Technology

Users of videoconferencing platform Zoom are reporting problems hosting and joining meetings and the company is investigating, according to the its status page. “Our team is investigating the root cause of issues joining Zoom Meetings. These issues appear to be limited to a subset of users,” according to an update just before 10AM ET. Zoom users in the UK first began noticing widespread outages earlier today, although free accounts appeared to be functioning normally. Some churches have started using Zoom to hold virtual Sunday services during the coronavirus pandemic. Hi there – We have received reports that Zoom users may be experiencing issues hosting and joining meetings. Please see https://t.co/aqz5nS7fZY for updates. — Zoom (@zoom_us) May 17, 2020 Overall Zoom usage has increas...

All across the country, people are finding ways to adapt to our new stay-at-home normal, and for some, that means adopting a furry friend. Shelters in the US have reported an increase in adoptions since the start of the pandemic, some of which have had to create waitlists or pause applications until they can rescue more animals. Petfinder.com, which works with shelters and rescue organizations throughout the country, saw adoption inquiries jump 122 percent between March 15th and April 15th. It’s led to a unique set of issues that many shelters haven’t faced before: juggling increased applications for pet adoptions and foster homes while having to adjust to their new circumstances. Many rescue organizations have had to close their adoption and medical facilities, and with that change has co...

A Friday letter from Amazon to members of Congress looking into the company’s third-party seller practices was “unacceptable,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tweeted Saturday. At issue is an Amazon executive’s testimony at a hearing last July, where he said the company doesn’t access information from third-party sellers on its platform to make competing items. But the Wall Street Journal reported last month that Amazon employees regularly used information from the sellers to develop the company’s private-label products. “Members from both parties have serious questions about Amazon’s business practices and its honesty with the Committee,” Nadler tweeted. “We will not permit stonewalling of our investigation, by Jeff Bezos or anyone.” Amazon vice president of public ...

Edison Mail has rolled back a software update that apparently let some users of its iOS app see emails from strangers’ accounts. Several Edison users contacted The Verge to report seeing the glitch after they applied the update, which was meant to allow users to sync data across devices. Reader Matthew Grzybowski said after the update he had more than 100 unread messages from the UK-based email account of a stranger. He didn’t have to enter any credentials to see the emails, Grzybowski added. Others on Twitter reported similar issues: The company said it was a bug, not a security breach, and that the issue appeared limited to users of the iOS app. “Ten hours ago a software update was rolled out to a small percentage of our user base. Some of these users who received the update are experien...

The Gigabyte Aero 15 is a laptop aimed at designers and creative professionals. But when I first saw the thing, I didn’t believe that. It looks nothing like any laptop that comes to mind when I think of “creators” (the slim and sleek MacBook Pros, XPS 15s, Surface Books, and Zenbooks of the world). The Aero is a beast. It’s 15.6 inches wide and 4.4 pounds. It has a bright LED logo on its lid, large visible vents on the back and bottom, and a colorful RGB keyboard that will turn heads from across the office. This is a gaming laptop, I thought on my first day using it. Designers won’t want this. But I’ve made myself stop thinking that because the reality is: that’s a stereotype. There’s no reason that big, flashy devices should be reserved for gamers; that’s just a design trend companies dec...

You can get two of Amazon’s Echo Show 5 smart displays for $90 today at Best Buy. To break down why exactly that’s a deal worth highlighting, that’s the regular price for just one of them. This model has a 5.5-inch display, which makes it easier to fit just about anywhere inside your home. And since this deal includes a second display, you can choose to set it up in a different part of your living space, or you can gift it to someone who you’d like to keep in contact with via its built-in camera. We think that the Echo Show 8, Amazon’s eight-inch display, is the one most people should buy due to its bigger screen and more powerful sound. Though, in terms of functionality, they’re identical — the Echo Show 5 is just tinier and thus, it’s better suited as a smart alarm clock than an entertai...

Facebook is buying Giphy, and that means how you send and receive GIFs on the internet could change forever. The service claims that more than 700 million people see Giphy content every day, and many of those views come from some of the internet’s most popular apps— from Apple’s iMessage to TikTok and Twitter — most of which rely on Giphy’s API and archives to let users share and post GIFs. It’s likely that at least some of those services won’t want to have a Facebook-owned platform integrated with their products moving forward. Not only do these companies generally prefer not to rely on major competitors, but Facebook’s services have had issues with privacy (like the Cambridge Analytica scandal) and reliability (like when a small Facebook SDK bug took down many major mobile apps earlier t...

Microsoft’s Surface Duo is meant to be a showcase for its unique, dual-screen design, so it may be a bit more forgivable that its specs don’t include the latest and greatest components or anything all that’s impressive by way of battery life and storage. According to Windows Central, the phone will ship with the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 (which we knew last year when it was announced), a rather small 3,460mAh battery considering it’s powering two screens, and storage options of 64GB or 256GB. Beyond the Duo’s signature two 5.6-inch displays, which can rotate 360 degrees and transform it into an 8.3-inch tablet when unfolded, Windows Central says the device will pack 6GB of RAM, an 11-megapixel camera for both front-facing and rear-facing photos and videos, a fingerprint sensor for auth...

Panasonic has resumed its work making battery cells at Tesla’s Gigafactory outside Reno, Nevada, the company tells The Verge. But Panasonic will not return to work at Tesla’s Buffalo, New York solar panel factory this weekend as planned. Mark Shima, president of Panasonic Solar North America (PSNA), has told employees in emails obtained by The Verge that the company has to delay bringing workers back because the region the factory is in, Western New York, did not meet New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s new criteria for reopening. “We will NOT restart manufacturing on this Saturday, May 16th,” Shima wrote in an email sent Thursday. “The new target date depends on the COVID-19 situation of Erie County and it will be announced from me in next several days.” A Panasonic employee in Buffalo...

GrubHub has come under intense scrutiny of late for what critics and some restaurant owners say are exploitative fees made only worse during the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a revealing BuzzFeed News story has shed light on another controversial yet longtime practice around phone ordering. The company, which also owns the Seamless and Eat24 services and is the largest food ordering platform in the US, uses an assortment of fees to collect revenue from restaurants, ranging from fees for marketing to various commissions on orders made through the web and its app. But as BuzzFeed points out, a lesser known method GrubHub uses to extract money from small businesses involves putting its own custom phone number on business pages that redirects calls to the partner restaurant. That way, when a cust...

A bipartisan group of senators are sounding the antitrust enforcement alarm Friday over Facebook’s newly announced acquisition of Giphy, a GIF-making and sharing website. On Friday, Facebook announced that it would acquire Giphy for the reported price of $400 million. Giphy is one of the largest GIF sites on the internet and social media and messaging services like Twitter, Tinder, Slack and iMessage already have Giphy integrated into their apps. In a Friday blog post, Facebook said that half of Giphy’s traffic comes from Facebook apps and that the gif website would be rolled into Instagram, a Facebook-owned product. In that same post, Facebook suggested that Giphy’s core function as a GIF-sharing app across social media would not change and that developers would “continue to have the same...

Fitbit, which makes fitness-tracking wearables, will be shifting supply chain resources to make emergency ventilators, Fitbit CEO James Park said to CNBC. The ventilators will be used to help treat COVID-19 patients and could help bolster the national supply of the medical devices, which have been in need during the pandemic. “There was a lot of concern about the shortage of ventilators and we realized we had expertise already around the supply chain,” Park said to CNBC. Fitbit plans to submit the designs for the ventilator to the FDA under an emergency use authorization Fitbit plans to submit the designs for its ventilator to the Food and Drug Administration under an emergency use authorization “in the coming days,” according to CNBC. An emergency use authorization is exactly what it soun...