Technology news

Photo by Ethan Miller / Getty Images President Trump says he has approved “in concept” Oracle’s bid for TikTok, less than a day before a de facto ban he threatened in August was set to go into effect.
“I have given the deal my blessing,” Trump said to reporters outside the White House Saturday as he departed for a rally in North Carolina. “I approved the deal in concept.”
On Friday, the Commerce Department issued an order to block transactions with both

2020 won't stop, and I'm exhausted. 
Maybe I should have known this year would be cursed when the New Year's Eve party I attended missed the countdown to midnight by three minutes — the year has been a downward spiral ever since. On the personal front, my cat died on my 24th birthday, I went through a break up during the loneliest period of modern history, and my apartment flooded three times. 
The world, meanwhile, experienced a string of disasters: a global pandemic is forcing

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok and parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit late Friday against the Trump administration to try to fend off a ban on new downloads of the app set to take effect Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported.TikTok says in the lawsuit that the Trump administration’s decision to ban new downloads of the app, announced Friday, violates free speech protections. The administration, which includes the Commerce Department, “took this extraordinary

Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit has issued a rare emergency alert to government departments after the recent disclosure of a “critical”-rated security vulnerability in server versions of MicrosoftWindows.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, issued an alert late on Friday requiring all federal departments and agencies to “immediately” patch any Windows servers vulnerable to the so-called Zerologon attack by Mond

You're a squirrel. You're out in the forest doing your nut-gathering thing when suddenly one of those big, fur-less squirrels that walk on two legs kneels down and extends a paw filled with your favorite nut. So you rush over and start helping yourself until, without warning, you just freeze.
That's what happened with this little rodent from Russia. A person offered it a handful of nuts, and a few nuts in the squirrel just... freezes. It doesn't appear to be scared, or injured. It just sits ther

Twenty-four winners of the Turing Award are endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election, The New York Times reported, explaining they’re concerned the Trump administration’s immigration policies could be detrimental to both computer research and the technology industry over the long term.“The most brilliant people in the world want to come here and be grad students, but now they are being discouraged from coming here, and many are going elsew

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. 
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
Was Snowflake’s IPO mispriced or just misunderstood?
With an ocean of neat stuff to get through below, we’ll be quick today on our thought bubble focused on Snowflake’s IPO. Up front it was a huge success as a f

After Hurricane Laura hit land in the southern United States in late August and devastated the Louisiana coast, the storm surges and rainfall it brought along flooded the region.
That flooded environment was an ideal breeding ground for some types of mosquitoes, particularly the aptly named floodwater mosquito, which led to a mosquito boom in the wake of the deadly storm. In just days, mosquitoes were taking out large numbers of cattle, some deer, and a few horses in already-devastated stretches

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Messaging app WeChat had its biggest one-day download numbers in nearly two years on Friday, ahead of a ban on new downloads from the US Commerce Department expected to take effect tomorrow. Preliminary data from analytics platform Sensor Tower showed Chinese-based WeChat had 10,000 installs in the US Friday, a 150 percent increase from Thursday and a 233 percent week-over-week increase. That’s the largest number of WeChat installs in the US in one

As anyone who tried to pre-order a PlayStation 5 surely knows by now: It was a bit of a mess.
Sony revealed on Wednesday that its upcoming next-generation gaming console will hit stores on Nov. 12. It was a fine presentation, filled with looks at new games and confirmation of the PS5's pricing – $499 for the standard version and $399 for one without a disc drive. 
Still, a few notable things were missing. Some of the key games lacked release dates that were later confirmed after the p

Welcome back to Human Capital, where we unpack all-things diversity, inclusion and labor in tech. This week, we’re looking at Google’s internal message board problem, as well as some highlights from TechCrunch Disrupt, where I had the pleasure of chatting with actress, producer and tech investor Kerry Washington about her investment strategy and her thoughts on The Wing’s internal turmoil.
Later, we’ll also highlight some other gems from Disrupt speakers on imposter syndr

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here.
While TechCrunch was busy producing our first-ever online Disrupt this week, the IPO market got even more exciting than expected — so here’s a quick look. Snowflake, Jfrog, Sumo Logic and Unity each raised price ranges days before IPO, to meet what had seemed like growing enthusiasm from public markets. Yet each still opene

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sony has apologized for PS5 preorders being a bit of a mess. “Let’s be honest: PS5 preorders could have been a lot smoother,” says Sony from the official PlayStation Twitter account. “We truly apologize for that.” Preorders for the new PS5 console began on Wednesday, a day earlier than Sony had said retailers would take orders. It led to a scramble as Walmart and others started randomly opening up their PS5 preorder slots. So

Peacock and a handful of other NBC apps are coming to Roku after the two parties reach a deal on Friday.
When Peacock launched in mid-July, it was notably absent from Roku, Fire TV, and some smart TV platforms including Samsung's, which all carry other popular video streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu, and CBS All Access. For now, Peacock is still not available on those latter two platforms.
Following the deal, viewers can expect Peacock and other NBC apps to start appearing on Roku in the coming

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the ongoing Epic Games vs. Apple saga, Epic says in a new legal filing that Apple made incorrect statements in its own legal filing earlier this week, asserting that Apple “cherry picked” Google search results about the popularity of Epic’s Fortnite game.
Apple had suggested that Epic started the legal fight over Fortnite in the App Store as a publicity stunt, and that Fortnite had already started to decline in popularity:“For r

In a year marked by calamity, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is yet one more tragedy. 
The 87-year-old veteran of the court met her life's challenges with admirable grit, never forgetting to break a path for women who might follow. The grief of losing that living inspiration is profound. Her death has also cracked open our already fragile politics at a time when those who oppose President Trump's agenda feel deep despair about the coming election. 
Justice Ginsb

What will Jimmy Fallon do for TV content in a post-TikTok world?
With the approaching ban of TikTok and WeChat from U.S. app stores, Fallon revived his "Watch it once" TikTok challenge for a (possibly final!) Friday night showdown with Jessica Alba. He technically did worse, but Alba called it correctly at the end of the video (before handing the win to Jimmy anyway): "I think we both lost."
It's true. The only winners here are the TikTok dancers, whose moves Fallon and Alba both struggled to re

The Mandalorian Season 2 premiere is rapidly approaching, and with its first teaser trailer out in the public and a few rumblings about casting, there's a lot to know heading into the next chapter of this Star Wars adventure.
First thing's first; let's get the basic details down. The Season 2 premiere hits Disney+ on Oct. 30, and the season will continue to focus on the world's new favorite dynamic duo: the Mandalorian and the Child, aka Baby Yoda. We'll also see the return of Cara Dune (Gina Ca

TLDR: Dashlane Password Manager creates strong, unique passwords for all of your accounts or website logins with one-click access from all of your devices. With almost everyone working from home these days, it’s no surprise that the overall state of web security isn’t great right now. In most cases, each of us is responsible for maintaining our own vigilance over passwords and other exploitable security measures. Unfortunately, that attention to our own digital health and safety isn

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A judge in Nevada has dismissed a defamation case by a former Tesla employee, who claimed the company spread a false rumor about him after he admitted leaking internal company information to a reporter in 2018.
Tesla argues in court documents that former employee Martin Tripp violated trade secrets and computer crimes laws when he told a Business Insider reporter that Tesla was wasting a significant amount of raw materials during production of its Model 3

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a warrior for freedom. 
She lived a life committed to preserving the American ideal, from her early days fighting against gender discrimination to her illustrious tenure as one of the country's top judges. So as news of Ginsburg's death set in on Friday, mourners in Washington, D.C. paid their respects outside the hallowed halls of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Photos captured at the event reveal a solemn gathering of grieving Americans who showed up to express their appre

Illustration by Alex Castro This week, I got to talk about vaccines and vaccine information with Natalie Dean, and The Verge’s Nicole Wetsman and Nilay Patel on The Vergecast. It was a great conversation with Dean, who is an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida and an expert in infectious disease epidemiology who has worked on designing vaccine trials.After the podcast, I got to ask something that had been on my mind: how did she — a person who works wit

If you’ve used a dating app, you’ll know the importance of choosing good profile pics. These photos don’t just relay attractiveness; a recent study suggested that 43% of people think they can get a sense of someone’s personality by their picture. You might guess that someone who has included a photo of themselves hiking is an outdoorsy type of person. But as scientists who study human-animal interactions, we wanted to know what this meant for pet owners – in partic

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Six people have been indicted by a grand jury in Washington state on charges they bribed Amazon employees to manipulate third-party seller listings on the e-commerce site, including listings for defective or dangerous products, authorities said.Starting in 2017, the people, including two former Amazon employees, paid more than $100,000 to have listings of products and accounts that Amazon had blocked or suspended from its Marketplace, which allows third-p

A yellow-eyed cat tilts its eyes at the camera, gazing up from a grey bedspread. ‘London Trip’, is the AI’s title for this photo-montage ‘Memory’ plucked from the depths of my iPhone camera-roll. It’s selected a sad score of plinking piano and sweeping violin. The algorithm has calculated it must tug at the heart strings. 
Cut to a crop of a desk with a 2FA device resting on a laptop case. It’s not at all photogenic. On to a shot of a sofa in a livi

With purchase after purchase, milestone surpassed after milestone surpassed, Facebook continues its slow suffocation of the internet. You, a thinking person who values your privacy and sees the Mark Zuckerberg-helmed behemoth as complicit in an array of real-world suffering, want out. 
But with Facebook operating the world's largest messaging apps — the company owns both Instagram and WhatsApp in addition to the familiar, now ominous shade of blue that accompanies Messenger — ma

TLDR: Here are 10 phone accessories that no serious gadget lover should be without — and you can now get an extra 20 percent off each. We don’t need to tell you…but every day, your phone inches closer and closer to being the absolute center of your universe. It’s understandable. It’s happening to all of us, so there’s no need to fight it. In fact, just turn into the skid. To help, we’ve assembled 10 phone accessories that you definitely should con

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first

TikTok may be the app-du-jour, but its presence in the United States may not last. 
Enter Triller, the video sharing platform emerging as the alternative to TikTok amid uncertainty over the app's future. Popular stars like Charli D'Amelio, the most followed person on TikTok, are starting their own accounts on Triller. D'Amelio is still posting on TikTok as usual, however. (Though she hasn't touched Instagram Reels, which they launched in an attempt to compete with TikTok.)
SEE ALSO: Charli

Sony’s upcoming PS5 hardware has appeared at the FCC, providing us with the first close up photos of the next-gen console. The FCC has published a variety of images, showing the standard PS5 laying horizontally, the included cables, and the removable base that holds the console in both vertical and horizontal positions.
The photos also show just how big the PS5 truly is. We learned earlier this week that the PS5 is the biggest game console in modern history, even topping the Xbox One VCR-l

If we don’t analyze statistics for a living, it’s easy to be taken in by misinformation about COVID-19 statistics on social media, especially if we don’t have the right context. For instance, we may cherry pick statistics supporting our viewpoint and ignore statistics showing we are wrong. We also still need to correctly interpret these statistics. It’s easy for us to share this misinformation. Many of these statistics are also interrelated, so misunderstandings can quic

TL;DR: Keep devices powered up with a Moovy 3-in-1 Wireless Fast Charging Station for $47.99, a savings of over $80 through September 21. The Moovy 3-in-1 wireless fast charging station, a great option for people who need to charge multiple devices at once, is on sale this weekend for $47.99 with coupon code VIPSALE20 — down from $129.
This little charger is 10 inches long and 7.4 inches wide, so it won’t take up a ton of space. It's easily transportable, has a silicone pad on t

Air purifiers can help remove pollutants and improve your home's air quality, making them a solid piece of home tech to invest in these days. 
You can find 10 of them on sale for an extra 20% off through September 21 using the promo code VIPSALE20. Among the options: an air purifier that plays lullabies (seriously).
Wynd Plus: Smart Personal Air Purifier with Air Quality Sensor
Wynd Plus has a sensor to evaluate the air quality in your space, so it only fires up its filter when it determine

iPhone users are about to receive access to Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 14. It will come with the usual array of shiny new features, but the real game-changer will be missing – at least until January. For the first time, iOS 14 is to require apps to get permission from users before collecting their data – giving users an opt-in to this compromise to their privacy. This caused a major backlash from companies that rely on this data to make money, most notably Fac