Technology news

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is experimenting with using a swarm of autonomous drones and ground robots to assist with military missions. In a video of a recent test, DARPA showed how its robots analyzed two city blocks to find, surround, and secure a mock city building.DARPA conducted its test back in June in Georgia, featuring both drones and ground-based robots. The demonstration was part of DARPA’s OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, which is desi

Photo: Chris Welch / The Verge Internet telecom companies aren’t your friends, no matter how cheerful they may try to portray themselves in advertisements. The latest reminder of that fact is the story of Tully Free Library in rural Tully, NY, which got hit by an absurd $880 bill from Verizon for using a mere 440 megabytes of data while accidentally roaming in Canada, according to a report from Ars Technica.The Tully Library offers a hotspot-lending program for residents to get internet a

Like many modern information workers, my personal phone serves many purposes. It’s how I communicate with friends and family; it’s how I experience entertainment; it’s how I navigate around a city; it’s how I purchase my morning coffee; it’s how I control countless smart home devices; and so on and so forth. It’s also crucial to how I perform my job, by letting me keep on top of the never-ending news cycle and communicate with my co-workers and other contacts

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Samsung managed to prompt some confusion the other day when a video uploaded to its own YouTube channel (now unlisted and probably set for deletion) mentioned that the Galaxy Note 10 was made from stainless steel. “Stainless steel and glass meld seamlessly to minimize bezel,” says the video’s narrator.
Wait, what?
The company never mentioned anything about switching from aluminum to steel during press briefings — nor was it brought up ons

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Yesterday Sonos invited media to come learn about new hardware later this month, and the company is already pushing some fresh products through the FCC. Model numbers S17 and S23 are now listed on the FCC’s site. Credit goes to Dave Zatz for spotting them. Now let’s get to figuring out what they might be.
S23 has the exact same label style as the Sonos Amp, which leads me to believe it’s a revamped version of the old Sonos Connect. No other cur

Jeffrey Epstein with Professor Marvin Minsky | Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images A victim of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky, as revealed in a newly unsealed deposition. Epstein was registered as a sex offender in 2008 as part of a controversial plea deal. More recently, he was arrested on charges of sex trafficking amid a flood of new allegations.Minsky, who died in 2016, was known as an associate of Epstein, b

You may not have heard of Kobaltbefore, but you probably engage with the music it oversees every day, if not almost every hour. Combining a technology platform to better track ownership rights and royalties of songs with a new approach to representing musicians in their careers, Kobalt has risen from the ashes of the 2000 dot-com bubble to become a major player in the streaming music era. It is the leading alternative to incumbent music publishers (who represent songwriters) and is building a ne

As companies collect increasingly large amounts of data about customers, the end game is about improving the customer experience. It’s a term we’re hearing a lot of these days, and we are going to be discussing that very topic with Amit Ahuja, Adobe’s vice president of ecosystem development, next month at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco. Grab your early-bird tickets right now — $100 savings ends today!
Customer experience covers a broad array of enterpris

Logan Paul Several YouTube moderators say that the platform’s most popular creators receive special treatment when it comes to moderation of their channels, allowing them to get away with worse behavior than a typical YouTube creator would, according to a new report from The Washington Post. Many of YouTube’s creators aren’t surprised.Moderators told The Washington Post that “recommendations to strip advertising” from videos that appeared to violate the site’

Jorge Conde ContributorShare on Twitter Jorge Conde is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads investments at the cross section of biology, computer science and engineering.Much of Silicon Valley mythology is centered on the founder-as-hero narrative. But historically, scientific founders leading the charge for bio companies have been far less common.
Developing new drugs is slow, risky and expensive. Big clinical failures are all too common. As such, bio requires incredibly spe

Photo credit: Bluehole PUBG Mobile Lite, a version of the popular battle royale hit designed to work with a wider range of smartphones, is out now on Google Play in “several regions” of Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and South America. PUBG Mobile, a spinoff of the popular PC and console game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is already the world’s highest-grossing mobile game. It earned $167M in July, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower, and amassed

By-the-minute car rental service Car2go is raising its rates for short trips under the guise of variable pricing, the company announced to its users today. As we’ve seen with other variably priced services like delivery and ride hailing, in practice this means you never really know what it will cost but will have little choice but to pay.
In an email to users of its service, Car2go said that as a result of “constantly evaluating our product, packages, and pricing strategies” it

The White Houseis contemplating issuing an executive order that would widen its attack on the operations of social media companies.
The White House has prepared an executive order called “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship” that would give the Federal Communications Commission oversight of how Facebook,Twitter and other tech companies monitor and manage their social networks, according to a CNN report.
Under the order, which has not yet been announced and could be revised, t

How safe are your secrets? If you used Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage snapshots, you might want to check your settings.
New research just presented at the Def Con security conference reveals how companies, startups and governments are inadvertently leaking their own files from the cloud.
You may have heard of exposed S3 buckets — those Amazon-hosted storage servers packed with customer data but often misconfigured and inadvertently set to “public” for anyone to access. Bu

There’s no shortage of AirPower knockoffs on the market. Many have been in the works since Apple took the wraps off its in-house version, positioned as more affordable alternatives. Since the company unceremoniously pulled the plug on the project, however, they’re the only game in town.
We reviewed a $99 one a while ago. It seemed fine, and Amazon is currently overloaded with even more affordable options. It’s probably unfair to lump Mophie in the knockoff category. The accesso

Image: USA The Jason Bourne spy franchise has been a solid action vehicle for actor Matt Damon, and over the years, Universal Pictures has experimented with trying to turn it into a bigger franchise. Its latest attempt is a TV show called Treadstone, and the first trailer just hit the web today.The series will debut on USA this October, and the trailer shows off all of the requisite hand-to-hand action scenes, car chases, and glimpses of documents the CIA really should have shredded years ago.

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1. Uber lost more than $5B last quarter
Uberreported earnings for the second time as a public company, posting its largest-ever quarterly loss. And while revenue grew 14% year-over-year, that also sparked concerns over (relatively) slow growth.
The company’s stock took a nose-dive of 11% in

Sometimes it does seem the entire tech industry could use someone to talk to, like a good therapist or social worker. That might sound like an insult, but I mean it mostly earnestly: I am a chaplain who has spent 15 years talking with students, faculty, and other leaders at Harvard (and more recently MIT as well), mostly nonreligious and skeptical people like me, about their struggles to figure out what it means to build a meaningful career and a satisfying life, in a world full of insecurity, i

Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images The White House has drafted an ambitious new proposal to regulate social media platforms, with the aim of combating perceived bias against conservatives, according to a new report from CNN. The proposal, some details of which were previously reported by Politico, would call on the FCC to develop new regulations concerning how social media platforms are allowed to moderate their users.The FTC, which typically focuses on consumer protection issues, would also

Proterrahas authorized shares to raise $75 million, a new round of funding that would push the electric bus maker’s valuation past $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned.
The company authorized the sale of 10,857,762 shares at a price of $6.91 in a Series 8 round, according to a securities filing that was obtained by the Prime Unicorn Index, a company that tracks the performance of private U.S. companies, and reviewed by TechCrunch. If all of the shares are issued, the company’s total va

Adobe By the end of this year, designers will be getting three new Adobe apps, which are all part of the company’s vision for the next era of creativity. This next generation of apps will focus on mixing real-life, physical elements with digital ones, and it will emphasize experiences “outside of the glass,” says Adobe chief technology officer Abhay Parasnis. They’ll also be interconnected through mobile and desktop experiences so that users can switch between apps on an

Photo: Amazon Amazon has been testing its Scout delivery robots near its headquarters in Snohomish County, Washington, for a few months. Today, it announced that it’s expanding the program, and it’s set to start testing the robots in the Irvine, California, area on a larger scale.To start, Amazon will only have “a small number of Amazon Scout devices,” which will only deliver packages on weekdays during daylight hours. Each Scout robot will also be accompanied by a human

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google says that it has fixed an issue that prevented news stories from appearing in Google News yesterday. In tests run by The Verge, this appears to be the case.
When indexing was experiencing problems, Top Stories in Google News would primarily show stories from Wednesday and omit many posted on Thursday. Search Engine Land first reported on the issues.
Google is constantly crawling, or indexing, the web to find new content to show users when they sear

Rich Polk/Getty Images for Streamy Awards It seems like every YouTube creator has a podcast these days, and that now includes Marques Brownlee.Brownlee, one of YouTube’s most prominent creators who has more than 9 million subscribers on his tech-focused channel MKBHD, is launching a new podcast called Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast. The podcast will be similar to the videos on his channel, focusing on product reviews and interviews with people in the tech industry. Brownlee has interviewed m

It’s down to the wire folks. Today’s the last day you can save $100 on your ticket to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019, which takes place on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. The deadline expires in mere hours — at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Get the best possible price and buy your early-bird ticket right now.
We expect more than 1,000 attendees representing the enterprise software community’s best and brightest. We’re talking founders of companies

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Discord will launch a feature called Go Live for its desktop application on August 15th. It will allow anybody with a PC to stream video of their game in any voice channel to up to 10 people at a time.Go Live is intended to give people the feeling of gaming in a living room with your friends, and it shows. It works based on Discord’s game detection, the same feature that shows your friends what you’re playing when you’re playing it.

With the success of Stranger Things and the new film version of Stephen King’s It, nostalgia feels like something of a current horror trope. In these stories, the evocation of childhood fears mixes with pleasurable memories of childhood pop culture, adding a bit of sweet to horror’s usual bitterness.
At first, the theatrical film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark looks like it might be following in Stranger Things’ footsteps. The first scene is set to the background music of Do

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge This week on The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller run through Samsung’s Unpacked event where we got our first look at the Galaxy Note 10. The crew discusses the event’s other announcements, including the Samsung and Microsoft partnership and their first impressions of the Note 10, which Dieter was able to try out.
In the second half of the show, Verge reporter Julia Alexander stops by to give us more details on the upcoming &ldquo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple’s Face ID biometric security can be misled using a pair of glasses with tape attached to them, security researchers from Tencent have discovered. ThreatPost reports that the method is able to fool Face ID into thinking someone’s eyes are open, meaning it could allow hackers to gain access to a locked iPhone while its owner is asleep.
The reality of the hack, however, means that it’s unlikely to be of much practical use in a real-wo

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Amazon says that it’s investigating reports that its hardware supplier Foxconn, which produces Amazon Echo and Kindle hardware for the company, has violated labor laws by requiring teenaged workers to work overtime and night shifts, as reported by The Guardian.The issue is specifically that the students — who are between the ages of 16 and 18 and are legally hired as “interns” — were working overtime and night shifts. Chinese labor

Photo by Ali Goldstein / Netflix There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling