Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge As it predicted would likely happen, YouTube removed more videos in the second quarter of 2020 than it ever has, as the company leaned more on its algorithm in place of most of its human content moderators. That’s according to the Community Guidelines Enforcement report the company released Tuesday (via Protocol), which shows it took down more than 11.4 million videos between April and June. In the same period last year, YouTube removed just under 9

Verily Life Sciences, the health care company owned by Alphabet, is getting into insurance, the company announced today. Verily is launching a new subsidiary for the effort called Coefficient Insurance Company, which will be backed by the commercial insurance unit of Swiss Re Group.Coefficient plans to offer stop-loss insurance. The explanation for stop-loss is a little technical, but it boils down to this: Employers that pay for employee health claims out of pocket buy stop-loss insurance. Once

Verily Life Sciences, the health care company owned by Alphabet, is getting into insurance, the company announced today. Verily is launching a new subsidiary for the effort called Coefficient Insurance Company, which will be backed by the commercial insurance unit of Swiss Re Group.Coefficient plans to offer stop-loss insurance. The explanation for stop-loss is a little technical, but it boils down to this: Employers that pay for employee health claims out of pocket buy stop-loss insurance. Once

In October 2016, a startup named Vue promised Kickstarter backers a pair of prescription eyeglasses that could double as wireless earbuds, a fitness tracker, and a smartwatch all at once, plus bone conduction speakers so nobody can eavesdrop on your music and calls. Two years and $3 million later, the company hadn’t shipped a single pair.But fast-forward another two years, and Vue is now ready to sell you on the idea again. The new $179-and-up Vue Lite glasses ditch some of the fancier fea

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Samsung announced its new Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra phones at its Unpacked 2020 online event in early August 2020. At this point, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn has now published his full review of the larger Note 20 Ultra. You can read that here or watch the video component of the review above. I’m just here to tell you where to buy them. Oh, and if you’re curious about when you can preorder the new Galaxy Z Fold 2, that’s coming on Se

When Snowflake filed its S-1 ahead of an upcoming IPO yesterday, it wasn’t exactly a shock. The company which raised $1.4 billion had been valued at $12.4 billion in its last private raise in February. CEO Frank Slootman, who had taken over from Bob Muglia in May last year, didn’t hide the fact that going public was the end game.
When we spoke to him in February at the time of his mega $479 million raise, he was candid about the fact he wanted to take his company to the next level, a

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps | Image: NASA Two years after being unexpectedly pulled from a flight to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps is now assigned to a new mission to the ISS. Rather than flying on the Russian Soyuz rocket as first planned, Epps will join the first operational crew of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, a new private capsule developed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the station.
Epps was originally supposed to fly on the Soyuz back in June 20

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is planning to expand its dedicated news section and says it is “considering” the UK, Germany, France, India, and Brazil as possible recipients, it announced Tuesday. The company’s timeline is vague: “within the next six months to a year,” so it’s curious why Facebook would announce something not yet imminent. But given Facebook’s volatile history with the news industry, and the trend toward requiring pla

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook’s annual Oculus Connect conference will be held online-only on September 16th — and it’s being rebranded as Facebook Connect, part of the social giant’s gradual assimilation of its virtual reality subsidiary.
Connect 2020 will be publicly streamed online, a change Facebook announced in April. Like the past few years’ events, it will cover a mix of virtual and augmented reality news from Facebook. But unlike previ

Host Aisha Tyler inside the FanDome arena. | DC Comics In a time when we’re oversaturated with virtual events, it’s impossible not to notice that most of them don’t exactly run smoothly. There are technical issues, sessions that run too long, and people so burned out on Zoom chats that sitting down for another video call on a Saturday afternoon is torturous.
It’s for these reasons that the sheer excellence of DC FanDome is so striking.
DC FanDome was an eight-hour virtua

Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images Shared bike and scooter companies in California are urging state legislators to oppose a bill that would “threaten the very existence of micromobility” in the state. The bill, AB 1286, would prohibit companies from including language in their terms of service asking riders to waive liability for injuries — a provision shared mobility companies claim would essentially force them to shut down if enacted.The bill is a product of the

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’ve scrolled through Reddit’s app recently, you might have spotted a live stream of someone playing music, making art, or just talking to the camera. Those broadcasts come from Reddit’s own live-streaming service, the Reddit Public Access Network (RPAN), which just celebrated its first anniversary last week. And as the service enters year two, Reddit is teasing an expansion to more subreddits at some point in the future.The best wo

Apple has announced a new major update to Final Cut Pro X that adds several new improvements to proxy workflows, making the software far more suited to remote and collaborative editing for videos. The 10.4.9 update also adds several other useful new features, including a machine learning-powered “Smart Conform” feature that can automatically crop videos for social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.Proxy files are smaller, lower-resolution versions of an original c

Later today, TwilioCEO Jeff Lawson is joining the TechCrunch crew for a live Q&A.
The discussion is part of our Extra Crunch Live series that has been live for the last several months. It’s been a good run, with guests like Charles Hudson, Sydney Sykes and Mark Cuban. We’ve also had entrepreneurs swing by, including one of the founders of Plaid.
But it’s about time we added Lawson to the mix as he’s in a slightly different spot than most guests to date, namely, h

Photo: Faze Clan Faze Clan has added yet another celebrity to its ranks. Today the gaming team / lifestyle brand announced that NBA star Ben Simmons has joined Faze as a member under the moniker “Faze Simmo.” Simmons is part of a long list of celebrity investors in Faze, including the likes of Pitbull, Offset, pro skateboarder Nyjah Huston, and fellow NBA players Jamal Murray and Meyers Leonard. Terms of Simmons’ investment were not disclosed.The connection between Faze and Si

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is improving the performance of tabs in Chrome, according to a new blog post, and the changes could lead to speed gains of up to 10 percent. “When you’re checking off one task after another from your to-do list, waiting even a few seconds while your tabs load can slow you down,” Google’s Alex Ainslie wrote.Chrome will speed up loading times for active tabs by taking back resources from those that’ve been idle for awhil

Courtesy of Netflix The story of video games is too often told by the same kind of person. Reports have extensively detailed the ways the video game industry has centered its orbit around men and boys — particularly white men and boys — and that homogeneity often extends to the people who are allowed to tell the story of games. Writers who were there at the medium’s nativity and made a career of chronicling video game history are also frequently from the same background, blind

Edison Mail has announced a new paid subscription service, Edison Mail Plus, which adds a variety of anti-phishing and security-focused features to the email app for either $14.99 per month or $99.99 per year.
The primary addition is a new “verify sender” feature, which flags suspicious emails when they arrive in your inbox and tries to provide better information around whether the person or company messaging you is legitimate. The system checks for standard email authentication mark

Vader Immortal is available now on PlayStation VR. The three-part series was previously an exclusive for the Oculus Quest and Rift, but has now arrived on the PlayStation for $29.99.
Each episode of Vader Immortal takes about an hour to play and is narrative heavy, with writing by David S. Goyer (best known for his work on the Blade and Dark Knight trilogies). The story is set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, with the player taking on the role of a small-time smuggler. Y

Microsoft is adding an audio transcription feature into Word for the web today. Transcribe in Word will appear in the online version of Word for Microsoft 365 subscribers, providing an easy way to automatically transcribe audio. Microsoft is supporting existing audio files, or even the ability to record conversations directly within Word for the web and have them automatically transcribed.
Once a conversation is transcribed, Microsoft’s AI will separate out each speaker and break the conve

Facebook Facebook is doubling-down on its e-commerce business and attempting to make shopping a destination in its main app, similarly to how it’s already done inside Instagram. As a test in the US today, the company is launching Facebook Shop, a tab within the main Facebook app where people will be able to find products to buy and then purchase within the app.At the same time, the company is expanding its Shops product, which launched earlier this year and lets people sell products on Fa

Facebook is rolling out a new tab in its main app called Facebook Shop. The company had introduced a similar tab on Instagram in July after it announced Facebook Shops — its feature to turn pages into stores — in May. The social media company’s idea is to offers a marketplace for creators and boutique brands to provide an easy way to conduct business. Previously on Facebook, you could see these pages selling items you might be interested in, but you might not go to their websi

Ring To make up for the last few days of no deal coverage, I’m making up for it with today’s roundup. It’ll be larger than usual, comprised of a few deals that have been happening recently. There haven’t been any true show-stopping deals as of late, but I still think these are worth telling you about.
You can pick up Ring’s latest video doorbell, the Video Doorbell 3 Plus, for $180 at Amazon, and it’ll come with an Amazon Echo Show 5 smart display at no extra

After far too few startups appeared ready to take advantage of warm public market conditions and ecstatic IPO receptions, a deluge of private companies filed to go public yesterday.
There was Sumo Logicin the morning and JFroga bit later on. Unityfiled in there as well. Snowflake also dropped, along with Asana later in the day. If you were dog-tired just reading Twitter, we understand. This morning, we’re going to catch you up on the key facts from each offering.The Exchange explores start

Batteries, the point of focus for everyone when it comes to electric vehicles (EVs). They’re undeniably the most important component of an EV, having a large impact in defining range, weight, cost, and longevity of the vehicle. In many cases, the battery is the limiting factor when it comes to the lifespan of an electric car. In the industry, most manufacturers consider the battery to be end-of-life when it can no longer hold more than 80% of its original charged capacity. It’s hard

The first trailer for Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-starring film that focuses on Sherlock Holmes’ brilliant teenage sister, has arrived despite Netflix being in the middle of a lawsuit over the project.Enola Holmes is based on a series of books by Nancy Springer that re-imagines Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s world by putting Sherlock Holmes’ younger sister at the heart of a series. Despite the focus of the film being on Enola, the lawsuit filed by Doyle’s estate has to

Python 3.9 is expected to be released on Monday 5th October 2020. Prior to releasing the official version, the developers had planned to release six alpha, five beta preview, and two release candidates. At the time of writing this article, the first candidate was recently released on 11 August. Now, we’re anxiously waiting for the second release candidate which will probably be available from 14 September. So, you might be wondering what’s new in Python 3.9. Right? There are so

An algorithm has confirmed the existence of 50 new planets in a world-first for machine learning in astronomy. Scientists from Warwick University made the discovery by analyzing data collected by space telescopes, such as NASA‘s Kepler and TESS. These telescopes capture signs of planets passing in front of their stars. This passage produces a distinctive dip in light emerging from the star. However, this effect can also be caused by a binary star system, interference from o

Back in 1997, Apple wasn’t as shiny as we know it today. It was actually a little bit rotten. It was the year they asked Steve Jobs to return to save the company, as it was struggling to keep up with the competition, Microsoft in particular. In just two years, its sales had fallen from $11 billion to just $7 billion. To survive, the company had to determine what its core assets were, where it was most relevant, and what it should focus on more. And it had to forge new partnerships, e