Technology

Los Angeles has settled its lawsuit against the operator of The Weather Channel app. The city filed litigation against the company in 2019, alleging that the app misled millions of people into granting access to their personal location data and sold that data to third parties. While IBM is celebrating this moment by calling those original claims “baseless” in a statement to The Verge, it sounds like they were largely true — since the only thing the settlement requires is for The Weather Channel to proactively warn users that yes, your location data is for sale. As part of the settlement, the app’s operator, TWC Product and Technology LLC, and the app’s owner, IBM Corporation, have agreed to revise the location-tracking disclosure screens to “ensure transparency and informed consent” for us...

You probably know the feeling: you set out to find something new on Netflix, but end up spending more time browsing than actually watching. There’s just so much there that it can be hard to make a choice. Recently I’ve been having the same issue every time I turn on my Xbox. Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service, is much like Netflix and other video streaming services in that, for a monthly fee, you have access to a broad range of experiences. If you follow Microsoft’s marketing, you’ll know that Game Pass is a place for the company’s big first-party games. With a subscription you can play every Halo or Gears of War title. When Halo Infinite is available next year, you won’t need to buy it — the game will debut on Game Pass at launch. Steadily, though, the service has become home to ...

Facebook is making it easier for users to find Black-owned businesses on its platform. The new feature is part of the company’s ongoing initiative, announced in June, that aims to aid Black communities. Admins that manage a Facebook page for a Black-owned business will have the option to self-identify. There is no badge or label that will be displayed to represent these types of businesses on Facebook. Instead, this will allow a business to appear in the “Black-owned Businesses” subsection located in the “Business Nearby” tab. The tech giant is also allowing minority-owned businesses to identify their listings, too. Image: Facebook Other tech companies are also making it easier to find Black-owned businesses. In July, Google introduced a new badge to represent those specific businesses. Ye...

On Tuesday, comedian Hasan Minhaj announced that after two years and six seasons, Netflix canceled Patriot Act. Despite the unexpected axing, it’s a symptom of a larger ailment: streaming can do many things better than traditional broadcast television. Late-night shows are not one of them. Patriot Act is different from a Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon-type program or even some of the other more timely shows Netflix tried to get off the ground, including The Break with Michelle Wolf and The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale. It was reminiscent of great Comedy Central late-night entertainment like The Daily Show, and it existed alongside Netflix series like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. Netflix’s development team claimed th...

In a podcast interview Wednesday, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi rejected the notion his company is capable of employing all of its drivers in California, as a state judge has ordered it to do. “We can’t go out and hire 50,000 people overnight,” Khosrowshahi said on the Pivot School podcast hosted by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. “Everything that we have built is based on this platform that… brings people who want transportation or delivery together. You can’t flip that overnight.” “You can’t flip that overnight” Last week, California Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with AB5, the state law that makes it more difficult for companies to use independent contractors. In his ruling, Schulman dismissed Uber’s argument that it was a technology platform and...

Facebook has conducted its biggest purge yet of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy movement, announcing on Wednesday that it has removed nearly 800 groups related to the topic in its latest moderation sweep. The removals coincide with a new, broader moderation policy detailed in a blog post published today regarding how Facebook handles borderline violent content, with a specific focus on QAnon and “US-based militia organizations.” Now, the social network says it will be purposefully disabling these groups’ ability to organize on Facebook, but not banning the topics they organize around outright as they often do not call directly for real-world violence. “We already remove content calling for or advocating violence and we ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission. Howev...

Lovecraft Country starts with a dream. A Black man fights on a battlefield, but we can’t see who he and his fellows are clashing with. The reveal is spectacular: aliens, monsters, and a princess of Mars. The soldier stares down a menagerie of impossible beings from the works of Wells and Burroughs, white writers who only ever thought to send white men off on adventures to face these creatures. In this dream though, the Black soldier is Atticus Freeman, confronting them with some help from a hero of his own: Jackie Robinson. Then he wakes up — back to the reality of the 1950s where white men are entitled to the world, the paperback on his chest where white authors lay claim to fantasy, and the racism that barely lets him exist in either. Based on Matt Ruff’s novel of the same name, Lovecraf...

Microsoft is revealing the dashboard and software UI that it plans to use on the Xbox Series X. The software giant is mostly sticking to the same guide and interface that exists on the Xbox One today, with big promises of speed improvements and some new rounded UI elements. While these new dashboard design changes will also be available on the Xbox One, the home section of the upcoming Xbox Series X console should load 50 percent faster than existing Xbox One consoles. Microsoft has also reduced the footprint of the home screen, guide, and Store so they use 40 percent less memory on the company’s next-gen console. Microsoft’s new Xbox design improvements. These speed improvements also mean that when you’re switching between games on an Xbox Series X, the home screen will load a third faste...

Instagram is expanding its feed today with the launch of “suggested posts.” These posts, from accounts you don’t follow, will show up after you’ve reached the end of your feed and give you the option to keep scrolling with Instagram’s suggestions. Up until now, the feed has been entirely determined by users’ preferences and the people they follow. For the past couple of years, Instagram has shown users a message when they reach the end of their feeds, meaning they’ve seen every post over the past two days from people they follow. With suggested posts, they’ll have the option to keep scrolling past that marker for more content. (That message will still be there along with the option to revisit old posts.) The suggested posts won’t be the same ones that show up in Explore. They’ll be related...

Apple has become the first US company to hit a market cap of $2 trillion. It’s an arbitrary milestone but a significant one all the same, testimony to the pandemic-defying performance of the iPhone maker. It’s also been just two years since Apple hit a $1 trillion market cap, meaning the company has essentially doubled in value in just over 24 months. Apple is not the first company in the world to hit the $2 trillion benchmark. Saudi Aramco, the gas and oil giant headquartered in Saudi Arabia, did so first. Aramco briefly hit the $2 trillion mark in December 2019 but has since dropped below that figure as its stock price wavers. Apple surpassed it as the world’s most valuable company on August 4th, 2020. Today, shares in the company crossed the $467.77 mark that gives Apple the $2 trillion...

One of the more hopeful developments at tech platforms this year has been their investment in removing misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were all relatively quick to acknowledge the threat that COVID hoaxes represent, and have worked to purge it from their networks. Enforcement of those misinformation policies has sometimes lagged behind the companies’ public statements, though. A piece of anti-vaccination agitprop catchily titled “Plandemic” racked up millions of views before it was spotted and taken down by the platforms in May. More worryingly, a new piece of propaganda pushing a phony COVID cure was seen by 20 million people on Facebook alone before the company got it under control. On Monday, the misinformation researcher Ben Decker warned...

In a new opinion piece for the New York Times, Tim Wu, Columbia University law professor and outspoken promoter of the free and open internet, writes an interesting defense of President Trump’s ban on the Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat in the US. Despite calling Trump “the wrong figure to be fighting this fight,” Wu argues that the threatened bans are “an overdue response, a tit for tat, in a long battle for the soul of the internet.” It’s an interesting counterpoint to the myriad, valid issues that have been raised about the ban, and it’s well worth a read. Core to Wu’s argument is that China has banned TikTok and WeChat competitors like YouTube and WhatsApp for years. Foreign companies are effectively blocked from fully and independently competing in the Chinese market, while Chinese ser...