Techflier

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here . 1. FTC ruling sees Musical.ly (TikTok) fined $5.7M for violating children’s privacy law, app updated with age gate In an app update released yesterday, all users will need to verify their age, and the under 13-year-olds will then be directed to a separate, more restricted in-app experience that protects their personal information and prevents them from publishing videos to TikTok . And if you’re confused about Musical.ly versus TikTok: The Federal Trade Commission had begun looking into TikTok back when it was known as Musical.ly, and the ruling itself is a settlement with Musical.ly. 2. How Disney built Star Wars, in real life Over the course of the past five years, Walt Disney Imagineering has been hard at work making the world of Star Wars a reality on Earth. Matthew Panzarino has all the...

A group of democratic lawmakers today announced a bill to end the practice of forced arbitration, an issue that was recently pressed by Google employee organizers, who appeared alongside lawmakers during the announcement. Mandatory arbitration clauses, frequently inserted into contracts, require employees and others to waive their right to sue. Instead, complaints are funneled through a private system. The practice, critics of the widespread system say, gives employers the upper hand in disputes. Calling the practice “fundamentally unfair and un-American,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, or FAIR Act, was about “guaranteeing every individual their day in court.” The bill, which has been... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2IGNAgg via IFTTT

A report by the lead data watchdog for a large number of tech giants operating in Europe shows a significant increase in privacy complaints and data breach notifications since the region’s updated privacy framework came into force last May. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC)’s annual report , published today, covers the period May 25, aka the day the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR ) came into force, to December 31 2018 and shows the DPC received more than double the amount of complaints post-GDPR vs the first portion of 2018 prior to the new regime coming in: With 2,864 and 1,249 complaints received respectively. That makes a total of 4,113 complaints for full year 2018 (vs just 2,642 for 2017). Which is a year on year increase of 36 per cent. But the increase pre- and post-GDPR is even greater — 56 per cent — suggesting the regulation is working as intended by building momentum and support for individuals to exercise their fundamental rights. “The phenomen...

Buyers of the new Samsung Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus will find a preinstalled plastic screen protector on their device when they unbox it beginning March 8th. Samsung has confirmed that it’s shipping the S10 with a protector on the display, meaning you won’t have to immediately hunt for something that’s compatible with the ultrasonic in-display fingerprint sensor on day one. Now, this is just your very basic screen protector — similar to what OnePlus does with their phones, if I had to guess — and it isn’t glass, so it’s bound to scratch over time. The included protector has a 90-day warranty. Samsung will sell extras of its first-party screen protector for $29.99, but the company doesn’t plan to bring it to Best Buy or carrier stores... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2Nz2yDH via IFTTT

For the first week, the Nokia 9 PureView will be $599.99 -- that's $100 off the normal price. The sale price is $200 lower than the Pixel 3 and $300 less than the Galaxy S10.  The post Nokia 9 PureView Launches in US March 3 on Sale for $600 appeared first on ExtremeTech . from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://ift.tt/2H3Vlua via IFTTT

Samsung’s promised Bixby remapping update is now available for owners of older Galaxy flagships, including the S8 and S8 Plus, S9 and S9 Plus, Note 8, and Note 9, after debuting on the soon-to-be-released S10 line . Assuming you have a compatible device that’s running Samsung’s Android Pie / One Touch UI software, you should be getting a new update that’ll bring the much requested feature to your phone. There are a few caveats to the feature, as noted by The Verge ’s Dan Seifert on Twitter : you can’t remap the Bixby button to launch another voice assistant, like Google Assistant or Cortana, even if you have those apps installed. my S10+ review unit has received an update to the Bixby app that lets me natively remap the button to a... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2TmQESC via IFTTT

Disney is in discussions to buy AT&T’s 10 percent stake in Hulu, which it comes into by way of its WarnerMedia acquisition, according to a report from Variety this morning. The news is not surprising – AT&T had already said it was exploring a sale. And Disney has been looking to increase its stake in Hulu following its deal for 20th Century Fox which, when closed, will see Disney picking up Fox’s 30 percent share in Hulu. Currently, Disney owns a 30 percent stake in Hulu’s streaming service. That means the Fox deal will give it a 60 percent stake in Hulu. Snagging AT&T’s Hulu share would bring Disney’s ownership to 70 percent. Comcast/NBCU is Hulu’s other major owner, but isn’t currently prepared to sell, Variety said. AT&T had detailed its streaming plans to investors in November, noting at the time it was thinking of selling its Hulu stake as part of its larger goal to “monetize assets” that were not essential to its current strategies and to help pay down its d...

Announced at last year’s WWDC, Apple’s been firing up Siri Shortcuts at a fairly steady clip. The company says there are now “thousands” of apps integrating the iOS 12 feature, which bring all sorts of third-party functionality to the smart assistant. There are five new Shortcuts available starting today. Most notable (depending on where you get your airline miles, I suppose) is probably the one from American Airlines. Saying, “Hey Siri, flight update” will provide you with information on your upcoming travel plans. The response uses location information to determine what the share, including flight status, travel time and the gate it will depart from. Caviar has a new Shortcut as well. It lets users check on food status or reorder frequent items, like, say, “order my usual pizza,” for those of us who are perfectly fine with the food related ruts we’ve dug ourselves into. Merriam Webster, meanwhile, is adding a “word of the day” Shortcut, while Dexcom is bringing glucose monitoring...

The future of healthcare isn’t entirely digital. For encounters as intimate as the client-therapist dynamic, a face-to-face relationship is still key. For those able to afford tech-enabled therapy services, Two Chairs , a San Francisco-headquartered mental healthcare business, may be of interest. The startup believes in the power of in-person therapy, as opposed to the new variety of affordable digital tools meant to replace or coexist with therapy services. Today, the company is announcing a $7 million Maveron-led Series A financing to open additional brick-and-mortar clinics and build out its client-therapist matching app, which leverages technology to pair its customers with a therapist best-tailored to their needs. The company currently operates four clinics in the Bay Area, where patients can access individual or group therapy. Each of those clinics was built with modern, young professionals in mind using “thoughtful design” to create “non-judgmental spaces.” A Two Chairs clin...

Today, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) is introducing a data privacy bill that would explicitly bar platforms like Facebook and Google from serving targeted ads that discriminate against protected groups, particularly by race, sexual orientation or gender. The DATA Privacy Act would empower the Federal Trade Commission to put in place specific definitions for what is considered discriminatory behavior in targeted ad and data practices. It would also extend the FTC’s civil penalty authority for violations of those rules, alongside broader protections on user data. “The Senator is focused [on making sure] that as Congress tackles the issue of protecting Americans data privacy, our government is also guarding against potential forms of... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2C7vSwL via IFTTT

The makers of Halide, a popular third-party iOS camera app that offers advanced RAW shooting and other powerful tools, are today releasing another photography app: Spectre . Spectre costs $1.99 and comes with one big specialty: long exposures. Long exposures are very common in the DSLR world: they can make an ordinary nighttime city shot feel much more artistic by creating streaks of light from passing cars. Or you can take a long exposure to bring a real sense of moving water to waterfalls or other nature scenes. But on phones, long exposures have often gone ignored: there’s no way of capturing one with the built-in camera on the iPhone or Google Pixel, for example. On devices from Samsung, LG, and others with manual photo modes, it can... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2Ukhk3y via IFTTT

The Crew Dragon will see space for the first time Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2ECH71I via IFTTT

Ceros  allows marketers to create animated, interactive content — but don’t call it a content marketing company. “We think content is just a dry, bland, over-leveraged, oversaturated space,” said founder and CEO Simon Berg. “The goal is not to hack the system, the goal is to make a great experience for your customers.” That’s why he describes Ceros as a platform for creating experiences. The company is focused on powering beautiful, well-designed graphics and web pages, instead of blog posts or white papers that mostly exist to snare search traffic. Ceros is announcing today that it’s raised $14 million in Series C funding. Ceros previously raised $19.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase . The new round was led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from Grotech Ventures, CNF Investments, Sigma Prime Ventures, StarVest Partners, Greycroft and Silicon Valley Bank. “Ceros is well known for empowering marketers to think creatively, but we have also come to know Ce...

Coinhive, a service that allows websites to use their visitor’s computers to mine cryptocurrencies, is shutting down, ZDNet reports. All of the service’s in-browser mining scripts will stop working on March 8th, and users will have until April 30th to withdraw any remaining Monero — the anonymity-focused cryptocurrency mined by the software — from their accounts. Coinhive’s service launched in 2017 as a way to mine cryptocurrency in the background of a website, turning visitors’ processing power directly into cash. Some sites were upfront with visitors about their use of the software, most notably the news website Salon and UNICEF , but countless others either didn’t disclose the fact they were using it , or saw the Javascript code added... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2TkGXEb via IFTTT

All Amazon Prime customers in the US can now set which day of the week they want to receive their packages. Customers can set which day they want as their default delivery day for future packages, and change them at checkout later. Items will come bundled in one package, saving boxes and making shipment deliveries more predictable. The feature, called Amazon Day, was first introduced in November as an invite-only program . The concept is part of Amazon’s “Shipment Zero” sustainability initiative, which aims to make all of Amazon’s shipments carbon neutral, with half its shipments being carbon neutral by 2030. Amazon says that since testing began with a group of Prime members last year, the company has reduced packaging by “tens of... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2T6PQlF via IFTTT

Google has new ideas to improve Chrome's performance, courtesy of a new back/forward cache. The post New Caching Change Could Dramatically Accelerate Google Chrome appeared first on ExtremeTech . from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://ift.tt/2VxIgxl via IFTTT

Shares of JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce service that rivals Alibaba, are on the rise today after the online retailer announced better than expected results for Q4 2018, bucking uncertainty around tech companies in China. The company reported net revenue of RMB 134.8 billion ($219.6 billion) for the final quarter of last year. Despite representing the slowest growth rate year-on-year since JD went public five years ago (22.3 percent), the figure beat analyst predictions of $19.149 billion. JD.com also beat on earnings per share. That combination saw its Nasdaq share price rise by as much as 14 percent in pre-market trading, Reuters reports . The stock is up around five percent at the time of writing, according to Yahoo Finance data . JD.com went public on the Nasdaq in 2014 Chinese startups are weathering challenging economics in the country. Apple recently cut its quarterly revenue forecast on account of China’s slowdown, while domestic Chinese tech companies have gone fu...

Amazon this morning announced a new initiative focused on reducing counterfeiting on its site called Project Zero – a name that references Amazon’s lofty goal of driving counterfeit sales to zero. The program will take advantage of Amazon’s technology, including machine learning capabilities, combined with brands’ own knowledge of their intellectual property in order to automatically and continuously scan Amazon’s store to identify and proactively remove violations, among other things. Brands who want to utilize the new tools will provide Amazon with their logos, trademarks and other key data about their brand. Amazon will then scan its 5 billion product listing updates per day, looking for any suspected counterfeits, it says. The idea here is to put more technology behind the search for counterfeits, in order to become more proactive instead of reactive. In the past, brands would need to file a counterfeit report with Amazon in order to take action. The new tools allow brands to ...

Trolls are trying to take down the YouTube channel of PewDiePie’s rival by misusing the site’s new rules against predatory comments on videos of children . YouTube spent the bulk of last week trying to clean up comments sections by banning users and channels associated with predatory comments, but the people trolling aren’t going to get anywhere, because they’ve misunderstood how the new rules work. In particular, trolls are leaving comments on videos from T-Series , a popular Bollywood channel that’s close to overtaking PewDiePie as the largest channel on YouTube. Their comments include timestamps suggesting there’s “CP,” or child pornography, at certain moments. A number of advertisers paused spending on YouTube last week after it came... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2XrIHLa via IFTTT

Over the last couple of years, publishing startup Serial Box has experimented with new ways to tell stories. Today the company is moving into the superhero world with a new partnership with Marvel, which will produce new stories about Black Panther, Black Widow, Jessica Jones, and Thor. The publisher is best known for long-form, serialized stories called “Serials”, which play out like a season of television. Each season is composed of 10 to 16 individual installments, which take about 40 minutes to read, each one designed to be read on its own, but which also convey a season-long storyline. The similarities to a TV show don’t stop there: instead of individual authors writing a single work on their own, they bring in a writer’s room of... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2tH2EQz via IFTTT

One of the major themes we are working on these days at the Extra Crunch Daily is trying to understand why America and many other Western nations can’t seem to build infrastructure anymore. The answers are complicated but critical: our infrastructure is decrepit, climate change is intensifying, and population growth will put even more strain on existing facilities. In our first part in this series , we wrote about a book entitled Politics across the Hudson , which was written by Phil Plotch. He formerly headed the redevelopment of the World Trade Center following 9/11 and is now a professor finishing up a book on the travails of the Second Avenue subway slated for publication later this year. We interviewed Plotch this week to get more details on what causes delays and cost overruns in infrastructure, and these are some of the most interesting highlights of our conversation: Misinformation is a huge challenge at all levels of infrastructure planning. “People at the bottom don’t un...

Uber and Lyft are reportedly planning to give some of its drivers cash bonuses with the intent that those drivers would then be able to use the cash to purchase stock in the two companies’ respective impending IPOs, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal . It’s a complicated workaround to a unique problem facing the ride-sharing companies, who can’t grant stock to their drivers due to Securities and Exchange Commission rules that prevent giving private company stock shares to contractors, who technically aren’t considered full-time employees under the law. And while the SEC has requested comments from companies as to whether or not it should change that rule, it’s unlikely that even with the support of Uber, Lyft, and... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts https://ift.tt/2tFbKgL via IFTTT

Nvidia is reportedly prepping new GPUs to launch in the lower price bands -- and directly in the markets where AMD still competes well. The post Report: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660, GTX 1650 Arriving Later This Spring appeared first on ExtremeTech . from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://ift.tt/2Nx12Sq via IFTTT