The Verge

Making Instagram a separate company. Buying Snapchat. Wiping everyoneas Facebook friends. Creating a feed of only ads. These were some of the ideas that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered over the years as he built his social media empire. Over the past two days, he talked about them from the witness stand at a federal [...]

Skullcandy has made a name for itself in recent years with well-featured budget earbuds that don't sound awful. Although its new Method 360 ANC earbuds are launching with a special $99.99 introductory price" (that will eventually go up to $129.99) making them one of the brand's most expensive offerings, the company has partnered with Bose [...]

Mohsen Mahdawi had a feeling his naturalization appointment would go awry. A week before his meeting with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Mahdawi called his friend Chris Helali and told him he was concerned. aHe thought it was likely a and I agreed a that he would be arrested, that they would ambush him [...]

OpenAI has revealed the advisors" for its new nonprofit commission: Dolores Huerta, Monica Lozano, Dr. Robert K. Ross, and Jack Oliver. The company says the four advisors will help inform OpenAI's philanthropic efforts," according to an announcement on Tuesday. Huerta was a prominent labor activist during the 20th century, while Lozano was the president and [...]

OpenAI is adding an image library to ChatGPT to make it easier to access your AI-generated images, the company announced today. It's rolling out to all Free, Plus, and Pro users on mobile and on the web. In a short video, OpenAI shows how it works. From the ChatGPT sidebar, you'll be able to see [...]

Funding is about to run out for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program - a system used by major companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, and AMD to identify and track publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The program helps engineers identify how bad an exploit is and how to prioritize applying patches or other mitigations. [...]

A PDF of Meta's opening statement slides in its FTC antitrust hearing yesterday contains easy-to-remove redactions that make it possible to see everything the company didn't want made public, The Verge has discovered. Thanks to the poor redactions, we can see sections comparing the use of Apple's Messages app to Meta apps like Instagram and [...]

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a potentially crazy idea" in 2022 to get people using Facebook more: deleting everyone's friends' lists. The possibility was discussed on Monday via internal emails shown by the FTC as Zuckerberg testified during Meta's antitrust trial. Zuckerberg floated the idea of considering wiping everyone's graphs" - their friends lists - [...]

Blackmagic Design, an Australia-based digital cinematography camera company, was gearing up to start making products in the United States before the Trump administration blew a tariff-shaped hole in its plans. Now, not only is Blackmagic having to increase prices in the US to mitigate some of the levies on imported goods, but those same tariffs [...]

About a year before the Federal Trade Commission first opened its antitrust investigation into Metaas acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, CEO Mark Zuckerberg internally suggested athe extreme step of spinning Instagram out as a separate company.a In a 2018 email to his executives, Zuckerberg wrote that, aa"while most companies resist break-ups, the corporate history is [...]

Anthropic is getting ready to introduce a new voice mode" feature that could rival OpenAI's similar option within ChatGPT, according to Bloomberg. The AI voice assistant will reportedly live within its Claude AI chatbot and could start rolling out as soon as this month." According to Bloomberg, Anthropic plans to roll out three English-language voices [...]

HermAs handbags, Birkenstocks, Tide Pods, Lululemon activewear, and mountains of luxury furniture a what if I told you you could cut out the middleman and buy it straight from the source for a fraction of the cost? So goes a genre of viral videos cropping up on social media that claim to show Chinese manufacturers [...]

Google announced Tuesday that it's going to redirect country code top-level domain names (ccTLD) for Google Search to google.com over the coming months to streamline people's experience on Search," according to a blog post. The change means that if, for example, you used google.ng (for Nigeria) or google.com.br (for Brazil), you'll see google.com in your [...]

Players looking to harness desert power will have to wait as Dune: Awakening has been delayed. Funcom, developers of the MMORPG based on Frank Herbert's Dune sci-fi series, announced the news saying the game will be pushed back from its May release date to June 10th. Players who have pre-purchased one of the game's deluxe [...]

If you want a mental escape from today's constant bombardment of alarming news, one method is to lose yourself in a good book - and an excellent way to do that is to read that good book on one of Amazon's Fire tablets. Amazon has put many of the latest Fire HD tablets on sale [...]

Google, for the first time, inked an agreement to purchase geothermal energy for its facilities in Asia. The deal also marks the first geothermal power purchase agreement for Taiwan, according to the company. Google is working toward climate goals of cutting the company's planet-heating emissions in half and matching its electricity use with carbon-free energy [...]

European allies who have reservations about working with Elon Musk's Starlink will have more to worry about if they side with Chinese satellite internet services, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr told the Financial Times. Carr said that politics having an influence on long-term decisions in Europe was unfortunate," and that allied Western democracies" should [...]

Anthropic is launching two major features today: Research and Google Workspace integration. The company announced today that Claude can now connect directly to your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Documents, turning the AI assistant into what Anthropic calls your frontline workplace assistant." Instead of manually digging through countless emails, calendar invites, and documents to find information, [...]

Google is letting Gemini Advanced subscribers try out Veo 2, its text-to-video AI model that it says is capable of creating high-resolution clips with cinematic realism." Starting today, subscribers can select Veo 2 from the Gemini model dropdown on the web and mobile, where they can enter a prompt to generate an eight-second video in [...]

An emergency meeting has been called to announce Among Us 3D will launch on May 6th. The game was originally planned to be a VR-exclusive before the development crew at Innersloth and Schell Games pivoted to making this version of the game accessible to those without the expensive hardware too. Among Us 3D is compatible [...]

Japan's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) has ordered Google to stop making deals that give preference to Google Search and Chrome on Android devices. Nikkei Asia says that it's the first time the regulator has issued a cease and desist order to a major tech company. The regulator found that Google had asked at least six [...]

After a light teaser trailer last month, we finally have our first proper look at The Life of Chuck. And while it doesn't give too much away, the new trailer provides a good taste of the emotional tone of the movie, which is a heartwarming story of one man's life that has a touch of [...]

Comcast has announced that new customers can choose a five-year, guaranteed price lock-in for its Xfinity internet plans. The plans won't require an annual contract, and range in price from $55 to $105 per month, according to a release emailed to The Verge. They also include unlimited data. It's a nice thought, being able to [...]

4chan appears to be down following a major hack that reportedly exposed its source code. A user on a competing messaging board claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday night and claimed to have reopened the site's /qa/ board. 4chan is, obviously, also notorious for trying to trick outsiders about things happening on the site, [...]

An Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered announcement seems imminent. Images from the game were found in the website files of the developer Virtuous before being removed. The images, which can still be seen on the hosting site imgur, included several side-by-side comparisons between the game's 2006 release and the remaster. Several photos show off the [...]

Notion is launching the third app in its suite of work tools, an email app called Notion Mail. (The other two, of course, are Notion Calendar and Notion itself.) The app, available now for web and Mac and in testing for iOS, is the next step in Notion's attempt to compete with Microsoft Office and [...]

The newest season of Doctor Who opens as the series often does a with an unsuspecting human stumbling into some alien strangeness that doesnat make any sense until an odd yet charming Time Lord shows up in a police box ready to save the day. The premiere episode, aThe Robot Revolution,a feels like classic Doctor [...]

Buying a refurbished device rather than a new one can save you a ton of money. It can also be a savvy method of getting what you want during yet another moment of global trade instability, with the latest blow coming from the Trump administration's intense tariffs on US imports from China. However, these products [...]

Most people know that buying a refurbished tech product will save you money compared to buying it new. It also gives a device a second life instead of sending it off to be recycled. Not only that, buying refurbished is sometimes a clever workaround for finding new or tough-to-find products at a lower price. If [...]

The latest addition to Nanoleaf's lineup does more than just light up a room. Like the company's Expo Smart Display Cases, Nanoleaf's new Pegboard Desk Dock is designed to both organize and put accessories like controllers and headphones on display using color-changing LED lighting that can be synced to what you're watching, playing, or listening [...]

Nvidia is announcing its RTX 5060 family of GPUs today, just a day before it releases the RTX 5060 Ti on April 16th. Two variants of the RTX 5060 Ti are launching, the $379 8GB of VRAM model and the $429 16GB version. The $299 RTX 5060 will launch at some point in May with [...]

(Before we get started, a reminder: The Vergecast is nominated for a Webby Award! Voting is only open for a few more days, and the award is decided by your votes. Weare up against some steep competition, but we really want to win a and wead love your help. Thanks so much to everyone who [...]

Polaroid's new Flip camera can prevent unwanted surprises when an instant photo develops. Using a new scene analysis feature, the instant camera warns you when the image you're framing is overexposed, underexposed, or when there's potential focus issues before you press the shutter button - all through a red LED warning light in the viewfinder [...]

Android is launching a new security feature that will force devices to reboot themselves if you haven't unlocked them for a while, making it harder for other people to access the data inside. The feature included in the latest Google Play services update says that Android phones will automatically restart if locked for 3 consecutive [...]

Car rental giant Hertz is alerting customers that personal information including credit card details and Social Security numbers may have been stolen in a data breach that impacted one of the firm's vendors. In a notice posted to its website, Hertz says that company data was acquired by an unauthorized third-party" during a cyberattack exploiting [...]

aYour honor, the FTC calls Mark Zuckerberg.a Flanked by two bodyguards, Metaas CEO solemnly strode into a Washington, DC courtroom. Despite his last-ditch efforts to avoid a trial, he was there, jaw clenched, to defend his company from being broken up by the US government. Shortly after he was sworn in, the Federal Trade Commissionas [...]

Apple says it's found a way to make its AI models better without training on its users' data or even copying it from their iPhones and Macs. In a blog post first reported on by Bloomberg, the company outlined its plans to have devices compare a synthetic dataset to samples of recent emails or messages [...]

President Donald Trump wants to expand his already chaotic and cruel mass deportations. On Monday, he told reporters that heas looking into the possibility of sending US citizens to a megaprison in El Salvador. aIad like to go a step further,a Trump claimed at a press conference with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele on Monday. aI [...]

OpenAI has introduced GPT-4.1, a successor to the GPT-4o multimodal AI model launched by the company last year. During a livestream on Monday, OpenAI said GPT-4.1 has an even larger context window and is better than GPT-4o in just about every dimension," with big improvements to coding and instruction following. GPT-4.1 is now available to [...]

Want a premium pair of earbuds without having to pay a premium price? Right now, Sony's noise-canceling WF-1000XM5 are on sale at Amazon and Target for $179.99 ($120 off), their best price to date. It's possible Sony could release the WF-1000XM6 sometime later this year, but for now, few wireless earbuds offer as much value [...]

The Star Wars strategy game announced in 2022 finally has a name: Zero Company, as EA revealed today. A website about the game describes it as a single-player turn-based tactics game," includes an image, and says that a first look" will be shown at Star Wars Celebration Japan on April 19th. The game will be [...]

Meta has announced that it's preparing to train AI on the data of EU users of its apps, including Facebook and Instagram. The company says that includes things like public posts, comments, and their chat history with Meta AI, but won't include private messages with friends and family." It also only applies to those who [...]

Samsung has announced new versions of its rugged tablets and smartphones designed for use in environments where they're going to get dirty, wet, and knocked around. Both the Galaxy XCover7 Pro and Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro feature improved battery life, but the tablet goes one step further with a dual hot-swap" feature allowing the battery [...]

After weeks of speculation, Warner Bros. Discovery has officially announced the first cast members who will appear in its upcoming Harry Potter TV adaptation. The casting confirmations, focused around some of the most notable adult characters from the Harry Potter novels, are one of the most reassuring signs of life for the wizarding world series [...]

Nvidia has brought some of its chip production stateside. On Monday, Nvidia announced that it has started producing its Blackwell AI GPUs at TSMC's plant in Phoenix, Arizona, while companies within the state package and test them. TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is the world's biggest chipmaker and announced a $100 billion investment in [...]

As easy as it has been for some people to downplay the covid-19 pandemic as part of putting it behind them, Ari Aster's next feature looks like a sobering reminder of how bad things really were. Set in May of 2020, Eddington revolves around sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) [...]

Due to the fluctuating tariff situation, a lot of people are seriously mulling over tech purchases they might otherwise be content to put off for a while. And it makes sense. While I don't endorse panic buying, your reasons for buying now are more justified because prices may increase. In light of that instability, it's [...]

Joel is a troubled guy. Throughout the first Last of Us game (and subsequent TV adaptation on HBO, where heas played by Pedro Pascal), he sees and does a lot of things head rather forget. He certainly doesnat seem to want to talk about them much. Which is why itas nice to see that, in [...]

In The Last of Us Part II, it takes a long time before players understand just who Abby is. A new character introduced as both an antagonist and protagonist, Abby is locked in a violent game of revenge with Ellie, but her reasoning and history donat become clear until around midway through the game, when [...]

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is preparing to put pop singer / songwriter Katy Perry into space, along with five other women: former NASA scientists Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen, journalist Gayle King, journalist and Bezos fiancee Lauren Sanchez, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Their flight, called NS-31, will launch aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, [...]