Technology

President Donald Trump says he’s recovered from COVID-19. Outside doctors say it’s too soon for him to return to public events, he’s coughing on Fox News, and he’s taking a potent steroid that can mask symptoms — but Trump says he’s not sick anymore. And he’s crediting that recovery to an experimental drug made by the company Regeneron, which he said on Wednesday was a “cure.” “They gave me Regeneron, and it was, like, unbelievable. I felt good immediately,” he said in a video recorded at the White House. There’s no evidence that the Regeneron drug had anything to do with how good Trump did or did not feel. There’s hardly any data that the drug, which is a cocktail of artificial antibodies against the coronavirus, works at all. So far, all we have are a few bits of information on a small g...

Aside from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Prime Day has become one of the biggest shopping moments of the year. It’s a two-day stretch wherein Amazon Prime members will likely find some of the best prices yet on popular tech products like games, gaming consoles, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories, and more. And with Prime Day 2020 happening so close to the year’s end, this week could be a good time to snag some gifts. Of course, not all of the best Prime Day 2020 deals will live on Amazon. Many other retailers, including Target, Best Buy, Walmart, and many more will also run competing deals you’ll probably want to know about. You can count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about, but if you want to be among the first people to know about price drops on products you...

Peloton has removed several hashtags related to the QAnon conspiracy theory from its virtual exercise platform, Business Insider reported. The move followed a tweet from a Washington Post editor earlier in the week that showed several hashtags— which allow people taking the same online fitness classes to connect with each other— using variants of QAnon’s “where we go 1 we go all” hashtag. A Peloton spokesperson told BI the company has “a zero-tolerance policy against hateful content” and removed the QAnon hashtags for violating that policy. QAnon is a false conspiracy theory that claims, among other things, that President Trump is secretly planning to arrest high-profile Democratic politicians and celebrities for pedophilia or cannibalism, and that he sends them coded messages about his pl...

Not everyone can afford a premium electric bike with prices that usually start at $2,000. But what if you could spend half that and still grab yourself a good-enough e-bike that’s suitable for long urban commutes and flexible enough to toss into the trunk of your car, roll onto a train, or carry home to your fifth-floor walkup? That’s what I hoped to find with the newest folding e-bike from the Chinese brand Fiido, which recently started selling directly into the European and North American markets. The Fiido D11 ticks all the boxes: it’s available for as little as $999.99, has a claimed range of up to 100km, and folds into a tiny transportable package. It also looks nice. But is it any good? Verge Score 7 out of 10 Good Stuff Good value for money Throttle with cruise control Good range fr...

Pakistan’s telecom regulator has banned TikTok, claiming the app failed to remove “immoral” and “indecent” content. The ban comes just over a month after the regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, banned dating apps, including Tinder and Grindr, for the same reason. TikTok had been installed 43 million times in Pakistan, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. That made it the app’s 12th largest market in terms of installs. The firm estimates TikTok has been installed 2.2 billion times total across Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. TikTok restricted two out of 40 accounts Pakistan flagged during the first half of 2020 The ban comes just a few months after TikTok was removed in India over concerns around the app’s Chinese ownership. The United States is still mo...

Amazon has officially canceled Crucible, its free-to-play multiplayer shooter. It’s the end of a rocky journey for the game, which was first launched in May after years in development before being put back into closed beta in July. “We very much appreciate the way that our fans have rallied around our efforts, and we’ve loved seeing your responses to the changes we’ve made over the last few months, but ultimately we didn’t see a healthy, sustainable future ahead [for] Crucible,” the Crucible team said in a blog post. If you’re in the closed beta, you’ll still be able to play the game in some form for a short while. The developers will be hosting a “a final playtest and community celebration” in the next few weeks, according to the blog. Once that’s done, matchmaking will be disabled, but y...

My biggest complaint about Disney Plus for the longest time was that it didn’t seem to understand how people (read: me) want to watch movies. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a perfect example. When Disney Plus launched, the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies weren’t exactly organized. There were rows for featured titles, movies, and TV shows, but everything was kind of strewn together. Almost every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie you wanted was here — you just had to spend a minute finding it. Now, however, it looks like Disney has changed around the Marvel section a tad to make it, well, make sense. In the screenshot below (taken from a Disney Plus US account), the Marvel films are separated into their specific phases, and then there’s an additional row for people who want to watch the Mar...

Google’s Meet videoconferencing service is getting breakout rooms, but they’ll only be available to G Suite Enterprise for Education customers at first, according to a Google blog post (via 9to5Google). With the feature, teachers and educators will be able to break their classes into smaller groups for things like projects or focused discussions. Google will let you make up to 100 breakout rooms in a single call. Once you’ve decided how many breakout rooms you want, Google will randomly group up the people on the call into rooms, but moderators can manually add people to other rooms if they want. Meeting moderators can also hop between rooms to check in on groups. If breakout rooms are something you might want to try out, but you aren’t an Enterprise for Education customer, you might be ab...

Apple is shifting how it ships devices to consumers: instead of sending out all of its hardware products directly from China or from local warehouses, the company is now going to use its network of Apple Stores as de-facto fulfillment centers, shipping products directly from the stores to get to customers faster. The change, Bloomberg reports, will use Apple’s nearly 300 stores in the US and Canada to speed up local delivery for customers within 100 miles of a store. The company has already apparently started using the new system with several stores earlier this year, but the broader rollout is coming just ahead of Apple’s upcoming iPhone launch next week (which is already taking place later than usual). The shift is largely an internal one, according to Bloomberg — so customers won’t be a...

Fortnite won’t be coming back to the App Store any time soon. On Friday, Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers refused to grant Epic Games a preliminary injunction against Apple that would force the game developer to reinstate Fortnite on the App Store, while simultaneously granting an injunction that keeps Apple from retaliating against the Unreal Engine, which Epic also owns (PDF). In other words, we now have a permanent version of the temporary restraining order ruling from last month. That means the state of affairs, in which Epic is banned from publishing new games on iOS and cannot distribute Fortnite on the App Store in its current form, will remain in place for the length of the trial — unless Epic decides to remove its own in-app payment mechanism that initiated the bitter legal feud in Au...

Google contractors who recently unionized say their jobs are being slowly shipped to Poland. On Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint laying out the allegations against HCL America, an engineering and IT contractor that works with Google in Pittsburgh. Obtained by Motherboard, the complaint argues the jobs are being outsourced in retaliation for legitimate union activity. In particular, the NLRB says the conduct took place “because employees formed, joined and assisted the Union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” None of the affected workers are legal employees of Google, but they specialize in engineering and IT tasks for HCL. The contractors voted to unionize in 2019, organizing under the Un...

Twitter announced a slew of temporary changes on Friday aimed at staving off abuse around the November 3rd US presidential election. Tweets that include premature claims of victory will be labeled, tweets intended to incite interference in the election or election results will be subject to removal, and tweets from political figures with more than 100,000 followers — which includes President Trump — that are labeled as “misleading” will be more difficult to access. “Twitter has a critical role to play in protecting the integrity of the election conversation, and we encourage candidates, campaigns, news outlets and voters to use Twitter respectfully and to recognize our collective responsibility to the electorate to guarantee a safe, fair and legitimate democratic process this November,” ac...