Technology news

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. Even with the best intentions, sometimes life gets in the way of making regular in-person support group meetings. Especially now, as we all shelter in place due to the coronavirus, it might be difficult to keep hold of the support network you need to help maintain your recovery. Luckily, some organizations have plans in place to help keep meetings going,

It was another brutal day on Wall Street as investors continue to come to grips with the new economic realities imposed by the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the S&P 500 are scraping near their lowest point in the last three years, brushing their lowest numbers since the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. The Nasdaq, while not down quite as sharply, is also following the the pack downward.
It seems there’s no herd immunity from a

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images On Wednesday, the Federal Communications Commission temporarily waived rules in a move to foster internet access for hospitals and schools stuck in the broadband gap as the coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt everyday life.In its announcement, the FCC said that it would waive the “gift rules” included in its Rural Health Care and E-Rate education programs that forbid participating hospitals and schools from accepting or requesting additio

Image: Apple Apple announced a new iPad Pro today, introducing a slew of much-needed features to the tablet, including support for the next generation of Wi-Fi, a feature that has not previously been available on either iPads or MacBooks.
Wi-Fi 6 arrived a little over a year ago, and routers supporting the new generation of Wi-Fi are starting to become more common. Wi-Fi 6 chips are still being integrated into laptops and smartphones, though — not even the 16-inch MacBook Pro from late la

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Tesla will reduce its workforce at its Fremont, California, car factory after the local Sheriff’s Office said the company was not complying with a three-week shelter-in-place order meant to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, BuzzFeed News is reporting. The Silicon Valley automaker will drop from around 10,000 employees to 2,500, though it’s unclear when the scaleback will take place, or what the company is doing to prevent those workers

You can mark yourself as available to offer help, after which you’ll appear on the map. | Image: NextDoor Nextdoor, the social networking app designed around local communities, is launching a new interactive map to let neighbors offer help to one another during the novel coronavirus outbreak. Called Help Map, the tool lets you mark yourself as available to help with anything from grocery shopping to child care. It will be available in the US starting today and will come to international m

After a woefully delayed, sluggish decision to finally close down the crowded parts of parks during the deteriorating coronavirus pandemic, the National Park Service said Wednesday it would now waive entrance fees during the crisis. 
Entrance fees are suspended indeterminately at parks that remain open. As former Park Service director Jon Jarvis told Mashable on Monday, it's critical to keep parks open right now, to provide us the open space we need to escape increasingly necessary, but sev

UPDATE: March 18, 2020, 5:19 p.m. EDT A statement from Microsoft noted that the console's product page inaccurately listed the launch date of the console, which does not exactly deny the potentially leaked release date.
The Xbox Series X has a release date: Nov. 26, 2020.
Nov. 26 also happens to be the fourth Thursday of the month, which means this console is landing on the same day as American Thanksgiving. Perfect timing for anyone who was planning on ignoring their family that day and could u

It’s been a bonkers week in the world, with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’sWinter batch, it was Demo Day week.
TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator companies since time immemorial. And we’ve been present throughout a number of format changes over the years. We&rsqu

Image: Apple Apple just announced a new iPad Pro and a new MacBook Air, but the iPad Pro’s optional new keyboard case with a trackpad makes picking between the two a lot harder. If you get the iPad Pro with the new case, called the Magic Keyboard, you’re choosing between two similarly sized portable computing devices with a keyboard and trackpad. (Though Apple insists the new iPad Pro is not a computer.)
The main thing to keep in mind is that one of those computing devices is still

Video games have become a powerful coping tool as the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to spread. Developers are making their games free or cheap, Pokémon Go was made easier to play indoors, and Twitch is skyrocketing in popularity. Animal Crossing: New Horizons seems almost ideally suited for this scenario.
It’s a game where players can live a relaxed life in the outdoors, and safely meet up with friends online. It’s cute and charming, and the desperate circumstances have

Apple made it official: trackpad and mouse support is coming to the iPad. You can get it on an iPad Pro by spending $299 or $349 on Apple’s new Magic Keyboard, get it on a regular iPad with Logitech’s $150 keyboard case, use your existing Bluetooth mouse or trackpad, or presumably use any number of forthcoming accessories.So the mouse support is there, but how will it work? The iPad and iPadOS are touch-based operating systems meant to be used with your big fat fingers, not tiny litt

We're still quite a ways off from the expected holiday 2020 launch of the PlayStation 5, but Sony gave us some nuggets of information to chew on this week while we're all cooped up in our homes.
Sony held a live-streamed briefing called "The Road to PS5" on Wednesday afternoon. The 52-minute presser focused heavily on specs, with absolutely nothing in the way of explosive game demos or announcements. You shouldn't be surprised to hear that the PS5 is incredibly powerful, but the way it handles a

Back in 2017, a formerly hot, formerly profitable company called Blue Apron went public. It didn’t go well. Today as the global stock market continues to fall, shares in the former venture darling are soaring, up more than 140% in midday trading.
Before its IPO, the company had to reduce its price range from $15 to $17 per share to $10 to $11 per share. That pricing change limited the company’s worth, and reduced the capital it raised in its debut. The meal kit delivery company final

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales Facebook will put a coronavirus information center at the top of the News Feed in the United States and other countries around the world, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today. In a call with reporters, Zuckerberg said that a collection of information from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control would begin appearing on top of the feed over the next day.The introduction of the information center comes after Facebook had been promoting links to the

Sony has finally unveiled its PlayStation 5 specs today, and there are some surprisingly big differences between the PS5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X. Both consoles are still arriving at the end of the year, and we’re now starting to get a better idea of what both Microsoft and Sony have prioritized for next-gen games. Sony has picked different CPU, GPU, and even SSD speeds that will impact how next-gen games are developed for the PS5 and Xbox Series X.On the PS5 side, the console h

Sony finally, at long last gave an actual presentation wherein it pulled back the curtain and revealed some actual details about the PS5. It’s not the details most of us would have wanted — we still don’t know what it looks like, how much it’ll cost, or what kind of games it’ll have. But we do at least know what kind of hardware it’ll have — and it’s looking pretty okay. PlayStation 5: the full spec and more detail on the tech that delivers Sony's

Image: Valve / The Game Awards In the absence of the official Game Developers Conference (GDC), the Steam Game Festival is returning for a spring edition starting today to help shine a spotlight on small creators. The festival, which first took place alongside The Game Awards in December, now features more than 40 indie games you can preview with free-to-play demos via Steam, a big jump from the initial 12 featured a few months ago.Geoff Keighley, The Game Awards executive producer and host, fi

It's very clear that one company uniquely suited for life during the coronavirus pandemic is Zoom. 
Despite privacy concerns, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have recently downloaded the video conferencing app. 
People are using Zoom to connect with coworkers while working from home. Educators are using Zoom to teach their students thanks, in part, to Zoom making it free to schoolsTeens are even using Zoom to hang out with friends.
One thing everyone experimenting with

A Mexican wolf pup. | Photo: US Fish and Wildlife Service The US population of endangered Mexican gray wolves jumped by 24 percent last year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced yesterday. That’s exciting news for conservationists who haven’t seen a leap in numbers that high since 2014. The recent census found 163 Mexican wolves in the wild in New Mexico and Arizona, compared to 131 in 2018.At least 21 of the 28 packs being monitored had pups last spring. The survival rate fo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge As millions of people adapt to working from home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Google has decided to pause on adding new features to Chrome and Chrome OS in an effort to keep the essential software running as smoothly as possible. In a tweet today, the Chrome development team acknowledged that “adjusted work schedules” have led the company to hit pause on “upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases.”
“Our goal is to ensur

With coronavirus shutting down movie theaters in many states, major studios Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. decided to bring some of their films to digital renting platforms like iTunes and Amazon early. It’s a moment that many industry insiders are referring to as pivotal: the theatrical window, once considered holy, is being shattered.
Movies like Emma, Trolls World Tour, The Hunt, and Birds of Prey are all being made available to consumers sooner than planned. For $20 a pop, people

The rise of social-distancing and self-isolation spawned by the coronavirus has reignited calls for free internet access to be considered a human right and universal entitlement. Among the proponents is Citizens Online, a charity that campaigns against digital exclusion, which has urged the UK government to make the internet free for everyone in the country during the pandemic. The organization argues that older people were already more likely to experience digital inequality prior to the outbr

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge These are unprecedented times. It’s fun to joke about the apocalypse — gallows humor being the incredible coping mechanism that it is — but it’s way less fun when that particular societal realignment is happening outside your door. Not that you should really be going outside much. We are in the early days of something so big that it’s really impossible to conceptualize how it’s going to change the world. Even so, there

Credit: ProPublica The coronavirus is going to challenge industries across the globe, and among the most pressing questions is whether hospitals in the United States will be adequately equipped to combat the virus. Nonprofit newsroom ProPublica has released an in-depth report showing how hospitals can be quickly overwhelmed by the virus and why it’s important to “flatten the curve,” or slow down the spread of infections.The report examines new data released by the Harvard Glob

Image: Sony Sony’s “Road to PS5” live stream featuring system architect Mark Cerny kicked off today, and we’re learning a great deal about the technical jump the upcoming PlayStation 5 will allow for game developers.The beginning of the talk was focused solely on the new console’s solid-state drive (SSD), specifically, the commercial 825GB M.2 SSDs that Sony says will hit speeds of 5.5GB of input data per second, and much more of compressed data. What does all that

Sony’s next-gen console, PlayStation 5, will support nearly all of the top PlayStation 4 games at launch via backwards compatibility. In a presentation today, architect Mark Cerny said that results from the company’s tests have been “excellent” on the new console. “We recently took a look at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles as ranked by playtime, and we’re expecting almost all of them to be playable at launch on PlayStation 5,” Cerny says.
Sony has alrea

The upcoming Microsoft Surface Duo, which would benefit from the new features. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Almost exactly a month after it released the first Developer Preview for Android 11, Google is releasing the second one. As it’s a developer preview, it’s not designed to be a public beta, nor does it include all of the features we’re expecting in Android 11, but there are a few new things to talk about.At the top of that list is an API that allows a fol

Overwatch unveiled its new hero today, Echo, who is described as an “evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence.” There doesn’t seem to be any relation to Amazon’s Echo product line, which comes equipped with its own artificially intelligent helper, Alexa.Echo “represents the cutting edge of technology,” according to a tweet from the game’s account. She was created by Dr. Mina Liao, who helped build the omnics — a

Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images The audience for Bernie Sanders’ rally Monday night trickled in slowly, like it does for most of his music festival-like events. Concert-style rallies have been a signature Sanders tactic throughout the campaign, drawing in young voters with acts like Vampire Weekend and Bon Iver — but the coronavirus outbreak has made that tactic unusually risky. Still, he had no trouble drawing a crowd on Monday night, as campaign surrogates made spe

TL;DR: Amazon has several vacuum sealers on sale as of Wednesday, March 18, including the FoodSaver Vacuum Sealer System (down $20 from its $99.99 MSRP).Chances are your pantry is brimming with canned goods amid the coronavirus outbreak. And while it's tempting to eat nothing but refried beans and SpaghettiOs while you social distance in the comfort of your home, adding some extra nutrition to your diet is definitely possible — "Though it might look a little different than normal," dietici

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After months of anticipation and drips of details, Sony has finally revealed the specifications and hardware details for the PlayStation 5, its next-generation home console that’s planned for release this holiday season.The PS5 will feature a custom eight-core AMD Zen 2 CPU clocked at 3.5GHz (variable frequency) and a custom GPU based on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture hardware that promises 10.28 teraflops and 36 compute units clocked at 2.23GHz (a