Technology

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...

Even without Prime Day, Amazon had a blockbuster quarter. Its net income nearly tripled from this time last year, as retail store closures and coronavirus restrictions encouraged people to spend big online. In its earnings report today, Amazon said it made $6.33 billion in net income, up from $2.13 billion during the same quarter a year earlier. Amazon’s Prime Day — which has previously been held in July — was delayed until October, so it didn’t give a boost to this quarter’s results. The corporate holiday / sales event offers days of discounts, helping to drive purchases during an otherwise slower season. Even without it happening this summer, Amazon’s net sales reached $96.1 billion for its third quarter, up from $70.0 billion the same quarter a year earlier. Bezos says customers are alr...

Ted Cruz was shouting at Jack Dorsey. “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” The Republican senator from Texas was yelling at the Twitter CEO during a congressional hearing on speech moderation on Wednesday. According to Cruz, Twitter, Facebook, and Google represented “the single greatest threat to free speech in America and the greatest threat we have to free and fair elections.” The moment could have passed as just another empty symbol of the culture war: a GOP politician insisting against all evidence that conservatives are censored online. But as the Republican war on Big Tech intensifies, conservatives have embraced the idea of directly regulating speech on social media in ways that wou...

Hackers reportedly stole $2.3 million from the Wisconsin Republican Party just weeks before the election using a scheme involving manipulated invoices, the Associated Press reports. The group noted the theft on October 22nd; Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt says that the FBI is currently investigating the case. According to Hitt, hackers used faked invoices from several vendors the campaign was working with for things like election mailings and Trump merchandise. Instead of featuring the vendor’s payment information, the documents relayed the money to the hackers. This kind of hack is actually a fairly common scam: Facebook and Google were hit by a similar phishing scheme in 2017 to the tune of $100 million. Scammers regularly use fake invoices to target businesses, organiza...

Elon Musk was among the celebrities that Trump administration officials tried to woo for a “Helping the President will Help the Country” taxpayer-funded ad blitz that never got off the ground, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. The $300 million campaign was pitched as a way to “defeat despair and inspire hope” over the coronavirus. “We must film them ASAP — we need content in the can now,” one official wrote in an email to contractors who worked on the ad campaign on September 13th. Like many of the more than 250 celebrities screened, Musk’s status on the “Celebrity Participant Status Chart,” first reported by Politico, shows as “pending answer.” An additional note by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s name reads that Musk “stated in 2018 that he was a ‘registered in...

On Thursday, Nvidia opened up preorders for the GeForce RTX 3070, the least-expensive of the three Ampere-powered graphics cards Nvidia announced during its September event. It’s a very good card. But if you’ve been following the RTX 30 series the last couple of months, you will know it’s also been very difficult to get your hands on one, and it will likely remain difficult well into next year. I knew I wanted to upgrade my graphics card this year, and I was dead set on buying the RTX 3080, but it literally sold out as soon as preorders went up. (Damn bots.) So I decided I’d be okay with a 3070; It’s not like I have a 4K monitor yet anyway. This morning, I decided to shoot my shot. Wait for it… I fired up two monitors with 20 different tabs spread across four Google Chrome windows, p...

2020 has been a bad year in almost every way. I don’t need to list the reasons. But one of the few bright spots has been the world of video games. From Animal Crossing helping folks stay connected during the pandemic’s early days to Travis Scott performing a virtual concert in Fortnite to politicians streaming Among Us on Twitch, games seem to be everywhere. They’re embedded in just about every aspect of our culture. Not all of this is new, of course, but it’s been accelerated by the current state of the world, where virtual spaces are becoming as necessary as real ones. In fact, you could say that now is the best possible time to pick up gaming as a hobby. From the sheer breadth of experiences that are available to the simple fact that more people are playing than ever before, video games...