Technology news

When you explicitly tell an Android app, “No, you don’t have permission to track my phone,” you probably expect that it won’t have abilities that let it do that. But researchers say that thousands of apps have found ways to cheat Android’s permissions system, phoning home your device’s unique identifier and enough data to potentially reveal your location as well.
Even if you say “no” to one app when it asks for permission to see those personally id

Amazon workers at a Shakopee, Minnesota warehouse plan to strike for six hours during Prime Day to demand safer working conditions and secure jobs. According to Bloomberg, workers across two shifts will leave the warehouse and protest outside the facility; they’ll also be joined by some engineers from the Amazon Employees For Climate Justice group who plan to fly in to support the strike.
There have been a number of strikes at Amazon warehouses on major shopping days, like Black Friday, bu

The best thing about the Amazon Fire 7 tablet is its $49 price. The worst thing is that its Android-based Fire OS 6 software lacks most of what makes Android, well, Android. It (like Amazon’s other Fire tablets) lacks any of the standard Google apps, like Google Maps, Google Photos, or Google Drive. What’s worse is that the built-in Amazon Appstore is a stand-in for Google’s Play Store, and most of the apps you know and love aren’t available.However, there is hope if you

If you use a Microsoft app on your Android phone, Microsoft might be quietly advertising its other apps in your “Share” and “Open” menus. Android Police has pointed out that some Microsoft mobile apps add extra options to your menus when you interact with a file. These icons show Microsoft apps that aren’t on your phone, taking up real estate that’s usually reserved for programs you chose to install.
Android Police tested this with multiple Microsoft apps, and

Apple’s Texas Hold’em game was released over 11 years ago for the iPhone as the first game ever sold on the App Store. Today, seemingly out of nowhere, Apple has updated the game with a refreshed version that actually works on today’s iPhones, as spotted by 9to5Mac.
The App Store page for Texas Hold’em claims that the update is to celebrate “the 10 year anniversary of the App Store.” That’s a bit strange: the App Store’s 10th anniversary — wh

Instagram’s next big fix for online bullying is coming in the form of artificial intelligence-flagged comments and the ability for users to restrict accounts from publicly commenting on their posts.The team is launching a test soon that’ll give users the power to essentially “shadow ban” a user from their account, meaning the account holder can “restrict” another user, which makes their comments visible only to themselves. It also hides when the account holder

Warning: spoilers ahead for season 3 of Stranger Things.
The third season of Stranger Things, like the first two seasons, revels in the fun, funny, nostalgic detritus of 1980s pop culture. Much of the series’s action is set in a mall, the center of teen life before the advent of iPhones and Amazon. In the shopping emporium, the kids buy colorful ‘80s clothes and watch movies like Back to the Future and George Romero’s Day of the Dead. Glimpses of classic Dungeons & Dragons

On Monday, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai proposed a new rule that would make malicious text message spoofing and overseas robocalls illegal, something that the agency has yet to fully address in its attempts to fight robocalls.The measure formally implements rules approved by Congress last year that authorize the FCC to go after text message fraudsters and international robocallers. If approved, calls and texts that use spoofing to imitate a different phone number would be

Flash flooding in Washington, DC has thrown the capital region in chaos, with reports of water rescues, traffic closures, and power outages. The floods are also taking their toll on the city’s thousands of bikes and scooters, with images surfacing on social media of dockless vehicles floating forlornly in floodwaters.Bird, Jump, and Lime, three of the city’s five operators, told The Verge that their employees were actively engaged in removing scooters from the flooded areas. Another

Last week, a report from the CSIS Security Group pointed ZDNet (and the rest of us) to a very shady app on the Google Play Store called “Updates for Samsung.” It offered to provide system-level Android updates to phones — and, in fact, it did redistribute Samsung’s software, though it was essentially a scam to get you to pay money for said updates.
Today, after we inquired, Google told The Verge that the app violated its policies and has been “suspended.” It i

Microsoft is celebrating Stranger Things season 3 in true Windows 1.0 style today. The software giant has created a Windows 1.11 app for a tie-in with Stranger Things, and it includes nostalgic apps like Paint, Write, and the original Windows cmd prompt. While the app is supposed to be set in the summer of 1985 just like the TV show, Windows 1.0 didn’t actually debut until November 1985.
Awkward dates aside, this app is designed more as a game to accompany the latest Stranger Things season

Chrome OS will soon be able to tether to an iPhone over USB, allowing Apple’s phones to share a mobile data connection without the battery drain of doing it wirelessly. News of the feature was first reported by Chrome Unboxed, which spotted it in a commit to Chromium’s source code. Along with consuming less battery power, the commit also notes that USB tethering should be more reliable than Wi-Fi.
Chrome OS has supported USB tethering to Android for a while now, and it also supports

It’s July, three months before we expect Google to fully unveil the Pixel 4. Like clockwork, the next scene in the phone rumor script has been performed: full 3D CAD renders of the upcoming phone. They come via Steve Hemmerstoffer — you know him as OnLeaks — who provided them to Pricebaba. Renders are generally not the most exciting kind of phone leak, especially after Google just tweeted out its own images, but there’s just a little extra information here: the dimensions

Anyone who goes into Spider-Man: Far From Home hoping that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will keep exploring and extending the tragedy of Avengers: Endgame will be thoroughly disappointed — but it’s a good kind of disappointment. The MCU’s continuity has gotten more and more convoluted and interconnected over the course of more than a decade of movies, as space aliens mingle with Sorcerers Supreme and cosmic threats alter the future, the past, and time itself. If Marvel insiste

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are widely using facial recognition tools on state driver’s license databases around the country, according to newly released documents.Searches even for low-level crimes
In documents from multiple states released today, Georgetown Law reveals how officials regularly turn to local DMVs for facial recognition searches. The database searches scan millions of license photos, regardless of whether any individual in the

Netflix Hangouts is a new Chrome extension that tries to make it easier to get away with watching Netflix while you’re supposed to be working. Just go to the show you want to catch up on during work hours, and press the extension’s icon in your Chrome menu to bring up a fake four-person conference call. Then you can sit back and watch the show in the window’s bottom right feed while three fake colleagues get down to business.
Depending on the show you’re watching, you cou

There’s a new trailer out for Pokémon Sword and Shield, which explains a little bit more about how the new “gigantamax” feature works as well as some of the new gym leaders players will battle. But that’s not why you’re here: the real news is that we have a handful of new pokémon to “ooh” and “ahh” over.
Four new creatures were revealed today, and they represent quite the range. Duraludon is a steel / dragon type that looks a bi

Super Mario World is a legendary Nintendo game that took the original Super Mario concept from the NES and expanded it into a whole new evolution of the franchise that arguably laid the groundwork for what Mario games are today. Sadly, despite its name, Dr. Mario World — the upcoming mobile evolution of the original NES title — lacks the same pedigree, hewing closer to free-to-play mobile puzzlers like Candy Crush Saga.To start, the base concept of Dr. Mario doesn’t even make i

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company will “most likely” start retrofitting its new, more powerful processing chip into older vehicles near the end of the year. The new FSD chip is the first to have been designed in-house. Tesla says it offers 21 times the performance of the Nvidia chips it replaces — a claim Nvidia disputes. The new chip has been shipping in Model S, X, and 3 cars since before its announcement, but soon it will be offered as a free upgrade to half a million Tes

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been getting pretty bored by phone colors of late. Everyone is offering the same silver and gold finishes, of course, while China’s initially laudable effort to develop every single blue gradient pattern imaginable seems to be running out of steam.
Former Oppo sub-brand Realme thinks it has the answer, and that answer is — what else? — “hire the most famous Japanese industrial designer alive to make phones inspired by vegetable

The UK’s data watchdog has announced plans to fine the airline British Airways a record £183 million over last year’s data breach. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said that “poor security arrangements” at the company lead to the breach of credit card information, names, addresses, travel booking details, and logins for around 500,000 customers. The fine would be the largest the ICO has ever issued, BBC News reports, far more than the £500,000

Wind Mobility, the Berlin and Barcelona-based micromobility startup that operates e-scooter rentals in Europe, Israel and Asia, is disclosing $50 million in Series A funding. The new round is backed by existing investors. The company last raised $22 million in funding eight months ago from Chinese Source Code Capital and Europe’s HV Holtzbrinck Ventures after it pivoted away from bike rentals to focus on e-scooters.
Coinciding with the new funding, Wind is unveiling its “third genera

DigitalBridge, the Manchester, U.K.-based startup using technology to help solve the “imagination gap” when planning home renovations, has picked up £3 million in new backing.
The round is led by Maven Capital Partnersvia two funds it manages: £1.5 million from Maven’s Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) and £1.5 million from the NPIF Maven Equity Finance, a regional development fund managed by Maven as part of the U.K. government’s Northern Powerhouse Investm

Soldo, the U.K. fintech that offers a multi-user spending account for businesses, has closed $61 million in Series B funding.
Leading the round is Battery Venturesand Dawn Capital, with participation from previous backers Accel and Connect Ventures. In addition, a small portion is debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. It brings total raised by the London-based startup to $82 million.
Founded by Carlo Gualandri, who previously helped create Italy’s first online bank, Soldooffers a multi-