Technology news

Image: Amazon Amazon debuted FreeTime back in 2012 as a way for kids to enjoy and experience tech and for parents to easily monitor their kids’ usage. Yet, the name (at least to me) sounds more like a service to help people spend less time on their electronic devices. To fix this, Amazon is renaming FreeTime to “Amazon Kids” and FreeTime Unlimited to “Amazon Kids Plus.”
Alongside the updated naming scheme, Amazon is also giving the service a new look. In the next f

LG’s official reveal of its twisting Wing smartphone had a Marvel-esque post-credit scene: a teaser of the next phone in its new “Explorer Project” range, which appears to have an expandable, slide-out display.The clip, as spotted by CNET, doesn’t offer a lot of information, just a brief shot of the side of the phone expanding out and sliding back before it lights up and a “hold your breath” catchphrase appears followed by the LG Explorer Project logo. But the

Photo by Leigh Vogel for The Verge Sen. Josh Hawley is publicly calling on the Treasury Department to reject Oracle’s proposed partnership with TikTok, saying the arrangement is unacceptable on national security grounds.The deal is currently awaiting a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but it has received praise from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who chairs the committee. In an open letter to Mnuchin, Hawley calls on the secretary to

AMD’s last batch of new graphics cards, the mid-range Radeon RX 5700 series, didn’t wow with their designs or performance — but the new Radeon RX 6000 looks like it could actually be the long-awaited answer to Nvidia’s flagship graphics cards.
When I say “looks like,” I mean it quite literally, though: AMD just revealed the design of its new card on Twitter today, and its triple-fan, giant shroud and twin 8-pin power connectors show it’s visually ready t

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A fired Facebook data scientist has written a 6,600-word memo condemning the company for ignoring evidence the platform was wielded to sway public opinion and manipulate elections around the world, according to a report from BuzzFeed News, which obtained a copy of the memo. The data scientist, Sophie Zhang, was fired earlier this month and posted the memo on her final day, the report reads.Zhang implies she was fired after bringing her concerns to upper m

76 Days is a big story told in tiny moments. 
Its premise is obviously major: Two directors, Weixi Chen and an anonymous reporter, embedded themselves in hospitals in Wuhan and Shanghai at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, during the 76-day lockdown of Wuhan. (A third director, Hao Wu, stayed in New York to edit the film.)
But there's no unified narrative or obvious lesson being served up here, no analysis of the virus' origins, or the Chinese government's reaction, or the global cons

Photo: Microsoft Back in 2018, Microsoft sunk an entire data center to the bottom of the Scottish sea, plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage 117 feet deep in the ocean. Today, the company has reported that its latest experiment was a success, revealing findings that show that the idea of an underwater data center is actually a pretty good one.On the surface, throwing an entire data center to the bottom of the ocean may seem strange, but Microsoft’s Project Natick team hypothe

Fortnite is currently experiencing game-wide problems with logins, keeping some players from accessing their accounts. According to the game’s official status account, “Players who see a message saying ‘You do not have permission to play Fortnite’ or ‘Your account no longer has play access to Fortnite’ because of this issue are not banned from Fortnite.”
Epic Games is currently investigating “issues related to kicks and logins.” The developer

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Anchor, a Spotify-owned company, is addressing the copycat podcast problem that’s roiled the industry for the past month. In an interview with The Verge, Mike Mignano, Anchor’s co-founder and head of podcast mission at Spotify, says the company is recalibrating its automated copycat detection system, implementing additional rules and checks on people who want to monetize their show, and making it easier for creators to report copycat shows whe

In an accidental Instagram post, actor Chris Evans shared an important public service announcement with his 6.1 million followers: "Guard That Pussy."
For those of you who've been offline the past few days, let's back up a second. On Saturday, Evans had a bit of a social media mishap when he briefly posted a screenshot of a camera roll to his Instagram Story.
Among the collection of 11 photos and videos that were visible in the screenshot was a dick pic, which obviously made headlines. But Evans

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge In a statement to The Verge, a US Customs and Border Protection spokesperson has defended the agency’s seizure of 2,000 pairs of OnePlus Buds at JFK airport on August 31st. Last night, CBP publicized the action and described the OnePlus Buds as “counterfeit Apple AirPods,” which set off a wave of controversy. It seemed like a possible gaffe by border officers who somehow didn’t realize they were blocking a genuine product, and OnePlus has

iOS 14 brings one of the most long-awaited features to Apple’s operating system in years: the ability to change the default browser from Apple’s Safari to a third-party option like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Mozilla Firefox. But you don’t have to wait for Apple to release iOS 14 this fall to break free of Safari. If you’ve got the iOS 14 beta installed, you can already switch to another default browser today. Here’s how to do it.To start, you’ll need to

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Despite what a recent patent application suggests, Instagram says it has no plans to add links to photo captions. The patent application was uncovered by Mike Murphy, in his weekly roundup of tech patents over at Protocol.Instagram parent company Facebook first submitted the patent application back in 2016, which shows a pop-up appearing when the user adds a URL to a caption, asking if the user wants to pay $2 to make the link live.The patent application

What market selloff?
Despite last week’s market declines, two big IPOs are rolling ahead this week, with Snowflakeand JFrog both boosting their IPO price ranges this morning. The jump in expected pricing means each IPO will likely raise more capital, valuing the firms more richly than their initial ranges made clear.
Snowflake’s first IPO range valued it comfortably north of $24 billion and its IPO detailed that both Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce Ventures were going to pour capit

After 17 years, Palantir is getting closer and closer to its public debut later this month. We’ve been covering different facets of the company’s direct listing process, including concerns about its governance and how insiders are accelerating the sale of their shares as the public markets date looms closer.
Now, we have several major updates from the company, courtesy of a third amended filing of the company’s S-1 to the SEC this afternoon.
The first news is that Palantir fina

Photography by Dan Seifert / The Verge It doesn’t matter how big your laptop’s screen is — if you’re going to be doing any serious multitasking for work or school, connecting a monitor can be a big help. Any modern laptop should be able to connect to whatever external monitor you have, but you may need to get creative.The first step is to figure out what outputs your laptop supports. It’s likely going to be HDMI, mini-HDMI, a USB-C port with Thunderbolt and / or Di

Mashable’s series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives — and our futures.
When algorithms work for us, they're invisible. We're vaguely aware that we're being served the kind of content we like, but we're too busy enjoying that cat video to even care. Our conscious relationships with these chunks of code are almost always fraught with the kind of frustration reserved for toxic partners. And in one case, legitimately terrifying. Chr

In his latest play in the ongoing rock battle with Nandi Bushell, Dave Grohl improvised a superhero theme song for the viral kid drummer. 
Bushell, who is 10 years old, has 156,000 subscribers on YouTube and appeared on Ellen last year. Collectively, her videos have more than 18 million views. In August, the viral sensation challenged Grohl to a virtual drum off, calling on the "Rock Gods of old" to empower her beats. To kick off the battle, she covered the Foo Fighters' "Everlong." Th

Google confirmed its annual hardware event is set for Sept. 30 at 11 a.m. PT, which will be livestreamed to the public. 
According to invites sent to the press, the company plans to announce a slew of products including new Pixel phones, a next-generation Chromecast, and a smart speaker.  
While Google already announced the Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5 early last month, details were vague — only mentioning price and availability. The only difference between the Pixel 4a (which has alr

GoodRxis a rare breed of modern tech IPO: a startup that is actually profitable and heading to the public markets. The consumer service offers coupons on prescriptions redeemable at pharmacies that can save customers significant money on their monthly drug prices.
The company filed an amended S-1 with the SEC this morning, and that included three pieces of news that hadn’t previously been reported.
First and most significantly, the company notes in its filing that it is offering its two co

With TikTok’s future in the U.Sup in the air, it’s the perfect time to strike while the iron is hot!
On Monday, YouTube officially announced its new feature YouTube Shorts, which looks and sounds a lot like the viral video app TikTok.
According to YouTube, Shorts is a “new way to express yourself in 15 seconds or less.” Users can use it to create and watch short-form videos right on the YouTube platform.
YouTube Shorts will provide a number of tools to allow creators to m

Picture it: Your couch, September 14, 2020. 
Today, friends all over the world are celebrating 35 years since Susan Harris's The Golden Girls first hit NBC. In the pilot for the beloved series, we met Sophia, Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy — as embodied by the immeasurable talents of Estelle Getty, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Bea Arthur — and began a journey of love, laughter, and cheesecake that would last decades.
To honor that revolutionary day in television and all the amaz

Congratulations, you landed your Series A round. What’s next? Your Series B, and a lot of twists and turns. Yasmin Razavi of Spark Capital and Elliott Robinson of Bessemer are joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 (happening right now!) to talk about how early stage founders should think about landing growth stage venture capital money.
Elliott Robinson is a partner in the San Francisco office where he focuses primarily on growth investments in SaaS and cloud companies. He co-authors Besse

Investor interest in no-code, low-code apps and services advanced another step this morning with Airtable raising an outsized round. The $185 million investment into the popular database-and-spreadsheet service comes as it adds “new low-code and automation features,” per our own reporting.
The round comes after we’ve seen several VCs describe no- and low-code startups as part of their core investing theses, and observed how the same investors appear to be accelerating their inv

TL;DR: See exactly where you're headed with the DanForce Bold-S 1080 Lumen Rechargeable Triple Headlamp for $41.99, an 8% savings as of Sept. 14. Whether you're an outdoors enthusiast or assembling your emergency go bag, a good headlamp is a useful tool to invest in. The DanForce Bold-S 1080 Lumen Rechargeable Triple Headlamp is a great option, allowing you to go hands-free when you're camping, hiking, or even navigating an emergency situation. 
This headlamp is able to blast bright li

Estonia-based Sentinel, which is developing a detection platform for identifying synthesized media (aka deepfakes), has closed a $1.35 million seed round from some seasoned angel investors — including Jaan Tallinn (Skype), Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise), Ragnar Sass & Martin Henk (Pipedrive) — and Baltics early-stage VC firm, United Angels VC.
The challenge of building tools to detect deepfakes has been likened to an arms race — most recently by tech giant Microsoft, which

Photo illustration by William Joel | Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images Today, Facebook Gaming is set to allow its partnered streamers to play copyrighted, popular music in the background of their live streams — which means they’ve seemingly solved the copyright problem that’s plagued live-streaming (and basically the entire internet) since the beginning. In a press release, a spokesperson for Facebook Gaming put it like this:
So, how’s it work? Mu

Image: GMC General Motors will reveal the all-electric Hummer truck on October 20th, and to help whet your appetite until then, the automaker is confirming a rumored standout feature.
GM confirms that the Hummer will come with Crab Mode, allowing it to move across the terrain diagonally like a sand-dwelling crustacean. Crab Mode is enabled by the electric pickup truck’s four-wheel steering capability and is a functionality that is “tailor-made for off-roading customers,” the c

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Ming-Chi Kuo has a new research note out, obtained by MacRumors, that says none of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 12 phones will include a high-refresh ProMotion display — and that includes the pricier Pro models. Kuo anticipates that Apple will move to the smoother 120Hz refresh rate with next year’s 2021 iPhone lineup.
That’s pretty disappointing news, seeing as most modern Android flagships now utilize high-refresh screens ranging

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Razer accidentally exposed over 100,000 gamers’ personal information for close to a month, according to a new report.
Security researcher Volodymyr Diachenko discovered that customer data on Razer’s website was made publicly available on August 18th because of a server misconfiguration. A redacted sample pictured below shows records of orders made on the company’s digital store, exposing personal information including email and maili

Photo by Anton Novoderezhkin\TASS via Getty Images Nvidia’s $40 billion acquisition of Arm is a hugely significant deal for the tech world, with implications that will take years to unravel spanning many areas of the sector. But if you listened to the press babble coming from the two companies over the last 24 hours, you’d think there was only one factor driving the purchase: artificial intelligence.
“AI is the most powerful technology force of our time. It’s the automat

TL;DR: As of Sept. 14, you can save up to $80 on Amazon Fire TV devices, including the Fire TV Stick, Blaster, Cube, and Recast.Marked by empty stadiums, a Tom Brady-less Patriots team, and some questionable attempts at standing up for social justice, football is officially back — at least for now.
If you plan on tuning in every Sunday night, make sure your TV is up to the task: With a media player like Amazon's Fire TV Stick, you can turn almost any display into a smart TV capable of stre

Image: Google Google is planning to launch its Pixel 5 smartphone, a new Chromecast, and a new smart speaker later this month. Google has started inviting members of the media to a special event on September 30th, promising new hardware. “We invite you to learn all about our new Chromecast, our latest smart speaker, and our new Pixel phones,” reads the invite.
Google already confirmed its plans to launch a Pixel 5 later this year, complete with 5G connectivity. The Pixel maker revea

Photo by Prodip Guha/Getty Images Amazon is adding its next high-profile celebrity voice option for its Alexa digital assistant, this time an exclusive for the India market. Starting next year, Alexa users can augment the voice assistant to sound like Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, one of the most prolific actors in Indian cinema and a household name in the country of more than 1.3 billion people.India is a key growth market for Amazon outside the US, as the e-commerce platform is most popula

TL;DR: Kick your workouts up a notch with the WearBands 5-Level Base System for $84.95, a 15% savings as of Sept. 14. A light workout is like a weak massage. It's nice, but it's also hard to see the point. If you're trying to get the same workout buzz you used to get at the gym, but at home, it's time to check out the WearBands 5-Level Base System. 
This five-level, color-coded system comes with varying resistance levels. There's green, gray, yellow, red, and black bands that rang

Image: Epic Games You can now buy an X-Wing glider in Fortnite, Epic Games announced Monday. The new glider has become available the same day EA released a new animated short introducing the story of Star Wars: Squadrons. The glider costs 1,200 V-Bucks.This isn’t the first time a Star Wars-themed item has appeared in Fortnite. You could buy a number of cosmetics, including skins for Rey and Finn and a First Order Tie Fighter glider, as part of a major crossover event around the release of

TL;DR: Add some fun to your cleaning routine with a three-pack of the Lazy Maid Quick-Mop Slippers for $14.99, a 74% savings as of Sept. 14. As much as everyone enjoys a spotless home, for some, making that happen may not be worth all the trouble. Watching Netflix is just more fun. But what if cleaning your floors involved dancing and shuffling across your floor to Drake's latest jam? With this set of Lazy Maid Quick-Mop Slippers, that can be your new weekend activity. 
All you have to

TL;DR: Pottery Barn is holding a WFH event that takes 20% off home office must-haves like desks, chairs, desktop organizers, office lighting, and more as of Sept. 14.The dedicated home office — something that was once reserved for freelancers, the self-employed crowd, and house flipping shows on HGTV — has become a staple in millions of households.
Whether you've been working from home for *checks notes* six months now or are part of the back-to-school-but-virtually wave, h

The Notorious B.I.G. will forever remain a king of hip-hop, but the crown that the rapper wore in the final photo shoot before his death is about to be passed down.
The signed plastic crown from the 1997 "K.O.N.Y." (King of New York) portrait session, along with several other iconic pieces of hip-hop history, are officially going on sale, courtesy of Sotheby's first-ever hip-hop auction.
Notorious B.I.G.’s  "King of New York" crown
Image:photo courtesy of sotheby's
The auction, which

Google CEO Sundar Pichai | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Google just made one of Big Tech’s most ambitious environmental commitments: it will work to run its operations purely on renewable energy by 2030. It also announced that as of today, it has purchased enough carbon offsets to essentially cancel out all the planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions the company has released since it was founded in 1998.Google has been carbon neutral each year since 2007, which means that it offs

TL;DR: As of September 14, select Nest smart thermostats are $50 off at Home Depot.If you'd like to decrease your home's energy usage, a smart thermostat is a great way to start. 
Google's Nest smart thermostats gather information on your schedule and temperature preferences so you can take a hands-off approach to heating and cooling your home. If you're rarely on the top floor of your home during the day, for example, it doesn't make sense to blast the heat up there. That's the sort of iss

Image: Fitbit The heart-monitoring electrocardiogram (EKG) app on Fitbit’s new Sense smartwatch has been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The feature can track heart rhythms and look for signs of atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heartbeat.“Our new ECG app is designed for those users who want to assess themselves in the moment and review the reading later with their doctor,” said Eric Friedman, co-founder and chief technology officer a