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To many, Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he’s been slowly exiting for years as the company shifted priorities from product design to operations. The Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle just published a new list of brutalities that paints a picture of discontent inside Apple, that’s responsible for “eroding the product magic” created by the union of Apple’s genius CEO and genius designer . The WSJ report follows a similar piece published by Bloomberg last week. Both reports describe an Apple design team, led by Jony Ive, increasingly frustrated by his absence after the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015. They tell the story of a company that once put design at the forefront, progressively being led by operational concerns. Ive’s absence was “straining the cohesion central to product development,” according to the WSJ , causing several key design team members to leave Apple over the last few years. Here

After detecting an unusual spike in energy consumption, Iranian authorities seized nearly a thousand computers being used to mine cryptocurrency, according to the country’s state media . Authorities discovered two bitcoin farms operating in abandoned factories in Yazd province, which caused a seven percent spike in the country’s power consumption this month. Iran’s central bank banned cryptocurrencies last year, citing concerns over money laundering. According to RadioFreeEurope , officials have said that the practice is making the local power grid “unstable,” and warned that people engaging in the practice could be cut off. Cryptocurrency is “mined” as high-powered computers solve mathematical problems, a task that requires considerable power. Iran subsidizes its power, keeping prices low, which appears to be one reason why miners have been operating in the country. Access to cryptocurrency also appears to be helping residents evade US-imposed banking sanctions.

Amazon is making it easier for users to find live television on its Fire TV units. The company says that it will soon roll out a “Live” tab that collects all of the various live programming across apps that users might have installed. Amazon describes the tab as a “single destination” that “brings together your live sports, news, and channels from select OTT services, streaming apps (e.g. PlayStation Vue), paid subscriptions, and over-the-air antennas into one consolidated view.” The tab is located on the TV’s main navigation menus, and the section will group the channels that you’ve recently viewed. It’ll also show off lists of other channels “which share similar programming,” like sports or breaking news. The tab isn’t quite live just yet: Amazon says that it’ll roll out to users in the next week.

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of blood-testing startup Theranos, will officially go to trial in San Jose next year, according to the US District Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California. Federal prosecutors indicted Holmes and the company’s former president and COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani last summer, charging the pair with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud. The pair face 20 years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. According to TechCrunch , the trial will begin in August 2020, with jury selection beginning on July 28th, 2020. The Wall Street Journal also reports that prosecutors have collected millions of pages of documents, and that the defense has complained about the amount that is being presented, and that the WSJ ’s initial reporting might have unduly influenced the way the government regulators approached the company. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003, claiming that it had develop

The US Army will soon be equipping some units in the field with tiny personal drones, reports Stars & Stripes . The 1st Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment will begin using the devices next month in Afghanistan as the military works to figure out the best way to use them. FLIR Systems has been testing the Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance System with a variety of units — the US Army began testing the drone back in 2016 and 2017, and the company picked up a trio of big contracts with the American , British , and French militaries this year. At the end of April, the 82nd Airborne’s 3rd Combat Brigade began training with the drones, playing out a variety of scenarios in which the devices could be used. According to Army Technology , the drones are designed to “assist dismounted soldiers deployed on the battlefield,” essentially allowing them to scout out nearby terrain and look for enemy soldiers that they might not be able to see otherwi

The Justice Department announced this week that former Equifax CIO Jun Ying has been sentenced to four months in prison for insider trading. He pled guilty earlier this year for for selling his stock in the company prior to the announcement that it had been hit with a massive data breach in 2017 . The Security and Exchanges Commission charged Ying with insider trading last year . The Department of Justice says that in August 2017, after learning about the breach, he began researching the impact that a similar breach had on another company’s stock price. Later that morning, he promptly exercised and sold all of his stock options, earning nearly a million dollars from the sale. In doing so, he avoided a loss of $117,000 that he otherwise would have incurred when the company’s stock price dropped after the disclosure. More than 150 million people had their personal information leaked in the incident. “Ying thought of his own financial gain before the millions of people exposed in this

I watched (most of) the new Bob Dylan documentary that Martin Scorsese made for Netflix the other week. It has some really relaxed and quirky behind-the-scenes footage of Dylan and the (often famous) people around him, along with some great performances. But there’s one thing about the documentary that is completely bizarre: portions of it are fake . Scorsese introduces viewers to a handful of talking heads who say they played a key role in documenting or creating the tour Dylan is embarking on, but in reality, they’re just actors. It’s not really clear why Scorsese did this (maybe it would be clearer if I had finished the film, but reviewers seem to say otherwise). It’s sort of just a prank, one you could seemingly go without finding out about. I love the idea of it — there has to be some kind of documentary-esque story that could use this technique to make a compelling larger point. But here? I’m still not sure what it accomplished other than getting us talking. Check out seven t

The G20 Summit wrapped up today in Japan, during which US President Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Following their meeting, Trump announced that the two countries would resume trade talks and that the US would hold off on implementing new tariffs indefinitely. He also indicated that US companies would be permitted to resume sales to Huawei, although it’s unclear when or how that will happen. In May, Trump signed an executive order that allowed the US government to block sales by US companies to foreign firms deemed a security risk. It’s not immediately clear what — or if any — steps have been taken to lift the restriction on sales to the beleaguered Chinese technology company. According to The Washington Post , Trump told reporters that he will be meeting with US officials to ease the pressure on Huawei, but also that they haven’t made a formal decision to lift them yet, while The Wall Street Journal reports that he indicated that the two countries will leave

For just over a month, Twitch has been trying to track down a group of anonymous trolls who spammed the platform with violent footage of the Christchurch shooting in the wake of the attack. That hunt kicked off in earnest when Twitch filed suit against the trolls earlier in June, but new filings show the company has more clues to the perpetrators’ identity than anyone suspected, including specific email addresses for at least three people and Discord logs where the attack was organized. The evidence was submitted in an ex parte filing on Thursday, which included a deposition from an incident response engineer at Twitch . According to the filings, Twitch has identified a specific user it believes to be responsible for coordinating the attack — a prior offender who uses the handle Skel or Sketyal — and linked that account to a series of email addresses, Twitter accounts, Discord channels, and at least one website. From its incident response work, Twitch also collected 35 different IP

Despite some new improvements to user privacy , Google’s popular Chrome browser has recently been lambasted in some quarters as problematical when it comes to privacy issues . These same articles suggest that if you’re concerned about the security of your data, you should try an alternative browser, such as Firefox, Safari, or Brave. Of course, anyone who has used a browser for any length of time will have built up a considerable library of bookmarks, preferences, and saved passwords. If you do move to a new browser, you won’t have to sacrifice your bookmarks; you can easily import them from Chrome into your new browser. Here’s how to do it. If you’re moving to Firefox : After you’ve installed Firefox, click on the “Library” icon to the right of the address bar, and then click on “Bookmarks” on the drop-down menu. Click on “Show All Bookmarks” on the bottom of the drop-down menu. Click on “Import Data from Another Browser…” (If you are moving from a browser other than Safari or

Bumble’s figured out a new way to bring video to its app: in-app voice or video calling . The feature applies to all of Bumble’s use cases, including Bumble Bizz for making professional connections; Bumble BFF for making friends; and Bumble for dating. The option to start a call will surface only once a match has been made. Women can call from that initial match while men have to wait until a woman has made the first move. The overall appeal is that people don’t have to swap phone numbers to chat, so if they unmatch, the other person loses their ability to make a call. Only one other major dating app, Badoo, allows for video calling within the app, which isn’t coincidental. The same man — Andrey Andreev — operates both Badoo and Bumble. Andreev just consolidated the apps, along with Chappy and Lumen, into a new holding group called Magic Lab with plans to invest in new tech to “bring people together.” Video has slowly come to dating apps in various forms. Hinge allows people to upl

EA Access will launch on the PlayStation 4 on July 24th, Electronic Arts announced today. The service — which has been available for Xbox One for nearly five years — gives players access to a massive library of Electronic Arts games. The subscription service is $4.99 per month and includes games such as Mass Effect: Andromeda, Dragon Age: Inquisition , Battlefield V , and A Way Out . Subscribers also get access to prelaunch trials and a 10 percent discount on EA digital purchases. EA revealed back in May that the service would finally come to the PS4 sometime in July . Subscribers who own EA Access on Xbox One will still need to pay separately for PS4 access; the service acts as a different account across various consoles.

Tetris Royale , a 100-player battle royale game, is coming to mobile devices in a partnership between N3TWORK and The Tetris Company. It’ll essentially be a mobile version of the Nintendo Switch’s impossibly addicting Tetris 99 . The game is the first Tetris game to come out of N3TWORK and The Tetris Company’s exclusive multiyear partnership, which means we’ll be seeing more Tetris games for mobile in the future. Aside from the 100-player competitive mode, Tetris Royale will have other modes like a Solo marathon mode and daily challenges where players can earn rewards to gain customization options, power-ups, and boosters that can be used in battle games. The game is currently in development and will be available for beta testing for iOS and Android devices in 2019. In the meantime, might I suggest playing this Flappy Bird Battle Royale game?

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival. In keeping with the spirit of the event, Zuckerberg brought some ideas. The big ones: Facebook was right not to remove the doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi . Zuckerberg said it should have been flagged as misleading more quickly, but defended leaving it up. (I basically agree with him on this one.) ”This is a topic that can be very easily politicized,” Zuckerberg said. “People who don’t like the way that something was cut...will kind of argue that...it did not reflect the true intent or was misinformation. But we exist in a society...where we value and cherish free expression.” But Facebook will treat deepfakes differently than other forms of misinformation . Zuckerberg said that the company’s policy team is currently considering it: “There is a question of whether deepfakes are actually just a completely different category of thing from normal false statements overall, and I think there is a

During Thursday night’s Democratic debates , former Vice President Joe Biden pitched his “smart gun” policy on the national stage when asked how he would work to combat gun violence. “We should have smart guns,” Biden said. “No gun should be able to be sold unless your biometric measure could pull that trigger. It’s within our right to do that. We can do that. Our enemy is the gun manufacturers, not the NRA. The gun manufacturers.” It’s a policy Biden has been touting frequently along the campaign trail, but the first it’s been brought up throughout this year’s Democratic debates. Generally, Biden has been advocating for some form of regulation requiring gun manufacturers to include a biometric system that would prohibit guns from being fired by people whose fingerprints are not registered for that specific weapon. Throughout the Obama-era , lawmakers like Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced a bill that would require these kind of “smart” attachments to new guns, and have older weapon

Daily Steals is offering an exclusive discount to Verge readers on Beats Solo 3 wireless on-ear headphones. This model usually costs around $199.99, but the open-box (new condition) model is $129.99 with the offer code VERGEBEATS used at checkout. You can choose between glossy or matte black color options. The Solo 3s were originally released almost three years ago, which is an eternity in the tech world, though they feature the same W1 wireless chip found in Apple’s first-generation AirPods. It allows for fast, easy Bluetooth pairing to your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. In our review , Vlad Savov noted in 2016 that these are “commendably comfortable and surprisingly good at isolating exterior noise.” Bluetooth wireless performance is as good as you’d hope: it didn’t suffer from any stutters or drop with other Apple devices or non-Apple devices. One aspect that hasn’t aged so well is the Micro USB charging port, though its “Fast Fuel” feature is a consolation, as it claims to giv

My esteemed colleague Russell Brandom leads our policy team. He was struck by the disingenuous response from conservative lawmakers to the most recent video sting from Project Veritas, which presented YouTube employees in an unfair light. Russell asked if he could take over the column today, and I was happy to oblige. I’ll be back tomorrow with thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at the Aspen Ideas festival. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been on a tear against Google lately, with the most recent salvo coming this Monday. Like most of O’Keefe’s work, it’s deceptively edited and doesn’t add up to much, but he managed to catch one executive in a pretty poor choice of words. In a hidden camera conversation with Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation, the executive is caught saying the following: Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because