Technology news

Twitter has announced it’s permanently suspended the accounts of conspiracy theory website Infowars and its controversial founder, Alex Jones. In addition, Twitter has banned Jones and Infowars from its livestreaming service, Periscope, where Jones regularly broadcast and boasted a large following. A post on the Twitter Safety account said the company took the action as a response to content posted yesterday after the much publicized senate hearing involving Facebook and Twitter. Today, w

Now valued at $5.6 billion, zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood is starting preparations to go public. Just a year and a half ago, it was still largely under the radar. But then it raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017 and then just a year later scored a $363 million Series D, both led by Russian-backed firm DST Global. Combined with the growth of its premium subscription for trading on margin called RobinhoodGold, the startup now h

Google has sent out invites for an October 9th event that will almost certainly be the official announcement of the thoroughly leaked Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones. There’s not much to go by from the invite in terms of clues — just a simple “I <3 NY” phrase, which subtly hints at the Pixel 3 with the numeral in the heart emojicon, but given the leaked devices already out there, Google probably doesn’t need to do much more to promote the announcement.The Pix

Huawei has been caught optimizing some of its top smartphones to over-perform on benchmark tests. On Tuesday, AnandTech discovered that Huawei’s P20 had been programmed to maximize performance specifically when running 3DMark, a popular benchmarking app. Today, the company behind 3DMark followed up with a statement saying that it had confirmed the findings and would delist the P20, as well as three other Huawei phones with similar behavior, from its benchmark leaderboards.
The delisted ph

Twitter just permanently suspended Infowars and Alex Jones, a full month after companies like Apple, Facebook, and YouTube removed the conspiracy theorist and his blog from their platforms. Twitter said that the Infowars creator had violated its “abusive behavior” rules.
Twitter at last deemed Jones went too far after he tweeted a video of himself confronting a CNN reporter, calling him an equivalent of “the Hitler Youth” and using other disturbing imagery to disparage h

When I woke up this morning I didn’t think I’d start my day off defending white male privilege. But there’s an “all men are trash” discussion playing out on TNW’s social media accounts, and I have some thoughts. Trigger warning: This article contains detailed commentary with examples of some of the absolutely horrifying things women are forced to put up with online. Those sensitive to discussions which include mention of topics such as rape and violence may w

Following widespread backlash to its introduction of a new “Outstanding Popular Film” category, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that it will pull back on the decision to include the category in the 91st Academy Awards ceremony in 2019. It will be holding off from implementing it in the future, pending further input and examination.
Citing “challenges for films that have already been released” and “a wide range of reactions” to

Nintendo has yet to offer a real discount on the Nintendo Switch, so if you’re looking to snag one, now is as good a time as any short of waiting until the holiday season. Namely, Best Buy’s popular bundle, which includes a 50 percent discount on your choice of one of the system’s best games, is back after selling out in July.For $329.99, you can pick either the Switch’s grey or neon blue / red color schemes and choose between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild, Sup

YouTube now lets you pause your YouTube TV membership instead of outright canceling it, as spotted by Android Police. The new policy, outlined in YouTube TV’s support documents, lets a subscription be on hiatus with access to YouTube TV through the end of the payment period.
A YouTube TV membership can be paused from four weeks to six months, and if you want to reinstate membership, the date you start things up again becomes your new monthly billing date. Pausing memberships isn’t a

Developer Treyarch has been tight-lipped about the new Call of Duty game’s battle royale variant for months now, letting small details trickle out since its big May reveal. The mode is called Blackout, and it exists as a free element of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. It was confirmed ahead of E3 this year to involve land, air, and sea vehicles and the biggest map the franchise has ever delivered.Beyond that, we’ve haven’t seen much, and the public has subsisted mostly on a recent

In an ecosystem enthralled with private capital and delayed public debuts, Bill Gurleyhas been something of a maverick. The former dot-com equity analyst and long-time partner at Benchmarkhas pushed hard for companies to go public and “grow up,” including at his portfolio company Uber, where he was formerly a board member.
Earlier this year, he noted that “it’s cool to go public again,” and now we are starting to see the fruits of Benchmark’s labors. Over the

Toyota is recalling about a million Prius hybrid vehicles from around the world due to a “fire risk” caused by a wiring issue that generates heat. Of the million cars, 192,000 of them are in the US, it announced yesterday in a press release.
If you own a Prius manufactured between mid-2015 and May 2018, check with a Toyota dealer to see if your vehicle has the wiring issue. Affected vehicles will be fixed for free.
Wiring connected to the hybrid vehicle’s power control unit co

Walmart has partnered with a delivery logistics company called Bringg to help it improve and further build out its last-mile delivery, primarily for groceries and household goods. The news, announced yesterday, coincides with the launch of a new Walmart program the company is calling Spark Delivery, which will crowdsource deliveries in a way similar to Uber and Lyft’s ride-hailing network. The program is Walmart’s latest attempt to build out a more robust delivery network so it can

Instagram today published a new guide on its Well-Being center aimed at parents of younger Instagram users. While the resources it offers are very helpful for non-savvy guardians, it doesn’t offer tools for addressing some of Instagram‘s deeper issues and the trouble it can cause young people. For the most part, the material is really basic and assumes the parent knows nothing about Instagram. It’s a good starter kit, even for adults — the app‘s built-in&

Epic Games wrapped up its weekly Fortnite Summer Skirmish series on Monday, crowning one victor and giving out $1.5 million in prize money after a four-day series of high-stakes tournament play between the game’s most skilled players. The event, taking place at PAX West in Seattle, was the culmination of weeks of tinkering, experimentation, and a fair number of failures. The series is just the beginning of Epic’s $100 million e-sports commitment, but it may prove to be influential i

The magic of artificial intelligence brings us better Netflix recommendations, better cancer diagnoses, and the ability to becomes gods by creating our own AI-powered creatures and forcing them to evolve for our amusement. So, about those Netflix recommendations… just kidding, lets talk about the “becoming a god” thing. Software developer Keiwan Donyagard developed an interactive artificial intelligence demonstration in the form of an evolution simulation. It’s called,

GreyOrange, a Singapore-headquartered firm that develops robots for warehouses, has pulled in a $140 million Series C funding round as it targets more expansion and growth.
The company was started in 2011. Today it has five regional offices across the world — covering India, Singapore, Japan, Germany, and the U.S. — three R&D centers and more than 60 ‘installations’ of its tech with retail customers worldwide. Right now, GreyOrange’stwo main produ

Little by little, Epic Games is poking holes in the “just build” mantra held by most Fortnite players. As part of today’s update, for instance, the edge of the storm circle will damage buildings, something that is bound to intensify late-game skirmishes that rely on player-created cover. More broadly, the recent introduction of a grappling hook-like weapon promises to upend everything you know about mobility in Fortnite.
The grappler is a plunger that you can shoot at nearly a

Love them or loathe them, push notifications on smartphones are a thing. Developers use them to increase user engagement with their apps. By sending the user a notification, you can alert them to a breaking news story, or send them a coupon and get them to buy something. That said, there’s a fundamental problem with how push notifications work on mobile. There are two popular mobile messaging APIs. On iOS, most developers tend to use Apple Push Notification Service (APNs). For Android spe

Google had a very bad day before Congress yesterday — or rather, the empty chair with a “Google” sign on it did. Because of a personnel standoff, Google wasn’t present at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, which left Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg time to defend their companies’ records and senators free to rain down criticism on Google. Senators hit the company over its decision to tail off US military contracts, its reported cens

The Justice Department has charged an alleged North Korean operative with involvement in the infamous hack of Sony Pictures in 2014, as well as last year’s devastating WannaCry ransomware attack.
North Korea named in 2014
The United States had faulted the country for the Sony hack as far back as late 2014. The cyber-operation was believed to be taken in response to The Interview, a Seth Rogen and James Franco movie depicting the assassination of Kim Jong-un. The subsequent leak of emails

The European Union has given Apple’s Shazam acquisition its approval after launching an investigation into the deal earlier this year over concerns that the purchase could be anticompetitive, via Reuters.After months of investigations, the committee has concluded that won’t be the case. “After thoroughly analyzing Shazam’s user and music data, we found that their acquisition by Apple would not reduce competition in the digital music streaming market,” EU competitio

Good news: YouTube is rolling out dark mode for Android. And this time, we’re serious. Reddit users are reporting that YouTube version 13.35.51 ships with the option to turn dark mode on or off. Google first announced that it’d be releasing dark mode versions of its mobile apps in March, and we saw the first signs of the YouTube rollout on Android back in July. That definitely wasn’t widespread, however. The company also tweeted this week that it’d be coming to Android s

Apple has announced that it will launch a global web portal for processing and tracking requests from law enforcement officers for data, via MacRumors.
It’s a change from the current system, where law enforcement officers submit requests by messaging an Apple law enforcement email account. A website would offer a more convenient, centralized hub for requests that will make it easier to track current inquiries and manage responses.
A more convenient, centralized hub for requests
In additio

When it comes to battery materials, there’s a lot of talk about lithium and cobalt, but some chemists think the batteries of the future could be powered by a commonly used dye.The dye in question is methylene blue, and it creates an intense sapphire color. The dye looks good, but it can be harmful when it leaches into wastewater from textile mills. Anjula Kosswattaarachchi, now a PhD candidate in chemistry at the University at Buffalo, used to work with textiles at the Sri Lanka Institute

Next year, owners of certain late-model BMWs will be able to turn on their HVAC system, adjust the lighting, or change the radio all without lifting a finger. Today, the German automaker announced the launch of a proprietary digital voice assistant, which will be available for models featuring BMW’s latest 7.0 operating system, starting in March 2019.BMW joins Mercedes-Benz in breaking free from the trend of automakers partnering with Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, or Google Assistant,

In early August, the creators of the incredibly popular game Fortnite announced that they would be leaving the Android Play Store. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, decried the “monopoly app store” model that Google had established. A few months before that, the Supreme Court accepted a lawsuit against Apple’s App Store from users who alleged Apple was abusing an iOS monopoly. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has struggled to name a company that competes with Facebook’s service

Every year, the shift into cooler weather comes alongside a shift into a cooler box office lineup: fewer billion-dollar blockbusters, fewer on-screen explosions, and a general trend toward less slashing, crashing action and more intense emotional action. The one thing that really heats up at the box office during the fall and winter season is the awards race: the last quarter of the year is a time for Oscar-bait projects and intense awards campaigning. We started The Verge’s four-part fal

Microsoft is starting to test Alexa support on the Xbox One today with its Xbox Insiders. The software giant is releasing an Xbox Skill for Alexa that will allow Echo, Sonos, and various other Alexa-enabled devices to control an Xbox One. With the new skill you’ll be able to power on an Xbox One with your voice, launch games, adjust volume, capture screenshots, start broadcasts, and more. Commands will work like “Alexa, start Destiny 2.”
While Microsoft has long supported Kine

Microsoft is altering its support cycle for businesses running Windows 10. The software maker currently releases two major Window 10 updates per year, and businesses have 18 months before they need to move from one to another more recent update. It’s all part of Microsoft’s “Windows as a service” push, and it’s designed to ensure Windows 10 gets new features instead of the previous three-year cycle for Windows releases. But it’s been a little too fast for som

Instagram launched a new parent-oriented section of its Well Being site today that’s designed to guide parents through the app and help them talk about it with their teens. The site basically just walks parents through privacy settings and content controls, like how to make an account public or private or how to block accounts.
All these features are old news, but it’s definitely possible that parents and teens had no idea they existed. It isn’t extremely easy to navigate to y

IBM secretly used footage from NYPD CCTV cameras to develop surveillance technology that could search for individuals based on bodily characteristics like age and skin tone. This is according to a report from The Intercept that cites confidential company documents, as well as interviews with former IBM researchers and NYPD officials.Although IBM advertises its video analytics software’s ability to search for individuals using traits like age and ethnicity, the company has not previously d

Solo: A Star Wars Story hit theaters earlier this summer, pulling off a satisfactory story, despite a rocky production, and giving a definitive origin to one of the franchise’s best-known heroes, Han Solo. If you’ve seen the film, you know the story: Han Solo escapes a rough childhood as a street rat, gets kicked out of the Imperial Academy, falls into a life of crime with a couple of gangsters, and ends up running into Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian. A newly released novelization o