Technology news

On Monday, the US Department of Justice signed on to a new international statement warning of the dangers of encryption and calling for an industry-wide effort to enable law enforcement agencies to access encrypted data once a warrant has been obtained. The US was joined in the effort by officials representing the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, and Japan.
The statement begins by acknowledging the value of encryption in protecting free expression across the world, citing a 2017 report

As paid newsletters grow in popularity, Snigdha Sur, the founder of South Asian-focused media company The Juggernaut, has no qualms about avoiding the approach entirely. In October 2017, Sur started The Juggernaut as a free newsletter, called InkMango. As she searched for news on the South Asian diaspora, she found that articles lacked original reporting, aggregation was becoming repetitive and mainstream news organizations weren’t answering big questions.
Then InkMango crossed 700 free r

Photo: Alphabet Alphabet’s X lab, the former Google division that launched the Waymo self-driving car unit and other ambitious projects, has officially announced its latest “moonshot”: a computational agriculture project the company is calling Mineral.The project is focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales, with a focus on “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simul

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Monday, YouTube announced a number of updates for its YouTube Music TV app, including TVs running Android TV OS and the new Chromecast with Google TV. For all smart TVs, YouTube Music users can now access saved playlists and liked songs in their available libraries, the company said in a blog post. The options will appear in the YouTube Music tab within the YouTube TV app. The update also includes new visuals to show albums and and playlist artwork.
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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10 is available for $550 from Microsoft’s eBay store, its lowest price yet. Normally the phone costs $950 and previously we have seen the price go down to as low as $600. This is for an unlocked version of the phone with a full US warranty. The device is compatible with all of the major LTE networks in the US.
Samsung originally released the Galaxy Note 10 last year alongside the larger Note 10 Plus. The base Note 10

Image: Netflix In a rare licensing move, Netflix’s hit drama series Narcos will be available to stream for free on ViacomCBS’s Pluto TV beginning on October 20th.The deal marks the first time that Narcos will be widely available to US streaming viewers without a Netflix subscription and for free. (The show was previously licensed to Univision through a linear deal.) All five seasons of the show (Narcos and Narcos: Mexico) will be available to stream as part of Pluto TV’s Crime

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Panasonic has released an official Lumix webcam app, as first spotted by PetaPixel. The software, still in beta since its quiet release late last month, lets you plug your camera into your Mac or Windows machine and have it recognized as a video source in apps like Google Meet and Zoom. Panasonic’s official software replaces the workaround hack the company introduced back in June.Panasonic’s workaround was necessary because of the webcam shortage dur

After an escalating series of viral stunts, internet collective MSCHF is taking on advertising itself. On Monday, the collective posted a series of jingles on TikTok aimed as a broadside against the primary source of funding for social networks. Some of the jingles call out the general concept, while others take on specific brands the group has decided to target: Amazon, Comcast, Facebook, Fashion Nova, the NFL, Palantir, Purdue, and even TikTok itself.“We had our team [do some] digging on

Our top picks for Prime Day headphone deals:
BEST WIRELESS EARBUDS: Apple AirPods Pro — save $50
BEST NOISE-CANCELING HEADPHONES: Bose QuietComfort 35 II — save $50More Prime Day coverageAll the best Prime Day deals are right here
Best laptop deals
Best kitchen deals
Best TV dealsBEST EARBUDS FOR WORKING OUT: Sony WF-SP800N in-ear noise-canceling headphones — save $51.99Amazon Prime Day started at midnight PT on Oct. 13, but we saw a ton of early deals at Amazon, Walmart, and B

These days when you found a startup, you don’t go out and buy a rack of servers. And you don’t build an in-house data center team. Instead, you farm out your infrastructure needs to the major cloud platforms, namely Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
That’s all well and good, but over time, any startup’s cloud setup will become more complex, varied and perhaps multi-provider. Throw in microservices and one can wind up with a big muddle, and an even bigger bill.

The Foxconn name displayed outside of an office building on Wednesday, May 8 2019 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Foxconn is a electronics contract manufacturing company, which is constructing a plant in south eastern Wisconsin creating thousands of jobs. | Photo by Joshua Lott for The Verge Through the many twists and turns of Foxconn’s troubled Wisconsin project, one thing has long been clear: the company is not building the promised 20 million-square-foot Gen 10.5 LCD factory specified in its

The Foxconn name displayed outside of an office building on Wednesday, May 8 2019 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Foxconn is a electronics contract manufacturing company, which is constructing a plant in south eastern Wisconsin creating thousands of jobs. | Photo by Joshua Lott for The Verge Through the many twists and turns of Foxconn’s troubled Wisconsin project, one thing has long been clear: the company is not building the promised 20 million-square-foot Gen 10.5 LCD factory specified in its

Samsung has announced the Galaxy A42 5G, the latest in its lineup of more reasonably priced and lower-specced A-series phones. The A42 is now Samsung’s cheapest phone with 5G, selling for £349 (about $455 USD). That puts it £80 below the Galaxy A51 5G, which was previously the cheapest way to buy into Samsung’s 5G lineup at £429 (or priced at $500 USD in the US).
The Galaxy A42 uses the Snapdragon 750G, a middle-of-the-pack processor that was just announced by Qualc

A Centaur rocket sends NASA’s Surveyor 1 mission to the Moon in 1966. A few months later, a similar Centaur rocket would launch Surveyor 2. Researchers think that a newly-discovered asteroid could be the booster from the Surveyor 2 mission. | NASA Earth is about to get a temporary mini-moon — and this one might be space junk. Researchers are tracking an object that looks like it will be captured by Earth’s gravity for just a few months this winter before safely heading back ou

For starters, iPhones, of course. That one was easy. The company skipped out on new mobile devices during its recent AppleWatch event, owing to COVID-19-related delays. And, of course, the fact that the events are all pre-taped and virtual now means companies can more easily split them up in ways that were harder to justify when people were expected to fly in from all over the world.
That doesn’t mean we won’t be getting more than just a phone (or, more like multiple phones). While A

A little less than two years after raising its seed round, the Israeli-based Nym Health has added another $14 million to its cash haul so it can roll out its technology developing auditable machine learning tools for automating hospital billing.
The new financing came from investors including GV (the investment arm of Google previously known as Google Ventures) and will be used by the company to expand its technology development and sales and marketing efforts across the U.S.
Billing has been a

Dmitry Rogozin | Photo by Alexander Ryumin\TASS via Getty Images The head of Russia’s space program said today that NASA’s plans to send people back to the Moon are “too US-centric” for Russia to participate. He has been critical of the program in the past and now says that Russia would only be open to participating if the Moon plans were more focused on international cooperation.
“The most important thing here would be to base this program on the principles of int

As the American election looms and the IPO cycle slows some, it’s a good time to review how well the public offerings we have seen thus far have performed.The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.Welcome to a Monday morning data rundown discussing how well the latest-stage startups that went public this year have performed after their first day. We’ll be awarding letter grades for post-IPO

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.
Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Lisbon will capture how the city is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).
We’d like to know how Lisbon’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech

AI-based tools like computer vision and voice interfaces have the potential to be life-changing for people with disabilities, but the truth is those AI models are usually built with very little data sourced from those people. Microsoft is working with several nonprofit partners to help make these tools reflect the needs and everyday realities of people living with conditions like blindness and limited mobility.
Consider for example a computer vision system that recognizes objects and can describ

The US economy may be in a precarious state right now with a presidential election looming on the horizon and the country still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic. But partly thanks to lower interest rates, the housing market continues to rise, and today a startup that has built technology to help it run more efficiently is announcing a major growth round of funding. 
Snapdocs, which is used by some 130,000 real estate professionals to digitally manage the mortgage process and other p

Enhance’s Oculus Quest version of Rez Infinite is coming just in time for the release of the new Quest 2 headset. The Quest version will be released on Tuesday, October 13th — the same day as the Quest 2.
Rez Infinite has been a VR staple ever since it launched alongside the PlayStation VR in 2016, subsequently making appearances on PC and Google Daydream. It’s a VR remake of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s trippy musical shooter for the Dreamcast and PS2; the PC and PS4 versions can

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook has announced it will remove all content on its platform that “denies or distorts the Holocaust.” The company says this expansion of its hate speech policies is a response to what it calls “the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people.” Facebook has previously faced strong criticism for letting Holocaust denial content spread freel

Facebook this morning announced a significant change in how it approaches Holocaust denial content on its social network. For years, the company has been criticized for not taking down this extremely offensive form of content in favor of allowing free speech and distancing itself from taking on the responsibilities of a traditional publisher. Today, it’s reversing that position, saying it will now update its hate speech policy to “prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holo

Another twist in a multi-year complaint saga related to the legality of Facebook’sdata transfers: European privacy campaigner, Max Schrems, has today been granted a judicial review of the Irish regulator’s handling of his complaint.
He’s expecting the hearing to take place before the end of the year — and is hoping the action will, at long last, lead to a suspension of Facebook’s EU-US data transfers.
Schrems says his aim is to “kick start a ‘paused&rsqu

The retail landscape is shifting rapidly. While D2C brands have changed the way we shop, Quince is looking to change retail even more dramatically.
The brand, which raised $8.5 million in seed funding last year (and only revealed as much today), is looking to rethink the supply chain with its own line of 700 items including men’s and women’s apparel, accessories, jewelry and home goods.
After beta testing for a year as ‘Last Brand,’ Quinceis launching with a new model cal

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s next fall event kicks off tomorrow at 1PM ET, when the company is widely expected to reveal its new iPhone 12 lineup of smartphones. Rumors have given us a pretty good picture of what we can expect to see with these new phones, and Apple’s official “Hi, Speed” tagline for the event suggests that one of the iPhone 12’s main features could be support for fast 5G cellular speeds.
Rumors have circulated about a number

Google’sNestunit today launched its newest thermostat. At $129, the Nest Thermostat is the company’s most affordable one yet, but it’s also the first to feature a new swipe and tap interface on its side, as well as Google’s Soli radar technology to sense room occupancy and when you are near the device.
Soli, it is worth noting, is not being used for enabling gesture controls. Instead, because the design team wanted a solid mirror finish on the front, Nest decided to use i

The new Nest Thermostat ditches the traditional rotating dial for a simpler, touch strip control system | Photo: Google Google’s Nest smart home division has a new smart thermostat available to order starting today. The new Nest Thermostat is a simpler model than the Nest Learning Thermostat or Nest Thermostat E and comes with a lower price, just $129.99. That’s $40 less than the Nest E and $120 less than the top-of-the-line third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat. It is available

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s epis

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Amazon Prime Day 2020 begins in the early hours of Tuesday, October 13th, lasting through Wednesday night. That’s when you’ll see some of the year’s best deals go live, but there are plenty of worthwhile sales happening already. If you want to see what Amazon and other retailers have available right now, check out the deals below.
Just so you know, we’ve only included products that are available for less than the previous lowest price. We

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Amazon Prime Day 2020 begins in the early hours of Tuesday, October 13th, lasting through Wednesday night. That’s when you’ll see some of the year’s best deals go live, but there are plenty of worthwhile sales happening already. If you want to see what Amazon and other retailers have available right now, check out the deals below.
Just so you know, we’ve only included products that are available for less than the previous lowest price. We

Twiliotoday announced its biggest acquisition to date, spearheading a stronger move into customer data management alongside its existing API-based tools for building and running communications services.
Twilio is paying $3.2 billion to acquire Segment,a technology startup that lets organizations pull customer data from one app into another, by way of APIs, and use its platform to better control the movement of that customer data, used for marketing and other applications that benefit from custom

This week, Apple will announce this year’s new iPhones. We’re expecting there to be four of them: the iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max, iPhone 12, and a smaller one that might be called the iPhone 12 mini. Apple’s invitation for its Tuesday event included the catchphrase “Hi, Speed.” Weird capitalization decisions aside, the “speed” hint embedded in the tagline lines up with the rumors: these will be the first 5G-enabled iPhones.
If you’re looking

All the joy of plane food, without having to leave the ground. | Image: Singapore Airlines Amidst plunging revenues due to the pandemic, Singapore Airlines is turning two of its Airbus A380 planes parked at Changi Airport into impromptu restaurants on October 24th and 25th, and it’s proved surprisingly popular. Bloomberg reports that all seats at the restaurants sold out within 30 minutes of bookings opening, as people rushed to recapture the excitement of balancing a tiny meal on an even

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Woot is offering one of the best pre-Prime Day 2020 deals so far. Apple’s AirPods Pro wireless earbuds are $190, which is the best price we’ve seen yet. This model usually costs $250, and Woot says this discount will last all day, or until it sells out.
If you were in the market for a set of AirPods, you’ll get the most for your money with this model. Unlike the less expensive AirPods, the AirPods Pro ship with silicon tips that prov

Shenzhen,known for its maker community and manufacturing resources, is taking the lead in trialing China’s digital yuan.
Last week, the city issued 10 million yuan worth of digital currency to 50,000 randomly selected residents who applied. The government doled out the money through mobile “red envelopes,” a tool designed to digitize the custom of gifting money in red packets and first popularized by WeChat’s e-wallet.
“Red packets are a common way we’ve seen