Technology

In its first report on its autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona, Waymo said that it was involved in 18 crashes and 29 near-miss collisions during 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. These crashes included rear-enders, vehicle swipes, and even one incident when a Waymo vehicle was T-boned at an intersection by another car at nearly 40 mph. The company said that no one was seriously injured and “nearly all” of the collisions were the fault of the other driver. The report is the deepest dive yet into the real-life operations of the world’s leading autonomous vehicle company, which recently began offering rides in its fully driverless vehicles to the general public. Autonomous vehicle (AV) companies can be a black box, with most firms keeping a tight lid on measurable metrics ...

The hottest decorations this Halloween may turn out to be PVC pipe covered in orange duct tape or painted a garish, spooky purple. From Chicago to Washington state, people are rigging up “candy chutes” to send Twix and Milky Ways into the waiting buckets of trick-or-treaters from a safe distance during the pandemic. They range from simple slides all the way to elaborate feats of puppetry — and they’ll be called into action tomorrow. Sarah Millar installs a candy chute for trick-or-treaters outside her home in the Edgewater neighborhood Sunday in Chicago. The chute allows children to collect candy from neighbors while social distancing during Halloween. pic.twitter.com/BAnxOZ0g42 — armando l sanchez (@mandophotos) October 25, 2020 “People have certainly gotten creative, and as bizarre as it...

The new Oculus Quest 2 VR headset was preordered more than five times as much as last year’s original model, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Facebook’s earnings call. Zuckerberg characterized the launch of the Quest 2 as the company taking “major steps forward in building the next computing platform.” “I’ve been very impressed and excited by the progress that our teams have made on this,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “I think that the new Quest 2 product is extraordinary. I love using it. And I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done there.” It’s not really surprising that there’d be pent-up demand for the Quest 2. The improved standalone headset is shipping with a starting price of $299 — that’s $100 less than the previous model, which has been difficult to find in stock all year. Faceboo...

Sony PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan says virtual reality won’t be a meaningful part of interactive entertainment in the near future. Ryan indicated to The Washington Post that VR still has a long way to go, although he emphasized that Sony isn’t giving up on the medium. The statement suggests that an update to Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is years away. “I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan told the Post. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that.” He notes that the upcoming PlayStation 5, which will be released November 12th, supports...

Samsung is back on top as the world’s biggest smartphone vendor one quarter after losing its spot to Huawei, according to reports from IDC, Counterpoint, and Canalys. The news comes just as Samsung posted its highest quarterly revenue figures ever, which the company said was helped by a boost in demand for smartphones. Huawei became the number one vendor for the first time three months ago, benefiting from strong sales in China while much of the rest of the world was operating under constrained retail conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Huawei’s shipments fell 7 percent quarter-on-quarter and 24 percent year-on-year, according to Counterpoint, while Samsung’s shipments increased by 47 percent over the last quarter. Xiaomi was able to regain the number three spot for the first time...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has successfully stored a small cache of rocks that it grabbed from the surface of an asteroid named Bennu last week, sealing the pebbles inside the vehicle’s belly. The asteroid particles will now remain inside the spacecraft over the next three years, as OSIRIS-REx makes its way back to Earth. OSIRIS-REx grabbed the sample on October 20th of last week, more than four years after launching from Earth on its mission to touch an asteroid. Using a thin robotic arm, the vehicle lightly tapped the asteroid Bennu, stirring up rocks on the surface and pushing some of the pebbles up into the spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx was a little too good at this sample grab While the maneuver worked as planned, OSIRIS-REx was a little too good at this sample grab. The vehicle wound up c...

Google parent company Alphabet’s third quarter revenue increased 14 percent from the year before, led by a rebound in advertising revenue for both Google and YouTube. YouTube brought in $5 billion in advertising revenue in the third quarter of 2020 — a sign that advertisers who pulled back on their spending because of the coronavirus earlier in the year may be returning to something resembling normal. YouTube now has more than 30 million music and premium paid subscribers — 35 million, including free trials — and YouTube TV has more than 3 million subscribers. That’s especially strong, since YouTube TV announced a monthly price increase from $50 to $64.99 in June. And in what may be a sign of the times, views for guided meditation videos on YouTube were up 40 percent since March, and DIY f...

There are any number of VPN services you can use to help protect your privacy and security with an encrypted internet connection, and now Google has its own. Well, technically, it already did, but only for Google Fi cellular subscribers on Android smartphones. Now, the company’s announcing it’ll throw in an Android-based VPN free of charge to any 2TB Google One cloud storage subscriber in the US — and will expand to iOS, Windows and Mac and other countries “in the coming months.” As you can see in the image above, you’ll need to be on the 2TB Google One plan which costs $9.99 a month or $99 per year, so it’s not exactly a free VPN. But if you’re interested, this Google GIF shows you how to turn it on: A new VPN is just the latest way that Google’s trying to sweeten its cloud storage offeri...

Remember Quibi, short-lived media company and purveyor of bizarre shows like Murder House Flip and a horror anthology featuring a golden arm? It’s only been a little over a week since the mobile-first, shortform streamer announced it was shuttering, but already the first of its unreleased shows has found a new home: Lil Yachty’s dramedy, Public Figures, is headed to HBO Max. It seems pieces of Quibi might live on — whether you watched it or not. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s efforts to sell Quibi outright to big companies like Apple and WarnerMedia was one of the first indications that things were about to go bottoms up at the young company. The attempts that followed to sell off Quibi’s unreleased content all but confirmed the streamer’s fate. It’s unknown whether other Quibi shows...

Among the tech platforms, no company, perhaps save Twitter, has had as contentious of a year as Facebook. The social media giant spent the last three months dealing with a notable ad boycott and one of the messiest and most complicated election cycles in US political history. Yet, Facebook’s handling of its many issues around political advertising, moderation, and election interference have had seemingly no effect on its bottom line, as the company just reported an astonishing quarter of revenue and user growth. The company reported a 22 percent year-over-year increase in revenue to $21.2 billion, as well as a 12 percent increase in profit to $8 billion. Its user growth is also still in the double digits, with 12 percent more people checking the main Facebook app every day for a total of 1...

Apple today announced its fiscal fourth quarter earnings, reporting $64.7 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $0.73 in a quarter that was “led by all-time records for Mac and services,” according to CEO Tim Cook. Like last quarter, Apple’s Mac and iPad lines showed strong performance as people continue working and learning from home due to the continued COVID-19 pandemic. The Mac had its biggest quarter ever, tallying $9 billion in sales. Apple introduced the latest iteration of its entry-level $329 iPad in September, increasing the device’s performance. The mid-tier iPad Air got a more significant makeover with a new design — now matching the iPad Pro — and a much faster processor. iPad sales were up 46 percent from the year-ago quarter. Unlike in recent years, and because the iP...

Apple’s big services bundle that will bring together products like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and Apple News Plus, will launch tomorrow, the company’s chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, told Bloomberg. Apple first announced Apple One during a September event, breaking down the different tiers that customers will be able to access. There are three different bundle tiers people can choose: Individual, Family, and Premier. The Individual plan gives subscribers Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and iCloud storage (50GB) for $14.95 a month. The Family plan ups the amount of iCloud storage to 200GB of iCloud storage for $19.95 a month and adds an Apple Music family plan (the Arcade and TV Plus benefits are the same as the Individual plan.) The Premier plan gives subscr...