I’m generally a person who appreciates physical media. I collect vinyl records, buy print books, and like to watch 4K Blu-ray movies. But for a variety of reasons, I switched entirely to buying digital games on each platform as soon as the option became available. Now that Sony and Microsoft have revealed their next-generation consoles…
The new Amazon Echo Show 10 in whitePhoto: Amazon The latest Alexa-powered smart display isn’t content with sitting still Amazon has just announced the latest iteration of its flagship smart display, the new Echo Show 10. The new model has a number of new changes and updates from the prior generation, but the one that…
Amazon has just taken the wraps off its long-rumored Amazon Luna, meaning the company is officially jumping into the cloud gaming ring — one that has become increasingly crowded over the past year. Google launched Stadia last November, Nvidia’s GeForce Now left beta in February, and Microsoft’s cloud gaming offering (formerly known as xCloud) is…
“I’d be more worried about the camera on your phone than I would be about a drone,” Amazon devices SVP Dave Limp told me in an interview a few hours after yesterday’s big Echo event. The drone in question is the Ring Always Home Cam, an autonomous indoor drone that can use a map of…
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Why is it so hard to place an order for a next-gen console or new Nvidia graphics card? Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Series S preorders went live on Tuesday, capping a rough week of product rollouts that included similarly messy situations for preordering Sony’s PlayStation 5 and…
Amazon revealed its new cloud gaming service, officially called Luna, at its annual Alexa hardware event today. That makes it an immediate competitor to Google’s Stadia, Microsoft’s xCloud, Sony’s PlayStation Now, and a number of other services from major game publishers all eager to try the code on how to stream video games over the…
Last week, I showed you why Apple’s App Store guidelines will never permit Microsoft’s xCloud or Google’s Stadia cloud gaming services in their current forms. But Microsoft has another form of game streaming that isn’t against Apple’s rules at all, and the company has all but confirmed it’s currently working to bring it to your…
Microsoft’s priciest video game acquisition, a $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media, shocked the industry on Monday. The deal puts Bethesda, one of the industry’s biggest publishers and owners of some of the most successful gaming series, under the Xbox brand. It also raises a simple but powerful question: how does…
This week was the deadline for ByteDance to divorce itself of TikTok over security concerns, but at press time no deal has been struck. Instead, we have the strangest of corporate entities now taking shape. And, thanks to journalists at the New York Times, we have perhaps the most delicious morsel of reporting to ever…
Social networks contain multitudes. One day you’re writing about internal dissent over the company’s ability to uproot influence campaigns and election interference; the very next, you’re watching a live stream of the same company’s foray into virtual reality helmets and designer mixed reality glasses. At a company with as many interests as Facebook has, different…
Processor is a digest for what’s happening in the world of consumer technology, with incisive analysis (or maybe just jokes) from Dieter Bohn. Sign up for the newsletter here and check out the Processor video series on YouTube. It is a remarkably good time to be into video games. It’s not just that we’ve got…
Nintendo has always been a strange company. The Kyoto-based game maker turned an Italian plumber into one of pop culture’s biggest icons, and the company has experimented with everything from DIY cardboard game accessories to three-pronged controllers. This unpredictable nature is what makes Nintendo so exciting (and occasionally infuriating). Often, these concepts seem to come…
Earlier this month, Intel announced its 11th-Gen “Tiger Lake” laptop CPUs. The company proclaimed them the new best processor for thin-and-light laptops — but thanks to AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 400 chips, competition for that title is fierce. This week, we finally got a chance to try one out. For some background: the Tiger Lake line…
Editor’s note: We’re barreling toward the 2020 election with big unresolved problems in election interference — from foreign actors to domestic troublemakers. So how can journalists sort through all of the noise without having their coverage or their newsrooms compromised? Jay Rosen, one of America’s foremost press critics and a professor of journalism at NYU,…
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Two consoles, a streaming service, and a lot of promises The next-generation of Xbox gaming is a little more complicated than what we’re used to. This past week, Microsoft announced it’s releasing not one but two new consoles: the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S. Not…
Microsoft is officially launching its xCloud gaming service today on Android phones and tablets, allowing you to play more than 150 genuine Xbox games on devices that could never run those games themselves — because they’ll be streaming from remote servers much like a YouTube video. But to do that, you’ll need to pay for…
LG is no stranger to two-screen smartphones in recent years, but the company has just officially announced its boldest foray into a dual-screen device in recent memory: the LG Wing. It’s a wild-looking, swiveling-display smartphone that looks to — quite literally — offer a new spin on what a phone can do. The new phone…
On the eve of the deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok, there was much movement and little certainty. The whole thing seemed to come down to three words — “trusted tech partner” — and no one I’ve spoken to seems to know what they mean. The most recent events were set in motion on Sunday…
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The new default for VR, if you’re okay with Facebook As someone who writes about virtual reality and has been stuck at home just like many people during the 2020 pandemic, I’ve gotten asked one question over and over: if virtual reality is so great and actual reality…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Most of the time, if you’re reading a review of a dual-screen laptop, you probably only care about one feature: the two screens. Asus’ previous Duo models, the ZenBook Duo and the ZenBook Pro Duo, were decent…
In July, amid increasing scrutiny from the Trump administration, TikTok announced a novel effort to build trust with regulators: a physical office known as the Transparency and Accountability Center. The center would allow visitors to learn about the company’s data storage and content moderation practices, and even to inspect the algorithms that power its core…
One reason I enjoy writing a column about the intersection between big technology platforms and democracy is that on most days, it feels like one of the most important things in the world. But on this strangest of days in San Francisco, where wildfires up and down the west coast blotted out the sun and…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. It’s a weird sort of relief to be reviewing the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2. Depending on how you count, it’s either the second, third, or even fourth iteration of Samsung’s folding phone design. The first was…
AMD has started a laptop revolution. For evidence, just look to The Verge’s Instagram account. “No Ryzen no buy,” reads the most-liked comment on a recent photo of the Intel-powered Lenovo Legion 5i. “If it’s INTEL no point of purchasing it,” reads the second comment down. There’s no doubt about it: the Ryzen 4000 series…
Early in the coronavirus pandemic, during the ambient dread of New York’s locked-down spring, I realized that I couldn’t put words in a coherent order. I built virtual spaces instead. That’s how I fell in love with the cockroaches from one of my favorite horror games. I’m talking about Amnesia: The Dark Descent, an adventure…
One aspect of the 2020 presidential campaign that isn’t much discussed is the fact that both candidates want to end the internet as we know it. Both President Trump and Joe Biden have called for the end of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies in most cases when their users…
On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He’d completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He’d received a 50 out of 100. That wasn’t on a practice test — it was his real grade. “He was like, I’m…
I’m currently reviewing the Microsoft Surface Duo and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 — they’re sitting on my desk right now next to another folding phone, the Galaxy Z Flip. All three represent different ideas for how to make a folding phone and all three are prohibitively expensive. Even if at the end of…
Programming note: The Interface will be off Monday for Labor Day. I. The announcements After months of deliberations, Facebook gave its answer to the critics who have called for it to put new restrictions on political advertising. The company said it would not accept new political ads in the seven days leading up to the…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Filed under: Entertainment Skateboarding is more accessible and inclusive than ever, thanks to social media platforms The last professional skate video I remember getting excited about was Lakai’s Fully Flared. Featuring a roster of top talent at the time — Mike Carroll, Eric Koston, Guy Mariano, plus up-and-comer…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. For developers, revisiting a classic game has always been a tricky proposition. Games tend to age poorly — whether it’s the graphics, controls, or subject matter — and so they’re regularly rereleased in an attempt to update…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. The Razer Blade Pro 17 is far from an Ultrabook. It’s just over six pounds and boasts a 17-inch screen, an H-series processor, and a top-end RTX GPU. But it’s got an Ultrabook-y vibe to it. Like…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. If you’re used to working in an office full of coworkers, but are now forced to labor from home, you may be feeling that things are a little quiet — too quiet. The solution might be to…
Filed under: Entertainment “I think the key for the post-corona era is how real we can feel in a virtual world.” The only live music I’ve managed to see all year came from an unexpected place. I recently found myself on a Friday night after hours at teamLab Planets, a popular tourist spot in Tokyo,…
Before the Tide Pods challenge was a public health crisis, it was a joke. The laundry detergent capsules, which were originally released in 2012, evolved over time to look strangely delicious: lush green and blue gels, swirled around one another attractively, all but daring you to eat them. This led to many jokes about Tide…
Image by Epic Games Apple’s cloud ban and Fortnite feud have made it gaming’s latest villain Apple has always had a complicated relationship with the game industry, but this month that relationship slid into a bitter and very public legal and regulatory war that could shape the future of iPhone apps. The first escalation occurred…
Epic Games took on Apple and Google in a very public way last week to protest what it believes are monopolistic app store policies. But Epic was prepared for the fight in part because it knows how to make a spectacle, having already pulled off massive in-game events like the appearance of a giant rolling…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Being a parent is not easy at the best of times — and these are definitely not the best of times. It was hard enough trying to keep kids happy, healthy, and busy during a summer where…
Apple and Epic Games have gone to war, with the two companies clashing over Apple’s App Store policies. Epic, in protest of Apple’s 30 percent fee for any digital transactions on its iOS platform, attempted to circumvent things with a direct payment option in Fortnite, leading Apple to ban the game entirely. But Apple’s Fortnite…
If you weren’t watching tech news yesterday, you missed an entire afternoon’s worth of cramming handfuls of popcorn in your mouth as you stared wide-eyed at the screen wondering what madness was coming next. It was A Day. Epic baited both Apple and Google into banning Fortnite from their respective app stores and did so…
TikTok is in trouble. Over the course of less than a day, the company lost its CEO and gained a surprising new suitor. The breakout social app could be within days of making a deal to sell itself to an American company — but the turmoil surrounding the sale threatens to leave the company permanently…
Yesterday, Facebook infuriated the VR world, announcing plans to require a Facebook login for future VR headsets. The decision broke an early promise from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and was almost universally reviled online, with critics raising concerns about intrusive data collection, targeted advertising, and being forced to use a service they hated. On the…
The story of video games is too often told by the same kind of person. Reports have extensively detailed the ways the video game industry has centered its orbit around men and boys — particularly white men and boys — and that homogeneity often extends to the people who are allowed to tell the story…
Following its removal from the Apple App Store, Fortnite has also been kicked off of the Google Play Store for Android. Earlier today, Epic Games snuck in an update for both the iPhone and Android versions of the game that allowed users to pay Epic directly for in-app purchases instead of using the officially sanctioned…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple’s walled garden gets an epic test Epic Games executed its most ambitious Fortnite live event yesterday, leading both Apple and Google to remove one of the world’s most popular games from their app stores. It was a well choreographed sequence of events designed to highlight the power…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Samsung has settled into a new routine for its Galaxy Note line of smartphones: take some of the major new features from the flagship Galaxy S updates from earlier in the year, improve on them slightly, and…
Apple has removed Epic Games’ battle royale game Fortnite from the App Store after the developer on Thursday implemented its own in-app payment system that bypassed Apple’s standard 30 percent fee The decision marks a significant escalation in the feud between Epic and one of the world’s most dominant mobile software marketplaces. It also comes…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Apple’s new 2020 version of the 27-inch iMac looks exactly like it has for eight years now. The updates are all on the inside, adding improvements that bring it up to the specs you’d expect in a…
Machine learning is a fantastic tool for renovating old photos and videos. So much so that it can even bring ancient statues to life, transforming the chipped stone busts of long-dead Roman emperors into photorealistic faces you could imagine walking past on the street. The portraits are the creation of designer Daniel Voshart, who describes…
Apple and Facebook are fighting again, and how you feel about it says something about who you trust to represent your interests in the strange tech landscape of 2020. Start with a rather academic question that may make your eyes glaze over in spite of yourself: When does pro-privacy regulation overstep its bounds to become…
One of the more hopeful developments at tech platforms this year has been their investment in removing misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were all relatively quick to acknowledge the threat that COVID hoaxes represent, and have worked to purge it from their networks. Enforcement of those misinformation policies has sometimes…
A demo of Epic’s upcoming Unreal Engine 5 release, scheduled to come out next year. Image: Epic Games Apple and Epic’s Fortnite fight has spiraled into something much more Epic’s legal fight with Apple over the future of Fortnite has quickly evolved into an existential battle for one of the game studio’s most lucrative and…
Last night, the Trump administration issued a pair of stunning executive orders against Chinese technology companies, banning US transactions with the companies after a deadline of September 20th. Most of the immediate focus has been on TikTok, which was targeted through its parent company ByteDance — but the second order could have a far more…
Outside of its hardware announcements, one of the bigger takeaways from yesterday’s Samsung event was its ever-closer relationship with Microsoft. The two companies are partnering together on everything from mobile gaming bundles, to optimizing their apps and integrating their software. They even announced that you’ll soon be able to use and control multiple apps from…
Samsung’s big Unpacked event went off with just a few hitches. It’s nice to know that even when an event is online some kind of logistical issue can cause AV problems and delay the beginning of a keynote. Makes everything feel a little more normal. I tease — the event itself was actually well executed.…
Samsung’s first look at the upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 2 during its Unpacked event seemed to spend more time focusing on how the new model fixes the flaws of the original rather than emphasizing whatever will make the foldable flagship great. In putting so much effort into convincing customers that this time it got things…
Programming note: It’s time for our summer vacation! The stretch between January and today is the longest uninterrupted period we have ever written The Interface, and so we’re taking a break to recharge. We return August 17th. On any other day, the memo that Kevin Mayer published Wednesday might have been the talk of the…
Based on wallpaper by Michael Gillett (Wallpaper Hub) Forty-five days to close the deal At first glance, a Microsoft acquisition of TikTok seems a little unusual. Microsoft has spent years walking back consumer plays like the Groove Music service, the Kinect Xbox accessory, its Microsoft Band fitness device, Windows Phone, and more recently the Mixer…
Well, we had an antitrust hearing. A long one, too. The House Judiciary Committee’s investigation into the market power of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google ran to nearly six hours, accounting for a handful of delays and intermissions. Alternating Democrats and Republicans asked the CEOs of those companies a combined 217 questions, ranging from pointed…
For the past week, Nintendo fans have resembled digital archaeologists. Following a massive leak of source code and other internal documents — appropriately dubbed the gigaleak — previously unknown details from the company’s biggest games have steadily trickled out. Those poring over the code have uncovered a new Animal Crossing villager, early prototypes for games…
A spectacular comeback for a Microsoft icon Let’s play a quick game of word association: Microsoft — Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers. But for me, for a while in the ‘90s at least, I would have immediately answered “Flight Simulator.” Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on…
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The ultimate autocomplete The most exciting new arrival in the world of AI looks, on the surface, disarmingly simple. It’s not some subtle game-playing program that can outthink humanity’s finest or a mechanically advanced robot that backflips like an Olympian. No, it’s merely an autocomplete program, like the…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. For years, Razer has set the standard for making gaming laptops that are compact, slim, and feel great to use. MSI wants to end that streak, and its new GS66 Stealth is actually a viable alternative, at…
Rodney Mullen.Photo: Activision Rodney Mullen, Chad Muska, and Bucky Lasek on the series’s lasting impact Rodney Mullen still remembers the first time he went on tour after appearing in a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. Mullen is widely regarded as one of the most influential skaters of all time, credited with creating many of the…
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. The biggest question about the Blade Stealth 13 isn’t actually about the Blade Stealth 13. It’s about the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, the best ultraportable gaming laptop ever made. For a while, that title belonged to the…
How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet — with fun! Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / Alex Castro / The Verge Here is the first honorable use of venture capital: using the funds to design, prototype, test, and then build a rubber chicken pipe to smoke weed out of. The first time I saw Puff The…
Microsoft is gearing up for a different Xbox future If you were heading into Microsoft’s Xbox game showcase yesterday to witness a demonstration of why next-gen gaming and the “world’s most powerful console” matter, you were probably left a little disappointed. Microsoft’s event featured a solid showcase for the future of Xbox and Xbox Game…
Ask any fan of Star Wars what they most yearn to reenact in a video game, and they’ll likely tell you two things: lightsaber duels and space battles. Last year’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Respawn gave us the first in a strong and sleek package. Now, another Electronic Arts studio — the Canadian…
Amid hosts of reasonable fears about the coronavirus pandemic, there’s also one far more dubious threat: “COVID parties.” As Wired explains in a good exploration of the topic, COVID parties (or “corona parties”) are events where people supposedly expose themselves to the coronavirus on purpose. Medical professionals and government officials have periodically warned about these…
Photo by Joseph Okpako / WireImage Filed under: Entertainment The singer of My Immortal (the song) has now read My Immortal (the fanfic) If you mention the name “My Immortal,” you may mean one of two things. The first is the 2003 hit song from rock band Evanescence. The second is a Harry Potter fanfic…
I. A week from now, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will be among the CEOs appearing before the House of Representatives’ antitrust committee. Today let’s check in on how the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case is developing. The first thing to say is that the case is developing slower than expected. Once on track to wrap up…
Dell’s G5 15 SE is focused. It’s not the best-looking gaming laptop or the fastest out there, but starting at $879.99, its AMD Ryzen processor and RX 5600M graphics chip make for a great tag team. Along with other speedy components like fast RAM, an NVMe SSD, and a 144Hz refresh rate display, this Dell…
It’s been such a newsy week that we’re ending it with two columns — enough to last you the whole weekend. First, we have what we hope is the ultimate Twitter hack FAQ, in response to this week’s catastrophic security breach. Yesterday’s issue was the most-read in Interface history, and we wanted to make sure…
Microsoft is planning to launch its game streaming service, currently known as Project xCloud, free to its paying Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers in September. The xCloud service will allow Xbox players to play games on mobile devices or even start a game on their consoles and resume it on their phone or tablet. Xbox…
Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge Librarians are using the activities to keep communities entertained and informed On the day the Peters Township Public Library in McMurray, Pennsylvania, was supposed to unveil a superhero-themed escape room, the library had to close its doors due to the coronavirus pandemic. With no physical location to work…
You can’t say you didn’t see it coming. Whatever Twitter eventually comes to say about the events of July 15th, 2020, when it suffered the most catastrophic security breach in company history, it must be said that the events were set in motion years ago. Beginning in the spring of 2018, scammers began to impersonate…
Peacock is NBCUniversal’s new streaming service and the last major entrant in the colloquial streaming wars. But Gidon Katz, the company’s president of direct to consumer, believes Peacock can win by leaning into something most of its biggest competitors won’t: offering premium entertainment, mostly for free. When Peacock launches tomorrow across the United States, people…
Filed under: Games Review The last big PS4 exclusive is a conflicted one Ghost of Tsushima is at its best when it’s quiet. The latest PS4 game from developer Sucker Punch is an attempt to merge the structure of a conventional open-world game with the setting of a classic samurai film. Think of it as…
For years, Apple has steadily revealed how the ARM-based chips in its mobile phones were catching up in performance to the beefier silicon you’d find inside a laptop or desktop — in 2018, the company claimed its new iPad Pro was faster than 92 percent of portable PCs. At some point, it seemed inevitable that…
A weird thing about running a tech company is that if you are very successful, at some point you will also be operating a vast quasi-legal system. Up to a certain point, one of your users complaining that they got locked out of their account is just a customer service problem. But after some threshold…
I. Yesterday we talked about how a recent social media conflict between journalists and the tech world might be better framed as a conflict between managers and their employees. Today I want to look at that conflict from another angle — how it played out on the buzzy, audio-only, invite-only social network Clubhouse. Like many…
Apple is standing behind its decision to reject future updates for the iOS app of new email service Hey. In a letter sent to Hey creator Basecamp and obtained by The Verge, Apple outlines the App Store rules it says the Hey app breaks and advises the company to adhere to developer guidelines if Basecamp…
If you’ve ever had an 18-inch satellite dish, you’ve enjoyed the work of Senator Ed Markey. Sen. Markey (D-MA) was there in 1992 as a US Representative when the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act was passed, which regulated cable service pricing, increased competition, and, in his eye, birthed the 18-inch satellite dish. He…
We live in the era of streaming entertainment, and it’s easier than ever to start watching whatever new Netflix, Prime Video, or Hulu show that your friends and co-workers are raving about. No matter if you’re looking for movies, sports, live TV, or anything else, you can probably stream it, and that’s why consumers have…
Lenovo’s Flex 5G has a lot to live up to as the world’s first 5G-enabled Windows 10 2-in-1 laptop. Not just that, it also needs to convince people that putting ARM-based processors in a Windows laptop is a perk, not a liability that spells incompatibility doom for those who rely on a lot of apps.…
I. A recurring theme of this newsletter is that I write about TikTok, make some dark prediction about its future, and then turn out to be totally wrong. In that spirit, I thought today we could look at the particularly newsy week the ByteDance-owned video app has had, and then contribute some additional speculation that…
On Thursday Snap held its second-ever partner summit as a virtual event, announcing a new suite of products and developer tools for Snapchat. The inaugural event was one of the more memorable tech productions I’ve been to — a high-energy keynote from CEO Evan Spiegel in front of giant vertical screens on a converted Hollywood…
After 90 days, Quibi’s free trial period has come to an end. Now, executives at the company have their biggest hurdle yet: getting people to willingly pay $5 or $8 a month for a service that most critics argue lacks exciting shows and flopped on launch. Quibi, a shortform video streaming service, is supposed to…
In April 2020, the weird and ambitious startup Magic Leap cut its workforce in half and delayed plans to take mixed reality glasses mainstream. The company had a wealth of ideas about how ordinary people might use its hardware, which overlays virtual images on reality. But after years of development, many were still prototypes or…
Tomorrow is July Fourth, or Independence Day if you live in the US. Like all major US holidays, there are some good sales happening on tech that are worth mentioning. We’ve listed the best ones we know about below, broken up by category. Many of them are happening through tomorrow night, so it’s best to…
Ubisoft on Thursday unveiled Hyper Scape, an all-new free-to-play battle royale (BR) shooter from the Montreal-based team behind Rainbow Six Siege that will attempt to carve out its own niche in the highly competitive genre. As first confirmed by leaks earlier this week, Hyper Scape is a much more futuristic-styled BR game set in a…
Congratulations! The world is falling apart (or at least feels like it’s falling apart), and you’ve decided to do something about it. That’s a commendable urge. Here’s where I tell you that you’ve also decided to do something very hard. Hosting a charity stream (on Twitch, YouTube, or on any other platform) is much more…
Rarely do we see so many ban hammers drop over a 48-hour period as we have seen this week. The big social platforms, who were once loath to intervene in matters of political speech, are getting much more comfortable with the idea. Today let’s look at what happened and why — and, for the sake…
Over the last week, dozens of developers, journalists, and streamers have come forward on Twitter with allegations of abuse they’ve endured as part of the video game industry. Their stories span several high-profile companies and include figures in powerful positions. While the sheer number of people speaking up at once is remarkable — and concurrent…
In this week’s edition of our Vergecast interview series, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and policy editor Russell Brandom talk with cybersecurity expert and founder of CryptoHarlem Matt Mitchell. Mitchell has worked with activists in the US to help them better understand the tools technology offers as well as the threats it can impose. On The…
Happy Worldwide Developer Conference to those who celebrate. I spent the weekend watching three stories unfold at the intersection of social networks and politics. Let’s take them in turn. I. During the initial George Floyd protests earlier this month, a big question was whether the social networks would take action against President Trump for one…
There is a plethora of streaming services available for anyone with a credit card handy. Hulu and Netflix are general entertainment providers offering licensed content and originals for subscribers. Others, like anime provider Crunchyroll and NFL Sunday Ticket, are targeted at specific interests. Streaming services like Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus are flashy newcomers…
Like many social media platforms and apps, TikTok feeds are built using a recommendation algorithm that uses a number of tools and factors to personalize it for each person. Now, TikTok has published a new blog post explaining how its recommendation feed works, and it includes tips for personalizing the feed to avoid being served…
Programming note: The Interface is off on Thursday. Back on Monday. It seems hard to believe now, but there was a time when political advertising was relatively uncontroversial. Sure, individual ads regularly proved to be controversial, from the nuclear provocations of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy” to racist fear-mongering of George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton.” And…
The highly anticipated Disney Plus streaming service, which will likely prove as essential as Netflix to many consumers, is now available. Disney Plus combines content from Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic into a single streaming app. You can dig into Disney Plus’ vault of animated classics, superhero blockbusters, TV shows, and new originals,…