Technology news

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Hurricane Dorian’s expected landfall on Florida has Miami, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and Tampa scrambling to remove bikes and scooters from their streets. If the devices aren’t removed from the streets, they could potentially be picked up by hurricane winds — transforming into threats to people and property.
Miami has demanded that all of these mobility companies remove their products from the streets by noon on Friday, Bloomberg report

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge New details about an upcoming Tile-like item tracker from Apple have been uncovered in the code of iOS 13. Rumors of this feature being built into iOS 13 have been circulating since last June when the Find My app was first announced at WWDC. Now, according to MacRumors, we have an even better idea of what Apple’s tracking system might look like.An examination of the iOS 13 code revealed an image of “a small circular tag with an Apple logo in t

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony’s Xperia 1 came to the US just last month, but next week, the company may already be planning to announce a successor to the flagship smartphone, specifically on September 5th at 12PM BST / 7AM ET during IFA 2019. The model is rumored to be called the Xperia 2, and according to Xperia Blog (via 9to5Google), we might be seeing it for the first time in a batch of leaked images.
It’s easy to tell the Xperia 1 from Sony’s earlier phones. It a

Nintendo’s Switch Lite seems like a great portable console. But due to the portable-focused nature, you’ll probably want to get a case for it. Fortunately, Nintendo is making an official one that looks just about perfect — assuming you live in Japan (via NintendoSoup).
The case appears to be made out of some sort of gray cloth, and it clips on to the Switch Lite. It’s not the flashiest case on the market, but it does the basics: it protects the Switch, it has a fold-down

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked on Friday afternoon by a group that calls itself the Chuckle Squad. The hackers tweeted racial slurs, antisemitic messages and at least one Holocaust denial from Dorsey’s account. Some offensive tweets were up for about 10 minutes, though not long after the hack began, those tweets were already being deleted, and they’re all gone now.
We're aware that @jack was compromised and investigating what happened.— Twitter Comms

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was seemingly hacked on Friday afternoon by a group that calls itself the Chuckle Squad. Twitter’s communications team issued a statement via Twitter.
We're aware that @jack was compromised and investigating what happened.— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) August 30, 2019The hackers used their time controlling Dorsey’s account to plug a Discord server used for their own activity, asking people to join. The server invitation link twee

A hacker has compromised Jack Dorsey’sTwitteraccount.
A stream of rogue tweets — including racial slurs — were posted to the Twitter chief executive’s own Twitter account just after 3:30pm ET. One of the tweets posted a Twitter handle for someone who purported to take credit for the account takeover. That account was quickly suspended.
Dorsey has more than 4.21 million followers.
Twitter spokesperson Ebony Turner said the company was investigating. The company also t

Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge Xbox Live went down again, according to the Xbox team and lots of reports on social media. This is the second time in just a few days. The outage lasted approximately two hours, and the service appears to be back up now — save a few lingering errors:
Our teams are aware & currently investigating errors when updating the Xbox One console. We'll update here & on our status page: https://t.co/PzAdjUFMJj when we have more info to share.— Xbox Supp

Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge Xbox Live is down again, according to the Xbox team and lots of reports on social media. This is the second time in just a few days.
The outage is mainly affecting sign-ins, account creations, and searches, according to a tweet from the Xbox team, but those sign-ins are required to play lots of popular online games.
We're aware that some users are unable to sign in currently & our teams are looking into it now. We'll update when we have more info to share. Th

Apple really unleashed the spoofs and goofs when the care instructions were spotted online for its new credit card. Of particular note were warnings against contact with denim and leather— common materials for people who own wallets and/or wear pants.In the intervening week and change, I’m sure more than one entrepreneur had the thought of targeting those very specific parameters. Take Pittsburgh-based KerfCase, which is offering this $39 wooden card case with a pop up feature for th

Photo by Kevin Winter / Getty Images Boyhood director Richard Linklater is making an adaptation of the classic Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along, which is set to star Ben Platt, Blake Jenner, and Beanie Feldstein. But in classic Linklater fashion, he’ll be filming the entire musical in real time over the course of the next 20 years, via The Hollywood Reporter.Merrily We Roll Along is a musical that depicts the lives of three friends: Franklin Shepard, a Broadway composer; Cha

If you were trying to sneak in a quick game on Xbox Live during your Friday afternoon lunch break and found that you can’t get online: don’t worry, you’re not alone.
While Microsoft’sXbox Live Status page still says all things are good to go (Update: Microsoft’s status page has now caught up with the outage, and says that it’s impacting sign-ins, account creations and searches), reports are pouring in of an outage keeping many users from logging in.
Micro

Skypeis best known for being a video calling app and, to some extent, that’s because its messaging feature set has been a bit underdeveloped. Today, the company is working to change that image with a series of improvements to Skype’s chatting features aimed at further differentiating it from rival apps.
One of the most useful of the new features is support for Message Drafts.
Similar to email, any message you type up in Skype but don’t yet send is saved within the conversation

It’s been over a year since CD Projekt Red last unveiled a look at the highly anticipatedCyberpunk 2077. Today, the company has released a new trailer showing off what gameplay will look like when the game comes out next year.The demo footage appears to be a condensed version of the one shown behind closed doors at E3 this year, and it shows off more of the actual gameplay for Cyberpunk 2077. As the demo explains, there are no set classes in Cyberpunk, although the demo does show off two d

Image: iRobot In January, Roomba maker iRobot announced its next autonomous chore-doing robot: a lawnmower called Terra. Autonomous lawnmowers aren’t exactly new, but Terra is different. Unlike most robot lawnmowers, it uses wireless beacons to understand what your yard looks like rather than relying on a long, cumbersome wire that’s around the edges of your lawn.
Last we heard, the Terra was in beta. Now, iRobot tells The Verge that the beta is “progressing well,” and i

Netflix The first episode of Carole & Tuesday — the new anime series from Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo director Shinichirō Watanabe — hits Netflix on August 30th. The series is set on Mars, 50 years after humans started living there, in a New York City-like metropolis called Alba City. It’s a futuristic world, but a familiar one as well. Watanabe pulls off an impressive trick here by presenting a world that’s just a little off familiar tech levels, just far

Spotify Spotify will now let all the people who insist on using Facebook Stories share their musical tastes. Similar to the feature that lets you share music to an Instagram Story from directly within Spotify, users can now do that for Facebook Stories, too. To share music from Spotify, tap “share,” and then select your preferred platform. Facebook will now show up as an option, and you can choose to share it to your story or News Feed.This feature may round out Spotify’s shar

Household debt in the U.S. continues to rise and as of this year now stands at nearly $14 trillion. Now, one of the startups that’s building tools to help consumers better cope with that is announcing a round of funding and plans for an IPO — signs of the demand for its services, and its success to date.
Credit Sesame — which lets consumers check their credit scores and evaluate options to rebalance existing debts and loans to improve that score and thus their overall “fi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Friday, the Federal Trade Commission voted to settle federal privacy charges against YouTube, as first reported by Politico. The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have corroborated the report, saying the official settlement will likely be made public next week.The exact terms of the settlement are unclear, but Google will reportedly pay fines between $150 and $200 million. The charges stem from data collection and targeting practices in YouTube, which

Emailing a co-worker without realizing they’re on vacation is a bummer for everyone involved. The second you get that “out of office” auto-reply, you suddenly remember the 20-minute conversation you had about their upcoming trip to Hawaii and feel like a goober. Meanwhile, they come back to a thousand “Hey, can you help with this? OH NEVERMIND SORRY ENJOY YOUR TRIP!” email threads.
Googleis trying to make this happen a little less often with a feature it’ll so

Didi Chuxing is launching a self-driving car pilot in Shanghai, the Chinese ride-hailing giant announced.The local government in Shanghai recently awarded Didi a permit to test its autonomous vehicles on public roads in Jiading District of Shanghai, though the company says it plans to expand beyond that district starting in 2021, according to Reuters. The company says it will deploy “30 different models of L4 autonomous vehicles.” (L4 means Level 4 on the Society of Automotive Engine

Programming note: Happy Labor Day!
To our U.S.-based readers, happy Labor Day weekend. Extra Crunch will be off on Monday and will resume publishing next Tuesday.Reminder: EC ticket discounts for Enterprise Sessions and Disrupt SF
Next week, we will be hosting our Enterprise Sessions event at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. It’s a killer lineup, and directly follows up on Ron and Frederic’s Extra Crunch coverage around quantum computing, next-generation cloud services, artificia

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A group of Google contractors in Pittsburgh is moving to unionize, according to a statement released on August 29th.
66 percent have signed union cards
About 90 employees work at a tech contractor for Google in the area called HCL, according to the statement, and 66 percent have signed union cards, indicating support for the plan. The employees are looking to unionize with United Steelworkers, an organization that represents about 850,000 workers. The

The thing about kids is that they don’t know things — they’re neither experienced nor educated — but they’re still pretty smart. And that makes the YouTube Kids platform’s strategy of determining whether it’s dealing with an adult pretty dumb.
The age gate is trivial to crack
Let’s back up for a second. YouTube has a mobile app for kids, and the idea behind it is that there will be guardrails up on the content there. Essentially, the idea is that y

German startup Volocopter says it’s the first company to fly an electric vertical takeoff and landing (or eVTOL) aircraft at an international airport while integrated into the air traffic management system. The company released a video of its 18-rotor aircraft (or octadecacopter) flying around Helsinki Airport on Friday, which shows test pilot Damian Hischier zooming around the runways a few dozen feet in the air.It’s not Volocopter’s first test flight by any means. But if the

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1. Apple will unveil the next iPhone September 10
Applehas sent out invites confirming rumors that its next major press event will happen on September 10. The event is expected to focus on the iPhone 11, unveiling three different models — the standard 11, as well as two Pro options.
If this