The Verge

Would your company pay $1,000 for Twitter? Some won’t have to make that decision. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge It seems like some companies may not have to pay Twitter $1,000 a month for the privilege of retaining their verified status and checkmarks. Twitter is giving a free pass to the 500 advertisers that spend the most on its platform as well as the top 10,000 organizations by follower count, according to a report from The New York Times.The decision comes as Twitter is preparing to make major changes to the way verification works on Twitter. It’s said that it’ll start winding down the legacy verified program in April and announced plans for Twitter Verification for Organizations. The latter is meant to let companies that are willing to pay $1,000 a month keep their verification as well as denote specific accounts as “affiliated.”For... Continue reading…

Image: Sega Oh, Mario went missing once? Big deal — Sonic’s just been murdered!In a very sudden, very confusing surprise, Sega has shadow dropped a new Sonic the Hedgehog game for PC and Mac. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, as baffling as that sounds, is a free murder mystery game on Steam you can download and play right now. The point-and-click adventure puts you amid the Sonic cast on a murder mystery party aboard the Mirage Express to celebrate Amy Rose’s birthday, but — gasp — the game turns out to be real as Sonic is found keeled over, dead on the floor. Image: Sega Our beautiful blue boy? He ded. I’m no fan of silly April Fools’ gags, but I’m all for lighthearted and weird headcanon experiments. So credit to Sega... Continue reading…

A gardener facing water shortages checks his tomato plants in southern France in August 2022. | Image: PASCAL GUYOT/AFP via Getty Images New research challenges assumptions that the plant kingdom is silent. Turns out, plants make a lot of noise when they’re stressed.Other plants and animals might even be able to interpret those sounds. And the ability to listen in could even help humans get smarter about the way we grow our crops, especially in a world where climate change is increasingly stressing us all out.“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information,” Lilach Hadany, senior author of the paper and an evolutionary biologist and theoretician at Tel Aviv University, says in a press release.“Even in a quiet field, there are actually sounds that we don’t hear, and those sounds carry information.”Tomato and... Continue reading…

Google’s Pixel 6 Pro is on sale right now for just $469.99, a whopping $429 off the phone’s initial list price. | Image: Google Sure, if you want a good smartphone that won’t cost a fortune, you could preorder Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy A54, the successor to one of our favorite midrange phones. However, if you’re looking for additional RAM or a bigger display, you may want to check out the current deal on Google’s Pixel 6 Pro. Right now, the last-gen Android phone is on sale at Woot in an unlocked black configuration with 128GB of storage for $469.99. That’s a $429 discount and just $20 more than the starting price of Samsung’s forthcoming A54.Both phones boast an OLED display with a fast 120Hz refresh rate for smooth scrolling. The Pixel 6 Pro, however, offers a larger 6.7-inch screen as well as 12GB of RAM, which is double that of the base A54. The Pixel 6 Pro... Continue reading…

Illustration: Samar Haddad / The Verge Last year’s iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 releases came with a host of great new features — including sweet lock screen customization options, which Verge reporter Jay Peters called one of the biggest successes of 2022. But Apple is still not done with iOS 16; iterative releases have been handed out for testing through the company’s public beta program. Now, Apple has pushed its latest public betas — iOS 16.5 and iPadOS 16.5 — which introduce even more new features, like being able to ask Siri to start a screen recording.You can download the latest public beta releases today — at your own risk, naturally. Here’s how to install the beta software on your iPhone or iPad once it’s available for your device.Before we get started, a word of warning:... Continue reading…

Haein Jeong / The Verge I.What a difference four months can make.If you had asked in November how I thought AI systems were progressing, I might have shrugged. Sure, by then OpenAI had released DALL-E, and I found myself enthralled with the creative possibilities it presented. On the whole, though, after years watching the big platforms hype up artificial intelligence, few products on the market seemed to live up to the more grandiose visions that have been described for us over the years.Then OpenAI released ChatGPT, the chatbot that captivated the world with its generative possibilities. Microsoft’s GPT-powered Bing browser, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Bard followed in quick succession. AI-powered tools are quickly working their way into other... Continue reading…

Image: Nintendo / The Verge Kirby developers Shinya Kumazaki and Tatsuya Kamiyama talk about the various shapes of Kirby and what we can learn from them. Continue reading…

OpenAI is accused of “unlawful collection of personal data.” | Illustration: The Verge Italy’s national privacy regulator has ordered an effective ban of AI chatbot ChatGPT, accusing creators OpenAI of “unlawful collection of personal data.” It’s ordered OpenAI to stop collecting Italian users’ data immediately until it amends its data collection practices.The country’s Data Protection Authority, the GPDP, issued a press release this morning saying that the company lacks lawful justification for the collection of users’ personal information. The GPDP says that OpenAI also has no mechanism in place to stop underage users accessing the service, which “exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and self-awareness” (translation via Google).This isn’t the first time that Italy’s... Continue reading…

Virgin Orbit was notable for launching its LauncherOne rocket from midair using Cosmic Girl, a converted Boeing 747. | Image: Virgin Orbit Virgin Orbit, the satellite-launching subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, has announced that it will lay off 85 percent of its workforce and is ceasing operations “for the foreseeable future.” The company, which aimed to provide a more affordable option for launching small satellites into orbit, had been struggling to secure funding to stay afloat and compete with larger players in the private space industry like SpaceX and Blue Origin.The news comes two months after its most recent mission in Cornwall, UK failed due to a dislodged rocket fuel filter.Just 100 employees remain at Virgin Orbit, with 675 roles to be cut by April 3rdAccording to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Virgin Orbit... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google CEO Sundar Pichai has responded to criticism of the company’s experimental AI chatbot Bard, promising that Google will be upgrading Bard soon.“We clearly have more capable models,” Pichai said in an interview on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast. “Pretty soon, perhaps as this [podcast] goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week.”“In some ways I feel like we took a souped-up Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars.”Pichai noted that Bard is running on a “lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA,” an AI language model that... Continue reading…

Photo by Daniel Boczarski/WireImage The gaming industry has changed, and it doesn’t need E3 anymore. Continue reading…

Not the kind of statement you can take to the bank | Illustration by Hugo Herrera / The Verge Block, recently targeted by short sellers at Hindenburg Research, is still presumably exploring its legal options. It has, however, released a statement about common investor questions it would like to answer. Unfortunately, none of the questions it wants to answer are “How did you not notice you were issuing a cash card to an obviously fake Donald Trump?”There’s a lot in the Hindenburg report, which essentially accuses Block of falling down on the job of fraud prevention. To demonstrate the point, Hindenburg changed its accounts’ names to “Donald Trump” and “Jack Dorsey,” and they were still able to send and receive money. They even got a debit card under the name Donald Trump!

Geoff Keighley at The Game Awards 2019. He’ll be hosting his fourth Summer Game Fest in June. | Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images E3 2023 has been canceled, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have big summer gaming events to look forward to. We’re already aware of at least three things you should mark on your calendar, and it seems like there will be major news of some kind from each one.Here’s the 2023 summer gaming events that we’re currently aware of. Given that E3 is now officially not happening, it’s possible this list will grow if more companies want to make a splash in June.

It was inevitable that E3 would end this way. Even before the pandemic put a pause on in-person gatherings, the Electronic Entertainment Expo was already on life-support as the larger developers had already put distance between themselves and the event to focus on their own presentations on their own time. And though E3’s eventual cancellation was all but written in stone, I still feel a great sense of loss. Which is odd considering I’ve never been to E3.I’ve covered it remotely before. It was my first year of freelancing for a small video game wiki site that no longer exists and I was excited because this was, in my freelancer’s eyes, the big leagues. I was covering E-friggin’-3. This was event that I had dreamed of when I first... Continue reading…

Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Ford is raising the price of the F-150 Lightning for the fourth time — the base “Pro” trim has gone from $55,974 to $59,974, not including a $1,895 shipping charge. When the company announced the Lightning in May 2021, the starting price for the Pro was $39,974, $20,000 less than where it’s sitting now. Other models in the lineup, such as the Lariat and Platinum, are also getting price bumps.According to Automotive News, the Lariat trim has gone up $1,500 to $77,869, and the Platinum model is now $99,969, up by $1,200. (Those prices do include the shipping charge.) The slightly more attainable XLT trim is the only one that appears to be unaffected — its price rose to $63,474 in December and seems to have stayed there. Even that, though,... Continue reading…

A pipe installed as part of the Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project carries carbon dioxide captured from emissions on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. | Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images Keeping coal and gas power plants alive while purporting to tackle climate change will likely make electricity more expensive for consumers, a new analysis warns. Fossil fuel companies have been eager to deploy technologies that filter planet-heating carbon dioxide out of power plant emissions. But relying on the technology, called carbon capture and storage (CCS), is a risky venture and consumers are likely to bear the costs.The cost of electricity from power plants outfitted with carbon capture devices is at least 1.5 to 2 times more expensive than other alternatives, according to a new report from the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). It’s much more affordable to turn to renewable energy like... Continue reading…

Image: Getty Images E3 has been canceled. Gaming’s big summer show was set to return in person in Los Angeles for the first time since 2019, but it’s been called off after huge gaming companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Ubisoft all said they wouldn’t be participating in the event.E3 2023 was scheduled for June 13th through 16th with a mix of industry-focused days and days that would be open to the public. But in the lead-up to June, there had been some worrying signs that things might be rocky for E3’s revival.According to an email sent to employees and verified by IGN, E3 2023 “simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry.”In an email to The Verge,... Continue reading…

Image: Chris Welch / The Verge Netflix’s ad-supported tier now works with Apple TV set-top boxes, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The “Basic with Ads” tier comes at a more affordable $6.99 per month cost, but when it launched in November, people who subscribed to it couldn’t use it on their Apple TV. At the time, Netflix told 9to5Mac that the ads plan would work on Apple TV down the line, and now that support is here.If you want to watch content through the ad-supported plan, you’ll need to be on version 2.3.0 of the Netflix app for Apple TV. I tested the plan on my laptop when it first launched, and whatever you’re imagining Netflix with ads is like, you’re probably right. Personally, I’d recommend the no-ads plans, but if you want to save a few bucks, the ads... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has filed three lawsuits against groups that it claims were abusing its takedown system by filing thousands of illegitimate copyright complaints against other products in a bid to get people to buy their merchandise instead. In an announcement on Thursday, the company calls the lawsuits a “new offensive against bad actors.”According to the lawsuits (which you can read here, here, and here), the alleged bad actors didn’t just file fake complaints and then sit back and wait to see if they worked. Amazon says the parties also “created fake, disposable websites, with product images scraped from the Amazon store” and tried to use them as evidence that they were the legitimate copyright holders. There is a sort of dark humor here — it... Continue reading…

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. | Image: Paramount Plus A few months ago, we received the news that Star Trek: Discovery was being canceled and that season 5 would be its last one on Paramount Plus. I was worried. The official Star Trek convention was canceled at what felt like the last minute, the streaming wars are settling down, and media companies are seemingly less and less interested in investing large sums of money in new shows.I spent that day wondering if that was just the first in a string of bad news about new Star Trek.Then, today, we got the news that Paramount has officially ordered a Starfleet Academy series for its streaming service that’s executive produced by Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau (Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, The Magicians) and will start production in 2024.

Turns out the Framework Laptop 16’s Expansion Bay is designed to accommodate secondary batteries, too. | Image: Framework I may have changed my mind about buying a Framework Laptop 13 this year, but I’m not done being excited about the company’s products. Heck, I’m more enthusiastic than ever — because it looks like Framework is seriously planning to let us snap a second removable battery into a laptop.One week ago today, the modular laptop company announced a 16-inch notebook that promises to let you swap out its entire butt for one that fits a discrete graphics chip, extra fans, or a pair of SSDs — and / or swap out the Framework Laptop 16’s entire keyboard deck to add, say, a numpad or fancy LEDs or virtual piano keys. It promised more details later this year. Image: Framework Piano keys, DJ controls, a wireless charging pad,... Continue reading…

Image: Naughty Dog The Last of Us Part I on PC hasn’t had a smooth launch. PC players have reported crashes, performance issues, and plenty of weird visual glitches. Now, Sony-owned developer Naughty Dog has started issuing bug fixes to try and fix some of the widespread problems and investigate other bugs that are affecting PC players.A new patch arrived on Steam and the Epic Games Store last night, which includes fixes for “several performance & hitch related issues impacting some users.” It’s not clear exactly what has been fixed, and for some players, it was only a 36MB patch on Steam.Naughty Dog has enabled extra crash diagnostic information, though. It’s designed to help the developer investigate crashes related to shader building and “other common... Continue reading…

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge BuzzFeed has taken its next step into AI-written content and started publishing AI-generated travel guides, as reported by Futurism. The publisher’s first AI-generated articles were ad-lib quizzes that were largely innocuous, but the travel guides appear to be a more brazen play to attract search traffic about different destinations.You can see the full list of travel articles from BuzzFeed’s “Buzzy” AI tool right here. Right now, there are 44 posts covering destinations like Morocco, Stockholm, and Cape May, New Jersey. The articles are “written with the help of Buzzy the Robot (aka our Creative AI Assistant) but powered by human ideas,” BuzzFeed says on Buzzy’s profile. The top of each story I’ve seen includes a line noting that an... Continue reading…

Image: Victoria Song / The Verge Starting on May 1st, OverDrive app users who still use it to digitally access a library’s collection will need to upgrade to Libby, a newer app from the same company that also lets you rent library ebooks for free.OverDrive’s digital platform started in 2002 and continued to operate separately even after Libby launched in 2017. OverDrive is often accessed via a library’s own OverDrive website instance, but the app effectively has the same purpose of distributing publisher books digitally for free, just like Libby.The OverDrive app was removed from the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store as of February 23rd, 2022. The company said it started displaying in-app discontinuation messages in July.Some aspects of the legacy... Continue reading…

Ring’s flagship video doorbell has a lot to offer, including a sleek design and a great field of view. | Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge In case you needed a reminder, you no longer have to shell out for an all-in-one security system just to monitor what’s happening at your front door. A competent video doorbell like the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 will often suffice while saving you a small fortune, especially since Ring’s flagship model is on sale right now at Wellbots for $174.30 (about $76 off) when you enter promo code RINGVERGE75 at checkout.The Pro 2 is easily the best wired video doorbell you can buy — and for good reason. The top-of-the-line device offers quick notifications and shoots crisp 1536 x 1536-pixel square video, allowing you to easily keep tabs on your front porch. It also features great motion detection and support for Amazon Alexa along with a solid... Continue reading…

Waymo’s minivans at its Arizona depot in 2018. | Image: Waymo Waymo’s Chrysler Pacificas are heading off into the sunset.On Thursday, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle operator announced it was phasing out the plug-in hybrid minivans it had been using for the last seven years. Instead, Waymo will rely on the all-electric Jaguar I-Pace as a platform for the fifth generation of its “Waymo Driver,” which is the branding the company uses to describe its autonomous driving hardware and software stack that enable its vehicles to drive without a person behind the steering wheel.Waymo’s Chrysler Pacificas are heading off into the sunset“For many, hailing a fully autonomous ride with Waymo may be the easiest way to access an EV,” the company said in a blog post. “Our growing ride-hailing service not... Continue reading…

Michael Cera at the premiere of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. | Image: Kevin Winter/Getty Images Sex Bob-Omb is getting back together. Netflix has not only confirmed that it’s working on an anime series based on Scott Pilgrim but also revealed that the cast from the live-action Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is coming back.That includes Michael Cera in the titular role, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona, Kieran Culkin as Wallace Wells, Anna Kendrick as Stacey Pilgrim, Brie Larson as Envy Adams, Alison Pill as Kim Pine, Aubrey Plaza as Julie Powers, Johnny Simmons as young Neil, Mark Webber as Stephen Stills, Ellen Wong as Knives Chau, and the League of Evil Exes played by Satya Bhabha, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, Jason Schwartzman, and Mae Whitman.Anime studio Science Saru will be helming the revival, and Bryan Lee O’Malley, who... Continue reading…

ADT Self Setup is a new DIY smart home system that can integrate with Google Home devices and the Google Home app. | Image: ADT Three years after Google invested $450 million in home security company ADT, the two companies finally have an integrated offering for customers looking for a DIY smart security setup. ADT’s Self Setup system, which launched last month, will now integrate with Google Nest devices — including its video doorbell and indoor and outdoor cameras.While ADT has offered Google’s smart home devices as part of its professionally-installed packages since shortly after the investment, this is the first time the two companies have offered a complete software security integration for a DIY product.Now ADT’s sensors and Google’s cameras can be controlled directly in the Google Home app or on a Google Nest Hub, as well as through ADT’s app. Plus,... Continue reading…

The Gen 3 had a rocky launch, but after a year of testing, it’s easy to see the hype behind this buzzy smart ring. Continue reading…

Arc’s mobile app doesn’t do too much yet, but it’s already fast and simple and useful. | Image: Arc/David Pierce When the team at The Browser Company set out at the beginning of this year to build a mobile web browser, CEO Josh Miller made a rule: we are not allowed to build a default mobile browser. Building another Safari felt like a waste of time because, well, Safari exists. Because of the way Apple locks down browser development, pretty much every other browser on iOS is just another Safari. Besides, The Browser Company isn’t trying to build another web browser — it’s trying to build “the internet computer,” an operating system for the internet that changes the way we interact with apps and content online.Instead of a browser, the team set out to do one thing and one thing only: bring users’ Arc sidebars to mobile phones. The sidebar is the... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge An artificial intelligence-focused tech ethics group has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate OpenAI for violating consumer protection rules, arguing that the organization’s rollout of AI text generation tools has been “biased, deceptive, and a risk to public safety.”The Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) filed its complaint today following the publication of a high-profile open letter calling for a pause on large generative AI experiments. CAIDP president Marc Rotenberg was one of the letter’s signatories, alongside a number of AI researchers and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk. Similar to that letter, the complaint calls to slow down the development of generative AI models and implement stricter government oversight.T... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Roku plans to lay off an additional 200 employees, the company announced today in an 8-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a little over four months after announcing a previous round of 200 layoffs last November. While the first round affected its US workforce specifically, today’s filing doesn’t specify where the affected workers are based.The layoffs are expected to impact around 6 percent of Roku’s workforce, and are part of a restructuring plan to “lower the company’s year-over-year operating expense growth and prioritize projects that the company believes will have a higher return on investment.” The restructuring changes are expected to mostly be completed by the end of the second quarter of this year.R... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has formally announced its revamped API tiers a month and a half after new CEO Elon Musk promised a big shake up of the system. In a thread, the company’s official developer account listed three tiers — free, basic, and enterprise — and provided some details on their prices and read and write limits. It also linked to signup pages, which offer links to get started with the first two tiers, and to express an interest in the third.The company says older tiers will be depreciated “over the next 30 days.” Here’s a short summary of the three replacements (which can also be found on Twitter’s website):

Jimi Hendrix with a Marshall amp in 1967. | Image: JJs / Alamy Stock Photo Marshall Amplification, the 60-year-old company that’s produced iconic guitar amps used by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Slash, and Kurt Cobain, is being acquired by Zound Industries, the Swedish company that’s previously licensed the Marshall brand for its headphones and speakers. Exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the resulting company will be the privately owned Marshall Group. The Marshall family will serve as its largest shareholder with a 24 percent stake.Jeremy de Maillard, who currently serves as Zound’s CEO and who will be CEO of Marshall Group going forward, said in an interview with The Verge that the deal is as much about acquiring Marshall’s engineering expertise as it is about acquiring the brand name.... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is working on a feature that would let you use your iPhone to control games on your TV, according a new report from Bloomberg and code shared by MacRumors contributing writer Steve Moser. Netflix recently said that it wants to make its games “playable on every Netflix device that you have,” and being able to use your iPhone to play TV games could be one way to help with that mission.According to Moser, the iOS app apparently contains code that says: “A game on your TV needs a controller to play. Do you want to use this phone as a game controller?”

Illustration: The Verge It was inevitable, but Microsoft has confirmed that more ads are coming to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot. Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi said in a blog on Wednesday that the company is “exploring placing ads in the chat experience,” and when we asked for more details, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the change.“Yes, ads will show in the new Bing, specifically in chat (as they do in the traditional search results),” said Caitlin Roulston, a director of communications at Microsoft, says in a statement to The Verge. “Since the new Bing is in preview, there may be some variability in how it’s currently showing up. We’re still exploring new opportunities for ad experiences and will share more over time.”Microsoft has been... Continue reading…