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Photo by PHILIP DAVALI/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images Well, now we know where the Obamas are heading after their split with Spotify. I had a whole fancy intro before getting the news, but this is about as hot as Hot Pod gets, so let’s get into it.Obamas take their podcasts to Audible after leaving SpotifyAmazon’s Audible and the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground announced a multi-year first-look deal on Tuesday, ending the speculation of where the former first couple would take their podcasts after their deal with Spotify ends in several months.It’s a big get for Audible, which is better known for audiobooks than podcasts even as it ramps up the development deals. It is also a curious choice for the Obamas, who were reported to be frustrated by the limitations that came with... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Popular daycare and childcare communications apps are “dangerously insecure,” according to newly published research, exposing children and parents to the risk of data breaches with lax security settings and permissive or outright misleading privacy policies.The details come from a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which published the results of a months-long research project on Tuesday.The research, conducted Alexis Hancock, EFF’s director of engineering for the Certbot project, found that popular apps like Brightwheel, HiMama, and Tadpoles lacked two-factor authentication (2FA), meaning that any malicious actor who was able to obtain a user’s password could log in remotely. Further analysis of application code... Continue reading…

The efforts are currently focused on old Priuses | Photo by Toyota/Getty Images Toyota is partnering with Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company helmed by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, to collect and recycle vehicle batteries. The plan is to take old, worn-out batteries and either refurbish them or break them down so their materials can be used to create new batteries.Redwood specifically plans on producing materials for anodes and cathodes — two major components of a battery cell. The company’s ultimate goal is to create a “closed-loop supply chain for electric vehicles,” meaning that it takes batteries from old EVs and turns them into batteries for new cars.Decades-old Priuses could end up at Redwood’s facility in NevadaWhile Toyota is currently launching its first long-range battery-electric vehicle,... Continue reading…

Image: Paramount Paramount “plans to commission” 150 international originals for its Paramount Plus streaming service by 2025, according to a press release. The company revealed details about seven of the originals on Tuesday, including content from Germany, Italy, France, and Mexico.With this major investment, Paramount is likely aiming to see the kind of traction other platforms have gotten from their own international originals. Netflix’s Squid Game is perhaps the most successful, becoming the streaming service’s biggest-ever series at launch, but its French thriller Lupin has been a hit as well. If you’re an Apple TV Plus subscriber, I’d highly recommend Pachinko, a drama about a Korean immigrant family that Apple recently renewed for a second... Continue reading…

NASA’s Space Launch System on its launchpad at KSC | Photo by Loren Grush / The Verge After three previous aborted attempts, NASA successfully fueled its new massive deep-space rocket, the Space Launch System, for the first time on Monday — completing a critical milestone ahead of the vehicle’s first flight. However, there was a shadow over the achievement. The fueling was part of an elaborate dress rehearsal that ended 20 seconds earlier than NASA had planned, and it’s unclear if the agency got all the data and practice it needed to proceed with the rocket’s debut launch.The Space Launch System, or SLS, is a key piece of NASA’s flagship Artemis program — an elaborate effort to send the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the Moon. But first, SLS needs to actually fly, and before that can happen, N... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Some social platforms limit the number of times you can change your username, while others don’t let you do it at all. Instagram is a username free-for-all; you can alter your Instagram handle whenever you want, as many times as you want — within certain limits.There’s a difference between your username and your display name. The display name is on your profile below your avatar. It doesn’t need to be unique to you, and it can contain emoji and special characters. (And yes, it can also be changed — up to two times within 14 days.)Your username, on the other hand, appears at the top of your profile and at the end of your profile’s URL. It needs to be unique to you. It’s also subject to more restrictions: it can’t be longer than 30... Continue reading…

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Two former Tesla employees have filed a lawsuit claiming the company violated federal law for failing to provide 60 days’ notice for a mass layoff.The lawsuit, which was filed on Sunday, follows the news that Tesla plans on laying off hourly workers, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk initially stated that the hourly workers were likely to be unaffected by the layoffs.The lawsuit was filed by John Lynch and Daxton Hartsfield, both of whom worked at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, when the layoffs began in early June. The two former employees allege they were among “more than 500” Gigafactory employees who were terminated.The two former employees allege they were among “more than 500” Gigafactory employees who were terminatedAccording... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has named a new CEO of its retail arm just weeks after the previous CEO announced he would be resigning. Doug Herrington, a 17-year company vet, is set to become CEO of Amazon’s worldwide stores business, Amazon leader Andy Jassy announced in an email posted to the company’s website.Herrington has a lot of experience in Amazon’s consumer business, as noted in Jassy’s email; Herrington “joined the company in 2005 to build out our Consumables business, launched AmazonFresh in 2007, and in 2015, took on leading all of our North American Consumer business,” Jassy wrote.But he’ll have a tough road ahead, as Amazon’s growth has slowed after surging during the pandemic, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, Jassy has... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is phasing out public access to a number of AI-powered facial analysis tools — including one that claims to identify a subject’s emotion from videos and pictures.Such “emotion recognition” tools have been criticized by experts. They say not only do facial expressions that are thought to be universal differ across different populations but that it is unscientific to equate external displays of emotion with internal feelings.“Companies can say whatever they want, but the data are clear,” Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University who conducted a review into the subject of AI-powered emotion recognition, told The Verge in 2019. “They can detect a scowl, but that’s not the same thing as detecting... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft, Epic Games, Meta, and 33 other companies and organizations have formed a standards group for “metaverse” tech. The Metaverse Standards Forum is supposed to foster open, interoperable standards for augmented and virtual reality, geospatial, and 3D tech.According to a press release, the Metaverse Standards Forum will focus on “pragmatic, action-based projects” like hackathons and prototyping tools for supporting common standards. It’s also interested in developing “consistent terminology” for the space — where many players can’t even agree on what a “metaverse” is. In addition to the companies above, the group’s founding members include major pre-metaverse entities like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Nvidia, Qualcomm,... Continue reading…

Save on this 75-inch Samsung TV and other hot tech today. | Image: Samsung The Verge Deals team is back in action this week, serving up some excellent savings from across the internet. If you’ve been biding your time on buying a new high-end TV, you may want to check out this day-long discount on the 75-inch model of Samsung’s QN85B Neo QLED TV, which is selling for its lowest price ever. The QN85B usually sells for $2,799.99 but is currently on sale for $2,399.99. While this QLED model may lack the unparalleled contrast and brightness control of pricier OLED models, the QN85B should deliver stellar picture quality and accurate lighting with its Mini LED technology, atop a number of other excellent features.This 4K display features a 120Hz refresh rate, and it’s HDR10 Plus-compatible, enabling excellent depth... Continue reading…

Image: GitHub Microsoft-owned GitHub is launching its Copilot AI tool today, which helps suggest lines of code to developers inside their code editor. GitHub originally teamed up with OpenAI last year to launch a preview of Copilot, and it’s generally available to all developers today.Priced at $10 per month or $100 a year, GitHub Copilot is capable of suggesting the next line of code as developers type in an integrated development environment (IDE) like Visual Studio Code, Neovim, and JetBrains IDEs. Copilot can suggest complete methods and complex algorithms alongside boilerplate code and assistance with unit testing.More than 1.2 million developers signed up to use the GitHub Copilot preview over the past 12 months, and it will remain a free... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Creators on Facebook and Instagram won’t have to share a cut of their revenue with the platforms until 2024. Meta previously said it would hold off on revenue sharing until 2023.In a post today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a slew of monetization updates for Facebook and Instagram, including the news of the revenue-sharing extension. Creators make money on the platforms through fan subscriptions, paid events, badges, and other methods, and the companies are adding more and more ways for creators to make money in an attempt to lure them away from platforms like TikTok. With one new feature, creators on Facebook with subscribers on other platforms will be able to give those fans access to subscriber-only groups, according to the... Continue reading…

In this handout image provided by Korea Aerospace Research Institute, a space rocket Nuri (KSLV-Ⅱ) taking off from its launch pad at the Naro Space Center on June 21, 2022, in UGoheung-gun, South Korea. | Photo by Korea Aerospace Research Institute via Getty Images For the first time in its history, South Korea has successfully launched a satellite into orbit on a domestically built rocket. The Nuri rocket lifted off at 4PM local time today from the Naro Space Center in Goheung. The launch could help South Korea gain footing in the growing global space industry and potentially bolster the nation’s national defense arsenal with future spy satellites.Nuri’s payload today included a set of satellites that officials say have no military purposes. The rocket placed a 357-pound performance verification satellite into orbit about 435 miles (700 km) above our planet. The performance verification satellite is now poised to help South Korea launch more satellites. While in orbit, the satellite will test an... Continue reading…

Alex Castro / The Verge Advocacy group Coin Center is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional financial surveillance’ Continue reading…

Max under Vecna’s thrall. | Netflix Though music played a surprisingly significant role in the first half of Netflix’s Stranger Things 4, volume 1 never actually got around to giving Eddie Munson the sick guitar that was featured in this season’s earliest trailers. In the first teaser for Stranger Things Volume 2, though, the outgoing king of Hawkins High’s Hellfire Club is finally getting his ax just in time for an epic battle in the Upside Down.Stranger Things 4 Volume 1 finally revealed the origins of Vecna, the malevolent presence that’s been menacing Hawkins for years, and established that Eleven and her friends truly are one of the only groups capable of taking the creature down as it tries to enter their world from the Upside Down. In the new trailer, everyone’s... Continue reading…

Image: Anker Fitness-focused, sporty earbuds usually come with one of two solutions for staying in your ears: they either have wing tips to help anchor them in place (as recently seen in the Sennheiser Sport buds), or there’s a wraparound ear hook a la the Powerbeats Pro. With its new Soundcore Sport X10 earbuds, Anker is opting for the latter. The $79 X10s have a bass-forward sound signature, IPX7 sweat and water resistance, and up to eight hours of continuous battery life (or 32 including case recharges). They’re available now in black or white, with a red color coming sometime later.Anker says the rotatable ear hook lets you “adjust the wearing angle to ensure the earbuds nest comfortably in place to prevent them from falling out during vigorous... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Big plans to go all-electric by 2030 Continue reading…

The phone gets a lot of use out of its light strips. | Image: Marques Brownlee We already know that Nothing’s debut smartphone, the Phone 1, will come equipped with a series of light strips on its back. But now, thanks to an in-depth video from Marques Brownlee, we have a much better idea of what they’ll actually be useful for. Brownlee’s video highlights a couple of different use cases, including having the LEDs work as a charging indicator, highlighting unread notifications, or flashing in time with ringtones.The strips, which Nothing is branding as its “glyph interface,” consist of a little over 900 individual LEDs embedded into the rear of the phone. Nothing CEO Carl Pei previously hinted in an interview with The Verge that they could serve as a modern take on the classic smartphone notification LED, but now... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook is cracking down on user reviews to prevent people from leaving fake feedback on businesses’ pages. The company has updated its Community Feedback policy to address this widespread issue.While Facebook has already been taking action against potentially abusive reviews, the new policy puts these rules into writing. Facebook’s new guidelines protect against people who leave fake bad reviews as a way to get refunds or other freebies out of a business that wants to please its customers, and they’re also supposed to tackle incentivized reviews. This addresses the overly positive (and usually very vague) reviews businesses pay random users to leave on their pages. I’m guessing that this applies to any (actually real) bad reviews... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last November, Uber launched a pilot of its Uber Pool replacement, dubbed UberX Share, in Miami, Florida. Today, the company says shared rides have returned to nine cities: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, San Diego, Portland, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. Like Lyft, Uber paused its Uber Pool service in March 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.Lyft Shared rides resumed in several cities over the last few months, and now, UberX Share is following a similar rollout. According to Uber senior vice president of mobility Andrew Macdonald, the feature will only match riders headed in the same direction and is designed to add no more than eight additional minutes to your trip’s arrival time. ... Continue reading…

A home workspace teeming with tech, toys, and the occasional cat. Gaming tech, fan collections, and cats and dogs Continue reading…

Three devices on one neat charger. | Image: Twelve South Twelve South’s latest accessory is the HiRise3, a $99.99 three-in-one charger designed to keep your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods topped up with power. It has a very similar set of features to Belkin’s Boost↑Charge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charger with MagSafe with a more compact design, lower starting price, and a couple more caveats.Let’s get the caveats out of the way first. Although the HiRise3 only works with MagSafe-compatible iPhones, it’s not an MFi-certified MagSafe charger. iPhone 12 and 13 devices will still magnetically stick to it, and they’ll still charge — but only at 7.5W rather than the full 15W of charging that MagSafe is capable of. That doesn’t mean an iPhone will literally charge half as fast, but it’s not as speedy... Continue reading…

The PS5 is a giant console, the biggest in modern history, and a DIY YouTuber has now created a PS5 “Slim” model that’s a fraction more than the thickness of the plastic cases that house PS5 games. Matt Perks, known as DIY Perks on YouTube, has spent a considerable amount of time and effort to create a PS5 “Slim” that brings the size down from nearly four inches to just under an inch.The result is a slim copper console that contains the key PS5 components, and a rather giant external power supply and cooling solution that can be hidden away. Most of the thickness of the PS5 comes from its cooling heatsink and power supply, so DIY Perks relocated those into a long external unit to make the actual console far more attractive on top of a... Continue reading…

Behold, my beautiful ... moth orchids. | Image: The Verge Sometimes, even as a tech reporter, you can be caught out by how quickly technology improves. Case in point: it was only today that I learned that my iPhone has been offering a feature I’ve long desired — the ability to identify plants and flowers from just a photo.It’s true that various third-party apps have offered this function for years, but last time I tried them I was disappointed by their speed and accuracy. And, yes, there’s Google Lens and Snapchat Scan, but it’s always less convenient to open up an app I wouldn’t otherwise use.But, since the introduction of iOS 15 last September, Apple has offered its own version of this visual search feature. It’s called Visual Look Up, and it’s pretty damn good.It works very simply. Just... Continue reading…

A leaked image of Sony’s Inzone H9. | Image: 91Mobiles / Onleaks Sony might be ready to announce a new lineup of gaming headsets, according to a report from 91Mobiles based on information provided by OnLeaks. Rather than being specifically PlayStation-branded, like Sony’s Pulse headset, the three headsets will apparently be part of a new gaming hardware brand from Sony called “Inzone,” which could also include a pair of gaming displays.Leaked images show the three so-called H-series headsets with a similar white color scheme to the existing Pulse headset. The H3 is wired, and has a USB-C port with a physical volume dial. There’s a button marked “NC/AMB” shown in renders of the H3, which suggests it might support noise cancellation and have an ambient audio mode to allow players to hear what’s going... Continue reading…

The faster you turn the Philips Hue Tap dial switch the faster your lights brighten or dim. | Image: Signify Signify just announced a new Philips Hue Tap dial switch, portable Hue Go lamp, and fully customizable track lighting in a range of smart lighting updates today.The Hue Tap dial switch (€49/$49) is available in matte black or white and adjusts lights with a turn of the dial. The faster you turn it the faster your lights brighten or dim. It features four buttons than can control scenes in up to three rooms or zones in the home. The magnetic base allows the Tap dial to be used as a remote control.The Philips Hue Perifo track lighting is made of individual rails that let you choose the length of the track. It can be attached to the wall or ceiling, connected to internal wiring or a standard outlet, and be fitted with your choice of Hue... Continue reading…

A screenshot of Downdetector showing problems across numerous services. | Screenshot: Downdetector.com Cloudflare experienced an outage on Tuesday morning, according to its status page. Cloudflare’s technology powers numerous other sites and services across the internet, and the outage seemed to impact a range of different sites, including Discord, Shopify, Grindr, Fitbit, and Peleton, according to Downdetector. Reports of issues started at around 2:30AM ET. Cloudflare reported that it resolved the issue at 4:06AM ET.The issues were most problematic for users of Cloudflare’s own DNS lookup service. Multiple Verge staff members found they were unable to access any websites at all during the outage as a result of using Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. Thankfully, the fix here is simple: change your DNS configuration. I found that simply... Continue reading…

Image: Matt Kennedy / Lucasfilm Ltd. There’s a lot of big shared universes that should be easier to binge Continue reading…

Image: Aspyr Media Plenty of games have launched in an unfinished state, but it's rare to see a port of a game first released in 2004 be so buggy that people who buy it can’t actually finish it. On Twitter game developer Aspyr admitted it was aware that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II was currently impossible to finish when played on the Switch.Aspyr’s bread and butter is porting beloved games so you would think it would know better than to ship something so busted. KOTOR II launched on the Nintendo Switch June 8, 2022, and as fans have picked it up and begun to play they noted a bug made it impossible to get past a cut scene about midway through the game.As first seen by Kotaku, one fan replied to Aspyr’s official Twitter account asking if... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge There’s good news for people who find bad news about crypto to be good. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to buy an exchange-traded fund based on shorting Bitcoin. The financial firm ProShares will debut the first ETF to let you bet against Bitcoin, and it’s set to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange when the bell opens tomorrow, June 21, under the ticker BITI.The SEC previously approved a futures Bitcoin ETF, also from ProShares, in October. It debuted alongside some of the biggest growth Bitcoin has seen. Now, cryptocurrencies have been severely struggling, with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and even stablecoins all suffering major losses.What’s funny about the SEC’s approval of an ETF that can be used to short Bitcoin is that it has not... Continue reading…

The Chromecast with Google TV is one of the first devices to access this new feature. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge One of the big features that shipped with the Chromecast with Google TV in late-2020 was its namesake Google TV software and dashboard. Google’s latest attempt at putting its services in front of your eyeballs while watching TV was a launcher that put personalization and smart recommendations at the forefront, as long as you’re a one-person household, of course. Google TV only supported one user profile, and after later adding kid profiles so you don’t have to subject yourself to endless Baby Shark-adjacent recommendations, Google promised to support more profiles. After some long delays and a slow rollout, that feature is finally here.Google TV users should now be able to add multiple user profiles to their devices thanks to a... Continue reading…

Resident Evil 4 on the Quest store is discounted to $35.99. | Oculus Meta has kicked off a Summer Sale on Quest VR games, and there are over 60 titles on sale. It might be a good time to stock up on games for a Quest 2 headset, especially if you’ve been holding out on some popular ones like Resident Evil 4, Vader Immortal, or Superhot VR.While Meta has been testing out all kinds of new VR and mixed reality headsets, the Quest 2 remains the de facto VR headset for gaming outside of Steam and PlayStation, and the only viable standalone option on the market. Today’s sale is discounting some individual games and bundles by as much as 40 percent off, though sadly Resident Evil 4 is only discounted by 10 percent — knocking its price down to $35.99 from its usual $39.99. That’s not much, but it’s still the... Continue reading…

Columbia Pictures If at first you don’t succeed you can try again, and again, and again, and eventually you might find an audience. At least that’s what appears to have happened for Morbius. The abysmal vampire superhero film starring Jared Leto is finally number one somewhere.In a press release issued by Fandango, which acquired Vudu in 2020, the company says that Morbius was the number one title in terms of revenue on Vudu for the week of June 13th, 2022. Notably, that’s revenue, not actual streams. Vudu charges for rentals and purchases and Morbius is currently available to rent for $5.99 or purchase for $19.99.While Morbius was number one at the box office its first weekend, its second week saw a drop off of 74-percent. That’s the worst second... Continue reading…

Using tech called “Private Access Tokens.” | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge When iOS 16 comes out later this fall, you may notice that you don’t have to deal with as many annoying CAPTCHAs asking you to slide a puzzle piece or distinguish between a hill and a mountain. That’s because Apple’s introducing a feature for its iPhones and Macs called Automatic Verification, which let some sites know that you’re not a bot without you actually having to do anything (via MacRumors).Apple has worked with two major content delivery networks, Fastly and Cloudflare, to develop the system. When it launches with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, sites that use either of the services to defend against spam should be able to take advantage of the system and stop showing you so many CAPTCHAs. If you’re attentive to how many sites go... Continue reading…

Image: CBS In the final season of Star Trek: Picard a lot of long-loved characters are expected to make their big returns (and possibly goodbyes) to the Star Trek universe. Earlier this year it was announced that almost the entire original cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation was going to be showing up in season 3. Now showrunner Terry Matalas is teasing even more characters from TNG showing up.As first noticed by TrekCore, Matalas recently appeared on the Inglorious Treksperts podcast and had a lot to say about the final season of the show. Including teases about some as-yet-unannounced returns:

Last week, NASA revealed that one of JWST’s primary mirror segments, shown here, was damaged by a larger than expected micrometeoroid. | Image: NASA On June 8th, NASA revealed that its new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is now sporting a small dimple in one of its primary mirrors after getting pelted by a larger-than-expected micrometeoroid out in deep space. The news came as a bit of a shock since the impact happened just five months into the telescope’s space tenure — but such strikes are simply an inevitable aspect of space travel, and more thwacks are certainly on their way.Despite what its name implies, space isn’t exactly empty. Within our Solar System, tiny bits of space dust are zooming through the regions between our planets at whopping speeds that can reach up to tens of thousands of miles per hour. These micrometeoroids, no larger than a grain... Continue reading…

Photo by Amanda Stronza/Getty Images for SXSW Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who released a trove of internal documents and data from Facebook and testified in front of lawmakers about the social network’s behavior, is now looking to start a non-profit focused on holding companies like Meta accountable, according to a report from Politico.The organization, which Haugen wants to call Beyond the Screen, plans to focus on three main goals: educating lawyers who could potentially be going up against social media companies, incentivizing investors to look into how socially responsible a tech company is before giving it money, and giving regulators and researchers an inside look into how platforms work. Politico reports that Haugen is currently working with two other people on the... Continue reading…

Mark Zuckerberg tries on the Holocake 2 prototype. | Meta Reality Labs And none of them are shipping Continue reading…

Sewing patterns are meant to be trashed — or not Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge After announcing Telegram Premium earlier this month, the messaging app has finally rolled out the paid tier, which gives users access to extra features for $4.99 / month (via TechCrunch). All the features are outlined in a post on Telegram’s blog, with some of its bigger draws including faster downloads and a larger maximum file upload size of 4GB (rather than the standard 2GB).Premium subscribers will also get double the limits imposed on standard users. Instead of joining up to 500 channels, subscribers are capped at 1,000 channels. The same goes for other features on Telegram — subscribers can create 20 chat folders with 200 chats each, save up to 10 stickers, pin up to 10 chats, and add a total of four accounts to Telegram instead... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Friday, TikTok announced that it had started routing American users’ data to US-based servers owned by Oracle. But a timely report from BuzzFeed News calls into question what TikTok’s promise really delivers, claiming TikTok employees based in China have “repeatedly” accessed US users’ data over the course of at least several months.In recordings of internal staff meetings and presentations obtained by BuzzFeed News, TikTok employees reportedly mentioned having to ask their colleagues in China to access US user data, as they weren’t able to access this data themselves. One member of TikTok’s trust and safety department team allegedly stated that “Everything is seen in China,” while another employee said a China-based engineer “had... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is known for its close-knit — and sometimes secretive — company culture, but one wouldn’t suspect an actual cult running things behind the scenes. Well, one Google contractor claims that’s exactly the case, as detailed in this unusual report from The New York Times.Kevin Lloyd, a contractor hired to work as a video producer for Google Developer Studio (GDS), alleges at least 12 members of an obscure religious sect work for GDS and hold an inappropriate level of influence over the work environment. Lloyd claims he was wrongly fired for calling out the group’s behavior and has filed a lawsuit against Google and his contracting agency ASG for wrongful termination, retaliation, emotional distress, and failure to protect him against... Continue reading…

From left to right: pastel dream, purple camo, cotton candy blue, pink lemonade, and lavender swirl. When it comes to colorful controller designs, Xbox’s game has been on point for years. Ever since the Xbox One generation, Microsoft has released many fun variations of its controllers — including limited editions and the Xbox Design Lab — and this momentum has not slowed with the Xbox Series X / S consoles. Meanwhile, the third-party range of Xbox controllers is more expansive than ever, and brands like PowerA are hitting budget-friendly prices with slick new colorways of its own, like the recently released pastel range of the $37.99 PowerA Enhanced Wired Controller for Xbox and PC. Marshmallowy vibes for days. The controllers have smooth, satin finishes on the front, lightly textured backs, and glossy accents on the... Continue reading…

AppleCORE filed a petition to hold the vote in May. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Workers at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland have voted to unionize, with 65 yeses and 33 nos. Around 110 employees were eligible to vote in the election.The store is the first Apple retail location in the US to hold a union election, after organizers in Atlanta withdrew their petition to hold a union vote, which had been scheduled to take place in early May.Organizing at the Towson store has been done by a group of employees that called themselves AppleCORE (an acronym for Coalition of Organized Retail Employees). The workers have said they want to expand their rights, specifically asking for a say when it came to pay, hours, and safety. AppleCORE is associated with a larger, established union, the International... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge WhatsApp has rolled out several new features this past week, including the ability to mute people during group calls (via Android Central). This sanity-saving feature seems helpful not just for muting people who forget to do it themselves, but also if you’re in the same room as someone who’s also on the call and don’t want to hear an echo of what they say.While some conferencing apps, like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, let hosts mute all participants (or specific ones), they typically don’t offer a way for individual users to mute whoever they want during a call. This feature offers a new level of control that’s probably best saved for chaotic meetings that involve up to the maximum of eight people on video calls — or up to 32 on voice... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A group of US lawmakers has signed off on a letter to Google that urges the company to reevaluate its treatment of search results that direct users to anti-abortion crisis centers rather than legitimate clinics, as first reported by Reuters. Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) are leading the initiative, while several other Democratic lawmakers have signed the letter in support.The letter cites research published by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which focuses on Google search results in “trigger law states” — or the 13 states where abortion will become illegal if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Research indicates that 11 percent of Google searches in trigger law states for... Continue reading…

The 1979 classic returns with retractable landing gear Continue reading…

And this time, the ladies are in charge Continue reading…