Technology news

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a right-wing militia group, the United Constitutional Patriots, operating in New Mexico was detaining migrants at gunpoint before turning them over to US officials. Now, Paypal and GoFundMe have banned the group from their services, according to Buzzfeed News.The number of paramilitary groups has grown in the US over the last couple of years, and in that time, their members have been making trips to the US southern border, saying that they&rsq

Editor’s Note: No one knows how to hire
Hiring is the lifeblood of the world. Few people do truly singular work; instead, nearly every facet of our civilization is built by groups of humans (and increasingly machines) working in tandem.
Image by PeopleImages via Getty Images
That presents quite the puzzle though: if teamwork is so critical to the functioning of, well, everything, why are we so god awfully bad at building teams?
Minus a couple of high functioning teams of course, the eviden

Earlier this year, the Central Intelligence Agency informed its counterparts in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK that Chinese technology company Huawei has received funding from the Central National Security Commission of the Communist Party of China, the People’s Liberation Army, and a “third branch of the Chinese state intelligence network,” according to The Times.The paper cites an anonymous source in the UK that says that details were shared with “only the

It was hard to know what to expect from “Guava Island.”
Last year, Donald Glover and Rihanna filmed the mysterious project with director Hiro Murai (who’s also directed multiple episodes of “Atlanta” and the music video for “This is America”, then they said almost nothing about it until debuting the film at Coachella and releasing it on Amazon.
“Guava Island” turns out to be a 54-minute, fable-like story of a musician named Deni (Glover) and

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributorA record $2.5B went to US insurance startup deals last year, and big insurers are in all the way Space tech rockets higher
In a foodie’s ideal world, we’d all eat healthy, minimally processed cuisine sourced from artisanal farmers, bakers and chefs.
In the real world, however, most of us derive the lion’s share of calories from edibles supplied by a handful of giant food conglomerates. As such, the ingredients and proces

Africa has made its global IPO debut. Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia—a $1 billion-valued company—began trading live on the NYSE last week.
The stock offering made Jumia the first upstart operating in Africa to list on a major global exchange.
This raises expectations for unicorns and IPOs to create the continent’s first wave of startup moguls. But unlike other markets, big public listings and nine-figure valuations could remain rare in Africa.
The rise of venture arms and

It’s difficult to remember a time when online media wasn’t arranged largely around memetic cultural events. On any given April 20th in recent years, for instance, you can find all sorts of weed-themed stories pegged around the unofficial holiday for marijuana. That’s not so in 1999: a search for “420” brings up precious few results.
Instead, the science and technology news of late April included one big company shake-up, some odd developments in space, and an extre

Free apps marketed to people with depression or who want to quit smoking are hemorrhaging user data to third parties like Facebook and Google — but often don’t admit it in their privacy policies, a new study reports. This study is the latest to highlight the potential risks of entrusting sensitive health information to our phones.Though most of the easily-found depression or smoking cessation apps in the Android and iOS stores share data, only a fraction of them actually disclose th

If you’re looking for a deal this weekend, we have more than a few suggestions that you may want to check out. First off, time is running out for Massdrop’s $50 off deal on the Sony 1000X M3 wireless headphones. Usually $349.99, this set of wireless, noise-canceling headphones are $299.99 until the end of the weekend.For those who have been out of the headphone game a while, Sony’s 1000X M3 are among the best over-ear models when it comes to comfort, impressive sound quality,

Wasting time every night debating with yourself or your partner about what to watch on Netflix is a drag. It burns people’s time and good will, robs great creators of attention, and leaves Netflixvulnerable to competitors who can solve discovery. A ReelGood study estimated that the average user spends 18 minutes per day deciding.
To date, Netflix’s solution has been its state-of-the-art artificial intelligence that offers personalized recommendations. But that algorithm is ignorant o

Over the course of eight books, The Expanse has felt a bit like one of those videos that zooms out from Earth into the larger universe. Part of the appeal of Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War was that they were a space opera set in our local neighborhood, dealing with issues that are relevant to the world we now live in: war, racism, justice, all accompanied by power armored-marines, spaceship battles, and a menacing alien threat.
But as the series progressed, authors Daniel Abraham and T

When Zoom hit the public markets Thursday, its IPO pop, a whopping 81 percent, floored everyone, including its own chief executive officer, Eric Yuan.
Yuan became a billionaire this week when his video conferencing business went public. He told Bloomberg that he actually wished his stock hadn’t soared quite so high. I’m guessing his modesty and laser focus attracted Wall Street to his stock; well, that, and the fact that his business is actually profitable. He is, this week proved, n

Apologies for skipping day three. This kept me extremely busy yesterday. Though the Galaxy Fold remained a constant companion.
Before you ask (or after you ask on Twitter without having read beyond the headline), no it’s hasn’t broken yet. It’s actually been fairly robust, all things considered. But here’s the official line from Samsung on that,
A limited number of early Galaxy Fold samples were provided to media for review. We have received a few reports regarding the ma

Last year at our TC Sessions: Robotics event, Boston Dynamicsannounced its intention to commercialize SpotMini. It was a big step for the secretive company. After a quarter of century building some of the world’s most sophisticated robots, it was finally taking a step into the commercial realm, making the quadrupedal robot available to anyone with the need and financial resources for the device.
CEO Marc Raibert made a return appearance at our event this week to discuss the progress Boston

We’ve been following Russia’s YotaPhone since 2012, but it seems like the saga of the power-sipping E Ink-backed dual-screen handset has come to an end. Yota Devices is bankrupt, reports Cnews.ru and Liliputing, pointing to a liquidation notice published in the Cayman Islands Gazette (PDF).Poor sales caught up to the company
According to Russian media reports, it was a lawsuit that eventually wound up bankrupting the company. Yota’s manufacturer for the first two YotaPhones, H

Lil Dicky, the white comedy rapper with questionable taste but an impressive rolodex, has come up with a millennial’s Earth Day answer to the 80s celebrity-studded, charity hit “We are the World“.
Dicky isn’t tackling African famine, instead he’s come up with an oddly anally-fixated paean to the Earth’s climate and the disaster the world faces if there isn’t some collective action taken to reverse our current course of carbon emissions.
To hammer this m

Roughly a year ago, entrepreneurs Caterina Fake and Jyri Engeström decided to form a traditional venture outfit called Yes VC. Fast forward, and the duo has nearly closed on $50 million for their debut fund, including backing from Supercell founder Ilkka Paananen, former Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson and the family office of Nokia Chairman Risto Siilasmaa.
That investors would want to invest alongside them isn’t surprising. Fake famously co-founded the photo-sharing site Flickr, which sold

The field of robotics is going through a renaissance thanks to advances in machine learning and sensor technology. Each generation of robot is engineered with greater mechanical complexity and smarter operating software than the last. But what if, instead of painstakingly designing and engineering a robot, you could just tear open a packet of primordial soup, toss it in the microwave on high for two minutes, and then grow your own ‘lifelike’ robot? If you’re a Cornell research

Teslais cutting its board down by more than one-third, to seven directors, by 2020, a move that includes the loss of some of CEO Elon Musk’searly advisers and allies, according to regulator filings posted Friday.
The filing comes days before a busy week for Tesla that will include an April 22 event meant to highlight its progress with autonomous vehicle technology, its April 24 quarterly earnings call and a hearing with a judge to determine whether Musk and the SEC were able to reach a res

Fastly, the content delivery network that’s raised $219 million in financing from investors (according to Crunchbase), is ready for its close up in the public markets.
The eight-year-old company is one of several businesses that improve the download time and delivery of different websites to internet browsers and it has just filed for an IPO.
Media companies like The New York Times use Fastlyto cache their homepages, media and articles on Fastly’s servers so that when somebody wants

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is a relaxed, Friday, Equity Shot. That means Kate and Alex were on deck to chew through the latest from the IPO front. We’ll keep doing extra episodes as long as we have to, though we’re slightly sorry if we’re becoming a bit much.
That’s a joke — we’re not sorry at all.
So, three things this week. First, Fastlyfil