Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 128, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, sorry this one's so Mac-heavy, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about David Attenborough and scree...
Playing Mixtape is like playing a video game version of a high school movie. Kids banter about the meaning of life and the theme songs that would play when they walk in a room. They're worried about looking cool at a big party. They're obsessed with finding booze. But under all of those tropes is...
Xbox just allcapsmaxxed: Meet XBOX. This isn't a joke; Microsoft appears to be actually rebranding Xbox to XBOX. Asha Sharma, Xbox CEO, ran a poll on X earlier this week, asking fans whether Microsoft should use Xbox or XBOX. The results were in favor of XBOX, and the company has now renamed its ...
YouTube is expanding its AI likeness detection program to all users over the age of 18 - meaning just about anyone can have the platform hunt for potential deepfakes of themselves. The likeness detection feature uses a selfie-style scan of a person's face to monitor YouTube for lookalikes. If the...
Microsoft's latest Windows 11 test will allow you to reposition the taskbar and change the size of the Start menu. The update, which is rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders in the Experimental channel, lets you place the taskbar on the bottom, top, left, or right side of the screen. Microsoft first...
ArXiv, a popular platform for preprint academic research, is taking a new step to attempt to reduce the volume of papers that include AI slop. If a paper has "incontrovertible evidence that the authors did not check the results of LLM generation," such as hallucinated references or "meta-comments...
If you’re not staying on top of Analogue 3D updates, now’s the time to start. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Analogue has released a new firmware update for its Analogue 3D console that adds the Memories save state feature. Memories, which was first introduced with its handheld A...
OpenAI announced yet another reorganization Friday, consolidating certain areas and making company president Greg Brockman the official lead of all things product. In a memo viewed by The Verge, Brockman wrote that since OpenAI's product strategy for this year is to go all-in on AI agents, the co...
The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus was billed by the company in late March as one of its “fastest gaming desktop processor ever.” That hype was evidently accurate, as benchmarks done by Gamers Nexus show the processor giving AMD’s pricier X3D cache-equipped Ryzen 9000-series CPUs a run for their mo...
AI radio DJs demonstrated their volatile personalities. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI...
The T1 Phone has the wrong number of stripes, but it does at least have 50 stars. | Screenshot: Trump Mobile Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone's whereabouts. This week, despite our best hopes, we s...
Google updated its spam policy to mark attempts to "manipulate" its AI model in search results as spam, including results in AI Overview or AI Mode in Search, as Search Engine Land reports: "In the context of Google Search, spam refers to techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search...
ChatGPT will even know how much credit card debt you have. | Image: OpenAI Your trust in AI is about to be put to the test: OpenAI will soon let you give the chatbot direct access to your bank accounts. The new feature announced in preview today will allow users to "securely connect" ChatGPT wi...
The Memorial Day deals have arrived — err, at least some of them. BioLite, purveyors of all things solar, has kicked off a larger holiday promo ahead of May 26th, resulting in reduced pricing on smokeless fire pits, headlamps, and solar-powered stoves, just in time for summer. The company’s Site ...
This week, a trio of video game cabinets emblazoned with pixel art of Donald Trump and a number of other government officials' faces suddenly appeared at the DC War Memorial. Looking at the cabinets from a distance, it's easy to get the sense that Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell (which you...
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here. A few days ago, my esthetician was smearing hot wax on my face. The ...
X is fighting for its users' right to anonymity against the far-right influencers and accused human traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are seeking to unmask their online critics. The Tate brothers filed suit against the owners of more than a dozen social media accounts - several of them ru...
Sonos has a new rival in town. Bose’s new Lifestyle Collection includes a $299 Lifestyle Ultra Speaker, a $1,099 Lifestyle Ultra Soundbar, and the $899 Ultra Subwoofer, all of which are now available directly from Bose and third-party retailers like Amazon and Best Buy. Bose Lifestyle Ultra Speak...
British online safety regulator Ofcom says it has accepted new commitments from X that aim to better protect UK users from seeing illegal hate and terror content on the platform. Under the agreement announced today, X says it will withhold access in the UK to accounts reported posting illegal ter...
Last summer, Peter Degen's postdoctoral supervisor came to him with an unusual problem: One of his papers was being cited too much. Citations are the currency of academia, but there was something unusual about these. Published in 2017, the paper had assessed the accuracy of a particular type of s...