The Verge

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...

Cath Virginia / The Verge The European Union has officially adopted a new set of right-to-repair rules designed to encourage people to repair broken devices, rather than replace them. One of the rules extends a product's warranty by one year if it's repaired while still covered.The European Union already requires companies to offer a two-year minimum warranty on products, but these new rules take things a step further. Even after the warranty period ends, companies are still required to repair common household products," including smartphones, TVs, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other items. If a product breaks while under warranty, consumers can choose between a replacement or a repair. If they choose to repair, the warranty will be extended for a... Continue reading...

The Model 3 might get an affordable younger sibling in 2025. | Image: Tesla Tesla says it will build more affordable electric vehicles - perhaps as soon as 2025 - refuting recent reports that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had canceled plans for a cheaper Model 2" vehicle in favor of getting a robotaxi out the door. But Musk didn't clarify whether the lower-cost EV would be a brand new model for Tesla or simplified versions of its current vehicles.In terms of a new product roadmap, there's been a lot of talk," Musk said during the company's first quarter earnings call, addressing the concerns investors have expressed over the past month about the delayed plans for a low-cost EV. We've updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models." Musk said we might see the vehicles in early 2025, if not... Continue reading...

Photo by VCG / VCG via Getty Images Tesla reported its first quarter earnings during an incredibly shaky moment for the company in which sales numbers and the stock price have both fallen. Against this backdrop, Tesla reported $1.1 billion in net income on $21 billion in revenue, down 9 percent from $23.3 billion the same time last year.The company's profits, once the envy of the auto industry, are at their lowest in six years thanks to rampant price cutting and slowing demand. Earlier this week, the company approved its latest price cuts for the US, China, and Germany - all major markets for the EV maker.Tesla's Q1 operating margins are 5.5 percent, down from 11.4 percent in Q1 2023. In a call with investors, the company's CEO, Elon Musk, blamed an industrywide shift... Continue reading...

Wattpad says DMs will be shut down on May 6th, alongside the deletion of all existing messages. | Image: Wattpad Community publishing platform Wattpad is removing the ability for users to send each other direct messages, claiming that the feature has only been relevant to a small percentage" of its global user base. Users will retain access to their DMs until May 6th, after which all existing messages will be deleted and the feature will no longer be available, according to Wattpad's help center.Wattpad is instead encouraging its users to communicate via the public commenting feature on stories or the conversation section of profile pages. There is currently no means for users to download their existing DMs, and Wattpad says that it's unable to retrieve such data. The feature will still exist in a limited capacity solely for Wattpad to... Continue reading...

Home internet for when you're not at home. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has announced two new home internet plans: Home Internet Plus and Away. Well, technically that's one home internet plan and one anywhere-but-home plan. These new flavors of T-Mobile's 5G-powered internet service aim to address different customers, but both serve the same goal: leveraging that sweet 5G spectrum to do more than just keep our phones connected.The new Away plan, importantly, does not allow for extended use in the same location," according to a footnote in T-Mobile's press release. It's basically a Starlink competitor designed for campers and RV owners, but instead of using satellite connectivity, it's more like a supercharged cellular hotspot. It can connect up to 64 devices at a time, which seems like way more... Continue reading...

Apple's next event will be all about iPads. | Image: Apple Apple has gone and announced a spring event for May 7th at 7AM PT / 10AM ET. While the company didn't say what the event is about, the Apple Pencil in its graphic suggests we're finally about to hear about new iPads - but which ones? Well, almost certainly OLED iPad Pros, which we've been hearing about for months, but the company might also announce a new iPad Air in two sizes for the first time.Rumors have also circulated in the last few months about a new Apple Pencil and updated Magic Keyboard accessories that would give iPad Pro owners a more laptop-like feel. Because more accessories are all the iPad needs, right? It doesn't seem likely that there will be an update of the 10th-generation vanilla iPad or the iPad Mini quite yet, so... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images Tech companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon committed today to reviewing their AI training data for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and removing it from use in any future models.The companies signed on to a new set of principles meant to limit the proliferation of CSAM. They promise to ensure training datasets do not contain CSAM, to avoid datasets with a high risk of including CSAM, and to remove CSAM imagery or links to CSAM from data sources. The companies also commit to stress-testing" AI models to ensure they don't generate any CSAM imagery and to only release models if these have been evaluated for child safety.Other signatories include Anthropic, Civitai, Metaphysic, Mistral AI, and Stability AI.G... Continue reading...

Image: Atlus Metaphor: ReFantazio is the inscrutable name for Atlus' next RPG project. The company launched a new trailer and a 30-minute video introducing players to the story, gameplay, and social elements of the game, and at first blush, it looks pretty damn intriguing. Check out the gameplay video below.Metaphor: ReFantazio is an action RPG from Studio Zero, a new internal studio spun up in 2016 and headed by Katsura Hashino. Atlus really wants you to know the bona fides of the developers working on Metaphor. Hashino himself worked on Shin Megami Tensei III, Persona 3, 4, and 5. The game's mechanical designer is Ikuto Yamashita, who helped design the mechs in Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Shoji Meguro, who did the music for the Persona series,... Continue reading...

Cody Two Bears attends the Stand With Standing Rock Benefit at ABC Home & Carpet on December 15th, 2016, in New York City. | Photo by Mark Sagliocco / WireImage A coalition of 14 tribes received $135,580,000 for solar energy, part of a Biden administration program to help more households run on renewable energy. The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA) Nation, which is leading the coalition, says the funding will bring jobs to their communities and make electricity more affordable.The Environmental Protection Agency announced $7 billion in Solar for All" grants yesterday for 60 awardees, including the MHA Nation. The money, which comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, is supposed to bring residential solar systems to some 900,000 low-income and disadvantaged" households. Six of the grants, totaling $500 million, are going to tribes.Funding for the MHA Nation is expected to bring solar energy... Continue reading...

Luminar's new Halo lidar sensor is expected to be less than one inch thick. | Image: Luminar Luminar is shipping out orders of its lidar sensors to Volvo as the automaker is preparing to start production of its EX90 electric vehicles, the company said today. Volvo will use the laser sensor to enable safety and self-driving features in the EX90, making it the first global consumer vehicle to standardize this technology," Luminar notes in a press release.The news comes during a Luminar Day" webcast, where the company is also announcing a new next-generation Halo" lidar sensor - one that's designed for mainstream adoption, including in affordable vehicles, at half the cost of its current system.The order of lidar sensors to Volvo, which Luminar notes is worth $4 billion, comes after Volvo announced last year that it had to p... Continue reading...

The The VWFNDR Keirin camera concept. This past weekend, a local startup held an exhibition not too far from where I live in Tokyo to show off its idea for an entirely new take on camera hardware. That's not the sort of thing that happens every weekend, even in Tokyo, so I biked on over to take a look.VWFNDR is a project started by UX designer Alvaro Arregui Falcon of Nuevo.Tokyo and independent industrial designer Mireia Gordi i Vila. The team later brought on London-based engineer Lucas Seidenfaden, who developed the first working prototype for their concept.That concept is called Keirin.Named after the Japanese cycling discipline that takes place on a similarly oval track, the Keirin is a camera focused on panorama photography. Its standout visual feature is a curved... Continue reading...

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Don't kick yourself if you missed out on Samsung's free TV preorder promo from earlier this month. The company is now offering a much better cash discount on one of its most notable new models: the glare-free Samsung OLED S95D TV. The smallest TV in the lineup, the 55-inch model starts at $2,299.99 ($300 off) at Best Buy and Samsung, while the 77-inch is also $300 off for $4,299.99 (Best Buy, Samsung). The 65-inch TV, meanwhile, is receiving an even steeper $400 discount for $2,999.99 (Best Buy, Samsung).Back in January, we saw for ourselves how well the S95D OLED eliminated most noticeable reflections, even as the TV sat right next to a light source. At the same time, the TV's display is brighter than ever, with the OLED screen... Continue reading...

There's a new cat-eye frame called the Skyler. | Image: Meta Meta just announced a slew of new updates for its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg just dropped an Instagram reel showing off a new cat-eye frame style for the glasses and a video calling feature. You can also now connect the glasses with Apple Music, and last but not least, the multimodal AI assistant is live for everyone in the US and Canada.You can peep a pretty clear demo of the video calling feature from Zuckerberg's reel. In it, he talks to Eva Chen, who runs fashion at Instagram, about the new Skyler frames and... chain lengths, of all things. The existing Wayfarer and Headliner models are also getting some new colors. The Headliner, which has rounder lenses, is also getting a low-bridge fit for folks who have... Continue reading...

The white Razer Viper V3 Pro next to its large bundled HyperPolling Wireless Dongle. | Image: Razer Does your gaming mouse track its own position 8,000 times per second? If you're the kind of person who cares, I suspect you might also want that mouse to track that fast out of the box - instead of having to buy an extra dongle for that feature.That's the most obvious difference Razer is announcing today with its flagship Viper V3 Pro mouse for esports pros and those who aspire to be one. For $160, the new Viper V3 Pro includes the $30 Razer HyperPolling Wireless Dongle, where the $150 Viper V2 Pro did not.Mind you, the 58-gram Viper V2 Pro was already an impressive piece of kit, taking the crown for the lightest wireless gaming mouse at its debut, and the V3 Pro now sheds an extra four grams to hit 54 grams and firmly cement itself... Continue reading...

Residents clean debris of their destroyed houses at the Khaung Dote Khar Rohingya refugee camp in Myanmar's Rakhine state on May 15th, 2023, after Cyclone Mocha made landfall. | Photo by Sai Aung Main / AFP via Getty Images No other region on Earth experiences more climate, weather, and water-related disasters than Asia, according to a new report. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released its 2023 State of the Climate in Asia today, which found that risks are only rising.From heatwaves to flooding and storms, climate change makes all kinds of disasters more intense all over the world. But the problem is particularly acute in Asia, which is heating up faster than the global average thanks to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.The report's conclusions are sobering."Climate change exacerbated the frequency and severity of such events, profoundly impacting societies, economies, and, most importantly, human lives and the environment... Continue reading...

Image: Amazon Amazon is bringing back free(ish) grocery deliveries for orders over $35 in the form of a new monthly subscription program the company announced today. It's $9.99 per month for Prime members and includes unlimited one-hour grocery delivery where it's available, as well as unlimited 30-minute grocery pickups, with a half-cost option for low-income non-Prime members who qualify.Amazon launched a trial of the subscription in three cities last year but now says it's available in 3,500 cities across the US. Deliveries include groceries from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh but also local grocers and specialty retailers that it's partnered with. Subscribers get priority access" for recurring weekly groceries, too.This new subscription could be... Continue reading...