Technology news

Academic researchers from New York University, Cornell Tech, and NortonLifeLock have discovered hundreds of so-called creepware apps available on the Android Play Store, which Google has since removed.
As ZDNet reports, creepware refers to any app that is able to "stalk, harass, defraud, or threaten another person, directly or indirectly," but isn't fully-featured enough to class as spyware. In other words, these apps enable abuse, but need to be combined with other apps to be counted as a serio

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has requested that Congress pass a law that would make price gouging illegal during times of national crisis, in light of inflated prices on crucial goods like hand sanitizer and N95 masks that have hounded the online retailer during the COVID-19 pandemic.In an open letter posted by Brian Huseman, Amazon’s VP of public policy, the company highlights its own ongoing efforts to try to crack down on price gouging. To date, Amazon says that it&rs

Image: Embodied The latest educational tech comes in the form of a seven-pound robot that looks like something ripped out of a Pixar movie. Moxie, an adorable educational robot, is designed for teaching kids at home. But it’s expensive: the robot itself is $1,500, and it requires a $60 monthly subscription after the first year.
Embodied, the robotics and AI company behind Moxie, says the robot will teach kids ages six through nine using weekly themes and lessons designed to promote cognit

Wrangling your numerous Google Chrome tabs is about to get a little easier.
Google announced Wednesday that the next version of Chrome will let users group open tabs together with custom name tags and even colors. The feature, which is currently live in the most recent Chrome beta build, will start rolling out next week when the latest version of Chrome launches. Once the update hits, users will be able to create a new group or assign tabs to an existing one simply by right clicking on a tab.&nb

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Nintendo Switch, like everything else that can lighten the mood during this incredibly tough time, is in short supply. And as soon as retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart gets it in stock, it quickly sells out. It can be disheartening to miss out on the opportunity to buy a Switch — but fear not! The purpose of this article is to help you do just that without paying more than it would usually cost at retail.
We’re keeping a loo

If you're feeling particularly nostalgic about the '90s and in the mood to tarnish your precious childhood memories, the Bug's Life fleshlight is here for you. 
In the Pixar movie, Heimlich is a chunky caterpillar who aspires to be a butterfly. His ribbed exterior, plump lips, and unfortunate bodily proportions make him looks, well, fleshlight-shaped. 
Inspired by the memes, Austin-based artist Malek Lazri brought the joke to (bug's) life. He painted over an actual Fleshlight with a ca

If you're stumped on how to spend your next family Zoom call, Megan Rapinoe has a provocative idea: start a conversation about how you'd like to change the status quo.
This is harder ice to break than, say, launching into a round of Mad Libs or sports trivia, but Rapinoe is offering both a suggestion and a solution. 
The World Cup champion and three of her current and former teammates — Christen Press, Tobin Heath, and Meghan Klingenberg — just debuted a deck of conversation car

Image: Amazon Finding TV shows and movies that you can stream on Amazon’s Fire TV devices for free without any subscriptions is about to get much simpler. The company is adding a new “free” tab to the main Fire TV navigation bar. In this section, you’ll be able to browse content that can be viewed at no charge — aside from dealing with ads — from apps like Pluto TV, Tubi, Crackle, IMDb TV, the CW, and Amazon’s News app.“Over the past year, we&rsqu

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge President Donald Trump has extended his executive order banning US companies from working with or buying telecommunications equipment from companies deemed a national security risk until May 2021, via Reuters.While the ban doesn’t explicitly call out specific companies, it’s been used to virtually shut down US operations with Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, which can no longer sell products in the US or work with companies like Google o

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is the latest company to resort to layoffs during the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The company filed a regulatory notice in New York last week revealing it had laid off 25 employees, or about 18 percent of its workforce. But Kickstarter tells The Verge its workforce reduction is more than twice that, as close to 30 employees decided to take voluntary buyouts as negotiated between the company&r

Exercise bikes provide a great home cardio workout that puts less strain on your joints than running on a treadmill. Out of the different types of exercise bikes, recumbent bikes are best for beginners, seniors, or people who don't want to put as much pressure or weight on their joints.
What is a recumbent bike?
A recumbent bike is an exercise bike that positions you in a reclined form while pedaling. Think of it sort of like a rowing machine, but your feet pedal instead of your arms pulling bac

Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images Uber outlined a series of measures it is taking Wednesday to adapt its ride-hailing and delivery businesses to a world changed by COVID-19. Chief among them is a new rule limiting the maximum number of people allowed in each vehicle.Starting May 18th, only three passengers will be allowed in each vehicle across its product line, the company said. Previously, Uber had allowed up to four passengers in its UberX vehicles. Passengers will not be allowed to ride in t

The New Mutants, a movie that feels like it’s never going to actually come out, has a new release date: August 28th.Like Mulan and Black Widow, The New Mutants was delayed because of the global pandemic, which saw movie theaters around the world shut down. Disney announced in an earlier press release that Mulan and Black Widow would move into their new release dates, July 24th and November 6th respectively, but didn’t mention The New Mutants at the time. Fans began speculating that T

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is adding a new tab grouping feature to Chrome, the company announced today. I, for one, am extremely excited for it. I can already see how it could help me better organize the dozens of tabs I typically have open at any given time. If you want to try the feature now, Google says it’s available in the latest Chrome Beta and will be rolling out more broadly to the desktop versions of Chrome next week.Google’s implementation of tab groupi

Centr Multiple people say Chris Hemsworth’s workout app, Centr, charged them up to a $99 or more subscription fee without warning, even after they attempted to cancel a free trial. The app has been flooded with complaints across Instagram, Facebook, and app stores, with users calling the company “sneaky” and a “scam” and demanding refunds.
Multiple fitness apps have offered free trials during the COVID-19 pandemic, and known good-body-haver and app founder Chris He

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon’s Eero announced today that its routers are now for sale on Apple’s website. The full product line, including the Eero and Eero Pro Mesh Wi-Fi Routers, are available to customers in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Eero did not specify whether its products will be available in Apple’s retail stores as they reopen.“This is an exciting step towards delivering our vision to bring eero to more customers

Within, the maker of VR fitness app-slash-game Supernatural, has announced new annual pricing plans for the service. Until June 1st you can sign up for a $149-a-year subscription, and the price will rise to $199 for people who subscribe after that date.Supernatural is a great VR workout, but it doesn’t come cheap. After a 30-day free trial, the service costs $19 a month, which comes out to $228 a year. The subscription model is somewhat unprecedented for VR apps, but Supernatural is a Pelo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The FBI alongside the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have formally accused China of funding and operating hacking cells dedicated to stealing coronavirus vaccine research from the US and its allies.The news was issued as an unclassified public service announcement on CISA’s website on Wednesday. News reports over the weekend first said the warning, which is directed at organizations wo

Two key Pixel execs, including the computer researcher who led the team that developed the computational photography powering the Pixel’s camera, have left Google in recent months, according to a new report from The Information. The executives who left are distinguished engineer Marc Levoy and former Pixel general manager Mario Queiroz.
Queiroz had apparently already moved off the Pixel team two months before the launch of the Pixel 4 into a role that reported directly to Google CEO Sundar

Photo by Samuel Corum / Getty Images On Wednesday, Democrats escalated efforts to ban major corporate mergers during the coronavirus pandemic, penning a letter to the Treasury Department calling for a ban on any mergers by companies that received pandemic relief.
For several weeks, lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, have pushed for a general moratorium on mergers until the pand

We finally have numbers to back up the wild view counts we’ve seen in live-streaming since the COVID-19 pandemic began and the lockdowns started — and they’re huge. According to StreamElements and Arsenal.gg, the live-streaming sector grew a full 45 percent between March and April; year over year, the industry is up by 99 percent. Which is truly impressive — those gains are directly attributable to the novel coronavirus.I’ve been writing for a while in these virtual

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Slack is making its big mobile redesign official today by pushing the changes live on the public versions of both its Android and iOS apps. The redesign’s standout feature is a new navigation bar at the bottom that lets you more easily get to critical parts of the app, such as your direct messages and your mentions, without having to use swipes or tapping through tiny, hard-to-see menus.The result is a unified mobile Slack that’s virtually the

Over the last few weeks all eyes in the crypto world have been glued to the halvening, a nigh-religious moment in the blockchain realm. Every once in a while, the amount of new bitcoin mined — distributed to miners, the folks with fleets of computers powering bitcoin’s database, or blockchain — is cut in half. Why does that matter? It slows the rate at which new bitcoin is introduced to the world as the cryptocurrency marches toward its 21 million coin cap.
That’s to say

VMware announced today that it intends to buy early-stage Kubernetes security startup, Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black, a security company it bought last year for $2.1 billion. The company did not reveal the price of today’s acquisition.
According to a blog post announcing the deal from Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice president at VMware’s Security Business Unit, Octarine should fit in with what Carbon Black calls its “intrinsic security strategy” &

Image: Epic Games Epic Games today said its massive battle royale hit Fortnite would be available on Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s PlayStation 5 consoles at launch later this year. Epic made the announcement alongside its reveal of Unreal Engine 5, its new game engine and developer toolkit designed for creating next-generation titles.“Epic will release Fortnite, built with UE4, on next-gen consoles at launch and, in keeping with the team’s commitment to prove out

Epic Games today announced the next iteration of its game engine, the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), with a stunning demo running on the PlayStation 5. Epic says the demo shows off what next-generation game consoles will truly be capable of once developers have full access to creative tools like UE5 and the capability to squeeze the maximum out of new hardware and software baked into Sony’s PS5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X.“The graphics speak for themselves. And Epic has always pushed

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says next-generation gaming consoles, in particular Sony’s PlayStation 5, will bring about changes in game development that go far beyond a jump in graphics quality. During a press briefing for the company’s newly announced Unreal Engine 5, which is optimized to work with next-gen consoles, Sweeney says the PS5 is a “remarkably balanced device.”“It has an immense amount of GPU power, but also multi-order

In a rare joint public statement, the FBI and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit CISAhave accused top Chinese hackers of trying to steal U.S. research related to the coronavirus strain, known as COVID-19.
The statement, published today, said that Chinese hackers “have been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property and public health data related to vaccines, treatments and testing from networks an personnel associated with COVID-1

Best Buy is hosting a one-day sale on tech in practically every category. We’ve picked out a few that are currently in stock, including a bundle containing Microsoft’s new Surface Go 2 and a Type Cover is $474. Usually, the tablet is $400, and the Type Cover will cost you at least another $100 on top of that, so this is a modest $25 discount on the package. The chances are good that you’re looking for a Type Cover with your new Surface Go 2, so you might as well save a little m

Image: Facebook Facebook is now rolling out its customizable avatars in the US after first launching them internationally last year. Like Bitmoji or Apple’s Memoji, avatars offer a way to express yourself through a virtual lookalike (or whatever character you feel like creating). They can be used “in comments, stories, Messenger — and soon text posts with backgrounds,” according to Facebook’s Fidji Simo. They can also be displayed on your Facebook gaming profile.&l

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge These days, while many of us are working from home and quarantining, it’s become more important than ever to keep in contact with colleagues, friends, and family. And one of the best ways to stay connected involves using technology. Videoconferencing apps such as Zoom, Google Meet, Skype, and Houseparty are being employed for everything from after-work hangouts to birthday parties, and chat apps like Slack and Facebook Messenger are popular for day-

Apple is reportedly asking publishers for permission to record audio of their stories to include in its News Plus app, according to Digiday. The publication says it spoke with four publishers that heard the offer. Apple would cover the costs of production and compensate publishers similarly to how it does for written articles: 50 percent of subscriber revenue goes to publishers based on how much time subscribers spent with publishers’ content in a 30-day period.
Digiday’s sources say

A new small study out of Harvard and Boston University is targeting the use of soft robotic exosuits among stroke survivors. The aim is to demonstrate how such technologies could impact the rehabilitation of patients suffering hemiparesis, a kind of paralysis that impacts muscles and limbs on one side of the body.The results so far seem promising. Among the six patients involved in the study, walking speed has been improved by an average of 0.14 meters a second. The patients are also able to wal

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Alienware has announced the second generation of its flagship Area-51m gaming laptop, the Area-51m R2. It’s largely similar on the outside to the original Area-51m, but the specs are almost completely overhauled on the inside, with 10th Gen Intel processors, new Nvidia GPUs, faster RAM, and better display options. All of those upgrades will be limited to the new R2 model, though. Despite Alienware’s goals for future-proofed upgradable parts, the Are

FeaturePeek’s founders graduated from Y Combinator in Summer 2019, which for an early stage startup must seem like a million years ago right now. Despite the current conditions though, the company announced a $1.8 million seed investment today.
The round was led by Matrix Partnerswith some unnamed Angel investors also participating.
The startup has built a solution to allow teams to review front-end designs throughout the development process instead of waiting until the end when the projec

If you use an iPhone or Mac and you want to cast a video from a specific app on your iPhone or Mac to your TV, you can use AirPlay. However, if you want to cast your whole screen — with all of the windows or applications you may have open — then you’ll want to use mirroring.You can mirror your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Mac screen on an Apple TV or an AirPlay 2-compatible smart TV. (Here are the system requirements.) The requirements for screen mirroring are similar to those

UK food delivery giant Deliveroohas been called on to do more to protect riders’ incomes and safety during the coronavirus crisis. The ‘meals-on-wheels’ service couriers provide makes them key workers in a pandemic characterized by social distancing and ‘shelter in place’ lockdowns, is the key argument.
More than forty MPs from across the political spectrum — including the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn and veteran Conservative MP, Sir Peter

LeoLabshas been building out its global network of space-scanning radars for the last couple years, leading up to today’s launch of its Collision Avoidance system, essentially satellite-monitoring-as-a-service. It should prove an indispensable asset to startups that don’t happen to have their own state of the art radar setup.
Space is full of junk, and it isn’t tracked as closely as anyone would like. A bit of debris the size of a pebble could put nearly any satellite out of co

Image: Dell Dell is making some big changes to its XPS lineup today, with a redesigned XPS 15 and a new XPS 17. The design updates see Dell ditching legacy ports in favor of USB-C and 16:10 displays across its main XPS laptops.
The new XPS 15 design is the most significant update in nearly five years, with a bigger 16:10 15.6-inch display, Intel’s latest 10th Gen processors, and even models with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Max-Q graphics inside.
The new 15.6-inch display trims the

It’s upgrade season for Dell’s Alienware laptops, with the company’s entire lineup of portable gaming machines — the Area-51m, the m17, and the m15 — getting overhauled with updated specs, including Intel’s new 10th Gen chips and Nvidia’s latest GPUs.For the top-of-the-line Area-51m (officially, the Alienware Area-51m R2, to distinguish itself from the first-generation Area-51m R1 model), that means Intel’s newly announced desktop-class 10th Gen CP

Justine and Olivia Moore, the twin investors behind the CRV-backed Liftoff List have long believed in the power of student entrepreneurship.
The twin sisters were among the early architects of Stanford University’s student investment program, Cardinal Ventures, and even back then they’d noticed that it was hard for student entrepreneurs to get press and coverage for their companies without raising significant capital in the Bay Area.
The Liftoff List, which launched with its inaugura

Image: Sony Sony says PlayStation 5 sales will prove whether its quiet promotion of its next-gen console will beat rival Microsoft. Sony has remained relatively quiet about its PlayStation 5 plans, revealing some specs, a logo, and a controller but no full console reveal or potential games just yet.In an investor call earlier today, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki fielded a question from an analyst around the lack of PS5 promotion versus the Xbox Series X and whether the company is failing to keep up wi

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
When we kicked off our series on private companies that have reached $100 million ARR, we didn’t expect it to last. Maybe a piece or two, but nothing more. Today’s entry should bring us past the 30 company mark.
It was less than a month ago that we added eight names to the club in a single post (HeadSpin, UiPath, DigitalOcean, BounceX, Wrike, Aeris, Podium 

Beauty guru and YouTube creator James Charles is well-versed in the apology video, a staple of YouTube culture that many of the platform’s top personalities have had to film, and he’s passing along those skills to a new generation of wannabe influencers.In a recent episode of his YouTube Premium competition series Instant Influencer, Charles gives a group of aspiring beauty stars a new challenge: create an apology video that is believable and won’t end up torn to shreds by the