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The new green screen feature in Microsoft Teams. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is adding a new green screen feature to Microsoft Teams today. It’s designed to improve Teams’ existing virtual backgrounds by increasing the sharpness and definition of the backgrounds around your face, head, ears, or hair. While it works best with a dedicated green screen, you can also take advantage of this feature with a solid color green or a clear background wall that’s behind you.“The screen or background wall must be flat without stains or other irregularities,” says Jan Steberl, Microsoft Teams program manager, in a blog post. “Users must apply a background effect in Teams meetings to enable the green screen effect and should carefully select the backdrop color so that the effect is applied correctly and better... Continue reading…

The iPad Air’s M1 chip makes it more than capable for even demanding 3D mobile games like Genshin Impact. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The best iPad for most people is back down to its best price ever. Apple’s latest iPad Air with 64GB of storage is on sale for $499.99 ($100 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. At this price, it’s just $50 more than the 10th-gen iPad but offers better performance and a slightly larger 10.9-inch screen. The midrange iPad Air utilizes an M1 processor for speedy, everyday app usage. While it favors Touch ID built into the power button over the more convenient Face ID of the iPad Pros, the latest Air feels pretty “pro” in most other ways — with second-gen Apple Pencil compatibility, add-on keyboard options, and a USB-C port. The Air ticks most of the boxes needed for iPad usage, from Apple Arcade gaming to content consumption and even getting a... Continue reading…

In this image from September 2006, the Antarctic ozone hole measured 11.4 million square miles (29.5 million square kilometers). | Image: Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images Chemicals that were banned after they punched a hole in Earth’s ozone layer are still building up at an alarming rate in our atmosphere, according to research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The chemicals were once widely used in air conditioning and refrigeration but were supposed to be phased out globally by 2010.Scientists were surprised to find that concentrations of several types of those chemicals have climbed since then, reaching a record high in 2020. The culprit could be alternative refrigerants that were meant to replace the ozone-depleting substances, the new research suggests. An even bigger problem? Researchers can’t find where all the chemicals are leaking from.The ozone layer has managed to make a... Continue reading…

Image: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images Just as CNBC scooped yesterday, Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Group is acquiring World Wrestling Entertainment and will spin out a new publicly traded company that combines it with Ultimate Fighting Championship. The deal values WWE, which for decades has been owned and run by the McMahon family, at $9.3 billion and the Endeavor-owned UFC at $12.1 billion.Both companies expect the agreement to close in late 2023. When it does, the result will be a combined sports entertainment powerhouse with fervent, loyal audiences for each brand. WWE just wrapped up WrestleMania, its biggest live event spectacle of the year, over two nights at SoFi Stadium. The company claims it reached a combined attendance of 161,892 people in the stadium. The event... Continue reading…

Image: James Bareham / The Verge Nintendo has started offering free repairs for faulty Joy-Cons in more parts of Europe, regardless of warranty status, as first reported by Nintendo Life. On a support page on Nintendo’s UK website, the company says it will fix Joy-Cons inflicted with the dreaded stick drift “at no charge” in the UK, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area (EEA) — even if the company’s two-year warranty has expired.Although Nintendo has offered free repairs for out-of-warranty Joy-Cons in North America, Latin America, and France, it never extended the policy to the UK, Switzerland, and all of the EEA until now. The company previously only repaired faulty Joy-Cons in these countries for free if they had an active warranty, and it’s unclear how long... Continue reading…

Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Last week, General Motors shocked the car world when it announced that it would be restricting access to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in its future lineup of electric vehicles. And so far, it appears to be alone in that decision.GM said it wanted to move away from the smartphone projection systems to offer customers a more integrated experience that sees Google Maps, Google Assistant, Spotify, and other apps run natively on the car’s infotainment display.But CarPlay and Android Auto are wildly popular; Apple says nearly 80 percent of new car buyers insist on the feature before making a purchase, while independent surveys suggest slightly lower but still robust levels of demand.The rest of the auto industry gets it. The Verge... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla delivered 422,875 of its electric cars to customers in the first quarter of 2023, including 412,180 Model 3 and Y vehicles and 10,695 Model S and Xs, the company has announced. That’s a 36 percent year-over-year increase versus the first quarter of 2022, a 4 percent increase from last quarter, and a record for the company, according to Electrek.The announcement doesn’t give much of an indication for the increase; for that we’ll likely have to wait for Tesla’s full financial results on April 19th. But news of the delivery numbers follow a series of price cuts across the US, Europe, and China impacting various models across Tesla’s range. In January, for example, Tesla reduced the price of the long range Model Y variant by 20... Continue reading…

Google’s Nearby Share app is available for Windows 10 and up. | Image: Google Google’s AirDrop competitor, Nearby Share, is now available on Windows as a beta app. After announcing plans for Nearby Share on Windows at CES 2022, Google has finally shipped the Windows app as a beta to allow Android users to share photos, documents, files, and links between Android devices and Windows PCs.The Windows Nearby Share just needs to be installed and configured to start sending and receiving files between Android and Windows devices. Google is supporting Windows 10 and up, but ARM-powered Windows laptops aren’t supported right now. You can setup Nearby Share to allow sharing with everyone, just your contacts, or limit it to your own devices.“Nearby Share Beta works with your Windows PC whether the app is open on the... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Tor Project, the organization behind the anonymous network and browser, is helping launch a privacy-focused browser that’s made to connect to a VPN instead of a decentralized onion network. It’s called the Mullvad browser, named after the Mullvad VPN company it’s partnered with on the project, and it’s available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.The Mullvad browser’s main goal is to make it harder for advertisers and other companies to track you across the internet. It does this by working to reduce your browser’s “fingerprint,” a term that describes all the metadata that sites can collect to uniquely identify your device. Your fingerprint can be made up of simple things, like what browser and operating system you’re using, to more... Continue reading…

The Huawei Watch Ultimate doesn’t look like an Apple Watch Ultra, but it’s got almost all the same features. | Image: Huawei You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where Huawei got the inspiration for its newly announced Watch Ultimate. It’s clearly Huawei’s not-so-subtle answer to the Apple Watch Ultra, and now, we know that similarity extends to the price tag, too. Starting tomorrow, the Ultimate will retail in the UK and Europe for €749 / £700 for the “expedition black” colorway and €899 / £800 for the voyage blue version.If you missed news of the Watch Ultimate, it’s likely because the company currently has no plans to launch the device in the US. (That Huawei ban is still kicking in 2023.) While the company once had a decent foothold in the wearable market, the ban has since limited its reach to US audiences for all but the most dedicated of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge In 2023, it’s hard to love classical music. Not because of the music itself — it’s just difficult to find it. Searching for George Gershwin is as likely to bring up his own performances as it is to bring up music he composed that’s performed by other artists. The problem is that, in the metadata, classical music doesn’t just rely on the typical stuff like artist, genre, song title, or album title. There are soloists to consider, and composers, and conductors, and pieces performed by an orchestra and a choir. Apple Music Classical, based on the Primephonic app that Apple acquired in 2021, addresses the problem with the metadata and has me wondering why more apps aren’t this rich in the stuff.I didn’t realize how little classical music... Continue reading…

Adding Zigbee and Thread to Home Assistant has never been easier. | Image: Chris Person For years, I have been waiting for an excuse to make the transition to Home Assistant. With the Home Assistant’s Zigbee and Thread dongle, I had that excuse. Continue reading…

Western Digital is about to launch a new Xbox storage expansion card. | Image: Best Buy Microsoft appears to be readying new Xbox expandable storage options from other manufacturers. A new Western Digital 1TB expansion card for Xbox Series S / X consoles has been spotted early on Best Buy, priced at $179.99. It’s the first time we’ve seen Xbox expandable storage that’s not manufactured by Seagate.Microsoft originally launched Xbox expandable storage cards nearly three years ago with its Xbox Series S / X consoles. The 1TB cards were priced at $219.99 and manufactured exclusively by Seagate. While we’ve seen 512GB and 2TB options appear from Seagate, prices have stubbornly remained high, despite similar storage for PS5 consoles dropping significantly. Image: Best Buy Western Digital’s Xbox expandable... Continue reading…

All Adventure Series e-bikes (like this RX) have the battery on the down tube for lower center of gravity and improved handling. | Image: Super73 California’s Super73 now offers more ruggedized models of its Super73 Z, S, and R series of e-bikes and a new K1D electric balance bike for kids — and parents stoked at the thought of putting their four- to eight-year-old on a vehicle that can go over 16mph.The so-called Adventure Series of e-bikes brings a refreshed design, suspension, gear box, seats, tires, and lights across Super73’s existing Z (entry-level commuter), S (multipurpose cruiser), and R (flagship power) e-bikes. All the electric bikes in the series feature front suspension, while some offer fully adjustable front and rear suspension. S and R models also had their battery moved to the down tube, which should improve handling thanks to a lower center of gravity. ... Continue reading…

A Sidewalk coverage map claims the network reaches over 90 percent of the US population. | Image: Amazon It turns out that I have a low-power, low-bandwidth, long-range IoT network all around me, ready and waiting for my smart gadgets to jump on. Today, Amazon revealed just how far its Sidewalk IoT network penetrates the average American neighborhood.And it’s deep.The company’s first Sidewalk coverage map claims that over 90 percent of the US population can access the now public network (it’s limited to the US only). Using a Sidewalk developer test kit supplied by Amazon, I drove around my town to confirm this data and, over three days of traveling more than 40 miles, found that the connectivity was surprisingly strong in my corner of South Carolina, even in the wilds of a national forest. Image: Jennifer Pattison... Continue reading…

The Jetson Rogue. | Image: Jetson Another hoverboard is being recalled due to fire risk. According to a notice on the US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s (CPSC) website, the 42-volt Jetson Rogue is being recalled because the lithium-ion battery packs in the hoverboards can overheat.A fire marshal in Pennsylvania determined that a Jetson Rogue was the point of origin for a fire that killed two children, the CPSC’s notice says. The parents of the children are suing Jetson and Target, where they say they purchased the hoverboard, alleging the two companies should have known of the risk of fire-related injuries due to the design of the Jetson Rogue. (The parents originally sued Walmart, but amended their complaint to sue Target.)The CPSC also says that “there have... Continue reading…

Would your company pay $1,000 for Twitter? Some won’t have to make that decision. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge It seems like some companies may not have to pay Twitter $1,000 a month for the privilege of retaining their verified status and checkmarks. Twitter is giving a free pass to the 500 advertisers that spend the most on its platform as well as the top 10,000 organizations by follower count, according to a report from The New York Times.The decision comes as Twitter is preparing to make major changes to the way verification works on Twitter. It’s said that it’ll start winding down the legacy verified program in April and announced plans for Twitter Verification for Organizations. The latter is meant to let companies that are willing to pay $1,000 a month keep their verification as well as denote specific accounts as “affiliated.”For... Continue reading…

Image: Sega Oh, Mario went missing once? Big deal — Sonic’s just been murdered!In a very sudden, very confusing surprise, Sega has shadow dropped a new Sonic the Hedgehog game for PC and Mac. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, as baffling as that sounds, is a free murder mystery game on Steam you can download and play right now. The point-and-click adventure puts you amid the Sonic cast on a murder mystery party aboard the Mirage Express to celebrate Amy Rose’s birthday, but — gasp — the game turns out to be real as Sonic is found keeled over, dead on the floor. Image: Sega Our beautiful blue boy? He ded. I’m no fan of silly April Fools’ gags, but I’m all for lighthearted and weird headcanon experiments. So credit to Sega... Continue reading…

A gardener facing water shortages checks his tomato plants in southern France in August 2022. | Image: PASCAL GUYOT/AFP via Getty Images New research challenges assumptions that the plant kingdom is silent. Turns out, plants make a lot of noise when they’re stressed.Other plants and animals might even be able to interpret those sounds. And the ability to listen in could even help humans get smarter about the way we grow our crops, especially in a world where climate change is increasingly stressing us all out.“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information,” Lilach Hadany, senior author of the paper and an evolutionary biologist and theoretician at Tel Aviv University, says in a press release.“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information.”Tomato and... Continue reading…

Google’s Pixel 6 Pro is on sale right now for just $469.99, a whopping $429 off the phone’s initial list price. | Image: Google Sure, if you want a good smartphone that won’t cost a fortune, you could preorder Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy A54, the successor to one of our favorite midrange phones. However, if you’re looking for additional RAM or a bigger display, you may want to check out the current deal on Google’s Pixel 6 Pro. Right now, the last-gen Android phone is on sale at Woot in an unlocked black configuration with 128GB of storage for $469.99. That’s a $429 discount and just $20 more than the starting price of Samsung’s forthcoming A54.Both phones boast an OLED display with a fast 120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling. The Pixel 6 Pro, however, offers a larger 6.7-inch screen as well as 12GB of RAM, which is double that of the base A54. The Pixel 6 Pro... Continue reading…

Illustration: Samar Haddad / The Verge Last year’s iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 releases came with a host of great new features — including sweet lock screen customization options, which Verge reporter Jay Peters called one of the biggest successes of 2022. But Apple is still not done with iOS 16; iterative releases have been handed out for testing through the company’s public beta program. Now, Apple has pushed its latest public betas — iOS 16.5 and iPadOS 16.5 — which introduce even more new features, like being able to ask Siri to start a screen recording.You can download the latest public beta releases today — at your own risk, naturally. Here’s how to install the beta software on your iPhone or iPad once it’s available for your device.Before we get started, a word of warning:... Continue reading…

Haein Jeong / The Verge I.What a difference four months can make.If you had asked in November how I thought AI systems were progressing, I might have shrugged. Sure, by then OpenAI had released DALL-E, and I found myself enthralled with the creative possibilities it presented. On the whole, though, after years watching the big platforms hype up artificial intelligence, few products on the market seemed to live up to the more grandiose visions that have been described for us over the years.Then OpenAI released ChatGPT, the chatbot that captivated the world with its generative possibilities. Microsoft’s GPT-powered Bing browser, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Bard followed in quick succession. AI-powered tools are quickly working their way into other... Continue reading…

Image: Nintendo / The Verge Kirby developers Shinya Kumazaki and Tatsuya Kamiyama talk about the various shapes of Kirby and what we can learn from them. Continue reading…

OpenAI is accused of “unlawful collection of personal data.” | Illustration: The Verge Italy’s national privacy regulator has ordered an effective ban of AI chatbot ChatGPT, accusing creators OpenAI of “unlawful collection of personal data.” It’s ordered OpenAI to stop collecting Italian users’ data immediately until it amends its data collection practices.The country’s Data Protection Authority, the GPDP, issued a press release this morning saying that the company lacks lawful justification for the collection of users’ personal information. The GPDP says that OpenAI also has no mechanism in place to stop underage users accessing the service, which “exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and self-awareness” (translation via Google).This isn’t the first time that Italy’s... Continue reading…

Virgin Orbit was notable for launching its LauncherOne rocket from midair using Cosmic Girl, a converted Boeing 747. | Image: Virgin Orbit Virgin Orbit, the satellite-launching subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, has announced that it will lay off 85 percent of its workforce and is ceasing operations “for the foreseeable future.” The company, which aimed to provide a more affordable option for launching small satellites into orbit, had been struggling to secure funding to stay afloat and compete with larger players in the private space industry like SpaceX and Blue Origin.The news comes two months after its most recent mission in Cornwall, UK failed due to a dislodged rocket fuel filter.Just 100 employees remain at Virgin Orbit, with 675 roles to be cut by April 3rdAccording to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Virgin Orbit... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google CEO Sundar Pichai has responded to criticism of the company’s experimental AI chatbot Bard, promising that Google will be upgrading Bard soon.“We clearly have more capable models,” Pichai said in an interview on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast. “Pretty soon, perhaps as this [podcast] goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week.”“In some ways I feel like we took a souped-up Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars.”Pichai noted that Bard is running on a “lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA,” an AI language model that... Continue reading…

Photo by Daniel Boczarski/WireImage The gaming industry has changed, and it doesn’t need E3 anymore. Continue reading…

Not the kind of statement you can take to the bank | Illustration by Hugo Herrera / The Verge Block, recently targeted by short sellers at Hindenburg Research, is still presumably exploring its legal options. It has, however, released a statement about common investor questions it would like to answer. Unfortunately, none of the questions it wants to answer are “How did you not notice you were issuing a cash card to an obviously fake Donald Trump?”There’s a lot in the Hindenburg report, which essentially accuses Block of falling down on the job of fraud prevention. To demonstrate the point, Hindenburg changed its accounts’ names to “Donald Trump” and “Jack Dorsey,” and they were still able to send and receive money. They even got a debit card under the name Donald Trump!

Geoff Keighley at The Game Awards 2019. He’ll be hosting his fourth Summer Game Fest in June. | Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images E3 2023 has been canceled, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have big summer gaming events to look forward to. We’re already aware of at least three things you should mark on your calendar, and it seems like there will be major news of some kind from each one.Here’s the 2023 summer gaming events that we’re currently aware of. Given that E3 is now officially not happening, it’s possible this list will grow if more companies want to make a splash in June.

It was inevitable that E3 would end this way. Even before the pandemic put a pause on in-person gatherings, the Electronic Entertainment Expo was already on life-support as the larger developers had already put distance between themselves and the event to focus on their own presentations on their own time. And though E3’s eventual cancellation was all but written in stone, I still feel a great sense of loss. Which is odd considering I’ve never been to E3.I’ve covered it remotely before. It was my first year of freelancing for a small video game wiki site that no longer exists and I was excited because this was, in my freelancer’s eyes, the big leagues. I was covering E-friggin’-3. This was event that I had dreamed of when I first... Continue reading…

Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Ford is raising the price of the F-150 Lightning for the fourth time — the base “Pro” trim has gone from $55,974 to $59,974, not including a $1,895 shipping charge. When the company announced the Lightning in May 2021, the starting price for the Pro was $39,974, $20,000 less than where it’s sitting now. Other models in the lineup, such as the Lariat and Platinum, are also getting price bumps.According to Automotive News, the Lariat trim has gone up $1,500 to $77,869, and the Platinum model is now $99,969, up by $1,200. (Those prices do include the shipping charge.) The slightly more attainable XLT trim is the only one that appears to be unaffected — its price rose to $63,474 in December and seems to have stayed there. Even that, though,... Continue reading…

A pipe installed as part of the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project carries carbon dioxide captured from emissions on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. | Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images Keeping coal and gas power plants alive while purporting to tackle climate change will likely make electricity more expensive for consumers, a new analysis warns. Fossil fuel companies have been eager to deploy technologies that filter planet-heating carbon dioxide out of power plant emissions. But relying on the technology, called carbon capture and storage (CCS), is a risky venture and consumers are likely to bear the costs.The cost of electricity from power plants outfitted with carbon capture devices is at least 1.5 to 2 times more expensive than other alternatives, according to a new report from the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). It’s much more affordable to turn to renewable energy like... Continue reading…

Image: Getty Images E3 has been canceled. Gaming’s big summer show was set to return in person in Los Angeles for the first time since 2019, but it’s been called off after huge gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Ubisoft all said they wouldn’t be participating in the event.E3 2023 was scheduled for June 13th through 16th with a mix of industry-focused days and days that would be open to the public. But in the lead-up to June, there had been some worrying signs that things might be rocky for E3’s revival.According to an email sent to employees and verified by IGN, E3 2023 “simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry.”In an email to The Verge,... Continue reading…