Technology

Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite now comes in two new colors, plum and and sage (via The Digital Reader). That means the Paperwhite is now available in four different colors — when Amazon revised the Paperwhite in November 2018, you could only get it in black, and Amazon introduced “twilight blue” last July. If you opt for a non-black Paperwhite, you should know that only the back of the device will be your chosen color. The front bezels will be black no matter which color option you pick. Amazon’s 2018 revision to the Paperwhite brought some nice new additions, including waterproofing and support for Audible audiobooks, which had previously been exclusive to the Amazon’s top-end Kindle Oasis. But it would have been nice to see Amazon make more changes to the Paperwhite in addition to launching ...

Here’s all the news about the Android 11 beta Contributors: Verge Staff Android 11 is on the way, bringing a bunch of new changes and features for phones and tablets. Google originally planned to release the beta during a reveal event on June 3rd, but the company delayed and ultimately canceled the event in favor of a quieter announcement. The public beta was released a week later, following a developer preview that was launched in February. The 11th major Android update includes some big features, including a new notification interface for text messages, better 5G support, and improved privacy features. The update also adds better support for foldable smartphones, optimizing for the growing device category, and a new power button menu with quick access to payment options and smart home co...

Tesla’s stock price hit $1,000 for the first time on Wednesday, meaning the Silicon Valley company has now passed Toyota in market capitalization and is the most valuable automaker in the world by that metric. This comes as at least six Tesla employees have tested positive for COVID-19 in California since CEO Elon Musk reopened the company’s facilities there last month — initially in violation of stay-home orders, and then with the blessing of local officials — according to new reports from The Washington Post and Electrek. An employee at Tesla’s Buffalo, New York solar panel factory also tested positive for COVID-19 after that facility reopened, as The Verge previously reported. Tesla employed 48,000 people worldwide at the end of 2019. It’s unclear how many have tested positive for COVID...

Amazon is announcing a one-year moratorium on allowing law enforcement to use its controversial Rekognition facial recognition platform, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday. The news comes just two days after IBM said it would no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition technology, citing potential human rights and privacy abuses and research indicating facial recognition tech, despite the advances provided by artificial intelligence, remains biased along lines of age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Much of the foundational work showing the flaws of modern facial recognition tech with regard to racial bias is thanks to Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, and Timnit Gebru, a member at Microsoft Research. Buolamwini and Gebry co-authored a widely cited 2018 paper...

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...