The Verge

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge On Tuesday, Apple quietly launched a Personal Safety User Guide to help “anyone who is concerned about or experience technology-enabled abuse, stalking or harassment.” The guide is a resource hub to help people figure out what their options are if they wish to remove someone’s access to shared information, as well as personal safety features available across the Apple ecosystem. Most notably, it includes a “Stay safe with AirTag and other Find My accessories” page at a time when an increasing number of people have come forward about being stalked with the devices.As pointed out by 9to5Mac, the hub is mostly repackaging a data privacy guide that was first published about a year ago. Overall, it’s a good thing to create an easily... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the first half of 2021, Twitter received fewer user information requests from governments and law enforcement agencies than in the six months before — but increased its compliance to a level that meant more user information was released overall.That’s according to data published by the social media platform Tuesday as part of its latest transparency report. The Information Requests report lists the number of requests as 12,369 globally between January and June 2021, with an overall compliance rate of 36.2 percent. In the previous reporting period for the last six months of 2020, Twitter received 14,561 requests and complied with 30 percent.Overall, Twitter said that the volume of user information requests had decreased by 15... Continue reading…

Image: Fanhouse After pushing back against Apple’s App Store fees last year, creator platform Fanhouse is introducing in-app purchases to its iOS app — now with a 50 percent surcharge — to let users subscribe to their favorite creators. The app’s co-founder, Rosie Nguyen, announced the changes today on Twitter. The company wrote that the changes are being made “as a result of apple’s b.s.”On Fanhouse, creators charge a subscription fee that allows fans to access exclusive (SFW) content like updates, photos, and videos. Followers can also tip creators or purchase “locked” content. The app promises its creators will receive 90 percent of payments, with the remaining going to the app.Fanhouse was initially able to slip a “subscribe” button into its app... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge If you’re hunting for an Xbox Series X, you might want to check your email inbox. As we noted last fall, Microsoft has occasionally been contacting Microsoft Store customers, offering a “limited supply of Xbox Series X bundles” that are available to “valued Microsoft customers” in the US. Image: The Verge Xbox Series X bundles now available The emails are addressed to Microsoft Store customers, and bundles are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Microsoft is limiting orders to one bundle per order or two bundles per 30-day period. The links to order a bundle are unique and tied to a Microsoft Account and don’t always guarantee that stock is available for purchase.

Verizon owned TracFone said attackers gained access to customer accounts | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Customers of Verizon-owned TracFone saw their numbers transferred to different carriers without their consent in recent weeks, as part of what the company characterized as the work of external attackers, according to a notice on its website (via the Wall Street Journal). Its Straight Talk and Total Wireless brands were affected as well.“We were recently made aware of bad actors gaining access to a limited number of customer accounts and, in some cases, fraudulently transferring, or porting out, mobile telephone numbers to other carriers,” TracFone said in the notice. The company did not reply to numerous requests for comment from The Verge, but the WSJ reported that some 6,000 customers were affected. Some saw their lines had been... Continue reading…

Uber faces a negligence lawsuit from a Massachusetts man left paralyzed in a crash | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A Massachusetts man is suing Uber for $63 million, claiming the ride-hailing company hired a driver with a dangerous record who was at the wheel in an accident that left him paralyzed. Will Good was in an Uber last April 30th on his way home from work when the driver swerved sharply and hit a parked car, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Suffolk Superior Court. The lawsuit says Good struck his head on the passenger side seat and immediately knew he was paralyzed.The lawsuit states that the driver has a driving history dating back to 1996 that includes more than 20 driving citations, including several for failure to stop and failure to yield. According to the suit, the driver was previously required by Massachusetts to undergo a... Continue reading…

The Appalachian Electric Power coal-fired Big Sandy Power Plant is seen June 3, 2014 in Cattletsburg, Kentucky. | Photo by Luke Sharrett/Getty Images Major tech companies are weighing in on a high-profile climate case in support of EPA greenhouse gas regulations. Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Tesla, Paypal, and Salesforce are among the companies that filed a brief yesterday asking the Supreme Court to uphold the agency’s authority to regulate the pollution causing climate change.“Both corporate action and EPA regulation are needed to reduce emissions at the rate necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate change,” the brief says. The companies say they are “united in their efforts to combat this threat.”The case the companies are weighing in on, West Virginia v. EPA, concerns whether or not the EPA has the regulatory authority to limit greenhouse gas... Continue reading…

Image: Valve Valve announced that the Steam Deck will go on sale starting February 25th. According to the company’s blog, customers who have reservations will get an email on that day and have three days to place an order. Valve also says that it’ll release new batches on a weekly basis, so if you’ve got a reservation, March will be the time to keep an eye on your email.Here’s some more info from Valve’s announcement:

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple is releasing iOS 15.3 and iPadOS 15.3 for compatible devices today. It’s a fairly minor update, but it does come with an essential security fix to patch a nasty Safari browser flaw. Security researchers revealed earlier this month that websites could exploit a flaw in Apple’s Safari browser to access URLs visited recently by an iOS user and even obtain a Google user ID.9to5Mac tested the iOS 15.3 release candidate that was released a few days ago and found it fixes this particular security problem. Apple’s quick fix will be useful for iOS and iPadOS users, as, unlike macOS, you can’t simply switch to another browser on iOS to avoid the security flaw. Apple allows third-party browsers on iOS, but they all have to use the same... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge HBO Max reached 73.8 million subscribers at the end of 2021, 46.8 million of which are located in the US, marking a 5.3 million increase over a full year. The numbers were shared as part of AT&T’s (HBO Max’s parent company) fourth-quarter earnings for 2021.

You can now auto-upload your PS5 captures from your console to your phone | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony seems to be close to making it a lot easier to share PS5 screenshots outside of your console. The company had appeared to be rolling out a way to have screenshots and videos captured on your PS5 auto-upload to the PlayStation app but now it’s gone. Sony began testing the feature in Canada and Japan in October, and it became available for me in the US on Tuesday night, but less than 24 hours later I am unable to use it.When the feature was first available for me, to get it to work, I had to do a couple of things. First, I had to open up the Media Gallery on my PS5, which you can find by going to the Games menu, scrolling all the way to Game Library icon, clicking that, and navigating to the Media Gallery. (If you’ve accessed the... Continue reading…

It’s a major international expansion. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Disney is planning to launch Disney Plus in 42 countries and 11 territories this summer, according to The Hollywood Reporter. It’s a significant expansion that could keep the pressure on other streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max.Here is the list of new countries getting Disney Plus, per The Hollywood Reporter:

Araya Doheny/Getty Images Isabelle Fuhrman’s performance as Esther in Paramount Pictures’ first Orphan film stunned audiences in no small part because of what the movie’s disturbing twist revealed about its titular child murderer. Twelve years later, Fuhrman is set to reprise her role in Paramount’s upcoming prequel Orphan: First Kill from director William Brent Bell, and the 24-year-old actress is certain that she’s about to shock everyone once again.In the original Orphan’s final acts, it’s revealed that nine-year-old “Esther” is actually a 33-year-old Estonian serial killer with proportional dwarfism caused by hypopituitarism, which she’s used to pretend to be a child for years as she bounces from one adoptive family to the next. Fuhrman, who was 12 when O... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The White House released a new cybersecurity strategy Wednesday aimed at reducing the risk of cyberattacks against government infrastructure.The strategy outlines the administration’s vision for moving government agencies towards a “zero trust” architecture — a cybersecurity model where users and devices are only given permissions to access network resources necessary for the task at hand and are authenticated on a case-by-case basis.The key document was published as a memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the administration’s policy arm, and addressed to the heads of all executive departments and agencies.According to the memorandum, shifting towards a zero trust architecture will require the implementation of... Continue reading…

Substack’s video feature is now in a private beta. | Screenshot: Andrew Zimmern via Substack Substack, the platform where creators can share free or paid newsletters, has announced a new video feature that’s currently in a private beta (via TechCrunch). The feature will let users upload or record videos directly in Substack and then publish them within their posts.The videos will be directly playable when viewed from a browserSubstack explains the videos will be directly playable when viewed from a browser. When included in an email, however, users won’t be able to click and play it from within the email itself — videos will instead show up as “clickable images” that redirect users to a web version in their browser. The platform’s support page says users can record and upload videos from their smartphone or desktop computer.... Continue reading…

Akili Interactive’s first product is a video game for ADHD. | Akili Interactive Akili Interactive, the company behind the first video game to get approved as a medical treatment, announced today that it will go public through a merger with Social Capital Suvretta Holdings Corp, which is run by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. The deal values the company at $1 billion.The Food and Drug Administration approved Aikili Interactive’s first product, a video game called EndeavorRX used to treat ADHD in children, in 2020. The company is still working towards full commercialization of the game but said in fillings today that around 1,000 doctors have written prescriptions for the game so far.The company has a slate of other projects in the pipeline, as well. In filings, it said it’s working on expanding... Continue reading…

Boston Dynamics is synonymous with four-legged robots, particularly its consumer model Spot. But in the past few years, the company has been expanding into logistics — one of the most challenging and potentially lucrative sectors in modern robotics.Today, Boston Dynamics announced the first commercial purchase of its pallet-stacking machine Stretch, which will be starting try-outs in DHL warehouses. The logistics giant will invest $15 million in Boston Dynamics as part of the deal, and Boston Dynamics will deliver a “fleet” of robots (exact numbers unknown) “to multiple DHL warehouses throughout North America over the next three years” where they will start with the work of truck unloading.“Deployment of the first Stretch units in... Continue reading…

A moon set can make for dramatic photos of the night sky. I always thought that taking a photo of the night sky meant mounting expensive cameras onto heavy telescopes and having extensive knowledge of the stars. But for the latest episode of my YouTube video series Full Frame, I flew 2,000 miles away from the big city lights of NYC to meet Bettymaya Foott, astrophotographer and director of engagement for the International Dark-Sky Association, who taught me how to capture incredible photos of the stars using cameras I already owned. What once seemed like a monumental task, involving deep knowledge of the cosmos, quickly turned into an incredibly peaceful but also incredibly cold night under the stars.Here is everything I learned about capturing a great photo of the night sky:Dark Place,... Continue reading…

Rows of composting grape pomace are covered for the winter in Sonoma County’s Alexander Valley on December 13, 2015, near Geyserville, California. | Photo by George Rose/Getty Images Scaling up composting, tree-planting, and other sustainable agricultural practices in California could trap about a quarter of the state’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, according to a new report. These strategies for drawing down greenhouse gases are cheaper and easier to ramp up than technological alternatives, like devices that suck planet-heating CO2 out of the air, and should play a key role in the state’s efforts to address climate change, the report authors argue.Although it often leads the nation in setting aggressive climate goals, California is also a state with one of the biggest carbon footprints, making it imperative that the state consider a wide range of strategies for reducing emissions. That could include... Continue reading…

Microsoft is planning to launch a public preview of its Android apps for Windows 11 next month, alongside some taskbar improvements and redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. Windows chief Panos Panay outlined the upcoming changes to Windows 11 in a blog post today, and they appear to be part of Windows 11’s first big update.The taskbar improvements include a mute and unmute feature and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors. Both were missing at the launch of Windows 11, but Microsoft is still working on improving the taskbar further to bring back missing functionality like drag and drop.The upcoming Windows 11 next month will also include the weather widget returning to the taskbar, something Microsoft started... Continue reading…

The Chaparral and its cargo pod in front. | Image: Elroy Air Elroy Air, a startup that wants to make cargo deliveries using autonomous hybrid-electric aircraft, has unveiled its pre-production craft: the Chapparral.Described by Elroy Air’s co-founder Clint Cope as “a hybrid between a rough-and-ready helicopter and a battle-hardened bush plane,” the Chaparral is a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft that transitions between hovering using eight vertical fans and forward flight using four swiveling propellers. A hybrid-electric powertrain gives it a range of up to 300 miles (482km) and a cargo capacity of 300 to 500lbs (136 to 226kg). Goods are loaded into an underslung pod that can autonomously be picked up and dropped off.“The Chaparral will be a vital logistics link for people around... Continue reading…

By going back in time, the game moves the series forward Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge In case you were looking for a deal on the Oculus Quest 2, Amazon has you covered. Its “Renewed Store,” where refurbished and used products are sold, will begin selling an appealing VR headset bundle on Tuesday, February 1st, although you can preorder it now for $249 (via Slickdeals). The kit contains a “like-new” Oculus Quest 2 128GB headset (normally $299 by itself), along with controllers, a silicon facial interface, a rugged, customizable head strap, and a hard case for the headset. The accessories aren’t official, as in, made by Oculus, but it’s enough to get you started. Read our review of the headset.This kit is sold and shipped from Amazon, which offers a one-year limited manufacturer’s warranty on the product. We’ve seen... Continue reading…

Xiaomi has announced the Redmi Note 11 series, continuing its popular line of budget-friendly handsets that sell in huge numbers in India and various other markets.There are four phones in total, but they only differentiate themselves in a few specific areas. All of them have what Xiaomi describes as a “trendy flat-edge body” — in other words, yes, it looks like an iPhone — and most of the specs are shared across at least two models. Here’s how it all breaks down:

Crytek has teased a new entry in its long-running Crysis series in a short trailer posted from its Twitter account. “Join the journey. Become the hero,” the trailer reads as it displays a large “4.” The announcement comes almost nine years after the release of the last numbered entry in the Crysis series, Crysis 3, which was released on February 19th, 2013.The official Crysis 4 teaser comes just hours after Crytek China appeared to confirm news of the game early in a post on Chinese social media site BiliBili. Its post, which now appears to have been deleted, said “The ‘Crysis 4’ project is confirmed, opening a new nano battlefield!” when translated into English, according to Eurogamer.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge So long, Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets; hello, Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association!The AV industry’s top lobbying group in Washington, DC is rebranding, dropping the reference to “self-driving” in exchange for a more straightforward moniker. The group, which was founded in 2016 by Waymo, Ford, Lyft, Uber, and Volvo, lobbies lawmakers to pass legislation favorable to its members. It has since grown to include the top AV operators in the country, including Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Motional, Nuro, and Zoox.It’s the latest move by the AV industry to distance itself from the term “self-driving”It’s the latest move by the AV industry to distance itself from the term “self-driving,” which many observers interpret as an... Continue reading…

Huawei’s P50 Pocket. | Image: Huawei Huawei, the embattled Chinese tech giant that continues to be the target of strict US sanctions, has announced that its flagship P50 Pro and foldable P50 Pocket will be sold outside of China. The P50 Pro will cost €1,199 (around $1,353), while the P50 Pocket will start at €1,299 (around $1,466). Huawei’s press release says the two phones will be available in “key markets across Asia Pacific, The Middle East & Africa, Europe and Latin America,” but declined to say exactly when and where.Nevertheless, at those prices, and without access to key Google apps and services like the Google Play Store, both devices will represent interesting curios rather than anything you should seriously consider buying. Sanctions have also impacted Huawei’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge More than two years after it was first announced, the Facebook-sponsored cryptocurrency formerly known as Libra appears to be coming to an end. The Diem Association set up by Facebook to manage the digital token is exploring a sale of its assets after meeting resistance by regulators who opposed the initiative, according to a new report by Bloomberg.The U.S. Federal Reserve “dealt the effort a final blow” by putting pressure on Silvergate, the banking partner that Diem said it was partnering with last year to launch the token, Bloomberg reports. I’ve also heard from someone involved that the Fed threatened Silvergate, putting the launch on ice.A Diem Association spokesperson, Michael Crittenden, told The Verge that Bloomberg’s story... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Activision plans to release at least the next three Call of Duty games on both Sony and Microsoft consoles, Bloomberg reports. The new report should be a sigh of relief to fans who were worried Microsoft would immediately make new Call of Duty games Xbox exclusive if its blockbuster acquisition of Activision goes through.According to Bloomberg, Activision had already committed to bring “the next few” Call of Duty titles to PlayStation sometime before Microsoft’s acquisition was announced. Last week, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said he told Sony that Microsoft wants to “keep Call of Duty on PlayStation” and that the company intends to honor existing agreements, so it seems like Activision’s commitment with Sony will stay in place.... Continue reading…

The Galaxy S22 leaks are coming in hot ahead of the upcoming Unpacked event scheduled for February. | Image: Samsung Samsung has confirmed a date and time for its next Galaxy Unpacked event: Wednesday, February 9th at 10AM ET / 7AM PT. The invitation features a large letter “S” with the words “The Epic Standard,” indicating that we can expect to see the Galaxy S22 series debut on the livestream, to nobody’s surprise. Samsung itself had already hinted that a new S-series Ultra device would be coming in February — one that will likely absorb the Note series.As they tend to, the S22 leaks have been coming in strong over the past month. From the looks of it, the S22 Ultra will indeed have a silo for the S-Pen stylus, like the Note does (did?), and the S22 is rumored to have a slightly smaller 6.1-inch display compared to the S21’s 6.2-inch panel. The... Continue reading…

The FTC fined a fashion website for allegedly blocking negative customer product reviews | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Fashion Nova, a California fast-fashion retailer, $4.2 million to settle allegations that it blocked negative product reviews from being posted on its website. The agency says this is its first case to challenge the practice of suppressing negative customer reviews.The FTC said in a complaint (pdf) that between 2015 and 2019, Fashion Nova used a third-party tool that allowed it to automatically post four- and five-star customer reviews but withheld “hundreds of thousands [of] lower starred, more negative reviews,” which was misleading to customers. “Suppressing a product’s negative reviews deprives consumers of potentially useful information and artificially inflates the product’s average... Continue reading…

Raven’s QA workers have formed a union — now what? Continue reading…

Image: Netflix | NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX Don’t Look Up is Netflix’s second most popular film debut to date, coming in around 4 million viewing hours short of Netflix’s crown jewel Red Notice.The new film racked up nearly 360 million hours of viewing during its first 28 days on the service, per Netflix’s Top 10 portal for tracking its most successful titles. Red Notice, meanwhile, tallied 364 million hours during its first four weeks on Netflix, while Bird Box holds third place with 282 million hours viewed.While it narrowly missed its opportunity to overthrow Netflix’s biggest film success to date — it looked like it still had a chance last week — Don’t Look Up is still a monumental win for the streamer. It’s the second major film release in a matter of months to topple... Continue reading…

El Salvador introduced Bitcoin as a legal tender alongside the US dollar in 2021. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The International Monetary Fund’s executive board has recommended El Salvador no longer use Bitcoin as a legal tender, citing potential risks to financial stability and consumer protection. The country’s use of Bitcoin could make it difficult for it to get a loan from the IMF, according to Bloomberg.The recommendation comes as part of the organization’s consultation, where staff members visit a country and prepare a report that’s discussed by the IMF’s executive board. The summary from the board looks at and discusses El Salvador’s economic policies as a whole, but the country’s 2021 adoption of Bitcoin as a legal tender got a lot of attention.The IMF’s board agrees with its staff’s recommendations from November that the country... Continue reading…

Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge Microsoft posted the second quarter of its 2022 financial results today, reporting revenue of $51.7 billion and a net income of $18.8 billion. Revenue is up 20 percent, and net income has increased by 21 percent.The PC market just had another big year thanks to continued pandemic demand, with around 340 million PCs shipped in 2021. This is now Microsoft’s second quarter of Windows 11, and Windows OEM revenue has increased by 25 percent in Q2, year over year. Windows Commercial products and cloud services revenue also increased 13 percent. Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Microsoft’s Surface Pro 8. Despite a healthier PC market, Microsoft did warn that Surface might take a hit this quarter, and it... Continue reading…

Ryan Wyatt is leaving YouTube to join Polygon Tech. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s head of gaming who oversaw some of its big deals to bring Twitch streamers to YouTube, is leaving to join the crypto company Polygon Technology, where he will be leading its Polygon Studios organization.Polygon is a “protocol and a framework for building and connecting Ethereum-compatible blockchain networks,” according to its website. Said another way, it can help people build decentralized apps that aren’t as tied to one blockchain’s fees, hurdles, or performance. In one description Polygon compares itself as the “broadband” to Ethereum’s internet, with faster transaction speeds and fees that are “10000x cheaper.”Wyatt will be focused on leading Polygon’s non-tech-related efforts, he said to The Verge in a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook partners with mobile carriers in developing countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan to give users free access to Facebook and a few other websites, but users have been unknowingly getting charged by their cellular providers, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.The service, called Free Basics, is offered through Meta Connectivity (formerly Facebook Connectivity) and is supposed to provide users with “access to communication tools, health information, education resources and other low-bandwidth services” at no charge. The program has been around since 2013, and as of last October, it serves more than 300 million people.Pakistan has been charged the most for using Facebook’s “free” internet at a... Continue reading…

NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope may have reached its final parking spot in space, but there’s still a long road ahead for the observatory before it can start taking the dazzling pictures of the cosmos that scientists have been eagerly awaiting. Over the next five months, mission engineers will meticulously tweak and test the telescope in order to prepare the spacecraft for its lifelong mission of observing the Universe.Yesterday at around 2PM ET, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, fired its onboard thrusters for a little less than five minutes, putting the vehicle into its final orbit in space. It was a crucial last step for JWST’s journey through the cosmos, capping off a 30-day voyage from the launchpad to its... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is walking back plans to replace third-party cookies with FLoC by instead proposing the Topics API, a new system for interest-based advertising. Topics works by pinpointing five of your interests, such as “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” based on your web activity, as measured by participating sites, for one week.Your browser will store these topics for three weeks before deleting them. Google says that these categories “are selected entirely on your device” and don’t involve “any external servers, including Google servers.” When you visit a website, Topics will show the site and its advertising partners just three of your interests, consisting of “one topic from each of the past three weeks.”As noted on the Topics API... Continue reading…

Hyperion Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief author Rick Riordan will be the first person to tell you how much he didn’t care for 20th Century Studios’ 2010 adaptation of the novel from director Chris Columbus. For years, Riordan’s been insisting to his fans how he’s been longing to see his work transformed into a live-action story that squares with the grand vision in his mind, and now, Disney Plus plans to make that happen.Though Riordan already announced almost two years ago in a series of now-deleted tweets that Disney Plus was moving forward with a new show based on the book series, the prolific author reiterated today the studio’s plans and shared some new details about the project in a new video posted to Twitter. Along with Riordan,... Continue reading…

A week after the news Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard, and amidst news of alleged union-busting, labor strikes, unionization and the continuing investigation of allegations of discrimination and abuse, Blizzard has announced it’s working on a new IP.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Today, the White House is saying out loud what you’ve likely already heard: the chip shortage won’t end anytime soon. “We aren’t even close to being out of the woods,” said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in a briefing with reporters today, according to Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and others.Her comments come alongside a new Department of Commerce report that cites chipmakers who “did not see the problem going away in six months,” which also isn’t exactly news: chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD have repeatedly suggested the shortage wouldn’t ease until the second half of 2022, while Intel has said it might not end until 2023.But the report, based on 150 responses from “nearly every major semiconductor producer and from companies... Continue reading…

Recently, I got Slacked by a colleague who was really annoyed and had to let off a bit of steam. It seems that a writer had shared a new Google Docs article with them (a usual way of submitting a freelance piece), and when my colleague opened the article, they found another, unknown person was already reading it — somebody who was definitely not on our staff.What had happened? The writer, probably in too much of a hurry to share the document with specific people, had simply made it public so that anybody could have access to it. This not only made the article available to anyone before it had been properly edited and published — something no publication wants — but opened it up to all sorts of mischief.Mischief like what happened... Continue reading…

Exactly Right Media Hello, hello. I’m back! Welcome to the week from sunny Los Angeles. My trip through California had me disconnecting from the internet, spotting Michael Keaton at a Santa Barbara restaurant inside a furniture store, and, naturally, ending up in multiple conversations about Joe Rogan. Just the R&R I needed :~). Anyway, I’m happy to be back with you and the podcast news. Let’s get into it.Hot Pod Summit is returning on February 24th to start On Air Fest. Hot Pod Summit is the invite-only industry conference for the people building the future of the audio industry. It will kick off On Air Fest, the audio industry’s premier cultural festival, featuring Jad Abumrad, Chuck D, Dr. Jane Goodall, and more. Buy your tickets here.If you’re... Continue reading…

Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images General Motors announced a $7 billion investment in growing its electric vehicle manufacturing capabilities in Michigan, calling it “the single largest investment announcement in GM history.”The company will spend the money on four manufacturing sites, with plans to create 4,000 new jobs and retain another 1,000 in the state. The investment includes construction of a new battery cell plant in Lansing and the conversion of GM’s assembly plant in Orion for production of the Chevy Silverado EV and the electric GMC Sierra. The latter will be GM’s second assembly plant scheduled to build full-size electric pickups, the first being the company’s Factory Zero in Detroit.GM has said it will spend $35 billion by 2025 on electric and autonomous... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Featuring the CEOs of Volkswagen, Ford, and Jeep Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The chairman of NSO Group, the Israel-based company whose spyware has been used to surveil journalists and human rights defenders around the world, has stepped down following allegations that it was also used to monitor Israeli citizens.News of former NSO chairman Asher Levi’s resignation was reported by Haaretz on Tuesday, although Levi told the Associated Press that his departure had been planned months in advance and was unconnected to current news.NSO has been embroiled in a domestic scandal since last week when the Hebrew-language business newspaper Calcalist reported that police in Israel had possessed Pegasus spyware since 2013. Calcalist alleged that the spyware had been used to monitor protest leaders and other anti-government... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Pfizer and BioNTech are launching a clinical trial to test an omicron-specific version of their COVID-19 vaccine, the companies announced today. They’re moving forward with studies of a new form of the vaccine in response to concerns that the original shot isn’t preventing infection with the newest variant of coronavirus or mild COVID-19 illness — even though it appears to be holding up well in terms of preventing hospitalization and death, especially for people who received a booster.The original two-dose series of the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines, made by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, don’t appear to offer much protection against infection with the omicron variant with the virus. A third booster dose restores some of that... Continue reading…