Technology news

Photo by Sean Rayford / Getty Images Former intelligence contractor and whistleblower Reality Winner has reportedly tested positive for COVID-19. Winner’s sister, Brittany Winner, tweeted her diagnosis earlier today. Winner is currently incarcerated in a federal medical prison in Fort Worth, Texas, where an outbreak has sickened hundreds of inmates and killed at least two.
Winner is seeking compassionate release during the coronavirus pandemic, citing underlying medical conditions. An ear

Wemo’s new miniaturized WiFi Smart Plug — which the company announced at CES earlier this year — is now available to actually buy.The new Wemo WiFi Smart Plug is functionally the same as the previous model, but it’s 45 percent smaller than the old (and now somewhat inaccurately named) Wemo Mini model that preceded it. Like the last version, it supports Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple HomeKit, and the Wemo app for your various smart home integrations.The new plug is

When HBO Max launched, one of WarnerMedia’s big selling points was having the entire Harry Potter collection available to stream. Three months later, that’s no longer the case.An email detailing what’s coming to and leaving HBO Max in August points out that all eight movies, from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, will leave the service on August 25th. It’s unclear where the films will wind up, but speculation is al

A render of the the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 leaked over the weekend, following in the footsteps of the Note 20 Ultra. It’s our best look at the device yet, at least until it officially debuts in a scant few weeks. I feel like, with a leak such as this, several hours of exclusivity for Patreon subs should suffice. Many of you have been quite patient. 😊 pic.twitter.com/MqxzlRpD5e — Evan Blass (@evleaks) July 17, 2020 The render comes from tipster Evan Blass, who shows it from e

Image: Google Marc Levoy, the researcher who used software to turn Google’s Pixel camera into a powerhouse, has joined Adobe to build a universal camera app, Adobe announced today.
Levoy headed up the team that developed the impressive computational photography technology used in Google’s Pixel smartphones, including features like Night Sight, Portrait Mode, and HDR+. His work also helped Pixels take great photos without requiring as much hardware as competing phones — the Pix

Peyton Carr ContributorShare on Twitter Peyton Carr is a financial advisor to founders, entrepreneurs and their families, helping them with planning and investing. He is a managing director of Keystone Global Partners. More posts by this contributorHow to build or invest in a startup without paying capital gains tax Make a personal plan for your exit or IPO
Companies like Uber, Lyft, Beyond Meat, Peloton, Slack, Zoomand Pinterest all made public market debuts in 2019, creating wealth and liquidi

Photo by Tobias Hase / Picture Alliance via Getty Images Has Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg cut a secret deal with President Donald Trump, turning a blind eye to his lies and incendiary posts in the hope that the social media giant won’t become the president’s next target? Rumors of this sort have been swirling for months, but Zuckerberg himself has now denied it, telling Axios that no such deal exists.
“I’ve heard this speculation, too, so let me be clear: There’s n

Illustration by Alex Castro The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase said that it stopped around 1,100 customers from sending bitcoin to hackers who gained access to high-profile Twitter accounts last week.Last Wednesday, over 100 Twitter accounts, some belonging to major companies like Apple and high-profile people like Vice President Joe Biden and Bill Gates, were hacked as part of a massive coordinated bitcoin scam. According to Twitter, the hackers were able to convince some of the company&rsqu

Aurora, the startup founded by former lead engineer for Google’s self-driving project Chris Urmson, is bringing its fleet of test vehicles to Texas. It’s the latest company to shift resources to the Lone Star State, which has quickly become a hotbed of autonomous vehicle testing.Aurora says it is bringing a “small” fleet of vehicles to the Dallas-Fort Worth area within the next few weeks. The company tests out its autonomous vehicle hardware and software in both Chrysler

Mario Kart Tour is finally getting widescreen support nearly a year after its initial launch. The option to flip your phone into landscape mode was a key feature missing when the Mario Kart series’ mobile iteration came out last year.Released in September 2019, Mario Kart Tour brought the popular go-kart racing series to smartphones. Unlike previous installments, the game’s controls are simplified — you do not need to press any button to accelerate your character, you can just

Snapchat The first of Snap’s new Mini applications rolled out Monday, with tools from meditation app Headspace, part of an initiative “to help support the mental health and emotional wellbeing of Snapchatters,” a Snap spokesperson said in a statement.Snap announced it was launching Minis at its virtual Partner Summit last month. The Minis, as the name suggests, are miniature apps made by third-party developers that run inside of Snapchat to create more social experiences among

Oxford researchers have developed a potential vaccine for COVID-19. Early testing in more than 1,000 clinical trial participants indicates the treatment is both safe and effective. Epidemiology breakthroughs aren’t our usual subject matter here at TNW, but the opportunity to finally publish some actual good news about the COVID-19 pandemic was just too much for us to pass up. The team, which included researchers from Oxford, and the Philipps University of  Marburg, Germany, deve

Today Jamf, a software company that helps other firms manage their Apple devices, raised its IPO price range.
The company had previously targeted a $17 to $19 per-share range. A new SEC filing from the firm today details a far higher $21 to $23 per-share IPO price interval.
Jamfstill intends to sell up to 18.4 million shares in its debut, including 13.5 million in primary stock, 2.5 million shares from existing shareholders and an underwriter option worth 2.4 million shares. The whole whack at $

Insider, a Singapore-based startup that develops software to help clients make marketing decisions, plans to launch in the United States after raising a $32 million Series C. The round was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia India, Wamda and Endeavor Catalyst.
Founded in 2012, the company says its SaaS for multichannel marketing and customer engagement is currently used by more than 800 brands, including Singapore Airlines, Marks and Spencer, Virgin, Uniqlo, Samsung and Est

Image: Warner Bros. Tenet was supposed to be the movie that kicked off the film industry’s return to theaters, but Warner Bros. has delayed the movie indefinitely.“We will share a new 2020 release date imminently for Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s wholly original and mind-blowing feature,” Warner Bros. chairman Toby Emmerich said in a statement to Variety.
Tenet was originally supposed to be released on July 17th. It was pushed back to July 31st because of ongoing concerns s

Effx, a startup that aims to give developers better insights into their microservice architectures, today announced that it has raised a $3.9 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Cowboy Ventures. Other investors and angels in this round include Tokyo Black, Essence VC Fund, Jason Warner, Michael Stoppelman, Vijay Pandurangan and Miles Grimshaw.
The company’s founder and CEO, Joey Parsons, was an early employee at Rackspaceand then first went to Flipboardand then Airbnba few yea

Earlier today, news broke that Xpeng, a China-based electric vehicle company has raised $500 million, adding to its 2019-era $400 million Series C. The round, a Series C+ investment, brings the company’s capital raised to date to around $2.2 billion.
Xpeng’s huge fundraise comes on the heels of a recent boom in the value of some public EV companies, including Tesla,Nio and Nikola. Speculation into the future value (and therefore present-day worth) of EV companies has led to their ran

The option to see directions via a cycle share scheme appears under regular bike directions. | Image; Google Starting today, Google Maps can show you directions using rented bikes from docked bike-share schemes like Citi Bike in New York City or Santander Cycles in London. It works by giving walking directions to get to a nearby dock, cycling directions to get from one dock to another, and finally walking directions once more to get from the dock to your destination. It’s similar to what

Shin Megami Tensei V will launch exclusively for the Nintendo Switch in 2021 as a simultaneous global release, Nintendo announced today. The news arrived alongside a teaser for the game, where “order itself has crumbled and chaos reigns over all.”
Atlus’ SMT series is known for mixing RPG elements with a Pokémon-like demon capture system; its popular Persona series is a spinoff. The last main entry in the series, Shin Megami Tensei IV, launched in 2013 for Nintendo 3DS.

Despite coming down hard on Tesla’s self-driving tech last week, Germany is looking to lead Europe in self-driving cars and is reportedly working on a broad framework to regulate Level 4 autonomous vehicles to do so. According to a report by Automotive News Europe (ANE), the framework is currently being reviewed by the transportation ministry and other government departments. All being well, the legislation could be ready for next summer. “The planned new legal framework should crea

Microsoft’s Windows 10X operating system, originally planned for dual-screen devices, might not appear until 2021. The software giant revealed earlier this year that Windows 10X is being reworked for single-screen devices, rather than hardware like the Surface Neo. These changes mean Microsoft won’t be releasing Windows 10X like it had planned to do so later this year.
ZDNet reports that single-screen devices running Windows 10X, designed for education and business use, are expected

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 will soon be two years old, but it’s still a great phone — especially at the $499 price Amazon is selling it for today. This is the best deal we’ve seen yet, and it’s far lower than its $1,000 retail price (though these days, it usually runs you about $600 or more depending on the color). This sale is specifically on the lavender color option with 128GB of storage. If that’s not your favorite col

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 weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.
Got all that? Great,

Photo by Tony Barson/FilmMagic It’s been a hard few months for Tenet fans. The $205 million film has been sidelined for weeks, as theaters have been shut down across the country due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The details of the film are shrouded in secrecy, which can’t be lifted until the film premieres — and the film itself can’t premiere until theaters reopen. In the month since Tenet’s release date was set, the US has plunged into a second wave of infecti

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. If you’re working with spreadsheets on a regular basis, you know that it’s important to keep your tables of data easy to explore and digest. You can do this by cleaning your data, and by styling and structuring your data appropriately. For instance, you could freeze your top header row, in order to keep it in place when you’re scroll down yo

Today, artificial intelligence programs can recognize faces and objects in photos and videos, transcribe audio in real-time, detect cancer in x-ray scans years in advance, and compete with humans in some of the most complicated games. Until a few years ago, all these challenges were either thought insurmountable, decades away, or were being solved with sub-optimal results. But advances in neural networks and deep learning, a branch of AI that has become very popular in the past few years,

TLDR: With a lifetime of VPN by VeePN protection, your online security will always be safeguarded on up to 10 devices. Hey you, work-from-home employee…you may have helped save the world from data thieves. Well, there’s no way of knowing your direct impact on cyber crime, but the number data breaches reports was down by a full third — 33 percent — over the first six months of 2020. And the number of people affected by those breaches was also way down, by 66 percent.&nbs

Leaked Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 image | Ice Universe (Twitter) A leaked and extremely blurry photo of what appears to be Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 2 has appeared online. Phone leaker Ice Universe has published two photos of the device, revealing that the successor to the Galaxy Fold will likely arrive in a gold model and with some camera upgrades. It’s not clear exactly what the camera array consists of at the rear, but rumors have suggested the Galaxy Fold 2 will adopt the same camera as

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. If your friends come over to your house, you might need to tell them your WiFi password. And if it’s a complex password, you would need to type it in for them. It becomes annoying and cumbersome if there are more than a couple of friends at your house. But you can speed up the whole process by using a QR Code, which your friends can scan to connect

In case 2020 wasn’t dystopian enough, hackers on July 15 hijacked the Twitter accounts of former President Barack Obama, presidential hopeful Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kim Kardashian, and Apple, among others. Each hijacked account posted a similar fake message. The high-profile individual or company wanted to philanthropically give back to the community during COVID-19 and would double any donations made to a bitcoin wallet, identical messages said. The donations followed. The hac

OnePlus Buds in case. | Max Weinbach (Twitter) A new leak has given us the best look yet at the soon to be launched true wireless earbuds from OnePlus. Several images were extracted from the OnePlus Buds APK by both 9to5Google and Max Weinbach of XDA Developers. While we don’t have a price yet, OnePlus did tease the buds on Instagram for “$XX.XX” suggesting they’ll retail for less than $100.The APK has images of the OnePlus Buds in black, blue, and white. These appear to

OnePlus Buds in case. | Max Weinbach (Twitter) A new leak has given us the best look yet at the soon to be launched true wireless earbuds from OnePlus. Several images were extracted from the OnePlus Buds APK by both 9to5Google and Max Weinbach of XDA Developers. These appear to be the same earbuds worn by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei when discussing the new Nord handset design with Marques Brownlee.
The APK has images of the OnePlus Buds in black, blue, and white. 9to5Google also discovered code

The UK government revealed its stockpile of coronavirus (COVID-19) treatments on Monday, having recently secured 90 million doses of potential vaccines. Britain’s fresh agreement with Germany’s BioNTech and the Bill Gates-backed Pfizer netted 30 million doses of their joint mRNA vaccine, a first for any world government. The two companies joined forces in March to fast-track development. [Read: A look at the $17 billion stock portfolio of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation]

Ride-hailing company Lyft is taking measures to keep its drivers safe amid the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s not supporting all of its drivers equally. According to a company announcement last week, Lyft will give its frequent drivers a perspex divider that helps to separate rear passenger seats from the front driver seat of the car, so as to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. Lyft also requires drivers and passengers to wear masks during trips. So far, the company says that it

The Jack Ma -controlled Ant Group finally sets in motion what the market has been anticipating for years. The financial services and payments behemoth said Monday that it has kickstarted the process of a concurrent initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and Shanghai Stock Exchange’s Nasdaq-style Star Market.
The public listing will enable Ant, which operates the Alipaywallet used across Alibaba’s e-commerce networks, to work toward several goals: digitize China&rsquo