Technology news

Naya Rivera, best known for her recurring role in TV series Glee and Step Up: High Water, is dead at 33. Her death was confirmed by the Ventura County sheriff's office on the afternoon of July 13, after an announcement earlier in the day that human remains had been recovered that morning.
Rivera was reported missing on July 8. following a boat trip with her 4-year-old son in California's Lake Piru. CBS Los Angeles reported at the time that another boater had raised the alarm after seeing Rivera'

Photo by Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images Employees at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention are calling for the federal agency to address what they say are “ongoing and recurring acts of racism and discrimination” against its Black employees, NPR reported. More than 1,000 CDC employees signed a letter to director Robert Redfield describing a “pervasive and toxic culture of racial aggressions.”
“In light of the recent calls for justice across this country

After a heated run, SaaS and cloud stocks dipped sharply during regular trading on Monday.
According to the category-tracking Bessemer cloud index, public SaaS and cloud stocks dropped around 6.5% today, a material blow to the value of some of the world’s most highly valued companies, measured by sector-averaged revenue multiples.
After recovering all their COVID-19-related losses earlier this year, SaaS and cloud stocks kept on rising, reaching new all-time highs with regularity. But earn

Photo by Eamonn McCormack/WireImage Over 60 women and nonbinary people have accused influential comics author Warren Ellis of manipulative and predatory behavior toward female fans and creatives. An open letter and dozens of statements were collected on a site created by some of his alleged targets, and have also been shared with The Guardian, which published a story on the allegations today.
The site was launched after several weeks of less specific allegations, including some posted on Twitte

How long will you get banned from Twitch for disparaging immigrants on multiple livestreams?
The answer is two weeks, apparently. That’s how long President of the United States Donald Trump was suspended on the platform.
The official Trump 2020 campaign Twitch channel is now back following two weeks of a temporary suspension for two separate instances of “hateful conduct” when broadcasting a stream. 
According to Twitch’s policies, “hateful conduct” on th

Photo: Skydio Skydio, a startup that makes autonomous drones that fly themselves with little human intervention, is entering the commercial drone market with its new X2 model. The X2 is Skydio’s first non-consumer device and it’s marketed toward government agencies, the military, and other organizations that require aerial surveillance or surveying, and it comes with a built-in infrared thermal camera. The X2 announcement coincides with Skydio’s new round of $100 million in fu

Chance the Rapper publicly and repeatedly tweeted his support for Kanye West's presidential bid on Monday. Lots of folks weren't happy. 
It began with Chance commenting on a new video from his pal Kanye.
"And yall out here tryna convince me to vote for Biden. Smfh," Chance wrote.  And yall out here tryna convince me to vote for Biden. Smfh https://t.co/JgbGBmPQk5
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) July 13, 2020Being charitable, West's apparent presidential ambitions don't see

Ubisoft will let you redeem a free copy of open-world hacking simulator Watch Dogs 2 for PC right now just by logging in to your Uplay account. To snag your copy of the 2016 game, head to this page on Ubisoft’s website where you’ll be asked to log in. When you do, you’ll see a message that you’ve successfully claimed the game and that it will soon show up in your Uplay library. It’s unclear how long the giveaway will be going on, though, so you might want to jump on

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images Seventeen states and Washington, DC have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s policy that would prevent international students who are taking online courses from remaining in the US.
ICE’s guidelines, announced on July 6th, stated that in order to remain in the country for the fall 2020 semester, international students must be enrolled in in-person classes at their schools or be subject to “immigration consequences including, but

The iPhone “batterygate” saga was one of the bigger controversies that Apple has ever faced. Apple’s throttling of iPhones with aging batteries prompted a class action lawsuit, and now you can register to get your chunk of the settlement that was reached earlier this year. Per MacRumors, there’s now a website where US consumers who owned an affected iPhone can go to file a claim.To meet the criteria, you must currently or have previously owned:An iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus,

Twitch has unbanned President Donald Trump, two weeks after suspending his account for “hateful conduct.”
Trump’s account, which was used to broadcast new and past campaign rallies, was banned for racist comments made by the president on two occasions. Twitch pointed to remarks at his recent rally in Tulsa, where he referred to criminals as “hombre[s],” and remarks from a rebroadcast of the 2015 event announcing his candidacy, when he called Mexican immigrants crimi

Image: Fisker Inc. EV startup Fisker Inc. wants to power its first SUV with Volkswagen’s mass-manufactured modular electric vehicle platform, or “MEB,” and it says it is in talks with the German automaker to do just that. In fact, the prototype SUV that Fisker Inc. revealed at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show was built on the MEB platform.
Fisker Inc. laid all of this out in an investor presentation that was assembled ahead of its push to become a publicly traded company on

Disney Plus is getting a new animated Star Wars series called Star Wars: The Bad Batch, which is set to debut on the streaming service in 2021. The new show is a spinoff of the recently concluded The Clone Wars animated series, which finished its run on Disney Plus earlier this year.Like The Clone Wars, Rebels, and the live-action The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch is being executive produced by Dave Filoni, who has become one of the instrumental pieces of Disney’s upcoming Star Wars strategy,

In Season 7 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, we met Clone Force 99, aka the "Bad Batch." Now they're getting a Disney+ series to call their own.
The elite commando squad that consists of "defective" clone troopers (aka mutants) is essentially a Star Wars-y spin on the X-Men. They popped up for an arc in the final season of Clone Wars, and starting in 2021 they're starring in their own set of animated stories on Disney's streaming service.
A brief story breakdown doesn't offer much in the way of spe

TL;DR: As of July 13, the Vitamix FoodCycler is on sale at Best Buy for just $229.99. It normally retails for $349.99, so you'll be saving $120.A combination of yard waste and food scraps makes up nearly 30 percent of what most people throw away, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And while things like leftover salad, chicken bones, and coffee grounds probably don't seem all that harmful compared to, say, single-use plastics that take eons to break down, they're actually doin

Photo by Stefan Sauer / picture alliance via Getty Images With coronavirus cases spiking across the US, public health officials are urging the population to wear masks in all public areas, a simple measure that could limit the spread of the disease. But while 20 states now have some kind of mask requirement in place, the new rules have been difficult to enforce. Police departments in Ohio and Texas have refused to enforce statewide mandates, and West Virginia’s mask rule leaves enforcemen

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google announced on Monday that its second-generation Pixel Buds are now available in more countries, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, Spain, and the UK. The true wireless headphones have only been available in the US since their April 27th release date.
Google also said it will offer Pixel Buds in more colors starting next month. Currently, you can only buy them in “clearly white,” but Google said the Pixel Bu

The stakes keep getting higher for American discount brokerage Robinhood, which today disclosed that it has added hundreds of millions of dollars to its previously disclosed funding round.
Including the $280 million that the company had already announced, Robinhood said that it was “pleased to share” that it “raised an additional $320 million in subsequent closings.” Its now $600 million funding round brings its post-money valuation to $8.6 billion. Fortune first reported

The second quarter’s venture capital results are coming into focus.
The Exchange will have more notes on Q2’s venture results this week, but this morning we’re digging into our first dataset concerning what happened in the world of private capital from April through June.
Crunchbase News — a place I used to work, it feels fair to note — ran its usual dig through the quarter’s venture results, effectively coming up with two answers to the question of what happe

Image: Summer Game Fest Even though E3, Gamescom, and other summer gaming events have become online-only or outright canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has already been a lot of gaming news this summer.We finally know what the PlayStation 5 looks like and some of the games coming to the system, for example, and we’ve been given previews of Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars: Squadrons, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the future of Destiny 2, and more. But there are still more events ahe

Image: Google Where is Google’s Pixel 4A? Sitting right on the company’s online store, as it turns out. Google seems to have mistakenly published an image of the Pixel 4A on its Canadian store. The text says “Nest Wifi,” but uh... that’s no Nest Wifi. The phone has already leaked extensively over the last few months, but this is a marketing render direct from Google — and suggests that the 4A might finally be coming sometime in the near future.Note also that

Image: Shipt Workers for grocery delivery platform Shipt are planning to walk off the job and not accept new orders on Wednesday, July 15th, saying the company’s move toward an algorithm-based pay structure will reduce their pay by at least 30 percent.“This seismic company shift is occurring at the same time that its shoppers — essential workers taking unprecedented risks during this pandemic — are already suffering significantly,” a group of Shipt shoppers wrote i

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Apple’s AirPods Pro have dropped to their lowest price yet at Woot, an online store owned by Amazon. Normally $250, they’re $35 off. This brings them down to $215 today only. For context, this deal is a mere $5 cheaper than the discount that has been happening at Verizon for the past week. Though, if you get these now, you’ll have gotten the best price yet on a brand-new set of AirPods Pro. Just add them to your cart, and you’ll see the p

Image: Superstrata Arevo is not a well-known name in the cycling world. But the Silicon Valley-based company is using its expertise in composites manufacturing and 3D printing to produce the “world’s first” 3D-printed unibody electric bike. (It’s not really the first, but more on that in a bit.)
Two models are being released today under Arevo’s newly created Superstrata brand. The Superstrata Terra is a lightweight analog that can be custom-built for a variety of r

Although Death Stranding was nothing if not divisive, I was very much on the side of those who loved it. The debut title from the newly independent Kojima Productions had its flaws, of course, and I wouldn’t take issue with Andrew’s review headline that called it both “breathtaking and boring.” But in totality, the experience really landed for me. There truly isn’t anything like it, and it’s rare to see such an expensive project with such an uncompromising vis

OnePlus is no stranger to producing headphones (pictured), but it has yet to release a true wireless model. | Image: OnePlus OnePlus will reveal its first pair of true wireless earbuds on July 21st, the company confirmed today. The OnePlus Buds, as the headphones will be called, will be revealed alongside the OnePlus Nord, the company’s new “more affordable” smartphone lineup. Other than confirming the name, OnePlus didn’t reveal any more information about the earbuds, s

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 news, dig into the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dive into the latest big news from the startup world. (You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, if you are so inclined! Don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episo

Microsoft Flight Simulator will launch on August 18th for PC. Microsoft has been holding private alpha testing of the new game in recent months, and it’s ready for preorder and preinstall today. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the latest installment in the hyper-detailed series that has been running since the 1980s. It follows the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition in 2014.
“We have been thrilled and humbled by the support and dedication that has fueled the Flight S

The UAE’s Hope spacecraft. | Image: Emirates Mars Mission This summer, the United Arab Emirates aims to join the ranks of just a handful of elite space-faring countries around the world by launching its first interplanetary mission to Mars. For the last six years, the small Middle Eastern country has worked tirelessly to build a spacecraft that can orbit the Red Planet to study its atmosphere and weather. Now, the mission is set to launch on top of a Japanese rocket.Know as the Emirates M

SiriusXM SiriusXM, a company most well-known for its satellite radio channels, is buying the podcasting company Stitcher from E.W. Scripps in a deal worth $325 million. The company confirmed the deal today after The Wall Street Journal first reported it last week. The move sets Sirius to compete even more seriously against Spotify, iHeartMedia, and Apple for dominance of the podcasting space.
Stitcher is not only a popular podcasting app with a premium, ad-free subscription service, but it&rsqu

Image: OnePlus The upcoming OnePlus Nord will have a selfie camera with an ultra-wide 105-degree field of view. OnePlus confirmed the news in a video posted to the Nord’s Instagram page. Although it didn’t confirm the resolution of the camera, a previous report from Android Central said that the phone will have two selfie cameras: one 8-megapixel wide-angle camera and a main 32-megapixel selfie camera. OnePlus has previously shown a prototype device with dual selfie cameras during a