The Verge

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…

Epic’s Deserted: Domination has nearly 3,000 players as of this writing. | Image: Epic Games Fortnite’s Discover tab, which lets you pick from Epic Games-made modes like Battle Royale or experiences from non-Epic creators, now show how many players are currently participating in any given experience. The change was officially rolled out on Wednesday, and it could be an important tool for creators to benchmark their work against Epic’s official modes.You can see the player counts in the game’s Discover tab, which represent the global number of players in-match at any given time, Epic spokesperson Dan Walsh tells The Verge. Based on what I saw, it’s overwhelmingly clear that Epic’s Battle Royale and Zero Build (the no-building Battle Royale introduced last year) are dramatically more popular than any experiences made by non-Epic... Continue reading…

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) came out in opposition to a bipartisan effort to ban TikTok, condemning Republicans and Democrats for a move he said could chill First Amendment-protected speech.“I hope saner minds will reflect on which is more dangerous: videos of teenagers dancing, or the precedent of the US government banning speech,” Paul said on the Senate floor Wednesday.Paul’s remarks followed an attempt by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) to ban TikTok nationwide on the Senate floor Wednesday. Earlier this year, Hawley, a long-time China hawk, introduced the No TikTok on United States Devices Act, a bill that would direct the president to ban use of the app on US devices, including those belonging to consumers.“I hope saner minds... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Electronic Arts is laying off around 6 percent of its workforce, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. In a blog post published on Wednesday, EA CEO Andrew Wilson says the job cuts come as the game publisher looks to reevaluate its investment strategy and reduce office space.“As we drive greater focus across our portfolio, we are moving away from projects that do not contribute to our strategy, reviewing our real estate footprint, and restructuring some of our teams,” Wilson states. “These decisions are expected to impact approximately six percent of our company’s workforce.”While Wilson doesn’t mention the specific departments that the layoffs are affecting, he says that it will provide “opportunities for our colleagues to... Continue reading…

Image: David Becker/Getty Images for Nightclub & Bar Media Group Seattle is making sure that some gig workers will be guaranteed rights that have generally only been available to traditional employees. This week, the city’s council passed legislation that requires app-based delivery companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart to provide paid sick time off to workers.Food delivery workers in Seattle have had these protections for a while — the city council passed the Gig Worker Paid Sick and Safe Time Ordinance in July 2020. However, that law was temporary and was set to expire at the end of April (some parts of it had already gone out of effect in November 2022 when Seattle and Washington as a whole ended their covid states of emergency). The new law, called the App-Based Worker Paid Sick and... Continue reading…

Image: Cliff Welch/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images The Yankee Entertainment and Sports (YES) Network, a regional channel that broadcasts games from the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, and the New York Liberty, is introducing a direct subscription so that you don’t need to have cable to watch the channel.The new direct subscription will be sold in monthly and annual packages of $24.99 per month, or $239.99 per year. You can subscribe via the YES app, which is available in a browser or through various smart TV app ecosystems. And if you want to save a few bucks, YES Network is offering introductory deals of $19.99 per month (a price that you can keep through the end of 2023) and $199.99 if you subscribe by April 30th.You’ll have to be in YES Network’s “regional coverage territory” to... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Disney has laid off Marvel Entertainment chair Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter as part of its layoffs affecting 7,000 workers, according to a report from The New York Times. Perlmutter, who’s been a Marvel executive since 1993 and joined Disney when Marvel was acquired in 2009, is a divisive figure.Perlmutter helmed Marvel during its sale to Disney and later served as an executive chair. During his 30-year tenure at Marvel, Perlmutter has been blamed for holding back the inclusion of women and people of color in the studio’s films. In a set of leaked emails from 2014, Perlmutter argued that past superhero movies with a female lead flopped, while a memoir from Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed that he had to get past Perlmutter’s “roadblocks” when... Continue reading…

When my six-year-old’s teacher told us we had to buy her a wired headset for school, I must have spent an entire hour doomscrolling Amazon reviews. Normal headsets wouldn’t fit, and every option for younger kids was from an alphabet soup brand of dubious quality — they felt like so much of a gamble that we eventually just went with one of the cheapest options.Logitech’s new Zone Learn would have been an instabuy for me. Not only does the $40 rotating boom mic headset come from a name brand but it also actually looks thoughtfully designed — minus one feature, perhaps.It’s flexible, adjustable, gives you the choice of over-ear ear cups or on-ear ear pads (in case your kid needs more or less isolation or gets claustrophobic or sweaty)... Continue reading…

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. | Image: Spike Chunsoft While detective stories are a mainstay in the worlds of film, television, and literature, they’re comparatively niche when it comes to video games. And with a few notable exceptions, the most beloved detective games tend to be visual novels. Kazutaka Kodaka loves detective stories and is best known for the dark adventure series Danganronpa. But for his studio’s next project, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, he decided to take things in a slightly different direction. “Mystery games tend to be dull because it’s mostly reading text,” Kodaka says. “But for this we created a world where you can solve various kinds of mysteries and roam around freely.”Rain Code is described as a “lucid-noir” detective game. It takes place in a sort of... Continue reading…

Image: Apple Apple has announced that its Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC, will begin on June 5th. The full event will run from June 5th through June 9th in an online format, but like last year, there will be an in-person experience at Apple Park on the first day of the show. Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, says this year’s WWDC is going to be Apple’s “biggest and most exciting yet.”Traditionally, Apple uses the show to share details on the next versions of its operating systems, such as iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and (sometimes) tvOS. Last year, the company used the event’s keynote to announce iOS 16’s customizable lock screens, its Home app refresh, Stage Manager, the M2 chip, and more.There are... Continue reading…

Image: Square Enix I’m one of the handful of people who actually enjoyed Forspoken. Despite its flaws (and yeah, my glowing review aside, it is a flawed game) I saw a solid story with interesting characters and a unique combat and traversal system that was genuinely fun to play. So the announcement of new story DLC for the game has me pleased that I’ll have another opportunity to hardcore parkour my way through Athia.Spoilers for Forspoken to follow.In Tanta We Trust is set to take place 25 years before the events of Forspoken and will feature Frey venturing into the past to team up with her mother during a great battle. One of my biggest complaints about Forspoken is that Frey didn’t get enough time to process the revelation of who her mother was and... Continue reading…

Image: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images Executive producer Zoe Bell explains how the paper is keeping the phenomenon going more than a year after acquiring it. Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Alexa now has the ability to let T-Mobile subscribers make and receive phone calls on dedicated devices hands-free. The new feature comes in the form of an Alexa skill, which can link your T-Mobile service directly to your Alexa Account. The new feature joins the other big US carriers AT&T and Verizon in enabling Alexa to handle phone calls.”This is completely free for T-Mobile customers and it’s fully available to all Alexa customers today,” wrote T-Mobile spokesperson Trang Nguyen in an email to The Verge. In comparison, Verizon still charges you $5 per month to use its Alexa skill.You can enable the new feature by opening your Alexa app and then going to More > Settings > Communication. Then, under accounts, select T-Mobile and... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google’s making it easier to find out more information about the advertisers behind the ads you see across search, YouTube, and the other sites where Google shows ads. The search giant has announced that it’s launching an Ads Transparency Center, a “searchable hub” containing a library of ads from verified advertisers.Some of the information available in the hub includes a list of the ads an advertiser has shown and which regions they appeared in as well as the last date and format in which it ran an ad.You can search for specific ads by heading to the Transparency Center directly or by selecting the three-dots menu that appears beside an ad you want more information about. From there, click the option that says “see more ads this... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter replies are back to normal — well, on the web. Earlier this week, tweet replies stopped showing who the user was actually replying to, which made them look like vague subtweets or random missives with no context. But on Wednesday morning, tweets once again included details about who is replying to whom on the web.It’s unclear if the original shift was a bug or an intentional change. When we asked Twitter to clarify, its press email auto-replied with a poop emoji. Personally, I think it was just a bug given that tweet embeds and tweets on TweetDeck still showed reply information even when tweets on Twitter.com did not. Unfortunately, on iOS, replies still don’t show who people are replying to, but fingers crossed that changes... Continue reading…

Image: Lamborghini Revuelto (pronounced rey-WEL-to) either means ‘unruly’ or refers to a dish of creamy scrambled eggs. Either way, it will replace the Aventador as Lamborghini’s flagship vehicle. Continue reading…

Memory-erasing technology but for your inbox. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Have you looked at your email inbox lately? Here’s a suggestion: don’t. I can tell you what it looks like without even seeing it. For starters, there’s a big red badge on your email app icon with a five-digit number that you ignore a hundred times a day. It’s stuffed full of promotional emails, spam, newsletters you don’t read, and a sprinkling of bills and credit card notices. Maybe there are a couple of legitimate messages from acquaintances or your parenting group buried in there somewhere, but the prospect of locating and responding to them is too daunting, so you ignore them forever.Your email inbox, like mine, is a wasteland. If there’s anything useful in there, it’s under a pile of digital garbage so thick most of us would... Continue reading…

The Sony ZV-E1 is pretty dang small for a full-frame camera. We know what most vlogs and YouTube videos look like in this, our Age of Content. So does Sony, and it’s starting to make cameras built to spit out exactly the style of video you’re looking to mimic.The new Sony ZV-E1 is a compact mirrorless full-frame system camera that’s dedicated to content creators and aimed squarely at vloggers. It’s the new flagship offering of Sony’s established ZV line of vlog-centric cameras, taking a similar 12-megapixel backside-illuminated full-frame sensor as the pro-focused FX3 and mixing in the A7R V’s AI autofocus smarts to reduce the friction in making high-quality video content.My colleague Becca Farsace spent a week with the camera and tested many of its vlog-centric automated features for you to... Continue reading…

The Verge We’ve all got to eat, and unless you’re the type of person who lives on instant meals and takeout, you probably need to cook as well. Most of The Verge’s staff not only cook but enjoy cooking, so we asked them to tell us what type of kitchen tools they are using these days.We got a wide variety of answers — and at least one debate. We have recommendations for instant thermometers, rice cookers, and toaster ovens as well as a back-and-forth about the best way to grind your coffee beans, and more.So check out how our writers and editors hone their foodie skills, and if you like, let us know in the comments what your favorite kitchen tool is. (And if you’re really into this kind of thing, feel free to check out last year’s favorite... Continue reading…

Image: Insta360 Insta360 is getting into the smartphone gimbal market with a device that aims to make it easier to film slick, stabilized, and well-framed video with your smartphone’s camera. The Insta360 Flow is a $159.99 gimbal with three-axis stabilization that’s available starting today across the US, Europe, and Japan.The obvious competitor for the Flow is DJI’s $159 Osmo Mobile 6 lineup of smartphone gimbals. And on paper at least, Insta360 has made a decent effort to match DJI’s features spec for spec. DJI includes a tripod in the box with the Osmo Mobile 6, so Insta360 has built one into the Flow. DJI has its ActiveTrack 5.0 automatic subject tracking feature; Insta360 has Deep Track 3.0. The Flow even has a built-in 215mm (8.5-inch) selfie... Continue reading…

Day One is a great app. It also asks you to trust it in a big way. | Image: Day One I have written in my journal 86 days in a row. It was my New Year’s resolution to actually commit to keeping a diary of my days, and every day since January 2nd, I’ve sat down and done so. This is the longest I’ve ever kept a journal — and almost certainly the longest I’ve ever stuck to a resolution of any kind. I’m probably more proud of myself than I should be.I’ve been using the Day One app, which is the giant of the digital journal space. Day One works on practically every platform, is fast and simple, and lets me write text as well as save photos, audio, and links into my journal. It’s a great app!But I had this moment, about a month into pouring my heart and soul (and hundreds of pictures of my newborn son) into Day One, where I... Continue reading…

Image: Naughty Dog I was expecting to write about how The Last of Us Part I arriving on PC is the latest example of a great PC port of a Sony PlayStation title. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The Last of Us Part I arrived on PC yesterday and players aren’t happy. Out of more than 9,000 reviews in the Steam store, 67 percent are negative.PC players are reporting issues that range from random crashes and stuttering, all the way up to long shader compilation times and characters randomly becoming dripping wet in cut scenes. The game also appears to be poorly optimized, taking up large amounts of VRAM on systems and dropping frames. I’ve personally experienced crashes and random frame rate drops on my own test system, which is a top-end gaming PC... Continue reading…

Photo by VALERIE MACON/AFP via Getty Images Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has lent his voice to a Ukrainian air raid app to warn citizens of incoming attacks during the ongoing conflict with Russia. “Attention. Air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter,” says Hamill over Air Alert, an app linked to Ukraine’s air defense system. When the threat has passed, Hamill signs off with “The alert is over. May the Force be with you.”Invoking his beloved Luke Skywalker character, some of the lines contain recognizable quotes from the Star Wars franchise like “Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.” You can hear a few lines in the following video starting around 56 seconds in:

London Underground advising people not to travel in record-breaking heat on July 19th, 2022. | Image: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images Google plans to roll out new alerts in search for extreme heat events, the company announced in a blog post today. Eventually, users should be able to find important information about extreme temperatures in their area when they search relevant terms like “heatwave.”The alert will bring up information like when a heatwave is forecast to start and end in an area, local news on the event, and recommended actions to stay safe. The feature is expected to be available in the US and “a number of countries” including parts of Europe in the second half of the year, according to Hema Budaraju, senior director of product for health and social impact at Google search.“We feel a great sense of responsibility as we continue to scale this work... Continue reading…

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images A number of well-known AI researchers — and Elon Musk — have signed an open letter calling on AI labs around the world to pause development of large-scale AI systems, citing fears over the “profound risks to society and humanity” they claim this software poses.The letter, published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, notes that AI labs are currently locked in an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy machine learning systems “that no one — not even their creators — can understand, predict, or reliably control.”“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge The Communications Workers of America union is alleging that Apple fired five workers in Kansas City, and disciplined another in Texas, in retaliation for organizing. The union has also accused the company of interrogating employees, promising those employees better working conditions if they don’t support the union, and threatening them with worse conditions if they do.A press release from the CWA quotes D’lite Xiong, one of the workers who was fired:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This article was originally published in June 2022. We’re reviving it today since Apple has finally gone through with its plans to launch the service.Apple is getting into the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) business with its new Pay Later service built into Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. While Apple bills the service as “designed with users’ financial health in mind,” BNPL is a practice that has come under scrutiny by government regulators as something that could potentially harm customers.Apple’s Pay Later service, which has been in the works since at least last year, lets users make a purchase with Apple Pay and then pay it back in four equal installments over the course of six weeks. There’s no interest on these installments, but it... Continue reading…

Image: Tesla The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is currently investigating (pdf) two separate non-crash-related seatbelt failures that occurred in newer Tesla Model X vehicles (via NBC News).NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) notes two complaints from Model X owners saying their front safety belts failed to stay connected to the seat belt anchor pretensioner. Both owners reported that the separation occurred while driving their 2022 and 2023 model-year Model X SUVs. The investigators write that “both vehicles were delivered to the owners with insufficiently connected anchor linkages.”NHTSA first opened the investigation on March 24th and says up to 50,000 or so Model X vehicles could be affected by the issue.... Continue reading…

Photo by Tim Stevens for The Verge Lucid, the EV startup behind the Air sedan that competes with the Tesla Model S, has announced that it’s laying off around 1,300 employees, or 18 percent of its workforce, within the next few months. According to an email from CEO Peter Rawlinson, which was attached to a regulatory filing, the cuts will affect employees and contractors “in nearly every organization and level, including executives.”Rawlinson says employees will hear more about the layoffs over the next three days, and the filing says the restructuring should be complete “by the end of the second quarter of 2023.” The email says that employees who are let go will receive “career resources, Lucid-paid healthcare coverage continuation, and acceleration of equity,” and the... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google is adding a new carousel in search results to help you see different perspectives on certain search topics. The feature, called “Perspectives,” is a new box showing “insights from a range of journalists, experts, and other relevant voices” that will appear under the “Top Stories” box in results.In a blog post, the company shared a GIF of what the box looks like for perspectives on this year’s Oscars. It includes tweets from Mark Hamill and Jamie Lee Curtis as well as a few articles. It looks fine, but I’m annoyed that it will be yet another thing cluttering up Google’s search results. (I may just be nostalgic for the good old days.) GIF: Google The perspectives, in this instance, are fairly inoffensive. But... Continue reading…

Image: Lloyd Fox/Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Adnan Syed’s murder conviction has been reinstated just months after he was freed from prison, as reported earlier by the Associated Press and The Baltimore Sun. Syed, whose case was featured in the popular Serial podcast, was convicted of the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999 and spent over 20 years behind bars.The Appellate Court of Maryland ruled in favor of the victim’s family after they filed an appeal, claiming that they weren’t given the proper notice to attend the hearing that resulted in Syed’s release. The court ordered a new hearing with sufficient notice given to Lee’s brother, Young Lee. It will reexamine the question of overturning Syed’s conviction, which, for now, is back in force.“This court has the power... Continue reading…

Image: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.It’s a busy news day, so I won’t waste time: Adnan Syed’s murder conviction has been reinstated, NPR cancels some of its standalone podcasts, and Slate takes its podcasts to YouTube.NPR cuts result in the cancellation of four podcastsLast week, NPR enacted its deepest layoffs since the Great Recession in order to make up for a $30 million shortfall. Ten percent of the staff — more than 100 people — were laid off, and all but one job vacancy was removed from the network’s careers site. The cuts touched all sectors of the organization, including the business side and radio production, but podcasting appears to have been hardest hit.N... Continue reading…

Image: Kia Kia is ready to pull the wraps on its next big electric vehicle (emphasis on big): the EV9 three-row SUV. The EV9 will have a proper North American debut at the New York International Auto Show next week, but before it does, the automaker is rolling out a list of key specifications to whet our appetite.Kia revealed the production version of the EV9 earlier this month in South Korea, but in doing so, it left out a lot of crucial details. We’ve seen the interior with its swiveling second-row seats as well as the very Soul-like exterior design. Today, the company is filling in some of the gaps as well as outlining its strategy to dominate the full-size electric SUV segment, which it claims is totally up for grabs.Full-size three-row... Continue reading…

Titmouse’s 5 Second Night 2023 poster. | Image: Titmouse Animation studio Titmouse’s annual showcase of shortform stories returns this month with a new batch of original cartoons created during artists’ time off. Continue reading…

Image: Substack Substack is desperate, huh? That’s what I understand from their fundraising email, anyway. They’re now hitting up retail investors for millions of dollars after they failed to raise last year.After certain recent historical events, I have become skeptical of the term “financial inclusion,” a set of buzzwords for making financial services more available to people who are not stratospherically rich. Maybe my cynicism is because Facebook tried to launch a stablecoin for the “unbanked” that you nonetheless needed (at least, according to the now-scrapped plan) a credit card to use. Maybe it is because Robinhood made a big fuss about how many brand-new retail investors it brought onto its gambling platform. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of... Continue reading…

I’ve got an order ready for Saul A. Is there a Saul A here? | Image: Jeremy Moeller/Getty Images If you’ve received a cryptic notification from the Starbucks app, you’re not alone — dozens of people say they got a message reading “Hello test1 from seank” from the coffee app on Tuesday.It’s unclear how many people the notification went out to. Twitter is flooded with screenshots of it, with posts often tagging the official Starbucks account asking what’s going on. However, every single one I saw showed an iOS notification, so it’s possible Android users were spared Sean K’s greeting. So far, the company hasn’t responded to any of the reports or put out a statement about what’s going on. We’ve also reached out for comment and will let you know if we hear back.

A visitor to a ceremony celebrating the commissioning of a research plant has a bottle of e-fuel in his hand at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). | Image: Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images Luxury carmakers’ push for synthetic e-fuels has weakened the European Union’s plan to get internal combustion engines off the road in the future. After weeks of delay, the Council of the European Union adopted regulations today to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from new cars and vans by 2035. That would have amounted to an effective ban on cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) if not for a last-minute update that carves out an exemption for ICE cars that swap out gasoline for e-fuels.E-fuel is a synthetic alternative that can be made from air and water using electricity. While running on e-fuel instead of gasoline might reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it’s still costly and inefficient. And some experts worry that making... Continue reading…

Image: Spotify / The Verge Spotify has launched Niche Mixes, a new set of personalized playlists that combine familiar songs and new recommendations into weirdly specific categories. Niche Mixes is an expansion of the music platform’s existing Spotify Mixes playlist feature (such as Mood Mixes or Decades Mixes) that grants users more precision to shape their listening habits.Some examples provided by Spotify are fairly self-explanatory, like the Feel Good Morning Mix (full of songs with a positive vibe), and the ’80s Running Mix that provides a retro soundtrack for your workout. There’s also a new Night Time Mix for tunes you can “wind down and relax” to, and the Driving Singalong Mix for some personalized in-car karaoke.Personalized Spotify Mixes combine... Continue reading…