The Verge

Fortnite fans have solved an Epic Games puzzle to reveal an Uncharted crossover coming to the game on February 17th. Tom Holland will star in Fortnite for a second time, thanks to a new skin in his portrayal as Nathan Drake in the upcoming Uncharted movie that hits theaters on February 18th. The original Nathan Drake character and Chloe Frazier will also be available in both movie and video game forms inside Fortnite.Epic Games started teasing the collaboration late on Friday with a treasure hunt website, days after leakers spotted code inside Fortnite that pointed towards an “Uncharted treasure map.” Players had to solve a 14-character password, with some creators getting clues along the way. The password, sicparvismagna, was solved in... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Forbes has announced that Binance, “one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency and blockchain infrastructure providers,” is making a $200 million investment to own a part of an “iconic business information brand.” That money is part of a $400 million private investment in public equity (PIPE) arrangement set up for Forbes to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.A defamation lawsuit and one crypto hacker/writer weren’t enough to stop this dealThe deal makes for an interesting milestone, showing how Web3 firms have reached their “let’s buy a media outlet” moment, kind of like Time Warner and AOL, or AT&T and Time Warner, or Verizon and AOL, or... you get the point.But this arrangement also brings... Continue reading…

Photo by Alex Castro / Amelia Holowaty Krales These gift ideas ran Cupid’s arrow right through us Continue reading…

Fujifilm’s Instax Square SQ1 is always a welcome gift, one that is currently selling at an all-time low. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Let’s face it: most of us have procrastinated on buying a gift for Valentine’s Day before. Thankfully, there’s still time to pick something up before Monday, February 14th, especially if you know where to look. To help you find the right gift, we’ve rounded up a few ideas that are set to arrive on time. These include deals on smart displays like Amazon’s Echo Show 8, as well as retro-inspired instant cameras, AirPods, and even a portable message gun.For those who waited until the very last minute, we’ve also included some digital gift ideas, including digital gift cards and games. And remember, if you need even more suggestions, you can always peruse our 2022 Valentine’s Day gift guide. There, you’ll find a selection of ideas spanning... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon warehouse employees who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear face masks at work, The Wall Street Journal reported. The company is rolling back a mask requirement it last put back into effect during the omicron surge in December. Last year, the mask requirement was lifted between May and August and again during much of November and December until the spread of the omicron variant spurred a change.Amazon is pushing incentives for vaccinations instead of mandatesThe company also updated its rules for paid time off. Warehouse employees who have received both doses of the coronavirus vaccine by March 18th are eligible for COVID-19 related paid leave if they contract the virus, while unvaccinated employees will... Continue reading…

It sounds like your streaks should be safe. | Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images The New York Times’ version of Wordle launched Thursday, but just like most big video game launches these days, it’s been messy. While there have been reports of a few different issues, perhaps the most egregious was that some win streaks weren’t carried over from the old Wordle URLs to the Wordle URL on the Times, despite what was promised after the Times announced it was buying the popular word puzzle from creator Josh Wardle. We asked the Times what’s been going on, and spokesperson Jordan Cohen shared details about how it has been fixing things.Shortly after Thursday’s launch, the Times identified a problem affecting users’ current streak information. “For these users, their Current Streak was being reset to one after successfully... Continue reading…

UNITED STATES - NOVEMBER 28: Nuclear power plant in northern California | Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images At least some nuclear power plants in the US contain counterfeit parts that could pose significant risks, an investigation by the inspector general’s office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found. Those parts “present nuclear safety and security concerns that could have serious consequences,” says the resulting report published on February 9th.While concerns about safety and nuclear waste have vexed the nuclear power industry for decades, the new findings come amidst growing enthusiasm for nuclear energy as a carbon-free power source that can help nations meet their climate goals.The investigation was conducted after unnamed individuals alleged that “most, if not all,” nuclear plants in the US have fake or faulty parts. The... Continue reading…

Photo by: Lindsey Nicholson/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Uber and Lyft have been operating on parallel tracks for a long time. Drivers moonlight for both services, customers toggle between the two apps, and despite Lyft’s efforts to position itself as a “woke” alternative to Uber, the two companies essentially operate identical ride-sharing services in the US.Of course, there’s a lot to differentiate the two from one another. Uber is global, while Lyft only operates in North America. Uber dominates ride-sharing, taking in roughly 70 percent of US riders spending and leaving Lyft with the rest. But this week’s earnings reports revealed a much sharper divergence between the two companies than we’ve seen in the past, namely around side hustles.side hustle divergenceUber’s main side hustle is... Continue reading…

Big changes for Warzone are on the way. | Image: Activision Blizzard Activision is working on two big Call of Duty initiatives for 2022, the company announced Friday. One is a sequel to 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and the other is a “new Warzone experience,” both of which will be “designed together from the ground-up,” according to a blog post.It’s unclear if the new Warzone experience is a full-on sequel or a major update in the vein of Fortnite’s massive chapter changes, and the company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment asking for clarification. However, Activision is promising some big things. You can expect “a massive evolution of battle royale with all-new playspace and a new sandbox mode​,” the blog says, and a new engine that powers “both the new Call of Duty game release... Continue reading…

Before Disney Plus, Netflix’s Marvel TV shows were pushing the edge of MCU-adjacent content on streaming, but soon, you won’t be able to watch Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Punisher, or The Defenders on Netflix anymore.News of the pending removal surfaced earlier today at What’s on Netflix, as viewers noticed flags on the shows in the Netflix app. Spokespeople for Netflix and Disney who declined to be named publicly have confirmed to The Verge that Netflix’s license ends February 28th.Polygon points out that this shift is coming just after a few characters from the Netflix shows popped up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Charlie Cox brought his Daredevil character into Spider-Man: No Way Home, while Vincent... Continue reading…

Photo: Alcon Entertainment Blade Runner’s next act will apparently be a live-action TV series from Amazon, with original director Ridley Scott set to return as an executive producer on the project, Blade Runner 2099, Variety reports.Blade Runner 2099 will pick up 50 years in the future from the Denis Villeneuve-helmed sequel Blade Runner 2049 from 2017 and will see Silka Luisa (the showrunner on Apple TV Plus’ Shining Girls) writing and executive producing the series. Deadline adds that Scott may also direct the show himself, too.Scott had previously teased the project in a BBC interview back in November — the first public mention of the series — mentioning that the live-action show was being developed as a 10-episode series to start, with a pilot and a show... Continue reading…

NASA unveiled a mosaic of the first images captured by the revolutionary James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, today. The image represents the early stages of the telescope’s 18 main mirror segments properly aligning before JWST reaches its full potential.The image is blurry, but this is actually a good starting point in the long process of adjusting JWST’s mirrors to take ultra-sharp photos of the distant Universe. The 18 points of light that appear in the image all represent the same isolated star, known as HD 84406, seen by a different primary mirror segment. Light collected from each primary mirror segment was reflected back to Webb’s secondary mirror, then measured using one of the telescope’s key imaging instruments, the Near... Continue reading…

Happy Friday. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter had some issues Friday; it wasn’t working on desktop for some people, and the problems seemed more prevalent on the West Coast. But about an hour after I first noticed problems, Twitter said things were fixed.“We’ve fixed a technical bug that was preventing timelines from loading and Tweets from posting,” the company said via its support account. “Things should be back to normal now. Sorry for the interruption!”

Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images One of the many aspirations for “web3” is that you could potentially take certain messy, emotional human processes and clean them up by putting them on the blockchain. “Smart contracts” write their terms directly into code, and actions they take are both public and irreversible. Enthusiasts believe this sort of “trustless” system can enable people come together to work on projects that they otherwise might not.If you get enough of those people together to work on a project, you might have a decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. The Ethereum network, on which many DAOs run, describes them as “a safe way to collaborate with internet strangers.” Remember when thousands of people came together within days to raise $47 million in an... Continue reading…

Construction workers install a new pedestrian bridge made with recycled wind turbine blades in County Cork, Ireland. | ReWind On a former train track bed connecting the towns of Midleton and Youghal in County Cork, Ireland, workers recently excavated the rusted remains of an old railway bridge and installed a pedestrian one in its place. The bridge would have been an unremarkable milestone in the development of a new pedestrian greenway through the Irish countryside, if not for what it’s made of: recycled wind turbine blades.That makes it just the second “blade bridge” in the world. The first, installed last October in a small town in western Poland, officially opened in early January. The engineers and entrepreneurs behind these bridges are hopeful they represent the beginning of a new trend: repurposing old wind turbine blades for infrastructure projects.I... Continue reading…

Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images Major automakers are feeling the strain of the anti-vaccine mandate protests in Canada that have blocked several major bridges on the US-Canada border. Honda, Toyota, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis have all had to cut production in Canada, the US, or both as the anti-mandate protests stretch into their third week.It is the latest supply chain disruption to affect the auto industry, which is still reeling from the semiconductor chip shortage that has slowed production and led to increased prices of both new and used vehicles.The convoy protests began in late January, after a loose affiliation of truckers banded together to drive from western Canada to the nation’s capital of Ottawa to voice opposition to COVID-19 vaccine... Continue reading…

Starship stacked on top of the Super Heavy rocket | SpaceX SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s hopeful that his company’s launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, will receive regulatory approval to launch by March and that the first orbital launch of SpaceX’s new Starship rocket will take place sometime this year.Musk made these comments during his first presentation on Starship since 2019, which he gave last night at the company’s test facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Standing in front of a full stacked prototype of the rocket that towered high over the stage, Musk provided an overview of some of the latest specs of the vehicle, why he wants to pursue deep space travel, and when he expects to make all these plans happen.It was his fifth presentation on Starship overall, with Musk talking for more... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales/ The Verge The Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 remains one of our favorite gaming laptops, despite its lack of a webcam. This cool and powerful laptop has returned to its lowest price at Best Buy. The G15 is normally available for $1849.99, but Best Buy has currently discounted it to $1,549.99. While Asus has recently updated its 15-inch Zephyrus line to include a webcam and more powerful CPU, the collection of specs still makes last year’s model extremely competitive at this price point. This model of the G15 includes a Ryzen 9 CPU, an RTX 3070 graphics card, a 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM. The Verge’s Monica Chin reviewed this laptop for us about a year ago and enjoyed the robust battery life and performance of this laptop.The Anker Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro... Continue reading…

Twitch has updated its usernames policy | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Video streaming website Twitch has updated its policy to ban usernames that have explicit references to sex or hard drugs. According to a blog post on the Amazon-owned platform, “usernames really matter on Twitch,” and given their visibility across the site, Twitch believes usernames “must be held to a universal and higher standard than other places people express themselves,” such as chat.Under the new policy, which takes effect March 1st, Twitch will remove reported usernames that include “references to sexual acts, arousal, fluids, or genitalia” and references to hard drugs. Alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana are excluded from that list, however. After the deadline, the company says it will suspend users if their usernames are “hateful,... Continue reading…

Netflix The internet of things falls apart Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Sources say staff at the company are stressed, overworked, and struggling to maintain standards Continue reading…

I have nothing against Google’s Meet videoconferencing platform — in fact, I’ve used it a few times — but I can’t help being annoyed when the feature is pushed at me via other apps. Specifically, Gmail. Meet first appeared on the desktop Gmail app in the spring of 2020, but it did not take up much space and was reasonably easy to ignore (or remove from your screen, if you so wished).A few months later, however, Meet made its way onto the mobile Gmail app via two tabs at the bottom of the screen: one labeled “Mail” and one labeled “Meet.” The problem wasn’t only that I was pushed to use a particular videoconferencing app while all I wanted to do was check my email, but it also took up space, expanding the bottom margin of the app and... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.This week’s episode covers these big tech stories: Samsung’s Galaxy S22 Unpacked event, the latest updates in tech regulation and antitrust policy, and the various troubles at Peloton this week.Verge editor Chris Welch joins Nilay, Dieter, and Verge managing editor Alex Cranz to discuss his hands-on experience using Samsung’s new phones — the Galaxy S22 and S22 Plus — and the rebranding of Samsung’s Note line.Senior reporter Adi Robertson also joins the show to explain this week in antitrust policy: the Open App Markets Act... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro What do you do with the IP rights to your very expensive cartoon primate? Put him on cannabis packaging Continue reading…

The latest trailer for Jurassic World Dominion has arrived, picking up on the cliffhanger from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and showing off a (jurassic) world that is now full of feral dinosaurs, roaming the fields, streets, and forests.This, the movie seems to be positing, is a bad thing, one that might see the dinosaurs move to displace man from its place on the top of the evolutionary food chain. “Humans and dinosaurs can’t coexist!” Laura Dern’s returning Dr. Ellie Sattler explains in a voiceover, amidst shots of T-rexes running wild. “We’re racing towards the extinction of our species” adds Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm in a subsequent shot.Ignoring the fact that having dinosaurs running around everywhere would be,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge 2021 is in the rearview mirror, but the year’s final reckoning didn’t come until the past week — at least where Wall Street is concerned. Major companies ranging from Apple and Google to Netflix and Tesla all announced their earnings for the holiday quarter — and, as has been the case for more or less the last decade-plus of history, Big Tech made Big Bucks.But taken in total, 2021 looks like a different year, even by Big Tech company standards. Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the fluctuating economy and job market, supply chain issues, semiconductor shortages, and other socioeconomic issues, major tech firms didn’t just manage to scrape out some tiny margins of revenue last year: they more or less broke the bank with some of the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Claudia Chinyere Akole ‘There are all sorts of obstacles that are thrown up in front of artists’ Continue reading…

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge Alienware’s new 14-inch X14 gaming laptop is now on sale, following its announcement in January at CES 2022. While the X14 is considerably smaller (and thinner) than the 15-inch X15 or 17-inch X17, it borrows some of the highlights of those pricier, more powerful machines. At launch, it features a 14-core Intel Core i7-12700H processor, up to Nvidia’s RTX 3060 graphics chip, and up to 2TB of SSD storage and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM clocked at 5,200MHz. If you want a machine with those specs inside, it’ll cost you $2,299.99 — not cheap for an RTX 3060-equipped laptop.There are less costly options at launch, and more are on the way. Prices for the low-end X14 configuration currently start at $1,649.99, and you’ll get the same Core i7-12700H... Continue reading…

This size reduction comes with a mix of good and slightly disappointing results Continue reading…

A close-up of the 2015 BlackBerry Priv. | Image: The Verge Plans to resurrect the Blackberry brand with a new keyboard-equipped 5G Android device have been shelved, according to reports from AndroidPolice and CrackBerry. Development on the device was announced in 2020 by Texas-based startup OnwardMobility, after it licensed the brand name from Blackberry. The device was rumored to use a similar design to 2015’s Blackberry Priv — which had a physical keyboard that could be revealed with a slide of its screen — with a release date planned for some time in 2021.That, obviously, didn’t happen, but there were signs of life earlier this year when OnwardMobility published a blog post titled “Contrary to popular belief, we are not dead.” Although the company admitted that it had “encountered various... Continue reading…

Image: Western Digital Western Digital says it has lost at least 6.5 exabytes (6.5 billion gigabytes) of flash storage due to contamination issues at its NAND production facilities. The contamination could see the price of NAND — the main component of SSDs — spike up to 10 percent, according to market research firm TrendForce. Any potential NAND shortages or price fluctuations could affect the PC market over the next few months, which had another big year in 2021 despite global chip shortages and demand for GPUs.The contamination of materials used in the manufacturing processes appears to have been detected in late January at two plants in Japan, with Western Digital’s joint venture partner, Kioxia (previously Toshiba), revealing it has affected BiCS 3D NAND... Continue reading…

Tiramisu (the cake, not the Android version). | Image: Getty Android 13’s first developer preview has confirmed what we’ve long-suspected: that the dessert-based codename for this year’s Android update is “Tiramisu.” 9to5Google spotted the codename in the debut developer preview under “Android Version” in the “About phone” menu. The Italian dessert has been cropping up in commits since July last year.Although each version of Android hasn’t been publicly named after a dessert since 2019’s Android 10, the tradition is still alive and well internally at Google. Android 10 was Quince Tart, Android 11 was Red Velvet Cake, and Android 12 was Snow Cone.Android 10 was Quince TartNow that we know that Google has settled on Tiramisu as a codename, we can’t help but turn our attention to Android 14’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies and replace them with a bundle of new standards referred to as the “Privacy Sandbox” just overcame a key regulatory hurdle. The UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has formally accepted Google’s commitments about how it’ll develop the new standards so they don’t harm competition or unfairly benefit the search giant’s own advertising business, the regulator announced today.Google’s plans are still in flux, and it’s not yet clear exactly what technologies Privacy Sandbox will use to replace third-party cookies. Just last month, Google abandoned one planned approach, FLoC, in favor of a new system called Topics API. Today’s approval is for Google’s approach,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Tinder is adding a new “Blind Date” feature that switches up the dating app’s usual left or right swipe: this time, you have to chat with other users before you can see what they look like.The Blind Date feature supposedly appeals to the “’90s nostalgia” felt by Gen-ZBlind Date is the latest addition to Tinder’s Fast Chat lineup that features other in-app experiences like Hot Takes and Swipe Night. With the feature, users will be paired based on what they have in common, answer prompts, and play games. If both users decide to match, they will be able to finally see each other’s photos. Image: Tinder Within the feature, Tinder users answer timed questions / prompts like “It’s OK to wear a shirt ___ times without... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Ford’s remote vehicle app FordPass was updated a week ago, and Electrek reports that it contains a set of image files hinting at a possible driverless parking assistant feature.Following in the steps of Tesla’s quite popular Summon featureThe images have filenames beginning with “freeDriveBehind” and “freeDriveForward,” which show stencil drawings of what looks like an overhead view of a Ford F-150 Lighting with arrows pointing from the rear-back and the front-forward, respectively.Associated images included also show the electric truck’s front view in between two Mustang Mach-Es while a checkbox displays on an iPhone, which is a fairly apt representation of a driver-free parking function.It wouldn’t be off-brand either for Ford to... Continue reading…

Wordle, the extremely popular online puzzle, is now officially being run by The New York Times after its creator sold it a few weeks ago. It lives at a new URL, https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html, but before you head there for your daily game, you should know that there’s currently issues with how player statistics (including streaks, win percentages, and guess distribution) are being transferred from the old version to the new.Here’s what an FAQ page from The Times says about how the stats transfer should work:

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Two years after the wildly popular subscription service MoviePass crashed and burned, its co-founder Stacy Spikes is determined to bring it back. Spikes says MoviePass will return this summer.The company, recently bought by Spikes after his unceremonious ouster from MoviePass in 2018, held its launch event today at the Walter Reade Theater Lincoln Center in NYC. Spikes began by wasting absolutely no time addressing the Helios and Matheson Analytics-shaped elephant in the room. The firm is now infamous for being the parent company of MoviePass that managed to blow the entire thing up shortly after the firm bought the startup, which became famous for offering unlimited movie tickets for a monthly fee.“A lot of people lost money, a lot of... Continue reading…

Real-time collaborative chat, as exemplified by apps such as Slack, has become a common way to communicate between colleagues and friends, especially since early 2020, when so many of us transitioned to working from home. In mid-2021, Google apparently took note of this and pit itself against Slack by taking two of the features from its corporate Workplace app suite — Chat and Spaces (previously called Rooms) — and integrating them into its standard Gmail app.Google Chat allows you to hold chat sessions with friends and groups of friends either on an informal or formal basis. The former can be done just between two people or between several in what Google calls a group conversation. The latter is done via a separate area that Google... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Gary Bowser, a leader of a group that sold mod chips for video game consoles, has been sentenced to 40 months in prison over his involvement with the organization, the Department of Justice said in a release Thursday.Bowser was a part of Team Xecuter, which made hacks for the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo 3DS, NES Classic Edition, Sony’s PlayStation Classic, and Microsoft’s Xbox, the DOJ said. Bowser’s role was to “administer the websites that communicated with customers offering devices for sale.” He pleaded guilty to two felony charges in October 2021, and the DOJ’s release noted that as part of his plea agreement, Bowser has agreed to pay $4.5 million in restitution to Nintendo of America.The sentencing is the latest update in what’s... Continue reading…

Small rocket company Astra’s launch today out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, ended in failure a little more than three minutes after takeoff, when an unexpected issue cropped up during flight and prevented the vehicle from reaching orbit. It’s unclear what exactly happened, but live footage from the rocket showed it spinning out of control just after the two main stages of the vehicle separated as planned.Today marked Astra’s first time launching out of the Cape, after launching primarily out of Kodiak, Alaska, for all of its previous missions and test flights. NASA was the customer for today’s mission, marking the first time Astra launched a payload for the space agency. Called the ELaNa41 mission, the launch carried four small satellites... Continue reading…

Photo by Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images California, you may have noticed more robot cars on your roads than usual over the past year. That’s because autonomous vehicle testing is booming in the state, with AV companies having driven more than 4 million miles in 2021, according to data released by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. This represents a sharp increase over the previous two years, a sign that the AV industry has come roaring back after the pandemic-influenced lockdowns of 2020.There were also fewer companies testing vehicles overall, a reflection of the increased pace of mergers and acquisitions that have taken place in recent years. Of the 50 companies registered with the DMV, only 22 reported testing during the year. Despite skepticism about the... Continue reading…

Apple says the issue affected Intel Macs. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple has released an update to solve the battery drain issues some Mac users experienced since upgrading to macOS 12.2. The release notes for the new version, 12.2.1, say it contains fixes for “an issue for Intel-based Mac computers that may cause the battery to drain during sleep when connected to Bluetooth peripherals.”Before Thursday’s updates, some users reported their MacBooks’ batteries would drain while the computer was asleep, sometimes even reaching 0 percent charge overnight. While there was evidence that Bluetooth was the culprit, some users reported that turning off Bluetooth before closing their computers didn’t help, making it slightly unclear what the issue was. Now, Apple’s said it’s specifically fixing an issue with... Continue reading…

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge If, like me, you’ve missed the taskbar time and date on multiple monitors in Windows 11, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s returning. Microsoft is finally bringing this functionality back after shipping Windows 11 last year without the ability to see the time or date on secondary displays.“We added the clock and date to the taskbars of other monitors when you connect other monitors to your device,” reads the release notes for a new Windows 11 build that has just been released to Release Preview testers. It’s good to see one of the many missing taskbar features returning to Windows 11, but there are still plenty more that Microsoft needs to address.Microsoft already promised a larger than usual update to Windows 11 in February, and it... Continue reading…

Photo by Joshua Yospyn/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Amazon Music has signed an exclusive deal with NPR to distribute Guy Raz’s How I Built This podcast a week before any other platform starting in March. The show will be produced twice weekly, an increase from its once-a-week cadence, and available early through Amazon Music and Wondery Plus. After that one-week window, the episodes will be released widely both on podcast platforms and radio stations. Wondery will also receive the exclusive ad sales rights and YouTube distribution rights, while NPR will maintain the radio distribution rights and underwriting.In an internal memo to NPR staff obtained by The Verge, Anya Grundmann, SVP of programming, and John Lansing, CEO and president, write that the deal is the “first of its kind for... Continue reading…

AMD’s $35 billion acquisition of semiconductor company Xilinx is officially going through, with the deal — originally announced in October 2020 — finally meeting all the various regulatory approval it needs to happen. The transaction (which would be the largest in AMD’s history) is set to go through next week on February 14th, AMD announced.The deal cleared its final hurdle — regulatory approval in China — on January 27th, setting the stage for AMD and Xilinx to finally close the acquisition.Xilinx, while also a semiconductor company, specializes in a very different kind of chip than the CPUs and GPUs for computers and serves that AMD has built its brand on. Specifically, Xilinx produces programmable semiconductors, including FPGAs... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google announced last month that it plans to make free “legacy” G Suite accounts pay for a subscription by May 1st. The move surprised a bunch of G Suite users that have been using the service with custom domains, and now, Microsoft is trying to entice G Suite users to pay for Microsoft 365 instead with a 60 percent discount offer.“If you’re a small business that’s relied on G Suite legacy free edition, we couldn’t help but notice you might be in the market for a new solution,” says Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365. “We’ve got news for you: today, you can get a 60 percent discount on a 12-month Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, or Business Premium subscription, along with the help you need to make the move.”Microsoft... Continue reading…

StockX Nike is suing an online marketplace for launching non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on Nike shoes, testing the limits of crypto trademark law and what an NFT actually is.StockX is a reseller for streetwear, bags, and sneakers, among other items. Unlike some marketplaces, it’s also an intermediary that takes in items and verifies their authenticity. StockX built on that system in January by launching NFTs linked with physical goods. The announcement promises these “Vault NFTs” can be redeemed for physical items but also traded instantly as digital goods.The problem is that Nike shoes are extremely popular on StockX, and its Vault tokens are linked with the name and picture of their corresponding products. Nike alleges that the resulting... Continue reading…

SpaceX stacking its Starship spacecraft on top of a Super Heavy booster at the company’s launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. | SpaceX This evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will give a presentation about his company’s next generation Starship system — a massive new rocket that SpaceX has been developing over the last few years to take humans to the Moon and eventually Mars. It’ll be Musk’s first presentation on the vehicle since 2019 and his fifth one overall since 2016.Starship is by far SpaceX’s most ambitious project to date. The design calls for a giant spaceship and rocket combo that would be more powerful than the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. Starship, the passenger part of the vehicle, is meant to launch to space on top of a gargantuan booster rocket known as the Super Heavy. Starship is supposed to be capable of landing on the surface of the Moon... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Following multiple reports of stalking, Apple says it plans to improve AirTag safeguards against unwanted tracking later this year. Specifically, Apple says users will be alerted sooner when an unknown AirTag is detected traveling with them. It also it’ll make unknown AirTags easier to find by “adjusting the tone sequence,” which might make them sound louder, and by guiding people directly to a mystery AirTag using the ultrawideband chip available on newer iPhones.“AirTag was designed to help people locate their personal belongings, not to track people or another person’s property, and we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products,” Apple writes in a press release. The company also acknowledges that it’s... Continue reading…