Technology news

Redbox 2 1024 Redbox has agreed to stop reselling Disney movies’ digital download codes, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The agreement settles a lawsuit Disney filed over the practice in December 2017.
Redbox maintains agreements with film distribution companies like Warner Brothers, which provide Redbox with discs that Redbox then rents out to customers. However, Disney doesn’t have an agreement with Redbox, so Redbox was forced to purchase Disney movies elsewhere in order to

James Charles is one of the most influential beauty creators on YouTube, and he’s using his platform to try to find YouTube’s next beauty guru through a four-part YouTube Original series.
The show, which is operating under the working title James Charles Instant Influencer, is akin to other fashion and beauty reality series, like Project Runway. Six contestants will be featured, with the winner taking home the grand prize of $50,000. Like all reality shows, though, the exposure Charl

The following contains spoilers for Netflix's Earthquake Bird. Earthquake Bird seems like a great movie. 
It’s beautifully shot, hauntingly scored, and wonderfully acted. Alicia Vikander leads superbly, and Riley Keough and Naoki Kobayashi offer dynamic supporting performances. The 1980s Japanese setting is enticing, and nearly every scene seems fitting of an exquisitely rendered whole. 
The problem here is the story, a slow-burn narrative of jealousy and betrayal that fizz

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Turning around the mess that is WeWork isn’t going to be up to John Legere. According to CNBC, the current T-Mobile CEO does not intend to take the chief executive role, despite rumors earlier this week that WeWork was strongly pursuing him.Legere “has no plans” to depart T-Mobile as it nears completion of its merger with Sprint, CNBC says. Both the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission have greenlit the combined mega-carrier

You're probably not going to get everything on your Christmas list, you might as well shoot for the stars. 
Not sure where to start? Take notes from this 10-year-old, whose Christmas list is the most luxurious list of items ever compiled.
The girl's dad, clearly awestruck by his child's knowledge of luxury goods, tweeted the list on Wednesday. "My 10 year old daughter must be out of her mind with this Christmas list," he wrote.My 10 year old daughter must be out of her mind with this Christ

A private equity firm will soon run the internet’s top domain name extension for nonprofits after purchasing the nonprofit organization that runs it.
Public Interest Registry (PIR), which runs the .org domain registry, has been sold to private equity firm Ethos Capital, according to the registry’s parent organization, Internet Society. The price of the acquisition is still unknown.
The .org domain name has been maintained by PIR since 2002. Internet Society was awarded the contract b

“5 months and growing strong” the Libra Association announced today in a post about its technical infrastructure that completely omits the fierce regulatory backlash to its cryptocurrency.
Forty wallets, tools and block explorers plus 1,700 GitHub commits have how now been built on its blockchain testnet that’s seen 51,000 mock transactions in the past two months. Libra nodes that process transactions are now being run by Coinbase, Uber, BisonTrails, Iliad, Xapo, Anchorage and

Google's hand has been caught in the cookie jar of your personal health data. And now, Congress is trying to slam that lid shut. 
This week, multiple reports came to light showing that Google is very much in the business of acquiring data about our health — from government bodies, health institutes and our own Google searches. That's caused alarm because, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a person's health information is supposed to have strict pri

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok has more than a billion users on its platform, and it appears the company is now experimenting with ways for it and its users to monetize their audiences on the app. Recently, TikTok has begun a limited test of a feature that lets users add links to their bios and posts, which can direct audiences to products or services. Judging by a video of the service in action posted by Fabian Bern, a marketer, it looks like audiences can purchase products fea

When Salesforceannounced this week that it was moving Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure, it was easy to see this as another case of wacky enterprise partnerships. But there had to be sound business reasons why the partnership came together, rather than going with AWS or Google Cloud Platform, both of which are also Salesforce partners in other contexts.
If you ask Salesforce, it says it was ultimately because of compatibility with MicrosoftSQL.
“Salesforce chose Azure because it is a trus

Walmart and Target are both slashing prices in the hopes that you'll spend your hard-earned Black Friday dollars with them this year. But we're not made of money; let's see which retailer has the best deals in some key categories.
When Do the Deals Start?
Walmart's official Black Friday event begins online at 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Nov. 27 and in stores on Thanksgiving Day, beginning at 6 p.m. local time. For those who can't wait, Walmart.com has some "Buy Now" Black Friday deals today, and mo

Earlier this month, at the WebSummit conference in Lisbon, D-Wave and Volkswagen teamed up to manage a fleet of buses using a new system that, among other things, used D-Wave’squantum technology to help generate the most efficient routes. While D-Wave’s 2000Q only played a small part in this process, it’s nevertheless a sign that quantum computing is slowly getting ready for production use and that D-Wave’s approach, somewhat controversial in its early days, is paying off

Part of the allure of Pokémon games is growing attached to each new creature you catch. Games like Pokémon X and Y, Sun and Moon, and Let’s Go incorporate some sort of bonding, from giving your pals a good pat to feeding and cleaning them up. In Pokémon Sword and Shield, downtime doesn’t just happen with one member of your team; it happens with the whole gang at once with the game’s camping feature.
When you’re out in the wild and between towns, campi

It's not like we didn't see this coming. 
On Friday, Twitter, as promised, released a detailed explanation of its new policy governing paid political ads on the platform. And, as to be expected, a host of prominent conservatives are crying foul. 
The policy, teased by Jack Dorsey in an Oct. 30 Twitter thread, was fleshed out in a series of blog posts explaining just what will and will not be allowed once it goes into effect on Nov. 22. Under the new rules, individuals or groups will no

Cyan Banisteris an American success story. A homeless teenager who originally supported herself by making hemp necklaces, then silk-screen T-shirts, she went on to become a self-taught engineer and to later hold several management roles at the security startup IronPort. It was a life-changing experience for her. She made an early fortune when it sold to Cisco for $830 million in 2007. She also met her husband, Scott Banister, who co-founded the company, and the two together and separately began

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. TikTok tests social commerce
The short-form video app said it’s allowing some users to add links to e-commerce sites (or any other destination) to their profile, while also offering creators the ability to easily send their viewers to shopping websites.
On their own, these changes might

Streaming services were supposed to save us from the high prices of cable and satellite subscriptions, but Hulu did its part to blur the lines between the two this week. 
The Disney-owned streaming giant announced Friday that Hulu + Live TV would get a $10 price increase to a new base rate of $54.99 per month. That will still get you the same things it always has, such as access to more than 60 channels as well as Hulu's existing on-demand library, but you'll pay more for it than you did be

Silicon is apparently the new gold these days, or so VCs hope.
What was once a no-go zone for venture investors, who feared the long development lead times and high technical risk required for new entrants in the semiconductor field, has now turned into one of the hottest investment areas for enterprise and data VCs. Startups like Graphcore have reached unicorn status (after its $200 million series D a year ago) while Groq closed $52M from the likes of Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital fame

Under Twitter’s new ad policy, environmental groups and fossil fuel companies alike won’t be allowed to run ads with “the primary goal of driving political, judicial, legislative, or regulatory outcomes.” The company will also place restrictions on ads aimed at educating or raising awareness on issues like climate change.The new details on cause-based advertising were released today after Twitter’s initial announcement last month that it would end all political adve

Airbnb is announcing new guidelines for its Experiences program, including more screening for risky or specialized experiences. Its rules are meant to improve the safety and quality of the program, which supplements Airbnb’s short-term rentals with paid activities like walking tours, scuba diving, and mushroom foraging.
According to a statement, the company aims to make all experiences “100 percent verified,” repeating a promise it previously made for rental listings. It doesn&

The ban on political ads announced by Twitter two weeks ago has come into effect, and the rules are surprisingly simple — perhaps too simple. No political content as they define it may be promoted; candidates, parties, governments or officials, PACs and certain political nonprofit groups are banned from promoting content altogether.
The idea intended to be made manifest in these policies is that “political message reach should be earned, not bought,” as the company puts it. It&

CRISPR, the revolutionary ability to snip out and alter genes with scissor-like precision, has exploded in popularity over the last few years and is generally seen as the standalone wizard of modern gene-editing. However, it’s not a perfect system, sometimes cutting at the wrong place, not working as intended and leaving scientists scratching their heads. Well, now there’s a new, more exacting upgrade to CRISPR called Prime, with the ability to, in theory, snip out more than 90 perce

Hulujust sent an email to subscribers of its Hulu + Live TV plan announcing that the price of the basic live TV plan will increase from $44.99 per month to $54.99 per month.
This is Hulu + Live TV’s second price hike this year, with a $5 increase in January, followed by this twice-as-large increase, which is supposed to take effect on December 18.
In the email, Hulu says this increase “allows us to continue delivering the best live and on-demand TV experience for you.” However,

Illustration by Alex Castro The US Supreme Court will take up a long-running copyright lawsuit between Oracle and Google, it confirmed today. This lets Google contest a controversial ruling that could deal a major blow to software development by establishing that companies can deny access to basic code elements through copyright law. No date has been set for a trial.
Oracle has claimed for years that Google’s Android operating system is built on stolen code from the Java software platform

Image: Vizio Sam’s Club, like every other major retailer, will be taking part in Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2019. It recently released its Black Friday ad, and all of its deals will switch on at 7AM local time on Friday, November 29th.
As far as what’s sticking out right now, Sam’s Club is back with the best-ever price on Vizio’s P-Series Quantum TV that we’ve seen yet. Also, Google Nest Hubs come in a two-pack that will sell for $129, the usual price for just a

Photo: iFixit One of the main promises Apple is making with its new 16-inch MacBook Pro is that the keyboard — after years of easily broken butterfly-switch mechanisms — is finally switching back to the more reliable scissor-style switches it’s used in the past. And iFixit’s teardown of the new laptop confirms that promise, with Apple using scissor switches that appear to be virtually identical the ones it uses in its Magic Keyboards, first introduced in 2015.The switche

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge Huawei’s folding Mate X, which was originally supposed to launch in June, then September, then on an unspecific date in November, then on November 15th in China, is now, in fact, officially on sale. The Mate X is the second major foldable to hit the market following the (also delayed) Samsung Galaxy Fold.The Mate X stands out from other foldables because its folding screen is on the outside of the phone, unlike the Galaxy Fold’s and Motorola Razr&rsqu