The Verge

“Orion reached its maximum distance from Earth during the Artemis I mission when it was 268,563 miles away from our home planet.” — NASA | Image: NASA On Monday, NASA’s Orion spacecraft reached its farthest distance from Earth, clocking in at 268,563 miles away from our planet. This marks the halfway point of the 25.5-day Artemis I mission, and the spacecraft will now continue its orbit around the Moon before heading back toward Earth.“Artemis I has had extraordinary success and has completed a series of history-making events,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a press conference, pointing out that Orion was the first spacecraft designed to carry humans to enter a distant retrograde lunar orbit and that it has surpassed the record for the furthest distance traveled away from Earth by a human-rated spacecraft.During Orion’s orbit around the Moon, which will last about a week, it... Continue reading…

The new SlimBlade Pro. | Image: Kensington Kensington’s new version of its SlimBlade trackball mouse has a big improvement over the original model: wireless connectivity. With the SlimBlade Pro, which Kensington announced on Tuesday, you’ll be able to connect the trackball to your PC or Mac via Bluetooth or with a 2.4GHz wireless dongle (via 9to5Mac).Kensington claims the SlimBlade Pro will be able to get up to four months of battery life on a single charge, so you should be able to use the trackball for quite a while before needing to plug it in. The dongle has a handy storage spot on the bottom of the trackball if you want to keep it out of sight. And if you prefer keeping your mouse or trackball hooked up to your computer all the time, the SlimBlade Pro works with a wired... Continue reading…

A Rolls-Royce AE 2100-A regional aircraft engine converted to perform a hydrogen test at Boscombe Down in the UK. | Image: Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce and European airline easyJet announced that they’ve successfully tested a hydrogen jet engine — technology the companies hope might eventually help erase aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions. The ground test marks “the world’s first run of a modern aero engine on hydrogen,” Rolls-Royce said in a press release yesterday.Aviation is considered one of the most difficult industries to clean up because it’s much harder to make electric planes than electric vehicles. Batteries charged with renewable solar and wind energy are still too bulky for long flights. So airlines and plane manufacturers are working to develop planes that can run on cleaner fuels like hydrogen, which produces water vapor instead of carbon dioxide when burned.... Continue reading…

YouTube Music’s 2022 recap will highlight your top tracks and artists. | Image; Google The end of the year is fast approaching, which means it’s time for the world’s biggest music streaming services to summarize your listening habits in the most shareable ways possible. First out of the gate this year is YouTube Music’s 2022 Recap feature, launching today.Like last year, the main attraction is the personalized music stats it pulls together, highlighting the artists, songs, music videos, and playlists you’ve most listened to and watched throughout the course of the year. But there are also some new inclusions, including highlights of artists you might have discovered before they blew up and a new “music personality” feature that attempts to analyze your listening habits to deliver a verdict on your “music vibe.”It’ll... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter will no longer take action against tweets that contain covid misinformation or the accounts that post them. Instead of announcing the change, the platform added a note to the pages that outline its covid misinformation policies, saying, “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”Twitter first introduced these policies in 2020 and began applying labels to tweets that contained disputed information about covid and its vaccines. The platform also removed tweets that contained “demonstrably false or potentially misleading content” and permanently suspended accounts if they continuously broke the rules. According to data posted by Twitter, the company suspended a total of... Continue reading…

Portal, the first-person puzzle game that spawned a thousand memes, is getting a glow-up on December 8th, courtesy of a free piece of DLC. Portal with RTX was originally announced alongside Nvidia’s new RTX 4080 and 4090 graphics cards and adds ray-tracing support along with remade hi-res textures and models to the game. The result is much more realistic lighting and reflections, making the 15-year-old title look almost brand new.Nvidia says the DLC was created with RTX Remix, its new modding platform that’s designed to make it easier to add support for modern technologies like ray tracing, enhanced materials, and DLSS to classic titles. Portal with RTX supports DLSS 3, the latest version of Nvidia’s AI upscaling technology, which is... Continue reading…

The M2-powered MacBook Air is on sale. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Times are hard, and if you’ve been stressing about how you’re going to afford a good gift this holiday season, it’s understandable. Thankfully, Cyber Monday offers one of the best (and last) opportunities to save big before the holidays. As we highlighted in our guide to the best Cyber Monday deals, we’re seeing some steep discounts on some of the newest and most popular products, including the new AirPods Pro and LG’s latest C2 OLED. There are also deals still available that won’t absolutely destroy your budget — like those on the new fifth-gen Echo Dot and even a year of Hulu.Below, we’ve curated a guide to some of the best deals on presents you can still get. Many of these are taken right from our various holiday gift guides as... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Whether you’re shopping for yourself or trying to come through with an amazing gift for someone else, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are great opportunities to pick up the latest wireless earbuds and headphones. Some of this year’s best models from Apple, Samsung, Sony, Bose, Beats, and others have now been on the market for a few months and seeing their first big discounts. Meanwhile, old favorites are hitting all-time lows.You can expect most of the deals to continue through Cyber Monday; we’ll be keeping an eye on this list and updating it with notable new discounts as they pop up.The best Cyber Monday deals on Apple AirPods

VinFast sent a batch of 999 electric vehicles to the US. | Image: VinFast VinFast, the Vietnamese electric vehicle manufacturer, is shipping its first batch of EVs to the US, capping a five-year effort to develop a Southeast Asian hub for the North American and European markets.The shipment includes 999 VF 8s, an all-electric crossover with 402 horsepower, 472 pound-feet of torque, around 290 miles of range, and a starting price of $40,700. The first cars are expected to be handed over to preorder customers by the end of December, the company said. Some of the vehicles will end up with Autonomy, a car subscription service, but the majority will go to retail customers.“A proud historical milestone for the Vietnamese automotive industry”“The export of the first 999 VF 8s is a significant event for VinFast... Continue reading…

Fun fact from the files of “there’s a job for that”: there are multiple companies that specialize in making fake Moon dirt. Technically, it’s called lunar regolith to help differentiate it from “soil,” which implies the presence of organic material, or from “dirt,” which, for this story, I learned literally just means “anything that makes you dirty.” Whatever you call it, it is nothing like our friendly terrestrial soils: it’s sharp, dusty, and jagged; it’s full of glassy globs from meteorite impacts; and its chemical composition has been altered by constant bombardment from solar wind. In short, lunar regolith is strange and alien stuff.So why would multiple companies go out of their way to simulate it? Because as more governments and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter search results for major Chinese cities have become filled with tweets about escort services, porn, and gambling that are obscuring legitimate reports about a wave of protests that have gripped the country, Washington Post and TechCrunch are reporting. Searches for “北京” (Beijing) or “上海” (Shanghai) are filled with such spam which, as of this writing, vastly outnumber any tweets about the protests.One analysis highlighted by Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos estimates that over 95 percent of tweets under the Beijing search term are from spam accounts, with over 70 percent of the accounts only having started tweeting in such volumes recently. New spam tweets are appearing every few seconds from accounts that are tweeting... Continue reading…

Photo by Soeren Stache/picture alliance via Getty Images The European Commission is opening the door for European airlines to begin offering inflight 5G connectivity, the organization has announced, by allocating certain spectrum for inflight 5G as well as “previous mobile technology generations.” Passengers will connect to an on-board pico-cell base station, which then connects to ground-based networks via satellite. Calls, texts, and data are all expected to be supported.“5G will enable innovative services for people and growth opportunities for European companies,” said EU commissioner Thierry Breton. “The sky is no longer a limit when it comes to possibilities offered by super-fast, high-capacity connectivity.” The Commission’s announcement does not offer details on exactly when 5G... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge With all the deals, discounts, and promotions running around, it can be awfully tempting to spend a mint over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But for those trying to stay thrifty and keep their spending in check, we’ve gathered some of the best early Cyber Monday deals you can currently find for less than $50. There are plenty of deals on wireless earbuds, smart home devices, and Bluetooth speakers that fall below the $50 mark, many of which we’d normally recommend picking up at full price.If you’re planning to do some spending on bigger ticket items, we’ve also rounded up all the noteworthy discounts that are currently live at retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy, as well as the best early Cyber Monday deals overall.T... Continue reading…

Apple’s AirTag tracker is down to just $25. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verg While much of our Cyber Monday coverage spans a wide range of prices, it’s no secret that the biggest savings are usually on the expensive, showy stuff like TVs. But if you’ve got a lengthy list for your upcoming holiday gift exchange, or you just need to stretch your budget a little more this year, look no further than these early Cyber Monday deals under $25 you can grab now.While anyone can find cheap crap on sale during Black Friday and Cyber Monday (just open up Amazon’s page and count all the items from brands you’ve never heard of), we’re compiling the best budget-friendly deals we know won’t steer you wrong. These are items we’ve tried or even tested ourselves — which is why we can say an Apple AirTag tracker for $24.98 is... Continue reading…

Diego Luna as Cassian Andor. | Image: Lucasfilm / Disney Plus The final episode of Andor’s first season brought everything full circle, and was a powerful reminder of what Star Wars has always been about. Continue reading…

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge Project Genesis launched in Las Vegas first, so I figured the experience of using it there would be much better than in Spokane. I was wrong. Continue reading…

Protest erupted in Zhengzhou on Tuesday when Foxconn workers were told that promised bonus payments would be delayed. | Image: @StephenMcDonell Foxconn has offered workers a 10,000 yuan ($1,400) settlement in an attempt to end protests at the facility, encouraging newly recruited staff to quit and subsequently leave its iPhone assembly factory in Zhengzhou, central China. CNN reports that the payout, equivalent to one or two months of wages, comes after violent protests erupted Tuesday over withheld pay and working conditions suffered during a strict covid lockdown.The Apple manufacturing partner reportedly made the offer Wednesday via a text message sent from its human resources department, requesting that workers “please return to your dormitories,” alongside a vow to honor pay agreements. The company offered 8,000 yuan (around $1,120) to workers who agreed to quit their... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” Beta, which has been gradually rolling out over the past couple of years, is now available to anyone who’s paid for the feature in North America, CEO Elon Musk has announced. “Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen,” Musk tweeted, “assuming you have bought this option.”The rollout of the beta software kicked off in 2020 with a small number of customers and has since gradually expanded to be available to around 160,000 drivers as of October this year. Getting access to the beta has typically required that drivers hit a minimum safety threshold with Tesla’s built-in Safety Score feature as well as logging 100 miles using the company’s... Continue reading…

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge You’re not just looking for a workhorse. You want a laptop that’s got game. Maybe that means frame rates, maybe even a high-refresh-rate screen for enhanced responsiveness in less demanding games. But above all, you want bang for the buck. That’s why you’re buying right now, during Black Friday week, when some of the best deals (and a bunch of predatory fake ones) show up.These are the deals that caught my eye — the ones I might consider myself or recommend to a friend, depending on their needs and budget. Let’s start with the least expensive and go from there!The best Black Friday gaming laptop deals

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you’ve been running into abrupt “can’t play title” errors when trying to stream HBO Max content on your Apple TV 4K, you're not alone. I ran into the issue last week, and found that others are also dealing with it.The issue seems to specifically occur on Apple TV 4K devices (all generations) running tvOS 16.1, and is happening on the latest HBO Max app version 52.50.1 (released Nov 16, 2022). For some, the issue is intermittent, and can be dodged through simple troubleshooting steps like force quitting the app, logging out of the app, reinstalling it, or restarting the Apple TV.HBO’s SVP of Communications Chris Willard tells The Verge they’re “aware and working on a fix.” The company’s specialized support team followed up with my... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Federal Trade Commission is preparing a potential legal challenge to Microsoft’s plan to buy Activision for $68.7 billion, and it could file the lawsuit by next month, according to Politico. The outlet’s sources say both CEOs — Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick — have already been deposed, and yet the FTC remains skeptical.The report notes that there are still a few steps to go before the regulator is ready to act, including a vote from its commissioners. If it does end up happening, it’d mean the deal would face antitrust challenges in the US, UK and the EU. This is despite Microsoft’s repeated attempts to assure regulators that its purchase of Activision — the company in charge of Candy Crush, Call of Duty, and all of Blizzard —... Continue reading…

And just like that, Messages are now way more fun. Google has started letting some users of its Messages app react to text messages with any emoji, instead of limiting them to the standard set of seven that have been available in the app for a while now (via 9to5Google). The feature’s similar to what other messaging platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, and paid versions of Telegram have — pressing and holding on a message gives you the standard emoji reactions, but you can then access the picker to react with whatever you want.The expanded emoji reactions appear to be a limited test at this point — 9to5Google says it’s heard two reports of it being rolled out, and while one person on The Verge’s staff has access to it, two other people who checked do not. Google didn’t immediately respond to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge If you’ve been dreaming of the day you can make Alexa sound like your very own British butler, well then, you’re in luck: Amazon is now making Alexa’s English vocals region-free.“We’ve added more voice options for English-speaking customers in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia by giving them the ability to select from Alexa’s American, Australian, British, Canadian, or Indian voice options,” PR representative for Amazon Kaley Heuschkel tells The Verge in an email.Previously, if you attempted to switch up Alexa’s voice, Amazon would force you to make a region change as well, which would disrupt products and services that are only available in the country you live in. In comparison, Apple already lets US customers switch Siri’s accent to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two Estonians have been arrested and are facing extradition to the US after being accused of defrauding thousands of people out of around $575 million with a crypto Ponzi scheme, according to the US Department of Justice. Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin, along with four unnamed co-conspirators, were allegedly behind a scam crypto mining company called HashFlare and a fake crypto bank project called Polybius.The scheme began in 2013 when Potapenko, Turõgin, and the others started a company called HashCoins, according to an indictment, which you can read in full below. HashCoins said it built cryptocurrency mining equipment, though the DOJ says it actually only “sometimes” resold equipment and components that it bought off the shelf. By... Continue reading…