Technology news

It’s finally Bag Week again! The most wonderful week of the year at TechCrunch. Just in time for back to school, we’re bringing you reviews of bags of all varieties: from backpacks to rollers to messengers to fanny packs.
I’ve been meaning to check out a Herschel bag for a while now, just to see what all the fuss is about. The Vancouver-based company has really exploded on the scene here in New York City over the past few years. The packs seemed to go from virtually n

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The 2020 Chevrolet Bolt is going to offer 21 miles more range on a full charge than its predecessors, thanks to a tweak in battery chemistry, the automaker announced Thursday. The new version of the automaker’s flagship electric vehicle will therefore get an EPA-estimated 259 miles of range when it goes on sale later this year, up from 238 miles.
“To achieve this notable range increase, Chevrolet’s battery engineering team improved the

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images Bernie Sanders just dropped his version of what a Green New Deal would look like if he becomes president — and it looks incredibly ambitious. The proposed set of federal policies aims to simultaneously avert a climate crisis while building up a green economy that protects workers and vulnerable communities.
At $16.3 trillion spent over 15 years, Sanders’ climate deal is by far the priciest of all the Democratic candidates left in the primary race. It&

Google has disabled 210 YouTubeaccounts after it said China used the video platform to sow discord among protesters in Hong Kong.
The search giant, which owns YouTube, followed in the footsteps of Twitter and Facebook, which earlier this week said China had used their social media sites to spread misinformation and discord among the protesters, who have spent weeks taking to the streets to demand China stops interfering with the semi-autonomous region’s affairs.
In a brief blog post, Googl

It's a tale as old as time: Parents are dying to know what their kids are texting about.
When cellphones and instant messaging accounts became popular back in the day, texting acronyms and online abbreviations were invented to make communication easier and secretly curse and chat with friends in a way that parents wouldn't be able to understand.
Eventually, helpful shorthand lists were created to teach clueless parents that "LOL" meant "laughing out loud" and "WTF" stood for "what the fuck." Now

Image: HP HP Inc. has announced that CEO Dion Weisler will be stepping down “due to a family health matter” and will be succeeded by Enrique Lores, who is currently president of HP’s printer division. Lores will officially begin as CEO on November 1st, according to the press release. HP says Weisler will be a director on the company’s board until the next annual stockholder meeting, which should be in April 2020.
Weisler has been CEO since 2015, when HP split into two pa

Vivianna and Peter Van Deerlin became something of Tesla evangelists after buying a Model S in 2012. 
They loved the car, its message, and the community around it so much they started volunteering at a "boot camp" for new and prospective Tesla owners near their home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. 
Later when they bought Tesla's newest Model 3, they decided to drive to Northern California to give the Tesla to their son. The couple, both 55 years old and physicians, would also be celebratin

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google just published a blog post revealing that it has disabled 210 YouTube channels that the company says “behaved in a coordinated manner while uploading videos related to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.” Google cites the behavior as being “consistent with recent observations and actions related to China announced by Facebook and Twitter.” The accounts were disabled earlier this week.Both Facebook and Twitter recently uncover

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DoorDash today announced more concrete details about its updated tipping policy, which the company says it’s been testing this month and plans to roll out to all of its delivery contractors starting next month. Under a newly revamped pay model, all drivers will receive 100 percent of the tip amount a customer adds through the DoorDash app either at checkout or after delivery. Drivers will be informed of this total and the breakdown before they decid

Three years after closing a $9.3 billion deal to acquire NetSuite, several Oracle board members have written an extraordinary letter to the Delaware Court, approving a shareholder lawsuit against company executives Larry Ellison and Safra Catz over the 2016 deal. Reuters broke this story.
According to Reuters’ Alison Frankel, three board members, including former U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, sent a letter on August 15th to Sam Glasscock III, vice chancellor for the Court of the Cha

VMwaretoday announced that it is acquiring Carbon Black, a publicly traded security company that focuses on securing modern cloud-native workloads. The price of the acquisition is about $2.1 billion.
In addition, VMware also confirmed the acquisition of Pivotal, which will have a value of about $2.7 billion. VMware’s revenue for the last quarter was $2.44 billion. That’s a big day for VMware.
“Building on another solid quarter, we are thrilled about announcing our intent to acq

The FCChas just approved nearly five billion dollars in subsidies for rural broadband operators to be paid out over the next 10 years. Recipients of this windfall will have to “maintain, improve, and expand” their broadband infrastructure, especially in underserved areas.
Carriers in 39 states, American Samoa and many tribal lands will receive varying amounts of funding depending on the number of people they serve, the cost of providing that service and so on. Naturally states with m

HP Inc. announced this afternoon that Dion Weisler is stepping down as president and CEO. The executive cited a “family health matter” in his decision, noting that he will be returning home to Australia.The company already has a successor lined up, as its president of Imaging, Printing and Solutions, Enrique Lores, got unanimous approval from its board of directors. Lores will be assuming the top spot on November 1.
“Enrique is an inspiring and proven business leader and is the

As the technologies that were once considered science fiction become the purview of science, the venture capital firms that were once investing at the industry’s fringes are now finding themselves at the heart of the technology industry.
Investing in the commercialization of technologies like genetic engineering, quantum computing, digital avatars, augmented reality, new human-computer interfaces, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, robots, and space travel that were once considered &ld

Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images News Corp is developing a news distribution service designed to offer an alternative to Google and Facebook, according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s currently being called Knewz, and it’s meant to give the Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing empire leverage over the two tech giants, both of which have become integral to the distribution of news — often to publishers’ consternation.
Knewz is also being developed due to concerns from News

Bungie has activated the long-awaited cross-save feature for Destiny 2, meaning you can finally move your Guardians, with all of their loot, to a different platform and freely jump between console and PC at your leisure. Here’s how to do it, whether you want to transfer your account data between a PC and PS4, an Xbox One and PS4, or even (in the future) a PC and Stadia.First, there are a few important disclaimers to keep in mind before you go through with activating cross-save for your acc

Netflix is still the No. 1 subscription streaming service in the U.S., according to a new report from eMarketer, but rivals, including AmazonPrime Video and Hulu,are starting to cut into its market share. The analyst firm forecasts 182.5 million U.S. consumers will subscribe to over-the-top streaming services this year, or 53.3% of the population. Netflix is still the top choice here, with 158.8 million viewers in 2019, and it is continuing to grow. However, its share of the U.S. over-the-top su

Image: Google One of the disappointments my colleague Dan Seifert had with Lenovo’s Smart Clock was that the device’s tiny screen didn’t do as much as it could (or should) compared to similar products. At launch, it didn’t even offer the basic function of acting as a digital picture frame for your photo library. That’s something the Google Nest Hub smart display can do, as can Amazon’s various bedside Echo devices with screens. Lenovo and Google are rectifyin

This week, nearly 200 startups convened at Y CombinatorDemo Day to pitch venture capitalists, angels and other folks looking to spend some money.
YC chief executive officer Michael Seibeltook some time out of his busy schedule to join us on a special episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast. Given that we had Seibel to chat with, Kate and Alex decided to drop the regular format and riff interview-style about what the accelerator program is up to.
We discussed the new

Apple Watch | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge With about a quarter of the worldwide market, the Apple Watch is far and away the most popular fitness watch. Many of its wearers, though, want to track their activity with third-party applications. If you’re one of their number, don’t fret — happily, the Watch’s popularity means that many commonly used apps — such as MyFitnessPal, Couch to 5K, Strava, and Nike Training — have made that process pretty

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that it’s looking into 153 possible cases of a mysterious lung disease that seems to be associated with e-cigarette use. The agency says it’s investigating the illness alongside 16 states where the cases were reported from June 28th to August 20th.The illness seems to start out gradually with symptoms that include difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, and / or chest pain. Some cases also invo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has announced that it’ll be ending its practice of using customer tips to pay its Flex drivers’ wages, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times and emails sent out to drivers.
The practice came under fire when it was revealed back in February that Amazon (along with other delivery services like Instacart and DoorDash) were using customer tips to pay delivery drivers their base pay, letting the corporations in question save money a

Photo by Ricardo Funari/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images Worldwide, rising levels of air pollution increase the chances that people will die early, a sweeping new study finds. In Australia, which has historically low levels of air pollution, an increase in sooty air led to a sharp rise in the rate of earlier deaths.More air pollution means more deaths, even at low levels of air pollution and short exposures to it, according to the study, which measured particulate matter and daily dea

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 will release tomorrow, August 23rd. Our review just went live, and if you already preordered, there’s a decent chance that you may have already received your new phone. But if you’re still thinking about taking the plunge, there’s a really good reason why you should do so today: it’s the last day to get a bunch of preorder incentives with the purchase of a Note 10.The good news is that you can get

Microsoft first opened up its Minecraft Earth beta to compatible iOS devices last month, and now it’s heading to Android. The software maker is accepting sign-ups for the Android version, and you’ll need an augmented reality (AR-capable) handset running Android 7 or above. Naturally, the more modern and powerful your phone is, the better this AR game will run.
Minecraft Earth is a new AR game that’s similar to Pokémon Go. Microsoft has spent months building the new game

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is shutting down its private messaging feature on September 18th, the company announced in a support post. It said it made the decision after choosing to focus its attention on public conversations, like the Stories feature it launched last year. YouTube launched its in-app messaging feature back in August 2017, meaning it will have been live on the service for just over two years before being discontinued.
YouTube didn’t say exactly why it&

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge TCL’s foldable phones appear in a series of recently published patents, which were first picked up by Mobile Kopen (via LetsGoDigital). These patents contain renders that outline, in pretty thorough detail, TCL’s take on a Galaxy Fold-esque device as well as a clamshell design that mimics a flip phone, with a large, seamless display once it’s opened up.
This isn’t the first time that TCL’s foldable phones have made a blip on our ra

Satechi is releasing two new USB-C hubs. First, the good news: both have two HDMI ports instead of one, and are able to connect to two 4K displays at once. That’s cool, and also addresses our main issue with the previous model by supporting 4K resolution at 60Hz instead of being capped at 30Hz.
Now for the sort-of bad news: these are exclusive to MacBooks, MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and Mac mini desktops that have a dual USB-C port arrangement. And, as you can see in the image above, they

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge At least three people in the last year have been arrested for illegally selling guns using Snapchat, as detailed in a report from The Guardian. In two of the three cases, the men allegedly purchased guns in a state with lax gun laws, brought them into a state with restrictive laws, and used Snapchat to advertise their availability by posting pictures and videos of the guns. They were tracked down by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Although many data plans these days are advertised as “unlimited,” most actually have a cut-off point when your data stream is going to slow radically. If you don’t want to pay the premium prices that “unlimited” plans demand, then it’s even more important that you avoid going beyond your maximum data allowance, or there will be high penalties to pay. Either way, it’s smart to monitor your data flow — no

Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images Australian airline Qantas Airways has announced plans to start testing 20-hour direct flights from New York and London to Sydney as early as this October, starting with mostly empty planes of employees, according to Bloomberg.
The flights — if they’re enacted on a commercial level, not just as tests — would be the longest direct flight offered by any airline. To start, Qantas will fly roughly 40 passengers and crew. The test flight crews w

Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese is the type of director studios can bank on, because his name draws people to movie theater seats around the world. The Departed, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Gangs of New York, and Mean Streets are just a few of his extremely successful movies. But his upcoming Netflix-produced movie, The Irishman, may not get a chance at a full theatrical run.Netflix’s film division chief, Scott Stuber, and chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, are discussing the

Image: Bose Bose just announced a surprise product: the Portable Home Speaker, a $349 speaker with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that supports Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, AirPlay 2, and Spotify Connect.The new speaker looks a lot like a next-generation version of the company’s SoundLink Revolve+ from 2017, with a similar conical design for 360-degree sound output and an integrated carrying handle. The added Wi-Fi connectivity adds a whole host of new services that should make the Portab

The CareVoice, a Shanghai-based health insurance software startup with ambitions to expand throughout Asia, announced today that it has raised about $10 million in Series A funding.
The investment was led by LUN Partners Group and an undisclosed global investment manager that specializes in financial services, with participation from DNA Capital and returning investors SOSV and Artesian Capital. It will be used on research and development and to grow The CareVoice’sbusiness in Hong Kong, w

Remediant, a startup that helps companies secure privileged access in a modern context, today announced a $15 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital and ForgePoint Capital.
Remediant’sco-founders, Paul Lanzi and Tim Keeler, worked in biotech for years and saw a problem first-hand with the way companies secured privileged access. It was granted to certain individuals in the organization carte blanche, and they believed if you could limit access, it would make the space more secur