The Verge

Image: Sony Pictures Animation Two of the biggest movies people want to talk about this week are Wonder Woman 1984 and Pixar’s Soul, but there’s another film that can’t be missed: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.Sony’s critically acclaimed 2018 animated superhero movie, which saw Miles Morales step into the web slinger’s suit and save the world with the help of a few other Spider-beings, is leaving Netflix on December 25th. That’s two days from now. It’s also unclear where Into the Spider-Verse will end up. Sony doesn’t have a major streaming platform, and none of the other big streamers — HBO Max, Disney Plus, Peacock, Apple TV Plus, or Amazon Prime Video — have announced that it’s arriving.Streaming shuffles aren’t new. Movies and TV shows leave Netflix (or... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit demanding information about the FBI’s Electronic Device Analysis Unit (EDAU) — a forensic unit that the ACLU believes has been quietly breaking the iPhone’s local encryption systems.“The FBI is secretly breaking the encryption that secures our cell phones and laptops from identity thieves, hackers, and abusive governments,” the ACLU said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, “and it refuses to even acknowledge that it has information about these efforts.”The FBI has made few public statements about the EDAU, but the lawsuit cites a handful of cases in which prosecutors have submitted a “Mobile Device Unlock Request” and received data from a previously locked phone. The... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Videoconferencing platform Zoom has had a blockbuster year, with its stock price rising more than 500 percent due to the unprecedented surge in remote work brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. But now the company is looking to expand beyond workplace video chat and into new territories, specifically email and calendar services, according to a new report from The Information.The company is already working on the email product, which the report states will be a web email service Zoom may begin testing as early as next year. The calendar app appears farther off and it’s unclear if development has even started. But both ideas are smart avenues for Zoom to explore, especially if companies start bringing employees back to the office and... Continue reading…

Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images Like they do every December, websites across the internet are rounding up their best posts and stories from the year. That includes the website for the Center for Global Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which highlighted its top five stories for 2020. And coming in at the number one spot, the health agency picked... mosquitoes.Specifically, it picked its recognition of World Mosquito Day, where the center called attention to a mosquito species called Anopheles stephensi, which spreads malaria. It’s certainly an interesting choice, considering the CDC spent the year battling a global pandemic. Not to knock mosquitoes! They’re very important, and they’re very deadly. But COVID-19 didn’t even make the number two... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Last week, the US Department of Commerce put Chinese drone maker DJI on its Entity List, limiting how it can work with US companies. The news startled DJI’s huge American user base, including companies that rely on DJI for entire fleets of commercial drones. But it’s likely less onerous than it initially sounded — even if, like many Trump administration decisions, it comes with a dose of uncertainty.The Trump administration has repeatedly used sanctions to crack down on Chinese tech giants, sometimes on nebulous or disputed grounds. It banned US companies from dealing with Huawei and ZTE, and it’s pursued confusing, legally ambiguous bans on the Chinese social apps WeChat and TikTok. While the Entity List is primarily meant for... Continue reading…

A great gaming rig and an okay laptop Continue reading…

The upcoming Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. | Photo: WinFuture An FCC listing confirms that Samsung’s S Pen stylus can be used with the company’s upcoming flagship Galaxy S21 Ultra phone. The confirmation, first discovered by Android Authority, comes in a test report for model number SMG998B. The discovery lends clarity to recent statements from Samsung mobile president TM Roh, who said that some of the “most well-loved features” of the Galaxy Note will be coming to other Samsung devices in 2021.The FCC test report explicitly describes an EUT (Equipment Under Test) device that can be used with an S Pen in both hover and click modes. “The EUT can also used with a stylus device (S Pen). The EUT operates with the S Pen in two different inductive coupling modes of S Pen motion detection (Hover and... Continue reading…

Telegram is adding a new group voice chats feature that’s similar to an always-on Discord room. Voice chats are now part of existing text chats, and operate as a persistent option to speak live with friends or family. As they’re always available, you can dip in and out of voice chats just like you would in a Discord room or call.Telegram is supporting “a few thousand participants,” so even bigger groups for things like live events will include voice chats. The feature appears at the top of an existing group chat, if enabled, allowing anyone to join the conversation freely. On the desktop versions of Telegram for Windows and Mac, you can also use a push-to-talk key for voice chats to control your microphone input. T... Continue reading…

Image: InnerSloth With roughly half a billion people reportedly playing it in November, Among Us has had the most monthly players for a mobile game ever, beating giants like Pokémon GO and Candy Crush Saga. According to Nielsen’s SuperData, the game is “by far the most popular game ever in terms of monthly players.”The success is even more remarkable because InnerSloth — the company that makes Among Us — only has four employees. That’s roughly 125 million players per person who works on the game. It’s proven to be so popular that the studio decided to cancel a sequel that was in the works and just put all its effort into improving the original. It even caught the attention of sitting congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who livestreamed herself... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The yearly Spotify Wrapped is a rather upbeat affair, which doesn’t doesn’t quite match everyone’s mood this year. For the more sullen among us, there’s another option: a bot from The Pudding that will judge us for our crimes of listening to terrible music.If you want to be judged, you open a page titled “How Bad is Your Spotify” and you log in with your Spotify account. (It might take a couple refreshes on the “Loading your music library” page.) This absolute jerk of an AI then drags you mercilessly while it pulls your playlists and top tracks. It asks you questions before it shows any results, in phrasing that gives the plain text the same aura as the girls who bullied me in middle school. Did you really listen to Clementine by Sarah... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro Ripple, its former CEO and founder Christian Larsen, and its current CEO Bradley Garlinghouse are being sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC says that they raised more than $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering.The suit claims that Ripple violated securities laws by selling XRP, which The Wall Street Journal calls “the third-largest cryptocurrency by market value,” over a seven-year period starting in 2013. According to the complaint, the “illegal securities offering” created an information asymmetry that let Larsen and Garlinghouse sell XRP to investors who only knew what Larsen and Garlinghouse chose to tell them.At the heart of the suit is a basic question about XRP: is it a security or a... Continue reading…

Substack plans to take a “hands-off approach” to determining who can use its newsletter platform and “resist public pressure” to remove writers seen by some as “unacceptable.” In a blog post this afternoon, the company outlined a relatively lax content moderation policy designed to let writers know they won’t be removed from the platform as long as they comply with basic rules.While it does have a short list of prohibitions, Substack says that “readers and writers are in charge.” The idea is that readers don’t have to pay for or subscribe to writers who they don’t agree with, and writers can leave — and take their mailing lists with them — if they don’t like the platform. “We just disagree with those who would seek to tightly constrain... Continue reading…

Photo: Sony Pictures Entertainment Sony Pictures saw a “bit of a boom” in interest from Hollywood creatives who want to work with a studio committed to theatrical releases, according to the company’s CEO.The uptick in interest comes just after WarnerMedia announced its 17 movies planned for 2021 will premiere on HBO Max the same day they hit theaters. For WarnerMedia executives trying to figure out how to bolster subscribers for its new streaming service and release films in an era when the return to theaters is uncertain, the move makes sense. Plus, WarnerMedia executives will tell you they’re still committed to theatrical releases, pointing to Tenet’s release. Others in the industry will point to Tenet as a reason for the HBO Max move.While Sony could sell a title... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge OnePlus will finally be making a smartwatch in 2021, CEO Pete Lau has announced on Twitter, marking the first foray into wearable devices for the smartphone company. There’s not many details yet on the upcoming device, including what smartwatch OS it’ll run, a price, or even a firm release date — Lau only notes that it’ll be “released early next year.”The idea of a OnePlus smartwatch isn’t a new one; the company had reportedly designed a Wear OS (then still called Android Wear) smartwatch a few years ago. OnePlus ultimately nixed that product, though” “We had completed the design but we still decided to scrap it,” Lau said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “We have to be focused.”

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Verizon’s new nationwide 5G network is reportedly slower than its LTE network, to the point that users are apparently better off just disabling 5G entirely unless they’re near a mmWave network. The results come from testing done by PC Magazine’s Sascha Sagan, who points to Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, or DSS, as the culprit.The tech lets carriers run LTE and 5G networks side by side, which is useful if, like Verizon, you don’t yet have enough dedicated 5G spectrum. While the carrier has largely focused on its mmWave network until recently, it also has begun rolling out a mid-band nationwide 5G network, which promises to avoid mmWave’s range issues by using DSS. The only catch is that, with Verizon, it seems like this tech leads to worse... Continue reading…

Image: Google Nickelback has created a parody version of its own song “Photograph” for a new Google Photos ad, and it’s a lot more entertaining than you might suspect. In the ad, Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger mercilessly makes fun of himself, fully leaning into the “Photograph” meme and its usefulness in explaining all sorts of graphs and in illustrating framed copies of other memes, as Kroeger instructs viewers to “look at them” in his unmistakable, raspy voice.The ad’s lyrics and photos touch on Kroeger’s “noodle hair” and his passion for photographing dessert. That it manages to both be a nice example of Google Photos’ features and a cute use of the old meme makes it worth a watch.“Photograph” is 15 years old, and the meme connected to it... Continue reading…

Steam’s annual winter sale is live. If you’ve been meaning to buy some games, either for yourself or as a gift for upcoming holidays, now’s the time to take a look around. There are thousands of games up for sale in the Steam Store (and you can vote for the 2020 Steam Awards while you’re there).While you’re browsing, the Epic Games store is also in the midst of its holiday sale. In addition to discounts of up to 75 percent, the sale provides endless $10 coupons — that is, you can apply one to a purchase (on “eligible games” priced at $14.99 and up), apply another to your next purchase, and so on. And the store will be giving away games for free until December 31st. As of this writing, the current freebie is Metro: 2033 Redux (usually... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Under new proposed regulations from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, it may become much easier for the government to track bitcoin transactions. And while there’s currently a 15-day comment period open, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are calling foul because that period includes Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day.The proposed regulations in question, which were filed at 4:20PM ET on December 18th, are about private wallets. Let’s say I am a famous and fancy cryptocurrency investor, and I do some trading on Coinbase. If I have my own private wallet that I want to transfer my money to, I will have to identify myself as the wallet’s owner if I’m sending more... Continue reading…

I’ve done it. | New York Times A miniature New York Times crossword can now float above your couch, courtesy of an augmented reality effect available on the Times’ Instagram page. Pull up the effect on your phone, and a prompt will appear saying, “The crossword has shattered into pieces!” A small crossword sits on whatever surface you’ve picked, while a cloud of letter shards hovers above it. As you move your camera around, the change in perspective will reveal the words that solve the puzzle.It uses the same principle of perspective, anamorphosis, that some artists play with to make work that creates an optical illusion when viewed from a specific vantage point. It’s a neat concept, but it’s not exactly the same as actually solving a crossword. Fiddling with your... Continue reading…

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge Elon Musk said Tuesday that he wanted to sell Tesla to Apple during the “darkest days” of the Model 3 rollout but that CEO Tim Cook “refused” to take the meeting.Musk dished about the proffer in response to a tweet about how Apple has reportedly reignited its desire to make and sell an electric, autonomous vehicle. He noted that Tesla was worth about one-tenth then what it is now, as the electric vehicle company rounds out a remarkable year where a meteoric stock price run turned it into the most valuable automaker on the planet. Of course, in 2017 Tesla was still hemorrhaging money and had not yet produced an electric vehicle at high volume.

Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge Amazon’s near-total e-commerce dominance is now the subject of regulatory scrutiny, and a new investigation from The Wall Street Journal provides an excellent and exhaustive look at how far the tech giant has been willing to go to make its “everything store” live up to the name.The story, “How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners,” delves into Amazon’s various strategies for dealing with competitors and managing the Amazon Marketplace, its platform for third-party sellers that’s responsible for more than half of all its retail sales. Amazon Marketplace is now central to claims the company abuses its market power to squash rivals by cloning their inventory or features and using seller data to inform its own line of... Continue reading…

Image: CD Projekt Red Cyberpunk 2077 has already sold more than 13 million copies since its launch two weeks ago, according to the parent company of developer CD Projekt Red.The sales milestone, revealed in an investor note from CD Projekt S.A. on Tuesday, is a remarkable one considering it accounts for some digital and physical refunds resulting from the game’s messy launch. That metric is counting sales between the game’s release on December 10th through December 20th, the note says. It’s about half of the 12-month sales forecast analysts projected for the game shortly after launch but before digital storefronts said they would begin accepting refunds, Bloomberg reports.Selling 13 million copies makes Cyberpunk 2077 one of the bestselling games of the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge In the wake of the groundbreaking Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Facebook, The Washington Post is reporting new details of the company’s negotiations with regulators in the run-up to the case, including an unusual offer to license its code and network to competitors.According to the Post’s reporting, Facebook was willing to significantly alter its business practices in order to avoid litigation, including one measure “allow[ing] another firm or developer to license access to its powerful code — and its users’ intricate web of relationships — so that they could more easily create their own version of a social network.”Ultimately, the FTC declined Facebook’s offer, filing an antitrust complaint against the company on December... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix If you’ve ever wondered how profanity actually became profane, Nicolas Cage is here to help you out. The actor is no stranger to swearing, but in Netflix’s upcoming show History of Swear Words he’ll be doing it in a more educational way. Though, if the trailer’s indicative of what the show is going to be like, it’ll still be very entertaining.It opens with Cage standing up and just screaming “fuck,” likely a reference to him doing pretty much the exact same thing in Deadfall. It only gets better from there, explaining the myth that the expletive is an acronym (standing for Fornication Under Consent of the King), and delving into how swear words are understood by the people using and hearing them.The show will include celebrity... Continue reading…

Photo by AL DRAGO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images Yes, Congress approved a new bill Monday that would classify illegal streaming as a felony offense, but the feds won’t be going after your favorite Twitch streamers, YouTubers, or their subscribers. They’re more interested in services dedicated to streaming pirated content.Monday night, Congress approved an over $2 trillion government spending and coronavirus relief package that included a handful of controversial copyright and trademark measures. A felony streaming bill, authored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), was included as part of that massive package. The news circulated all across the internet; in a poorly headlined Hollywood Reporter article, tweets, and YouTube videos. Quickly, content creators and their fans grew increasingly... Continue reading…

A worker on a rooftop installing air conditioning at a hotel. | Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Congress’s $900 billion stimulus bill includes some unexpected climate provisions, including new restrictions that will change the way Americans cool their homes and refrigerate their groceries. The new measures will phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used in air conditioning and refrigeration, “super” greenhouse gases that are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in their climate impact.The goal of the provision is to cut the production and import of HFCs by 85 percent by 2035. Under the new provision, that goal will be federal policy and the EPA will have the power to implement new restrictions on manufacturers and importers in order to meet it.Those measures will bring the US in line with an important climate... Continue reading…

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge Volvo’s first EV is an impressive blend of Swedish ingenuity and electric performance Continue reading…

Image: CD Projekt Red GameStop reportedly sent a memo to employees telling them to accept returns of Cyberpunk 2077, even in the event the physical game box has already been opened, according to Kotaku and Vice reporter Patrick Klepek. GameStop’s return policy typically doesn’t let you return opened games, but GameStop seems to be making an exception for Cyberpunk 2077 after its buggy launch.You can return PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of game within 30 days of purchase to get a refund, reports Kotaku. GameStop didn’t reply to a request for comment, but employees at GameStops in Chicago and Houston confirmed to The Verge by phone that their stores were accepting returns of the game.Other retailers have also offered refunds of Cyberpunk 2077. Best Buy a... Continue reading…

Image: Netflix Remember this time last year, when everyday didn’t bring with it a new horror and people just wanted to talk about The Witcher? Well, now a new video from Netflix is trying to bring back some of that energy, piecing together lyrics from the show’s breakout song, “Toss a Coin to your Witcher,” all sung in different languages.In the video, the song jumps between languages, starting with English before leading into Polish, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and more. It’s incredibly charming, with all the different Jaskiers coming together to remind various townspeople and locals to toss a coin to their Witcher. It’s the holiday season; not tipping at least 20 percent, especially in areas with heavy snowfall and grotesque monsters that... Continue reading…

Photo by Dmitry Feoktistov / TASS via Getty Images “Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment,” she said.So I gaze on the present,

Image: Microsoft Microsoft Flight Simulator has always been about making you feel like a pilot, but you’ve never been able to experience it in VR — until today. With today’s free update, Asobo Studio has added support for OpenXR-compatible headsets, which include Windows Mixed Reality headsets as well as the Valve Index, HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest (if you use a Link cable).Microsoft originally announced that the VR feature would be coming first to the HP Reverb G2. This latest update includes support for most Windows Mixed Reality headsets, Oculus, Valve, and HTC headsets.Before, if you wanted to feel like you were really in an airplane while playing Flight Simulator, it would take a lot of computer monitors and some carpentry... Continue reading…

Photo by Lauren Clitheroe All of the women tell the same story of how they were scammed. A company called The SkinGlo emailed them with a tempting deal: it was looking for content to fill its Instagram feed, and its team had chosen them to help. In exchange for five photos of them using The SkinGlo’s electric face scrubber — even photos taken just from their phones — they’d receive €450, or about $525 USD. They could even watermark the images and only send over a clean file once they got paid. It seemed like a good deal.There was one small catch, though. The women would have to buy the company’s face scrubber themselves, with a 50 percent off discount code, bringing the total to €40, or about $48.Although that stipulation was slightly odd, the company still... Continue reading…

Photo by ROB ENGELAAR/ANP/AFP via Getty Images Voat, an “anti-censorship” alternative social network that’s been described as the “alt-right Reddit,” is scheduled to shut down on December 25th. Voat co-founder Justin Chastain announced the pending closure yesterday, saying the site had run out of money after an investor defaulted on their contract in March. “I personally decided to keep Voat up until after the US election of 2020. I’ve been paying the costs out of pocket but now I’m out of money,” Chastain wrote.Voat was founded in 2014 and hosted Reddit-like forums with minimal moderation. It grew rapidly after Reddit added an anti-harassment policy and banned five subreddits that it said violated the rules, including its infamous r/fatpeoplehate forum. The site set a model for... Continue reading…

Image: Vimeo Vimeo is being spun off into a standalone public company as the video streaming site sees rapid growth brought on by the pandemic. Since shortly after its founding, Vimeo has been owned by IAC, the enormous tech and media holding company behind Angie’s List, Ask, Dotdash (formerly About.com), and, until recently, the dating app juggernaut Match Group.IAC expects to complete the spinoff of Vimeo in the second quarter of 2021. “It’s time for Vimeo to spread its wings and become a great independent public company,” Joey Levin, IAC CEO, said in a press release. The spinoff is supposed to help Vimeo raise money to further invest in product and sales capabilities.Vimeo is “focused on making video far easier and more effective than ever... Continue reading…

Photo by Alex Castro / The Verge Our favorites for all your new devices Continue reading…

Image: Tidux (Twitter) Sony’s latest PlayStation 5 update seems to have fixed one of the biggest issues with cross-gen games on the console: making it clearer when players have the PlayStation 4 version of a game installed and notifying them when there’s a PS5 version available to download.The feature, spotted by Twitter user Tidux, aims to clarify one of the more frustratingly complex parts of the PlayStation 5. Because the console offers backwards compatibility for all PS4 games — including ones that offer free next-gen PS5 updates, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Destiny 2 — it’s pretty easy to accidentally install the older version of the game.Microsoft has taken a simpler approach to the system, with its Smart Delivery program that will automatically... Continue reading…

The Ring Mailbox Sensor is a motion sensor designed for your mailbox, One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. In it, the main protagonist, Wayne Szalinski, is a nerdy scientist-slash-home-gadget-inventor who develops a shrink ray in his attic that accidentally shrinks his kids and two neighbor kids down to the size of gnats.But it was Wayne’s other inventions that always caught my eye — in particular, his Rube Goldberg-esque system for announcing when the mail has arrived. I’m no Wayne Szalinski and I’m certainly not an accomplished engineer, but building a system to let me know when the mail has arrived has been an ongoing smart home goal of mine.I’ve tried using Zigbee contact sensors mounted inside my mailbox, and I’ve even tried using a motion detector shoved in... Continue reading…

The microwave is a cooking tool designed around precision. Punch in how long you need your food to heat up in a microwave, and that’s what it will do; no more, and no less.But for all the exactitude that governs the microwave — and that the microwave tries to impose on our food and our cooking — the reality is that things can’t be so neatly stuffed into a convenient digital box. Life isn’t binary, so many microwaves feature an “add 30 seconds” button to give us humans the wiggle room we need within the otherwise unbendable numbers of the countdown clock.It’s a button that stands in almost caveman-y opposition to the intended functionality. Instead of calculating the perfect amount of time to reheat or cook your food, it turns out that... Continue reading…

Decoder interview with Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The year 2020 was when most of us went from going out with loved ones to exchanging recommendations on what type of TV show or movie to stream next. One way to suit everyone’s taste — kids, adults, and sports fans — is to try the Disney Bundle, a streaming pack that consists of Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Hulu.Each of these services offers a slew of streaming options, so for a $12.99-a-month price tag, you are getting a ton of bang for your buck. You can also opt just for Disney Plus at a cost of $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year.Here are some of my favorites.We’ve rounded up our favorite and most-used games, apps, and entertainment. Check out our app picks for iPhones, Android phones, PCs, and M1-equipped Macs; our favorite mobile... Continue reading…

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge A group of high profile tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and VMWare have filed an amicus brief in support of Facebook’s legal action against NSO Group, Microsoft has announced. Facebook-owned WhatsApp sued the spyware vendor last year, alleging that its software was used to hack 1,400 devices via a vulnerability in the messaging service. Other companies listed on the filing include the Internet Association, and Microsoft subsidiaries GitHub and LinkedIn.In response to Facebook’s lawsuit last year, NSO Group has argued it should benefit from “sovereign immunity,” Reuters reports, because it sells its tools to foreign governments. However, in July a judge denied its request to dismiss the lawsuit. Now NSO Group is... Continue reading…

Image: Epic Games Marvel superhero Black Panther is now available in Fortnite. You can get him, Captain Marvel, and Taskmaster as part of the Marvel Royalty and Warriors Pack, which costs $24.99.Epic had hinted toward Black Panther’s eventual arrival with the release of the Wakandan Salute emote Monday morning. The salute has become an iconic greeting — something that many of the cast members of the 2018 Black Panther movie have spoke publicly about in the months after its release. The film grossed $1.35 billion at the box office, including an astounding $700.4 million domestically.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Last week, news broke that IT management company SolarWinds had been hacked, possibly by the Russian government, and the US Treasury, Commerce, State, Energy, and Homeland Security departments have been affected — two of which may have had emails stolen as a result of the hack. Other government agencies and many companies are investigating due to SolarWinds’ extensive client list. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that some big tech companies have been infected, too.Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, Belkin, and VMware have all had computers on their networks infected with the malware. There could be far more: SolarWinds had stated that “fewer than 18,000” companies were impacted, as if that number is supposed to be reassuring, and it even a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple once again appears to be seriously looking at making a car. Reuters reports that Apple is pursuing production of a passenger vehicle by 2024 as well as the creation of self-driving systems and a “breakthrough battery technology.” The report is vague on how it all comes together — it’s not clear that all of this tech is going into the first passenger vehicle Apple hopes to make — but it indicates that Apple is considering vehicle production, after previously shutting down plans to make a car.There have been rumors of Apple developing a car going back to 2015. But in 2016, the project was scaled down significantly, with development of a full car being scrapped and Apple’s team refocusing on providing software that could be licensed... Continue reading…

Photo by Evan Blass / Voice Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Chromebook 2 has been revealed in a new leak, showing off the return of the company’s unique bright orange coloring in an otherwise similar-looking design, via Evan Blass.There are some visible changes to the new model, including minor adjustments to the port layout and the extension of Samsung’s application of the orange color. The keyboard on the second-generation model has been made a more neutral black, even as the orange hue has extended to the sides of the laptop.But any more substantial changes will likely be found in the internal specs, which presumably will see some sort of improvement from last year’s model — especially considering that there are new 11th Gen Intel laptop chips out. Combining the... Continue reading…

Image: ConcernedApe Stardew Valley is an idyllic digital space to escape to after a long year — and thanks to its 1.5 update available today on PC, you can now bring friends and family along to your farm with local split-screen co-op. The multiplayer update from a couple of years back made it possible to play and share farms online, but this local co-op addition lets you do the same with the people you actually live with, even if they don’t have their own copy of the game.You can add the ability for local co-op by having Robin the Carpenter build cabins on your farm, or if you’re starting from scratch, you can select to have the cabins already built when you make a new game. Once the cabins are built, you can start local co-op for up to three other people... Continue reading…

Photo by Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images On Monday, congressional leaders unveiled their massive spending and coronavirus relief measure, including a handful of controversial copyright measures civil liberties activists fear could penalize internet users for everyday online behavior. Congress is expected to vote on the package as early as Monday.Congress’ $2.3 trillion spending and relief package includes controversial measures previously introduced as the CASE Act, the Trademark Modernization Act, and a felony streaming proposal — all significantly expanding the rights and powers of intellectual property owners.Most controversially, the CASE Act would create a quasi-judicial tribunal of “Copyright Claims Officers” who would work to resolve infringement claims. As outlined in... Continue reading…

Fish are seen after being unloaded from a boat at the port in Songkhla on February 2, 2016. Around 100 people have been arrested by authorities in a recent crackdown on abuses involving Thailand’s multi-billion dollar seafood industry. The deep-rooted problem caused the huge global brand, Nestle in 2015 to admit that it had discovered clear evidence of slavery at sea in parts of the Thai supply chain. | Photo by Paula Bronstein / Getty Images A tracking system designed to help ships avoid crashing into each other has become an important tool for spotting bad behavior on the high seas. Researchers can now put a spotlight on corporations that dominate fishing in unregulated international waters where it’s easier to get away with overfishing. And it’s giving us a better idea of how widespread slave labor could be on fishing vessels.That all makes it easier to make companies answer for any abuses they commitTwo recently published papers use this technology, the maritime Automatic Identification System (AIS), to make high-seas fishing a little less mysterious. The first study, published in the journal One Earth on December 18th, traces the origins of thousands of high-seas... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has been asked to stop advertising its 5G network as more reliable than the competition by the National Advertising Review Board (NARB), which investigated T-Mobile’s claims made primarily in an ad featuring celebrity scientist Bill Nye after complaints from Verizon earlier this year.But the NARB also says T-Mobile shouldn’t have to mention the speed of its network when broadly discussing coverage superiority in future ads. T-Mobile has said it will comply with the recommendation. But it cast the recommendations as a partial win in a statement saying it “appreciates that the panel agreed that T-Mobile can continue to advertise its superior 5G coverage without qualification.”T-Mobile’s compliance is notable because telecom... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A coalition of civil rights groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union have filed an objection to the proposed expansion of Customs and Border Protections facial recognition at land and sea ports. The National Immigration Law Center, Fight for the Future, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are also participating in the motion, alongside twelve others.Filed in November, CBP’s proposed rule would expand the biometric exit system, authorizing the collection of facial images from any non-citizen entering the country. But in a filing on Monday, the final day of the comment period, the coalition argued that those measures are too extreme.“CBP’s proposed use of face surveillance at airports, sea ports, and the land border would put... Continue reading…