Technology news

The Olympics and Paralympics are coming to Tokyo next year, and official fleet provider Toyota is planning a massive deployment of battery-electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles.The automaker says it will provide “3,700 mobility products and/or vehicles” for the Olympics, 90 percent of which will be “electrified.” That can mean either battery-electric, hydrogen-powered, or even gas-electric hybrid. Of the 3,700 vehicles, 850 will be battery-electric and 500 will be fuel-c

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Each of the big five tech companies has been caught secretly using human contractors to listen to conversations recorded by their gadgets and services. Pro-privacy Apple is one of those companies, and thanks to a report from the Irish Examiner, we may know a little more about the actual work Apple contractors did, including having to listen to an arduous 1,000 Siri recordings every day.
Apple’s Siri assistant currently records and sends snippets of your

When Dell acquired EMC in 2016 for $67 billion, it created a complicated consortium of interconnected organizations. Some, like VMware and Pivotal, operate as completely separate companies. They have their own boards of directors, can acquire companies and are publicly traded on the stock market. Yet they work closely within Dell, partnering where it makes sense. When Pivotal’s stock price plunged recently, VMware saved the day when it bought the faltering company for $2.7 billion yesterda

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has banned conservative news site The Epoch Times from buying ads after it was discovered that the site was trying to avoid the company’s rules for transparency around political advertisements, according to a report from NBC News.The Epoch Times previously spent $2 million on Facebook ads supporting President Trump and amplifying conspiracy theories, which is more than any other organization, save for the Trump campaign itself. After journa

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Earlier this week, YouTube quietly announced a policy change to its treatment of videos targeted toward minors and young children. The video platform says it will now remove all content that contains “violent” or “mature” themes if it is targeted toward kids, either through the title of the video, its description, or the accompanying tags.Going forward, YouTube says this type of content “will no longer be allowed on the platf

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is testing a new Collections section that rounds up content into themed lists like “Watch in One Weekend” and “Stream & Scream.” Netflix told TechCrunch that Collections are put together by “experts on the company’s creative teams” instead of the algorithms that ordinarily recommend content to you on the main home screen.The feature is only being tested on iOS for now. If you’re involved in the A

Google yesterday announced it’d banned 210 YouTube accounts “related to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong” and the discovery was “consistent with recent observations and actions related to China announced by Facebook and Twitter.” If you’re not an avid reader of social media company blogs, let me clear things up for you: Google banned 210 accounts that the People’s Republic of China was using to spread disinformation and propaganda about the protests an

GOG, that other gaming platform, created a new launcher specifically to help everyone get all their games in one place. I finally tried it, and it’s a surprisingly gratifying experience. The Store Wars of 2019 continue to bubble beneath the crust of the gaming industry — forever brewing into the next big shitstorm should someone dare to declare platform exclusivity. Being upfront, I only care about it on a philosophical level, in that I like to examine the arguments, but i

Photo by Natt Garun / The Verge Amazon is reportedly selling thousands of products that are mislabeled, banned, or declared unsafe by federal agencies, according to an investigation from The Wall Street Journal. It found that no fewer than 4,152 items fitting those criteria were freely available to buy on Amazon’s storefront.The list of mislabeled, banned, and unsafe products found by the Journal is shocking, including “FDA-approved” products that the agency never vetted, medi

Illustrations by Alex Castro / The Verge Some of the world’s largest book publishers have jointly filed a lawsuit against Amazon-owned audiobook company Audible today over a new, controversial speech-to-text feature the literary industry claims is a violation of copyright law.The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District Court of New York, includes the Big Five: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. It also includes San Francisco-based publisher

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1. Overstock CEO resigns after ‘deep state’ comments
This comes after CEO Patrick Byrne released a statement declaring that he cooperated with federal investigators back in 2015 and was in fact “the notorious ‘missing chapter 1’ of the Russia investigation.” He

Waymo, the self-driving car company under Alphabet, has been testing in the suburbs of Phoenix for several years now. And while the sunny metropolis might seem like the ideal and easiest location to test autonomous vehicle technology, there are times when the desert becomes a dangerous place for any driver — human or computer.
The two big safety concerns in this desert region are sudden downpours that cause flash floods and haboobs, giant walls of dust between 1,500 and 3,000 feet high tha

The day of reckoning for the “flexible office space as a startup” is coming, and it’s coming up fast. WeWork’s IPO filing has fired the starting gun on the race to become the game-changer both in the future of property and real estate but also the future of how we live and work. As Churchill once said, “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Until recently, WeWork was the ruler by which other flexible-space startups were measured, but q

It’s perfectly natural for a red-blooded American to, once they have procured their first real drone, experiment with attaching a flame thrower to it. But it turns out that this harmless hobby is frowned upon by the biggest buzzkills in the world… the feds.
Yes, the FAA has gone and published a notice that drones and weapons are “A Dangerous Mix.” Well, that’s arguable. But they’re the authority here, so we have to hear them out.
“Perhaps you’ve s

Pad & Quill makes some of the most handsome leather goods for the modern world, and its Gladstone Leather Briefcase is no different. This bag harkens back to the day of gentlemen with newspapers tucked under their arms and an Ascot on their head. This bag has an air of permanence and longevity, and yet it’s designed for people with modern needs.
The bag features a smooth, hinged top that spreads to reveal a large opening. The bag doesn’t collapse inward when it’s empty or o

The UK’s health data watchdog, the National Data Guardian (NDG), has published correspondence between her office and the national privacy watchdog which informed the ICO’s finding in 2017 that a data-sharing arrangement between an NHS Trust and Google-owned DeepMind broke the law.
The exchange was published following a Freedom of Information request by TechCrunch.
In fall 2015 the Royal Free NHS Trust and DeepMind signed a data-sharing agreement which saw the medical records of 1.6 m

Samsung’s settled into a nice little twice-yearly schedule for releasing flagships. That’s allowed the company double the opportunity to introduce some nice upgrades to their high-end Android handsets. Nearly six months after the release of the S10, the company just dropped the new Note line. Here’s a whole bunch of words I wrote about the 10+, the larger of the devices, which is helping distinguish the two lines with an utterly gigantic 6.8-inch screen.Samsung Galaxy Note 10+

Image: FAA The Federal Aviation Administration would like you to know that drones and weapons are “a dangerous mix.” The government agency sent out a notice on Thursday “warning” the public “that it is illegal to operate a drone with a dangerous weapon attached.” A dangerous weapon is broadly defined as “any item that is used for, or is readily capable of, causing death or serious bodily injury.”“Perhaps you’ve seen online photos and v

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge For some time now, Google Calendar users have been vulnerable to a rather nasty type of spam that seems to have gained momentum lately. It works like this: an email containing an invitation to an event is sent by a spammer to your Google Calendar (this can apparently happen even with an email that ends up in your spam folder), and the calendar automatically puts the appointment into your calendar — even though the body of the appointment contains a

India today addressed a long-standing challenge that has been affecting the country’s booming startup ecosystem. As part of a raft of measures to boost overall economic growth from a five-year low, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said New Delhi is exempting startups from Section 56(2) — a provision more popularly known as an “angel tax” in the local income tax laws — that required startups to pay a certain tax if they received an investment at a rate h

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber imposed a $1-per-ride surcharge it called a “Safe Rides Fee” in 2014, but it was a just a play for profit. The money collected by the company from the fee — estimated at around $500 million — was never earmarked specifically for safety and was “devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip,” according to an excerpt from New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s new book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

Photo: Hulu Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated to reflect the film’s release on Hulu.
In the middle of the documentary Jawline, 16-year-old nano-celebrity Austyn Tester organizes a fan meetup in a mall food court. A gaggle of teen and tween girls show up, and he soaks up their rapturous affection, offering compliments, hugs, a

The 2020 Chevy Bolt EV now has 259 miles of range, a 9% increase from previous year models of the electric hatchback, according to the EPA.
To get there, the company focused on cell chemistry, not the battery pack. The GM brand did not add more battery cells or change the battery pack or the way it is integrated into the vehicle structure, a spokesperson confirmed.
Instead, Chevrolet’s battery engineering team made what the company described as “impactful changes to the cell che

CEO Jeremy OBriant never intended to create Torch, an agile growth marketing agency based in San Francisco. He started his career as a CPA, but after leading a growth team at Sidecar and running growth projects on his own, forming Torch was the most obvious thing to do. He now leads a team that implements “agile growth,” an iterative approach that involves setting clear goals and running smaller experiments over the course of monthly sprints. Learn more about their approach to growth

RKO Radio Pictures Inc./Photofes 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
The Most Dangerous Game, a 1932 movie adaptation o

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has updated its employee guidelines to caution against unnecessary political debate and improper disclosure of company information.Unveiled on Friday, the guidelines direct Googlers to be respectful in all internal communications, with prohibitions against trolling or blanket statements against groups of people that make fellow employees unwelcome.“Don’t troll, name call, or engage in ad hominem attacks,” the new guidelines read.

Oh hey, y’all, it’s Friday! It’s August! Which means it’s a great day for Facebookto drop a little news it would prefer you don’t notice. News that you won’t find a link to on the homepage of Facebook’s Newsroom — which is replete with colorfully illustrated items it does want you to read (like the puffed up claim that “Now You Can See and Control the Data That Apps and Websites Share With Facebook”).
The blog post Facebook would really

Nonprofit groups and NGOs are now invited to apply for exhibit space in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF on Friday, October 4th.
Founded in 2014, TechCrunch Include leverages our extensive network to support underserved and underrepresented groups in tech. Two years ago, we began to invite nonprofit and NGO groups to exhibit at the conference, as well as provide tickets for the event. This year, TechCrunch will host 10 nonprofits or NGOs at the Moscone Center at Startup Alley inside D

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge The Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Facebook when it came to light last year, but newly revealed documents containing internal Facebook conversations released jointly by Facebook and the District of Columbia attorney general show that the company was already investigating complaints about Cambridge Analytica potentially abusing data as early as September 2015, months before the December date that Facebook has repeatedly testified to.“We suspect