The Verge

Illustration by The Verge More than 200 Substack authors asked the platform to explain why it's platforming and monetizing Nazis," and now they have an answer straight from co-founder Hamish McKenzie:

Image: Rockstar Games The 18-year-old Lapsus$ hacker who played a critical role in leaking Grand Theft Auto VI footage has been sentenced to life inside a hospital prison, according to a report from the BBC. A British judge ruled on Thursday that Arion Kurtaj is a high risk to the public because he still wants to commit cybercrimes.In August, a London jury found that Kurtaj carried out cyberattacks against GTA VI developer Rockstar Games and other companies, including Uber and Nvidia. However, since Kurtaj has autism and was deemed unfit to stand trial, the jury was asked to determine whether he committed the acts in question, not whether he did so with criminal intent.During Thursday's hearing, the court heard Kurtaj had been violent while in custody... Continue reading...

Cars, trucks, SUVs, and other vehicles drive in traffic on the 405 freeway through the Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles, California, on August 25th, 2022. | Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images The US saw record gains in fuel efficiency last year, but it still falls short of what's needed to meet fast-approaching deadlines. Thanks to their love of large vehicles, American automakers have fallen behind their competitors when it comes to getting more miles per gallon of gas.Real-world fuel economy in model year 2022 rose slightly to 26 miles per gallon, according to the EPA's latest Automotive Trends Report. That's a 0.6mpg increase from the year before, which is apparently more than double the annual rate of improvement in fuel economy" over the past nine years, according to the EPA.But while the agency celebrates the incremental improvement, there's still a long way to go to reach the fuel efficiency standards the US has set... Continue reading...

Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images On the surface, electric scooter pioneer Bird filing for bankruptcy would seem to be a nail in the coffin for shared micromobility - that nebulous term often used to describe rentable electric bikes and scooters in cities. After a number of mergers and some bad financial management, the OG scooter company is going belly up. That can't bode well for the future of scooters in general, right?But actually, shared electric mobility is doing just fine. Sure, the margins are tight and profitability is still rare, but shared scooter and bike companies are becoming more integral to city life in ways we never thought possible.The only thing that's dead is the zero-interest rate-influenced era of unhinged investments and wildly skewed valuations... Continue reading...

The gadget that saved Christmas. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge I thought I could hold out until Friday, but as I stared at my Christmas tree's unlit midriff, I realized that was too long to wait.I'd ordered a set of spare incandescent bulbs for my Christmas tree on Amazon, but the delivery was days away and the problem was staring me in the face. The more I thought about it, the trouble didn't seem to be a single bulb, anyway. Half the strand on the middle section of the pre-lit tree was dark, and the internet seemed to agree that one burnt-out bulb shouldn't bring down the whole string.I opened Amazon and typed Christmas tree light voltage checker" into the search bar. Predictably, my search returned a sea of same-looking products made by companies with alphabet-soup names. I clicked on... Continue reading...

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge The Philips Hue smart lighting system offers a wide range of excellent smart bulbs, from color-changing and tunable white bulbs in every shape and size to LED light strips, outdoor lanterns, and holiday lights. Hue is well known for its interoperability with a wide array of smart home ecosystems and devices and now works with Matter, the new smart home standard designed to make it easier for all your smart home devices to communicate with each other locally in your home.Because Hue already works locally through its Zigbee bridge and is compatible with most platforms and smart devices, the benefits of moving your Hue system to Matter aren't that obvious. However, Hue says that any automations you have that previously relied on cloud... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. And today, we're bringing you a special episode where we're just going to talk about one very big problem: Twitter.2023 will go down as the year that Elon Musk killed Twitter. First, he did it in a big way by buying the company, firing most of the employees, and destabilizing the platform; then, he did it in a small but important and symbolic way by renaming the company X and trying to make a full break with what came before.So now that the story of the company named Twitter is officially over, it felt important to stop and ask: what was Twitter anyway, and why were so many powerful people obsessed with it for so long?Here at The Verge, we don't often look back; we're a site... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Beeper is throwing in the towel in its fight to bring iMessage to Android - mostly. Although it just announced yet another fix to let Android users send iMessages from its messaging apps, Beeper announced that it's going to stop finding workarounds and instead focus on its long-term goal of building the best chat app on earth."Each time that Beeper Mini goes down' or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper's credibility takes a hit. It's unsustainable," Beeper writes. As much as we want to fight for what we believe is a fantastic product that really should exist, the truth is that we can't win a cat-and-mouse game with the largest company on earth."What started as a simple app download in Beeper Mini has b... Continue reading...

Image: SiriusXM SiriusXM is getting sued by the state of New York for making it too difficult for subscribers to cancel their plans. The suit claims that customers who want to cancel are required to chat over the phone or online with an agent who bombards them with questions and offers. Sirius deliberately wastes its subscribers' time even though it has the ability to process cancellations with the click of a button," the suit reads.Attorney General Letitia James' office claims that SiriusXM's own data reveals that it takes subscribers an average of 11.5 minutes to cancel by phone, and 30 minutes to cancel online. The suit is seeking damages for affected customers, as well as a $5,000 penalty to the state of New York for each violation.Having to... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge As 2023 comes to a close, the art team at The Verge looks back on our most memorable and favorite art. Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Elon Musk's X platform, previously known as Twitter, mostly stopped working for more than an hour. In mobile apps, the timelines wouldn't refresh, and on the web, a placeholder message proclaimed, Welcome to X! This is the best place to see what's happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now." The global internet trackers at Netblocks noted a significant international outage" that wasn't linked to any country-level blocks or filtering.At about 1:35AM ET, shortly after this article was published, access to timelines was restored, although we haven't heard what caused the problem.Oddly, posting to the site still worked, even if the posts disappeared after a refresh, and accounts followed with notifications... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge's newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.Hello! Apologies for the late send, I have been buried in Hot Pod Summit prep. I promise it will be worth it! We're putting together a great lineup for 2024. We're still working on our invitation list - if you're interested in attending, let us know here.This is about the time yakky media folks like myself come out with predictions for next year. Nick Quah published takes from people across the industry today for Vulture. Yesterday, The Podglomerate's Joni Deutsch had a piece for Nieman Lab with her own predictions. I highly recommend checking out both!Today, I don't have predictions so much as stories on which I am keeping a close... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Valve announced a new privacy feature for the Steam client today that lets players choose whether certain games they buy and own are visible to others on the platform. According to the update announcement, starting today, Steam beta testers will be able to mark games as private to keep them, well, private.You can mark a game private from three places: your shopping cart; your game list in a web browser; or from the Steam client itself. The new privacy filter is great if you've been holding off on buying OnlyCans: Thirst Date for the last two years or so or you really don't want your friends to know that you're deeply into oddly specific simulator games. Image: Valve Beta users can now make purchases private... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is stepping down officially December 29th. Microsoft has not appointed a direct replacement and instead has rolled the suite of Activision Blizzard executives - including Blizzard president Mike Ybarra, Activision publishing president Rob Kostich, and Activision Blizzard vice chair Thomas Tippl - under Microsoft's game content and studios president Matt Booty.Kotick's departure comes just two months after some big Xbox leadership changes that saw Sarah Bond promoted to Xbox president, leading all Xbox platform and hardware work, and Matt Booty promoted to president of game content and studios, including overseeing Bethesda and ZeniMax studios. Now Booty is getting even more responsibilities with... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Just like all gadgets, even tablets solely devoted to fitness will eventually meet their software demise. That time is rapidly approaching for Peloton's first-gen bike tablets, known as Quartz. Peloton sold these first-gen bikes between 2013 and 2016. The company already cut off software updates for the early touchscreens back in 2019. But now, as reported by Pelo Buddy, the hammer is coming down, and Peloton will completely cease support for the tablets in June 2024. If you don't make a move by then, you won't be able to access classes anymore, leaving Just Workout" as the only feature that will still work.So what's a budget-conscious Peloton devotee to do? Well, there are a couple of options to choose from. Affected customers can... Continue reading...

Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images For years, Waymo has been claiming that its driverless vehicles have the potential to be safer than humans. Now the company says it has the data to back it up.Waymo analyzed 7.13 million fully driverless miles in three cities - Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco - and compared the data to human driving benchmarks to determine whether its cars were involved in fewer injuring-causing and police-reported crashes. And it was the first time the company studied miles from fully driverless operations only, rather than a mix of autonomous and human-monitored driving.Waymo analyzed 7.1 million fully driverless miles in three citiesThe conclusion? Waymo's driverless cars were 6.7 times less likely than human drivers to be involved a... Continue reading...

Image: Ohni Lisle / The Verge It's a TV. It's a roller coaster. It's a 4D Disney World experience. It's the Sphere, and it's a lot more fun than my phone. Continue reading...

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images A popular training dataset for AI image generation contained links to child abuse imagery, Stanford's Internet Observatory found, potentially allowing AI models to create harmful content.LAION-5B, a dataset used by Stable Diffusion creator Stability AI and Google's Imagen image generators, included at least 1,679 illegal images scraped from social media posts and popular adult websites.The researchers began combing through the LAION dataset in September 2023 to investigate how much, if any, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) was present. They looked through hashes or the image's identifiers. These were sent to CSAM detection platforms like PhotoDNA and verified by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.The dataset does not keep... Continue reading...

The Verge A look back at the big moments - and the best releases. Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge PlayStation 5 sales have hit a new milestone. Sony announced on Wednesday that it sold 50 million consoles since its launch in late 2020.The number shows just how much PS5 sales are ramping up, as Sony announced in July that it sold more than 40 million units. This likely has to do with an increased availability of the PS5 after supply chain issues resulted in fewer consoles on store shelves.We're grateful for all of our players who have joined the PS5 journey so far, and we're thrilled that this is the first holiday season since launch that we have a full supply of PS5 consoles - so anyone who wants to get one can get one," Jim Ryan, the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said in a statement.The PS5 reached 50... Continue reading...

The Verge / Photos by Allison Johnson and Amelia Holowaty Krales Smartphones - the gadgets I spend most of my waking hours thinking about, testing, and tinkering with - are generally considered a mature product category. This means that, in any of the previous, oh, five years, you'd struggle to find a big defining moment for the industry. Likewise, there was no iPhone" moment in 2023, and I'll bet you 20 bucks we won't see one in 2024, either.But that's not to say that it wasn't an interesting year for mobile tech; far from it. We didn't have a singular, spectacular innovation: just a bunch of smaller ones that, altogether, could make a big difference in the long run.Life got a little easier for partnerships and group chats that include Android and iPhone-owning members, for example. We have new... Continue reading...

Nomad's upcoming stand Qi2 charger will help make charging rates more consistent across devices. | Image: Nomad Nomad, a reputable producer of phone cases and accessories, has announced its first stand charger based on the new magnet-enhanced Qi2 standard. The $100 Stand Qi2 Magnetic Wireless Charger is capable of charging MagSafe and Qi2-enabled devices at up to 15W, and features a metal and glass design that'll be available in black or white. You'll have to supply your own 20W USB-C power adapter, but Nomad has at least included a two-meter USB-C to USB-C cable alongside the product.Much like other Qi2-based chargers that have been announced - such as Belkin's new BoostCharge offerings, Anker's latest MagGo accessories, and Mophie's upcoming trio - the Nomad Stand Qi2 charger isn't available to purchase yet. Nomad's marketing director Chuck... Continue reading...

A PornHub banner from the 2023 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. | Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images Porn sites Pornhub, XVideos, and Stripchat face stricter requirements to verify the ages of their users after being officially designated as Very Large Online Platforms" (VLOPs) under the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA). In a press release today, the European Commission said the three sites fulfil the threshold of 45 million average monthly users in the EU." The sites will have to comply with the DSA obligations by February 2024.Being designated as a VLOP means the sites will also have to conduct risk assessments and mitigate the spread of illegal content like child sexual abuse material and deepfake pornography. There are also transparency requirements like being subject to external audits, publishing transparency reports... Continue reading...

US Vice President Kamala Harris (right) and Michael Regan (left), administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on Friday, January 27th, 2023. | Image: Jemal Countess / UPI / Bloomberg via Getty Images The Environmental Protection Agency named 11 grantmakers" today, universities and nonprofit organizations that will be in charge of doling out $600 million of federal funding to locally led environmental projects. It's a new strategy aimed at making it easier for small grassroots groups - especially those burdened with the most pollution - to access funding.Those groups will be able to apply for subgrants from the EPA's grantmakers, who've been assigned to oversee funds for certain regions. The 11 grantmakers include some of the most prominent voices fighting a legacy of environmental racism and injustice in the US.That includes the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), made up of member organizations across the US - from Brooklyn's oldest... Continue reading...

Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge The electric bike company's new leadership outlines its post-bankruptcy plan to relaunch and expand into more areas of e-mobility. Continue reading...

Image: Getty Rite Aid isn't allowed to use AI-powered facial recognition technology for another five years as part of a settlement it reached with the Federal Trade Commission. In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the FTC accuses Rite Aid of using facial surveillance systems in a reckless" manner from 2012 to 2020.During this period, the FTC says Rite Aid used facial recognition technology to capture images of all consumers as they entered or moved through the stores." It then allegedly created a database of customers identified as shoplifters or exhibiting some other kind of suspicious behavior. For some customers, the database would have accompanying information," such as names, birth dates, and the activity deemed suspicious by the store,... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Blockchain games are returning to Epic Games' marketplace. The Epic Games Store has a strict ban on games classified as Adults Only" by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) - normally games with excessive nudity or violence. But the marketplace announced today that blockchain games classified as AO only because they use blockchain are an exception to this rule.

Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge If you have an iPhone 14 or iPhone 15, you can now use satellite connectivity to access Verizon's roadside assistance service. In a support page spotted by MacRumors, Apple now says you can take advantage of the capability with devices running iOS 17.2 (or higher) and a Verizon SIM card.Verizon's roadside assistance program is run by the Allstate-owned Signature Motor Club and offers help when you're having car trouble, even if you're in a friend's car or a rental. It includes vehicle towing up to 10 miles in any direction, winching, fuel delivery, jump starts, tire service, and more. While Verizon offers a $4.99 per line monthly subscription, it also offers flat fees for Verizon customers who use the service without a subscription.A... Continue reading...