The Verge

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber has lost the final appeal in a long running UK legal battle over whether its drivers are self-employed or legally-recognized workers with all the attendant rights, Bloomberg reports. The ruling is the conclusion of the company’s five-year legal fight in the country and a major setback for Uber that could affect all gig workers in the UK, regardless of employer.Today, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers are, indeed, workers, confirming the decision made by three lower courts. The unanimous decision means that drivers are entitled to a minimum wage, paid holiday, and other legal protections. Judge George Leggatt said Uber drivers working time isn’t limited to time spent driving passengers, but also “includes any period... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge YouTube’s permanent Spaces locations, which were designed to offer resources and networking opportunities to its creators, won’t reopen after the pandemic, the company has confirmed. Instead, YouTube says it’s shifting to a hybrid model that will combine pop-up locations with virtual events. The Spaces that won’t be re-opening are in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rio, and Tokyo.Although it was the pandemic that pushed YouTube towards a virtual model, the shift away from permanent Spaces has been underway for at least a couple of years. Back in 2019, TubeFilter reported that the company was moving towards a reliance on temporary pop-up locations to give it the flexibility to serve creators across a wider area. At the time... Continue reading…

Apple is said to be lobbying the Indian government in a move that could see the company manufacture iPads in the country for the first time. Reuters reports that the government is planning to launch an incentive scheme designed to boost India’s computer exports, and Apple wants in — but is angling for a better deal.The initiative will have a budget of up to Rs. 70 billion ($964 million) over five years, according to Reuters, but Apple is reportedly asking for that to be almost tripled to Rs. 200 billion. The reason is said to be partly that India’s supply chain doesn’t yet have the scale to meet Apple’s demands.Apple already makes iPhones in India, having started in 2018 to avoid new import tariffs imposed by the Indian government as... Continue reading…

YouTube has removed one of Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s recent videos, a diss track aimed at popular children’s channel Cocomelon, for violating guidelines around cyberbullying and child safety.In the video, Kjellberg attacks Cocomelon’s content and pokes fun at kids who watch the videos. Kjellberg also uses phrases like “your audience is just a bunch of motherfucking virgins,” which could violate YouTube’s guidelines for using offensive or vulgar language in videos that include children. Toward the end of the video, Kjellberg also hands what appears to be plastic weapons to a few kids, who use them to attack a melon.YouTube’s team decided to remove the video because it contained imagery that was inappropriate for children despite... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge This morning, Nvidia announced that it would artificially reduce the performance of its upcoming $329 GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card when it comes to one specific task: Ethereum cryptocurrency mining. As weird as that news might sound, it was music to the ears of some gamers — who have been trying and failing to get their hands on graphics cards for months due to the great GPU shortage, and blaming miners for part of that.You might be wondering: what does this mean for other GPUs? Nvidia isn’t talking about its plans for future graphics card just yet, but the company tells The Verge (in no uncertain terms) that it won’t nerf existing GPUs. “We are not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold,” says a spokesperson.I was also a bit... Continue reading…

illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The Game Developers Conference is changing course from its original (potentially risky) plan of hosting a hybrid in-person / digital event in 2021. According to an announcement on Thursday, GDC 2021 will be all-digital and split into three separate events to better and more safely accommodate the networking, games showcases, and instructional workshops and panels the event is known for.The series of events will start with GDC Masterclass, a collection of virtual workshops and trainings for developers that will take place on March 4th and 5th. GDC Showcase, which will be open to the public and free to attend, will run from March 15th through 19th, featuring networking and lectures in “a new array of content and formats.” Finally, GDC... Continue reading…

Image: Blackmagic Blackmagic is releasing a new, “Pro” version of its Pocket Cinema Camera 6K, which looks to fix a lot of the pain points we found in the original. It adds a tiltable, brighter screen (and an optional electronic viewfinder attachment), a bigger battery, and built-in ND. The camera is slotting into Blackmagic’s line-up above the regular 6K, coming in at $2,495, about $500 more than the non-Pro version.While the new features still won’t make the camera ideal for consumers, they will bring some quality-of-life improvements to filmmakers and video production houses on a budget — especially that tiltable screen. I’ve used a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera before, and it’s a dream mounted on a tripod at eye-level, but an ergonomic nightmare... Continue reading…

Vaio Vaio is known for making laptops that pack a surprising amount of power into unbelievably thin form factors. The Vaio Z may be the company’s most ambitious product yet. It contains up to Intel’s four-core Core i7-11357H — and at a starting weight of 2.11 pounds, it’ll be the lightest laptop ever to house an Intel H-series processor. (Though models you can buy in the US are 2.32 pounds.)Part of the reason the Vaio Z is so light is that it’s the first laptop ever to be made of “contoured carbon fiber.” You’ll find carbon fiber in some of the nicest lightweight laptops on the market, including the Dell XPS line — it’s a sturdy and lightweight material. But those laptops utilize sheets of carbon fiber that are held together with metal or... Continue reading…

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images Weeks after Reddit community r/WallStreetBets shitposted GameStop stock up to more than $400 a share, the House Financial Services Committee pulled all of the major players in for questioning on Thursday.The hearing featured:

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge The Android 12 developer preview is out, and the internet is busy poring over it to find any new features or hints at the OS’s future. So far, there have been a few interesting things discovered, such as an Emergency SOS feature, some redesigns, and other useful, if minor, finds:

Photo by GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images The House Energy and Commerce Committee has called a new hearing on platform misinformation to include testimony from Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Scheduled for March 25th, the hearing will be a joint effort from the Communications and Technology subcommittee and the Consumer Protection and Commerce subcommittee.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are all scheduled to testify.“This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation,” the chairs of the committees said in a joint statement. “For far too long, big tech has failed to acknowledge the role they’ve played in fomenting and elevating... Continue reading…

WhatsApp has a new plan to explain its contentious privacy policy — the one that came under fire when users grew concerned the platform would share their messages with parent company Facebook. In an announcement on Thursday, the company explained how users can read through the new policy and learn how business and personal messages — which have different privacy standards — are handled.The new privacy policy primarily concerns messaging businesses on WhatsApp and what parts of your data those businesses have access to. Most WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning they can only be accessed by the people actually talking. But WhatsApp also lets users message businesses, and those messages aren’t extended the same protections.... Continue reading…

The first image taking by NASA’s Perseverance rover after touching down on Thursday. | NASA/JPL NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully touched down on the surface of Mars after surviving a blazing seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere. The rover’s clean landing sets the stage for a years-long journey to scour the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater for ancient signs of life. GIF: NASA / JPL A live video feed from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California showed mission engineers cheer upon confirmation of a clean Perseverance touchdown. “Touchdown confirmed,” Swati Mohan, a member of NASA’s Entry, Descent, and Landing team, said. “Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars ready to begin seeking the signs of past life.” The landing team of roughly 30 engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion... Continue reading…

Image: Rudeism Hades, Supergiant Games’ Greek-themed roguelike, can be a pretty tough game. But one intrepid Twitch streamer took it upon himself to up the challenge by beating the game in an incredibly nontraditional way: by using a controller made out of an actual pomegranate.Pomegranates are a big part of the game, serving as useful power-ups, and they also have an important place in Greek mythology. But I never imagined that someone could use a real-life pomegranate to defeat the final boss.To make the controller, streamer Dylan “Rudeism” Beck cut up a pomegranate into 10 pieces, wired the pieces to a MakeyMakey circuit board to make them act as capacitive touch buttons, and taped an earth wire from his arm to the board. Here’s how the... Continue reading…

The issue appears to affect the Pixel 2 series, but may be spreading to newer phones. | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Some owners of previous-generation Pixel phones are having serious trouble with their cameras. Android Police has noticed a recent increase in one-star Play Store reviews for the camera app used by the Pixel, with frustrated owners saying the camera often crashes upon opening or no longer works at all. A thread in Google’s Pixel support forum features similar complaints. The Pixel 2 XL seems to be cited most often for experiencing the problem, but some posters say they’re having trouble with devices as recent as the 3 or 4A.It’s not an entirely new problem. Android Police has been tracking camera issues that have plagued Pixel 2 phones primarily over the last year, and it notes more devices seem to be affected now. Owners say that... Continue reading…

A coalition of tech and business groups have joined together for a lawsuit challenging Maryland’s newly passed digital services tax, as first reported by The Washington Post. The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Maryland, argues the state tax is preempted by federal law and violates various constitutional prohibitions against state taxes on out-of-state activity.The lawsuit is led by the US Chamber of Commerce, which is joined by three tech industry groups: Internet Association, NetChoice, and Computer & Communications Industry Association. Membership varies, but all three associations count Google, Facebook, and Amazon as members, as well as other tech giants.The Maryland law would establish a new gross revenue tax on... Continue reading…

Microsoft is announcing two new versions of Office today: a consumer Office 2021 version and Office LTSC for commercial customers. Office 2021 will be available later this year for both Windows and macOS, and similar to the previous Office 2019 release, it’s designed for those who don’t want to subscribe to the cloud-powered Microsoft 365 variants.Microsoft isn’t fully detailing all of the features and changes in Office 2021 just yet, but the Office LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) variant will include things like dark mode support, accessibility improvements, and features like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel. Office 2021 will include similar features.Don’t expect any major UI changes here, either. Dark mode is the obvious change... Continue reading…

NASA is landing a rover on Mars today, February 18th, but if you’re looking for a different perspective than the traditional live stream, the space agency is currently streaming the scene from inside mission control — in an immersive 360 degrees. You can look around to watch people as they go about their work, but there are also big virtual screens displaying multiple other views, including NASA’s other live stream. It might be the best way to experience the landing because you’ll get it all simultaneously.At the time of writing, the stream is broadcasting interviews with key mission staff, explaining the purpose of today’s landing, as well as some of the technical jargon that’ll start getting thrown around once Perseverance begins its... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 will be available for free on its YouTube channel for 48 hours, starting on Friday, February 19th, at 12AM PT, according to a blog post from the company (via The Wrap). Writer and director Aaron Sorkin said the movie is being shown for free to “commemorate the anniversary of the verdict in this historic trial,” and he praised the people depicted in the movie as “the real patriots who inspired a generation — actually, generations.”The film centers on the eight Vietnam war protestors who were charged with inciting a riot and conspiracy for demonstrating during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Sorkin is no stranger to political subject matter, notably working on The West Wing and A... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Update February 18th, 2:10PM ET: Google released the first of its Android 12 developer previews, so we’ve updated the info in this post to be relevant if you want to install it on your phone. The instructional photos might include a mention of Android 11, but we’ve ensured the steps are still accurate.You can try out the Android 12 developer preview software right now if you have a Pixel 3 or later, but it’s understandable if the idea of flashing your device to install the OS is intimidating. It can be a tricky process, and the steps differ slightly depending on what phone you have and what kind of computer you’re going to use to download the software. But Google itself makes this process much more streamlined.Google’s Android Flash... Continue reading…

For YouTube TV customers who subscribe individually to HBO Max, Showtime, and Starz, the company is rolling out a new entertainment bundle that will save people $5.The optional package is $30 a month. Individually, HBO Max costs $15 a month, Showtime is $11 a month, and Starz is $9 a month, meaning customers who subscribe to all three spend $35 a month through the individual subscription plans. YouTube TV has steadily added more premium channels over the last couple of years, including inking a deal with WarnerMedia for HBO Max in February 2020.While the bundle is an easy way to save $5 a month, YouTube has also gotten increasingly expensive over the last year. In June, YouTube TV increased its monthly price from $50 to $65. The move... Continue reading…

A warming center in Houston, Texas. | Photo by Thomas Shea / AFP via Getty Images Power outages and freezing temperatures continue to throttle Texas. People without heat or safe water are heading to warming centers or gathering in the homes of friends who have the lights on. The most pressing concern for many Texans right now is keeping warm, finding food, and making sure their water is safe to drink. But in the background is the ever-present threat of COVID-19 — which could spread in those indoor spaces.COVID-19 cases in Texas are declining right now, like they are in most of the country, but thousands of cases are still reported each day. Hospitalization rates are still high. The ongoing pandemic means that any other disaster, like the freeze, is layering on top of a baseline emergency. “It’s broadened everything... Continue reading…

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Facebook is now rolling out multiuser support as an experimental feature for Oculus Quest 2 headsets, the company announced on Thursday. The primary account holder will be able to add up to three additional accounts to one device. Facebook is also rolling out app sharing as an experimental feature for the Quest 2, which will allow accounts on one device to access the apps owned by the primary account holder.For now, the new features are exclusive to the Oculus Quest 2, but Facebook plans to bring them to all Quest users “eventually.”There are a few other caveats to be aware of. Facebook began requiring people to log in to their Quest headsets with their Facebook accounts last year, and that controversial rule still applies to everyone... Continue reading…

After calling FX home for several years, Atlanta creator Donald Glover is reportedly moving to Amazon with an overall deal worth eight figures, according to multiple publications. The news was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter.As part of the deal, Glover will work on a series of projects for Amazon, including the recently announced Mr. and Mrs. Smith series, which he’ll star in alongside Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. (Waller-Bridge also has an overall deal with Amazon.) One rumored project includes Hive, which is centered on a “Beyoncé-like figure,” according to the Reporter. Glover’s most popular show, Atlanta, will continue at FX where the show is set for a third and fourth season.Arguably, the most interesting... Continue reading…

GIF: Chris Torres Nyan Cat turns 10 this year, and to mark the occasion, a one-of-a-kind edition of the iconic GIF is going up for auction. Chris Torres, the artist behind Nyan Cat, has remastered the original animation and will be selling it through the crypto art platform Foundation. The auction begins at 1PM ET today and will run for around 24 hours.“I’m looking at [the GIF] right now, and I’m like, ‘Yes, it looks good,’” Torres said in a phone call with The Verge. “I think it turned out really well this time around.”Crypto art has been growing in popularity over the past few years, and there are now a number of digital marketplaces — including Zora, SuperRare, and Nifty Gateway — where collectors can buy and sell digital works. Last year, the... Continue reading…

Google is releasing a developer preview for the next version of Android, Android 12, for Pixel devices today. As is the norm for Google, the very first previews of Android are full of a lot of developer-facing changes. Android 12 has updates to how the OS handles images, video, and future security updates.It’s also the norm for Google to hold some of the major UI changes in reserve for its Google I/O conference, typically held in May. Although this developer preview does include some changes to the UI for notifications, until we install it we won’t know how closely it will map to the leak we saw earlier this month.It’s available for Pixel 3 and newer phones but needs to be manually installed by flashing your device. It’s likely... Continue reading…

Photo by JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images Last November, California passed Proposition 22, which made it so that companies like Uber and Lyft could classify their workers as contractors instead of employees, avoiding the obligation to give them benefits. Bloomberg has written a great report about how this type of change — replacing regular employees with contractors — could be coming to many other industries across the nation, which could affect millions of workers.While the law was pushed for by ride-share companies, the article talks about the effects already being seen in other industries, like how grocery delivery workers are being fired and replaced by on-demand DoorDash workers. It also details an op-ed by an Uber investor, talking about how Prop 22 could be used to... Continue reading…

Image: teamcoil Puss might be the strangest video game I’ve ever played.In Puss, you play as a small pixelated cat head navigating short mazes. The mazes are often filled with obstacles and bullets impeding your route to the end, and if you touch a wall for too long, you’ll get zapped and lose a life.That’s only part of the experience, though. It’s the mind-meltingly psychedelic aesthetic that permeates every aspect of the game that makes Puss stand out. Image: teamcoil Nearly every maze in Puss offers an entirely new visual experience, and most have bright colors that regularly change, shift, or flash as you navigate through the level. The intensity of the graphics can sometimes feel overpowering, often distracting me from... Continue reading…

Image: Google The Apple TV app is now available for Google’s 2020 Chromecast. It was announced in December that Apple’s streaming app, which offers access to its Apple TV Plus originals, would be coming to the awkwardly named Chromecast with Google TV. Starting today, owners of the excellent $50 device can download Apple TV and start using it.Apple TV originals like Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, and For All Mankind will appear in Google TV’s recommendations and search results. Of note, you’ll also be able to add Apple’s original shows and movies to Google TV’s universal Watchlist. Some bigger streaming services like Netflix have decided against participating in Watchlist in the months since the Chromecast’s release, as they seemingly prefer to keep... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is reorganizing its responsible AI teams in the wake of Timnit Gebru’s firing. The ethical AI team will now roll up to Marian Croak, a prominent Black executive in the engineering department. Croak will also oversee employees focused on engineering fairness products, according to Bloomberg. She will report to Jeff Dean, who leads the company’s AI efforts.The ethical AI team was not aware of the reorganization until news broke Wednesday night.The change is an attempt to stabilize the department, which has been in turmoil for months, Bloomberg reports. In December, Timnit Gebru, co-lead of the ethical AI team, announced she’d been abruptly fired. The following month, the company began investigating her counterpart Margaret... Continue reading…

I am so tired, and there are so many things happening. Days like today have become the norm over this last, lost year; there is a tragedy happening every second of every day, and if you’re lucky enough to be outside of the blast radius you’re only able to perceive what’s happening through a screen. Just last night, Texas Senator Ted Cruz decided to take a family trip to Cancún as large swaths of his state are without power or potable drinking water in the midst of a historic deep freeze. He’s now on his way back, after being shamed online for his bafflingly cruel choice.That was the first thing I saw this morning. This was the second.This funky little robot’s name is Nicobo, and it was created by Panasonic for companionship. It’s... Continue reading…

The rebooted Mortal Kombat movie has debuted its first trailer — and, much like the games it’s based on, the upcoming film looks to be very violent. (Warner Bros. has actually released two trailers, with a more gory red-band version available on YouTube.)Mortal Kombat stars Lewis Tan as an MMA fighter Cole Young, who seems remarkably blasé about the suspiciously dragon-shaped scar on his chest (he assumes it’s just a birthmark, which certainly strains credulity.) But Cole is quickly recruited to fight in a legendary tournament — the titular “Mortal Kombat” — with the fate of Earth in his hands. (Literally. There’s going to be a lot of fighting.)The trailer also gives the first good look at the latest live-action versions of Sonya,... Continue reading…

Amazon’s latest 1080p streamer is faster and runs improved software, but it feels out of place in a 4K world Continue reading…

Image: Devolver Digital The indie gem Minit, released back in 2018, felt like a breath of fresh air. The monochromatic adventure game took a seemingly absurd time constraint — killing the player every 60 seconds — and turned it into both a passionate love letter to top-down classics like The Legend of Zelda and an ingenious and clever quest that threw constant surprises at the player.Now, the core team behind Minit — Nuclear Throne and Disc Room developer Jan Willem Nijman, designer Kitty Calis, composer Jukio Kallio, and artist Dominik Johann — are back with a new spinoff title, Minit Fun Racer. The game takes the same core idea and applies it to a side-scrolling biking game reminiscent of arcade titles of decades past. All proceeds of the game, which is... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Some Facebook employees believed they were promoting “deeply wrong” data about how many users advertisers could reach, and one warned that the company had counted on “revenue we should have never made” based on its inflated numbers, according to recently unsealed internal emails.The Financial Times reported the statements today based on a newly unredacted filing from a 2018 lawsuit in California. The lawsuit claims that Facebook knowingly overestimated its “potential reach” metric for advertisers, largely by failing to correct for fake and duplicate accounts. The filing states that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged problems with the metric in 2017, and product manager Yaron Fidler proposed a fix that would correct the numbers.... Continue reading…

An illustration showing NASA’s Perseverance rover making its way toward the Martian surface. | Image: NASA / JPL On February 18th, NASA will make a daring attempt to land a car-sized rover on Mars in its most complex mission yet to hunt for ancient extraterrestrial life. If it survives the plunge through the Red Planet’s atmosphere, the Perseverance rover will kick off the first leg of a grand relay race to capture humanity’s first cache of pristine Martian soil samples, among many other scientific objectives it hopes to score along the way.What time will NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars?Having traveled 293 million miles since its launch in July last year, the rover is now gearing up to execute the Solar System’s most grueling parking job ever. At around 3:48PM ET, Perseverance will begin its wicked seven-minute descent toward the Martian... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge It’s a good thing that Nintendo’s Switch supports microSD because prices for the expandable storage format just keep getting better. Today, for instance, you can buy PNY’s 512GB microSD card at Amazon for just $70. It’s a Deal of the Day, so this price will expire later tonight. Previously, it was rare to find this amount of storage for less than $100, and with each Switch game being between 5-15GB in size, this will serve you a long time.Also at Amazon, you’ll find the lowest price yet offered on Apple’s most recent Mac mini with the M1 processor. It’s the base model with 256GB of storage, which is admittedly not much, but you’ll pay $600 at checkout instead of $670. This price drop beats all other retailers, but the catch is that... Continue reading…

A double-sided projection to show off our 3D planet in 2D. | Image: Gott, Goldberg, Vanderbei A trio of scientists have devised a new way to try to represent our spherical planet as a flat picture with a new class of projection that involves printing the map as a double-sided circle, Phys.org reports. The Double-Sided Gott projections involve splitting a globe in two and printing the separate hemispheres on separate sides. The paper is the work of J. Richard Gott, Robert Vanderbei, and David Goldberg from Princeton and Drexel universities.While 3D globes are the most accurate way of representing the layout of the Earth’s surface, it’s much more convenient to refer to a 2D representation. There are a variety of ways of converting this 3D shape into 2D, which are referred to as map projections, but none of them are perfect.“We... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Nvidia is purposefully making its new RTX 3060 graphics cards less efficient to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency. New drivers that will accompany the release of the GPUs later this month will reduce the hash rate of Ethereum mining by around 50 percent, using software detection for cryptocurrency mining.“We designed GeForce GPUs for gamers, and gamers are clamoring for more,” says Matt Wuebbling, head of global GeForce marketing at Nvidia. “Yet NVIDIA GPUs are programmable. And users are constantly discovering new applications for them, from weather simulation and gene sequencing to deep learning and robotics. Mining cryptocurrency is one of them.”It’s clear Nvidia is making the changes to try to help with the availability of its GeForce... Continue reading…

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge On February 16th, I wrote that Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code threatened to splinter the internet. On February 17th, the splintering arrived: Google cut a deal with News Corp. that will ensure its services continue to be provided in Australia, and Facebook walked away from the bargaining table and began preventing people from sharing news links from Australian publishers around the world.I think Facebook basically did the right thing, and Google basically did the wrong thing, even though Google had a much tougher call to make. Today, let’s talk about why the tech giants made the decisions that they did, why Australia’s shakedown is rotten, and what’s likely to happen next. (If you didn’t read my piece on the subject, it offers a... Continue reading…

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Mediatonic’s charming platformer battle royale title, is coming to Xbox Series X / S and Xbox One this summer, Microsoft announced in a blog post today. The news comes just one day after Mediatonic announced that the game was going to be ported to the Nintendo Switch sometime this summer as well. While no firm release date has been announced, both ports will likely launch within the same time frame.Fall Guys originally released in 2020 on PC via Steam and PS4, where it was a free title for users with an active PlayStation Plus subscription. The game mixes battle royale with the platformer genre, where players compete in elimination-type challenges. The title draws inspiration from competitive game shows... Continue reading…

Photo by Kaitlin Hatton / The Verge Getting my license at age 16 was a breath of fresh air. It was me, my used 2007 Mazda6, and the open road. As anyone who knew me at the time will say, though, I was a misfortune magnet as a teenager and this extended to my car. There was even a running joke among my peers that I was on a first-name basis with the local tow truck drivers because AAA had to dispatch them on a regular basis — a dead battery being one of the more common mishaps.Whether the battery died so often because I left a light on, the weather was frighteningly cold, or I waited too long to replace the battery, doesn’t really matter. However, my mom eventually saw fit to save me both time and money by gifting me the Halo Bolt Portable Car Jump Starter so I would... Continue reading…

Alex Parkin Out on the high seas, more than 200 miles from shore, seafood companies can operate with almost no oversight. These are ungoverned, international waters where it’s easier for companies to get away with overfishing and abuses like modern-day slavery.Scientists using new hacks for old technology are slowly changing that.Two decades ago, large vessels began carrying a little box that connects to what’s called the maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS). It sends out a radio signal with information about the ship, like an identifying number, and its size, course, and speed. That’s supposed to help ships avoid running into each other. It also helps authorities see where vessels are when they’re close to shore.After the 9/11... Continue reading…

When Masashi Takahashi, a producer at Square Enix, started working on Bravely Default, he had a very specific audience in mind. Takahashi had grown up playing classic turn-based roleplaying games — he distinctly remembers watching his older brother play Final Fantasy III while he was still in kindergarten — and felt that many modern RPGs had become too complex, leaving older players behind.“They seem kind of impenetrable,” he says of modern games. “I thought if I could make a game that was able to make [older players] recall things they liked about games when they were younger, and create a game for that type of audience, that was one thing that spurred me forward.”The first Bravely Default launched on the Nintendo 3DS in 2014, and it... Continue reading…

Business on the lid, party in the keyboard Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Peloton is fighting to have the terms “spin” and “spinning” treated as generic terms, arguing that they’ve entered into common usage in spite of being trademarked since the late 90s, Bloomberg reports. This week it filed petitions with the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to try and cancel both trademarks owned by Mad Dogg Athletics, arguing that “spin class and spin bike are part of the fitness lexicon” and that they’re “generic terms to describe a type of exercise bike and associated in-studio class.”Mad Dogg had earlier filed a lawsuit against Peloton, alleging that its products infringe upon its exercise bike patents. While the lawsuit doesn’t make claims on trademarks, Bloomberg characterizes... Continue reading…

Facebook is expanding its “Climate Science Information Center.” | Image: Facebook Facebook will start labeling posts about climate change with a banner that directs people to its information page on climate change. It’s the company’s latest effort to weed out lies and myths about the climate crisis, and it follows criticism from lawmakers and scientists concerned that the social media giant allowed false information to proliferate on its platform.For now, the labels will only appear on Facebook posts in the UK. But the company plans to start rolling them out elsewhere “soon,” it said in an announcement on Thursday. Facebook debuted its “Climate Science Information Center” in the US, Germany, the UK, and France back in September. Now, Facebook is also expanding that page to include new information debunking common... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The US government has released updated figures on the number of companies and federal agencies it believes were impacted by the recent SolarWinds hack. “As of today, 9 federal agencies and about 100 private sector companies were compromised,” Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger said in a briefing, though she declined to name specific organizations. Although the hack was “likely of Russian origin,” Neuberger said the hackers launched their attack from inside the US.The latest figures revealed are lower than the 250 federal agencies and businesses that were previously reported to have been infected, though Neuberger cautioned that the investigation is still in its “beginning stages” and that “additional compromises” may be... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The next major update to Windows 10, version 21H1, will be delivered in the first half of 2021 and focuses on improving remote work scenarios. Microsoft traditionally delivers two major Windows updates per year, with most of the bigger features dropping in the spring and a smaller update in the fall. While IT admins are used to this approach, Microsoft appears to be reversing this cadence for 2021.“Windows 10, version 21H1 will have a scoped set of features improving security, remote access and quality,” explains John Cable, Microsoft’s head of Windows Servicing and Delivery. “The features we are releasing in this update are focused on the core experiences that customers have told us they’re relying on most right now.” These... Continue reading…