Technology news

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Two days ago, we brought you the news that a new iOS 13.2 update to Apple’s HomePod would finally be able to tell different users’ voices apart. But that same evening, the update disappeared — probably because of numerous reports that it was bricking HomePods. Thankfully, it appears there’s now a new iOS 13.2.1 update, rolling out now, that picks up where 13.2 left off.
As MacRumors notes, iOS 13.2.1 has the exact same changelog, which

Julian Shapiro ContributorShare on Twitter Julian Shapirois the founder of BellCurve.com, the growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps you hire senior growth marketers, and finds you vetted growth agencies. He also writes at Julian.com. More posts by this contributorGetting more people to open your emails What’s the right way to sponsor a YouTube influencer?
We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask

Image: Valve In September, Valve launched a beta for a redesigned Steam library, and today, the company said that redesign is available for everyone. The new library has a refreshed visual look, intended to make it easier to find your games, see what your friends are playing, and follow news and updates from the games in your library. (You might have to relaunch your Steam client once or twice to get the update.)
Here’s one image of what it looks like in practice:Image: The Verge / Sean H

Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images On Wednesday, Twitter announced that it would ban all political advertising on the platform next month, a move President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is calling “a very dumb decision.”
Twitter’s move to ban all political ads comes after weeks of lawmakers berating Facebook over its own policy that allows politicians to lie in ads. Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign was the first to take issue with the policy, penning le

Twitterfounder and CEO Jack Dorsey announced abruptly — though the timing was certainly not accidental — that the platform would soon disallow any and all political advertising. This is the right thing to do, but it’s also going to be hard as hell for a lot of reasons. As usual in tech and politics, no good deed goes unpunished.
Malicious actors, state-sponsored and otherwise, have and will continue to attempt to influence the outcome of U.S. elections via online means, includi

Image: Apple In Apple’s Q4 earnings call, CEO Tim Cook announced that later this year, you’ll be able to buy an iPhone on an Apple Card, pay for it over 24 months with zero interest, get your 3 percent cash back on the purchase, and manage payments in the Wallet app with one fell swoop.Apple already offers a number of ways to finance the cost of the iPhone, such as the iPhone Upgrade Program, and it seems like only the “manage payments in the Wallet app” portion is truly

Facebook, a social network originally founded as an Ivy League version of Hot or Not, has billions of users and the power to sway elections. In the U.S., where nearly 70 percent of adults are Facebook users, its recent choices make it clear where the company stands: with the party of Donald Trump. 
On the day that the company rolled out one of its biggest new products, the Facebook News tab, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided the place he wanted to be on launch day was a media event co

Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are applauding Twitter’s decision to ban political ads from its platform starting in November, seeing it as a welcome contrast to Facebook’s hands-off approach to misleading ads.
In a statement, Bill Russo, deputy communications director for the Biden campaign, thanked Twitter, saying “We appreciate that Twitter recognizes that they should not permit disproven smears, like those from the Trump campaign, to appear in

Facebook has done it again. 
As the company fights growing backlash against its political advertising policies and new pressure from lawmakers, Facebook is proving once again that seemingly no scandal is big enough to affect its bottom line — at least for now.
The company delivered its results for the third-quarter of 2019, revealing that it had taken in $17.7 billion while growing its daily active users to 1.62 billion — both comfortably ahead of analysts' expectations for the

This week, the developer of the popular note-taking software Notepad++ released a new version update. Nothing seemed particularly strange about it, except maybe the name: Notepad++ v7.8.1 is the “Free Uyghur” edition.
Developer writes about plight of the Uyghur people
In a blog post announcing the updated version, developer Don Ho writes about the plight of the Uyghur people, an ethnic minority in China that’s faced persecution from the country’s authoritarian government.

As Jack Dorseyannounced his company Twitter would drop all political ads, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg doubled-down on his policy of refusing to fact check politicians’ ads. “At times of social tension there has often been an urge to pull back on free expression . . . We will be best served over the long term by resisting this urge and defending free expression.”
Still, Zuckerberg failed to delineate between freedom of expression, and freedom of paid amplification of that expression

Apple’siPhone sales still make up over half of its quarterly revenues, but they are slowly shrinking in importance as other divisions in the company pick up speed.
Apple’s stock remained largely unchanged after-hours following the release of its Q4 earnings. The company delivered earnings per share of $3.03 versus the street’s estimate of $2.84 on revenue of $64 billion compared with expectation at $62.99 billion.
The big story continues to be major growth in Services, iPad and

Twitter will cease running paid political ads. 
The announcement, made Wednesday afternoon by Jack Dorsey, is in stark contrast to Facebook's controversial decision to allow politicians to pay to spread lies. It's a smart move, and, despite Mark Zuckerberg's protestations, Dorsey makes clear that it has nothing to do with free speech. 
As the Twitter CEO rightly points out, the policy will not prevent politicians from tweeting, but rather will prevent them and their teams from using hi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple today reported its fiscal fourth quarter 2019 earnings, which saw the company earn a record $64 billion in revenue. The news reflects the general trend with Apple over the past year: iPhone sales are down, but service revenue hit an all-time high. In other words, Apple’s strategy to de-emphasize hardware sales and bet more on subscription services seems to be working.That $64 billion in revenue is up 2 percent year over year compared to Q4 201

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Lyft lost $463.5 million in the third quarter of 2019, which was almost twice the amount that the company lost over the same period of time last year. The ride-hailing company brought in nearly a billion dollars in revenue — $955.6 million to be exact — which, compared to $585 million of revenue in the third quarter of 2018, represents an increase of 63 percent year over year.Lyft and its larger rival Uber have been under pressure from investo

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Just minutes before Facebook released its third quarter earnings this afternoon, Twitter dropped a mic at its feet: CEO Jack Dorsey made the surprise announcement that his social network will ban political advertising starting in November to “focus our efforts on the root problems, without the additional burden and complexity taking money brings.”Dorsey’s position was clear. These types of ads are risky when combined with the influen

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, Mixer announced that it’s dropping the price of its subscription from $5.99 a month to $4.99. While it’s not clear what specifically prompted the change, it’s hard to miss the fact that $4.99 is also the price of a monthlong Tier 1 subscription on Twitch.Mixer’s subscriptions are a little like their analogs over at Twitch: after you buy a subscription to a channel, you get custom emotes from the broadcaster to use in chat, a

Sophia Wood ContributorShare on Twitter Sophia Wood is a principal at Magma Partners, a Latin America-focused seed-stage VC firm with offices in Latin America, Asia and the U.S. Sophia is also the co-founder of LatAm List, an English-language Latin American tech news source. More posts by this contributorLatin America Roundup: SoftBank bets on Brazilian unicorns and Konfio raises $250M for lending plans
Brazil continued to churn out unicorns this month, with Curitiba-based Ebanx becoming the fir

This is not a drill: two health-tech companies are building the world's first database for images of poop and they need your poop pics.
The campaign is called "#GiveAShit For Science" and asks people to upload photos of their bowel movements by using a smartphone browser to visit seed.com/poop (yes, that's the whole URL).
The companies behind the initiative are Seed, a "microbial sciences" company that conducts microbiome research (and sells a probiotic), and Auggi, an AI company developing tech

TikTok users are calling for more visibility for creators of color on the platform.
The app's For You Page, a never ending queue of trending content, displays videos based on content the user has already engaged with. Nobody outside of TikTok itself knows how the algorithm works, and TikTok declined to comment on it for Mashable, but some users claim that the app's most popular faces are overwhelmingly white. Tired of not seeing people who look like them while scrolling through the app, the user

Despite ongoing public relations crises, Facebookkept growing in Q3 2019, demonstrating that media backlash does not necessarily equate to poor business performance.
Facebook reached 2.45 billion monthly users, up 1.65%, from 2.41 billion in Q2 2019 when it grew 1.6%, and it now has 1.62 billion daily active users, up 2% from 1.587 billion last quarter when it grew 1.6%. Facebook scored $17.652 billion of revenue, up 29% year-over-year, with $2.12 in earnings per share.Facebook’s earnings

CEO Jack Dorseyjust announced, via tweet, that Twitterwill be banning all political advertising — albeit with “a few exceptions” like voter registration.
“We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” Dorsey said.
While it’s not totally clear how broad those exceptions will be, it sounds like the ban will apply to both ads endorsing candidates and ads advocating a position on political issues.
Dorsey said the company will share the final po

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is banning all political ads globally, starting November 22nd, according to tweets by the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday.
The changes will affect both candidate ads and issue ads, although ads encouraging voter registration will still be allowed, along with other exceptions. Dorsey said a full policy will be made available to the public on November 15th.
“Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents,” Dorsey

According to Pornhub, the yeehaw agenda remains strong heading into Halloween.
The adult video platform released its Halloween insights on Wednesday, and overall Harley Quinn ranked as the top character in Pornhub searches. The Joker came in second place. "Succubus" — the female demons of medieval lore who seduce men while they sleep and suck the life force right out of them — came in fifth in this years Halloween-themed searches. Classic "sexy costumes" like nurse, kitty/cat, and ma

Horse owners fled with their animals Wednesday morning as a new blaze erupted on Southern California's parched terrain. 
The wind-whipped Easy Fire, born near Easy Street in the city of Simi Valley north of Los Angeles, made a vigorous run at Ronald Reagan's hillside presidential library, but the blaze, promptly attacked by firefighters, has so far been stopped near the edges of the landmark. Yet flames have spread over some 1,300 acres while threatening more than 7,000 homes, according to

Xiao Wang Contributor Xiao Wang is CEO at Boundless, a technology startup that has helped thousands of immigrant families apply for marriage green cards and U.S. citizenship while providing affordable access to independent immigration attorneys. More posts by this contributorInternational students face immigration hurdles under Trump Which immigration headlines should you care about?
Immigration advocates are rightly fretting over the Trump administration’s new health insurance mandate and

Image: Fair Scott Painter, the founder of SoftBank-backed car leasing startup Fair.com, has resigned as CEO following last week’s layoffs and announcement of a planned restructuring, The Verge has learned. SoftBank’s Adam Hieber is taking over as interim CEO. Painter will stay on as chairman of Fair. His brother, who was Fair’s CFO, left the company last week.
“As I’ve said so often in the last few days - - what we do hasn’t changed; how we do it must change,

Recently, The Verge reported on a string of ransomware attacks that have hit cities including Baltimore; Atlanta, Georgia; Newark, New Jersey; and 22 Texas towns. Even The Weather Channel has fallen victim.
But before those attacks, there was an attack on the nation’s capital, days before the presidential inauguration. An article from The Wall Street Journal details how hackers Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru seized control of Washington, DC’s surveillance cameras right before

If you’ve ever tried buying a bike online, or ski equipment, or any number of expensive goods where it would be useful to know a lot more than you do, you might check out Curated, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that wants to help busy shoppers who know generally what they want but don’t necessarily have time to visit a specialty store to learn more.
It isn’t the first startup to help with shopping recommendations. Among its predecessors is Hunch, a company that deli

The online grocery wars continue. Amazon this week just made grocery delivery free, so Walmart is now touting how its grocery service offers the booze. The retailer today announced a new milestone in terms of giving its customers the ability to shop for alcohol online, noting that more than 2,000 Walmartlocations across 29 states will now let you pick up wine and beer along with your other grocery purchases.
The alcohol pickup service has to abide by local laws, which limits its expansion in som

Photo by Nilay Patel / The Verge When Apple announced its redesigned Mac Pro this June, the company didn’t give a release date more specific than “this fall” — but the powerful new computer has just shown up in FCC filings, which could indicate an imminent launch.Showing up in the FCC doesn’t exactly guarantee the Mac Pro will be coming out soon, as many companies’ devices hit the FCC months before they actually launch. But Apple devices often appear in filin

As much as we’d like to think that we’re entering an era of autonomous robots, they’re actually still pretty helpless. To keep them from falling down all the time, a human’s fast reflexes could be the solution. But the human has to feel what the robot is feeling — and that’s just what these researchers are testing.
Bipedal robots are excellent in theory for navigating human environments, but naturally are more prone to falling than quadrupedal or wheeled robot

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1. HBO Max will cost $14.99 per month and launch in May 2020
AT&T and WarnerMediaannounced the pricing, launch timetable and content lineup of their HBOMax streaming service. They also revealed that HBO has placed a straight-to-series order for “House of the Dragon,” a spin-off of

This post probably(?) contains spoilers for HBO’s House of the Dragon. It’s all in the books though. 
HBO's recently announced Game of Thrones prequel will be called House of the Dragon and focus on the history of House Targaryen in Westeros. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the series will be set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones. 
That might seem like a long time, but 300 years puts  the start of the series at the war of Aegon’s Conquest, which

Eliot Peper ContributorShare on Twitter Eliot Peperis a critically acclaimed novelist who writes speculative thrillers that explore the intersection of technology and culture. More posts by this contributorHow to read fiction to build a startup
Just as as tangible as airplanes, computers and contraception, The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States of America are also human inventions.
Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scal