its ur expert

Xbox's former chief operating officer, Helen Chiang, suddenly left Microsoft less than two weeks ago after being promoted into the role in July. I wrote in my Notepad newsletter last week that it seemed very weird for Chiang to suddenly depart Microsoft after 21 years with a surprisingly short memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma. Now, Chiang says she has "serious concerns" about how she was treated. In a lengthy LinkedIn post - entitled "clarity is kindness," a reference to Sharma's WSJ profile - Chiang doesn't dispute that she was fired, but she doesn't say why she was let go. Eurogamer reported last month that Chiang had been "terminated for p … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/bqNVQrk

Employees at an ICA Kvantum supermarket in Sjoebo, Sweden unloading spoiled food from the freezer units. | Image: Johan Nilsson / TT News Agency / AFP via Getty Images Grocery stores across Europe have been hit by another wave of suspected cyberattacks, reporting sudden changes in the temperatures of their fridges and freezers. Major supermarket chains across Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Estonia were affected according to local reports shared by Bloomberg and Reuters . One Ica Kvantum store in Sweden said on its Facebook page that its fridges and freezers had been hacked overnight, with temperatures remotely raised to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). In a statement to Business Insider , a spokesperson at Swedish supermarket chain Coop also confirmed that "unauthorized actors were able to access and … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/Slb8wCr

Jackery announced a new portable power station that uses the safer and longer-lasting lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries the company first introduced in 2023. But what makes the new Explorer 100D stand out is that it's Jackery's smallest power station to date, measuring only 4.6 by 3.4 by 3.4 inches and weighing just 1.87 pounds. Its size and 96Wh (30,000mAh) of battery capacity means you can squeeze it into your carry-on and power multiple devices during a long flight. The Jackery Explorer 100D will be available starting November 15th through Walmart for $99. The power station is already available from Costco if you don't want to wait, … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/xzCeDGI

Gravity is a cruel mistress, slowly dragging the famed telescope ever closer to its ultimate demise with every day. Hubble is in no immediate danger of burning up in the Earth's atmosphere, but its time will run out in the early to mid 2030s unless its orbit is boosted. So NASA is taking proposals from the private sector to see if anyone can save it. In a post on NASA's site , Administrator Jared Isaacman said: "Hubble still has important science ahead of it, and we should be looking at every reasonable opportunity to keep it delivering for as long as possible … If there are innovative and cost-effective ways to extend the life of an asset … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/5mgpCdf

While more cities are canceling their contracts with Flock Safety, just as many are discovering how difficult that can be in some instances. Plymouth, Minnesota's city council voted to terminate its contract with Flock in September, but failed to respond to the city's request. For over a month, the cameras remained up, and the city had received no acknowledgment from the company. So, Police Chief Eric Fadden took matters into his own hands and physically disconnected the cameras. "After hearing nothing for more than a week, I directed our staff to disconnect the power cords from the cameras in order to be sure that they are not functioning … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/N5ow7PB

A high-stakes California ballot measure pitched as a fast track for "essential" infrastructure could wind up giving data center developers a loophole to evade public scrutiny, environmental advocates warn. Proposition 45 would shorten timelines for state-mandated environmental assessments for eligible projects and make it more difficult for residents to challenge those projects in court. Proponents say passing the measure would help alleviate the state's housing shortage and meet rising electricity demand with new renewable energy projects. Environmental groups and some legal experts, however, warn that data center developers backing the pr … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/XBqC9sD

Rather than recommend a single horror film or an unsettling album for our final installment of spooky season recs, I present you with a small selection of creepy, disturbing, and just plain weird videos from YouTube. There's a little something for everyone here. Whether you're a fan of surreal art house shorts, cosmic horror, or classic viral clips, you're bound to find something below that will get you in the Halloween spirit. Possibly in Michigan This 1983 short film from Cecelia Condit found its audience over 30 years later when it was uploaded to YouTube and eventually found its way to Reddit. If you've ever wondered what a feminist mu … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/0vEiK8B

What is a keyboard if not the original brain-computer interface? You can tap on a touchscreen or talk to the computer, but if your work involves getting information out of your head and into the computer, you're probably spending a lot of time using a keyboard. We've written about many keyboards over the years, from the legendary Optimus Maximus to the ultra-luxe Seneca to even stranger fare . But I wanted to know what my coworkers actually use. As I'd hoped, there's a wide range. Some of us are strictly utilitarian, optimizing for ergonomics or functionality. Others obsess over every detail of feel, sound, layout, and looks. Still oth … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/zkVsqFT

After hackers stole a shocking $6.3 billion from Binance customers in a record-breaking crypto heist, the company's CEO says that 90 percent of the funds have been replaced , and the company plans to cover the remaining 10 percent as well. Binance is covering the stolen funds directly, and the remaining 10 percent consists of "less liquid" tokens, which the company says may take longer to acquire. The company also said in a post on X that, while withdrawals remain paused, they're on track to be enabled on Sunday. Our commitment remains the same: Binance will fully cover the financial impact of the funds stolen in this incident. We will co … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/PDOASFB

As the weather cools, it may be worth investing in a smart thermostat to help lower your energy bills. Right now, Google’s fourth-gen Nest Learning Thermostat is on sale in all three colors for $219.99 ($60 off) at Amazon , Best Buy , and The Home Depot , matching its best price of the year and just $10 shy of its all-time low. Google Nest Learning Thermostat (fourth-gen) Where to Buy: $279.99 $219.99 at Amazon $279.99 $219.99 at Best Buy $279.99 $219.99 at The Home Depot Google’s latest Nest Learning Thermostat is its most capable to date, and comes with new features designed to lower energy consumption without sacrificing comfort. Like prior models, it learns your heating and cooling preferences over time and automatically creates a schedule based on your habits, so you don’t have to constantly adjust the temperature yourself. It can also suggest schedule changes to save energy and automatically adjusts the temperature when ...

Nearly two years after LG and Samsung announced at CES 2025 that their latest smart TVs would include access to Microsoft's Copilot, the company is ending support for the AI assistant's functionality on all TVs this year, according to a report by Windows Central . The news comes not from an official announcement from LG, Samsung, or Microsoft, but from an on-screen notification that appeared on Windows Central' s Zac Bowden's webOS-powered LG TV earlier today. "Microsoft has recently decided to end support for Copilot functionality on all TVs, including the Copilot-enabled feature available on our LG TVs. As a result, the Copilot-enabled feat … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/6gO7ShG

Within hours of the iPhone Duo launch last Friday, people reported that the inner screen on some brand new foldable phones was already broken. The issue was similar across many photos shared on social media: some kind of issue or crack would appear in the middle of the screen above the hinge, with lines appearing on the right side of the display. On Monday, Apple acknowledged an "issue" and said it's replacing damaged units, without going into much detail about how many broken phones have been reported so far. So what's actually going on? Shahram Mokhtari, the lead teardown technician at iFixit, has actually taken apart the iPhone Duo and … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/sqFoMVy

On Monday, OpenAI announced impressive breakthroughs in mathematics, computer science, and physics, along with what the company says is an evolving approach to communicating its findings. But despite its apparent course correction, researchers who spoke to The Verge are growing increasingly tired of the company's antics. It has been a turbulent few months between OpenAI and mathematicians, who are still grappling with the hundreds of preprints unceremoniously dumped on them at the start of October. This time, OpenAI says it is working with expert "shepherds" to decide how best to share its latest breakthroughs. All three results conc … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/ig3qbdJ

Elon Musk claims Ukraine violated Starlink's terms of service before the recent slowdown, as reported earlier by Ars Technica . According to Musk, "Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week," however Ukrainian officials have denied that happened, or that it is actually possible for them to do. The statement comes nearly two weeks after Ukrainian officials accused SpaceX of putting limits on the military's satellite internet service that disrupted its drone missions and operations. As reported by Axios , Ukraine uses Starlink for communications … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/Qw6PF7N

In its latest gift to oil and gas companies, the Trump administration is expected to announce plans today to weaken rules that guard against methane leaks. Methane is a smog-forming pollutant and a powerful greenhouse gas that's up to 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide on a 20-year horizon. It's the primary component of what the fossil fuel industry calls "natural gas" that routinely leaks from oil and gas wells and pipelines. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reversing course on its previous efforts to plug those leaks. As part of President Donald Trump's deregulatory agenda, the EPA plans to undo Biden-era rules that were ex … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/NQe2zIM

As it prepares to go public , Anthropic's S-1 filing makes generative AI's methane dependency glaringly obvious. "Competition for access to electrical supply and data center locations with adequate power availability is intense." In documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, Anthropic acknowledges that data centers are becoming increasingly reliant on "natural gas" - the fossil fuel industry's marketing term for what is primarily methane - leaving the company's AI data center buildout vulnerable to rising fuel costs and existing supply chain constraints. And in a possible catch-22, Anthropic admits that rising gl … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/3gMQ0xT

From the bright minds that brought you FTX Arena and NBA Top Shot NFT maketplace (where sales last month dropped to $762,781, which is a 99.66 percent decrease compared to the February 2021 peak of $226,350,843), the NBA announced Monday that it has new "preferred" prediction market deals for Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as a memorandum of understanding with the US CFTC about how to manage the relationships. It also announced an expansion of its DraftKings deal to include prediction markets, and says that more expansions will be announced with others soon. The NBA is already facing scandals after Jontay Porter pleaded guilty to conspiracy … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/2ye8UYx

As is tradition, iFixit has torn open the latest iPhone and laid its parts bare on a table. It found some interesting details about how Apple might be hiding the crease on the Duo's folding screen and gave it a 5/10 repairability score. That might not seem particularly high, but it's the best score the site has given to a foldable yet. The internal screen's matte nano-texture cover doesn't just make it more readable in bright sunlight; it also helps mask the crease by scattering reflections. When looking at the display under a microscope, iFixit also found oval-shaped subpixels arranged at various angles, which the site believes are design … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/QEGj29H

In my mind, Spooky Season music comes in two distinct flavors. There are the fun, occasionally goofy songs like "The Monster Mash" and John Carpenter's "Halloween Theme." Then there is the genuinely terrifying: Throbbing Gristle , The Body , or Scott Walker's The Drift . This 2006 album from the singer-songwriter is truly upsetting. On it, Walker explores death, disease, and tragedy. But not just from some abstract perspective. There are visceral descriptions of the hanging of Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci. He sings about 9/11, his stillborn twin brother, and the Srebrenica genocide. Lyrically, it's about as dark as an album … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/PVjdOnC

Launcher-like pinned tabs, pop-over glance view, and more make Zen my go to browser. | Image: Zen Browser I know many of you are mourning the loss of the Arc browser, and I get it. It felt like the first app in a long time to really offer a new approach to browser design . Atlassian bought the company last year and shifted its focus to developing Dia , its even more AI-focused browser. And soon enough, Arc will officially be no more , leaving dedicated users in a lurch. But I abandoned Arc quite some time ago for the Zen Browser and haven't really missed it. If you're willing to deal with some minor inconveniences, I think you'll find Zen is the Arc replacement you're looking for. Zen unabashedly rips off all the best bits of Arc. Visually, they'r … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/LYju5aN

The mods at r/opensource posted new submission rules that, among other things, banned projects that use AI. The post made Saturday evening opens by saying, "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." The new rules have set off a firestorm in the comments, and even spurred the creation of a rival sub r/trueopensource . Moderator Wolvereness has waded into the comments to explain that there's nuance and room for selective enforcement, such as "software that incidentally has accessibility features that use AI," including … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/reURzaF

This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here . How it started The digital publishing industry has relied on Google for a very long time. Many outlets spent time and money optimizing their webpages to show up at the top of the search engine, with the goal of getting readers to click on their articles or discover their websites for the first time. For years, the relationship between Google and publishers was largely reciprocal; online pub … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/dlbQsn6

BBC's Blue Planet III is looking to prove its authenticity by leaving in the less-than-perfect shots. Previous incarnations of the nature series were defined by their gorgeous, crystal-clear footage that seemed almost too good to be real. But one dead giveaway of AI is when things look too polished and seamless. To counter that, Blue Planet III goes warts and all. Executive Producer Elizabeth White told The Guardian in the past, "the amount of plankton and things" floating in the water would have caused them to cut a shot. Or "we might have framed out a boat or a buoy or gone: 'Oh, actually … the water conditions are not really good enough … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/hLlsf62

On Thursday, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro signed the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act into law, requiring disclosures on AI-generated ads. The law requires any ad - whether it's a still image, video, audio, or text - that "has been significantly modified or generated by artificial intelligence" to include a label in the same format as the ad itself. That applies to TV commercials from multi-billion-dollar companies , as well as restaurants' ugly, crowded flyers about their wing specials. Pennsylvania is one of the first states to require disclosures on AI content. And it requires those labels regardless of where an ad … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/5S8DTgM

OpenAI is now training its most advanced AI models without internet access following a string of rogue hacking incidents. In a blog post on Friday , OpenAI says it built an offline testing environment where AI models can interact with indexed and cached web content "without risk of affecting external systems." OpenAI paused training its frontier AI models in September , after disclosing several incidents in which its AI agents broke out of their testing environments to hack third-party companies and government agencies , or swarm obscure websites . On October 1st, OpenAI resumed reinforcement learning training and internal inference with tighte … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/kjlyAEf

Jack Dorsey's Block announced an AI model called Dessa that's trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation," and to show off the model, Block shared chats it has had with humans that can occasionally be a little awkward and uncanny. Take this one , for example, shared by Dessa lead Ragavan Thurairatnam. The conversation between the model and the speaker does have a mostly natural back and forth (though for some reason, the model initially mistakes the speaker for somebody named "Ronaldo"). We made the first AI model you can have a realistic conversation with that was trained entirely on speech! Dessa is a full-duplex speech-to-sp … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/DzJyPia

The Space 2 comes in multiple colors, including an attractive seafoam green. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge My colleague John Higgins considered Soundcore’s Space One some of the best budget noise-canceling headphones you could buy when they launched in 2023 — and their successor has only improved upon their winning formula, albeit with a $30 price increase. Thankfully, the Soundcore Space 2 are currently on sale at Amazon , Best Buy , and Walmart in all three colors for an all-time low of $106.49 ($23 off), making them even easier to recommend. Soundcore Space 2 Where to Buy: $129.99 $106.49 at Amazon $129.99 $106.49 at Walmart $129.99 $106.49 at Best Buy The Space 2 builds on the original with improved active noise cancellation, particularly when it comes to the low-frequency sounds associated with trains and airplane engines. They also deliver more accurate sound performance thanks to various design upgrades, while retaining ma...

The Duo has a Nintendo DS-like shape anyway, so Delta 2.0 is running with it. | Image: Riley Testut The Delta gaming emulator has been upgraded with a plethora of new goodies and support updates, which includes optimizing it for Apple's iPhone Duo. Delta 2.0 also introduces Sega Genesis games, animated controller skins, custom Pokémon DLC experiences, and a new UI that was built around supporting Liquid Glass. Adding support for the iPhone Duo is an obvious standout here - if you looked at Apple's flagship foldable and wondered how well it could emulate Nintendo DS games , this update was made with you in mind. Delta app creator Riley Testut told The Verge that Delta 2.0 optimizes controller skins for "every pose in both portrait and lands … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/7fpNFzP

Zero Company will have you teaming up with some unlikely new allies. | Image: EA and Disney If you’ve been curious about Star Wars Zero Company , the XCOM -like strategy game set in the Star Wars universe, Amazon has both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X physical editions on sale for $47.99 and $49.99, respectively. The game usually sells for $59.99. While I’m not usually enthused by turn-based strategy games, I’ve been impressed enough with the story and characters to keep playing, and any fan who’s familiar with the world surrounding the battles should make the experience more immersive. Star Wars Zero Company Where to Buy: $59.99 $47.99 at Amazon There’s a surprising depth here, as well, with branching story missions that have consequences, and higher difficulty modes that punish you more severely for mistakes. The character creator is impressive, too, with a huge number of unlockable outfits and accessories, as well as classic alien ra...

Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch an Xbox "next-generation handheld device" for the holiday season of 2027. The Xbox next-gen console, codename Project Helix, would then launch in the holidays of 2028, according to a new report from Fortune . The report doesn't make it clear whether the handheld would be made by a manufacturer like Asus, or by Microsoft itself. Xbox teamed up with Asus for its Xbox Ally devices, which ran a modified version of Windows 11 with an Xbox mode enabled. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has also described Project Helix as a " family of devices ," suggesting that Microsoft's next Xbox console may not be just one piece of … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/WbB7MyE

CoreWeave had a bad week last week. Its bonds slipped into distressed territory by a common definition - when investors demand 1,000 basis points more in yield than they'd get from government bonds. Last Tuesady Chamath "SPAC King" Palihapitiya noticed the distressed debt , and also asked whether the AI buildout was a private credit bubble . Its shares are down more than 20 percent since Tuesday's close, which is kind of a lot! There even seemed to be some collateral damage in the market on other AI companies, too. Now, I have also asked if the AI industry is a bubble, but when the SPAC King echoes concerns held by a lady whose ongoing questi … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/6SbChyA

The Miles is a smart plug for your car. My 15-year-old daughter just got her learner's permit, so when I was pitched a new gadget tailored to teen drivers, I was intrigued. The Miles Plug is a small device that plugs into your car's OBD-II port and monitors location, driving habits, and vehicle health, along with emergency accident response and roadside assistance. The idea is that knowing all these things should help me feel more comfortable when my daughter starts driving alone. I tested the (now discontinued) Ring Car Cam when my son was learning to drive, but he hated it and refused to turn it on; I wondered if the Miles could provide the same peace of mind without feeling a … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/fzF1lZK

Sony’s WF-1000XM6 are on sale in black today only. | Image: Sony For a very limited time, Sony’s latest high-end noise-canceling earbuds are actually cheaper than their last-gen counterpart, the WF-1000XM5 . B&H Photo is selling Sony’s latest WF-1000XM6 in black for an all-time low of $238 ($92 off) at checkout. Other retailers aren’t currently offering a discount on the XM6. Sony WF-1000XM6 earbuds Where to Buy: $329.99 $238 at B&H Photo The XM6 are a solid upgrade over their predecessor and easily amongst the best noise-canceling wireless earbuds on the market. In his review , John Higgins noted that they do a better job of tuning out other people’s conversations than any other earbuds he’s tested. Sony has also improved the bone-conduction sensor and added AI-powered microphones that help keep your voice clear during calls, even in noisy environments. The XM6 earbuds also deliver clean, balanced sound with impressive bass, raising the...

There's a fast-growing category of two-wheeled electric vehicles splitting the difference between high-end scooters and entry-level motorcycles, fresh bikes with avant-garde style but approachable performance. I'm talking about offerings like the Infinite Machine P1 and BMW CE 02 , similar concepts but with wildly different attitudes. Among this class, the Maeving RM2 stands out. It has a distinctly retrofuturistic flair, bringing together the vibe of classic British motorcycles like the Triumph Bonneville or Royal Enfield Continental GT, just without the literal vibes caused by internal combustion. Quite the contrary, in fact. The RM2 is o … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/qiz2jmL

Now, former Savannah police officer Amber Harpe was fired in August following a department investigation that found she had shared her Flock login information with her husband, Tyler Harpe, an ICE agent. SPD does not share its Flock data with ICE and said sharing access to the system violated the department's security protocols. While he had unauthorized access to the system, Tyler Harpe conducted 983 searches related to 97 license plates, which were overwhelmingly registered to Hispanic drivers, according to Savannah's local ABC affiliate, WJCL . The Harpes defended their actions, saying they didn't use access for personal reasons and that … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/FhRT9M3

Mister Organ doesn't reach the level of societal horror of The Act of Killing or the creepypasta-meets-true-crime gruesomeness of Beware the Slenderman , but there's something deeply unsettling about Michael Organ and his intimate campaign of terror against everyone who enters his life. Mister Organ is a documentary by David Farrier, an Auckland, New Zealand journalist. The movie starts with Farrier reporting on Bashford Antiques, a shop in Ponsonby that has begun aggressively clamping cars in its lot and demanding exorbitant fees to release them - up to $760. Farrier's article for The Spinoff eventually led the government to introduce legi … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/94aLYIp

Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward." Police responded to the scene and asked Marvin to move out of the robot's way. When she refused, they placed her in cuffs and arrested her. The incident was captured on video and has now garnered considerable media attention. The delivery robots have become a common sight on the … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/OCS1ETL

Back in February, I went to Los Angeles to take in some art and stayed in Koreatown. Down the street from my hotel, there was this little coffee shop - Stagger - that is, I think, best known for its matcha, which is good. But the drink I unexpectedly found myself obsessed with was their cream top, an iced Americano with, yep, vanilla cream on top. When I got back to Oakland, I kept thinking about how badly I wanted one. For more than 20 years, I've been drinking my coffee - iced or otherwise - black. Originally this was because I knew I could put black coffee that had cooled off in the microwave to reheat it without worrying that the milk i … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/HzO4klM

It used to be so easy to get away with things in school. The teacher, after all, was always turned around writing at the chalkboard! But then came a bit of technology, previously mostly used for military purposes, called the overhead projector. It would change far more than just the disciplinary record of students everywhere. In this episode of Version History , we tell the story of the overhead projector. David Pierce is joined by The Verge 's Jake Kastrenakes and Stanford professor Antero Garcia to discuss how overhead projectors were developed, how they made their way into classrooms, and how they changed so much about the way kids learn. … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/hRr4AiH

AUSTIN, TEXAS - APRIL 8: Tesla Cybercabs are lined up on a lot at Tesla Giga Texas in Austin, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. | Image: Getty Images This is The Stepback , a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on autonomous vehicles, policy, and road rules, follow Andrew J. Hawkins . The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here . How it started The first state to pass a law legalizing self-driving cars operating on public roads was Nevada in June 2011 - long before such vehicles were operating on public roads. This was three years before the introduction of Tesla's Autopilot , five years before Waymo spun out of the Google self-driving car project, and seven years before the first commercial robotaxi … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/iOA2uZ9

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film's social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter , the film's distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a "permanent suspension" was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge . While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase. Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all face … Read the full story at The Verge. ...

Apple's App Store rules now more explicitly ban so-called "nudify" apps that generate intimate images of people without their consent using AI tools. The rule changes follow significant criticism toward Apple after X users used Grok earlier this year to make nonconsensual, sexualized deepfakes, including minors . Apple didn't pull X or Grok from the App Store, though it told senators that it threatened to yank Grok . At Apple's WWDC event in June, protestors also called on Apple to "remove Grok, X, and all nudify technology from the App Store," and in July, a San Francisco city attorney ordered Apple to remove 13 "nudify" apps, which it said … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/xULozin

After this horrific crash involving a Tesla driver who said he was asleep and using the driver assist mode, the California Highway Patrol warns that "Despite its name, full self-driving is not fully autonomous. Technology does not relieve drivers of their responsibility to safely operate their vehicles." Video released by CHP shows the Tesla speeding past flares, cones, and emergency lights where officers were on the scene of an earlier accident, before ramming into the back of a parked patrol vehicle. CHP says two officers were seriously injured in the accident and taken to a hospital. Two Solano CHP officers were seriously injured when … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/D2gKLph

Apple’s Home Collection is part of the company’s first major push into the smart home category. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge For more than a decade, Apple has told other companies to build smart home devices for its platform. This week, Apple launched its own . The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, thermostats, sensors, a smart door lock, and a video doorbell, all codeveloped with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. They arrive alongside HomeView , Apple's first smart display. Even after 12 years of HomeKit, Apple's smart home ecosystem still feels underdeveloped, especially compared to the competition. Amazon's and Google's ecosystems support more products, and both have popular in-house brands: Ring and Nest. Apple had nothing of its own to point c … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/iY6uVIe

President Donald Trump posted a series of photos on Truth Social showing off renovations to the White House - but one of them appears to be modified with AI. The picture, which compares an old White House column to a "restored" one, has several discrepancies and was flagged by Google's AI detector as "made or edited with OpenAI." As pointed out by users on Reddit , the picture of the "restored" column has an uneven number of steps on both sides of the structure. The number of steps also doesn't match up with the ones in the "before" photo. Additionally, the before and after photos appear nearly identical in angle and detail; the reflection i … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/XTtxq8w

If you're a new user of Withings' fitness-tracking smartwatches or smart scales and want to sync and access your health data through third party apps like Apple Health or Google Health it's now going to cost you. According to a discussion on Withings' support forums spotted by MacRumors , new Withings accounts created from October 13th, 2026, and onwards will require a Withings Plus subscription to use the "automatic sync to third-party apps" feature. The subscription costs $9.95 per month or $99.50 per year but Withings' devices come with a free one month trial that includes the option to sync their data to third-party apps. When the trial … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/CPJva9i