Technology news

In 2018, Google executive T. Jay Fowler confirmed on Twitter that the company planned to migrate Google Play Music subscriber catalogs, playlists, and preferences over to YouTube Music, which at the time it had just re-relaunched as its own paid streaming service with Fowler at the helm. A few months shy of two years later, 9to5Google reports that Google has developed an internal beta version of YouTube Music that may add at least some of this long-awaited functionality.Specifically, 9to5Google

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is refusing to meet with White House adviser Peter Navarro and the trade czar is “fuming,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday. It’s the latest feud in the never-ending saga of beef between Bezos and Donald Trump, who has leveled ongoing Twitter tirades against Amazon and the Bezos-owned Washington Post since 2016.
According to the Post’s report, Navarro approached Bezos at an opulent Alfalfa Club dinner

Ganes Kesari ContributorShare on Twitter Ganes Kesari is a co-founder and head of analytics at Gramener. He helps transform organizations through advisory in building data science teams and adopting insights as data stories.More posts by this contributorWhen and how to build out your data science team
Since they started leveraging the technology, tech companies have received numerous accusations regarding the unethical use of artificial intelligence.
One example comes from Alphabet’s Googl

Ethernet / Internet (stock) A new report estimates there are 42.8 million people in the US without broadband access, nearly twice the official estimate reached by the Federal Communication Commission. The report was conducted by BroadbandNow, a company that helps consumers check their area for broadband availability. In its 2019 report, the FCC estimated only 21.3 million Americans lacked broadband access.
BroadbandNow chose nine ISPs — which it does not name in the report— that had

TL;DR: Grab some solid Zs with the Tempur-Pedic TEMPUR-Neck support pillow for $40.76. Normally $99, you save 59%.Are you a log sleeper, or a restless toss-and-turn type? Do you arise each morning refreshed and rejuvenated, or do you always feel like a zombie barely able to function? 
Obviously, no two people sleep alike and some of us get way less than the recommended 7-8 hours of nightly rest due to the vagaries of life — and there is only so much coffee you can drink to keep you go

Look who's returning to Studio 8H! 
On Thursday, NBC announced Saturday Night Live's hosts and musical guests for two more episodes of Season 45. Feb. 29, former writer and two-time host John Mulaney will appear alongside Talking Heads' musician David Byrne. Byrne recently collaborated with Mulaney for a segment called "Papier-mâché time with David Byrne" in Netflix's John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch.
On Mar. 7, No Time To Die star Daniel Craig will host for his second t

Netflix knows you hate those autoplaying previews. 
The streaming giant finally copped to that fact Thursday morning, acknowledging that the oft-reviled "feature" where a preview — with sound blasting — would start playing the moment you scroll your mouse over a show is not always welcomed. But Netflix did more than just admit reality— it also officially offered up a way to disable the feature. 
"Some people find [autoplay while browsing] helpful," wrote Netflix in re

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is in the process of rolling out the official build of Chrome 80, its latest version, and while most of the upgrades are behind the scenes, there are a couple of features that can make surfing just a little better, and that can be enabled manually. One of these will let you avoid all those annoying drop-down requests from websites asking you if you want to allow notifications, and the other will make your online travels just a bit faster by elimina

Video game publisher Private Division is delaying its Nintendo Switch port of Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds due to the coronavirus outbreak. The company announced the news today via Twitter, adding that the virus is “impacting the Virtuos team working on the port,” and that they’d like to give them enough time to properly finish development. The physical version will now be released via cartridge, too, following complaints over the boxed Switch product contain

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix has finally answered the plea of many, many customers and now offers a way to disable autoplaying videos when you’re browsing the home screen. If you’re tired of trailers for shows or movies starting to play whenever you briefly pause on a selection, this is the option you’ve been waiting for.The important thing to know is that you can only change this setting by signing into Netflix with a web browser; as of now, there’s n

Vaio Japanese manufacturer Vaio has released what looks to be the lightest laptop you can buy with a hexa-core chip. The new SX12 is just 2.01 pounds — and it packs an Intel Core i7-10710U “Comet Lake” processor, featuring six cores and 12 threads.
There are laptops lighter than two pounds out there (though there aren’t a lot). The Acer Swift 7, for example, is just 1.96 pounds. But those looking for ultra-portability often have to make sacrifices when it comes to specs

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber reported its fourth quarter earnings on Thursday, in which it posted a net loss of $1.1 billion. It was not quite as much as the previous quarter, when it lost $1.2 billion, or as stunning as Q2, which saw Uber lose a jaw-dropping $5.2 billion in just three months.Overall, Uber says it lost $8.5 billion in 2019 — a sign of just how steep Uber’s path to profitability will be. That said, the company says it thinks it can finally eke out a p

The activist investment firm Elliott Management has steadily amassed a $2.5 billion stake in the headline-grabbing, Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank even as a series of missteps battered the company’s share price.
Famous for its investments in companies like Slackand Uber and infamous for betting billions on the co-working real estate marketplace and development company WeWork, SoftBank presented an enticing target for Elliott’s brand of financial speculation, according to a

Sundance Institute Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
In 2019, the blockbuster Conjuring franchise produced a film called The Curse of La Llorona, which is generally considered pretty bad. This is unfortunate, because it’s going to confuse a lot of people who hear about the contemporaneous La Llorona — an excellent indie movie that puts a superna

Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit “has not yet completed” its plans to secure the 2020 presidential election, a government watchdog has said.
The report, published on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, said the unit, CISA, is “not well-positioned to execute a nationwide strategy for securing election infrastructure prior to the start of the 2020 election cycle.”
The watchdog said the unit should “urgently finalize” its plans

Claire Diaz-Ortiz ContributorShare on Twitter Claire Diaz-Ortiz is an angel investor and bestselling author of nine books that have been published in more than a dozen countries. An early employee at Twitter, she was called “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter” by Wired and holds an MBA and other degrees from Stanford and Oxford. More posts by this contributorWomen are the secret ingredient in Latin America’s outsized returns
When Flavia Deutsch and Paula Crespi were raising

Claire Diaz-Ortiz ContributorShare on Twitter Claire Diaz-Ortiz is an angel investor and bestselling author of nine books that have been published in more than a dozen countries. An early employee at Twitter, she was called “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter” by Wired and holds an MBA and other degrees from Stanford and Oxford. More posts by this contributorWomen are the secret ingredient in Latin America’s outsized returns
Read the first part of this article, Latin America

Apple has throttled the competition in another category.During the company’s recent earnings call, CEO Tim Cook noted the company’s wearable division now rivals the size of a Fortune 500 company. He failed to give more specifics, but the point is striking: between Apple Watch and AirPods, Cupertino has another juggernaut on its hands.Apple’s wearable fortunes come from two distinct sub-categories: more mature wrist-worn devices that include smartwatches and wearable trackers (a

At-home DNA testing companies 23andMe and Ancestry each laid off about 100 employees over the past month, cutting around 14 and 6 percent of their workforces, respectively.23andMe pointed to declining sales as the reasons for the layoffs, and Ancestry CEO Margo Georgiadis cited “a slowdown in demand across the entire DNA category” in a blog post. Interest in DNA testing skyrocketed through 2016, 2017, and 2018, with millions of people buying kits from direct-to-consumer companies. Bu

Ever since companies like Disney, AT&T, and Comcast announced that they were developing streaming platforms, the narrative has largely been: “War is upon us!” In this case, “us” refers to the streaming companies that are fighting for people’s attention and time. But in a broader sense, “us” also refers to the billions of people who will have to choose where to spend their hard-earned cash every month.“Streaming wars” are fun to think abou

On February 7, aka this Friday, the Bay Area startup community will descend on Galvanize to celebrate everything great and small about tech startups at the 3rd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party.
Lucky for you, we have just 15 tickets left! They’re available on a strictly first-come, first-served basis, so if you want to join us for an unforgettable night of fun and opportunity, get your ticket now before they’re gone for good.
The TechCrunch Winter Party provides the perfect atmosphere

Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images Trolls expressing support for President Trump called into the phone line Democrats were supposed to use for reporting precinct tallies during the Iowa caucuses, adding to the chaos Monday night as the election app failed and precinct chairs tried to phone in results instead, Bloomberg reports.Frustrated poll workers posted images of caucus paperwork on social media that showed the phone number, and it wasn’t long before that number ended up on 4ch

Netflix customers have complained for years about the frustrating and annoying autoplay feature that occurs on its homepage. Today, the company announced that subscribers can finally disable autoplay functionality.People can choose to disable autoplay in two different formats: one that automatically starts the next episode in a series and one that autoplays previews while browsing. Netflix rolled out an option to disable autoplay with episodes in a series way back in 2014, but this new setting s

Dating app usage in the U.S. is on the rise, but so are the issues it brings. According to a new Pew Research Center report on online dating, out today, 30% of U.S. adults have at some point used a dating app or website. That’s up from just 11% in 2013. A smaller number of U.S. adults, 12%, said they found a long-term relationship via online dating. In addition, a majority of users reported an overall positive experience with online dating. But when drilling down into specific areas, some

Listen, this week sucks. Last week pretty much sucked, too. Honestly, it’s probably time to just scrap this stupid jerk of a year and give 2021 a go. (Spoiler: That one will suck, too.) But you take your victories where you can get them, and Netflix just handed us a beautiful one for once in our sad, miserable lives.
Some people find this feature helpful. Others not so much.We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear — members can now control whether or not they see autoplay previe

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has “demanded” that Clearview AI stop using data scraped from its social networks for its controversial facial recognition database, CBSNews reports. “Scraping people’s information violates our policies,” a spokesperson for the company said, “Which is why we’ve demanded that Clearview stop accessing or using information from Facebook or Instagram.”A day later, LinkedIn joined the growing group of co

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has “demanded” that Clearview AI stop using data scraped from its social networks for its controversial facial recognition database, CBSNews reports. “Scraping people’s information violates our policies,” a spokesperson for the company said, “Which is why we’ve demanded that Clearview stop accessing or using information from Facebook or Instagram.”A day later, LinkedIn joined the growing group of co

Image: Dylan Tallchief Late last year, electronic musician and YouTuber Dylan Tallchief made a functional drum machine in Microsoft Excel after a bunch of Excel DAW memes made their way around social media. Now, Tallchief is back with an even more ambitious project that fully realizes the original meme’s potential: an Excel DAW he calls xlStudio. (For those outside the audio world, DAW stands for “digital audio workstation” and is a software suite like Ableton or FL Studio use

Image: Deep Silver Metro Exodus will be available on Steam starting Saturday, February 15th, according to a tweet by the series’ official Twitter account. The game launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive last year, also on February 15th.
The game should be available at the same time in many regions, according to the announcement:
Journey beyond in the critically acclaimed #MetroExodus - returning to the Steam Store on Saturday 15th February 2020. Release times as follows:
00:00 ET
5:00

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Trump administration’s latest suggestion for combating the dominance of Chinese telecom giant Huawei: invest in its European competitors. The idea comes from US Attorney General William Barr, a former top lawyer for Verizon, who floated the notion of pushing members of the technology and telecom industries to invest in Ericsson and Nokia when speaking to a crowd at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC on Thursday,

Instagram has added a feature which lets you sort through the accounts that you’re following by “Most shown in feed” and “Least interacted with.” From there, users can manage their follow status and notifications, or mute an account.“Instagram is really about bringing you closer to the people and things you care about — but we know that over time, your interests and relationships can evolve and change,” the company says. “Whether you graduate

Image: Netflix Locke and Key is what would happen if you took the brooding teen drama of Riverdale and combined it with the all-too-real family tragedy and otherworldly scares of The Haunting of Hill House. That might make Netflix’s latest series sound derivative. But while it shares a similar tone as other shows on the service — Sabrina fans will find a lot to enjoy here — Locke and Key’s wildly creative premise gives it its own unique flavor. Yes, it’s dark, magi