Technology

Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling on the Federal Trade Commission for a thorough review of Amazon’s bid to acquire MGM, arguing that the deal could harm consumers and may have anticompetitive effects in the streaming space and beyond. In a letter addressed to newly sworn-in FTC chair Lina Khan and shared exclusively with The Verge, Warren urged the FTC to specifically and closely examine “the possible anticompetitive effects this deal will have on streaming services and entertainment products in addition to the broader impacts that this transaction may have on workers, small businesses, and competition overall as Amazon—which already dominates numerous markets—accelerates its aggressive monopolistic behavior.” The FTC is said to be reviewing the deal as part of a larger antitrust investi...

WhatsApp’s Spanish language content moderators and customer service representatives are pushing the company for equal pay, according to an internal letter obtained by The Verge. They say they’ve been excluded from a $2 per hour premium paid to other bilingual contractors. The workers are employed by Accenture, a third-party contracting firm, in Austin, Texas. “For several years now, Accenture, Facebook, and Whatsapp have denied equal treatment and pay to Spanish language Contingent Workers,” employees say in the letter. “It is an insult for companies like Facebook and Accenture to publicly champion diversity, but yet fail to deliver this to its own workers.” Accenture classifies much of its workforce as contingent, meaning employees are hired as contractors for a specific period of time. W...

The first of a dozen-plus Roku Originals to premiere on the Roku Channel will kick off July 30th with The Demi Lovato Show, a series that had originally been slated for a debut on Quibi. The show will now launch as Roku’s first “original” to land on the Roku Channel, the platform’s free and ad-supported streaming offering. While originally intended for Quibi, the show will be brand new to audiences when it arrives on the Roku Channel this week. Each episode will be 10 minutes long, feature a celebrity guest, and will cover topics as wide-ranging as UFOs, activism, mental health, gender identity, and police reform. In a statement, Lovato said that they have “never been one to shy away from speaking candidly about things.” The show had previously been announced as Pillow Talk with Demi Lovat...

Zoom has announced that it’s acquiring a company known as Kites (short for Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions), which has worked on creating real-time translation and transcription software. Zoom says the acquisition is a move to help it make communicating with people who speak different languages easier, and that it’s looking to add translation capabilities to its video conferencing app. According to its site, Kites began at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and its technology was originally developed to act as in-classroom translation for students who needed help understanding the English or German their professors were lecturing in. Zoom already has real-time transcriptions, but it’s limited to people who are talking in English. On a support page, Zoom also makes it clear t...

Apple isn’t backing down from its hybrid work model that will require most employees to return to the office three days a week starting in early September. Fully remote positions will be extremely limited. “We believe that in-person collaboration is essential to our culture and our future,” said Deirdre O’Brien, senior vice president of retail and people, in a video recording viewed by The Verge. “If we take a moment to reflect on our unbelievable product launches this past year, the products and the launch execution were built upon the base of years of work that we did when we were all together in-person.” The news comes nearly a month after Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out an email telling employees the company was rolling out a new work model that would require them to return to in-office wo...

SpaceX’s satellite internet network, Starlink, should have roughly 500,000 users within the next 12 months, Elon Musk said at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) conference on Tuesday. SpaceX’s current goal, Musk said, is to beam broadband internet to most of the planet by August. The internet network, in the midst of an open beta phase, has launched more than 1,700 satellites to low-Earth orbit since 2018 and recently surpassed a “strategically significant” benchmark of 69,420 active users, Musk told MWC. He said Starlink is already running in 12 countries and expanding. “We’re I think on our way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months,” he added. Reaching half a million users in the next year and unlocking global internet coverage — minus Arctic r...

Last week, a pair of YouTube’s most popular creators was set to spar in the marketplace of ideas in a debate over the government’s simple, common sense advice to wear masks during a global pandemic to stop the persistent spread of COVID-19. The spat grew from a series of videos between right-wing provocateur Steven Crowder and the host of the H3 Podcast, Ethan Klein, calling one another out for their purported bad takes on mask-wearing. In March, Crowder called out Klein for saying that “you shouldn’t think about” what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells you and just wear the mask, rather than criticizing the agency and its scientists. Crowder, who is widely known as the face of the “change my mind” meme, has challenged people to debates in the past, including college stud...

Twitter has fixed a bug that left some of us horrified when we opened the site (as is often the case, but for different reasons) — those viewing the social network in a web browser found that they no longer had the option to switch between the algorithmic view and the reverse-chronological one. The algorithmic view, which shows tweets out of order, has been much maligned since it first appeared, and the bug on Tuesday had people worried that Twitter was finally starting to force it on everyone. Twitter’s support account says that web users should be able to change their timeline order again, and a few of us at The Verge have confirmed that the button is back on our timelines. Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour called the toggle’s disappearance a “bug,” reiterating what a company spokespe...

United Airlines is adding a long-awaited feature to the in-flight entertainment seatback screens of its new Boeing 737 Max 8 jets — support for Bluetooth headphones. The company is making the upgrade as part of “United Next”, a new plan to expand and modernize its fleet with what it says are larger, fuel-efficient jets and a more comfortable in-flight experience. I haven’t flown in the last two years — for reasons that are hopefully obvious — but the thing that grinds most of my past flying experience to a halt is dealing with the bizarre two-pronged audio jacks airplanes use for inflight audio. Having headphones with a 3.5mm audio jack isn’t hard, but it doesn’t reflect the Bluetooth audio lifestyle, Apple, and plenty of other tech companies have slowly forced me to adopt. I don’t like th...

Joanna Masel is quick to recognize that the contact tracing apps built to track cases of COVID-19 aren’t as good as they could be. The apps, built on a framework offered by Apple and Google, aren’t used by many people in the United States and didn’t seem to make a big difference in the spread of the virus. But Masel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and advisor to the team behind the Arizona exposure notification app, thinks there are ways to make the apps more useful. In a paper published last week with colleagues, she outlined one possible improvement: adjust the apps so that they could better recognize situations where people who are exposed to the virus have a lower risk of catching COVID-19. Then, they may not need to quarantine for a full 14 days. “The possibili...

Facebook is getting into the subscription newsletter game. It’s launching a new service today, called Bulletin, that allows writers to publish free and paid newsletters that can be posted to the web, sent to subscribers’ inboxes, and shared across Facebook. Perhaps the biggest perk for now: Facebook says it won’t take a fee from writers “at launch,” and writers retain full ownership of their work and subscriber list. Malcolm Gladwell, Tan France, and Erin Andrews are among the debut writers The new platform is “focused on empowering independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and power their businesses,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a live audio call discussing the launch. At launch, Facebook has signed up Malcolm Gladwell, Tan France, and Erin Andrews, among others to co...

T-Mobile is offering a new, low-stakes way to try out its network for free for 30 days with no additional equipment required. Identified by Light Reading, T-Mobile’s existing Test Drive program now works over eSIM with compatible iPhones. All you need to do is download an app, follow the instructions to start the trial with eSIM, and you’re up and running — no billing information required. There’s no change to your current carrier plan or phone number, but you’ll be using T-Mobile data on your device. The Test Drive program has been around in one form or another since 2014. With the most recent iteration — which is still available to those who can’t use the eSIM feature — T-Mobile will send you a free Wi-Fi hotspot you can connect to with your current phone to try out the network. This new...