Technology news

Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images After it initially made restaurants participating in a discount program foot the bill, Grubhub on Thursday said it would be changing the program to cover the discount — for up to 25 orders per restaurant.Grubhub’s Supper for Support promotion offers diners $10 off an order of $30 or more placed via Grubhub between 5 and 9PM during the month of April. Under the original terms of the deal, however, restaurants that opted in were expected to

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge SoundCloud has introduced a new donation button artists can add to their profile to help offset the financial repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative provides an additional way for fans to directly support acts on SoundCloud as live concerts and festivals are indefinitely postponed in many portions of the world.
To add the button to your SoundCloud artist page, click “Edit,” and then “Add support link.” Pick your

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After firing Chris Smalls, who helped organize a warehouse worker strike at Amazon’s Staten Island, New York facility over novel coronavirus safety, Amazon executives publicly attacked him on Twitter. Now we might know why. Leaked meeting notes obtained by Vice News lay out a plan for executives to smear Smalls and make him the focus of the company’s effort to discredit a growing labor movement inside the company.
“He’s not smart,

Image: Facebook Facebook Messenger finally has its own desktop app, making it easier to message and video chat with friends and family from your computer.
The app, which is now available on the Microsoft Store and Mac App Store, lets you message friends and start video calls, just like on the mobile and web versions. It also includes a dark mode, which Facebook has been rolling out as one of the new features introduced to the desktop’s redesign.Facebook’s Messenger desktop app joins

HBO is making a number of its original series and popular movies available for free beginning April 3rd to non-subscribers, including The Wire, Detective Pikachu, and The Sopranos.The move is being described by Variety as a “good will gesture” by WarnerMedia; an effort from the conglomerate to provide entertainment to people stuck at home due to the novel coronavirus. More than 500 hours of content will be made available, with many of HBO’s top series among the list, including

Steve Fecht for Genreal Motors General Motors and Honda are joining forces to develop two new electric vehicles, the companies announced on Thursday. They’ll have Honda nameplates but will be built using GM’s newly announced flexible EV platform with its Ultium-branded improved battery packs.Honda will design the exteriors and interiors of the new EVs, while the platform will be engineered to support Honda’s specifications, the companies say. They will be manufactured at GM&rs

As COVID-19 forces schools, offices, and social groups to move their daily operations online, video calling service Zoom has become the new centerpiece of many people’s daily life. But the increased use has brought heightened scrutiny to the company’s data practices. Every day, it seems, new vulnerabilities in the platform are coming to light.Today is no exception. The New York Times discovered that Zoom has been supporting a data-mining feature that automatically matched users&rsquo

Image: Grimes Grimes recently released a new music video for “You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around,” and it came with a surprise: a content dump containing assets from her new album Miss Anthropocene and an invitation for anyone to remix the song or video.
The music video features Grimes in front of a green screen and was originally shot so her team could create visuals for the album. Now, it’s an opportunity for collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Bec

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla was able to avoid a huge sink in first quarter sales despite coronavirus-related shutdowns in China and the US, according to new figures that were just released by the company. Other automakers reported big dips in sales earlier this week as the quarter came to a close, though losses are expected to be even more brutal in the second quarter as more of the world stays at home in an effort to suppress the spread of the novel coronavirus.Tesla delivere

Image: Guilherme Rambo / 9to5Mac We’ve known that Apple has been working on a Tile-like tracking tag system for months, but the biggest confirmation of the upcoming product yet has come in a since-deleted support video posted by Apple today. The video straight-up confirms both the existence of the tracking tags and the “AirTag” name, as spotted by Appleosophy.The AirTag name has come up before in previous leaks, but today’s news marks the clearest confirmation of the bra

One of the biggest complaints Disney Plus received at launch was The Simpsons not being available to stream in the correct 4:3 ratio. Disney has worked on a solution, and the company is hoping subscribers will be able to stream the show in its proper format by the end of May.“We appreciate our fans’ patience and are working to make the first 19 Seasons (and part of 20) of The Simpsons available in 4:3 versions on Disney Plus,” a tweet from the company reads. “We expect to

One of the biggest complaints Disney Plus received at launch was The Simpsons not being available to stream in the correct 4:3 ratio. Disney has worked on a solution, and the company is hoping subscribers will be able to stream the show in its proper format by the end of May.“We appreciate our fans’ patience and are working to make the first 19 Seasons (and part of 20) of The Simpsons available in 4:3 versions on Disney Plus,” a tweet from the company reads. “We expect to

Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images Amazon Prime Video is partnering with South by Southwest to launch what it’s calling a film festival collection, which will include works from filmmakers who had been scheduled to screen at the 2020 event in Austin. Originally scheduled for mid-March, the 34-year-old tech, music, and film fest was canceled by Austin Mayor Steve Adler on March 6th due to public health concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.Filmmakers were notified today and given the ch

Image: Google Google has added another entry to its long list of discontinued products on Thursday with the planned shutdown of Neighbourly, its short-lived crowdsourced Q&A platform. The service will go dark on May 12th.Neighbourly was launched in May 2018 to help gather together local knowledge for cities and neighborhoods within those cities, kind of like a cross between Nextdoor and Quora. But Google says it just didn’t really take off.“We launched Neighbourly as a Beta app

A new feature in Google’s Arts & Culture app allows you to turn your boring old photos into works of art — or at least, reasonable approximations — the company announced in a blog post. Instead of creating an overlay on your original image or blending it with an image of an artwork, Art Transfer “kicks off a unique algorithmic recreation of your photo inspired by the specific art style you have chosen,” according to Google.
Here’s how to use it: open the c

eBay is launching a new “Up & Running” program today that aims to help physical retailers move some of their business online if they’ve been shutdown or are struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of that program, eBay is waiving seller fees for new businesses to the platform starting today, April 2nd, through June 30th.Along with the waived fees, eBay will also be giving new businesses a free Basic-tier eBay Store for three months (which typically costs $21.95 per

Image: Naughty Dogg Sony announced on Thursday that it has delayed Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II “until further notice” because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The game had been previously scheduled to launch on May 29th.
“Logistically, the global crisis is preventing us from providing the launch experience our players deserve,” Sony said in a statement. Sony has also delayed Iron Man VR.
Update: SIE has made the difficult decision to delay the launch of The Last

Photo by Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Amazon has stopped selling N95 respirators, paper surgical masks, face shields, surgical gowns and gloves, and large-volume containers of sanitizer to general consumers, according to Recode. The company will instead prioritize the sale of these products to hospitals and governments, which can sign up to make purchases through a new portal on Amazon’s business site.Amazon says it will waive the commission fee it typically takes fro

Photo: Xinhua / Shen Bohan via Getty Images The Food and Drug Administration has issued its first authorization for a COVID-19 test that looks for antibodies in the blood, rather than for the virus in the nose or throat. While the antibody approach means this test will have limitations, it’s an important tool that could help in the response to the pandemic.The test is produced by the biotechnology company Cellex. Health care providers have to draw blood from a patient’s vein to run

Zoom is facing a variety of privacy and security issues this week, and the company is already responding to some of them rather quickly. Software engineer Felix Seele discovered earlier this week that Zoom’s macOS installer works around Apple’s OS restrictions by using “the same tricks that are being used by macOS malware” to get its software on Macs.
This meant the Zoom app was being installed without users providing final consent, thanks to a misleading prompt that auto

Image: Cards Against Humanity Cards Against Humanity has announced a new Family Edition of its popular phrase-matching card game, and you can download and print the public beta of the game for free right now.
You can download two PDFs of the beta: one 21-page PDF with small square cards and one 47-page PDF with larger rectangular cards. If you want to play, all you need to do is print out the PDF and cut out the cards.
Many of the regular Cards Against Humanity cards aren’t appropriate fo

Photo: Jim Bridenstein / Twitter NASA is officially bringing back its iconic “worm” logo from the 1970s for SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon 9 Crew Dragon launch, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced today on Twitter. The organization is seeking to “mark the return of human spaceflight on American rockets from American soil.”
The worm is back! When the @SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off carrying @NASA_Astronauts aboard #CrewDragon, it will sport the iconic symbol to mark t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Slack, the instant messaging app of choice for many companies, has probably become an even bigger part of your life if you’re working from home. And while Slack is usually used for work, it’s also very useful for conversing with friends and family. Slack offers paid plans, but anyone can sign up for the free version and create a workspace, a virtual space where you can set up different conversations and projects.
Each of those conversations an

Photo by Lars Ronbog/Getty Images for Copenhagen Fashion Summit Last week, Everlane’s consumer experience team was gutted by layoffs in the middle of its union drive, a huge blow to the nascent organizing effort. Now, the former employees are fighting back, accusing the CEO of retaliation and threatening a legal challenge if the employees aren’t reinstated.
The team, which primarily operates remotely, announced plans to unionize in late December, as reported by Anna Merlan in Vice.

Alex Castro / The Verge Apple Watch users can now ask Siri to play music through Spotify. With an update to Spotify’s app today, spotted by 9to5Mac, you can now ask Siri to play music through Spotify by ending a music request with “on Spotify.” The example Spotify gives is something as simple as “Hey Siri, play music on Spotify.”
It’s a small update, but it’s an overdue one for the Apple Watch. Apple only started allowing third-party music apps to integ

Image: Google Google has rolled out a new technology to improve audio quality in Duo calls when the service can’t maintain a steady connection called WaveNetEQ. It’s based on technology from Google’s DeepMind division that aims to replace audio jitter with artificial noise that sounds just like human speech, generated using machine learning.If you’ve ever made a call over the internet, chances are you’ve experienced audio jitter. It happens when packets of audio da

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google will start to lift its ban on coronavirus-related advertising this week after its policy caught fire from Democratic lawmakers who feared it may bolster misinformation from the White House.Over the next few days, Google will begin to allow “government entities, hospitals, medical providers, and NGOs” to run ads related to the novel coronavirus on its platforms. Since February, most nongovernmental advertisers have been barred from runni

Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images New York’s status as a stubborn holdout against electric bikes and scooters appears to finally be over. Included in the state’s tentative budget agreement reached on April 1st is a provision that would legalize throttle-based bikes and scooters, which would effectively end the City of New York’s unfair and frustratingly long-running crackdown on immigrant delivery workers.The budget language almost exactly mirrors a bill that passed

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Quibi, a mobile streaming service that is set to launch next week, and T-Mobile are partnering to give the telecom’s customers free access to Quibi content. The specifics of the deal had been rumored since last month, but T-Mobile confirmed it today.The free one-year subscription is only available to T-Mobile customers with two or more voice lines at standard rates on Magenta and ONE plans as well discounted First Responder, Military and Magenta Plu