The Verge

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales There’s a wide variety of deals happening in the tech space, including TVs, computer components, and more. Starting with a gadget that’ll give you some fast transfer speeds, SanDisk’s Ultra 1TB NVMe SSD is $100 at Best Buy. That’s a great price for this kind of capacity, given it’s much faster than your standard SATA SSD. SanDisk covers this model with a five-year warranty. In terms of how you can use it, make sure your PC’s motherboard has an open M.2 2280 slot, or get crafty and buy an M.2 enclosure to turn it into a fast, compact external drive like the one shown above.Someday, Sony will enable the PS5’s M.2 slot for an SSD of this size and shape, but until it does I wouldn’t recommend buying one expressly for that reason. Just to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Lately, the consumer internet — that set of products devoted to building and monetizing large networks of people — has started to feel rather buzzy. A space that had been largely emptied out over the past five years is once again humming with life. The products are compelling enough, and growing fast enough, that Facebook and others have begun trying to reverse-engineer and copy them.It still doesn’t seem quite real to me, and yet everywhere I look the signs are there: social networks are competitive again.Today, let’s tour this weird new landscape and talk about what it means — and doesn’t mean — for the tech giants and the governments trying to rein them in.I. How competition endedIf I had to put a date on when competition ended... Continue reading…

Detective Pikachu. Pokémon is a phenomenon, one that’s lasted a steady 25 years built on a foundation of approachable roleplaying games. On the DS, Nintendo’s bestselling piece of hardware, three of the top 10 bestselling titles are mainline Pokémon games. It’s a franchise that perpetually serves as a system seller despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it evolves at a glacial pace. But that’s only true of the core Pokémon experience. While those RPGs have been infamously resistant to change, the many, many Pokémon spinoffs are a different story. In fact, many of Pokémon’s biggest success stories, from the blockbuster film Detective Pikachu to the staggering success of Pokémon Go, were a result of this experimental attitude.Without these offshoots,... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony is working on a next-generation VR headset for the PS5. The headset won’t launch this year, but Sony is announcing early plans to make it available on the PS5 at some point in the future. Sony’s new VR headset will include an improved field of view, resolution, and even a single cord to make it easier to use.“We’re taking what we’ve learned since launching PS VR on PS4 to develop a next-gen VR system that enhances everything from resolution and field of view to tracking and input,” says Hideaki Nishino, Sony’s head of PlayStation platform and planning. “It will connect to PS5 with a single cord to simplify setup and improve ease-of-use, while enabling a high-fidelity visual experience.” Photo by James Bareham /... Continue reading…

Evil Geniuses CEO Nicole LaPointe Jameson on reinventing the industry Continue reading…

Qualcomm Chip maker Qualcomm has introduced a new reference design for augmented reality glasses: an AR “smart viewer” you can tether to a phone or PC via USB-C. Called the XR1 Smart Viewer, the system is meant to be lightweight and look (sort of) like sunglasses, while also enabling features like hand tracking and spatial awareness. The first glasses based on its design are set for release in mid-2021.The XR1 is designed as a consumer-focused “must-have accessory” for phones and computers, rather than a self-contained product. It uses two 1920 x 1080 OLED displays with a 90Hz refresh rate, plus an array of cameras, to add a virtual overlay to the real world. The camera array can also support hand tracking as a control scheme, and it can detect... Continue reading…

Brent Rose for The Verge Fitbit is launching an exclusive wellness program for Fitbit Premium subscribers called Mindful Method. The program is created by alternative medicine specialist Deepak Chopra and builds on the company’s focus on stress management that started with the Sense smartwatch.Mindful Method encompasses over 30 audio and video sessions on topics like mindfulness, sleep, stress management, wellness, and the mind-body connection, Fitbit says. The program is taught by Chopra, a renowned author and wellness expert, with more sessions from Chopra planned to be released over the coming months.From biofeedback to bioregulationIn a press presentation of the new program, Chopra led attendees through a sample meditation from Mindful Method. Overall,... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Alex Castro | Photography by Spotify The company wants to be at the center of creator monetization Continue reading…

Today marks the launch of Star. It’s a new section of Disney Plus for international audiences that will offer more mature R-rated films, TV shows from FX, and other shows and movies that Disney owns the rights to but don’t fit into Disney Plus’ family-friendly image.Star is effectively Disney’s solution to the fact that Hulu doesn’t exist in international markets. It marks a way for the company to expand on the value proposition of Disney Plus to international customers with the most crucial currency any streaming service has to offer: a bigger library of content.What that means is that international users are about to get a massive influx of movies and shows available on Disney Plus, through Star, that won’t be available for US... Continue reading…

Image: Google Google is struggling to fix one of its new Stadia games, after closing down its own in-house game studios earlier this month. Journey to the Savage Planet debuted on Stadia on February 1st, the same day Google shut down its Stadia studios and fired a number of developers.Journey to the Savage Planet was developed by Typhoon Studios, a studio Google acquired to build out its first-party Stadia titles. Players of the game have found it’s riddled with bugs on Stadia, including game breaking issues that won’t let certain players get past the main menu.The game launched on Stadia earlier this monthEurogamer reports that Reddit users have been complaining about the issues for weeks, and it’s not clear who will actually fix it. As employees... Continue reading…

Oppo has teased a new wireless charging solution that works when a phone is up to 10 cm (3.9 inches) away from a charging pad. The company has shown off its Wireless Air Charging tech in a 30-second clip on its Weibo page to coincide with MWC Shanghai. The clip shows the Oppo X 2021 rollable concept phone, announced in November, charging above the pad, even when held at an angle. The technology offers charging speeds of up to 7.5W, Oppo says.The Chinese manufacturer is the latest to announce a truly wireless air charging solution, following Xiaomi and Motorola’s teases from earlier this year. Back in January, Xiaomi announced Mi Air Charge Technology, which it says can charge multiple devices at 5W “within a radius of several meters.”... Continue reading…

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted an interactive 360-degree view of the Perseverance landing site on Mars in 4K resolution. It’s the latest jaw-dropping imagery to return from the mission, including that incredible video of the rover plunging through the Martian atmosphere before being “skycraned” down to the surface of the red planet.The 360-degree video was captured by Perseverance’s color Navcams perched atop a sensing mast above the rover. The scene can be navigated in a browser or in the YouTube app on your phone or 4K smart television. The images were captured on February 20th, two days after the Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater.Perseverance has a total of 23 cameras, the most of any Mars rover to date: 16 for... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook will restore news content to its platform in Australia after the government agreed to amend its proposed News Media Bargaining Code. In an update posted today, Facebook’s William Easton, managing director of Australia and New Zealand, said that the company is “satisfied that the Australian government has agreed to a number of changes and guarantees that address our core concerns.” News content will return to the platform “in the coming days,” Easton said.Facebook and Google have been at loggerheads with the Australian government about an upcoming law that will require them to pay publishers for content shared on their platforms. In response to the proposed bargaining code, Facebook took the extreme measure last week of blocking... Continue reading…

Photo by Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge More that 4,300 SpaceX employees volunteered to be part of a COVID-19 antibody study co-authored by CEO Elon Musk in 2020.The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, shows evidence that infected people who exhibited milder symptoms developed less of an immunity to COVID-19 than those who got sicker from the disease. The group behind the study found some evidence that suggests there’s a particular threshold of antibodies that could provide immunity, though they wrote that “the precise levels [...] associated with protection from re-infection remain unclear.”Vaccines also produce a much stronger immune response than cases with little to no symptoms, the authors note. They hope that this research, and o... Continue reading…

Image: LG LG Electronics has told The Verge that the company’s phone with a resizable screen, the LG Rollable, has not been put on hold. “I can firmly deny that any such decision on future mobile products has been finalized,” says an LG spokesperson. The denial comes in response to a report from Yonhap News that LG had reportedly told parts suppliers that the Rollable had been put on hold and that they could request a refund for their development efforts.Denying that a final decision has been made is not quite the same thing as reassuring everyone that the Rollable is still coming in 2021, but it could reflect the general uncertainty that comes with designing, manufacturing, and shipping complicated electronics during a global pandemic. And it... Continue reading…

Screenshot: The Verge Google has finally added Apple App Store privacy labels to its Gmail app, almost a month after we ran an article wondering what was taking so long (via MacRumors). The app is the second major Google app to get the labels, after they were added to YouTube when it was updated earlier this month.So how does it look? Well, that’s up for you to decide. The app apparently shares your coarse location and user ID with advertisers, as well as information about your interaction with advertisements. According to the privacy label, though, it doesn’t collect your name, physical address, or phone number (though as an email client, Gmail obviously collects your email address). Location data is also used for analytics and there are some features of... Continue reading…

Image: SpaceX Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-based internet provider, will double in speed “later this year”, according to a tweet by Elon Musk, posted as a reply to someone who had just received their Starlink beta kit (via CNET). The company currently promises speeds between 50 to 150Mbps, and Musk specifically calls out a 300Mbps goal in his tweet.While 300Mbps isn’t unheard-of speed, it’s faster than many people currently have access to, especially in the low-to-medium population density areas that Musk talks about targeting in a second tweet.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Lucid Motors is going to become a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in a deal that will leave the electric vehicle startup with $4.4 billion in cash. The California startup, which is majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, plans to start shipping its first luxury electric vehicle — the 500-mile range Air sedan — later this year. An electric SUV is slated to follow in 2023.Much like many other startups in the automotive space have done over the past year, Lucid Motors is skipping the traditional path to becoming a publicly-traded company and is instead merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Specifically, Lucid Motors is merging with Churchill Capital Corp IV, which is already... Continue reading…

Image: Twisted Metal Wiki Sony is bringing back its Twisted Metal franchise, but this time it’s going to be a TV show, not a video game. According to Variety, the show is moving ahead in its production, with the writers of Deadpool and actor Will Arnett signed on as executive producers.The Twisted Metal games center mainly around getting in a heavily armored car and blowing other drivers up. The series, which the head of PlayStation Productions calls “one of the most beloved franchises from PlayStation,” started on the original PS1 and got releases on the PS2 and PS3 as well (though my personal favorite was the PSP version, which I sunk hours upon hours into). The series went dormant during the years of the PlayStation 4, however, with no signs of a console... Continue reading…

Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen wants to make American wireless great again. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Dish Network co-founder and chairman Charlie Ergen underscored the company’s commitment to building a 5G wireless network on today’s Q4 2020 earnings call. He restated the intention to bring 5G online in its first major cities by the end of Q3 2021 — that’s the period running from July through September — and was bullish on Dish’s ability to boost the US’s somewhat dismal global position in terms of wireless network offerings.Ergen spent several minutes on today’s call recapping what the company has done so far in its network-building effort. With its acquisition of Boost Mobile last year, it’s currently offering prepaid service as an MVNO on T-Mobile’s network, but it has also been accumulating its own spectrum to make the move to a... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Last November, Microsoft debuted two next-gen consoles — the Xbox Series X and the more affordable Xbox Series S. If you are looking for the more affordable next-gen Xbox, Best Buy has the console in stock right now.The Xbox Series S variant costs $299, is smaller, and is less powerful than the $500 Series X. One other important thing to note is the Xbox Series S is a digital-only console, meaning it lacks a disc drive to play physical games.If you plan to buy this console, you may want to consider picking up a few accessories that will help you get the most out of your new gadget, most notably an additional controller if you are playing a game with a local co-op with a friend or family member.As far as storage goes, both... Continue reading…

Hayley Arceneaux | Image: St. Jude Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, will join the first all-civilian trip to space, SpaceX announced today. She will orbit Earth for up to five days in the Crew Dragon capsule as part of the Inspiration4 mission. Crew members are being selected based on “mission pillars of leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity,” according to the press release for the mission. Arceneaux, SpaceX said, will represent hope.Diagnosed with bone cancer at 10, she had some of the bones in her left leg replaced with titanium as part of her treatment. She was treated at St. Jude, where she now works with children who are being treated for lymphoma and leukemia. With the upcoming mission, Arceneaux will become... Continue reading…

Image: Marvel New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will allow movie theaters in New York City to open with a limited audience capacity for the first time in nearly a year.As part of the restrictions, theaters will only allow a maximum of 50 people to sit in any one screening (restricting capacity to 25 percent). Attendees must wear masks and sit in their assigned seats. The theaters will also have to implement advanced air filtration systems, according to Cuomo. While theaters outside of New York City have been allowed to reopen over the last few months, high case numbers in the city have prevented people from going. Theaters originally shut down because of the pandemic in mid-March 2020.Allowing New York City theaters to open is a big deal, especially for... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Epic Games will give Fortnite players 1,000 V-Bucks if they ever purchased an in-game loot box, presented within the game as “loot llamas” containing randomized items, as part of a proposed class action lawsuit settlement to be approved later this week.While Fortnite’s massively popular battle royale mode has never contained randomized loot boxes, the game’s cooperative survival mode, “Save the World,” did — at least until 2019 when Epic changed its loot box system to allow players to see the item inside prior to purchase.Now, anyone who purchased a randomized loot box prior to their discontinuation will have the 1,000 V-Bucks (roughly $8) deposited automatically into their accounts over the next two to three days. The decision is... Continue reading…

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge Samsung has announced that it’ll be extending the amount of time that its Galaxy smartphones and tablets will be getting security updates. Now, devices released from 2019 and onward will receove at least four years of security updates.Previously, Samsung offered either monthly or quarterly security updates for at least the first two years of a device’s life span, the frequency of which is determined by the device itself. More premium phones like the Galaxy Note or Galaxy S lines get monthly updates, while budget-friendly models like 2020’s Galaxy A71 5G get quarterly updates. Samsung also drops some of its higher-end devices down to quarterly updates after a certain point in time, like the Galaxy S8 lineup.It’s important to note that... Continue reading…

Image: Instagram Instagram is announcing that it’s adding resources for people affected by eating disorders to its social platform. If users search for hashtags or content that’s potentially related to disordered eating, the company will guide that user to resources or help lines provided by the National Eating Disorders Association (or NEDA) in the US, as well as others in the UK, Australia, and Canada.Instagram says that currently, it tries to blur out potentially triggering content in search results, and it does direct people to generalized crisis support, but it should now direct users to resources specifically designed around eating disorders. In its blog, Instagram also says that it plans to show the resources if someone is trying to share eating... Continue reading…

NASA on Monday released a trove of video footage showing its Perseverance rover landing on Mars after plunging through the planet’s atmosphere, unveiling the most in-depth views of a Mars landing ever.

Velodyne, which makes LIDAR sensors crucial for the operation of autonomous vehicles, has removed its founder, David Hall, as chair of the company’s board following an investigation, Reuters reports. Hall’s wife, Marta Thoma Hall, has also stepped down as chief marketing officer.The investigation, which started in December 2020, concluded that the Halls “each behaved inappropriately with regard to Board and Company processes, and failed to operate with respect, honesty, integrity, and candor in their dealings with Company officers and directors,” the company said in a statement.David Hall had previously stepped down as chairman of the board “voluntarily,” the board said, and transitioned to a new role as executive chairman. Marta... Continue reading…

Images: Karma Automotive Electric vehicle startup Karma Automotive has fully revealed its newest hybrid car, the GS-6. While it shares the same design as the company’s ultra-luxury sedan, the Revero GT, Karma is pricing the GS-6 at nearly half the price — $83,900 — in a bid to reach a much wider set of customers.Karma says it’s able to do that because it plans to make more cars at its California production plant, is making them more efficiently, and has streamlined its supply chain, according director of public relations Jeff Holland. “It helps that our parent company also owns our battery supplier A123 Systems, but over the past few years we have also seen a substantial reduction in the cost of lithium ion batteries and other EV-related components including... Continue reading…

Valheim is on a trajectory like nothing we’ve ever seen. The Viking-themed indie survival game has been shooting up the Steam charts, selling 3 million copies in an unheard-of 17 days. And people aren’t just buying it on a whim; they’re actively playing it, too. On Sunday, the game reached 500,000 simultaneous players, according to SteamDB, leaving the charred remains of four other all-time Steam player count records in its wake.As of Friday, February 19th, the game had already passed Postal and Grand Theft Auto V to become the ninth most-played game on Steam at peak, but now it’s surpassed the records for Among Us, Life is Strange 2, Fallout 4, and Terraria to reach the No. 5 slot, according to Steam Charts. It’s going... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is adding a new mobile feature that will automatically download show recommendations and movies based on viewer history. Downloads For You launches globally today for Android users, the company announced.You’ll need to opt in to use the feature. Once toggled on from the downloads tab, you’ll need to set how much space — 1GB, 3GB, or 5GB — you’ll want to use. More space equals more Netflix recommendations downloaded. TechCrunch reports that although Netflix’s full catalog is available with the feature, some downloads will be limited because of licensing restrictions. The platform continues to improve its offline watching options; Netflix launched Smart Downloads on Android in 2018, which automatically deletes... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Netflix’s next Sherlock Holmes project, The Irregulars, just got a new teaser highlighting the dark, supernatural adventures yet to come on the eight-part series. The Irregulars, set to start streaming on March 26th, follows a group of “troubled street teens” who are “manipulated into solving crimes” by the “sinister Doctor Watson,” according to Netflix.The Irregulars is based in part on the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of street urchins in Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes novels that helped Watson and the famous consulting detective gain a street-level view on London and handle some of the busy work of solving mysteries. Netflix’s version, created by Tom Bidwell, seems to take things in a far moodier and spookier... Continue reading…

Image: MySmartPrice Sony’s upcoming WF-1000XM4 earbuds may have been shown off in a leak, with a slimmed-down design. The leak from MyDrivers (via MySmartPrice) claims to show the sequel to Sony’s very good WF-1000XM3 — and if it’s real, it seems like a nice design upgrade.The new purported design does away with the large, Popsicle-stick-like design that sticks out of the user’s ear, and instead goes with a more modern style of bud that fits in your ear — similar to Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Pro. Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Last year’s WF-1000XM3, for reference. The leaked image shows a copper accent cylinder that acts as a design flair similar to Sony’s 1000XM3 headphones or its modern, high-end Walkmans. We’ll likely have to... Continue reading…

Photo by MOHD RASFAN/AFP via Getty Images A Malaysian news site was fined the equivalent of nearly $124,000 for five comments below an article. News outlet Malaysiakini has raised money to cover the fee of 500,000 ringgit, but human rights advocates say it was targeted for its reporting on government corruption, and they worry that the case could chill political speech online.The New York Times reported the verdict on Friday, when a panel of judges found Malaysiakini guilty of contempt of court. The outlet argued that it wasn’t responsible for reader comments, and it removed them after police warned that the comments illegally insulted Malaysia’s judiciary. But the court said it should have preemptively moderated the comments and never allowed them online.Malaysiakini is a... Continue reading…

Smoke rises from an illegally lit fire in a section of Amazon rainforest, south of Novo Progresso in Pará state, Brazil, on August 15th, 2020. | Photo by Carl de Souza / AFP via Getty Images Fires in the Amazon reached devastating new levels in 2020, new NASA satellite imagery shows. The space agency developed a new tool to track fires from space after Brazil’s Amazon suffered a record-breaking year of fires in 2019.Specialized sensors on satellites collect visible and infrared imagery, which NASA uses to detect thermal anomalies — basically hotspots caused by fire. Its satellites found 1.4 million of those anomalies in the Southern Amazon last year, compared to 1.1 million in 2019.“Fire activity was up significantly in 2020,” Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the announcement today. “All types of fires contributed to the increase, including... Continue reading…

Russia’s Progress 77 cargo resupply ship is seen approaching the International Space Station through the window of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. | NASA SpaceX’s Crew Dragon astronaut taxi is doing “beautifully” so far in its first operational, long-duration stay on the International Space Station, NASA’s human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders told The Verge. The capsule, named Resilience, sent three NASA astronauts and a Japanese astronaut to the station last November, and a trivial housekeeping task is the only unexpected hiccup faced by the crew.“We’ve been very, very happy with how things are going,” Lueders said in an interview. “The only minor thing we had was we’re getting some little bits of lint on the seal” where Crew Dragon connects to the ISS, she added. Astronauts have been floating in and out of the spacecraft for months, leaving behind a buildup of lint and dust.“I can... Continue reading…

Image: Spotify Barack Obama is getting into the podcast game. Today, Spotify announced that the former president and rockstar Bruce Springsteen — yes, you read that right — will host a show called Renegades: Born in the USA exclusively for the audio platform. They’ll discuss “race, fatherhood, marriage, and the state of America,” per a press release, and the first two episodes premiere today for both free and premium Spotify users. The first season will contain eight episodes total.Higher Ground, the production company owned by Michelle and Barack Obama, signed a deal with Spotify in 2019, committing themselves to creating exclusive podcasts for the platform. Renegades is the second of those shows. The Michelle Obama Podcast debuted this past summer... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has just announced a new monthly phone plan called Magenta Max that the company says is designed for the era of 5G. According to this press release, T-Mobile claims Magenta Max is “the first and only 5G consumer smartphone plan that can’t slow you down based on how much data you use.” That makes it sound like the carrier is doing away with what’s known as deprioritization, where your speeds are subject to slowdown after you exceed a certain amount of data in a billing cycle.“T-Mobile has lit up the highest-capacity 5G network available — a network so powerful it can start unleashing the power of 5G to deliver unlimited premium data,” the company said. Magenta Max promises “unlimited 4K UHD” video streaming compared to the... Continue reading…

Anthony and Joe Russo’s AGBO production company is entering the audio space in a new multiyear deal with Spotify, following its massive success with Extraction on Netflix and the upcoming Tom Holland-led feature Cherry on Apple TV Plus.The directors, best known for their work on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame as well as sitcoms like Arrested Development, will produce several series for Spotify. The move comes at a time when Spotify is trying to assert itself as the dominant podcast platform. With the Russo brothers, known for their specific type of blockbuster storytelling, the company is looking “to tell more stories that have the power to span generations and territories.”Spotify has signed other deals with... Continue reading…

DC is launching another universe to tell its superhero stories — but this time, it’s not on HBO Max or Cartoon Network: it’s on Spotify.The publisher is working on nine shows for Spotify, including shows about Catwoman, Wonder Woman, the Riddler, Batgirl, Superman and Lois Lane, and more — although DC creative director Jim Lee didn’t give too much more information about what those shows entail right now.Spotify and DC Comics signed a podcasting deal last June. The multiseries, multiyear deal was part of a bigger partnership between Spotify and DC Comics’ parent company, WarnerMedia. The first project out of the partnership is Batman Unburied, which will explore the “darker aspects of Bruce Wayne’s psychology.”Competition within the... Continue reading…

In the US, 5G remains a work in progress, despite carriers waving “5G Mission Accomplished” banners for years | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The fourth industrial revolution will not be televised Continue reading…

If all goes according to plan, in a few years, Toronto’s esports teams will have a futuristic new home. Today, Overactive Media — the ownership group behind the Toronto Defiant of the Overwatch League and the Call of Duty League’s Toronto Ultra — announced plans for a new 7,000-seat venue in the city, which is designed to host both competitive gaming matches and other events like concerts. The venue is expected to cost around $500 million to build and open in 2025.The new arena will be located at Exhibition Place in Toronto, which is also home to BMO Field, where soccer club Toronto FC plays. It’s being designed by Populous, the prolific architecture firm behind recent projects like Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London and T-Mobile Arena... Continue reading…

At least one future is here right now. The prankster art / marketing collective MSCHF recently spent $74,500 to purchase a Spot robo-dog from Boston Dynamics. It mounted a Tippmann 98 paintball gun on its back and is allowing people around the world to remotely control the bot via their phones in an art gallery filled with its own work for two minutes at a time. MSCHF is calling it Spot’s Rampage, and the event is happening on February 24th at 1PM ET. Quoth MSCHF’s latest manifesto:

Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for NARAS The Paris-born electronic music duo Daft Punk are no more. The group, consisting of French musicians Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, confirmed the breakup with an eight-minute video titled “Epilogue” excerpted from their 2006 science fiction film Electroma, according to Pitchfork, which also confirmed the news with Daft Punk’s publicist.Daft Punk formed in 1993 in Paris and would go on to have a monumental effect on the emerging house and techno scenes of Europe and later all of pop music around the globe, with landmark albums like 1997’s Homework and 2001’s Discovery and singles like “Around the World” and “One More Time.”A standout of Daft Punk’s early career included the anime film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of... Continue reading…

All five seasons of The Muppet Show arrived on Disney Plus this past Friday. And depending on which episode you are streaming, you may receive a content disclaimer warning of potentially offensive material featured in the episode.Disney included a content warning for 18 episodes of the comedy show. The disclaimer, as pictured below, has been added to some episodes, warning viewers that the episode featured may include “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.” Despite the controversial material some episodes contain, Disney decided to leave these episodes to “acknowledge the [offensive content’s] harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.” S... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Samsung released its Galaxy S21 phones in late January, and it isn’t taking long for its original price to plummet. The Galaxy S21 Plus with a 6.7-inch 120Hz OLED screen and 128GB of storage that originally sold for $1,000 is now $800 at Amazon, which is the steepest price cut yet. Making this deal even better is the extra $100 in savings Amazon is offering on the Galaxy Buds Pro wireless earbuds (knocking them down to $100) when you purchase them together. To take advantage of that bundle offer, highlight the orange “Extra Savings” box on the product page, then hit “Add both to cart.” Currently, the black, silver, and violet colors are available with this deal.The smaller Galaxy S21 is $100 off its usual price, making it $700 (with the... Continue reading…

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge Samsung has launched support for electrocardiogram (EKG) readings and blood pressure monitoring on its Galaxy Watch Active 2 and Galaxy Watch 3 devices, according to SamMobile. The feature comes courtesy of the Samsung Health Monitor app, which is now available to download from the company’s app store in 31 additional countries. Prior to today, the features were restricted to owners of one of those two devices in South Korea and the US only.Samsung first announced last month it would be adding the features to its latest Galaxy Watch devices through software updates, considering both smartwatches have the requisite sensors used for measuring heart rate and blood pressure and performing an EKG. Image: Samsung Now,... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is planning to add text predictions to Word in March. The new feature will work similarly to Google Docs’ Smart Compose option, using machine learning to predict what words an author will need to speed up document creation. Microsoft originally announced a beta of text predictions last year, but Neowin spotted it’s now on the Microsoft 365 roadmap to reach all Word users on Windows next month.Word will highlight grayed-out predictions when users are writing a document, and the suggestions can be accepted using the Tab key or rejected by hitting Escape. Text predictions can also be completely disabled by Word users. Image: Microsoft Word text predictions. Microsoft also started rolling out identical... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Twenty-five years later, that’s still the case Continue reading…

Image: TikTok TikTok is announcing today that it’s taking a couple small steps to try and help people who are affected by eating disorders. To do this, it’s partnering with the National Eating Disorder Association (or NEDA) to have an eating disorder awareness week, and implementing two new features that aim to provide resources and support to those who need it.If a user searches TikTok for terms like “proana” (short for “pro-anorexia”), or “eating disorder,” the app will now show support resources, along with NEDA’s phone number. Currently, searching the terms only shows the support number, but the new interface will also provide users with advice on how to deal with an eating disorder. Image: TikTok Instead of just... Continue reading…