The Verge

Let's check out the specimens! | photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images The most important thing to know about social media is this: Most people don't post.You know this. I know this. God knows this. I am going to limit my analysis to text-based sites because video sites such as TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram are not my ministry. This analysis may transfer in whole or in part to those platforms, for all I know.The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives. They are well-balanced and have hobbies. One of those hobbies is visiting social media sites, where they are usually looking for either information or entertainment. They're the audience.The development of trolls appears to be the internet's version of... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Every time another Google app or feature bites the dust - even a small, relatively inconsequential one - I get annoyed. Really annoyed.Here's the thing: there are Google Assistant-equipped devices in three rooms of my relatively small house: living room, bedroom, and office. Which means, unfortunately, that when I say Hey, Google" out loud to my phone, I am just as likely to get a reaction from one - or more - of those three devices. (Yes, I know that's not supposed to happen and no, we haven't been able to fix it yet.) And they sometimes offer different answers simultaneously, which makes things even more confusing. This is what I got when I hit the mic icon in Search. To avoid this unfortunate state of affairs,... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Tomorrow, Apple will launch its Vision Pro headset, marking the company's most high-profile product launch since the original Apple Watch. And later this year, it will open up the iPhone's App Store (at least in the EU) in new ways, offering developers more freedom - even if some of them are already displeased with the approach Apple is taking. There are enormous moments ahead for this company, and in the run-up to all of that, today Apple announced its Q1 2024 earnings. At least for now, the pivotal question surrounding Apple's business remains the same as always: how's the iPhone doing?Pretty well, it turns out. This was the first full quarter of iPhone 15 sales, and Apple reported iPhone unit revenue of $69.7 billion. (Just a few... Continue reading...

Image: OpenAI OpenAI's GPT-4 only gave people a slight advantage over the regular internet when it came to researching bioweapons, according to a study the company conducted itself. Bloomberg reported that the research was carried out by the new preparedness team at OpenAI, which was launched last fall in order to assess the risks and potential misuses of the company's frontier AI models.OpenAI's findings seem to counter concerns by scientists, lawmakers, and AI ethicists that powerful AI models like GPT-4 can be of significant help to terrorists, criminals, and other malicious actors. Multiple studies have cautioned that AI can give those creating bioweapons an extra edge, such as this one by the Effective Ventures Foundation at Oxford that looked... Continue reading...

Image: Amazon Amazon has taken the wraps off of an AI shopping assistant, and it's called Rufus - the same name as the company's corgi mascot. The new chatbot is trained on Amazon's product library and customer reviews, as well as information from the web, allowing it to answer questions about products, make comparisons, provide suggestions, and more.Rufus is still in beta and will only appear for select customers" before rolling out to more users in the coming weeks. If you have access to the beta, you can open up a chat with Rufus by launching Amazon's mobile app and then typing or speaking questions into the search bar. A Rufus chat window will show up at the bottom of your screen, which you can expand to get an answer to your question, select... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube reached an important milestone on Thursday for its paid music and video tiers, crossing the 100 million subscriber benchmark globally. That figure includes trial subscriptions, so the real number of paid subscribers is fewer. YouTube's subscription tiers have been a primary revenue generator for Google's subscriptions services, which hit $15 billion in revenue (including YouTube TV and Google One) in 2023. It's been roughly nine years since YouTube launched a paid, ad-free subscription service; it later decided to divide YouTube Red into YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium.YouTube Music is the company's streaming music service; the ad-free Premium tier costs $10.99 per month. YouTube Premium, at $13.99 per month, includes... Continue reading...

The Abode Lock is a retrofit Wi-Fi smart door lock that comes with a Bluetooth keypad with a fingerprint reader. | Image: Abode Hot on the heels of launching the first Wi-Fi HaLow security camera, DIY smart home security company Abode is leaning into Wi-Fi as its primary smart home protocol with the arrival of its first smart door lock.The Abode Lock ($159.99) is a Wi-Fi-powered retrofit lock that replaces the rear portion of a deadbolt but keeps the front lock the same, so you can continue to use your keys but also have digital access through an app and with a fingerprint reader and keypad.The smart lock works on 2.4 or 5 GHz Wi-Fi and is now available to buy. It comes with a Bluetooth-connected keypad you place on the outside of your door for PIN and fingerprint unlocking. The whole package costs $159.99 on Goabode.com, which is currently running a launch... Continue reading...

Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images It's not you, it's the interest rates.The reasons are probably more nuanced than that, but a number of prominent car tech companies are finding themselves in the unenviable position of being dumped by the bigger companies that they've relied on for funding. It's especially harsh when you consider we're a few weeks away from Valentine's Day.It started earlier this week, when auto parts giant Aptiv said it was pulling funding from Motional, the robotaxi joint venture it started with Hyundai in 2020. The reason? Money, of course. And how long it was taking to commercialize the technology.Aptiv said it was incurring millions of dollars in losses while waiting for Motional to launch its fully driverless ridehail vehicles. The company... Continue reading...

Image: Meta The Meta Quest 3 will soon give wearers the ability to easily view spatial videos as well as use new pinching gestures for control, features that are similar to what you'll find in Apple's much more expensive Vision Pro headset that launches this week. Both changes are starting to roll out gradually as part of update v62, which should get to most owners of Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro headsets starting the week of February 7th.The spatial video support will allow wearers to view 3D footage captured with Apple's headset or an iPhone 15 Pro / Pro Max. Image: Mark Zuckerberg (Instagram) A short clip from Mark Zuckerberg's early look" at spatial video playback on a Quest 3. Apple's spatial 3D videos are... Continue reading...

Image: Google Google is bringing generative AI to - where else? - Google Maps, promising to help users find cool places through the use of large language models (LLM).The feature will answer queries for restaurant or shopping recommendations, for example, using its LLM to analyze Maps' detailed information about more than 250 million places and trusted insights from our community of over 300 million contributors to quickly make suggestions for where to go."Google says the feature will first become available in the US, but there's no word yet on when other countries will also get it.It's a natural place for Google to flex its AI musclesIt's a natural place for Google to flex its AI muscles, as the company has been laboring for years to turn its... Continue reading...

The Snap Pixy. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Snap gave up on its Pixy flying selfie camera drone after just four months, but it turns out the company sold under 71,000 drones - and now the company is recalling every one of those drones because their batteries pose a fire hazard. Yes, the entire drone is being recalled, not just the removable battery, likely because Snap doesn't make those batteries anymore.Snap and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission say you should immediately stop using the Pixy Flying Camera, remove the battery and stop charging it" now that there have been four reports of the battery bulging, one fire, and one minor injury."Then, you can get a full refund for the entire drone and / or any batteries you own - sounds like we're talking at least $185... Continue reading...

Anker's Soundcore Sport X10 offers wraparound hooks and an IPX7 rating for water and sweat resistance for less than $60. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge If you've already broken your New Year's health-related resolutions, today's lead deal might get you back on track. Right now, Anker's Soundcore Sport X10 - an excellent budget-friendly pair of workout earbuds - are on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and B&H Photo for $55.99 ($24 off). That's just $5 shy of their all-time low price and the best price we've seen so far this year.For a pair of earbuds that cost less than $60, the X10 offers a lot. Their flexible, wraparound hooks, for example, ensure they'll stay comfortably in place even during the most vigorous workouts. At the same time, they can handle sweaty gym sessions and even runs on rainy days thanks to their IPX7 rating for water and sweat resistance. And, of course, they offer... Continue reading...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks at a press conference following the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with five tech CEOs. | Lauren Feiner During an unusually emotional hearing on Wednesday, senators spent hours trying to get a group of five tech CEOs to confront the harms their platforms have caused and submit to more checks on their power.The Senate Judiciary Committee invited the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snap, X, and Discord to face the families of children who'd died following cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, or other harmful events on their platforms. They asked why Section 230, the law that shields online platforms from being held liable for their users' posts, should stop these families from facing them in court.The CEOs expressed condolences for the families hurt on their services but reiterated the work and investment they've already made to keep users safe.... Continue reading...

Comcast can still use 10G" to describe products and services, so long as it's being used accurately. | Image: Xfinity Creative Comcast has agreed to abandon its Xfinity 10G network" product branding after advertising watchdogs concluded that it could cause consumers to think they will all experience significantly faster speeds than are available on 5G networks," which isn't true.On Wednesday, the National Advertising Review Board (NARB) ruled that Comcast should discontinue the term 10G" both when describing the Xfinity network and within the name of its Xfinity 10G Network service itself. The decision stems from challenges raised by T-Mobile and AT&T that highlighted the confusing differences in the terminology being used by cellular networks, where the G" in 5G stands for generation," and the 10G branding used by cable companies, which instead represents... Continue reading...

Image: Google Google's Bard chatbot is adding AI image generation, catching up on a feature that rival ChatGPT Plus has had for months.Users can prompt Bard to generate photos using Google's Imagen 2 text-to-image model. Bard, now powered by Google's Gemini Pro large language model, was always going to have image generation. It was assumed the more powerful Gemini Ultra model would power it; however, that model remains in development.Google has been positioning Bard as a worthy competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT Plus, which runs GPT-4 and lets users generate images thanks to DALL-E 3 integration. Both chatbots perform well, but Bard's lack of text-to-image features gave ChatGPT Plus a bit of an edge. People can use the updated Bard with Imagen 2 at no... Continue reading...

The Verge is delighted to announce that Hot Pod Summit is returning for another day of must-hear interviews, crucial panels, and intimate networking with leading creators and decision-makers from across the audio world. Now in its third year with The Verge, Hot Pod Summit has become the leading event for exploring the buzziest and most important topics in the podcasting industry. This year's invite-only summit, presented by AdsWizz and Simplecast, will feature This American Life creator Ira Glass, Throughline hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, Israel Story co-founder Yochai Maital, and more exciting guests to be announced soon. It'll also include breakout sessions discussing some of the biggest topics of the... Continue reading...

Image: Netflix Though Netflix has had success in the past producing its own original feature-length projects, the streamer decided last year that it was high time to slow things down a bit and get back into the business of licensing popular movies created by other studios. You can see that strategic pivot reflected pretty clearly in the lineup of new films Netflix has planned to debut through 2024.But while there's nothing quite as buzzy as, say, a fresh Knives Out installment or a new picture from The Twisted MindTM of Martin Scorsese, for the folks who've been patiently waiting for follow-ups to old classics like Beverly Hills Cop and newer fare like Rebel Moon, Netflix has you covered.Along with director Tony Scott's long-awaited Beverly Hills... Continue reading...

Squid Game. | Image: Netflix Things have been a little quiet for Netflix so far this year when it comes to television, but the streamer has at least a few heavy hitters in store. Today, it revealed its upcoming TV slate for 2024 - alongside similar lists for film and games - and, while there aren't a lot of surprises or new reveals, the lineup is shaping up pretty well.In addition to soon-to-premiere series like Avatar: The Last Airbender and 3 Body Problem, this year will also feature the return of some of Netflix's biggest series, including Arcane, Squid Game, and Bridgerton, alongside quite a bit of reality television. Also, the Terminator anime is due this year, and Girls5eva is making the transition from Peacock to Netflix for its third season in March.Of... Continue reading...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is seen after the senate luncheons in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, January 23, 2024. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Intuit, maker of TurboTax, is in another row with lawmakers - this time over how it spent $94 million in tax breaks. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) sent a letter to Intuit yesterday blasting the company for not answering questions they have about how Intuit used the tax credits.SEC filings show that Intuit received $94 million in federal research and experimentation credits in 2022, which grew to $106 million in 2023. The credit is supposed to support research that the company otherwise might not have been able to afford. The four lawmakers initially sent a letter to Intuit on January 2nd, demanding to know how the money was spent and setting a... Continue reading...

The company's pre-existing Phone 2. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge The Nothing Phone 2A is official... sort of. The company confirmed the name of the upcoming device during its most recent community update YouTube video, but that's about all it announced. It didn't show off much more about the phone, including its appearance, specs, or price. The name of the device was one of several announcements made in the video, which also included news of a new SDK to let third-party developers integrate with Nothing's illuminated Glyph interface.With Phone 2A we've really doubled down on the core user needs - performance, camera, you name it," Nothing co-founder Akis Evangelidis said, adding that the device includes some of the most loved features of Phone 2." He doesn't explicitly say that the Phone 2A is... Continue reading...

The Gocycle CX+ cargo e-bike has a unique Flofit handlebar. | Image: Gocycle Gocycle, the British e-bike company founded by a former McLaren car designer, has just taken the wraps off an innovative new electric cargo bike for families. The CX series of longtails are lightweight and foldable, as you'd expect from Gocycle, with an intriguing new handlebar on the CX Plus model that can be quickly adapted for rider comfort.Gocycle calls it Flofit, and it's probably the most adjustable-for-comfort handlebar ever developed!" says company founder and designer Richard Thorpe in a press release. Adjustable in reach, grip angle, offering multiple hand positions, and of course foldable - it's a game-changer for discerning urban e-bikers." Image: Gocycle Fold the chassis, handlebar, then remove... Continue reading...

Major artists like Swift have been removed from TikTok. | Photo by Buda Mendes/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Universal Music Group (UMG) has started removing the music catalogs of performers the label represents - including Taylor Swift, Drake, and Olivia Rodrigo - from TikTok after negotiations to renew licensing agreements broke down this week. The previous licensing agreement between UMG and TikTok expired on January 31st.On Tuesday, UMG accused the video platform of attempting to bully it into accepting a bad deal" that didn't soothe the record labels' concerns regarding adequate compensation for artists and songwriters, protections against AI-generated music, and online safety on the platform to protect artists from hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment." TikTok responded saying that it was disappointing" that UMG had chosen... Continue reading...

Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images Today's hearing on child safety was - mostly - an unusually focused affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee called up the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord and grilled them for four hours on the potential dangers their services posed for children. Many of the lawmakers emphasized emotional impact, playing to an audience filled with families who'd had kids targeted by predators or otherwise harmed online.But midway through the hearing, it was dragged off course by a predictable tangent: the fact that TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. And a meeting ostensibly about keeping kids safe dipped into a now-familiar attempt to make TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew answer questions utterly unrelated to the rest of the day.Although... Continue reading...

Image: Konami Silent Hill, the town in desperate need of a city council or something, showed up during PlayStation's State of Play in a big way with two new trailers and a stealth drop of a new, free-to-play game.The first game was the debut of Silent Hill: The Short Message, an all-new entry in the Silent Hill franchise. According to PlayStation's blog, The Short Message is a short, experimental, free-to-play game meant to introduce newcomers to the joys of that idyllic foggy city. Though the name was only just revealed, details on The Short Message including screenshots and the names of the main characters - Anita and Maya - were leaked in 2022. Based on the trailer below, the leaks were accurate.After The Short Message, Konami showed off a new... Continue reading...

Image: Kojima Productions The sequel to Death Stranding is shaping up to be just as strange as the original. At its State of Play showcase today, Sony showed off a new trailer for the game that... starts out with a particularly disturbing bit of surgery. The lengthy clip features a whole bunch of new locations outside of the US, as well as the return of a villain who has been given a Joker-esque makeover. And yes, the baby makes an appearance - along with a new, talking doll.The sequel also has an official title now: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. It's due to launch in 2025. Here's the premise:

The Vision Pro's not-a-Lightning-connector connector. | Image: Nilay Patel / The Verge Ray Wong of Inverse discovered a hidden joy today: The Apple Vision Pro power cable connects to the battery with what may well be Lightning's final form. Using a SIM removal tool, he pushed into a small hole in the silver external battery pack of the Vision Pro next to the cable, and...Out it popped, revealing what looks like a bigger, 12-pin version of the connector Apple's iPhone moved away from last year.

Illustration: The Verge During the January Microsoft Research Forum, Dipendra Misra, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab NYC and AI Frontiers, explained how Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (or LASER) can make large language models more accurate.With LASER, researchers can intervene" and replace one weight matrix with an approximate smaller one. Weights are the contextual connections models make. The heavier the weight, the more the model relies on it. So, does replacing something with more correlations and contexts make the model less accurate? Based on their test results, the answer, surprisingly, is no.We are doing intervention using LASER on the LLM, so one would expect that the model loss should go up as we are doing more approximation,... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge During the roughly 40-minute presentation, expect to hear new info on Rise of the Ronin, Death Stranding, Sonic Generations, Judas, and more. Continue reading...

Image: Philips Philips is halting sales of its recalled sleep apnea machines in the US after finding they were pumping foam particles into users' airways. In its earnings report on Monday, the company says it will not sell new CPAP or BiPAP devices in the US until it meets the requirements outlined by the Food and Drug Administration.Philips first issued a recall on its sleep apnea machines in 2021 over potential health risks." The recall includes devices made between 2009 and April 21st, 2021, and stems from a polyester-based polyurethane foam Philips included in the machines to minimize sound and vibration. As noted by Philips, that foam can break down," leading the person using the device to breathe it in or swallow it, resulting in potential... Continue reading...

The newest Roomba vacuum - the Combo j9 Plus - faces stiff competition. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge By abandoning its deal to buy iRobot, Amazon has left the robot vacuum maker stuck under the couch. Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is starting to roll out a new design for its OneDrive cloud storage service for consumers. The software maker first unveiled a Fluent design refresh for OneDrive last year, and it will be available to all OneDrive personal users by the end of February.It's both a visual and functional upgrade designed to help you get to your files quickly and keep your content organized in multiple ways," says Miceile Barrett, a Microsoft product manager. The improved visual design reduces clutter and distractions, allowing you to focus on what's important - your content." Image: Microsoft The before and after. The new visual interface for OneDrive more closely matches Windows 11 and changes to Microsoft's various... Continue reading...

Bitcoin mining machines in a warehouse at the Whinstone US Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, on October 10, 2021. | Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images The US Department of Energy (DOE) will begin collecting data on crypto mines' electricity use, following criticism from environmental advocates over how energy-hungry those operations are.We will specifically focus on how the energy demand for cryptocurrency mining is evolving, identify geographic areas of high growth, and quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand," Joe DeCarolis, administrator of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), said in a press release today.We will specifically focus on how the energy demand for cryptocurrency mining is evolving."The EIA, the statistical agency of the Department of Energy, announced that it is initiating a provisional survey of electricity... Continue reading...

You can make Alexa and Google Assistant fight for your love with JBL's retro-styled speakers. | Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge I know that someone, somewhere, shares my thinking that the virtual assistants we've grown fond of are mortal enemies somewhere in a digital parallel universe. But JBL's new line of Authentics speakers has warped everything I thought I knew about the ancient rivalry, allowing you to call on either assistant without toggling a setting.Right now, you can pay as little as $274.95 ($75 off) for the JBL Authentics 200 at Amazon, Best Buy, and JBL's online storefront, which is the best discount we've seen on the travel-friendly speaker. The Authentics 300 is also available for $349.95 ($100 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and JBL, while the larger Authentics 500 can be had for $549.95 ($150 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and direct from JBL.JBL is... Continue reading...

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is launching a suite of its Microsoft 365 apps on Apple's Vision Pro headset later this week. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Loop, and Microsoft Teams will all be available in the App Store for Apple Vision Pro on February 2nd - the same day Apple's new headset is available in stores.Apple Vision Pro owners will also be able to access an AI-powered version of Copilot while using the headset, including the ability to create drafts, summarize documents, and generate PowerPoint presentations with your voice. Image: Microsoft Microsoft Word on the Vision Pro. Word on the Vision Pro includes a focus mode much like the reader mode found in the desktop versions, alongside a ribbon... Continue reading...

Shopify Magic Media Editor. | Image: Shopify The Shopify Magic suite of generative AI tools that launched in April last year is adding a media editor that brings generative image fill to its platform and conversational search powered by AI. Merchants can prompt the image editor to change photo backgrounds without Photoshop experience to match whatever theme they have in mind.Shopify's AI editor can also suggest backgrounds and styles that match existing product images in the merchant's library once it rolls out this spring.Glen Coates, Shopify's vice president of product, says many sellers on the platform don't have access to big studios or professional photographers, but they still need to set their items up for success. Since there's no additional cost to use this tool, it... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge FTX says it will repay investors after the cryptocurrency exchange's collapse led to the loss of billions of dollars. During a court hearing on Wednesday, FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich said the company expects to have sufficient funds to pay all allowed customer and creditor claims in full."The company will recompense customers based on the price of the cryptocurrency they purchased as of November 2022 - when the exchange filed for bankruptcy. There are still some challenges associated with getting the lost funds back to customers, though, as Dietderich notes the company will need to comb through all the claims to determine whether they're legitimate.I would like the court and stakeholders to understand this not as a guarantee, but as... Continue reading...

There's no word yet on how Bullitt-produced phones like the Cat S75 (pictured) will be affected. | Image: Cat Bullitt Group, the UK-based smartphone manufacturer behind the rugged handsets of Cat, Land Rover, and Motorola, has seemingly shut down. On Monday, Mobile World Live spotted several Bullitt Group employees on LinkedIn saying that the company folded on January 26th after a critical planned restructuring" failed. The Telegraph reported earlier this month that the company was on the brink of insolvency.Bullitt Group has yet to issue an official statement confirming the closure. The manufacturer previously told The Telegraph that it planned to transfer its satellite connectivity business and all 100 of its employees to a new company owned by its creditors, though one former employee now claims the entire workforce has been laid off. We... Continue reading...

Image: US Capitol / Flickr The CEOs of five major tech companies will make a case for why their platforms are safe for kids. Continue reading...