Technology news

Eric Schmidt will depart Alphabet’s board this June, after holding a seat for 18 years. His departure comes just over a year after Schmidt stepped down from his role as Alphabet’s executive chairman — it also comes as Google struggles with internal turmoil over its involvement with US military contracts, potential business in China, and reported cover-ups of sexual misconduct.
Schmidt has been a key presence at Google during his time with the company. He initially took a board

United States officials have largely unchecked power to search electronic devices at the border, and can share the resulting data widely, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.The organization, which is suing both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agencies had released new information on how they conduct border searches. Civil liberties advocates have argued that officials are exercising unconstitutional powers to search devices, and the ACL

Workplace communication platform Slack says it will be deactivating a public channel dedicated to giving away $1,000 per day to anyone that can guess that day’s selected vocabulary word, citing company policies. The game, called The Word of the Day Is, was started by Gabriel Whaley last week as an experiment. It used a Slack bot to monitor entries, which were any one-word messages entered into the public channel. Winners were then sent the money via Venmo.
Whaley, the founder and CEO of a

The podcast wars are coming. After Luminary’s troubled launch, The Verge’s Nilay Patel and Ashley Carman sit down with podcast expert Nick Quah of Hot Pod to discuss if Luminary or anyone could be “the Netflix of podcasts” and where the industry is headed.
You can listen to the discussion in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from the interview.Nilay Patel: I think the podcast war is coming. I think the question of “why isn&r

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki published a blog post today addressing some of creators’ biggest concerns and frustrations, including copyright claims removing ads from their videos, the site’s trending section not showing some of the most popular uploads, and comments being removed for family vloggers.
It’s clear from Wojcicki’s blog that addressing the community’s most consistent complaints was a top priority — and chief among those is copyright claims. Copyrigh

Today’s big story for Applerevenue was once again focused on services. That’s likely to be the tale for the foreseeable future, as the company continues to pump billions into products offerings like Apple TV+.
As predicted, hardware was more of a mixed bag for the company. The iPad, a bright spot in an otherwise stagnant tablet market also marked a key highlight the quarter, as revenue jumped 22 percent year over year. Notably, the company now offers its largest range of slates, with

Applereleased earnings for its fiscal second quarter today, reporting revenue of $58 billion, a decline of 5 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.46, down 10 percent. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
The market apparently approves. Apple’s shares have jumped $10 apiece since the earnings were released, putting the company in spitting distance of the $1 trillion market cap it has been flirting with sinc

Apple just reported its second quarter financial results, posting quarterly revenue of $58 billion (down 5 percent from the same quarter a year ago) earnings per share of $2.46. The company said its crucially important services division hit an all-time high of $11.5 billion in revenue. iPhone revenue came in at $31.05 billion and was again down year over year, as were Mac sales. But the iPad, wearables/home/accessories, and services units of Apple’s business all saw gains.“We delive

Google’sparent company Alphabet announced that two board members, Eric Schmidt and Diane Green, will not be seeking re-election when their terms expire on June 19.
Schmidt has been on the company’s board since 2001, and also served as Google’s CEO for a decade, until April 2011. He then became the company’s executive chairman, before transitioning into the vague-sounding role of “technical advisor” at the end of 2017. (He said last year that he’s focused

FireEye,one of the largest and most prominent security companies on the market, reported its fiscal first quarter earnings after the bell Tuesday.
The cybersecurity giant reported first quarter loss of $78.3 million, or 38 cents a share, on revenues of $210 million (statement). FireEye reported a loss of 3 cents per share on an non-GAAP basis, in line with Wall Street expectations
FireEye’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the company “met or exceeded our guidance ranges for all key

Jude Gomila, who previously sold his mobile advertising company Heyzap to RNTS Media, is taking on a new challenge — building a “knowledge base” that can fill in Wikipedia’s blind spots, particularly when it comes to emerging technologies and startups.
While Gomila is officially launching Golden today, it’s already full of content about things like the latest batch of Y Combinator startups and morphogenetic engineering. And it’s already raised $5 million from

The National Academy of Sciences took a major step today to oust sexual harassers when members at its annual meeting voted to approve a new amendment that would allow the organization to kick out people who badly violate its new code of conduct. This vote isn’t the final verdict, however: the entire membership of the NAS still needs to weigh in — a process that’s expected to be wrapped up by mid-June.The National Academy of Sciences, or NAS, was founded in 1863, and is one of

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones, season 8, episode 3, “The Long Night.”
As Game of Thrones moves into the second half of its final season, we’re in the endgame — not just for the remaining contenders for the Iron Throne, but also for the behind-the-scenes string-pullers with their own grandiose plans for the fate of Westeros. Littlefinger’s cunning, Varys’ spy networks, Tyrion’s battle strategies, and Melisandre’s prophecies and fire magic have

Google employees say they will hold a sit-in tomorrow to protest alleged retaliation against workers.In a tweet, the organizers of last year’s walkout of Google employees said the sit-in was scheduled for 11AM.From being told to go on sick leave when you're not sick, to having your reports taken away, we're sick of retaliation.Six months ago, we walked out. This time, we're sitting in. 11am tomorrow. #NotOkGoogle #GoogleWalkout pic.twitter.com/GCq0x1O8cZ— Google Walkout For Real Cha

Oculusis getting serious about monetizing VR for enterprise.
The company has previously sold specific business versions of the headsets, but now they’re adding a pricey annual device-management subscription.
Oculus Go for business starts at $599 (64 GB) and the enterprise Oculus Quest starts at $999 (128 GB). These fees include the first year of enterprise device management and support, which goes for $180 per year per device.
Here’s what that fee gets you:
This includes a dedicated

Facebook today released a new SDK that allows mobile app developers to integrate WhatsApp verification into Account Kit for iOS and Android. This will allow developers to build apps where users can opt to receive their verification codes through the WhatsApp app installed on their phone instead of through SMS.
Today, many apps give users the ability to sign up using only a phone number — a now popular alternative to Facebook Login, thanks to the social network’s numerous privacy scan

Googleemployees are staging a sit-in tomorrow to protest the alleged retaliation toward employees at the hands of managers. The plan is to stage the sit-in tomorrow at 11 a.m.
“From being told to go on sick leave when you’re not sick, to having your reports taken away, we’re sick of retaliation,” Google employees tweeted via @GoogleWalkout. “Six months ago, we walked out. This time, we’re sitting in.”
Google declined to comment on the sit-in, but pointed

Facebook announced at its annual F8 developer conference today that its Portal and Portal Plus video calling devices will soon be available in Canada and Europe, starting this fall. The device will also support WhatsApp calls, and all calls will have end-to-end encryption.
The $199 Portal and the larger $349 Portal Plus launched last year at a time when consumer trust in Facebook was waning after a string of privacy scandals, and the product had to be delayed for several months in the wake of t

Hackers gained access to technology giant Citrix’s networks six months before they were discovered, the company has confirmed.
In a letter to California’s attorney general, the virtualization and security software maker said the hackers had “intermittent access” to its internal network from October 13, 2018 until March 8, 2019, two days after the FBI alerted the company to the breach.
Citrix said the hackers “removed files from our systems, which may have included f

Rae Witte ContributorShare on Twitter Rae Witte is a New York-based freelance journalist covering music, style, sneakers, art and dating, and how they intersect with tech. You can find her writing on i-D, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire and Forbes, among others.New York-based DJ and creative consultant Amrit and I are sitting at a women’s empowerment dinner waiting for her manager, Ramya Velury. Another friend of ours asks where Ramya is. “She said she was getting an Uber 15 minute

After announcing plans to reshape Facebook around privacy last month, Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual F8 conference to outline more of what that might look like. Zuckerberg opened the conference stating, “The future is private ... So today, we’re going to start talking about what this could look like as a product.” The initiative is still in very early stages, though, and so many of the announcements hint at that direction without actually taking the large step

The monetization hose is on full blast at Instagramnow, and today at F8, Facebook unveiled one of the latest developments on that front. The company said that creators will now be able to tag items to sell them directly to people viewing their posts and Stories.
For now, this will work only on items that are tagged from businesses that are part of the new checkout beta program Instagram is running in the U.S.
It’s also part of a bigger transactional swing that we’re seeing at Instagr

The intelligence community’s annual transparency report revealed a spike in the number of warrantless searches of Americans’ data in 2018.
The data, published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), revealed a 28% rise in the number of targeted search terms used to query massive databases of collected Americans’ communications.
Some 9,637 warrantless search queries of the contents of Americans’ calls, text messages, emails and other communic

Valve is throwing a little bit of a “screw you” to Oculus this morning, announcing the specs of their high-end VR headset the Valve Index, just before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some minor updates to the Rift.
The Valve Index is a high-end headset with few compromises. It’s $999 for the whole system, but you can buy each of the components individually, as well.
The headset’s 1440×1600 per eye display is the same as the Vive Pro, but it features some insa

At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today announced that it is launching its Portal video chat hardware internationally by bringing it to Canada and a select number of European countries, too. This rollout will begin in June in Canada, with Europe following this fall. In the U.S., Portal sells for $199 and $349, depending on the screen size. The company did not announce international pricing.
Portal originally only launched in the U.S. As the company’s co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerbe

Aperture was a great application for editing photos back in the day, but it hasn’t been supported by Applefor years. You can, however, still run it on the latest Macs, should you need to. But that won’t be the case for long, the company has announced.
In a support page pointed out by MacRumors, Apple explains that “for technical reasons, Aperture will not run in future versions of macOS after macOS Mojave.”
What exactly those technical reasons are only Apple knows, but it

Facebook and Oculus have finally revealed a release date for their Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S headsets: May 21st. Both headsets will ship in 22 countries next month, they’ll cost $399, and you can preorder them today.
The Oculus Quest is a much-anticipated standalone VR headset that Oculus announced last year. It works without external tracking cameras or a separate computer, using a Snapdragon mobile chipset. The Oculus Rift S is a refresh of the 2016 Oculus Rift; it’s not a &l

Facebook’ssocial graph is aging, full of long-lost acquaintances and hometown friends you don’t care much about seeing in the News Feed any more. But Facebook is now testing a pivot away from its core identity of connecting you with existing friends so it can revitalize the social graph and keep people coming back. Facebook’s “Meet New Friends” lets you browse people from shared communities such as your school, workplace or city who’ve also opted in to the fea