The Verge

The change goes into effect with Fortnite’s v20.40 update. | Image: Epic Games Any Fortnite V-Bucks purchased on PlayStation will soon be available across every platform where the game is available except Nintendo Switch, developer Epic Games announced Monday. Previously, any V-Bucks you bought on a PlayStation console were locked to Sony’s platforms, but starting with the v20.40 update that will be released on Tuesday, you’ll also be able to access those V-Bucks as part of your “Shared Wallet” when you play Fortnite on Xbox, PC, Android, and cloud gaming services.Sony has been reticent to play nicely with Epic’s cross-platform ambitions for Fortnite in the past. Cross-play wasn’t available until Sony enabled it in September 2018 despite cross-play being an option for players on Xbox and Switch ahead of that time.... Continue reading…

Watch free movies and TV shows with ads on Freevee. | Image: Amazon Amazon Freevee, the ad-supported streaming service formally known as IMDb TV, now has a dedicated Apple TV app, Amazon announced Monday. Freevee was previously available on Apple TV within the Prime Video app, but now Freevee has its own app that you can download from the App Store for the Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD.Freevee offers access to Amazon Studios shows like Bosch: Legacy and Pretty Hard Cases as well as other free movies and TV like Mad Men and Knives Out. Freevee recently signed a new deal with Disney that will rotate in movies like Deadpool 1 and 2, Logan, and The Post among its selections, and it has over 75 channels streaming, including an exclusive channel that only plays Kim’s Convenience. You won’t be able to pick which... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Apple is making it easier for podcasters to get their subscription shows onto its platform. Creators on select podcast distribution platforms like Acast and Libsyn will soon be able to automatically upload their premium shows onto the Apple Podcasts app instead of having to publish it episode by episode through Apple’s platform.Currently, those who offer subscription shows through the Apple Podcasters Program need to publish episodes through Apple Podcast Connect. The company says that its new Delegated Delivery system will allow creators to skip that extra step and publish shows on Apple directly from their host’s dashboard. In addition to Acast and Libsyn, the initial group of partner hosts includes Buzzsprout, Omny Studio, RSS.com,... Continue reading…

Yasmin Finney as Elle Argent in Netflix’s Heartstopper. | Image: Netflix Doctor Who’s titular Time Lord will soon go through a regeneration that leaves them looking a lot more like Sex Education’s Ncuti Gatwa than Jodie Whittaker, but the forthcoming Doctor won’t be the only new face to look out for as the franchise celebrates its 60th anniversary. Heartstopper’s Yasmin Finney has been cast as a mysterious character she and showrunner Russell T. Davies are only referring to as “Rose.”In a press release about Finney’s casting, Davies described life on Doctor Who as getting brighter and wilder and rhetorically pondered how there could ever be “another Rose,” referring presumably to Billie Piper’s character Rose Tyler.“You’ll find out in 2023, but it’s an absolute joy to welcome Yasmin to the Doctor Who set,”... Continue reading…

Among properties facing wildfire risk, annual likelihood of wildfire today. | Image: First Street Foundation More than half of all homes, 56 percent, in the contiguous 48 states face at least some wildfire risk in the next few decades, according to a first-of-its-kind report published today by the nonprofit research organization First Street Foundation.First Street gave each address in the continental US a rating between one to 10, with one representing close to no risk and 10 representing a 36 percent or more likelihood that a property could be caught up in a wildfire sometime during the next three decades. More than 20 million properties across the continental US are threatened by at least “moderate” wildfire risk. Those homes have up to a 6 percent chance of being in a blaze at some point over a 30-year timespan, the typical timeframe for... Continue reading…

The 15-inch MSI GS66 is the cheapest its ever been | Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge The Verge Deals team is ready to lead you into the week with some excellent savings on a variety of awesome tech. Our inaugural deal of the week is the MSI GS66 Stealth gaming laptop, which is currently available at Best Buy for $1,299.99, the lowest price we’ve seen yet for this configuration that typically costs $1,499.99.The MSI GS66 Stealth is a slim yet powerful 15.6-inch laptop that weighs a little under five pounds. This laptop is powered by an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card, both of which should provide enough power to make good use of the 1080p display’s 240Hz refresh rate.16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD round out the list of specs for this powerful laptop (here are the rest, in case you’re curious).... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the wake of the sudden collapse of TerraUSD, several other stablecoins’ values (whose values are supposedly pegged to the dollar) have started facing issues.Deus Finance’s DEI coin is currently trading at around 66 cents and has been fluctuating since Sunday, reaching a low of around 52 cents early Monday morning.Unlike other major stablecoins like USD Coin and Tether, which (allegedly) have actual dollars or assets backing them, DEI’s values are controlled by algorithms making trades. It’s not that there’s no collateral — as CoinTelegraph points out, there’s a DEUS token that you can use to get new DEI tokens and that you can receive if you redeemed DEI. Unlike with Terra, where the value of the corresponding coin crashed, the... Continue reading…

Antony Starr as Homelander. | Amazon The superpowered humans of Amazon’s The Boys are a danger in and of themselves, but it’s Vought — the immensely powerful and unscrupulous megacorporation that secretly created them — that poses the largest threat to the world. This has been obvious since the series’ very first episode, and while it’s occasionally felt like the organization might be on the brink of getting its comeuppance, a new trailer for The Boys’ upcoming third season makes clear that Vought’s nowhere near giving up.The Boys’ second season detailed how, in addition to secretly exposing children to chemicals that eventually gave rise to the world’s population of superpeople, Vought also knowingly brought on a deranged Nazi to join the Seven, its flagship team of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US Department of Justice is prosecuting the operator of a payment platform that flouted economic sanctions using cryptocurrency. As reported by The Washington Post, it’s possibly the first criminal prosecution of crypto-related sanctions evasion — underscoring both the technology’s potential for getting around financial blocks and its traceability by law enforcement.District of Columbia Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui revealed the prosecution’s existence in an opinion on a still-sealed case, omitting the name of the payment platform as well as the “comprehensively sanctioned country” it dealt with. (There are five such countries: Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Ukraine’s Crimea region.) The operator apparently used an exchange to... Continue reading…

An action figure of Jeff Bezos captures the oddly plasticky, unreal nature of his tweets. | Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge Friends, I’ve had alerts on for Jeff Bezos’ tweets for a while now, and after some consideration, I’m afraid I have to conclude that this man cannot post.I am, in fact, finding it difficult to believe how bad he is at posting. It’s astonishing. If Elon Musk’s tweets are pure lizard-brain id, Bezos’ tweets are all superego — my guy probably workshops them, which is why they’re DOA, emotionally. Even something like this, which is (I think) supposed to be loose, absolutely fails by modern Twitter standards:

Konami Last week, leaked concept art revived fans’ hopes that a new Silent Hill game was in the works. Now, a VGC report is claiming that Konami is working on several entries in the survival horror series.On May 12th, Twitter user AestheticGamer1 shared four images that were allegedly from a new entry in the Silent Hill series. Shortly after he tweeted the images, they were removed for copyright reasons, adding fuel to the speculation that they were indeed what he claimed them to be.

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout first released on PC and PS4 back in August of 2020. | Image: Mediatonic The battle royale bean simulator Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is going free-to-play and finally coming to the Nintendo Switch and Xbox consoles on June 21st. The game, which first launched on PlayStation and PC, was initially set to be released on Switch and Xbox last summer, but it will finally be arriving on those platforms soon. A dedicated PS5 version of the game will be released on June 21st as well. Progression will be shared across platforms, and you’ll be able to make cross-platform parties.Developer Mediatonic, which is now owned by Fortnite maker Epic Games, revealed the move to free-to-play, the new versions, and a whole host of updates on the way for Fall Guys in a video published Monday. These changes include an upcoming... Continue reading…

Last year’s iPhone 13 Mini and iPhone 13. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple has released iOS 15.5, the latest version of its iPhone operating system. It’s short on user-facing enhancements but could help appease regulators concerned with Apple’s dominant control over in-app purchases.New iOS 15.5 features include a pair of buttons added to the Wallet app, which allows Apple Cash card users to quickly request or send money, as well as a new setting in the Apple Podcasts app that lets you place limits on the number of episodes stored in your phone. According to Apple’s release notes, the update also includes various bug fixes, including one that should improve the reliability of home automations triggered by people arriving and leaving.The full release notes read:

Photo Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is pushing back against Elon Musk’s concerns around spam and bots on the platform, saying that Musk’s suggestion to measure the problem by performing a random sampling of 100 accounts wouldn’t work. “Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5 percent,” Agrawal wrote on Twitter today. His defense comes after Musk suddenly sprinkled some doubt on his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter by tweeting that the deal was “temporarily on hold” over spam concerns.According to Musk, the hold was put in place pending details to support the service’s estimate that less than 5 percent of its measured daily active users are bots or spam accounts. Specifically who needed to be convinced,... Continue reading…

Apple People will tell you Severance or Ted Lasso are the best shows coming out of Apple TV Plus, and while they’ve certainly had excellent receptions and won a few rewards, they are not the best show on Apple TV Plus. That honor falls to For All Mankind, a science fiction alternate history from Battlestar Galactica creator Ron D. Moore.I know this is controversial to say. Everyone loves Ted Lasso’s blend of optimism and humor. They adore what Severance has to say about our work-home life balance and are curious about the baby goat room. I get it. These shows captivate you, and the first few episodes of For All Mankind absolutely pale in comparison. But the back half of the first season of For All Mankind and the entire second season of the... Continue reading…

A 3D product rendering of the upcoming Sonos Sub Mini, as created by The Verge. | Product render by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Sonos announced its most affordable soundbar to date last week. But some of the company’s loyal customers were disappointed by the lack of a less expensive subwoofer to go along with the new Sonos Ray. It felt like the perfect opportunity to announce a product that’s been rumored for months. The only subwoofer that Sonos currently sells is the $749 Sub, which costs more than both the Ray and Beam — so it’s hard to justify as an accessory at those terms.But despite no announcement last week, The Verge can confirm that Sonos is coming closer to releasing a smaller, less costly subwoofer that will be able to wirelessly pair with the Sonos Ray, Beam, and Arc. Rumors about such a device popped up a few months ago after Sonos accidentally... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge As Peloton gets its financial ducks in a row, it appears the company is easing up on its patent disputes. Today, Peloton and iFit — which owns rival NordicTrack — announced that they’ve settled all pending litigation and that “all pending actions between the companies will be dismissed.”The announcement itself was brief, offering little detail. As part of the settlement, iFit has agreed to remove some on-demand leaderboard tech from its devices, while Peloton will license “certain iFit patents relating to remote control technology.” This is somewhat a reversal in attitude from where Peloton was roughly six months ago.Back in November — just as Peloton’s stock woes were beginning to take hold — the company reportedly filed lawsuits... Continue reading…

Staff Photo By Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald JetBlue launched a hostile takeover of Spirit Airlines after its earlier acquisition offer was rejected. The New York-based airline said in a release that its tender offer for $30-per-share was “all-cash” and “fully financed.”Earlier this month, Spirit’s board of directors rejected JetBlue’s $32-a-share bid to acquire the airline in favor of an existing merger agreement with Frontier, one of its ultra-low-cost competitors. The board cited antitrust issues and “an unacceptable level of closing risk” to its shareholders as its reasons for rejecting the JetBlue bid.But JetBlue is still intent on acquiring Spirit, whether it wants to go ahead with the deal or not. The airline has said that absorbing Spirit would allow it to better... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass offer a lot of value if you want to play all kinds of games via subscription. The service normally costs $14.99 per month for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (which covers both Xbox and PC) or $9.99 per month for PC Game Pass and includes AAA titles like Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 as well as rotations of major third-party games and indies.If you want to try it out, there’s an introductory price that gives you one month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for $1. But before you redeem it, you should know that it’s possible to use the trial as a way to save a lot of money on Game Pass Ultimate for up to three years.Activating the $1 trial can save you hundreds of dollarsMicrosoft allows Xbox... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber held its second annual product event today, at which the company announced new features for business travelers, group rides, and electric vehicles. The news comes as the company’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, is renewing his efforts to make Uber’s core ride-hailing product profitable through cost-cutting and a hiring slowdown.Just because Uber is trying to rein in its costs doesn’t mean it will stop rolling out new features in its ongoing effort to win new customers (or retain its current customers) and expand into new fields. Since the pandemic, Uber has pivoted away from trying to be the “Amazon of transportation” and toward a more streamlined version of itself as a car service with a thriving delivery business.In a blog post,... Continue reading…

Image: Pixar Animation Studios Pixar has provided the very first details of its upcoming feature Elemental — including a release date of June 16th, 2023. Directed by Peter Sohn (best known for The Good Dinosaur), the movie takes place in a city filled with beings tied to the various elements of fire, water, air, and land. It follows two characters named Ember and Wade, who, you might’ve guessed, are composed of seemingly opposite elements.Here’s Sohn on the film:

The colony of algae was enclosed in a unit the size of an AA battery. | Image: Paolo Bombelli / Creative Commons Scientists have used algae to power a low-energy computer chip for six months.Researchers from the University of Cambridge sealed a colony of cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae, inside a metal enclosure the size of an AA battery. The unit was then left on a windowsill, according to New Scientist, where the algae photosynthesized, generating a tiny current of electricity that powered an ARM Cortex-M0+ chip.The system is only a proof of concept, but its creators hope algae-powered chips could be used in future Internet of Things devices. They say the advantage of using algae over traditional batteries or solar power is that it has a smaller environmental impact and could potentially provide continuous power.“Our... Continue reading…

Will Poulter as Colin Ritman. | Image: Netflix No matter how much time passes between Black Mirror’s seasons, the series always manages to feel just as unsettlingly prescient as when it first began airing. It isn’t exactly surprising that Netflix is working on yet another installment of the tech-focused dystopian series, but it seems as if our next taste of Black Mirror’s going to be a little different than what we’ve seen before.Variety reports that Netflix has greenlit Black Mirror and is currently in pre-production for its sixth series — the details for which are largely being kept quiet. Unlike the interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and fifth series that came before it, Black Mirror’s anthological sixth series is reported to consist of more episodes and be more “cinematic in... Continue reading…

Amazon has a new coupon clipping feature for its Alexa app’s shopping list. | Image: Amazon While you may buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, most people don’t do their weekly grocery shopping with the retail giant (unless Whole Foods is your local store). Amazon is therefore missing a big chunk of your shopping habits, and now, it's offering an incentive for you to hand over that data: grocery coupons.Alexa Shopping List Savings, which launched this month, is a new feature for the digital assistant that lets you clip coupons in the Alexa app for items you’ve added to your shopping list. The savings are added up, and the cashback is put on your digital Amazon gift card within a few days. The US-only service is now available to all customers and works exclusively with the Alexa app’s pre-installed shopping list. S... Continue reading…

Image: Sony Sony has confirmed the launch date and other details for the three new PlayStation Plus tiers it’s launching, which will be available in the US starting on June 13th. The new PlayStation Plus options look a lot like Xbox Game Pass, which gives players access to a collection of games that rotate periodically and gives new owners a cheaper way to access a library of quality gaming titles right out of the gate.It has also released a full list of PS5 and PS4 games to come “in the launch timeframe,” with big names like Spider-Man, The Last of Us Part II, and God of War, as well as its lineup of classic games (included below).One difference will remain, however: Sony has said that unlike Microsoft with Halo Infinite, Gears 5, and Forza... Continue reading…

Is turn-by-turn navigation on Google Maps going to work if the Pixel Watch’s chip blows? | Image: Google Earlier this week, Google confirmed what we’ve suspected for a long time: the Google Pixel Watch is coming later this fall. And while we learned some details, the reveal was more of a teaser than a full-blown announcement. Some of that was to be expected, and of course, the next few months will be full of speculation about what the final form of the Pixel Watch will be. But one thing Google has to get right is the chip inside.It’s clear, from the Pixel Watch’s design to the company’s massive undertaking in retooling Wear OS, that Google is trying to make an Android flagship smartwatch that can give the Apple Watch a run for its money. The thing is, Wear OS’s sluggish evolution wasn’t all on Google. For a number of years, Wear OS was... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google and Samsung have partnered to create Health Connect, a platform and API (application programming interface) that gives developers a toolset to sync users’ health data between Android apps and devices. This should make it easier for users to keep track of their health and fitness data across several different platforms.Once a user opts in, developers can compile their health data in an encrypted hub that’s located on a user’s device. Google says users will get full control over what kind of data they share and what apps they share it with. If more than one app is collecting the same type of data, such as steps taken, users can choose to share that data with one app over the others. Health Connect supports over 50 data types in a... Continue reading…

Tennant and Tate will star in an upcoming 2023 special. | Image: BBC David Tennant and Catherine Tate will return to Doctor Who in celebration of the long-running show’s 60th anniversary, the BBC has announced (via Gizmodo). The pair are currently filming scenes that are set to air in 2023.Tennant starred as Doctor Who’s Tenth Doctor from 2005 to 2010, while Tate played The Doctor’s companion, Donna Noble. The fan-favorite Doctor has made a reappearance in the past, with the BBC bringing back Tennant and Billie Piper (Rose Tyler) for Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special in 2013, called “The Day of the Doctor.” But now, Tennant is set to make yet another return a whole decade later.

Photo by Gloria Sin / The Verge Boost Mobile will now let you pay part of your phone bill with “blockchain-backed” Boostcoins earned through watching ads and playing games (via CNET). In a press release, the carrier says you can get BoostCoins by downloading the new BoostOne app, and then interacting with the games, ads, and Boost Mobile’s partners from within the app.But don’t get too excited just yet — one Boostcoin equals just one cent. In other words, you’ll likely have to dedicate a lot of time to the app if you want to see any significant savings. As pointed out by CNET, watching an ad lasting several seconds will earn you two Boostcoins. There’s also a Wheel of Fortune-style Spin & Win game that rewards players with anywhere from five cents to $5 in a single... Continue reading…

The back of a seventh-generation iPod Nano. | Photo: Sean O’Kane Pour one out for the iPod, the beautiful little gadget of my teenage dreams. While Apple finally discontinued the last iPod model this week, the “pod” lives on in the digital audio medium we all love and obsess over.The iPod was never really the format where the podcast flourished (that would be the smartphone), but at the time podcasts were getting started, the iPod was pretty much the only game in town. In 2004, the iPod controlled 60 percent of the total MP3 player market. It was the default option for listening to audio shows on the go, if an inelegant one.In 2004, the iPod dominated the MP3 market“It was a terrible experience,” says Leo Laporte, founder of early digital audio outlet This Week in Tech (TwiT) and host of radio... Continue reading…

The Aya Neo 2 is the successor to the Aya Neo. | Image: Aya Neo Handheld maker Aya Neo is adding the Aya Neo 2 and Aya Neo Slide to its lineup of portable PC gaming devices, both of which are set to come with an upgraded Ryzen 7 6800U chip and a Radeon 680M integrated GPU with RDNA 2 graphics, according to a report from Liliputing. The Radeon 680M iGPU is capable of pushing 3.38 teraflops, more than double the 1.6 teraflops delivered by the Steam Deck.As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, the Ryzen 7 6800 APU (accelerated processing unit) comes with eight cores and runs on the faster Zen 3 plus architecture. It also comes with the integrated Radeon 680M iGPU, which has 12 compute units (CUs). For comparison, the Steam Deck has a quad-core AMD APU that runs on the older Zen 2 architecture and an iGPU... Continue reading…

David Harville was eBay’s former director of global resiliency. eBay’s former director of global resiliency, David Harville, pleaded guilty to taking part in a bizarre harassment campaign, which involved sending live cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig face mask, and other strange items to a Massachusetts couple (via The Guardian). Harville is the last of seven eBay employees to plead guilty to harassing and stalking the pair.In 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged former eBay employees Harville, James Baugh, Stephanie Popp, Brian Gilbert, Stephanie Stockwell, Veronica Zea, and Philip Cooke with devising a harassment campaign targeting Ina and David Steiner, the publishers behind the EcommerceBytes newsletter. The group’s scheme was meant to intimidate the Steiners over their publication’s... Continue reading…

The SteelSeries Arctis 7P Plus works with almost everything... except Xbox consoles. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge SteelSeries is running a spring sale promotion that takes up to 40 percent off some of its gaming headsets, mice, and mousepads through Monday, May 23rd. While the discounts on individual items may range, there are some great deals to be had — including some that are available at new all-time lows.The Arctis 7P Plus, for instance, is our pick for the best wireless gaming headset for PlayStation consoles, but it also works with Windows PCs, the Nintendo Switch, smartphones, and the Oculus / Meta Quest 2. While it’s on the premium side and usually retails for about $70 more than Sony’s own Pulse 3D headset, it offers great battery life, USB-C charging, an easy-to-use audio dial, rotatable ear cups that allow for easier storage, and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix may be expanding into livestreaming. According to a report from Deadline, Netflix is currently working on a livestreaming option for stand-up specials and other live content.As pointed out by Deadline, support for livestreams could open up the possibility for Netflix to air live reunions, like the one recently held by the real estate reality show Selling Sunset, as well as enable live voting for competition shows.Netflix could also use the feature to air live comedy specials. This year, Netflix held its first-ever live and in-person comedy festival, called the Netflix Is a Joke Fest. The Los Angeles-based event spanned several days and featured over 130 popular comedians, including Ali Wong, Bill Burr, Jerry Seinfeld, John... Continue reading…

The Z24m comes with a 5MP tiltable webcam. | Image: HP HP’s upcoming 23.8-inch Z24m monitor is geared toward creative professionals and comes with a webcam that tracks your movement to keep you in the frame during video calls, much like Apple’s Center stage feature in its Studio Display and some iPads (via Ars Technica). The Z24m’s 5MP tiltable webcam sits at the top of the monitor, which, as Ars Technica points out, is supposed to put its focus on you even if other people are in the background of the shot.An HP spokesperson also told Ars Technica that you can adjust the webcam’s settings to make it track you quicker. And while you can’t remove the webcam from the monitor, you can push it down to hide it from view. The Z24m also has dual noise-canceling microphones and dual speakers that... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge; Getty Images It’s official: the iPod is over. After 20 years, Apple announced this week that it was discontinuing the final product in the brand that defined music players in the mid-2000s and helped catapult Apple to mainstream success.A lot of us at The Verge have fond memories of our days spent using the music players over that two-decade run, so we decided to write some of them down to reflect not just on what a great music player it was but also what an important device it was in our lives at the time. Plus, we’ve got a lot of scars from these things getting destroyed or “going missing.”Here are our memories of buying iPods, rediscovering them, nurturing them back to life, and sometimes just losing them.I have two iPod stories: one about the... Continue reading…

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Tech industry trade organizations NetChoice and the Computer Communications Industry Association have appealed directly to the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of the Texas social media law known as HB 20. The law, which creates liability for content moderation decisions that are based on “the viewpoint of the user or another person,” could make it impossible to enforce bans on hate speech — or to even moderate platforms at all. HB 20 was successfully blocked in court late last year, and then unblocked by an appeals court on Wednesday without explanation.“Texas HB 20 strips private online businesses of their speech rights, forbids them from making constitutionally protected editorial decisions, and forces them to publish and promote... Continue reading…

It’s not this sniper rifle, but it can shoot pretty dang far. | Image: Microsoft Halo Infinite’s glitched and overpowered “tank gun” will be added back to the game’s campaign in a forthcoming update, developer 343 Industries announced Friday.The tank gun is an extremely powerful weapon — essentially a portable version of a Scorpion tank’s cannon that has unlimited ammo — and it’s been popular with speedrunners and as a way to make the game a lot easier. But even though you need to know exactly where to look to find the gun (which is invisible, by the way), Halo senior community manager John Junyszek said in April that 343 would be removing the “tank gun glitch” alongside the game’s second season, which launched May 3rd. That decision wasn’t a very popular one with the community, and it seems there’s been enough... Continue reading…

The malicious pop-up ad that appeared on several crypto sites Friday | Image: CoinGecko As if this week weren’t bad enough for many cryptocurrency owners, with stablecoins crashing and Coinbase suffering an outage at a particularly bad time, now they’ve reportedly been targeted by a new phishing attack. As reported by CoinDesk and The Block Crypto, sites including Etherscan, CoinGecko, and DexTools all warned users that they were aware of suspicious popups appearing for visitors, and advised them not to confirm any transactions based on popups.Like many recent phishing attacks, this one appeared to promise a link to the Bored Ape Yacht Club project, with an ape skull logo and a (now-disabled) nftapes.win domain. It prompted users to connect their MetaMask wallets (a software cryptocurrency wallet that enables access on... Continue reading…

Somebody at Krafton is probably doing these poses after the company’s latest earnings report. | Image: Krafton PUBG: Battlegrounds, the PC and console version of the battle royale shooter series, is making a lot of money following its switch to free-to-play in January, as revealed by developer Krafton’s latest earnings report published Friday.According to the report, on PC, sales were up 61 percent year over year to $82.3 million. On console, the sales jump was even bigger, increasing 124 percent from the previous quarter and 274 percent year over year, though Krafton didn’t put a dollar figure behind those increases. The game also saw a “nearly tripled” increase in average monthly active users from Q4 2021.PUBG: Battlegrounds was originally a paid title when it launched on Steam in early access in 2017, but the outsized financial success of... Continue reading…

Photo by: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, is a devastating condition that’s still very poorly understood, so when new research comes out, it can feel like a very big deal — especially if that research seems to offer a way to save children’s lives. Posts on social media cheered one such new study this week, heralding the research as identifying the reason hundreds of babies die unexpectedly each year.But even though the study points in a promising direction for future research, it isn’t a panacea, experts say. “There is nothing definitive about this at all,” said Rachel Moon, a researcher studying sudden infant death syndrome at the University of Virginia, in an email to The Verge. The surge in interest around the study is understandable,... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Two and a half months after our Steam Deck review, Valve has finally provided the drivers you’ll need for audio if you choose to install Windows on the gaming portable. Before today, you would have had to pair Bluetooth headphones or plug in USB-C earbuds or a dongle to get any kind of audio on Windows at all. Both the speakers and 3.5mm jack did nothing on Windows before today, and it blamed AMD for the delay.But now, this pair of new drivers should enable both of the missing audio features. It took a while for AMD and Valve to bring out the initial set of graphics, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and SD card drivers for Windows, too.Is it time to install Windows on your Deck? Nope, I definitely wouldn’t say that. While Valve keeps squashing bugs... Continue reading…

If you consider yourself a Lego fan, you’re going to want to read this story and visit this website before Tuesday, May 17th, at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. That’s because Lego is about to put its third and possibly final batch of officially unofficial sets on sale, and that’s the time you can vote with your dollars for the five fan-made creations that will become a reality.These Lego sets were designed by fans, not the Danish brickmaker itself, and Lego originally rejected each and every one. But, now, Lego’s Bricklink Designer Program will give a gorgeous 1950s diner, a working waterfall, a huge train station, a steampunk science lab, and more a second chance at official Lego stardom.The sets are pieced together and shipped by Lego itself,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal acknowledged the possibility that Elon Musk’s deal to purchase the company could fall through in a series of tweets this afternoon that sought to explain why he’s shaking up Twitter’s leadership. Agrawal said that he’s still “accountable for leading and operating” Twitter for the time being and that his recent changes are meant to “build a stronger Twitter” and help manage costs.“While I expect the deal to close, we need to be prepared for all scenarios and always do what’s right for Twitter,” Agrawal said.His remarks come after Musk tweeted this morning that his $44 billion purchase of Twitter is “temporarily on hold” over concerns about spam and fake accounts. While it is entirely unclear whether Musk can... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Yik Yak, an app that acts as a local anonymous message board, makes it possible to find users’ precise locations and unique IDs, Motherboard reports. A researcher who analyzed Yik Yak data was able to access precise GPS coordinates of where posts and comments came from, accurate within 10 to 15 feet, and says he brought his findings to the company in April.First launched in 2013, Yik Yak was popular on college campuses, where it was often used to gossip, post updates, and cyberbully other students. After waning relevance and failed attempts at content moderation, the app shut down in 2017, only to rise from the dead last year. In November, the company said it had passed 2 million users.Motherboard spoke with David Teather, a computer... Continue reading…

itch.io / TTRPGs For Reproductive Rights With most large gaming companies giving either inadequate or no responses to the potential repeal of Roe v. Wade in the United States, indie tabletop RPG developers are stepping up. Today, Roll for Romance, a Dungeons and Dragons podcast, in collaboration with over 200 TTRPG creators, launched TTRPGs for Reproductive Rights on itch.io.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge An Apple TV that actually competes with Roku and Amazon could be on the market by the end of the year. According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a tweet, Apple would launch a new Apple TV “that improves cost structure” in the second half of 2022.It’s about damn time.Currently, Apple sells three Apple TV models. Its 4K Apple TV comes in 32GB and 64GB capacities and retails for $179 and $199, respectively. That’s a good deal for what you get from the 4K Apple TV. Apart from Nvidia’s Shield lineup, no set-top box really has the same support for a wide range of home theater standards and formats that the Apple TV 4K does. It’s the gold standard for professional home theater installers and is particularly praised for its EDID capabilities.EDID,... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and editor-at-large David Pierce discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.On Wednesday, we saw Google announce a whole bunch of products and features from their keynote live stream — from updates to the Nest Hub Max to previewing a 2023 Pixel tablet. So, on The Vergecast, we’re focusing a chunk of the show on Google’s announcements and initiatives for the coming year or so.And there’s no better way to start that conversation than with an interview with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. Read the full transcript of that conversation here.After the interview, Verge deputy... Continue reading…