Technology news

Poland has officially challenged the European Union’s recently-approved controversial copyright directive, according to Reuters, saying that the legislation would bring unwanted censorship. The country filed its complaint yesterday with the the Court of Justice of the European Union.Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Konrad Szymanski said that the “system may result in adopting regulations that are analogous to preventive censorship, which is forbidden not only in the Polish con

This week, the Equity duo of Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm convened to get some quick hits in about Slack’s WORK, Luckin Coffee and Sam Altman’s departure from Y Combinator.
They then dug a bit deeper into the money around food: DoorDash and Sun Basket both raised this week. And what is a discussion about venture in food without mentioning Blue Apron?
And finally, TransferWise illustrates how not to IPO.
In all of this, they considered a world without the word “unicorn” as

Earlier this week, SpaceX successfully launched its first 60 StarLink satellites into orbit around the Earth. An amateur astronomer in the Netherlands caught sight of them orbiting Earth after deployment, and captured the scene on video.Astronomer Dr. Marco Langbroek noted on his blog that he calculated where the satellites would be orbiting, and waited with his camera. The result is a spectacular one: a string of bright dots flying across the sky, prompting some people to report that they saw

Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions into his virtual reality dream, a new platform that Facebookowns.
Facebook bought Oculusand has spent the last five years killing what it was and reinventing it as a Facebook-scale company. It has dumped most of the co-founders, brought in Zuck loyalists to take over the most important decisions and shifted towards accessibility over appeasing the company’s early supporters.
Facebook’s latest release is the realization of all that.
The company&rsqu

Since May 7th, the Baltimore’s city government has been dealing with a ransomware attack that has shut down everything from its email to the systems that allow residents to pay water bills, purchase homes, and other services. According to a report in The New York Times, the tool that has crippled the city is a National Security Agency creation called EternalBlue, which has been used in other high-profile cyberattacks.According to security experts, hackers used EternalBlue, which exploits

Since May 7th, the Baltimore’s city government has been dealing with a ransomware attack that has shut down everything from its email to the systems that allow residents to pay water bills, purchase homes, and other services. According to a report in The New York Times, the tool that has crippled the city is a National Security Agency creation called EternalBlue, which has been used in other high-profile cyberattacks.According to security experts, hackers used EternalBlue, which exploits

Last year, Amazon rolled a new announcements feature for Echo devices, and later expanded it to Alexa-compatible Sonos speakers. Now, the feature can be used across all of the devices that utilize Alexa.The feature essentially allows you to turn your Echo devices into an intercom system, and initially rolled out to the Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Show, and Echo Spot. Users send out their announcement by saying “Alexa announce that / tell everyone / broadcast...”, and their messa

Living in a dense urban environment brings many startup-fuelled conveniences, be it near instant delivery of food — or pretty much whatever else you fancy — to a whole range of wheels that can be hopped on (or into) to whisk you around at the tap of an app.
But the biggest problem afflicting city dwellers is not some minor inconvenience. It’s bad, poor, terrible, horrible, unhealthy air. And there’s no app to fix that.
Nor can hardware solve this problem. But smart hardwa

Some of the world’s greatest artworks are known for their elaborate backstory or complex history, but not many are actively dangerous to those who own them. ‘The Persistence of Chaos’ might be an exception. Created by internet artist Guo O Dong, this piece of art is an ordinary laptop filled with six of the world’s most dangerous pieces of malware. It’s perfectly safe — as long you don’t connect to your Wi-Fi or plug in a USB.Speaking to The Verge, arti

Earlier this week, an altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught fire on Facebook, and despite being faked, the platform has so far declined to remove it. However, it has now chosen to notify users who attempt to share the clip that it is faked.“Once the video was fact checked as false, we dramatically reduced its distribution,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Verge. “Speed is critical to this system, and we continue to improve our response. People who see the video i

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Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributorBig revenues, huge valuations and major losses: charting the era of the unicorn IPO Some reassuring data for those worried unicorns are wrecking the Bay Area
A lot of students attend public universities to lessen the financial burden of higher education. At last tally, tuition and fees at American public colleges and universities averaged around $6,800 a year, per the federal government. That’s far below the $32,600 mean p

As of May 2019, over 20 US states have introduced bills seeking to regulate data privacy, data security, or some combination of the two. While many of these bills agree in spirit (i.e. privacy good, data collection and usage bad), the various bills are decidedly more divergent as to how to accomplish these objectives. With the states locked in an arms race to one-up each other on being the most privacy protective, the end result over the next four to five years could be a patchwork of state reg

Black Mirror’s fifth season will return to Netflix with three new episodes on June 5th, and to promote the return of the series, it will release a trio of extremely short episodes on its América Latina YouTube channel.The three Little Black Mirror episodes will feature several YouTube stars from Latin America, according to Variety. Netflix approached the YouTubers ( Maia Mitchell, Rudy Mancuso, Juanpa Zurita, Lele Pons, Anwar Jibawi, Hannah Stocking, Jeff Wittek, Delaney Glazer and

In many regions around the world, Huawei phones are easy to come by. They’re sold through carriers, and available in stores. That’s not the case in the US, where Huawei does not officially sell its devices and no carriers offer them. If those things aren’t a deterrent, you’ll likely have to go online to buy one, and even then, the list of retailers that stock Huawei-made devices, including its Honor phones, is shrinking as a result of the US federal government’s re

In Chinese science fiction author Chen Qiufan’s debut novel Waste Tide, a young woman finds herself transformed and stuck in the midst of a vicious power struggle between factions in the polluted, fictitious Silicon Isle in Guiyu, China. It’s a near-future science fiction thriller that feels pressingly relevant in 2019, about the pressures that advanced capitalism and technology exert on the most vulnerable people on Earth.
Silicon Isle is a dump — literally. It’s where

One of the biggest names behind the Overwatch League is moving on. Last night Nate Nanzer, commissioner of the Overwatch League, announced that he’s leaving Blizzard “for a new opportunity.” ESPN has since confirmed that Nanzer will be joining Epic Games to oversee e-sports at the Fortnite developer. Pete Vlastelica, CEO of Activision Blizzard’s e-sports division, will take charge as the next OWL commissioner.
“I get way too much credit for the success of the Overw

It’s that time of the year again, when NASA gives you the opportunity to “ship” your name to another celestial body. This time, the destination is Mars, and the shipping service is NASA’s future Mars 2020 rover, which will be headed to the Red Planet in — you guessed it — 2020.The rover’s primary mission is to get us closer to answering that fundamental question: did Mars ever host alien life? The robot is equipped with tools and instruments that will h

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a newsletter published every Saturday that dives into the week’s most noteworthy venture deals, fundraises, M&A transactions and trends. Let’s take a quick moment to catch up. Last week, I wrote about an alternative to venture capital called revenue-based financing and before that, I jotted down some notes on one of VCs’ favorite spaces: cannabis tech. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunc

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! You might think the world is complicated enough and there’s no need to make basic tasks harder, right? Right? Wrong. That’s why you need to stop what you’re doing right now and buy the Albert Math Clock. This clever contraption doesn’t just tell you the time (what did you expect? Have you even read the start of this article?), it displays equations you have to solve to get the in

Microsoft appears to be readying a special Fortnite-style version of the company’s Xbox One S console. WinFuture reports that Microsoft will release a purple edition of the Xbox One S in the coming weeks, in a bundle designed for Fortnite fans. The Xbox One S Fortnite Limited Edition will reportedly include a new “Dark Vertex” skin and 2000 V-Bucks in-game currency. The bundle is also saidto include a month of Xbox Live Gold, EA Access, and Xbox Game Pass.
It’s not clear

Like most planets in our solar system, the Earth has its own magnetic field. Thanks to its largely molten iron core, our planet is in fact a bit like a bar magnet. It has a north and south magnetic pole, separate from the geographic poles, with a field connecting the two. This field protects our planet from radiation and is responsible for creating the northern and southern lights – spectacular events that are only visible near the magnetic poles. However, with reports that the magnetic n

The U.S-China trade war is increasingly influencing tech. Huawei has suffered a turbulent past week with key suppliers pausing work with the company, and now China’s largest chipmaker is planning to delist from the New York Stock Exchange.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) announced in a filing published Friday that it plans to delist next month ending a 15-year spell as a public company in the U.S. The firm will file a Form 25 to delist on June 3, which is likely to se

For the last five years, Ikea has teamed with notable designers and artists to create high-dollar goods. Its “Art Collection” offered customers the opportunity to buy limited edition furnishings and art at prices customers could stomach. Ikea’s 2019 Art Collection was to feature rugs, eight of them from notables in the industry, including Virgil Abhoh, the art director for Louis Vuitton’s men’s line. For anyone willing to plop down $500, they could own the artistic

If you’ve been out and about in Silicon Valley in the last month or so, chances are you’ve heard of “Alpha Girls,” a new book written by journalist Julian Guthrie about four people who’ve made a big impact on the world of startup investing. The book recognizes them — Theresia Gouw, MJ Elmore, Sonja Hoel Perkins, and Magdalena Yesil — because they are interesting individuals, each with very different upbringings and skill sets and areas of expertise.
But

Few places summon the trolls like movie reviews. After suffering through multiple cases of review-bombing – when trolls flood in with disproportionate negative reviews – Rotten Tomatoes wants to weed out the people who haven’t actually, you know seen the movie. Specifically, users will now be required to verify their ticket purchase for their votes to be counted in the new Audience Score: “Rotten Tomatoes now features an Audience Score made up of ratings from users

HumanEyes‘ Vuze XR is a rare breed of camera. It’s pocket-sized, shoots in VR, 360, and 5K formats, and it costs around the same as an entry-level DSLR. What really sets it apart, however, is how easy it is to use. I love VR. And the thought of making my own glorious, fully immersive, 180-degree family vacation videos that we can watch on our headsets – like the VR videos on YouTube – fills me with joy. But I’m neither a filmmaker nor a professional photograph