The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is updating its store for Xbox and Xbox Game Pass to include language support, the company announced today. The Languages label is meant to make it “easier to decide if you’d like to purchase or play that title” by including information on the game’s interface, audio, and subtitles.Whatever language console owners have set as their default will display first. The feature applies to 27 languages and displays how localization has been applied to various parts of the game, such as controls, subtitles, or spoken dialogue. “We’ve already added language tags to hundreds of games and will add more over time,” the announcement reads.Fans have previously criticized Microsoft’s handling of localization, specifically outside of the US.... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is withholding ebook and audiobook versions of works it publishes through its in-house publishing arms from US libraries, according to a new report from The Washington Post. In fact, Amazon is the only major publisher that’s doing this, the report states. It’s doing so because the company thinks the terms involved with selling digital versions of books to libraries, which in turn make them available to local residents for free through ebook lending platforms like Libby, are unfavorable.“It’s not clear to us that current digital library lending models fairly balance the interests of authors and library patrons,” Mikyla Bruder, the global marketing chief at Amazon Publishing, told The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler in an... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook Gaming has announced a path to partnership for streamers in its Level Up creators program, which is the site’s equivalent of Twitch’s affiliates. It’s pretty grueling, and eligibility isn’t judged on the same metrics as its Level Up program, which allows streamers to start monetizing their broadcasts. Partners, however, get a slew of benefits, including a direct line to Facebook’s support team, a private Facebook Gaming community group, partner-only invites to Facebook Gaming events, a partner badge, and more.Streamers in the Level Up program, on the other hand, are able to monetize their streams with Facebook Stars, a site currency, and fan subscriptions; they also get features like high-quality transcoding (i.e., 1080p... Continue reading…

Images: Kia Kia has given its next electric vehicle a name and is getting ready to pull the cover off the new car sometime within the next few weeks. Dubbed “EV6,” it’ll be the first electric vehicle that Kia is building on the new platform it’s sharing with parent company Hyundai — the same platform that Apple was reportedly interested in using to power... whatever it’s building before talks with the Korean automakers broke down.Kia released a few images of the car viewed off-angle from the sides, which reveal that the EV6 has a sort of hatchback-style shape. There’s a close-up image of a taillight, which appears to run across the entire rear of the car — a choice that’s becoming quite common in electric vehicle designs. Kia also released a video... Continue reading…

Photo by Scott Taetsch / Getty Images The Miami Heat has suspended Meyers Leonard indefinitely after he used an anti-Semitic slur during a Twitch stream on Monday.“The Miami Heat vehemently condemns the use of any form of hate speech,” the NBA team wrote in a Twitter statement on Tuesday evening. “The words used by Meyers Leonard were wrong and we will not tolerate hateful language from anyone associated with our franchise.”

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Xbox Series X / S and PS5 consoles haven’t even reached the six-month mark yet, but game modes that favor performance or visual quality are already common. It feels like not a week goes by without a game getting an update to allow players to pick between a demanding 4K resolution or sacrificing some resolution and quality for 60fps or even 120fps modes.Last month, the big next-gen update was Control, with modes for both performance and visual quality. Today, it’s Overwatch with choices that let you pick between a 120fps mode or resolution and visual quality. These updates have made us fall in love with old games or appreciate how much better they run on modern consoles.This emerging trend brings better choice to console gaming... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Twitter has devised a potential solution to its problematic image cropping issue: no more cropping. The company said on Wednesday it’s now testing a “what you see is what you get” image preview within the tweet compose box and experimenting with displaying full-frame images. That way, images will show up in the Twitter timeline looking just as they did when the user was composing the tweet.“Now testing on Android and iOS: when you Tweet a single image, how the image appears in the Tweet composer is how it will look on the timeline –– bigger and better,” the company wrote in its announcement tweet on the new feature test. Twitter also says its testing new 4K image uploading on Android and iOS as part of a broader push “to improve how... Continue reading…

Toyota announced earlier this year that it’s gearing up for the release of its first mass-market EVs for the US, but now it also appears ready to show off one for Europe as soon as next week, according to a new microsite launched Wednesday.Called “X Prologue,” apparently, Toyota is merely showing a single headlight of the new electric vehicle beneath a countdown that ends on March 17th. There are no other details as of yet, save for how the hood appears to match the styling of Toyota’s other modern vehicles. There’s also an LED light bar that carries across the nose of the car — a design element that’s becoming increasingly popular in the electric vehicle space.As Autocar points out, Toyota had previously announced plans to reveal a... Continue reading…

Image: HTC HTC has announced a new set of trackers for its Vive virtual reality headsets, including one that captures facial expressions and mouth movements. The $129.99 Vive Facial Tracker attaches to the Vive Pro headset. It uses two cameras and an infrared illuminator to record lip, cheek, and jaw movements and then translates that into virtual facial expressions. HTC says the product is “coming soon.”HTC unveiled an experimental VR facial tracker in 2019, and it teased the product earlier this week on Twitter. A few developers, like the creators of social space Neos VR, have worked with the tool. Until today, though, HTC hadn’t confirmed a wide commercial release. The Facial Tracker supports 38 distinct facial movements, and users can also... Continue reading…

In the video game Howling Dogs, released in 2012, players wake up in a prison with few options: a shower, a nutrient dispenser, a garbage chute, and a recreation room with a virtual reality headset. For the first few clicks, all you can do is navigate the prison: getting your nutrient bar, cleaning up, examining a photograph by your bed. Then you put on the headset, and you’re thrown into a world of strange, vivid imagery. You live out a strange snapshot life before being thrown back to the same tiny room. You click through the same motions again and again, each time visiting a different world, as sparklingly strange as the prison is dull.This was Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s Howling Dogs: a poem, a game, and many people’s first... Continue reading…

Classic arcade-style Ninja Turtle action is making a return. Today, publisher Dotemu announced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, which it says was “inspired by the classic TMNT brawlers we all kicked shell in as kids,” including the early ‘90s hit Turtles in Time.For players, that means old-school pixel art based on the original 1987 character designs and co-op brawler action with up to four people. Also, for some reason, Mike Patton is here to sing the classic theme song in the debut trailer. Here’s the basic setup for the game, which looks to span a huge range of classic TMNT locales:

Today is “MAR10 Day,” and although it is not Mario’s “birthday” (which is September 13th), this day usually has some of the best deals on games published by Nintendo. Nintendo rarely discounts its first-party games, so if you recently purchased a Switch and want to stock up on some games, today is a good day to expand your game library.Several retailers — including Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Walmart — are slashing the prices of some Nintendo games, with up to $21 in savings available. Most of the games feature the mustachioed plumber, some of which are available for $39, such as Super Mario Odyssey, Mario Tennis Aces, New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and Super Mario Maker 2. Other deals include $40 for titles like Mario Kart 8... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games on Wednesday expanded its worldwide legal fight against the dominant mobile app store operators with a new legal claim against Google in Australia. The claim accuses Google of “anti-competitive conduct breaches the Australian Consumer Law” and also accuses the search giant of violating the country’s Competition and Consumer Act of 2010.The legal claim follows a similar action against Apple in Australia filed last November, and Epic’s legal fight against app stores now spans the European Union, the UK, and the US in addition to Australia.The main thrust of the complaint is one we’ve heard before — that it’s due time Apple and Google allow app makers to bypass the 30 percent cut through either alternative app stores or... Continue reading…

On Ice Perspectives On TV, ice skating often looks like a sport stuck in time. Cameras aren’t hanging from wires above the action or placed close to the ice for a dynamic look at skaters zipping by. Instead, a few stationary cameras planted around a rink flip from one view to the next when a better angle is available. It can be dull to watch.But far more exciting and intimate ways to shoot ice skating have been emerging on social media, and one person in particular has made a name synonymous with turning the sport into something spectacular to watch: Jordan Cowan, under the name On Ice Perspectives.Plenty of others try to make videos similar to those Cowan uploads to his channels. What gives his content the edge is that he was a professional skater who... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Waymo is publicizing more data from its autonomous vehicles, which it says is for the benefit of the research community. Building on the trove of data it released in 2019, the Alphabet company is calling this latest batch “the largest interactive dataset yet released for research into behavior prediction and motion forecasting for autonomous driving.”This “motion dataset” includes over 100,000 segments, each around 20 seconds long, of objects like cars and people and their trajectories, as captured by Waymo’s sensor-laden vehicles. The company has included corresponding 3D maps and geographic details in each segment to provide researchers with context for their prediction modeling. In total, Waymo says it is releasing 570 hours of... Continue reading…

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Fifteen years since first learning to knit, Petrina Hicks has only ever made sweaters for other people. There was one cardigan attempt back in 2015, but they had to make so many modifications that the end product was frumpy and ill-fitting. Hicks didn’t have the luxury to be picky: the cardigan was the only sweater pattern they could find above an XL or XXL.“I want to be a sweater maker,” Hicks said. “I couldn’t find things that were cute. I couldn’t find things that were in my style.”Hopeful crafters pick up knitting for a variety of reasons: to adopt a slow-fashion wardrobe, to keep stress at bay during the pandemic, or to make the clothes they wish existed, controlling the color and fit to their liking. Ravelry, the largest knitting... Continue reading…

The pop-up gives users the option of editing their comment, or posting it anyway. | Image: TIkTok TikTok is rolling out a pop-up today that’s designed to warn users before they post a comment that might be “inappropriate or unkind.” The new feature is one of two being announced that are designed to “promote kindness” on the service. The other is Filter All Comments, so that they only appear once individually approved.The new unkind warning appears if TikTok believes a comment might violate its community guidelines. “Would you like to reconsider posting this?” the pop-up box reads, before encouraging users to “Edit” it, or “Post anyway.”Prompts like these have been explored by other social networks to cut down on bullying and harassment. Instagram rolled out similar prompts back in 2019, Twitter announced it was testing them last... Continue reading…

Semiconductor production, as shown above in GlobalFoundries’ European factory, is an extremely capital-intensive business. The European Union wants to double its chip manufacturing output to 20 percent of the global market by 2030. The goal is part of its new Digital Compass plan, announced yesterday, which aims to boost “digital sovereignty” by funding various high-tech initiatives.As well as doubling chip output, the EU also wants all households to have 5G access and gigabit internet connectivity by 2030; for “all key public services” to be available online in every member state; and for the bloc to have its first quantum computer. Funding for these and other projects will come from the EU’s €672.5 billion ($800 billion) coronavirus response fund, with 20 percent of this money ($160 billion) earmarked for tech investment.The EU’s ambition to produce... Continue reading…

The iPhone 12 mini. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Apple is cutting production of the iPhone 12 mini in the first half of this year, Nikkei Asia reports. Planned production of the smallest iPhone 12 model has reportedly been reduced by 70 percent or more in the first half of this year, making up the majority of a 20 percent cut in total iPhone 12 production. Some suppliers have been asked to temporarily stop producing iPhone 12 mini-specific components, while other parts are being reallocated to the Pro and Pro Max, Nikkei reports.Alongside the iPhone production news, Nikkei also reports that Apple has pushed back production for two new Apple Silicon MacBooks. Originally due to enter mass production in May or June, the laptops will now be manufactured in the second half of the year. N... Continue reading…

A Sonos-branded speaker inside Audi’s new TV, the Q4 E-Tron. | Image: Audi Sonos has partnered with Audi to equip the automaker’s Q4 E-Tron with sound, a first for the California-based audio company best known for home speakers. The news was confirmed Tuesday by Sonos CEO Patrick Spence after Audi published images of the Q4 E-Tron’s interior showing the Sonos logo. Protocol was first to report the deal.On Tuesday, Audi published a trove of shots showing off the interior of its next EV, the Q4 E-Tron. While the German carmaker emphasized its new augmented reality heads-up display, others took note of the Sonos logo, despite no mention of the collaboration in the press release.“We want to be in all the different categories of audio, and a big chunk of that is in auto,” said Spence during the Q&A of a scheduled... Continue reading…

It’s a mystifying phone with a steep price tag Continue reading…

Asus is going big with its latest gaming phones. The ROG Phone 5 lineup will start shipping this month across the globe, costing 799 euros (around $950) for the base configuration with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of fast UFS 3.1 storage. Every configuration has a 6.78-inch FHD+ OLED screen with a 144Hz refresh rate and a 300Hz touch sampling rate. Also, the headphone jack has made a comeback after being absent from the ROG Phone 3, this time with a quad DAC in tow for hi-res audio. (In case you’re wondering where the ROG Phone 4 went, Asus skipped over the number four, like OnePlus did, due to its similarities with the word “death” in some Asian languages.)The most notable changes from the last generation are exclusive to some even more... Continue reading…

Instagram Instagram launched its smaller Lite app in 2018 only to pull it from the Play Store in spring of last year. Now, the app’s getting a relaunch with new features and a slightly larger file size. Instagram announced today that the app will start rolling out on Android to 170 countries, including the US, through the Play Store, and that the new app requires only two megabytes, compared to the regular Instagram app’s 30MB. (The original Lite app only required 573 kilobytes, however, so it’s definitely larger than that.) No iOS version is planned for now.This bigger size allows for new features, though, including the ability to send direct messages and record and post videos. It also prominently features the Reels tab on the homepage while... Continue reading…

The USB-C webcam on Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Microsoft is reportedly planning to release a new webcam this spring. The software giant has previously offered a variety of webcams under its LifeCam brand, but Microsoft hasn’t updated these significantly for 10 years. Petri reports that a Surface event will take place this spring, and a new webcam will be on the agenda alongside Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop 4.The webcam will reportedly include a privacy cover and support high dynamic range (HDR). While Microsoft uses 4K USB-C webcams on its Surface Hub 2 device, this new webcam is rumored to skip 4K support. It’s not clear what resolution will be supported, or whether it will support Windows Hello facial recognition. Image: Microsoft Microsoft’s old LifeCam... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon appears to have reached the “late-prototype stage” in the creation of its secretive home robot codenamed Vesta, claims a new report from Insider. The device has been under development for around four years and now has more than 800 employees working on it, says the publication. If the robot launches, it will be one of Amazon’s biggest and most ambitious new products, in the mold of the Echo, Kindle, and Fire Phone.Indeed, it’s comparisons to the latter device, Amazon’s failed smartphone project, that seems to be concerning some of those involved in Vesta’s development. “People are very skeptical — we’re worried it could turn into another Fire Phone,” one of six anonymous sources cited by Insider as “directly involved in the... Continue reading…

Nikon has announced development of the Z9, its highest-end mirrorless camera to date and the first in the Z-mount line that the company describes as a flagship. Actual details are thin, but Nikon promises that it will deliver “the best still and video performance in Nikon history” upon release.From the single image released, the Z9 looks like a cross between the current mirrorless Z7 and the D6 full-frame DSLR, with a built-in vertical grip. Nikon says the Z9 uses a newly developed full-frame sensor and a new image processing engine, with support for 8K video “as well as various other video specifications that fulfill diverse needs and workflows.”That’s about it for details so far, except that Nikon says the Z9 will be released in... Continue reading…

Of course John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, has jumped into NFTs by spending $888,888.88 on one made by Steve Aoki, according to Rolling Stone. It’s nice to know he’s keeping busy after stepping down from T-Mobile’s CEO gig on April 1, 2020.The NFT in question is called “hairy.” It’s a 36 second-long video, featuring music — which Rolling Stone describes as “soundscapes in harmony with digital animations” and I would describe as “if Darude were making music from inside a Game Boy” — and this visual: GIF: Steve Aoki A portion of the Hairy NFT. Not only is Legere’s ownership of the video permanently embedded in the blockchain, but he’ll also get a screen in some acrylic that will display the NFT, as... Continue reading…

Samsung has just announced an Unpacked event coming up on March 17th, 2021, its second for the year so far. The invitation calls the event “Galaxy Awesome Unpacked.” Between recent A-series leaks and the chaotic, “awesome”-themed promotional video for last year’s models, it seems safe to assume that we’ll see the Galaxy A52 and A72 devices debut.An entire event dedicated to unveiling midrange devices is a little unusual, but the leaked information we’ve seen thus far has pointed to Samsung taking these phones very seriously. The A52 5G looks like it will receive monthly security updates — something Samsung has tended to reserve for higher-end phones — and spec leaks have indicated we can expect high-refresh rate screens.If nothing... Continue reading…

Image: Verkada Verkada, a Silicon Valley security startup that provides cloud-based security camera services, has suffered a major security breach. Hackers gained access to over 150,000 of the company’s cameras, including cameras in Tesla factories and warehouses, Cloudflare offices, Equinox gyms, hospitals, jails, schools, police stations, and Verkada’s own offices, Bloomberg reports.According to Tillie Kottmann, one of the members of the international hacker collective that breached the system, the hack was meant to show how commonplace the company’s security cameras are and how easily they’re able to be hacked. In addition to the live feeds, the group also claimed to have had access to the full video archive of all of Verkada’s customers.In a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter is actively working on a “big overhaul” of its TweetDeck platform, which lets you arrange lists and feeds into easy-to-read vertical rows, and it plans to share more about the project publicly later this year, product chief Kayvon Beykpour said in an interview with The Verge published Tuesday.TweetDeck, as one of the oldest and originally third-party account management apps for the platform, hasn’t seen much in the way of design or major feature changes in years. The app launched 12 years ago and was acquired by Twitter in 2011, and it’s more or less still the same vertical grid viewer for your various Twitter feeds it started as. Mostly, Twitter has ported over new functions added to its main website and mobile apps while... Continue reading…

A new bill to bring back net neutrality is on its way, supported by one of the open internet’s most fervent advocates. At an advocacy event last month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he would be introducing a measure in the next few “weeks” that would engrave the no throttling, block, or paid fast lanes rules into law.Reached by The Verge on Monday, Markey reaffirmed his commitment to introducing a bill soon. “The coronavirus pandemic has proven that broadband is as essential as electricity and other utilities. We need to restore net neutrality protections to ensure that our internet remains open and free and that consumers can continue to benefit from this critical infrastructure,” Markey told The Verge.Legislation like Markey... Continue reading…

Image: Sonos There wasn’t much left that we didn’t already know, but today, Sonos has officially announced its latest speaker, the Sonos Roam. Just as The Verge reported last week, the Roam is a portable battery-powered speaker priced at $169. Preorders start today, and it will go on sale on April 20th.The Sonos Move was the company’s first try at a portable product, but it’s quite large and hefty to actually travel with. The Roam, however, is a true “bring it anywhere” speaker. It’s the smallest speaker that Sonos has ever made, though the measurements I gave you last week were a hair off. It’s actually 6.61 x 2.44 x 2.36 inches and weighs 0.95 pounds. Sonos told me it considered “hundreds” of different sizes and prototypes before landing on this... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge HTC may be teasing new modules and attachments for its Vive virtual reality headsets, including a lip tracker, UploadVR reports.HTC’s been building up to some kind of announcement on its Vive Twitter account over the last week. Yesterday, it posted an image of a hinge, which savvy Twitter users matched to an experimental lip tracking module HTC announced at the Game Developers Conference in 2019. You can see a picture of the hinged product HTC is teasing and a matching photo of its lip tracking device below.

T-Mobile will soon start sharing certain customer data with marketers to provide more relevant ads. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile will soon put a new privacy policy into effect that will allow it to share certain kinds of customer information with third-party advertisers. Starting on April 26th, 2021, all customers will be automatically opted in to the new program, as spotted by The Wall Street Journal. Customers who don’t want to participate will need to manually opt out using their accounts’ privacy tools.T-Mobile’s new policy is no different than AT&T or Verizon’s. This is an about-face for former Sprint customers, however. T-Mobile acknowledges in its announcement of the policy change that Sprint offered a similar opt-in service rather than an opt-out one.The companies say the data they share doesn’t reveal individual customers’ identitiesThe new... Continue reading…

Support for Microsoft’s Edge browser is ending today — not the new Chromium-based one, but the original Edge that was built as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11. Microsoft now calls it Legacy Edge, and the company announced it would be discontinuing the product back in August. That day has finally come: Legacy Edge will no longer receive security updates, and anyone still using it should start the process of switching to something else.Legacy Edge was originally codenamed “Spartan” and was included with Windows 10 as the operating system’s default web browser before it was officially named Edge. The Edge mantle is being taken up by Microsoft’s Chromium-based browser, which was in beta throughout 2019 and officially launched in... Continue reading…

It’s simply the best Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The Xbox Series X and Series S are some of the hottest and most challenging gadgets to buy right now. Fortunately, the Microsoft Store has restocked both the Series X and Series S gaming consoles. Get ‘em while supplies last.Whether you purchase the most affordable next-gen console (the Xbox Series S) or Microsoft’s most powerful gaming console to date (Series X), both share many accessories that are great for early adopters.Several of the most popular games to play on these consoles include third-party titles like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Additionally, some popular Xbox One titles like Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Gears 5, and Ori: The Collection have all received graphical updates that take... Continue reading…

Andrew Steer speaks at the opening ceremony for New York City’s Climate Week in 2010. Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund has a new leader and a newly announced deadline. Andrew Steer will take the helm as president and CEO of the Earth Fund in mid-April after stepping down from his role leading one of the environmental organizations Bezos currently funds. According to Steer, Bezos intends to spend the entire $10 billion fund by 2030 — a date that hadn’t previously been publicly disclosed.Choosing Steer to lead the Earth Fund is another signal that Bezos intends to spend his cash on mainstream strategies to address the climate crisis. Bezos’ first group of grantees were mostly legacy environmental organizations that work toward the reduction of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions. In contrast, other high-profile efforts have... Continue reading…

It’s been a while since most of us have been able to go to a bowling alley, but “Right Up Our Alley” is a new drone video that might just be the next best thing, thanks to an astonishing display of camera work and drone piloting skill, via Kottke.The video, from YouTuber jaybyrdfilms, doesn’t provide too many details, other than it was shot at Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, and it was filmed with an FPV drone. But the footage speaks for itself.At first, it gives off the impression of a standard drone flight, with a bird’s-eye view of the building itself. But things quickly shift as the pilot meticulously swoops the drone inside the open door of the bowling alley, maneuvering past diners and waiting bowlers before swooping down the... Continue reading…

Disney Plus has officially surpassed 100 million subscribers, less than a year and a half after the streaming service launched.Executives announced the milestone during Disney’s annual shareholders meeting. The last time Disney gave an update on Disney Plus’ subscribers number was in February during its first quarter earnings; there, it announced that, as of January 2nd, 2021, there were just over 94 million. Although executives didn’t say what pushed Disney Plus over 100 million subscribers, the recent success of WandaVision and Raya and the Last Dragon likely helped. The next big series for Disney Plus is The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, out on March 19th.“The enormous success of Disney Plus ... has inspired us to be even more... Continue reading…

A long, spoiler-filled chat Continue reading…

New Phone Hub feature in Chrome OS. | Image: Google Google is marking 10 years of Chromebooks by unveiling new features for Chrome OS today. The biggest addition is a new Phone Hub feature that connects an Android phone to a Chromebook. It allows Chrome OS users to respond to texts, check a phone’s battery life, enable its Wi-Fi hotspot, and locate a device easily.Phone Hub is packed into a taskbar widget that even expands to show you recent Chrome tabs that you have been browsing on your phone. It looks like it will be a super useful feature for Android and Chromebook owners. Google is also enabling its Wi-Fi Sync feature on more devices, allowing you to connect to Wi-Fi networks you’ve already configured and used on your Android phone and other Chrome OS devices. I... Continue reading…

Photo by Victor Boyko/Getty Images Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey now plans to convert the proceeds from the NFT auction of his first tweet to bitcoin and donate them to charity. The highest bid for the tweet is currently $2.5 million.The auction will end on March 21st, and he plans to donate the bitcoin to Give Directly, a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to people living in poverty. He’ll be giving the bitcoin to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund for COVID-19 relief.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Cybersecurity researcher Daylam Tayari has found evidence in Twitch’s internal API that the site plans to implement something called a “brand safety score” for its streamers. That score would depend on a number of criteria: the streamer’s age, a rating given by Twitch staff, their ban history, the relationship the streamer has with Twitch, their automod settings, their partnership status, the ESRB rating of the game being played, and whether the stream is set to mature.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter has sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for opening an investigation into its moderation practices, arguing that the probe attempts to “intimidate, harass, and target Twitter” in retaliation for banning former President Donald Trump.Twitter filed the suit yesterday in California federal court. It’s asking the court to stop Paxton from demanding “volumes of highly confidential documents” on Twitter’s content moderation system. “Twitter sought for weeks to reach an agreement with AG Paxton that would put reasonable limits on the scope of this demand, but to no avail,” its complaint reads. “This retaliatory conduct violates the Constitution.”Paxton opened an investigation into Twitter — along with Google, Apple, Facebook, and... Continue reading…

League of Legends: Wild Rift, a spinoff of the PC game, is heading into open beta in North America on March 29th, developer Riot announced today. The beta will be available for mobile devices on iOS and Android.Riot announced Wild Rift in 2019; it promised a March open beta earlier this year. The game isn’t a true port but instead a “built from scratch” version with changed elements like the game’s controls and its maps. North American players will have “full access” to Wild Rift as part of the beta, with room for more players to join. Although Wild Rift’s open beta is currently only available to mobile players, the game is also expected to launch on consoles.Wild Rift was initially expected to launch last year but was delayed due to... Continue reading…

Image: Epic A new season of Fortnite is almost here, which can only mean one thing: a big in-game event. Today, Epic detailed what players can expect when season 6 of Fortnite’s second chapter kicks off. It sounds pretty ambitious and even includes a story-focused solo experience.The event has been dubbed the “Zero Crisis Finale,” and here’s how Epic describes it:

Photo by Liu Debin/VCG via Getty Images Russia and China have signed an agreement to build and work on an “International Scientific Lunar Station” orbiting the Moon, the countries’ space agencies announced Tuesday. The space powers had been in talks for months as Russia mulled over whether it would participate in NASA’s Gateway program, a rival lunar space station to be built by a coalition of other countries in the next decade.The International Scientific Lunar Station that Russia and China will work on is “a complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the Moon,” Roscosmos said in a statement. It will be designed to support a variety of research experiments “with the possibility of long-term unmanned operation with the prospect... Continue reading…

Now that so many people are working remotely, it’s become more accepted than ever for official documents to be sent digitally — and most are sent as PDFs.In case you’re not familiar with the background of that format, PDF stands for portable document format and was created by Adobe in the early 1990s to allow people and organizations to create exact digital versions of paper documents. The idea was that the document was an exact, unchangeable copy of the original (while some PDFs can now be edited, you can create a PDF that cannot).Since then, PDFs have become a standard for sending official documents. If you need to send something with any kind of legality, you’ll probably be asked to send it as a PDF.You can create a PDF from a... Continue reading…

Zipline’s drones fly autonomously to their destination, dropping packages off via parachute. | Image: Zipline The threat of COVID-19 has prompted many countries to draft new and emerging technologies to fight the pandemic, with the latest example taking flight in Ghana. This month, COVID-19 vaccines were delivered by drone for the first time in the West African nation, allowing the medicine to reach remote areas underserved by traditional logistics.Deliveries were made by US firm Zipline, which started couriering blood and drugs in Rwanda in 2016. Since then, the company has expanded its operations to Ghana in 2019 and the US in 2020, delivering medical supplies and PPE in North Carolina last May. Now, Ghana’s government has tapped Zipline to deliver the first vaccines supplied to Africa by the COVAX initiative, a project launched with the help... Continue reading…