Technology news

Bill McGlashan, who built his career as top investor at the private equity firm TPG, has been put on “indefinite administrative leave, effective immediately,” says the firm after McGlashan was caught up in what the Justice Department said today is the largest college admissions scandal it has ever prosecuted.
McGlashan is among 49 others accused of participating in a bribery ring involving parents, admissions counselors, and athletic coaches at Yale, Wake Forest, and the University o

Elon Musk’s plan to build express-route tunnels in Las Vegas received its first approval Tuesday, after the board of directors for the city’s Convention and Visitors Authority voted in favor of Musk’s Boring Company for a new people-mover project.The plan involves digging a loop of underground tunnels that could carry passengers in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds. The loop would just encompass the convention center, but could be expanded to include other points in

Vunglefounder Zain Jafferfiled a lawsuit today accusing the mobile advertising company of wrongfully terminating him from the role of CEO.
The lawsuit cites a section of the California labor code that it says “expressly and specifically prohibits discrimination and retaliation by employers based upon an arrest or detention that did not result in conviction.”
Jaffer was arrested in October 2017 in an incident involving his young son — the charges included performing a lewd act o

In the wake of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s abrupt resignation, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar III announced that Dr. Ned Sharpless will serve as interim commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
Since October 2017, Dr. Sharpless served as director of the National Cancer Institute and, before that, worked as a researcher and hematologist-oncologist at the University of North Carolina. He is also a co-founder of G1 Therapeutics, a biotech firm focused on ca

At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, T-Mobile CEO John Legere was questioned by lawmakers over the company’s spending at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC, focusing specifically on hotel stays that occurred after its merger plans with Sprint were announced last spring.
Democratic lawmakers like Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Hank Johnson (D-GA) pressed Legere on whether the company was pining for favorability from the Trump administration in order to receive approval for

Chrome 73 has officially rolled out to all users today, bringing with it several new improvements, including the long-awaited dark mode for both Windows and macOS.Dark mode was first announced for Chrome last month, but today’s release has made it official. It works pretty much as you’d expect: if dark mode is enabled on your computer (see here for macOS and here for Windows 10), Chrome will automatically theme itself appropriately to match, in what essentially looks like the browse

Chrome 73 has officially rolled out to all users today, bringing with it several new improvements, including the long-awaited dark mode for macOS. (“Windows support is on the way,” the release notes read.)
Dark mode was first announced for Chrome last month, but today’s release has made it official. It works pretty much as you’d expect: if dark mode is enabled on your computer (see here for macOS and here for Windows 10), Chrome will automatically theme itself appropriat

The early days of the iOS App Store was a Wild West of content, but one of the biggest and best games around back then was Rolando, a puzzle platformer that was specifically built around the iPhone’s (still novel at the time) touchscreen and accelerometer technology.The original game hasn’t been available for years, having been lost to the ravages of time (and iOS updates), but developer HandCircus has announced today that it’ll be bringing Rolando back with a new, remastered

In October, The Verge reported on new conversational features Twitter was testing in an effort to promote friendlier interactions on the often hostile site. Some of those features are now becoming more widely available — but only within twttr, a new public beta app that the company is using to test new features with the wider public. The Verge got access to twttr on Tuesday, and spent the past few hours reading and posting replies using the app’s new threading features.The basic ide

How would we break up the world’s most powerful companies? Live from SXSW, The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Casey Newton, and Ashley Carman discuss just how one might split up tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.You can listen to their discussion in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from this interview about the complications of breaking up a giant company like Google.
Nilay Patel: How would you break up Google?
Dieter B

To complement Microsoft’s translucent Phantom Black controller for the Xbox One and PC, the company is releasing a Phantom White color option that’s a good fit aesthetically for Xbox One S owners or those who picked up the Robot White edition of the Xbox One X. It will go on sale starting on April 2nd for $69.99, and preorders for the controller are open now.
admire its design to pass the time between loading screens
It follows a similar design pattern to the Phantom Black edition;

Microsoft sued Foxconn’s parent company on Friday for failing to honor a patent-licensing agreement from 2013. Foxconn, best known as one of Apple’s suppliers, was supposed to make royalty payments to Microsoft, but Microsoft alleges it didn’t pay on time and still owes the money, plus interest.
The suit targets FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn parent Hon Hai, which makes phones for Xiaomi, Huawei, and other companies. It alleges that Hon Hai has “continually failed&r

Microsoft is bringing its classic Halo game collection to PC, and adding Halo: Reach to the entire Halo: The Master Chief Collection. The games will be available on both the Microsoft Store and Valve’s Steam store, allowing PC gamers to grab them from their preferred store of choice. The Master Chief Collection includes Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST (Campaign), Halo 4, and now Halo: Reach.
Halo fans have been calling on Microsoft to bring the series to PC, and the com

Microsoft is bringing its popular Minecraft title to Xbox Game Pass next month. The software maker is releasing Minecraft as part of the monthly Xbox Game Pass subscription on April 4th, adding to the more than 100 games that Xbox players can access. While many Xbox players probably already own a copy of Minecraft, its addition to the Xbox Game Pass subscription will still help Microsoft on its mission to convince Xbox owners to subscribe.
Microsoft has been aggressively pushing its Xbox Game P

Matthew Douglass Contributor Matthew Douglass is a board member of the nonpartisan Business for America and previously co-founded digital health company Practice Fusion in 2007.More posts by this contributorA Digital Healthcare Argument For Net Neutrality
In America, democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. Watching our democracy function (or, more accurately, malfunction) over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that there is a slow-moving crisis developing for our democracy &md

Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s ongoing battle to maintain the biggest channel on YouTube has been turned into a video game.The game, Zero Deaths, places Kjellberg in a post-apocalyptic setting where he must defend his fiancée Marzia from an army of sub bots (fake YouTube subscribers) who are trying to destroy the world. It’s an obvious allusion to Kjellberg’s ongoing battle with T-Series, a popular Bollywood channel that has been accused of using sub bots to

Uber thought it would have 75,000 autonomous vehicles on the roads this year and be operating driverless taxi services in 13 cities by 2022, according to court documents unsealed last week. To reach those ambitious goals, the ridesharing company, which hopes to go public later this year, was spending $20 million a month on developing self-driving technologies. 
The figures, dating back to 2016, paint a picture of a company desperate to meet over-ambitious autonomy targets and one that is wi

Yesterday, Twitter rolled out its much-anticipated prototype application to the first group of testers. We’ve now gotten our hands on the app and can see how the current version differs from the build Twitter introduced to the world back in January. While the original version and today’s prototype share many of the same features, there have been some small tweaks as to how conversation threads are displayed, and the color-coded reply labeling system is now much more subtle.
“Tw

The origin story of BlackBird, a startup that links travelers to planes and commercial pilots through an app, didn’t begin with air travel. It was prompted by car sickness.
BlackBirdCEO and founder Rudd Davis, who was getting his pilot’s license at the time, asked his flight instructor if he would fly his family to Tahoe because his son gets terribly sick every time they traveled by car. What Rudd discovered was an incredible experience that was far more affordable than he realized.&

In the wake of the second fatal crash in six months involving Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes, the European Aviation and Safety Administration is grounding the planes as Boeing said it was taking additional steps to address an issue that may have contributed to the crash.
On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 plane operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 on board the flight. Last October, a Lion Air flight departing from Jakarta crashed in similar circumstances, kil

Your startup will not succeed unless you, the founder, build an exceptional team. Great teams are built on top of great culture. Yet any venture-backed startup founder will tell you, myself included, that developing a positive corporate culture is more art than science, requiring constant and creative recalibration as your company grows. What then does this have to do with employment law?
First, building an exceptional team means hiring great people; whether that involves W-9s for consultants, I

Cloud-hosting company Scaleway refreshed its lineup of high-performance instances today. These instances are now all equipped with AMD EPYC CPUs, DDR4 RAM and NVMe SSD storage. The more you pay, the more computing power, RAM, storage and bandwidth you get.
High-performance plans start at €0.078 per hour or €39 per month ($44.20), whichever is lower at the end of the month. For this price you get 4 cores, 16GB of RAM, 150GB of storage and 400Mbps of bandwidth.
If you double the price, y

At a small media event in New York City, Onewheel announced the Pint, a new single-wheeled electric rideable geared toward novice riders, urban commuters, and value-conscious buyers. It features a smaller, more commuter-friendly design anchored around three new features: the Maghandle (a fold-out magnetic carry handle), the Lightbar that serves as an LED notification and battery strip on the footrest, and a new optional dismount system for inexperienced riders, called Simplestop.The Pint has a

Voice recognition is a standard part of the smartphone package these days, and a corresponding part is the delay while you wait for Siri, Alexa or Googleto return your query, either correctly interpreted or horribly mangled. Google’s latest speech recognition works entirely offline, eliminating that delay altogether — though of course mangling is still an option.
The delay occurs because your voice, or some data derived from it anyway, has to travel from your phone to the servers of

If you want smooth gameplay without screen tearing and you want to experience the high frame rates that your Nvidia graphics card is capable of, Nvidia’s G-Sync adaptive sync tech, which unleashes your card’s best performance, is a feature that you’ll want in your next monitor.To get this feature, you can spend a lot on a monitor with G-Sync built in, like the high-end $1,999 Acer Predator X27, or you can spend less on a FreeSync monitor that has G-Sync compatibility by way of

Ikea furniture is ubiquitous because it’s affordable, but it’s not always accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities. For example, some wardrobes are handleless, and it can be difficult to turn on a lamp with its tiny switches. To remedy this, Ikea Israel teamed up with nonprofits Milbat and Access Israel to develop ThisAbles, a line of 3D-printed add-ons for Ikea furniture.There are 13 designs available. They slip over Ikea furniture and accessories to turn a small

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange today, per SEC documents and confirmation from CEO Sacha Poignonnec to TechCrunch.
The valuation, share price and timeline for public stock sales will be determined over the coming weeks for the Nigeria-headquartered company.
With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African tech startup to list on a major global exchange.
Poignonnec would not pinpoint a date for the actual IPO, but noted the min

Pen15’s depiction of the early 2000s is frighteningly, uncomfortably accurate, and even that isn’t saying enough. The breakout Hulu comedy, produced by Lonely Island members Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, is crafted to a level that viewers describe as giving them “PTSD flashbacks” to middle school. Creators Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine play their 13-year-old selves among a cast of actual middle-schoolers, but they blend in seamlessly. They’re beli

The White House wants $72.4 million to fund the establishment of Space Force headquarters, according to a statement released by the Department of Defense today.
That’s far less than previous estimates for standing up the Space Force. Last September, a leaked memo signed by Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson estimated that standing up the Space Force would cost $3.3 billion for fiscal year 2020, and nearly $13 billion over the next five years.
The idea behind the Space Force is to g

Despite all of the talk about whether artificial intelligence algorithms will replace doctors, Eric Topol isn’t worried. Topol is a cardiologist at the Scripps Research Institute, a geneticist, and the author of several books about the future of health care.His newest book is called Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again (out now from Basic Books). Topol argues that humans will always crave the bond of being cared for by other humans and that AI can hel

Eero is now officially a part of Amazon, and it’s highlighting the moment by discounting several of its mesh Wi-Fi bundles today (on Amazon, of course). You can save $100 on all three tiers of its home Wi-Fi systems, starting at $199 for the most affordable bundle that includes one Eero router and one Eero Beacon, $299 for the system that consists of one Eero router and two Eero Beacons, or $399 for the most capable offering that includes three Eero routers.
Spotify is adding a free Hulu