Technology news

Most mobile apps seek to be the center of attention. They are created by owners and product managers who obsess over extending as many user sessions as possible. Unfortunately, they don’t place a high consideration on the impacts of their customers’ well-being. Meanwhile, many users are increasingly aware of how much time they are spending staring and tapping at their favorite apps. Apple has even made users more aware of just how much time they are spending on their phones with the

Photo: TiVo So much for it being an early, experimental test. TiVo has confirmed that it plans to place pre-roll video advertisements before DVR recordings for all customers — even those with a lifetime subscription plan. “DVR advertising is going to be a permanent part of the service,” a company spokesperson flatly told Light Reading. “We expect to be fully rolled out to all eligible retail devices within 90 days.”
“Eligible” retail devices are those r

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! Confession time: I’ve always yearned to be the headphones-in-public-wearing type, but due to my follicly-challenged condition — I haven’t been able to. In my dreams, I often cycle to work, donning Apple’s Beats atop my luscious, long hair. Then I wake up, full of joy, only to stare in the mirror and see the reflection of my shining bald head. Aw, how terrible I feel. But you know what

Our robot colleague Satoshi Nakaboto writes about Bitcoin every fucking day. Welcome to another edition of Bitcoin Today, where I, Satoshi Nakaboto, tell you what’s been going on with Bitcoin in the past 24 hours. As Nightingale used to say: Time is money! Bitcoin Price We closed the day, September 20 2019, at a price of $10,181. That’s a minor 0.82 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$84.68. It was the lowest closing price in eight days. We’re still 49 percent below Bitcoin&lsqu

The debate over the police using machine learning is intensifying – it is considered in some quarters as controversial as stop and search. Stop and search is one of the most contentious areas of how the police interact with the public. It has been heavily criticized for being discriminatory towards black and minority ethnic groups, and for having marginal effects on reducing crime. In the same way, the police use of machine learning algorithms has been condemned by human rights groups who

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Earlier this week, Facebook released a new update for its Creator Studio, allowing businesses on the platform to schedule Instagram posts and IGTV videos up to at least six months in advance. This update isn’t completely new as companies have been able  to schedule posts through third-party services for a while. But the problem with using third-par

Back in January, Blackstone — the investment firm whose assets under management surpassed a jaw-dropping half a trillion dollars earlier this year — quietly began piecing together a new, growth equity platform called Blackstone Growth, or BXG. Step one was hiring away Jon Korngold from General Atlantic, where he’d spent the previous 18 years, including as a managing director and a member of its management committee.
Step two has been for Korngold, who is responsible for running

Apple Arcade launched yesterday, alongside iOS 13, and while I’ve only used it for a short while, I think I can say this is the kind of mobile gaming I want, now and forever. For starters, this is a price I can actually stomach. I’m not a fan of subscription gaming, per se. But with a price as reasonable as Arcade’s ($4.99/month), and as many games as there are (i.e. more than I’ll be able to play in several months, if not a year), I don’t feel the pecuniary sting

Immigration Silicon Valley When engineer Seth Vargo found that a company using his open-source code worked with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, he pulled the code off Github. The company, enterprise software maker Chef, found that, without the code, its business ground to a halt.
Vargo had worked for the Seattle-based company, but he didn’t know about the contract with ICE until tech writer Shanley Kane tweeted about it on Monday. ICE, which was formed under the presidency of Geo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge PayPal is reinstating a controversial policy around its handling of fees in the event of a refund. Starting next month, PayPal will begin pocketing the initial 2.9 percent commission fee sellers forfeit during a transaction even when the seller is refunding a customer in full.The company initially rolled out this policy back in April, but seller backlash over PayPal claiming the commission fee led it to reverse course. Now, PayPal says it’s updating

Google’s Chromebook laptops are no longer “cheap and cheerful” toys only good for light browsing. They can actually do serious stuff, like run Android applications, as well as run fully-fledged Linux distributions.  But to make the most of that, you need a reasonably powerful machine, like this Samsung Chromebook Plus V2. This meaty device packs a 12.2-inch touchscreen, 64GB of storage, 4GB RAM, and an Intel Core m3 processor. It’s also a 2-in-1 machine, allowing yo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is almost completely backtracking on the verification system changes it announced yesterday. All YouTubers who are currently verified will get to keep their verification status, and YouTubers who are not yet verified will still be able to apply for it once they hit 100,000 subscribers, as creators have in the past.
Only a single key change isn’t being reversed: YouTube will actually verify that channels are authentic, whereas in the past it

Yesterday, software development tool maker Chef found itself in the middle of a firestorm after a Tweet called them out for doing business with DHS/ICE. Eventually it led to an influential open source developer removing a couple of key pieces of software from the project, bringing down some parts of Chef’s commercial business.
Chef intends to fulfill its contract with ICE, in spite of calls to cancel it. In a blog post published this morning, Chef CEO Barry Crist defended the decision. &ld