Technology news

There aren't many weather events more fearsome than a derecho. But few seemed to notice the one that just hit the U.S. Midwest.
A derecho is a powerful, long line of thunderstorms that NOAA says "produce destruction similar to that of a tornado." Such a storm system pummeled Cedar Rapids, Iowa and the surrounding region on Aug. 10. Winds hit speeds of some 110 mph — equivalent to a Category 2 hurricane.
Yet you might not have noticed, amid the nationwide chaos sown by the Trump administrat

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice,Michael Markman,Keith Teare,Denis Pombriant,Brent Leary,and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Tuesday, August 11, 2020. For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgangThe Gillmor Gang on Facebook…and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images President Donald Trump has joined Triller, a rival to the video sharing app TikTok that he wants ban in the US. First noted by New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, Trump’s Triller account (@donaldjtrump) has about 3,500 followers, and his introductory video has more than 590,000 views.The intro video features clips of the president and audio clips of him saying “I’m a professional at technology,” and “nobody can do it like me.&rdqu

Life is not easy even if you're Netflix, a household name and streaming giant now up against titans like Disney+ and HBO Max. Though Netflix was never home base for every superhero movie or Star War, it usually had a rotation of some of the most popular movies in history, but that lineup looks different now in the throes of the streaming wars.
With that in mind, we decided to figure out the top 10 highest grossing movies on Netflix. These titles barely crack to the top 100 box office rankings, b

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend enjoyment.
Ready? Let’s talk money, upstart companies and spicy IPO rumors.
Sadly the best news of the week isn’t a fit here
So far this little newsletter has bested performance expectations, and has quickly become my favorite thing to write each week. Sadly, however

Fortnite is heading back to Gotham City.
Starting on Friday, Batman, Harley Quinn, and Catwoman skins returned to Epic Games' popular battle royale throwdown, along with cosmetic items for each. They're all available in the Fortnite item shop individually and as bundles.
Image:epic games
That's not all, though. Another Gotham City-themed set of additions is coming in November as part of a bundle called The Last Laugh. As you might've already guessed from the title, the bundle features Batman's a

Everybody loves a good plot twist, right?
Whether they're ambiguous and thought-provoking (looking at you, David Lynch) or downright shocking (hello, The Mist), twists have been a staple of movies since pretty much the dawn of cinema.
In the list below, we've narrowed down some of our more recent favourites.
From cases of mistaken identity to killers in disguise, here are 25 of the best movie plot twists from the year 2000 onwards. And it goes without saying, but...major spoiler alert.
1. Mement

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There are few things that US political leaders can agree on these days, but one of them thankfully appears to be 5G. Manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, health care and many other industries are beginning to incorporate the fast, device-to-device connectivity provided by the fifth-generation wireless standard. But the key 3.5 GHz

In the 15 years he’s been teaching, high school literature teacher Jude Mirambeau has never faced a school year like the past one. In March, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, his state of Florida, which is home to some of the largest school districts in the nation, shuttered its schools in an attempt to slow infections. Teachers shifted to “distance learning.” Mirambeau’s district, the Broward County school district, which has about 270,000 students, loaned out tens of th

NASA calls NGC 1614 a "peculiar galaxy."
The brilliant cosmic object is the result of two merging galaxies. There are a number of wild things happening in this Hubble image, posted on Friday by NASA.To the right upper right is a "tidal tail," which forms when stars and gas are "stripped" from the outside arms of galaxies during a merger, according to Cosmos.
There's a "burst" of radiant star formation in the center of the merger, notes NASA, as gases from the smaller galaxy stream into the large

The United States Postal Service is in trouble.
You may have noticed that it's taking longer to receive letters and packages through the USPS. You may have also seen that your social media timeline is in an uproar over the Trump administration's efforts to gut the Constitutionally-enshrined institution. 
President Trump has repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud, without any evidence.  He's also refused to financially aid the USPS during the pandemic, Business

The Los Angeles Lakers play the Denver Nuggets in the NBA’s bubble.| Photo by Jim Poorten/NBAE via Getty Images The Food and Drug Administration authorized a saliva-based COVID-19 test that the National Basketball Association helped study. The testing method, called SalivaDirect, is cheap and could be run by most labs.
Labs could charge as little as $10 per sample to run the test, said Nathan Grubaugh, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health and one head of the team dev

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that two-factor authentication for its app is “embarrassingly late” but apparently is now on the way. Musk didn’t provide a timeline, but said on Twitter that two-factor authentication — which adds an additional step to verify a user’s identity at sign-in— is in “final validation.”Sorry, this is embarrassingly late. Two factor authentication via sms or authenticator app is

Research shows that doctors who offer empathic and positive messages can reduce a patient’s pain, improve their recovery after surgery, and lower the amount of morphine they need. But it doesn’t mean that telling a patient something simple, such as “this drug will make you feel better,” will have an effect. It’s more complicated than that, as our latest research shows. Positive messages are usually repeated, definite, specific, and personal. They should also be com

Every year hackers descend on Las Vegas in the sweltering August heat to break ground on security research and the most innovative hacks. This year was no different, even if it was virtual.
To name a few: Hackers tricked an ATM to spit out cash. A duo of security researchers figured out a way to detect the latest cell site simulators. Car researchers successfully hacked into a Mercedes-Benz. A Windows bug some two decades old can be used to plant malware. Cryptocurrency exchanges were extremely

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Mozilla and Google have extended their arrangement to keep Google the default search engine within the Firefox browser until at least 2023, ZDNet reported. The companies have not formally announced the deal, which ZDNet estimates is worth between $400 and $450 million per year, but are expected to announce it later this fall. The current arrangement was due to expire at the end of 2020.
The move comes as Mozilla just announced plans to lay off 250 employe

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Mozilla and Google have extended their arrangement to keep Google the default search engine within the Firefox browser until at least 2023, ZDNet reported. The companies have not formally announced the deal, which ZDNet estimates is worth between $400 and $450 million per year, but are expected to announce it later this fall. The current arrangement was due to expire at the end of 2020.
“Mozilla’s search partnership with Google is ongoing, wit

TLDR: The training in The 2020 Complete Adobe Creativity Bundle can help you do better digital work, then get it seen to advance your career. If you need to edit an image or create a piece of digital media, you already know the Adobe Creative Cloud and its armada of apps is more than ready to jump in and help get the job done. But you might not immediately think of Adobe CC if you need a stock photo for your website or some helpful feedback on your creative projects. But there’s a lot mor

A jogger wears a gaiter as a mask in April, 2020. | Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images A minor face-covering controversy broke out this week, thanks to a widely-misinterpreted paper involving masks, lasers, and spit.The study, which came out in Science Advances on August 7, was pretty straightforward. It laid out a method that other scientists could use to test masks in their own labs. Using a dark box, some lasers, a cell phone camera and a relatively simple algorithm th

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Genki is offering a 15 percent discount to readers of The Verge who buy two or more products from its site. Two easy picks are its new Covert Dock for the Nintendo Switch along with the Portable Stand or Genki Audio Bluetooth adapter for the Switch to go with it. Whatever you end up buying, just add them to your cart and then paste in the offer code ONTHEVERGE at checkout to save. If you were thinking about getting the Covert Dock and the Portable Stand tog

The Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter just revealed mechanisms driving mammoth storms in the Jovian atmosphere. Storms on Jupiter form ammonia-rich hail — called mushballs — in the atmosphere of the giant planet, new research reveals. Investigators believe these tempests play an important role in regulating the Jovian atmosphere. Shallow lightning is seen by the Juno spacecraft emanating from clouds rich in ammonia. Large quantities of ammonia normally found in the atmosphere of Jupi

Coronavirus lockdowns have led to a massive reduction in global emissions, but there’s one area where energy usage is up – way up – during the pandemic: internet traffic. Data-intensive video streaming, gaming, and live streaming for business, university, and school classes is chewing up energy. Estimates can be notoriously difficult and depend on the electricity source, but six hours of streaming video may be the equivalent of burning one litre of petrol, due to emissions fro

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge President Trump issued an executive order Friday giving ByteDance 90 days to either sell or spin off its TikTok business in the US.
“There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that ByteDance ... might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States,” Trump wrote in the order, which references national security concerns. ByteDance is based in China, and the Trump administration has recently suggested tha

Facebook appears to flipping the switch on integrating the chat systems for Instagram and Messenger. On Friday evening, several editors at The Verge across the country — on both iOS and Android devices — noticed an update screen popped up in Instagram’s mobile app with the message “There’s a New Way to Message on Instagram” with a list of features including a “new colorful look for your chats,” more emoji reactions, swipe-to-reply, and the big one:

TeslaCEO Elon Musk acknowledged Friday that the company was ‘embarrassingly late’ rolling out a security layer known as two-factor authentication for its mobile app.
“Sorry, this is embarrassingly late. Two factor authentication via sms or authenticator app is going through final validation right now,” Musk wrote Friday in response to a question from a Twitter follower.
Musk said in April that the additional security layer was “coming soon.” He first mentioned

The number of classic movies on streaming services has risen considerably in the last year — meaning it’s now easier than it used to be to become a cinephile in the streaming age. But which service has the highest concentration of classic films? Two years ago, I wrote an article about how hard it was to be a cinephile in the age of Netflix. I wanted to see how many classic films were actually available on streaming services, without having to pay anything extra. At the time, there w

Photo by Rachel Luna/Getty Images Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney has issued a series of public comments on his personal Twitter account regarding the legal fight the Fortnite creator initiated with Apple yesterday, following the iPhone maker’s removal of the game from the App Store. In the four-part thread, Sweeney says the fight isn’t about money. Rather, he says Epic is fighting for “the basic freedoms of all consumers and developers.”“At the most basic level, we&rsq

The controversial facial recognition software maker Clearview AI has a new contract with ICE, the most controversial U.S. government agency. Clearview was already known to work with the branch of Homeland Security fiercely criticized for implementing the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies. The new contract makes it clear that relationship is ongoing — and that Clearview isn’t just playing a bit part in tech’s lucrative scrum for federal contracts.
First spo

EA today revealed that it’s rebranding and consolidating its subscription service. Whereas before it operated under a few different names, now it’ll all be under a new banner called EA Play. This is likely both an attempt to avoid confusion and to make its transition to Steam more appealing. I wouldn’t want to say gamers avoided EA‘s subscription service, an otherwise decent value, because it was confusing — but I am going to say that I avoided it because it w

Rent the Runwayand Glossier became unicorns within the same week in June 2019. That same year, only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went toward female-founded companies.
Silicon Valley’s disconnect between the monetary success of female-founded companies and funding them in the first place is disheartening. The conversation is there, but the dollar sign momentum remains missing.
Anu Duggal founded the Female Founders Fund before both were even a tangible reality. In 2014, the entrepreneur

In the four years since Help Lightning first began pitching its services out of its Birmingham, Ala. headquarters, the company has managed to sign up 100 customers including some large Fortune 500 companies like Cox Communications, Siemens, and Boston Scientific.
Now, with an additional $8 million in financing from Resolve Growth Partners, the company is hoping to expand its sales and marketing efforts and continue to refine its product.
The technology was initially invented by Bart Guthrie, a n