Technology

Facebook estimates it has helped 2.5 million people register to vote this year across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, the company said. With more than a month until the 2020 election, that’s already higher than the two million people it helped register in both 2016 and 2018. The company has set a goal to help four million people register to vote this year, though, so it still has a ways to go. As part of its efforts to reach that goal, the company launched a “voting information center” that has resources about voting on Facebook and Instagram in August. And this weekend, the company started showing users information about how to register to vote at the top of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Facebook says it will continue showing these notifications through September 25th. Image: Fa...

ActBlue, the FEC-certified Democratic fundraising site, says its fundraising following the Friday death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has topped $100 million. The tally broke ActBlue’s previous records for single-day donations, dollars raised in one hour, and dollars raised in one day, the organization said. Ginsburg died of cancer Friday at age 87. “Amid the devastating loss of Justice Ginsburg, it is inspiring to see people taking action to honor her legacy,” ActBlue executive director Erin Hill said in a statement. The surge of small-dollar donations began shortly after Ginsburg’s death was announced Friday evening. Donors gave 1.5 million contributions for a total of $91.4 million between 8PM ET Friday and end-of-day Saturday, with a record $6.3 million in donations betw...

Twitter it was looking into why the neural network it uses to generate photo previews apparently chooses to show white people’s faces more frequently than Black faces. Several Twitter users demonstrated the issue over the weekend, posting examples of posts that had a Black person’s face and a white person’s face. Twitter’s preview showed the white faces more often. The informal testing began after a Twitter user tried to post about a problem he noticed in Zoom’s facial recognition, which was not showing the face of a Black colleague on calls. When he posted to Twitter, he noticed it too was favoring his white face over his Black colleague’s face. Users discovered the preview algorithm chose non-Black cartoon characters as well. When Twitter first began using the neural network to automatic...

I was on a bit of a Star Wars kick the past week, watching The Empire Strikes Back, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi, inspired partly by the great news of a new trailer for The Mandalorian’s second season. Tonight, though, I’m planning to stream RBG, the 2018 documentary about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday. Here’s the original trailer: [embedded content] RBG Ginsburg had an absolutely astonishing career and life, and this documentary, along with the 2018 drama On the Basis of Sex, are both great reminders. RBG is streaming on Hulu. [embedded content] The Mandalorian, Season Two Then of course, we have the first trailer for the second season of the wildly popular Disney Plus show The Mandalorian. The Child is back (aka “Baby Yoda”). Or, he will be back, on Disney Plus Oc...

On Friday, it looked like the US was ready to ban new downloads of TikTok and WeChat, two popular China-based apps that the Trump administration warned posed security threats to American users. The Commerce Department issued an order that would have prohibited new downloads as of Sunday. And on Saturday WeChat in particular saw a sharp uptick in new installs in the US, according to analytics platform Sensor Tower, with an 800 percent week-over-week increase. But as of Sunday afternoon, each has received a reprieve from a US ban, at least temporarily. President Trump said Saturday he had given a deal between TikTok, Oracle, and Walmart his “blessing,” prompting a one-week delay from the Commerce Department on TikTok’s ban. And a judge in California issued a preliminary injunction blocking t...

I’m not sure about you, but one of the things that has been keeping many of us sane during these weird, not-so-wonderful times, is coffee and tea. Besides the caffeine energy lift (for those of us who take it with caffeine), the imbibing of hot liquids can be relaxing, while iced coffee or tea can be very refreshing. With that in mind, we’ve asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their favorite coffee and tea brewers, grinders, and other paraphernalia. If you’re also an enthusiast, we hope you’ll enjoy looking over some of the gadgets that we enjoying using for our daily infusions. If you’re not, maybe this will give you some ideas of things to try. Bialetti Express Moka PotPhoto: Bialetti As a dumb Midwestern American, my first introduction to the Moka Pot came with my very first E...

A judge in California has blocked the Commerce Department’s ban on new downloads of China-based messaging app WeChat, Reuters reported Sunday. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said in her order that WeChat users showed “serious questions going to the merits of the First Amendment claim, the balance of hardships tips in the plaintiffs’ favor.” On Friday, the Commerce Department outlined how the bans on WeChat and TikTok that President Trump had been threatening for months would work: Beginning today at midnight, US users would not be able to download the apps from Apple and Google’s app stores. A tentative agreement appeared to be reached Saturday for a new TikTok entity, TikTok Global, part of a partnership with Oracle and Walmart, so the Commerce Department postponed the TikTok ban until...

President Trump says he has approved “in concept” Oracle’s bid for TikTok, less than a day before a de facto ban he threatened in August was set to go into effect. “I have given the deal my blessing,” Trump said to reporters outside the White House Saturday as he departed for a rally in North Carolina. “I approved the deal in concept.” On Friday, the Commerce Department issued an order to block transactions with both TikTok parent company ByteDance and WeChat, effective September 20th. The order is set to go into effect on November 12th for TikTok, effectively halting the app’s operations. The details of the deal are still in flux, but the new company, called TikTok Global, would be based in the US and take over processing and storage for all US-based TikTok users. Trump said the new compa...

Six people have been indicted by a grand jury in Washington state on charges they bribed Amazon employees to manipulate third-party seller listings on the e-commerce site, including listings for defective or dangerous products, authorities said. Starting in 2017, the people, including two former Amazon employees, paid more than $100,000 to have listings of products and accounts that Amazon had blocked or suspended from its Marketplace, which allows third-party sellers to promote and sell their products, the Department of Justice said. The former employees also provided internal Amazon information that allowed attacks on other third-party sellers and their accounts, including flooding the sellers’ product listings with fake negative reviews, authorities said. The defendants accessed contact...

Messaging app WeChat had its biggest one-day download numbers in nearly two years on Friday, ahead of a ban on new downloads from the US Commerce Department expected to take effect tomorrow. Preliminary data from analytics platform Sensor Tower showed Chinese-based WeChat had 10,000 installs in the US Friday, a 150 percent increase from Thursday and a 233 percent week-over-week increase. That’s the largest number of WeChat installs in the US in one day since October 7th, 2019. Video platform TikTok, also facing a US ban, saw its downloads increase Friday as well, adding 247,000 new installs for a 12 percent increase from Thursday, according to Sensor Tower. TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, has been in talks with US companies over the past several weeks attempting to create...

Twenty-four winners of the Turing Award are endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election, The New York Times reported, explaining they’re concerned the Trump administration’s immigration policies could be detrimental to both computer research and the technology industry over the long term. “The most brilliant people in the world want to come here and be grad students, but now they are being discouraged from coming here, and many are going elsewhere,” David Patterson, a Google distinguished engineer and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley told the Times. Among the names on the endorsement are Vint Cerf, who co-designed TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the internet; Martin Hellman, who invented public key cryptography; Ed Catm...