The Verge - All Posts

The Q6 isn't known for top-tier gaming specs and ultra-deep black levels, but it offers a lot of TV for just $450. | Image: TCL Here at The Verge, we spend a lot of time reporting on pristine, high-end TV sets - including the latest panels from Sony, LG, and Samsung. That said, not everyone is in the market for a picture-perfect OLED panel or one purpose-built to reduce glare. Thankfully, TCL's 65-inch Q6 QLED is a more economical option, one you can grab at Amazon and Best Buy today for $449.99 ($250 off), its lowest price to date.Despite being TCL's entry-level Q Class panel, the Q6 offers a lot for its budget-friendly price tag. The quantum dot-enabled 4K panel is bright and color-accurate, with solid black levels and vivid color that should shine no matter what you're watching. It features Google's terrific TV interface and built-in Chromecast functionality... Continue reading...

Photo by Joe Scarnici / Getty Images Blizzard has announced it will not hold BlizzCon, the publisher's annual fan convention, this year. After careful consideration over the last year, we at Blizzard have made the decision not to hold BlizzCon in 2024," Blizzard wrote on its website.Instead of BlizzCon, Blizzard wrote that it would be holding other, smaller events throughout the year and mentioned participating in other trade shows, such as Gamescom. Additionally, 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of World of Warcraft, with Blizzard stating that it's planning multiple, global, in-person events" as well as sharing updates for WoW's 10th expansion, The War Within, and Diablo IV's first expansion, Vessel of Hatred.Despite this year's cancellation, Blizzard says the event... Continue reading...

Image: Facepunch Studios The popular physics sandbox game Garry's Mod is pulling all of its Nintendo-related add-ons following copyright takedown requests from the gaming giant. On Wednesday, the developers of Garry's Mod made a post on Steam saying users may have noticed that certain Nintendo related workshop items have recently been taken down," adding that this is not a mistake," as the takedowns came from Nintendo.Honestly, this is fair enough. This is Nintendo's content and what they allow and don't allow is up to them," the post reads. They don't want you playing with that stuff in Garry's Mod - that's their decision, we have to respect that and take down as much as we can. This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through."

Megatron. | Image: Robosen Three years later, Hasbro's self-transforming, dancing, driving, talking, and attacking Optimus Prime finally has a villain to fight. Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, is about to arrive. For $1,200 - $899 through May 25th - its robot partner Robosen has created what could be the best auto-converting Transformer yet.Just to make sure you're getting it: this bot automatically transforms itself into a badass remote-control tank with a gigantic auto-extending cannon that can actually fire projectiles - then stands up and speaks over 270 phrases from original Megatron voice actor Frank Welker while doing all sorts of tricks.Here, bask in the glory of childhood imagination become real:

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Google is working on a fix to block crafty individuals from gaining access to the emails of accounts logged in to some Android TV units. The Android TV operating system, which is preloaded on many smart TVs on the market, could allow people with physical access to get into Gmail and other services associated with the owner's account, as reported by 404 Media.Since Android TV is just Android under the hood, it treats the owner's Google account login as a persistent one, allowing them to automatically log in to allowed apps from the Play Store. Chrome is not allowed by Google to install on Android TV, but there's a workaround that could get it installed, allowing easy access to Gmail, Drive, and other services - as demonstrated by... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Chicago and Mobile, Alabama, are cutting ties with ShotSpotter, the controversial gunshot detection company - but the sensors that notify police about shootings probably aren't going anywhere, according to a new report from Wired and South Side Weekly.Internal ShotSpotter emails reviewed by Wired and South Side Weekly reveal that the company hasn't removed its sensors from other cities that have ended their contracts, including San Diego, California, and San Antonio, Texas. Per the report, ShotSpotter doesn't sell its sensors but instead the software that alerts police that a shooting may have taken place. After a city's contract with ShotSpotter lapses, the sensors occasionally remain installed. In some instances, police continue... Continue reading...

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit stopped working for most users this afternoon. For nearly an hour, the site didn't load and displayed an error message reading, Oops, something went wrong, please try again later."At 12:52PM ET, the platform made an update on its status page, saying, An issue with a Reddit backend has impacted many users on our site." The site later said it had identified the issue" and is remediating it." The outage appears to have started around 12:45PM ET, with Downdetector recording a massive spike of outage reports at that time. Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge Reddit seems to have dealt with issues earlier today as well. Its status page says it resolved another issue at around 12PM ET. Now that Reddit's back... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Just like Instagram, Threads will now automatically filter out potentially offensive words, phrases, or emoji by default. In a post on Thursday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that the new Hidden Words feature will apply to both your Following" and For You" feeds, along with search results, profiles, and replies to your posts.If you want to cast a wider net over the content Threads filters out, you can add specific words, phrases, or emoji to hide by tweaking the option inside the app's settings. Meta notes that you can turn Hidden Words on or off at any time. Instagram started letting users filter out abusive words from their comments in 2016 before extending the feature to DMs. Image: Threads A... Continue reading...

EPA administrator Michael Regan during the EPA's Journey to Justice" tour on November 16th, 2021. | USEPA photo by Eric Vance The Verge spoke to EPA administrator Michael Regan about the agency's new rules for power plant pollution. Continue reading...

Image: Wacom Wacom has thrown a tablet-shaped curveball at digital creatives waiting on Apple's highly anticipated OLED iPads. The company introduced the Wacom Movink 13 on Wednesday, its own OLED-based offering that targets creatives in need of a highly portable display drawing tablet.Available now for $750 via the Wacom web store, the Movink features a full HD 13.3-inch Samsung OLED display that gives it several advantages over comparably midrange LED-based tablets. The most notable is the lack of a backlight - not only does that prevent light leakage and excess heat, according to Wacom (the latter being a familiar nuisance for display tablet users), but it also allows the tablet to be more compact.Wacom says the Movink is the thinnest and... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google is making it a lot easier to move between devices during a meeting. The new Switch here" feature allows you to move an active Meet call from your computer to your smartphone or vice versa. This means you can swap devices as you sit down at your desk or get up to go somewhere during a full group session without your tile bouncing in and out of the window.There's also a new function that allows you to join a call in two places. So, you can have your call active on the kitchen tablet and office computer while you run back and forth, flipping an egg and pulling an espresso shot (note for boss: I do not do this). GIF: Google While another call is active, the same meeting window on another device now has a... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Spotify submitted a new version of its iOS app with in-app pricing information for users in the European Union about how much they'll pay for subscriptions made outside of Apple's payment system - but Apple has stonewalled it again.Spotify says Apple rejected the request because it won't request an entitlement and pay Apple the commission it takes from purchases made from external links. As part of an EU ruling from earlier this year, Apple must allow music streaming apps to include external purchase links. However, Apple's updated rules say app developers will need to use the Music Streaming Services Entitlement and that it's still taking a commission from these purchases.Apple spokesperson Hannah Smith provided the message sent from... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge It was going to happen, and then it wasn't going to happen, and then it happened. The United States Congress passed a bill that would either ban TikTok or force it to be sold, and President Joe Biden signed it.So... what now? TikTok could sue, and win, and go back to normal. TikTok's owner, ByteDance, could just decide to shut it down and move on. Or it could sell TikTok US. Those are really the only three outcomes, and we have a year or less to figure out which it's going to be.On this episode of The Vergecast, we discuss all the possible outcomes for TikTok. Then we try to figure out which companies might buy the platform - and which definitely won't, despite desperately wanting to. There's no easy, obvious choice, but there are a... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images The world's largest tech company has a security problem. A series of high-profile security incidents have rocked Microsoft over the past few years, and a scathing report from the Cyber Safety Review Board recently concluded that Microsoft's security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul." Inside Microsoft, there is concern that the attacks could seriously undermine trust in the company.Sources tell me that Microsoft's engineering and security teams have been scrambling to respond to new attacks from the same Russian state-sponsored hackers that were behind the SolarWinds incident. Known as Nobelium or Midnight Blizzard, the hacking group was able to spy on the email accounts of some members of Microsoft's senior leadership... Continue reading...

Image: Supercell Supercell doesn't release a lot of games, but the studio's mobile releases tend to be big hits. Think Clash of Clans, Brawl Stars, and Clash Royale. Now, the developer is gearing up for its next major release: Squad Busters, which will be out globally on both Android and iOS on May 29th.It's a competitive multiplayer game, but one on a larger scale than a typical mobile release. In each match, 10 players compete to collect the most gems while building up a squad of computer-controlled characters. It's sort of like a simplified MOBA: you move your team around fighting minions, earning cash that lets you improve and grow your squad before you eventually start fighting other players and going for the big gem pile in the middle of the map.... Continue reading...

A power plant in Thompsons, Texas, that's home to the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project. | Image: Luke Sharrett / Bloomberg via Getty Images The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has just finalized rules aimed at slashing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. But it still doesn't crack down on the nation's fleet of gas-fired power plants. That's a big omission considering the US gets 43 percent of its electricity from gas, more than from any other source of energy.EPA administrator Michael Regan says the agency is taking more time to strengthen rules for today's existing gas power plants. But waiting too long risks leaving the decision up to a possible forthcoming Trump administration, which tried to gut environmental protections the last time. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for the US to meet climate commitments it set under the Paris agreement. The Biden... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Threads is testing the option to automatically hide your old posts. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says the feature is only available to a small number" of users for now, but it will let you choose to archive individual posts manually or have them automatically archived after a certain amount of time.You can see an example of how the feature might look in Mosseri's post on Threads. Users with access to the test should be able to manually archive their content by hitting the three dots in the top-right corner of a post and selecting Archive now." This will give users the option to hide certain posts on their profiles, similar to the archive option on Instagram.Mosseri says that users can make their posts public again at any time. He... Continue reading...

Photo by Prince Williams / Wireimage While Drake's fans have been having a ball with the Canadian rapper's recently released track dissing fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar, the legal team representing Tupac Shakur is threatening to take legal action if the song isn't pulled off the internet.Billboard reports that late rapper Tupac's legal team is ready to take Drake to court over the release of Taylor Made," Drake's recently released song featuring the AI-generated voices of Shakur and Snoop Dogg. In a statement about Drake's creation of Taylor Made," litigator Howard King called the song a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time" and said the Shakur estate never cleared the use of Tupac's voice.The Estate is deeply dismayed and... Continue reading...

Photo by Urbanandsport / NurPhoto via Getty Images The Department of Transportation (DOT) finalized rules that will soon require airlines to quickly refund passengers if they cancel or delay flights or make significant changes.Airlines must pay passengers back either in cash or in the original form of payment, no matter the reason they cancel their flight. Alternatively, passengers can choose to accept travel credit, other kinds of transportation, or another flight offered by the airline.Airlines must also refund passengers if their flight itinerary is significantly changed" and they don't accept the airline's alternative travel options. Specifically, this means that you can get your money back if your flight changes its arrival or departure time by three or more hours for domestic... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge One more app joins the passwordless future we've been promised. WhatsApp says it's now rolling out support for passkeys in the iOS version of the app. With the feature enabled, users of Meta's encrypted messaging app can use iPhone biometrics for login - that is, Face ID or Touch ID - or their phone's passcode.WhatsApp already supports unlocking its iOS app with one of these options, but this takes that a step further. Passkey support comes to the iPhone version several months after Meta started distributing it to Android WhatsApp users in October. WhatsApp spokesperson Zade Alsawah iOS users will see the app in the coming weeks," so if you don't see it now, keep checking.Passkeys are supposed to be the secure (or, at least, more... Continue reading...

The Digital Services Act strikes again. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok Lite users in Europe will have to find another way to earn an extra 38 cents a day.The light version of the TikTok app, which launched in two EU countries a couple of weeks ago, included a reward feature that paid users a small amount each day to engage with videos. European regulators launched an inquiry soon after, citing the feature's potential for encouraging addiction - particularly in young people. TikTok responded today by suspending the feature in the EU while it addresses the investigation.TikTok Lite is designed as a lightweight alternative to the main TikTok app for easier use on slow internet connections. It has been available in parts of Asia for years and became available in France and Spain earlier this month.... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple has been quiet about its plans for generative AI, but with the release of new AI models today, it appears the company's immediate ambitions lie firmly in the make AI run locally on Apple devices" realm.Researchers from Apple released OpenELM, a series of four very small language models on the Hugging Face model library, on Wednesday. Apple said on its Hugging Face model page that OpenELM, which stands for Open-source Efficient Language Models," performs very efficiently on text-related tasks like email writing. The models are open source and ready for developers to use.OpenELM is even smaller than most lightweight AI modelsIt has four sizes: 270 million parameters; 450 million parameters; 1.1 billion parameters; and 3 billion... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The US government has charged and sanctioned four Iranian nationals over claims they carried out a yearslong hacking campaign against US government agencies and companies. It also accuses the group of waging these attacks on behalf of the Iranian government.An indictment unsealed on Tuesday alleges that from around 2016 through at least April 2021, the four individuals waged cyberattacks against more than a dozen" US-based companies, along with the US departments of the Treasury and State. The companies targeted by the attacks were primarily" contractors for the US Department of Defense that had access to sensitive information.The indictment names Hossein Harooni, Reza Kazemifar, Komeil Baradaran Salmani, and Alireza Shafie Nasab as... Continue reading...

Image: Aggro Crab The underwater adventure is a rare glimpse into a more accessible soulslike experience. Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Reddit is updating its mobile app on iOS and Android to emphasize comments, the company said today. The handful of changes announced are aimed at removing hurdles and reducing friction points," the company wrote in a blog post.The changes are subtle but add up to comments becoming more of a focal point in the user experience. Comments will now load faster and open in an instant" when users click on the comment icon of a post. Clicking the comments icon takes users straight to the top comment, essentially bypassing the original post. GIF: Reddit A context bar" with the original post will be pinned to the top of the screen with the text, image, or video content compressed. Clicking on the thumbnail will take the... Continue reading...

Image: Getty During last night's earnings call with investors, Elon Musk threw out an all-time late-night dorm room bong sesh of an idea: what if AWS, but for Tesla?Musk, who loves to riff on earnings calls, compared the unused compute power of millions of idle Tesla vehicles to Amazon's cloud service business. If they're just sitting there, he mused, why not put them to good use to run AI models? (Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? No, I mean really looked?)There's a potential... when the car is not moving to actually run distributed inference," Musk said. If you imagine the future perhaps where there's a fleet of 100 million Teslas and on average, they've got like maybe a kilowatt of inference compute. That's 100 gigawatts of... Continue reading...

It's where Mister Rogers' Neighborhood lives. | Image: PBS Distribution via The Wrap. Parents, it's time to green-light more screen time.PBS classics from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, including titles like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Thomas and Friends, are coming to streaming. PBS Distribution is making the edutainment programming available for free in the form of a FAST (free, ad-supported streaming) channel called PBS Retro, which is accessible through The Roku Channel.We identified an interest in connecting audiences with the content they grew up watching," PBS distribution president Andrea Downing told The Wrap. The Roku Channel is home to other PBS FAST channels as well, including PBS Antiques Road Show, Antiques Road Trip, PBS Food, Julia Child, and PBS Nature.The Roku Channel is becoming increasingly... Continue reading...

The Rabbit R1 is a fun little thing -and oh boy, is it orange. There were times I wasn't sure the Rabbit R1 was even a real thing. The AI-powered, Teenage Engineering-designed device came out of nowhere to become one of the biggest stories at CES, promising a level of fun and whimsy that felt much better than some of the more self-serious AI companies out there. CEO Jesse Lyu practically promised the world in this $199 device.Well, say this for Rabbit: it's real. Last night, I went to the swanky TWA Hotel in New York City, along with a few hundred reporters, creators, and particularly enthusiastic R1 buyers. After a couple of hours of photo booths, specialty cocktails, and a rousing keynote and demo from Lyu - in which he made near-constant reference to and fun of the Humane AI Pin - we all got our... Continue reading...

Image: Joanna Nelius / The Verge On Wednesday, Qualcomm announced the impending arrival of its Snapdragon X Plus laptop processor alongside more information for its previously announced Snapdragon X Elite chips. While this is not the first time we've seen Qualcomm processors in a laptop, it's the first time the company could have a chip that rivals Apple, Intel, and AMD on speed.The Snapdragon X Plus is Qualcomm's entry-level laptop chip. It has 10 cores, 42MB of cache, a maximum multithreaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 tera operations per second (TOPS, or how many mathematical calculations it can solve in a second) to assist with fancy-smancy generative AI applications. But keep in mind, TOPS is an arbitrary measurement that can sound more impressive than... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge iPhone users can finally enjoy retro gaming emulators without jailbreaking their phones. Continue reading...

Lamborghini's mission to produce gas-electric hybrid versions of all of its models continues with today's release of the plug-in hybrid Urus SE. The SUV is the top selling vehicle in Lamborghini's lineup, and a hybrid version is sure to draw a lot of interest from the Italian automaker's customer base of luxury-minded one-percenters.The electrified luxury SUV's hybrid powertrain can put out a total of 800 CV (a metric unit of horsepower that translates to 789 hp), or 588 kW, thanks to its 25 kWh battery. It can also travel as far as 60 km (37 miles) on battery power alone, which is certainly a healthy step up over the hybrid Revuelto's 10 km of electric-only driving. And, as befitting its Lambo-ness, the... Continue reading...

Adobe claims its new VideoGigaGAN generative AI model can upscale video clips more consistently and in higher quality than other VSR methods. | Image: Adobe Adobe researchers have developed a new generative AI model called VideoGigaGAN that can upscale blurry videos at up to eight times their original resolution. Introduced in a paper published on April 18th, Adobe claims VideoGigaGAN is superior to other Video Super Resolution (VSR) methods as it can provide more fine-grained details without introducing any AI weirdness" to the footage.In a nutshell, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are effective for upscaling still images to a higher resolution, but struggle to do the same for video without introducing flickering and other unwanted artifacts. Other upscaling methods can avoid this, but the results aren't as sharp or detailed. VideoGigaGAN aims to provide the best of both worlds -... Continue reading...

The app recommendations in the Windows 11 Start menu. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is starting to enable ads inside the Start menu on Windows 11 for all users. After testing these briefly with Windows Insiders earlier this month, Microsoft has started to distribute update KB5036980 to Windows 11 users this week, which includes recommendations" for apps from the Microsoft Store in the Start menu.The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps," says Microsoft in the update notes of its latest public Windows 11 release. These apps come from a small set of curated developers." The ads are designed to help Windows 11 users discover more apps, but will largely benefit the developers that Microsoft is trying to tempt into building more Windows apps.Microsoft only started testing... Continue reading...

Image: Mercedes-Benz AG Mercedes' box-shaped luxury off-roader finally gets an electrified makeover. Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok - or else face a US ban of the platform - is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure.It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday.Once signed by the president, ByteDance would have up to a year to complete a sale of TikTok or face an effective ban for the platform in the US. The bill gives ByteDance an initial nine months and gives the president discretion to extend it another three should there be progress toward a deal. Still,... Continue reading...

Eight years ago, Valve began offering no-questions-asked refunds for any game you buy on Steam - as long as you asked for that refund within 14 days of purchase and hadn't played more than two hours of a game.But when Valve started letting you play games ahead of their release dates with its Early Access" and Advanced Access" programs, it introduced a loophole: people could play for many, many hours ahead of launch and still request a refund after.Today, Valve's closing the loophole: Your Advanced Access and Early Access playtime now counts against the two-hour refund limit.Here's what Valve's updated refund policy says about that as of today:

That's a nice looking charger. | Image by Elago MagSafe isn't a particularly controversial standard, but I've heard people grumble about it. They get upset because it doesn't charge quite as efficiently as an old-fashioned cable and they get annoyed that any phone case needs to be MagSafe-compatible. But could charging by cable provide you with something as stupidly fun as this new phone stand from Elago?The Elago MagSafe MS W5 Charging Stand is a mouthful of a name for what's just a Nintendo Game Boy Advance SP shaped MagSafe stand. Do the buttons and switches work? No! Does it fold close? Absolutely not! It's merely a piece of plastic you slot a MagSafe charger into. It's so simple you could probably 3D print something similar at home. Image by Elago Don't... Continue reading...