The Verge

Ye at Paris Fashion Week. | Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images Kanye West, the musician now known as Ye, is buying Parler, a social media platform that styles itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. The acquisition was announced by Parler in a press release, which said that it has entered into an agreement in principle with Ye that’s expected to close later this year.“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” said Ye in a press statement.

The Chromecast with Google TV 4K, originally released in 2020. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Android 12 is rolling out for the 4K model of the Chromecast with Google TV, 9to5Google reports. The update for the 2020 streaming dongle follows the release of Google’s cheaper HD model last month, which shipped with Android 12 out of the box. To download the update on the 4K dongle, navigate to the profile icon at the top right of the interface, then hit Settings, System, About, and select System Update.The update doesn’t add any major new features to the two-year-old streaming dongle, but it contains a couple of new settings that should improve playback in certain situations. FlatPanelsHD reports that the biggest is a new frame rate matching feature that should cut down on judder by allowing the Chromecast to match the frame rate of... Continue reading…

Image: G4 TV Comcast is shutting down G4 after attempting to relaunch the gaming channel last year, according to a report from Deadline. The channel first appeared on linear cable back in 2002 until it met its demise as the final studio shows were axed in 2012, and it was eventually replaced by the Esquire Network.Dave Scott, the CEO of Comcast’s Spectacor division, announced the shutdown in an internal memo obtained by Deadline before it was even sent, saying that the channel has had low viewership and has not “achieved sustainable financial results.”

The EQE SUV will be out by 2023. | Image: Mercedes-Benz The Mercedes-Benz EQE has been SUV-ified. The German automaker revealed a higher riding, more utility-focused version of its EQE sedan, and while the price is still being kept under wraps, the EQE SUV is expected to hit US dealerships starting in 2023.We’ve known that we’d be getting an SUV version of the EQE sedan since it was first revealed last year. Mercedes did the same for its flagship EV, the EQS, coming out with the SUV version earlier this month. It’s the fourth EV to be built on the automaker’s new EV platform.Mercedes says the EQE SUV will be “the most spacious representatives of its class”With the EQE SUV, we’re getting three trim levels — one rear-motor and two dual-motor versions — as well as an AMG performance... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Microsoft failed to properly protect Windows PCs from malicious drivers for nearly three years, according to a report from Ars Technica. Although Microsoft says its Windows updates add new malicious drivers to a blocklist downloaded by devices, Ars Technica found these updates never actually stuck.This gap in coverage left users vulnerable to a certain type of attack called BYOVD, or bring your own vulnerable driver. Drivers are the files your computer’s operating system uses to communicate with external devices and hardware, such as a printer, graphics card, or webcam. Since drivers can access the core of a device’s operating system, or kernel, Microsoft requires that all drivers are digitally signed, proving that they are safe to use.... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple is working on a dock for the iPad that would allow the device to function as a smart display and speaker, according to a report to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The company reportedly plans on introducing the capability as soon as next year, converting the iPad into an Amazon Echo Show-like device that you can set atop a counter or nightstand.Amazon already does something similar with its Fire tablets, as the company lets users place the devices into a charging dock to prop them up like a smart display. Even Google announced a docking accessory for its upcoming Pixel Tablet last week, which is supposed to serve as both a magnetic charging station and speaker. Once the tablet’s in place, it’ll function like a Nest Hub Max, letting you... Continue reading…

This Xbox version of the Hammerhead HyperSpeed is the definitive version, so says Razer. It can work with PlayStation and Xbox, while the PS-specific version can’t work with Xbox. | Image: Razer To stand out from the many over-ear headsets that Razer has released for consoles, the company is bringing a new version of its Hammerhead wireless earbuds to PlayStation and Xbox in November for $149.99. Each console is getting its own color treatment of the Hammerhead HyperSpeed (white with blue accents for PlayStation, black with green for Xbox). This model features active noise cancellation — and of course, Chroma RGB lighting effects. Included with each is a USB-C audio transmitter along with a USB-C-to-A adapter since the Series X / S consoles don’t have a USB-C port.As you might have anticipated, each version handles connectivity a little differently but both support 2.4GHz wireless and Bluetooth 5.2 for pairing with mobile... Continue reading…

$399.99 is an aggressive price for a promising Android handheld that has a 6.8-inch OLED screen with 144Hz refresh rate. | Image: Razer Razer is finally showing off the Edge, its portable Android gaming handheld. Good news: it looks a lot better than the last time we saw it in December 2021. There’s a lot to go over with this one. The Edge will release in a Wi-Fi-only version for $399.99 in January 2023, followed by a 5G-ready version through Verizon in early 2023. It’ll support the carrier’s ultra wideband and sub-6GHz networks. Razer’s following the Steam Deck reservation model, allowing people to pay $5 to reserve an Edge.It’s meant to be a great device for cloud game streaming through Xbox Cloud Gaming or Nvidia GeForce Now. Razer says that the Edge supports up to 144 frames per second through the Steam Link app when you’re streaming PC games locally. The Edge runs... Continue reading…

Image: Meta Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social universe set in virtual reality (VR), is reportedly struggling to gain and keep users. According to internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Horizon Worlds currently has around 200,000 monthly active users, a dip from the 300,000-user milestone Meta confirmed it hit back in February.Horizon Worlds lets users create (or visit) spaces where they can hang out, play games, meet other people, and chat with friends. The platform’s userbase actually increased tenfold following its expansion to all Quest users in the US and Canada last December, something the popularity of Meta’s Quest 2 headset during last year’s holiday shopping season likely contributed to as well.But now it looks like Meta’s... Continue reading…

Google’s Pixel 6 was a great value at $599, but a $200 discount makes it even more attractive. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge As expected, the sun has set on Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale, along with the litany of counter sales running elsewhere. Despite this, however, there are still plenty of solid deals to check out at Amazon and Best Buy, many of which are holdouts from earlier in the week. Some of these products may not be available for their lowest prices ever, true, but they’re still worth a look if you missed them earlier this week.A bit of housekeeping before we dig in, though. While there are plenty of other deals available today, you can also sign up for our sweepstakes for a chance to win a sack full of free gear hand-picked by The Verge’s deals team. Just head over to this page and sign up before the morning of October 19th to throw your hat in... Continue reading…

Jeff Sheldon’s desk is a well-known thing on the internet – now he’s trying to upgrade it. Ugmonk started as a T-shirt store — now founder Jeff Sheldon is trying to turn it into something much more ambitious. But as he knows, hardware is hard. Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AT&T Illinois will pay $23 million after it admitted to making payments to former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan’s political ally in return for his “vote and influence over a bill,” according to a Friday press release from the Department of Justice (via Ars Technica). The company will also have to cooperate with the government’s investigation into the alleged misconduct and will have to set up a compliance and ethics program that the government will receive reports on. If the company keeps up its end of the bargain, the government will dismiss its prosecution.According to the DOJ, in 2017 AT&T paid one of Madigan’s allies $22,500 through a lobbying firm that it worked with. AT&T employees tried to make it seem as if... Continue reading…

Kristen Radtke / The Verge Workers at Apple’s Penn Square store in Oklahoma City have voted to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, with 56 yeses, and 32 nos. According to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversaw the election, all regular full-time and part-time employees at the store were eligible to vote, 95 in total.The election was only the second one carried out for a US Apple store. In June, workers in Maryland voted to unionize in association with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Another election was scheduled to happen in Atlanta, but the CWA called it off, claiming that the company had made a fair election “impossible” by intimidating workers.Apple has faced several complaints about anti-union... Continue reading…

A burst of tweets from women who, as children, modeled for relaxer brands is one of the latest instances of the Black Twitter community finding an unexpected connection and reminiscing over a shared experience.

The company was accused of faking a video that showed its truck driving | Getty Images Trevor Milton, founder and former CEO of electric and hydrogen vehicle company Nikola, has been found guilty on three counts of fraud after a jury decided that he lied to investors to increase the startup’s stock. An indictment filed in 2021 accused the company of staging a video that purportedly showed its Nikola One semi driving under its own power, when it was actually rolling down a hill.Milton was also accused of misleading investors about where the batteries in its vehicles came from, the development process for its pickup truck, and about how far the vehicles were in development, according to Reuters. He stepped down from his role as CEO in September 2020.Milton’s charges include one count of securities fraud, and two counts of... Continue reading…

SmartThings hubs will be among the first devices to be Matter certified. | Image: Aeotec An over-the-air update coming later this month will turn Samsung’s standalone SmartThings hubs into controllers for the new smart home standard Matter. The v2 hub will control Matter devices over Wi-Fi and ethernet, while the current hub and SmartThings dongle will also act as Thread border routers. Samsung is the first company to publicly announce Matter certification.Jaeyeon Jung, Samsung Electronics corporate vice president and head of SmartThings’ mobile experience business, told The Verge in an interview that the company received its Matter certification early on Wednesday, October 12th, a week after Matter launched. Michelle Mindala-Freeman of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which oversees Matter, confirmed that it started... Continue reading…

The CF Industries fertilizer complex in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, on June 30th, 2022. | Photo by Emily Kask for The Washington Post via Getty Images A massive effort to capture the pollution causing climate change is marching forward in Louisiana, and it’s becoming a major flashpoint in the debate over how to clean up an “energy state” speckled with fossil fuel and petrochemical plants.This week, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards announced an “unprecedented” collaboration between two oil and gas giants, ExxonMobil and EnLink Midstream, and leading ammonia producer CF Industries. In what they’re calling the “largest-of-its-kind commercial agreement,” the three companies will attempt to capture 2 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, transport the gas across the state, and bury it underground.Three companies will attempt to capture 2 million tons of carbon dioxide... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge We all want everything to work just fine all the time. But sometimes they just don’t. Your Windows app slows down. You get the dreaded “this program is not responding” pop-up. Your whole computer freezes.In cases like this, the best option is often to force quit the unresponsive app. This means your computer will force the program to close, regardless of what it’s in the middle of doing or trying to do. There are several ways you can do this on a Windows PC. Here they are.

Image: Nvidia Nvidia is pausing the launch of its upcoming 12GB RTX 4080 graphics card. After originally unveiling the 12GB RTX 4080 last month alongside a much more powerful 16GB model, Nvidia now admits it messed up with the naming. “The RTX 4080 12GB is a fantastic graphics card, but it’s not named right,” says Nvidia in a blog post. “Having two GPUs with the 4080 designation is confusing.”Nvidia is now pausing the launch of the 12GB RTX 4080 model but will still go ahead and launch the 16GB version on November 16th.Criticism had been building over Nvidia’s decision to label the 12GB model as an RTX 4080, particularly when the 16GB model was so different. The RTX 4080 12GB was supposed to start at $899 and include 7,680 CUDA Cores, a 2.31GHz... Continue reading…

A Seabin at work in one of the Great Lakes | Image: Great Lakes Plastic Cleanup Waste capture devices collect thousands of pieces of trash in the Great Lakes each day. Can they also motivate humans to stop putting waste in the water in the first place? Continue reading…

It took me 10 attempts to get this shot. You’ll have much better luck if you remove the straps, but even then I wouldn’t call it reliable. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge Google’s official line is that the Pixel Watch does not support Qi charging or reverse charging from a phone. However, in the last few days, many users have anecdotally reported that these wireless charging methods do, in fact, work. Curious, I tried it out for myself, and I’m sorry to say that, while it does sort of work, it’s simply not reliable.First off, I decided to try charging the Pixel Watch using my Pixel 7 Pro review unit. I turned on the Battery Sharing feature, plopped the watch on the back of the phone, and it worked! For a grand total of 10 seconds. While the charging animation popped up, it never actually maintained a stable-enough connection to meaningfully charge. Sometimes I got it to work for as long as a minute, but... Continue reading…

Apple’s Face ID has long provided biometric logins for the iPhone. | Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge Apple’s rumored virtual and augmented reality headset will reportedly use iris scanning tech for logins and payments, according to The Information. The report, which cites two people involved in developing the headset, says the scanning is supposed to make it easier for multiple people to use the headset with their own accounts.The eye-scanning system echoes iOS tools like Apple’s fingerprint or Face ID logins, and it would take advantage of the device’s many cameras. It would also help differentiate Apple’s offering from its main competitor: the Meta Quest Pro, which the company formerly known as Facebook announced earlier this week. The Quest Pro features inward-facing cameras that can track eye and face motion, but it doesn’t (at... Continue reading…

Park Hae-il and Tang Wei in Decision to Leave | Image: CJ ENM Park Chan-wook, the director behind Oldboy and The Handmaiden, returns with a film that’s part whodunit, part ill-fated romance Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Handles, usually indicated by an @ sign in front of a name or nickname, are useful for people who want to create an identity, indicate their opinions, or make a joke — and many social networks, such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook, have adopted it. Now, finally, YouTube is as well — and not just for its established creators.Until recently, the only people who had YouTube handles — individual URLs that allow people to find your videos — were those who had at least 100 subscribers. The rest of us were using URLs that went something like youtube.com/user/your.handle. Now, YouTube is rolling out handles to all its users — @ names that will be used to identify you in channel pages, Shorts, and other YouTube areas.YouTube is sending out... Continue reading…

Valve’s latest beta Steam Deck update enables users to set longer custom startup videos on the handheld. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Valve released its latest Steam Deck beta update yesterday, which includes longer boot animations among the usual array of bug fixes and optimizations. Now, the maximum length of a boot sequence has been increased from 10 seconds to 30 seconds, opening up the possibility for users to create longer custom startups.Some users discovered they could create their own sequences prior to any native support, which as Rock Paper Shotgun reports, have ranged from nostalgic:

A Starlink terminal in Ukraine. | Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images After providing tens of thousands of Starlink terminals to help Ukraine’s war effort, SpaceX has told the Department of Defense that it may not be able to provide future funding for the service, CNN reports. In a letter dated September 8th, the company’s director of government sales reportedly wrote that SpaceX is “not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time.”The terminals have provided essential connectivity to Ukraine during its war with Russia. Putin’s war machine has targeted Ukraine’s communications infrastructure as part of its invasion of the country, but Starlink’s satellite-based internet connectivity has provided an effective way for Ukraine’s... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is bringing GPU decompression to Windows PC games soon. After launching DirectStorage earlier this year, GPU decompression promises to be the next step in the ongoing effort to improve game load times on PCs. Microsoft says it’s “one of our most highly requested features” from game developers.GPU decompression works by offloading the work needed to decompress assets in games to the graphics card instead of the CPU. Modern games include massive amounts of assets like characters, landscapes, and objects that are all compressed to reduce the total size of a game.“Typically, decompression work is done on the CPU because compression formats have historically been optimized for CPUs only,” explains Cassie Hoef, a senior program... Continue reading…

The cream-colored Apple Watch Series 8 is still available at Walmart for $349. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Amazon wasn’t the only one offering a deluge of deals earlier this week. If you were looking for alternative places to shop during Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale — perhaps one that didn’t require you to sign up for a premium membership — Walmart was featuring many of the same deals, dropping notable discounts on standouts like the Apple Watch Series 8 and Beats Fit Pro. While many of the sales have ended, Walmart is still offering discounts on a handful of items, none of which require a Walmart Plus membership to take advantage of.Below, we’ve rounded up a selection of the best deals you can still get from Walmart’s “Rollbacks and More” sale. Admittedly, the options are limited, but perhaps a new pair of earbuds or a smartwatch is... Continue reading…

The Arecibo Observatory after its collapse in 2020. | Photo by RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images The National Science Foundation (NSF) won’t rebuild the massive Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico following its collapse in late 2020. The agency instead plans to build an education center focused on STEM education and outreach, according to an NSF announcement.The Arecibo Observatory was an important tool for deep-space observation and featured in films such as Contact and GoldenEye. But in August 2020, an auxiliary cable fell, with another cable failing in November. The NSF feared that others might have followed, which would have put Arecibo at risk, and said that it planned to demolish the observatory. But before that could happen, Arecibo collapsed in on itself.The unnamed new center is set to open sometime in 2023. The NSF is... Continue reading…

The organizers have dubbed it the “T-Force Social Care Alliance.” | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Workers on T-Mobile’s social media customer service team, who respond to customer questions, comments, and complaints on sites like Twitter and Facebook, are trying to start a union. On Wednesday, they announced the creation of the “T-Force Social Care Alliance,” posting a letter tying their decision to pay cuts, layoffs, and management’s lack of response to employees raising concerns about those issues.The letter says that T-Mobile has cut monthly bonuses for T-Force (the carrier’s name for its social media support team), instead replacing them with “micro-raises” and an annual bonus, which the alliance claims there are very few details about. According to the letter, workers may end up with thousands of dollars less per year —... Continue reading…