The Verge

The music industry's nightmare came true in 2023, and it sounded a lot like Drake. "Heart on My Sleeve," a convincingly fake duet between Drake and The Weeknd, racked up millions of streams before anyone could explain who made it or where it came from. The track didn't just go viral - it broke the [...]

The future of the internet will be determined in one building in Washington, DC - and for six weeks, I watched it unfold. For much of this spring, the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in downtown Washington, DC, was buzzing with lawyers, reporters, and interested onlookers jostling between dimly lit courtrooms that hosted everyone from the [...]

At this point, it's becoming easier to say which AI startups Mark Zuckerberg hasn't looked at acquiring. In addition to Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI), sources tell me the Meta CEO recently discussed buying ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity, the AI-native Google rival. None of these talks progressed to the formal [...]

While it wasn't the first film to feature fast-moving ghouls, there is no denying how much of an impact 28 Days Later had on modern zombie movies. It was a gripping and nauseating wonder, whose action felt uniquely visceral thanks, in part, to director Danny Boyle's inspired use of a digital video camera. And there [...]

If you've been curious about trying out a Mac for the first time or need a small computer powerful enough to be your home media server, we strongly recommend the latest Mac Mini. Thankfully, the step-up M4 model with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM is on sale at Amazon and B&H Photo for [...]

Applebee's and IHOP plan to launch an AI-powered personalization engine" that could help its restaurants provide recommendations and customized deals, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The personalization engine would use a customer's past purchases - or the orders of customers similar to them - to make recommendations. Justin Skelton, the chief [...]

Amazon released a new software update for several recent Kindle models last week. The company's release notes only mention performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general enhancements," but the update includes notable upgrades when it comes to adjusting text and line spacing, improving legibility and accessibility for many users, as spotted by The eBook Reader. [...]

Earlier this month, Microsoft's Family Safety feature, primarily used by parents and schools as a set of parental controls and filters, started randomly blocking Google's Chrome browser from opening on Windows. The first reports surfaced on June 3rd, with some Chrome users noticing the browser kept closing or wouldn't open. Microsoft has introduced a bug [...]

Tesla has begun sending out invitations for its highly anticipated robotaxi service, but there's one significant caveat: it's installing a safety monitor" in the front passenger seat, as previously reported by Electrek. The invites, which were sent to Tesla influencers and investors, say the human monitor will accompany you on your trip" when rides begin [...]

The idea behind Trump Mobile is relatively straightforward. It's easy to launch a mobile carrier these days, and it can be extremely lucrative - just ask Ryan Reynolds! You should know, though, that Trump Mobile is a pretty bad deal. And the network's supposed flagship phone? We're willing to bet that this $500, made-in-America, coming-soon [...]

Meta is announcing its next pair of smart glasses with Oakley. The limited-edition Oakley Meta HSTN (pronounced how-stuhn") model costs $499 and is available for preorder starting July 11th. Other Oakley models with Meta's tech will be available starting at $399 later this summer. Like the existing Meta Ray-Ban glasses, the Oakley model features a [...]

Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or watch any YouTube video, and listen carefully. Past the content and inside the linguistic patterns, you'll find the creeping uniformity of AI voice. Words like "prowess" and "tapestry," which are favored by ChatGPT, are creeping into our vocabulary, while words like "bolster," "unearth," and "nuance," [...]

Astro Bot is filled with whimsy and silliness that makes you want to pay attention to the details. But in a presentation at this year's Game Developers Conference, director Nicolas Doucet shared one particular aspect of Astro the robot that I hadn't noticed but blew me away. Doucet talked about how Team Asobi worked hard [...]

The Acer Swift 14 is all over AI the place. It has powerful chip options, exceptional battery life, and loads of ports for such a portable laptop. The keyboard and trackpad are solid, which is not always a given at any price. But the screen and webcam are mediocre, and the speakers are outright terrible. [...]

Last week, a Tesla Model Y with the word "ROBOTAXI" scratched into its side and no one in the driver seat made a turn off Austin's bustling South Congress Avenue. Another Tesla, described by autonomous vehicle experts as a "chase vehicle," followed closely behind. Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the clip, seemingly confirming that [...]

Late Wednesday night at about 11PM CT, SpaceX was about to perform a static fire test of Ship 36, ahead of a planned 10th flight test for its Starship, when there was suddenly a massive explosion at the Massey's Testing Center site. SpaceX says A safety clear area around the site was maintained throughout the [...]

Adobe has a new computational photography camera app for iPhones - and one of its creators, Marc Levoy, helped make the impressive computational photography features that made some of Google's earlier Pixel cameras shine. The new app, called Project Indigo, was released last week by Adobe Labs. It's free and available for the iPhone 12 [...]

We've been waiting for Spotify's lossless streaming for more than four years, but there are some new and promising hints that the feature might finally arrive sometime soon. The X account for Spicetify, a command-line tool that lets you customize the Spotify client, says that a new version of Spotify includes some hidden mentions of [...]

Now that warmer weather is here, spring cleaning duties are likely falling by the wayside. But the good news is you can enjoy the outdoorsandclean your home with zero effortby letting a robot vacuum do the hard work for you. For that, we recommend a versatile model like the Eufy X10 Pro Omni, which is [...]

The bosses in Elden Ring Nightreign are already pretty tough. But if you've gotten good and need a harder challenge, you'll be able to take on Everdark Sovereigns," which are more difficult versions of the game's Nightlord foes you face to conclude a run. These limited-time versions of the Nightlords are extremely challenging and pose [...]

Midjourney has released the first version of its video generation model to the public. For now, the tool can generate short videos based on images uploaded or created on the platform, but Midjourney plans on rolling out more capabilities in the future. After creating an image using Midjourney, the service will show a new animate" [...]

Beyond the selfies between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and the friendly conversations between the pair on stage, all is not well with Microsoft's $13 billion AI investment. Over the past year, multiple reports have painted a picture of a Microsoft and OpenAI relationship that is straining under pressure. As OpenAI [...]

For the third time, President Donald Trump has extended the deadline for TikTok to spin out from its Chinese parent company or face a US ban. As White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed in a statement Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order on Thursday extending the deadline another 90 days, landing the new deadline [...]

The Department of Justice reported yesterday that it filed a civil complaint to seize roughly $225.3 million in cryptocurrency linked to crypto investment scams. In a press release, the DOJ said it traced and targeted accounts that were part of a sophisticated blockchain-based money laundering network" dispersing funds taken from more than 400 suspected victims [...]

Sluggish Wi-Fi is one of my least favorite tech problems to deal with because it messes with everything: my work, my smart lightbulbs, my online sessions of Mario Kart World. There are many reasons your Wi-Fi may be wonky, but the good news is that you can solve many of them with better routers. One [...]

With FBC: Firebreak, Remedy Entertainment has entered the world of the first-person co-op shooter. Set in its Control universe - specifically the site of the first game, the brutalist nightmare office called the Oldest House - players control a member of the titular three-person team of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), tasked with addressing [...]

Nothing is more frustrating than buying a new pair of headphones, an OLED TV, or a laptop just to find out that you could have gotten it for a lot cheaper somewhere else. That's why, in order to keep customers happy and prevent them from going elsewhere, many retailers offer price-matching policies in which they [...]

Valve is introducing accessibility features for players with disabilities in its latest beta for Steam Big Picture Mode and SteamOS. The features -listed in full and explained here -include options to modify the Steam UI, like a high contrast mode, as well as a built-in screen reader for SteamOS. In its post, Valve describes the [...]

At a recent exhibition in Copenhagen, visitors stepped into a dark room and were met by an unusual host: a jaguar that watched the crowd, selected individuals, and began to share stories about her daughter, her rainforest, and the fires that once threatened her home - the Bolivian Amazon. The live interaction with Huk, an [...]

Summer Game Fest 2025 was definitely a weird one, but even with everything going on outside, the games on display were still immaculate. My favorites, the ones that I live for, are small, unique, and made for pure love of expression. Being able to see that love so clearly on display, expressed through such painstaking [...]

After watching writer / director Eliza McNitt's new short film Ancestra, I can see why a number of Hollywood studios are interested in generative AI. Many of the shots were made and refined solely with prompts, in collaboration with Google's DeepMind team. It's obvious what Darren Aronofsky's AI-focused Primordial Soup production house and Google stand [...]

YouTube is bringing its Veo 3 AI video generation model, which my colleague Allison Johnson recently called a slop monger's dream," to YouTube Shorts later this summer, according to a Cannes Lions keynote from YouTube CEO Neal Mohan. Shorts creators can already take advantage of the previous-generation Veo 2 model to generate backgrounds with Dream [...]

The strange world of Death Stranding just keeps on expanding. As Deadline reports, Hideo Kojima's ghostly, post-apocalyptic video game is getting a spinoff in the form of an animated film. While there aren't a lot of details yet, the animated feature will supposedly be in the same mold as other animated spinoffs like the recent [...]

The Nintendo Switch 2 is more expensive in practically every way: pricier console, pricier games, an entire Chat button you'll eventually have to pay to use. So it was nice when Nintendo revealed you won't need its own $55 camera to video chat with pals. "You can use the Nintendo Switch 2 camera accessory (sold [...]

Facebook is adding support for passkeys on its mobile app. That means you'll be able to log into the platform using your device's authentication method, like your fingerprint, face scan, or PIN, making it more difficult for bad actors to take control of your account. Passkeys offer a more secure alternative to typical passwords because [...]

AI tools are flooding the culture ecosystem - and no corner of the arts space is immune. In this series, we're looking at the ways artists are embracing AI, pushing back on it, or trying their best to find an equilibrium with a new technology that's both sweeping and destabilizing. We talk to perfumers questioning [...]

The next version of the Near Field Communication (NFC) standard aims to make it easier to make payments, pair devices, and unlock doors using your phone or smartwatch. The most notable improvement is a boost to the distance of contactless connections from 0.5cm to 2cm, extending the range by x4. The NFC Release 15 standard [...]

Robin Ward was recovering from a broken arm when he fell in love with The Roottrees are Dead, a free browser game hosted on itch.io, an indie games salesfront. He reached out to its creator, Jeremy Johnston, and told him, "This should be a bigger deal than it is." At the same time, Ward says, [...]

Waymo announced today that it intends to launch a fully autonomous robotaxi service in New York City - but first it needs to change state law to permit its vehicles to operate with safety drivers behind the wheel. The Alphabet-owned company said it has applied for a permit from the city's Department of Transportation to [...]

Google is building Search Live into AI Mode, allowing you to have a back-and-forth voice conversation with the company's AI chatbot right from its search engine. The test, which is rolling out now to Labs users in the US, currently doesn't support camera-sharing, but Google plans to add the capability in the coming months." Search [...]

I don't know about you, but I've gotten back into Animal Crossing: New Horizons in a pretty big way since the Switch 2 arrived. I've started a new island (the game loads faster and runs better on that console), and I've been doing house chores to the relaxing music. The natural progression of my invigorated [...]

Choosing a budget Android phone typically means wading through a ton of product pages and doing spec comparisons. Of course, a simpler way through the noise is to use The Verge's handy guide to the best cheap phones. But we're going to make it even easier for you today with a great discounted option. The [...]

If you stumbled across Terence Broad's AI-generated artwork (un)stable equilibrium on YouTube, you might assume he'd trained a model on the works of the painter Mark Rothko - the earlier, lighter pieces, before his vision became darker and suffused with doom. Like early-period Rothko, Broad's AI-generated images consist of simple fields of pure color, but [...]

Blame Ryan Reynolds. With a new wireless brand from the hosts of SmartLess emerging last week, and the debut of Trump Mobile this week, it sure seems like there's a hot new trend in Celebrities Selling Things: phone service. How did it come to this? Why can't they just stick to tequila? I talked to [...]

The most surprising thing about Govee's colorful smart lamp with a speaker built-in is that we didn't get something like this sooner. We've had color-changing smart home lights that sync to music via an app, and we've had Bluetooth speakers with RGB lights - putting the two together feels like the natural next step. The [...]

Framework finally made a touchscreen laptop, and the convertible 2-in-1 is one of the coolest-looking computers ever made. It doesn't have top-tier specs, but its two-year-old 13th Gen Intel Core i3 processor isn't on its last legs just yet. Like Framework's Laptop 13, the new Laptop 12 has modular ports and fully repairable innards. And [...]

Eufy is launching its first portable smart display, designed to allow multiple users to control and monitor security devices from a single hub. The Smart Display E10 is capable of displaying up to four live camera feeds simultaneously and can be paired with the company's AI-supported video doorbells, smart locks, or the Homebase S380 data [...]

In an effort to restore trust in the security of its cameras, smart home brand Wyze has developed VerifiedView - a new layer of protection that embeds your user ID into the metadata of every photo, video, and livestream. Wyze claims the system matches this data to your account before playback, blocking unauthorized access to [...]

Ties and Taco Carlier, who founded VanMoof as an alternative to Big Bike, are working for Accell Group, the Dutch cycling giant responsible for over a dozen bicycle brands including Batavus, Sparta, Carqon, and Raleigh. According to multiple sources, the first e-bike, developed for the Raleigh brand and pictured above, is nearing completion. The bike's [...]

Leica has announced the first 35mm film produced under its own name, Monopan 50. It's an ultra-fine grain black-and-white film, and will cost $10 per 36-exposure roll when it goes on sale on August 21st. Leica says that the new film is produced in Germany, though wouldn't name a manufacturer when asked. The specs, right [...]