The Verge

Today, I'm talking with Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org. Bookshop, at its core, is a website that lets local bookshops all over the country - and in a few other countries - sell their books online. If you want a book, you go to Bookshop and click buy - it's just as easy as [...]

Kobo has increased the price of three of its e-readers following a similar price increase by the company in January 2023. The seven-inch Kobo Libra Colour, as well as the six-inch Kobo Clara Colour and Kobo Clara BW, are all now $10 more expensive, as spotted by TheeBookReader. The prices of the larger (and aging) [...]

Sid Meier developed the first Civilization game in 1991 and has contributed to every iteration since. When I visited Firaxis Games last year, I saw that the company maintains the very computer Meier used to develop the game, which can still be booted up and played. Walking through the halls of the studio, I saw [...]

Sid Meier's Civilization VII is the latest in the long-running 4X strategy franchise that first debuted in 1991 on MS-DOS. The new turn-based game from Firaxis Games and the titular, legendary designer is set to release on PC and modern consoles in on February 11th, 2025 - over eight years after the last installment. Civ [...]

The Beatles have won their eighth competitive Grammy award thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence. The 2023 track Now and Then" - which Billboard reports is the first song knowingly created with AI assistance to earn a Grammy nomination - was awarded Best Rock Performance on Sunday, beating out competition from Green Day, [...]

Microsoft is getting ready to remove the VPN feature from its Microsoft 365 subscription later this month. Originally designed as a privacy feature, the VPN in Microsoft 365 utilizes the Microsoft Defender app to encrypt internet traffic and hide IP addresses. Microsoft is now removing this privacy protection feature from Microsoft 365 on February 28th. [...]

Your next car purchase is probably going to be more expensive, thanks to President Donald Trump. Around 5.3 million vehicles are built in Canada and Mexico, 70 percent of which are destined for the United States. Those vehicles will soon be subject to 25 percent tariffs, which were just announced by the Trump administration. And [...]

Last month, Fortnite Festival, the game'sRock Band-like music mode, rolled out local multiplayer on PlayStation and Xbox. It's a great addition if you and up to three buddies want to relive the halcyon days of 07 on a single TV, particularly if you're using a nostalgia-inducing peripheral like the PDP Riffmaster - which is now [...]

Over the last couple years, it feels like we've heard news of mass layoffs and hiring freezes from tech companies nearly every week, and since the beginning of 2024, there's been a new wave of layoffs and firings. In the first few days of January 2024 alone: And all that adds to the tens of [...]

Smart rings are in the middle of a renaissance. Thatas great because we finally have way more options than just an Oura Ring. The downside is most of Ouraas would-be rivals are launching their first, maybe second-gen smart rings. Meaning, if you want an Oura Ring alternative, thereas a good chance youall have to put [...]

Imagine walking up to your front door and it unlocks a even opens a automatically as you approach. It may sound like the stuff of smart home dreams, but it could soon be a reality, thanks to ultra-wideband (UWB) technology arriving on smart locks. With its precise, real-time location capabilities, UWB enables a smart lock [...]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 69, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If youare new here, welcome, get ready for some web-slingina, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, Iave been reading about Elon Muskas gamer habits and spy satellites and [...]

Canada will set its own tariffs against US goods in retaliation to broad 25 percent tariffs President Donald Trump announced Saturday on Canadian imports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a 25 percent tariff on a total of $155 billion worth of American goods - $30 billion of that on Tuesday when Trump's tariffs go into [...]

The National Transportation Safety Board will only update the press about the plane crashes in Washington, DC and Philadelphia on X - not over email, as reported earlier by The Desk. The agency announced on Saturday that it will use its @NTSB_Newsroom account to share "news conferences or other investigative information. The NTSB later said, [...]

The US is officially imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. President Donald Trump announced that goods imported from Mexico and Canada will face a 25 percent tariff, while goods from China will face a 10 percent tariff. There will also be a lower 10 percent tariff on energy resources from Canada. In a series [...]

Google just debuted a series of Super Bowl ads showing how small businesses use Gemini AI across all 50 states, but the cheese lovers out there might notice something a little off about its Wisconsin one. As spotted by @natejhake on X, the ad shows Gemini AI generating text that says Gouda accounts for 50 [...]

President Donald Trump has fired Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In a letter posted to X, Chopra confirmed his term as CFPB Director has concluded." Chopra was notified of his removal via an email from the White House, according to a report from the Associated Press. During Chopra's tenure, [...]

In 2008, Mortis Ghost made a game with his friend, composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. It was a surreal roleplaying game about a baseball player fighting ghosts called Off. He shared it for free on a French-speaking forum, where it garnered a small audience. One player was a French artist who was inspired to make a [...]

While your Windows computer should be pretty well locked down with a password or maybe even some kind of biometric protection, it's impossible to guarantee that no one else is ever going to get access to it, whether itas a thief swiping your unlocked laptop from a coffee shop or one of your kids wanting [...]

When you yell aCan you just Google it?a at your AI assistant, itas fair to say that the AI assistant is not doing its job. I was browning some beef on the stove and trying to determine when my husbandas flight was landing. I didnat have the flight number, but there are only so many [...]

On January 9th, 56-year-old Peter Akemann flew his DJI Mini 3 Pro drone far beyond the legal limit of his ability to see - and into a Super Scooper water dumping plane fighting the Los Angeles Palisades wildfires, grounding it for repairs after punching a hole in its left wing. Now that authorities have traced [...]

YouTube is expanding the availability of its dedicated community space feature to more creators on the site, giving them more opportunities to connect with their fans without needing to lean on another platform like Discord. Only available for access via mobile devices, Communities first launched during the Made for YouTube event last fall, letting the [...]

Windows Insiders will soon see a Copilot icon in one more place: Paint. Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels will see the new button thanks to an update rolling out now, putting AI tools in one location. Clicking the Copilot button in the task bar will reveal a dropdown menu with generative features like [...]

Though Netflix is planning to bring back a number of its ongoing series in the coming months, the streamer has decided to cancel its adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Netflix announced today that The Sandman will conclude with its upcoming second season. In a statement about the show coming to an end, Sandman showrunner [...]

BioWare now has fewer than 100 employees after laying off around two dozen" staffers and shifting others to different projects at EA, Bloomberg reports. The changes follow BioWare's own Studio Update" published this week where GM Gary McKay said the studio had worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues [...]

In 2016, Apple started including an auto power-on feature for its new MacBook models that activated when you opened the notebook lid or plugged in USB-C power when the lid was open. This is a cool little convenience if you donat want the added step of pressing the power button a plus it could get [...]

While Mark Zuckerberg and Meta press forward with augmented glasses projects buoyed by its million-selling set of smart Ray-Bans, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says that Apple just pulled the plug on an AR glasses project. Codenamed N107, they're described as something that would've looked similar to regular glasses but with added displays in the lenses [...]

In Adult Swimas Common Side Effects from Joe Bennett (Scavengers Reign) and Steve Hely (American Dad!), the discovery of a strange mushroom that can heal any sickness or injury is either a miracle or a doomsday scenario, depending on who you ask. The plant is a godsend to people suffering from debilitating illnesses, but its [...]

A popular Bloodborne framerate mod is no longer available thanks to a DMCA takedown request from Sony. Australia-based Twitch streamer Lance McDonald first developed the mod back in 2020 before making it available to download in 2021. Lance announced today in a post on X that Sony Interactive Entertainment asked them to remove download links [...]

Nvidia is touting the performance of DeepSeek's open source AI models on its just-launched RTX 50-series GPUs, claiming that they can run the DeepSeek family of distilled models faster than anything on the PC market." But this announcement from Nvidia might be somewhat missing the point. This week, Nvidia's market cap suffered the single biggest [...]

I would have preferred any other Super Bowl matchup than another showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, but the world doesn't revolve around me. Regardless, I love a good championship football game, especially one enhanced by an immersive sound system. If you're in need of a home theater audio upgrade yourself, [...]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased exactly two weeks ago that o3-mini would ship in a couple of weeks," and it's arriving on time today. OpenAI is launching its latest o3-mini reasoning model inside ChatGPT and its API services and making a version with rate limits available to free users of ChatGPT for the first time. [...]

MultiVersus will go offline at the end of its next season, Warner Bros. Games announced on Friday. The free-to-play brawler's fifth and final season starts on February 4th and runs through May 30th, 2025, after which you'll only be able to play against AI opponents or through local co-op. It will also no longer be [...]

Ugreen has announced another Apple AirTag alternative with its new Finder Slim wallet tracker. It's not only much thinner than an Apple AirTag, at just 1.7mm thick, the Finder Slim is also thinner than the 2.4mm Chipolo Card Spot, the 2.8mm Pebblebee Card Universal, the 2.5mm Tile Slim, and the 2.6mm Eufy SmartTrack Card E30. [...]

Apple has agreed to a $20 million settlement in a class action lawsuit over battery swelling in early Apple Watch models. If you experienced the issue and owned an Apple Watch Series 0, 1, 2, or 3, you may be eligible for a small payout. The lawsuit, Smith et al. v. Apple Inc, was filed [...]

WhatsApp has disrupted a spyware campaign last month that targeted journalists and civil society members, the company announced on Friday. The campaign originated from an Israeli spyware company called Paragon Solutions and impacted around 90 users. In a statement to The Guardian, WhatsApp says it has reached out to affected users, saying it had high [...]

If you're tired of watching your heating bill soar every month, now is a good time to invest in Google's latest Nest Learning Thermostat. Normally $279.99, right now Amazon, Best Buy, and Google are selling the smart thermostat in all three color options for $239.99 ($40 off), which is just $10 shy of its lowest [...]

Apple wants to ensure it has a voice in the remedies trial for the Justice Department's search monopolization case against Google, and filed an emergency motion to stay the proceedings while it appeals the district court's denial of its request to be more directly heard in the case. The remedies phase of the trial is [...]

DeepSeek startled everyone last month with the claim that its AI model uses roughly one-tenth the amount of computing power as Meta's Llama 3.1 model, upending an entire worldview of how much energy and resources itall take to develop artificial intelligence.A Taken at face value, that claim could have tremendous implications for the environmental impact [...]

Blackmagic Design has announced that it's finally bringing several advanced features already available for the iOS version of its free camera app to Android. The Blackmagic Camera for Android 2.0 update released this week allows several smartphones running the app to be monitored and controlled from a single device, including, for the first time, a [...]

TikTok's traffic is almost back to normal despite its delayed return to US app stores, according to Cloudflare Radar data seen by CNBC. The DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains" is around 10 percent lower than the levels before its abrupt shutdown, David Belson, Cloudflare's head of data insight, told CNBC. To compare, TikTok's traffic dipped [...]

Electronics, avocados, vegetables, cars, tractors, crude oil a these are some of the things that could soon get more expensive for US consumers. Under President Donald Trumpas proposed plan, goods coming in from Mexico and Canada will be subject to a 25 percent tariff beginning on February 1st. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has [...]

The DeepSeek story contains multitudes. Itas a story about the stock market, whether thereas an AI bubble, and how important Nvidia has become to so many peopleas financial future. Itas also a story about China, export controls, and American AI dominance. And then, somewhere in there, thereas a story about technology: about how a startup [...]

Behance co-creator Scott Belsky has announced he's leaving his position as Adobe's Chief Strategy Officer to become a partner at independent film production company A24. Belsky initially joined Adobe when it acquired the Behance artist portfolio platform for $150 million in 2012. Following a brief departure in 2016, he rejoined Adobe in 2017 to lead [...]

Looking for a way to speed up your weekly cleaning? It might be worth investing in a robot vacuum that can also mop up your floors, like the Dreame L20 Ultra. The hybrid robot vacuum / mop is one of our favorites, and has currently dropped to an all-time low price of $614.99 ($785 off) [...]

Disney's extraordinarily expensive Star Wars hotel isn't coming back. The building that housed the Galactic Starcruiser is being converted into office space, scuppering hopes that it could be reborn or repurposed into a new interactive attraction. The Wrap reports that the hotel will be converted into an office for Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative arm [...]

Midnight Society, the game studio co-founded by Dr Disrespect (real name Herschel Guy" Beahm) has shut down, killing the first-person shooter title it was developing. The studio made significant" layoffs in September after terminating its relationship with the controversial streamer in June due to inappropriate" messages he exchanged with a minor. Within hours of the [...]

Dr Disrespect - aka Herschel Guy" Beahm - was one of Twitch's top streamers until he was suddenly banned in June 2020. Now, we know what happened. As confirmed in a lengthy statement from Beahm himself, he sent private messages on Twitch to a minor that he says sometimes leaned too much in the direction [...]

When the Minimal Phone was first announced this time last year, you might have been forgiven for thinking it was vaporware. But one year - and many delays - later, the world's first Android phone with both an E Ink display and a physical QWERTY keyboard has begun shipping to backers. In broad strokes, the [...]