Technology news

Businesses need to understand cause and effect: Someone did X and it increased sales, or they did Y and it hurt sales. That’s why many of them turn to analytics — but Bilal Mahmood, co-founder and CEO of ClearBrain, said existing analytics platforms can’t answer that question accurately.
“Every analytics platform today is still based on a fundamental correlation model,” Mahmood said. It’s the classic correlation-versus-causation problem — you can use the

Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images Airports around the United States are experiencing delays in processing international travelers, due to a nationwide outage affecting the computer systems used by Customs and Border Protection. JFK, LAX, SFO, PHL, O’Hare, Midway, Sea-Tac and other airports are confirming delays.
“US Customs and Border Protection is experiencing a temporary outage with its processing systems at various air ports of entry and is taking immediate action to address th

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge For more than a year, a company called Corellium has been offering hackers a virtual iPhone. For a price, you could summon up a virtual iPhone on your computer, changing the model or iOS version through a simple menu tab.
Now, Apple is suing to shut that virtual iPhone down. In a lawsuit first reported by Bloomberg, Apple alleges that Corellium’s virtual iPhone replica infringes on the company’s copyright of iOS and related technology. It

Upfront Ventures, the 23-year-old, LA-based venture capital firm, is gearing up for far more deal-making.
In addition to filing paperwork with the SEC this summer to raise its third growth-stage investment fund (it is also investing a $400 million early-stage fund and probably announcing another soon), the firm just added two new general partners to its lineup of investors.
One of them, Michael Carney, joined Upfront as a principal in 2015 after working as an editor at the news site PandoDaily,

Ewan McGregor is reportedly in talks to return to his iconic Star Wars role in an Obi-Wan Kenobi series for Disney’s Disney+ streaming service. If the series actually makes it to screens, it’ll mark the end of years of effort to get an Obi-Wan movie made, and it will show how Disney intends to use its streaming service.The original plan was to make a feature-length theatrical Star Wars spinoff, according to a Hollywood Reporter story from 2017. Those plans were eventually scrapped fo

A tool that lets you create custom face filters and other excellent effects for Instagram, Spark AR Studio is now available to all users. Previously, it had only been available for Facebook and beta testers.
We here at The Verge have already used it to create our first filter, which you can see and share through Instagram’s mobile app by going to The Verge’s Instagram account (@verge) and tapping on the face icon.If you’d like to know how to make your own filter for use on Inst

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Nintendo made a lightly updated version of the original Switch console that offers improvements like better battery life. But if you bought the old model recently, you might not be out of luck. The company is offering upgrades to the newer model for customers who bought the old version from July 17th going forward (when Nintendo announced the new model), according to a report from Polygon, which confirmed Nintendo is performing the swaps.
Shipping not included

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Huawei is developing a “mapping service,” according to a report by state-run news outlet China Daily, seemingly designed to challenge Google Maps — but not the way you might expect. The service is apparently intended for software developers, meaning apps that offer navigation or ride-hailing services could use Huawei’s planned mapping technology instead of building their own.
A Huawei exec told China Daily that the mapping service

The labor shortage in America is forcing companies in every industry to reassess how they identify, attract, and keep top talent. A 2017 PwC survey of CEOs found that most viewed a lack of skilled workers as the primary threat to their business, and in 2019, hiring and retaining smart, capable people remains the chief internal concern of the entire executive suite, according to a global Conference Board survey. For many leaders in the tech industry, this concern has transformed into overwhelmin

A playable main character from the upcoming hybrid RPG/shooter Borderlands 3, The Beastmaster FL4K, will be a robot that identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. This may be the closest we’ve come to getting a playable, canonically transgender protagonist in a AAA video game – excuse me while I do a happy dance. While Gearbox hasn’t officially said the character represents the transgender community, it’s been revealed that FL4K is on a personal journey to di

Photo by Christoph Soeder/picture alliance via Getty Images Segway-Ninebot has a solution for all of those dockless electric scooters that need to be gathered up every night for charging: build one that can drive itself to the charging station.The Chinese scooter giant’s new self-driving scooter, the KickScooter T60, was introduced at an event in Beijing on Friday, according to Reuters. The scooter has three wheels (two in front, one in back), and it can supposedly use artificial intellig

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1. Cloudflare files for initial public offering
The web infrastructure company has recently found itself at the center of political debates around some of its customers, including social media networks like 8chan and racist media companies like the Daily Stormer. In fact, the company went so far

Google’s Area 120 incubator has a new project: the fantastically named Fundo, a digital meet-and-greet service for creators, revealed today in a report from Variety.What is Fundo? Well, it’s not the name of an adorable, floppy-haired dog, although I can understand why that would be your first impression. No, Fundo is an online meet-and-greet service for creators that lets fans “meet your favorite creator from anywhere, using your phone or computer,” per the service’

The phrase “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” was originally meant sarcastically.
It’s not actually physically possible to do — especially while wearing Allbirdsand having just fallen off a Bird scooter in downtown San Francisco, but I should get to my point.
This week, Ken Cuccinelli, the acting Director of the United States Citizenship and Immigrant Services Office, repeatedly referred to the notion of bootstraps in announcing shifts in immigration policy, even g

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would be charging ahead with a vote to formally approve the T-Mobile-Sprint merger; but Democratic senators are calling on the agency to reopen the issue for public comment before taking that vote.Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) penned a letter along with others like Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) asking the FCC to r

Xbox this week revealed that, contrary to popular rumor, we aren’t going to be getting multiple models of next-generation Xbox after all — meaning there’s no xCloud console in development. We’re also not likely to see cloud gaming consoles for quite some time. A persistent rumor surrounding the next console generation has been that we’re going to get “streaming only” consoles alongside the traditional corporeal ones — consoles built sort of like G

Any first responder knows that situational awareness is key. In domestic violence disputes, hostage rescue or human trafficking situations, first responders often need help determining where humans are behind closed doors.
That’s why Megan Lacy, Corbin Hennen and Rob Kleffner developed Lumineye, a 3D-printed radar device that uses signal analysis software to differentiate moving and breathing humans from other objects, through walls.
Lumineye uses pulse radar technology that works like ech

If there is one company at the top of everyone’s mind this year, it is Slack.
The now-ubiquitous workplace messaging tool began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in June after taking an unusual route to the public markets, known as a direct listing. Slack bypassed the typical IPO process in favor of putting its current stock on the NYSE without doing an additional raise or bringing on underwriter banking partners.
Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson and Slack i

Google publicly disclosed its acquisition of homework helper app Socratic in an announcement this week, detailing the added support for the company’s AI technology and its relaunch on iOS. The acquisition apparently flew under the radar — Google says it bought the app last year.
According to one founder’s LinkedIn update, that was in March 2018. Google declined to comment when asked for specifics about the acquisition.
Socratic was founded in 2013 by Chris Pedregal and Shreyans

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Runkeeper this week announced that it will discontinue its Wear OS app in the next few weeks, as reported by Android Central. The update was emailed to users this week, where the company told users that it decided to end support because “the integration didn’t work well / work consistently for most users.”
In a response to users, Runkeeper elaborated that only a small percentage of Runkeeper users were actually using the Wear OS app. “It

NASAis celebrating alongside Northrop Grumman at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as the latter becomes the first commercial partner to make use of the Vehicle Assembly Building on-site at the base. The VAB, as it’s more commonly known, is a cavernous building that’s used to build and test rockets ahead of rolling them out to nearby launch pads, which was originally constructed by NASA to support the Apollo program.
Northrop Grumman will be using the VAB to build and prep its OmegA l

Photo by Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images On Friday, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced a sweeping policy plan to counter hate speech and gun violence in America that specifically proposes changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one of the tech industry’s most pivotal legal protections.
Outside of proposing a nationwide gun licensing system / registry and requiring universal background checks, O’Rourke laid out a plan aimed at making so

What’s the lifeblood of any early-stage startup? Money and media coverage. Opportunities to acquire both abound at Disrupt San Francisco 2019, our flagship tech conference that takes place on October 2-4. It’s all about networking and making the right connections to make your startup dreams come true, and there’s no better networking mecca than Startup Alley.
Buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and plant your early-stage startup in the path of more than 10,000 attendees, incl

Users have said they are receiving emails from Amazoncontaining invoices and order updates on other customers, TechCrunch has learned.
Jake Williams, founder of cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec, raised the alarm after he received an email from Amazon addressed to another customer with their name, postal address and their order details.
Williams said he ordered something months ago which recently became available for shipping. He checked the email headers to make sure it was a genuine message

If you’re a New Yorker, one of the easiest ways to keep up-to-date on the latest consumer products — furniture, beauty products, mobile apps, you name it — is to hop on the subway.
Even before you board, you may find yourself walking through a station filled with colorful startup ads. And once you’re actually on the train, you’ll probably be surrounded by even more of those ads.
It felt very different when I first moved to New York in 2013, back when the only compan

YouTube is hiring managers to work specifically with progressive political publishers and conservative political publishers as the company faces accusations of censoring right-wing political content amid a crackdown on supremacist content and conspiracy theories.
The new managers will focus on “advising partners on YouTube channel development strategies and representing the political publisher landscape within the organization,” according to the job postings. Managers will also work

Image: Canoo Automotive startup Canoo (formerly known as Evelozcity) is teasing the designs of its planned electric vehicles, and it has spent the last few months staffing up as it moves closer to production in 2021. But the startup will take the next few steps in that process without its CEO, the company tells The Verge.Stefan Krause, a former executive at BMW, is stepping away from the CEO role for “personal reasons,” according to the company. Canoo’s CTO, fellow co-founder

The future of competitive Fortnite kicks off tomorrow with the Champion Series, and it’s proving to be the most controversial e-sports contest developer Epic Games has ever embarked on. The issue is not prize money or who’s allowed to participate. Instead, the furor is over an in-game mech suit, ripped straight from the pages of classic Japanese manga. And it’s poised to boil over when pro players start competing for an eye-popping $10 million in prize money over the next 30 da

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A fast-acting hacker could be able to weaken the encryption of Bluetooth devices and subsequently snoop on communications or send falsified ones to take over a device due to a newly discovered vulnerability in the standard.
The vulnerability is pretty clever: instead of directly breaking the encryption, it allows hackers to force a pair of Bluetooth devices to use weaker encryption in the first place, making it far easier to crack. Each time two Bluetooth

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is testing a new feature that will automatically hide direct messages that its automated systems think could be offensive. In a short GIF posted by the company, the new section can be seen in the app’s existing “Message requests” folder, which is where Twitter puts any messages sent to you by users you don’t follow. From there, you’d have the option of viewing “additional messages, including those that may conta