Technology news

Facebook could face sanctions for not complying with the European Union’s consumer rules, according to a report from Reuters today. Back in February, the company was told to change its users terms and conditions to recently updated EU standards, but it has yet to do so, the report says.
In February, Facebook changed its terms of service, but to EU officials, it wasn’t enough. “While Google’s latest proposals appear to be in line with the requests made by consumer authori

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler has more than a few projects on his plate, and he’s just signed up for another: he’s producing the upcoming Space Jam sequel starring LeBron James.
The original Space Jam was a live-action / animation hybrid that came out in 1996. It featured Michael Jordan, as himself, getting recruited by Bugs Bunny to help a basketball team made up of Looney Tunes characters defeat their animated sports nemeses: a team called The Monsters. (Look, the ‘90s

Amazon appears to have leaked some upcoming products on its UK website. Pocket-lint spotted listings for two new Alexa items, a smart plug and a subwoofer, that appear to be going on sale soon.
The subwoofer is by far the more interesting of the two. It’s called the Echo Sub, and it can work in conjunction with one or two other Echos to improve their sound quality. If you put two Echos in a room with the Echo Sub, the leaked listing says you’ll even be able to turn them into a 2.1 s

Although the spotlight at this week’s SpaceXevent was squarely on Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa — the first paying passenger for the company’s nascent space tourism business — Elon Musk also revealed a wealth of new details about the BFR and just how this enormous rocket and spacecraft will get to the moon and back.
In a lengthy (one might even say rambling, in the true Musk style) presentation, we were treated to cinematic and technical views of the planned rocket,

Apple has just released an update for Apple Music on Android, and the biggest new addition is that it now supports Android Auto. So if you’re an Android user but prefer Apple’s music subscription service over Google Play Music or Spotify for whatever reason, now you can listen to it through Google’s in-car platform. Apple began beta testing the feature last month.This also means that Apple, which has its own competing take on this whole thing with CarPlay, somehow beat YouTube

Lyfthas officially entered the public transit space with the launch of Nearby Transit, a feature currently available just in Santa Monica, Calif. This comes just a couple of days after Lyft deployed electric scooters in the city.
Today, Lyft customers in Santa Monica will see the Nearby Transit option, which includes route information and schedules for the Big Blue Bus, LA Metro and Metrolink. The feature is in partnership with Trafi, a transit information platform.“Building on the launch

Gil Beyda Contributor Gil Beyda is a partner at Comcast Ventures.The startup media is awash with stories of corporate venture capital prioritizing their own interests over those of their portfolio. While acknowledging that some of these stories may have a basis in truth, it’s critical to recognize there is much more to the story.
It’s time the whole story is told.
The truth is that not all corporate venture capital firms are the same. And in fact, some have a strategic adv

More and more tech companies are blurring the line between gadgets and health devices. The new Apple Watch Series 4 will eventually do electrocardiograms. Fitbit just announced a fitness coaching program tailored to the health care industry that aims to “help improve wellness, disease management and prevention.” Google recently gave its Google Fit software an overhaul that awards users “heart points.” Based on an acquisition made last year, it seems Nest also has ambitio

Coinbasehas made yet another addition to its C-suite. The cryptocurrency trading platform has hired Brian Brooks, the former executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Fannie Mae, as its chief legal officer.
The hiring is part of the company’s effort to expand its legal, compliance and government affairs teams. Mike Lempres, who until now held the chief legal and risk officer title, will transition into the role of chief policy officer.
“From the time it was

How important is YouTube’s trending section for getting views? According to YouTube chief business officer Robert Kyncl, it has less of an impact than people might believe. In an interview posted today, creator Caspar Lee and Kyncl discuss everything from monetization and YouTube’s trending section to memberships, echo chambers, and abuse. “You are getting a majority of your views through recommendations,” Kyncl tells Lee.Unlike recommendations, which are fed to users ba

Amazonis experimenting with a new tool called Scout designed to help shoppers better figure out what they want to buy in a more visual fashion, according to a report from CNBC, which first spotted Scout live on Amazon’s site. Using a combination of imagery, a thumbs up and down voting mechanism, and machine learning technology, Scout offers an almost Pinterest-like way of browsing Amazon products, then refining recommendations through user input.
Currently, the site lets you search for fur

Can puppets have a sexual orientation?It’s a question you probably didn’t expect to be debating this week, but here we are.
In an interview with Queerty earlier this week, long-time Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman said that he wrote Bert and Ernie’s relationship — long a subject of fond, tongue-in-cheek speculation — to be that of “a loving couple.” According to Saltzman, during his 15-year tenure with the show, he modeled Bert and Ernie after his ow

We finally know what happens when a mysterious purple cube comes in contact with water. Fortnite’s cube, which has been traveling across the game’s island since late August, just dropped into the scenic Loot Lake, and it’s completely transformed the location. The cube is nowhere to be seen; instead, the lake is a huge bouncy pad, rendered in the same bright shade of purple as the cube. You can see it immediately when you drop onto the island.
This isn’t the first impact

Alibaba’s founder and chairman Jack Ma says the Chinese mega e-commerce company no longer has plans to create 1 million jobs in the US, citing the ongoing trade conflict as the reason Alibaba is retracting its promise to Donald Trump. A new round of tariffs between the US and China will make mutual trade more difficult.
Ma told Chinese state-run news outlet Xinhua today that his promise was based on the assumption that the US and China would have “rational trade relations,” wh

Hardware retailer Newegg suffered a month-long data breach that exposed users’ credit card information to the same hackers who targeted British Airways and Ticketmaster UK earlier this year. The exact scope of the attack is still unknown as the company just discovered the breach yesterday and began taking action.
Newegg sees about 50 million monthly visitors and has a business valued at $2.65 billion. Threat management firm RiskIQ, which uncovered the breach alongside cybersecurity firm V

The bicycle industry has a new tariff problem. A newly implemented round of tariffs will put a 10 percent tax on nearly all bike-related imports from China starting next week, a tax that rises to 25 percent at the end of the year. (Both are collected on top of a pre-existing 11 percent tariff on completed bicycles.) Thousands of business owners and bike riders mobilized against the tariffs, sending letters to Congress and comments to the US Trade Representative — but despite the lobbying,

In the twenty years since Movile launched its first technology services in 1998, the technology industry in Latin America has exploded.
Movile chief executive Fabricio Bloisi
Technology startups have gone from being an afterthought to being at the forefront of the economic changes sweeping through the region. And Movile’s digital marketplaces, delivery services, and investment capital (powered by Naspers) have, in many ways, led the charge.
At our Latin America Startup Battlefield eve

Netflix’s original programming team has demonstrated real dominance in nostalgic 1980s throwback science fiction, stand-up comedy specials, feature films that other studios don’t want to release, and just about every genre you can imagine. Now it’s about to seriously go after horror, judging from the trailer for the new series The Haunting of Hill House, which looks like a creepy, unnerving journey through some kid’s nightmares.The show comes from writer-director Mike Fl

A security researcher has published details of a vulnerability in a popular cloud storage drive after the company failed to issue security patches for over a year.
Remco Vermeulen found a privilege escalation bug in Western Digital’s My Cloud devices, which he said allows an attacker to bypass the admin password on the drive, gaining “complete control” over the user’s data.
The exploit works because drive’s web-based dashboard doesn’t properly check a user&rsq

European regulators are taking a preliminary look at Amazon’s third-party data collection practices as part of an early antitrust probe, European Union officials disclosed today.
The EU is “gathering information”
Margrethe Vestager, the head of the EU’s competition bureau, said during a press conference that the EU has been “gathering information” on how the company uses data from sellers on its third-party marketplace. Regulators want to know whether that da

When it launched the Versa back in March, Fitbit also announced plans to pivot. While the company will continue to operate in consumer hardware, it’s also shifting much of its focus toward healthcare. A month earlier, the company had acquired Twine, a platform that serves as part of the foundation of its new health coaching service, Care.Announced today, the system uses the new Fitbit Plus, combined with the company’s off-the-shelf hardware to provide additional health insight,

Facebookwill push users to register to vote through a partnership with TurboVote, has partnered with the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute non-profits to monitor foreign election interference, and will publish a weekly report of trends and issues emerging from its new political ads archive. Facebook has also confirmed that its election integrity war room is up and running and the team is now ‘red teaming’ how it would react to problem scenarios such

The 70th Primetime Emmy Awards had barely finished before complaints about them started to appear: despite the diversity on show in the nominations, it was a depressingly limited slate of winners (on-screen, at least). The hosts seemed bored throughout the whole thing. The ratings were low. The wedding proposal was lame and awkward. As is the case seemingly every year, no one but the winners seemed entirely happy with what had happened, leading to a simple question: What is an Emmy actually wor

A couple of specs you’ll never hear mentioned at an Apple keynote or find on the company’s website are an iPhone’s actual battery capacity and the amount of RAM inside each phone. Thankfully, Apple has to file this stuff with government regulatory agencies like China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (TENAA).The company has done just that for its latest iPhones, and you can find links to the filings at MacRumors. The important thing is that we now know th

The way people enjoy sports has changed. On Twitter, fans are watching games together, interacting directly with their favorite athletes, and engaging with their teams beyond a logo and a collection of players. Each team’s account has its own voice and personality that they exhibit across platforms.
For men’s professional sports teams, it can be easy to assume that the person behind the keyboard shares certain characteristics with the players they’re tasked with representing &m

Earlier this year, Google conducted tests to provide better location information for emergency calls. Today, the company has announced that the technology is available in the US through new deals with T-Mobile and RapidSOS.
Google’s partnerships with RapidSOS and T-Mobile are separate, and they’re meant to cover as many people as possible when an emergency call is made. Any Android user in a RapidSOS-covered area will have their location sent (RapidSOS is used in over 1,000 emergenc

A former sales executive at Spotify has sued both the streaming music company and its US head of sales, Brian Berner, over alleged gender discrimination, equal pay violations, and defamation over her firing.In a complaint filed with the New York Supreme Court on September 18th, Hong Perez accused Spotify of fostering a negative work culture for women at the company. Hired in 2015, the complaint says that “for three years, she [Perez] received extremely positive reviews and performance fee

Nintendo Switch Online launched yesterday, and with it came the ability to play your downloaded Nintendo Switch games on multiple devices. The subscription service, which starts at $3.99 for a month, adds overdue features like cloud saves that have long been available on services like Xbox Live and PSN. It’s not perfect, as it’s been reported that online data could be lost immediately if subscriptions lapse. But it’s still a step up from having your games tied to one Switch.Pr

Next month, Rockstar is releasing Red Dead Redemption 2, and we already know the Western will feature a robust single-player mode. What we haven’t heard about, however, is the much-anticipated online mode for the game. Today, the developer provided a few concrete details about the experience, which will be known as Red Dead Online. Here’s how Rockstar describes it:
Red Dead Online is an evolution of the classic multiplayer experience in the original Red Dead Redemption, blending nar

Lobsters, famously, are boiled alive. A Maine restaurant owner wants to do the deed more humanely by getting them high before cooking. It’s a nice thought, but probably won’t do much, considering that lobsters might not have the receptors necessary to get stoned.Being boiled alive seems uniquely inhumane and, earlier this year, Switzerland banned the practice. Yet the question of whether lobsters can feel pain remains up for debate. “They can sense their environment,” Bo

This year, the Toronto International Film Festival ran from September 6th through the 16th — 10 days of public screenings, industry events, symposiums and lectures, red carpets, and nighttime parties. That may not sound like much, but over the course of those 10 days, TIFF hosted more than 200 films from around the world, from major upcoming awards contenders like Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man to weird little horror indies looking for a probable home on a streami

Code hidden in an upcoming Galaxy S9 Plus update suggests that Samsung might be planning to release a 5G variant of the Galaxy 10 next year, reports XDA-Developers, echoing previous rumors that Samsung would include the next-generation connectivity in one variant of its flagship handset.There are four main versions of the upcoming phone that seem to be in production. The code refers to them as “beyond 0” (expected to be an entry-level model), “beyond 1” (the standard S10

GitLab, the developer service that aims to offer a full lifecycle DevOps platform, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series D funding round at a valuation of $1.1 billion. The round was led by Iconiq.
As GitLabCEO Sid Sijbrandij told me, this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $145.5 million, will help it enable its goal of reaching an IPO by November 2020.
According to Sijbrandij, GitLab’s original plan was to raise a new funding round

Neil deGrasse Tyson has a new book out called Accessories to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military, co-written with Avis Lang of the American Museum of Natural History. The book is a look at the relationship between the military and scientific communities, and if you’d like to hear an excerpt from the audiobook, The Verge has you covered.
The audiobook is narrated by Courtney B. Vance (American Crime Story, Law & Order: Criminal Intent). In this excerpt, tak

Are internet platforms suppressing speech and hurting civic culture? Google’s critics could build a case for this claim on a censorship-friendly search app for Chinese citizens, YouTube’s confusing demonetization of news-heavy YouTube channels, or Google’s work on military AI. Critics of Facebook could bring up the massive Cambridge Analytica scandal or its failure to spot foreign misinformation campaigns. Both groups could mention Google and Facebook’s connections to co

Xiaomi continues to expand its Mi 8 phone lineup. Today, the company announced the new Mi 8 Pro and Mi 8 Lite. In China, they’re known as the Mi 8 Screen Fingerprint and the Mi 8 Youth Edition, respectively. The Pro is definitely the more interesting device, as it includes a built-in fingerprint sensor beneath the display. Other specs include:Snapdragon 845 processor
Either 6GB or 8GB of RAM with 128GB of storage
6.21-inch, 1080 x 2248 OLED display
Dual 12-megapixel rear-facing cameras an

A British satellite, designed to test out ways to clean up debris in space, just successfully ensnared a simulated piece of junk in orbit using a big net. On Sunday, September 16th, the vehicle, known as the RemoveDEBRIS satellite, deployed its onboard net, which then captured a nearby target probe that the vehicle had released a few seconds earlier. The demonstration shows that a simple idea like a net may be an effective way to clean up all the material orbiting Earth.
The RemoveDEBRIS satell

Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson — known for his fight with the US government over 3D-printed guns — has been charged with sexually assaulting a minor, according to The Austin American-Statesman. The Statesman reports that police filed an arrest warrant for Wilson today in Travis County, Texas, alleging that a girl under 17 years old (the state’s age of consent) said Wilson paid her for sex after meeting on a site called SugarDaddyMeet.com. The Statesman reports that ja

Salespeople usually spend their days talking. They are on the phone and in meetings, but when it comes to updating Salesforce, they are back at the keyboard again typing notes and milestones, or searching for metrics about their performance. Today, Salesforcedecided to change that by introducing Einstein Voice, a bit of AI magic that allows salespeople to talk to the program instead of typing.
In a world where Amazon Alexa and Siri make talking to our devices more commonplace in our non-work liv

Diversity fatigue is a real thing, but that’s not news to Twilio Global Head of Culture & Inclusion LaFawn Davis. What that does mean for her, however, is less talk and more action. Since coming on board as Twilio’s diversity and inclusion leader about one and half years ago, Davis has been focused on creating a global approach, rather than one that is just U.S.-centric.
That strategy is based on three pillars, Davis told TechCrunch. Those are having an equitable approach (i.e. h

It looks like we’re getting more details about the superhero side of Disney’s planned (and apparently still-unnamed) streaming service, thanks to a story in Variety.
We already knew that the Disney service would include original Marvel and Star Wars shows. On the Star Wars side, there’s a revival of “The Clone Wars” and a live action series produced by Jon Favreau, for which Disney might pay $100 million for the first 10 episodes.
Now Variety is reporting that Disne