built as a blogging platform, numerous themes and plugins have helped WordPress become about so much more than ju

Just like Square, Venmo is accepting the reality that some people like having a physical payment card in their wallet. If nothing else, it’s good having a backup for digital payments, and a card makes spending your Venmo balance in the real world more convenient. With its new iOS update today, Venmo is signaling a wide release of its debit card.
The company has been testing a physical Visa card for months, but for the official release, it looks like Venmo has switched to MasterCard and a

Google Earth is getting a new Measure tool today that will let you — you guessed it — measure the distance and area of things on the map.
With the tool, users can measure the distance between two points or the surface area of a selected chunk of the map. (Now you can finally find out how far your house is from the North Pole.) Users aren’t limited to simple squares, either. The Measure tool will let you select the borders of an area so it’s easier to measure irregularly

Google has announced several new features for its Google Classroom product today, including new ways for parents and teachers to shut off access to apps and browsers when students should be sleeping or focusing on coursework.
Now, through assigning quizzes in Google forms, teachers can lock students into the assignment and keep them from browsing the internet or searching for answers elsewhere. Another new feature will allow parents a little more control of the school-issued devices by being ab

Beating humans at board games is passé in the AI world. Now, top academics and tech companies want to challenge us at video games instead. Today, OpenAI, a research lab founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, announced its latest milestone: a team of AI agents that can beat the top 1 percent of amateurs at popular battle arena game Dota 2.You may remember that OpenAI first strode into the world of Dota 2 last August, unveiling a system that could beat the top players at 1v1 matches. However

Amazon Prime members will now get 10 percent off certain sale items and other discounts at all Whole Foods stores nationwide beginning on June 27th.There are two ways to activate the deal. You can get the Whole Foods app, sign in with your Amazon account, then scan the app’s Prime Code when you check out at a physical store, or you can enter your mobile number during checkout to verify your Prime membership.Inside Whole Foods stores, there will be yellow stickers indicating 10 percent off

With the rise of free-to-play games in mobile, the death of premium-priced titles has long been foretold. But they seem to stick around regardless. And if the success of Monument Valley 2 is any indication, premium mobile games will be around for some time.
Today, developer Ustwo Games revealed that the sequel took in more than $10 million in its first year, topping the $5.8 million the original Monument Valley made in its initial 12 months. Premium games might not be the most lucrative games o

AT&T has announced today that it’s acquiring AppNexus, a digital advertising company that would help the telecom giant better build out its growing advertising business in hopes of competing with companies like Google, Facebook, and Verizon.According to The Wall Street Journal, AT&T wants to appeal to advertisers with hyper specific targeted ads by levering the huge amount of data it already has on customers from its wireless offerings over the years for more successful campaigns.

RRE Ventures has raised $265 million for its latest fund.
The firm was founded back in 1994, and this is its seventh fund (eighth if you include a separate “opportunity” fund for making follow-on investments). Exits in the last few years include Bitly (acquired by Spectrum Equity), Business Insider (acquired by Axel Springer) and TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter).
General Partner Raju Rishi said that RRE will continue to follow its current investment strategy. That means putting abou

We haven’t been able to avoid privacy policies in our post-GDPR world, but figuring out what these legal documents are trying to tell us isn’t easy. They’re typically filled with legalese and boring chatter about data and how it’s handled. I get why no one wants to spend time reading them.
So to save us all some effort, I called a couple lawyers — Nate Cardozo from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Joseph Jerome from the Center for Democracy and Technology &md

BigID announced a big $30 million Series B round today, which comes on the heels of closing their $14M A investment in January. It’s been a whirlwind year for the NYC data security startup as GDPR kicked in and companies came calling for their products.
The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from previous investors ClearSky Security, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Information Venture Partners and SAP.io.
BigIDhas a product that helps companies inventory their

India’s PolicyBazaar, which runs a digital insurance business of the same name and a lending marketplace called PaisaBazaar.com, is the latest company to join SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund after it announced a new funding round of over $200 million.
The deal was led by the Vision Fundwith participation from existing investors including InfoEdge, the company behind jobs platform Naukri.com. The startup’s other investors count Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global

Another legacy carrier built on offering phone services is now taking a deeper dive into the world of advertising and specifically ad tech to help catapult itself into the next generation of tech and communications. Today, AT&T confirmed that it is buying AppNexus, a programmatic advertising marketplace that competes against the likes of Google and Facebook and describes itself as the world’s largest independent digital ad exchange.
Today’s release did not reveal any financial te

Apple might be upgrading its headphone lineup in a big way next year with a new, high-end version of its wireless AirPods headphones with noise cancellation and water resistant technology and a (previously rumored) over-ear model, according to a report from Bloomberg.An earlier report from Barclays analysts claimed that Apple would add the noise-cancellation feature to its AirPods sometime in 2019. Bloomberg’s report does indicate a delay for the over-ear models, though, which were origin

Apple News has a new old mission: Curating political news and analysis by paying a team of experienced human editors to quality-assess journalism, rather than letting unchecked algorithms run wild and exaggerate anything — no matter how awful, obnoxious or untrue.
‘Fakebook’ eat your heart out.
Apple says human curation is not a new direction for Apple News — describing it as a “guiding principle” across the product since it launched three years ago.
Although

Nokia announced today that its new 3.1 phone will go on sale in the US through Amazon and Best Buy on July 2nd. It’ll start at $159. The company unveiled the device in May as an update to its Nokia 3. The 3.1 includes:
5.2-inch HD+ display with a 18:9 aspect ratio
MediaTek 6750 octa-core processor
13-megapixel rear-facing camera; 8-megapixel wide-angle front-facing camera
2GB of RAM and 16GB of storageBecause it’s also an Android One device, it’ll get monthly Google security u

It’s not often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon,Microsoftand Salesforceto agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.AI, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice.
Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as strategic investors in the company this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, R

It’s not often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon,Microsoftand Salesforceto agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.AI, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice.
Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as strategic investors in the company this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, R

Brian Brackeen ContributorShare on Twitter Brian Brackeen is the chief executive officer of the facial recognition software developer KairosRecent news of Amazon’s engagement with law enforcement to provide facial recognition surveillance (branded ‘Rekognition’), along with the almost unbelievable news of China’s use of the technology means that the technology industry needs to address the darker, more offensive side of some of its more spectacular advancements.
Facial r

Uberis in court in the UK today to try to overturn a decision by London’s transport regulator last fall to withdraw its license to operate in the city — where it claims to have some 3.5 million regular users.
Its appeal is being heard in Westminster Magistrates Court from today, with the hearing expected to last for several days. The company can continue to operate its service in London while it appeals the decision.
Transport for London (TfL) sent shockwaves through the ride-ha

Microsoft is building Adblock Plus directly into its Edge browser for iOS and Android. The software giant has started making the integration available to Microsoft Edge for Android beta users over the weekend, alongside an iOS test program. The feature will be rolled out more broadly to all Edge for iOS and Android users soon. The adblocker can be enabled in the Microsoft Edge settings, and doesn’t require a separate add-in to download and install.
Microsoft’s step is significant, a

Microsoft is building Adblock Plus directly into its Edge browser for Android. The software giant has started making the integration available to Microsoft Edge for Android beta users over the weekend, with plans to roll it out more broadly to all Edge for Android users soon. The adblocker is available in the Microsoft Edge settings, and doesn’t require a separate add-in to download and install.
Microsoft’s step is significant, as the company has partnered with Adblock Plus to build

By the middle of this week, all AmazonPrimemembers will have access to discounts at Whole Foods Market stores across the U.S. — finishing a nationwide rollout that’s part of the retailer’s master plan to dominate physical and virtual commerce in America.
All Prime members will receive 10% off hundreds of sale items and “deep discounts on select popular products,” the retailer said in a statement.
 
In the six weeks since Amazon first made the discounts availabl

It looks like Indonesian ride-hailing firm Go-Jek will finally initiate its long-awaited expansion in Southeast Asia over the next month.
The company announced today that it’ll launch businesses in Vietnam and Thailand under the names of Go-Viet and Get, respectively, using a model that sees local founders run each business independently with backing from local partners and the Go-Jekmothership.
TechCrunch understands that the Thai and Vietnamese entities will go live for customers fr

Microsoft has been teasing keyboard and mouse support for the Xbox One for years now, but it’s finally becoming a reality soon. The software giant has partnered with Razer to enable its Chroma RGB lighting support in Xbox games. Chroma allows players to have an assortment of colors light up on a keyboard, and it’s also useful for spotting ability cooldowns in games like Overwatch. Windows Central reports that Microsoft started briefing developers about the upcoming support earlier t