Technology news

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge In its latest teardown video, iFixit took apart an iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro, and found that the devices look pretty similar to each other on the inside. The displays are interchangeable, iFixit found, and so are the 10.78 Wh batteries.iFixitThe iPhone 12 is on the left, the iPhone 12 Pro is on the right.When they removed the camera shield on the iPhone 12, iFixit found a plastic spacer where the iPhone 12 Pro has its telephoto lens and LiDAR sensor. Both dev

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games fired back against Apple yet again in a new court filing, saying the iPhone maker “has no rights to the fruits of Epic’s labor,” the latest salvo in the ongoing battle between the two companies.A quick recap: Back in August, Epic introduced a new direct-payment system in its wildly popular Fortnite game to bypass Apple’s 30 percent fee. Apple kicked Fortnite off the App Store for breaking its rules, and Epic responded wi

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Food delivery platform DoorDash has partnered with a restaurant for the first time to build a new brick-and-mortar store, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Burma Bites, a spin off of Oakland, California-based Burma Superstar, was designed for delivery and takeout, and will offer versions of menu items from the parent restaurant as well as new items in environmentally-friendly to-go containers, DoorDash said. According to the Chronicle, all menu items

In case you missed the news, NASA pulled off a pretty complicated maneuver: It collected dust from the asteroid Bennu, a rock speeding through space some 200 million miles from Earth. 
In fact, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did the job so well that an issue has cropped up since the collection on Tuesday. Some of the sample is leaking into space because a lid was jammed open by large bits of material. 
"The big concern now is that particles are escaping because we're almost a victim of o

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here.
Back in August during Y Combinator’s two-day demo extravaganza, TechCrunch noted a number of startups from India that stood out from the batch. Names like Bikayi (e-commerce tools), Decentro (consumer banking APIs), Farmako Healthcare (digital health records) and MedPiper Technologies (helping hire health professionals) joined our lis

The numbers are in.
White supremacists are responsible for the majority of terrorist plots and attacks that occurred during the first eight months of 2020, according to a recent report by the nonpartisan think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). 
Researchers found that white supremacists, anti-government extremists from the violent far-right, and involuntary celibates (incels) carried out 67 percent of all domestic terrorist plots and attacks. Far-left terrorists acc

Facebook isn't happy with New York University.
It's because of NYU Ad Observatory, a newly launched research project from the university's engineering school that aims to show how different election campaigns are spending their ad money on the site, and what kinds of voters they're targeting. The research is gathered with help from a data-collecting browser extension.
Facebook let NYU know that the project, which is being driven by the work of more than 6,500 volunteers, runs afoul of the social

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Startup failure is easy to hold up as a type of martyrdom for progress, especially if the founders are starting out scrappy in the first place and trying to save the world. But heroic narrative gets complicated when the startup failure involves the biggest names in entertainment, dubious product decisions, and well over $1 billion in l

Patreon has banned QAnon creators from its services, following the lead of several other major platforms. 
Patreon — a platform that allows creators to get paid directly by supporters — announced on Thursday that it would no longer allow the conspiracy theorists, saying the "QAnon-dedicated creators" would be removed from now on. 
"While Patreon does not propagate this content directly, there are a small number of creators on the platform who have supported the QAnon conspi

On Thursday evening during the third second and final presidential debate, President Trump declared that New York City is a "ghost town." Just two days later, New Yorkers lined up for the first day of early voting and showed the president that his former city is anything but empty.
Some Twitter users pointedly incorporated Trump's "ghost town" reference in photos and videos they snapped of voting lines that spanned numerous blocks. For a ghost town there sure are a lot of people lining up f

As critically ill COVID-19 patients started showing up in droves at emergency rooms around the world, ventilators became a crucial technology keeping patients alive. When hospitals’ own resources became overwhelmed, the Strategic National Stockpile dusted off and distributed thousands of the life-support machines throughout the country. But not all were in working condition. J. Scot Mackeil, a biomedical technician with more than 40 years of experience, worked on a team tasked with inspec

SpaceXhas launched another batch of 60 Starlink satellites, the primary ingredient for its forthcoming global broadband internet service. The launch took place at 11:31 AM EDT, with a liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This is the fifteenth Starlink launch thus far, and SpaceX has now launched nearly 900 of the small, low Earth orbit satellites to date.
This launch used a Falcon 9 first stage booster that twice previously, both times earlier this year, including just in Se

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Patreon has updated its policies and will no longer support creator accounts on its platform that “advance disinformation promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory,” the company announced in a blog post.
A “small number of creators” on Patreon have supported QAnon with their work, the platform says, adding it’s taking action because “a number of other online platforms become overrun with pages and groups actively focused ar

On Friday afternoon the FBI visited Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, because a man who was associated with white nationalist groups had her name on a list, along with other activists' names. The man was recently arrested on a weapons charge. On Friday night, Garza told Trevor Noah about the unexpected visit on The Daily Show.
"This is because we push so hard to make sure Black people are treated just like everybody else," Garza said to Noah about why her n

Remember "murder hornets"? You know, the two-inch long wasps that stoked unreasonable fear in people all around the United States.  
Well, scientists in the U.S. have located the first nest of the invasive species in Blaine, Wash. and they got rid of it on Saturday, the Associated Press reported. The discovery took weeks and lots of dental floss, which was used to tie tracking devices to three hornets. And it worked; one of the insects led researchers to the location of the nest in a tree.

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

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Italian Data Protection Authority has started an investigation into the widespread use of bots that generate fake nude images on messaging app Telegram. The news follows an investigation by security firm Sensity, which found that as of July 2020 more than 100,000 faked images had been generated and shared in public Telegram channels.The bots can generate fake nudes that have watermarks or that show only partial nudity, and users pay to “reveal&r

During the first wave of COVID-19, researchers at Oxford University built a computer model that suggested if 56% of the UK downloaded and used a contact-tracing app (alongside other control measures) it could end the epidemic in the country. With the English app only available since September, it’s too early to tell how the system is actually doing. But even based on other countries whose apps have been available much longer, there’s still very little evidence that they can make a r

Kerry Brown / Netflix In 1939, Alfred Hitchcock came to Hollywood. The English master of suspense would ply his trade in sunny California, and Rebecca, his first American film, would win him his first and only Oscar. Despite the acclaim, Hitchcock hated Rebecca, as it was his first encounter with American censors and their stodgy Production Code, which made it nearly impossible to accurately adapt the Daphne du Maurier book on which it was based. Still, Hitchcock found a way, and we remember Re

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you take the typical death toll in the United States in a typical year and add the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or the population of St. Louis, Missouri, you’ll end up with the number of people who died this year. There were nearly 300,000 more deaths than there would have been during a normal year, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without a pandemic, that many more people would still be ali

If your mail-in ballot is cast, but no one is around to count it, did it make a sound? 
The U.S. presidential election is fast approaching, and people keep telling you this is the most important election in a generation. The coronavirus, of course, means that when it comes to safely casting your vote this election is also one of the most unusual. Thankfully, large swaths of the country (but sadly not all) have a simple way to confirm that their residents' mail-in ballots have been received

TLDR: These 10 business resources can get your digital enterprise headed in the right direction. Whether you’re running your own business or just working from home as part of someone else’s, there are plenty of business services that you don’t often realize you really need until you really need ‘em. Thankfully, many of those services are available now at some big savings off their regular price. This collection of 10 must-have resources for managing scheduling, paperwork

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Welcome to the weekend. In tech deals world, this week consisted mostly of a few notable Prime Day 2020 leftovers that hung around after Amazon’s big shopping event. Even those are mostly done now, but in their place are some fresh, new deals you might not have seen before — that is, unless you’ve been deal-hunting on The Verge earlier this week. With every week that goes by, we’re getting closer to Black Friday, so expect the

The future of the gig economy is on the ballot this November. But there are only two choices: one that changes how ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft operate and another that cedes control to the app makers over the drivers and workers.
That's why Uber and other gig-based apps have raised $200 million to convince California voters to vote "yes" on Proposition 22, according to California campaign finance records. If passed, Prop. 22 would keep drivers and delivery workers as independent contrac

What will the future of public transport look like? The major projects being planned today, such as the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail network, aren’t fundamentally different to what’s been built over the last 30 years. Maglev trains are largely confined to niche projects in China. Hyperloop remains an unproven glimmer in Elon Musk and Richard Branson’s eyes. The likes of HS2 can deliver considerable improvements in network capacity but through incremental changes in conventio

It could be the long-awaited turning point in the world of venture capital and beyond. Yale,whose $32 billion endowment has been led since 1985 by the legendary investor David Swensen, just let its 70 U.S. money managers across a variety of asset classes know that for the school, diversity has now moved front and center.
According to the WSJ, Swensen has told the firms that from here on out, they will be measured annually on their progress in increasing the diversity of their investment staff, f

Samsung Samsung would like you to believe its new 85-inch Interactive Display can bridge the gap between students in the classroom and students studying at home, now that blended-learning is the new normal across the country. In reality, it’s just a slightly bigger digital whiteboard — but assuming it doesn’t cost too much, the tweaked vision does sound intriguing.
Now that COVID-19 has swept the country, some students are huddling around tiny Chromebook screens at home while

Shortly after voting to move forward with a pair of subpoenas, the Senate Judiciary Committee has reached an agreement that will see the CEOs of two major social platforms testify voluntarily in November. The hearing will be the second major congressional appearance by tech CEOs arranged this month.
Twitter’sJack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will answer questions at the hearing, set for November 17 — two weeks after election day. The Republican-led committee is chaired

The end of OSIRIS-REx’s sample collector, showing asteroid sample leaking out into space | Image: NASA NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft did its job a little too well on Tuesday, when it tried to scoop up a handful of rocks from an asteroid named Bennu more than 200 million miles from Earth. The vehicle actually grabbed too much material with its robotic arm, jamming the lid at the end of the arm open —and letting part of the asteroid sample escape out into space.
“We were al

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook wants a New York University research project to stop collecting data about the social platform’s political ad-targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program is violates its terms of service, which bar scraping.A Facebook official

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook wants a New York University research project to stop collecting data about the social platform’s political ad-targeting, The Wall Street Journal reported.The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program is violates its terms of service, which bar scraping.A Facebook official

Photo by Mandel Ngan-Pool/Getty Images Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 17th. “The hearing will focus on the platforms’ censorship and suppression of New York Post articles and provide a valuable opportunity to review the companies’ handling of the 2020 election,” according to a press release.Last week, the New York Post published a story claiming that Hunter Biden introduced his fathe

In ye olden days of piracy, RIAA takedown notices were a common thing — I received a few myself. But that’s mostly fallen off as tracking pirates has gotten more difficult. But the RIAA can still issue nastygrams — to the creators of software that could potentially be used to violate copyright, like YouTube downloaders.
One such popular tool used by many developers, YouTube-DL, has been removed from GitHub for the present after an RIAA threat, as noted by Freedom of the Press F

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A judge in California has rejected a request from the Department of Justice to reverse a previous decision allowing WeChat to remain active in US app stores. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said new evidence the government presented did not change her opinion about the messaging app, owned by Chinese company Tencent app. WeChat will remain active in US app stores for the time being.
“The record does not support the conclusion that the government h

A California court weighs in as Prop. 22 looms, Google removes popular apps over data collection practices and the Senate subpoenas Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. This is your Daily Crunch for October 23, 2020.
The big story: Uberand Lyftdefeated again in court
A California appeals court ruled that yes, a new state law applies to Uber and Lyft drivers, meaning that they must be classified as employees, rather than independent contractors. The judge ruled that contrary to the rideshare companie