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Square Enix What had once been a warning of dark times to come is now a reality. Square Enix has finally announced its NFT (or non-fungible token) project after threatening us with the company’s embrace of the controversial and largely reviled-by-gamers blockchain technology.To facilitate this extraordinary waste of fans’ good-will, Square Enix has partnered with Enjin, an NFT company that will store Square Enix’s tokens on its Efinity blockchain. Starting today, consumers will be able to pre-order a physical action figure that comes with a code redeemable for a digital NFT. There will also be physical trading cards that similarly have a digital NFT component available for pre-order later this year.If you’re wondering which of its many franchises... Continue reading…

Minecraft developer Mojang Studios is taking a strong stance against NFTs. In a blog post titled “Minecraft and NFTs,” the studio, which is owned by Microsoft, wrote that “integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow.”“To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset,” Mojang said.According to Mojang, some companies have created “NFT implementations that are associated with Minecraft world files and skin packs.” The... Continue reading…

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Samsung is gearing up the hype machine for the release of its next foldables once again, and ahead of the next Unpacked event on August 10th, mobile president TM Roh has published another blog post making the case that the time for foldables is now — and that more people are picking up foldable phones.“Three years ago, Galaxy foldables could be summed up in a single word: radical,” Roh wrote. “Very quickly, however, it became clear that this groundbreaking, flexible design fit perfectly into modern lifestyles. As a result, what was once a novelty three years ago is now the preferred choice for millions.”Samsung says that nearly 10 million foldable smartphones shipped worldwide in 2021In the post, Roh says that the industry shipped... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla already reported vehicle shipment numbers for the second quarter, and now its full Q2 2022 financial report (pdf) reveals it’s dealing with inflation and the overall economic downturn, combined with a plunge in prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In the letter to investors, Tesla execs reveal the company has sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin holdings, adding $936 million in cash to its balance sheet.Last year, Tesla made a $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin and announced that it would accept Bitcoin as payment. Tesla started accepting Bitcoin in late March, then abruptly reversed itself in May, just 49 days later.In the latest report, Tesla says the value of its remaining “digital assets” is $218 million, which it had... Continue reading…

An upgrade from “hopefully next year.” | Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company hopes to start delivering the Cybertruck, its battery-powered electric pickup, in the “middle of next year” during a call for investors. This is a more specific timeline than Musk has provided before — in last quarter’s earnings call, he said that the truck would be coming “hopefully next year.”Tesla originally announced the truck in 2019, with a goal of starting production in late 2021. In August 2021, the company announced a delay until 2022, and Musk pushed that prediction further back until “hopefully” next year during the company’s Q4 earnings call in January. In the meantime, competitors like Ford and Rivian have launched their own electric pickups, with Ford saying that it plans to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has internally announced a hiring freeze that will remain in place for two weeks. According to a report from The Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, sent out an email to inform workers about the decision. This follows Google’s announcement of a hiring slowdown that will last until the end of this year.“We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months,” Raghavan writes. As noted by The Information, Google says that the hiring freeze won’t affect existing job offers, but the company will no longer extend any new ones to applicants.In his message to employees earlier this month about the slowdown, Google CEO Sundar... Continue reading…

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman campaigns ahead of primary election | Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images Over the last few weeks, the Fetterman and Oz campaigns have been locked in an online tit for tat as the midterm election cycle continues to heat up in Pennsylvania. The Oz campaign has repeatedly slammed “radical liberal” John Fetterman over Twitter for his 2016 Bernie Sanders endorsement and “crazier than you think” policy platform. But rather than distancing Fetterman from the criticism, his campaign has embraced the attacks as content inspiration.The standoff burst into full view on Wednesday when Dr. Mehmet Oz posted a photoshopped image of Sanders and Fetterman styled as a 1980s department store glamour shot, taken from the film Step Brothers. The Fetterman campaign replied with an image reading, “graphic design is my passion,”... Continue reading…

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 23: U.S. President Joe Biden points to a wind turbine size comparison chart during a meeting about the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images The Biden administration is eyeing chunks of the Gulf of Mexico as new areas to expand its growing offshore wind ambitions. Today, President Joe Biden proposed opening up 700,000 acres off the coasts of Galveston, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana to future wind development. The administration is now looking for public input on developing those locations, after its proposal today to make them official “wind energy areas” where lease sales could be held in the future.Building up an offshore wind energy industry in the US has been a big part of the Biden’s administration’s goals on climate change. There’s very little of it right now — just two small wind farms operating off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. The first... Continue reading…

A screenshot of WordPerfect 2021. You read that right. Recently my colleagues and I were discussing the history of word processors (that’s just the kind of thing we do here), and a few of them reminisced about using one called WordPerfect many, many years ago. Given that its heyday was in the eighties, I hadn’t heard much about it, so I Googled it for fun. And that’s when I discovered that it’s still being sold as a productivity suite. What’s more, it’s not one of those cases where a company is still taking money for what’s essentially abandonware — the most recent release is WordPerfect 2021. As in a year ago. And it’s on sale.Corel, the company that’s been in charge of WordPerfect since before I was born, is running a (horrifically modern) Black Friday in July promotion, which ends at 9... Continue reading…

KIMIHIRO HOSHINO / AFP via Getty Images Remember when Facebook’s News Feed was chock full of apps like Zynga’s FarmVille? This era in the early 2010s was Mark Zuckerberg’s first big attempt at making Facebook much bigger than just a social network and more like a platform for developers akin to Windows.It was a formative period for the internet, when mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off. For Facebook, it was the “Move Fast and Break Things” era — an early motto of the company —when it grew to hundreds of millions of users and made decisions that still haunt it to this day. What did Zuckerberg get right in this period that set Facebook up for dominance, and what did he get wrong along the way?That’s a tease of what you can expect in the second episode of the... Continue reading…

It’s a good idea to check out which apps you have installed every once in a while. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge As we use our phones year after year or transfer everything over to a new device, many of us have accumulated a catalog of apps that we downloaded at one point but haven’t actually used in months (or possibly years). Whether it’s a failed social network, the companion app for the smart device you threw in the trash or just Duolingo shaming you for giving up on learning Spanish, all these apps can take up valuable space on our phone’s storage, clutter up our home screens, and, in worst case scenarios, even drain our batteries.In this article, I’ll go over some quick and easy ways to get rid of apps you no longer use and to make apps that you don’t use very often a little more efficient.Note: the screenshots in this article were taken... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Calendar’s new “known senders” option is supposed to make it easier to keep spam from clogging up your schedule. Toggling on the setting prevents invites from people you don’t know from automatically appearing in your Calendar. This way, Google Calendar will only automatically add invites from people in your contacts list, anyone you’ve interacted with through Workspace, and users in your company or organization.If you’re familiar with Google Calendar, you’ll know that Google automatically adds events to your schedule based on the emailed invites you receive. Letting the floodgates open by allowing Google Calendar to add events received by “everyone” could mean having a calendar infested with fake and annoying events. While t... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An update for the Android Google Photos app (versions 5.97 and later) can help you go directly to a list of screenshots, according to Android Police. With the update, you’ll have faster access to screenshots by using a shortcut, accessible from the Photos icon on your phone’s homepage with a long press or available to split out as a direct shortcut placed on your screen.If you don’t know how to use shortcuts on Android or have forgotten, here are Google’s instructions:

It’s light on features. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple’s latest slate of updates — iOS and iPadOS 15.6, macOS 12.5, watchOS 8.7, and tvOS 15.6 — are starting to show up for some users. Given the next versions of the OSes are likely due out in a few short months (and beta testers are already using them), it’s not a surprise that Wednesday’s updates are all relatively light on features. According to the release notes, here’s what’s new:

OpenAI Those waiting for a chance to use DALL-E may soon get their turn. The powerful AI tool that generates images based on provided text will open in beta to one million users on the waitlist, OpenAI, the company that created DALL-E, announced today.Users enter a phrase or string of words into DALL-E, and the tool returns its own interpretation in the form of four images, ranging from whimsical to hyperreal. An updated DALL-E 2, launched in April, added the ability to edit existing images.

Photo by GREGG NEWTON / Gregg Newton / AFP via Getty Images NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket’s debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then.The Space Launch System, or SLS, is a major component of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency’s initiative to send humans back to the Moon. Designed to carry NASA’s Orion crew capsule into deep space, the rocket is slated to perform a series of missions over the next few years that should eventually culminate with astronauts landing on the lunar surface again. But first, NASA wants to see it... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Cybercrime may be a global industry — but that doesn’t mean criminals are immune from facing prosecution across borders.The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today that it had extradited dual Romanian / Latvian national Mihai Ionut Paunescu — known as “Virus” — to the US from Colombia for allegedly designing malware used to steal money from bank accounts across the world and operating the infrastructure used to distribute it.Paunescu is alleged to be one of the creators of the Gozi Virus, a Trojan that infected millions of computers in countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Finland between 2007 to 2012. Distributed through corrupted PDF documents, the Gozi Virus captured banking login details and passwords from... Continue reading…

Chelsea star Sam Kerr in FIFA 23. With the 2022 edition of the Euros currently underway in a sweltering England, interest in the women’s game is particularly high right now — and EA is taking advantage with the next FIFA release.Today, the company unveiled the first trailer and gameplay details for FIFA 23, and, among other changes, the game includes the addition of women’s club teams from the top leagues in England and France. FIFA 23 will also feature both editions of the world cup: the 2022 men’s competition in Qatar and the women’s, which follows in 2023 in Australia and New Zealand. (Both will be added as part of a free, post-launch update.)EA first introduced women’s international teams in the 2016 edition of FIFA, but the inclusion of club teams is still a big —... Continue reading…

Image: Faze Clan Faze Clan, one of the biggest esports companies in the world, has officially gone public via a SPAC merger with B. Riley Principal 150 Merger Corp. The deal values Faze at $725 million, according to Axios, which is lower than the original $1 billion valuation from when the merger was announced in October. Faze is now trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol FAZE.Faze is a huge esports and gaming lifestyle brand, and it’s extremely popular with younger audiences — Faze claims that about 80 percent of its audience is between the ages of 13 and 34. It not only has 11 competitive esports teams in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, PUBG, and Valorant but is also associated with some big personalities,... Continue reading…

Image: Sony Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered from Insomniac Games is coming to PC on August 12th, and it’s going to come with a host of PC features like unlocked framerates, Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and ultrawide monitor support. Insomniac Games has been working with Nixxes Software to port the game to PC, and it has included a variety of customizations you’d expect to see in a typical PC game.PC players of Spider-Man Remastered will be able to output at a variety of resolutions and use ultrawide 21:9 and 32:9 monitors. If you’ve got three monitors that make use of Nvidia’s Surround multi-monitor setup, then you’ll even be able to get Spider-Man swinging across all your monitors. Image: Sony PC specs list... Continue reading…

Alexa’s getting better at doing its thing without your input. | Image: Amazon Amazon is making a bunch of changes to the Alexa user experience, all with the same idea in mind: making the virtual assistant easier to use. The most notable is a change in how Alexa handles Routines, which developers can now create and recommend to users instead of requiring you to manually build your own automations. Alexa’s also starting to coexist with other manufacturers’ assistants, and Amazon is working to make sure that the most important commands — like “Stop!” — work no matter what wake word you’re using.Amazon made these announcements during its Alexa Live developer event, in which the company announced a slew of other new Alexa features mostly geared toward developers. They can add shopping to skills, more easily support M... Continue reading…

Amazon is counting on Matter to help fulfill its smart home ambitions. | Image: Amazon Amazon wants every smart home device to work with its Alexa ecosystem, and it says Matter is key to achieving that goal. “We really believe in ambient intelligence — an environment where your devices are woven together by artificial intelligence so they can offer far more than any device could do on its own,” Marja Koopmans, director of Alexa smart home, told The Verge in an interview.“Matter brings interoperability, and interoperability between all of those devices in the home is essential to realizing [our] vision of ambient intelligence.” The more devices can talk to each other, the more “experiences” platforms can build with them. For example, “If I leave home and I forget to turn off the lights or adjust my thermostat, Alexa will... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge DoorDash is changing its policies in a move that it says will crack down on underage alcohol orders. In addition to having users upload a photo of your ID to the app, DoorDash drivers will now have to scan your ID when they arrive at your home.DoorDash has already been testing the two-part verification process in Dallas, Detroit, Miami, Phoenix, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and Northern Virginia, but now it’s rolling out to all customers. The service previously only required you to upload an image of your ID that Dashers were supposed to check when they arrived at your home. Image: DoorDash DoorDash first piloted alcohol deliveries in California in 2016 before expanding to 20 additional states last September. In 2020,... Continue reading…

Screenshot: Tom Warren / The Verge It’s finally happening: Discord voice chats are coming to Xbox consoles. Starting today, Xbox Insiders can test this new integration, allowing you to connect to Discord calls from an Xbox One or Xbox Series S / X console. While this isn’t a Discord app for Xbox, you’ll be able to transfer calls from the mobile Discord and Xbox apps to your Xbox console and chat to your friends with your regular Xbox headset.I’ve been testing the integration today, and it shows up in both Discord mobile and the Xbox dashboard. First, you’ll head into the Parties & chat section of the Xbox dashboard and scan a QR code on your phone. This will open up the Discord mobile app, and you’ll then link up your Xbox profile to your Discord profile. Once that’s... Continue reading…

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Wednesdays, editor-at-large David Pierce leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into your home.David starts today’s episode with Verge managing editor Alex Cranz and news writer Mitchell Clark to chat about what it took for Mitchell to get service from Dish’s new cellular network Project Genesis and why he was rewarded with NFTs to test the connectivity in Spokane, Washington.Later in the show, David talks with senior policy reporter Makena Kelly about VPNs and why... Continue reading…

The Nanoleaf Lines modular smart lights give a futuristic vibe to your walls. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge After Nanoleaf’s recent announcement of the new, limited edition Ultra Black Triangles to celebrate its 10th anniversary, it’s also running celebratory deals that run until July 24th. The smart home lighting company is discounting various starter kits (cleverly dubbed “smarter kits”) and various wall panel light expansion packs, with some getting discounts as hefty as 58 percent off. There’s a lot to browse on Nanoleaf’s site, but we’re highlighting the ones we feel are the best.The biggest price drop is on the Nanoleaf Shapes Mini Triangles, which are down to just $49.99 for a five-pack smarter kit at Amazon and Best Buy. These triangles may be tiny, but they’re easy to expand into much larger forms that are kind of cute.For the... Continue reading…

Discord calls in the Xbox dashboard | Image: Discord Discord and Microsoft are bringing Discord voice calls to the Xbox. The feature, available now to Xbox Insiders and coming soon to the rest of us, will allow users to connect to Discord voice chats from their Xbox, facilitating all kinds of cross-platform play shenanigans.The process of connecting your Xbox and Discord accounts and starting up a voice chat is pretty involved. First, you have to download the Xbox mobile app, as you’ll use your phone to transfer Discord calls to an Xbox. Then, you have to connect your Xbox account to your Discord one. If you’ve connected them in the past, the instructions state that you’ll need to do so again to accept the new voice permissions.Once that’s done, whenever you want to talk with your... Continue reading…

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon’s Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks.Lepp became an author six years ago, after deciding she could no longer stomach having to spout “corporate doublespeak” to employees as companies downsized. She had spent the prior two decades working... Continue reading…

Image: Ken Pillonel After teasing modified AirPods that swap Apple’s Lightning port for a USB-C connection, Ken Pillonel, the robotics engineering student behind the USB-C iPhone, has finally released the full video that shows his entire process. And the best part is that Pillonel is making his schematics open source, meaning you, too, can accomplish such a feat (given that you have a 3D printer).Pillonel starts by sawing open the AirPods case, essentially breaking it, as they’re not designed to be taken apart. He then designs two replacement pieces to go on either side of the case, first by using an FDM 3D printer and then switching to SLA for a smoother result. The pieces he constructs snap perfectly into place in the most satisfying way possible,... Continue reading…

Image: Annapurna Interactive Annapurna Interactive’s Stray, the fantastic adventure game where you navigate through a cyberpunk-inspired world as a cat, is winning over more than just players. House cats, who typically sit idly as their owners play games, are getting engaged with the game, too. And people can’t stop tweeting about it. So, someone smarter than I am made the Twitter account @CatsWatchStray to bundle up all of that joy in one place.Compared to almost everything else happening around the globe, this is so wholesome. You just get to see cats being unabashedly invested in the game. Perhaps it’s due to the realistic animations of the in-game cat or the fact that there’s a dedicated meow button, but cats are turning Stray, a single-player game, into a... Continue reading…

Managing your Destiny 2 loot should’ve always been this easy. | Image: Alice Newcome-Beill While everyone is talking about Destiny 2’s annual summer event, Solstice of Heroes, I’m busy with an evergreen event I like to call “managing my character’s inventory.” Anyone that plays Destiny 2 regularly has almost definitely used Destiny Item Manager (DIM), a community-created tool that keeps track of your items in a browser or on your phone at one point or another.In fact, this tool has become so widely used that opening your vault in Destiny has a disclaimer that you should use DIM instead of attempting to manage your piles of loot in-game. DIM syncs with your Destiny 2 account and allows you to easily swap items between characters, assign loadouts, remotely pull stuff from the postmaster, and other quality-of-life improvements... Continue reading…

Creative constraints + Instagram angst = success Continue reading…

The 10T will have a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset and a sparkly back panel. | Image: OnePlus Pete Lau is throwing a party. As he has just announced in a community forum post, the OnePlus CEO says its upcoming 10T will launch on August 3rd with an in-person event in New York City. The 10T continues OnePlus’ tradition of performance-focused specs with a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset, which is, in theory, a cut above the regular ol’ Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in the OnePlus 10 Pro. OnePlus will also take the opportunity to launch OxygenOS 13, which Lau says will come to the 10 Pro first and the 10T later this year.Qualcomm says the “Plus” version of the 8 Gen 1 offers faster performance and better battery efficiency than the non-plus chipset. It’s a pull-out-all-the-stops kind of processor, and it’s largely intended for mobile devices... Continue reading…

Endurance focuses on the game’s larger ships. | Image: Hello Games No Man’s Sky has a major new free update releasing today, developer Hello Games has announced. The new Endurance update is focused on the game’s freighters and frigates, the large ships in the game that players can use as a mobile base of operations and to complete missions. Endurance is the 20th major update for the game, which was originally released in 2016.Improvements coming with this major update include a new ship bridge that offers instant access to warping and teleportation to navigate the game’s universe. Players can also build bigger freighters featuring exterior sections, as well as with new plant growing and manufacturing features, and the ships can now analyze planets from space. New expedition- and combat-focused missions... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is only 18 but it’s slap-bang in the middle of a mid-life crisis, with user numbers declining and TikTok eating its Gen Z lunch. In response, the company is trying to push more video content from creators into users’ feeds, and is now shifting resources away from more text-focused products like its News tab and Bulletin newsletter platform.As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook exec Campbell Brown told employees about this change in priorities in a recent memo. Brown said engineering and product teams at Meta-owned Facebook would, in future, spend less time on News and Bulletin to “heighten their focus on building a more robust Creator economy.”Facebook wants its feed to look more like TikTokThis change in... Continue reading…

The tags include an e-paper display to show your flight info. | Image: Alaska Airlines Alaska Airlines says it’s becoming the first US-based airline to roll out support for electronic bag tags, small programmable devices with e-paper displays that are designed to replace the paper tags currently in use. It plans to launch the new program in phases, and it’ll initially be focused on San Jose airport in California. The airline will initially give out 2,500 of the tags for free to its frequent flyers from the airport in late 2022, TechCrunch reports, and they’ll be available to purchase by Mileage Plan members next year.Alaska Airlines intends for the tags to cut down on the amount of time its customers spend on flight admin at the airport. Rather than having to print a luggage tag in person, they can instead set up the... Continue reading…

Photo by Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images Netflix wants linear TV to die. CEO Reed Hastings has been banging the TV murder drum for more than 8 years now, and in the investor call today, he reiterated his belief, confidently saying that Netflix was in a great place because linear TV would be dead in “5 to 10 years.”Hastings is financially incentivized to say this. One of the biggest competitors for the largest streaming service on the planet is the set of totally free streaming channels that beam into any TV with an antenna, and their costlier friends on cable TV.Netflix needs linear TV to die because it needs the streaming holdouts still using linear TV. It shed a whopping 1.3 million subscribers across the US and Canada in the last three months, according to its 2022 Q2... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The electric rebirth of Scout, the classic off-road SUV brand, is getting real this week as Volkswagen names Scott Keogh as CEO of its new spinoff company. The former head of VW Group America, as initially reported by Axios, pushed for VW to start a new electric truck line after seeing a fully restored vintage Scout: “the rights to the brand were just sitting there,” Keogh said.VW acquired the Scout brand through a 2020 merger of its commercial trucking company Traton with Navistar, which the German automaker initially bought part of in 2016. In May, it was reported that VW Group is willing to pump $1 billion into the new Scout brand and set goals to sell a quarter million electric off-roaders under the name annually starting in 2026. ... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Another Samsung Unpacked virtual event is right around the corner, now confirmed to take place on August 10th at 9AM ET / 6AM PT, and along with it are some incentives for the early, early birds. Samsung is offering customers in the US the chance to put in free, no-commitment reservations for its upcoming devices on its website now, well ahead of preorders — and even the devices’ announcement.Galaxy fans who reserve before the August 10th Unpacked will later receive varying tier-levels of store credit once the devices can be ordered, ranging from $30 to $200, toward Samsung’s next devices. As for what devices you’re signing up for? We can say with certainty that among the rumors, leaks, and Samsung’s own invite graphic, you can expect... Continue reading…

Yep, that’s a foldable. | Image: Samsung Samsung has provided a clear solution to the unusual puzzle it provided yesterday, confirming that its Galaxy Unpacked event will indeed take place on August 10th. The image included with the teaser also confirms that its foldables will be taking center stage, with a Galaxy Z Flip-shaped device acting as a “greater than” symbol. The event will start at 9AM ET and will be streamed on Samsung.com.Based on the cryptic hint that Samsung dropped yesterday, along with the timing of last year’s Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Fold 3 launch, it was kind of a no-brainer to assume that we’d see updated foldable phones next month. If the phone in the invitation image is actually the Z Flip 4, then rumors that the device would feature minimal updates appear... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix’s upcoming ad-supported offering won’t include all of the content you can currently watch on the streaming service, Netflix executives said during the company’s Q2 2022 earnings interview video.“Today, the vast majority of what people watch on Netflix, we can include in the ad-supported tier,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said. “There are some things that don’t — that we’re in conversation about with the studios on — but if we launched the product today, the members in the ad tier would have a great experience. We will clear some additional content, but certainly not all of it, but we don’t think it’s a material holdback to the business.”“It’s certainly a nice to have,” said CFO Spencer Neumann. “But it’s not a must-have. As... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After Netflix reported losing subscribers for the first time in over a decade last quarter, the company’s Q2 earnings report revealed the number of worldwide subscribers dipped by 1 million, including a drop of 1.28 million in the US and Canada alone between the end of March and the end of June. That’s better than its projection of losing 2 million worldwide, but the subscriber shortfall in the US and Canada is double the 600,000 drop it reported for Q1. Netflix now reports it has 73.28 million paid subscribers in the US and Canada and 220.67 million worldwide.This comes nearly a week after Netflix announced a partnership with Microsoft on its cheaper ad-supported tier that it expects to launch by early next year. In the letter,... Continue reading…

The map includes filters for narrowing down what type of locations you’re looking for. Instagram’s latest update aims to make it easier for users to find local businesses or attractions by adding a searchable map that lets you “discover popular local businesses near you,” according to an Instagram Story from Mark Zuckerberg. The map will show you a list of places nearby and will let you see posts about a certain place or see only certain types of business.There are a few ways to get to the map — if someone tags a place in a post or story, you can tap on the tag and hit “see location” to get to the location’s page. If you move around on the map, you’ll then be able to search the area to see what’s nearby. Navigating to the map and searching it from a story sticker. You can also search for places... Continue reading…

The owl is cute, though. | Illustration by Alex Castro/The Verge Last year, I decided to start learning Korean. It was entirely on a whim — I don’t live in Korea and have no reason I’d ever need to go there. Nonetheless, it’s been an incredibly rewarding experience, and I’ve gotten to a point where I can speak, read, and write comfortably much faster than I ever thought I could.That’s entirely due to the wealth of apps and online services out there that I’ve been able to take advantage of. Without easy access to native speakers or in-person classes, much of my early journey involved scouring the internet for resources and trying every one I could find. Here, I’m going to briefly discuss my experience with each one and whether I’d recommend it for its price.It’s important that I make a few caveats... Continue reading…

Netflix actually used this image in its announcement tweet. | Image: Netflix Sam Raimi’s incredible Spider-Man movie trilogy will be available on Netflix beginning August 1st, the company announced on Tuesday.Raimi’s trilogy is the best Spider-Man trilogy, and I won’t hear another word edgewise. I know the films aren’t objectively the best — the third one is just bad — but for many people of a certain age like me, they’re formative movies that are packed with iconic moments and legendary memes.Tobey Maguire’s Emo Peter Parker is basically a permanent internet character. One of the best parts of Spider-Man: No Way Home was when Willem Dafoe got to say perhaps his most classic Norman Osborne line. Netflix itself even used a Spider-Man meme in its announcement tweet.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Cloud and Oracle servers located in the UK struggled with cooling-related outages Tuesday as the country experienced record-breaking heat that reached as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Both companies blame temperature for the unexpected shutdowns.On its Google Cloud status page, Google notes it has experienced a “cooling related failure” in one of its UK-based data centers. “This caused a partial failure of capacity in that zone, leading to VM [virtual machine] terminations and a loss of machines for a small set of our customers,” Google states. The company adds that it has also “powered down” some of its machines to prevent any further damage.As pointed out by The Register and Bleeping Computer, Oracle has... Continue reading…

The Lego Movie. | Image: Warner Bros. Netflix plans to acquire the animation studio Animal Logic, which is known for making hits like Happy Feet and The Lego Movie, the streaming company announced on Tuesday alongside its Q2 2022 earnings.“Today, we announced that we will be acquiring leading animation studio Animal Logic, with ~800 amazing people mostly in Sydney and Vancouver, which will help us accelerate the development of our animation production capabilities and reinforces our commitment to build a world-class animation studio,” Netflix wrote in its Q2 2022 shareholder letter (pdf).The two companies are already partnering on The Magician’s Elephant (set for a 2023 release) and Ron Howard’s first animated film, The Shrinking of Treehorn. The acquisition is expected... Continue reading…

The cast of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. | Image: HBO Max/Warner Bros. Though there were quite a few real people campaigning for #TheSnyderCut’s release before Warner Bros.’ 2021 announcement, new reporting from Rolling Stone suggests that a sizable amount of the movie’s social media hype was being driven by bots and inauthentic accounts.When Warner Bros. announced last year that it planned to release an extended cut of its 2017 Justice League film, the move was seen by many as both a vindication of and capitulation to director Zack Snyder and his extremely online fandom. For years, Snyder loyalists insisted that the movement developed organically as people saw the cut Joss Whedon, who replaced Snyder as director, delivered — and found it lacking. But, according to Rolling Stone, which obtained copies of... Continue reading…