The Verge

Photo illustration: The Verge / Photo by Bluesky The head of Threads and Mastodon competitor Bluesky on why she thinks decentralization is the way forward in a post-Twitter internet. Continue reading...

We're in a Gilded Age of fast, cheap, and trendy clothing. Anyone can purchase copies of expensive garments online that arrive at record speeds to their home, and for a fraction of the original price. This practice has made items affordable - often at the expense of the workers making the products - and created shopping habits that can be wasteful and impulsive. One e-comm giant, Shopify, estimates that 20 to 30 percent of online purchases are returned, while the National Retail Federation says around 18 percent of online orders are returned.The online fashion house, Finesse, is promising to change that. Their motives are to reduce overproduction by using AI to market and design their clothing exactly for their audience.Retailers have... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft has committed changes to Chromium that will improve text rendering on Windows machines. Following years of complaints, Chrome version 124 will finally support contrast and gamma values from the Windows ClearType Text Tuner for text rendering in Google's browser.This change should mean Chrome will finally match the improvements Microsoft made to Edge for font and text rendering, so you can apply text contrast enhancements and gamma correction to improve the readability of text on webpages. Chrome uses Skia for text rendering with hard-coded values for contrast and gamma, so it wasn't picking up the improvements that ClearType has to offer.Microsoft's ClearType font technology has long been used in Windows to improve text... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge The European Commission is opening five non-compliance investigations into how Apple, Google, and Meta are complying with its new Digital Markets Act antitrust rules, the regulator announced today. We suspect that the suggested solutions put forward by the three companies do not fully comply with the DMA," the EU's antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement. We will now investigate the companies' compliance with the DMA, to ensure open and contestable digital markets in Europe."In particular, the Commission plans to investigate Google and Apple's anti-steering rules in their app stores and whether Google is guilty of self-preferencing its own services within its search engine. Apple's browser choice screen for iOS is also... Continue reading...

The production line of Easy Mac Macaroni & Cheese Cups on March 27, 2020, at the Kraft Heinz plant in Champaign, Ill. | Zbigniew Bzdak/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images The Biden administration today announced the largest investment in cleaning up industrial greenhouse gas emissions to date. The Department of Energy (DOE) selected 33 projects across more than 20 states to receive up to $6 billion in federal funding for clean energy technologies. It's a diverse cohort spanning from mac-and-cheese maker Kraft Heinz to manufacturers of chemicals, paper, and construction materials.Industrial emissions account for almost a quarter of the nation's planet-heating pollution. It's also widely considered the most difficult kind of climate pollution to prevent. Alternatives to fossil fuel-fired furnaces and industrial processes have lagged behind other clean energy technologies. The Biden administration thinks... Continue reading...

Image: Studio Ghibli Studio Ghibli fans who missed their shot at watching Spirited Away in theaters last year can try again between April 27th and May 1st at U.S. cinemas nationwide." The showings are part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2024, which will put 14 Ghibli films - with English dubbed and subtitled versions with the original Japanese voice work - back in theaters throughout the year. It's not clear how many theaters are involved, but in my area, five theaters are showing Spirited Away over the course of as many days.That's the largest list of movies since Ghibli Fest started in 2017. Others hitting theaters this year include Miyazaki classics like Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, as well as movies from other Ghibli directors,... Continue reading...

The world of Elden Ring expands on June 21st with a new world, items, and bosses to slay. | Image: Amazon We spent much of the time following Elden Ring's launch begging FromSoftware to expand the universe of its latest Game of the Year award-worthy soulslike. By now, you'll realize our prayers were answered. Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree will launch on June 21st for the PlayStation 5, Xbox, and PC. It takes place in a whole new area separate from the game's standard map, one filled with new stories, characters, and bosses to slay. It sounds full enough to be a standalone game, but alas, you'll need the base game to enjoy the $39.99 expansion.When it comes to purchasing options, Shadow of the Erdtree is not your average piece of downloadable content - there are preorder bonuses, physical bundles, and special editions with collector's... Continue reading...

The first-generation Roam speakers. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sonos will launch the follow-up to its Roam wireless AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth speaker in June, along with a new app specifically for its portable speakers. That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who writes in his Power On newsletter today that the company has rejiggered the hardware to fix Bluetooth issues with the speaker.Gurman says the new app will also support the company's rumored $449 high-end headphones, which may also come in June. However, users will have to wait for the Move 1 and 2 and the first-generation Roam to gain support, as the company has reportedly had trouble getting the software up to snuff.The original Roam is a solid speaker with some quirks, like no stereo pairing over Bluetooth, which The Verge's Chris... Continue reading...

Image by Cath Virginia / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 31, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hi, sorry for my bad taste in TV, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I've been reading about LA crime rings and AI music tools, watching March Madness even though all my brackets are already busted, watching the story of Mickey Mouse and pretending I don't care about Love Is Blind while my wife watches even though I'm now kind of obsessed with Love Is Blind, and trying to understand all the basketball terms LeBron James uses in his new podcast.I also have for you a huge new Netflix show, a super-cheap USB charger, a newish messaging app, the new X-Men series... Continue reading...

Smart ceiling lights are finally becoming a thing and are great for lighting up your whole room with both fun and function. We compared two new options from Aqara and Nanoleaf to find out which is the best. Continue reading...

Yesterday, Square Enix released a trailer for The Rising Tide, the next paid DLC for Final Fantasy XVI, and gave the expansion a release date: April 18th. The update to the PS5 game will be available as a single purchase add-on or in the $24.99 Final Fantasy XVI PlayStation Store Expansion Pass. And besides adding the eikon Leviathan to the game, other content introduces a game mode as well as new weapons and abilities.For no good reason, I haven't played a new Final Fantasy game in years, but I trust Ash Parrish's conclusion that the Leviathan being missing has been an error in need of correction. PlayStation's blog post says in addition to fighting it in a new boss fight, Clive will get Leviathan Eikonic abilities, including summoning... Continue reading...

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge While a lot of our files are stored in the cloud, there are still many ones and zeros that get stored locally. But as the capacity of the drives used by our desktops and laptops has increased, finding files has gotten that much harder. How many photos and videos do you have stacked up in your computer? How many documents and downloads?Personally, I tend to neglect file management because there's so much storage space available. But when I do need a file, especially one I haven't used for a while, the old phrase about finding a needle in a haystack comes to mind. It's even worse if I don't remember much about what it was called.Don't despair. Windows has the tools you need to track down what you're after. And if the built-in options... Continue reading...

The Verge The Financial Times has a new generative AI chatbot called Ask FT that can answer questions its subscribers ask. Similar to generalized AI bots (like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini), users can expect a curated natural language answer to whatever they want to know - but with answers derived from the outlet's decades of published information rather than sources that are harder to explain or are subject to ongoing legal action. So don't expect it to give you an answer for the best recipe for fettucini alfredo.When we asked, Who runs Microsoft's AI products?" the tool returned an up-to-date answer and referenced news that broke this week about Microsoft hiring DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman as the head of its new AI team:

Suno will happily sing you a tune. | Image: The Verge / Shutterstock I heard a new song last weekend called Soul Of The Machine." It's a simple, old-timey number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (musicians in the know would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings about being a trapped soul with a heart that once beat but is now cold and weak.Soul Of The Machine" is not a real song at all. Or is it? It's getting harder to say. Whatever it is, it's the creation of Suno, an AI tool from a startup of the same name focused on music generation. Rolling Stone said this song's prompt was solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI." And you know what? I doubt I'd glance askance at it if I heard it in a mix of human-recorded Delta blues tunes. The track is technically... Continue reading...

Sunglasses that convert to reading glasses with a swipe. Continue reading...

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Emad Mostaque is stepping down from his role as CEO of Stability AI, the startup that helped bring Stable Diffusion to life. In a press release late on Friday night, Stability AI says Mostaque is leaving the company to pursue decentralized AI." Mostaque will also step down from his position on the board of directors at Stability AI.The board has appointed two interim co-CEOs to lead Stability AI - COO Shan Shan Wong and CTO Christian Laforte - while it conducts a search for a permanent CEO. As we search for a permanent CEO, I have full confidence that Shan Shan Wong and Christian Laforte, in their roles as interim co-CEOs, will adeptly steer the company forward in developing and commercializing industry-leading generative AI... Continue reading...

The Asus ROG NUC. | Image: Asus When Asus rescued Intel's NUC brand of compact computers from the dumpster, I held out hope that the company might also revive Intel's ambitious miniature gaming PCs. It did, but prepare for a little sticker shock - these systems may cost as much or more than a comparable gaming laptop.The company's website currently lists two models of the ROG NUC, with what Asus tells us are tentative prices of $1,629 and $2,199. The entry-level model sports an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, Nvidia RTX 4060 graphics, 16GB of 5600MHz DDR5 RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage, while the advanced config bumps that up to an Core Ultra 9 185H, RTX 4070, and 32GB / 1TB of RAM and storage respectively.Since you can easily find Asus' popular Zephyrus G14 and G16... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge It's all about Apple's vise grip over the smartphone market and the iPhone's locked-down ecosystem. Continue reading...

Image: Mozilla Mozilla is ending its partnership with Onerep after the company's CEO admitted to having ties to a data broker, as first reported by Krebs on Security. Though customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep's CEO do not align with our values," writes Mozilla's vice president of communications Brandon Borrman, in a statement provided to The Verge.In February, Mozilla bundled Onerep's data removal service into its new $8.99 per month Monitor Plus subscription. The service let users hunt down their personal information on the web and submit takedown requests across dozens of websites - all through Mozilla's partnership with Onerep.However, an in-depth report from Krebs on Security found that... Continue reading...

Image: Mint If you've been using Intuit's Mint app to help you budget, automatically collect your expenses, put them in useful categories, and remind you to pay them, then you were probably a bit shocked to find out that Intuit will be folding Mint into its other financial service, Credit Karma. Originally, the final date was going to be January 1st, 2024, but now, Mint will officially disappear on March 23rd, 2024.Credit Karma's main service is to offer advice about financial products based on your credit score, which means this may be a good fit depending on how many of Mint's features will be moved to Credit Karma. But it's too soon to tell. (According to Intuit, some of the most popular Mint-like features are available on Intuit Credit Karma,"... Continue reading...

Photo by Taylor Hill / WireImage Two years after several legendary musicians broke with Spotify in protest over controversial remarks made on podcaster Joe Rogan's show, most have now returned to the music service - with Joni Mitchell as the latest example. As noted by The New York Times, several of the singer-songwriter's most pivotal albums, including Blue, are once again available to stream on Spotify. Mitchell's representatives haven't offered any comment on her quiet comeback.Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives," Mitchell wrote in 2022 amid an uproar directed at Rogan for misinformation that was repeated on his podcast.Neil Young, the musician who was most vocal in his criticism of comments on The Joe Rogan Experience... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge / Getty Images So, what do artificial teeth have to do with the Department of Justice's massive lawsuit against Apple? Well, they may be one of the reasons why the DOJ decided to file its lawsuit in the state of New Jersey - instead of, say, Virginia or Washington, DC, like it did for Google and Microsoft.The DOJ previously filed - and won - a similar antitrust case against a company that makes fake teeth in the Third Circuit, which includes New Jersey.In an interview with The Verge, William Kovacic, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission and a professor at the George Washington University Law School, explains that the Third Circuit is a jurisdiction with some pretty good law for plaintiffs on monopolization issues." He points to the DOJ's... Continue reading...

The stinky stylus in question. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge I smelled the S Pen, and the reports are true: it kind of stinks.The S Pen is one of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra's signature features - it's a stylus that lives in the phone. A report from Reddit user LatifYil kicked off the S Pen aroma discussion earlier this week, noting that the S Pen on their Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra absolutely reeks." Dozens of commenters with S24 Ultras (and earlier stylus-toting Galaxy phones) responded in affirmation: their styli stank.As noted by SamMobile, a moderator on Samsung's EU community forums offered a reasonable explanation for the smell:

The stylish Victrola Stream Onyx is on sale for $334.20 as part of Amazon's Big Spring Sale. | Image by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge We're two days into Amazon's Big Spring Sale, and we've already seen some pretty good deals on personal audio gear and home theater equipment, including a new low on Apple's latest AirPods Pro and a rare discount on the Sonos Ray and second-gen Sonos Beam. The sale has gotten even better since it kicked off, too, especially now that Amazon is selling the Victrola Stream Onyx for a new low of $334.20 ($266 off).Victrola's entry-level Works with Sonos turntable lets you stream all your records to your Sonos speakers like its pricier siblings - including the forthcoming Stream Sapphire and midrange Stream Carbon. What you don't get is the Sapphire's unique ability to stream records to practically anything or the Carbon's high-end Ortofon... Continue reading...

Attendees arrive for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Nuclear Energy Summit at the Brussels Expo on March 21st, 2024. | Photo by Nicolas Maeterlinck / BELGA / AFP via Getty Images More than 30 countries have pledged to pursue nuclear energy as one way to meet global climate goals. Even so, nuclear energy is still a controversial energy source that's bogged down by concerns about radioactive waste, safety, and high costs.At a nuclear energy summit in Brussels yesterday, the countries pledged to work to fully unlock the potential of nuclear energy by taking measures such as enabling conditions to support and competitively finance the lifetime extension of existing nuclear reactors, the construction of new nuclear power plants and the early deployment of advanced reactors," The Associated Press reports. The US, China, Japan, France, Britain, and Saudi Arabia were among the 34 countries to sign the pledge.It's a... Continue reading...

Image: Larian Studios With the sheer popularity surrounding Baldur's Gate 3, the game is ripe for an expansion - but if it ever happens, it won't be made by its developer Larian Studios. During a panel at the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Larian founder Swen Vincke revealed that the studio plans on moving away from Dungeons & Dragons games, as first reported by IGN.We're not going to make new expansions, which everybody is expecting us to do. We're not going to make Baldur's Gate 4, which everybody is expecting us to do. We're going to move on," Vincke said. He added that Larian is also going to move away from D&D" and start a new project.

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Michael Duva, Getty Images Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn are calling for TikTok briefings to be declassified so the government can better educate the public on the need for urgent action." The briefings come as support grows for a forced sale of TikTok due to national security concerns around ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the app.We are deeply troubled by the information and concerns raised by the intelligence community in recent classified briefings to Congress. TikTok is a weapon in the hands of the Chinese government, and poses an active risk to our democratic institutions and national security," Blumenthal and Blackburn wrote.Last week, in an unusually speedy process, the House passed a bill that... Continue reading...

Image: Max We may be waiting a while to see Robert Pattinson return as Batman, but the franchise isn't going totally quiet. Max just released the first teaser trailer for The Penguin, which sees Colin Farrell reprise the titular role from the 2022 film The Batman. As a teaser, the short clip doesn't give much away, but the vibes are clear: this is going to be a crime drama, only set in Gotham.Matt Reeves, who directed The Batman, will serve as an executive producer, while Lauren LeFranc (Agents of SHIELD) is showrunner. And while we don't know much of the premise just yet, the rest of the cast includes Cristin Milioti, Rhenzy Feliz, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Deirdre O'Connell, Clancy Brown, and Michael Zegen.The eight-episode-long show... Continue reading...

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge When you're composing a document or email in Google Docs or Gmail, you may have noticed that the application often tries to finish sentences for you. As I was writing this, Google suggested when I started writing this" instead of my preferred when I started to type." That's because of Google's Smart Compose feature, which tries to anticipate your thought processes and add what it thinks you're going to type next.Once a suggestion appears (in slightly lighter type), you have two choices: if you like it, you can hit the tab on your keyboard (or, on a mobile device, swipe across the word), and it's there. If you don't like the suggestion, just keep typing, and it disappears. Google tries to read my mind. You may find... Continue reading...

I am also wondering this, little talking flower. | Image: Nintendo Since last year's release of Super Mario Bros. Wonder on the Nintendo Switch, one question has plagued me: just what does that goo taste like? In the game, it's a jelly-like substance in a tempting shade of lime green, and at various points, you can swim through it like thick, goopy water. When you first encounter it, one of the many talking flowers asks, How's the goo taste?" But it turns out getting a definitive answer is much harder than I anticipated.Initially, I thought I had it figured out. The goo looks remarkably like a previous Nintendo creation, the disturbing Gooigi from Luigi's Mansion 3, and my culinary investigative instincts had already solved that one. In 2019, the game's producer, Kensuke Tanabe, told me that Gooigi... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Over the course of 88 pages of surprisingly readable legalese, the US Department of Justice attempted to make the case that Apple is a problem. Apple, the DOJ alleges in its sweeping antitrust complaint, has systematically crushed innovation in the smartphone world, robbing not only competitors but also iPhone users of the opportunity to get better software and use better hardware.The argument is complicated, but it has an awful lot in common with another big antitrust trial, one the government won more than two decades ago: US v. Microsoft. That case was about a huge corporation ruthlessly working to neutralize any company that threatened to open up its walled gardens, make it easy for people to build and use cross-platform software,... Continue reading...

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images, The Verge Nintendo might not need to individually sue emulators out of existence to drive them deeper underground. Today, GitLab cut off access to Nintendo Switch emulator Suyu, and disabled the accounts of its developers, after receiving what appears to be a scary email in the form of a DMCA takedown request.GitLab received a DMCA takedown notice from a representative of the rightsholder and followed our standard process outlined here," spokesperson Kristen Butler tells The Verge.Suyu was a fork of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo successfully sued, but this isn't about Nintendo now having the rights to Yuzu's code - or maybe even Nintendo at all? Nintendo didn't necessarily win the rights to Yuzu's code in its settlement, and GitLab didn't... Continue reading...

Image: Qualcomm Can Qualcomm replicate Apple's feat and finally create Arm-based laptops worth buying, 15 years after its first attempts? Here's one incredibly promising sign it might: Qualcomm is telling game developers their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops - no porting required.In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games," Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86/64 games at close to full speed.Those laptops may be coming fast. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon X Elite systems this summer, and unannounced consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface... Continue reading...

Dark clouds gather over the Baltic Sea on November 8, 2023. | Photo by Stefan Sauer/picture alliance via Getty Images Brightening Earth's clouds so that they reflect more sunlight just might cool the planet - that is if we can figure out how to do it without causing any unintended harm. To test the theory out, a group of over 30 leading scientists have written up a research road map that was published in the journal Science Advances yesterday.The paper focuses on how to approach attempts to artificially shade Earth's surface with marine clouds by spraying saltwater into the air from ships, a strategy called marine cloud brightening (MCB). They'll need to be really careful with any future experiments, which would fall into the controversial category of solar geoengineering. The idea is to counteract some of the effects of climate change by finding ways... Continue reading...

The Music Frame comes with room to hold a physical art print or photo while integrating with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Samsung's just opened up preorders for its 2024 TV and audio lineup, which includes everything from the latest version of The Frame TV to Samsung's glare-free OLED TV. However, the real star of the show here is the Music Frame smart speaker, which was one of our favorite audio products from this year's CES and now comes with $50 in Samsung credit when you preorder it for $399.99 for arrival on April 1st.There are a few caveats to keep in mind, though. First, you won't be able to use the $50 to offset the cost of the smart speaker itself, but you can spend it on other Samsung devices. Second, you won't see the credit for a while. Samsung will only email details about how to redeem it after the speaker is delivered, and it may take up to... Continue reading...