The Verge

Image: Humane Humane announced Friday that the AI Pin, its splashy AI-powered wearable, will start shipping in March 2024. People who placed priority orders will get their devices first, and Humane says it will ship orders based on the date of purchase, according to a post on X (formerly Twitter).While Humane didn't share a specific date for when orders would start shipping, the March timeframe is more specific than the early 2024 timeframe the company provided in November.

Diablo IV, Diablo IV, Diablo IV. | Image: Blizzard Entertainment If your holiday plans involve chillaxing and binging on a ton of video games, we have some great news for you. Now through January 4th at 1PM ET, thousands of great titles are on sale as part of Steam's annual winter sale, including many of our favorites from the past year.The ongoing promo offers a great chance to catch up on newer titles, including demon-slaying action RPG Diablo IV ($28 off), the terrific remake of Dead Space ($36 off), and Mortal Kombat 1 ($35 off). Other titles that aren't as discounted but still well worth a look include GOTY contender Baldur's Gate 3 ($6 off), Cocoon ($5 off), and the delightfully charming deep sea exploration game, Dave the Diver ($4 off).There are plenty of older titles on sale, too, just in... Continue reading...

Image: Insomniac Games Insomniac Games has released a statement few days after a ransomware attack exposed millions of files including sensitive employee information, confidential business information, and assets for in-development games.We're both saddened and angered about the recent criminal cyberattack on our studio and the emotional toll it's taken on our team," the statement posted on X read. We have focused inwardly for several days to support each other."

Photo Illustration by Adrien Fillon/NurPhoto via Getty Images Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, is facing a $1.8 million fine plus victim compensation after admitting it made money off of content showing victims of sex trafficking. The company was arraigned in a Brooklyn federal court on Thursday on a charge of engaging in unlawful money transactions involving sex trafficking proceeds."Aylo, formerly known as MindGeek, will resolve the charge by entering a deferred prosecution agreement with the US government. Under the terms of the agreement, Aylo must pay $1.8 million to the US government and compensate victims who appeared on its porn sites. It will also have an independent monitor for three years, which will evaluate Aylo's content screening and monitoring processes" and ensure it properly... Continue reading...

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge Earlier this month, Google announced the release of Gemini, what it considers its most powerful AI model yet. It integrated Gemini immediately into its flagship generative AI chatbot, Bard, in hopes of steering more users away from its biggest competitor, OpenAI's ChatGPT.ChatGPT and the new Gemini-powered Bard are similar products. Gemini Pro is most comparable to GPT-4, available in the subscription-based ChatGPT Plus. So we decided to test the two chatbots to see just how they stack up - in accuracy, speed, and overall helpfulness.Gemini versus ChatGPT: the basicsChatGPT Plus and Gemini Pro are both very advanced chatbots based on large language models. They're the latest and greatest options from their respective companies,... Continue reading...

The Verge / Photos courtesy of Microsoft and Getty Images 2023 has been a fairly uneventful year for laptops. Apple continues to dominate in both performance and battery life, while Microsoft only had incremental upgrades for its Surface line, and Intel has waited until the very end of the year to try to respond to Apple's dominance. But 2024 looks set to be one of the most interesting years for laptops since the Windows 8 days, thanks to a new version of Windows, a big AI push, and another attempt at making Windows on Arm a reality.Apple's iPad pushed Microsoft into creating Windows on Arm more than 10 years ago, and laptop manufacturers followed with some weird and wonderful designs to match Windows 8. While I'm not expecting a big design overhaul for Windows 12 (or whatever Microsoft calls... Continue reading...

The Verge / Photo from Getty Images In the podcasting world, the year 2019 may seem like it happened in a parallel universe. Vulture's Nicholas Quah deemed it the beginning of the big podcasting era," pointing to the millions of dollars that Spotify invested in building out its podcast operation - and the expected domino effect as other companies follow suit. There was podcasting before 2019, and there will be podcasting after 2019. What podcasting will look like in 2024 remains very much up for grabs," wrote Quah.And although 2024's outlook still isn't entirely certain, it's pretty obvious that the golden years are over. There were a staggering number of layoffs in podcasting and the audio world at large this year, hitting every entity from public radio to... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Google's Safety Check feature for Chrome, which, among other things, checks the internet to see if any of your saved passwords have been compromised, will now run automatically in the background" on desktop, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. The constant checks could mean that you're alerted about a password that you should change sooner than you would have before.Safety Check also watches for bad extensions or site permissions you need to look at, and you can act on Safety Check alerts from Chrome's three-dot menu. In addition, Google says that Safety Check can revoke a site's permissions if you haven't visited it in a while.Google also announced an upcoming feature for Chrome's tab groups, also on desktop: Chrome will let... Continue reading...

The Verge Behold! Someone is investing in a podcast companyCould it be a sign that the tide is turning? Danish podcast and audiobook subscription service Podimo announced a new funding round worth 44 million ($48.4 million). Participants in the round include previous investors Augustinus Fabrikker and HighlandX, as well as the Danish Export and Investment Fund.This investment allows Podimo to continue our strong growth trajectory while orienting the company towards profitability," Morten Strunge, CEO of Podimo, said in a statement. This funding isn't solely about financial support. While profitability remains a key objective, our investment focus extends beyond financial milestones. We are resolutely committed to enhancing our product and... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Not only has Apple halted online sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra Series 2 (with in-store sales to follow), but the company's ongoing patent rift with medical device maker Masimo has another ripple effect: out-of-warranty hardware repairs for several Apple Watch models are now unavailable to customers. That's according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who reports that Apple has informed customer service employees that out-of-warranty hardware repairs and whole unit replacements for the Apple Watch Series 6 onward (with the exception of the SE) will be unavailable for the duration of the ban imposed by the US International Trade Commission.If you own one of the models included in the ban and your device is out of... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Discovery shows were set to be pulled from PlayStation libraries on December 31st, but that's not happening now, thanks to updated licensing arrangements," as reported by GamesIndustry.biz.The original plan was one of two recent reminders from PlayStation that digital ownership sucks - especially because there were a lot of shows that were set to be removed from video libraries. You can see the full list on Sony's website, which now contains the note about the changed policy. Due to updated licensing arrangements, the Discovery content removal planned for December 31, 2023 is no longer occurring," Sony says. We appreciate your ongoing support and feedback."However, while this is good news for people who have invested in Discovery... Continue reading...

Image: Hyperloop One Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation startup that promised to whisk us through nearly airless tubes at airline speeds, is shutting down, according to Bloomberg.The company is selling off its assets, closing down its offices, and laying off employees. It will formally close at the end of the year, at which point all of its intellectual property will shift to its majority stakeholder, major Dubai port operator DP World. Whoever buys the test track in the Nevada desert will have one hell of a Slip N Slide if they want it.Since its founding in 2014, the company raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investments. While there is still a small smattering of startups trying to build hyperloops, the demise of... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google might finally start telling you when your Android phone has a degraded battery, Android expert Mishaal Rahman wrote in an article for Android Authority. Unlike iPhone users, who have been able to see their phone's battery health stats from their settings for a long time, Android owners currently need a third-party app or must enter special command codes in order to check out their battery health.This month's Pixel Feature Drop already added new battery information; currently, it shows the manufacture date of your battery and its cycle count. But the Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 adds a hidden battery health" page, Rahman says, and although it doesn't yet include an actual battery health meter, code suggests that it could show... Continue reading...

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...