Category: Technology

Israel quietly rolled out a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks, uses technology from Google Photos as well as a custom tool built by the Tel Aviv-based company Corsight to identify people affiliated with Hamas.The facial recognition program was built in tandem with Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, according to the Times report. After the October 7th attacks, officers within the…

Dbrand tried and failed to fix the Ghost Case — replacements will take longer

The Dbrand Ghost Case for the iPhone 15 Pro. | Image: Dbrand Dbrand is scrapping plans to fix its anti-yellowing Ghost Case, but not because it yellows — it’s that it scratches very easily. The company had promised in November to ship free replacements with scratch-resistant coatings, but now it’s telling customers via email they’ll have to wait. Most of its production run of those ended up “unshippable,” the company says, so instead it’s sending a redesigned “Ghost 2.0” this summer. Essentially, it’s a delay.The company says that its first test runs of the newly-coated…

Why You Really Shouldn’t Buy an iPad Pro or Air Right Now

Unless you’re desperate, you shouldn’t buy a new iPad Pro or iPad Air right now. If you’re looking to upgrade to a new iPad, you’ve got plenty of options. Apple’s current iPad Pro, the 2022 model, is still in excellent shape. The same goes for the iPad Air 5 which is the latest version of […]Why You Really Shouldn’t Buy an iPad Pro or Air Right Now is a post by Adam Mills from Gotta Be Mobile.

Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment

Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back. The September deal put $1.25B into the […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

SpaceX aiming to launch massive Starship for the third time early Thursday

SpaceX will attempt to send the massive Starship rocket to orbit for the third time early Thursday morning after U.S. regulators gave the green light for launch. The company is aiming to complete the launch within a 110-minute window that opens at 7:00 a.m. CT. Starship testing is conducted from SpaceX’s sprawling Starbase campus near […]© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

SpaceX is cleared to attempt its third Starship test flight

SpaceX Starship on a Super Heavy rocket booster | Image: SpaceX Now that the Federal Aviation Administration has granted SpaceX a license (pdf), the third test flight of its Starship Super Heavy vehicle could take place as soon as Thursday morning. SpaceX says that a 110-minute launch window will open at 7AM CT / 8AM ET / 5AM PT tomorrow, March 14th. If you’re planning on watching to see what happens, we recommend getting up early before the launch just in case it’s either canceled or, as we’ve seen on previous attempts, occurs at the very beginning of the launch window.In a post on X (…

Amazon will let sellers paste a link so AI can make a product page

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sellers on Amazon will soon be able to make product pages with just the copy-and-paste of a link.Amazon is releasing a new generative AI feature that takes information from a seller’s external website and then generates an Amazon product page for the item, complete with a written description and images. The goal is to help sellers reduce the time it takes to bring the product from a different website onto Amazon, says Mary Beth Westmoreland, Amazon’s VP of worldwide selling partner experience, in a blog post. Image: Amazon Amazon’s AI will parse…

Tesla’s Cybertruck is a dystopian, masturbatory fantasy

It’s been four years since Tesla first announced the Cybertruck, a hideously ugly electric pickup truck that didn’t seem to actually improve on EVs or pickups in any meaningful way. Instead, the 6,600-pound mass of “stainless super steel” seems to be more the culmination of one man's bizarre fantasy, and that man just so happened to own an entire company he could leverage to birth that fantasy, with all its sharp angles and unnecessary lighting bars, into reality.Today, Tesla finally delivered the first, long-delayed production Cybertrucks to 10 buyers in a livestream on CEO Elon…