Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook and YouTube are removing content that potentially names the anonymous whistleblower who sparked a presidential impeachment inquiry, with Facebook saying it violates rules against “coordinating harm” on the platform. The decision follows Facebook’s earlier choice to remove ads featuring the name — which Republican political figures, including Donald Trump, Jr., have publicized on Twitter.
BuzzFeed reported attempts to sprea

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The company at fault for the tens of thousands of delayed text messages that were sent out early Thursday morning says that more messages were delayed than it originally believed. Syniverse, the company at fault, originally stated that 168,149 messages were delayed. It now says that the number was based on “preliminary data” and that further review shows the message total “is higher than initially reported.”
Syniverse didn&rsqu

Chris Cox’smotivational speeches were at the heart of Facebook’s new employee orientation. But after 14 years at the social network, the chief product officer left in March amidst an executive shake-up and Facebook’snew plan to prioritize privacy by moving to encrypt its messaging apps. No details on his next projects were revealed.
Now the 37-year-old leader will be putting his inspirational demeanor and keen strategy sense to work to protect the environment and improve the go

Joshua Luber runs a sneaker empire valued at more than $1 billion, but he thinks they’re just now scratching the surface. The consumer marketplace recently expanded to include a fifth category (collectibles). “It’s an evolution of eBay that works similar to the stock market,” Luber states, “but at the core, it’s around the concept of true market price.” 
We visited StockX’s 15,000-square-foot facility in Detroit to get a peek into their authen

The crowded landscape of programs teaching non-technical people to become software developers has been a proving ground for a new model of education financing: income share agreements (ISAs). With an ISA, students avoid paying tuition upfront or taking out private loans, instead paying a percentage of their income for a time after graduation after they’re earning a minimum income.
The model aligns education providers with students’ career outcomes, and one startup is staking a claim

If you're going down, you might as well do it fighting. 
A collection of WeWork employees sent that message loud and clear on Nov. 8 with the publication of an open letter criticizing their soon-to-be former employer of greed, corruption, and deception. Following the aborted IPO and September ouster of cofounder Adam Neumann, along with the promised restructuring by SoftBank, the employees see the writing on the wall — and are doing something about. 
The letter, which the New Yor

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey may be riding a wave of goodwill after he dunked on Mark Zuckerberg, but don't be fooled: Twitter is still a burning hellscape. 
Sure, Dorsey's decision to disallow political ads on Twitter deserves some praise. He is, after all, willing to take a step that Zuckerberg and Facebook are too cowardly to take, setting a precedent that's been lacking in social media.
And, as he made the announcement, Dorsey was smart enough to throw some thinly veiled shade at Zuckerberg'

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is removing content that potentially names the anonymous whistleblower who sparked a presidential impeachment inquiry, saying it violates rules against “coordinating harm” on the platform. The decision follows an earlier choice to remove ads featuring the name — which Republican political figures, including Donald Trump, Jr., have publicized on Twitter.
BuzzFeed reported attempts to spread the alleged whistleblower’s name

Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for WIRED WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton is still behind the idea of deleting Facebook, telling a crowd at Wired’s 25th anniversary summit that while people have to make their own decisions about the social network, he stands by his decision to leave. “If you want to be on Facebook and you want to have ads thrust in front of you, go to town,” he added.
Acton’s original tweet came at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as

Amazon has big plans for its virtual assistant. One day, perhaps sooner than you think, Alexa will take a proactive role in directing our lives. It’ll interpret our data, make decisions for us, and summon us when it has something to say. Rohit Prasad, the scientist in charge of Alexa‘s development, recently gave MIT Technology Review’s Karen Hao one of the most terrifying interviews in modern journalism. We know how dangerous it is to let bad actors run amok with AI and our da

Is anyone feeling deja vu? It seems every year, Google makes puzzling choices with its Pixel displays. The Pixel 2 XL was criticized for awful color calibration, the Pixel 3 XL for its absurd notch, the Pixel 4 for never sticking to the claimed 90Hz refresh rate. But there’s another problem with Google‘s latest: it’s screen isn’t all that bright. Worse, it seems Google is purposefully limiting the panel’s brightness, even in high ambient light. As noted by Mishaal

We won’t bury the lead on this news, startup fans. We’re giving all you professional procrastinators and time-delayed decision makers an extra week to pull yourselves together and score early-bird savings on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December).
Early-bird pricing remains in play until 15 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Don’t let this last-chance clock run out. Beat the deadline, buy an early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin and keep up to €500 in your wallet.
One

This July, Facebookannounced a new division called NPE Team which would build experimental consumer-facing apps, allowing the company to try out new ideas and features to see how people would react. It soon thereafter tapped former Vine GM Jason Toff to join the team as a product manager. The first apps to emerge from the NPE Team have now quietly launched. One, Bump, is a chat app that aims to help people make new friends through conversations, not appearances. Another, Aux, is a social music l

Photo courtesy Roku If you’re constantly misplacing your Roku remote, you now have an alternative way to control your movies — right from your wrist. According to the Roku blog, there is now a free app available for the Apple Watch.
The Roku app looks, and works, very much like the iPhone and Android apps. It allows you to launch various Roku-based channels (listed in the order of most recently launched), control the cursor on your TV interface, play and pause your videos — in

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg The Surface Pro X sure looks nice, but a lot of currently available apps on the Microsoft Store don’t work with its custom SQ1 64-bit ARM processor — and weirdly, my colleague Dieter Bohn found that the Microsoft Store won’t stop you from buying apps that don’t work. So, in theory, you could pay for an app and download it, only to find it’s incompatible with your shiny new computer. Frustrating, to say the least.
Microsoft promised

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google has announced a few of its Black Friday deals, and they’re currently focused around its Pixel phones. You’ll be able to find decent discounts on unlocked Google Pixel 4, Pixel 4 XL, and the midrange Pixel 3A and Pixel 3A XL soon at a variety of retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo, and more.
Google’s Pixel 4 saw a brief $100 price cut before it even released in late October (never pay full price for a phone), b

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. YouTube’s homepage redesign focuses on usability, giving you control over recommendations
The company announced an updated, cleaner design that does away with information density, instead giving more room to the videos and their titles. Other new features include an “Add to Queue&r

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Samples of lung fluid from 29 lung injury patients in 10 states all contained the same chemical, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today. The discovery is a huge step forward for the ongoing investigation into the severe and mysterious lung injuries that have affected e-cigarette users across the country.The chemical, called vitamin E acetate is now considered a “chemical of concern” by the CDC, which is investigating the out

Official word has come down from federal authorities on one potential cause of the mystery illness affecting vape users: Vitamin E acetate, a chemical found in some vaping products that has been demonstrated to linger in the lungs long afterwards. The finding has been called a “breakthrough” but is far from the last word on the situation.
Sadly, the condition has already claimed the lives of at least 39 people, and more than 2,000 cases have been reported collectively from every stat

Trans and non-binary people in states like Illinois, Arizona, and Florida will soon have the option to choose the first name they want on their payment cards without it having to match their legal name.  
Mastercard partnered with the Chicago-based bank BMO Harris, which has branches in eight states, and Superbia Credit Union, a new Michigan-based credit union that will serve and advocate for LGBTQ people across the country, to offer this option, called True Name. BMO Harris is planning to

Global Climate Strike | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge “Climate strike” has been crowned word of the year by Collins Dictionary. The term, which refers to people leaving work or school as a way to demand action on climate change, was used 100 times more often in 2019 compared to last year, Collins’ lexicographers found. The company says that they monitor a 9.5 billion-word body of text each year to identify “new and notable” words that reflect big shif

Sometimes, the boring explanation is actually the scarier one. 
People across the U.S. collectively freaked out Thursday when they awoke to find seemingly random text messages on their phones from friends, parents, and employers who claimed to have never sent them. And while you'd be forgiven for suspecting NSA-style malfeasance, Russian troll farms, or some hackers trying to trick you into sending them bitcoin, we now know what actually happened — and it's a doozy. 
It turns out

Aaron Bartnick ContributorShare on TwitterAaron Bartnick (@AaronBartnick) served as Digital Director for Congressman Seth Moulton’s presidential campaign. He is currently completing graduate studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.As the digital director for Congressman Seth Moulton’s 2020 presidential campaign, I was responsible for everything the campaign did on the internet: the emails you claim to hate, the videos we hoped would go viral, the online infrastructure tha

Jessica Alter ContributorShare on Twitter Jessica Alter is co-founder and chairman of Tech for Campaigns, an organization building the lasting tech and digital arm for Democrats and has helped over 200 campaigns on this front since 2017.
Jack Dorsey’s announcement that Twitter will no longer run political ads because “political messages reach should be earned, not bought” has been welcomed as a thoughtful and statesmanlike contrast to Mark Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’

At the kickoff keynote for Adobe Max, the company’s massive annual creativity conference, 15,000 designers and creatives cheered as Photoshop on the iPad was unveiled onstage. The long-anticipated app had been teased since last year’s conference, and the air in the Los Angeles Convention Center was filled with excitement as attendees finally got to try it out in between workshop sessions and panels hosted by inspirational speakers. But online was a different story, as negative review

Stock trading app Robinhoodis valued at $7.6 billion, but it only operates in the U.S. Freshly funded fintechstartup Alpaca does the dirty work so developers worldwide can launch their own competitors to that investing unicorn. Like the Stripe of stocks, Alpaca’sAPI handles the banking, security and regulatory complexity, allowing other startups to quickly build brokerage apps on top for free. It has already crossed $1 billion in transactions within a year of launch.
The potential to power

Amazon doesn't release a Black Friday ad in the traditional sense. Instead, intel about its highly anticipated Black Friday deals generally comes in the form of press releases and "sneak peaks" the online giant decides to share in the leadup to Black Friday.
On Nov. 6, we received an email listing the deals Amazon will offer the entire WEEK of Black Friday. This is earlier than we received any deal intel in 2018. And the prices prove how deeply discounted Echo, Fire and Kindle products will be t

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Black Friday is quickly approaching and the sales are ramping up. The next set of deals include Sony’s outstanding wireless noise-canceling WH-1000XM3 headphones, which are now a record $70 off at four different outlets. So far, this is the biggest discount we’ve seen for these headphones. That’s not bad for noise-canceling headphones that actually block out sound — beating out competitors in this category.
They’re on sale for $27

Image: Lordstown Motors The closed General Motors factory in Lordstown, Ohio that’s been at the center of the company’s tension with President Trump has a new owner: an electric vehicle startup called Lordstown Motors. The deal — which was surprise announced by Trump on Twitter back in May — was finalized Thursday. Terms were not disclosed.
The deal could bring hundreds, maybe thousands of jobs back to the area, and GM says the factory’s new purpose will help estab