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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Meta held its 2022 games showcase this past week, lifting the curtain on several new virtual reality games in the works for the Quest 2 headset. We’ve got a roundup of the titles that we’re most excited about right here. In celebration of the event, Meta has slashed prices on several VR games that see discounts only on a few occasions each year. So, whether you just bought a Quest 2, or you just want to fill out your library a little more, check out these deals.I’ve highlighted a few deals that I think are particularly good:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The EU has agreed on another ambitious piece of legislation to police the online world.Early Saturday morning after hours of negotiations, the bloc agreed on the broad terms of the Digital Services Act, or DSA, which will force tech companies to take greater responsibility for content that appears on their platforms. New obligations include removing illegal content and goods more quickly, explaining to users and researchers how their algorithms work, and taking stricter action on the spread of misinformation. Companies face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover for non-compliance.“The DSA will upgrade the ground-rules for all online services in the EU,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a... Continue reading…

Some of the new armor customization options in Halo Infinite’s second season. | Image: 343 Industries Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries is targeting a “late August” launch for the game’s long-awaited network co-op campaign mode, the game’s head of creative Joseph Staten says in a new Halo Waypoint blog post. As part of a new roadmap included in the post, Staten also shared that 343 is targeting an open beta for Halo Infinite’s Forge mode in September.343 Industries announced months ahead of Halo Infinite’s December release that co-op and Forge mode wouldn’t be available at launch. The developer then said it was aiming to ship campaign co-op “with” season 2, and then pushed that target to “later” in season 2.Split-screen campaign co-op, which lets you play the campaign with your friends on the same TV, is even further away. Based... Continue reading…

This is Dorsey’s official image on Block’s “Leadership” website. | Image: Block Jack Dorsey’s new title at Block is not CEO, but Block Head. No, this is not a very belated April Fools’ joke. The company filed an 8-K with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announcing the change — and of course, the new title came into effect on 4/20.Despite the new title (which, in full, is “Block Head and Chairperson”), Dorsey’s job at Block, the company formerly known as Square, will ultimately remain the same: there will be “no changes in Mr. Dorsey’s roles and responsibilities, and he will continue to serve as principal executive officer of the Company.” Block’s bylaws also no longer require that the company to have an officer with the title of CEO and president, which seems to mean that anyone who succeeds Dorsey... Continue reading…

Are we surprised it’ll be called the Pixel Watch? Nah. | Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge After years of speculation, we finally know what Google’s first in-house smartwatch will be called. Surprising absolutely no one, a new trademark filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reveals it is... Pixel Watch.The filing (via 9to5 Google) is about as barebones as it gets. The description says the Pixel Watch name is “intended to cover the categories of smartwatches; cases adapted for holding smartwatches; wearable computers in the nature of smartwatches; smartwatch straps; smartwatch bands.” Further on in the filing, it’s noted that while the Pixel Watch name is not in current use, there is an intent to use it. Not to mention, Google recently changed its store to more prominently feature watches. Clearly, Google has... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twenty-one Raven Software QA employees have until May 20th to submit their ballots in a historic video game industry union vote. Today the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decreed that voting for the union would commence and that the voting unit would be composed of those 21 employees, against Activision Blizzard’s argument that the voting unit should be opened to all Raven employees.In a statement to The Verge, Activision Blizzard spokesperson Rich George said:

Photo by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images Twitter levied a new ban today on “misleading” advertisements “that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.”“We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis,” the company said in a blog post today.“Misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis”Its decisions about what’s legit content in regard to climate change will be guided by “authoritative sources,” it says, including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC has published a couple of landmark reports on the crisis over the past few months that break down what... Continue reading…

Florida’s governor has signed a bill stripping Disney of its special tax status in the state | Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a bill stripping the Walt Disney Company of its special tax status in the Orlando area. The move is widely viewed as retaliation against Disney for its criticism of the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, a position DeSantis took umbrage at.Disney CEO Bob Chapek apologized last month to employees who protested what they viewed as a failure by the company to support its LGBTQ community. Disney then issued a press release that said its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that.”DeSantis said Friday he was “just not comfortable having that type of... Continue reading…

A screenshot from Borderlands 3. | Image: Gearbox Software Gearbox Software added crossplay to Borderlands 3 last year, but Sony’s platforms didn’t support the feature at first. That will change soon, as the company announced at PAX East that full crossplay support — including with PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 — will be arriving sometime in the spring, GameSpot reports. When the feature is available, PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Stadia players will all be able to play the game with each other.Sony has been resistant to enabling crossplay on some games in the past, originally blocking support for it in titles like Fortnite and Rocket League before eventually coming around. However, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a Borderlands spinoff, launched in March with support for crossplay on all platforms, i... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two months ago, my best friend stayed with me and watched all of Emily in Paris on my Netflix account. I have spent the time since flitting past worthless recommendation after worthless recommendation because, while I enjoy a frothy dramedy, my taste is different than hers and Netflix has failed to grasp that.A “forget what you just saw” button on Netflix would fix this. But when you’re using the Netflix app on your phone, tablet, set-top box, TV, or even, if that’s a thing you do, your Facebook Portal, there is no button to forget what you have seen. There is just the ruin of your recommendations after a friend visits or your kid goes on a Cocomelon binge.But, as this tweet pointed out, there is actually a Forget button. Well okay,... Continue reading…

Image: Sony (WH-1000XM4, left), TechnikNews (WH-1000XM5, right) Sony’s WH-1000XM4 noise-canceling headphones have been one of the best options since they debuted in 2020, but it appears the company is gearing up to release the next generation. German tech news site TechnikNews has published some images and specs of the successor, seemingly called the WH-1000XM5 (via Gizmodo).The first thing you might notice is a sleek new design, particularly a thinner headband. The 1000XM3s and 1000XM4s were almost identical, but Sony could change the way things look for the new 1000XM5s.Instead of a shrouded arm that swivels, the arm is exposed, with a single contact point replacing the XM4’s larger folding hinge over the ear cups. That changes the design of the ear cups as well but suggests just a bit more of... Continue reading…

The rotating bezel on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3. | Dan Seifert / The Verge While we’re likely months away from seeing Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 lineup, a disturbing report is making its way around the smartwatch rumor mill. According to a SamMobile report, Samsung is considering ditching the Classic model — and possibly the physical rotating bezel along with it.To put it nicely, that is a stupid idea.It is not hyperbole to say that the physical rotating bezel is one of the most beloved features on Samsung smartwatches. It goes back all the way to when its smartwatches were under the “Gear” moniker. The bezel at that time actually looked like a gear — teeth and all. It was a clever design aesthetically, but it was also functional. Being able to rotate the bezel to scroll through widgets, screens, and apps is... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On April 17th, the decentralized finance (DeFi) project Beanstalk Farms was exploited for $182 million after an attacker mounted a lightning-fast hostile takeover, buying a controlling stake of tokens and immediately voting to send themself all of the funds.The incident sparked discussion around “governance attacks,” a way of manipulating blockchain projects that use decentralized governance structures by gaining enough voting rights to reshape the rules.In the wake of the attack, chat logs and video evidence show that the founders were warned about the risk of exactly this kind of attack, but they dismissed community members’ concerns.The Beanstalk exploit was made possible by another DeFi mechanism known as a “flash loan,” which... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Several years ago, I had to deal with a situation that may be familiar to a lot of people: I was slammed with a series of high medical bills that had been denied by the insurance company. The doctor was in network, but according to the insurance company, his bills were coded wrong. Or wait, his facilities weren’t in network or… well, you get the idea. It took over a year and many phone calls to iron out the issue — and I wouldn’t have gotten through it had I not been able to record each phone call I made with the insurance company and the various medical facilities involved.Today, it would be nearly impossible.Federal law in the US says that you can legally record a phone conversation, but only if you are taking part in that... Continue reading…

Amazon’s Smart Thermostat is down to just $47.99 today at Amazon. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge It’s Earth Day, so in honor of the occasion, we’re starting today’s roundup with an excellent deal on Amazon’s eco-friendly Smart Thermostat. Smart thermostats such as Amazon’s can reduce and, in some cases, track your energy consumption. And they’re also a great buy for bargain hunters given that they can lower your monthly energy bill.In honor of the holiday today, some retailers are discounting an array of smart thermostats, including Amazon’s budget-friendly option. Right now, you can buy the Smart Thermostat for $47.99 instead of $59.99 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Kohl’s, which is its lowest price to date. Plus, depending on where you live, you may be eligible for a rebate of up to $50 from your local energy provider.Despite its... Continue reading…

Twitter is testing a CC button for closed captions on videos. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter said on Friday it’s testing a new “CC” button to turn captions on and off on videos with captions available. The feature is rolling out to some users on iOS and will be coming “soon” to Android, the company says.As shown in a video tweeted by Twitter’s Support account, the button appears in the upper-right corner of a video attached to a tweet.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sony is aiming to launch its revamped PlayStation Plus tiers in the Americas on June 13th, the company announced Friday. Sony is targeting a launch date first in markets in Asia (with the exception of Japan) on May 23rd, followed by a Japan launch on June 1st, an Americas launch on June 13th, and a Europe launch on June 22nd.Sony first announced the new tiers in March, with the premium options offering perks like access to a collection of games to download or stream and the ability to play classic PlayStation, PS2, PS3, and PSP games. (Unfortunately, if you want to play the retro games, you’ll have to pay for the most expensive tier.) At the time of the original announcement, Sony had said that the tiers would be available first in the... Continue reading…

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Now that Apple has several models, there’s more to consider Continue reading…

Apple Cash debit cards may be switching from Discover to Visa. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple Cash, formerly known as Apple Pay Cash, may be transitioning from the Discover payments network to Visa, a new report from MacRumors suggests. Visa has a much larger global network than Discover, which might account for the move.Since its launch in 2017, Apple Pay Cash had a partnership with Green Dot Bank on Discover’s network, but in recent days, users have noticed that Apple Cash virtual cards now have a Visa logo on them. Apple Cash virtual cards live in users’ Apple Pay mobile wallets, and let them send peer-to-peer payments via iMessage. They function like virtual debit cards, and can be linked to a bank account or other debit card. Apple Card customers’ cash back earnings can be paid to Apple Cash accounts as well.Apple... Continue reading…

This is the JetDrive Lite 330 looks like popped out. | Image: Transcend SD card slots have returned to the MacBook Pro in their 2021 iteration, which means it was only a matter of time before we started seeing MacBook-tailored SD cards hit shelves again. Today, in gadgets we’ve seen before but recent events have elevated in relevance, Transcend has announced a new 1TB SD card for MacBooks: the JetDrive Lite 330. The idea is that you can pop this device into a MacBook Pro’s SD slot and it blends right in. It’s the right color so that it doesn’t disrupt the overall look, and it’s the right size so that it won’t add any additional bulk.The video below is pretty convincing:The device is currently listed for $249.99 on Amazon. So let’s do some quick math: Upgrading a MacBook Pro model from 1TB to 2TB of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is reportedly working on a feature that allows users to set a status, codenamed “Vibe.” The possible feature was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, a researcher and reverse engineer with a track record of spoiling upcoming app updates.Screenshots shared by Wong show a “Set a status” field above the tweet composer box. A dropdown list has five pre-set vibes, none of which sound that fun, including “shopping grocery” and “driving highway.” It’s unclear if statuses will be limited to presets or if users will be able to add custom updates beyond what Twitter creates.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel discusses the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.We’ve got some big news for The Vergecast today. David Pierce has returned to The Verge as editor-at-large and now rejoins The Vergecast to host the show with Nilay each week. We’ve got a lot of plans ahead for growing the show with David, so stay tuned for that.On today’s episode, David, Nilay, and Verge managing editor Alex Cranz discuss some change-ups in the streaming world this week: Netflix has lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade after contending with more rival services than ever before, and streaming service... Continue reading…

The Large Hadron Collider restarted after three years of upgrades. | CERN Two beams of protons zipped around the Large Hadron Collider on Friday, marking the return of the world’s largest particle accelerator after over three years on hiatus. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, spent the past three years doing maintenance work and making major upgrades to the system. Now, the group is preparing to start on a four-year stretch of data collection scientists hope will reveal new secrets of the universe.“It is going to be two to three times better, in terms of the ability for our experiment to detect, collect and analyze data,” Marcella Bona, a particle physicist from Queen Mary University of London, told BBC.This summer will mark the start of the third run of the LHC, referred to as Run 3.... Continue reading…

Glacier retreat in Greenland. | Image: Google This Earth Day, Google is dedicating its Doodle to how badly we’re messing up our beloved planet. It’s actually kind of a cool Doodle. Four different GIFs show time lapses of dramatic changes driven by climate change.From Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, you’ll see footage of bright corals losing their color under the stress of warmer waters. Corals are living creatures that get their color from algae in their tissues with which they have a symbiotic relationship. Under stress, including rising ocean temperatures, corals lose that algae in a depressing phenomenon called “bleaching.” GIF: Google / The Ocean Agency Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching on Lizard Island, Australia. The images were taken each month from... Continue reading…

Those squid kids finally have a release date. Nintendo has announced that Splatoon 3 will hit the Nintendo Switch on September 9th. The colorful shooter was previously pegged to launch sometime this summer.Like past entries in the series, Splatoon 3 is a four-on-four shooter that’s like a cross between paintball and Call of Duty where teams of humanoid creatures called Inklings and Octolings compete to paint a battlefield a particular color. The lack of violence and vibrant tone have helped differentiate the series from the glut of other competitive shooters. The new entry will introduce the typical new weapons and stages along with an improved co-op experience and what looks to be a much more in-depth single-player campaign.With the... Continue reading…

Nintendo You can’t keep a good Sonic game down. As Sonic fans flail about, overjoyed that Sonic Origins will be launching soon, some fans expressed dismay that the franchise’s blue-headed stepchild Sonic Spinball seems to have been forgotten in all these anniversary bundles and rereleases yet again. Nintendo heard those cries of injustice and is adding the “what if Sonic was a pinball?” game to the Sega Genesis library in the Switch Online Expansion Pack.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images A fart button? Continue reading…

Changing your default Android web browser or texting app is as easy as changing your wallpaper. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales Android provides you with countless ways to customize your phone, from the color and shape of your app icons to your preferred method of system navigation. That customizability extends to your default app for common tasks like making calls and texting. Maybe you’d prefer to use a web browser with more privacy features or swap Google Assistant out for Alexa. You’re free to download the app of your choice and set it as the default — it just takes a few steps.For reference, these are the types of apps to which you can assign new defaults:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Photography by Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images The city of Blagoveshchensk sits in the far east of Russia, some 3,500 miles from Moscow and further still from Kyiv. Across a river, the Chinese city of Heihe sprawls to the south, joined by the first Sino-Russian road bridge; beside the bridge, there’s little about the city to make the news.But the public affairs of the city are now laid bare for anyone willing to look in the form of 150GB of emails from the Blagoveshchensk City Administration published online by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets — just one of many data sets leaked to the organization since the invasion of Ukraine began.As the war in Ukraine approaches the 60-day mark, leaks from the country have been coming at an unprecedented rate. On April... Continue reading…

An example infotainment screen in the (not currently self-driving) Tesla Model 3. | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Drivers in the UK will effectively be allowed to watch TV while behind the wheel of a self-driving car, under new rules announced by the country’s Department for Transport. Although drivers are currently restricted from viewing “non-driving related content” on a “television-receiving apparatus,” this rule would be waived under specific circumstances once the proposals come into force. The new rules are set to be introduced into the UK’s Highway Code over the summer, according to BBC News.The ability to watch TV comes with some restrictions. A car will need to be driving itself at the time, and the driver must be ready to take back control of the vehicle if required. Importantly, drivers will only be allowed to view content “through the... Continue reading…

BrightDrop 258.85 miles in the jump seat of one of the world’s first all-electric delivery vans Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has launched a new limited experiment that will see it promote developers’ third-party safety tools natively on its service, TechCrunch reports. The test will initially focus on apps like Block Party, Bodyguard and Moderate, which can help block harassment and other toxic content on the platform.With this experiment, select users will see these services promoted with a new prompt when they mute or block another account on Twitter. It highlights apps featured in Twitter Toolbox, a recently launched initiative that currently promotes third-party Twitter tools in an online hub. “The Twitter Toolbox offers more solutions to improve your experience on Twitter,” the prompt reads, before listing a selection of services.The experiment... Continue reading…

A phone-sized field mixer. | Image: Teenage Engineering’s TX-6 overview video Teenage Engineering, the company behind ultra-stylish synthesizers, speakers, and PC cases, has released a new audio gadget: it’s called the TX-6, and it’s a tiny (in size, not price) field mixer absolutely festooned with knobs. In addition to letting you mix together sound from six stereo inputs and output them to a computer, speaker, or both, in true Teenage Engineering fashion, the TX-6 can also act as a basic synthesizer, drum sequencer, and USB-C audio interface.We gotta talk about those knobs first though. By default they act as controls for a three-band equalizer, letting you tweak the highs, mids, and lows for each input. But a peek at Teenage Engineering’s guide reveals the tons of other things you can do with them, from... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Earlier this week Netflix reported quarterly earnings results that showed its subscriber numbers dropping for the first time in a decade, but not every streamer is experiencing that kind of pullback. Even though AT&T has offloaded HBO and the rest of WarnerMedia to their new home with Discovery, it still had one more set of subscriber numbers to reveal with its own earnings report Thursday morning.The numbers showed HBO added nearly 13 million subscribers last year across both traditional HBO and HBO Max, including growth of three million in the last quarter. Now both services combine for 76.8 million subscribers worldwide, which is still dwarfed by Netflix’s 221.64 million subscribers and even the most recent Disney Plus count of 129.8... Continue reading…

Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images A former president of the United States has their pick of big problems to tackle once they leave office. Jimmy Carter worked on housing. Bill Clinton spent much of his time working to fight HIV and AIDS. Barack Obama, who has been out of office for six years, has so far led a fairly quiet post-presidency. But in recent weeks, he has begun drawing attention to an issue that advisers say has become increasingly important to him: disinformation, and the broader problems with our fractured information ecosystem.In the months after President Donald Trump was dislodged from office, what could feel at times like an all-consuming focus on disinformation in the tech and political press began to fade into the background. The shift is... Continue reading…

A picture of Valve’s official dock. | Image: Valve Valve has quietly updated the specs to its still-unreleased official dock for the Steam Deck handheld gaming PC, as reported by Review Geek. The Steam Deck tech specs page originally said the dock would have one USB-A 3.1 port, two USB-A 2.0 ports, and an Ethernet port for networking, but the page now says that all three USB-A ports will use the much faster 3.1 standard, and it now specifies that the Ethernet port will actually be a Gigabit Ethernet port.According to the Wayback Machine, Valve’s Steam Deck tech specs page listed the original specs as of February 12th, and the accompanying diagram of the dock pointed to an “Ethernet” port for networking. But by February 22nd, the specs were updated to list the three USB-A 3.1 ports. And b... Continue reading…

An activist from the Extinction Rebellion (XR) climate change group, wearing a mask depicting Jeff Bezos, takes part in a protest outside of Amazon’s headquarters in central London on November 26, 2021. | Photo by TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images A lot of companies talk green this time of year — here’s what to look for in their pledges Continue reading…

Image: Instagram A new test from Instagram could make it harder for you to see recent content in the app. Though you can now look up all sorts of recent Instagram posts centered around a particular hashtag, the test will only let you see the posts with the most likes or short videos called ‘Reels’ related to the hashtag. The company says this trial will mix “more recent and timely content” in the two groups, to see how people engage with it.When they were first introduced on Instagram, hashtags could be a fun way to highlight photo trends, but now they are mainly a way for users to get more visibility, and hence, more clicks and likes. According to Instagram, the “top posts” tab shows popular posts, while the “recent” tab shows content in the order it... Continue reading…

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge OnlyFans has “temporarily paused” Russian accounts and says it can no longer serve Russian creators. The company confirmed the change to Motherboard in a statement today.The subscription-based platform popularized by sex workers had previously allowed Russian creators to stay and continue to get paid despite economic sanctions. In February, Rolling Stone reported that Russian OnlyFans creators briefly lost access to their accounts with little warning. Shortly after, OnlyFans said it had restored access and that “accounts will have full functionalities as long as we continue to have payment methods to support them.”But, on Thursday, the company said it was taking steps to pause accounts receiving payments in Russia. In a statement to M... Continue reading…

Start lining up for the PlayStation 5 at Sony | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Update April 21st, 6:33PM ET: Sony has sold out of PS5 consoles for now.A year and a half since its release, the PlayStation 5 is still extremely difficult to get your hands on. Sony has been one of the most reliable retailers when it comes to console restocks, though it usually reserves them for invite-only restocks that you have to register in advance for. This is one of the rare moments where Sony is opening up a public queue, so if you’re still in the market for this rare console, either the disc-based PS5 for $499 or the $399 PS5 Digital Edition, just go ahead and queue up via its direct store to try your luck.You don’t have to refresh the landing page once you’ve arrived in the queue — just wait it out — but we do recommend that... Continue reading…

Image: Google With all the apps that we tend to have running on our phones, it’s a constant worry as to whether the battery will be able to make it through the day — and that’s not helped when apps misfire and run power-draining features in the background. According to 9to5Google, a recent bug in Google’s Messages app on Android phones left the camera running in the background — a great way to both heat up your phone and run down your battery.The Google Messages app allows you to easily take a photo directly from the app and attach it to a chat message. According to the article in 9to5Google, the camera app would occasionally keep running, even when you did not have it on screen. (This issue was also reported happening with a Pixel 6 Pro in a Reddit... Continue reading…

But Google’s own app can still record calls. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is changing its Play Store policy to clamp down on a workaround that call recording apps were using, potentially closing the final loophole that allowed these apps to exist (via NLL-Apps on Reddit). On May 11th, a rule clarifying that “the Accessibility API is not designed and cannot be requested for remote call audio recording” will go into effect, making it so that apps won’t be able to record audio from a call.As XDA points out, Google has been playing whack-a-mole with call recording methods after it removed the official API with Android 6. In an email to The Verge, Google spokesperson Dan Jackson said the reason for the change is that call recording was an inappropriate use of the accessibility API. “Only services that are... Continue reading…

Photo by AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Following a 23–16 Wednesday vote, Florida’s Senate passed SB 4-C, a bill designed to dismantle any and all of the state’s special tax districts that were created before 1968. Though there are over 1,800 different special tax districts in the state, given the GOP’s ongoing fight with The Walt Disney Corporation, the new bill reads very much like retaliation against the megacorporation for recently denouncing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.In a press conference earlier this week ahead of the Florida legislature’s special session, Governor Ron DeSantis urged his fellow Republicans to support a legislative move that would dissolve Florida’s special tax districts like the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the Disney-controlled governing... Continue reading…

Asus has quietly announced two additions to its Zenbook line that are all about the screens. The new AMD-powered Zenbook 13 S joins a limited, but slowly growing lineup of 13-inch OLED laptops for folks seeking the benefits of OLED technology for a consumer-accessible price. But Asus isn’t leaving Intel behind — the company has also unveiled a new Zenbook Pro 15 Flip OLED convertible powered by 12th-Gen Core processors and Arc GPUs.The Zenbook 13 S OLED doesn’t look too different from 13-inch Zenbooks we’ve seen before. It weighs 2.2 pounds and is just over half an inch thick. It’s available in some fun colors: Ponder Blue, Aqua Celadon, Refined White, and Vestige Beige. But the most interesting thing is that the word “Asus,” famously... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sony is reportedly working to bring advertisements to free-to-play PlayStation games, according to a report by Insider. The ads would appear in games and are meant to give game developers a way to monetize their work and encourage them to continue building free-to-play games.The in-game ads are expected to launch by the end of the year and would appear in inconspicuous places within the game, like billboards. Players could also get rewards for watching advertisements, and the ads would be sold through a private marketplace, Insider reports. Sources told Insider that Sony hasn’t yet decided if it would take a portion of ad revenue but is considering having developers and publishers pay for consumer data.Sony did not immediately respond... Continue reading…

Psyonix Carcinization describes the evolutionary process in which a crustacean will eventually and inevitably evolve into a crab. Battle royale-ification is this process happening in video games. Rocket League, the game with the simple-yet-elegant premise of “what if soccer was soccar,” will undergo battle royale-ification with its new game mode Knockout Bash.Starting on April 27th, Knockout Bash will pit eight players in a free-for-all to be the last car driving. Knockout Bash will feature the hallmarks of a typical battle royale mode: perma-death (in this case, instead of infinite respawns, players get three KOs before a game over) and an encroaching danger zone with an ever-shrinking battle arena.Rocket League will add new actions and... Continue reading…

A 3D recreation of the upcoming Sonos soundbar. | 3D product render by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Sonos is nearing the release of a new entry-level soundbar, and you’re looking at it. Codenamed “Fury” and officially known as model S36, the new device is yet another soundbar that will join the company’s lineup beneath the $449 Beam and flagship $899 Arc.It appears that Sonos is no longer willing to cede the lower-cost soundbar market to Vizio and other competitors, as I can reveal that the new product is expected to sell for around $249. That’s substantially less expensive than any Sonos soundbar to date. It’s currently penciled in for release just a few weeks from now on June 7th.I’ve seen genuine photos of the new soundbar, and The Verge has used them to create the 3D renders for this article. It’s not an exact match but more... Continue reading…

Slowly but surely, Lego is supersizing all the most iconic vehicles you’ve ever seen in brick form — like the Back to the Future DeLorean, the Space Shuttle, and, of course, its Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series, including the legendary 7,541-piece UCS Millennium Falcon and 6,785-piece UCS AT-AT Walker. Today, Luke’s scuffed-up X-34 Landspeeder is getting the treatment in time for Star Wars Day (“May the Fourth”), and the $199, 1,890-piece set certainly looks the part. GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge, video by Lego Below you’ll find the biggest images we could nab so you can zoom in and see the details for yourself — including a lovingly detailed, exclusive C-3PO minifig that’s got a proper half-silver,... Continue reading…

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has demanded that YouTuber Trevor Jacob turn over his pilot license after he posted a video called “I Crashed My Plane,” of a crash that the agency suggests was staged, as reported by The New York Times. In the video (which you can watch here), Jacob’s plane appears to have an engine malfunction, and he jumps out of it while wearing a parachute. In a letter, the regulator told Jacob that he “demonstrated a lack of care, judgment and responsibility by choosing to jump out of an aircraft” and said that Jacob “operated this flight to purposefully cause [the plane] to crash.”Jacob posted the video in December, and it already has more than 1.7 million views. Like several members of the flying... Continue reading…