Technology

CVS is expanding its payment options by teaming up with PayPal to use its QR codes as another touch-free form of payment at the retail pharmacy chain. PayPal and Venmo users can pay with money that’s already in their account instead of having to pay with a credit card, and Venmo users can also use Venmo Rewards to pay for items, all “without needing to touch a keypad or sign a receipt.” CVS says the new QR codes will arrive at 8,200 of its US stores in the fourth quarter of 2020. Since we’re in the middle of an ongoing pandemic, it’s not the most ideal to be touching in public, so if you don’t have tap-to-pay on your phone or simply don’t use it, it’s another way to do touch-free payment at stores. CVS says it will be the first nationwide retailer to accept PayPal and Venmo QR codes at che...

An amendment proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that would ban the US military from recruiting on Twitch failed a House vote Thursday evening. Had it passed, it would have been an amendment to the House Committee on Appropriations bill, which is part of the process in how the Pentagon’s annual budget is set. The vote is now at 45 yeas to 105 nays. Majority is not in favor of @AOC‘s bill. The US Navy and Army have stated they will continue to stream on Twitch and declined to comment on pending legislation. — Shannon Liao (@Shannon_Liao) July 30, 2020 Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her frustration at trying to win over her colleagues Thursday evening: Imagine trying to explain to your colleagues who are members of Congress what Twitch is — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) July 30, ...

Microsoft’s new Edge browser is randomly crashing when users type into the address bar tonight. The issues appear to be affecting Edge users who have selected Google as the default search engine. Microsoft says it’s aware of the problems and the company’s Edge team is investigating. Microsoft recommends turning off Search Suggestions in edge://settings/search. The Verge has tested this workaround and it solves the problem if you have Google set as your default search engine. Are you seeing Edge crash when trying to type into the address bar? The team is looking into it! In the meantime, as a workaround, please turn off Search Suggestions here: edge://settings/search. We’ll follow up once we have more! — Microsoft Edge Dev (@MSEdgeDev) July 30, 2020 The Microsoft Edge crashes started ...

From a pure entertainment perspective, I am genuinely sorry that the House’s antitrust hearing targeting the big four tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google — took place Wednesday instead of next week. Because literally a day after a meeting attempting to determine if Big Tech was too big, three of the four companies in the hearing got bigger. (Google’s parent company, Alphabet, had a decline in revenue of about 2 percent, mostly due to a decline in search ads — but this was still better than analysts predicted.) None of these companies wanted their earnings numbers read aloud to them before questioning began The hearing was about how tech companies have consolidated their power. The coronavirus seems to be making that consolidation even easier. No wonder, when it became clear...

Twitter provided an update about the unprecedented July 15th attack that allowed hackers to tweet from some of the most high-profile accounts on the service, in a blog post and a series of tweets published Thursday evening. Twitter now says that a few employees were targeted in a phone spear phishing attack. While Twitter doesn’t quite say, that presumably means hackers called up Twitter employees while posing as colleagues or members of Twitter’s own security team, and got them to reveal the credentials they use to access internal systems. Twitter had previously said its own tools were compromised in the attack, but up until this point, the company hadn’t specified how that had happened. “This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit hu...

Apple today reported extremely strong third quarter earnings, offering another look at how the company is shaking off the toll the COVID-19 pandemic is taking on its business. Analysts had been expecting around $52.3 billion in revenue and earnings per share of $2.07, but Apple crushed those predictions with $59.7 billion in revenue — up 11 percent from last year’s third quarter — and EPS of $2.58, up 18 percent. The company announced a four-for-one stock split alongside the earnings, saying that “each Apple shareholder of record at the close of business on August 24th, 2020 will receive three additional shares for every share held on the record date.” As has become the norm, Apple’s services and wearables divisions performed strongly. But the iPhone, Mac, and iPad all fared well during Q3...

Before Android, before the iPhone, and before GoPro became a known brand, the Flip Video camcorder took the world by storm, allowing millions to shoot digital home videos one-handed and easily save, share, and upload them to a nascent YouTube, thanks to an iconic flip-out USB port. What you probably didn’t know: the Flip Video was almost a Google-branded camera, internal Google emails revealed by the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust sub-committee show. It would have been Google’s first camera and perhaps the first piece of Google-branded hardware as well. What we know In January 2006, a year and a half before the first Flip Video went on sale, Google Video product manager Peter Chane tried to convince his colleagues that they should cut a deal to make Google Video the primary video ho...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos warned investors earlier this year that they might want to take a seat and prepare for a possible loss in Q2, as the company planned to spend $4 billion — all of its expected Q2 operating profit — on COVID 19-related expenses. Amazon projected a potential loss of $1.5 billion this quarter. But with the end of Q2 now behind us, Amazon shared its quarterly results, and they’re quite the opposite of gloomy. Despite the pandemic, Amazon doubled its net profit year over year to $5.2 billion, compared to $2.6 billion at this time in 2019. This impressive figure comes after the company spent over $4 billion on what Bezos describes as “incremental COVID-19 related costs in the quarter to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers,” suggesting profit could have...

Apple has confirmed it’s planning to launch its new iPhones a little later this year. “Last year we started selling new iPhones in late September, this year we expect supply to be available a few weeks later,” said Apple CFO Luca Maestri in an earnings call with investors today. Maestri didn’t reveal why this year’s iPhone supply is delayed or constrained, but rumors of an iPhone delay have been circulating for months. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Apple had delayed mass production of its upcoming iPhone handsets by around a month. Qualcomm also hinted at an iPhone delay earlier this week, highlighting a “partial impact from the delay of a global 5G flagship phone launch” for its fourth quarter projections. Apple typically unveils its annual iPhone refresh in Sept...

For years, Razer has set the standard for making gaming laptops that are compact, slim, and feel great to use. MSI wants to end that streak, and its new GS66 Stealth is actually a viable alternative, at least in terms of performance. It still has a little work to do on nailing the small design details. The GS66 Stealth doesn’t quite nail the fit and finish to take on the best, but landing short of that still gets you a polished laptop that’s stuffed with powerful components and other features that typically come with a $2,349 gaming laptop (as configured; this model starts at $1,499 and goes up to $2,999). It has a Thunderbolt 3 port for fast data transfer, and its display has a 300Hz refresh rate that takes full advantage of the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Max-Q graphics to show off your games ...

The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel has been very busy Contributors: Verge Staff On July 29th, the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee held a hearing with four of the biggest figures in tech: Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. But while the CEOs’ testimonies got most of the attention, the subcommittee also published a treasure trove of internal documents from the companies, providing an unexpected look into the internal workings of some of the largest and most secretive companies in the world. Some of those documents have gone into building the antitrust case for breaking these companies up — or at least heavily regulating them. But others simply give a glimpse into how the world’s largest tech companies operate, ...

The latest electric vehicle startup to cash in on a new wave of hype and investment in the space is Li Auto, a five-year-old Chinese company that started trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday after raising $1.1 billion in an initial public offering. It’s the second Chinese EV startup to become a publicly traded company in the United States, following Nio’s 2018 IPO and subsequent listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Another, XPeng, will reportedly be next. With Tesla recently becoming the world’s most valuable automaker, there is suddenly a renewed focus on funding EV startups. Fresh money has been rushing into the likes of Rivian, Nikola, Fisker, Karma, and even suppliers like Velodyne and Hyliion over the last few months from both the public and private sectors. While most of the ones goi...