The Verge

Image: Bluesky Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups temporarily" to try and resolve performance issues it's been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx of new users has been a problem.We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues," Bluesky wrote in a post. We'll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality. We're excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!" Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge An image of Bluesky's post. Bluesky's status page... Continue reading...

Image: The Verge On Thursday, various outlets reported on a June Reddit post from user potterharry97 saying that Steam would no longer be publishing games with AI-generated content. Later in the month, another game dev penned a similar post. Valve says that's not quite right.In a statement emailed to The Verge, Valve PR representative Kaci Boyle said the company's goal is not to discourage the use of [AI] on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies." She went on to say that the company's current review process takes into account current copyright law, and that while developers can use these AI technologies in their work... they can not infringe on existing copyrights."Boyle added that Steam... Continue reading...

Bill Gates has done many AMAs. | Photo by Saeed Adyani / Netflix The moderators of Reddit's IAmA community will no longer solicit and coordinate ask me anything (AMA) conversations with celebrities and high-profile individuals, they wrote in a post on Saturday.Reddit's AMAs featuring notable people have become an iconic aspect of the platform, giving regular users the chance to ask questions of people they may otherwise never have a chance to speak with. (Bill Gates has done 11 of them.) The AMAs are usually a fascinating mix of interesting perspective and personal anecdotes, even if the person being featured is usually doing some sort of self-promotion. And sometimes, the entertainment is reading how the AMAs go south.r/IAmA has more than 22 million subscribers, so the subreddit offers a... Continue reading...

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer who routinely digs into app code to expose unreleased features, tweeted early this morning that Meta's Twitter clone, Thread, had been released into the Google Play store. It appears as though that was a mistake, however, because the app is nowhere to be found now.Paluzzi included screenshots that showed off some of the UI elements, including the login screen, which lets users sign in with their Instagram accounts, and another screen with a list of their followed accounts from the image and video site, so they can choose who to follow on Threads. Check out the screenshots in this gallery:It's not surprising that Threads looks... a lot like Twitter. From the screenshots, a new post will show character... Continue reading...

The TSA will expand its facial recognition program to over 400 airports. | Image: Getty Images The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will expand its facial recognition program to around 430 US airports over the next several years following what it calls extremely promising" results in its pilot program, according to Fast Company. The agency reportedly said its program yielded 97% effective results across all demographics, including those with dark skin. The program is currently in use in 25 airports.As pointed out in Fast Company's story, a 97% effectiveness rate across more than two million airline passengers per day means that, for over 60,000 of those people, the biometrics won't work properly if it's used in every airport in the country.At the moment, the pilot program is officially voluntary. It uses 1:1... Continue reading...

Image: Square Enix / Blizzard / The Verge Even if you've never heard of Ralph Ineson, you've heard Ralph Ineson. Continue reading...

Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. | Image: Lucasfilm / Disney The newest Indiana Jones movie isn't trying to reinvent the classic Lucasfilm formula, but it is trying to make you think about what it really means to obsess about the past. Continue reading...

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge After a month of outrage, protests, and unrest from the community, Reddit has finally flipped the switch to shut down some third-party apps.Apollo, an iOS app that became a rallying point for the recent protests against Reddit's imminent API pricing, no longer loads any content from the platform. When I open it up, all I see is a spinning wheel. Developer Christian Selig confirmed to me that Reddit is the one that turned things off, not him: would have been nice to have been given a time," he says in an email to The Verge.

Photo by Sean Hollister Ever heard the urban legend about how the original Nintendo Game Boy survived a bomb? I have reason to believe that's not true. But until recently, the flagship Nintendo Store at New York City's Rockefeller Center housed an original Game Boy that, it claimed, was damaged in a bombing during Operation Desert Storm.We just confirmed with Nintendo New York that, after many years on display, the Gulf War Game Boy is no longer there. VideoGameArt&Tidbits reported the news; they say a worker told them it was returned to Nintendo's US headquarters in Washington state.It may have been sent back months ago: YouTuber Elliot Coll filmed a trip to the store in February where an off-camera voice says we had to send it back to headquarters for... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Many popular third-party Reddit apps will be shutting down on Friday because of the platform's forthcoming paid API, and fans of the apps are sending them off with heartfelt posts and memes.The Apollo for Reddit subreddit, for example, is filled with posts celebrating the app. So long and thanks for everything," said one post for an Apollo-themed version of the was I a good boy" meme. This morning, someone posted a Dawn of the Final Day" image. Even Carrot Weather seems to be mourning Apollo. Seriously, just scroll through them all.

Illustration: The Verge The Apple Card may soon no longer be backed by Goldman Sachs. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs is in talks to offload its partnership with Apple to American Express.Apple launched its credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs in 2019 and, more recently, made its new Pay Later service available to users in March. While Apple's new financial division is handling the lending side of its buy now, pay later service, it's still working with Mastercard and Goldman Sachs to enable the program.But now, sources tell the Journal that Goldman Sachs wants to exit from both of these partnerships and have American Express take its place. According to the Journal, a deal with American Express isn't imminent or... Continue reading...

I repeat, the IARC is not a food safety agency. | Photo by Yui Mok / PA Images via Getty Images Yesterday, Reuters broke the news that the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) will declare aspartame as possibly carcinogenic" next month. However, that doesn't mean you have to raid your pantry and toss any sugar-free foods containing the artificial sweetener.Why? Because this is not the agency that consumers should listen to with regard to food safety. The IARC only assesses the hazard of a given substance, not the risk. For example, there is a hazard of a meteor destroying the Earth or the sun causing skin cancer. But that's not what matters to the average person. What matters is the actual risk of a hazard happening. There are thousands of meteors in space, but only the ones hurtling... Continue reading...

The new sign-in prompt now appears as soon as you try to access Twitter and removes the previously available background preview. | Image: Twitter / The Verge If you currently try to access Twitter without logging in to your user account, you'll be unable to see any of the content that was previously available to the wider public. Instead, you'll meet a Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you're a registered Twitter user.Twitter didn't immediately make a public announcement, making it unclear if this was an intentional update or another technical mishap. Later on Friday, however, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted, claiming in a reply that the change is a Temporary emergency measure," blaming data pillaging" for degrading the service for all... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you're looking for a third-party Reddit app for Android after rif is fun for Reddit (RIF) goes away soon, you're going to have a few options. The developer of Relay for Reddit announced Friday that the app would continue to be available after July 1st, while the developer of Now and Nara for Reddit said those apps will continue on, too.Relay will be moving the app to a subscription model, developer DBrady announced in a Reddit post. Reddit will start charging for its paid API on July 1st, and the potential costs of that are forcing apps like RIF and Apollo for Reddit to shut down. But DBrady seems to have found a way to make the numbers work with subscriptions - something they said they were contemplating earlier this month.Relay... Continue reading...

Image: TCM via Twitter About a week after the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, a group of famed directors - Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson - has been brought on board to curate films for the network, as reported earlier by CNBC.TCM is the commercial-free cable channel that runs a library of curated classic films on a 24/7 loop. Since its launch in the '90s, TCM has been regarded as a staple in the film industry, specifically among those dedicated to film preservation and history.That's why Warner Bros. Discovery sparked outrage last week after slashing the TCM team from 90 to about 20, according to The Wrap, and laid off film veteran Pola Changnon, the executive vice president of... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge The world's most valuable company briefly crossed the $3 trillion mark on January 3rd, 2022, and today is the first time its market cap has reached that bar again, as individual AAPL shares showed a price above $192 soon after trading began on Friday.Its share price maintained that level and eventually closed the day at $193.97, making it the first company to end a day with a market cap of over $3 trillion. Four other US companies are worth more than $1 trillion, led by Microsoft at around $2.5 trillion, along with Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Nvidia. Image: Apple Screenshot of Apple's stock price at the end of the day on June 30th, 2023. In May, CEO Tim Cook reported an all-time high for its installed base... Continue reading...

This is our best look at the Ai Pin yet. | Image: Humane Humane, the buzzy company started by former Apple employees that has been making big promises about an AI-first and post-smartphone future, announced today that its first gadget will be called the Humane Ai Pin. It'll be powered by an advanced Snapdragon platform" in partnership with Qualcomm, and it's coming later this year.That's really all we know so far. Humane continues to be mysterious about how the Ai Pin works, what exactly it will do, and even what it looks like. (Most mysterious of all: why in the world is AI" not capitalized? What is Ai?" Am I supposed to pronounce it like eye?" I am confident this will infuriate The Verge's copy desk and me in equal measure for years to come.)The last we saw of this gadget was at the... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you, too, are so very tired of not knowing which reviews to trust on the internet, we may eventually get some peace of mind. That's because the Federal Trade Commission now wants to penalize companies for engaging in shady review practices. Under the terms of a new rule proposed by the FTC, businesses could face fines for buying fake reviews - to the tune of up to $50,000 for each time a customer sees one.You know those one-line reviews on Amazon listings that don't quite seem legitimate? Like the ones that rate a product five stars and say something incredibly vague, like This is such a great item," without expanding on any specifics? Well, that's just one type of fake feedback that the FTC wants to crack down on.The FTC's... Continue reading...

The Game Boy Mini Camera" by Christopher Graves. Twenty-five years ago this month, the Game Boy Camera arrived in the United States and Europe. Now, a modder has made the chonky 118 x 112-pixel greyscale digital imager fully fit inside a standard Game Boy cartridge. And it's so damn clean. Photo by Christopher Graves Photo by Christopher Graves Christopher Graves is calling their creation the Game Boy Camera Mini, and here's some video of it in action:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge FTC v. Microsoft is over, but who won? Continue reading...

IRL's company logo. | Photo illustration by William Joel/The Verge I have a packed issue this week, starting with the implosion of a once-hot social media startup called IRL. It raised $200 million at over a $1 billion valuation, and now its board is dissolving the company after finding that most of its users were fake. The SEC is investigating. It's a whole mess. I have ex-CEO Abraham Shafi's first public comments on the situation since he was ousted by the board.Also in this issue: a convo with the earliest investor in MosaicML, the AI startup that just sold to Databricks for more than $1 billion; some notes on Google's AR strategy; a scoop about Meta getting into the app distribution game; drug use in Silicon Valley; a Musk-versus-Zuckerberg cage match update; and more...But first: Thanks to Roblox... Continue reading...

Heavy-metal band The Polymetallic Nodules" played to protest against deep-sea mining outside Dutch ministerial buildings in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 8th, 2023. | Photo by Charles M Vella / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images When the island nation of Nauru announced that it would sponsor a deep-sea mining effort for battery materials, the country sent scientists and world leaders into a panic. It meant that companies might soon start harvesting minerals like nickel, cobalt, and copper from the ocean's deepest depths for the first time. Scientists raised the alarm: what havoc would that do to ecosystems that humans are barely starting to understand?The move set a deadline for the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to decide on regulations for deep-sea mining by July 2023. That deadline to craft regulation is nearly here - and the ISA, an international organization established by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, is expected to miss... Continue reading...

I got results when trying to improve my athletic performance, but it took time, dedication, and a lot of patience with macro logging. Continue reading...

The A2 is about as affordable as it gets for an LG OLED TV. | Image: LG It's the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend, which means a couple of things: fly-by-night fireworks sellers are probably popping up in mall parking lots around you, and there are deals to be had (ones that don't risk you any bodily harm).As for today's deals, one of the best is the $700 discount Best Buy is currently offering on the 48-inch LG A2 OLED TV. That knocks the price of the entry-level OLED down to $599.99 - an all-time low we've seen once or twice before. While the A2 may be considered entry-level compared to LG's other OLED models, it's still an excellent panel. The A2 has the rich color contrast expected of OLEDs, and though it may not stack up to the brightness and features of newer, higher-end models like the C2 or... Continue reading...

Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images EVO doesn't start until August, but the best fighting game match of the year has already happened.Dominique SonicFox" McLean is a fighting games legend. They've won numerous tournaments in numerous games, including six EVO championships across five different titles. They are, unequivocally, one of the best fighting games players to have ever picked up a fight stick.But apparently, Twitter user BradonNinjaaa was unaware of this. Because only a person who has either been completely absent from the fighting games scene for the last 10 years or is so thoroughly confident in their own abilities to the point of self-delusion would ever do to SonicFox what BradonNinjaa did - challenge them to Mortal Kombat.Yesterday evening, SonicFox... Continue reading...

Image: Getty Images The Supreme Court has ruled that a graphic designer can't be required to make a website celebrating the wedding of a (possibly hypothetical) gay couple, saying it would violate First Amendment protections against compelled speech. It's a decision that isn't necessarily surprising for the current court but one that could intersect strangely with the coming fight over online moderation.Justice Neil Gorsuch delivered the majority opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis, and it was supported in a 6 to 3 vote, with the court's liberal minority dissenting. Gorsuch determined that Colorado graphic and web designer Lorie Smith could legally refuse service to a same-sex couple looking to commission a wedding website, something that Smith found morally... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google is facing scrutiny over claims it misled advertisers about where it places video ads - and whether it violated US sanctions. As reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, research from the analytics company Adalytics suggests that Google may have cost media buyers up to billions of digital ad dollars" by putting ads on sites in ways that violate Google's own standards.The report centers around one of Google's video ad formats, called TrueView, which the company places on YouTube and other sites across the web, called Google video partners. These ads appear during videos and give viewers the option to skip the entirety of the advertisement after five seconds. Advertisers only pay for the ad if a viewer watches at least 30... Continue reading...

Image: WhatsApp Transferring your WhatsApp messages and large attachments between phones running the same operating system could soon be a little easier. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new chat transfer feature that bypasses any cloud backups simply by scanning a QR code shown on your old phone with your new phone. Data is only shared between your two devices, and is fully encrypted during transfer," WhatsApp's announcement of the new feature says.The new process has the potential to be a lot quicker and easier than the existing cloud-based alternative, which involves backing up a history of your chats to iCloud or Google Drive and then downloading it to a new device. And it handily avoids any cloud storage limits you might run into if your... Continue reading...

Photo by Xavi Torrent / Getty Images Thousands of influencers post content online with one goal: getting a brand deal. It's affirmation that they've made it" as an influencer, that they're interesting enough to be paid to post, and that content creation could be a job. It's usually a good thing - until, of course, it blows up in your face.It's not clear to me why anyone involved in Shein's recent PR campaign thought it was a good idea to send influencers on a free trip to try to beat the labor exploitation accusations that plague the company. There's an unseriousness to sponsored content - the cheery, upbeat music, the approval process videos go through before they can be posted - that makes it an insufficient response to workers who say they're subjected to illegally... Continue reading...

Image: Apple The summer of sci-fi continues over on Apple TV Plus. Just as season 1 of Silo ends and a new season of Foundation is about to begin, Apple has confirmed that its alien series Invasion will be back very soon. The first episode of a 10-episode-long season 2 will premiere on August 23rd, with new ones dropping on Wednesdays. As part of the announcement, we also got some early images of season 2 that include a cool spacesuit and what seems like a pretty war-torn version of Earth.Invasion originally premiered in October 2021 and told a planet-wide story about an alien invasion, letting viewers see things unfold from multiple perspectives. It took a bit to get going but eventually ended up as a great start to a sci-fi story once it got... Continue reading...

The letter warns that the strict rules for generative AI outlined in the AI Act have consequences.' | Photo by Philipp von Ditfurth/picture alliance via Getty Images Some of the biggest companies in Europe have taken collective action to criticize the European Union's recently approved artificial intelligence regulations, claiming that the Artificial Intelligence Act is ineffective and could negatively impact competition. In an open letter sent to the European Parliament, Commission, and member states on Friday, and first seen by the Financial Times, over 150 executives from companies like Renault, Heineken, Airbus, and Siemens slammed the AI Act for its potential to jeopardise Europe's competitiveness and technological sovereignty."On June 14th, the European Parliament greenlit a draft of the AI Act following two years of developing its rules, and expanding them to encompass recent AI... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit has informed moderators of protesting communities that are still private that they will lose their mod status by the end of the week, according to messages seen by The Verge. If a moderator tells Reddit they are interested in actively moderating" the subreddit, the company says it will take your request into consideration."Here is the full message, which we have confirmed was sent to moderators of at least two subreddits:

The Kobo Elipsa 2E is the company's largest e-book reader. It has some cool note-taking features, but this starting summer, it won't work with Pocket anymore. | Image: Kobo It looks like Kobo readers might not lose Pocket integration after all. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox and current owner of Pocket, originally said in a support document that Kobo's Pocket integration would stop working entirely after August 15th, 2023, when Pocket will require Firefox accounts to log in. In separate statements to The Verge Mozilla and Kobo now say that existing users of the integration will not be affected, and that Kobo would update their devices to use the new logins.The original announcement that Kobo's Pocket integration would stop working was reported earlier this week by Goodereader.com and confirmed by The Verge.Sarah Vasquez, a senior manager for communications at Mozilla, provided the following statement... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is throwing a major wrench into video playback for viewers who are using ad blockers. The company has confirmed to The Verge that it's currently running a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium."The statement comes after some people began noticing a new prompt warning that video playback could be cut off if YouTube detects repeated use of ad blocking tools. Android Authority earlier reported on those tests, which prevent viewers from watching more than three videos when an ad blocker is active.Ad blocker detection is not new, and other publishers regularly ask viewers to disable ad blockers," Google spokesperson Oluwa Falodun told The Verge by... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google will be removing links to Canadian news in Search, News, and Discover following the recent passage of the Online News Act in Canada, according to a blog post by Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs. The law, also called Bill C-18, forces big tech companies like Google and Meta to pay news publishers for their content.The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called link tax') creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians' access to news from Canadian publishers," Walker wrote. We have been saying for over a year that this is the wrong approach to supporting journalism in Canada and may result in significant changes to our... Continue reading...

Image: Annapurna Interactive The Not-E3 summer of games is winding down, but it is not over yet. Annapurna Interactive was the latest publisher to put on its own showcase, debuting new games and sharing big updates for others. Here are the highlights from the presentation.StrayPlayStation's best play-as-a-cat game is stray-ing to a new platform. Originally launched last year as a PC / PlayStation timed exclusive, Annapurna Interactive has announced that Stray, the cypberpunk cat-sim, is coming to Xbox on August 10th. Annapurna announced the move in the cutest way possible, with the game's lead gato pawing an Xbox controller off a table, as its concerned owner stares helpless in the face of the cat's reckless disregard. The only thing that could be more realistic... Continue reading...

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge Electrify America is adding support for Tesla's NACS electric vehicle charging plug, which the company has dubbed the North American Charging Standard. On Thursday, the company said it will work toward bringing the NACS connector to existing and future" charging stations by 2025.This doesn't mean Electrify America is getting rid of the Combined Charging System (CCS), a standard that's used by EVs from automakers like General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, and others. The company says the CCS plug will still be available alongside the NACS connector. It doesn't mention the aging CHAdeMO connector that it also offers at its stations, however, which is used by the Nissan Leaf.Still, Electrify America's planned NACS support is a... Continue reading...

You can get up to 20 percent off of the Steam Deck. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Steam Deck rarely goes on sale, which is why you might want to take advantage of this deal on the portable gaming PC while it's hot. As a part of the Steam Summer Sale, Valve is taking up to 20 percent off the Steam Deck in the US as well as internationally. You can buy the Steam Deck starting at $359.10 ($40 off) for the base model with 64GB of storage, which matches the price we last saw when the handheld first went on sale in March, and you can save a lot more on the higher-end Decks.If you require more storage, you might want to consider buying the 256 or 512GB model. As my colleague Sean Hollister pointed out, you can easily upgrade it with a new SSD, but there's a slight risk of damage if you aren't careful. What's more, the... Continue reading...