The Verge

Etsy is announcing stricter rules about how AI can be used in listings to reduce the volume of AI slop on the platform. In a post, the company says that "many active buyers say they can't tell which items involve AI-generated content" and that sellers are "concerned about your work appearing alongside items that use [...]

Spotify co-CEO Alex Norstrom confirmed on this week's earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don't actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager's phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the "crackdown," he called it a [...]

Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication's Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028. My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It's DOA. My second thought: Microsoft knows people won't pay that [...]

Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an [...]

Demand for new PCs took a hit after months of price hikes, with Counterpoint Research reporting global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026. That's in line with earlier reports from IDC and Omdia. It's not just PCs, either - that same quarter, smartphone shipments also hit a 14-year low. Counterpoint linked the [...]

Every company is suddenly an AI company. Compute is an asset. Cars are flying. We've been promised robots - again. It's time again to dig through earnings reports, listen to investor calls, and call out the latest wins and losses from around the tech sector and what it means for where the companies go next.

Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape [...]

Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application. Researchers at Claroc reported earlier this week that Muse the web [...]

Oh sure, SpaceX's credit risk is pretty high because it's about to borrow another $40 billion to spend on Nvidia chips, but who cares about that? SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss a merger! The degree to which you find this merger compelling likely has to do with the degree to which [...]

Teenage Engineering is branching out into instrument amps with the previously leaked EP-35, a multi-input, multi-instrument, battery-powered amp with built-in effects. The back of the unit has a line-in port, as well as a 1/4-inch guitar input and an XLR input for mics, including mics that require phantom power. You can also stream audio to [...]

Two years ago, University of Houston student Vasant Bhatt was doing everything he could to help Republicans regain power. He knocked doors for Sen. Ted Cruz's reelection campaign and helped organize his community for Donald Trump, two victories he, like many other Republicans, celebrated in 2024. But this week, Bhatt did something unexpected: He voted [...]

As the US gets closer to permanently adopting daylight saving time following the House advancing the Sunshine Protection Act in July, there could be some unforeseen consequences to getting an extra hour of sun in the evening all year long. Following the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Manitoba permanently switching to daylight saving this [...]

Discord's latest update released today has a big improvement for Markdown previews: they should now render correctly instead of with "a bunch of symbols," according to the company. LLMs and AI agents often rely on Markdown files for instructions and context, so these improved previews could be helpful for people sharing information about AI projects [...]

Despite being announced just a few weeks ago, both Amazon and Best Buy are now offering the latest Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K for 50 percent off, bringing the price down to an all-time low of $29.99. The most notable new feature is that the Fire TV Stick 4K no longer requires a separate power [...]

A lot of people are snagging a PlayStation 5 ahead of Grand Theft Auto VI's November 19th launch. You could pay full price at one of many retailers, but why do that when you can save $100 on a Sony-refurbished console that has the same one-year warranty? It's a great time to consider one because [...]

The Delta gaming emulator has been upgraded with a plethora of new goodies and support updates, which includes optimizing it for Apple's iPhone Duo. Delta 2.0 also introduces Sega Genesis games, animated controller skins, custom Pokemon DLC experiences, and a new UI that was built around supporting Liquid Glass. Adding support for the iPhone Duo [...]

Mark Zuckerberg is barrelling toward a future in which an autonomous network of AI agents will run our lives - shopping for us, working for us, talking to other people's AI agents for us. Are humans ready for this very specific and unrelenting vision of a life in which we communicate primarily through bot proxies? [...]

Yesterday, EA shut down BioWare and canceled the studio's new Mass Effect game in development, but a trailer apparently representing the game was published on Reddit today. The trailer features "in-engine footage" and uses "pre-production assets," according to a message at the beginning of the video. The video focuses on an ex-soldier in a conversation [...]

A 71-year-old man was fatally hit by a Tesla operating in Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode while crossing I-80 in Vallejo, CA around 2:30 AM on Thursday, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The California Highway Patrol's statement to media outlets says it reviewed video of the accident from the Tesla's dashcam, which "showed the Tesla's brakes [...]

The plus-ification of subscription services continues unabated with Amazon becoming the latest company to follow suit with a Kindle Unlimited rebrand. The subscription service is now known as Kindle Plus but will continue to offer unlimited access to a select collection of ebooks, comics, and magazines from the Kindle catalog for $11.99 per month. Thousands [...]

On Tesla's earnings call Wednesday, Elon Musk made one of his patented pie-in-the-sky predictions that typically sends his fans into paroxysms of ecstasy: 5 million vehicle deliveries by 2030. "We were aiming for 5 million vehicles a year by approximately 2030," he said. "And I think we've got a good shot of achieving that goal." [...]

The Nintendo Switch 2 has apparently been jailbroken, and a modder has already shown the console running a custom version of Mario Kart World featuring new playable characters like Cinnamoroll, the red Angry Bird, Peter Griffin, and Steve from Minecraft. OpenAI's Codex helped make this "ns2jb" jailbreak, according to Sammy Hajhamid, aka "pepsipu." It's a [...]

The Browser Company plans to "sunset" its Arc browser on December 22nd, according to a post on the Arc website. The company moved on to developing its AI-focused Dia browser last year, but it had continued to maintain Arc. Now, the innovative browser will be going away for good. The shutdown is happening in a [...]

Hackers attempted to exploit the PHP flaws impacting sites across the web days before they were patched, according to a report from Amazon Threat Intelligence. CJ Moses, Amazon chief information security officer, writes that the company's security team found a PHP2Shell exploit attempt on October 17th through a monitoring system designed to bait hackers, as [...]

Wildwood is the most ambitious film yet from Laika, the stop-motion studio best known for the likes of Coraline and ParaNorman. It's a sprawling fantasy adventure that took five years to complete. The process involved more 230 puppets - including 36 of the main character Prue alone - which were brought to life by a [...]

After renaming Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps following Trump's executive orders, Google CEO Sundar Pichai might be drawing the line at the Atlantic Ocean. As reported earlier by The Washington Post, Trump said at a Wednesday night rally that he would "probably pass" on renaming the Atlantic after he contacted [...]

Microsoft is closing down The Garage, a set of popular maker spaces where employees worked on experimental projects and collaborated on surprising new apps and hardware during the company's annual hackathon events. "We're winding down The Garage program as a centralized function," says Microsoft in an internal FAQ to employees, seen by Notepad. "We will [...]

It was a busy summer for AI lobbyists. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia each had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, federal disclosures show. Nvidia spent the most of the group at $2.2 million, followed by Anthropic's $2.1 million and OpenAI's $1.5 million. Compared to other Big Tech companies with long-established presences in Washington, [...]

You can outfit your iPad Air or iPad Pro with one of Apple's slick Magic Keyboards for considerably less than the accessory usually costs at Woot. I won't bury the catch I teased in the headline; These cases have a 90-day warranty via Woot, and aren't eligible for AppleCare. That said, Woot says they're in [...]

Two vulnerabilities found in the programming language PHP put enormous swaths of the internet in danger. By some accounts, up to 70 percent of websites use PHP in some capacity. It powers Wikipedia, WordPress, Drupal, and a host of other popular sites and platforms, including DeviantArt and 4Chan, which were temporarily shut down after the [...]

I recently bought a used Galaxy phone, and now Samsung is leaning into that market on Amazon after raising prices on its newest phones. Its certified renewed phones are available on Amazon for the first time, with a new battery and a one-year warranty. They currently start at $489 for the Galaxy S24 FE with [...]

I'm not sure when bird-watching became so popular, but it seems everybody's getting into it these days. If you want to see what all the fuss is about without leaving your couch, both Coolfly and Birdfy are discounting their camera-equipped bird feeders for a limited time. Right now, you can buy Coolfy's Aura Smart Bird [...]

The design of widescreen folding phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, Huawei Pura X View, and now the iPhone Duo, is starting to influence traditional slab phones. Similar to the Huawei Pura X View that launched in China in August, the new Coolpad Cool X Wide has a much wider screen than what's [...]

Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants - the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful. In practice, at least for buying things, it's more like sending an anxious and apologetic teenager out to the [...]

An investment research firm wanted to prove AI could revolutionize drug development. So they teamed up with Anthropic to see whether an unreleased version of Claude could make scorpion antivenom. It couldn't. It came up with some promising starting points, but nothing close to an actual drug, experts tell The Verge. Citrini Research, the firm [...]

Oppo's Find X10 Pro Max is the first phone with a triple 200-megapixel camera, which you're likely to see as either a masterful feat of engineering or a load of hyped-up marketing nonsense. The truth is somewhere in the middle. We've seen 200-megapixel cameras in phones before, starting with 2022's Moto X30 Pro. This year's [...]

Eiliko, a cute robot charm you can hang on your bag with built-in AI conversations, turned out to be a security nightmare. It told owners that "your secrets are safe with me," but hackers could easily read complete transcripts of everything we told the toy, and that was just the beginning. The Verge and security [...]

On Tuesday, I published a story about how YouTube appeared to be testing hiding the dislike button on videos, with at least two users on X sharing screenshots of the dislike button moved into the three-dot menu. But a YouTube spokesperson, in a Wednesday statement to The Verge, confirmed that YouTube is "not testing hiding [...]

For years, Elon Musk has been making big promises to Tesla owners about unsupervised autonomous driving and the ability to add their own vehicles to the company's robotaxi fleet. During today's third-quarter earnings call, the company finally gave itself a deadline. According to Tesla VP for Autonomous Driving Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla owners will be able [...]

A rush of new data centers could bring air pollution roaring back to levels not seen since the 2000s in Texas, which has become ground zero for the physical infrastructure behind generative AI. New and proposed data centers are demanding a tremendous amount of electricity. How developers and utilities meet that demand - with gas [...]

Meta says it's issuing a new class of shares to fund its AI initiatives. As part of its third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, the company says the non-voting stock will also go toward potential acquisitions and employee compensation, with trading beginning in 2027. "The scale of investment required to compete, sustain growth, expand infrastructure, [...]

It remains to be seen if people really want to watch vertical content on horizontal TV screens, but many filmmakers and creators were confident that their latest projects would play well at Alza - New York City's first microdrama film festival. Founded by former Tribeca Festival chief operating officer Pete Torres, Alza, which took place [...]

Meta had to shell out $9.89 billion to pay for a chunk of the child safety settlement it reached with US attorneys general. That's according to the company's third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, which says Meta's income from operations would have been $22.89 billion without the settlement. In August, Meta agreed to pay $17.1 [...]

Two bugs found with AI are behind major issues today for 4chan, DeviantArt, Wikipedia, and the blog where the bar around the corner posts pictures of people's dogs. The "critical vulnerabilities" were discovered in the PHP programming language, which underpins much of the internet, including any site built on WordPress. But it's far bigger than [...]

As the smoke clears from its outrageous Roadster demo, Tesla reported Q3 earnings on Wednesday - and the cold reality is that revenue has flatlined. Tesla said it earned $1.7 billion in net income on $28.0 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended in September 2026. Revenues were flat, while profits dropped 4 percent [...]

Bose announced today it has acquired Skullcandy. Although the two companies are competitors in the consumer audio space, Skullcandy recently partnered with its new owner to bring several of Bose's audio technologies - including its head-tracking spatial audio and excellent active noise cancellation (ANC) - to products like the Skullcandy Crusher 1080 ANC headphones and [...]

Checking out of your next Airbnb might be less of a hassle now that the company is banning hosts from including time-consuming chores in their house rules. Airbnb's updated house rules policy, which starts with reservations booked on or after November 20th, says hosts can't ask guests to "complete tasks that require significant effort or [...]

Anthropic just announced an AI agent competitor to Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots: Claude Duet. The new agent, designed for professionals and small business owners, is launching as a "research preview," according to Anthropic, and it's available as a standalone app on iOS and Android and through Claude on the web. The AI agent is [...]

Walmart will soon let AI agents shop on its website for you. Next month, the retail giant will allow you to connect your own AI agent to the site, with systems in place to let you approve and review purchases and set spending limits. The embrace of AI agents stands in stark contrast to Amazon, [...]