Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge: Google unveils classroom and accessibility ChromeOS features, including rolling out a tool to let users control a device with their head and facial expressions — Google is announcing a variety of classroom and accessibility-focused ChromeOS features today, and one of the standouts is being able …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Brendan Carr becomes FCC chair, and plans to focus on tech and media regulation, combating China, spectrum licenses, infrastructure, the space economy, and more — Brendan Carr is now formally the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, giving him the power to set the agency's agenda …
Jay Peters / The Verge: Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance's Nuverse, is back online in the US; developer Second Dinner plans to find a new publisher to avoid future bans — Marvel Snap is back online in the US after access was cut off Saturday night due to the law that banned TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps.
Emma Roth / The Verge: Google Play and Apple's App Store still aren't offering TikTok in the US; Senator Tom Cotton warns of “ruinous liability”, as Trump says there's “no liability” — TikTok announced on Sunday that it's “in the process of restoring service,” but the app is still unavailable in the App Store and Google Play.
Richard Lawler / The Verge: Card game Marvel Snap, published by ByteDance-owned Nuverse, cuts off access for US gamers, as the TikTok divest-or-ban law impacts other ByteDance-linked apps — The divest-or-ban law aimed at TikTok is also taking down other ByteDance-linked apps, including the popular card game Marvel Snap.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Adam Mosseri says Instagram profile grids will display content as rectangles instead of squares as part of a change rolling out “over the weekend” — Instagram's profile grids will display content as rectangles instead of squares as part of a change rolling out “over the weekend …
Mia Sato / The Verge: Instagram adds a new tab in the Reels feed that will show videos that a user's friends have liked or added commentary to — Instagram is bringing back one of its more chaotic features, now reworked for the short-form video era. — A new tab in the Reels feed will serve up videos …
Jay Peters / The Verge: Nintendo teases the Switch 2, featuring a new kickstand design and backward compatibility for physical and digital games, with more details on April 2, 2025 — The console looks a lot like the original, but it's bigger. In the video, the Joy-Con controllers are black with colored accents, and they attach to the console magnetically.
Abigail Bassett / The Verge: A look at Watch Duty, a free app that has become a crucial lifeline for LA during the wildfires by showing active fires, evacuation zones, and other vital info — ‘We view what we are doing as a public service,’ says the cofounder of the nonprofit that millions of people are relying on to stay safe.
Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge: Asus unveils the Zenbook A14, with a new base-model eight-core Snapdragon X processor, available mid-January starting at $1,100; a $900 variant debuts in March — Asus' new featherweight laptop is aiming to be the latest Windows rival to the Apple MacBook Air.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Nvidia updates its Autonomous Game Characters, says the NPCs can “perceive, plan, and act like human players” in games like PUBG, with “small language models” — Nvidia has spent the last two years showing off its digital “ACE” characters that can have in-game conversations with you using generative AI.
The Verge: What to expect at CES 2025: TVs with AI features, laptops built around Nvidia's new 50-series discrete GPUs, Matter smart home devices, and more — It's time for the biggest tech show of the year. CES 2025 officially kicks off next week, with most of the industry's biggest names gathering …
Emma Roth / The Verge: Samsung and Google plan to bring Eclipsa Audio, a new open-source 3D audio standard, to some YouTube videos later this year on Samsung's 2025 TVs and soundbars — Samsung and Google are ready to push a new standard, Eclipsa Audio. … Over the years, Samsung notably hasn't supported Dolby Vision HDR …
Victoria Song / The Verge: Apple and Strava partner to feature Strava athletes in Fitness+ programming, add more detailed Fitness+ workout summaries in the Strava app, and more — Apple Fitness Plus is getting a fresh makeover in the Strava app. The two companies just announced they're collaborating to revamp …
Tom Warren / The Verge: 2024 was a big year for Windows on ARM, and fierce competition between Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm promises to make 2025 an exciting year for Windows laptops — With rumors of Nvidia entering the CPU market, 2025 might be an even bigger year for Microsoft's Arm efforts.
Callum Booth / The Verge: A look at the EU's common charging regulations, which come into force on Dec. 28 and cover USB-C ports, fast charging, unbundling of charging bricks, and more — The common charging standard brings USB PD support, improved labelling, and less e-waste.
Emma Roth / The Verge: OpenAI says ChatGPT is mostly recovered and APIs and Sora fully operational, after an outage led to the services “experiencing high error rates” for a few hours — ChatGPT stopped working for many users on Thursday afternoon, when the chatbot suddenly couldn't respond to queries …
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: The US NHTSA suggests easing rules allowing for fully driverless cars and urges companies operating driverless cars to share more data for greater transparency — But there's a twist: the agency wants self-driving car companies to cough up more data.
S.E. Smith / The Verge: A look at the quickly disappearing web, as digital decay and link rot erase all kinds of media; a Pew study says 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 are now gone — The internet is forever. But also, it isn't. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?
Sean Hollister / The Verge: After a rough year, Intel says its $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU, which received near-universal praise from reviewers, has already sold out in most retailers — While we haven't managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” …
Sean Hollister / The Verge: Framework releases a $39 modular component to add two extra M.2 slots to the Laptop 16, letting users have 26TB+ of storage, and updates the Laptop 16's cooling — The most ambitious laptop ever made just got a long-promised modular upgrade. … At launch, you only had two options …
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: An analysis of App Store rankings shows how market saturation for AI-based creative apps is making it harder to find good apps that use AI in more focused ways — Many high-ranking AI apps feel like an attempted cash grab, and it's not easy to spot the trash from the treasure.
Kylie Robison / The Verge: During his NeurIPS talk, Ilya Sutskever says “Pre-training as we know it will end”, as “we've achieved peak data and there'll be no more” — OpenAI's cofounder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, made headlines earlier this year after he left start …
Nilay Patel / The Verge: YouTube removed the ability to click video titles in YouTube Player for Publishers; outlets give up ad revenue by using the standard player to link to YouTube — For about a year, I've gotten notes from readers asking why our YouTube embeds are broken in one very specific way …
Sean Hollister / The Verge: Telefónica, one of the world's largest carriers, plans to preinstall the Epic Games Store on every new compatible Android phone it sells, including Samsung's — Telefónica, one of the largest carriers in the world serving the UK, Spain, Germany, and Latin America with the O2 …
Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge: GM pulling the plug on Cruise's robotaxi experiment in favor of “privately owned” driverless cars is the beginning of a risky new phase for autonomous vehicles — Eight years and $10 billion later, GM has decided to pull the plug on its grand robotaxi experiment.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Google launches Veo, its AI video model to generate “high-quality” 1080p resolution videos in various styles, to businesses, beating OpenAI's Sora to market — Veo, Google's latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines.
Gaby Del Valle / The Verge: The CFPB proposes limiting data brokers' ability to sell Americans' personal and financial info, after the National Public Data breach discovered in April 2024 — In the wake of high-profile hacks affecting hundreds of millions of Americans, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) …
Lauren Feiner / The Verge: A look at the DOJ's proposed remedies in the Google Search antitrust case, and why forcing a sale of Chrome might not be biggest threat to Google's power — Selling Chrome might not be the most painful part of the DOJ's antitrust demands for Google.
Allison Johnson / The Verge: Samsung Galaxy S24 FE review: reasonable price, telephoto camera, and a big screen, but the screen isn't that sharp and other ~$500 phones offer more value — The S24 FE feels less like a ‘Fan Edition’ and more like an exercise in retail positioning. … There's something bugging me about Samsung's “Fan Edition” phone line.
Umar Shakir / The Verge: The US FTC finalizes amendments to its Telemarketing Sales Rule, letting the agency pursue scam tech support companies even when consumers initiate the calls — The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has finalized amendments to its Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), making it easier to protect consumers …
Richard Lawler / The Verge: Microsoft says a feature to let US users play and buy Xbox games from the Xbox app on Android is “ready to go live as soon as the court makes a final decision” — A few weeks ago, Microsoft exec Sarah Bond said that in November, “players will be able to play and purchase Xbox games directly from the Xbox App on Android.”
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Anthropic updates Claude to add custom writing styles tailored to users, aiming to personalize its replies, following similar ChatGPT and Gemini features — Anthropic is adding a new feature to its Claude AI assistant that will give users more control over how the chatbot responds to different writing tasks.
Nilay Patel / The Verge: Q&A with GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani on running the company since 2019, competing with social media, Squarespace, Wix, and more, AI, the Airo platform, and more — Despite everything, websites are still a pretty neat idea — but what if AI builds them?
Justine Calma / The Verge: A UN task force proposes taxing crypto mining to raise funds for climate action and cites IMF research that says $0.045 per kWh used could raise $5.2B annually — A tentative proposal to tax cryptocurrency mining to raise funds for climate action took off during a United Nations climate conference that's set to come to a close today.
Lauren Feiner / The Verge: Snap files to dismiss New Mexico's lawsuit over Snap's alleged child safety issues with predators, saying the complaint misrepresents the state's investigation — Snap says the basis of a scathing lawsuit suggesting it systematically recommends teens' accounts to child predators is backwards …
Emma Roth / The Verge: SafeRent, an AI screening tool used by landlords, agrees to pay ~$2.3M to settle a discrimination lawsuit and will no longer display certain tenant scores — SafeRent, an AI screening tool used by landlords, will no longer use AI-powered “scores” to evaluate whether someone using housing vouchers would make a good tenant.
Victoria Song / The Verge: Samsung Galaxy Watch FE review: identical to the Watch 7 with similar health features, but has the guts of a three-year-old Watch 4, poor battery, and one size — As an entry-level device, the FE doesn't quite nail the right mix of price, features, and hardware. … Everybody loves a deal.
Mia Sato / The Verge: Google tightens its rules against “parasite SEO” content, or articles that have little to do with the website's focus, after cracking down on “reputation abuse” — Google is tightening its rules against “parasite SEO” content, or articles and pages that often have little …
Jay Peters / The Verge: Bluesky says it has “no intention” of taking user content to train AI tools, ahead of X implementing new terms of service that let it train AI on user content — ‘We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.’
Mia Sato / The Verge: Facebook makes Views its primary metric for content, bringing it in line with Instagram; each time a piece of content appears on a screen, it counts as a View — Views will be measured not just on video content but also on photos, text posts, and more. When Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced …
Emma Roth / The Verge: Mark Zuckerberg says Threads is testing custom feeds for certain profiles or topics; the Threads' version seems easier to use than Bluesky's custom feeds — Threads is testing a way to create custom feeds for certain profiles or topics, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Friday.
Emma Roth / The Verge: NASA partners with Microsoft to create Earth Copilot, an AI chatbot that can answer questions about the Earth using NASA's geospatial information — NASA is teaming up with Microsoft to create an AI chatbot designed to make it easier to access and understand scientific data about the Earth.
Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge: Fake AI albums added to artists' pages are flooding Spotify to profit from royalty fraud, abusing a distribution process effectively based on the honor system — How fake music targets real artists. … I first noticed something weird when a HEALTH album dropped on my Spotify new release radar.
Emma Roth / The Verge: TikTok makes its AI ad creation tool, Symphony Creative Studio, available to all advertisers and adds the ability to use content from Getty Images with the tool — TikTok will let advertisers pull in content from Getty Images when using the platform's AI ad creation tool.
Quentyn Kennemer / The Verge: Snap unveils new Snapchat location and privacy tools, including letting parents request their teen's location and view their location-sharing settings — Once known only for its self-destructing pics, in recent years Snapchat has sneakily evolved into a location-oriented social media app.
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge: Google updates Maps to help users search for products like home goods, clothing, and electronics and find stores nearby, improve traffic reporting, and more — Google has added some new travel and shopping features to Maps that aim to make it easier to find local products and stay on time during busy periods.
Chris Welch / The Verge: Sonos reports Q4 revenue down 8% YoY to $1.5B, spent $4M on “app recovery investments”, and has released 16 app updates and “restored 90% of missing features” — Sonos is still trying to climb out from the hole it dug itself earlier this year by recklessly shipping …
Tom Warren / The Verge: Nvidia launches its Nvidia app for Windows, designed to overhaul and replace the GeForce Experience app, after a beta earlier in 2024 — Nvidia is officially launching its Nvidia app on PC today, designed to overhaul and replace the GeForce Experience app.
Jay Peters / The Verge: Signal rolls out new call features, including the ability to share a link to a call, emoji reactions, a “raise hand” button, and a dedicated calls history tab — Signal is making a bunch of improvements to calls so they are more competitive with Zoom and Google Meet, including the ability to share a link to a call.