Technology news

Everlywell was one of the first startups to announce that it was working on a self-administered, at-home COVID-19 diagnostic kit, but it initially sought out to ship kits before regulators made clear that this was not in line with its guidelines. Everlywell then became intent on working with the FDA to secure a proper Emergency Use Authorization for its kits before sending any to consumers, and that approach has paid off with the U.S. drug regulator issuing an EUA for Everlywell’s tech tod

Ford said Saturday it will test hourly and salaried employees with suspected COVID-19 symptoms in four metro areas where it has major operations as it prepares to reopen facilities this month.
The automaker is expected to resume production and some operations at its North America facilities May 18. Aside from factory workers, Ford is also bringing back about 12,000 employees whose jobs cannot be done remotely such as vehicle testing and design. The company’s parts distribution centers

Jinyan Zang ContributorShare on Twitter Jinyan Zang is a researcher at Data Privacy Lab and a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Harvard University .Latanya Sweeney ContributorShare on Twitter Latanya Sweeney is a professor of government and technology in residence at Harvard University's Department of Government, editor-in-chief of Technology Science and the founding director of the Technology Science Initiative and the Data Privacy Lab at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT), just subscribe here.
Commercial real estate, the traditional heart of most cities, may have lost its reason to exist in the last few months. The world is about to find out what the situation is as more locations start to reopen.
First up in our ongoing coverage of the topic, Connie Loizos caught up with a couple proptech investors this week for TechCrunch, who saw exis

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A Friday letter from Amazon to members of Congress looking into the company’s third-party seller practices was “unacceptable,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tweeted Saturday.At issue is an Amazon executive’s testimony at a hearing last July, where he said the company doesn’t access information from third-party sellers on its platform to make competing items. But the Wall Street Journal reported last m

Did you know we have an online conference about product design coming up? SPRINT will cover how designers and product owners can stay ahead of the curve in these unprecedented times. Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: “Why are all websites starting to look the same?” These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizon

Edison Mail has rolled back a software update that apparently let some users of its iOS app see emails from strangers’ accounts.Several Edison users contacted The Verge to report seeing the glitch after they applied the update, which was meant to allow users to sync data across devices. Reader Matthew Grzybowski said after the update he had more than 100 unread messages from the UK-based email account of a stranger. He didn’t have to enter any credentials to see the emails, Grzybowsk

“Never Have I Ever” is a new Netflixcomedy created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, loosely based on Kaling’s own teenage years.
The show focuses on Devi (played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who’s desperately hoping for a good sophomore year after the sudden death of her father — cue the awkward attempts to get a boyfriend, to lose her virginity and to become one of the cool kids at school.
On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by T

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first compan

Update May 17th, 9:30AM ET: The X-37B successfully took off at 9:14AM ET on Sunday, though ULA ended live coverage of the mission early at the request of the Air Force.
Original Story: The Air Force’s mysterious spy spaceplane, dubbed the X-37B, is headed back to space on Sunday morning for its sixth mission in Earth orbit. As usual with this spacecraft, its exact purpose is a secret, though the Air Force says the vehicle will be carrying a number of experiments on this trip and testing ou

Look at the short video below. Can you answer the following questions: Which object caused the ball to change direction? Where will the ball go next? What would happen if you removed the bat from the scene? You might consider these questions very dumb. But interestingly, today’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems would struggle to answer them. Questions such as the ones asked above require the ability to reason about objects and their behaviors and relations over time

Facebook is buying Giphy, and that means how you send and receive GIFs on the internet could change forever. The service claims that more than 700 million people see Giphy content every day, and many of those views come from some of the internet’s most popular apps— from Apple’s iMessage to TikTok and Twitter — most of which rely on Giphy’s API and archives to let users share and post GIFs.It’s likely that at least some of those services won’t want to ha

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge You can get two of Amazon’s Echo Show 5 smart displays for $90 today at Best Buy. To break down why exactly that’s a deal worth highlighting, that’s the regular price for just one of them. This model has a 5.5-inch display, which makes it easier to fit just about anywhere inside your home. And since this deal includes a second display, you can choose to set it up in a different part of your living space, or you can gift it to someone who you&rs

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge You can get two of Amazon’s Echo Show 5 smart displays for $90 today at Best Buy. To break down why exactly that’s a deal worth highlighting, that’s the regular price for just one of them. This model has a 5.5-inch display, which makes it easier to fit just about anywhere inside your home. And since this deal includes a second display, you can choose to set it up in a different part of your living space, or you can gift it to someone who you&rs

On Saturday, the United Launch Alliance(ULA) is targeting a liftoff time of 8:24 AM EDT (5:24 AM PDT) for one of its Atlas V rockets carrying the U.S. Space Force’s X-37B orbital test vehicle, which is a fully autonomous winged spaceplane that looks a little like a scaled down version of the Space Shuttle .
This is the sixth mission for the X-37B, though it’s the first flown under the U.S. Space Force’s supervision, since the space plane was previously operated by the Air Forc

Dark matter may not give off any light or radiation, but we might be able to watch it smash into atoms here on Earth. Dark matter makes up 85% of all matter in the Universe, but astronomers have never seen it. The nature of this mysterious — something — remains largely unknown. The mass which we call dark matter does not give off light, heat, radio waves, or any other form of electromagnetic radiation. But, astronomers and physicists know something (and a LOT of it) is out there. Wi

With many major sectors totally frozen and reeling from losses, tech’s biggest players are proving themselves to be the exception to the rule yet again. OnFriday, Facebookconfirmed its plans to buy Giphy, a popular gif search engine, in a deal believed to be worth $400 million.
Facebook has indicated it wants to forge new developer and content relationships for Giphy, but what the world’s largest social network really wants with the popular gif platform might be more than meets the e

Bicycles are probably the best way to get around New York City, especially during these days of empty roads and social distancing. There’s just one problem every aspiring city cyclist faces: bikes take up a lot of space in a shoebox apartment. Well, that and bike theft — which you know, is easier to prevent if you can keep your bike inside said shoebox apartment. The thing is, bikes shouldn’t have to take so much space. They are fundamentally thin machines — only a few i

Kevin Rosehas been in the spotlight since co-founding the early social news aggregation site Digg in late 2004. A genial whiz kid turned serial entrepreneur, he has since become as well-known for launching a whole lot of slickly designed products, some of them out of his startup incubator Milk (later acquired by Google), and North, an incubator that would later lead him to a site for watch enthusiasts called Hodinkee in New York.
Along the way, Rose has been investing, at times as an angel, for

Image: Fitbit Fitbit, which makes fitness-tracking wearables, will be shifting supply chain resources to make emergency ventilators, Fitbit CEO James Park said to CNBC. The ventilators will be used to help treat COVID-19 patients and could help bolster the national supply of the medical devices, which have been in need during the pandemic.
“There was a lot of concern about the shortage of ventilators and we realized we had expertise already around the supply chain,” Park said to CNB

NASA’splan to return to the Moon is ambitious enough on its own, but the agency is aiming to modernize international cooperation in space in the process. Today it published a summary of the “Artemis Accords,” a new set of voluntary guidelines that partner nations and organizations are invited to join to advance the cause of exploration and industry globally.
Having no national affiliation or sovereignty of its own, space is by definition lawless. So these are not so much space

Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images A bipartisan group of senators are sounding the antitrust enforcement alarm Friday over Facebook’s newly announced acquisition of Giphy, a GIF-making and sharing website.On Friday, Facebook announced that it would acquire Giphy for the reported price of $400 million. Giphy is one of the largest GIF sites on the internet and social media and messaging services like Twitter, Tinder, Slack and iMessage already have Giphy integrated into their apps.In a Fr