Technology news

Microsoft shuttering its ebook store is hardly the end of the world. The Kindle customer base is, by all accounts, predominant in this space. Not all product launches succeed — some fail. That’s business. And, to be fair in disclosing the “other side,” Microsoft is offering coupons to make up some of the lost value their ebook customers are experiencing. But it gives one pause — and should give one pause. Combined with the news that Apple is retiring the iTunes bra

Photo by Ryan Manning / The Verge Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and chairman of its board until 2014, was among the powerful men who spent a meaningful amount of time with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to reporting from The New York Times. Employees of Gates’ namesake foundation reportedly also met with Epstein, in multiple visits to the disgraced financier’s mansion.
A spokeswoman for Gates declined to say how many times the pair had met
Previously, Gates ha

The Pixel 4 is set to be unveiled at an event on Tuesday. This much we know for sure. We know a bunch more, too, (as outlined in this rumor roundup from yesterday), thanks to both official reveals and unofficial leaks. How much of this was planned is hard to say, but Google seemingly doesn’t mind building up the hype cycle.Earlier today, Best Buy Canada made what may well be the most egregious reveal today (granted, there are three more days left to leak). The big box store posted up a pre

Samsung makes good, underrated smartwatches. It’s just been difficult to get much attention in a category so utterly dominated by a single player. Even still, the company has managed to hold onto the number two spot in global market share, according to recentish numbers. At 11.1 percent, it’s a little less than a third of what Apple’s been able to generate.
The line has been a fairly stark contrast to Apple’s offerings. Samsung’s smartwatch philosophy is in line wit

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry in 2018 saw 194 billion downloads and more than $100 billion in purchases. Just in the past quarter, consumer spending exceeded $23 billion and installs topped 31 billion. It’s a fact: we spend more time on our phones than we do watching TV.
This week, the only thing on everyone’s minds was App Store c

Hakan Samuelsson, the CEO of Volvo recently said it was “irresponsible” to put autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the road if they were not sufficiently safe, because that would erode trust among the public and regulators. He’s right, of course; to a point. But focusing on safety alone could seriously hamper the progress of AVs, and could actually lead to less safe conditions for motorists overall, counterintuitive as that sounds. By designing AVs to follow only the safest of protoc

This week California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, published draft guidance for enforcing the state’s landmark privacy legislation.
The draft text of the regulations under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will undergo a public consultation period, including a number of public hearings, with submissions open until December 6 this year.
The CCPA itself will take effect in the state on January 1, with a further six months’ grace period before enforcement of the law

Mark AR / Twitter Imagine a world that’s filled with invisible graffiti. Open an app, point your phone at a wall, and blank brick or cement becomes a canvas. Create art with digital spraypaint and stencils, and an augmented reality system will permanently store its location and placement, creating the illusion of real street art. If friends or social media followers have the app, they can find your painting on a map and come see it. You might scrawl an in-joke across the door of a friend&

Photo: Bloomberg Businessweek Last year, the CEO of Quintillion, an Alaskan company trying to build a trans-Arctic undersea cable, was charged with wire fraud after forging contracts to help raise more than $250 million from investors. This week, Bloomberg posted a captivating feature about how that CEO nearly pulled off the scam of a lifetime. It’s a fascinating story of how someone tried to fake it ‘til they almost made it — but also a cautionary tale about big ambitions can

We all have that one friend who treats their pet like it’s their child and/or best friend. (Yes, I am that person and yes, I have my dog’s name tattooed on me. What of it?)
You’d probably figure that a stellar pet parent already has enough stuff for their fur baby, but there's a high chance you're wrong. Pet accessories (pet cameras, chew toys, tracking devices, this umbrella-leash contraption) aren’t always cheap, especially the good ones. 
If you have one or more p

Chrome OS isn’t the most option-packed operating system around, but there are some things you can do to make your Chromebook’s desktop look and work the way you want.
Ready?
Customize your Chromebook’s wallpaper
First, let’s tackle your desktop’s basic appearance:Right-click anywhere on your Chromebook’s desktop and select “Set wallpaper” from the menu that appears.
Click through Google’s categories to select an image, or click the “My

Welcome to CHEAP, our series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! Gaming is cool. You get to lose yourself in finely crafted worlds, tax your brain solving complex puzzles, or just spend your time blasting the shit out of computerized chumps. But as fun as playing video games by yourself is, the true joy comes from multiplayer sessions. In the old days you would’ve had to get a whole load of people round to someone’s house to play together, but those times are

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s latest Mac update, macOS Catalina, was released earlier this week, and with it came a flurry of complications both minor and major.For one, this update is the first for Apple to drop 32-bit application support, which is causing all sorts of headaches for users of smaller apps, plug-ins, and other software that may not be updated for quite some time or may have been created by a company that no longer exists. There are also a fair number

The discovery of yet another exoplanet is no longer news. More than 4,000 planets around other stars have now been found since the detection of the first one in 1995. As astronomers long suspected, or at least hoped, it seems that planets are ubiquitous in stellar systems and there are probably more planets than stars in our galaxy. But a new discovery of a large planet orbiting the small star GJ3512 is worth noting. The paper, published in Science, challenges our understanding of how planets f

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 Rousseau used to say: Let’s get this bread! Bitcoin Price We closed the day, October 11 2019, at a price of $8,321. That’s a notable 3.06 percent decline in 24 hours, or -$263.5. It was the lowest closing price in two days. We’re still 58 percent below Bitco

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. Inevitably, one day you’re going to die. While you may think your online identity will go to the grave with you, that’s not always how it works out. Without setting your account to self-implode or handing your login details to a trusted person, companies like Facebook and Google will carry on storing your data and everything else they’v

In September, a Japanese man was arrested for reportedly stalking a pop star and attacking and groping her at her home, according to Japanese news organization NHK. Allegedly, this man found the woman’s home by studying photos she posted on social media, observing a train station reflected in her eyes, finding that train station using Google Street View, waiting for her at the train station, and following her home.The man also apparently learned more about where the woman lived by studying

Earlier this week the bottom fell out at Blizzard when it banned an esports pro from competing after he spoke out in support of the Hong Kong protests. It seems half the gaming industry (to say nothing of the wider tech industry) has gotten caught up in the ensuing fallout — and now Riot Games is downright begging its esports pros not to drag them into it. John Needham, head of Riot Games’ League of Legends esports division, issued a statement on the official LoL espo

Photo by Maik Boenisch/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images Video game developer Blizzard Entertainment has finally broken its silence over banning a professional player of popular virtual card game Hearthstone for voicing support for the Hong Kong protests. In a lengthy statement, the company says it will reduce the one-year suspension of player Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung to a six-month one, and it will restore the prize money it withheld from him.
Blizzard claims that its ini

Photo by Maik Boenisch/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images Video game developer Blizzard Entertainment has finally broken its silence after banning a professional player of popular virtual card game Hearthstone for voicing support for the Hong Kong protests. In a lengthy statement, the company says it will reduce the one-year suspension of player Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung to a six-month one, and it will restore the prize money it withheld from him.
Blizzard claims that its in

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Securities and Exchange Commission has formally instructed Telegram Group, the parent company of the Telegram encrypted messaging service, to halt sales of its cryptocurrency Gram. The SEC says the company, and its crypto-focused subsidiary TON Issuer Inc., failed to register an early sale of $1.7 billion of its crypto tokens prior to the October 31st launch of its blockchain network. Because the SEC treats cryptocurrency as securities, the agency

Photo: Ben Rothstein / Netflix Writer-director Vince Gilligan brings an underlying confidence to nearly every moment of El Camino, the Breaking Bad sequel movie he made for Netflix. The carefully choreographed cinematography, Aaron Paul’s raw and committed performance, Gilligan’s faith that those who tune in will have keen memories for the details of his AMC series Breaking Bad — the Netflix original film successfully makes the case for its existence, even though it’s tw

A new survey suggests that Google’s Stadia might bump up against millions of gamers’ data caps, meaning a large contingent of potential customers won’t be able to use the platform’s features. This might kneecap some bold claims Google‘s recently made about what the service is capable of. The survey is from BroadbandNow, and covers responses from 943 participants. Their info suggests that almost six million gamers (out of around 34 million estimated to play at

Alexa users in the US can now speak to their devices in Spanish. Better yet, you can alternate between English and Spanish commands on the fly – no need to switch languages in a menu. ¡Que chévere! The feature is a long time coming. It’s been available in Mexico and Spain for some time, but US users have been waiting for some time. According to some metrics, the US has more Spanish speakers than anywhere else in the world outside of Mexico. With Spanish support also com

Image: Facebook When Libra launched on June 18th, it seemed like an alarming new front in Facebook’s megalomaniacal expansion. Having captured billions of users and tens of billions of dollars in annual profits, the company would now be taking over currency itself. The company’s head of blockchain, David Marcus, laid out his plan for Libra in a detailed white paper, with some of the financial world’s most powerful companies already signed on to help govern the new currency as