The Verge

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge It’s not difficult to share a password for Netflix or Spotify with a friend or leave yourself signed in at someone else’s house or in a hotel room, which means, after several years, there could be a host of people sharing your streaming services that you’ve completely forgotten about.Whether it’s an ex-partner, a niece or nephew, a college roommate from back in the day, or whoever else, you don’t necessarily want your accounts being used by a whole cast of characters. It can lead to restrictions on your account, and it’s not great from a digital security perspective either.Thankfully, you can check who’s logged in to your accounts relatively quickly and boot them out if needed. We’ll cover some of the most popular services here and... Continue reading…

Image: AT&T / Cherish Medical AT&T has teamed up with medical sensor manufacturer Cherish Health to create a claimed “industry first” radar device capable of detecting emergency conditions and monitoring people who are at risk of falling. It can do this across multiple rooms throughout the home, even through walls. Dubbed the Cherish Serenity, the device uses a combination of AT&T cellular connectivity and Cherish’s radar and AI technology to detect body position, movement, and biometrics without requiring cameras or wearable trackers.The device is designed to help older generations live more independently while retaining some privacy. Data from the US Census Bureau shows that people over the age of 65 represent the fastest-growing segment of the country’s... Continue reading…

Photo by JODY AMIET/AFP via Getty Images The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully launched its JUICE spacecraft to study Jupiter’s icy moons on Friday, April 14th. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission will visit three of Jupiter’s largest moons — Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — to investigate whether they could be potentially habitable, a question that has been igniting debate among astronomers since the first evidence of subsurface oceans on these moons was seen by the Galileo mission in the 1990s.JUICE launched at 8:14AM ET from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, carried by an Ariane 5 rocket. The launch had been delayed from its original launch date of April 13th due to weather conditions, but the skies today were clear for liftoff.The spacecraft separated from... Continue reading…

Image: VW The ID.7 is a big, beefy sedan that comes in two battery sizes with a best-in-class range estimate. But can Volkswagen make sedans cool again? Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google will release new AI-powered search tools next month, with even more features coming in the fall, reports The New York Times.The new features will be available exclusively in the US, and will be released initially to a maximum of one million users, says the NYT. It’s not clear exactly what the tools will offer, but they will likely build on the conversational promise of Google’s experimental Bard chatbot. They’re being developed under the codename “Magi.”The plans are part of Google’s efforts to meet the threat posed by new systems like Microsoft’s Bing chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Many think these chatbots could one day replace traditional search engines like Google — despite their failings.According to the NYT, Google’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix ran into significant issues with its second-ever live event on Sunday evening. Love is Blind: The Live Reunion failed to start streaming at its planned 8PM showtime, leading to major consternation from the show’s fans across social media. Netflix acknowledged the problem on Twitter soon after and promised to kick off the presentation within 15 minutes.That didn’t happen, either. More than an hour later, subscribers were still encountering error screens when trying to watch the event. Netflix followed up by saying it’d be “worth the wait.” As the delay stretched on, hosts Vanessa and Nick Lachey posted to Instagram thanking fans (and a live studio audience) for their extended patience.

Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images A few months ago, I discovered a new genre of YouTube video. It’s called the “extended highlight,” and it typically takes the form of a video somewhere between eight and 18 minutes long, with rapid-fire jump cuts between all the most important parts of a game.Since I embraced the glory of the extended highlight, I feel like I’ve watched more sports than ever. I’ve seen every Arsenal goal and almost-goal, every cool Steph Curry shot for the Warriors, every Daniel Jones run for the Giants, every Aaron Judge strikeout or home run for the Yankees. But I rarely, if ever, sit and watch a game. I used to! But why would I now? All the good parts are right there on YouTube a few hours later.Much has been made over the last decade about how... Continue reading…

The sporty pair of wireless earbuds, which are 30 percent off on Amazon, offer more bang for your buck than most models. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Happy Saturday, friends! When it comes to workout-friendly earbuds that are aimed at the gym, we spend a lot of time propping up the Beats Fit Pro. However, if you’re in need of something that’s easier on your wallet, Anker’s Soundcore Sport X10 are on sale in black at Amazon for $55.99 ($24 off), nearly matching their best price to date.The X10 pack a lot of value into their sub-$60 package. Their flexible, wraparound hooks ensure a secure fit regardless of your activity, and they offer bass-heavy sound that’s well-suited for the kind of beat-driven tracks that often define our gym playlist (err, or at least my gym playlist). They round out said feature set with up to eight hours of playback, a useful transparency mode, and an IPX7... Continue reading…

Makoto Shinkai attends the Los Angeles red carpet premiere of Suzume. | Photo by Victoria Sirakova / Getty Images Suzume director Makoto Shinkai sees his latest film as an invitation to young theatergoers to build relationships with the past. Continue reading…

Image: Bluesky Bluesky is really, really fun.Yes, the platform is essentially just Twitter but decentralized. And yes, the Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky is one of many services emulating how Twitter looks right now. But after spending a few hours in Bluesky since getting my beta invite this week, it’s so far the service where I feel the most joy.Similar to Mastodon, Bluesky is a federated social network, which, at its most basic level, means that users can participate through different providers instead of a huge central one. The easiest comparison is email: if you have Gmail, you can send an email to somebody on Apple’s iCloud, and they can reply back to you.Bluesky lets you pick from different hosting providers. When I joined the app on Tuesday, I... Continue reading…

Image: SpaceX SpaceX’s Starship rocket has been cleared for launch by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), meaning it could take its first orbital flight test as soon as next week, as reported earlier by CNN.With the help of SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket, Starship is the spacecraft that’s designed to ferry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars. SpaceX says it's targeting a Starship launch from the company’s Texas Starbase “as soon as” April 17th.

Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge Elon Musk has created a new company dedicated to artificial intelligence — and it’s called X.AI, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company, which a Nevada filing indicates was incorporated last month, currently has Musk as its director and Jared Birchall, the director of Musk’s family office, listed as its secretary. The filing, which The Verge has also obtained, indicates that Musk incorporated the business on March 9th, 2023.Rumors about Musk starting up an AI company have been floating around for days, with a report from Business Insider revealing that Musk had purchased thousands of graphic processing units (GPUs) to power an upcoming generative AI product. The Financial Times similarly reported that Musk planned to... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Apple TV 4K is getting a new multiview feature just in time for tonight’s Friday Night Baseball games, as first spotted by Tom’s Guide (via TechCrunch). The feature is still in beta and will reportedly let you watch up to four sports streams at once in a grid format.Developer Steve Moser first uncovered the multiview feature in Apple’s code last month, and it looks like the company is finally getting ready to roll it out. According to TechCrunch, the feature is available within the tvOS beta 16.5, which you can gain access to by heading to the Settings app and then hitting System > Software Updates > Get Beta Updates.Once you have the beta, TechCrunch says you can view multiple streams at once by turning on a game and then selecting... Continue reading…

The 15-inch MacBook Air is expected to match the resolution of the 14-inch MacBook Pro. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple’s betting on a larger MacBook Air with a 15-inch display to help boost slumping laptop sales, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The device, which is expected to arrive this year, could come with the same M2 chip included in the MacBook Air models released last year — not the upgraded M3 chip as previously thought.As noted by Gurman, the 15-inch MacBook Air may feature the same 3024 x 1964 resolution as the 14-inch MacBook Pro, albeit with a bit less sharpness as it stretches to fill more space. It’s not yet clear when this laptop will come out just yet, but Apple is reportedly testing it with macOS 14, which it plans on revealing at Worldwide Developers Conference this June.Apple’s laptop sales have slid quite a... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Two Senate Democrats are demanding that Tesla do more to prevent its customer data from being compromised after reports surfaced that employees shared video footage captured by its customers’ vehicles of car crashes, road rage incidents, and other potentially embarrassing clips.Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) accused the company of showing “willful disregard” for its customers’ privacy, claiming that the recent report from Reuters raised “serious questions about Tesla’s management practices.”“We urge you to take all necessary actions to ensure that any images or videos consensually collected from Tesla vehicles are subject to strict privacy safeguards,” the senators write in an April 14th letter to Tesla CEO Elon... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Roblox is now letting creators sell digital items that are only available in limited quantities, according to a post on its developer forums. That means, for example, that a creator can make a small number of digital sweaters for Roblox avatars in an effort to make that sweater feel more valuable. Users will also be able to resell these limited items, and when that happens, the original creator will get a 10 percent cut of every sale.Before now, creators could already make and sell digital items (which you may see referred to as “user-generated content,” or UGC). Roblox is calling these new user-made limited items “Limiteds,” and yes, the entire premise of a scarce digital Roblox good feels like it’s straying into the realm of NFTs.But... Continue reading…

Image: Instagram Instagram announced a slew of new features for its TikTok competitor Reels today, including a new way to edit videos and find trending content.The biggest change is in the video editing process. Users will now be able to tweak uploaded video clips, audio, stickers, and text overlays all in the same screen instead of having to do it in separate steps. Stills shared by the company show a timeline editing feature similar to what TikTok has, which helps when lining up audio and video clips and makes transitions smoother.Instagram users will also have a new way to find trending videos. Trends and challenges that are easy to recreate are part of what made TikTok an incubator for viral content, and until now, there wasn’t a quick way to see... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft started testing a new Xbox Home UI last year that will be released in 2023, but fans haven’t been impressed with the aging tiled interface that does nothing to show off the dynamic backgrounds and wallpapers available on the console. The new Xbox Home UI started to feel like a giant Xbox Game Pass ad, and now Microsoft is acknowledging that it feels a little crowded.“We heard from you that the changes to the top of Home did not leave enough space for you to enjoy your backgrounds and that it felt crowded,” says Ivy Krislov, senior product manager lead of Xbox experiences, in a blog post today. “We’re working to balance the experience, accessibility, function, and the needs of our community and bring you a great and refreshed... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft Edge is testing a new feature that could make its sidebar even more useful. In Edge Canary version 114.0.1789.0, you detach and mount the browser’s sidebar to your desktop, as spotted earlier by GeekerMag (via Windows Central).While I didn’t get the chance to try the feature out for myself, GeekerMag’s Viney Dhiman shows how it works in the video embedded below. Simply hit the “Detach from Edge” button at the bottom of the sidebar, and Edge will automatically pin the sidebar to the right side of your desktop.The sidebar will stay up even when you minimize Edge, allowing you to access Bing’s AI chatbot and other tools without having a webpage open. To reattach the sidebar, simply hit the same button you used to detach it.... Continue reading…

Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-inspired music game it acquired in July of last year, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. In a message displayed on Heardle’s website, Spotify says the game is going away for good on May 5th.“Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,” the message reads. “From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.” Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge Despite taking inspiration from Wordle — the word guessing game that took the internet by storm — Heardle is still pretty unique, serving as a fun way to put your music knowledge to the test. The game gives you six tries to guess the name of a song as you listen to progressively longer snippets of the track.I... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Parler, a self-described “unbiased” alternative to mainstream social media networks, is being purchased by a company that will temporarily shut down the platform ahead of a planned relaunch. A statement posted to Parler’s website on Friday reveals that its parent company Parlement Technologies has agreed to sell the platform to digital media company Starboard (previously known as Olympic Media) for an undisclosed sum, with the deal expected to be finalized by “the end of Q2, 2023.”Starboard disclosed that the platform will be pulled to undergo a “strategic assessment,” and it suggested Parlement had made the right move in pivoting to cloud services last year. “No reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is... Continue reading…

Nicolas Cage as Dracula. | Image: Universal Save for Nicolas Cage’s over-the-top Dracula, almost nothing about Universal’s Renfield really works the way it could. Continue reading…

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Sling TV is finally making its way to Amazon Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 10 devices — nearly two years after Amazon first promised that it would bring the app to all the Echo Show devices in its lineup.While Amazon did manage to bring Sling TV to the Echo Show 15 last year, it never came to its other devices until now. The newly added Sling TV app makes it possible to stream live TV and on-demand content straight from the Echo Show 8 and Echo Show 10.Sling TV has a host of live channels that you can tune in to depending on your subscription plan, including Fox, TBS, ESPN, MLB Network, AMC, Discovery, NBA TV, and more. There’s also a free ad-supported streaming option that you can access called Sling Freestream.It’s nice that Amazon... Continue reading…

A screenshot of Artifact, the new news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. | Image: Artifact Last week, I observed here that journalists have mostly continued to post on Twitter as if everything is normal there. That’s less true today than it was then — good on NPR and PBS for showing some spine and suspending their use of the platform — but there’s no doubt that it continues to be the digital broadcast destination of choice for many or even most reporters.As I noted in that piece, one reason for Twitter’s stickiness is the sense that none its alternatives have yet to reach critical mass. And while that’s clearly true, it’s also the case that there is probably more talent working on new social networks at this point than at any moment since the early 2010s.Mastodon, Post, T2, and the Untitled Meta Social Network are just a... Continue reading…

Image: OpenAI In a discussion about threats posed by AI systems, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, has confirmed that the company is not currently training GPT-5, the presumed successor to its AI language model GPT-4, released this March.Speaking at an event at MIT, Altman was asked about a recent open letter circulated among the tech world that requested that labs like OpenAI pause development of AI systems “more powerful than GPT-4.” The letter highlighted concerns about the safety of future systems but has been criticized by many in the industry, including a number of signatories. Experts disagree about the nature of the threat posed by AI (is it existential or more mundane?) as well as how the industry might go about “pausing” development... Continue reading…

Logan Roy wishes! | Image: PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Everything’s coming up Murdoch! Succession is back, Dominion Voting Systems won’t drop its suit, and our boy Rupert may be open to further [LCD sound system voice] discovery, discovery, discovery.I am personally thrilled about this trial because I am a longtime Murdoch watcher. I love having more details about Rupert et al. blasted into the public sphere. This family, which owns News Corp, lurks over American journalism like Dracula’s brides over Jonathan Harker. This defamation suit is maybe the most serious challenge to their power in America I’ve seen so far.Winning a defamation case is hard and expensive; usually people settleThe central claim of Dominion’s $1.6 billion suit is that Fox executives and hosts knew that the election... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter Blue subscribers now have a maximum tweet length of 10,000 characters and support for bold and italic text formatting. The announcement comes just weeks after the character limit for Twitter Blue was first bumped up from 280 characters to 4,000 back in February, with the latest increase and additional formatting features seemingly designed to help Twitter compete with newsletter platforms like Substack — which has recently found itself in Elon Musk’s crosshairs.This isn’t the first time Twitter has introduced long-form writing features. The company — under previous leadership — was testing a new Notes feature for writers and had previously purchased the Revue newsletter firm in 2021, which served as a rival to Substack. Both of... Continue reading…

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images Hackers who claim to have breached Western Digital have reportedly stolen around 10 terabytes of data from the company and are holding it hostage. TechCrunch spoke to the hackers who appear to have control over Western Digital’s code-signing certificate, private phone numbers belonging to company executives, stolen SAP Backoffice data, and even managed to gain administrator access to Western Digital’s Microsoft Azure instance.Western Digital reported a “network security incident” earlier this month that allowed an “unauthorized third party” to access data from the company’s systems. The incident put Western Digital’s cloud network out of action for 10 days, and the company only just managed to bring its My Cloud service back online e... Continue reading…

A drone view of the giant wiper blade stretched across Cybertruck’s windshield. | Screenshot from video by Brad Sloan. A new drone video has surfaced showing the Cybertruck’s ridiculously large windshield wiper in action. And you know what? It’s functional — and perhaps improved — but still doesn’t reach a good chunk of the glass in front of the passenger.The video shot by Brad Sloan above Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory location on Thursday (and surfaced by Electrek) shows the Cybertruck undergoing a wind tunnel test. At the 13:42 mark you can see the truck’s single XL wiper blade start moving, with decent reach across the majority of windshield. Maybe it’s the angle, but it does seem like an improvement over some prototypes we’ve seen.The Cybertruck’s giant windshield was one of the electric pickup’s most distinctive features when it was unveiled in 2019.... Continue reading…

Nintendo Game Boy, Lego edition — not authorized by Lego or Nintendo. | Image: Nick Lever Nick Lever, video editor and Lego Masters Australia finalist, has recreated the original Nintendo Game Boy in bricks — and with such droolworthy depth that I hereby petition Lego to make it into an official set.It’s just 364 pieces, only 115 different parts, most of them common enough you can find ‘em dirt cheap. Almost every recognizable facet of the Game Boy is represented, from the angled rice-grain Start / Select buttons to the distinctive tint of the screen — achieved here by placing lime green tiles underneath a trans-blue window.While there’s no removable battery tray or front speaker, you can indeed press down on the D-pad and click in a “cartridge.” You might want to take a close look at those A and B buttons, too... ... Continue reading…

Image: Bungie Bungie is the latest online game developer to announce it’ll start monitoring, warning, and even banning Destiny 2 players who use controller-spoofing XIM hardware or similar to cheat. The company told The Verge in February that it was investigating ways to combat cheaters, and now its policy is drawing a clear line on what won’t be allowed. The move comes as other big online games, from Call of Duty to Overwatch, are also adopting methods to try to detect the hardware and either mess with or outright ban players using them.In its blog post today, Bungie notes that “external aides” are a problem that the community is growing frustrated with — while avoiding actually mentioning the names of the devices to deter spotlighting them.The... Continue reading…

The $599 Creality K1. | Image: Creality 3D printers can take hours or even days to produce simple parts — but it only took two weeks for the biggest names in consumer 3D printing to declare that era is over.On March 29th, Prusa announced the $799 Prusa MK4, its first new printer in four years. The company boasts it can print a “draft mode” 3DBenchy boat in under 20 minutes, four times faster than the 80 minutes it took with the previous generation. Image: Prusa The Prusa MK4 has a new mainboard, firmware, quick-swap nozzles, load cell sensor for a “perfectly smooth first layer without user interaction,” LCD screen, more precise stepper motors, and more. On April 8th, Anker responded by doubling the speed of its already fast 250mm/s printer to... Continue reading…

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Law enforcement officials have linked a trove of classified government documents leaked on Discord to a 21-year-old Air Force National Guard member, as reported earlier by NBC News. The suspect, Jack Teixeira, was arrested at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday.“Today, the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.The Pentagon first discovered the sensitive documents posted to Discord, Twitter, Telegram, and 4chan last week. The leaks revealed details about the Russia-Ukraine war along with information about the US’s... Continue reading…

Rocksteady Studios You could be forgiven at this point for not believing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is ever coming out. Rocksteady Studios, of Batman: Arkham series fame, has delayed the game yet again. This is the second time the game has been delayed this year and the third overall, taking the release date from 2022 to May 26th, 2023, to some later date in 2023 to, now, February 2nd, 2024.Earlier this year, Suicide Squad was heavily featured in Sony’s February State of Play. It was the first time players had an up-close look at the gameplay, and they were... less than enthused. Turns out, an always online, live service shooter with a battle pass is just not what people want right now. Who’da thunk?According to the announcement, Rocksteady... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google Chat is getting a new look that matches the redesigned interfaces of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Gmail. Like the makeovers it rolled out to its other Workspace apps, this one is also based on Google’s Material Design 3 system.As you can see in the below GIF, you’ll notice some small tweaks to the entire interface, including rounded buttons (and a rounded search bar), along with some blue accents throughout. There have also been some minor changes to the main message view, compose setup, new topic button, and the thread panel within direct messages and spaces. Image: Google Earlier this week, Google also announced a new Chat feature that lets Space Managers create announcement-only channels, sort... Continue reading…

Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge Otter.ai is one of the more popular machine-powered transcription apps — and it’s easy to see why. Its algorithms do a good job of transcribing speech, including differentiating and identifying the people speaking. And if you use its Otter Assistant feature, it will attach to your calendar and automatically transcribe Zoom, Teams, and Meet meetings that are on that calendar — even if you don’t attend.While that could be handy — if your boss asks you what happened at a meeting, you can have the info even if you were playing Wordle at the time — it could also be a problem. For example, what if you forgot (or didn’t notice) that the automatic function was on, and it recorded a meeting that might contain sensitive information or was... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is rebranding its “Super Follows” feature, which lets you subscribe to individual users to get access to some exclusive content, to just “Subscriptions.” Twitter owner Elon Musk promoted the feature on Thursday, noting that you can find it in the “Monetization” section of settings.Super Follows were first announced in February 2021, and as far as we can tell, the rebranded Subscriptions have many of the same features. With Subscriptions, you can charge users so they can get access to things like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, and special subscriber badges. Down the line, Twitter says that it hopes to include “newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content.”That line about newsletters makes this... Continue reading…