Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Streaming service Quibi has updated its iOS app to support streaming to a television using Google Chromecast. The update, released Tuesday, arrives a couple of weeks after Quibi added AirPlay support, which at the time marked the first way to stream its shows and other short-form videos beyond a mobile screen. As of Tuesday evening, the Android version of the app, which was last updated on May 20th, does not appear to support Chromecast streaming yet.Quib

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Four United States senators have called on the Federal Communications Commission to take a “fresh look” at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a rule that protects websites from liability for user-generated content. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), and Kevin Cramer (R-ND) signed a letter to FCC chairman Ajit Pai, asking the agency to “clearly define the framework under which technology firms,

Image: Facebook Facebook is launching its revamped news tab in the US today, reports TechCrunch, and the launch will include a dedicated local news section among other topics, including a George Floyd-specific section as of Tuesday. The tab can only be found on mobile right now only by tapping the hamburger menu, selecting “see more,” and sifting through a handful of other sections. It was first tested starting last October, and Facebook said at the time it would be paying participa

HP The need for a home / office printer has increased as more of us are working or schooling from home. You could be a parent who needs to print out workbooks for your child. Or you may find that it’s easier to make notes on a business report using a pen or pencil rather than a keyboard. Or you’ve suddenly discovered that a government office is demanding that you snail mail a form to them. Or your local office supply store, which you normally use for printing out occasional forms, i

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Panasonic is making it easier to use its mirrorless cameras as webcams via a USB cable, thanks to a new beta version of its Lumix Tether app (via Engadget). Using a mirrorless camera should make you look significantly sharper on video calls, especially compared to the typical picture quality from a laptop’s built-in webcam.
The Lumix Tether app already allowed you to connect your camera to a laptop or desktop for tethered shooting. That lets you see a live

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This time around we’re recording what we call an Equity Shot, a single-topic show that we pull together whenever there’s a news item of sufficient weight that it demands we break our regular cadence and record a little more.
So Danny and Tash and Alex got together to discuss the recent Vroom IPO and Lemonade filing to go public. These are topic

Photo by Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images The 3M corporation has filed suit against a third-party Amazon seller called KMJ Trading Inc, which allegedly sold more than $350,000 worth of N95 respirator masks, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The products were listed for as much as $23 per mask — a huge markup from the list price of $1.27.
Amazon has struggled with counterfeit mask sales since the beginning of the novel coronavirus outbreak, when N95 masks became an urgent necessit

Image: Bungie Game developer Bungie detailed the future roadmap of its sprawling online shooter Destiny 2 on Tuesday in a Twitch live stream packed with news about where the game is going this fall and how the studio plans to support it once Microsoft’s and Sony’s new consoles arrive. Perhaps the biggest news was the announcement of not just one, but three new major expansions keeping the game active until at least 2022.Typically, Bungie’s Destiny series, which first launched

Destiny 2 is coming to the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and today Bungie has given additional details on just what that transition will look like when the ports release this holiday season.
First off, Bungie is promising the next-gen versions of Destiny 2 will support 60fps and 4K resolution on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, marking a significant jump from the 30fps / 1080p version of the game on current-generation consoles.Despite those improvements, Bungie is promising that the cross

Signal’s new transfer feature in action. | Image: Signal Encrypted messaging app Signal now lets you transfer your account data, including your conversation history, to a new iPhone or iPad from your existing iOS device. The feature rolled out in the app’s version 3.9.1 update last week, but the company formally announced the new feature in a blog post published on Tuesday, which also outlines the steps of how the process works. “This is the first time that upgrading to a new

Photo by Jerritt Clark/Getty Images Faze Clan is taking a page out of Marvel’s playbook. Today, the organization announced that it will release a feature-length film later this year, starring Faze talent, which will kick off what it describes as “an immersive cinematic universe.”
The “Faze Clan Universe,” as it’s called, is being created in partnership with Invisible Narratives, a digital studio helmed by former Paramount president Adam Goodman and film produ

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Nintendo said 300,000 Nintendo Network ID (NNID) accounts were broken into as part of a hacking attempt in April, which is nearly twice as many as initially stated. Nintendo previously said that 160,000 accounts were broken into.
NNIDs were used for the 3DS and Wii U and allowed users of either system to download content and link their systems to a shared wallet. A new account system was used for the Nintendo Switch, but 3DS and Wii U owners could link their a

It’s been nearly 30 years since the last movie in the series, but Bill and Ted Face the Music — the third film in the wacky, time-traveling comedy series — is finally concluding the franchise, and a new trailer gives us a first look at what to expect.Face the Music finds Alex Winters and Keanu Reeves returning as Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, the stoner buddies whose band — Wyld Stallyns — was supposed to write a song so good it literal

It’s a winner-takes-all economy. More and more labor markets act as lotteries, where a couple of “superstar” workers make extremely outsized returns relative to their peers — who may well have started from the exact same starting line.
In the tech world, two JavaScript engineers can potentially earn billions of dollars in differential compensation by simply choosing different startups to join, and that massive income spectrum extends to professionals from law to finance t

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge A Google employee has acknowledged the issues some users are having with their Pixel Buds, 9to5Google reports. “I just wanted to let all of you know that we’ve heard you,” the Googler wrote on the company’s support forums, “our team will be rolling out software updates in the coming weeks to improve Bluetooth stability and connectivity.”
The problems with Google’s Pixel Buds gained widespread attention last month, with

Samsung’s midrange Galaxy A51 is $110 off at Amazon, bringing the price down to just $289. For context, this phone released just a few months ago, and it’s worth checking out if you want an affordable phone with a big OLED screen, good build quality, a headphone jack, and compatibility with all US carriers.Despite it looking like a chip off the block of Samsung’s high-end Android phones that cost hundreds more, the Galaxy A51 overall performance is lacking by comparison. Its ca

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge 5G internet has been one of the biggest buzzwords in the tech world over the past few years. As the next generation of cellular technology, the faster speeds and lower latencies it offers promise to change everything from your phone to home internet to fields like self-driving cars and remote surgery. But there’s also been a lot of bad information, rumors, and outright bizarre conspiracy theories.
So: what is 5G? Well, as the name implies, it’

Xenoblade Chronicles was always an ambitious game. The sci-fi RPG, which debuted on the Wii in Japan in 2010, takes place in a massive open world set on the backs of gigantic creatures. When the game was ported to the Nintendo 3DS a few years later, its huge size meant that it was only playable on the enhanced version of the handheld.
According to Tetsuya Takahashi, executive director at developer Monolith Soft, the team was able to cram almost everything they wanted into the experience, includi

Yesterday evening, Vroom, a digital used car retailer, priced its IPO at $22 per share, a figure that was a full $7 above the low end of its first proposed IPO price range. The venture-backed firm first proposed a $15 to $17 per-share IPO price range, which it later raised to $18 to $20 per share.
Pricing at $22 per share meant that there was strong demand for the company’s equity during its IPO process. Pricing strength doesn’t guarantee performance as a public company, but it does

Confirmation before permanently deleting docs or books. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Amazon now supports permanent document and book deletion from personal libraries directly from newer Kindle e-readers. The feature, first spotted by The eBook Reader, is available in software update version 5.12.5, although it’s not mentioned in the release notes.Library management has long been an issue for voracious Kindle users. Libraries can quickly grow unwieldy, especially when using a Kindl

Image: Google Google Meet’s new AI-powered background noise cancellation has started rolling out, VentureBeat reports. Google announced the feature back in April for its G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers. It’s coming to the web first, with iOS and Android following later.
A video produced by VentureBeat shows the software in action, with G Suite’s director of product management Serge Lachapelle demonstrating how it can pretty seamlessly remove t

Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images Each day, workers at the wastewater treatment plant in New Haven, Connecticut, siphon off a bit of sewage and put it in a cooler. Then, researchers from Yale University swing by to pick it up. In their hands, that pile of refuse is a key tool to predict the trajectory of the local COVID-19 outbreak.Cities around the United States are dipping into their sewer systems to track the levels of the novel coronavirus circulating inside their populations. If

The TechCrunch crew has worked to keep tabs on this year’s startup accelerator classes. Conventional wisdom in startup land states that great companies are founded during more trying economic times. Well, a recession was declared yesterday by the National Bureau of Economic Research. We should, therefore, see some breakout startups in the next few years.
Which means it’s a good time to see what’s bubbling up. To that end, the TC team has spent time parsing the latest from start

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple will announce that it’s shifting from using Intel processors to its own ARM-based chips this month at WWDC 2020, Bloomberg reports. The developer conference is due to take place starting on June 22nd with an online-only format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg notes that the timing of the announcement could change due to the health crisis.
Rumors of Apple switching to using its own ARM-based processors in its Macs have been around for ye

Two of Planet’s SkySat satellites hitched a ride on this December 2018 launch of one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.| SpaceX In the coming weeks, satellite operator Planet will hitch a ride on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, sending up three of its own small satellites along with 60 of SpaceX’s internet-beaming Starlink satellites. When the gaggle of satellites launch, Planet will be the first to tag along to space as part of SpaceX’s new small satellite ride-share

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge I.Recently the president did a bad post, and a lot of people got mad. Twitter hid the post behind a warning. Snap said it wouldn’t promote the president’s account any more. Facebook said the post was bad but would stay up, and that made a lot of people at Facebook mad — current employees, contractors, former employees, and even employees of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who don’t work for Facebook but are indirectly funded by it.

The AI editors confused Little Mix’s Leigh-Anne Pinnock (left) and Jade Thirlwall (right).| Image composite: Getty Microsoft’s decision to replace human journalists with AI to run its news and search site MSN.com has been criticized after the automated system confused two mixed-race members of British pop group Little Mix.As first reported by The Guardian, the newly-instated robot editors of MSN.com selected a story about Little Mix singer Jade Thirlwall’s experience with raci

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is now fact-checking tweets that link 5G and the COVID-19 pandemic by adding a label that promises to get users “the facts about COVID-19,” Business Insider reports. Clicking the label takes you to a Twitter page titled “No, 5G isn’t causing coronavirus” that includes links to news reports, fact-checking organizations, and government agencies debunking the conspiracy theory.
Twitter confirmed the move in a statement g

Propzy, a Vietnam-based startup that guides consumers through the entire process of a real estate transaction, announced it has raised a $25 million Series A led by Gaw Capital and SoftBank Ventures Asia, the early-stage venture arm of SoftBank Group. Other investors included Next Billion Ventures, RHL Ventures, Breeze, FEBE Ventures, RSquare and Insignia.
Instead of proptech, Propzyfounder and CEO John Le prefers the term “firetech” to describe the startup, using “fire”

Photo by Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong has escaped arrest after a court in Seoul denied prosecutors’ request to detain him while they conduct an investigation into alleged accounting fraud. Lee, who goes by Jay Y. Lee in the West and is the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, spent almost a year in jail until February 2018 for his role in a separate scandal.
“It appears that prosecutors have secured considerable amount of evidence through their inv