Technology

Google’s Area 120 team, an internal incubator that creates experimental apps and services, has launched Keen: a would-be Pinterest rival that draws on the search giant’s machine learning expertise to curate topics. Available today on the web and Android, co-founder CJ Adams says Keen aims to be an alternative to “mindlessly” browsing online feeds. Google wants to know: what are you keen on? “On Keen […] you say what you want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people you trust to help make that happen,” writes Adams in a blog post. “You make a ‘keen,’ which can be about any topic, whether it’s baking delicious bread at home, getting into birding or researching typography. Keen lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find...

You can now trade-in your old Mac at Apple Stores in the US and Canada. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman notes that Apple’s site has been edited to remove a disclaimer that says Mac trade-ins are online-only, and a representative from the company confirmed the policy change to Gizmodo. The change means the computers are accepted in-store along with other Apple devices like iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. This follows a Bloomberg report which said the new policy was coming this week. The change theoretically makes it much easier to get money for your old computer towards a gift card or new device. Rather than having to mail in your old machine, if it’s eligible for a trade-in then you should now be able to take it directly to a store and get instant credit for it. In contrast, Apple’s site notes ...

If you’ve been wondering what could knock out one of the United States’ three big cellular carriers’ ability to deliver calls and text messages — and keep it that way for most of an entire day — T-Mobile now has a partial answer that pertains to its extensive nationwide outage Monday. The short version, if we’re reading this correctly: a fiber-optic circuit failed, and its backup circuit also failed, which caused a chain reaction that strained the network to the point that many calls and texts couldn’t make it through. The longer version: June 16th, 2020 6:23pm PST Update on T-Mobile Voice and Text Performance Every day we see the vital role technology plays in keeping us connected, and we know T-Mobile customers rely on our network to ensure they have connections with family, loved ones a...

Logitech announced today that it plans to put labels communicating the carbon impact of products on all product packaging and on its website. The company says it expects labels will appear first on its gaming products later this year. The goal is to include labels across its full product portfolio by 2025, Logitech tells The Verge. “Just like calories went on the packaging in the food industry years ago, we believe that carbon content level should be a choice factor for the consumers who are interested in it,” said Logitech’s CEO Bracken Darrell in an interview with The Verge. The number you’ll see on the label represents the total carbon life cycle of the product. That indicates the amount of carbon emitted in the entire life of the product, including the sourcing of a product’s materials...

A new study analyzing COVID-19 contact tracing apps conducted by Amnesty International has found that Bahrain and Kuwait are using their public health apps as mass surveillance tools. The study analyzed a collection of contact tracing apps, which are designed to inform and monitor physical contact between people in the event someone contracts COVID-19, from 11 countries: Algeria, Bahrain, France, Iceland, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Norway, Qatar, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates. It found three particularly egregious apps that collected satellite location data from users, instead of relying simply on Bluetooth signals, and matched accounts with real identities. In one extreme case, some citizens who downloaded the BeAware Bahrain contact tracing app became contestants on a televised game sh...

Renders for an unannounced Samsung tablet, the Galaxy Tab S7 Plus, show that the device could have a big 12.4-inch screen (via 9to5Google). That screen size would make the Tab S7 Plus quite large compared to most Android tablets, though it would be a bit smaller than Apple’s 12.9-inch iPad Pro. The renders come from leaker OnLeaks and case maker Pigtou and were apparently based on leaked CAD drawings. That means you should take anything about the renders with a grain of salt — but what the renders show seems within the realm of possibility. Here they are, if you want to see them for yourself: Grid View Pigtou’s article also has some rumored specs and information about the Tab S7 Plus. It apparently will be approximately 285mm long, 185mm wide, and 5.7mm thick, and it could come with a dual...

Qualcomm is launching its next 5G chipset today, the Snapdragon 690, the first product in its 6-series chips to get support for the next-generation networking standard — although it’ll only support the slower sub-6GHz versions of 5G, not the faster mmWave standard. The new Snapdragon 690 also promises a variety of other improvements over the previous 6-series chips. Qualcomm says it’ll offer 20 percent better CPU performance and 60 percent faster graphics rendering compared to the Snapdragon 675. Cheaper phones can now get 5G support But the addition of 5G support — by way of a new Snapdragon X51 modem — is particularly important for the broader adoption of 5G, given that the company’s 6-series chips tend to show up in midrange and budget phones, like those from HMD’s Nokia, Motorola, and ...

Facebook aims to improve the resources it providers American voters and will attempt to help more people register to vote ahead of the 2020 US election, according to a new op-ed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg published in USA Today on Tuesday evening. Zuckerberg says the company set a goal of helping 4 million people register to vote, up from 2 million four years ago, through resources provided across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Facebook will also introduce a new “Voting Information Center” similar in design to its COVID-19 hub, which features vetted public health information and news about the novel coronavirus and related topics. “The 2020 election is going to be unlike any other. It was already going to be a heated campaign, and that was before the pandemic — and before the killing of G...

DoorDash, the high-flying food delivery startup, was sued by San Francisco’s district attorney Tuesday for alleged unfair business practices and worker misclassification. It was the latest legal challenge targeting a gig economy company in California since the passage of the state’s first-in-the-nation worker misclassification law. In a statement, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin accused DoorDash of “illegally” classifying its delivery workers as independent contractors when they are, in fact, employees. Boudin argues that misclassification hurts workers by contributing to rising income inequality and the shrinking of the middle class, and it hurts the public by forcing other companies that classify workers as employees to compete with DoorDash on an unfair playing field. “Misc...

United and American Airlines said Monday that they will temporarily ban passengers who don’t comply with a new industry-wide mandatory mask policy that goes into effect this week. The new policy announced this week by industry trade organization Airlines for America covers United, American, Delta, Hawaiian, Southwest, and JetBlue. Face coverings will now be required on all these companies’ domestic flights, though the trade group left room for exceptions like young children, people with disabilities, or people with a medical reason for why they cannot wear a mask. Masks must be worn the entire flight, except for when drinking or eating. While some major airlines already required masks, there were reports that the companies weren’t actually enforcing those policies mid-flight. The trade gro...

Apple is threatening to remove Hey.com from the App Store if the ambitious new email service doesn’t begin offering an in-app subscription and sharing a cut of its revenue, according to an executive at Basecamp, which makes Hey. David Heinemeier Hansson, the CTO of Basecamp, said that Apple is acting like “gangsters,” rejecting a bug fix update and asking the company in a phone call to commit to adding an in-app subscription to prevent it from being removed. “I was taken aback by how brazen that threat was,” Heinemeier Hansson told The Verge. “I thought you were supposed to wrap the threats in euphemisms or something. But it was pretty clear.” In an email to The Verge, Apple said that it requires all developers to follow strict guidelines around business models. The company declined to com...

PS4 and Xbox One owners now have the chance to play the PC version of The Witcher 3 at no extra cost. The Witcher 3 originally released in 2015 on all three of those platforms, but the PC version is arguably the best way to experience the game: console versions were limited to an average framerate around 30 FPS and screen resolutions as low as 720p on the original Xbox One and 900p on PS4. Though the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions would receive 4K resolution and HDR support a few years later, some visual details took a hit, so it’s still worth checking out on PC for better graphics alone. Have you upgraded a gaming PC in the past five years? Better performance is not the only reason console owners should snag it on PC: downloadable fan-made mods can add numerous things not previously foun...