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Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images While showing up at a protest can demonstrate your opinion to the world, you may not want your face — or the faces of other protesters — to be included, especially when there is the possibility that authorities will collect and use that information (as they have for tracking movements during COVID-19 social distancing). As a result, many consider it vital to obscure the faces of people in any photos you may post on social media and other onl

Harriet Lander/Copa/Getty Images The English Premier league is set to restart in the coming weeks, and Sky Sports is working with EA Sports’ FIFA division to create simulated chants and crowd noises designed for specific teams.The goal is to replicate “the vibrant atmosphere of Premier League clashes,” according to a press release. While some sports leagues are beginning to pick up seasons suddenly paused by the global coronavirus pandemic, safety precautions means teams play

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, today announced he’s resigning from that platform’s board to dedicate his time and money to “serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate.” I've resigned as a member of the reddit board, I have urged them to fill my seat with a black candidate, + I will use future gains on my Reddit stock to serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate, and I’m starting with a pledge of $1M to @kaepernick7’s @your

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Yelp is launching a new tool to allow businesses on the platform to identify themselves as black-owned, CEO Jeremy Stoppelman announced in a blog post Friday. Customers will be able to search the Yelp app for black-owned businesses they want to support. Over the last week, Yelp says it saw a huge increase in the searches on the app for black-owned companies across various industries.
The company also said that it is donating $500,000 to the Equal Just

Earlier this week, TechCrunch covered a grip of earnings reports showing that some companies helping other businesses move to modern software solutions are seeing accelerated growth. Inside the Software as a Service (SaaS) world, this is known as the digital transformation. Based on how many software companies are talking about it, the pace of change is only picking up.
But since we published that first entry, a number of SaaS companies that have posted financial results seemed to disappoint inv

If you own your home, how much do you pay for property taxes? Does it seem like too much?
If you disagree with how much you’re paying in property taxes, you can appeal the assessment. Most people don’t, though — perhaps because they are unaware they can, or because they just don’t have the time or resources to deal with the lawyers and paperwork.
TaxProper, a company out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch, has raised $2 million to simplify the process. The round wa

According to CNBC there are two suitors rivaling Uber for purchase of U.S. food delivery company Grubhub: Just Eat Takeaway (the union of Just Eat and Takeaway) and Delivery Hero.
Both are European companies perhaps looking for a major entry to the United States market. Just Eat Takeaway is based in the U.K. and Holland, while Delivery Herois based in Germany. They are both lavishly funded, with Just Eat Takeaway having raised around $1 billion (a combined tally for both companies that now make

Photo by Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Instacart is adjusting how it handles customer tips following the announcement last week of a congressional inquiry into the practice of tip-baiting, in which Instacart allows customers to promise big tips for shoppers only for those customers to later rescind the tip after the order is dropped off.Instacart now says it will shorten the window a customer can alter their tip from three days down to 24 hours. It’s also now r

Instacartannounced today that it is changing its tip policy to protect its growing shopper network from tip-baiting. Tip-baiting, a grotesque tactic, is when customers bait shoppers with a big tip and then reduce the tip to zero after they receive their groceries. It emerged as Instacart’s demand skyrocketed due to the pandemic and people being unable to go to the grocery store.
Instacart continues to say that tip-baiting is rare and that less than 0.5% of orders have tips removed after de

A startup called Portobel is working to help food producers shift their businesses so they can support direct-to-consumer deliveries.
Portobelis backed by Heroic Ventures and led by Ranjith Kumaran, founder or co-founder of file-sharing company Hightail (acquired by OpenText) and loyalty startup PunchTab (acquired by Walmart Labs).
Kumaran told me that he and his co-founders Ted Everson and Itai Maron started out with the goal of improving the delivery process by using low-cost, internet-co

Last year, Googlelaunched the beta of Currents, which was essentially a rebrand of Google+ for G Suite users, since Google+ for consumers went to meet its maker in April 2019. While Google+ was meant to be an all-purpose social network, the idea behind Currents is more akin to what Microsoft is doing with Yammer or Facebook with Workplace. It’s meant to give employees a forum for internal discussions and announcements.To complicate matters, Google kept Google+ around, even after the launch

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Vergee Chinese EV startup Nio announced its first-quarter results last week and, by most accounts, the Tencent-backed company appears to have weathered the impact of COVID-19. That argument was further bolstered on Thursday when Nio released strong May delivery figures. But Nio also recently finalized a crucially-timed $1 billion bailout from a local government in China, and the price the company had to pay to survive is becoming increasingly apparent.
Now Nio &

The Lenovo Chromebook 3 is available now for $229.| Lenovo Lenovo has announced a new 11-inch Chromebook 3, which is now available on the company’s website for $229. The device joins a sizable lineup of budget Chrome OS products from Lenovo, including its $279 Chromebook Duet and its $359 Flex 5.The new model supersedes the existing 14-inch Chromebook 3, which was in turn a refresh of its Chromebook S340. That model sold for $249, but it’s not currently available on Lenovo’s s

Alexis Ohanian,the founder and former CEO of Reddit,stepped down from his position on the company’s board Friday as the U.S. roils with nationwide protests against police brutality after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man.
Ohanian is calling on the company he founded to fill his position with a black board member, a high-profile step for a company with its own rocky track record around issues of race.
“I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadersh

The Square Off robotic chess board was already a great device for these times. The system makes it possible to play a solo game using 20 different degrees of difficulty or challenge someone remotely through chess.com. I met with the Mumbai-based startup a couple of CESes ago, and was quite impressed with the execution.Now, in the face of massive global isolation courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company has introduced a video calling feature. Using the connected app, players can connect wit

Photo by Kainoa Little/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Mythical buses full of bloodthirsty antifa protestors are causing panic in rural counties throughout the country — even though there’s no evidence they exist. The Associated Press has catalogued at least five separate rural counties where locals have warned of imminent attacks, although none of the rumors have been substantiated. Notably, the rumors are often tailored to a specific local region, a “hyperlocal&rdqu

Will Walker Contributor Will Walker is a JD candidate at Harvard Law School, and a contributing author to "Incomprehensible!: A Study of How Our Legal System Encourages Incomprehensibility, Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It".As the United States sees its second week of large-scale protests against police brutality, it’s painfully clear that the country’s racial divide requires significant short- and long-term action. But most of these calls for change gloss over the role Sil

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Instagram says its terms of service don’t grant websites a sublicense to embed other people’s posts. Ars Technica reported yesterday that Instagram’s policies “require third parties to have the necessary rights from applicable rights holders,” according to a company spokesperson. “This includes ensuring they have a license to share this content, if a license is required by law.”
The news follows a legal defeat

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Serena Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian — the co-founder of Reddit — resigned from Reddit’s board of directors today. He announced the move in a tweet, urging the company to hire a black candidate in his stead and promising his future gains on Reddit stock to serve the black community.The move comes just two days after a number of popular subreddits went private or, in some cases, banned new posts to protest the company’s hat

Image: Harry Potter/Warner Brothers Harry Potter is one of the most popular franchises in the world. Warner Bros. — which owns the film rights to J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World — is hungry for fresh content that will get tons of customers to subscribe to the new HBO Max streaming service. We already know that having the Harry Potter films is hugely important to WarnerMedia, given the company’s last-minute deal wrangling to secure the films for the service’s debut a

iPad deals are more common than you might think. Whether you’re after the most affordable iPad, the high-end iPad Pro, or something in between like the iPad Air or iPad mini, there’s usually some sort of price cut happening somewhere. Of course, it’s difficult to know exactly where you can find those deals unless you’re looking around at all of the major retailers. But that’s what we’re doing each day when we hunt for deals, so let us help you out.
Below, we&r

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Telegram has released a new update adding video editing tools and allowing you to add animated stickers to any photo or video you send on the mobile messaging app.The new update allows you to edit videos and adjust various elements like brightness and saturation. You can manually tweak the video to your preference, or you can tap your screen twice to have Telegram adjust it automatically.
Though Telegram already introduced stickers, you can now add them t

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed $750 million towards the manufacturing and distribution a potential COVID-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University. The funds come as part of a deal with British-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, who’s joined forces with organisations fighting to protect the world against infectious diseases like COVID-19: the Serum Institute of India (SII); the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the Gavi Vaccine Allian

Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward has updated Modern Warfare with a message of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The message, which appears on the game‘s Message of the Day segment, as well as the loading screen for its battle royale format, Warzone, shows solidarity for those protesting against racism and the senseless killing of George Floyd. Our community is hurting,” the message reads. “Call of Duty and Infinity Ward stand for equality and inclusion

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Whether you’re shopping for your first iPad or upgrading from a previous generation, figuring out which Apple-made tablet is best for you can be confusing. There are a bunch of models out there, which makes it hard, and a new version usually comes out each year. And since most of them look similar, it becomes even more difficult to shop with confidence.
Let’s break it down.
Currently, Apple sells five different models. In order of most aff

For two decades children’s digital privacy in the United States has been regulated by a national law: the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The law limits how companies can collect data on children under 13 years old. If website operators don’t properly adhere to the rules outlined in the act, they could face massive fines. In September, the Federal Trade Commission announced a record-breaking penalty against YouTube, in which the Google-owned service agreed to pay $17

James Bareham, The Verge Sony is discounting the cost of its PS Plus online subscription and PS Now cloud game streaming service at Amazon, so now is the time to top off your account. Subscribing to one of these services usually costs $60 for a one-year subscription, but right now each one costs $42.
You may know this already, but PS Plus is Sony’s subscription for PS4 that allows multiplayer gaming, and it provides free games and discounts to members. PS Now is its cloud streaming servic