The Verge

20th Century Studios It was once hard to imagine that 20th Century Studios’ more mature Marvel projects like the Deadpool movies and Logan would ever end up streaming on (a relatively kid-friendly platform like) Disney Plus. But that’s precisely what is about to happen — just in time for San Diego Comic-Con.Marvel announced today that 20th Century Studios’ Deadpool, Deadpool 2, and Logan are all following in the footsteps of Netflix’s Marvel shows and making the move to Disney Plus on July 22nd.

Image: Google Google’s more affordable and palm-friendly spin on the Pixel 6, the $449 Pixel 6A, is now available to preorder, as are the new Pixel Buds Pro. Focusing on the phone first, your preorder will ensure that you’re among the first to get the Pixel 6A on or close to launch day, which is Thursday, July 28th. Google announced the release date all the way back at its I/O conference in May, and we’ve been waiting very patiently.The same goes for the $199 Pixel Buds Pro (scroll down to see a $15 off deal), Google’s first wireless earbuds to include active noise cancellation and ship in multiple bright color options. Those are releasing the same day, and you can place a preorder right now.We have a review of the Pixel 6A right here from Allison... Continue reading…

You can change the way the Alexa voice assistant sounds on your smart speaker or smart display just by asking Alexa. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Alexa’s pleasant, feminine voice has filled the homes of millions over the past few years, but Amazon finally offered a viable choice last year when it released a masculine counterpart. Amazon was late to this. Apple and Google have offered different voices, both feminine and masculine, in their virtual assistants for years. But late or not, it’s now easy to switch up the dulcet tones of your virtual assistant.In addition to the two main Alexa voices, Amazon also has celebrity voices. Right now, you can choose between Samuel L. Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal, and Melissa McCarthy. Last year, during the holiday season, Amazon added Santa Claus as a more limited “celebrity voice.” (He only answers certain holiday-related queries.)The... Continue reading…

Image: Ubisoft Ubisoft has delayed Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora from a 2022 release window to sometime in 2023 or 2024, the company announced as part of its Q1 earnings on Thursday (pdf). The delay keeps up with something of a tradition for Avatar properties to get pushed.“We want to make [Avatar] a video game industry brand,” Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said on Thursday’s earnings call. “It is important for us that we come with something that is perfect.”The company first announced it was working on a new Avatar game in 2017, and it debuted the first trailer in 2021. It seems likely that Ubisoft’s plan was to release Frontiers of Pandora this year to coincide with the December debut of Avatar: The Way of Water, but now, we’ll be waiting until 2023... Continue reading…

The service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, which is being built by Oshkosh. | Image: USPS The United States Postal Service, or USPS, has another new proposal that raises the percentage of electric vehicles it plans on purchasing to modernize its fleet (via Electrek). In a press release on Wednesday, the service said that “at least 50 percent” of its initial order for 50,000 next-generation mail trucks will be battery electric vehicles. That’s quite a change from what USPS leadership announced in February when they said that only 10 percent of the service’s new fleet would be electric.That number did get bumped up in March when the service announced it was planning an initial order including 10,019 electric trucks, just a few weeks after telling President Biden that it would continue with its plans to obtain mostly... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitch is rolling out a new safety tool that will allow streamers to share information on users they’ve banned from their chat. Shared Ban Info, as the new function will be known, will allow streamers to cooperate in keeping their communities safe from malicious actors.Twitch details the process on how Shared Ban Info will work here. Rolling out today, the Shared Ban Info program first requires streamers to create a sharing request. You can request to share ban info with other partners, affiliates, or mutual followers. Once that request has been accepted, when one party bans a user from their channel and that user attempts to chat in a channel that has a Shared Ban Info connection established, that user’s messages will be flagged,... Continue reading…

Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images President Joe Biden has tested positive for COVID-19, the White House announced today. Biden is experiencing mild symptoms and has started taking Paxlovid, an antiviral treatment.The news comes amid a wave of COVID-19 infections sweeping the country, driven by the highly transmissible BA.5 variant. Biden spent part of yesterday traveling and gave a speech about the administration’s clean energy goals in Massachusetts.In the week before the positive test, NPR reports that the president had also “lingered for extended conversations, posed for pictures and gave hugs at the Congressional Picnic on the White House South Lawn.” During a four-day trip to the Middle East, he shook hands with leaders in the region and attended meetings and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Activision Blizzard employees will participate in yet another walkout today, this time over concerns about employee safety in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Organized by A Better ABK, Activision Blizzard’s internal employee rights advocacy group, the walkout will take place at four of the publisher’s North American offices: California, Texas, Minnesota, and New York, where a new QA worker’s union was just organized.“We are calling for protection of several communities of marginalized workers,” tweeted A Better ABK on July 6th as they announced the walkout. “Employees are actively facing state legislation that is putting women, LGBTQ+ employees, and their families at risk, with other vulnerable groups... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge TikTok is making it easier for users to watch videos with auto-generated captions, the company announced today, updating a feature it introduced in 2021 that had a number of shortcomings.The previous caption feature required creators to enable auto-generated captions on their video before posting, meaning the availability of captions depended on whether the video creator remembered to click a button. If a creator forgot to enable captions, there was no way to add them after publishing the post without deleting and starting over, and deaf and hard-of-hearing users regularly had to ask others to turn on closed captions. This new update adds the ability for viewers to turn on closed captions in addition to creators.

Martial arts game Sifu is on sale for $31.99 (20 percent off) as part of the PlayStation Summer Sale. If you’ve recently managed to secure a PlayStation 5, you can enjoy your new console while saving on a number of titles thanks to Sony’s Summer Sale promotion in the PlayStation Store, which lasts until August 3rd. Some highlights from the sale include PS5 and PS4 deals on the new teen-horror game The Quarry and martial arts title Sifu, both of which we don’t often see discounts on. PS4 owners can pick up the standard edition of The Quarry for $40.19 ($19.80 off), while the PS5 version is on sale for $46.89 ($23.10 off). In addition, both the PS4 and PS5 versions of Sifu, a challenging kung fu game wherein you must eliminate the martial arts masters who killed your father, are on sale for $31.99 instead of $39.99. Read our Sifu review.O... Continue reading…

Characters from the popular Neopets game | Image: Neopets A hacker claims to have stolen information from Neopets, the long-running virtual pet website, affecting 69 million users of the service.The hack was confirmed by posts from the official Neopets Twitter and Instagram accounts on July 20th, with a tweet informing the public that the company “recently became aware that customer data may have been stolen” and had hired a forensic firm to investigate. The social media posts did not give further information about the scope of the hack but suggested that all site users change their passwords as a precaution.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. | Image: Amazon Rivian’s R1T electric trucks are becoming increasingly visible across the US, and now Amazon reveals the electric delivery vans it’s buying from Rivian are ready for a nationwide rollout.Amazon says these new trucks have 360-degree visibility with exterior cameras that link to a large internal display as well as safety features like sensor detection, highway- and traffic-assist technology, adaptive cruise control, collision warnings, and automatic emergency braking. For the drivers inside them, the vans have cooled seats, doors that automatically lock and unlock, and a powered bulkhead door that opens itself when the driver reaches their destination. Image: Amazon Inside view of Rivian’s Amazon delivery van. E... Continue reading…

Today, two astronauts will be conducting a fairly standard spacewalk on the outside of the International Space Station, but the pair of spacewalkers is a bit unusual. The duo consists of cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev of Russia’s Roscosmos and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency, spacefarers from two countries that do not typically conduct spacewalks together.The timing of the spacewalk comes amid strained relations between Russia and the European Union over the former’s decision to invade Ukraine. The invasion hasn’t had a significant impact on operations on the ISS, as NASA, the European Space Agency, and Roscosmos have continued to work together — in space and on Earth — to keep the space station running.... Continue reading…

Live A Live is one of the most influential games you’ve probably never played. The role-playing game originally debuted back in 1994, but it never left Japan — but nearly three decades later, it’s finally getting a global release. The game is particularly notable as the directorial debut of Takashi Tokita, who went on to direct titles like Chrono Trigger and Parasite Eve. That makes Live A Live a fascinating piece of video game history — but it turns out it’s also a fascinating game.Live A Live looks a lot like a traditional Japanese RPG, albeit one with some modern upgrades, including an art style that’s very similar to newer releases from Square Enix like Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy. It has turn-based combat, an epic... Continue reading…

The next generation of the upgradable ultrabook is finally here Continue reading…

Ride away on your low-emission scooter branded by your favorite big oil corp. | Image: Shell Shell, the company known for selling gasoline to fill your car, is trying to diversify with other forms of transit, like making electric scooters. That’s right, instead of driving to the red and yellow mollusk in one of the corners of your town for a fossil fuel fill-up, you can just ride with it on a battery-powered Shell Ride scooter.Shell itself isn’t the one building and selling them. Rather, the gas company licensed out its name to US-based manufacturer Lotus International last year, which then gave birth to Shell Ride-branded e-scooters and e-bikes. Lotus handles the marketing, too — including making an unboxing video of its Shell Ride SR-5S Electric Scooter that’s capable of up to 20 miles of range, up to 15mph speeds, and sells... Continue reading…

One Medical’s (pre-pandemic) picture of a visit with your subscription-provided doctor. | Image: One Medical Amazon’s two biggest acquisitions in its history have been Whole Foods ($13.7 billion) and the recently closed purchase of MGM ($8.45 billion), but now, if the deal closes, the third entry on that list will be a $3.9 billion buyout of One Medical. One Verge staffer who has been considering signing up for the company’s $199 primary care provider subscription (on top of insurance, just like any other doctor) called the company “healthcare for millennials.”Backed by Alphabet’s GV unit (formerly Google Ventures), One Medical’s pitch includes an app, 24/7 access to on-demand telehealth services over video, and guaranteed same- or next-day appointments available through more than 125 offices. Slick YouTube videos promise “reimagined” doctors’... Continue reading…

Daniel Kaluuya as OJ Haywood, Brandon Perea as Angel Torres, and Keke Palmer as Emerald Haywood. | Image: Universal Pictures Nope stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Warner Music Group has cut a licensing deal with SoundCloud to adopt the streamer’s Fan-Powered Royalties system, which allocates royalties based on individual user listening and is thought to be more artist-friendly. WMG is the first major label to adopt the system, and its embrace of the model could signal a larger shift for the industry.SoundCloud made waves last year when it introduced the new payout model in which money paid by subscribers is allocated to artists they actually listen to. That may seem like a no-brainer, but it is far from the industry standard. The pro rata model, which is used by industry heavyweights like Spotify and Apple Music, pools all subscription money and divvies it up based on total streams across the... Continue reading…

This isn’t a 120Hz Android phone, but you get the idea. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia’s cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, now supports 120fps game streaming across all Android phones with high refresh rate displays, rather than being limited to specific preapproved models. The rollout was announced last month, 9to5Google reported at the time, but Nvidia spokesperson Stephenie Ngo confirmed to The Verge that it’s officially rolling out this week.Support for 120fps gaming should result in games that look smoother and feel much more responsive compared to the 60fps cap that was previously in place for many devices. 120fps streaming has previously been available on a limited selection of Android handsets from Samsung, Google, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Asus, but now it’s available on any Android handset with the correctly... Continue reading…

The Home tab on the left versus the Feeds tab on the right. | Image: Meta Facebook’s almighty News Feed is getting split in two… kind of. Today, it’s announcing two feeds that will now be found in its iOS and Android apps. Home is the new name for the tab you see when you first open the app and is designed for algorithm-based discovery with Reels, Stories, and other personalized content. Then there’s an entirely new Feeds tab, which contains recent posts from friends, groups, Facebook Pages, and favorites, with no “Suggested For You” posts in sight.The two tabs will be accessible from both the iOS and Android versions of the Facebook app, where they will start to appear in the shortcut bar today. Meta’s press release says the contents of this bar are designed to change based on which tabs users spend the most... Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge Just a few months after announcing a “radical” split structure placing its electric vehicle future in a new segment called Model E, Ford is discussing more details about sourcing battery production capacity and the basic raw materials to power all of those EVs. Its run rate by late 2023 will need to support the production of 270,000 Mustang Mach-Es, 150,000 Transit EVs, 150,000 F-150 Lightnings, and 30,000 units of a mystery all-new mid-size SUV destined for release in Europe.What it did not mention, however, is a report from Bloomberg on Wednesday indicating that the company is planning to lay off as many as 8,000 people from the Ford Blue segment that is now responsible for its legacy internal combustion engine-powered businesses. ... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A survey of news consumption habits has found that TikTok is the fastest growing news source among adults in the UK. According to a report from UK regulator Ofcom, the app is currently used by 7 percent of UK adults as a news source, compared to 1 percent in 2020.The survey is more evidence of TikTok’s massive and growing presence in the digital world, and illustrates how the app is quickly becoming a go-to source for information as well as entertainment. In the US, for example, it was recently estimated that 40 percent of Gen Z (individuals born 1997 to 2012) use either TikTok or Instagram for everyday searches to find things like where to eat, instead of previous favorites like Google Search and Maps.Although TikTok has risen fast... Continue reading…

Google Wallet users in the US can download the app in the Google Play Store. | Image: Google The new Google Wallet app is available to all customers now, shortly after people in 39 countries started seeing it available on their phones Monday.Some people have had trouble pulling it up via search in Google Play or getting the update, but they can try this link, or find it via Google’s tweet.Google Wallet’s official rollout is the latest step in the long history of Google’s payment app variations. The company combined Google Wallet and Android Pay in 2018 to create Google Pay, a single app that included tap-to-pay, tickets, and loyalty programs under one umbrella that worked across Android and Google Chrome. In 2020, Google Pay had a big app refresh to pull in peer-to-peer payments, deals, and other services.Now Google announced... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is bringing a new taskbar overflow feature to Windows 11, designed to make it easier to find your open apps once you run out of taskbar space. It’s perfect for power users or people who love to keep all of their apps open all the time. The new taskbar overflow is a three-dot menu that appears once you’ve run out of taskbar space, and neatly hides all the apps that can’t fit on the taskbar all at the same time.Currently, if you open too many apps in Windows 11 and Windows 10, then the taskbar creates an overflow area that only shows the most recent app that has been used or open. This means that if you’re an app connoisseur, it can get difficult to navigate between lots of programs on smaller laptop screens (especially if you... Continue reading…

Twitter imagery showing the process of clipping a Space. | Image: Twitter A new feature that lets you extract a short audio clip from a Twitter Space is getting a widespread release on iOS and Android, Twitter has announced. Anyone in a Space is able to make a clip, which then expires after 30 days. Although the feature isn’t currently available to Twitter web users, the platform says support is “on the way.”Clips are designed to make content from Twitter’s live audio feature more easily sharable on the platform, by serving up the best bits of an audio livestream without asking listeners to sit through the whole thing.The widespread rollout of the feature follows a more limited test that started in March. At the time, the ability to clip a Space was only available to a small number of users on iOS, and even... Continue reading…

Image via Facebook Have you seen the tank of nightmare fuel currently circulating around the internet — the video where a robot dog fires an assault rifle? I’ve got good and bad news.The good news: It’s probably just a dangerous toy cobbled together by a Russian hoverbike startup guy.Vice traced the video back to a Russian hoverbike company founder named Alexander Atamanov, who uploaded both the video and a high-res image of the gun-dog-bot in March. Looking at both the bot itself, it’s not clear it’s anything more than a gun strapped to an existing Unitree dogbot. (It’s not clear if the bot even aims or fires the gun itself.) Looking at his larger Facebook history, it seems likely that he simply slapped together a couple of things he liked into a new... Continue reading…

Dell XPS 13 Plus running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS | Image: Dell Ten years after launching a pioneering combination of Linux preinstalled on a commercial laptop with Project Sputnik, Dell and Canonical announced that the XPS 13 Plus is the first OEM PC certified for Ubuntu 22.04 Long-Term Support (LTS). That makes this a straightforward route to having a PC that just works without worrying about whether or not each component is ready to work with Linux.Linux-equipped Developer Edition models of the laptop were already available, with prices starting at $1,289.00, but currently ship with the older 20.04 LTS software. Long-term support releases deliver what it says on the tin for ten years of software updates, with the end of standard support for this version scheduled in 2027 and the end of life in... Continue reading…

The Eve Motion is the first Thread-based motion sensor. | Image: Eve Smart home company Eve continues its transition to Thread this week with the release of the second generation of its motion sensor. A wireless sensor that works over Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy, the Eve Motion is the first standalone motion sensor to use the Thread wireless protocol, which is a pillar of the new Matter smart home standard.Today, the motion sensor will work with Apple HomeKit to trigger automations such as turning on connected smart lights or opening smart window shades. But when Matter arrives later this year, Eve says the motion sensor and all Eve’s Thread-based products will receive an over-the-air firmware update to be compatible with Matter. This will open the device to other Matter ecosystems, including Google... Continue reading…

Square Enix What had once been a warning of dark times to come is now a reality. Square Enix has finally announced its NFT (or non-fungible token) project after threatening us with the company’s embrace of the controversial and largely reviled-by-gamers blockchain technology.To facilitate this extraordinary waste of fans’ good-will, Square Enix has partnered with Enjin, an NFT company that will store Square Enix’s tokens on its Efinity blockchain. Starting today, consumers will be able to pre-order a physical action figure that comes with a code redeemable for a digital NFT. There will also be physical trading cards that similarly have a digital NFT component available for pre-order later this year.If you’re wondering which of its many franchises... Continue reading…

Minecraft developer Mojang Studios is taking a strong stance against NFTs. In a blog post titled “Minecraft and NFTs,” the studio, which is owned by Microsoft, wrote that “integrations of NFTs with Minecraft are generally not something we will support or allow.”“To ensure that Minecraft players have a safe and inclusive experience, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods, be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset,” Mojang said.According to Mojang, some companies have created “NFT implementations that are associated with Minecraft world files and skin packs.” The... Continue reading…

Image: Dan Seifert / The Verge Samsung is gearing up the hype machine for the release of its next foldables once again, and ahead of the next Unpacked event on August 10th, mobile president TM Roh has published another blog post making the case that the time for foldables is now — and that more people are picking up foldable phones.“Three years ago, Galaxy foldables could be summed up in a single word: radical,” Roh wrote. “Very quickly, however, it became clear that this groundbreaking, flexible design fit perfectly into modern lifestyles. As a result, what was once a novelty three years ago is now the preferred choice for millions.”Samsung says that nearly 10 million foldable smartphones shipped worldwide in 2021In the post, Roh says that the industry shipped... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tesla already reported vehicle shipment numbers for the second quarter, and now its full Q2 2022 financial report (pdf) reveals it’s dealing with inflation and the overall economic downturn, combined with a plunge in prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In the letter to investors, Tesla execs reveal the company has sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin holdings, adding $936 million in cash to its balance sheet.Last year, Tesla made a $1.5 billion investment in Bitcoin and announced that it would accept Bitcoin as payment. Tesla started accepting Bitcoin in late March, then abruptly reversed itself in May, just 49 days later.In the latest report, Tesla says the value of its remaining “digital assets” is $218 million, which it had... Continue reading…

An upgrade from “hopefully next year.” | Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company hopes to start delivering the Cybertruck, its battery-powered electric pickup, in the “middle of next year” during a call for investors. This is a more specific timeline than Musk has provided before — in last quarter’s earnings call, he said that the truck would be coming “hopefully next year.”Tesla originally announced the truck in 2019, with a goal of starting production in late 2021. In August 2021, the company announced a delay until 2022, and Musk pushed that prediction further back until “hopefully” next year during the company’s Q4 earnings call in January. In the meantime, competitors like Ford and Rivian have launched their own electric pickups, with Ford saying that it plans to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google has internally announced a hiring freeze that will remain in place for two weeks. According to a report from The Information, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, sent out an email to inform workers about the decision. This follows Google’s announcement of a hiring slowdown that will last until the end of this year.“We’ll use this time to review our headcount needs and align on a new set of prioritized Staffing Requests for the next three months,” Raghavan writes. As noted by The Information, Google says that the hiring freeze won’t affect existing job offers, but the company will no longer extend any new ones to applicants.In his message to employees earlier this month about the slowdown, Google CEO Sundar... Continue reading…

Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman campaigns ahead of primary election | Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images Over the last few weeks, the Fetterman and Oz campaigns have been locked in an online tit for tat as the midterm election cycle continues to heat up in Pennsylvania. The Oz campaign has repeatedly slammed “radical liberal” John Fetterman over Twitter for his 2016 Bernie Sanders endorsement and “crazier than you think” policy platform. But rather than distancing Fetterman from the criticism, his campaign has embraced the attacks as content inspiration.The standoff burst into full view on Wednesday when Dr. Mehmet Oz posted a photoshopped image of Sanders and Fetterman styled as a 1980s department store glamour shot, taken from the film Step Brothers. The Fetterman campaign replied with an image reading, “graphic design is my passion,”... Continue reading…

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 23: U.S. President Joe Biden points to a wind turbine size comparison chart during a meeting about the Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images The Biden administration is eyeing chunks of the Gulf of Mexico as new areas to expand its growing offshore wind ambitions. Today, President Joe Biden proposed opening up 700,000 acres off the coasts of Galveston, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana to future wind development. The administration is now looking for public input on developing those locations, after its proposal today to make them official “wind energy areas” where lease sales could be held in the future.Building up an offshore wind energy industry in the US has been a big part of the Biden’s administration’s goals on climate change. There’s very little of it right now — just two small wind farms operating off the coasts of Rhode Island and Virginia. The first... Continue reading…

A screenshot of WordPerfect 2021. You read that right. Recently my colleagues and I were discussing the history of word processors (that’s just the kind of thing we do here), and a few of them reminisced about using one called WordPerfect many, many years ago. Given that its heyday was in the eighties, I hadn’t heard much about it, so I Googled it for fun. And that’s when I discovered that it’s still being sold as a productivity suite. What’s more, it’s not one of those cases where a company is still taking money for what’s essentially abandonware — the most recent release is WordPerfect 2021. As in a year ago. And it’s on sale.Corel, the company that’s been in charge of WordPerfect since before I was born, is running a (horrifically modern) Black Friday in July promotion, which ends at 9... Continue reading…

KIMIHIRO HOSHINO / AFP via Getty Images Remember when Facebook’s News Feed was chock full of apps like Zynga’s FarmVille? This era in the early 2010s was Mark Zuckerberg’s first big attempt at making Facebook much bigger than just a social network and more like a platform for developers akin to Windows.It was a formative period for the internet, when mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off. For Facebook, it was the “Move Fast and Break Things” era — an early motto of the company —when it grew to hundreds of millions of users and made decisions that still haunt it to this day. What did Zuckerberg get right in this period that set Facebook up for dominance, and what did he get wrong along the way?That’s a tease of what you can expect in the second episode of the... Continue reading…

It’s a good idea to check out which apps you have installed every once in a while. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge As we use our phones year after year or transfer everything over to a new device, many of us have accumulated a catalog of apps that we downloaded at one point but haven’t actually used in months (or possibly years). Whether it’s a failed social network, the companion app for the smart device you threw in the trash or just Duolingo shaming you for giving up on learning Spanish, all these apps can take up valuable space on our phone’s storage, clutter up our home screens, and, in worst case scenarios, even drain our batteries.In this article, I’ll go over some quick and easy ways to get rid of apps you no longer use and to make apps that you don’t use very often a little more efficient.Note: the screenshots in this article were taken... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google Calendar’s new “known senders” option is supposed to make it easier to keep spam from clogging up your schedule. Toggling on the setting prevents invites from people you don’t know from automatically appearing in your Calendar. This way, Google Calendar will only automatically add invites from people in your contacts list, anyone you’ve interacted with through Workspace, and users in your company or organization.If you’re familiar with Google Calendar, you’ll know that Google automatically adds events to your schedule based on the emailed invites you receive. Letting the floodgates open by allowing Google Calendar to add events received by “everyone” could mean having a calendar infested with fake and annoying events. While t... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An update for the Android Google Photos app (versions 5.97 and later) can help you go directly to a list of screenshots, according to Android Police. With the update, you’ll have faster access to screenshots by using a shortcut, accessible from the Photos icon on your phone’s homepage with a long press or available to split out as a direct shortcut placed on your screen.If you don’t know how to use shortcuts on Android or have forgotten, here are Google’s instructions:

It’s light on features. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple’s latest slate of updates — iOS and iPadOS 15.6, macOS 12.5, watchOS 8.7, and tvOS 15.6 — are starting to show up for some users. Given the next versions of the OSes are likely due out in a few short months (and beta testers are already using them), it’s not a surprise that Wednesday’s updates are all relatively light on features. According to the release notes, here’s what’s new:

OpenAI Those waiting for a chance to use DALL-E may soon get their turn. The powerful AI tool that generates images based on provided text will open in beta to one million users on the waitlist, OpenAI, the company that created DALL-E, announced today.Users enter a phrase or string of words into DALL-E, and the tool returns its own interpretation in the form of four images, ranging from whimsical to hyperreal. An updated DALL-E 2, launched in April, added the ability to edit existing images.

Photo by GREGG NEWTON / Gregg Newton / AFP via Getty Images NASA is aiming to launch its new monster rocket, the Space Launch System, on its first trip to deep space as early as late August, the agency announced today. NASA says it has placeholder dates for August 29th, September 2nd, and September 5th for the rocket’s debut, though there is still plenty of work left to do on the vehicle between now and then.The Space Launch System, or SLS, is a major component of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency’s initiative to send humans back to the Moon. Designed to carry NASA’s Orion crew capsule into deep space, the rocket is slated to perform a series of missions over the next few years that should eventually culminate with astronauts landing on the lunar surface again. But first, NASA wants to see it... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Cybercrime may be a global industry — but that doesn’t mean criminals are immune from facing prosecution across borders.The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today that it had extradited dual Romanian / Latvian national Mihai Ionut Paunescu — known as “Virus” — to the US from Colombia for allegedly designing malware used to steal money from bank accounts across the world and operating the infrastructure used to distribute it.Paunescu is alleged to be one of the creators of the Gozi Virus, a Trojan that infected millions of computers in countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, and Finland between 2007 to 2012. Distributed through corrupted PDF documents, the Gozi Virus captured banking login details and passwords from... Continue reading…

Chelsea star Sam Kerr in FIFA 23. With the 2022 edition of the Euros currently underway in a sweltering England, interest in the women’s game is particularly high right now — and EA is taking advantage with the next FIFA release.Today, the company unveiled the first trailer and gameplay details for FIFA 23, and, among other changes, the game includes the addition of women’s club teams from the top leagues in England and France. FIFA 23 will also feature both editions of the world cup: the 2022 men’s competition in Qatar and the women’s, which follows in 2023 in Australia and New Zealand. (Both will be added as part of a free, post-launch update.)EA first introduced women’s international teams in the 2016 edition of FIFA, but the inclusion of club teams is still a big —... Continue reading…

Image: Faze Clan Faze Clan, one of the biggest esports companies in the world, has officially gone public via a SPAC merger with B. Riley Principal 150 Merger Corp. The deal values Faze at $725 million, according to Axios, which is lower than the original $1 billion valuation from when the merger was announced in October. Faze is now trading on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker symbol FAZE.Faze is a huge esports and gaming lifestyle brand, and it’s extremely popular with younger audiences — Faze claims that about 80 percent of its audience is between the ages of 13 and 34. It not only has 11 competitive esports teams in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, PUBG, and Valorant but is also associated with some big personalities,... Continue reading…