The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit's ask me anything" posts, or AMAs, could feel more like special events than standard posts with a twist, thanks to changes that go sitewide on Thursday. While none of the updates reflect a total overhaul, they do put a new kind of emphasis on the popular Q&A sessions.Starting on Thursday, a new AMA tab will offer special options like the ability to schedule and promote an AMA in a single post. Creators of the posts can also add up to five cohosts, whose answers are tagged as such in the comments section. When the AMA is over, hosts can also add an ending note with closing thoughts, links, or final promotional info.For ordinary site users, a new RSVP option will let them get notifications so they don't miss one. Once the AMA is... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Amazon Music on Tuesday introduced Topics, a new AI-powered feature that should let you easily discover other related podcasts based on topics discussed in a particular episode.After analyzing podcast transcriptions and descriptions to identify key topics, AI, with the aid of human reviewers, generates a Topics tag button. Located beneath each episode description, clicking on any tag will produce a list of related podcast episodes to that subject.As an example, Amazon shared an Amazon Music mobile app screenshot of an episode about the effects of caffeine as a drug from the Stuff You Should Know podcast. Titled, Selects: The Duality of Caffeine," Amazon added three Topics tags underneath the product description: Caffeine," Coffee,"... Continue reading...

A small-scale model of a carbon removal facility during a groundbreaking ceremony at the Occidental Petroleum and 1PointFive Direct Air Capture (DAC) plant in Ector County, Texas, on April 28th, 2023. | Photo: Getty Images Companies are increasingly turning to newfangled ways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as a way to hit their sustainability goals. But who's watching to make sure these tactics are working?A new project called the Carbon Removal Standards Initiative (CRSI) launched today, with the goal of helping develop standards for efforts to draw down and sequester CO2. It comes as big names in tech scale-up investments in carbon dioxide removal (CDR), even though there are still concerns about whether those technologies will be able to prove themselves at commercial scale.Who's watching to make sure these tactics are working?CDR can look like many different things - building an industrial facility to filter CO2 out of the air or s... Continue reading...

More watchfaces, Garmin Pay, and GoPro are now in the Garmin Connect IQ Store. | Image: Garmin Garmin doesn't have the best third-party app store, but it's at least getting a bit better starting today. You'll now be able to make purchases in the Connect IQ Store using Garmin Pay, plus there's a handful of new watchfaces and a GoPro app.Previously, downloading apps from the Garmin Connect IQ Store could be a real pain, as there wasn't an easy way to pay for apps that weren't free. (Even free apps like Spotify could sometimes be a headache to download and install.)The other problem with Connect IQ is that there simply aren't a ton of apps compared to Google Play or Apple's App Store. And while that's still an issue, today's announcement does bring some bigger names to Connect IQ. That includes four Disney-themed watchfaces,... Continue reading...

Image: Disney The next phase of Disney's plan to make its streaming services profitable is another round of price hikes served up with more news and new playlist features.Disney is rolling out a new wave of price hikes that its subscribers will probably be none too pleased to be hit with. Beginning October 17th, individual monthly and annual plans for Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN are all going up. Monthly subscriptions to Disney Plus with ads will jump from $8 a month to $10. The monthly Disney Plus ad-free tier will increase from $14 to $16, and annual ad-free plans will rise from their previous $140 price point to $160. Hulu's ad-supported tier will rise from $8 / month and $80 / year to $10 / month and $100 / year, and monthly... Continue reading...

Photo by Andrej Sokolow / picture alliance via Getty Images Waymo is spreading out a little more in the two major cities in which it operates.The robotaxi company announced today that it was growing its service areas in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, as the company seeks to attract more customers to its burgeoning business.In San Francisco, Waymo's service area is extending south of the city into the San Francisco Peninsula to cover Daly City, Broadmoor, and Colma - a total of 10 additional square miles for a total of 55 square miles. The company recently got rid of its waiting list in San Francisco, opening up its 24/7 robotaxi service to anyone within the service area who has downloaded the Waymo One app. In Los Angeles, where the company's waitlist is still in effect,... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge X is suing a group of major advertisers over accusations that they held an illegal boycott" against the platform formerly known as Twitter. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, X claims Unilever, Mars, CVS, Orsted, and dozens of other brands conspired to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue" through a World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) industry initiative.To join the WFA's initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), companies must agree to withhold advertising from social platforms that aren't compliant with the organization's safety standards. X alleges GARM organized an advertiser boycott of Twitter" to coerce the company into following the initiative's safety standards. The lawsuit... Continue reading...

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge The Sonos Ace headphones launched with a very convenient trick called TV Audio Swap, which lets you send audio that would normally come out of the Sonos Arc soundbar to the headphones instead. Two months later, the company is enabling TV Audio Swap on its more affordable soundbars - and it's no longer limited to customers with Apple devices.The feature now works on both generations of the Sonos Beam as well as the entry-level Sonos Ray. Until now, an iPhone or iPad was required to activate TV Audio Swap, but now Android devices can do so as well. The feature itself uses a direct Wi-Fi connection to send audio from the soundbar to the headphones, but you'll need the app for setup and to toggle certain settings. Photo by... Continue reading...

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Google is done making Chromecasts. In a post on Tuesday, Google says it's ending production of Chromecast" after over a decade of selling the streaming dongles.Even though Chromecast devices will now be available while supplies last," Google says it will continue to push software and security updates to its newer devices without specifying which ones. The most recent update to the lineup was the Chromecast with Google TV released in 2022.But now, Google says technology has evolved dramatically" since the launch of the original Chromecast in 2013. We invested heavily in embedding Google Cast technology into millions of TV devices, including Android TV," Google writes. We are taking the next step in evolving how streaming TV devices... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge The Quibi story is both short and epic. In January 2020, company founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman were onstage at CES delivering an hour-long presentation on how they were about to upend the entertainment business. They'd developed new tech, signed up seemingly half the stars in Hollywood, and had raised more than a billion dollars to pull it off. By October, it was all over. Quibi was shutting down.On this episode of The Vergecast, we're once again trying out a couple of our favorite new show formats. First up is the rewatch show, which we're calling Version History. We talk through the whole story of Quibi, from its early days as NewTV to its extremely ill-timed launch and ultimate demise. Is there a world in... Continue reading...

Image: Google Google isn't waiting for its upcoming hardware event to announce the Chromecast's successor. Alongside the new, sleeker Nest Thermostat, today, the company is introducing the Google TV Streamer, a $99.99 set-top box that improves upon the Chromecast with Google TV with substantially better performance, Thread and Matter integration, and useful new features like a remote finder.Yes, there are some Gemini AI tricks thrown in, and with other hardware upgrades like a built-in ethernet jack, the Google TV Streamer seems poised to be a much better entertainment hub than its predecessor. The only downside? Since it's not a dongle anymore, you'll have to provide your own HDMI cable when it ships on September 24th.The sloped, low-profile... Continue reading...

Google Home is getting a Gemini intelligence upgrade. | Image: Google Nest While splashy chatbots may get all the attention, generative AI has real potential to make the smart home simpler and more accessible. Amazon has already announced its plans for a smarter Alexa to power your home. Now, it's Google's turn to promise that it can produce a better, smarter, more helpful Google Assistant.Ahead of its fall hardware event next week, Google announced three new Gemini intelligence-powered experiences it plans to bring to its Google Home smart home platform later this year. There's a new camera intelligence feature that generates descriptive captions for video footage from Nest cameras, a natural language input for creating Google Home routines, and a smarter Google Assistant for Nest smart speakers and displays... Continue reading...

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Nvidia is on a mission to eliminate its legacy Control Panel and GeForce Experience apps and combine them into a single new Nvidia app. That effort started earlier this year, and a new beta update today adds display settings, RTX Video Super Resolution, RTX Video HDR sliders, and more features.The new displays section lets you adjust resolution, refresh rate, and orientation controls for connected monitors or TVs. The controls are similar to what exists inside the Settings section of Windows 10 or 11, but this now lets you adjust all your GPU settings in a single location. Image: Nvidia The new display section of the Nvidia app. Image: Nvidia Nvidia's statistics overlay is also getting... Continue reading...

Image: CNET Red Ventures is selling CNET to Ziff Davis, the digital media and internet company that owns other notable tech publications like Mashable, IGN, and Lifehacker. Ziff Davis' chief executive, Vivek Shah, confirmed the acquisition to The New York Times on Tuesday.Ironically, back in 2000, it was CNET Networks Inc. that paid $1.6 billion to acquire the then-tech-publishing-behemoth Ziff-Davis Inc. and its online services company, ZDNet. So much has happened in the last two decades in the form of divestments and realignments that today's inverted purchase isn't as ouroboric as it might seem. In 2020, Red Ventures acquired CNET along with a few other smaller properties for $500 million.While an official figure hasn't been announced, Ziff... Continue reading...

Image: HBO / Warner Bros. Discovery House of the Dragon has just concluded its second season, but we now know there are two more to look forward to. As reported by Variety, House of the Dragon showrunner and co-creator Ryan Condal confirmed during a press event that the series would have four seasons in total, with the third expected to go into production in earlyish 2025."This is the first time that HBO has confirmed how many seasons the Game of Thrones prequel will have, but the network hasn't revealed how many episodes remain. I haven't had discussions with HBO about it," Condal said when asked whether Season 3 will have eight episodes, matching that of its second season. I would just anticipate the cadence of the show, from a dramatic storytelling perspective, will... Continue reading...

Image: MacRumors (YouTube) Not a day goes by without me getting frustrated at the state of the mobile web. I rarely use my iPhone to read news articles now because every time I do there's a cookie prompt obstructing what I want to read, or so many ads on a page that I can't even see the text anymore.Apple is clearly just as frustrated as I am, so it's added a Thanos snap animation to iOS 18 that wipes out annoying parts of websites.The new Distraction Control" feature showed up in Safari earlier this week in the fifth beta of iOS 18 and iPadOS18. It's designed to let you temporarily remove annoying and distracting elements from a mobile website, including cookie prompts, ads, those infuriating autoplay videos that follow you around while you scroll a site, and... Continue reading...

Polymetallic nodules rich in nickel, manganese, and cobalt that could be used for batteries. | Photo by Pallava Bagla / Corbis via Getty Images Scientists discovered dark oxygen' in the ocean's abyss, where companies want to mine battery metals. Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple's latest developer betas launched last week with a handful of the generative AI features that were announced at WWDC and are headed to your iPhones, iPads, and Macs over the next several months. On Apple's computers, however, you can actually read the instructions programmed into the model supporting some of those Apple Intelligence features.They show up as prompts that precede anything you say to a chatbot by default, and we've seen them uncovered for AI tools like Microsoft Bing and DALL-E before. Now a member of the macOS 15.1 beta subreddit posted that they'd discovered the files containing those backend prompts. You can't alter any of the files, but they do give an early hint at how the sausage is made. In the... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple is adding a new feature to Safari called Distraction Control" that lets you remove distracting things like cookie preference pop-ups while you're browsing, MacRumors reports. The new feature is available with the fifth iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia developer betas that launched on Monday.You can get an idea of how Distraction Control works thanks to a video from MacRumors. From a menu, you can choose an option to Hide Distracting Items" and then select items you want to hide from the page you're looking at. When items are hidden, they dissipate away with a very slick animation.In a pop-up shown in the video, Apple notes that hiding distracting items will not permanently remove ads and other content that updates... Continue reading...

Photo by Valerie Macon / AFP via Getty Images Actors have once again picked up their picket signs. But this time, members of the Screen Actors Guild are striking against the video game industry after negotiations for a new contract governing interactive media and video games fell through. The guild began striking on Friday, July 26th, preventing over 160,000 SAG-AFTRA members from taking new video game projects and impeding games already in development from the biggest publishers to the smallest indie studios.Negotiations broke down due to disagreements over worker protections around AI. The actors union, SAG-AFTRA, negotiates the terms of the interactive media agreement, or IMA, with a bargaining committee of video game publishers, including Activision, Take-Two, Insomniac Games,... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft made it clear earlier this year that it was planning to make security its top priority, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. Starting today, the software giant is now tying its security efforts to employee performance reviews.Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft's chief people officer, has outlined what the company expects of employees in an internal memo obtained by The Verge. Everyone at Microsoft will have security as a Core Priority," says Hogan. When faced with a tradeoff, the answer is clear and simple: security above all else."A lack of security focus for Microsoft employees could impact promotions, merit-based salary increases, and bonuses. Delivering impact for the Security Core Priority will be a key... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Folks are beginning to receive checks from Apple to compensate them for having to spend money when their MacBook butterfly keyboards malfunctioned. As the payments go out, Apple is closing the book on an issue with stuck or otherwise unusable keys that plagued owners of Mac laptops made between 2015 and 2019.The checks are the result of Apple's $50 million settlement of a class action lawsuit over the keyboards in 2022. People who filed during the claims window starting late last year were eligible for payments of $50, $125, or $395, depending on how extensive or frequent the repairs were. A court in June ordered Apple to begin paying out. Verge reporter and smart home expert Jennifer Pattison Tuohy received one for the maximum amount,... Continue reading...

Image: Nintendo When The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is released on September 26th, it will be the first Zelda game in decades with the titular princess as the hero. Nintendo has released a new trailer highlighting some of the new powers she'll have and all the places she'll get to use them.Princess Zelda will have the whole of Hyrule to explore in Echoes of Wisdom. She'll traverse the harsh landscape of the Gerudo Desert, the calming waters of Jabul, the jungles of the Faron Wetlands, and the scorching lava floes of Eldin Volcano. And to get around the wide world of Hyrule, Zelda will be able to summon a trusty steed to her side, just like Link.Zelda's got a couple of new powers that will aid her in her quest to save Hyrule from dangerous... Continue reading...

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo by Booking Holdings The head of online hotel and flight giant Booking on how competition, regulation, and AI are changing travel. Continue reading...

All colors of the M3 Air are on sale, including starlight. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Wow, it wasn't long ago that the M2 MacBook Air dropped to its lowest price (and that deal is still kicking, by the way), but now there's a chance to get the newer M3 model for its best-ever rate, too. The 13-inch M3 MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is $849.98 (around $250 off) in all available colors at Amazon. And for those who want more storage or RAM, Amazon is also selling the 8GB RAM / 512GB configuration for $1,049.98 and the 16GB RAM / 512GB version for $1,249.98 - each around $250 off.If you can spend the extra dough, that highest-specced model is ideal since it has the performance headroom to last quite a long time. However, even the base MacBook Air is a great all-around machine, especially since its 256GB... Continue reading...

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge If you've been on Max lately, you might've noticed more personalized rows of content across your entire homepage. That's because the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max rolled out a new whole page optimization" system in the US last month to get viewers to keep coming back - and Warner Bros. Discovery says it's working.Liesel Kipp, Warner Bros. Discovery's senior vice president of global streaming product, tells The Verge that the company has seen a meaningful lift" in how long viewers watch content on Max, how many times they come back, and the types of shows people end up watching. The system can really help consumers find those hidden gems on Max," Kipp says.Similar to other content algorithms, like the one used by... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Elon Musk has revived his complaint against OpenAI after dropping a previous lawsuit, again alleging that the ChatGPT maker and two of its founders - Sam Altman and Greg Brockman - breached the company's founding mission to develop artificial intelligence technology to benefit humanity.The new lawsuit filed in federal court in Northern California on Monday says that Altman and Brockman assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture" by promising that OpenAI would be safer and more transparent than profit-driven alternatives. The suit claims that assurances about OpenAI's nonprofit structure were the hook for Altman's long con."Musk made similar accusations in a hilariously bad" lawsuit that he... Continue reading...

Image: Yahoo Yahoo is a giant in the world of fantasy sports, but its app hasn't gotten a meaningful update in years. Ahead of the 2024 NFL season, though, the company is rolling out a completely overhauled version of the Yahoo Fantasy Sports app that brings both a cleaner design and a huge amount of new content for fantasy players.The new app is divided into three sections. The first thing that appears when you open the app is a list of all your fantasy teams across sports - football is by far the most popular, but Yahoo also offers fantasy baseball, basketball, and more, and part of the team's goal with the new app is to get you playing new fantasy games. There's also a News tab with dedicated content for fantasy players and a Scores tab that... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge OpenAI has had a system for watermarking ChatGPT-created text and a tool to detect the watermark ready for about a year, reports The Wall Street Journal. But the company is divided internally over whether to release it. On one hand, it seems like the responsible thing to do; on the other, it could hurt its bottom line.OpenAI's watermarking is described as adjusting how the model predicts the most likely words and phrases that will follow previous ones, creating a detectable pattern. (That's a simplification, but you can check out Google's more in-depth explanation for Gemini's text watermarking for more).Offering any way to detect AI-written material is a potential boon for teachers trying to deter students from turning over writing... Continue reading...

The OnePlus Pad's keyboard case and stylus run an additional $149.99 and $99.99, respectively. | Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge The $549.99 OnePlus Pad 2 may have just recently launched, but the original version remains a worthwhile option that's now undercutting the new model's price by $170. Now through August 6th, you can pick the first-gen OnePlus Pad at Woot for $379.99 ($100 off), its lowest price ever. Sure, the older Pad may not have a 12.1-inch display or a nifty vibrating stylus that makes it feel like you're writing on paper, but its 11.6-inch LCD has some great specs of its own - including a speedy 144Hz refresh rate and sharp, 2800 x 2000 resolution.OnePlus's first tablet was a pleasant surprise when it launched last year, as the brand's freshman effort offered great performance at an affordable price. That's thanks in part to a snappy MediaTek... Continue reading...