The Verge

Archer says it will launch an air taxi service in New York City with United Airlines, which will include routes between Manhattan and major airports like JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark. The aviation company aims to replace hourlong taxi rides along congested roads with breezy flights lasting between 5-15 minutes. Archer and United would utilize preexisting [...]

Discord is preventing some users from accessing sensitive content unless they allow the platform to verify their age by scanning their face or ID. The new age verification process is described as an experiment" by Discord, and is being trialed in the United Kingdom and Australia in response to local laws that require online platforms [...]

Wikipedia is attempting to dissuade artificial intelligence developers from scraping the platform by releasing a dataset that's specifically optimized for training AI models. The Wikimedia Foundation announced on Wednesday that it had partnered with Kaggle - a Google-owned data science community platform that hosts machine learning data - to publish a beta dataset of structured [...]

Go to any run club in the world and thereas a good chance that everyone there has two things: a Garmin smartwatch to track their run and a Strava account to brag about it. Given the global running boom, it makes Stravaas lack of any modern, in-app training plans a curious and glaring omission. Or, [...]

Towards the end of Mark Zuckerbergas testimony in a Washington, DC courthouse, a smile flashed across his face. Metaas lead attorney, Mark Hansen, had asked the CEO if he was ahappya about paying $19 billion for WhatsApp in 2014. Zuckerberg flashed a grin, took a brief pause, and responded, aIad do it again.a Over the [...]

Gemini Live's feature that lets it see and respond to what's on your camera and your screen will now be free for all Android users via the Gemini app, Google announced today. The AI-powered feature officially launched earlier this month for everyone on Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25 using the Gemini app. At the [...]

Copilot Vision, Microsoft's AI assistant feature that can interpret what's on your screen and help you use apps, is now available for free use within the Edge browser, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, announced on Bluesky today. Vision is a talk-based experience," as Microsoft calls it, meaning you use it by speaking into the [...]

Zoom suffered a major outage this afternoon that prevented people from connecting to video calls and accessing its website. As shown by Cisco's ThousandEyes platform, site connectivity dropped off at around 2:40PM ET before coming back online nearly two hours later. Users across X posted about the outage, with some getting an Unable to Connect" [...]

Right-wing influencers are shilling an app that purportedly lets people earn crypto for reporting sightings of undocumented immigrants. ICERAID, a aGovFi protocol that delegates intelligence gathering tasks to citizens,a has recently been promoted by the likes of conspiracy theorist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer, Proud Boy-turned-media personality Jacob Engels, and disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz. [...]

Apple's making steady progress toward its climate goals, the company's latest environmental progress report shows. Its planet-heating pollution shrank by 800,000 metric tons last year compared to 2023, about a 5 percent drop. Looking back over the past decade, Apple says its global greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by more than 60 percent. That's no [...]

During Meta's antitrust trial today, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. Attorneys for both Apple and Snap called the errors egregious," with Apple's representative indicating that it may not be able to trust Meta with [...]

Xbox is finally rolling out the ability to purchase games and DLC, as well as sign up for Game Pass directly from its mobile app. But there's a catch: you'll no longer be able to access remote play within the Xbox app. The update is arriving for beta testers on iOS and Android, but Xbox [...]

In recent years, Do Not Disturb has evolved on both iPhones and Android phones: it's no longer just a simple block on notifications and distractions, but rather a selection of modes you can customize to suit all the different scenarios in your life (like driving, sleeping, working, or exercising at the gym). This means you [...]

OpenAI is releasing two new AI reasoning models today: o3, which the company calls its most powerful reasoning model," and o4-mini, which is a smaller and faster model that achieves remarkable performance for its size and cost," according to a blog post. The company also says that o3 and o4-mini will be able to think" [...]

As a part of its ongoing Book Sale, Amazon isn't just cutting prices on its budget-friendly Fire HD tablets - it's also offering a great deal on the latest Kindle Scribe. Right now, you can buy it with 16GB of storage for an all-time low of $324.99 ($75 off). If you need more storage, you [...]

Lyft said it is acquiring mobility platform FreeNow, giving the ridehailing company its first major presence in Europe after years of operating exclusively in the US and Canada. FreeNow aggregates taxis alongside private vehicles, including luxury rides. The acquisition of FreeNow nearly doubles Lyft's potential market and will aide the company as it seeks to [...]

Falling somewhere between a 3D printer and the inkjet you use to churn out color photos, Anker's eufyMake brand has announced what it's calling the industry's first 3D-texture UV Printer designed for personal use." The UV Printer E1 is closer in size to a 3D printer than an inkjet, but is designed to produce 2D [...]

Figma slapped Swedish AI coding startup Loveable with a cease-and-desist warning for naming one of its new product features Dev Mode." It turns out Figma successfully trademarked the term Dev Mode in November last year, according to the US Patent and Trademark office, having introduced its own Dev Mode feature in 2023. We're flattered that [...]

DJI's new drone accessory is designed to ensure public safety and emergency officials are heard loud and clear - and I mean really loud. Its enterprise-focused Zenmuse V1 speaker can broadcast the sound of someone's voice at up to 127 decibels at 1 meter, a number DJI says is on par with the sound level [...]

TikTok has announced Footnotes," its own take on the community notes features that started on Twitter and have been spreading to other social networks. As elsewhere, it's a crowd-sourced approach to moderation - TikTok says contributors will be able to add relevant information to content on our platform." US users can apply to become Footnotes [...]

The government will continue funding the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program. In a statement to The Verge, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) spokesperson Jared Auchey said it executed the option period on the contract to ensure there will be no lapse in critical CVE services" last night. On Tuesday, MITRE, the government-funded organization [...]

Spotify is down according to widespread user reports across the US and Europe, with issues preventing the platform from loading or streaming music. At 8:45AM ET on Wednesday morning, the Spotify Status account on X said it was aware of some issues" affecting the service right now, and is currently checking them out." It's unclear [...]

Microsoft has started testing an early version of its Copilot for Gaming experience. Sources familiar with Microsoftas Xbox plans tell me that employees can now access Copilot within the Xbox mobile app, and that while it looks similar to the existing Copilot chatbot, itas designed to tap into your Xbox account. Announced last month, Copilot [...]

Patreon is taking on Twitch with a new feature that lets creators offer live video streams directly on the platform. The feature will be available starting this week" to select creators" in an early access test, and the company plans to roll it out more widely this summer, according to a press release. In the [...]

Digital picture frame company Auraas newest product, the Aspen, displays your digital photos in analog style. With a 12-inch antiglare display, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and a super slim bezel, the $229 frame improves on the companyas 10-inch Carver frame ($149) while retaining Auraas core photo-sharing feature. It also brings two new features to the [...]

Nvidia is releasing a new GPU driver today that includes a massive amount of fixes for bugs and crashes that have plagued its Game Ready drivers recently. After widespread reports of black screens, game crashes, and general stability issues, today's 576.02 driver release (.exe download) not only bumps the version number significantly from last month's [...]

Iave been trying to buy a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III for two weeks, and I no longer believe this camera exists. It definitely existed at one point. The camera was released in 2019, and Iam sure I used one at least for a little bit because I was working at a camera website [...]

Microsoft has enabled a new computer use" feature for Copilot Studio this week that lets AI agents interact with websites and desktop applications. Much like OpenAI's Operator or Claude's identically named computer use" feature, businesses will be able to use Copilot Studio to build AI agents that treat websites and desktop apps as if they're [...]

When the Breakthrough Prize, founded by Facebook, Apple, and Google moguls and sometimes called the Oscars of Science" by people who want that to be true, invited a comedian to present one of its awards it probably should have expected a few topical jokes. Remarks made by Seth Rogen during the April 5th livestream about [...]

Not to brag, but Iam somewhat of an expert in folding wagons. Huge flex, I know. But Iave never tested one with a motor like BougeRVas new Electric Foldable Wagon. I have a little surf shack that sits almost exactly 1km (0.6 miles) from the parking lot, where I regularly carry supplies and sports gear [...]

Making Instagram a separate company. Buying Snapchat. Wiping everyoneas Facebook friends. Creating a feed of only ads. These were some of the ideas that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered over the years as he built his social media empire. Over the past two days, he talked about them from the witness stand at a federal [...]

Skullcandy has made a name for itself in recent years with well-featured budget earbuds that don't sound awful. Although its new Method 360 ANC earbuds are launching with a special $99.99 introductory price" (that will eventually go up to $129.99) making them one of the brand's most expensive offerings, the company has partnered with Bose [...]

Mohsen Mahdawi had a feeling his naturalization appointment would go awry. A week before his meeting with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Mahdawi called his friend Chris Helali and told him he was concerned. aHe thought it was likely a and I agreed a that he would be arrested, that they would ambush him [...]

OpenAI has revealed the advisors" for its new nonprofit commission: Dolores Huerta, Monica Lozano, Dr. Robert K. Ross, and Jack Oliver. The company says the four advisors will help inform OpenAI's philanthropic efforts," according to an announcement on Tuesday. Huerta was a prominent labor activist during the 20th century, while Lozano was the president and [...]

OpenAI is adding an image library to ChatGPT to make it easier to access your AI-generated images, the company announced today. It's rolling out to all Free, Plus, and Pro users on mobile and on the web. In a short video, OpenAI shows how it works. From the ChatGPT sidebar, you'll be able to see [...]

Funding is about to run out for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program - a system used by major companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, and AMD to identify and track publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The program helps engineers identify how bad an exploit is and how to prioritize applying patches or other mitigations. [...]

A PDF of Meta's opening statement slides in its FTC antitrust hearing yesterday contains easy-to-remove redactions that make it possible to see everything the company didn't want made public, The Verge has discovered. Thanks to the poor redactions, we can see sections comparing the use of Apple's Messages app to Meta apps like Instagram and [...]

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a potentially crazy idea" in 2022 to get people using Facebook more: deleting everyone's friends' lists. The possibility was discussed on Monday via internal emails shown by the FTC as Zuckerberg testified during Meta's antitrust trial. Zuckerberg floated the idea of considering wiping everyone's graphs" - their friends lists - [...]

Blackmagic Design, an Australia-based digital cinematography camera company, was gearing up to start making products in the United States before the Trump administration blew a tariff-shaped hole in its plans. Now, not only is Blackmagic having to increase prices in the US to mitigate some of the levies on imported goods, but those same tariffs [...]

About a year before the Federal Trade Commission first opened its antitrust investigation into Metaas acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, CEO Mark Zuckerberg internally suggested athe extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.a In a 2018 email to his executives, Zuckerberg wrote that, aa"while most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is [...]

Anthropic is getting ready to introduce a new voice mode" feature that could rival OpenAI's similar option within ChatGPT, according to Bloomberg. The AI voice assistant will reportedly live within its Claude AI chatbot and could start rolling out as soon as this month." According to Bloomberg, Anthropic plans to roll out three English-language voices [...]

HermAs handbags, Birkenstocks, Tide Pods, Lululemon activewear, and mountains of luxury furniture a what if I told you you could cut out the middleman and buy it straight from the source for a fraction of the cost? So goes a genre of viral videos cropping up on social media that claim to show Chinese manufacturers [...]

Google announced Tuesday that it's going to redirect country code top-level domain names (ccTLD) for Google Search to google.com over the coming months to streamline people's experience on Search," according to a blog post. The change means that if, for example, you used google.ng (for Nigeria) or google.com.br (for Brazil), you'll see google.com in your [...]

Players looking to harness desert power will have to wait as Dune: Awakening has been delayed. Funcom, developers of the MMORPG based on Frank Herbert's Dune sci-fi series, announced the news saying the game will be pushed back from its May release date to June 10th. Players who have pre-purchased one of the game's deluxe [...]

If you want a mental escape from today's constant bombardment of alarming news, one method is to lose yourself in a good book - and an excellent way to do that is to read that good book on one of Amazon's Fire tablets. Amazon has put many of the latest Fire HD tablets on sale [...]

Google, for the first time, inked an agreement to purchase geothermal energy for its facilities in Asia. The deal also marks the first geothermal power purchase agreement for Taiwan, according to the company. Google is working toward climate goals of cutting the company's planet-heating emissions in half and matching its electricity use with carbon-free energy [...]

European allies who have reservations about working with Elon Musk's Starlink will have more to worry about if they side with Chinese satellite internet services, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr told the Financial Times. Carr said that politics having an influence on long-term decisions in Europe was unfortunate," and that allied Western democracies" should [...]

Anthropic is launching two major features today: Research and Google Workspace integration. The company announced today that Claude can now connect directly to your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Documents, turning the AI assistant into what Anthropic calls your frontline workplace assistant." Instead of manually digging through countless emails, calendar invites, and documents to find information, [...]

Google is letting Gemini Advanced subscribers try out Veo 2, its text-to-video AI model that it says is capable of creating high-resolution clips with cinematic realism." Starting today, subscribers can select Veo 2 from the Gemini model dropdown on the web and mobile, where they can enter a prompt to generate an eight-second video in [...]

An emergency meeting has been called to announce Among Us 3D will launch on May 6th. The game was originally planned to be a VR-exclusive before the development crew at Innersloth and Schell Games pivoted to making this version of the game accessible to those without the expensive hardware too. Among Us 3D is compatible [...]