Technology

After nearly a month of back-and-forth, Grubhub has walked away from a potential acquisition from Uber and will instead merge with European company Just Eat Takeaway. The all-stock deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. Uber was looking to buy Grubhub because the combined food ordering and delivery service would have rivaled, or maybe even surpassed, market leader DoorDash. An acquisition of Grubhub — which owns Eat24, Seamless, and MenuPages — would have been so significant that it was already drawing regulatory heat. Shortly after talks between the two companies were made public in May, a handful of US Senators alerted the country’s top antitrust officials asking for the potential deal to be scrutinized. Possible antitrust trouble was one reason Uber reportedly balked in...

Facebook is partially lifting its advertising ban on face masks and will now allow third-party businesses to advertise cloth masks and other non-medical face coverings like bandanas, the company announced on Wednesday. The company first instituted a site-wide ban on ads for all forms of face masks, including medical and respiratory masks, in March due to national shortages and concern for medical staff and other frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ban was also designed to protect against scams, misleading marketing, and other abuses, as Facebook could not reasonably vet every ad promoting face masks that began flooding online marketplaces in early March. As the spread of the novel coronavirus began accelerating throughout the US earlier this year, a surge in demand for clea...

Under normal circumstances, Google would have introduced its Pixel 4A smartphone by now. Last year’s Pixel 3A and 3A XL upended what consumers could expect from a $400 phone — especially in terms of camera performance. The company aggressively advertised that strength by comparing its midrange device to Apple’s pricey iPhones, which (at the time) couldn’t compare to Pixels when it came to low-light photography. Selling a great camera with Google’s excellent software at a price under $500 turned out to be a smart recipe. It’s generally believed that the Pixel 3A and 3A XL are among the more successful Google-branded phones to date. They were a bright spot between sluggish sales of the Pixel 3 and more recently the Pixel 4. (Last month, The Information published a report that said Google har...

Samsung released a new model of the Galaxy S20 with support for Verizon’s Ultra Wideband millimeter-wave 5G network last week, but it turns out the device includes some compromises over the standard model. As spotted by Digital Trends, the Galaxy S20 5G UW has 8GB of RAM, which is 4GB less than the standard Galaxy S20. The Verizon model also does not include a microSD card slot, which allows owners to expand the phone’s storage capacity. “We had to make certain design and hardware decisions to provide a device with the form factor and price point as other S20 models,” a Samsung spokesperson told Digital Trends. The Galaxy S20 5G UW costs $999.99, the same price as the Galaxy S20. The Samsung Galaxy S20 line launched in March, and it was the first line of mainstream 5G smartphones. Though t...

On Wednesday, Twitter announced that it will begin testing a new feature that will prompt users to think before they tweet articles they haven’t read. This test is currently limited to Android users in English. If a user decides to retweet an article before reading it, Twitter may prompt them to open it before they do so. Twitter did not say when it plans to bring the feature to additional operating systems. “Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you Tweet it,” Twitter said. “To help promote informed discussion, we’re testing a new prompt on Android — when you Retweet an article that you haven’t opened on Twitter, we may ask if you’d like to open it first.” It’s easy for links/articles to go viral on Twitter. This can be powerful but sometimes d...

The American Civil Liberties Union sued Los Angeles Monday over the city’s requirement that electric scooter rental companies provide anonymized real-time location data. The lawsuit centers on the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s use of a digital tool called the Mobility Data Specification program (MDS), which the agency created as a way to track and regulate electric scooters operating on its streets. MDS provides the city with data on where each bike and scooter trip starts, the route each vehicle takes, and where each trip ends. LADOT has said the data won’t be shared with police without a warrant, won’t contain personal identifiers, and won’t be subject to public records requests. But the ACLU says the data tool is unconstitutional. “Renting an electric scooter should not giv...

Twitter is working on a new system for verifying users, according to a tweet by reverse engineer and online sleuth Jane Manchun Wong. She discovered a “request verification” field in the Twitter app in the “personal information” section of the app’s settings. Twitter confirmed Wong’s tweet but declined to comment further. The company’s help page still says its verified account program is on hold, and “we are not accepting any new requests at this time,” however. So it’s not clear when Twitter may reopen verification to users or what the new process may entail. Twitter used to add a blue check next to the names of accounts it had verified as authentic, and that were “of public interest.” Although Twitter originally stated that a verified badge did not imply a formal endorsement by the compa...

IBM will no longer offer general purpose facial recognition or analysis software, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter to Congress today. The company will also no longer develop or research the technology, IBM tells The Verge. Krishna addressed the letter to Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Reps. Karen Bass (D-CA), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY). “IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any [facial recognition] technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna said in the letter. “We believe now is the time to begin a nat...

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong has escaped arrest after a court in Seoul denied prosecutors’ request to detain him while they conduct an investigation into alleged accounting fraud. Lee, who goes by Jay Y. Lee in the West and is the vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, spent almost a year in jail until February 2018 for his role in a separate scandal. “It appears that prosecutors have secured considerable amount of evidence through their investigation, but they fell short of explaining the validity to detain Lee,” the Seoul Central District Court said, as reported by Nikkei. “Considering the significance of the case, it is appropriate to determine whether the suspects are responsible and the degree (of their involvement) through sufficient trials and debates.” As such, the case against Lee cou...

Nintendo Switch styluses aren’t exactly a common accessory for the hybrid gaming system. Sure, there have been a few attempts, but nothing has come close to making a stylus a practical accessory for Switch owners. The Colors SonarPen, the latest attempt at a Switch stylus, goes beyond hardware to try to transform the device into a proper tablet. The stylus is an accompanying piece for Colors Live, a digital painting app for the Nintendo Switch that is the successor to the Nintendo 3DS stylus art game Colors! 3D. The SonarPen is a wired stylus that connects to the Switch’s 3.5mm audio jack due to the console’s lack of built-in Bluetooth. “Because the Switch doesn’t have general Bluetooth, it’s not possible to use professional styluses available for other platforms,” Colors Live designer Jen...

Digital assistants from Amazon, Apple, and Google state their support for the Black Lives Matter movement when prompted (via Business Insider). As people have protested in all 50 states and across the world over the death of George Floyd and against racism and police brutality, tech companies have responded by putting out statements of solidarity against racial injustice. Though not all tech companies or their executives have outright said the words “black lives matter” in their public statements, Amazon, Apple, and Google have programmed their voice assistants state the phrase. The voice assistants also have responses to the question “do all lives matter?”, referencing a right-wing refrain commonly used to criticize the Black Lives Matter movement. Apple and Google’s assistants more empha...

German air taxi startup Lilium said on Monday it has raised an additional $35 million to fuel its goal of launching an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle by 2025. That’s in addition to $240 million raised by the company in early March, when much of the globe began to feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lilium, which is based in Munich, is one of the more promising ventures with its sights set on an urban taxi service meant to supplant normal car traffic. And while other eVTOL companies are struggling to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lilium is continuing to raise funds. As part of its expanded round, Lilium is adding a new investor: Baillie Gifford, the 112-year-old Scottish asset management firm that is the second biggest shareholder in Tesla after Elo...