Technology news

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok-rival Triller and Centricus (a London-based global investment firm) are the latest suitors looking to buy TikTok’s US business with a $20 billion bid, joining Oracle and a recently combined Microsoft / Walmart effort to acquire the popular short-form video application, according to a report from Bloomberg.The Triller/Centricus offer would see Centricus pay TikTok parent company ByteDance $10 billion in cash upfront, and another $10 billion in

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Bloomberg is reporting that TikTok-rival Triller and Centricus (a London-based global investment firm) are the latest suitors looking to buy TikTok’s US business with a $20 billion bid, joining Oracle and a recently combined Microsoft / Walmart effort to acquire the popular short-form video application. But a spokesperson for TikTok tells Reuters it has not received an offer, or been contacted about a potential bid.As originally described by Bloombe

Epic Gameshas been removed from Apple’s App Store.
If you’ve already downloaded Fortnite to your Mac or iOS device, it should still work, but Epic’s termination means the Fortnite developer will no longer be able to submit new apps or updates.
MacStories Managing Editor John Voorhees noted the termination on Twitter, as well as the fact that the App Store is currently featuring Fortnite competitor PUBG.
Appleconfirmed the move in a statement:
We are disappointed that we have ha

In June, the CTA announced that CES 2021 would go forward in-person. The event was set to have slipped under the wire — having narrowly avoided a COVID-19-related shutdown two years in a row. A month later, however, its organizers reversed course, announcing the January show was going virtual. Disappointing, perhaps, but not surprising.
The past five months have seen one in-person show cancellation after another, from MWC to E3, from WWDC to Computex to our own Disrupt, which is going onli

Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic Post Malone is the latest celebrity to jump into the world of competitive gaming. Today, Envy Gaming announced that the pop star had joined as a co-owner, acquiring “an undisclosed equity stake” in the company. Envy operates teams in multiple games, and itowns the Dallas Empire of the Call of Duty League and Overwatch League team Dallas Fuel, which hosted OWL’s first home game in 2019.
“I grew up in Texas and I’ve been gaming

For years, India has served as the largest open battleground for Silicon Valley and Chinese firms searching for their next billion users.
With more than 400 million WhatsApp users, India is already the largest market for the Facebook-owned service. The social juggernaut’s big blue app also reaches more than 300 million users in the country.
Googleis estimated to reach just as many users in India, with YouTube closely rivaling WhatsApp for the most popular smartphone app in the country.
Sev

The global legal services industry was worth $849 billion in 2017 and is expected to become a trillion-dollar industry by the end of next year. Little wonder that Steno, an LA-based startup, wants a piece.
Like most legal services outfits, what it offers are ways for law practices to run more smoothly, including in a world where fewer people are meeting in conference rooms and courthouses and operating instead from disparate locations.
Stenofirst launched with an offering that centers on court r

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple has officially terminated the Epic Games account on the App Store on Friday, following its Fortnite dispute and ongoing legal battle with the game studio over in-app payments in the battle royale game, the company confirms to The Verge. That means the app is no longer available on the iPhone or iPad whatsoever, even if you’ve once downloaded it once before — and other Epic games like Infinity Blade are also no longer re-downloadable.
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As we’re about to start September, the final third of this awful, awful year, I have only two questions for Microsoft and Sony, the makers of the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 respectively: when and how much? Watch #PS5's first global ad spot, showcasing immersive features including 3D Audio and the DualSense. Read on to learn how devs are harnessing DualSense’s adaptive triggers and haptics: https://t.co/Y79pSzkGsU pic.twitter.com/yiGWIQ6MZQ — PlayStation (@PlayStation)

In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg addressed the recent shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, both in a seven-minute public address and in a heated series of questions from employees that was subsequently reported by Buzzfeed News.
Protests in Kenosha erupted into violence on Tuesday night, as two people were killed by a bystander later identified as Illinois resident Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse has been charged with two murders in connection with the event, as well as reckless en

Photo: Neuralink Amid the search for a COVID-19 vaccine and launch of a new Mars rover, there is yet another technological breakthrough on its way — at least, according to Elon Musk. Today at 6PM ET, his company Neuralink will demonstrate what may be one of the first “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.”Apparently, Neuralink is looking to connect to the human brain using flexible electrodes thinner than a human hair. And it is now wil

Bella Thorne's OnlyFans success is leading to severe financial consequences for sex workers who rely on the platform for income.
The actress and pornography director broke records by making $2 million in less than a week since she launched her OnlyFans account. Although she said she wouldn't post nudity, she sent her subscribers a Pay-Per-View (PPV) message Thursday allegedly advertised as a nude photo. The message was priced at $200. 
When fans paid the fee and opened the photo, they were

Google Assistant is getting a new feature that makes it easier to donate money to important humanitarian and nonprofit organizations, starting with the Center for Policing Equity, an organization that works to promote police transparency and accountability.
The news was announced today to coincide with the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington. The new donation shortcut can only be accessed on mobile phones for now, either by saying “Hey Google, donate to racial justice,” to As

Welcome back to Human Capital, where we break down the latest in labor, diversity and inclusion in tech. This week, we’re looking at the launch of the Diversity Riders initiative in venture capital and how it can go further, Instacart’s labor practices and some alternative, more inclusive approaches to running a startup. Also, Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel recently shared a compelling anecdote about his experience as a Black founder raising money back in 2016.
Justice for Jacob Bla

Elon Muskis set to deliver a progress update for Neuralink, the company and technology he founded that aims to create a direct, ultra-low latency connection between our brains and our computers. The update will kick off at 3 PM PT (6 PM ET), and will be streamed live above.
Based on Musk’s tweets, what we should see is an actual product demo of a Neuralinkdevice in action. The multi-CEO has said that it will be a version 2 of the robot that Neuralink revealed last year during a similar up

Simon Moss ContributorShare on Twitter Simon Moss is CEO of Symphony AyasdiAI, an enterprise artificial intelligence company for financial services.Announcements like Selina Finance’s $53 million raise and another $64.7 million raise the next day for a different banking startup spark enterprise artificial intelligence and fintech evangelists to rejoin the debate over how banks are stupid and need help or competition.
The complaint is banks are seemingly too slow to adopt fintech’s br

57 years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" address at the March on Washington, demonstrators once again descended on the National Mall to demand racial justice. 
United under the rallying cry "Get Your Knee Off Our Necks," thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial Friday to demand an end to police violence and fight for changes to the criminal justice system. The march occurred during a time of acute focus on systemic racism and amid protests tied to the po

First, NBA players walked off the courts in solidarity with Jacob Blake and racial justice. WNBA players did too, and a ripple effect reverberated across the sports world with baseball, soccer, and tennis games also getting postponed.
Now, as part of an agreement with the players' union to resume the NBA playoffs on Saturday, all NBA arenas under the league's ownership will be available to convert into voting locations for the 2020 general election. This temporary repurposing will allow for safe

NASAand Boeinghave provided some updates around their Commercial Crew plans, which aim to get Boeing’s CST-100 spacecraft certified for regular human flight. The CST-100 and Boeing’s Commercial Crew aspirations hit a snag last year with a first attempt of an uncrewed orbital flight test, which did not go to plan thanks to a couple of software errors that led to an early mission ending, and a failure to reach the International Space Station as intended.
In a blog post on Friday, NASA

Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images A former intern at SpaceX is suing the aerospace company, claiming that SpaceX retaliated against her after she reported experiencing sexual harassment and gender discrimination while on the job, according to a new lawsuit. The suit alleges that the former intern was not extended a full-time job opportunity when she brought up inappropriate comments and actions made by her then manager.
The plaintiff, Julia CrowleyFarenga, worked as a summer intern for Sp

GM is moving the engineering team responsible for the mid-engine Chevrolet Corvette to the company’s electric and autonomous vehicle programs to “push the boundaries” on what its future EV battery systems and components can deliver, according to an internal memo.
The memo, sent by Doug Parks, GM’s executive vice president of global product development, purchasing and supply chain, announced that the Corvette team would move from the automaker’s global product team t

For Marco Lai, the founder of Chinese podcast network Lizhi, radio has always been social.
Twenty years ago, the entrepreneur was a host at a radio station in southern China. He ran a late-night program where listeners could call in and chat about anything as they wished, often riffing on feelings, relationships or other intimate subjects. Those who couldn’t get through the phone line sent text messages that Lai would then read on air. At the time, it was a popular and promising model for

Google‘s working on a service that would provide ethics consulting for companies building AI solutions. According to a report from Wired, the company is considering launching this ethics consultancy service by the end of the year. Reporter Tom Simonite writes: Initially, Google will offer others advice on tasks such as spotting racial bias in computer vision systems, or developing ethical guidelines that govern AI projects. Longer term, the company may offer to audit customers’

Bryce Hall and friends at a recent party. | Bryce Hall/Instagram Los Angeles city attorney Mike Feuer has charged four people, including TikTok creators Bryce Hall and Blake Gray, for allegedly throwing a series of parties in the Hollywood Hills area in violation of public health restrictions in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“We allege that these hosts have been incredibly irresponsible with a highly infection disease spreading,” Feuer said during a press conference. He a

Autonomous vehicles have yet to become mainstream, but companies like Lyft,Cruise,Nuro and Aurora are still fighting the good fight. The AV space has always faced its share of regulatory and development hurdles, but this year brought a new set of hurdles with the COVID-19 pandemic.
At TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility, we’ll hear from Cruise, Lyft, Nuro and Aurora about where they are in their respective journeys to public deployment and how they’ve navigated the year.
Cruise Director of

Rudy DeFelice Contributor Rudy is co-founder and CEO of Keesal Propulsion Labs, a digital transformation company serving the law departments of the Fortune 500. Rudy is an attorney, technology entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and best-selling author. He is a an alumnus of Harvard Business School and the University of Connecticut School of Law.One doesn’t have to dig too deep into legal organizations to find people who are skeptical about artificial intelligence.
AI is getting tremendous attentio

Image: FCC A new set of Bose sunglasses with built-in speakers could be on the way, as revealed by new filings published by the FCC. You might be looking at the next version of the company’s Frames line of audio sunglasses.
Check out this gallery for a few other angles on the glasses, showing where the speakers and hardware are built into the frames and and also revealing that the device will have a USB-C port for charging:The filings also confirm the glasses will be branded under the Fra

Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia have developed an algorithm that detects misogynistic content on Twitter. The team developed the system by first mining 1 million tweets. They then refined the dataset by searching the posts for three abusive keywords: whore, slut, and rape. Next, they categorized the remaining 5,000 tweets as either misogynistic or not, based on their context and intent. These labeled tweets were then fed to a machine le

Photo illustration by William Joel / The Verge The Verge is a place where you can consider the future. So are movies. In Yesterday’s Future, we revisit a movie about the future and consider the things it tells us about today, tomorrow, and yesterday.
The movie: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow
The future: The Terminator movies are, with the exception of Terminator Salvation, more about fighting the future than living in it. What glimpses of it we get are usu

Michigan-based electric truck startup Bollinger Motors hasn’t started production on its rugged electric trucks, the Jeep-like B1 and the B2 pickup, but it’s already rolling out a new vehicle type. This week, the company unveiled the Deliver-E, its all-electric delivery van concept that is slated for production in 2022.A lot of companies, from legacy automakers to tech startups, are developing their own electric delivery vans right now. But what sets Bollinger apart is the variability

At TechCrunch Disrupt, our Startup Battlefield competition this year looks to be fiercer than ever, judging by the applicants. That’s actually saying something, considering the game-changing brands to emerge from our stage over the years, including Cloudflare, Dropbox, Vurb, Mint, GetAround, Fitbit, Yammer and more. Altogether, Startup Battlefield participants have gone on to raise $9 billion from investors and to generate 115 exits over the history of TechCrunch Disrupt, now in its tenth

Facebookis testing a new feature that could help news publishers create a better experience for paying subscribers on the social network.
The idea is that when Facebook identifies a subscriber from one of its publisher partners, that subscriber will be invited to link their news account to their Facebook account. Once they’re linked, if they encounter a paywalled article on Facebook, they’ll be able to read it without hitting the paywall or having to log in again.
Facebook also says

The front-facing camera has been a pretty constant bugbear for phone makers for a number of years now. Xiaomi certainly isn’t the first to offer a clever technological solution to the problem — and it’s also certainly not the only company to show off under-screen camera tech — but next year, it’s committed to bringing that technology to market.
The manufacturer noted its plans today as part of its earnings report, stating that it will begin manufacturing handsets us

A new AI-powered tool can show you how much screen time different public figures and topics are getting on TV. Stanford University researchers created the system to increase transparency around editorial decisions, by analyzing who’s getting coverage and what they’re talking about. “By letting researchers, journalists, and the public quantitatively measure who and what is in the news, the tool can help identify biases and trends in cable TV news coverage,” said project l

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge This week on The Verge’s Friday episode of The Vergecast, Wired senior writer and Verge alum Lauren Goode stops by to discuss her new podcast Get Wired and stays to talk tech and gadgets with her Verge colleagues Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn.On this episode, we are one step closer to reviewing Microsoft’s long-awaited Surface Duo.
Our review of the Microsoft Surface Duo is approaching
Around 29 minutes into the show, Dieter reveals he got h

We’re on the other end of nearly every single SaaS earnings report that you can name, with the exception of Slack, and shares of software companies are holding onto their year’s gains. Which means SaaS and cloud companies have made it through a somewhat steep gauntlet largely unscathed.
There were exceptions, of course, but when we consider public software and cloud companies, the tale of the tape is somewhat clear. And it appears to indicate that today’s huge revenue multiples