Technology

Zoom has acquired Keybase, an encryption and security service meant to serve as a secure home for your online identities. The acquisition is meant to quickly add a team of security-focused developers to Zoom, which has been widely criticized in recent weeks for lapses in security inside its increasingly popular videoconferencing software. Keybase co-founder Max Krohn will now lead Zoom’s security engineering team. The Keybase team is supposed to help Zoom build end-to-end encryption for its videoconferences “that can reach current Zoom scalability.” Zoom has been working on building true end-to-end encryption for videoconferences since coming under criticism over the last month for making its calls incorrectly appear to be fully encrypted. The company plans to publish encryption designs on...

People in the United States spend upward of 90 percent of their time indoors — inside homes, apartment buildings, schools, and offices. With the threat of COVID-19 looming over every interaction, those indoor spaces (where the virus spreads more easily) can seem loaded with hidden threats. Fortunately, scientists already have the tools to make buildings better for people and less hospitable to pathogens like the coronavirus. “The science is decades old on all the benefits that come from healthy buildings, including infectious disease reduction,” says Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But these strategies have not been fully deployed in buildings.” “The science is decades old on all the benefits that come from healthy ...

Swedish audio brand UrbanEars has announced its first pairs of true wireless earbuds, the Luma and the Alby. They’re modestly specced, but that’s understandable considering they’re priced at just $99 and $69 respectively. The UrbanEars Alby are the cheaper of the two at $69, and for that price you’re getting three hours of battery life from the earbuds themselves, plus an extra 12 hours from the USB-C charging case. They’ve got an IPX4 resistance to water splashing, and there’s a single microphone on each earbud for making calls. Stepping up to the $99 Luma gets you more battery life with 5 hours per charge, a wireless charging (or USB-C) case that provides 20 hours more, and an extra microphone on each earbud to reduce background noise when calling. Both sets of buds include touch and voi...

When Viacom and CBS closed their merger in December 2019, the latter company gained access to a plethora of networks — networks the newly merged company, ViacomCBS, is now bringing to distribution partner Google in a new deal with YouTube TV. Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, CMT, Paramount Network, TV Land, and VH1 will all launch on YouTube TV this summer, the company announced today. The multi-year deal also includes prior CBS channels that were available to YouTube TV subscribers, including CBS broadcast stations, CBS Sports Network, Pop TV, Smithsonian Channel, and The CW. YouTube TV will also continue to carry ViacomCBS’ premium cable brand, Showtime, as part of the extended distribution agreement. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. “We are thrilled to have rea...

A few days ago Marques Brownlee declared 2020 “the year of the ultraminor Apple update.” He’s got good evidence for doing so: the iPad Pro, iPhone SE, and even the new 13-inch MacBook Pros are all fairly minor on paper. I think I can both narrow and expand that declaration, though. I hold out hope we’ll see something more substantial this fall in a few products (looking at you, Pixel and iPhone), so let’s narrow it to this spring. But let’s also expand it beyond Apple: yesterday’s pile of new hardware announcements from both Microsoft and Sonos are the very definition of iterative updates. Microsoft put out new versions of the Surface Book, Surface Go, Surface headphones, and Surface Dock that amount to spec bumps. But the thing about spec bumps is sometimes they turn out to be transformat...

Microsoft is hosting an event today where it will show off the first gameplay footage from several games launching on its upcoming Xbox Series X console. One of those games will be Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which was recently announced for the console (with Smart Delivery support, no less, like Cyberpunk 2077). And just to keep expectations at bay, we already know that Microsoft is waiting until July to show off Halo Infinite and other titles from its internal Xbox Game Studios. Still, that leaves a lot of open space for new and returning franchises to make their next-gen debut. How do I watch the Xbox Series X gameplay preview? We’ve posted the YouTube stream above, but it’s being hosted at a bunch of other places around the web. Take your pick: What time does the Xbox Series X gameplay ...

Nintendo Switch sales were up 34 percent year-on-year last quarter as the company moved 3.29 million units, despite acknowledging that production has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a big sales driver, with 11.77 million units sold as of the end of March 31st. That’s enough to make it the seventh-best-selling Switch title yet even with only ten days worth of sales data accounted for. Nintendo adds that New Horizons actually sold 13.41 million copies in its first six weeks, though, which likely takes it past Pokémon Let’s Go! into sixth place. Japanese sales figures had already revealed that New Horizons was a big hit. The game sold more in its first three days than any other Animal Crossing or Nintendo Switch title to date, also pushing Switch con...

The LG Velvet has finally officially launched in South Korea, following weeks of teases and announcements. As expected, the phone features a “raindrop” triple rear camera array, is powered by a Snapdragon 765, and has a 6.8-inch OLED display with a small central notch. Details about its global launch are expected to come later this month. LG has taken such a gradual approach with the reveal that we knew practically everything about the Velvet already. The South Korean electronics giant showed off its name and design in sketch form back in April, then announced its processor along with additional details the following week. We also knew the specs of its cameras, display, and battery thanks to a blog post published late last month. The main camera has a 48 megapixel sensor, and it’s joined b...

Countless iOS apps experienced problems launching Wednesday evening, according to multiple reports on Twitter and crowdsourced user reports on Downdetector. The issues seem to have started around 6:30PM ET, and Spotify, TikTok, Pinterest, Tinder, and more were affected, according to Downdetector. I personally experienced problems with Spotify and GrubHub, but they are both working for me now, so it seems apps are starting to starting work as normal again. The issue was caused by an apparent problem with a Facebook software development kit (SDK) tool that’s used to power sign-in features for many of the apps. Many developers have reported problems with the SDK in this thread on GitHub. You didn’t need to be logging into the apps via Facebook to be affected by the crashes — I wasn’t able to ...

Smart home platform Wink will require customers to pay a $4.99 per month subscription fee starting May 13th, the company announced today. That gives Wink users just seven days to decide if they want to pay a monthly fee for a service that was previously offered for free as part of owning a Wink product. If you opt not to sign up for Wink’s subscription, “you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app, with voice control or through the API, and your automations will be disabled on May 13,” according to Wink’s announcement blog. That seems to mean that you’ll lose the ability to use non-Wink-made smart home products connected to a Wink-managed setup. Though if you decide to subscribe later, your device connections, settings, and automations can be reactivated. “This fee ...

Lyft’s ride-hailing business is down 70 percent, year over year, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s chief executives said in an earnings call with investors Wednesday. The company’s ride volume hit a bottom in the second week of April, plummeting 75 percent year-over-year, and has since gradually risen in the final weeks of the month. As the COVID-19 related shutdown continues with no clear end in sight, Lyft is projecting continued pain for its business. “We cannot predict the trajectory or timing of the eventual recovery,” CEO Logan Green said, “but it is clear that macro trends will continue to negatively impact our business.” But Lyft’s earnings report for the first quarter of 2020 was slightly less grim than it’s ride-hailing business. The company brought in $955.7 mi...

Etsy began pushing homemade masks in early April, and the results panned out in a big way: total sales on the platform doubled last month, by and large thanks to a surge in face mask sales. For comparison, Etsy’s marketplace sales figures between January and March were up only 16 percent. More than 12 million face masks were sold during April, totaling around $133 million in sales. Etsy says they represented the second largest category of product sales across the entire site during the month of April. “It was like waking up and discovering it was Cyber Monday.” “It was like waking up and discovering it was Cyber Monday, except everyone in the world just wanted one product and that product was in extremely limited supply,” Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said on a call with investors this afternoon...