Technology news

An artistic rendering of astronauts landing on the surface of the Moon again | Image: NASA After years of debate, NASA plans to update its guidelines for how much biological contamination of other worlds will be allowed while the agency explores the Solar System. The new rules would relax some of the agency’s requirements for how to explore the Moon and Mars — two high-profile destinations where NASA hopes to send astronauts in the coming years.
For decades, NASA has followed fairly

Google has long struggled with getting device manufacturers to update older devices to the latest version of Android, but the company announced today that it’s starting to see some success, with Android 10 seeing the fastest adoption rates of any version of Android.
According to Google, Android 10 was installed on 100 million devices five months after its launch in September 2019 — 28 percent faster than it took the company to reach a similar milestone for Android Pie. Google credits

PC shipments had a rough first quarter for all of the same reasons as everything that isn’t a Clorox wipe or N95 mask. People just weren’t ready to drop a ton of money on a new device. The impact of COVID-19 was lessened slightly by IT departments and individuals adapting to the new remote working realty, but the numbers were far from ideal overall, due in no small part to issues with the supply, as the virus hit China and other parts of Asia.According to numbers from Gartner, Q2 has

In a statement issued this week, the U.S. Treasury Department notes that Amazon has agreed to pay $134,523 to settle potential liability over alleged sanctions violations. The charges specifically pertain to goods and services sent to people located in Crimea, Iran and Syria, which are covered by Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions, between November 2011 and October 2018.The Treasury Department also states that the retail giant failed to report “several hundred” transac

Dünzl\ullstein bild via Getty Images Tens of thousands of people won’t be descending upon San Diego this summer for the annual Comic-Con International gathering, but the festival is still going ahead as a virtual event with a lineup that includes some heavy hitters.It’s a good year for streamers. Amazon, FX, HBO, Hulu, and ViacomCBS are just some of the networks and studios that have announced they’ll have a presence during the convention. For San Diego Comic-Con’s

Harley-Davidson, the storied and struggling Milwaukee-based company that last year launched its first production electric motorcycle in an effort to reboot sales and appeal to a younger customer base, is cutting 700 jobs from its global operations. About 500 workers will be laid off before the end of the year, the company said Thursday.
The company’s CFO John Olin is also out, effective immediately. Harley-Davidson’s current VP Treasurer Darrell Thomas has taken over as interim CFO u

TikToklikes and views are broken for some unknown portion of the video app’s user base this afternoon. The impacted users are seeing a “zero” like count on TikTok posts, including their own and those of other app users, as well as “zero” views. The company has acknowledged the issue and says it’s working on a fix, but declined to explain what was causing the problem.
The TikTok Support account responded to the problem at 2:43 PM ET, noting it was working quick

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge For a few hours on Thursday afternoon, videos that appeared on TikTok user pages, following feeds, and the For You Page all displayed broken Like totals for some users across the globe. TikTok showed that these videos had zero likes. It’s not clear what caused the issue as of press time.
“Hi TikTok community! We’re aware that some users are experiencing app issues – working to quickly fix things, and we’ll share updates here!

Image: Superhot Team The team behind time-bending first-person shooter Superhot has a pretty good proposition: buy or have bought the first game and you get the follow-up for free. Called Superhot: Mind Control Delete, the standalone expansion has been in early access on Steam since 2017. But it’s releasing in full on July 16th, and developer Superhot Team wants to reward buyers of the original with a free copy. That means as many as 2 million people are eligible to receive the expansion

Photo by MORRIS MAC MATZEN/AFP via Getty Images An advocacy group is urging lawmakers to make sure hospitals can repair their own equipment — citing a survey of over 200 medical professionals. The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has released a new report on how “right-to-repair” rules affect medical professionals, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. It concludes that a lack of clear rules makes it more difficult to fix vital medical devices at a sustainable co

Apple today announced its plans for a new, free resource aimed at helping educators of all skill levels gain the ability to teach both Swift and Xcode — the latest in Apple’s educational initiatives focused on encouraging more students to learn app development. On July 13, Apple will begin offering free online training to educators that will serve as an introduction to its Develop in Swift curriculum.
This curriculum has also been completely redesigned to meet students learning style

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony has made a $250 million investment in Epic Games, the two companies announced on Thursday, giving Sony a minority interest in the game development studio.
The investment lets the two companies “broaden their collaboration across Sony’s leading portfolio of entertainment assets and technology, and Epic’s social entertainment platform and digital ecosystem to create unique experiences for consumers and creators,” according to a press

When Hamilton landed on Disney Plus last week, it seemed like everyone was clamoring to watch it. In a new company all-hands, CEO Bob Chapek stressed that Hamilton brought in a lot of new subscribers and played an important part in Disney Plus’ growth, according to an audio recording obtained by The Verge.Chapek didn’t give out numbers on how many new Disney Plus subscribers the movie brought in, but told employees that “there were a lot of them.” More importantly, Chapek

Funding for virtual reality startups has grown more sparse over the past couple years, as investors have grappled with extended timelines for mainstream adoption. Meanwhile, connected fitness has exploded, gaining attention amid shelter-in-place as companies like Peloton have seen huge user gains with Mirror recently selling to Lululemon for $500 million.
FitXR wants the virtual reality headset to become the next hot-seller in the connected fitness space.
The startup, which develops the popular

Sony revealed what the physical boxes for PlayStation 5 games will look like in a blog post on Thursday, using the upcoming Spider-Man: Miles Morales as an example. While they look a lot like, well, game boxes, there are still a few interesting design details to note.
Sony will once again sell games in blue cases, similar to PS4 games, but the PS5 cases are a slightly darker blue that seems to match the blue accents on the PS5 console and controller. And the PS5 header at the top of the game lab

iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 are now available in public beta, and you can download and install them. The process for installing each is similar. We’ll walk through what’s new and how to get the betas onto your devices.
Unless you’re enrolled in Apple’s developer program, this is your first opportunity to try out the new software in beta. These betas will update periodically, culminating in the final release, which we expect at the end of summer. It’s usually timed for the

Photo by Brent Rose for The Verge You might not be getting much use out of GoPro’s outdoor action cameras during the coronavirus pandemic, so GoPro is making it a lot easier for you to repurpose its flagship Hero 8 camera for use indoors as a macOS webcam. GoPro says support for Windows is currently in development.Using new beta software, you can transform the Hero 8 into a webcam that connects to your computer via USB for use on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other videoconferencing services

EQT Ventures, the Stockholm-headquartered venture capital firm that invests in Europe and the U.S., is losing founding partner Hjalmar Winbladh, TechCrunch has learned.
Rumours that he was leaving the “multistage, sector-agnostic” VC fund that he helped launch in 2016, begun circulating within the European startup ecosystem last week, with multiple sources telling TechCrunch that Winbladh has his heart set on starting something new.
A serial entrepreneur, in the real sense, Winbladh

Appleunveiled the next major version of iOS a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing around with beta versions of iOS 14 and here’s what you should expect when you update your iPhone to the final release of iOS 14 this fall.
The most interesting change is something you’re not going to notice at first. The home screen has been rethought. In some ways, the iPhone now works more like Android devices. You can add widgets to the home screen and there’s a new app launcher called the

This is your opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of iOS — and iPadOS. Applejust released the first public beta of iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, the next major version of the operating systems for the iPhone and iPad. Unlike developer betas, everyone can download these betas without a $99 developer account. But don’t forget, it’s a beta.
The company still plans to release the final version of iOS and iPadOS 14.0 this fall. But Apple is going to release betas every few weeks over

Kevin Frazier ContributorShare on Twitter Kevin Frazier, a Masters of Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School and JD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Law, uses his spare time to advocate for better government.More posts by this contributorBig tech should create a national service program to make the US more united COVID-19 shows we need Universal Basic Internet now
If every California student without an adequate internet connection got together and formed a state, it would cont

Dieter Bohn / The Verge The public betas for iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 are rolling out today, and they bring a laundry list of new features, including the biggest changes to the iOS home screen that we’ve seen in years.This will be the first opportunity for anyone who’s not enrolled in Apple’s developer program to try out the new operating systems, which we expect to see in their final form at the end of this summer. The usual caveats about beta releases apply: it’s very poss

Venn, the company looking to be gaming’s answer to ’80s-era MTV, has revealed the first slate of shows to premier on the network when it launches August 5, 2020.
Working out of studios in Playa Vista in Los Angeles and New York’s World Trade Center (coming in 2021), Venn intends to use 1,000 square feet and 30 million pixels of LED walls and floors to create its interactive shows and narratives.
The company is planning a slate of news and talk shows, game shows and documentarie

Image: fccid.io A mysterious new Samsung wearable device has been revealed in FCC filings made public today. You can see a diagram of what the wearable is expected to look like at the top of this post, taken from the filings.
The diagram seems to show that the device will have some kind of heart rate sensor, indicating it might be a fitness-focused wearable. Samsung’s most recent fitness wearable was the the Galaxy Fit, which was released last year, so perhaps this new device is a refresh

You just got your first customer! You just hired your first employee! You just got your first VC investor! These are huge milestones in the life of a startup and are extraordinarily exciting. That is, until that first draft of the contract arrives in your inbox and you suddenly realize you are 30 pages of legalese away from getting your deal done.
Contracts are the foundation for any business, and getting good at negotiating and understanding these instruments is critical for any startup founder

Earlier this month, Spanish early-stage venture capital firm K Fundofficially launched its second fund, which sits at €70 million, up from €50 million the first time around.
Targeting Spanish startups with an international outlook, the seed-stage firm plans to invest from €200,000 to €2 million, writing first checks in 25-30 companies. Meanwhile, a portion of the fund will also be set aside for follow-on funding for the most promising of its portfolio.
Described as business m

Docker and AWS today announced a new collaboration that introduces a deep integration between Docker’s Compose and Desktop developer tools and AWS’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and ECS on AWSFargate. Previously, the two companies note, the workflow to take Compose files and run them on ECS was often challenging for developers. Now, the two companies simplified this process to make switching between running containers locally and on ECS far easier.
“With a large number of co

Amie, a new productivity app from ex-N26 product manager Dennis Müller, has picked up $1.3 million in pre-seed funding to “kickstart” development and hiring.
Backing 23-year-old Müller is Creandum — the European VC best known for being an early investor in Spotify — along with Tiny.VC and a plethora of angels. They include Laura Grimmelmann (Ex-Accel), Nicolas Kopp (CEO, N26 U.S.), Roland Grenke (Dubsmash co-founder) and Zachary Smith (SVP of product at U.S. cha

As the world continued to cope with the impact of the coronavirus outbreak, the second quarter of 2020 became the largest yet for mobile app downloads, usage and consumer spending. According to new data from app store intelligence firm App Annie, mobile app usage grew 40% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2020, even hitting an all-time high of over 200 billion hours during April. Consumer spending in apps, meanwhile, hit a record high of $27 billion in the second quarter. And app downloads

It’s hard to believe that Alexa was only announced in November 2014. In fewer than six years, the smart assistant has gone from consumer electronics curiosity to a nearly ubiquitous tech phenomenon. Launched alongside the first Echo device, Alexa has helped define a new paradigm of voice computing, alongside Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant.According to recent numbers, 29% of U.S. internet users also use a smart speaker. With that demographic Amazon has been utterly dominant

Today, the U.S. exceeded three million COVID-19 cases and 132,000 deaths. In several states, new hotspots have rolled back plans to reopen businesses. The novel coronavirus has — and will continue — to profoundly impact the way we live and work.For the moment, that includes a shift in the employment status of many Americans. More than 50 million people have filed for unemployment since mid-March. And while many states have made efforts to reopen businesses and return some sense of no

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Logitech’s Harmony brand tried to reinvent the wheel with its Harmony Express remote control, and it didn’t work. The company just sent out an email to customers alerting them that the $250 remote — which used Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant as the brains for controlling your various home theater components — will cease functioning after September 30th. It will be fully cut off from both the Harmony and Alexa clouds, according to thi

The DeathAdder V2 Mini seen with the included anti-slip grip tape applied to the main mouse buttons. | Image: Razer Razer has announced a miniature version of the DeathAdder V2 gaming mouse, expanding its lineup of shrunken peripherals beyond the Razer Viper Mini. It’s called the DeathAdder V2 Mini, and it maintains the same hourglass design and simple button layout that mostly mirrors that of the larger version. Though, with a smaller size, people with smaller hands or a claw grip style

When COVID-19 began to shutter the United States economy, startups jumped into cost-cutting mode as expectations rose that venture capital was about to get a heck of a lot harder to raise. After all, prior downturns in the broader economy, and tech sector in particular, had taken a bite out of the ability for startups to attract new funds.
PitchBook research shows that, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the amount of money venture capitalists invested fell, with early-stage deal and doll

Coinbaseis the latest mega-startup that may approach the public markets. The digital currency exchange company could follow Palantir, which is also nearing its IPO, after the secretive data-focused unicorn announced that it had filed privately.
Earlier today Reuters reported that Coinbase, a popular American-based cryptocurrency trading platform, could pursue a public debut later this year, or early next year. Plans remain fluid, according to the report, which went on to say that the crypto-focu