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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla has won a lawsuit that tried to blame the company’s Autopilot driver assist software for a 2019 crash, Reuters reports. The jurors in the case found that the software wasn’t at fault in a crash where the car turned into a median on a city street while Autopilot was engaged. The jury awarded plaintiff Justine Hsu, who sued Tesla in 2020, no damages.The trial is believed to be the first regarding Autopilot, and could prove to be an important case if Tesla faces future lawsuits over the technology. While Reuters reports that the result of the trial “is not legally binding in other cases,” Tesla is under intense scrutiny for its Autopilot and its Full Self-Driving driver assistance features, which don’t make its cars fully autonomous... Continue reading…

The Pixel Tablet in a coral color. | Image from @saori_vj’s video on Instagram The Pixel Tablet is supposed to launch sometime this year — Google I/O in May feels like a pretty good venue! — and ahead of its eventual release, somebody captured a video of the tablet in real life at Google’s “Shaped by Water” installation currently happening as part of Milan Design Week (via 9to5Google).In the Instagram video from Saori Masuda (you’ll need to browse over to the very last video in the gallery), you can see many Google and Pixel devices laid out along a table, including some Pixel Tablets, Pixel Watches, different versions of Pixel Buds, and Pixel phones.

Din Grogu piloting IG-12. | Image: Lucasfilm / Disney Plus Rather than dotting every single i and crossing all of its t’s The Mandalorian spent its extremely adequate third season trying to forge new lore for lore’s sake. Continue reading…

AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series will apparently add some lower power chips for handhelds. | Image: AMD via Aokzoe You’ve obviously heard of the Steam Deck, and perhaps Asus drew your attention to the upcoming ROG Ally with its not-an-April-Fools’-joke. But that’s apparently just the tip of the iceberg for AMD-powered Steam Deck rivals, which have at least four handhelds based on slivers of silicon the chipmaker has yet to reveal.One of the reasons we got so excited about the Asus ROG Ally is that Asus hinted it might be the first handheld since Steam Deck to offer a custom part specifically tuned for portables — and a growing body of leaks suggests that collaboration with AMD is called the Ryzen Z1.

Collector containers at the Orca direct air capture and storage facility, operated by Climeworks AG, in Hellisheidi, Iceland, on September 7th, 2021. | Image: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images Climeworks, the Swiss company that’s capturing CO2 emissions for Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, is crafting plans to expand across the US, which is becoming the destination for companies that want to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.“The US is a very interesting place, perhaps the most interesting place at the moment ... from a market perspective, but also from a policy perspective,” says Christoph Beuttler, Climeworks’ chief climate policy officer. The Inflation Reduction Act more than tripled tax credits for direct air capture (DAC) and storage projects. And the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes $12 billion for capturing and storing carbon dioxide.Together with other partners, Climeworks has applied for a slice... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Mullvad, the Swedish company behind Mullvad VPN (virtual private network), says police walked away with nothing after attempting to seize computers from its office, as reported earlier by PCMag. According to an update on Mullvad’s site, the authorities left and didn’t take anything after it informed them that the company doesn’t store customer data.“We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law,” Mullvad writes. “After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.”

SpaceX Starship prototype stacked on top of a Super Heavy rocket in Boca Chica, Texas. | Image: SpaceX The Starship launched successfully but didn’t last long into its first orbital test flight before blowing up. Continue reading…

Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images Redbox wants to give Netflix’s DVD business a second chance at life, but Netflix isn’t budging. That’s according to a report from The Hollywood Reporter (via NextTV), which says that Redbox’s parent company has already expressed interest in acquiring Netflix’s DVD business, only to get turned down by the streamer several times.Bill Rouhana, the CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul, which acquired Redbox for $370 million last year, tells The Hollywood Reporter that Netflix has brushed off his attempts to purchase its DVD business “three or four times” before Netflix announced its decision to sunset the offering on Tuesday. “I’d like to buy it,” Rouhana says. “I wish Netflix would sell me that business instead of shutting it down.”After 25... Continue reading…

For more than a decade, Snapchat has been a fixture in the lives of young people. But the business side of the app has been much less stable. This week I flew down to LA to check in on the company — and while Snap still has plenty of big ideas, I was struck by how much the company’s ambitions seem to be limited at the moment by the recent downturn in the economy.The occasion for my visit was the annual Snap Partner Summit. For the past three years, due to the pandemic, the event had been online-only. But this year the company gathered together its business partners and the press together in person again, in a giant airplane hangar in Santa Monica.It was an inspired location for a tech event. Instead of bringing people together in some... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Considering how much it costs, YouTube TV is sometimes knocked by customers for offering only so-so picture quality. This can vary depending on your location or the specific feed that YouTube TV is serving you, but if you scan the YouTube TV subreddit, you’ll see picture quality as a common grievance. It wasn’t always this way. Now, the company is doing something about it — for certain content, at least.In a post to the aforementioned Reddit community yesterday, YouTube TV shared details on recent (and upcoming) enhancements to the app. The change that easily received the most attention was this one:

Victoria Alonso attends the 33rd annual GLAAD Media Awards. | Photo by Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for GLAAD When Disney suddenly fired Marvel Studios’ former VFX and postproduction head Victoria Alonso earlier this year, it was widely reported that the decision came down as a result of her violating company policy by working on and promoting another studio’s film without permission. It was also suggested that the middling response to some of Marvel’s recent VFX-heavy spectacles Alonso oversaw, like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, might have played a role in her dismissal. But in the latest turn of events, rather than letting a legal battle play out (publicly) in court, Marvel has agreed to settle with Alonso.While the specific details of Disney’s settlement with Alonso haven’t been made public, Deadline reports it as being a... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has removed the “government-funded” and “state-affiliated” labels that led several news outlets to stop tweeting on the platform. When asked why Twitter has dropped the labels, Elon Musk says it was a “suggestion” from Walter Isaacson, the author of his upcoming biography, according to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn.The labels have already disappeared from the profiles of NPR, PBS, CBC, and BBC, all of which publicly criticized the move. NPR became the first major media organization to leave the platform after getting slapped with the “state-affiliated” label and was later followed by PBS and CBC. NPR’s profile no longer has a “state-affiliated” media label. The labels have also been removed from state-controlled... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google is updating its Bard AI chatbot to help developers write and debug code. Rivals like ChatGPT and Bing AI have supported code generation, but Google says it has been “one of the top requests” it has received since opening up access to Bard last month.Bard can now generate code, debug existing code, help explain lines of code, and even write functions for Google Sheets. “We’re launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript,” explains Paige Bailey, group product manager for Google Research, in a blog post.You can ask Bard to explain code snippets or explain code within GitHub repos similar to how Microsoft-owned GitHub is implementing a ChatGPT-like... Continue reading…

Hannah Waddingham pictured performing onstage at the 2023 Olivier Awards. | Image: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for SOLT Hannah Waddingham, the Emmy-winning actor best known for her role as Rebecca Welton in Ted Lasso, is set to host a musical holiday special on Apple TV Plus later this year. Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas will be recorded live in front of an audience at the London Coliseum and will feature Waddingham performing festive classics and musical numbers alongside a big band and some “special surprise guests.”Big holiday-themed releases have become something of a tradition for Apple in recent years. Last year saw the streamer release Spirited, a retelling of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol starring Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell. Home for Christmas is being produced by Done+Dusted and will be directed by BAFTA award winner... Continue reading…

The Chromecast with Google TV (HD) is a good streaming device if you can get away with 1080p. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge If you’re looking for a Mother’s Day gift that’s cheap in price but not quality, today’s lead deal is a good one to consider. Right now, you can pick up the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) on sale for $19.99 ($10 off) from Best Buy, Google, and B&H Photo. That’s just $1 shy of the device’s all-time low.Google’s entry-level streaming device is the budget-friendly version of one of our favorite models, the Chromecast with Google TV (4K). Like its pricier sibling, it’s uniquely capable of curating recommendations across a variety of streaming services and provides an array of helpful info, including Rotten Tomatoes ratings. It can also play HDR videos, supports casting, and comes with the same Google Assistant-compatible voice remote as... Continue reading…

A resident holds a phone while walking on debris following Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers, Florida, on October 2nd, 2022. | Image: Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images For years, Twitter has been a go-to for agencies that need to warn people during a rapidly changing crisis. The National Weather Service uses it to share hurricane and tornado alerts. Firefighting agencies tweet updates about where a blaze is headed. It’s supposed to give people a heads-up so that they can take precautions to keep themselves safe.Recently, though, agencies have started facing the real possibility of losing that resource. Twitter announced in February that it would restrict access to its previously open API, and over the past week, it’s cut off public service accounts for agencies such as the National Weather Service, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Bay Area Rapid Transit. The accounts were later... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft has released version 1.2 of its DirectStorage SDK and has a surprise addition that will help speed up old hard drives. While DirectStorage initially launched as a way to stream data from the latest speedy NVMe solid state drives to your GPU without a CPU slowing things down, Microsoft has heard from developers that improved support for legacy hard drives would also benefit games.Parts of DirectStorage have always worked on hard drives, but developers have had to use separate methods for NVMe devices and HDDs. That complicates the process of supporting an API that’s really designed for high-speed SSDs that aren’t always used by PC gamers to store and play games.With DirectStorage 1.2, developers can now use the same code on... Continue reading…

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Computing storage manufacturer Seagate has agreed to pay a $300 million penalty imposed by the US Department of Commerce (DOC) for shipping over $1.1 billion worth of hard disk drives to Huawei, violating export control restrictions. An investigation by Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) determined that Seagate shipped 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei between August 2020 and September 2021 without obtaining an export license, despite a rule introduced in August 2020 that restricts sales to the Chinese company.The $300 million penalty is the largest fine ever imposed by the BIS that isn’t tied to a criminal case. The BIS says it’s more than double Seagate’s profits in selling the hard drives.Seagate became Huawei’s sole... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Something to consider before sending a risky text via WhatsApp is that now, disappearing messages are a bit more optional. Mark Zuckerberg is announcing a new tweak to the service’s burn-after-reading feature, which allows the recipient to long-press a message and choose to keep it.WhatsApp describes the adjustment as a “sender superpower,” and assuming it all works as designed, it still keeps the sender in control of what ultimately happens to the message. That’s because the sender is sent a notification when a recipient tries to save a message, and the sender can then choose if it will disappear or be saved.According to the company’s blog post, this gives senders the ability to “veto” a recipient’s attempt to save a message.... Continue reading…

Dota 2 has a 40-percent larger map. | Image: Valve Dota 2, one of the world’s most popular esports titles serving over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam as I write these words, has just dropped a massive update called New Frontiers that will likely change the free-to-play game forever. And the biggest difference by far is real estate: the game’s entire map is now 40 percent larger, letting you explore around the edges.“The core objective of the game remains the same,” assures Valve — “your lanes aren’t further away from each other, and everything you need to win is still in the center of the map.” Image: Valve A few of the new goodies. But Valve goes on to describe “meta-defining new features,” new locations, new Tormentor mini-bosses, vision-granting... Continue reading…

Image: CNBC A new video obtained by CNBC gives us a first look at the fire that engulfed a set of Ford F-150 Lightnings in a Dearborn, Michigan, holding lot earlier this year. This heavily edited version of the video shows police arriving on the scene as smoke billows from a group of electric trucks tucked in the back of the lot.“Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up,” one police officer says during the video. “The smoke is clear as day.” In February, Ford suspended production the production of and recalled some of its Ford F-150 Lightnings after one of the vehicles caught fire while charging and spread to two neighboring trucks. Ford eventually traced the cause of the fire to a “rare” issue affecting the vehicle’s battery, which is made by South Korean... Continue reading…

Image: Blizzard Wouldya look at that, Diablo IV is getting one more beta before launch. During today’s D4 livestream event, the developers announced that they’ll be holding a third beta.

Classic city-building with a fun, interactive twist. | Image: Codebrew Games Did you play SimCity on a floppy disk? Are you uncomfortable with the “theft” part of Grand Theft Auto but you love running around and playing mini-games? Did you quit checking Twitter and suddenly find yourself looking for things to do on your phone?Boy, do I have a game recommendation for you. I’d like to introduce you to my newest guilty pleasure: Pocket City 2.I’m actually not a big mobile gamer. And despite semi-regularly spending $7 on a single cup of coffee, I’m pretty stingy when it comes to paying for apps. But when I read the description of everything you could do in Pocket City 2, I couldn’t pay for it fast enough. I have not regretted this $5 purchase since.It’s a mobile city-building game of the classic SimCity genre:... Continue reading…

Chief Twit Elon Musk has chosen 4/20 as the date to purge the blue checkmarks. We’ll see what happens! Continue reading…

Michael Schumacher pictured in the pits of the Autodromo Nazionale circuit on September 10th, 2010. | Image: Fred Dufour / AFP via Getty Images The family of Formula 1 racing legend Michael Schumacher is preparing to take legal action against Die Aktuelle, a German tabloid magazine, for publishing an AI-generated “interview” with the star. The publication ran a front cover spread earlier this week promising an exclusive with Schumacher, accompanied by a tag referring to the piece as “the first interview” since the F1 star suffered a serious brain injury during a skiing accident in December 2013.“No meager, nebulous half-sentences from friends,” reads the translated text on the magazine cover. “But answers from him! By Michael Schumacher, 54!” A strapline calling the interview “deceptively real” is the only indication on the cover that the piece wasn’t authentic. Die Aktuelle,... Continue reading…

Image: Disney Five Spider-Man movies, including the full Tobey Maguire-led trilogy, are coming to Disney Plus very soon, Disney announced on Thursday. Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, and The Amazing Spider-Man all hit the streaming service tomorrow, April 21st. Spider-Man: Homecoming and a Spider-Man-adjacent movie, Venom, will be available on May 12th.It will be great to have these Spider-Man movies on Disney Plus. Since Sony Pictures owns the film rights to Spider-Man, the movies have so far been available on different streaming services, which was a huge pain, especially when the vast majority of Marvel movies are already on Disney Plus.You may have noticed that the list is missing a few Spider-Man movies, however. Still absent are The... Continue reading…

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge When the original Apple Watch SE came out in 2020, it represented the sweet spot in Apple’s smartwatch lineup. It was faster than what was then Apple’s entry-level flagship, the Series 3, but also cheaper than the newest models. And while it’s certainly beginning to show its age, you can pick it up at Walmart in the 40mm GPS configuration for $149 ($130 off) or in the larger 44mm variant for $179 ($130 off).Apple’s smartwatch lineup has changed pretty substantially since 2020, especially with the introduction of the new Ultra model, but the first-gen Apple Watch SE can still make for a solid entry-level pick if you’ve never owned a smartwatch (or if you want something inexpensive to hand to the kid).The SE shares some features found... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Apple’s new HomeKit architecture is a ground-up, under-the-hood rebuild of the company’s Apple Home smart home platform. Apple says it “will improve the performance and reliability of the accessories in your home.” First announced at WWDC, this new foundation for Apple’s smart home is part of the company’s support of the smart home standard Matter.Following a false start late last year, when the option to upgrade to the new architecture was released with iOS 16.2 but was quickly pulled following multiple user complaints, Apple is trying again. With iOS 16.4, which released this month, users can once again choose to enable the new Home architecture.However, upgrading is entirely optional. And if you use an iPad as your main Apple Home... Continue reading…

Forspoken was supposed to be the next-gen technological gaming showcase, but EA’s Immortals of Aveum may have it beat in the “your PC need not apply” realm. Today, the company’s revealing the system requirements for Ascendant Studios’ “Call of Duty but with magic,” and they blow past anything a developer’s ever dared ask for.The minimum spec is an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super or better or an AMD 5700 XT paired with a Core i7-9700 or Ryzen 7 3700X, 16GB of dual-channel RAM, and with an SSD “strongly recommended” to play the game. That’s at a mere 1080p resolution, low to medium spec.Based on the GPU requirements alone, it’s likely that under 9 percent of today’s gaming PCs will even qualify, based on the latest Steam hardware survey.... Continue reading…

T-Mobile is adding a plan designed for frequent phone upgraders. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has announced another rate plan today: Go5G Plus, which guarantees two-year device payment plans and that existing customers will get the same new phone promotions as new customers. It takes the place of Magenta Max as the carrier’s most expensive plan to the tune of $90 per month with autopay for a single line.The company is announcing the new plan and a couple of other promotions in an aggressive bid for new customers and is doing so on 4/20 because the company intends to “smoke the competition.” That’s some real “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy.Go5G Plus includes everything Magenta Max offers, like unlimited premium data, Netflix, and Apple TV Plus, and adds a few more things on top in addition to the phone upgrade... Continue reading…

Photo by Bennett Raglin / Getty Images for BuzzFeed Inc. BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning news arm of BuzzFeed.com, is being shut down, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced to staff on Thursday. The shutdown is happening as part of a new wave of layoffs at the company that will reduce the company’s workforce by about 15 percent.“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” Peretti wrote in a memo to staff the company shared with The Verge. Peretti said they would focus on HuffPost, which it acquired in 2020, as the company’s news brand because the publication is “profitable with a loyal direct front page audience.” Both HuffPost and BuzzFeed plan to open “a... Continue reading…

Imgur founder Alan Schaaf at Web Summit 2018. | Photo by Diarmuid Greene /Web Summit via Getty Images Popular image hosting platform Imgur is done with hosting pornography. In a blog post published this week, the company says it has a new terms of service coming into effect on May 15th and that, as a result, it’ll be removing “nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content” from its platform as well as “old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account.”“You will need to download/save any images that you wish to save if they no longer adhere to these Terms,” Imgur wrote in its blog post. “Most notably, this would include explicit/pornographic content.”The blog post doesn’t offer much detail about how Imgur is defining “old, unused, and inactive content.” Depending on the definition, this could cover a huge portion... Continue reading…

Image: Acer For years, Acer’s definition of a “compact juggernaut” still took up 18 liters of space — and still looked like a traditional tower PC. But today, the company’s announcing a low-slung SFF gaming desktop that fits the most powerful PC gaming parts into an unusual 15.4-liter chassis.The Acer Predator Orion X doesn’t look like any desktop the company’s sold before, and not just because the company’s backing away from its “this literal alien will eat you” vibe in favor of something a little more Evangelion. It’s also because the PC has three distinct zones for each of its major component clusters, with items accessible by pulling those “Zone 02,” “Zone 03,” and “Zone 01” lever-latches you can see on the front. Image: Acer... Continue reading…