Technology

FRANKFURT / AP Volkswagen’s namesake brand hopes to bounce back from its diesel emissions scandal with a broad restructuring that will mean more battery-powered cars, digital services such as ride-sharing, and more SUVs for the U.S. market. Herbert Diess, the head of the Volkswagen division, unveiled the company’s Transform 2025 plan at a news conference, saying that “in the coming ...

  San Francisco / AP Facebook has built a tool for geographically censoring posts at the leading social network as it seeks a path back into China, The New York Times has reported. The New York Times cited three current and former Facebook employees, who asked for anonymity, as saying that the tool could filter news feeds at the social ...

  San Francisco / AP An industry-backed autonomous car lobbying group has urged US regulators to go further to remove speed bumps than what was laid out in guidelines published two months ago. In a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a ‘Self-Driving Coalition’ founded early this year by Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft hailed the framework ...

  Faye Flam Bloomberg Blind faith in any technology can be dangerous — especially when it comes to areas of forensic science such as DNA fingerprinting. For example, if police have “DNA evidence” against a suspect, most juries will assume that’s proof of guilt. But while the technology for analyzing DNA has become vastly more sensitive since it was first ...

  Bloomberg A U.S. safety agency is investigating an accident involving a massive experimental drone Facebook Inc. is developing to bring the internet to remote areas of the world. No one was hurt in the incident, which came during the unmanned aircraft’s first test flight on June 28. It marks the latest hiccup in Facebook’s plans to wirelessly connect the ...

  NEW YORK / Bloomberg At the largest online travel conference last week, industry executive Steve Hafner was asked an unusual question: What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think about Google? “Annoying,” said Hafner, chief executive officer of Priceline Group Inc.’s Kayak business. Hafner captured the mood well. Despite more than $15 billion in annual revenue ...

  Washington / AFP Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted, Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump: the battle over fake news is heating up after a White House campaign in which the misinformation industry may have swung the outcome of the vote. Last week, Google and Facebook moved to cut off ad revenue to bogus news sites. But media watchers ...

  SAN FRANCISCO / AP It sounds like a great idea: Forget passwords, and instead lock your phone or computer with your fingerprint. It’s a convenient form of security — though it’s also perhaps not as safe as you’d think. In their rush to do away with problematic passwords, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies are nudging consumers to use ...

  Bloomberg Chinese mobile developer Meitu Inc. started testing demand for a proposed Hong Kong initial public offering of about $750 million, which could become the city’s biggest technology listing in nearly a decade. The Xiamen-based company, which makes apps used to touch up selfie photos, will gauge interest from potential investors from Monday through Dec. 2, according to terms ...

  Dubai / Emirates Business Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM) has announced that its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., have extended their decade-long strategic foundry collaboration to manufacture Qualcomm Technologies’ latest Snapdragon premium processor, Qualcomm® Snapdragonâ„¢ 835, with Samsung’s 10-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology. The decision to use Samsung’s cutting edge process in the next generation ...