Technology news

Responding to Elizabeth Warren’scall to regulate and break up some of the nation’s largest technology companies, the venture capitalists that invest in technology companies are advising the presidential hopeful to move slowly and not break anything.
Warren’s plan called for regulators to be appointed to oversee the unwinding of several acquisitions that were critical to the development of the core technology that make Alphabet’s Googleand the social media giant Facebook s

When you walk into a restaurant at this year’s SXSW, Foursquare’s new Hypertrending feature will know. Your phone will show up as a blip on a live map that literally anyone in Austin, Texas can access. And Foursquare founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley just really wants to know: do you think that idea is creepy, or no?
“If this freaks people out, we don’t build stuff with it,” Crowley told TechCrunch, talking past the fact that he’s apparently alrea

If you follow baseball with even a passing interest, you know that nearly everyone’s got a way to “fix” the national pastime. Pitch clocks, moving the mound — there are a million ideas for how to curb waning interest in the sport. Robo umpires have long been on the list, as well, but given the sort of pushback things like instant replay have traditionally received among the fan base, that’s always seemed like a bit of a technological pipe dream.
That, however, is pr

Mark Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook less like a town square, and more like a living room. So he declares in a massive blog post earlier this week, a winding read on Facebook’s potential for change and the future of the internet altogether. After building an multi-billion-dollar business on the idea of open sharing, Facebook is ready to become a more private, intimate kind of social network. You can read the full 3,200-word blog post here, but we’ve broken down the key p

Authorities have arrested one leader on Wednesday of a cryptocurrency project called OneCoin, which prosecutors allege was in fact a pyramid scheme rather than a functional currency. Konstantin Ignatov was arrested on a wire fraud conspiracy charge, while his older sister, Ruja Ignatova, has been indicted for money laundering, and wire and securities fraud, in a document unsealed yesterday. Ignatova is currently at large.
OneCoin, a Bulgaria-based company, was founded in 2014 and still has oper

The story of how Evan Spiegel came to create Snapchat is being turned into a short-form video series by Quibi, an upcoming short-form streaming service designed for mobile users that’s set to launch next year. Quibi’s name stands for “quick bites,” so all the show’s episodes will be less than 10 minutes in length.
Quibi co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former CEO of DreamWorks, and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of HP, announced the series during a South by Southwe

The story of how Evan Spiegel came to create Snapchat is being turned into a short-form video series by Quibi, an upcoming short-form streaming service designed for mobile users that’s set to launch next year. Quibi’s name stands for “quick bites,” so all the show’s episodes will be less than 10 minutes in length.
Quibi co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former CEO of DreamWorks, and Meg Whitman, the former CEO of HP, announced the series during a South by Southwe

As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it.
A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts Universityveterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. “as soon as possible.” That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her

Sam Altman,the well-known president of the prolific Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator,is stepping down, the firm shared in a blog post on Friday.
Altman is transitioning into a chairman role with other YC partners stepping up to take on his day-to-day responsibilities, as first reported by Axios. Sources tell TechCrunch YC has no succession plans. YC’s core program is currently led by chief executive officer Michael Seibel, who joined the firm as a part-time partner in 2013 and assum

Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman today announced a slate of new series and projects heading to their forthcoming video streaming service, Quibi. The list includes an origin story to complement Telemundo’s hit show “El Señor de los Cielos;” a music competition show produced by Justin Bieber manager and entertainment exec Scooter Braun; a show from Jennifer Lopez’s company about the power of giving and paying it forward; as well something called “Frat Boy Gen

“Fresh Prince” star Alfonso Ribeiro has dropped his lawsuit against Fortnite creator Epic Games for using without his permission his “Carlton” dance as an emote in the popular game.
According to documents filed in an LA court, Ribeiro voluntarily dismissed the suit. He had already dropped a suit against Take-Two Interactive similarly related to his dance. Last month, Ribeiro was denied a copyright for his dance by federal officials, which seemed to put the nail in the cof

Microsoft has a zero-day vulnerability in Windows 7 that remains unpatched, Google revealed in a blog post yesterday. It’s one of two zero-day vulnerabilities that, along with one in Google Chrome, hackers were exploiting to send malicious code to users.
The unpatched Windows 7 vulnerability lets hackers escalate local privileges to execute malicious code. Google wrote in its blog post that it’s only seen Windows 7 32-bit systems contain this vulnerability. Older versions before Win

One would think that having one of the most high-profile breaches in recent memory would make a company take security to heart, but Equifax is full of surprises. The latest is that its MyEquifax.com site, to which the company invites those affected by its poor security practices to freeze and unfreeze their credit, itself has extremely poor security.
It’s all documented by security researcher Brian Krebs, who discovered the issue not in some special investigation but in the process of sign

In June 2014, music cognition professor Henkjan Honing witnessed a strange sight: a sea lion named Ronan headbanging to a beat. When the beat sped up or slowed down, so did the bops of Ronan’s head. And when “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind & Fire started playing over the speakers, Ronan kept perfect time.Moving with a beat may sound trivial to us humans. But Ronan’s rhythm, first published by researchers at the University of Santa Cruz in 2013, is a major clue in

“Captain Marvel”isn’t a bad movie, exactly.
It seems, at this point, that Marvel’s moviemaking machinery is incapable of producing a genuinely terrible film. There’s no “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” or “Suicide Squad” in the Marvel filmography, just “Thor: The Dark World,” “Ant-Man” and “Doctor Strange” — movies that are fine but forgettable.
Still, I wanted more than that for &ldquo

The Apple AirPods are ripe for a refresh in 2019, if only because these truly wireless in-ear headphones are approaching their third year on shelves without a single hardware revision. From where Apple is sitting, it’s easy to see why it has waited this long to release a new version. There are now several truly wireless headphones on the market — good ones, even — but new options like the Samsung Galaxy Buds are only now beginning to tread on the AirPods’ biggest selling

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is examining the rise of injuries related to shareable electric scooters, according to CNBC. The study was launched at the request of the Public Health and Transportation departments in Austin, Texas, where local health officials are seeing more injuries related to scooters offered bypopular ride-sharing companies Bird and Lime.There have been other studies into the spike in scooter-related injuries, but the Austin study is the first to be ov

Facebook as we know it is on its way out as the company eyes a so-called pivot to privacy, but its legacy lives on. Developer Kyle Seely — creator of AIM-based visual novels Emily is Away and Emily is Away Too — is working on a new game that aims to recapture the spirit of Facebook in its heyday. Called Emily is Away <3, Seely’s latest game will let players create a “Facenook” account, send friend requests, and enjoy angsty ambiguous statuses.The game, set in 20

Vizio’s 65-inch P-series Quantum 4K HDR television is $1,599 ($200 off) at B&H Photo, and is today’s best deal if you’re in the market for a high-end TV. This model first went on sale in late July 2018, and while we’ve seen its price dip below where it currently sits during Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year, deals are fairly rare on Vizio TVs, let alone its premium Quantum TV model. This model can reach a peak brightness of 2,000 nits, it boasts 192 local dimmi

Back when Flickr first announced that it would be limiting free accounts to just 1,000 pictures, the company announced an exception: while it would be deleting any pictures on accounts over that number, any Creative Commons licensed photos uploaded before the November 1st, 2018 deadline would be allowed to stay. And today, the company announced that it would be making the policy permanent — all Creative Commons photos will be allowed on Flickr for good, regardless of upload date, even on

The idea of antitrust in the tech industry has been tossed around a lot lately. Most recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) published a proposal to break up big tech companies, notably Amazon, Facebook, and Google.We cover antitrust policy often on The Vergecast, talking to lawmakers, policy experts, and academics about next steps that governments can take to regulate these big technology companies from becoming too powerful.Here are some episodes of our show that help explain whether this shou

The idea of antitrust in the tech industry has been tossed around a lot lately. Most recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) published a proposal to break up big tech companies, notably Amazon, Facebook, and Google.We cover antitrust policy often on The Vergecast, talking to lawmakers, policy experts, and academics about next steps that governments can take to regulate these big technology companies from becoming too powerful.Here are some episodes of our show that help explain whether this shou

Nvidia’s G-Sync variable refresh rate tech takes the leash off of your graphics card, letting it push as many frames per second as it possibly can, while eliminating input lag and visual artifacts (like motion blur and screen tearing) on your monitor. If you buy a monitor equipped with G-Sync, you can expect a smoother gaming experience with fluid animations. But such a monitor is costly, with a baseline price of around $350 for a 1080p display, and hundreds more for one that can output a

Flickr announced today that all Creative Commons images will remain protected on its site – including those uploaded in the past and those that will be added in the future. The news follows Flickr’s November 2018 announcement where it had stated it wouldn’t delete Creative Commons photos already on its service, after switching over to a new business model which put an end to the free terabyte of storage in favor of a new subscription-based service.
There had been concern prior

What if, instead of sitting on your phone on the sofa ordering stuff from Amazon, you could buy the same things locally from local stores that ultimately enliven and enrich your local neighborhood? What if by doing that, you wouldn’t be walking through deserted main streets, past boarded-up shops, dark alleys and graffiti? What if someone created a marketplace for independent businesses, local events and experiences that kept the money in the local economy rather than being siphoned off in

Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new direction for Facebook this week that shifts its focus from a sprawling series of social apps to a one-stop shop messaging service that combines everything the company has to offer. If there’s an analog to what Facebook is trying to build, it exists in the form of Tencent’s WeChat, the single largest social network in China. There are a number of key differences between the two products, but the ultimate goals look markedly similar: singular, all-purpo

“I hear a lot that algorithms are powerful technologies, and the companies are monopolies, and we are helpless against them, and Google is the only option,” says Kartik Hosanagar, a professor of technology and digital business at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’m trying to say that we aren’t.”
Hosanagar is the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control, which comes out March

As Lyft continues to prepare for its IPO, the on-demand transportation startup is trimming staff to cut costs ahead of another wave of expansion.
TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Lyfthas laid off around 50 staff in its bike and scooter division, mainly people who had joined the company when it acquired the electric bike-sharing startup Motivate, a deal that closed about three months ago. The cuts range from managers through to technical people and those holding less-senior roles, and ha

In a telling sign of the state of bike sharing, Mobike, a once red-hot startup that attracted billions in investment capital, is closing down all international operations and putting its sole focus on China.
On Friday, Mobike laid off its operations teams in APAC, which entailed more than 15 full-time employees and many more contractors and third-party agency staff across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Australia. Those affected were told the company will “ramp down” the reg

The story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranoshas inspired quite a bit of content, including a NYT Best Seller, an ABC podcast, a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and now an HBO documentary directed by “Going Clear” director, Alex Gibney.
The documentary is called “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.”
The tech world was shocked when the WSJ broke the news that Theranos, the biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, wasn’t what it appeared to be.
Promising

Entrepreneurs and tech executives are widening their gazes outside of developed nations for their next source of growth. Ubiquitous cheap phones and increasingly affordable phone plans such as Jio in India are helping another billion users join the internet. What do those users want though, and how are they the same and different than existing internet users?
That’s the subject of a critical book by Payal Arora, entitled The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West. The compact the