The Verge

Image: Snowman The latest game release on Netflix manages to capture the thrill of flying — while somehow also turning it into something chill.Laya’s Horizon is the newest game from Snowman, the studio best known for serene snowboarding games like Alto’s Odyssey. And in many ways, it’s an experience that builds on what the team has done in the past. Instead of boarding through procedurally generated 2D worlds, in Laya’s Horizon, players are soaring through a handcrafted 3D open-world island full of secrets to uncover. It’s one of the best games to hit Netflix’s fledgling gaming service to date.In Laya’s Horizon, you don’t exactly fly but, rather, glide around using a wingsuit. You start out from a perch that oversees much of the idyllic island where... Continue reading…

It feels like you’re making genuine eye contact with the person you’re talking to. The chic videoconferencing experience was built in collaboration with Steelcase and provides lifelike scale, natural eye contact, and no distractions. Sure beats my work-from-home setup. Continue reading…

Photo by Adrien Fillon / NurPhoto via Getty Images Pornhub has blocked all users in Utah in protest of the state’s online age verification law that’s set to go into effect on Wednesday, as reported earlier by Vice. Users trying to access Porhub from Utah won’t be able to access any content and will instead see a message read by adult performer Cherie Deville explaining why the site has shut down in the state.“While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users and, in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” Deville says. “Until a real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has experienced another data breach, reporting that personal information belonging to hundreds of account holders was exposed in an attack between late February and March 2023. The company disclosed in notification letters issued to impacted customers on April 28th that a hacker managed to access information such as full names, dates of birth, addresses, contact information, government IDs, social security numbers, and T-Mobile account pins.The company has not revealed how the hacker managed to access its systems. According to a data breach notification posted to the Maine attorney general’s office, 836 customers were impacted before T-Mobile discovered the breach on March 27th.T-Mobile has reset the account pins of the users... Continue reading…

Security system Abode now works with all Google Nest cameras and thermostats. | Image: Abode Starting today, users of the smart home security system Abode can now control and automate Google Nest products natively inside the Abode app. This new feature will let you do things like set your alarm system to arm automatically when your Nest Thermostat switches to “away” and have your Google Nest Cam with floodlight send an alert to a professional monitoring service if it spots someone lurking on your property.Long-term users of Abode will note that some of these features aren’t strictly new. They used to be able to have their Nest Thermostat’s mode control their security system — and more — before Google disabled its popular Works With Nest (WWN) program way back in 2019. (Some legacy connections still work, but those will be shut... Continue reading…

The logo for Bluesky’s AT Protocol. | Bluesky Last week, we talked about how BeReal missed its moment. This week, let’s discuss how Bluesky might avoid the same fate.Bluesky, of course, is the decentralized social network that surged in popularity over the weekend as the app opened up invitations to more beta testers and quickly sped past its first 50,000 users. Suffice to say it has been a long time coming: I first wrote about the company here in 2019, when Jack Dorsey woke up one day and decided he would try to rebuild Twitter on an open protocol and funded a team to do just that.Elon Musk’s reign of error over the past six months has led to a flood of talent and money into social networking companies. Among the apps attempting to capitalize on Twitter’s decline are Post, T2,... Continue reading…

I will be tackling all six of those Tody to-do’s later. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge By the end of 2021, my apartment looked like a tornado had run through it. The messiness made me anxious, but keeping a tidy home hadn’t been my priority that year. My mom was fine in February, and by November, ALS had robbed her of quite literally everything. After her funeral, I came home to my disaster apartment, looked at my mountains of clutter, and realized I didn’t even have a comfortable place to cry.I threw myself a pity party and then downloaded the Tody app — a to-do app dedicated solely to cleaning — the next day.The Tody app (Get it? To-do, tidy, Tody) came recommended by a friend with an immaculate house. Looking at their spotless home reminded me of something a college friend told me when she first saw my pigsty of a... Continue reading…

The 2007 writers' strike (pictured above) lost California an estimated $2.1 billion and was credited with tipping the state into a recession. | Photo by Stephen Chernin/Getty Images As of today, thousands of Hollywood television and movie writers are going on strike for the first time in 15 years.The Writers Guild of America (WGA) voted unanimously to strike on Tuesday after contract negotiations with the major Hollywood studios collapsed. The WGA is attempting to secure higher wages and better working conditions from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — a group representing around 350 major studios and streaming services like Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Apple, and Sony — for the thousands of movie and television writers the union represents. Picket lines are expected to form starting Tuesday afternoon.The last WGA strike in 2007 and 2008 lasted 100 days and was credited with tipping... Continue reading…

Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images AI chatbots are being used to generate news stories and blog posts for online content farms in the hopes of attracting a trickle of ad revenue from the stray clicks of web users.Experts have been warning for years that such AI-generated content farms will soon become commonplace, but the wider availability of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has now made these warnings a reality. NewsGuard, a for-profit organization that rates the trustworthiness of news sites, highlighted the problem in a recent report identifying 49 sites “that appear to be almost entirely written by artificial intelligence software.”Said NewsGuard:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Samsung has banned the use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT on its internal networks and company-owned devices over fears that uploading sensitive information to these platforms represents a security risk, Bloomberg News reports. The rule was communicated to staff in a memo which describes it as a temporary restriction while Samsung works to “create a secure environment” to safely use generative AI tools.The biggest risk factor is likely OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, which has become hugely popular not only as toy for entertainment but as a tool to help with serious work. People can use the system to summarize reports or write response to emails — but that might mean inputting sensitive information, which OpenAI might have access too.“... Continue reading…

The Redfall intro screen, with the Steam Deck’s performance hud above it. | Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge Nearly four hours in, I am not at all convinced that Redfall is a good game — unless there’s a lot of hidden depth, it feels like a rare miss from Arkane.But unlike that other recent big release, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, you can make it playable on Steam Deck with a few easy tweaks.I’m not saying it’ll look good, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the default setting!Before: 24fps for this grainy mess below. Tap here for full image. After: 43fps, and things look smoother, too! Tap here for full image. Before: Tap here for full image. After: Note: the time of day was changing as I was taking screenshots, sorry! Tap here for full image. S... Continue reading…

Photo by Fabian Sommer / picture alliance via Getty Images BeReal is releasing another feature that seems to counter the purpose of the app: a feed dedicated to famous people. Instead of exchanging daily photos with your friends, now you’ll get to see what the top athletes, artists, and activists of the world are up to.BeReal, the app that markets itself as “Your friends for real,” gives you different windows of time each day to take a selfie and front-facing photo that gets shared with friends. The whole point of the app is to randomly share what you’re up to with friends, whether you’re doing something as boring as laying in bed or sitting in front of your computer at work.But now, BeReal is throwing strangers into the mix. Its new feed, called RealPeople, is a “curated timeline of the... Continue reading…

Debris litters the ground on April 22nd, 2023, after the SpaceX Starship liftedoff on April 20th for a flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. | Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images Environmental groups and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas have filed suit against the Federal Aviation Administration after SpaceX’s Starship blew up during a launch at its Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, last month.The explosion obliterated the launch pad, sending dust and debris flying for miles. Ash scatted over areas where endangered species live, according to the complaint filed in federal district court in Washington, DC, today. The explosion also sparked a 3.5-acre blaze, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.The suit alleges that the FAA failed to “take a hard look” at the environmental risks posed by SpaceX’s operations in Boca Chica, as it was required to do under the National Environmental Policy Act. The groups... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter had plenty of problems in February (the rate limit debacle) and March (when it broke all links and pictures), but through April, the service didn’t register outages of similar significance. Now it’s May, and the streak has ended early as a number of people (including many Verge staffers) report the Twitter.com desktop website has logged them out without warning and won’t let them log back in.It’s unclear what’s causing the problem, and in place of a functional PR department, Twitter responds to press inquiries with only a poop emoji, so who knows when things may be fixed or if a single engineer has managed to crash something big... again.The outage is, coincidentally, occurring exactly at the same time it’s becoming a little... Continue reading…

Image: Getty Embattled electric vehicle startup Lordstown Motors says it could run out of money if its deal with iPhone manufacturer Foxconn fails to go through. The deal is in jeopardy after Foxconn notified Lordstown that it’s in breach of its investment deal because its stock has fallen under $1 a share.Lordstown traces its origins to GM’s announcement in 2018 that it would be closing down its Lordstown, Ohio, factory. Then-President Donald Trump assailed GM over the decision, leading to the automaker’s decision to sell the plant to a struggling electric truck startup called Workhorse.Instead, Workhorse’s founder and former CEO, Steve Burns, started a new company called Lordstown Motors with the plan to build electric pickup trucks, centered on... Continue reading…

Image: Mastodon Mastodon is making it easier for newcomers to create an account on the platform. On Monday, the decentralized network announced that it will start directing new users to create an account on mastodon.social instead of prompting them to choose from one of the thousands of other servers on the platform.This update doesn’t mean that Mastodon’s taking away the ability for new users to sign up for an account in a specific community, though. It will simply present two separate options on its signup page: “Join mastodon.social” or “Pick my own server.” The service’s flagship mastodon.social server is the platform’s largest, but the network notes that users can swap instances at any time.Prior to this change, creating a Mastodon account wasn’t... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon will add over 100 original Prime Video titles to Freevee, the company’s free ad-supported streaming option, this year. That includes the first three episodes of shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty and A League of Their Own, which will become available on May 26th.The company is also adding the first few episodes of The Terminal List and Paper Girls to Freevee this month, along with all episodes of Goliath and The Tick. Freevee is also getting the first season of Upload, the second season of Homecoming (it already has the first), and the sci-fi movie The Vast of Night.Amazon says other Prime Video content, including the first seasons of Reacher, The Wheel of Time, and more will become available on Freevee “later this year.”... Continue reading…

The new Xbox Home UI. | Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge Microsoft has reworked its Xbox Home UI to better accommodate background images and simplify access to key parts of the Xbox dashboard. The software giant halted a test of an upcoming Xbox Home UI last month to rework it, and the result looks like a great improvement for Xbox owners.The new Xbox Home UI moves the tiles of apps and games down further, so there’s a lot more space to see a background. The tile sizes have also been reduced, and there’s a new responsive game art that will update the background when you hover over certain games and apps. Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s old Xbox Home UI test. Image: Microsoft The new Xbox Home UI. At the top, there’s a new floating UI that... Continue reading…

Back in early 2020, as the covid pandemic drove classrooms online, school districts found themselves needing to bulk purchase affordable laptops that they could send home with their students. Quite a few turned to Chromebooks.Three years later, the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund concludes in a new report called Chromebook Churn that many of these batches are already beginning to break. That’s potentially costing districts money; PIRG estimates that “doubling the lifespan of Chromebooks could result in $1.8 billion in savings for taxpayers.” It also creates quite a bit of e-waste.One of the big problems is repairability. Chromebooks are harder to upgrade and repair, on average, than Windows laptops. That’s in part,... Continue reading…

The payments app works in the US and Canada. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft is launching a payments system inside Microsoft Teams that lets small businesses earn money from appointments, classes, one-on-one sessions, webinars, and much more. Teams business users in the US and Canada will now be able to collect payments during a meeting, opening up the service to financial advisors, lawyers, instructors, tutors, and other small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) to collect payments for virtual meetings.Over the past few years, we’ve seen a shift in how services are offered online, thanks in part to the pandemic and the growth and ease of virtual meetings. “The pandemic changed the game,” says Brenna Robinson, general manager of Microsoft 365 small and medium business, in an interview with The Verge. “I... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Meta is hosting another gaming showcase for its Quest VR headsets on June 1st, the company announced on Monday. The event will feature “over 40 minutes of content,” according to a blog post, including game announcements, first looks, updates, and a preshow and postshow.The show will mark Meta’s third annual Quest Gaming Showcase. The 2022 event, which took place in April, featured some pretty cool games, including Resident Evil 4, Among Us VR, and a new add-on for Beat Saber. Here’s hoping Meta has some good things in store for the event, though some VR fans might still be unhappy that the company is shutting down the widely praised Echo VR.The event’s preshow begins at 12:45PM ET, with the main show starting at 1PM ET. You’ll be able... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge SwiftKey recently received Bing AI integration that puts Microsoft’s chatbot right at the fingertips of users who’ve installed the software keyboard. But now, the OpenAI-based search tool is making its way automatically onto pretty much every modern Samsung Galaxy device, SamMobile reports.You see, Samsung Galaxy devices use their own One UI Android launcher, and that launcher includes a SwiftKey keyboard integrated into the system. This means Microsoft’s Bing AI is straight up making a Kool-Aid entrance onto Galaxies. Last week, Microsoft also barged in on users who went to try rival Google’s Bard on Edge browser.

The ThinkPhone is a successful collaboration nine years in the making and a step in the right direction for Motorola. Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A redesigned Halo service was due this fall with an AI-powered personal trainer, celebrity-led fitness classes, and even Apple Watch support. But Amazon threw in the towel on Halo before it got there. Continue reading…

Bowser gazing at a Super Star. | Image: Universal The writing’s been on the wall basically from the moment The Super Mario Bros. Movie first hit theaters, but after weeks of sitting comfortably at the top of the domestic box office, Universal, Illumination, and Nintendo’s big movie collaboration has officially made $1 billion.It’s been less than a full month since co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie premiered, but in those few short weeks, the project’s already raked in a cool $490 million domestically and $532 million internationally, making it the fifth pandemic-era movie to cross the $1 billion mark. Given how the film only just opened in markets including South Korea and Japan within the past few days, it’s all but assured to make quite a... Continue reading…

Image: Elgato Stream Deck fever has hit The Verge — here are some of the uses that we put ours to. Continue reading…

Geoffrey Hinton (foreground) has left Google to speak out on the dangers of AI. | Image: Getty Geoffrey Hinton, who alongside two other so-called “Godfathers of AI” won the 2018 Turing Award for their foundational work that led to the current boom in artificial intelligence, now says a part of him regrets his life’s work. Hinton recently quit his job at Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI, according to an interview with the 75-year-old in The New York Times.“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” said Hinton, who had been employed by Google for more than a decade. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things.”Hinton notified Google of his resignation last month, and on Thursday talked to CEO Sundar Pichai directly, according... Continue reading…

Whoops. It’s a long-standing belief here at The Verge that copyright law is the only real law on the internet, because it’s the only speech regulation most people on most platforms will accept. (At least in the United States.)Post something that blatantly infringes someone else’s copyright, and most platforms will spring into action to take it down, because they are protected from liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they take action in a reasonable amount of time upon request. And the way the DMCA influences user behavior on platforms is really well-known: we have been writing about “no copyright intended” for over a decade now. There are lots of and lots of people out there who know how it works.Anyway, Elon Musk isn’t... Continue reading…