Technology news

Wikileaks just got served with a tweet.
On Friday, the law firm representing the Democratic National Committee served Wikileaks with a single tweet, linking to a number of legal documents related to its lawsuit against the organization founded by Julian Assange.@wikileaks By Court order, you are being served with the following legal documents: https://t.co/ICg8qWnsUy, https://t.co/ZP2tTPJ4pb, https://t.co/RKue30s4hM, https://t.co/q5g0G1rQpQ.
All of these documents may be found here: https://t.co

Zain Jaffermay be gearing up for a fight to take back control of Vungle, the mobile ad company he founded.
Jaffer was removed from his role as CEO last fall following his arrest on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and performing a lewd act on a child.
However, a San Mateo County judge subsequently dismissed the charges. The district attorney’s office released a statement offering more context for the dismissal, saying that they did not believe there was any sexual conduct on th

After weeks of struggling to answer questions about whether or not Alex Jones and InfoWars should be allowed to remain on Facebook, the company caught some onlookers by surprise when it announced early Monday morning that it had "unpublished" pages belonging to Alex Jones and InfoWars.
Nothing had changed in terms of the content posted by the accounts run by Jones and InfoWars. Facebook had previously removed some posts from the accounts, but additional "strikes" hadn't been publicly reported.&n

Spotify is testing a new feature in Australia that’ll let non-paying users skip ads (both audio and video) as many times as they like. The company tells AdAge that the idea is that users will likely only skip ads they don’t care about, so what they do consume will give Spotify feedback on how to better target them. A company executive compared it to Discover Weekly, but for ads. Advertisers won’t have to pay for skipped ads.
I sort of understand this, but I don’t know ho

Would you eat this murder pie?
Andrew Fuller is a cake sculptor, horror fan, and "believer that every day is Halloween." He recently made an especially terrifying pie inspired by serial killer Ed Gein, who was infamous making clothing and furniture out of human skin and bones. Also known as the "Butcher of Plainfield," Gein had exhumed bodies from local graveyards and murdered two women for his macabre DIY crafting.
SEE ALSO: 'Zombie Walk' Canceled After Hit-and-Run at Comic-Con
"I am relatively

The home release of Avengers: Infinity War includes a gag reel and this little sneak peek is enough to get us enticed.
The clip makes it very clear that the people on set of this movie were having a lot of fun. You've got flubbed lines, fans that are blowing people's hair in their faces, Chris Hemsworth jumping poorly, and Benedict Wong just having a good time.
Avengers: Infinity War comes out on Blu-ray Aug. 14. Read more...
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It's 10 a.m. at Caesar's Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas, and the conference room is packed. 
Scores of hackers, cybersecurity professionals, and press have gathered at the DEF CON hacker conference to hear straight from the horse's mouth just how bad things are when it comes to securing our elections. And, as Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for the office of cybersecurity and communications Jeanette Manfra explained, it's bad. 
SEE ALSO: 6 issues with online

This week, Elon Musk shocked markets with an unexpected plan to take Tesla private, removing all shares from public markets at an estimated cost of at least $50 billion. But while Musk claimed that funding for the move had already been secured, unnamed sources in a recent Bloomberg report say Tesla is still working to line up financial support from a variety of different sources.
According to the report, Tesla is currently seeking funding from a broad pool of investors, in part to avoid a conce

Google is warning Android users that it doesn’t carry Fortnite Battle Royale in the Play Store. If you search for Fortnite in the Play Store, it will return a notice from Google. “Fortnite Battle Royal by Epic Games, Inc is not available on Google Play,” the sign says, likely as a clarification to users, as first spotted by 9to5Google.
By saying upfront that the Play Store doesn’t have Fortnite, Google is attempting to protect unknowing users who might download some mali

Early Saturday morning, the United Launch Alliance will send up its most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, along with a spacecraft bound for the Sun. On top of the rocket is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, embarking on the first ever mission into the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona. Thanks to a big lift from the Delta IV, the Parker Solar Probe will get closer to the Sun than any human-made vehicle has been before — a mere 4 million miles away.
Getting to the Sun is actual

Sometimes you need a break from toxic social media that’s filled with constant comparisons to how your friends are eating better, dressing better, and traveling to more exotic places than you. Well, there’s plenty of appeal in instant cameras. They have physicality since you can hold your mementos in your hand, and they’re a fun, unpredictable throwback to the analog days when you had to manually adjust the settings of a camera to get the best shot.
You’ve probably seen s

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Home yesterday, a Bixby-enabled speaker, which garnered public attention not for its arrival, but for its bewildering design. The device is supposed to be Samsung’s entry into the high-end smart speaker market, meant to take on the Apple HomePod. And while there’s still a lot we don’t yet know, such as price and availability, one thing’s for sure: it doesn’t look like a speaker.
Some might say it looks like the Google Home’s cousin

Federacy, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 class, has a mission to make bug bounty programs available to even the smallest startup.
Traditionally, bug bounty programs from players like BugCrowd and HackerOne have been geared toward larger organizations. While these certainly have their place, founders William and James Sulinski, who happen to be twins, felt there was a gap in the marketplace, where smaller organizations were being left out of what they considered to be a crucial service.

People managing Facebook pages with large American followings will now need to take extra steps to verify their identity, according to an announcement made by the company today. Now, if these managers want to continue to post on their pages, they’ll need to complete an “authorization process” that includes enabling two-factor authentication and confirming what country they’re based in.If a page manager needs to authorize their account, they’ll get a notice at the t

NASA’sambitious mission to go closer to the Sun than ever before is set to launch in the small hours between Friday and Saturday — at 3:33 AM Eastern from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to be precise. The Parker Solar Probe, after a handful of gravity assists and preliminary orbits, will enter a stable orbit around the enormous nuclear fireball that gives us all life and sample its radiation from less than 4 million miles away. Believe me, you don’t want to get much closer th

Say goodbye to Twitch’sCommunities. The game-streaming service says it’s soon killing off this still relatively new addition to its site in favor of implementing a tagging system instead. With the changes, users will be able to filter streams by tags within a directory or across different games on the Browse page, in order to better find the sort of streams they want to watch.
The closure of Communities and addition of tags is being planned for mid-September, says Twitch.
Twitch laun

If you’re a trivia weirdo, or just an insufferable know-it-all like me, at some point over the last few years you have wondered why past seasons of Jeopardy! are not available to binge. The show has aired every weeknight for decades, the current iteration having made its original debut in 1984; just think of how much trivia that is! Ostensibly that answer has had something to do with keeping the game interesting: if your contestants have had access to literally every category and answer y

Auxetics are materials that store energy internally rather than bulging out. In this way they can store more energy when squeezed or struck and disperse it more regularly. Historically, however, these materials have had sharp corners that could break easily with enough pressure. Now researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University of Cambridge have discovered a way to use auxetics in a more efficient and less fragile way. In this way you can create systems that store energy and rele

Facebookis invading the blockchain, but how? Back in May, Facebook formed a cryptocurrency team to explore the possibilities, and today it removed a roadblock to revealing its secret plans.
Former head of Messenger David Marcus,who leads the Facebook Crypto team, today announced he was stepping down from the board of Coinbase, the biggest crypto startup. Marcus was formerly the president of PayPal and helped Facebook Messenger adopt chatbot commerce and peer-to-peer payments, so he was both

Hell is back, and it looks as intense as ever. At Quakecon today, Bethesda revealed the first proper look at Doom Eternal, the sequel to 2016’s excellent reboot of the iconic shooter series, with a series of lengthy videos. Eternal was initially revealed at E3 back in June with a teaser trailer, but this is the first time the developer is showing off gameplay. You can watch the keynote in its entirety above, though the Doom section starts about an hour and 11 minutes into the presentation

Samsung gave the world a first look yesterday at the Galaxy Home, its take on a high-end, HomePod-like smart speaker. And much like Apple did with the HomePod, Samsung announced the speaker well in advance of its actual availability — and well before it’s willing to share full details on how the speaker works.
Right now, there are a few things we know: the number of speakers (six, and a subwoofer); number of mics (eight); what it looks like (alien houseplant); and that it will inclu

We’re going all out for this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt SF (September 5-7), which means more fantastic content, more of the most influential startup and tech leaders and tons of networking. As such, we are expanding our TC Include program at Disrupt SF and partnering with #BUILTBYGIRLS to host an engaging day full of interactive programming for even more students who are interested in tech and entrepreneurship. In the past we’ve worked with organizations like BUILD.org

Facebooktoday announced it’s implementing a new measure to secure Facebook Pages with large U.S. followings in order to make it harder for people to administer a Page using a “fake or compromised account.” Beginning with those that have large U.S. followings, some Facebook Pages will now have to go through a “Page Publishing Authorization” process. This will require the Page managers to secure their accounts and verity their location.
Facebook says the process only

In a world bursting with abundances like self-driving cars and robotic personal assistants, you would think that basic needs like sustainable food sourcing and distribution would be a problem of the past. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), every year roughly a third — 1.3 billion tons — of food grown for consumption is lost or wasted. In industrialized countries like the U.S., this results

Jake Bright Contributor Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa. More posts by this contributorMallforAfrica goes global, Kobo360 and Sokowatch raise VC, France explains its $76M fund Harley-Davidson to expand EV lineup, may include scooters, bicycles
Emerging markets credit startup Mines.io has closed a $13 million Series A round led by The Rise Fund, the global impact fund formed by private equity giant TPG, and 10 others, including Ve

The 1960s were a beautiful time for watches. Horology was in its prime and the great names we know and love today – Rolex, Omega, Cartier – were just one of many watchmakers churning out commodity products to a world that needed to tell the time. Their watches – simple, elegant, and mechanically complex – were the ultimate in mechanical efficiency and design and no one did it quite as well as Seiko. This mechanical golden age ended in the late 1970s with the rise of the q

During a gold rush, Silicon Valley’s line is to always invest in picks and shovels instead of mining. Sometimes it pays just to do both.
TechCrunch has learned through a company fundraise overview that Beijing-based mining equipment seller Bitmain hit a quarterly revenue of approximately $2 billion in Q1 of this year. Despite a slump in bitcoin prices since the beginning of the year, the company is on track to become the first blockchain-focused company to achieve $10 billion in annual rev

Alexa’s Announcement feature, which lets you broadcast voice messages to other Echo devices, has been available since April, but Amazon is opening up the feature to other devices. The Announcement feature is now available for Alexa-enabled Sonos speakers like the One and the Beam, as well as other devices like the Ecobee4 smart thermostat and Switch+ smart light switch.The feature is particularly handy when using it as a one-way home intercom. For instance, if you’re a parent, you c

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services, and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
Chi-Raq, an offbeat adaptation of Aristophanes’ ancient Greek comedy Lysistra