Technology news

Mirror Lululemon, the company behind trendy fitness apparel, is getting into the hardware business with Mirror. The fitness lifestyle company announced on Monday it would spend$500 million to acquire the startup, which sells a $1,495 reflective display so subscribers can exercise while simultaneously streaming workouts and watching themselves.The apparel company’s CEO Calvin McDonald tells The New York Times the purchase is about “strengthening our community and our loyalty and our

Photo by Stephen Brashear/Getty Images Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began a series of test flights on Monday to determine whether the 737 Max should be allowed back in the air, after it was involved in two deadly crashes that killed 346 people in 2018 and 2019. The tests are expected to last around three days.“While the certification flights are an important milestone, a number of key tasks remain,” the FAA said in a statement. “The FAA is following a d

Lululemon today announced plans to acquire home exercise startup Mirror for $500 million. The fitness apparel company noted its plans by way of a press release, noting that it hopes to close the sale by the end of the second fiscal quarter of this year.The deal comes at a time when home workout solutions are in high demand. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely limited workout options for many across the world, and the continued closure of gyms has prolonged the problem. Even when they begin to reo

A blood drive in Chicago at the Field Museum of Natural History. | Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images The American Red Cross is testing all donated blood for novel coronavirus antibodies and will use that information to learn more about the spread of COVID-19. They’ll also check back in with donors to find out how long their antibodies last.If someone has antibodies to the novel coronavirus, it’s a sign that they were, at one point, infected with the virus. While the tests on the mar

‘Xbox Series S’ concept. | jiveduder on Reddit A leaked Microsoft document recently hinted at the company’s second next-gen Xbox, and now rumors suggest it will be fully revealed in August. Eurogamer reports that Microsoft had originally planned to unveil the console, codenamed “Lockhart,” in June. Microsoft has now reportedly moved these plans to August, and Eurogamer claims the console will be named the Xbox Series S.
Microsoft has been working on this second che

Photo by Eduardo Sanz / Europa Press via Getty Images If you’re a weather geek, you probably already know that Dark Sky, one of the most popular weather apps around, has been acquired by Apple and is probably being integrated into iOS 14. As a result, anyone who uses an Android device and has the Dark Sky app is going to lose access on July 1st. In addition, a variety of other apps (some not even weather-related) will lose access to the Dark Sky API.
If you’re an Android user with D

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube has banned several prominent white supremacist channels, including those belonging to Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, and Richard Spencer.Other channels banned include American Renaissance (with its associated channel AmRen Podcasts) and the channel for Spencer’s National Policy Institute. The channels repeatedly violated YouTube’s policies, a YouTube spokesperson said, by alleging that members of protected groups were inferior. These com

The 2021 Geneva Motor Show has been canceled because of the “financial consequences” of this year’s event getting the axe, but also because of concerns about the pace of the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation behind the show announced on Monday that a “majority” of exhibitors recently said they would “probably not participate in a 2021 edition in and that they would prefer to have [the next show] in 2022” instead. The show itself is also now up for sale.T

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge The New York Times has announced that, as of today, it will no longer be distributing articles in the Apple News app, making it one of the largest publishers to end its association with Apple’s publishing platform.In a memo announcing the change, Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer at the Times, said the company wants “a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the

Image: Activision Popular battle royale shooter Call of Duty: Warzone is upping its already large 150-person lobbies to let 200 people compete in Quad mode contests, publisher Activision announced today. The new lobby size will arrive with an update releasing at 2AM ET tomorrow, June 30th.
Warzone’s large lobbies are one of many ways the game tries to differentiate itself from the increasingly crowded battle royale market. But after this update, if you’re playing in a full Quad mode

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has banned TikTok, WeChat, and several dozen other China-based apps it views as “engaged in activities ... prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India,” according to India Today. A total of 59 apps are on the banned list.India is a huge market for TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. According to SensorTower data from April, 30 percent of TikTok’s 2 bi

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Twitch has temporarily banned President Donald Trump, in the latest surprise and high-profile suspension from the streaming service. Trump’s account was banned for “hateful conduct” that was aired on stream, and Twitch says the offending content has been removed.
One of the streams in question was a rebroadcast of Trump’s infamous kickoff rally, where he said that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Twitch also flagged comm

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit will ban r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, and about 2,000 other communities today after updating its content policy to more explicitly ban hate speech. The policy update comes three weeks after Black Lives Matter protests led several popular Reddit forums to go dark temporarily in protest of what they called the company’s lax policies around hosting and promoting racist content. It marks a major reversal for a company whose commitment to free

Today Personal Capital, a fintech company that had attracted more than $265 million in private funding, announced that it is selling itself to Empower Retirement, a company that provides retirement services to other companies. The deal is worth $825 million upon closing, with another $175 million in what are described as “planned growth” incentives, according to a release.
The deal is a likely win for Personal Capital . According to Forbes, the firm was worth $660 million around the

Image: Universal Studios Japan Universal Studios Japan is delaying the opening of Super Nintendo World, the new Mario-themed expansion of its Osaka amusement park, NHK reports. Universal said the delay was due to concerns about the coronavirus. A new opening date has yet to be announced.
The video game-themed area was originally set to open in July ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics. However, the international sporting event was pushed back to 2021 as a result of the pandemic.Super Nintendo Worl

How close are deepfakes to being used in big-budget films and TV shows? Pretty damn close, if a new demo from Disney is anything to go by. In a video and paper being presented at a computer graphics conference this week, researchers from the House of Mouse show off what they say is the first photo-realistic deepfake at a megapixel resolution.And the results are... pretty good! They’re not mind-blowing, certainly, and not good enough to be used in the next Marvel movie, but it’s a sol

Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images COVID-19 has caused libraries around the US to stay closed since mid-March. Less than two-thirds of Americans in rural areas have broadband internet connections at their homes. The Markup has written about the ways in which libraries are attempting to keep their patrons online. It’s well worth a read.
In the town of Cherokee, Iowa, about 40 percent of school-aged kids have no internet access. Tyler Hahn, director of the Cherokee Public Library, told The

Agora isn’t the only company headquartered outside the United States aiming to go public domestically this quarter. After catching up on Agora’s F-1 filing, the China-and-U.S.-based, API-powered tech company that went public last week, today we’re parsing DoubleDown Interactive’s IPO document.The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.The mobile

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Mercedes-Benz is suspending its two-year-old subscription service after mediocre sales, Automotive News reports.Mercedes-Benz USA head of sales Adam Chamberlain described the service as a learning experience that would have been expanded if sales were better. “If the demand would have been unbelievable, then it could have gone further,” Chamberlain told Automotive News last week. “But demand was just OK, so we kept it.”
Mercede

GIF by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 can now be configured with a LED dot-matrix display hidden in its lid, with a new model costing $1,999.99, Asus announced today. This “AniMe Matrix” display consists of 1,215 Mini-LEDs that support 256 levels of brightness each and can be used to show anything from the time to music visualizers, GIFs, or an animated logo from your favorite technology website (see above).
Beyond its eye-catching exterior, the Zephyrus G14&

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Amazon’s Fire HD 8 tablets are $30 off today at Amazon and Best Buy. The base model with 32GB of storage costs $60 (usually $90). If you want the option to have wireless charging and to upgrade the RAM to make things a little more smooth with multiple apps open, the Fire HD 8 Plus is $80 (usually $110). The bundle that includes the Fire HD 8 Plus and a wireless charging dock is $30 off, too, costing $120 today instead of $150.
Both of these tablets have a

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Amazon’s Fire HD 8 tablets are $30 off today at Amazon and Best Buy. The base model with 32GB of storage costs $60 (usually $90). If you want the option to have wireless charging and to upgrade the RAM to make things a little more smooth with multiple apps open, the Fire HD 8 Plus is $80 (usually $110). The bundle that includes the Fire HD 8 Plus and a wireless charging dock is $30 off, too, costing $120 today instead of $150.
Both of these tablets have a

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our week-starting primer, in which we go over the latest, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into the latest on the health of the startup market.
Don’t forget that you can follow Equity on Twitter, and, as explained in the show, you can sign up for Alex’s new TechCrunch newsletter “Th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Earlier this month, the Russian authorities lifted their ban on the Telegram messaging app, citing the company’s willingness to help with its counterterrorism efforts. However, despite the official ban being in effect for over two years, Telegram has reportedly remained accessible in the country for much of that time. In a new feature, The Washington Post has written how Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov, “humiliated and outmaneuvered Russi

Microsoft is releasing its own Windows File Recovery tool, designed to retrieve files you’ve mistakenly deleted. Windows File Recovery is a command line app that will recover a variety of files and documents from local hard drives, USB drives, and even SD cards from cameras. Recovery of files on cloud storage or network file shares is not supported, though.
Like any file recovery tool, you’ll need to use it as soon as possible on deleted files to ensure they haven’t been overwr

GitHub went down for thousands of software developers this morning. The Microsoft-owned service, which provides version control via Git and hosting for software development, experienced issues for more than two hours. GitHub users experienced errors logging into the service, and some were even unable to use their integrated development environment (IDE) due to how closely linked software development is to the service.
GitHub said it was investigating the outage, before identifying the errors and

GitHub is down for thousands of software developers this morning. The Microsoft-owned service, which provides version control via Git and hosting for software development, has been down for more than an hour. GitHub users have experienced errors logging into the service, and some are even unable to use their integrated development environment (IDE) due to how closely linked software development is to the service.
GitHub says it’s investigating the outage, and has “identified the sour

American Airlines will soon remove the booking limits it placed on flights back in April. | Photo by Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images American Airlines will resume booking its flights to capacity starting July 1st, the company has announced. The policy is similar to that of United Airlines, which ABC News reports has never blocked out seats or put a cap on the capacity of its flights. However, the approach contrasts sharply with other airlines, who are continuing to enforce capacity caps in order to

In the last episode of Josh Gad's Reunited Apart for a while, the host and superfan brought together the cast of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, arguably the quintessential '80s movie. Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, and Jennifer Grey joined Gad over video call for a chat about their memories of the shoot, as did Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett (who played Ferris' parents) and Ben Stein, the economist and occasional actor responsible for "Bueller?... Bueller?... Bueller?" (He can also still do th

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge This year’s new iPhones might not have as much in the box as you’re used to. According to well-connected analyst Ming-chi Kuo, Apple is planning to stop including a power adapter and EarPods in the box with 2020 models, and will even remove the power adapter from the new iPhone SE’s packaging later this year. Kuo’s research note was reported on by AppleInsider, MacRumors, and 9to5Mac.
Apple is attempting to offset the cost incr