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The Pixel 9A looks a lot like the Pixel 9, only with its sunglasses removed. | Image: OnLeaks / Android Headlines Google's first leak of the fall is here, with new renders of its upcoming Pixel 9A posted online for the world to see. As with the Pixel 8A leak earlier this year, Android Headlines has yet again acquired images of Google's next budget A-series release, this time by way of OnLeaks, which was responsible for spoiling the recent Pixel 9 lineup.The big change coming on the Pixel 9A, according to the leak, is that it won't feature Google's now-signature visor look for its camera housing. Instead, it seems like there are two cameras in a pill-shaped module that sits almost flush with the rear of the phone. A camera flash is set to the right, making it look like the rear of an iPhone 7 Plus but magnified. The rest of the body looks similar to... Continue reading...

The Home Depot's newest smart door features smart glass that can turn from opaque to clear with the press of a button or a smart home command. | Image: The Home Depot Glass front doors are great for letting light in during the day but not so great when you want privacy at night. The Home Depot has a smart solution for this problem - a glass front door that can switch from clear to opaque on a schedule, with a voice command, or by pressing a button.The smart glass Feather River door is a prehung fiberglass front door with built-in smart glass. A button on the door lets you change the glass from clear to opaque, and it works with The Home Depot's Hubspace smart home app to control it from your phone. You can also set the glass on a schedule and have it be clear during the day and opaque at night. The door costs $798 for a three-quarters lite, $899 for a half lite, and $998 for a full lite, similar to... Continue reading...

Cruise's failure to disclose the fact that a pedestrian was seriously injured by one of its driverless vehicles in San Francisco last year has now resulted in a $1.5 million fine to the federal government.Last October, a Cruise vehicle hit a pedestrian and then dragged her 20 feet after she was initially struck by a human driver in a hit-and-run incident. In the aftermath, Cruise disclosed that its vehicle had struck a pedestrian but omitted details about the victim being dragged. As a result, the California Department of Motor Vehicles pulled the GM-backed company's permit to operate self-driving cars in the state, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation into the incident.Today, NHTSA... Continue reading...

Flooding in Boone, North Carolina, about an hour northeast of Spruce Pine. | Photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images Hurricane Helene brought historic rainfall and flooding to western North Carolina last week, leaving dozens dead and catastrophic damage stretching across the state's mountain towns. The devastation also reached the small town of Spruce Pine, which is home to the purest quartz on Earth.Spruce Pine's high-quality quartz is an essential ingredient in the chipmaking process, as it's the only naturally occurring source of the ultrapure mineral. The quartz mined from this area is used as a crucible to melt polysilicon, which is then used to produce silicon wafers - the base of a semiconductor.Even though it's possible to produce pure silicon from the quartz found in abundance elsewhere in the world, it takes a considerable amount of time... Continue reading...

Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Amid the hullabaloo around California Gavin Newsom vetoing a closely watched artificial intelligence bill, three other bills that would regulate a different type of AI - autonomous vehicles - landed on his desk with less fanfare. The governor signed one and vetoed two others.For the second time in two years, Newsom vetoed legislation (AB 2286) that would have banned autonomous trucks from operating on public roads. He also vetoed another (AB 3061) that would set up new data reporting requirements for AV companies. And he signed a third bill into law (AB 1777) that would create guidelines for when an autonomous vehicle gets in a crash or encounters first responders.Labor groups have been pushing the state legislature to adopt an AV... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Reddit is giving its staff a lot more power over the communities on its platform. Starting today, Reddit moderators will not be able to change if their subreddit is public or private without first submitting a request to a Reddit admin. The policy applies to adjusting all community types, meaning moderators will have to request to make a switch from safe for work to not safe for work, too.By requiring admin approval for the changes, Reddit is taking away a lever many communities used to protest the company's API pricing changes last year. By going private, the community becomes inaccessible to the public, making the platform less usable for the average visitor. And that's part of the reason behind the change.The ability to instantly... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Verizon is experiencing a huge outage affecting its mobile services across the country.During the incident we received reports from Birmingham, Foley, Montgomery, Benton, Brookland, Des Arc, Fayetteville, Hot Springs Village, Washington, Dover, Apopka, Brandon, Cape Coral, Clermont, Crestview, Fort Pierce, Hollywood, Miami, Naples, Ocala and 652 other cities," according to a website tracking the outage.There are also more than 100,000 user reports of problems on Downdetector. Downdetector's outage map shows hotspots in many places, including New York and Atlanta. Based on that map, it appears as though the outages are more prevalent on the East Coast.We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers," Verizon... Continue reading...

Matt Strauss, head of Peacock and global streaming, has plans to keep you watching. Continue reading...

Image: Parker Ortolani / The Verge Some Tesla Cybertruck owners are starting to get Full Self-Driving (FSD) access on their vehicles. The company's polarizing electric pickup truck has lacked the driver-assistance software feature since its launch in November 2023. Now, members of the Cybertruck Owners Club (as reported by Electrek) are reporting that the update has been installed on their vehicles.Tesla had promised that FSD would come to the Cybertruck in September, after the launch of the Autopark feature - and with today's news, it would appear that it just hit that deadline. It's the latest version of FSD (12.5.5), and to start, it's coming to Cybertrucks set up for the early access program. The update includes a promised vision-based attention monitoring system for... Continue reading...

Photo: Getty Images Oasis announced the North America leg of its 2025 reunion tour this morning, and the band's management also shared a decision that will be welcome news to fans: they won't have to worry about inflated dynamic pricing" rates when ticket sales kick off on October 4th. Dynamic pricing allows for ticket costs to fluctuate based on demand, but all too often, the end result is that prices surge far beyond face value for high-profile performances. This has led many people to bemoan the feature in recent years.It is widely accepted that dynamic pricing remains a useful tool to combat ticket touting and keep prices for a significant proportion of fans lower than the market rate and thus more affordable," the statement reads.But, when... Continue reading...

Image: Kojima Productions The 2024 edition of the Tokyo Game Show took place over the weekend, and one of the highlights was a presentation from Death Stranding 2 studio Kojima Productions. It included a few interesting details about the weird-as-hell sequel, which the developer has helpfully split up into a series of clips in lieu of a traditional trailer. They feature some of the new characters joining the cast, some dialogue that makes little sense out of context, and what looks like a completely ridiculous photo mode to play around with.The first includes some returning faces played by Norman Reedus and Lea Seydoux and also provides a proper introduction to one of the stranger elements of Death Stranding 2: a physic medium who has been turned into a... Continue reading...

Image: AMD AMD is releasing new BIOS updates that will boost performance for its Ryzen 9600X / 9700X processors and address some latency issues. The performance improvements and latency reductions arrive around a month after disappointing Zen 5 desktop CPU reviews and appear alongside updates to Windows 11 that include optimized AMD-specific branch prediction for both Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips.CPU reviewers have been reporting a higher-than-expected core-to-core latency across the Ryzen 9000-series of desktop processors, and now AMD has addressed this with a new BIOS optimization.The latest AMD updates for AM5 motherboards include AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 firmware, which AMD says will address some corner cases" where it takes two transactions to read and... Continue reading...

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge Autumn is here, and once again, warnings are going up about the spread of the covid-19 virus - along with the flu and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. To try to minimize the upsurge, the US government is once again offering free home rapid antigen tests to each US household. According to the government website, orders will start shipping this week.As before, it's extremely simple to put in your order. You will not need to submit a credit card or any other financial information.

If successful, the merger would create a combined satellite streaming business with around 20 million US subscribers. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DirecTV has reached an agreement to acquire Dish TV, Sling TV, and the rest of Dish parent company EchoStar's wider TV business, a move that would combine Dish's roughly 8.1 million subscribers with DirecTV's 11 million US subscribers, The New York Times reports. The deal is a complicated debt transfer - the transaction price is a single dollar, but DirecTV will assume $9.75 billion of Dish's debt. The deal serves as a lifeline for EchoStar, which has no means to pay the $2 billion of its overall $20 billion debt due by November 14th.In a statement, DirecTV chief executive Bill Morrow said a merger between the two companies will be better able to work with programmers to realize our vision for the future of TV, which is to aggregate,... Continue reading...

Image: Ford For customers still unsure whether they're ready to make the switch to an all-electric vehicle, Ford is sweetening the pot.Today, the company launched a new initiative called the Ford Power Promise," in which it will provide a suite of benefits to customers who buy or lease a new EV. And chief among them is a complimentary home charger for all new customers, as well as the costs of standard installation.The charger that's being offered is the company's Ford Charge Station Pro, a $1,310 Level 2 charger that comes with a standard CCS1 connector. Ford declined to put a monetary value on the installation but said it would cover costs up to 60 amps of power and 80 feet of wire run. Customers who need to upgrade their home electrical... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB 1047) today. In his veto message, Governor Newsom cited multiple factors in his decision, including the burden the bill would have placed on AI companies, California's lead in the space, and a critique that the bill may be too broad.

Photo: John Carl D'Annibale / Albany Times Union via Getty Images You know how Marvel and DC have held joint ownership over trademarks for Super Hero" for decades? That time is apparently mostly over, as the US Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the companies' claim to several of their trademarks, reports Reuters.The cancellation comes as the result of a challenge from Superbabies Limited, a small company that produces a series of Superbabies comics about, well, superhero babies. Superbabies creator S.J. Richold decided to challenge the two comic giants' claim to the trademarks after DC attempted to block Richold's efforts to promote The Super Babies," wrote the law firm that represented Richold in a release.Marvel and DC didn't respond to the challenge by a July 24th, 2024 due date,... Continue reading...

The Razer Freyja can turn most computer chairs into haptic gaming accessories. | Image: Razer Razer has released the Freyja gaming cushion, a haptic cushion that you can attach to your gaming chair, the company announced. The cushion is $299.99, and it's available to buy now.The Freyja is an extension of the vibration you get from gaming controllers - except instead of just jolting your hands, it buzzes several panels positioned behind and beneath you in response to things happening in a game.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Spotify was down earlier on Sunda, with users across social media reporting that the app and website weren't working, and for those of us at The Verge who tried we saw the same issues.Downdetector showed a spike in the number of reports about problems with the music streaming service that started at about 10:40AM ET. Spotify said it was working on the issue, and now it appears to be resolved, with the number of reports falling off sharply and a new messages from @SpotifyStatus saying Everything's looking much better now!"

The StandBy feature of iPhones offers a hint of how an Apple smart home display could work. | Image: David Pierce / The Verge Apple is preparing to take a fresh run at the smart home that starts with a rumored smart display that it may release next year. That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who writes in his Power On newsletter today that the display will use a new operating system, called homeOS, that's based on the Apple TV's tvOS (much like the software that drives HomePods now.)Gurman reports that the display will run Apple apps like Calendar, Notes, and Home, and that Apple has tested prototypes with magnets for wall-mounting. And it will support Apple Intelligence - something Apple's HomePods don't currently do.Rumors of such a device have been going around for some time now, with form factors ranging from a HomePod with a screen to a display a... Continue reading...

Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 54, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I've been reading about AI slop and sports betting and Jony Ive, clearing my schedule for the new season of The Great British Bake Off, watching Sicario and Pirates of the Caribbean and A Quiet Place: Day One on plane-seat screens like their directors intended, insta-subscribing to Hasan Minhaj's new YouTube show, and just relentlessly trolling people with Vergecast clips through Pocket Casts' new feature.I also have for you a couple of new Meta gadgets, the mobile game that will eat up all your free... Continue reading...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Some of the most watched and listened to music on YouTube and YouTube Music disappeared on Saturday, replaced by a short message:

Brian Williams during a Meet the Press taping in 2008. | Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images for Meet the Press Former news anchor Brian Williams is in talks to host an Amazon Prime election night special, reports Variety. The show would apparently be a non-partisan discussion" as election night news comes in and could include multiple guests.Williams has been out of the news game for a while. He lost his role as anchor of NBC's Nightly News after some of his reporting was found to have been repeatedly embellished. He went on to host MSNBC's 11th Hour until he resigned from the network in 2021.If the deal goes through, Williams would begin the November 5th presidential election night broadcast as early as 5PM ET and continue for up to eight hours - or longer if the election is too close to call, writes Variety, citing unnamed sources familiar... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images Meta is restricting links on Threads, Instagram, and Facebook that lead to Ken Klippenstein's newsletter containing a JD Vance dossier that was allegedly nabbed in an Iranian hack of the Trump campaign. The company has apparently removed posts containing the link and is seemingly blocking links to PDFs of the dossier being hosted elsewhere.Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold emailed Meta's statement to The Verge:

So full. So filled." | Image: Disney This week, I've been slowly catching up on Dark Matter; I'm about 20 hours into Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door on the Switch; and I'm still trying to work a trip to the movie theater into my schedule to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.I'm behind, in other words! And this week's trailers shoveled so much more onto my need-to-watch pile, from the next Marvel MCU film, Thunderbolts, to the amusingly bizarre black comedy Rumours, to Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuaron's new Apple TV Plus series. That's to say nothing of all the game trailers from Sony's State of Play event this week.Check out some of my favorite trailers from this week below.ThunderboltsMarvel hasn't said much about Thunderbolts, which sees David Harbour's Red Guardian and... Continue reading...

Playstack Now that Balatro is out on mobile, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And while it's a great game, its tutorial doesn't do the best job of setting you up for the kind of success necessary to hook you. In my first few hours, though I was completing the objectives laid out, it felt like I was stumbling my way to success instead of achieving it through strategy. Onboarding was a bit too abrupt, focused on the barebones of how to play instead of blending that with tips on how to play effectively. With that in mind, here's some useful info and tips on how to get started.I was told there would be no mathIn Balatro, the main gameplay loop is amassing enough poker chips to beat a set chip total called a blind. To do that, you must... Continue reading...

Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp 2024 in Europe. | Screenshot: WordCamp WordPress is essentially internet infrastructure. It's widely used, generally stable, and doesn't tend to generate many splashy headlines as a result.But over the last week, the WordPress community has swept up into a battle over the ethos of the platform. Last week, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg came out with a harsh attack on WP Engine, a major WordPress hosting provider, calling the company a cancer" to the community. The statement has cracked open a public debate surrounding how profit-driven companies can and can't use open-source software - and if they're obligated to contribute something to the projects they use in return.The conflict has escalated in the days since with a barrage of legal threats and has left swaths of... Continue reading...

Illustration: Cath Virginia / The Verge Arc creator The Browser Company has officially started a bug bounty program to keep its growing Chromium-based browser's security in check. The company is also launching a new security bulletin to maintain transparent and proactive communication" with users and researchers on bug fixes and reports.These security revisions followed a devastating bug a researcher found and reported to the company that would've allowed bad actors to insert arbitrary code into anyone's browser just by knowing their easily findable user ID.The problem lived inside the Arc Boosts feature that lets you customize any website with CSS and Javascript. On top of its initial mitigations, the company says it now has disabled Boosts with Javascript by default and... Continue reading...

Photo by Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images Here's the thing about asking investors for money: they want to see returns.OpenAI launched with a famously altruistic mission: to help humanity by developing artificial general intelligence. But along the way, it became one of the best-funded companies in Silicon Valley. Now, the tension between those two facts is coming to a head.Weeks after releasing a new model it claims can reason," OpenAI is barreling toward dropping its nonprofit status, some of its most senior employees are leaving, and CEO Sam Altman - who was once briefly ousted over apparent trust concerns - is solidifying his position as one of the most powerful people in tech.On Wednesday, OpenAI's longtime chief technology officer, Mira Murati, announced she's leaving... Continue reading...

A container truck burns outside the Port of Los Angeles. | Image: Pepe's Towing A truck full of lithium-ion batteries is burning in Los Angeles, shutting down ports and a bridge. It's not clear what the batteries were for - but LA's Vincent Thomas Bridge, leading to the Port of Los Angeles and the next-door Port of Long Beach, has been shut down for at least 15 hours now while local firefighters let the truck burn. State Route 47 was also closed in both directions as of a couple of hours ago.Amazingly, a local towing company caught the explosion on camera from a nearby drone:

Illustration: The Verge Meta is rolling out the ability to tag your location on your Threads posts. If you have the feature, you'll see a pin in the post composer that you can tap so you can include where you are.Note that adding your location to a Threads post doesn't share an exact pin on a map. Instead, the feature lets you give your users an approximate idea of your location by sharing things like a city name, a neighborhood, or a restaurant. And if you see a Threads post that includes a location, you can tap that location to see other posts from the same place.I have the feature, and I've been messing around with it. When I tap the pin in the post composer, Threads shows me a range of options: I can stay broad by tagging myself in Portland, OR, which is... Continue reading...

This robotic arm's articulated hand can detach and crawl around on its own. | Screenshot: YouTube Researchers from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have developed an articulated hand that can extend the reach of a robotic arm by detaching and crawling away on its own to grab things. The research was recently presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and was spotted by IEEE Spectrum magazine.Due to their strength and speed, robotic arms are typically permanently attached to floors or other structures for added stability, which limits their reach. The goal of the research, conducted at the EPFL's Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA), was to develop a bimodal robotic hand with expanded grasping capabilities, including occasional independence from the robot... Continue reading...

Image: Nintendo The Nintendo Museum in Kyoto is a slick and playful trek through the company's century-long history. But it's lacking much in the way of revelations. Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft In response to security concerns, Microsoft is detailing how it has overhauled its controversial AI-powered Recall feature that creates screenshots of mostly everything you see or do on a computer. Recall was originally supposed to debut with Copilot Plus PCs in June, but Microsoft has spent the past few months reworking the security behind it to make it an opt-in experience that you can now fully remove from Windows if you want.I'm actually really excited about how nerdy we got on the security architecture," says David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, in an interview with The Verge. I'm excited because I think the security community is going to get how much we've pushed [into Recall]."One of... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge It's been a rough couple of months for Disney Plus subscribers. First came news of yet another price hike - which will take effect on October 17th - followed by Disney's announcement that it will begin charging $6.99 a month to add an extra member" to an ad-supported plan (so long, password sharing). Fortunately, both new and returning subscribers can lock in three months of Disney's ad-supported Basic plan for $1.99 a month through the end of today, September 27th.As is the case with the base tier with most streaming services, Disney Plus Basic doesn't allow you to download content for offline viewing. It does provide access to the same slate of programming as the more premium tiers, though, which means you can tap into TV shows and... Continue reading...

CNN chairman Mark Thompson announced plans to introduce a digital subscription business in July. | Image: CNN CNN will put some of its digital content behind a subscription paywall starting next month, The New York Times reports. The experiment will test similar subscription models to those used by publications like The New Yorker, Wired, and The Wall Street Journal, with CNN reportedly hoping to bring in additional revenue amid a decline in cable TV viewership.A metered" paywall feature is set to launch sometime in early October that will require CNN's more frequent readers to pay for access after exhausting a nonspecified number of free articles. CNN is the most visited news website in the US, attracting 441.4 million visits per month, according to Press Gazette. The price of this subscription model hasn't been disclosed but will initially... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Steam just removed its forced arbitration policy, opening the door for lawsuits against its parent company, Valve. In an update on Thursday, Steam says its subscriber agreement now provides that any disputes are to go forward in court instead of arbitration."Many companies include a forced arbitration clause in their user agreement, waiving a person's right to a trial in court. Arbitration involves settling a dispute outside a legal system before an impartial third party. This method is often faster but may not get the best results for consumers, as arbitrators don't need to consider the law when issuing a decision.Many services put mandatory arbitration agreements in their terms of service, which people may not even read or fully... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge You can't buy Meta's most impressive new product, the smart glasses codenamed Orion. You might be able to buy something sort of like them a few years from now, but most of us will never get to so much as wear them. That doesn't necessarily make them less impressive, though, or less important. Orion is a statement of purpose from Meta: that AR glasses really are the future and that we're eventually going to get there.On this episode of The Vergecast, The Verge's Alex Heath joins the show to tell us all about his experience with Orion - two hours in the glasses of the future, playing Pong with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and making smoothies and doing all sorts of other things. He also tells us about his conversation with Zuckerberg... Continue reading...

The new ULL-supported controller (seen right) was tested against an unspecified standard Bluetooth gamepad (left). | Image: LG LG has teamed up with Razer and MediaTek to develop a new Bluetooth gaming controller that could greatly reduce the input lag for cloud-based gaming. According to LG, it's the first controller to utilize Ultra-Low Latency (ULL) Bluetooth technology - an in-development standard that aims to make wireless controllers as responsive as their wired counterparts.The BT ULL-enabled controller was compared against a standard controller" at LG's webOS Summit event on Friday. The demonstration highlighted the superior responsiveness, reduced input lag and control precision of the BT ULL technology across various cloud-based games, including FPS, fighting and racing titles," LG said in its newsroom post. Image: LG There's... Continue reading...

Automated responses in Gmail can now provide more detail and context for some users on iOS and Android. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is rolling out a Gemini-powered update to Gmail for Android and iOS that will tailor smart replies more specifically to emails. First announced back in May, Google says its new contextual Smart Replies will offer more detailed responses to fully capture the intent of your message" by taking the entire content of the email thread into consideration.Users can hover over each of the suggested contextual smart replies to preview the text, and select the option that best matches their needs or writing style. Suggested replies can be edited or sent immediately. The idea is that this will both save time (especially if you're often buried in your Gmail inbox) and improve the variety of automated responses available beyond a simple Yes,... Continue reading...