The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A new app hopes to be an independent platform for the wildly popular Buy Nothing groups Continue reading…

In February 2020, I found that that it was possible not only to mute conversations or other accounts on Twitter, but (courtesy of a tweet by @nonprofWHIT ) that you could also mute a specific word. And you could do it straight from a tweet.Now, Twitter has announced it is expanding this feature so that when you mute a word or phrase, it will not appear in your Explore tab or Event-based notifications.Here’s how you go about it.Mute words or phrases on an iPhoneIf you’re using the Twitter app on an iPhone, it’s a quick and easy process:

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Just over 13 months ago, the Trump-era Federal Trade Commission sought to break up Facebook. The lawsuit was a long time in coming — it sought to unwind acquisitions that were made in 2012 (Instagram) and 2014 (WhatsApp) — and, in its initial form, was laughed out of court. The FTC had not plausibly demonstrated that Facebook had a monopoly, Judge James E. Boasberg ruled at the time, and thus could not proceed.Still, Boasberg offered the FTC a second chance: re-file the case with more evidence to support its central claim, and perhaps it could go to trial. In the intervening months, President Trump had been dislodged from office, and antitrust crusader Lina Khan took the reins at the FTC. To no one’s surprise, she took Boasberg up on... Continue reading…

Working from home is normal now. For some of us, it has become a permanent change.Thankfully, in these days of videoconferencing, texting, and file-sharing, it has been possible for many of us to move to home desks and offices and thrive that way. It helps that remote working was already a part of many people’s lives before COVID-19 appeared. But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. It’s been an adjustment for many of us here at The Verge, too.Now we’re taking the tech expertise of our staff, and the experience of our writers and editors, to put together our best tips and advice on working from home. For example, we give advice on looking for the best monitor, choosing a business-level file-sharing service, and buying a printer. (Yes,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge The need for a home / office printer has increased as more of us are working or schooling from home. You could be a parent who needs to print out workbooks for your child. Or you may find that it’s easier to make notes on a business report using a pen or pencil rather than a keyboard. Or you’ve suddenly discovered that a government office is demanding that you snail mail a form to them. Or you’re tired of trekking to your local office supply store for printing out occasional forms.Whatever the reason, if you find yourself in need of a printer, it’s not difficult to find one. Printers have not changed a lot over the past few years; they’ve just become more efficient and less expensive. You will still be choosing between laser and inkjet... Continue reading…

A great choice for the space constrained Continue reading…

Nuro, the autonomous delivery company, announced its third-generation autonomous vehicle with a host of new improvements, including a bizarre-looking external airbag for pedestrians.The company, which has a fleet of driverless delivery pods scurrying through the Southwest, says its new vehicle will have twice the cargo space as the second-generation R2 robot. It will also include modular inserts and new temperature-controlled compartments to keep food warm or cold, depending on the need.twice the cargo spaceNuro, which is valued at $8.6 billion, was founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, two veterans of the Google self-driving car project that would go on to become Waymo. It is one of the few companies to be operating... Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge This pandemic has more people working from home than ever before, but it’s not all lollipops and daffodils. While there may have been some early excitement about not commuting or being breathed on by Chet the Xerox Tech, an actual home office can be downright depressing and / or uncomfortable. I should know.As someone who has freelanced for the great majority of the last decade, I’ve worked from home nearly that whole time — even when home was a camper van for more than five of those years. Yes, that was a tight space for a home office, but those constraints led me to refine my WFH game to keep my body healthy and my mind at least partially sane. Here are some of the tips (and items) that made the biggest difference for me.Desk setupI... Continue reading…

You can buy the cloth once again. | Image: Apple Apple’s $19 polishing cloth is back in stock at the company’s online store, as spotted by 9to5Mac. The very expensive piece of cloth was first introduced following Apple’s October event, but it was quickly backordered — according to MacRumors, it was “impossible” to get one before the holidays — so if you’ve been waiting to get one, now’s your chance.“Made with soft, nonabrasive material, the Polishing Cloth cleans any Apple display, including nano-texture glass, safely and effectively,” reads Apple’s description of the cloth on its product page. Sounds perfect if you need to clean a Pro Display XDR with the nano-texture glass screen. That already costs $5,999 — the nano-texture glass is a $1,000 upgrade from the standard model — and if... Continue reading…

Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images At a press conference on Monday, the Biden administration announced a policy that will require insurance companies to reimburse up to eight over-the-counter at-home COVID-19 tests for their customers beginning January 15th, as first reported by the Associated Press. The administration said in a Twitter thread that the “update” is a part of a larger plan to “increase access to COVID-19 testing.”Under the new policy, insured Americans will either have to purchase the test kits under their insurance or submit receipts to their insurance for reimbursement. A family of four under the same plan would be eligible to be reimbursed for up to eight COVID tests each, totaling 32 tests per month. The plan will also require consumers wanting... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Beats’ best earbuds yet, the Beats Fit Pro, were only available in the United States immediately upon their release a few months ago. Apple then launched the earbuds in China, but now they’re set to become much more widely available on January 28th. That’s when the Beats Fit Pro will launch across Canada, Europe, and Japan.According to a tweet from the Apple-owned brand, preorders for the “worldwide” release will begin on January 24th before the buds hit shelves on the 28th. The Beats Fit Pro include flexible wingtips that help them (comfortably) stay anchored in your ears without coming loose — even during exercise.According to Engadget, in Europe the Beats Fit Pro will be priced at £200 / €230; in Canada they’ll cost $250 CAD; and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A ransomware attack last week has left an Albuquerque area jail without access to its camera feeds and rendered automatic door mechanisms unusable. Inmates have been confined to their cells as a result, while technicians struggled to bring systems back online.As first reported by the Albuquerque Journal, visitor access to the Metropolitan Detention Center was completely suspended as the jail was put into lockdown. All internet services at the jail were also knocked offline, leaving staff unable to look up inmate records.All county internet services at the jail were also knocked offline, leaving staff unable to look up inmate recordsBased on the lack of camera coverage, all inmates within the facility were placed on lockdown from the... Continue reading…

The NLRB said Amazon broke labor laws in the original election. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The second union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama will begin on February 4th, according to a notice posted Tuesday by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which you can read below. The election is a redo of the one that was carried out in 2021, the results of which were declared invalid by the regulatory agency after reports that Amazon had broken labor laws during the union drive.The election will be carried out almost a year after workers originally voted on whether to unionize Amazon’s BHM1 facility. The union lost that election nearly two-to-one but disputed the results, taking issue with a mailbox that employees feared Amazon had access to. The mailbox was installed by the USPS, at Amazon’s request, and at... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Turo, the peer-to-peer car-sharing service, has filed for its initial public offering, the latest transportation-related startup to sell its shares on a public stock exchange. The company proposes to sell $100 million of stock, but that figure could change as Turo gets closer to its public debut.Founded in 2010, the San Francisco-based company allows people to rent out their personal cars to other customers, much like Airbnb does for homes. In its S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Turo claims it has 85,000 active hosts (meaning vehicle owners), 161,000 active vehicles, and 1.3 million active guests over the period of 12 months ending September 30th, 2021.opting for an old-fashioned IPO rather than a SPACUnlike... Continue reading…

The monolithic Xbox Series X console is still a bit tricky to get. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Update 12:58PM ET, January 11th: Best Buy has sold out of consoles for now.Update 12:30PM ET, January 11th: GameStop still has both bundles available, and now Best Buy has restocked Xbox Series X consoles. They are available for the standard $499.99 without a bundle. As usual for Best Buy, it is based on local availability at stores in your area.Another week, another restock of Xbox Series X consoles at GameStop. Hopefully this is a trend that new console availability is opening up in 2022 to a point where soon anyone will be able to walk into a store and pick up their hardware of choice without any fuss. While we’re not quite there yet, the restocks are remaining fairly consistent.GameStop has two Xbox Series X console bundles today,... Continue reading…

Photo by Alix Diaconis / The Verge Hello again. Welcome to your Tuesday Hot Pod. Today, we’re catching up on all sorts of big moves in the industry, layoffs at Spotify, and talking about what makes a podcast a hit. Let’s get to it.But first, one exciting announcement: On Air Fest announced its in-person return last week with plans to take over Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel on February 25th and 26th. Here’s the bigger news for us, though: Hot Pod Summit is returning on February 24th as part of the festival. For the new folks here, Hot Pod Summit is an invite-only industry conference where we’ll discuss the topics of the moment, interview big names in the space, and broadly, network with the people you want to know. We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks on how you can... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook moderators at an Accenture site in Austin are facing a payroll disaster that has left many without their holiday paychecks. Workers at the site handle moderation, customer service, and other tasks for Facebook and WhatsApp — and a work stoppage has already been threatened if the situation is not resolved.The problems began as early as January 4th, when some workers noticed errors in the system that tracks paid time off (PTO), a clerical confusion that was attributed to a recent change in payroll providers at the site. Things got more serious when the January 6th round of paychecks failed to arrive. Internal pay stub systems showed many paychecks as zeroed out, and workers were left with no idea of when they might get their... Continue reading…

Photo: Blizzard The name Overwatch 2 has become synonymous with delay. First reported by The Brick Fan, a Lego review site, the extremely popular toymaker is delaying the release of an Overwatch 2-themed set as the company reviews its relationship with Overwatch 2 publisher Activision Blizzard.In a statement to The Verge, Alice Carter, Lego’s senior manager of corporate brand communication, said:

Roku is making live TV even easier to find with its new Live TV Zone, a one-stop shop for all things live and linear.The Live TV Zone will be home to not only Roku’s own Live TV Channel Guide, which previously existed as a standalone channel, but also third-party services like YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, and Sling, among other apps. Users will also find their recently watched content in this tab, in addition to entertainment programming, sports, and local and national news coverage.The Live TV Zone can be found under the Live TV tab from the left-hand navigation menu.Roku has been leaning heavily into its live TV features. The company last year expanded voice command support for its live TV guide with the Roku OS 10.5 update. It... Continue reading…

Judge rules Google has to turn over 180 documents in an NLRB case | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A judge appointed by the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Google must turn over some 180 documents related to an internal campaign to fight union organizing efforts by employees. Dubbed Project Vivian, a Google attorney described the ongoing effort between 2018 and 2020 as a way to “engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck,” according to one of the documents.The documents are part of a case the NLRB brought against Google in December 2020, which alleged the internet giant violated US labor law by spying on and firing employees who were organizing protests and trying to unionize. Former Google employee Laurence Berland, fired in 2019, was organizing against the company’s hiring of IRI Consultants,... Continue reading…

Microsoft is announcing a new matte black option of its Surface Go 3 today, with optional LTE connectivity. The announcement comes just a day after images of the new Surface Go 3 model leaked online, with a new matte black finish. The new color option and LTE connectivity are the only changes, as it’s identical to the regular Surface Go 3 otherwise.Microsoft first launched the Surface Go 3 in September, with new Intel processor options. The Surface Go 3 can be configured with an Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y or Core i3-10100Y, upgrades over the Surface Go 2, which launched with a Pentium Gold 4425Y or a Core m3 chip.

Image: Sony Sony’s Xperia 5 III, the compact counterpart to its Xperia 1 III, is now on sale in the US, almost nine months after the company initially announced the device in April 2021. The phone retails for $999.99 and will be available in black or green, with the latter exclusive to Sony’s own online store. The phone went on sale in the second half of last year in the UK and Europe.The phone has seen some internal upgrades compared to the Xperia 1 II, which bring it more into line with mainstream handsets from 2021. It’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, runs Android 11 out of the box, and should also be able to benefit from at least some 5G connectivity in the US. Elsewhere, battery capacity has been upped to 4,500mAh, and Sony... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Cristiano Amon is optimistic about everything Continue reading…

Image: GKIDS The mind behind Summer Wars and Mirai discusses his latest anime feature Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge It’s a new year, and like clockwork, 2022 has brought with it a plethora of new chips for laptops, desktops, phones, and more.Intel announced new CPUs for virtually every product it makes, AMD refreshed its laptop processors and graphics cards for its whole lineup and started teasing its next major desktop overhaul, and Nvidia came out swinging with the announcement of its most powerful GPU yet. If you weren’t keeping up (or even if you were) it was a lot. And that was just CES: Qualcomm already announced its next-gen chips for smartphones and laptops in December, and Samsung is teeing up a new Exynos processor, too. And that’s not even considering Apple, which tends to play its cards closer to its chest.But as the dust settles and... Continue reading…

Monster Hunter Rise was one of the best games of 2021, taking almost all of the improvements Capcom made to its famously punishing action RPG series with Monster Hunter World and bringing them to an even breezier package on the Nintendo Switch. The series only took off in popularity with its portable entries on the PSP, so this new title tailored just for the Switch felt right at home.That said, if you were used to World, Rise was a noticeable technical step back. It’s one of the best-looking games on the Switch, but it’s still a game on the Switch — it runs on a TV at roughly 720p and 30 frames a second, and the environmental design is much simpler than in World.That’s why I was interested to check out the PC version of the game,... Continue reading…

We found three discounted gaming keyboards from Corsair that should please most people, coming in a variety of form factors and with different features. First up is Corsair’s first 60 percent keyboard, the K65. This compact keyboard is normally $109.99 but has recently dropped to $89.99 at Best Buy and Amazon. We last saw the K65 drop to this price during Black Friday. While the diminutive layout of this keyboard certainly isn’t for everyone, it should appeal to those who are striving for a minimalist aesthetic on their desk.Just like other 60 percent keyboards, the K65 eliminates the function row, directional arrows, and navigation keys that let you easily go up and down the page. This keyboard uses Cherry MX Silver switches and uses... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Nvidia is launching a new 12GB model of its RTX 3080 today. Revealed initially in Nvidia’s latest GeForce drivers, the new 12GB model goes on sale today from select board partners and offers 2GB more memory than the original 10GB RTX 3080.A memory bump is welcome, particularly as it was a source of concern during our initial review of the RTX 3080 in 2020. It also matches the 12GB found on the RTX 3080 Ti. This new RTX 3080 model also includes 8960 CUDA cores, a bump of nearly 3 percent over the original. The upgraded memory also means this GPU has 20 percent more cumulative bandwidth over the original 10GB variant, thanks to a wider 384-bit memory bus.Nvidia is still recommending a 750W power supply, but this 12GB RTX 3080 draws an... Continue reading…

Thou must live, die, and know Continue reading…

The stupidest (and hence best) Wordle spoof we’ve seen: Letterle. | Image: @edjeff Part of the charm of Wordle — this season’s must-play puzzle game — is that you can only do it once a day. But that’s also part of the frustration, too.For while it is wonderful to think to yourself: “Ah, a coffee break. Time to sit down and do my Wordle” (part and parcel of the indulgent “treat brain” we all seem to have developed during the pandemic), you sometimes want to scratch that puzzle itch just a little longer.With that in mind, here are some of the best and stupidest Wordle spoofs we’ve seen so far. They either push the format to ridiculous degrees, offer genuinely fun challenges, or are single-click jokes that may, at least, help temporarily release you of your Wordle cravings.1) Sweardle This one does... Continue reading…

Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge Spotify is disbanding its founding podcast studio and laying off some of the team. An affected employee tells The Verge that Studio 4, or Spotify Studios as it’s been referenced externally, consisted of 10 to 15 employees and produced shows like Dissect and Chapo: Kingpin on Trial. Spotify called affected employees on Friday and said their last days would be January 21st. They’ll receive two months’ worth of severance. Some employees were reassigned while others were laid off and pointed to the Spotify job board. The studio’s head, Gina Delvac, was also let go.Spotify declined to comment. In a note to Spotify staff obtained by The Verge, however, Julie McNamara, head of US studios and video, acknowledged the layoffs and said shutting... Continue reading…

Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters.Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don’t have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. “Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?” asked one Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched.“Forced crossplay is a scam by... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple says it will introduce third-party payment options for the first time ever in iOS apps, following South Korean legislation designed to open up the perceived monopolies of Google and Apple’s app stores. The alternative payments will only be available in South Korea and follows the announcement of similar changes by Google last November.Apple’s decision was shared by the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) and reported by the Yonhap News Agency, but details of the implementation are thin on the ground.Arguments over payment fees triggered the Epic Games trialApple currently charges developers a 30 percent fee on any digital purchases made by consumers using iOS apps. This fee has become increasingly contentious for... Continue reading…

The level of detail is staggering. | Image: Rijksmuseum The Rijksmuseum has released what it claims is the “largest and most detailed photograph of any artwork,” and it’s viewable for free on its website. The scan is of Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch, a roughly 12 by 14 foot painting which is currently the focus of a massive research and restoration project called “Operation Night Watch.”The technical details of the scan are staggering. In a press release, the Rijksmuseum explains that it’s made up of 8,439 individual photographs taken with a 100 megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400 MS camera. Neural networks were reportedly used to check each image for color and sharpness, and an AI system helped stitch these photos together into a single image.The result is a 717 gigapixel... Continue reading…

Photo by Visual China Group via Getty Images/Visual China Group via Getty Images US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has threatened the government funding of chipmaker Intel after the company made what Rubio described as “humiliating apologies” to China.Intel issued apologies to its Chinese partners and the Chinese public last December after it noted in a routine letter to suppliers that it would not use “labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.” This stipulation is required by US law as part of trading sanctions against China for its ongoing persecution of the Xinjiang region’s Uyghur population (which the US government has designated a genocide). Intel’s letter to suppliers, though, went viral in China, and caused a huge public backlash against the company.As first reported by The Verge last year,... Continue reading…

An email sent to customers warning them about the change. | Image: Pottermore If you own digital Harry Potter books purchased on Pottermore, you might want to redownload your copies before the option disappears for good at the end of the month. The site is emailing its customers to warn them that the books will no longer be available to redownload after January 31st, since being removed from sale in September last year.When it launched back in 2012, Pottermore was the only official way to download digital copies of the Harry Potter books. Despite big stores like Amazon running promotions for the titles, which are some of the best-selling books of all time, stores would funnel customers to Pottermore to complete the sale (retailers like Amazon reportedly still got a cut, however).

Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Travis Kalanick in the show’s first season. | Image: Showtime There’s a new teaser for the first season of Super Pumped, Showtime’s upcoming anthology show about Silicon Valley startups that hit it big. As we saw in the teaser from December, season one will revolve around Uber and its former CEO Travis Kalanick, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.The show’s first story will be based on the book that’s also named Super Pumped, which was written by New York Times reporter Mike Issac. It’ll follow the, in the trailer’s words, “wild, loud, cocky, shady, reckless, excessive, ridiculous, damaging, outrageous” story of Uber’s founder, who resigned from his role as CEO in 2017 after investors demanded change following a series of controversies.This new trailer contains some quotable moments, including one... Continue reading…

The company has announced changes to its office reopening plans. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Meta, the parent company of Facebook, will require staffers to have received a COVID-19 booster shot to be able to work from its US offices, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Meta had already said that US office employees would have to be vaccinated against COVID-19 when they returned to the office, but beginning March 28th, they’ll also need proof of a booster vaccine, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge. The company is also delaying its full office reopening until March 28th, pushing back a return that had been previously set for the end of this month.Not all Meta employees will have to return to the office on March 28th. Those who want to come back can defer their return by three to five months, a policy that... Continue reading…

On Saturday, Android boss Hiroshi Lockheimer accused Apple of “using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products,” after a Wall Street Journal report revealed how US teens have turned Apple’s iMessage into a social status symbol that locks Android users out.Now, Lockheimer is taking a slightly less abrasive stance: the Google executive said Monday that “we’re not asking Apple to make iMessage available on Android. We’re asking Apple to support the industry standard for modern messaging (RCS) in iMessage, just as they support the older SMS / MMS standards.”

Resellers will also be to get in on the action. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Associated Press, or AP, has announced that it’s starting a marketplace to sell NFTs of its photojournalists’ work in collaboration with a company called Xooa. It’s billing its foray into NFTs as a way for collectors to “purchase the news agency’s award-winning contemporary and historic photojournalism” and says that the virtual tokens will be released at “broad and inclusive price points” (though it’s hard to tell what types of prices resellers will want on the AP marketplace).The news outlet says its system will be built on the “environmentally friendly” Polygon blockchain and that the NFTs will “include a rich set of original metadata” to tell buyers when, where, and how the photos were taken. It says its first collection,... Continue reading…

Two LAPD officers who were fired from their jobs in 2017 for playing Pokémon Go while on duty have had their appeal for reinstatement denied by a California judge.The officers’ squad car video camera showed the two officers, Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell, ignored a request for backup to play the game, according to court documents. The pair were stationed near a robbery in progress, and after the responding officers put out a call for backup, Lozano and Mitchell seemingly ignored the call and left the area.When asked later why they hadn’t responded to the call, the two officers said they were in a loud area and couldn’t hear their radio. Lozano and Mitchell’s supervisor was skeptical of their explanation and checked the in-car... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile appears to be blocking some iPhone users from enabling iCloud Private Relay, a feature that lets you hide the websites you visit from third parties, according to a report from 9to5Mac.

Take-Two wants to bring its franchises to mobile, and Zynga can help. | Image: Rockstar Games Take-Two Interactive just announced its intent to buy FarmVille developer Zynga for $12.7 billion in what could be the biggest acquisition in video game history. It’s an absolutely massive deal; to put it in perspective, the acquisition would be $5 billion more than Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of the parent company of Skyrim maker Bethesda Softworks. You could throw in the money Disney paid for Lucasfilm and still have cash left over.So what is Take-Two getting for its money? Yes, big Zynga games like FarmVille, Words With Friends, and High Heels! will join Take-Two’s own roster of franchises that includes Grand Theft Auto, NBA 2K, and Civilization. But perhaps more importantly, Take-Two will now be able to use Zynga’s expertise... Continue reading…

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Uber has quietly shut down its Apple Watch app, with the software now showing a message that instructs people to “please switch to the Uber mobile app.” The company is “no longer supporting the Apple Watch app,” according to the text, which ends with Uber apologizing for any inconvenience caused by the app’s discontinuation. There’s also a sad face emoji to drive that sentiment home.As noted by MacRumors, Uber hasn’t yet removed the Apple Watch app from its App Store listing, where it still gets its own tab and screenshots. Presumably, that will all be history once the company releases its next update to the iOS app. The Verge has reached out to Uber for more details, and if I had to guess, the company is likely to cite low usage as... Continue reading…

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the would-be creator of a “decentralized” Amazon Web Services alternative with scamming investors out of millions. The SEC announced a complaint on Friday against Australian citizen Craig Sproule, the CEO of cryptocurrency startup Crowd Machine, which promised a global cloud computing network built on users’ computers. In reality, Sproule allegedly sent $5.8 million to South African gold mines as investors’ cryptocurrency tokens became worthless.An SEC complaint says that Sproule collected at least $33 million through an initial coin offering (or ICO) to build a decentralized “Crowd Computer” platform, which he claimed was “battle-tested” by Fortune 500 companies. He compared the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, has been ordered to delete a huge store of personal data gleaned from police agencies in EU member states over the past six years. The deletion order comes from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), a watchdog body overseeing EU institutions’ compliance with privacy and data protection legislation.EDPS has given Europol a year to review its databases and then remove any data that cannot be linked to a criminal investigation.The total volume of data stored in Europol’s systems amounts to around 4 petabytes according to reporting in The Guardian — equivalent to hundreds of billions of pages of printed text — and includes data on at least a quarter of a million current... Continue reading…

Shazam is available in yet another place. | Image: Shazam Update January 10th, 3:44PM ET: Shortly after this article was published, the extension was made unavailable from the Chrome Web Store. At the moment, the apps page on Shazam’s website still advertises the extension, but the link to it leads to a 404 error. We’ve reached out to Apple (which owns Shazam) to ask what happened, and will update this story again if we hear back, or if the extension is re-listed on the store.The original article continues below.Today I learned about Shazam’s Chrome extension, which seems to have been out for about a month and can help you identify music playing on the webpage you’re viewing. Having the app directly in Chrome could help you figure out what song is playing in an ad, trailer, or livestream... Continue reading…

The Golden Globes continued its tradition of cringe, this time on Twitter | Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images If the controversy surrounding the Golden Globe Awards didn’t already push the show into irrelevancy, announcing this year’s winners via bizarre, out-of-touch tweets sure did (via TechCrunch). As a refresher, the Golden Globes was barred from airing on NBC following a Los Angeles Times investigation that uncovered possible racism and bribery within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that doles out the awards.