Technology news

Facebook will now let you post 3D photos to your timeline from the Facebook app even if you have a phone with a single camera, the company announced today. In theory, this should make it possible for a lot more phones to take 3D photos — and Facebook says it also means you can use your front-facing camera to take take 3D selfies.
The feature, which was first made available in October 2018, was previously exclusive to phones that had two or more cameras that could take portrait mode shots.

There are plenty of accelerators aiming to sway young startups to join their ranks rather than apply to Y Combinator,but Pioneer‘s sell is a bit different.
First off, they are fully remote; founders selected to participate in the program chat with advisors via video chat. Second, Pioneer is largely looking at companies that aren’t companies yet, framing themselves as more of a “startup generator” than an accelerator that aims to help entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley z

SpaceXhas won the launch contract for NASA’s 2022 mission to explore the mineral-rich asteroid known as Psyche, the space agency announced today, including launch services and other mission-related costs valued at $117 million — remarkably low for a mission of this scale.
The Psyche mission will use a Falcon Heavy rocket, which will launch from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Located between Mars and Jupiter, the Psyche asteroid is made of the exposed nickel-i

Image: Byte Byte plans to start paying creators in April, offering $250,000 in total payouts to the first group of creators in its partner program.
The program will be fairly limited at first. Only up to 100 creators will be included, and they have to apply and be chosen by Byte. Byte says it’s looking for people who regularly post, make full-screen portrait videos, and are positive members of the community.
Byte will pay partners every 30 days based on their viewership. Creators will be

Images: Audi Audi will make and sell sportier performance versions of its E-Tron and E-Tron Sportback electric cars powered by a three-motor system, the company announced on Friday. The news comes as parent company Volkswagen says it has tapped Audi to “take the lead for research and development” for the entire Volkswagen Group.The new performance models will be dubbed E-Tron S and E-Tron Sportback S, and Audi says they’ll be “more agile, sharper and more dynamic”

As a tech reporter, I’m used to seeing companies announce a product early only to delay it by months come release time. So it was a pretty big surprise to read a Windows Central report claiming Microsoft may release the Surface Duo–its dual-screen Android phone–months earlier than anticipated. When Microsoft announced the Duo and Neo–its larger Windows 10X-running sibling–in October, the company said the devices would be released during the holiday period of 2

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The World Health Organization launched a TikTok account on Friday as part of its efforts to cut through coronavirus misinformation online. A specialized public health agency of the United Nations, WHO is one of the leading organizations working to contain the spread of the virus.In WHO’s first video, Benedetta Allegranzi, technical lead of infection prevention and control, describes measures people can take to protect themselves from the novel coron

The “Sent via Superhuman iOS” email signature has become one of the strangest flexes in the tech industry, but its influence is enduring, as the $30 per month invite-only email app continues to shape how a wave of personal productivity startups are building their business and product strategies.
I had a chance to chat with SuperhumanCEO and founder Rahul Vohraearlier this month during an oddly busy time for him. He had just announced a dedicated $7 million angel fund with his fr

Photo: Pontifical Academy for Life Vatican officials are calling for stricter ethical standards on the development of artificial intelligence, with tech giants IBM and Microsoft being the first companies to sign its new initiative.The “Rome Call for AI Ethics” lays out six broad principles: transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and security and privacy. These principles say that technology should “protect people,” particularly the “wea

Image credit: Moment Moment has informed users that it will no longer be developing its Moment Pro Camera app for Android (via Android Police). The app isn’t required to use Moment’s lenses, but it provided additional controls for serious photographers. Moment blames the difficulty of making the app compatible across the many different versions of Android made by phone makers.
“We love Android,” said co-founder Marc Barros in an email to Moment customers that was shared

Photo by Amelia Krales / The Verge Facebook Messenger is getting even simpler with the removal of the Discover tab, which was an attempt from the social network to inject its ill-fated chatbot platform into its private messaging app. The change was first announced in August of last year, and TechCrunch now reports that the switchover will begin happening starting next week.Following an extensive Messenger redesign announced back in 2018, Facebook pledged to make the app simpler and less clutter

The first time a non-Pixar title was shown before a Pixar feature film in theaters, it was in November 2017 when Olaf’s Frozen Adventure played before Coco. Although the piece was contentious among filmgoers, the pairing made sense: Frozen was Disney’s biggest animated film in years, and the crossover between Frozen and Coco audiences was obvious.Now, Disney is rolling out another non-Pixar short before of a Pixar movie, but this one is less sensical: The Simpsons in a short called P

Photo by Olly Curtis/Future via Getty Images Google is preventing employees from traveling to Italy, Iran, Japan, and South Korea because of outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, Business Insider reported. Amazon is asking employees to defer all nonessential travel, a spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, which includes domestic travel within the US.
Both companies had already halted employee travel to China, and Google temporarily closed down its offices in China at the end of January.A Google em

The FCChas officially and finally determined that the major wireless carriers in the U.S. broke the law by secretly selling subscribers’ location data for years with almost no constraints or disclosure. But its Commissioners decry the $208 million penalty proposed to be paid by these enormously rich corporations, calling it “not properly proportioned to the consumer harms suffered.”
Under the proposed fines, T-Mobilewould pay $91M; AT&T, $57M; Verizon, $48M; and Sprint, $12

An iPhone app built by controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AIhas been blocked by Apple, effectively banning the app from use.
Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup “violated” the terms of its enterprise developer program.
The app allows its users — which the company claims it serves only law enforcement officers — to use their phone camera or upload a photo to search its database of 3 billion photos. But BuzzFeed News revealed that the company &mda

Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images Every horror story begins with a pause, a held breath, when nobody is quite sure what to make of the unfolding situation. When’s a good time to panic? My favorites put off answering the question for as long as they can.For the last few days I’ve been thinking about Severance, the prizewinning 2018 novel by the author Ling Ma, because of its premise: a fungal fever in China spreads across the globe and kills millions, decimating society. It feels om

Chat bots were central to FacebookMessenger’s strategy three years ago. Now they’re being hidden from view in the app along with games and businesses. Facebook Messenger is now removing the Discover tab as it focuses on speed and simplicity instead of broad utility like China’s WeChat.
The changes are part of a larger Messenger redesign that reorients the People tab around Stories as Facebook continues to try to dominate the ephemeral social media format it copied from Snapchat

Apple has made a new commercial featuring MacBooks (and MacBook-like laptops) from popular anime. The clips come from Mr. Osomatsu, New Game!, Keroro Gunsou, Your Name, Weathering With You, and more, according to Polygon’s resident anime expert Julia Lee.
The video spot shows how pervasive Apple laptops have become in popular culture. I found it particularly interesting that even though many of the laptops featured don’t actually have the Apple logo on them, they’re all instant

Facebook first showed off its 3D photos back in 2018, and shared the technical details behind it a month later. But unless you had one of a handful of phones with dual cameras back then (when they weren’t so common), you couldn’t make your own. Today an update brings 3D photos to those of us still rocking a single camera.
In case you don’t remember or haven’t seen one lately, the 3D photos work by analyzing a 2D picture and slicing it into a ton of layers that move separa

Photo by RONNY HARTMANN/AFP via Getty Images Four and a half years after the Volkswagen Dieselgate broke, the company is still facing scrutiny on two continents. In its home country Germany on Friday, the Volkswagen Group agreed to pay a settlement of nearly $1 billion to hundreds of thousands of owners who argued their cars lost value after the scandal. The same day, Porsche’s offices were raided again by German police in an effort to uncover new evidence about Dieselgate.
On top of that

Cortana on Windows 10 is getting some changes, Microsoft announced today, as the company shifts focus for what it wants its personal assistant to be. The new Cortana will emphasize productivity features, like helping to manage your schedule, adding to-do items, or sending emails.
As part of that shift, Microsoft is removing some of the older consumer-facing functionality like the ability to control music, manage a smart home, or support for third-party Cortana skills. In other words, Microsoft i

Coronavirus fears prompt even more event cancellations, controversial facial recognition software is being used widely and DocuSign acquires Seal Software. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 28, 2020.
1. Facebook cancels F8 conference, citing coronavirus concerns
Facebookhas confirmed that it has canceled its annual F8 developers conference over growing concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. More specifically, the company says it’s canceling the “in-person compone

With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft’sCortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. That’s very much in line with Microsoft’s new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans.
Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that h

GDC’s top sponsors continue to pull out of attending the San Francisco gaming conference. Today, Amazonannounced it would no longer be sending employees to the event.
In an update, the team shared that they would instead be hosting a “global online event” to share news that they had been planning to detail at the conference.
Amazon Game Tech is a “diamond partner” at the Game Developers Conference this year, a designation that signifies sponsors “who play an i

Image: Netflix I Am Not Okay With This begins with Sydney Novak, covered in blood, running down the middle of the street at night. There are probably other ways she’d rather be spending her time. That would seem to make sense with the series’s narrative: her life is pretty normal — up until the part where you find out she has superpowers that allow her to blow things up with her mind.Netflix’s new comedy is a work of low-key dread that recalls a lot of other stories abou

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing.”
Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors: The round was led by the game-focused firm Makers Fund,with participation from Clash of Clans developer Supercell, Unity C

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales Jabra’s Elite 65t truly wireless earphones aren’t the newest to hit the market, but they’re still easy to recommend if you’re looking for a set that offer good sound quality, reliable wireless connectivity, and a comfortable fit. If you don’t want to spend more than $100 on wireless earbuds, you should check out Best Buy’s deal. They’re $90, down from their usual price of around $130, and currently, all three colorways ar

MKBHD It’s been six months since Xiaomi unveiled the Mi Mix Alpha, with its intriguing “surround screen” that wraps almost entirely around the phone. Now, tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee (also known as MKBHD) has a more in-depth look at the prototype hardware running prototype software. And while it seems very polished for an unfinished product, a closer look reveals a few areas where its software needs some optimization and where some of its hardware doesn’t quite seem a

Netflix has taken an aggressive step in its fight with publishing company Chooseco. It’s asking a court to cancel the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark, arguing that it’s a generic descriptor rather than a meaningful brand.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted earlier this week, Netflix filed a response to Chooseco’s lawsuit over Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive film released in late 2018. Netflix admits that it negotiated with Chooseco over licensing the Choose Your Own