The Verge

Substack will now help users determine whether what they're reading may have been written by AI. A new tool coming to the platform can scan posts, notes, replies, and comments to provide an estimate of how much text could be AI-generated or written with AI assistance, according to a blog post published on Tuesday. The [...]

I am a very clumsy man. So clumsy, that I have AirTags hanging off practically every camera I own. Have I left my camera in an Uber? Yes. Have I left it on an airplane? Also yes. For me, finder tags are essential for my cameras. The problem is, strapping a finder tag to a [...]

If you've been thinking about picking up a Kindle before school starts, or for your next vacation, now's a good time to do it. As part of its Black Friday in July sale, Best Buy has brought the Kindle Paperwhite back down to its all-time low of $124.99 ($35 off). It's the Kindle we recommend [...]

As component and RAM shortages drive prices higher, Apple is reportedly launching an "Apple Upgrade" program for leasing new devices. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, it will work similar to a car lease, with options to upgrade to a new device early, or keep or return the device at the end of the lease. Gurman [...]

Twitch is giving parents more control over how their children are using the streaming platform, including the ability to block them from broadcasting entirely. Parental controls are now available that allow guardians to link Twitch accounts with their 13- to 17-year-old children, providing account management features and a weekly email summarizing their teen's activity, including [...]

A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic's $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin writes that the settlement will provide "meaningful relief," offering authors around $3,000 for each book [...]

There's a symbiotic - and sometimes frustrating - relationship between social media sites and the creators that depend on them. Platforms need influencers' and creators' content to keep consumers on their apps; the creators, in turn, need to be able to reach those audiences to justify creating their content in the first place. Creators want [...]

It must be earnings day, because Tesla is making a Robotaxi announcement. The company said in a post on X that it was launching its Robotaxi service in Orlando and Tampa, attaching a pair of maps that show each city's service area. No word on fleet size or whether interested customers would be able to [...]

Tomorrow's foldable-centric Galaxy Unpacked event looks like it will be Samsung's biggest in years. The company is expected to launch new versions of its Fold and Flip phones while also introducing a brand new Fold form factor that's shorter and wider. It would be the second upheaval to Samsung's foldable lineup in less than 12 [...]

A few years ago, the team at Light shipped the most smartphone-like device they'd ever created. The Light Phone III still kept to its minimalist, no-distractions ethos, but it was a phone-size rectangle with a phone-size touchscreen, a camera, and a number of other features. Some people loved having an almost-smartphone, but Kaiwei Tang, Light's [...]

Google is launching Gemini 3.6 Flash alongside a new security model dedicated to quickly finding and patching security vulnerabilities. In a blog post on Tuesday, Google describes Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber as a "cost-efficient and highly capable alternative" to larger, more expensive AI systems, such as the one offered by Anthropic's Mythos. The cybersecurity model [...]

Stellantis will use technology from Intel's Mobileye to power its Level 2 hands-free driving features for its vehicle brands, the companies announced Tuesday. Starting in 2027, Stellantis will begin using Mobileye's EyeQ system-on-a-chip and a data crowdsourcing program called the Road Experience Management, or REM, which uses real-time data from Mobileye-equipped vehicles to build out [...]

The familiar story with Xteink's tiny e-readers plays out once again with its new X4 Pro: upgraded hardware held back by frustrating software. The company's latest tiny e-reader adds a touchscreen and lighting, so choosing it over a Kindle or a Kobo feels like less of a compromise - until you use it. The new [...]

Garmin announced a new smart band today designed to track "advanced fitness and wellness features" without a screen to eliminate distractions and push its battery life to up to 10 days between charges. Similar to competing products like the Whoop 5.0 and Google's recently announced Fitbit Air, the Cirqa uses a combination of heart rate, [...]

Woot is celebrating its 22nd anniversary by rolling out a full week of sales, and one of them stands out for gamers looking to get a deal on Nintendo's latest console. Normally $449.99, the Nintendo Switch 2 is $22 off for Woot customers who already have an account, or $50 off for new customers, when [...]

Nintendo does a lot of weird things, but Splatoon might just be one of the strangest - or at least the boldest. The series started as an attempt to muscle into the ultra-competitive online shooter space, but in a way that feels a world away from the violence and bombast of Call of Duty or [...]

I first slipped on Halliday's original smart glasses at CES 2025. I was not a fan. The glasses had a tiny, movable display window embedded into the frame that was incredibly finicky to see, and my 30-minute demo left me with achy eyeballs. It was an interesting concept with terrible execution, especially compared to the [...]

Last week, two Chinese AI companies unveiled models they say can credibly compete with the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. The response was swift and predictable. Markets wobbled, commentators declared Silicon Valley shooketh, and policymakers reached for the familiar language of arms races and wake-up calls. In one headline, The Associated Press said a [...]

How does AI make you feel? Are you excited to vibe-code" your smart home? Or anxious about all the added pollution and billions of gallons of water used by data centers? Dig a little deeper and you'll start to question the actual value of the GPUs that underpin all the leaps and promises of generative [...]

Sony Music Entertainment has filed another lawsuit against Udio, accusing the AI music generator of infringing the copyright of more than 30,000 of its songs, ranging from Elvis Presley's Hound Dog to Beyonce's Say My Name, and Harry Styles' As It Was. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court on Monday, claims that this [...]

Last October, we told you how the FCC had given itself the power to retroactively ban gadgets that have already received its approval to be imported and sold in the United States. Now, the FCC's getting ready to wield that power for the first time, by cracking down on the "DJI front companies" suspected of [...]

After seeing Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey for the first time early last week, I came away impressed, but somewhat conflicted about two of the film's more fantastical set pieces. While those scenes were beautifully crafted and tremendously acted, there was something a little bit off about the way they hit my eye. I spent days [...]

Index funds are touted as one of the safest ways to invest. Rather than picking and choosing individual stocks, index funds let you bet on the market as a whole. So what happens when a company like SpaceX - a giant gamble, and, in my opinion, terribly overpriced - is fast-tracked into the Nasdaq-100? Does [...]

The aptly-named 2K Megahits 2026 Bundle" from Humble includes 15 Steam games for $15. It's a smattering of the publisher 2K's biggest games of the 2010s, including BioShock Infinite, Risk of Rain 2, Borderlands 3, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The bundle will be available until August 7th, though the bundle page notes that keys for [...]

You probably know the signature PlayStation boot sound. Did you know that it's technically a multi-part chime? There's the synthy section where "Sony Computer Entertainment" shows onscreen with a white background. You only get to the next screen with the echo-y chimes and the color-filled PlayStation logo if your console recognizes the disc. How badly [...]

The end of the Ford F-150 Lightning was also the start of a new era for the automaker. After failing to capture the market with the electric version of its popular F-Series truck, Ford is going back to the drawing board with its Universal Electric Vehicle Platform. The first offering will be a $30,000 electric [...]

A judge partially granted the request from a dozen state attorneys general to temporarily place the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery on hold, as reported by Variety and Reuters. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said that based on the new company's market share, "the Court is persuaded that it can presume [...]

A video from Gamers Nexus explains how, after connecting a new LG UltraGear monitor to a PC running Windows 11 for the first time, Windows Update is silently installing LG driver updates and the LG Monitor App Installer, without so much as a permission pop-up or notification. The app doesn't appear to include special controls [...]

Adobe's experimental camera app has taken an unexpected turn. After Project Indigo was launched last year to provide a "more natural (SLR-like) look" for iPhone photography, the Indigo camera app is now being updated with a suite of generative AI tools. And the change doesn't rely upon Adobe's own Firefly AI models. Adobe describes the [...]

Today, I'm talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25. Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so [...]

There are a ton of deals available to shop today thanks to Best Buy's Black Friday in July" sale lasting all week. The sale typically aligns closely with Prime Day each year, but of course, Amazon's shopping holiday happened much earlier than we expected. So it's nice to have some deals in July. One of [...]

Electric aviation is still in its infancy, but manufacturers are already looking beyond mere air taxi trips across cities. Today, one of the leading air taxi startups, San Jose-based Archer Aviation, unveiled a new aircraft it co-developed with defense technology company Anduril - though the platform is designed for both military and commercial uses, the [...]

After months of teasing us with reminders about how large Avengers: Doomsday's cast is going to be, Marvel has finally released a proper trailer for the film. Though Robert. Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom definitely appears to be causing a lot of the chaos in Doomsday's first trailer, the movie seems like it's going to feature [...]

AliExpress has been hit with a 550 million (about $629 million) fine for violating Europe's Digital Services Act (DSA) rules by failing to prevent illegal, unsafe, or counterfeit products from being sold on the e-commerce platform. The European Commission ruled that AliExpress didn't take effective measures to reduce the dissemination of illegal products, noting the [...]

China's leading AI companies are ramping up the pressure on Silicon Valley, as Moonshot and Alibaba unveiled models they claim can go toe-to-toe with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic at a fraction of the cost. The rapid-fire releases suggest America's lead at the AI frontier is increasingly tight, just as the technology is becoming [...]

Just why? ():: :()( What am I supposed to do with this? It's un-Googleable. Unpronounceable. It doesn't even render the same way on various platforms. It looks one way on YouTube Music. Another on Apple Music. And yet another on Bandcamp. Even the artist name ) [...]

Following the success of its $99 Kodak-branded Snapic A1, Reto Project is releasing the Kodak EC35, an even more affordable 35mm film camera for just $34.99. The EC35 certainly isn't fancy. Its 25mm acrylic lens with a fixed f/10 aperture and 1/100 shutter speed basically put it on par with a drugstore disposable. The fact [...]

I would never go so far as to say there's no place for AI in music (I'm a fan of Holly Herndon, after all). But I generally find music made with generative AI to be offensively boring, especially the outputs of Suno. So I'm having a bit of a tough time processing the fact that [...]

According to the The New York Times, federal agents have been told that the FBI will no longer be investigating confrontations involving ICE agents. The DHS and DOJ denied the change in policy to The Times. The reported change in guidance follows renewed scrutiny of violence by ICE agents who have killed two people in [...]

In 2017, I bought an old Magnus chord organ off Craigslist for $10. It's one of my favorite music gear purchases. Electric chord organs let you play full chords with just a press of a button, making them perfect for aspiring singer-songwriters or fooling around at home. But chord organs largely fell out of favor [...]

Birdfy has kicked off a midyear sale, taking up to 40 percent off a range of its smart bird feeders. One of the best deals is on Netvue's Birdfy Feeder AI-Powered Smart Bird Feeder with Camera, which has dropped to $149.99 at Birdfy and is its second-best price to date. The bundle, which includes a [...]

The manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested Saturday in Miami by US Marshals in relation to new rape and sex trafficking charges in England. According to the Associated Press, British authorities are seeking the brothers' extradition. The new charges facing Andrew Tate include seven counts of rape, three of sex trafficking, three counts [...]

Clap on. Clap off. Well, more like, Clap, pause for half a beat but no longer because otherwise it'll stop hearing you, clap again because you waited too long, clap louder and faster, that didn't work, clap two more times, and suddenly: on. The Clapper didn't always work - and even when it did, it [...]

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started As a kid, I relished trips to [...]

On July 19th, dozens of teams of high school students will begin a five-day, 630-mile road race from Fort Worth to Fort Stockton in Texas. But this is not your typical contest. The students design and build the cars themselves, using off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed materials. The winner is the team that accumulates the [...]

Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney's, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he'd roll into the company's offices and offer [...]

Mystic Leaks suggests that the Pixel 11a will return to featuring a flagship-grade processor with the Tensor G6. Rather than the Tensor G5 found in the Pixel 10 and 10 Pro, the Pixel 10a shipped with the previous generation Tensor G4. That was a huge disappointment since, typically, the Pixel a lineup kept the modern [...]

Now, if you want to, you can use Google's 3D emoji in your own creations. The company shared some details about how it went about designing the little pictograms and why, as part of World Emoji Day on Friday. Things you might not necessarily worry about in a 2D illustration suddenly become very important when [...]