Technology news

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Two members of a console hacking and piracy organization known as Team Xecuter have been arrested and charged with fraud, one of whom is named Gary Bowser. French national Max Louarn and Bowser, originally from Canada but arrested in the Dominican Republic, allegedly led the group, which makes a line of tools for cracking locked-down gaming hardware.Team Xecuter is a sophisticated operation known best for its Nintendo hacks, including a USB device called the S

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has published the results of an employee survey undertaken by the company over the summer following allegations of endemic harassment and toxicity, and the results are eye-opening.
In the anonymous survey of nearly 14,000 employees, one in four respondents said that they had either witnessed or experienced workplace misconduct themselves in the past two years, and one in five said that they didn’t feel “fully respect

Welcome to TNW Basics, a collection of tips, guides, and advice on how to easily get the most out of your gadgets, apps, and other stuff. iOS 14 now lets you install widgets on your screen — a useful new feature that completely changes how your phone screen looks, depending on how many of them you use. So how do you use them? Let us explain. Apple introduced several new features to iOS 14 that change the way the phone looks — including the ability to hide apps without deleting

Twitteris developing a new product called “Birdwatch,” which the company confirms is an attempt at addressing misinformation across its platform by providing more context for tweets, in the form of notes. Tweets can be added to “Birdwatch” — meaning flagged for moderation — from the tweet’s drop-down menu, where other blocking and reporting tools are found today. A small binoculars icon will also appear on tweets published to the Twitter Timeline. When t

Photo: DANJAQ and MGM / Nicola Dove No Time to Die, the 25th James Bond film, has been pushed back an entire year. It will now arrive on April 2nd, 2021, the film’s producers confirmed today.
Originally, the film was supposed to arrive in April 2020, before getting delayed to this November due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The new delay gives the world five more months to potentially recover and for people to decide when they’re willing to brave theaters again.
MGM, Universal and Bond p

An Apple patent application published yesterday reveals an idea for a foldable smartphone that would include a “self-healing” display cover, allowing the device to repair dents or scratches covering the screen. The application, spotted by Patently Apple, was originally filed by Apple in January.As Apple wrote in the patent application, the proposed concept’s display would allow the device to repair itself without the user having to manually intervene. In theory, the foldable&rs

Daydream, Google’smobile-focused virtual reality platform, is losing official support from Google, Android Police reports. The company confirmed that it will no longer be updating the Daydream software, with the publication noting that “Daydream may not even work on Android 11” as a result of this.
This isn’t surprising to anyone who has been tracking the company’s moves in the space. After aggressive product rollouts in 2016 and 2017, Google quickly abandoned its V

Grindr,one of the world’s largest dating and social networking apps for gay, bi, trans, and queer people, has fixed a security vulnerability that allowed anyone to hijack and take control of any user’s account using only their email address.
Wassime Bouimadaghene, a French security researcher, found the vulnerability and reported the issue to Grindr. When he didn’t hear back, Bouimadaghene shared details of the vulnerability with security expert Troy Hunt to help.
The vulnerabi

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Operating system updates can often suffer from unwanted glitches, and it seems that the latest iOS 14 and watchOS 7 releases from Apple are not immune. There have been complaints over the last few days that some people who have updated their devices have found — instead of increased efficiency — a wide range of issues, including missing fitness data, health apps that refuse to open, inaccurate reports of stored data, and increased battery drain on i

One year ago, Uber’sbusiness model could be categorized as an “all of the above approach,” a strategy to generate revenue from all forms of transportation, including ride-hailing, micromobility, logistics and package and food delivery.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended that business strategy, prompting Uber to offload its shared micromobility unit Jump, double down on delivery with its acquisition of Postmates and, now, to sell a stake in its growing, but still unprofitable logisti

Welcome back to Human Capital, a weekly digest about diversity, inclusion and the human labor that powers tech.
This week, we’re looking at a number of topics because a lot went down. CoinbaseCEO Brian Armstrong took a controversial stance on social, Clubhouse found itself under scrutiny again, but this time around anti-Semitism and a new site launched that sheds light on some of the negative experiences of underrepresented people in tech. Meanwhile, the founder from Ethel’s Club unv

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Since releasing them last year, Apple has quietly continued to improve upon the AirPods Pro with firmware updates that have tweaked their noise cancellation and sound quality. The company rarely details or comments on the changes that come in each release of AirPods firmware; there are no update notes that spell out what’s new. Nor is there any way to manually force install the latest AirPods / AirPods Pro software. It just... happens in the background at

GIC,Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, will invest $752 million in Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail, and TPG will invest $250 million in the Indian firm, they all said Saturday midnight (local time).
The Government of Singapore Investment Corp and TPGare the latest high-profile investors to back Reliance Retail,India’s largest retail chain, in the past four weeks. Reliance Retail — like its sister sibling Jio Platforms — is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, I

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Would-be TikTok competitor Triller has allegedly inflated its monthly active user numbers, according to a report published in Business Insider.In the last month Triller — a short-form video app that has attracted a number of TikTok stars, including the most popular person on the platform, Charli D’Amelio — announced that it had more than 100 million monthly active users. Speaking to Business Insider, six former employees dispute those nu

Google officially dropped Daydream virtual reality support from Android 11 — a final step in its retirement of the system. As Android Police notes, Google posted an announcement saying its latest version of Android doesn’t support the VR platform’s app. “Daydream VR app is no longer supported by Google and may not work properly on some devices running Android 11 or later,” it reads.
In fact, the Daydream software is no longer supported at all, according to Google. I

Some Apple Card users have reported seeing mysterious charges on their credit card statements from “Waters Hardy & Co.,” a 10-person Dallas-based tax preparation and consulting firm. It’s a real company. But strangely, it seems those charges were actually mislabeled transactions from AT&T.
The issue seems to have begun two days ago. “If you see a charge on your Apple credit card from ‘Waters, Hardy & Company CPA’ please know this was not us and we

Denis Barrier ContributorShare on Twitter Denis Barrier is co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation, a global venture capital firm investing across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.Alex Lazarow ContributorShare on Twitter Alex Lazarow is an author, a global venture investor with Cathay Innovation and is an adjunct professor with the Middlebury Institute for International Studies MBA program. More posts by this contributorThe innovation supply chain: How ideas traverse continents and transfo

Plaid, the company building a universal banking API that lets you connect an app or service with a bank account, has updated Plaid Link. PlaidLink is the interface you see when you add your bank account to any app or service that uses Plaid, such as Venmo, Acorns or Chime.
Given that 3,000 apps have been using Plaid, chances are you’ve seen Plaid Link in the past. According to the company, one in four people in the U.S. have used Plaid to connect their accounts.
And today’s update is

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The halloween cat collar (three pack, adjustable strap, ghost pendant and bell) has conspicuously rave reviews on Amazon. “Three for $10 is a steal!” reads one. “They seem to be made of quality material and the clasps don’t break away as easily as some other ones.”The review, like many on the e-commerce platform, is fake. It was written by Jason Wawiernia, a search engine optimization specialist in Michigan. After he left his

Your local bike shop won’t carry them. Amazon has too many of them. And the ones from the sharing services keep breaking down. Where are you supposed to go to find a decent electric bike or scooter?
How about RidePanda, the new online marketplace for battery-powered two-wheelers? The site, which just came out of stealth last week, aims to become a “one-stop shop” for electric micromobility. Each e-bike, e-scooter, and e-moped is hand-picked, tested, and rated based on its compo

Anyone who writes online or in a word processor has likely gotten used to the inevitable squiggly line denoting a misspelled word or clumsy phrase. But what if you use a word that’s loaded, a phrase that’s too formal or not formal enough, or refer to a group of people in an outdated way? Writer is a service that watches as you type, flagging language that doesn’t match up with your style guide and values, and it just raised $5 million to scale up.
Both people and the companies

For several years, blockchain technology has been touted as a way to verify the sale of property. Any kind of property. And so entrepreneurs busily began the process of trying to create a startup that could complete a property deal on the blockchain.One that stood out from the start was Propy, started by Natalia Karayaneva, an experienced, real-world property developer who had subsequently joined the blockchain world. Propy’s other co-founder is Denitza Tyufekchieva (pictured). 
Propy

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is adding a new way to withdraw funds from your Coinbaseaccount. If you’ve added a compatible debit card to your account, you can transfer USD, EUR or GBP to your bank account nearly instantly.
There are some drawbacks, and the main one is that you’ll pay a lot of fees. In the U.S., Coinbasededucts 1.5% from the transaction, or a minimum $0.55 if it’s a small transaction. In the U.K. and Europe, you pay 2% in fees or a minimum fee of £0.45

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images A 74-year-old man said he was one of 46,459 people to test positive for the coronavirus in the United States yesterday. This diagnosis was stunning and destabilizing — unlike the diagnoses of the other 46,458 people — because that man is the president of the United States. Just like every other person in the US, President Donald Trump was still at risk of catching the virus — and he repeatedly disregarded advice that could have reduced his ri

Image: JerryRigEverything Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2 has survived having dirt dropped on it in a new durability test from YouTuber Zack Nelson (aka JerryRigEverything), backing up Samsung’s claims that its hinge is more durable on this year’s device. Nelson’s test involved dropping a handful of dust and dirt on Samsung’s new foldable, and he reported the phone continued to feel just as smooth to open and close. That indicated the worst of the dirt hadn’t made

One of the magical things about television is how, through the power of drama and/or comedy, it can take someone who would, in almost any other context, be the worst person you know, and make them fun to watch. That’s not to say that Emily Cooper (Lily Collins), the eponymous star of Emily In Paris, is a terrible person. She’s just someone you’d diplomatically describe in text messages as “a lot,” and in the new Netflix series, you get to see her inflicted on an ent

TLDR: The Complete Agile Scrum Product Owner Masterclass Course teaches what it takes to lead a project from ideation to successful completion. In the world of project management as outlined by one of the most popular PM methodologies, the Agile Scrum product owner is basically the team’s quarterback. Recruited by an employer to bring a new product to fruition, the product owner starts moving the ball down the field. They spot holes in the game plan. They make sure major weapons are being

Another week, another fall hardware event. On Wednesday, through a 30-minute infomercial, Google officially announced its new product lineup: the Pixel 5, the Pixel 4a 5G, Chromecast with Google TV, and Nest Audio.On this week’s episode of The Vergecast, The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Dan Seifert, and Chris Welch go into detail on these products (which were leaked pretty heavily this year) and discuss how they stand among the competitors in affordability and quality.Also, in a

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter this week announced it would be changing how image cropping works on its website after concerns that the machine learning-based algorithm the company was using was racially biased in how it cropped images, in particular by favoring white faces over Black ones.In a post diving into the issue, Parag Agrawal, the company’s chief technology officer, and design chief Dantley Davis explained how the company tested the model for racial or gender bi

I’m not a selfie guy. Raising my hand and pointing my phone at my own face never quite felt natural to me. Sure, I’ve done it a bunch of times, but it never really got any less awkward. It never felt like me. Because it wasn’t me. There has long been whispers about phone cameras secretly post-processing your selfies to make you “more beautiful,” with the iPhone XS “Beautygate” scandal perhaps being the most notorious instance of this trend. Critics have

Image: Tesla Tesla said Friday it was able to deliver 139,300 vehicles during the last quarter, smashing its previous record for deliveries, of 112,000 cars. It was also slightly better than Wall Street expectations of 137,000 vehicles for the quarter. The company said it produced a total of 145,036 vehicles over the same period.This was the third consecutive quarter of better-than-expected delivery numbers from Tesla. The company delivered 88,400 vehicles in Q1 of 2020, down from the fourth qu

The Crash Bandicoot series has always occupied a strange place in the pantheon of platform games. It doesn’t offer the sheer joy of movement and discovery that has propelled the Super Mario games, nor the technical spectacle that drives each new Ratchet and Clank title. Even still, there’s something distinct about Crash: the over-the-shoulder perspective, the bouncy movement, the oh-so-’90s vibe. It has smaller ambitions, but is much more focused as a result. And it turns out n

Microsoft is adding a native Windows Package Manager to Windows 10 soon, but it’s limited to a command line interface instead of an easy to use GUI. While many will be happy to just be able to install apps from the command line, Tweeten developer Mehedi Hassan has created winstall — a web app that uses Microsoft’s package manager that lets you create app packs to bulk install all of your favorite Windows applications.
It’s ideal for developers who regularly switch PCs, en

TLDR: The Essential Growth Hacker Bundle gives entrepreneurs the tools to understand and launch an effective digital marketing strategy. Now that we’ve spent the past two decades working out how digital marketing fits in a new business’ overall sales and engagement strategy, we’ve slowly taken our next step through the looking glass into the next stage of online business development: growth hacking. In case you’re new to the term, it’s exactly like it sounds. It&rs