Technology news

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images A judge has ordered the release of former US Army analyst Chelsea Manning from a Virginia jail. Manning has been imprisoned since May 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury.Manning’s appearance before the jury was no longer needed, and “her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose,” Judge Anthony Trenga wrote in his order. Under the order, Manning will be required to pay a total of $256,000 in conditional fines, which began ac

While you’ve probably spent a lot of today thinking about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth remembering that other health issues aren’t going away — and that heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States.
Heartbeat Health is a startup working to improve the way that cardiovascular care is delivered, and it announced today that it has raised $8.2 million in Series A funding.
Dr. Jeffrey Wessler, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, is a cardiolog

Image: Disney Disney is delaying Mulan’s release due to the novel coronavirus pandemic spreading across the world, according to Variety. There is no new release date at this time. The movie was originally scheduled to open on March 27th.Disney is also delaying New Mutants, Fox’s newest entry in the X-Men franchise, that was set to be released on April 3rd. New Mutants has already been delayed multiple times for an assortment of reasons. There is no expected release date for it at th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AT&T is suspending data caps for broadband internet customers on Thursday, as waves of employees face new work-from-home policies from US companies trying to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, according to Motherboard.As it stands, some AT&T home internet customers, not to be confused with those who subscribe to an AT&T mobile data plan, have plans that cap the amount of monthly data they can use with devices like laptops, game consoles,

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Comcast is increasing the speed of its discounted internet service for low-income households to 25Mbps down, an increase from 15Mbps down. Upload speeds will be increased to 3Mbps from 2Mbps. Comcast is also beginning to offer a 60-day free trial of the service, which costs $9.95 per month.
The updates come in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Comcast says the goal is to ensure customers “will be able to use their Internet service for all their

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Comcast is increasing the speed of its discounted internet service for low-income households to 25Mbps down, an increase from 15Mbps down. Upload speeds will be increased to 3Mbps from 2Mbps. Comcast is also beginning to offer a 60-day free trial of the service, which costs $9.95 per month.
The updates come in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Comcast says the goal is to ensure customers “will be able to use their Internet service for all their

Photo: Tyler Demogenes / Atlanta Faze The city-based Call of Duty League is shifting to a new format amid the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic. In a statement, the league said that upcoming matches will be played online as opposed to large events hosted by cities across North America and Europe. “Call of Duty League has seen firsthand the power of our live events in our inaugural season, and will return to city-based competition in front of live audiences as soon as it is safe and logis

Brizzly+ Brizzly, a Twitter client that first launched in 2009, is back with a new goal to serve the needs of all the world’s Twitter power users. The company is launching its Brizzly Plus service today, a subscription that costs $6 per month, or $60 annually, and gives people access to non-native Twitter features like an undo button and auto-deletion.
The undo button allows subscribers to set a delay between when they type and send their tweet and when it posts. They can choose between n

Photo by Axel Heimken/picture alliance via Getty Images Juul Labs co-founder James Monsees is planning to step down as adviser and board member of the beleaguered e-cigarette company, Bloomberg reports.“Building this company alongside all of you has been the single most rewarding experience of my career and perhaps my life,” Monsees reportedly wrote in an email to Juul employees. According to Bloomberg, he was planning to spend more time with his family. Formerly the company’s

Well, that was terrible.
During the day’s wild trading session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped by just under 10% in what was the largest single-day percentage decline since the stock market crash in 1987 (when markets were sufficiently scarred to institute failsafe measures for the future, to prevent similar, shocking declines).
Investors shrugged off news that the Federal Reserve was stepping in to offer nearly $1.5 trillion in emergency relief as the major indexes all fe

Today after the bell, Slack,a popular workplace communication product, reported its FQ4 2020 earnings, the three-month period ending January 31 2020. The company’s results came in ahead of expectations. However, its shares have rapidly lost altitude in the wake of its news.
In the fourth quarter, Slack’s revenue rose to $181.9 million, a gain of 49% compared to the year-ago quarter. Investors had expected Slack to report $174.14 million in top line. The company, therefore, beat on gr

Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG Disney will close its Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California following concerns about contributing to the spread of the novel coronavirus. The company will continue paying cast members (the company’s terminology for employees) during the closure.
“While there have been no reported cases of COVID-19 at Disneyland Resort, after carefully reviewing the guidelines of the Governor of California’s executive orders, we are proceeding with

Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG Disney will close parks in its Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland Paris following concerns about contributing to the spread of the novel coronavirus. The company will continue paying cast members (the company’s terminology for employees) during the closure.
“While there have been no reported cases of COVID-19 at Disneyland Resort, after carefully reviewing the guidelines of the

Photo by David Madison/Getty Images A list of dubious coronavirus tips is going viral on Facebook and Twitter, as well as spreading through email. It falsely claims to be from the Stanford Hospital board and contains advice like “take a few sips of water every 15 minutes at least,” to kill the virus. None of these tips have anything to do with reality; it is dangerous misinformation.
Stanford confirmed the message did not come from the university. In a statement emailed to The Verge

Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images During a disease outbreak, one of the best tools at the disposal of public health officials is low-tech detective work. When a person is diagnosed with an illness like COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, public health experts figure out where they’ve recently been and track down everyone they’ve been in contact with.“Sometimes it requires we know private information about a person who has been infected,” says

Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images After the National Hockey League announced on Thursday that it was pausing its 2019–20 season amid growing concerns over the novel coronavirus pandemic, Major League baseball announced it was suspending spring training games and postponing the start of the 2020 season by at least two weeks, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association canceled March Madness.NCAA President Mark Emmert and the league’s board of governors decided to cancel the Di

Photo credit should read TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced a state ban on most large public gatherings of over 500 people as New York works to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The move will see the entirety of Broadway and most of New York City’s concert venues shut down, as well as numerous other businesses, including meeting spaces, museums, sports games, and other locations.
Broadway theaters will be shut down starting at 5PM ET toda

Photo by John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images For anyone looking to escape coronavirus headlines last night — travel banned, Forrest Gump tested positive, basketball was canceled — Sephora was your safe space. Okay, maybe not safe from the virus, but safe from thinking about it at least. It was the place to stick your head in glittery sand.I swung by a store in midtown Manhattan last night, in between picking up new contacts and heading home to catch Trump’s apocalyptic add

Tag Heuer has announced the third generation of its Connected Wear OS smartwatch, with the goal of improving both the “smart” and the “watch” halves of the product. Changes include new sensors that make the third-gen Connected watch more useful for fitness and sport tracking, along with new design updates like a ceramic bezel, screwed caseback, mechanical buttons, and a higher-resolution screen.Better known for its luxury mechanical watches, Tag Heuer has been one of the

Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images The US National Hockey League announced on Thursday that it will “pause” its 2019–20 season amid growing concerns over the novel coronavirus pandemic. While there are no reports of an NHL player testing positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, the NBA suspended its season on Wednesday “until further notice,” after a player on the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus. As NHL commissioner Gary Bettman

For the second time this week trading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for 15 minutes this morning when a market drop triggered the exchange’s internal circuit breaker, shortly after 9:30am.
The control, part of the NYSE’s automatic provisions to pause trading, has been put to the test since markets first began realizing the extent of the economic damage a worsening COVID-19 outbreak could cause in the U.S.
The NYSE’s circuit-breaker system was implemented after the Black

GitHubtoday announced new features for GitHub Classroom, its collection of tools for helping computer science teachers assign and evaluate coding exercises, as well as a new set of free tools for teachers.
The first of these is autograding, which does exactly what the name promises. Teachers can now add tests to their workflows that automatically test assignments and grade them accordingly. These tests then run automatically on every student repository. More importantly, though, teachers can als

We’ve got a barrage of news related to the COVID-19 pandemic, while Comscore partners with Twitch and the ACLU sues over facial recognition in airports. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 12, 2020.
1. US institutes 30-day travel ban on Europe, taps SBA and tax deferrals to stimulate the economy
Let’s see if I can fit all the recent COVID-19-related news into one entry. The big one is President Donald Trump’s decision to institute a 30-day ban on travel from Europe —

Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images The American Civil Liberties Union has sued for information about the Trump administration’s controversial facial recognition programs. The ACLU’s suit demands more detail on how border control agents scan travelers’ faces at the US border as well as plans to expand face recognition capabilities, which enable “undetectable, persistent government surveillance on a massive scale.”
The ACLU has filed public reco

With the White House’s surprise decision to bar foreign nationals from Europe from entering the United States, the already battered airline industry is facing yet another challenge. Unsurprisingly, we are now seeing even more cancellations across the industry as even U.S. citizen and legal permanent residents can now only enter the United States through 11 CDC-approved airports.
The approved airports are Atlanta (ATL), Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Detroit (DTW), Newark (EWR), Honolulu (HNL), N

Microsoft has released a Windows patch for a security vulnerability that was prematurely disclosed earlier this week.
Details of the “critical”-rated bug were released on Tuesday as part of the software giant’s typical monthly release of security patches, what it calls Patch Tuesday. The bug exists in the latest version of Windows’ server message block, known as SMB, which lets Windows communicate with devices, like printers and file servers, on the network and across the

Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images As various sports leagues and major conferences decide to postpone seasons and events in wake of the spreading coronavirus pandemic, Disney hasn’t made the decision to close some of its most visited theme parks.In the United States, there are more than 1,300 confirmed coronavirus cases, and extreme precautions are being taken to contain the spread as that number is expected to rise. As more cases pop up in California and Florida — hom

Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images As various sports leagues and major conferences decide to postpone seasons and events in wake of the spreading coronavirus pandemic, Disney hasn’t made the decision to close some of its most visited theme parks.In the United States, there are more than 1,300 confirmed coronavirus cases, and extreme precautions are being taken to contain the spread as that number is expected to rise. As more cases pop up in California and Florida — hom

Brizzly, the name associated with a long-gone Twitter client, and later, a goofy project highlighting our addiction to social media, is coming back. And this time, it’s focused on serving the needs of Twitter power users in search of features Twitter itself has failed to build — like an Edit button and an auto-deletion option for tweets, among other things.
These features and more are a part of a new subscription service, Brizzly+, which offers a robust toolset built on the Twitter A

According to a new report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo,Applecould unveil new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models with scissor-switch keyboards. MacRumors first noticed the report; TechCrunch obtained the research note as well.
Apple updated the big MacBook Pro in November. The company slightly increased the size of the display from 15” to 16” without any meaningful changes in overall size. Apple also abandoned the controversial butterfly keyboards. The 16-inch MacBook Pro now relies on t

Due to ongoing concerns about viral content, The Verge is issuing new guidance regarding exposure to memes about touching one’s face. Effective immediately, please discontinue use of the following memes and consider the suggested alternatives.The Nathan Fillion
This one starts off good, but the situation quickly deteriorates. Nathan touches his lips, nose, and then pretty much all over his face. Not recommended.Alternative: Nathan Fillion wearing novelty-sized clown gloves.The facepalm
As

On Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced legislation to further restrict the use of the popular viral video app TikTokon government devices.
The bill seeks to expand existing federal guidance prohibiting use of TikTok to encompass any U.S. government-issued device. The legislation is the most recent effort by U.S. lawmakers to limit Chinese-built tech software, devices and components for fear that those products have the potential to be leveraged by the Chinese

Investors are turning to remote-only meetings to combat COVID-19, which was officially declared a pandemic yesterday.
The novel coronavirus is already spreading via community contact in the Bay Area; an employee of South Park Cafe, a popular hub for techies and venture capitalists run by the credit card startup Brex, tested positive this week. The spot is a few hundred feet from a number of high-profile venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins.
But for many remote-friendly venture capita

There’s just been a torrent of economic news since the first identification of patients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China in early December 2019 until the declaration of a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) yesterday. Investors have fled the public market, more and more companies are teetering on the abyss, and surprisingly, some companies and even entire markets are doing better than ever.COVID-19 officially declared a pandemic by the WHO, as deaths pass 4,000Given the ins

Photo: Universal Pictures Universal Pictures has delayed the release of F9, the ninth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, to 2021 amid coronavirus fears.
The movie was set to be released on May 22nd, but will now open on April 2nd, 2021, in North America according to Universal Pictures — almost a full year later. That new date was originally reserved for Fast and Furious 10, suggesting that the tenth installment in the franchise is also delayed.“While we know there is dis