Technology news

United Airlines has begun physically covering built-in webcams on in-flight entertainment devices following privacy concerns, according to a report from BuzzFeed. The screens, enterprise-grade tablets provided to United by the aviation equipment division of Panasonic, are said to come with built-in webcams by default, with Panasonic executives claiming the cameras could one day provide improved entertainment features like seat-to-seat video calling and even gaming. United claims it did not spec

Elon Musk has agreed to more specific oversight on his tweets about Tesla. After weeks of negotiation, Musk and the Securities and Exchange Commission decided Friday that Musk must have a company lawyer pre-approve tweets about Tesla’s financial health, sales, or delivery numbers — estimated or otherwise — as well as other specific subjects, according to a new court filing.The two sides filed late Friday to amend the settlement agreement reached last year over the “fundi

While the world’s focused on the latest Avenger’s flick, an international team of scientists have potentially unlocked the super powers of another familiar Marvel character: Magneto. Researchers from the Argonne National Laboratory, Oakland University in Michigan, and Fudan University in China have discovered a quantum-level exploit that has the potential to give engineers greater control over the magnetic properties of certain metals. The experimental observations were discovered t

If you grew up in the 1990s, you’re probably familiar with Bill Nye. He was the host of the popular PBS series Bill Nye the Science Guy, a TV program that ran for a hundred episodes and introduced kids to a range of science concepts. More recently, he hosted Bill Nye Saves the World, a Netflix series designed to educate the wider public about the importance of science. Now, Nye has a new project: a science-themed podcast called Science Rules, which will launch on May 16th.Unlike his TV pr

Earlier today, agents from the FBI searched the offices of uBiome,the medical testing company that sells analyses of an individual’s microbiome — the bacteria that live in the gut, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The FBI is reportedly investigating uBiome’s billing practices, the WSJ reported.
“I can confirm that special agents from the FBI San Francisco Division are present at 360 Langton Street in San Francisco conducting court-authorized law enforceme

In just the three days since it launched, the podcast startup Luminary has lost access to shows from multiple major networks, which have pulled their content over its business practices, and lost the faith of the industry it wanted to please. Luminary users and paying subscribers are now left without access to major podcasts, including The Daily, The Joe Rogan Experience, and Blackout.
Shows from Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast — all Spotify entities — weren’t on the platfor

Nick Saenz & John Frost ContributorNick Saenz and John Frost are attorneys at at Lewis & Llewellyn LLP, a boutique litigation firm in San Francisco specializing in complex corporate litigation.
Several recent court decisions have changed the landscape of California’s competition law, concluding that employee non-solicitation provisions are per se invalid. These cases have major implications both for mature companies relying on such provisions to preserve their talent pool, and for

One of Twitter‘s latest memes has people spilling about their previous work experience, YouTubers included. Now we’re able to see what they did before they started making videos for entertainment — and several of them have apparently started in boring jobs. The “5 Jobs I’ve had” meme appears to have started with one user who tagged a few friends, and proceeded to spread. Soon everyone was listing their work history, (including your author), so much so th

Google is banning a popular Chinese developer from its Google Play Store and systematically removing dozens of its apps after BuzzFeed and security researchers discovered that the developer was committing ad fraud and abusing user permissions. The Chinese developer DO Global, which is partly owned by Baidu, was found to be producing fake ad clicks to gain revenue, among other fraudulent practices.“We take our responsibility to protect users and advertisers seriously, and invest in tools a

If Magic Leapfails, the skeptics will at least have to admire the AR startup’s keen ability to raise vast amounts of capital.
The company announced today that it has locked down another $280 million in a deal with Japan’s largest mobile operator, Docomo. The deal brings the company’s ever-swelling total cash raised to $2.6 billion. The deal follows an investment from AT&T last year also focused on the company’s cloud ambitions.
“DOCOMO aims to co-create advanced

Uber’sannouncement of its IPO pricing earlier today came with a $500 million belated Easter egg. The payments giant PayPal is making a half-billion-dollar investment in the company, paying $47 per share, which gives the company a valuation of $78.8 billion (in the middle of the range of Uber’s IPO pricing of $44-$50 per share).
Neither Uber nor PayPalgave much detail about the $500 investment. Uber’s S-1 and a short statement on LinkedIn from PayPal’s CEO Dan Schulma

Internet provider Cox is offering a $15 / month service that it dubs Cox Elite Gamer, an internet bill add-on that the company claims will optimize the connection between players and video game servers for hugely popular titles like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Overwatch. For customers who sign up for the service, Cox says it will seek out the most efficient path to a game’s server. Theoretically, this could result in reduced ping and a lower latency, which is a huge factor in any shooter

Low-income Americans can file their taxes for free, but odds are they ended up paying anyway.
ProPublica found that tax-filing giant Intuit is deliberately concealing search results for its free filing service, instead pointing all consumers toward its paid products. While users visiting TurboTax’s homepage will be greeted with what looks like free tax software, the software’s parent company usually finds a way to charge anyone using the product. The manipulative design choice echoes

Earlier this month, The Verge published an investigation checking in on the many “innovation centers” Foxconn had announced it would open in Wisconsin. Foxconn had promoted the buildings as part of its effort to turn the state into a technology hub employing 13,000 people, with the centerpiece being a heavily subsidized LCD factory on Lake Michigan. But as of early April, the buildings stood empty. Some hadn’t even been bought, and no one in Wisconsin seemed to know what was g

While MoviePass continues to experiment with ways to prevent going out of business, competing movie theater subscription service Sinemia is calling it quits ahead of what is shaping up to be one of the biggest theatrical events of all time.Just as Avengers: Endgame has started breaking box office records on its first day, Sinemia says it is ceasing operations in the US due to mounting pressure from competing subscriptions from theater chains and legal action brought against the company for its

Microsoft is moving its Edge browser to the Chromium engine, meaning improved web compatibility for the default browser on Windows 10. This should mean that all of Google’s services work well with the new version of Edge, but beta testers found out earlier this week that Google Meet, Google’s enterprise messaging service, had suddenly stopped working. Google Meet users were greeted with a prompt to download Chrome or Firefox, generating fears that Google’s services wouldn&rsqu

August announced today that it is halting shipments of its new View doorbell camera a mere 17 days after it first went up for sale. The View is August’s first battery-operated doorbell camera, and it was selling for $229.99.
In a statement announcing the stoppage of shipments, August CEO Jason Johnson cites “performance challenges in specific user environments” as the reason. In my review of the View, published on April 9th, I noted that I experienced numerous connectivity and

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. Facebook hit with three privacy investigations in a single day
First came a probe by the Irish data protection authority looking into the breach of “hundreds of millions” of Facebookand Instagram user passwords that were stored in plaintext on its servers. Then, Canadian authoritie

E3’sjust over a month away, and per usual, the news in the lead up has offered more insight into what we won’t be hearing about at the big gaming show. Late last year, Sony announced that it would be skipping its big annual press conference at the event. The move marks a key absence for the gaming giant for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, as the company will instead be “exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019.”
The sentiment should

Ford Motor Company admitted in a financial filing on Friday that it’s under investigation by the US Department of Justice over its internal emissions testing practices. The investigation is still in the “preliminary stages,” according to the automaker.
Notably, Ford says the investigation has nothing to do with the use of “defeat devices,” or software meant to deceive regulators, which was the issue at the center of Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal.Ford announ

Media center app Plextoday is rolling out new features to expand upon its partnership with TIDAL,the streaming music service it began working with last November. Before, Plex subscribers could fill in the missing albums from artists in their library by way of TIDAL, but this option was only available within playlists. Now it’s available in users’ own music collection, too. In addition, a new feature called Artist TV allows you to play the artist’s video catalog along with other

Tax day might have already come and gone, but that doesn’t mean ProPublica is done highlighting the questionable tactics of TurboTax’s parent company, Intuit. According to a new report, Intuit purposefully stopped Google from surfacing its free tax filing service in search results in an effort to steer all consumers — no matter their income — toward the company’s paid services. Intuit added code to the robots.txt file on its website that instructed Google to leave

If free nations demand companies store data locally, it legitimizes that practice for authoritarian nations, which can then steal that data for their own nefarious purposes, according to FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg. He laid out the threat in a new 93-minute video of a discussion with Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari released today as part of Zuckerberg’s 2019 personal challenge of holding public talks on the future of tech.
Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook will refuse to comply with law

After a week of Galaxy Fold troubles, The Vergecast’s Dieter Bohn, Ashley Carman, and Paul Miller unfold the Samsung saga with Dieter’s official review of the phone and Samsung’s reaction to its potential misgivings.Of course, we’ve got drama in another part of the tech word, too. The new podcast app Luminary launched this week, and shows are pulling out of the app. Ashley Carman explains the controversy and how it’s affecting podcast creators.This wouldn’t b

The Astell & Kern Kann is, in my book, the best portable music player you can buy. It’s got a huge 6,200mAh battery, a sweetly melodic AKM AK4490 DAC, a beefy amplifier that can feed the most demanding of headphones, and USB-C charging. It also costs a mighty $999. Now imagine A&K took each one of those specs and cranked it up to 11. That’s how you arrive at the newly unveiled $1,499 Astell & Kern Kann Cube, the spectacularly high-specced second generation of the Kann li

Aaron Levie Contributor Aaron Levie is the Chief Executive Officer of Box.More posts by this contributorNow the cloud wars (really) begin The Industrialist’s Dilemma
Amidst the newly minted scooter unicorns, ebbs and flows of bitcoin investments and wagers on the price of Uber’s IPO, another trend has shaken up the tech industry: the explosion of enterprise software successes.
Bessemer notes that today there are 55 private companies valued at $1 billion or more compared to zero a de

Whenever a security startup lands on my desk, I have one question: Who’s the chief security officer (CSO) and when can I get time with them?
Having a chief security officer is as relevant today as a chief marketing officer (CMO) or chief revenue boss. Just as you need to make sure your offering looks good and the money keeps rolling in, you need to show what your security posture looks like.
Even for non-security startups, having someone at the helm is just as important — not least g

Amazon is planning to launch a new high-fidelity music streaming service with better-than-CD-quality audio, reports Music Business Worldwide. The new service is expected to cost around $15 a month, and it would sit alongside Amazon’s existing music services. These include Prime Music and Music Unlimited, which currently offer streams at a maximum of 256 Kbps, well below the 1,411 Kbps bitrate of CDs.
“It’s a better bitrate, better than CD quality,” said one of MBW’

Go to Google (don’t worry, I’ll wait). Type in “Thanos.” Click the little cartoon Infinity Gauntlet on the right side. Now sit back in horror as Evil Space Grimace snaps half of your search results into dust in the wind.Call it an Easter egg or Snap Engine Optimization. It’s a fun little promotion for the last movie that needs any promoting at this point, having just sailed past $60 million for the biggest-ever Thursday preview.
This is not about the #AvengersE

Facebook’sVP of global affairs and communications, Nick Clegg, today said the social network — likely in response to pressure from European officials — is “open” to changing its rules on election advertising for European Union elections that will take place on May 23, by allowing cross-border campaigning rather than requiring those running ads in a specific market to be registered as businesses in those markets. But Clegg added that it will require getting approval

Sam Altman’slittle brother Jack is an entrepreneur, too.
Jack Altman,whose resume includes a stint as vice president of business development at Teespring,has raised $15 million in Series B funding for his startup, Lattice, a modern approach to corporate goal setting. Shasta Ventures led the round, with participation from Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the latter being the organization his brother led as president until very recently.
Lattice, used by high-growth companie

Today’s best deals don’t follow any particular theme. There’s an eclectic mix of discounts on phone accessories, smart displays, 4K TVs with Fire TV hardware built-in, and more.The Google Home Hub smart display is $88 on Massdrop, which is close to the best price that we’ve seen for this product. The Home Hub debuted at $149 before the 2018 winter holidays, and it sold for $99 during Black Friday. You don’t need to enter a promo code at checkout to get this deal. T