Technology news

The U.S. has suffered from devastating wildfires over the last few years as global temperatures rise and weather patterns change, making the otherwise natural phenomenon especially unpredictable and severe. To help out, Stanford researchers have found a way to track and predict dry, at-risk areas using machine learning and satellite imagery.
Currently the way forests and scrublands are tested for susceptibility to wildfires is by manually collecting branches and foliage and testing their water c

Brex,last valued at $2.6 billion, is restructuring its credit card for startups business and cut 62 staff members, the co-founders Pedro Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras said in a blog post.
“Today we’re restructuring the company to better align our priorities with this new reality, while simultaneously accelerating our product vision. With that, I have some very sad news to share. 62 people will be leaving Brex today,” the post reads.
The cuts come as Brex’s customer bas

TikTok has a new competitor: Zynn, a nearly button-for-button clone of TikTok that differentiates itself with one key twist — it pays users to sign up, watch videos, and convince others to follow suit. The app launched at the beginning of May, and as Mashable noticed, it’s now the number one free app in Apple’s App Store and in the top 10 on Google’s Play Store, too.
Zynn is fully a TikTok clone. The core interface is identical, and both are oriented around watching short

Sonyhas been dishing out details on the PlayStation 5 piece-by-piece, rather than dropping all of the details at one big mega event. First came word of the Holiday 2020 release window. Then came an overview of the specs — like that it’ll have a super-fast solid-state drive by default. Most recently, they showed off the controller. (The divvied up approach makes sense, really; with the ongoing pandemic preventing events like E3 and GDC from happening… why wouldn’t So

Illustration by Alex Castro / Th Facebook’s decision not to take action against recent posts about mail-in ballots and the Minnesota protests by President Trump is roiling employees, some of whom are calling on executives to reconsider their stance. In response to an internal post explaining the company’s rationale, some employees criticized the company’s neutral posture.
“I have to say I am finding the contortions we have to go through incredibly hard to stomach,”

A screengrab from SPadre’s livestream of the engine test | Image: SPadre A fourth prototype of SpaceX’s next generation Starship rocket exploded right after a test at the company’s south Texas test site on Friday. Shortly after SpaceX ignited the engine on the test rocket, a massive fireball engulfed the vehicle in flames, leaving very little hardware still standing and apparently causing damage to the test site.
The failed test comes just a day before SpaceX is set to perform

When this editor first met Jeremy Conrad, it was in 2014 in San Francisco, at the 8,000-square-foot former fish factory that was home to Lemnos, the hardware-focused venture firm Conrad co-founded three years earlier.
Conrad — who’d studied mechanical engineering at MIT — was excited at the time about investing in hardware startups, having just closed a small new fund. One investment his team made around that time was in Airware, a company that made subscription-based software

The global spread of COVID-19 and resulting orders to shelter in place have hit retailers hard.
As the pandemic drags on, temporary halts are becoming permanent closures, whether it’s the coffee shop next door, a historic bar or a well-known lifestyle brand.
But while the present is largely bleak, preparing for the future has retailers adopting technologies faster than ever. Their resilience and innovation means retail will look and fee different when the world reopens.
We gathered four vi

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images The United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO), President Trump said in a press conference today.“China has total control over World Health Organization,” Trump said. “We have detailed to them the reforms that they must make and engaged with them directly but they have refused to act.”
Trump had previously frozen funding to the WHO, claiming that the organization bowed to pressure from China an

SpaceXhad just conducted yet another static fire test of the Raptor engine in its Starship SN4 prototype launch vehicle on Friday when the test vehicle exploded on the test stand in Boca Chica, Texas. This was the fourth static fire test of this engine on this prototype, so it’s unclear what went wrong versus other static fire attempts.
This was a test in the development of Starship, a new spacecraft that SpaceX has been developing in Boca Chica. Eventually, the company hopes to use it to

Today, the online film festival We Are One is kicking off 10 days of films, talks, musical performances and VR experiences.
The event is a collaboration between Tribeca Enterprises(the organization behind the Tribeca Film Festival) and YouTube,with help from 21 film festivals from around the world.
Think of it as an attempt to recreate a little bit of the excitement of this year’s canceled festivals, and to showcase some of the films that would have screened there. Partner festivals includ

Box CEO Aaron Levie has been working to change the software world for 15 years, but the pandemic has accelerated the move to cloud services much faster than anyone imagined. As he pointed out yesterday in an Extra Crunch Live interview, who would have thought three months ago that businesses like yoga and cooking classes would have moved online — but here we are.
Levie says we are just beginning to see the range of what’s possible because circumstances are forcing us to move to the c

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Amazon is discontinuing its Echo Look camera, a standalone device that gave owners fashion advice using artificial intelligence and machine learning. The Look’s companion app and the device itself will stop functioning on July 24th. Between now and July 24th, 2021, Look users can back up their images and videos by making a free Amazon Photos account. (People with existing Photos accounts will have their media backed up automatically.) Anyone who wants to

Google has launched Android Studio 4.0, adding a host of new features to the app development environment. The most eye-catching of the upgrades is a souped-up Motion Editor, Android’s interface for creating MotionLayout animations in apps. In previous versions of Android Studio, developers had to manually create and modify complex XML files to design their animations. The new Motion Editor generates the XML files for you, allowing you to create complex animations through a simpl

In spite of a positive quarter with record revenue that beat analysts’ estimates, Salesforce stock was taking a hit today because of lighter guidance. Wall Street is a tough audience.
The stock was down $8.29/share, or 4.58%, as of 2:15 pm ET.
The guidance, which was a projection for next quarter’s earnings, was lighter than what the analysts on Wall Street expected. While Salesforcewas projecting revenue for next quarter in the range of $4.89 to $4.90 billion, according to CNBC, ana

Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino revealed in a recent interview that he believes The Social Network is the best film of its decade. He’s wrong. Space Boobs in Space is the best film of the 2010s. Space Boobs is a perfect film, it told the whole story. The Social Network, on the other hand, has plenty of room for improvement (2010? Ha, those were the innocent days for social media). That’s why I think it’s time for a sequel. And since Tarantino’s such a biii

Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to regulate speech on social media platforms.Thursday evening is also when we record our weekly chat show The Vergecast. Co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn bring in Silicon Valley editor Casey Newton and senior reporter Adi Robertson to examine what exactly the executive order is trying to do and how effective it would b

After months of trickling out information about the PlayStation 5, Sony‘s finally putting on a show. Specifically, it’s going to reveal some of the games that’ll be available on its new console. It’s likely not going to be a console reveal, but at least it’s something. Join us Thursday, June 4 at 1:00pm Pacific time for a look at the future of gaming on PlayStation 5: https://t.co/Yr8fafcOVd #PS5 pic.twitter.com/F0yBbDmOtC — PlayStation (@PlayStation) May 29,

Audihas created a new business unit called Artemis to bring electric vehicles equipped with highly automated driving systems and other tech to market faster — the latest bid by the German automaker to become more agile and competitive.
The traditional automotive industry, where the design to start of production cycle might take five to seven years, has been grappling with how to bring new and innovative products to market more quickly to meet consumers’ fickle demands. The model is m

Frazer Harrison/Getty Images In 2010, Bruno Mars famously sang that he wanted to be a billionaire “so fucking bad,” working to wind up on the cover of Forbes magazine. Kylie Jenner, the youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, clearly had similar ambitions.A new investigation by Forbes has discovered that Kylie Jenner, who Forbes named a self-made billionaire in March 2019, isn’t actually a billionaire. Based on Forbes’ reporting, Jenner likely never was. Now, she’s

Image: Beats Beats today announced four new colors of its Powerbeats Pro true wireless earbuds. The new hues are much brighter and more vibrant than the original lineup and include yellow, pink, red, and blue. They’ll be available from Apple’s website, stores, and other retailers on June 9th for the standard $249.95 price point.The Powerbeats Pro were first released in April 2019, and it’s quite common for Beats to release new colors of its products. However, these new Powerbe

President Trump follows through on his threat to challenge the legal protections enjoyed by social media and internet companies, Magic Leap’s CEO is stepping down and China sees its biggest autonomous driving round yet.
Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 29, 2020.
1. Trump signs an executive order taking direct aim at social media companies
Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting the legal shield that internet companies rely on to protect them from liabili

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge On Tuesday, Tile sent a letter to European competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, accusing Apple of anticompetitive behavior.Tile, best known for its Bluetooth tracking devices, argued that Apple is disadvantaging Tile (relative to Apple’s own services) by defaulting the “always allow” function to “off” for third-party tracking products and “on” for its own FindMy app in iOS 13.5. Tile also complained that Apple h

Introduced in mid-2017, the Look was one of the more obscure — and, honestly, kind of bizarre — entries in the Echo line. It was a small camera designed to take videos and selfies of its owner, using machine learning to help choose outfits.No surprise, really, that it never caught fire. And now, three years after its introduction, it’s dead. First noted by Voicebot.ai, Amazon sent a letter to customers noting that the camera has been discontinued — what’s more, serv

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Former Vice President Joe Biden still wants to repeal the pivotal internet law that provides social media companies like Facebook and Twitter with broad legal immunity over content posted by their users, a campaign spokesperson told The Verge Friday. Still, the campaign emphasized key disagreements with the executive order signed by the president earlier this week.
Earlier this year, Biden told The New York Times that Section 230 of the Communications Decency

Steve Tan Contributor Steve Tan is a Singapore-based serial entrepreneur and full-stack digital marketer with over 14 years of hands-on experience who is also the CEO and founder of Super Tan Brothers Pte. Ltd, which operates e-commerce, software, logistics, marketing, educational and investment companies around the globe.Intuitively, stores that sell online should be making a killing during the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, everyone is stuck at home — and understandably more willing to sh

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has released a new Xbox One update that brings a number of changes to the Guide menu, which gives you quick access to things like your friends list, messaging, and achievements. The biggest change is that you can now reorder your Guide tabs, which should make it easier to customize your Guide in a way that’s best for you. Microsoft first previewed the new Guide in April.
The updated Guide has a new default left-to-right order and fewer tab

Photo by Drew Angerer / Getty Images As President Donald Trump rages against Twitter for moderating his tweets, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is calling for a federal investigation into the company on unrelated grounds. The senator has sent a letter to the Justice Department calling for Twitter to be investigated for violating ongoing sanctions against the nation of Iran, as first reported by Axios.As Cruz describes it in the letter, Twitter’s refusal to ban Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei con

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The PlayStation 5 will have one selling point Sony thinks might be important to fans who are on the fence about upgrading to a new generation of gaming console: exclusive titles, playable only on the new hardware. Speaking with Gameindustry.biz in an interview published Friday, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said his company’s upcoming device — which, as of today, has its first official reveal event scheduled for next week — will have games y

Adam Benzion ContributorShare on TwitterA serial entrepreneur, writer, and tech investor, Adam Benzion is the co-founder ofHackster.io, the world's largest community for hardware developers.Aluminum and iconography are no longer enough for a product to get noticed in the marketplace. Today, great products need to be useful and deliver an almost magical experience, something that becomes an extension of life. Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) is the latest embedded software technology that moves har

It’s a big day for Elon Musk. The enigmatic billionaire just unlocked almost $800 million worth of cheap Tesla shares — the first payout in what’s considered the largest compensation package of its kind in history. Indeed, Musk can now buy around 1.7 million Tesla shares for $350.02 each, a total cost of just over $595 million. Tesla stock opened Friday trade at $808.32, which means Musk hypothetically stands to profit around $778.6 million in just two trades. [

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge British car manufacturer McLaren has confirmed that its partnership with OnePlus has reached its “scheduled conclusion” in what is likely to mean the end for OnePlus’ McLaren-branded handsets. “Since the start of this partnership in 2018, OnePlus has been a supportive, valued partner,” McLaren said in a statement given to Android Authority, adding, “We wish them well and hope to see them in the future.”
OnePlus’ pa