Dbrand wants you to feel less guilty about having your face buried in a screen all day and not getting outside to ‘touch grass.’ The company’s latest collection of skins lets you wrap your gadgets in bright green artificial turf so you can touch grass whenever you want and no matter where you are. The […]
Substack plans to protect foreign writers “residing lawfully” in the US who may be targeted by the government for what they write. The company is partnering with the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to provide legal support to impacted writers — whether they publish on Substack or not — citing recent attacks […]
Commerce chief threatens to pull grants so firms double down on US spending
More doubt is being cast over the US CHIPS Act program with the Trump administration threatening to halt payments unless companies in line to receive funding commit to substantially expand their own investments.…
Though Sony’s initial plans to release Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse in 2024 didn’t quite work out, the film finally has a new premiere date that seems like it will stick. Last night at this year’s CinemaCon expo, Sony announced that it now intends for Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse to hit theaters a little over two […]
It’s finally time for the biggest video game event of the last few years. In January, Nintendo officially unveiled the successor to the Switch, helpfully called the Switch 2. The short video showed off some of the console’s features, like magnetized Joy-Cons, and provided a brief glimpse at a new Mario Kart game. But it […]
Welcome to the worst day on the internet! As Chaim Gartenberg pointed out years ago, brands and a holiday dedicated to hoaxes are rarely a winning combo. If you’re a company with any kind of social media presence in 2025, you really, truly only have four options on April Fools’ Day: So far, we’ve seen […]
On Sunday, a few thousand people in Green Bay, Wisconsin, gathered to hear Elon Musk speak — and give away two giant cardboard checks for $1 million. Attendance at the event was limited to people who had added their names to a petition against “activist judges,†created by Musk’s America PAC. He has promised money […]
The UK government must be thrilled
Google will soon offer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email for all users, even those who do not use Google Workspace, and says it'll do so without imposing any undue stress on IT admins.…
How’s that 5G rollout going in your area? Even in 2025, there’s no guarantee you’re going to be able to get reliable cell service everywhere you go, especially if you happen to live somewhere that’s especially crowded or remote — or if you work in your company’s basement. That’s where Wi-Fi calling comes in, which […]
Google is updating Gmail to allow enterprise users to send encrypted messages to any inbox in just a few clicks. Google says it’s developed a new encryption model that, unlike the current encryption feature on Gmail, doesn’t require senders or recipients to use custom software or exchange encryption certificates. The feature is rolling out in […]
Fulcrum is region's latest challenge to the hyperscalers
An alliance of cloud service providers in Europe is investing €1 million into the Fulcrum Project, an open source cloud federation tech that gives an alternative to local customers anxious about using US hypercalers.…
So much of our online and technological lives rely on standards, the sets of rules designed to make sure our favorite gadgets and services work together. At their best, they make everything work seamlessly, and we never need to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes. But at their worst, they leave us perplexed about […]
Tech secretary reveals landmark legislation's full details for first time
The UK's technology secretary revealed the full breadth of the government's Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR) Bill for the first time this morning, pledging £100,000 ($129,000) daily fines for failing to act against specific threats under consideration.…
Every time I see “mAh” on a consumer product, I cringe. Megahertz are starting to bruise, too. That’s because the most critical components of portable gadgets — batteries and processors — should really be measured in watts: it’s the one common spec that gives you a real idea of what your device can do. With watts, […]
Buying a giant battery for the next blackout or off-grid adventure can be daunting, especially when hundreds or even thousands of dollars are on the line. Get it wrong and you’ve either spent too much money for something you’ll never use or discover that you didn’t buy enough capacity to keep your most important devices […]
What counts as failure in New Space?
Comment Yet another rocket exploded over the weekend and – you guessed it – its CEO called the test flight "a great success." This raises the question: what even counts as failure anymore in the world of so-called "New Space" – the VC-fueled and risk-friendly private rocket sector?…
Modern 64-bit-only chips are leaving the original Arm operating system behind
A new funding effort from RISC OS Open seeks to modernize the operating system for future Arm hardware.…
Mark Zuckerberg — having spent months cozying up to President Donald Trump — will now be looking to reap the benefits as European tech regulators bear down on Meta. The EU is expected to impose fines against the social media giant any day now, having preliminarily ruled in July 2024 that Facebook and Instagram’s “pay […]
Lenders told of £175 million project top-up for 2025, four years after buyout
The UK's third-largest supermarket has seen the expected costs of its tech divorce from former US owner Walmart rise to nearly £1 billion ($1.3 billion) after news broke that the project is now expected to run into calendar Q3 of year four, overshooting its original three-year timeline.…
Not exactly Snowden levels of skill
A student at Britain's top eavesdropping government agency has pleaded guilty to taking sensitive information home on the first day of his trial.…
ChatGPT’s latest image generator — which has gone viral for its ability to generate uncanny recreations of Studio Ghibli art — is now available for everyone, after OpenAI initially delayed the rollout beyond its paid tiers following heavy demand. CEO Sam Altman announced on X that the image generation update has “now rolled out to […]
Optimistic much?
Arm expects to see its architecture account for half of the datacenter CPU market by the end of this year, up from 15 percent in 2024, all thanks to the AI boom.…
The developers of Palworld and PUBG: Battlegrounds have announced details of dating simulators set in the universes of their respective games. The Palworld dating sim, technically called Pal♡world! ~More Than Just Pals~, was actually announced ahead of April Fools’ Day last year. But yesterday, developer Pocketpair released a second trailer for the game and published […]
Blame the 23andMe implosion, rise in far-right govt
OpenSNP, a fourteen-year-old open source repository for genetic records, will shut down and delete all its data at the end of April.…
Ampler made one of the first modern e-bikes I ever tested, and now it’s selling the first commercial electric bikes — the Nova and Nova Pro — I’m aware of that can be charged over a USB-C port integrated right into the frame. Hell, that same jack will even charge your gadgets in a pinch, but not […]
How about making sure Windows crashes less, and stops hassling us to use Edge? That would improve productivity, too
Microsoft has quietly revealed it’s redesigning the Blue Screen of Death, the notification that Windows presents after it crashes so badly a reboot is the only way out.…
OK, AMD it is, then. Or Nvidia, Arm, Qualcomm, RISC-V, MOS 6502 ...
Intel's newly appointed CEO Lip-Bu Tan has used his first major speech to admit the x86 goliath needs to shape up, and sketched out plans to turn things around.…
Producing this stuff is bad enough, but d'ya really have to leave all of it on the web for anyone to find?
Jeremiah Fowler, an Indiana Jones of insecure systems, says he found a trove of sexually explicit AI-generated images exposed to the public internet – all of which disappeared after he tipped off the team seemingly behind the highly questionable pictures.…
Resurge an apt name for malware targeting hardware maker that has security bug after security bug
Owners of Ivanti’s Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA Gateway products have a new strain of malware to fend off, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA.…
OpenAI has raised $40 billion in a new investment round led by SoftBank, vaulting the company to a $300 billion valuation. It’s the largest funding round for a private tech company in history, according to CNBC. OpenAI is set to receive $10 billion up front (SoftBank will invest $7.5 billion along with $2.5 billion “from […]
Indiana Uni rm -rf online profiles while agents haul boxes of evidence
A tenured computer security professor at Indiana University and his university-employed wife have not been seen publicly since federal agents raided their homes late last week.…
The commercial space industry is booming, and it’s only expected to keep growing as more billionaire-led companies send rockets into the sky. Elon Musk’s SpaceX continues to dominate the space industry with dozens of launches each year, but it could soon have some serious competition with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launching its rival New Glenn […]
From the Kindle Colorsoft and Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 to the top-of-the-line Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, Amazon’s Big Spring Sale has brought steep discounts on some of our favorite gadgets. There’s just one problem: a large chunk of them will set you back at least several hundred dollars, if not more. That can be a tough […]
The release of Apple’s iOS 18.4 on Monday includes good news for robot vacuum owners. The update includes support for controlling robot vacuums and adding them to automations and scenes in the Apple Home app via the Matter protocol. With the official rollout of iOS 18.4, companies like Roborock, iRobot, and Ecovacs are introducing firmware […]
1990s incident response in 2025
Two Oracle data security breaches have been reported in the past week, and the database goliath not only remains reluctant to acknowledge the disasters publicly – it may be scrubbing the web of evidence, too.…
Wafer-scale AI chip startup apparently smoothed over American concerns around UAE's G42 planned stake
AI chip startup Cerebras Systems says it has cleared a key hurdle ahead of its planned initial public offering (IPO), claiming it resolved concerns about its sources of funding with the US Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS).…
Microsoft is making its AI features widely available on Copilot Plus PCs equipped with Intel and AMD chips. One of the most notable of these features will be Live Captions, which translates audio to English subtitles from dozens of different languages in real time. Microsoft first started testing Live Captions on Intel and AMD devices […]
Smart plugs are great, but unfortunately, they can’t automate everything. Thankfully, there is a cheap cube-like contraption called the SwitchBot Bot that can add a touch of modern functionality to your garage door, light switch, and other traditional devices. It would normally run you $29.99, but right now you can buy it directly from SwitchBot […]
Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is happening now through the end of today, March 31st, with several dozen good-to-great deals available that don’t require an Amazon Prime membership. Our main roundup has you covered with more than 100 deals on Verge-favorite gear with quite a high price ceiling. But, for this post, we wanted to provide […]
Apple has released iOS 18.4, and one of the biggest features is priority notifications, which use Apple Intelligence to highlight “important notifications that may require your immediate attention,” according to Apple’s patch notes. The priority notifications will appear at the top of your notification stack on your Home Screen, as shown in the below picture […]
Following months of testing, Plex has started to roll out its redesigned mobile app to Android and iOS devices, and it will arrive to everyone within the next week. The new app comes with an updated navigation system that should make it easier to access different parts of the app and find content to watch, […]
Explanation leaves a 'lot of questions unanswered,' says infosec researcher
A digital burglar is claiming to have nabbed a trove of "highly sensitive" data from Check Point - something the American-Israeli security biz claims is a huge exaggeration.…
Warner Bros. Discovery introduced new branding for its Max streaming service yesterday, alongside announcing availability in Australia. Although still simply called Max, the service has traded its bright blue appearance for a monochromatic black-and-white color palette that’s more reminiscent of the iconic HBO logo. The new look has already been introduced on the streaming service’s […]
Amazon has launched a new AI model, Nova Act, which is designed to perform tasks — like online shopping — in your browser. For now it’s only available to developers in a “research preview,” but Amazon is also expanding access to its other Nova AI models through a web portal, making them easier to find […]
Amazon has officially launched its AI-powered Alexa Plus – but it’s only available to a “small number” of customers to start, Amazon spokesperson Kristy Schmidt confirmed to The Verge. As shown on its early access page, Alexa Plus also doesn’t come with all the features Amazon showcased during its recent devices event, like the ability […]
Whenever Verge staffers are asked to describe their smart tech, office tools, kitchen gadgets, or whatever else, they talk about things they recently bought, things they picked up 10 years ago, or things they’ve had sitting around their house for decades. We’ve gathered a few of the items that our staffers have enthused about in the past […]
A few months ago, I was stuffing my face with Christmas cookies and catching up on the season 3 reunion episode of Netflix’s The Ultimatum. It was a typical tawdry hour of reality TV. Clout-hungry influencer wannabes dressed to the nines, nursing their bruised egos and rehashing the minutiae of why their relationships crashed out […]
Silicon Valley's latest energy fixation won't stop the coming power panic
Analysis Atomic energy is becoming the preferred solution to address the projected bump in megawatts needed to charge AI in the future, but it simply won't come soon enough in many cases.…
Today, I’m talking with Matt Bromberg, who is the CEO of Unity, one of the leading video game development platforms. He’s been in the job for less than a year, and in many ways, he is the perfect Decoder guest. Unity is one of those companies that we love here on Decoder because we interact […]
Nova Custom, based in The Netherlands, makes laptops focused on privacy, customisation, and freedom. Nova Custom laptops ship with either Linux, Windows, or no operating system, and they’re uniquely certified for Qubes OS (the V54 model will be certified soon), the ultra-secure and private operating system.
Deadline reports that Warner Bros. Discovery has agreed to sell Coyote vs. Acme’s global distribution rights to Ketchup Entertainment, the same production studio that bought The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie last fall. Ketchup reportedly spent around $50 million on the sale, and plans to release the feature some time in […]
It’s World Backup Day, which to the makers of storage devices means driving home the urgency of protecting the files you hold dear. So obviously, there are deals on all sorts of storage today, including SSDs and microSD cards. B&H Photo is making a big thing out of its deals, and with this being the […]
Only the strong will survive, but analyst says cull will not be as rapid as during dotcom era
Gartner says the market for large language model (LLM) providers is on the cusp of an extinction phase as it grapples with the capital-intensive costs of building products in a competitive market.…
France’s competition watchdog (Autorité de la concurrence) ordered Apple to pay €150 million (~$162.4 million) after finding that its App Tracking Transparency system allows the company to abuse its dominance in the mobile app market. In its decision, the authority says the initiative — which Apple pitches as a way to give users more control […]
Microsoft giveth with one hand but taketh away with the other
Windows Insiders will soon get their hands on Microsoft's attempt to ward off another CrowdStrike incident, and the company is also closing a loophole for users who don't want a Microsoft account.…
As TikTok’s April 5th sell-by date approaches, Americans are back to where they stood before the original January deadline: watching anxiously to see if a major social media app gets banned. But that’s far from the only big event we’ll see over the coming month. April is filled with momentous turns in long-running tech policy […]
But will they really upend the enterprise PC market? How about software? Networking, anyone?
Analysis Disrupt? It's an awful hackneyed term that some analysts, consultants and technologists like to use.…
This week, on April 4th, Microsoft turns 50 years old. The company has gone through sweeping changes over that time — from two guys in New Mexico to more than a quarter-million employees worldwide, from making text-based operating systems to holographic video games — but through the decades, it’s remained a foundation of the tech world. Microsoft […]
Sometimes we treasure our devices and tools not just because they’re practical, but because we like their style — the way they look, the way they make our surroundings look, or just because it’s nice to work with something that is, well, snazzy. It reflects our taste. It gives us, or our living space, style. […]
The Razer Blade 16 is designed to be the gaming-focused alternative to the MacBook Pro, and I’m always here for that. I love a gaming laptop that still looks and feels like a somewhat normal laptop, and the new Blade returns to a thinner and lighter chassis design after the last-gen got a bit chunky. […]
From smartphones to surveillance cameras to security snafus, there's no escape
Opinion I was going to write a story about how Amazon is no longer even pretending to respect your privacy. But, really, why bother?…
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has created a system for private aircraft owners to request that their registration information — including their name and address — be kept private. That may impact celebrity private jet trackers, which have used FAA registration information to identify jets belonging to the likes of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift. […]
Social media platform magically worth a billion more than what he bought it for
Comment Billionaire Elon Musk's xAI is to acquire billionaire Elon Musk's X in a deal that values the former at $80 billion and the latter at $33 billion.…
One of Sony’s best-ever PlayStation ads is a 21-second video titled, “Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video.†It’s a “step-by-step†guide about how to lend your PS4 games to your friends. It has one step: one person hands another person a game box. The ad succinctly clowns on Microsoft’s original and convoluted game sharing policy […]
Microsoft has announced that it’s overhauling its Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error message in Windows 11. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified screen that looks a lot more like the black screen you see when Windows is performing an update. It’s not […]
Some Hollywood studios are reportedly earning money from fake AI-generated movie trailers on YouTube, against the wishes of the union representing actors. According to a report from Deadline, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Sony Pictures redirected ad revenue to themselves instead of enforcing copyright protections and shutting down the popular Screen Culture and KH Studio […]
The official unveiling of the Switch 2 was an incredibly confident moment for Nintendo. It was brief and lacking almost entirely in details. There was no price, no release date, and no confirmed games outside of a Mario Kart tease. The 2 in the name implied a bigger and better Switch, but when it came […]
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that
The last commands have been sent to the ESA's Gaia satellite and, after a dozen years scanning the galaxy, the spacecraft is shutting down its computers and boosting out into a retirement orbit around the Sun.…
Crims are disabling security tools early in attacks, Talos says
interview Antivirus and endpoint security tools are falling short as ransomware crews increasingly deploy "EDR killers" to disable defenses early in the attack – a tactic Cisco Talos observed in most of the 2024 cases it handled.…
The big difference between Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 7 and the cheaper Z Flip 7 FE will be their cover screens, going by new renders released by the leaker OnLeaks. Earlier this month he produced designs that show a new, larger cover screen on the flagship Flip 7, but our first look at the more […]
FCA still splashing on customizing, integrating HR and finance system way after 2021 go-live
The UK's financial regulator is signing a deal worth up to £12.3 million ($15.9 million) with tech services biz Cognizant to make "enhancements" to a Workday HR and finance system it implemented several years ago.…
Make things that work for the billions, not the billionaires
Opinion Since it is currently fashionable to make laws by whim and decree, here are three that should apply immediately across techdom. The following are banned: DoNotReply messages, updates that reset your configuration choices to default, and forced incomprehensible choices.…
'I'm glad you asked that question. We'll get to that tomorrow' (After I research the answer)
Who, Me? Wait, what? It's Monday again? That means it's time for another instalment of Who, Me? What's that, you ask? It's The Register's Monday column in which we tell your tales of technological messes and celebrate your escapes.…
NHS boffins think there's a connection, but ‘snot all good news: Swallowing batteries is even more dangerous
Researchers from the UK’s National Health Service believe increasing adoption of cashless payments may be having an unexpected payoff: Fewer kids are swallowing coins and seeking medical help to remove them.…
11 companies, including SMIC, accused of disguising outposts so they can illicitly serve Beijing
Chinese tech companies created entities in Taiwan and disguised them so they had no connections to China, so they could lure top tech talent to work on significant projects.…
PLUS: Indonesia crimps social media, allows iPhones; India claims rocket boost; In-flight GenAI for Japan Airlines
Asia In Brief China last week commenced a crackdown on inappropriate collection and subsequent use of personal information.…
RISC OS, the operating system from the United Kingdom originally designed to run on Acorn Computer’s Archimedes computers – the first ARM computers – is still actively developed today.
Do you want to install Windows 11 without internet access or without an online Microsoft Account? It seems Microsoft really doesn’t want you to, as it has removed a very common and popular way of bypassing this requirement.
PLUS: OpenAI bumps bug bounties bigtime; INTERPOL arrests 300 alleged cyber-scammers; And more!
Infosec in brief Oracle Health appears to have fallen victim to an info stealing attack that has led to patient data stored by American hospitals being plundered.…
Blue95 is a modern and lightweight desktop experience that is reminiscent of a bygone era of computing. Based on Fedora Atomic Xfce with the Chicago95 theme. ↫ Blue95 GitHub page Exactly as it says on the tin.
I’ve complained about the utter inscrutability of the Windows release process for a long time, with Microsoft seemingly using channels, build numbers, code names, date-based version numbers, and so on interchangeably, making it incredibly hard to keep track of what is being released when.
Billy Tolley swings a Microsoft Kinect around an abandoned room in sudden, jittery movements. “Whoa!†he says. “Dude, it was so creepy.†On the display, we see an anomaly of arrows, spheres, and red lines that disappears almost as soon as it arrives. For Tolley and Zak Bagans, two members of the Ghost Adventures YouTube […]
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 77, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, don’t forget to make your Venmo private, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I’ve been reading about RISC and Ben Affleck and Google’s […]
There's also a new release of the Zorin OS distro
The handy GNOME extension Dash to Panel will live on, under its present maintainer, after winning financial backing from one of the distros that uses it.…
Thousands of anti-Tesla protesters took to the streets Saturday March 29th in opposition to Elon Musk and his efforts with DOGE to eliminate humanitarian aid, close federal agencies, and fire government workers. It was the culmination of nearly two months of steady, almost daily demonstrations aimed at hurting Tesla’s sales — and ultimately Musk himself. […]
In our notification-heavy world, there is still one activity where you might just miss that buzz on your phone or ping on your smartwatch – while you’re vacuuming. Thankfully, Samsung has a solution. Its newest cordless stick vac, the new Bespoke AI Jet Ultra ($1,099), now has an LCD display control panel that, along with […]
More silicon, more power, more pain for datacenter operators
Comment As Jensen Huang is fond of saying, Moore's Law is dead – and at Nvidia GTC this month, the GPU-slinger's chief exec let slip just how deep in the ground the computational scaling law really is.…
I realized quite late in Assassin’s Creed Shadows that being this version of a shinobi is hard — but it was precisely the precision the game demanded that made it all the more rewarding. With Shadows, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has achieved both its most impressive stealth and assassination mechanics. At its best, Shadows evokes […]
Miscreants warming to Delphi, Haskell, and the like to evade detection
Malware authors looking to evade analysis are turning to less popular programming languages like Delphi or Haskell.…
Airbus UK wins £150M contract to revive long-delayed rover project
Airbus UK, a wholly-owned subsidairy of US aerospace giant, has won the £150 million contract to complete a landing system for the long-delayed ExoMars rover.…
It’s sold as an outdoor camplight, but BougeRV’s very bright LED lantern is really a multifunctional work lamp for any place that needs an extra dose of lighting. It’s rechargeable and compact enough to serve as a long-lasting flashlight with three swiveling LED panels that can direct 3000 lumens onto your table, campsite, workspace, or engine block […]
A court took action on Friday to keep the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from shutting down a consumer watchdog agency while its court case plays out. Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted a preliminary injunction to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from being further gutted while she decides whether […]
Microsoft is no longer playing around when it comes to requiring every Windows 11 device be set up with an internet-connected account. In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview, the company says it will take out a well-known bypass script that let end users skip the requirement of connecting to the internet and logging in […]
A peek behind the curtain in one corner of online advertising
AppLovin, which provides a way for software developers to make money by embedding ads in their mobile apps, has been sued for a third time this month – after short-seller reports accused the biz of fraud and deceptive revenue practices.…
A couple of years after buying Twitter, Elon Musk announced that his AI business xAI has acquired the social media platform that’s now known as X. In a tweet, he described it as an all-stock transaction, valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, including $12 billion in debt it had as part […]
Microsoft is starting to test Quick Machine Recovery, a feature designed to prevent incidents like last year’s Crowdstrike catastrophe. It’s rolling out in its latest Windows Insider Preview build (6120.3653) and allows IT professionals to remotely recover Windows 11 devices even if they won’t boot. Microsoft first announced Quick Machine Recovery last year as part […]
After Google completed its acquisition of Fitbit in early 2021, the company integrated Fitbit’s services with its own and required users to migrate existing Fitbit accounts to a Google account by 2025. But in an email sent to Fitbit users today, Google now says that deadline has been extended until next year. “As we have […]
The company that has pushed to open up the deep sea for mining is cozying up to the Trump administration after years of hitting roadblocks in international negotiations. The island nation of Nauru initially sponsored The Metals Company (TMC) and its deep-sea mining effort. In 2021, that triggered a race to develop regulations before TMC […]
MrBeast teamed up with Alex Cross author James Patterson to co-write a thriller novel with Squid Game-like elements, according to a report from Deadline. The upcoming book, which doesn’t have a title yet, has reportedly fetched eight-figure bids for the publishing rights. The book’s logline, which reads, “Players fight to survive deadly tests held in […]
The SteamOS-powered version of Lenovo’s Legion Go S handheld gaming PC debuted at CES 2025 with a somewhat attractive $499.99 price tag. At that price, The Verge’s Sean Hollister considered it a true Steam Deck rival, wedged neatly between the cost of Valve’s $399 LCD and $549 OLED models. The handheld recently went up for […]
