Technology news

Oraclehas allegedly withheld $400 million in wages from racially underrepresented workers (black, Latinx and Asian) as well as women, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs said in a filing today. The OFCCP is the office within the DOL that enforces equal pay and ensures government contractors comply with anti-discrimination regulation.
In the OFCCP’s second amended complaint today, the office alleges Oracle “impermissibly d

European startup Starship Technologies is bringing its six-wheeled delivery robots to a college campus in Virginia. The company announced Monday that George Mason Universitywill allow students to use their meal plans to have select food and drink orders delivered by the robots.Starship says it’s providing George Mason with at least 25 robots, and orders from Blaze Pizza, Starbucks, and Dunkin’ will be available at the start. More will be added in the “coming weeks,” and

Okta,the Nasdaq-listed cloud identity management company, has recruited former Charles Schwab chief marketing officer Becky Saeger to its board of directors. The latest appointment comes one month after the company named Shellye Archambeau, former chief executive officer of MetricStream, to its board.
Saeger becomes Okta’s third female board member. Michelle Wilson,a former senior vice president and general counsel at Amazon,joined the company’s board in 2015. According to data colle

M. Umair Siddiqui Contributor M. Umair Siddiqui, PhD is the chief scientist of Phase Four.
In case you missed it, space is being democratized — and quickly.
Last November, from a sheep farm in New Zealand, California-based Rocket Lab launched six payloads via their “It’s Business Time” small Electron rocket.
The successful launch brings Rocket Lab one step closer to their goal of “super-frequent small payload deliveries.”
Indeed, one of the satellites on boar

Apple might be in for another MacBook Pro hardware controversy. A report from iFixit highlights an issue with the laptop’s backlights failing, causing the lighting at the bottom of the screen to appear spotted and uneven. An enterprising user has already dubbed the problem “flexgate.”
Flexgate is here
The issue seems to arise because of a cable that is used to connect the MacBook’s display to a control board in the base of the computer, iFixit explains. Starting with the

Twitter has started to roll out a new interface for its web users that includes several key features, like a newly designed emoji button.The most important changes are tiny shortcuts to make tweeting easier. A large, dedicated button in the tweet box makes it easier to add an emoji, an updated trending section appears on the right-hand side of the page, and little aesthetic updates make it easier to see who’s involved in a conversation. These changes, alongside the way Twitter’s des

NASA is replacing one of the astronauts assigned to fly on the first crewed test launch of the CST-100 Starliner, a capsule being developed by Boeing to take passengers to the International Space Station. NASA announced today that astronaut Eric Boe will no longer be flying on the mission due to unspecified “medical reasons.” Instead, NASA astronaut E. Michael “Mike” Fincke will take Boe’s place.
Boe was assigned to this flight in August of 2018, along with eight o

Acer announced two 12-inch Chromebook devices today at the annual Bett conference for educators: the Chromebook 512 and the Chromebook Spin 512. Both feature 1366 x 912 resolution on 3:2 aspect ratio screens — a ratio which, according to Acer, falls between that of books and mobile media.Compared to the Chromebook 512 — which starts at $329.99 and is equipped with a dual-core Celeron N4000 chip — the Chromebook Spin 512, which starts at $449.99, features a more powerful quad-c

In case you hadn’t heard, Google Hangouts is going away — and if you’ve been dreading the day you’ll have to replace it with the perhaps much nicer-looking Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, we’ve got some brand-new guidance from Google on when the switch will be happening.
Namely, October to start. That’s when Google will start retiring the classic Hangouts app for its G Suite customers — aka companies that pay to use Google Apps — according to an

Communications satellites are multiplying year by year as more companies vie to create an orbital network that brings high-speed internet to the globe. Ubiquitilink, a new company headed by Nanoracks co-founder Charles Miller, is taking a different tack: reinventing the Earthbound side of the technology stack.
Miller’s intuition, backed by approval and funding from a number of investors and communications giants, is that people are competing to solve the wrong problem in the comsat world.

Google,as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipediafor its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back.
Google.orgPresident Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, while the Endowm

What if you want to update your Instagram Story but all you did this weekend was binge Netflix? You can now basically become an ad for your favorite show with a new integration that lets you post artwork from Netflix titles to your Instagram Story, as spotted by TechCrunch.
The Netflix app will now allow you to share a show or movie’s artwork to your Instagram Story after tapping the “share” button. When other Netflix users view your story, they’ll also see a “watc

As we get ready for TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI on April 18 at UC Berkeley, we can’t help but look back at last year’s robotics event. With more than 1,000 attendees, thought-provoking panels and cutting-edge demos, 2018’s TC Sessions: Robotics was pretty great.
We’ve compiled some highlights of some of our favorite moments from last year to whet your appetite for 2019’s current speaker lineup. Check out the highlights below and be sure to grab your Earl

This is not earth-shattering news by any means, but Googletoday announced that Gmail is getting a strikethrough button in its formatting bar. In addition, it’s also getting Undo/Redo options and the ability to download emails as .EML files.
There really isn’t much more to be said about this, but if you ever wanted to use strikethrough in an email to show that you edited something out, then your time has come. Same for those of you who always wanted to see undo and redo buttons in Gma

Latin America is getting another fintech unicorn thanks to Advent International’s acquisition of a 51 percent stake of Prisma Medios de Pago, an Argentine payments company formed as a joint venture between Visa International and local banks.
The deal, which values Prismaat $1.42 billion, is yet another sign of Latin America’s growing prominence for global investment and the central role that fintech plays in the development of an innovation economy in the region.
Prisma Medios de Pag

Zyngafounder Mark Pincusis raising up to $700 million for a new investment fund that will focus on publicly traded tech companies in need of strategic restructuring, according to a new report in Axios. It says his new firm is called Reinvent Capital and that Pincus is founding the outfit with hedge fund manager Michael Thompson, who has been steering his own New York-based firm, BHR Capital, for the last nine years.
Reinvest’s plans, says Axios, involve investing in up to 15 internet, soft

Honor is launching its first smartwatch in Europe, to coincide with the launch of its hole-punch flagship phone, the Honor View 20.It’s not entirely a new watch: the Honor Watch Magic and Honor Watch Dream — seemingly the same watch, but the Dream features smaller band sizes and pastel colors — were released in Honor’s home country of China last year in October.
Both sizes appear to sport 1.2-inch AMOLED touchscreens with 390 x 390 resolution (326 ppi), as well as GPS tr

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case regarding whether Yelp is culpable for removing defamatory reviews from its site, resolving a case that could have affected web platforms’ legal protections. Today’s list of Supreme Court orders denies a complaint brought by Dawn Hassell, an attorney who requested that Yelp take down false, negative reviews about her practice. This means that a California Supreme Court decision will stand, and Yelp isn’t liable for the reviews.

Earlier this month, thousands of vendors exhibited at the tech trade show CES. But notably absent was the sex toy startup Lora DiCarlo, whose invitation to exhibit at the show was rescinded after CES changed its mind about awarding an Innovation Award to the company’s Osé vibrator.For some, the decision to revoke the award was a sign of pervasive sexism and a discomfort with female pleasure, particularly given CES’s long-standing tolerance of sex robots, VR porn, and, until r

On Tuesday, Google’s Jigsaw unit published a quiz that tests users’ abilities to identify phishing emails. The quiz tests you on a series of emails to see if you can distinguish telltale signs of phishing.
“Phishing is, by far, the most common form of cyberattack,” Jigsaw explains in a blog post. “One percent of emails sent today are phishing attempts.” According to the post, the quiz is based on trainings Jigsaw held with “10,000 journalists, activists

Having reached critical mass, Netflix shows are now influencing culture — whether that’s prompting everyone to “tidy up” or causing chaos with “Bird Box”-inspired challenges. For good or bad, what happens on Netflix is talked about, memed and shared across the social media landscape. Today, Netflix is launching a new feature aimed at better inserting its brand into those online conversations: Instagram Story integration.
Launching first on iOS, Netflix users w

The electric guitar has been floating around in some form or another since the early 1930s. But given how much the instrument dominated the music landscape for the latter half of the 20th century, interesting innovations don’t really come along too often.Fender’s models are probably the most iconic of the bunch, and the company has found most of its successes sticking to what works. In recent years, however, the American guitar manufacturer has been looking for ways to broaden its ap

Honorofficially launched the Honor View 20 today in Paris. Honor is Huawei’s sub-brand for mid-range phones. And the View 20 doesn’t look like your average smartphone — the company traded the notch for a hole-punch display.
Honor thinks this design isn’t as intrusive as a centered notch. And rumor has it that Samsung could also put a hole-punch display into the Samsung Galaxy S10.
I played with the Honor View 20 for a bit of time, and it definitely feels different from an

Mozilla,the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser and other open-source projects, today announced that it has hired Roxi Wen, the former CFO of display manufacturer Elo Touch Solutions, as its new CFO. Wen will replace former Mozilla CFO Jim Cook, who departed almost a year ago after 14 years with the organization.
Wen joins Mozilla at a crucial time. In terms of its technology, Firefox is now a real competitor again. With that foundation in place, Mozilla is now in a position where it needs

Match Group and the media brand Betches are partnering to launch an iOS dating app that allows users to help their friends pick out potential dates. The app is called Ship, and it lets users swipe for their friends and chat about profiles, so even if your best friend is in a relationship, he or she can download the app and look around for you. (Your mom could, too.)Ship could stand out by creating a different behavior than we’re used to on most dating apps. More importantly, it comes from

Electronic music can occasionally sound a little too pristine and digital, and some of the best electronic musicians stand out for the way they dirty their productions up to give them an organic edge. To aid with that quest, Latvia’s Erica Synths is launching a new eurorack synth module called the Plasma Drive — whose job it is to add distortion to your music via the novel approach of turning it into lightning.
Devised by the mad scientists at another Latvian company, Gamechanger Au

The Honor View 20 will go on sale in Europe tomorrow starting at £499 / €569 for the 128GB model, making one of the world’s first phones with a hole-punch display available to a wider audience. The View 20 is already on sale in China, but no availability has been announced for the US.Hole-punch display smartphones are just starting to arrive, and they could be the antidote to notches. The View 20 has a 6.4-inch LCD display with a resolution of 2310 x 1080. Its selfie camera app

Google’sstrategy around its consumer messaging services remains baffling, especially since it killed off Allo (yet kept Duo on life support). Today, the company clarified the timeline of the transition from classic Hangouts to Chat and Meet for its paying G Suite customers. For them, the Hangouts retirement party will start in October of this year.
For consumers, the situation remains unclear, but Google says there will be free versions of Chat and Meet that will become available “fo

As I will likely continue repeating until the heat death of the universe, life would be great if everything used USB-C. Sadly, everything doesn’t use USB-C, which is why I have to carry around a separate pouch of dongles and cables to make sure I can charge all of my gadgets. But the High Five — a crowdfunded mini-cable that claims to be the “world‘s first 5-in-1 charging cable” — might be able to help with that.
The High Five is being made from Vonmähle

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:1. After raising $125M, Munchery fails to deliver
On-demand food delivery startup Munchery is ceasing operations, effective immediately. The company laid off 30 percent of its workforce in May, after shutting down its Seattle, Los Angeles and New York operations.
At the time, Munchery said it plan

The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project has a singular focus on the blockchain, but this morning it announced a framework for building supply chain projects where it didn’t want blockchain stealing the show.
In fact, the foundation is careful to point out that this project is not specifically about the blockchain, so much as providing the building blocks for a broader view of solving supply chain digitization issues. As it describes in a blog post announcing the project, it i

Waymoand Magna plan to build thousands of self-driving cars at a factory in southeast Michigan, including autonomous versions of the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan.
Waymo, the former Googleself-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, announced Tuesday that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation voted to approve the company’s plan to set up a manufacturing facility in the state to build its self-driving vehicles. The MEDC ap