Technology news

As my quarantine hits day 40, I've settled on a routine for checking on the coronavirus data that floods the internet every day. Instead of looking at multiple sites, I go to Bing. Yes, Bing.
It's messy online. One site shows you the rate of new cases, the other recovery and fatality rates. Over there, logarithmic graphs of total cases. 
To cut through all the noise, I go to a site I never used before the pandemic broke out. Everyday I refresh the Bing tab that I opened on my laptop around

Back on April 20, reports started to appear of gamers discovering their Nintendo accounts had been accessed by an unauthorized person. Even worse, was the fact linked PayPal accounts had been used to purchase Fortnite VBuck currency. At the time Nintendo didn't publicly acknowledged a security problem, but now it has.
As The Verge reports, Nintendo posted a notice to customers on its Japanese website informing them that illegal logins had occurred. In total, some 160,000 Nintendo Accounts have b

Lisa Wehden ContributorShare on Twitter Lisa Wehden is an investor at Bloomberg Beta, a VC fund focused on the future of work; previously she launched Entrepreneur First in Berlin.
Next month, Apple and Google will unveil features to enable contact tracing on iOS and Android to identify people who have had contact with someone who tests positive for the novel coronavirus.
Security experts have been quick to point out the possible dangers, including privacy risks like revealing identities of COVI

Podcasting just hit a major milestone.
There are now more than one million podcast shows on Apple Podcasts, according to Apple. 
Let me reiterate: we don't mean episodes. We’re talking more than one million individual podcast shows: As in the shows which then release their episodes. That’s a lot of podcasts.
Apple confirmed in an email to Mashable that Apple Podcasts hit more than one million podcasts and that this milestone was reached on Monday, April 20. 
The company bri

Many industries have been negatively impacted by the novel coronavirus, including the cruise industry, with cruise ships deemed some of the most dangerous places due to the limited airflow and confined spaces. With no global organization or agency keeping track of cases from cruise ships, the Miami Herald, a Florida-based newspaper, decided to track outbreaks on oceangoing cruise ships.
As of April 23rd, the Miami Herald found at least 3,582 people during or directly after a cruise have tested p

Amazon tech workers are taking a sick day on Friday to protest the tech company's treatment of their fellow employees during the current coronavirus pandemic. 
In March and April, the Seattle-based technology company fired two tech workers and three warehouse workers who had criticized Amazon over unsafe warehouse conditions during the current coronavirus pandemicAmazon Employees for Climate Justice (AEJC), which started in Dec. 2018 to push for the development of a company-wide climate cha

Texas truly is forever. The cast of Friday Night Lights reunited via Zoom to revisit the pilot episode while socially distancing as part of Global Citizen's "Together At Home" series, to raise money for the World Health Organization.
The rewatch reunited Scott Porter (Jason Street), Aimee Teegarden (Julie Taylor), Adrianne Palicki (Tyra Collette), Derek Phillips (Billy Riggins), Gaius Charles (Smash Williams), and Brad Leland (Buddy Garrity). 
Fair warning: They make it two seconds into the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is extending its increase in the hourly pay rate of warehouse workers through May 16th, according to a report from CNBC. The company originally announced in March that, as part of its hiring increase to contend with the huge surge in demand due to the coronavirus pandemic, it would raise warehouse worker pay by $2 an hour.The pay increase was temporary, slated to end by May 1st. Now, Amazon is extending the pay bump to help incentivize workers to c

Matt Ocko,co-founder of venture firm Data Collective (DCVC), was among a small group of VCs viewed as alarmists when they began tweeting about the coronavirus’s imminent appearance in the U.S. back in January.
In retrospect, those individuals were prescient, so we spoke with Ocko last week about why he was so certain the U.S. was about to get walloped by COVID-19, and asked how some of the startups in DCVC’s portfolio — which has long had a strong biotech focus — are tryi

The coronavirus has decimated the travel industry, and Airbnb, the home rental company that appeared unstoppable not so long ago, has not been spared.
While the headlines have focused on the measures it’s taking to stockpile cash to offset its losses, behind the scenes, the nearly 12-year-old company has been busily redesigning its products. These include rethinking its home screen and app landing pages to reflect a world where short-term stays are out and longer-term stays — includi

Divergent, the Los Angeles-based startup aiming to revolutionize vehicle manufacturing, has cut about one-third of its staff amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended startups and major corporations alike.
The company, which employed about 160 people, laid off 57 workers, according to documents filed with the California Employment Development Department. Founder and CEO Kevin Czingerdidn’t provide specific numbers. However, he did confirm to TechCrunch that he had to reduce staff due to

Today marks the conclusion of a years-long saga that started when John Oliver did a segment on Net Neutrality that was so popular that it brought the FCC’s comment system to its knees. Two years later it is finally near addressing all the issues brought up in an investigation from the General Accountability Office.
The report covers numerous cybersecurity and IT issues, some of which the FCCaddressed quickly, some not so quickly and some it’s still working on.
“Today’s GA

Suzanne Borders ContributorShare on Twitter Suzanne is the CEO and co-founder of BadVR. She thrives at the intersection of data, art, technology and poetry.As a small business owner, I was excited to learn about the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act that offers low-interest loans to firms impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as I read through the details and began to apply, it became clear that this legislation — while well-intentioned — may not

Kara Carmichael has been an Instacartshopper for years in Orlando, Fla. It’s how she’s been able to support her family, she told TechCrunch. But she says she has noticed an increase in third-party bot activity that has made shopping “nearly impossible.”
Despite the high demand for Instacartamid the COVID-19 pandemic, shoppers like Carmichael are facing difficulties claiming orders within the shopper app. This is the result of what appears to be some sophisticated work by

Update: We mistakenly noted in an earlier version that Chaudhri had been a part of Microsoft’s Hololens team. The story has been updated to remove the reference. 
In his two decades at Apple, Imran Chaudhri worked on many of the company’s most iconic product lines, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The designer left the company in 2017 , but today he’s offering up some fun insight into Apple Watch’s beginnings on the wearable’s fifth birthday.The thread is a

Image: The Verge In March, as COVID-19 spread around the world, I argued that tech companies would need to get creative to help us maintain our social ties through the weeks and months of physical distancing to follow. Sure, we’ve got phone calls and Zoom, but neither were built for a world in which we would need them to host virtually all of our work, school, and play. It seemed clear that some new tools would be needed — and, as of today, we have some.Facebook today rolled out a n

Facebook is rolling out a suite of new products to expand its capabilities in video chat. The company today announced Messenger Rooms, a tool for starting virtual hangouts with up to 50 people and allowing friends to drop in on you whenever they like. It’s also doubling the capacity of video calls on WhatsApp from four people to eight, adding video calls to Facebook Dating, and adding new live-streaming features to both Facebook and Instagram.CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the features in a

Photo by Brennan King / The Verge Samsung and Google are offering free phone repairs to health care workers and first responders to help support those frontline workers in the fight against COVID-19 (via 9to5Google). The two companies are offering the repairs in partnership with phone repair company uBreakiFix.
Samsung’s program, called “Free Repairs for The Frontline,” will “provide free repair services for Samsung smartphones, including cracked screen and battery repla

Happy Birthday Hubble! To celebrate the telescope’s three decades in space, the team of researchers behind the Hubble have released an amazing new image of two nebulas in the Large Magellenic Cloud, a smaller galaxy about 163,000 light-years from our Milky Way.The larger, red nebula is NGC 2014, and the bright, newly formed stars at its heart are 10-20 times the size of the Sun, according to NASA. The blue nebula, NGC 2020, was formed when a star 200,000 times larger than our Sun ejected a

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon and Alex Castro / The Verge On Friday, Apple and Google revised their ambitious automatic contact-tracing proposal, just two weeks after the system was first announced. An Apple representative said the changes were the result of feedback both companies had received about the specifications and how they might be improved. The companies are also releasing a “Frequently Asked Questions” document, which rehashes much of the information already made publi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon lost 84,000 Fios TV subscribers and 68,000 postpaid mobile phone subscribers during the first quarter of 2020 as the telecom company continued seeing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In its earnings report this morning, Verizon said it’s seeing an “ongoing shift from traditional linear video to over-the-top offerings.” That trend isn’t new, but widespread quarantines are only helping to push it along.With 70 percent of

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two US lawmakers spearheading an antitrust investigation into Amazon are looking into whether a top company official lied before Congress about whether the e-commerce giant uses independent seller data to create its own products and unfairly compete on its platform.
In a report Thursday, the Wall Street Journal wrote that Amazon employees used independent seller data to develop the company’s own competing products. In one case, Amazon employees alle

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Last week, we saw Apple announce an addition to its smartphone lineup as well as a new keyboard case for the iPad Pro. This week on The Vergecast, co-hosts Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss The Verge’s reviews of those products: the new iPhone SE and the Magic Keyboard.Starting at $399, the iPhone SE joins a group of smartphones in a competitive price range far below flagship phones. Does spending less still get you a satisfactory iPhone experience?In addit