Tech industry

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-california-wealth-tax.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50217587 Points: 39 # Comments: 43

Article URL: https://www.courthousenews.com/german-court-calls-google-aerial-imagery-spying/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216142 Points: 17 # Comments: 4

Xbox's first chief operating officer (COO) is leaving after the new role was created just a few months ago. Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today, according to an internal Xbox memo seen by The Verge. Chiang has been at Microsoft for 21 years, serving as the head of Minecraft before being promoted to Xbox chief operating officer in July. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma announced Chiang's departure in a surprisingly short memo today. "Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft today. I'm grateful for her years of service and wish her well," said Sharma. As Chiang is departing today, her immediate responsibilities are being split up between other Xbox leaders … Read the full story at The Verge.

Pentagon memo: Insider trading gives US enemies key intel on military operations.

Company says foreign-made robotic vehicles are crucial to US chip production.

Google has updated its privacy policy in a way that could mean you'll start seeing targeted ads based on your personal data if you're using personalized AI features. The update, spotted by Android Authority, adds an exception to its promise about not using your Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads. While the previous version simply said it wouldn't do that, as of October 16th, Google has added the line, "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads." That means anyone who has connected their Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos to AI Mode and other Search tools … Read the full story at The Verge.

Daytona is building a cloud for agents that's like giving every agent its own computer. It has attracted founders of Stripe, Perplextity, Datadog, Mercor, and others as angels, it says.

Top-funded fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems received an $85 million award from the federal government to advance conductors for fusion power plants.

Early-stage and follow-on investors in the AI lab are already sitting on major paper returns.

After years of debating how driverless cars should tell the world no one is at the wheel - flashing text, audio alerts, custom lights - the feds just stepped in with a single answer: cyan. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released proposed changes to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 108, specifically rewriting the rules to fit autonomous vehicles. It's a mix of cutting red tape for human-free designs and standardizing how robotaxis communicate with the world around them - starting with a distinctive blue-green light. NHTSA is proposing cyan-colored marker lamps "to clearly and consistently signal to law e … Read the full story at The Verge.

No new accounts from now, and the end will come in December

SpaceX plans to access at least 80,000 cell sites as part of efforts to compete directly with Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources tell the publication that SpaceX is in talks with Crown Castle Inc., one of the nation's largest cell tower owners. The move would give SpaceX access to half of the 158,500 cell towers currently operational in the US, according to Reuters. When asked about a potential partnership with SpaceX, Amazon, or other satellite services during an earnings call on Wednesday, Crown Castle CEO Chris Hillabrant said, "I don't think I want to get into customer-specific detail, but you can … Read the full story at The Verge.

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/21/politics/heat-ray-weapon-dhs-pentagon Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50210075 Points: 85 # Comments: 85

Ukraine has changed drones and war-fighting tech to reduce reliance on Starlink.

Article URL: https://thinkrail.ai/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219186 Points: 35 # Comments: 32

Article URL: https://ayoships.com/breakdowns/block-blast Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50217946 Points: 50 # Comments: 11

Top investors from Iconiq and Sapphire Ventures, along with Rahul Vohra, the founder of Superhuman Mail share the do's and don'ts for building hit products.

Article URL: https://www.techpowerup.com/354081/sony-retires-its-last-4k-blu-ray-player-in-japan-ps5-is-all-thats-left Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214447 Points: 15 # Comments: 5

A new program wants to encourage more startups to allow workers to cash out early by making it easier to transact tender offers.

If you share Spotify sub with family, you may need to scan QR code to prove it.

We gave the iPhone Duo a 7 /10. But that wasn't always the score we planned, and it might not be the right score forever. Such are the challenges of reviewing - and assessing - a big, new idea about the most popular smartphone in history. On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay debate whether the Duo deserved the score it got, and try to work through how this device might change over time. Is the outer screen, as Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggested, the worst iPhone ever? Would it be a better product if it started as an iPad rather than an iPhone? Would we feel differently about this thing if it were simply called the iPad Du … Read the full story at The Verge.

The iPhone Duo officially goes on sale today, but a few units already have broken screens. According to posts on Reddit about the affected units, the issue appears to be happening at a similar spot on all of them: Some kind of problem shows up on the inner screen along the hinge and a strange bright line (or lines) across the right side of the display. Here's how one user in Australia described what happened to their phone: Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times. I was showing it to a friend, and as I opened it, I felt something around the internal hinge, underneath the screen. As I cont … Read the full story at The Verge.