The Verge

Interstate 40 in Adrian, Texas. | Photo by Paul Harris / Getty Images Wind power isn’t cleaning up as much pollution as it could, especially in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, new research shows. The US’s wind energy boom has already led to billions of dollars of health benefits. But the majority of that hasn’t trickled into communities that have historically been burdened with the most air pollution, finds a study published today in the journal Science Advances. Fortunately, that could change if new wind energy projects are deployed more strategically.Over the past two decades, wind energy has grown from less than half a percent of the US electricity mix in 2002 to almost 10 percent today. By 2014, increasing amounts of wind energy had measurably improved air quality, resulting in... Continue reading…

Players at a Call of Duty League tournament. | Photo by Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images The US Army halted a planned sponsorship with Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty esports league after allegations of Activision’s workplace culture of harassment and discrimination came to light last year, according to documents obtained by Vice.The Army wasn’t the only organization taking another look at its plans with Activision at the time; sponsors, including Coca-Cola and State Farm, were also reevaluating their support of the Overwatch League. The Verge reached out to sponsors listed on the Call of Duty League and the Overwatch League websites for comment in August 2021, and as observed by Kotaku reporter Ethan Gach, our inquiry to the Army appeared in the documents as part of a broader discussion about “the brand reputation... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Workers at Blizzard’s Albany, New York offices — organized as GWA Albany under the Communications Workers of America (CWA) — have won their union vote, making them the publisher’s second union and the third overall union in the US video game industry. The vote was a majority decision — 14 “yes” votes out of a total possible 18 votes — marking an important step in Blizzard Albany’s unionization process that began in July of this year.“With this victory, we’re advocating for ourselves and each other because we care deeply about our work and the games we make,” said Amanda Deep, associate test analyst at Blizzard Albany, in a CWA press release celebrating the win. “Our colleagues at Raven inspired us when they announced the formation of... Continue reading…

Celsys has canceled an upcoming rollout of an AI image generator for its Clip Studio Paint app following backlash from the artist community who use it. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Japanese illustration app Clip Studio Paint has canceled the rollout of a recently announced AI image generator tool after backlash from its users. In a blog post and update to its announcement, Celsys (the company behind Clip Studio Paint) apologized to its community, saying, “We were so preoccupied with how generative AI technology could be used creatively that we lost sight of what our core users want from Clip Studio Paint as a creative tool.”Celsys announced it would be launching the “experimental image generator palette” on November 29th as part of a winter update due December 6th. The company said the feature would be based on the open-source Stable Diffusion AI model, which has been criticized by artists for its use of artists’... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Elon Musk claimed last week that “hate speech impressions” on Twitter were down by one-third since he took over the company.But the total amount of hate speech on the platform has risen during that same time period, according to research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.An average of 1,282 tweets with slurs against Black people appeared daily on Twitter before Musk took over; that number jumped to 3,876 after he bought the company. During the week of Musk’s tweet, it increased even further to 4,650 tweets a day on average.Slurs against transgender people increased 62 percent since Musk bought TwitterSlurs against transgender people increased 62 percent since Musk bought Twitter, to 5,117 tweets a day on average, the report... Continue reading…

Photo by Joe Buglewicz / Getty Images Infowars founder Alex Jones has filed for personal bankruptcy in the wake of a billion-dollar defamation penalty. As reported by Reuters this morning, Jones filed a petition for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a Houston court this morning. Jones’ company, Free Speech Systems, filed its own bankruptcy petition in July.Today’s bankruptcy filing indicates that Jones has 50 to 99 creditors. That presumably includes over a dozen people who lost children at the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut, which Jones claimed for years had been faked — leading to a series of defamation suits that Jones lost by default. He estimated his assets to be worth between $1 million and $10 million and his liabilities between $1 billion and $10... Continue reading…

The game features a single-player campaign, as well as a tense, one-versus-one multiplayer mode. | Image: Bethesda You’d think the best gaming deals of the year are behind us now that Black Friday is over and it’s December, but Best Buy appears to have other plans. The retailer surprised us today with a one-day deal on Deathloop for PlayStation 5 for a new all-time low of just $9.99 ($50 off). This deal is set to run until 1AM ET unless Best Buy runs out of stock before that.Deathloop was one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2021, blending roguelike, run-based gameplay with the immersive sim first-person action that Arkane is known for. While this isn’t the first discount since its release, it’s the biggest yet, so long as you aren’t counting that it’s included as a freebie for subscribers of Xbox / PC Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Extra.... Continue reading…

Lead character Jacob in The Callisto Protocol. | Image: Krafton The game, led by Dead Space creator Glen Schofield, takes an old-school approach to survival horror. And it works… except when it becomes painfully frustrating. Continue reading…

The face of the Huawei Watch Buds flips open to reveal hidden earbuds, a neat solution for folks who constantly leave their wireless earbuds at home. | Image: Huawei Central / collage by The Verge If you’d already seen any leaks of the Huawei Watch Buds on the web, then you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some fan-made concept or an early-development product destined to never see the light of day. But, in an announcement on Weibo, Huawei has not only confirmed that the Huawei Watch Buds are a genuine product, but provided a teaser video for us to get a better look (via The Register).As the name suggests, the Huawei Watch Buds are a pair of earbuds concealed within a smartwatch that looks similar to the Huawei Watch 3. Details are a little sparse so there’s no word yet on what kind of performance or battery life you can expect from either of the products, but the watch itself does appear to be running HarmonyOS.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Kanye West, now legally known as Ye, has been suspended from Twitter shortly after posting an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. Twitter CEO Elon Musk confirmed the suspension late on Thursday, noting that Ye had “again violated our rule against incitement to violence.”The Twitter suspension comes nearly two months after Twitter locked Ye out of his account following an anti-Semitic post. Instagram also restricted access to Ye’s account in October after he posted a screenshot showing a text message between him and rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, accusing Diddy of being controlled by Jewish people.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix currently has a relatively small group of about 2,000 subscribers who it invites to preview upcoming projects and provide feedback about them ahead of release, but that number’s about to grow significantly as the streamer looks to maximize its profits in an increasingly competitive streaming market.The Wall Street Journal reports that Netflix plans to open up its Preview Club program to “tens of thousands” more subscribers across the globe in order to glean reactions from people that might end up being used to make last-minute tweaks to the streamer’s films and movies ahead of their broader release.That’s reportedly what happened with ​​Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up after a small Netflix test audience said that they thought the... Continue reading…

With dual cameras and dual motion detection, this camera catches it all — just not fast enough Continue reading…

Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy at the 46th Annual Saturn Awards. | Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images for ABA While Mike Flanagan’s forthcoming The Fall of the House of Usher series based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe is still headed to Netflix, the Haunting of Hill House creator is getting ready to take his talents to another streaming platform that’s likely looking to beef up its horror catalog.Deadline reports that Mike Flanagan and Intrepid Pictures CEO Trevor Macy (who has also executive produced the whole of Netflix’s “Flanaverse”) have signed a new exclusive, multi-year overall TV production deal with Amazon Studios. Under the new deal, Intrepid Pictures will create new series and films for Amazon Prime similar to how the indie production house crafted series like ​​The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, and The Midnight Club for... Continue reading…

Kanye West, now legally known as Ye, wears a Balenciaga mouthguard during Paris Fashion Week. | Photo by Edward Berthelot/GC Images Kanye West, now legally known as Ye, will no longer be purchasing Parler, the platform’s parent company confirmed on Thursday.The announcement came shortly after Ye went on an antisemitic rant while appearing on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars program on Thursday. Despite the timing, Parler’s corporate owner, Parlement Technologies, claims that the two parties agreed to terminate the deal last month.“Parlement Technologies has confirmed that the company has mutually agreed with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler. This decision was made in the interest of both parties in mid-November,” a company spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.Ye first announced his intent to purchase the social media platform in October... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge A video doorbell is a high-tech upgrade for your front door, adding visual voicemail to your doorstep and a heads-up to who’s there on your smartphone or smart display. Another fun and little-known feature of smart doorbells is the option to change up the doorbell’s ringtone.Depending on the model, you can change the sound the doorbell itself makes or the sound the electronic chime inside your house makes. For example, Nest video doorbells can use different tones at the front door, but Ring and Arlo doorbells only change the sound of the compatible digital chimes inside your house.Changing your video doorbell sounds is fun to do for the holidays — Ring and Google offer Halloween, Christmas, Hanukkah, and other holiday-themed chimes —... Continue reading…

Gerald “Jerry” Lawson is one of the overlooked founding fathers of gaming. Among the litany of recognizable names in the gaming industry, there is one that’s often left out of the conversation. Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, the engineer responsible for the development of the video game cartridge, among other outstanding achievements, is the subject of today’s Google Doodle. While his name may not get the same recognition as the likes of Carmack, Romero, or Bushnell, Lawson was an instrumental part in the growth and development of video games, long before many of these prominent upstarts would hang their shingle. Image: Google Today’s Google Doodle is an interactive celebration of Gerald “Jerry” Lawson’s contributions to gaming. A Brooklyn-born and -raised Black man, Lawson began his career... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Discord is expanding its server subscription program, allowing more creators to start charging subscription fees for premium access and perks.“Starting today, we’re expanding the availability of Server Subscriptions, allowing creators on Discord to earn money directly within their server,” wrote Discord creator product lead Derek Lang.Community servers in the US have the capability to enable subscriptions provided they meet the minimum criteria.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Coinbase has accused Apple of forcing it to remove NFT transfers from its Wallet app on iOS. On Thursday, it tweeted that Apple “blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature” because the iPhone maker wanted the blockchain fees associated with an NFT transfer to go through its in-app purchase system, giving it a 30 percent cut.According to Coinbase, it’s impossible to make that happen for a variety of reasons, with one important one being that Apple’s system doesn’t support paying in crypto.While some NFT marketplaces let you purchase the digital tokens using traditional fiat currency like the US dollar, the fees Coinbase is talking about are a different matter entirely. On blockchains like Ethereum, which many NFT... Continue reading…

It’s a slight delay — Disney previously announced the show would be coming February 2023. | Image: Disney The Mandalorian’s long-awaited third season debuts on Disney Plus on March 1st, Disney announced on Thursday. Disney had previously said it would be out in February, but it turns out that we’re getting it just a little bit later than expected.Season 2 premiered in October 2020, so it’s been some time since we’ve had new episodes of the show starring the galaxy’s favorite bounty hunter / baby alien duo. They made an appearance in a few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, but soon, we’ll be able to see the both of them together once again.The third season comes on the heels of the excellent Andor, which had its season 1 finale air on Disney Plus. After you’re done with your Mandalorian rewatch, I highly suggest Andor; both shows have... Continue reading…

Image: Nvidia Two weeks ago, Nvidia and tech watchdog GamersNexus agreed on one thing: if your Nvidia RTX 4090 graphic card’s 12VHPWR power cable starts smoking and melting, it’s probably because you didn’t plug it in all the way. But the PCI-SIG standards body is now suggesting that Nvidia and partners should have accounted for that.GPU manufacturers “need to take all appropriate and prudent measures to ensure end user safety, including testing for the reported problem cases,” reads part of a statement from the PCI-SIG. The group also spends 49 words deflecting any blame away from itself:

Image: Disney Remember when making actors look older or younger in movies was a huge deal? The amount of postproduction work to achieve realistic results was immense back in the day, but now, researchers from Disney have revealed FRAN, a new artificial intelligence tool that can convincingly age or de-age an actor in a fraction of the time.In an academic paper, Disney Research Studios explains that FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background.... Continue reading…

OpenAI’s latest tool / toy is an AI chatbot. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI has released a prototype general purpose chatbot that demonstrates a fascinating array of new capabilities but also shows off weaknesses familiar to the fast-moving field of text-generation AI. And you can test out the model for yourself right here.ChatGPT is adapted from OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. While GPT-3 in its original form simply predicts what text follows any given string of words, ChatGPT tries to engage with users’ queries in a more human-like fashion. As you can see in the examples below, the results are often strikingly fluid, and ChatGPT is capable of engaging with a huge range of topics, demonstrating big improvements to chatbots seen even a few years ago.But the... Continue reading…

The weekly meeting of the EU Commission on November 30th, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium. | Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images The European Union has taken a major step toward legitimizing attempts to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Yesterday, the European Commission adopted a proposal for new rules on how to certify carbon removal, a still controversial strategy for limiting climate change.The worry is that, without the proposed rules, ineffective carbon removal projects might derail climate goals and give polluters a sham to hide behind while presenting themselves as green. So, to weed out such projects, the European Commission wants to establish a framework for certifying “high-quality” carbon removals.“Higher transparency will ensure trust from stakeholders and industry, and prevent greenwashing,” the Commission said in its announcement.“The EU is... Continue reading…

Frictional Games Frictional Games, maker of SOMA and the Amnesia series, has announced it’s working on a new entry in its roster of survival horror titles with Amnesia: The Bunker.With a release date sometime next year, Amnesia: The Bunker seems to be unlike any of its predecessors. For starters, in the game’s short announcement trailer, it looks like you’re not going to be forced to stare down unknown eldritch terrors with naught but a flashlight and thinking happy thoughts. No, you’re getting a gun. Image: Frictional Games “So anyway, I started blasting.” The arrival of guns to Amnesia will no doubt cause major discussion as the series was lauded for specifically not giving you the means to just blast your enemies to bits.... Continue reading…

A very boring render of the IdeaPad 1 from Lenovo’s website. | Image: Lenovo Back in September, AMD launched some of the first mobile chips from its upcoming Ryzen 7000 line, the budget-oriented “Mendocino” series. At launch, they were described as tailored to “the everyday laptop,” combining last-gen Zen 2 CPU cores with high-end RDNA 2 graphics.That RDNA 2, generally seen powering much more expensive machines as well as the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles, could become widely available at a budget price point was an exciting prospect. But Mendocino only announced one partner at launch: Acer and its Aspire 3 series. Since then, we’ve basically heard... crickets about the Mendocino series.That is, until today. Kudos to Notebook Italia for spotting several new items on Lenovo’s Product Specifications... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Eufy and LastPass suffer security lapses, and Spotify Unwrapped takes over social media. Continue reading…

Teaser art of Ballister Blackheart and Nimona from Annapurna’s upcoming Nimona feature. | Image: Netflix After co-producing a number of animated projects like Sausage Party and Missing Link with the help of other studios, Annapurna Pictures is gearing up to launch its own in-house animation arm with two Disney alums leading the division.Today, Annapurna announced that it has tapped former Walt Disney Animation Studios president Andrew Millstein and screenwriter Robert Baird (Monsters University, Big Hero 6) to head up its animation production arm, which will release the studio’s forthcoming Nimona adaptation in 2023 with Netflix. In a press release about the new studio, Annapurna founder and CEO Megan Ellison said that Millstein and Baird’s contributions to Nimona’s production were key to bringing the project home and described bringing... Continue reading…

Android’s latest updates aim to boost accessibility and add fresh quality-of-life features for drivers and watchOS users. | Image: Google Android has announced a batch of new features for mobile and smartwatch devices, introducing new accessibility tools and quality-of-life updates for digital car keys, Google TV, and watchOS. One of the major announcements is the introduction of a reading mode for Android — a new feature that creates a more accessible screen reading experience without being tied to specific apps.To use Reading mode, you have to install an app from the Google Play store, which provides new adjustable display and audio options — such as contrast, font type, and size — allowing users to customize how content is viewed on their phone to best serve their individual needs. Additionally, a new text-to-speech function with speed control is available with a... Continue reading…

Summer Game Fest host Geoff Keighley at The Game Awards in 2019. | Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images Summer Game Fest is back again in 2023 with its first-ever in-person kickoff show on June 8th, which just so happens to be a few days before E3’s big return.For the past three years, Summer Game Fest has served as the gaming industry’s big June blowout while E3 has been in flux due to the pandemic. E3 hasn’t happened as a big in-person event for quite a while; it was canceled in 2020, held as a series of remote events in 2021, and canceled again in 2022. In its place, Summer Game Fest became one of the biggest virtual events of the June gaming season. (In 2021, it was where we saw the first gameplay trailer of Elden Ring.)This year, both Summer Game Fest and E3 are back with major in-person components in the Los Angeles area, setting... Continue reading…

Image: Canoo Struggling EV startup Canoo has delivered its first electric pickup truck to the US Army for “analysis and demonstration.” The company’s Light Tactical Vehicle (LTV) is built on the same platform as Canoo’s Duplo toy-looking EV prototype truck that was first revealed in 2021.Back in July, the army announced that it had awarded Canoo a $67,500 contract to produce a “new light to heavy duty Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) or series-hybrid electric wheeled vehicle, for Government analysis and demonstration,” according to the original solicitation.Canoo, which was founded in 2017 by two former employees of Faraday Future, has developed several EV concepts, including a multipurpose delivery van and an electric truck. The company is also... Continue reading…

Image: 1Password Password management provider 1Password just launched its new “sign-in with” feature that automatically saves and fills logins using third-party credentials. 1Password thus is now able to give customers an option to sign in to sites or apps that require, say, their Google, Apple, GitHub, or Facebook credentials with just one click.Now, users don’t need to remember which provider they used for this specific service since 1Password can do it for them.For example, let’s say you’re trying to sign in to Spotify, but you can’t remember if you usually sign in with your Gmail, Apple, or Facebook accounts. A 1Password pop-up will inform you which provider it’s linked to and ask whether you’d like to click to sign in with your stored login... Continue reading…