Technology news

Four years ago, Porscheshowed off a concept that would mark a turning point — in investment, R&D and product trajectory — for the German automaker. The reaction to the Mission E, as it was called then, prompted Porsche AG to push forward with a plan to not only develop one electric car, but commit billions of dollars toward electrification.
On Wednesday, in a debut held in three countries simultaneously, the world finally got to see the first fruits of its strategy.
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If you’ve got a Pixel or the Essential Phone, chances are that you’ve got — or are about to get — the full stable release of Android 10, which has a bunch of interesting new features that are worth checking out.
But where do you find them? I installed Android 10 on my original Pixel XL late yesterday (yes, I’ve still got the first version of the Pixel — so sue me), and except for a few stylistic changes, the new features weren’t immediately obvious.You c

Image: Valve Valve today announced a visual overhaul for game libraries to make it easier to find your games, see what your friends are playing, and follow news, updates, and events from game developers. The updates come as Steam faces increasing competition from the Epic Games Store and Discord to be the central hub for PC gaming. Steam has long clung to a relatively dated user interface, so the refresh is a welcome change for the nearly 16-year-old service. The library update will be availabl

Fourteen women today filed a lawsuit against Lyft alleging the company has not addressed complaints pertaining to sexual assault, including rape. The suit, filed today in the Superior Court of San Francisco, seeks special, general and punitive damages, among other types of relief.
In one case, a woman describes a Lyftdriver who ended the ride more than one mile away from her house, locked the doors, told her, “I love you” and took her phone, the suit claims. It goes on to describe ho

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has “temporarily” turned off the ability to tweet via text message just days after the feature was misused by hackers to tweet a racial slur, bomb threat, and other crude messages from the account of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
The ability to tweet via text was important to Twitter in the service’s early days, but it’s more of a legacy feature at this point since most people rely on the smartphone app. The feature still exists

Google’s Project Jacquard — the company’s touch-sensitive fabric technology — is making a surprise return today with the announcement of a second product using the tech: the Cit-E smart backpack, built in collaboration with luxury fashion brand Yves Saint Laurent, that features a touch-sensitive shoulder strap for controlling a connected smartphone (as spotted by Charged).
Like the first Jacquard-powered product, the Levi’s smart jacket, the Cit-E backpack is powere

MGM and Huluannounced today that they will be adapting “The Testaments,” Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The series has been key in establishing Hulu’s reputation as a home for original content. It was the first streaming original to win an Emmy for Best Drama, and was recently renewed for a fourth season.
The novel, meanwhile, was published back in 1985. The show followed its blueprint during its first season, telling the st

Photo by Brooke Palmer / Warner Bros. Entertainment A history of disappointment has lowered the bar for Stephen King adaptations. A few extraordinary exceptions aside, adaptations of King’s work tend to range from acceptable to disastrous. Some draw on weaker material. (There’s likely a ceiling on how good any film version of Thinner could be.) Others fail to explore the underlying themes of King’s books in favor of scares — like either version of Pet Sematary — or

At the big European tech trade show, IFA 2019, Amazontoday announced over 20 new Fire TV-branded devices, including a next-generation Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Edition soundbar from Anker — its first foray into Fire TV Edition audio products — and 15 new Fire TV Edition products, including the first OLED Fire TV Edition smart TVs.
The announcement represents a significant expansion of Amazon’s Fire TV hardware line and integrations at a time when Roku has gained a lead over Amazon

Hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebookaccounts have been found online.
The exposed server contained over 419 million records over several databases on users across geographies, including 133 million records on U.S.-based Facebook users, 18 million records of users in the U.K., and another with more than 50 million records on users in Vietnam.
But because the server wasn’t protected with a password, anyone could find and access the database.
Each record contained a user&rs

Samsung has announced its next in-house processor, the Exynos 980, at IFA 2019. It looks to be taking a big step forward by offering a 5G modem integrated directly into the CPU, instead of requiring a separate modem just to be able to support the next-generation network.It’s a small change, but an important one: much like Qualcomm, which is promising to add a 5G modem to its next Snapdragon flagship, Samsung is making 5G support the default option for future phones and tablets that use Exy

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Up to this point, TVs that come loaded with Amazon’s Fire TV software (or even Roku OS for that matter) have stuck to LCD. But today Amazon has announced that an OLED Fire TV Edition is on the way — just not in the United States, unfortunately. The company has partnered with Grundig to release two versions of an OLED TV: one will have far-field voice microphones built in for hands-free Alexa control and, in case that creeps you out, the other one won

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Amazon and Anker are partnering to put a Fire TV into a soundbar for the first time. The new product is picking up Anker’s Nebula branding, which means that the proper way to refer to this new device is “The Nebula Soundbar — Fire TV Edition.” It’s a $229.99 soundbar that is able to stream 4K Ultra HD video and provides the Fire TV software without the need for another box.
Packing a streaming box into a soundbar seems like an obviou

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Amazon is announcing updates to its Fire TV ecosystem today, including a new version of its flagship streaming box, the Fire TV Cube. Although it looks exactly the same, it should operate much more quickly than before. Part of that is the usual bump in processor speed, but a much more important part will be a new feature Amazon is calling “Local Voice Control.”
Local Voice Control allows the Fire TV Cube to interpret some commands without having to as

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s annual September event is less than a week away, and that means it’s officially Apple hardware season. Although we’re likely to see new iPhones and possibly new Apple Watches, another hardware product might get some stage time as well: a new Apple TV.
MacRumors reports today that references to a new Apple TV have popped up in an internal build of iOS 13. A tweet from @never_released, which MacRumors says has shared codenames

The Disrupt Battlefield is one of the best parts of the conference. Twenty+ startups step on to the Disrupt Main Stage with a product, a pitch, and a dream. They have six minutes to convey how they’re going to fundamentally disrupt their industry, and six minutes of Q&A with world-renowned judges from the VC world.
Pride. Anxiety. Despair. Glory. Anything could happen on that stage, particularly with judges that are at the top of their game and can smell bull shit from a mile away.
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Flipkart,the largest e-commerce platform in India, said Tuesday it has concluded the roll-out of a range of features to its shopping app in what is its biggest update in recent years.
Chief among these new features is access to Flipkartin Hindi language. Prior to the revamp of the app, Flipkart was available only in English, a language spoken by 10% of India’s 1.3 billion population.
Flipkart says it is hoping that the new features, which includes a video streaming service, would help it r

During an Oval Office press conference this week, the President told reports that the United States is currently not interesting in broaching the subject of Huawei as part of increasingly heated trade conversations with China. The statement appears to run counter to pat suggestions that he was willing to discuss the U.S. government’s blacklist of the electronics giant during trade talks.“It’s a national security concern,” Trump said. “Huawei is a big concern of our

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1. Children’s privacy costs just $170 million for Google in settlement with the FTC
The complaint from the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General’s office focused on YouTube’suse of cookies to track viewers of kids’ channels without getting permission f

Creators of child-directed content will be financially impacted by the changes required by the FTC settlement, YouTube admitted today. The settlement will end the use of children’s personal data for ad-targeting purposes, the FTC said. To address creators’ concerns over their businesses, YouTube also announced a $100 million fund to invest in original children’s content.
The fund, distributed over three years, will be dedicated to the creation of “thoughtful” origin

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon looks set to release a new Fire TV Cube and a host of new “Fire TV Edition” devices soon — as well as what could be the first OLED Fire TV television set. Now-deleted posts on TechCrunch and CordCutters had the details, which have since made the rounds on Engadget, the BBC, and elsewhere.Reportedly, the new Fire TV Cube will have a six-core processor and support Dolby Vision, plus be able to interpret voice controls directly on th

The National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday that a combination of factors that included driver inattention, the design of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system Autopilot and an over reliance on the feature caused the January 2018 crash of a Model S into a parked fire truck on a highway in Southern California.The NTSB filed its briefing on the probable cause of the crash a day after issuing a preliminary brief that provided important details about the incident, including tha

While investors are already writing big checks for meditation startups, Elevate Labs founder and CEO Jesse Pickard said that none of the existing meditation apps can replace the experience of working with a human coach.
“This experience where you have somebody that meets with you is wildly better than any digital product that’s out there,” Pickard said. “The problem is, it’s not affordable to 99% of the planet.”
So Elevate Labs is launching a new mobile app to

An artistic rendering of the Aeolus satellite that ESA moved on Monday, September 2nd. | Image: ESA On Monday, a European satellite changed its position in orbit to avoid a potential collision with one of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites — one of 60 probes the company launched in May to beam internet coverage down to Earth. The European Space Agency (ESA), which operates the satellite, performed the maneuver after calculating a higher-than-usual probability that the two satellites might

The FTC is imposing a historic fine of $170 million for YouTube’s violation of the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. The settlement agreement will put increased responsibility on both YouTube and the content creators themselves to properly identify any child-directed content on the platform, as YouTube is now prohibited from collecting personal data from viewers of any of those videos. Creators who fail to comply with this new requirement may be penalized di

All eyes are on the next iPhone, but Apple could also be working on a new AppleTV. The device could be announced next week, or maybe later this fall.
The anonymous Twitter account @never_released shared the codename of a new Apple TV — AppleTV11,1 or J305AP. They have been accurate when it comes to finding codenames of various unreleased Apple products in the past.
AppleTV11,1 is J305AP. https://t.co/jjCkhADmJh
— Longhorn (@never_released) September 4, 2019MacRumors has separately fo

Let’s Do This is a Y Combinator alumni startup from 2018 which is a marketplace for endurance events, from a 5K fun run to an Ironman triathlon. It has now raised a $5 million seed round, with Serena Williams and Usain Bolt participating. The round was led by Pete Flint (partner at NFX, formerly of Trulia and LastMinute).
Other investors include Y Combinator,Shasta, Index and FJ Labs. Other angels were Paul Buchheit (YC, Gmail), Yuri Sagalov (YC, AeroFS), Simon Nixon (MoneySupermarket), Ti

The company formerly known as WeWork, in an amendment to the S-1 that launched dozens of critical headlines, says it has added a new director to its board and unwound the $5.9 million payout to chief executive Adam Neumann over the name “We.” 
The new board member is Frances Frei, a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School and a consultant to the company since March 2019.
Frei’s previous claim to fame was rehabilitating the executive and

Startup studio Betaworks is putting out a call for audio-focused startups.
Specifically, it’s announcing Audiocamp, the latest in its “camp” programs, where it makes a pre-seed investment in a handful of early-stage startups, all around a specific theme. (The last one was focused on synthetic media.)
“When we make these calls for a camp around a theme, what we’re trying to do is see everything that’s out there in a short period of time,” said Danika Lasz

An artistic rendering of one of OneWeb’s satellites in space. | Image: OneWeb OneWeb — an aerospace company with plans to beam internet connectivity from space — announced plans today to provide “fiber-like internet” coverage to the Arctic starting as early as 2020. Using the company’s planned mega-constellation of satellites, the company says it can provide high-speed internet to homes, boats, and planes all located above the 60th parallel north latitude.
On

It looks like Blizzard’s colorful hero shooter Overwatch is getting more portable very soon. Both Eurogamer and Kotaku are reporting that the game will be coming to the Nintendo Switch next month; these reports follow a series of retail leaks that pointed to the port’s existence. The official announcement is expected during today’s Nintendo Direct broadcast, which kicks off at 6PM ET tonight.
It’s shaping up to be a busy year for Overwatch. In addition to the Switch port,

Logitechhas delivered a new version of its popular MX Master mouse — the MX Master 3. This brand new iteration of the wireless mouse finally adds USB-C charging, which brings it in line with the charging standards used on most modern smartphones and computer accessories. Along with the MX Master 3, Logitech also debuted its new MX Keys wireless keyboard, which gives you a lot of what’s great about their fantastic Logitech Craft keyboard in a more affordable, slightly trimmed-down pac

The early-bird countdown clock just keeps spinning, folks, and once it ticks over to 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6, your chance to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt SF 2019 disappears once and for all. Save your money to feather your nest; buy your early-bird passes right now.
Our flagship Disrupt kicks off in less than one month (on October 2), and we can’t wait. More than 10,000 people will descend on Moscone North to focus on anything and everything related to early-stage startup

Australian satellite startup Fleet Space Technologies has raised a $7.35 million round of funding to help launch its next generation of nanosatellites, extremely small satellites it employs to deliver Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to customers globally.
Fleet’s satellites are roughly the size of shoe boxes, which are much cheaper and easier to launch than traditional geocommnications satellites, and the company intends to use a globe-spanning constellation of these in order to serv