Technology news

Doug Loverro, the former associate administrator for NASA’s human spaceflight program | Image: NASA A federal criminal probe is looking into allegations of misconduct by a former NASA official who abruptly resigned from his position at the agency in May, The Wall Street Journal reports. Prosecutors are investigating if the official illegally disclosed information to Boeing about how to compete to build NASA’s new human lunar lander, the report states.
The target of the probe is Doug

At TechCrunchEarly Stage, I spoke with Coatue ManagementGP Caryn Marooneyabout startup branding and how founders can get people to pay attention to what they’re building.
Marooney recently made the jump into venture capital; previously she was co-founder and CEO of The Outcast Agency, one of Silicon Valley’s best-regarded public relations firms, which she left to become VP of Global Communications at Facebook,where she led comms for eight years.
While founders often may think of PR a

No matter what you think of Sequoia Capital,the firm doesn’t rest on its laurels. Though it’s now managing ungodly amounts of money and has for decades been considered among the top venture firms in the world, it routinely finds new ways to stay relevant and to ensure that it gets a first look at the most promising founders.
It was the first firm to employ scouts, for example. Recently, to create more room between itself and its ever-growing number of competitors, the firm has also b

Andy Rachlefffounded Wealthfront a decade ago to give investors a better and smarter way to manage their wealth, building on core academic research showing that a carefully balanced portfolio of low-fee ETFs outperformed more aggressive strategies. Since then, the company has taken in billions of dollars of invested capital under management and expanded into new banking services, including high-interest checking accounts.
Rachleff and I talked on Extra Crunch Live about where Wealthfront is head

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge If you’re in an important videoconferencing session and you are getting an infodump that you know you won’t remember, it can be very useful to have a transcription of that session. Video and audio recordings are all well and good, but a text version of your meeting can be a lot easier to search if you’re looking for that one specific bit of data inside of an hour’s worth of conversation.
There are a number of third-party apps out the

Image: DC Universe DC Universe’s original content — a list that includes Titans, Swamp Thing, Stargirl, and Young Justice — is heading to HBO Max, according to DC chief creative officer and publisher Jim Lee in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The news comes as WarnerMedia is in the process of a larger reorganization at DC Comics, which was also hit by a wave of layoffs this week.The writing has been on the wall for DC Universe (at least in its current form) ever sinc

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon can be held liable for defective products sold on its Marketplace in California, an appeals court ruled Thursday, which suggests that if you buy a defective third-party product on Amazon, it might be Amazon that’s responsible. The California Fourth District Court of Appeals reversed a 2019 trial court ruling and reinstated claims from a woman who says she suffered third-degree burns when a defective laptop battery she bought from a third-part

Facebookjoined the growing ranks of companies publicly complaining about the 30% fee that Apple collects on payments made through its App Store.
Those complaints came midway through a blog post about the social network’s new feature supporting paid online events. Facebook said that to support struggling businesses, it won’t be collecting any fees on those events, at least for the next year, which means that those businesses keep 100% of payments on the web and on Android.
But Fa

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge This week on The Vergecast, a topic very aligned with the theme of this podcast dominated the show: antitrust in the app store.The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Tom Warren, and Dan Seifert discuss the timeline of events that led to Epic Games suing both Apple and Google after Fortnite was kicked off of their mobile app stores. The crew reads through statements from both sides of the drama and compares this to similar market complaints in the past.Later

In this series we’ll take a science and technology-based overhead view of the future from the perspective of a time traveler. This edition focuses on what you’d see if you traveled far enough into the future to watch the universe end. So you’ve decided to visit the end of the universe? Well, bully for you. Some folks might call it a spoiler, but I say we should skip to the end just to see where all of this is going. Luckily for us Matt Caplan, a theoretical physicist from Illi

Welcome back to Human Capital, where we look at all things labor and diversity, equity and inclusion. This week, Uber and Lyft’s legal battle against a California law pertaining to independent contractors continued. As of right now, it’s looking like Uber and Lyft are going to temporarily cease operations in California next week if they can’t get their way.Meanwhile, Pinterest employees reached their breaking point when former COO Françoise Brougher sued Pinterest allegi

Businesses will now be able to monetize online events on Facebook,thanks to a new feature that the social network is launching in the United States and 19 other countries today.
In a call with reporters, Head of Facebook App Fidji Simosaid that Facebook’s Events feature was designed for in-person events, but with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social distancing orders, the company “really quickly pivoted” to supporting online events.
In fact, Simo said that in June of this

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook is launching a new digital platform that will let event organizers create paid online events to try to fill the gap created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the social media giant announced on Friday.But there’s one catch: the platform is going to cost event organizers and businesses more on iOS, as Facebook says Apple is refusing to waive its standard App Store fees or allow the company to use its own in-app payment processing system it says

Initialized Capital,the early-stage venture firm that got its start inside of Y Combinator almost a decade ago and spun out of the organization roughly five years later, has closed its newest fund, with $230 million in capital commitments, co-founder Garry Tan announced on Medium earlier today.
The fund, its fifth, brings the assets that the San Francisco firm is managing to $770 million.
Tan also announced that Initialized has a new general partner in Brett Gibson,with whom Tan has partnered wi

NASAand SpaceXhave set a specific target date for Crew-1, the first operational crewed mission for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Crew-1 will carry astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Soichi Noguchi to the International Space Station, and will mark the first regular service mission of the Dragon spacecraft following its certification at the conclusion of its development and testing program.
Crew Dragon’s final major milestone in that process was Demo-2, the m

Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images Pinterest employees are staging a virtual walkout today to protest discrimination and retaliation at the company. In a petition posted on the anonymous networking app Blind on August 13th, employees called for solidarity with three high-profile women who’ve recently accused the company of racial and gender inequity.The petition encourages employees to overlay their Slack avatar with the faces of the three women. It also asks them to sign off Slack tod

As the antitrust drumbeat continues to pound on tech giants, with Reuters reporting comments today from the U.S. Justice Department that it’s moving “full-tilt” on an investigation of platform giants including Google parent Alphabet, startups in Europe’s travel sector are dialing up their allegations of anti-competitive behavior against the search giant.
Googlehas near complete grip on the search market in Europe, with a regional market share in excess of 90%, according t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with facial recognition company Clearview AI this week for “mission support,” government contracting records show (as first spotted by the tech accountability nonprofit Tech Inquiry). The purchase order for $224,000 describes “clearview licenses” and lists “ICE mission support dallas” as the contracting office.
ICE is known to use facial recognition technology;

The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. | Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images This week, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico — an iconic facility made famous by movies like Contact and Goldeneye — had to halt observations of the Universe after a structural cable failed, punching a hole in the facility’s giant reflector dish. Operators of the observatory say the overall facility is mostly fine, but they’re working to figure out exactly what went wrong.
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Liran Haimovitch ContributorShare on Twitter Co-founder and CTO of Rookout, Liran is an award-winning cybersecurity practitioner and writer who advocates for modern software methodologies.Across the board, industries need to embrace modern workflows to keep up with the speed of startups. And out of all the various methodologies, I find the “lean methodology” to be the most intriguing of them all. It’s a unique combination of pragmatism and a higher purpose.
Lean methodology des

Around two years ago, artist and designer Dick Hogg saw a GIF of a banana going through an MRI machine. Seeing the different layers of the fruit was mesmerizing. It inspired him. Not long after, Hogg called up his game design partner, Ricky Haggett, and said simply, “I really want to make a game that does this.”
Now, the pair is ready to show off the result: I Am Dead, a cute and colorful game that’s launching on the Nintendo Switch and PC later this year. It’s essentiall

It’s a whole new playing field these days for music labels and publishers, and today one of the biggies made an acquisition to help it sharpen up its strategy to better understand what people want to see and hear online today.
Warner Music — with a market cap of $15.4 billion, one of the big three recording giants (alongside Universal and Sony) and which owns labels like Atlantic, Elektra and others and has a huge roster of artists that includes the likes of Madonna, Ed Sheeran

Facebookis going all-in on short-form videos. After flirting with the idea in Lasso, a TikTok-clone it tested in select markets, and adding a similar feature called Reels to Instagram recently, the company is exploring a new venue for this TikTok -esque experience: The big blue app.
The company confirmed to TechCrunchthat it is testing short-form videos in the Facebook app in India, its biggest market by users. In the current avatar, “Short Videos” has a dedicated section within the

Rebranding streaming services is very in these days across a number of entertainment industries, and EA is jumping on the trend by rebranding its EA Access and Origin Access services simply as EA Play.There are no financial changes for customers, nor does the rebranding require any additional effort for people to play games under their current subscription. The company describes the rebrand as “an important step in streamlining our services to ensure that being an EA Play member is the bes

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ashraf Ismail, the former creative director for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, has been fired by Ubisoft, Bloomberg reports. Ismail stepped down from his role and took a leave of absence in June after a fan accused Ismail of lying about his marital status in order to pursue a romantic relationship with her.
“As a result of investigations, Ashraf Ismail has been dismissed from Ubisoft and is no longer an employee,” a spokesman for Ubisoft tol

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge A mesh Wi-Fi system is one of the best investments you can make during a time when most of us are stuck at home due to the pandemic. It can help you get more out of the internet that you pay for. Luckily for you, some of the best options are on sale today — and both are known for being very easy to set up. Eero’s three-pack of mesh Wi-Fi beacons, pictured above, are $200 (normally $250) at Best Buy and Amazon.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
If you

If you’ve been using Zoom to work from home over these last few months, it’s possible that the name you’re being identified by in the lower left corner is not what you’d prefer. Perhaps it’s your email instead of your name, or it’s all in lower case, or it includes that middle name that you’ve always hated. Whatever the case, it is easy to change your Zoom name — and to add a profile photo, if you want.
If you’re using the desktop Zoom app, h