The Verge

Image: Getty The 75th annual Emmy Awards likely won't take place on September 18th as planned. According to a report from Variety, vendors, producers, and others involved with the ceremony have been notified that the date has been pushed back amid the Hollywood strikes.While the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced its nominees for the 2023 awards on July 12th, this took place just one day before the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) called a strike. Meanwhile, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike since May, with both unions looking for higher streaming residuals and protections surrounding the use of AI.The Television Academy still hasn't confirmed that the Emmys have been delayed, but even if it were to take place, it would... Continue reading...

Wow, a readable website on your phone. Who knew that was possible? | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge We've all been there: someone in our social feeds or group chat just sent a link to an interesting article, but when we click that link and it opens in our phone's browser, it's almost impossible to read because there are so many ads, pop-ups, chat with us" nags, and other crap getting in the way. Most times, I just give up and close the browser, forfeiting knowing about whatever the topic was.But since I installed Google's Reading Mode app on Android, I can quickly bypass all of that crap with a simple two-finger swipe gesture and actually read the thing I clicked the link for.Reading Mode was released late last year and is intended to be an accessibility feature - it makes reading content on your phone easier if you are vision... Continue reading...

Image: Netflix / Ripstone Games / Night School Oxenfree II: Lost Signals and The Queen's Gambit Chess could not be more different, and yet both are key to understanding Netflix's gaming philosophy. Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony is running a PS5 sale in the UK, India, Ireland, and Germany where the price of a standard console is dropping by around 16 percent. In the UK the PS5 can now be found for 399.99, below its regular 479.99 price and even far below the 449.99 price at launch, before a PS5 price hike outside the US last year.The UK 75 off promotion is available immediately and runs until August 10th. In Germany Sony is also taking 75 off the PS5, with Amazon Germany selling a PS5 for even less at 459.99, down from the regular 549.99 pricing until August 7th. You can also find 75 off the PS5 in Ireland and Austria and 7,500 off in India.The price drop promotions come just as Sony has announced it has sold 40 million PS5s since the console's... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge Update July 28th, 2:51AM ET: After saying that Twitter / X would soon only have a dark mode'" because it's better in every way," Musk now says that A lot of people have asked to keep light mode, so we will, but the default will be dark and dim will be deleted." The following article appears as it was originally published.Just when you think Elon Musk can't get any more divisive, he's weighed in on the light mode versus dark mode debate - and Twitter, currently undergoing a rebranding to X, is apparently going all in on the latter. Early this morning, Musk posted that this platform will soon only have dark mode'. It is better in every way."That immediately brought about the usual responses that you might expect, with several... Continue reading...

AMD and Asus have announced the ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D, a beefy 17-inch gaming laptop with an RGB lightstrip on the bottom. Which, sure, whatever. The exciting news is what's inside this device. This Strix is powered by AMD's 7945HX3D mobile laptop, which could, if the stars align, provide gaming performance that we haven't seen in AMD's current laptop landscape and fulfill last year's extreme gaming laptop" promise.The chip has 16 cores and 32 threads with boost clock up to 5.4GHz, with 55W+" TDP - those things alone put it at the top of AMD's laptop processor stack. But it's also the first mobile processor to feature AMD's 3D V-Cache (144MB of it, to be specific), which allows AMD to place additional layers of cache directly onto the... Continue reading...

Image: Intel Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was very bullish on AI during the company's Q2 2023 earnings call - telling investors that Intel plans to build AI into every product that we build."Later this year, Intel will ship Meteor Lake, its first consumer chip with a built-in neural processor for machine learning tasks. (AMD recently did the same, following Apple and Qualcomm.)But while Intel previously suggested to us that only its premium new Ultra chips might have those AI coprocessors, it sounds like Gelsinger expects AI will eventually be in everything Intel sells.Gelsinger often likes to talk up the four superpowers" or five superpowers" of technology companies, which originally included both AI and cloud, but today, he's suggesting that AI a... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge At a recent House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on self-driving cars, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) kicked off her five minutes of questions for the panelists with a quick appraisal of the toaster-shaped autonomous shuttle that has puttered around her district in Gainesville, Florida, for the past three years.It moves not very fast," Cammack said with a grimace. So there's a lot of frustrations with it, I'll say that."That's something that the Gainesville Autonomous Shuttle has in common with Congress: neither seems to be much in a hurry.So there's a lot of frustrations with it, I'll say that"The hearing on Wednesday, entitled Self-Driving Legislative Framework: Enhancing Safety, Improving Lives and Mobility, and Beating... Continue reading...

Photo by Hector Vivas / Getty Images Lionel Messi has taken MLS by storm, and that's good news for Apple. The league partnered with Apple for a streaming service called MLS Season Pass, which kicked off this season and will continue for the next decade. And though Messi only played his first match for his new club, Inter Miami, on July 21st, it seems that viewership has already improved.While Apple did not release specific numbers, in a statement, Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr explained that the week of July 19th-26th had the 3 most-watched matches ever on MLS Season Pass, with viewers in almost 100 countries and regions around the world. And the fans for those matches were roughly split between the MLS Season Pass English and Spanish language broadcasts."Considering... Continue reading...

Image: Getty Images So, it looks like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to be held in contempt of Congress after all - at least for now.The House Judiciary Committee was supposed to vote to hold Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress on Thursday, but chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) canceled the vote shortly before it was scheduled to take place, as first reported by Bloomberg. The vote was originally a play to get Meta to hand over additional documents as part of a committee investigation into alleged collusion with the White House to censor conservative speech.But according to a tweet from Jordan on Thursday, Meta must have provided enough new material to calm his concerns.Based on Facebook's newfound commitment to fully cooperate with the Committee's... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge LinkedIn appears to be developing a new AI tool that can help ease the effectively robotic task of looking for and applying to jobs. According to a new leak, the Microsoft-owned company seems to have a new LinkedIn Coach" assistant in testing that could support you through the application processes, teach you new skills, and help you network on your LinkedIn network.The news comes from app researcher Nima Owji, who uncovers features from various developers that haven't been deployed yet. In an email, LinkedIn spokesperson Amanda Purvis tells The Verge the company is always exploring" new ways to improve user experience on the platform. Purvis adds that the company will have more to share soon."

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft revealed the final games you'll be able to claim with an Xbox Live Gold subscription before Gold is replaced with the Xbox Game Pass Core, and, well, they're games you may not have heard of before. Throughout the month of August, Xbox Live Gold subscribers will be able to snag Blue Fire, a 3D platformer, and Inertial Drift, an arcade racer, according to an Xbox Wire blog post.If you claim the games, you'll be able to play them and others you've grabbed from the Games with Gold program as long as you have an Xbox Game Pass Core or Ultimate subscription. Image: Microsoft Xbox Live Gold will be discontinued on September 1st, and current subscribers will be moved to Xbox Game Pass Core on September 14th. Xbox... Continue reading...

There are other options available if you don't want to use voices from Snoop Dogg or Gwyneth Paltrow. | Image: Artifact Artifact - the new-ish news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger - is adding an AI-powered text-to-speech feature that will read you news articles.The company is offering the new feature as part of a partnership with Speechify. Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow are among the voices that can read you the news, and if you want an idea of what that might sound like, you can hear their AI voices on Speechify's website. There are more than 30 English voices available, according to Robby Stein, Artifact's head of product.To turn on the text-to-speech player, you can tap on a play" icon you'll see on the bottom bar while reading an article, and the player will let you choose things like reading speed (up to 4.5x!) and... Continue reading...

People gather at Barton Springs Pool on June 21st, 2023, in Austin, Texas as extreme temperatures across the state prompted excessive heat warnings | Photo by Brandon Bell / Getty Images Seeing how much hotter certain neighborhoods can get compared to others nearby blows my mind, and I report on this kind of thing for a living.I live in New York City, which tops a new list of places in the US where temperature spikes because of urban sprawl. It's a problem called the urban heat island effect. Basically, areas with more paved surfaces and less greenery trap heat. That raises temperatures in cities compared to more rural locations. It also makes certain neighborhoods within a city hotter than others.A new analysis ranks 44 major cities that altogether are home to a quarter of the country's population. More than half of the population in these cities live in census tracks that can feel at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Roblox is now available in open beta on Meta's Quest VR headsets. Roblox and Meta had announced earlier in July that the social metaverse platform would be arriving on the headsets soon, and now, you can try it for yourself.To check out Roblox experiences on your Quest, you can grab the app from the Quest Store. (Technically, it's available through Meta's App Lab.) Once it's on your headset, you can sign in to your Roblox account and explore from there. Note that you can't make a Roblox account on Quest just yet, according to a Roblox developer forum post.Because the app is still in beta - Roblox and Meta are launching this in beta to give developers a chance to test and optimize their experiences for VR - there are some issues that R... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge According to a new report by Reuters, Tesla performed intentional inflation" about the range estimates of its electric vehicles under the guidance of CEO Elon Musk.An anonymous source said the automaker had started to use algorithms about a decade ago that would inflate projections at a full charge. Then, once Teslas reach a 50 percent state of charge, the numbers get a bit more realistic so drivers have a better chance of avoiding getting stranded, along with a 15-mile buffer that allows the vehicle to drive on battery after it reaches zero. According to the source, Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged."The Reuters report also claims that Tesla created a dedicated Diversion Team" last summer focused solely on... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge The ChatGPT for Android app is now available in the Google Play Store, launching a few months after the free iOS app brought the chatbot to iPhones and iPads. According to a company tweet, it's available first in the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil, with other countries set to follow later, mimicking the staged rollout we saw for the iOS version.On July 27th, OpenAI announced additional availability, saying the Android ChatGPT app is now available in Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, the Philippines, the UK, and South Korea.As we noted previously, the launch of an Android app is coming after Sensor Tower and Similarweb data showed drops in web traffic and app installations for June.

The Kindle Paperwhite Kids is just like the standard model pictured above but with some kid-friendly extras. | Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge If you're looking for an e-reader you can safely take to the beach, right now, the latest Kindle Paperwhite Kids is on sale for $114.99 ($55 off) with 16GB of storage at Amazon and Best Buy. That's one of its better prices this year and just $4 shy of the standard, ad-free Kindle Paperwhite's all-time low price.It might seem strange to say, but the latest Kindle Paperwhite Kids is a bargain for children and adults alike. That's because, at its core, it's the Kindle Paperwhite - our favorite Amazon e-reader - just with parental controls you can turn off and no ads. Like the standard model, the kid-friendly Kindle Paperwhite offers IPX8 waterproofing, so you won't need to worry it'll break if it gets wet as you lounge by the pool. With... Continue reading...

The Medicine Cabinet feature aims to tackle more than forgetfulness when it comes to medication adherence. | Image: GoodRx There's no shortage of apps designed to remind people to take their medications. But GoodRx, an online pharmacy and telehealth app, is trying to take it a step further by launching a digital medicine cabinet." The idea is to create a one-stop shop that allows people to check price comparisons, get reminders and refills, and even earn financial rewards for taking their meds.The name of the game is to improve medication adherence - or how well you follow your doctor's orders when it comes to treatment. That includes things like regularly taking antidepressants, antibiotics, or statins to reduce cholesterol, etc. To get the best results, the pharmaceutical journal US Pharmacist says you need an adherence rate of around 80 percent. You... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony announced it has sold over 40 million PlayStation 5 consoles despite the unprecedented challenges of COVID" and supply chain issues. Unlike the press release shared when the PS5 crossed 10 million units sold as of July 2021, Sony didn't call its flagship console out as the fastest-selling console in the history of Sony Interactive Entertainment," reflecting a slower pace of sales even as supply issues ebbed.PlayStation 5 shipments have begun to ramp up this year. Sony nearly hit 40 million consoles sold earlier this year and tripled the number of consoles it shipped from January to March 2023 at 6.3 million units. At the same time last year, it shipped just 2 million PlayStation 5 consoles.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Peacock added just 2 million subscribers over the past three months, bringing the service up to 24 million subscribers in the US. That number was included in Comcast's earnings report today, which says Peacock nearly doubled its subscribers year over year.In addition to the small bump in subscribers, Peacock's revenue grew 85 percent year over year to $820 million. The service still lost $651 million, however, up from $467 million at the same time last year.Earlier this month, Comcast announced that it's raising the price of Peacock on August 17th. While the ad-supported Premium plan is going from $4.99 to $5.99 per month, the ad-free Premium Plus plan is going from $9.99 to $11.99 per month. Comcast also took away the free tier for... Continue reading...

Image: Niantic The next major release from Pokemon Go developer Niantic is launching very soon. The studio announced today that Monster Hunter Now, a collaboration with Capcom, will be available globally on September 14th, launching on both iOS and Android.The announcement was made as part of a lengthy presentation detailing more about how the game will actually work, including the weapons that'll be available at launch (sword and shield, great sword, long sword, hammer, light bowgun, and bow) and how the cycle of hunting and gearing up will play out. Monster Hunter Now also has a clever feature called paintball, where players can mark monsters they come across so they can fight them later.You can check out the full video below:The launch comes at... Continue reading...

Image: Netflix In the finale of The Witcher's third season - which also happens to be the final episode where Henry Cavill will play the lead role - our hero, Geralt of Rivia, spends most of his time in bed. This is not an exaggeration: after getting his ass thoroughly kicked in a previous episode, he's stuck recuperating in a forest, trying his best to get healthy so he can continue his quest. It's a bizarre choice that sidelines Geralt in what should, in theory, be an important moment for the series, the character, and the actor. Instead of sending Cavill out on a high note, the season just kind of... ends.It didn't have to be this way. When it debuted way back in 2019, Netflix's adaption of The Witcher proved to be a surprisingly faithful version... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge The European Commission is opening a formal antitrust investigation into Microsoft's bundling of its Teams software with its Office productivity suite. Slack originally filed an anti-competitive complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission in July 2020, just months after a global pandemic began and the Microsoft Teams userbase started to grow rapidly.The European Commission will now carry out an in-depth investigation into whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling Microsoft Teams to its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 productivity suites.Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe," explains Margrethe Vestager, executive... Continue reading...

Slack has now acknowledged the issues and is investigating the cause. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Slack, the workplace chat app, experienced an outage this morning, with messages failing to send on the service. Reports began spiking on DownDetector at around 5AM ET and the service's status dashboard acknowledged the issues with a post at 5:35AM ET, noting that Users may be experiencing trouble with sending messages in Slack."But as of 6:13AM ET Slack reported that the issues had been resolved. Slack is now back up," a message read. Users may need to reload their apps to see this restoration."Slack had elevated the status to an outage" at 5:57AM ET:

Getty Images There's a new bipartisan bill to establish a new federal agency tasked with regulating online platforms.The bill, sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), would create a new agency called the Digital Consumer Protection Commission that would be empowered to go after giant tech firms for a slew of anti-competitive behaviors and failing to protect consumer privacy.For years I have been trying to find ways to empower consumers against Big Tech," Graham said in a statement Thursday. I have heard too many stories from families who feel helpless in the face of Big Tech. Stories about children being bullied to the point of committing suicide. Human trafficking. Exploitation of minors. All the while the social... Continue reading...

Photo by Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has high hopes for Threads, his competitor to the company formerly known as Twitter.During Meta's second quarter earnings call with investors on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was asked multiple times about Threads and his expectations for its long-term success. He said it's a weird anomaly in the tech industry that there hasn't been an app like this for text-based convos that has reached 1 billion people," echoing previous comments he has made both on Threads itself and during a recent interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman.Threads reached 100 million signups faster than any consumer software product in history, but it's nowhere near reaching the 1-billion-user club yet. Its engagement is also estimated to have... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla is facing a new investigation with the California attorney general's office looking into safety issues with the company's Autopilot feature as well as its marketing practices, CNBC reported on Wednesday.The outlet was tipped off to the investigation by Tesla owner Greg Wester, who California Attorney General Rob Bonta's office called to ask about his August 2022 Federal Trade Commission complaint about his Tesla's phantom braking" problem and what he believed to be misleading claims around the company's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system.Tesla CEO Elon Musk's claims about his cars' fully driverless capabilities date back to 2016 when he said all new Tesla EVs would have the necessary hardware for it. In fact, the company has... Continue reading...

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Waymo is pausing its efforts to develop autonomous truck technology to refocus on ridehailing services instead. The Alphabet-owned company announced today that it will push back" the timeline on its commercial and operational efforts for trucking and will also be scaling back development in the unit. A small number of employees were laid off as a result of the decision.Waymo's trucking unit, also known as Waymo Via, sat alongside its Waymo One robotaxi division. Taken together, they represent the company's efforts to commercialize its autonomous driving technology. Now the timeline and the future of its autonomous trucks are in question.The news follows reporting earlier this year that Waymo would slightly" delay its Via timeline... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit is starting to test a new Official" label that will make it easier to spot if an account is authentic. The new label will appear sitewide, meaning that it won't be up to the moderators of individual subreddits to have to verify specific accounts.Starting today, we're beginning early testing of placing a visual indicator on certain profiles to provide proof of authenticity, reduce impersonation, and increase transparency across the platform," a Reddit admin (employee) wrote in a post. This is currently only available to a *very* small (double-digit) number of profiles belonging to organizations with whom we already have existing relationships, and who are interested in engaging with redditors and communities on our platform."R... Continue reading...

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Public companies will now have to disclose cybersecurity incidents sooner, thanks to a rule adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the new policy, the SEC will require public companies to report data breaches and hacks four business days after they are discovered.Companies will have to disclose any cybersecurity incidents on a Form 8-K filing. These publicly available documents typically inform shareholders about major changes to the company - and now they'll include a new Item 1.05 for cybersecurity incidents. The disclosure should include information on nature, scope, and timing," as well as its material impact or reasonably likely" on the company.

AWS VP Swami Sivasubramanian at the AWS Summit event. | Image: Amazon During the AWS Summit in New York on Wednesday, Amazon launched Agents for Bedrock, which will let companies build AI apps that can automatically do tasks on their own, like booking a flight for users instead of just telling them about it. AI agents are the assistant that actually gets a restaurant reservation instead of just giving suggestions on where to eat.I believe this will supercharge developers who wanted an easier way to build agents and at the same time customize the data the models read," Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and machine learning at AWS, tells The Verge. Building agents took so much time even with how advanced generative AI is now, but we're making it so developers can access exactly the models they... Continue reading...

Image: Neopets Neopets is back in a big way. I don't mean the revamped website or even the weird bit of news where Arthur lookalike John Legend has become Neopets' first influencer. I'm talking about the games. Over 50 web browser games from the site's past have been restored via an emulator and are playable right now. The Neopets Team / Neopets.com These games' triumphant return is a part of Neopets' new era" that began when Neopets' parent company, NetDragon, allowed the site to spin off into its own fully independent company. Under this new leadership, The Neopets Team began working immediately to revive the flagging site that's been around since - brace yourself, elder millennials - 1999. The team worked on fixing bugs,... Continue reading...