Technology news

The idea that social media can be harmful to our mental and emotional well-being is not a new one, but little has been done by researchers to directly measure the effect; surveys and correlative studies are at best suggestive. A new experimental study out of Penn State, however, directly links more social media use to worse emotional states, and less use to better.
To be clear on the terminology here, a simple survey might ask people to self-report that using Instagrammakes them feel bad. A corr

TeslaModel 3 owners who opted for the Performance variant now have a reason to go to the track. Or, if history is a guide, they’ll skip the track and try the newly released Track Mode software feature in a parking lot or winding road.
Track Mode — to be clear — is designed for, and should only be used on closed autocross circuits and racetracks. Here’s why.
The software feature taps into the dual electric motors to squeeze even more performance out of the vehicle. But in

Done cloning Snapchat, Facebookis now chasing Chinese short-form video sensation TikTok with the launch of its knock-off Lasso. Available now for iOS and Android, Lasso is Facebook’s answer to the zany mobile lipsyncing playground that’s gained ground with young users, both in China and in the West.
The release confirms TechCrunch’s scoop from last month that the company was building an app called Lasso to let people share short videos with soundtracks. With TikTok lo

Facebook will no longer force employees to settle sexual harassment claims in private arbitration, following a similar change at Google yesterday, according to The Wall Street Journal. Facebook reportedly announced the news to employees internally today, and vice president of people Lori Goler told the Journal that it wants to “be part of taking the next step” at “a pivotal moment” in the tech industry. It also announced an updated policy on dating among employees, requi

With major production hurdles looking more like they’re in the rearview mirror, Tesla is starting to roll out small updates for the now tens of thousands of Model 3 owners in North America.One of the stranger decisions Tesla made with the lower-cost Model 3 sedan was to give owners just two ways to unlock the car’s doors: with a credit card-sized key or with their smartphones. But the company has changed course and, Friday, started selling a $150 Model 3-shaped key fob on its websit

Thousands of Californians have evacuated their homes in the wake of disastrous wildfires over the past few days, and five have been killed. Among the most recent to leave their homes have been a number of YouTube creators, including Shane Dawson, Jake Paul, and members of FaZe Clan, as the affected region has become a popular place for creators to live and work.There are currently three major fires affecting communities in Northern and Southern California, but the fires affecting some of YouTub

News of T-Mobile’s rumored internet TV service has been circulating since 2017, and a new FCC filing of its set-top box finally hints at an imminent launch. Spotted by Variety, the filing contains a user manual PDF which calls the device the “T-Mobile Mini,” and features some photos of the streaming box. The filing was made by Kaonmedia, the company that built set-top boxes for Layer3 TV, a small cable company that was acquired by T-Mobile earlier this year.
The back of the de

Facebook has quietly released an app called Lasso that lets users create fun, short videos designed to compete with TikTok, the viral 15-second video app that recently merged with Musical.ly. Lasso is Facebook’s latest bid to win over teens, which the large social media platform has lost its hold over. In 2018, only half of teens say they still use Facebook, compared to in 2014, when 71 percent of them said they did. The app was first reported as in development in late October.
On Lasso,

PayPalhas shut down several accounts, including those for far-right group the Proud Boys and their founder, Gavin McInnes, for the promotion of “hate, violence, or other forms of intolerance.” Several anti-fascist groups were also banned as part of the same wave of policy enforcement.
PayPal confirmed the bans to TechCrunch, which were first reported by BuzzFeed News. The Proud Boys are a right-wing organization that has until recently managed to avoid being labeled a hate group. How

Another day, another exit scam. This time it comes to us from South Korea, where an exchange, Pure Bit, has completely shut down after raising $2.8 million in Ethereum from investors.
The exchange, which promised to deliver something call Pure Coin, was live yesterday and today is completely shut down after posting “Sorry” and “Thanks” to their communications channels.
According to a Reddit thread, the team was anonymous and that the process of building and pumping exchan

Two researchers, Dr. Domenico Vicinanza of Anglia Ruskin University and Dr. Genevieve Williams, have “sonified” a video of the 5,000th Martian sunrise captured by the Mars rover, Opportunity. The music is a representation of the experience of seeing the sun rise over the red dunes as light pierces the planet’s atmosphere.
It’s beautiful.
From the release:
Researchers created the piece of music by scanning a picture from left to right, pixel by pixel, and looking at brigh

Upstart launch provider Rocket Labaims to finally launch its first fully commercial payload to orbit this weekend after months of delays. The small Electron rocket will take six satellites from four companies to orbit as early as tomorrow evening Pacific time — Sunday afternoon at the company’s launch site in New Zealand.
“It’s Business Time,” as this launch is called, in honor of being the first to carry a full load of paying customers, was originally scheduled for

PayPal said today that it will cancel accounts used by far-right group the Proud Boys as well as multiple accounts from anti-fascist groups.The move will make it much harder for the groups to raise money online. The decision is the latest act of “de-platforming” by the tech industry, which has been grappling with how to effectively handle users that promote hateful or violent ideologies.the move will make it harder for the groups to raise money
The ban will include the Proud Boys ac

Hackers siphoned off thousands of Healthcare.gov applications by breaking into the accounts of brokers and agents tasked with helping customers sign up for healthcare plans.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said in a post buried on its website that the hackers obtained “inappropriate access” to a number of broker and agent accounts, which “engaged in excessive searching” of the government’s healthcare marketplace systems.
CMS didn’t sa

For some people, labeling a film as a B-movie is a crushing bit of condescension, but for others, it’s high praise and an implicit recommendation. Between directing blockbusters like Star Trek and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams has spent the last few years eagerly embracing the latter point of view, producing outright B-movies through his company Bad Robot. Beginning with the found-footage monster movie Cloverfield, and continuing on with its spiritual successors 10 Cloverfield

Giphy, the internet’s go-to platform for finding the perfect reaction GIF to send colleagues on Slack, soft-launched a new platform today dedicated to short-form video.Giphy isn’t exactly Vine, but it’s not YouTube, either. It’s a site for short-form video (30 seconds or less) that people can upload and watch. Although the platform uses a more traditional form of video than GIFs, it’s a foray into the “future of entertainment,” according to a press rele

Amazonhas signed a new deal with Apple that will allow the retailer to increase the selection of Appleproducts on its site, according to a report from CNET, which Amazon also confirmed. The deal will give Apple-authorized resellers the ability to sell a wide range of devices on Amazon — including Apple’s recently launched iPad Pro, iPhone XS and XR, and Apple Watch Series 4, in addition to Beats headphones.
Previously, these products were only available through Amazon’s third-p

Over the last three months, you might have seen a joke format that asks viewers to help pop culture figures by giving them their credit card number. That meme was the calling card of “VoiceoverPete,” an actor who delivers lines with such an impressive command that people were willing to pay him for custom videos — that is, until the website that hosted his services terminated his account for promoting scams. But VoiceoverPete’s career didn’t die there. Instead, an

The worm has turned, it seems. Emulators, which let people run old console games on their computers, were once the scourge of the gaming industry. Now Sonyis using one of the very pieces of software the industry decried as the basis for its PlayStation Classic retro console.
In the licenses list for the console can be found PCSX ReArmed, as Kotaku noticed in its review yesterday. That’s the ARM port of PCSX Reloaded, itself an offshoot of the original PCSX emulator, which ceased developmen

Google has hired Geisinger Health CEO David Feinberg to oversee its many health care initiatives, reporting to AI chief Jeff Dean and working closely with CEO Sundar Pichai to organize Google’s various health-related ventures.Google has been interested in health care for some time; its current efforts are quite fragmented, and they span across several teams and its parent Alphabet’s companies, including Nest, Verily, Calico, DeepMind, and Google Fit. In 2008, Google launched a proje

Disney is gearing up to launch its own standalone streaming service next year, but that doesn’t mean the company is giving up on another prominent streaming platform — Hulu.Disney CEO Bob Iger addressed questions about Hulu’s future during Disney’s recent investors’ earnings call, and he noted plans for expanding internationally while building up Hulu’s original content slate. The company could see a much larger stake in Hulu following the company’s acq

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
The first episode of Deadwind (aka Karppi), a Finnish detective series that debuted

The New York Times doesn’t keep bodies in its “morgue” — it keeps pictures. In a basement under its Times Square office, stuffed into cabinets and drawers, the Times stores between 5 million and 7 million images, along with information about when they were published and why. Now, the paper is working with Google to digitize its huge collection.The morgue (as the basement storage area is known) contains pictures going back to the 19th century, many of which exist nowhere

The tech scene in São Paulo is an absolute delight, and we’re honored to have seen such an amazing turnout at the Startup Battlefield Latin America.
In case you missed it, we’ve put together a little recap of the event below.
Editor’s Note: We will embed videos from the event as soon as they’re available.
A China Twist to Brazil’s Mobility Revolution
Featuring Ariel Lambrecht (Yellow), Eduardo Musa (Yellow), Tony Qiu (Didi Chuxing), Hans Tung (GGV)
Mobility i

A Utah man has pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges, after admitting to knocking several gaming services offline five years ago.
Austin Thompson, 23, launched several denial-of-service attacks against EA’s Origin, Sony PlayStation and Valve’s Steam gaming services during the December holiday season in 2013.
At the time, those denial-of-service attacks made it near-impossible for some gamers to play — many of whom had bought new consoles or games in the run-up to Chri

Amazon has made a deal with Apple that will see the Cupertino tech company sell its products — including iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches — directly on Amazon, according to a report from CNET.
Amazon has sold Apple products before, but those have been from third-party sellers, which means that the prices are often variable (and wildly different from the “official” Apple prices) and that sourcing isn’t as reputable.Rolling out on Amazon sites in the US, UK, France,

Samsung has quietly unveiled its second Android Go phone, the Galaxy J4 Core, following up on the previously released Galaxy J2 Core from over the summer, via Android Police.
Like the J2 Core, the J4 Core is still based on the Android 8.1 Oreo version of Android Go, not Android 9 Pie. Specs have been improved a bit for the J4 Core, though: it has a higher resolution 6-inch 1480 x 720 display, a larger 3,300mAh battery, and double the storage at 16GB.The rest of the specs are similarly lackluste

Welcome to Fav’d For Later, a Friday roundup of our favorite memes, trends, and all-around good internet content. This week, I have been liberated by a meme.
Can I just say something real quick? People who yell at you to get off your phone and live in the moment are annoying. They’re annoying! God, that feels good.As someone who spends 85 percent of my life online professionally, I get it. Comparing our lives to others on Instagram makes us sad. Facebook is where all your old high s

On the very first page of The End of Animal Farming, author Jacy Reese makes it clear that the book is not about why animal farming is bad. There have been plenty of books chronicling the damage caused by factory farms, but his book is about how to solve animal farming itself.Technology will be a big part of the answer, says Reese, an animal rights activist and research director at the Sentience Institute. Scientific advances have already brought us the plant-based Impossible Burger and the fir

This week, I’ve tried to do something new at TechCrunch with this experimental column — getting obsessed about a topic broadly in tech and writing a continuous stream of thoughts and analysis about it.
With my research consultant and contributor Arman Tabatabai, we’ve covered two topics: Form Ds, the filing that startups usually submit to the SEC after a venture round closes (although increasingly do not), and SoftBank,which faces all kinds of strategic pressure due to its debt

Tetris is a game that has followed me for my entire life. It’s the first video game I ever played on the NES, while the Game Boy iteration was the first portable experience I couldn’t put down. Since then, I’ve played it on nearly every device I’ve owned — from terrible mobile adaptations to freeware PC takes on the game. But despite being one of the most beloved and popular video games of all time, the current state of Tetris is rather dire. There are a handful of