Technology news

In the eternal struggle to find the right streaming box for your home, you chose the Apple TV. It's understandable, as maybe you're already bought into Apple's ecosystem with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac computer. However, one daunting task remains: figuring out which apps to install on your Apple TV to get the most out of it.
The good news is that an Apple TV supports many of the same apps as your other Apple devices. If you love something on iPhone or iPad, specifically something that relates to wa

Is your bestie busy trying to crack an Unsolved Mystery? Have they already scheduled a virtual viewing party for The Crown's next season? Are they still talking about the Taylor Swift documentary that came out earlier this year? Then you might want to do a little shopping.
We've pulled together some of the best Netflix merch out there for the series and movies viewers can't get enough of. And while you're grabbing some stuff for your friend, why not throw in a thing or two for yourself?
Happy st

As thousands of online reference guide users have recently learned, the dictionary defines "schadenfreude" as "enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others." 
On Friday morning, Merriam-Webster reported a 30,500% increase in queries for the word following the revelation that Donald and Melania Trump had contracted COVID-19 — which, of course, came after months of the White House's insufficient and ineffective response to the pandemic. 📈 Lookups for 'schadenfreude' have

Peanuts, the beloved comic strip created by Charles M. Schulz, turned 70 on Friday, Oct. 2. As part of the celebration, fans got a peek at The Snoopy Show from Apple TV+ in the form of a teaser.
The minute-long peek hypes "all new adventures" for Snoopy the dog, his person Charlie Brown, and the Peanuts gang as a whole. It's coming for Apple TV+ subscribers' nostalgia feels on Feb. 5.  Read more...
More about Peanuts, Apple Tv Plus, The Snoopy Show, Entertainment, and Streaming Services

James Bond may not avert his next death until 2021, but apparently Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter movie will still hit the big screen this year: the just-posted official teaser trailer for the movie confirms that it’ll arrive this December, “only in theaters.”At just 13 seconds of footage, it’s not much of a teaser — and where are the swords? Milla Jovovich mans a minigun, and her squad has a couple rifles at their disposal. But as our sister site Polygon

Twitter's abusive behavior policy is supposed to protect everyone. Following Donald Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis, thousands are claiming it doesn't. 
On Friday, the social media platform attempted to clarify its rules on abusive tweets, stating: "Tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm, or fatal disease against anyone are not allowed and will need to be removed." The explanation came following a report from Vice on what content the platform would and would not allow surroundin

In a move that, I’m sure, has absolutely no relation to anything going on in the world today, Apple has quietly updated its “Face with Medical Mask” emoji with friendlier eyes, eyebrows, and rosy cheeks. Before, it looked a little lethargic. Now, it’s almost happy? You can practically imagine a smile underneath.Except you don’t have to imagine. Cue Emojipedia:
As Emojipedia points out, the new emoji is literally Apple’s existing “Smiling Face” with

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The going has not always been easy but the tech IPOs keep coming. Airbnb itself is almost here, in what is likely to be the ultimate stock market listing of this dramatic year. After the pandemic triggered mass layoffs for the short-term rental marketplace, it has managed to make up all of the lost ground to pre-pandemic projections, T

On Friday night, while a distracted world read about President Donald Trump's coronavirus diagnosis, a $23 million space toilet launched into space.
This toilet, which astronauts and cosmonauts will test on the space station for three years, will eventually be the latrine NASA astronauts use on missions to the moon and beyond. It's costly because the machine — called the Universal Waste Management System (UWMS) — is part of a system that recycles urine into drinking water.
"And when

Nintendo revealed on Thursday that Steve and Alex from Minecraft will be added to the character roster in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch, and now we’re getting the full reveal: they’ll arrive on October 13th, and there’s a whole video you can watch where longtime Smash series director Masahiro Sakurai shows off their new moves, including the ability to build your own platforms out of blocks! See it above.
The video reveals that you’ll effectively have

The holidays give us precious time with our loved ones, as we gather around dinner tables, living rooms, and all other types of communal spaces with those we hold near and dear. And sometimes you just need a good pair of headphones to drown them out when they start badgering you about why you aren't married yet.
Whether that applies to your family situation or not, great headphones are more important than ever. They can make boring commutes pleasant and keep you focused at work, whether your dis

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

In a rare Friday episode, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert spent his opening monologue cataloguing the events of the past week that led to Donald Trump being diagnosed with COVID-19. It's a riveting watch.
Colbert, who is normally one of the more critical voices when speaking about the 45th U.S. president, struck a more solemn tone in his monologue. His reservations with Trump's conduct in general, and handling of the coronavirus pandemic specifically, are still quite clear, but Colbert accept

TLDR: The 2020 Adobe Graphic Design Certification School offers training in all three of Adobe’s industry-leading graphic design apps. From its lofty perch at the top of the creative food chain, it’s hard to remember a time when the family of apps that make up the Adobe Creative Cloud weren’t the preeminent digital creation tools on the planet. But back in the mid-80s, way before easy audio and video editing and website building, Adobe was built on the back of Illustrator, one

Astronomers worked hard to get this galactic glamour shot.
"Looking this good isn’t easy," wrote NASA on Friday. "30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and beauty."
This is galaxy NGC 5643, located some 60 million light-years from Earth. It's a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, meaning it has arms that spiral out from its center. The central

Facemasks have become big drivers of e-commerce. In August, Etsy’s quarterly earnings report showed mask sales on the site reached $346 million in the second quarter of 2020. During the same period, face mask sales netted the struggling retailer Gap Inc. $130 million. And the global mask market is projected to grow to $2.3 billion by 2027. Cloth and paper masks routinely make best seller lists on Amazon in multiple categories including “Tools & Home Improvement,” “He

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon and Alex Castro / The Verge Well, the coronavirus made it all the way to the White House. In a country that still maintains the highest numbers of cases in the world, that’s not a huge surprise. The White House might be an exclusive, highly-guarded venue, but viruses generally can squeeze their way onto any guest list — all they have to do is slide past the velvet rope as someone’s plus one.That’s the thing about this virus. It doesn&rsqu

Social distancing and pandemic fears didn't stop Jimmy Fallon from staging a new edition of Lip Sync Battle on Friday night.
Special guest Millie Bobby Brown, who's out repping her new Netflix movie Enola Holmes, joined Fallon for a remote showdown in which the two took on hits from Dua Lipa, the Jonas Brothers, Katy Perry, and, of course, the week's guest hosts BTS. It gets pretty raucous. 
Fallon does his typical lip sync thing with the help of fancy cameras and a proper performance stage

With so many podcasts out there, how can anyone manage them all? Luckily, there are a number of great iOS apps out there to help in that department. 
I’ll break down some of the best podcast apps available on iOS. To be honest, the podcasting game is still begging to be reinvented, so while the apps listed are all great in their own right, there’s no single standout platform. However, each recommended app does have its own unique style and set of features. Let’s get starte

Welcome to the weekend. Amazon Prime Day 2020 kicks off in less than two weeks, starting on Tuesday, October 13th and lasting through the 14th. That’s two days to get some of the best deals that we’ll see all year. We’re prepping behind the scenes for the event to make sure you’re able to get exactly what you’re looking for. But for now, I’m going to highlight a few of this week’s best deals that are still going on.
Lastly, two quick reminders. First, yo

TLDR: The CharbyEdge Pro 6-in-1 Universal Cable can handle Android and iOS devices, offering detachable charging options to get almost any device powered up quickly. You’ve got a charging cable for your phone. You’ve got one for your tablet. You’ve got another for your laptop. On top of that, you’ve likely got at least two or three more devices that you spend some time with, each requiring their own special energy delivery. Before you know it, every time you want to go a

With COVID-19 vaccines currently in the final phase of study, you’ve probably been wondering how the FDA will decide if a vaccine is safe and effective. Based on the status of the Phase 3 trials currently underway, it is unlikely that the results of these trials will be available before November. But it is likely that not just one but several of the competing COVID-19 vaccines will be shown to be safe and effective by the end of 2020. I am a scientist and infectious diseases specialist at

SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, are all the rage right now, and people are emerging from all corners to raise them.
Among the latest entrants — and someone who might be of interest to Silicon Valley watchers — is Emil Michael,a former Uberexecutive and top lieutenant to former CEO Travis Kalanick. Earlier today, Micheal registered plans with the SEC to raise $250 million in an IPO for a blank-check company that will broadly acquire a company in the tech sector.
IPO E

Update October 2nd, 10:00PM ET: Just 2 seconds before liftoff, SpaceX stopped the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket, without giving a clear indication of what went wrong. The next opportunity for SpaceX to fly is Saturday evening, though a launch date hasn’t been confirmed yet.
Original Story: Late Friday night, SpaceX is slated to launch a new upgraded GPS satellite for the US Space Force from Cape Canaveral, Florida — the latest spacecraft intended to help modernize the current GPS fle

An aspect of video calls that many of us take for granted is the way they can switch between feeds to highlight whoever’s speaking. Great — if speaking is how you communicate. Silent speech like sign language doesn’t trigger those algorithms, unfortunately, but this research from Googlemight change that.
It’s a real-time sign language detection engine that can tell when someone is signing (as opposed to just moving around) and when they’re done. Of course it’s

A day after the Senate Commerce Committee moved forward with plans to subpoena the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook and Google, it looks like some of the most powerful leaders in tech will testify willingly.
Twitterannounced late Friday that Jack Dorsey would appear virtually before the committee on October 28, just days before the U.S. election. While Twitter is the only company that’s openly agreed to the hearing so far, Politico reports that Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg also plan to appea

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have agreed to testify virtually before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 28th, Politico reported Friday evening. Assuming that the hearing is live-streamed in some way, that means you’ll be able to watch some of the world’s most powerful people get grilled by policymakers who’ve recently discussed changing the laws that let their companies

President Donald Trump’s positive COVID-19 result has made Twittera busy place in the past 24 hours, including some tweets that have publicly wished — some subtly and others more directly — that he die from the disease caused by coronavirus.
Twitter put out a reminder to folks that it doesn’t allow tweets that wish or hope for death or serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone. Tweets that violate this policy will need to be removed, Twitter said Friday. However

The new Microsoft Flight Simulator is an immersive beast of a PC game, and we can only imagine how immersive it might get in VR — but you might not have to imagine much longer, because Microsoft has just opened signups (via Eurogamer) for a closed beta of the virtual reality experience.There are quite a few requirements if you want to be considered, though. Not only do you have to own the game, have a Windows Mixed Reality headset, be a registered Microsoft Flight Simulator “Insider&

Kindred Capital,the London-based VC that backs early-stage founders in Europe and Israel, recently closed its second seed fund at £81 million.
Out if its first fund raised in 2018, the firm has backed 29 companies. They include Five, which is building software for autonomous vehicles; Paddle, SaaS for software e-commerce; Pollen, a peer-to-peer marketplace for experiences and travel; and Farewill, which lets users create a will online.
However, what sets Kindred apart from most other seed

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge President Trump reportedly has COVID-19, and while some are wishing for his speedy recovery, others have publicly tweeted a hope that he’ll die of the disease. As you might imagine, that’s expressly against Twitter’s rules — and the company tells Motherboard that it will enforce them.
In other words: You can’t tweet that you hope Trump dies of COVID.
Specifically, Twitter tells the publication that it will suspend people who

Twitteraddresses questions of bias in its image-cropping algorithms, we take a look at Mario Kart Live and the stock market takes a hit after President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. This is your Daily Crunch for October 2, 2020.
The big story: Twitter confronts image-cropping concerns
Last month, (white) PhD student Colin Madland highlighted potential algorithmic bias on Twitter and Zoom — in Twitter’s case, because its automatic image cropping seemed to consistently highlight Ma

The venture world is swimming in capital these days, and the flood doesn’t appear to be abating.
That’s changing the game for venture capitalists and their firms, which transformed from solo practitioners focused on one stage and a single geographical area to covering all startups in all geos in all industries in just a handful of years.
One firm that has navigated those changes for decades is Index Ventures, one of the first funds to launch in Europe that has evolved into a multi-st