The Verge

Apple first introduced Universal Control at WWDC 2021 in June. Apple’s newest developer betas for iPadOS and macOS Monterey include Universal Control, indicating the long-awaited feature might finally be released sometime in the near future. Universal Control, which Apple announced at WWDC 2021 in June, is an impressive-looking feature that lets you use a Mac’s keyboard and mouse with an iPad just by placing the iPad next to the computer. Universal Control seems to have been more ambitious than Apple anticipated, however, since it already missed a fall release estimate, is now supposed to come out this spring, and hadn’t even shown up in betas until Thursday.MacRumors reports that Universal Control is enabled by default if the iPadOS 15.4 and macOS Monterey 12.3 betas are installed, and the... Continue reading…

Cameras, fountain pens, and a very long desk Continue reading…

The 30 V 5G is ready for all varieties of Verizon 5G. | Image: TCL When Verizon lit up its new C-band 5G spectrum earlier this month, only a handful of flagship phones were ready to use the network. Starting today, there’s a low-cost option if you’re looking to get on C-band 5G right now: the $299 TCL 30 V 5G. Announced at CES, the 30 V 5G is a Verizon exclusive (for now, at least), and it supports all of the carrier’s flavors of 5G: slower but widespread “Nationwide,” very fast but scarce mmWave, and the sweet C-band spectrum that sits in between, both in terms of coverage and speed.The TCL 30 V 5G features a big 6.67-inch 1080p screen, Snapdragon 480 5G chipset with 4GB RAM, and a 4,500mAh battery — all typical specs for a budget device. It’s one of eight new 30-series phones the company is releasing... Continue reading…

Image: Ubisoft In a move no one saw coming because not that many people were playing the game in the first place, Hyper Scape, Ubisoft’s attempt to get in on the increasingly bloated battle royale market, will be shutting down on April 28th. On Hyper Scape’s website, the announcement reads:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is making its Xbox subscriptions a little more flexible after a UK regulator raised concerns. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) “has secured undertakings with Microsoft” that will improve accidental renewals for Xbox Live Gold or Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.Microsoft has agreed to offer refunds to Xbox subscribers that are on recurring 12-month subscriptions and even cancel inactive memberships if customers are reminded how to stop payments and still continue not to use a membership.The CMA identified a number of concerns around Microsoft’s auto-renewing subscriptions, and the Xbox maker has agreed to address them with the following improvements:

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the culmination of a two-year legal process, the former operator of dark web index site DeepDotWeb was handed a sentence of 97 months in prison for money laundering on Tuesday.The sentence was issued to Tal Prihar, an Israeli national, by a judge of the District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The judgment from the court ordered Prihar to forfeit $8.4 million in cash, along with an ASUS laptop, a black iPhone, and his accounts at cryptocurrency exchanges Binance, Kraken and OKCoin.The DeepDotWeb site started operating in 2013, operated by Prihar and another Israeli citizen Michael Phan, who is a co-defendant in the case. The site was hosted on the open internet but provided links to the .onion domains of dark web... Continue reading…

For the last seven years, a leftover piece of an old SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has been circling the Earth on a very wide orbit, having a pretty unremarkable time. But that’s all about to change on March 4th, when this rocket piece is predicted to accidentally slam into the far side of the Moon. And according to the astronomer who first figured this out, it’s a reminder that we need to take better care of our deep space junk.The doomed component is part of a rocket that launched from Florida in February of 2015. The vehicle lofted a particularly valuable satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called DSCOVR, which monitors solar winds coming from the Sun to better predict space weather. In order to perform its job... Continue reading…

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge Understanding your broadband speeds could be just as simple as reading the nutrition label on the back of the food you buy at the grocery store as soon as the end of this year.The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously on Thursday to press forward on a new plan that would require internet providers, like Comcast and Verizon, to offer new labels disclosing an internet plan’s price, speed, data allowances, including introductory rates and later price hikes, as well as network management practices, like throttling, at the point of sale. This allows for greater transparency into market rates and could lead to lower prices down the line.“Access to accurate, simple-to-understand information about broadband Internet access... Continue reading…

You can buy the GoPro Hero 10 for $349.98 from GoPro today. | Image: Becca Farsace / The Verge It’s nearly the end of January, which means the holidays are sadly a month behind us. If you’re understandably already starting to crave another break, channel your wanderlust by preparing for your next vacation with this GoPro Hero 10 deal. Right now, you can take great photos and video clips on your next trip while saving big now that GoPro’s latest action camera has reached an all-time low.Typically $499.99, GoPro is selling the camera — alongside a one-year GoPro annual subscription, a 32GB SanDisk Extreme microSDHC card and free express shipping — for $349.98. The service typically costs $49.99 per year and offers unlimited cloud backup as well auto uploads, GoPro.com discounts, unlimited access to premium editing tools in the Quik... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Messenger added end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) chatting in 2016 when it was still called Facebook Messenger, and Meta was still Facebook. Now many things have changed, but the optional feature is fully rolled out to everyone, with toggles to encrypt text messages as well as group chats and calls. Meta has discussed switching to E2EE as a default, but that may not happen until next year at the earliest, as some regulators claim this would harm public safety.There are two ways Messenger users can opt in to the secure chats, either via vanish mode, by swiping up on an existing chat to enter one where messages automatically disappear when the window is closed or the original version that was introduced in 2016 as Secret Conversations. You can... Continue reading…

Image: Yang Hae-sung / Netflix Undead horror mixed with high school drama Continue reading…

Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images This story originally ran in Hot Pod, The Verge’s preeminent audio industry newsletter. You can subscribe here for more scoops, analysis, and reporting.You’ve probably seen this by now, but to catch you up if not: On Monday, Neil Young issued an ultimatum to Spotify: keep Joe Rogan or me. It can’t have both on the service.“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” he wrote in a now-deleted letter, according to Rolling Stone. The chief issue, he said, is Joe Rogan, Spotify’s star podcaster to whom it reportedly paid up to $100 million for an exclusive license to his show.Yesterday, Young made good on his word... Continue reading…

It’s not perfect, but there’s a lot to like for outdoorsy athletes Continue reading…

A Snoop Dogg experience inside The Sandbox. | The Sandbox Warner Music Group will open an outpost in virtual world The Sandbox, and it hopes music buffs will express their fandom by acquiring nearby property. In an announcement, WMG described its new home as a “combination of musical theme park and concert venue.” It will work with The Sandbox to host concerts and other “musical experiences.” But so far, it’s only discussed one specific event: a special sale of digital real estate called Land, which Sandbox users can buy “coveted” plots of in March.Concerts have become a fixture of virtual worldsThe Sandbox has previously partnered with individual artists like Snoop Dogg for experiences, but this is apparently a larger and more ambitious installation. “Warner Music has secured the equivalent... Continue reading…

More free games are on the way to add to your backlog. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge One of the hallmarks of the Epic Games Store is its regular offerings of free games, and the company confirmed in a blog post that it will continue give games away in 2022. Some of the games Epic has offered in the past have been quite notable, including Control, Civilization VI, and even the store-crashing Grand Theft Auto V, so it seems likely the company will make some good freebies available this year.Epic also announced that its store has more than 194 million users, up 34 million year over year. Valve hasn’t released its own year-in-review numbers for Steam, so it’s hard to directly determine how well Epic is competing, but comparing peak concurrent user counts indicates Epic still has a ways to go to catch up. Epic reported a... Continue reading…

HBO Max Have you seen this woman? Continue reading…

The S7 is the best robot vacuum that can also mop, but skip the “Rock Dock” auto-empty station Continue reading…

The Tesla Bot concept. | Image: Tesla What’s more important to Elon Musk? A hugely successful business selling critically lauded electric vehicles or the sci-fi dream of a humanoid robot that doesn’t exist outside of a slide deck?Well, if you’re familiar with Musk’s modus operandi, you won’t be surprised that Musk has declared the latter — a non-existent robot — to be Tesla’s “most important product development” in a recent earnings call. Discussing the company’s product map for the years ahead, Musk noted that the Roadster and Semi (originally set to launch in 2020) and Cybertruck (first slated for 2021) would be in production “hopefully next year” (emphasis ours) before smoothly switching gears to talk up the Tesla Bot — a humanoid robot concept unveiled by the company l... Continue reading…

A deluxe headset that should cost considerably less Continue reading…

Antitrust reform is on the horizon, and tech is spooked Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Moderna gave its omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccine to the first participant in a clinical trial, the company announced Wednesday. The report comes a few days after Pfizer / BioNTech launched a trial of its shot targeting the fast-spreading variant.The announcement coincides with the release of data showing that the two-dose series of Moderna’s original vaccine struggled to block the omicron variant of the virus, which has mutations that help it dodge those antibodies. A booster shot restored much of its ability to neutralize the virus — and while that protection weakened over time, it still stuck around for at least six months.Still, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement that the omicron variant is enough of a threat that... Continue reading…

Tear gas in Portland, Oregon during summer 2020. | Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images Proving tear gas directly causes menstrual changes is tricky Continue reading…

GeForce Now is exiting beta on LG TVs. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia’s GeForce Now app for LG TVs has exited beta, the graphics card manufacturer announced today. The cloud gaming service was released in beta last November for select LG televisions, and lets you stream games off Nvidia’s servers bought on stores like Steam and the Epic Games Store.If you’ve got a compatible 2021 LG TV, you can download the GeForce Now app from the LG Content Store. To celebrate the launch, Nvidia is offering six-months of GeForce Now’s Priority tier free with qualifying LG TV purchases between February 1st and March 27th.Although it’s previously been possible to access Nvidia’s streaming service on the Nvidia Shield, being able to access the service directly from a TV itself is a much more streamlined solution.... Continue reading…

Photo by Felix Zahn / Photothek via Getty Images When you’re in the middle of a Zoom video meeting at home and your cat suddenly decides to start bawling for its dinner, you’ll want to mute your audio in a hurry. In that case, you have a choice: you can either reach for your mouse or touchpad and start searching for the “Mute” button or you can use a quick keyboard shortcut to cut off that noise immediately.Zoom has a long list of keyboard shortcuts that you can use before or during a videoconference. By using these shortcuts, you can quickly join a meeting; mute and unmute the audio; start, pause, and stop recording; switch views from Speaker (a large image of the person speaking) to Gallery (several equally sized images, no matter who is speaking); and perform a variety of other... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Fans of inky blacks and bright highlights rejoice: Netflix now officially lists HDR support for Google’s Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and more affordable 5A. That’s according to one of the streaming giant’s support pages, spotted by 9to5Google, which appears to have been updated some time after January 14th. The update also appears to have listed the phones as supporting HD on the service.The update should mean owners of Google’s latest smartphones won’t have any problem watching HDR or HD content on Netflix. Although the streaming service often lists new devices as compatible on the day of their release, as with the Galaxy S21 series, there are occasionally times when it doesn’t list support until much later, like with the OnePlus 8.It’s not... Continue reading…

Google’s ambitions for gaming-focused Chromebooks might be close to reality. After years of teasing Steam for Chrome OS and even Nvidia demoing support for DLSS and ray tracing on Arm-based Chromebooks, references to new gaming Chromebooks have now been spotted in test versions of Chrome OS.Google revealed two years ago that it was working on Steam support for Chromebooks, but we’ve heard very little ever since.9to5Google reports that three codenames for potential gaming Chromebooks have been spotted, all with RGB keyboards. The publication speculates that both HP and Lenovo could be testing gaming Chromebooks, based on employee contributions to Chrome OS code. A third mysterious device, codenamed Ripple, appears to be a tablet with a... Continue reading…

Image: Studio Ghibli A theme park based around the work of legendary Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli will open on November 1st in Nagakute, Japan, the company’s official Twitter account has announced. Plans for the park, which shouldn’t be confused with the existing Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, were initially announced in 2017.Ghibli Park will be located on the site of the 2005 World’s Fair in the city of Nagakute, around 90 miles east of Kyoto and 150 miles west of Tokyo. A recreation of Satsuki and Mei’s house from My Neighbor Totoro was already built on this site for the fair, but the new park will expand on this with new attractions based on other Ghibli films.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has shuttered a controversial influence campaign in which it paid workers to tweet about how much they love working at Amazon, reports The Financial Times. Employees at the retailer’s warehouses (which it calls fulfillment centers) were paid to share positive impressions about the company and to deny widely-reported workplace failings — like employees being forced to urinate in bottles in order to meet performance targets.According to internal documents shared by The Intercept in 2021, the scheme launched in 2018 in response to waves of criticism of Amazon’s safety standards and working conditions. Workers were selected for their “great sense of humor” and told to respond “in a polite — but blunt — way” to the company’s critics,... Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew Hawkins Lamborghini is accelerating into the world of the blockchain with the release of its first NFT (non-fungible token) next month. The Italian automaker, which is in the midst of an ambitious shift to hybrid and electric sports cars, announced that it would auction off a series of NFTs that it produced in collaboration with Swiss artist Fabian Oefner, as well as NFT Pro and Sotheby’s.Oefner’s image depicts a Lamborghini breaking down into its core components as it rockets through the inky blackness of space. It’s less amateurish in its design than many of the more popular NFTs, like the Bored Ape series, which raises questions as to how it will be received by the crypto community.Lamborghini is fully embracing the astronomical themeL... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is announcing 135 creators who will take part in the #YouTubeBlack Voices Fund, including a slate of 40 in the US and Canada. The fund provides one year of support, including seed funding for channels, development programs, workshops, and networking opportunities.“Black creators have played an important role in shaping the culture on YouTube. From fashion and comedy to politics, learning and wellness, Black creators have propelled our platform forward,” the company said in the announcement.The grantees of the fund, now in its second year, include creators from a variety of backgrounds like lawyers, athletes, lifestyle vloggers, comedians, dermatologists, and pop culture commentators.YouTube announced the fund in 2020,... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Small businesses will soon be able to use iPhones to accept payments without the need for Square-style extra hardware, according to a Bloomberg report. The feature has been anticipated since Apple bought contactless payment startup Mobeewave in 2020, and Bloomberg now says it could be coming via a software update “in the coming months.”Mobeewave previously worked with Samsung on similar NFC functionality, trialling a system called Samsung POS in the startup’s home country of Canada in 2019 before launching it worldwide. Samsung POS enabled Samsung phones to accept payments directly from contactless cards and NFC payment services like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay.Bloomberg’s report says it’s unclear if Mobeewave’s technology... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Samsung Electronics broke both its quarterly and annual records for revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021, making 13.87 trillion won (~$11.5 billion) in operating profit off 76.57 trillion won (~$63.6 billion) in revenue in the three-month period. The full-year numbers were 51.63 trillion won ($42.9 billion) in operating profit and 279.6 trillion won (~$232.4 billion) in revenue.Samsung attributes the 24-percent year-on-year revenue growth to increased sales of consumer products like premium smartphones, TVs, and appliances. The more profitable semiconductor business drove operating profit growth of 52 percent year on year, despite supply chain issues limiting production of RAM and flash storage.Looking to 2022, Samsung expects... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) is moving forward with unionization efforts at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse after having “reached a sufficient showing of interest” to hold an election, according to National Labor Relations Board spokesperson Kayla Blado. The NLRB says that it’s scheduled a hearing for February 16th, after which the specifics and date for the election will be decided. This is only the second time Amazon’s warehouse workers have made it to this point in the unionization process, as Vice reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley pointed out on Twitter.On Wednesday, the ALU tweeted that its petition had been accepted and that “the fight is just beginning.” It’s been working to unionize Amazon workers in New York for a while: in October 2021, it... Continue reading…

The Cowboy 4 e-bike which just launched in the US. | Image: Cowboy Brussels-based electric bike maker Cowboy now has an additional $80 million in funding to help fuel its expansion into the US and beyond. The company has raised over $120 million since its founding in 2017, putting it on track to “reach over 100,000 riders by 2023,” according to a press release announcing the new funding round.The capital injection propels Cowboy into the ranks of a select few boutique e-bike companies like Seattle-based Rad Power and Amsterdam-based VanMoof, who are riding a tidal wave of investment after interest in e-bikes exploded globally during pandemic lockdowns. In September, VanMoof announced that it was the “most funded e-bike company in the world” with a $128 million investment round that brought its total... Continue reading…

Dev Pramanik/Titan Comics Though director Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth from 1976 was itself an adaptation of Walter Tevis’ sci-fi novel of the same name, David Bowie’s performance in the cinematic adaptation has become so iconic that Titan Comics plans to lead with it in its upcoming graphic novelization from writer Dan Watters and artist Dev Pramanik.Like the film before it, Titan’s The Man Who Fell to Earth will tell the story of Thomas Jerome Newton, a humanoid alien with Bowie’s signature heterochromatic eyes who comes to Earth on a desperate mission in search of water that his home planet desperately needs. In a press release about the new book, Watters reflected on how the original story was always a rumination on humanity’s relationship with... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple has identified and is rolling out a fix for the bug that intermittently prevented third-party apps from syncing in iCloud (via 9to5Mac). In a response to a developer on Apple’s community forum, Apple says it has “investigated this issue on the CloudKit backend, and have implemented a fix.”The company still didn’t specify exactly what went wrong — it said the errors “resemble request-throttling that may be affecting a specific user, or the container as a whole,” and vaguely blamed “an underlying issue” for causing the widespread syncing problems.Some users received a “Request failed with HTTP status code 503” error codeAs 9to5Mac reports, developers have been dealing with this issue since November, which hasn’t been publicly... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix keeps getting more expensive — and HBO seems to think that’s great news for its own business. During the earnings call for HBO Max parent AT&T on Wednesday, the company’s chief executive John Stankey said the higher price of competitors will help HBO grow in the US.“We said the market was going to come to us on pricing, and lo and behold, we are no longer the high-priced offer in the market,” Stankey said. “The nice part about that is we think it’ll allow us to have domestic growth as we move forward.”While he didn’t specifically cite Netflix, the company recently raised its prices across all of its plans, bumping its popular standard plan to $15.50 from $14 per month. Its 4K plan, meanwhile, now costs $20 per month. That means... Continue reading…

You’ll have to wait even longer now. | Image: Tesla Tesla’s Cybertruck and Roadster will be delayed to “hopefully next year,” the company’s CEO Elon Musk said in an earnings call Wednesday. The announcement confirms earlier reports that the electric pickup truck would miss its earlier production date of late 2022.“If we were to introduce new vehicles, our total vehicle output will decrease,” Musk said. “We will not be introducing new vehicle models this year.”When asked about what else is holding back the Cybertruck besides battery production, Musk said that the pricing and what people are willing to pay for the included tech is the main issue “How do we make the Cybertruck affordable?” he said. The Cybertruck originally had a starting price of $39,900 at its unveiling event in 2019.M... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge ID.me, a facial recognition company that has been contracted by the IRS to verify taxpayers’ identity, uses a powerful facial recognition technique to match faces against a larger database, despite earlier claims to the contrary.According to a LinkedIn post made by CEO Blake Hall Wednesday and spotted by reporters at CyberScoop, the company does use a technique known as one-to-many face matching in which a target face is compared against a database of other known faces to find possible matches.This contradicts previous public statements made by the company, including a press release issued just days ago, where comments attributed to Blake Hall said the company used only a less powerful form of facial recognition known as one-to-one... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Discord experienced a widespread outage Wednesday afternoon, preventing many users from connecting to the communications app. The outage started at around 2:45PM ET and prevented users from joining calls or participating in text chats. “We are currently investigating a widespread API outage and are working to resolve this ASAP,” said the official Discord Twitter account. However, now the issue has been resolved, as the account tweeted “connection should be fully restored now” at 5:19PM ET.Discord is used widely by the gaming community and currently has 150 million monthly active users. This latest outage appeared to affect most users, with widespread reports of issues even connecting to the service.In a message in the Discord client,... Continue reading…

Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images This week, Neil Young published an open letter demanding Spotify remove his music because he didn’t want to share the platform with podcaster Joe Rogan. It appears Young is getting his wish, as Spotify is now removing his music, according to The Wall Street Journal.“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he said in the now-deleted letter, reports Rolling Stone. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”Young didn’t mince words in the letter, which he addressed to his manager and his record label, Warner Records. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by... Continue reading…

Image: Tesla Tesla’s fourth quarter brought in a record windfall, as the company announced Wednesday that it turned a $2.3 billion profit.It was the company’s second year finishing in the black, but it significantly improved over last year’s fourth-quarter profit of just $270 million. The company ended this year with $5.5 billion in net income, compared to $721 million in 2020. Tesla turned that profit on just over $17.7 billion in revenue and did it while its average sales price continued to drop due to the increasing popularity of the more affordable Model 3 sedan and Model Y SUV.Tesla produced 305,840 vehicles in the fourth quarter, a 70 percent increase over the previous year. For the entire year, the company delivered 936,172 vehicles, just... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Intel is still feeling the burn from the chip shortage. It’s struggling to fully capitalize on tremendous pandemic-fueled demand for new PCs, because you can’t make a laptop with Intel chips alone. And yet that didn’t stop Intel from having its best financial year ever — in today’s Q4 2021 earnings, it’s reporting its highest quarterly and highest yearly revenue ever, at $19.5 billion and $74.7 billion, respectively — and four other revenue records as well. Profits weren’t nearly as rosy: net income went down 21 percent in the quarter and 5 percent year over year to $4.6 billion and $19.9 billion, respectively.CEO Pat Gelsinger warned about other suppliers’ chips constraining the company’s growth during Intel’s Q3 2021 earnings in... Continue reading…

No “hey Google” required. | Photo: Dan Seifert / The Verge If your Google Assistant-powered smart home display or speaker is rambling on and on after you asked it for the weather, you can now tell it to “stop” without having to say “Hey Google” first. It’s a small, but welcome, change and one that makes interacting with a digital assistant just a little more natural.Google’s smart home devices have had a version of this feature for years, where you could silence an alarm without saying “Hey Google.” It’s nice to see it expanding to silence the Assistant, too — saying “stop” when you want something to... well, stop happening is just so instinctive, like batting at an insect buzzing around your ear.

Image: Kia The pricing for Kia’s EV6, the company’s first all-electric model, has finally been revealed, and it ranges from $42,115 to $57,115 (including the mandatory destination fee), depending on the trim level, the company said in a statement. The EV6 lineup will include rear-wheel drive (RWD) and all-wheel drive (AWD) options.Compared to Kia’s Niro EV, the EV6 is important for Kia because it’s the first EV built with the all-electric design in mind, using parent company Hyundai’s E-GMP platform. Its release also marks Kia having something to show for its space in the EV market — something that’s been plagued with delayed shipping.Before adding the $1,215 destination fee, the EV6 Light model is available with RWD for $40,900. The EV6 Wind... Continue reading…

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

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

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

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

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