Netflix and other streaming platforms are stepping up efforts to sign YouTubers, which could mean big streaming deals for sports channel Dude Perfect or former NASA engineer Mark Rober, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal writes that streaming platforms’ creator-signing ambitions have “shifted into overdrive” in response to the success of MrBeast’s Beast Games. Amazon has made “at least $100 million” in profit from the show and is apparently already working out deals for two more seasons. Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, is apparently asking over $150 million per season to renew.

Rober and Dude Perfect have each been approached by Netflix, writes the Journal. But Netflix “doesn’t usually allow for sales promotions in shows that it pays to make” — something that has apparently “been a sticking point” in its talks with Rober, who sells robotics kit subscriptions through his channel. That sort of thing is more in line with Amazon’s business, making it a “particularly attractive” option for creators like Rober, the article says.

Still, Netflix is no stranger to signing YouTubers. Its 2016 deal with Colleen Ballinger Evans, aka Miranda Sings, res …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Smart home company SwitchBot is preparing a new Matter-enabled smart hub called the SwitchBot Hub 3, according to a registration with the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) that HomeKitNews spotted. It has a display like the $70 Hub 2, but adds physical controls — including, delightfully, a knob.

According to the CSA listing, the Hub 3’s knob works for things like tweaking temperature on your smart thermostat or adjusting media volume — it says it’s compatible with “Apple TV, Spotify, and other streaming platforms for unified audio management.” The other physical controls include what looks like a home button, back button, and a mysterious button with an “S” logo on it. It also has four “editable quick-scene buttons on the home page for one-touch activation of customized modes.”

The SwitchBot Hub 3’s display will turn on when it detects motion, including “hand gestures or device movements,” and will show indoor temperature and humidity, third-party weather forecasts, and “real-time status updates for door locks.” It will support SwitchBot’s Bluetooth-connected smart devices, which the Hub 2 bridges to Matter, making them controllable via major smart home platforms from the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. The listing says the Hub 3 supports voice control through both Alexa and Google Assistant. SwitchBot hasn’t officially announced the new hub, and it’s not clear when it might launch.

SwitchBot has a large stable of smart home products, including a universal Matter smart home remote and retrofit devices like a curtain-dragging device, tiny button-pressing robot, and stick-on device for turning boring old deadbolt locks smart. In January, the company showed off an inventive modular robotic smart home platform.

Evan Feinman is out as the director of the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, reports ProPublica’s Craig Silverman in a Bluesky post today. BEAD aims to bring high-bandwidth internet to underserved areas of America, much of which is rural. Silverman shared screenshots from a department-wide email Feinman sent on Friday, in which he warned there would be “deeply negative outcomes” if the program shifts from fiber build-outs to using satellite-based internet like that which Elon Musk’s Starlink offers. “Feinman’s term ended and he was not reappointed,” Silverman writes.

This month, Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a “rigorous review” of the program, which he said “has not connected a single person to the internet,” something he blamed on “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations.”

BEAD was introduced as part of the $1 trillion Biden-era infrastructure spending bill. The program offers $42.5 billion in grants to states to use toward building out internet infrastructure that would provide at least a 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up connection to underserved parts of the country. The program prioritizes fiber-based internet, but allows for other kinds where fiber isn’t proven to be tenable.

Getting from the start of the program to actual network buildouts has been a long, multi-step process that started with the FCC making a map of US broadband access and moves through state proposals, challenges to the FCC’s map, and selection of ISPs that will be paid to build new service. According to the government BEAD progress-tracking site, three states — Delaware, Louisiana, and Nevada — had made it to the last step of issuing a final proposal for public comment before the site stopped being updated regularly.

Lutnick’s announcement mirrors much of Republicans’ ongoing backlash to the program, some of whom say that Biden had blocked Starlink from being part of it for political reasons, as The New York Times wrote on March 5th. The Times notes FCC denials, most recently in 2023, that kept Musk’s company from getting $886 million in Universal Service Fund subsidies for a separate rural broadband program. The FCC said said the company couldn’t “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service.” 

The rules that Lutnick may propose could benefit Musk’s company, which was “expected to get up to $4.1 billion” under the BEAD program’s initial rules, according to The Wall Street Journal in March. The outlet said Starlink could get as much as $20 billion under Lutnick’s overhaul of the program. 

In his outgoing staff email, Feinman wrote that the overhaul could strand “all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer,” adding that it would be “yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.”

In the quotes from the email below, Feinman writes what he says will “definitely happen” next.

1. Removing the “woke” requirements from the program. This will include all provisions related to labor and wage, climate resiliency, middle class affordability, etc. I do not regard the inclusion or removal of these provisions as significant; they were inserted by the prior administration for messaging/political purposes, and were never central to the mission of the program, nor were they significant in the actual conduct of the program.

2. A “pause” that isn’t a pause. The administration wants to make changes, but doesn’t want to be seen slowing things down. They can’t have both. States will have to be advised that they should either slow down or stop doing subgrantee selection.

3. Some kind of limit on spending, per location. This could be fine. There weren’t any cases of a state planning to spend hundreds of thousands to connect one location anyway. However, if it’s heavy handed or imposed in a manner that ignores the needs of rural communities, it could be very bad – more on that below.

4. Changes to the treatment of fiber and satellite. Generally, even though the law pretty clearly requires that fiber builds be the program’s “priority projects,” the administration wants to increase the usage of low-earth satellites and diminish the usage of fiber.

5. The NTIA team will try to persuade the administration to embrace the best version of their chosen direction, and the BEAD team – especially the program officers out in the states – will do everything they can to support the states in conducting the program and dealing with changes.

He goes on to list what he considers are likely impacts of the changes.

1. Delays in getting broadband to the people. Some states are on the 1 yard line. A bunch are on the 5 yard line. More will be getting there every week. These more-sweeping changes will only cause delays. The administration could fix the problems with the program via waiver and avoid slowdowns. Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection.

2. More people will get Starlink/Kuiper, and fewer people will get fiber connection. This could be dramatic, or it could be measured, depending on where the admin sets the threshold limit, and whether states are permitted to award projects above the new threshold on the basis of value per dollar, or if they’re forced to take the cheapest proposal, even if it provides poorer service.

3. The 3 states with approved Final Proposals remain in limbo. They are currently held in NIST review regarding their proposed FPFRs (the budgets accompanying their approved final proposals).

This makes no sense – these states are ready to go, and they got the job done on time, on budget, and have plans that achieve universal coverage. If the administration cares about getting shovels in the ground, states with approved Final Proposals should move forward, ASAP.

4. West Virginia (and soon additional states) who have completed their work, but don’t have approved Final Proposals also remain in limbo. They have a final proposal ready to go that gets exceptional service to all West Virginia homes and businesses. Like the three states with approved Final Proposals, only the current administration stands between them and getting shovels in the ground. If the administration cares about getting things done, they should allow any state that comes forward with a Final Proposal under the old rules in the next couple of months move forward with that plan.

5. No decision has been made about how much of the existing progress the 30 states who are already performing subgrantee selection should be allowed to keep. The administration simply cannot say whether the time, taxpayer funds, and private capital that were spent on those processes will be wasted and how much states will have to re-do.

6. The wireless industry will be, effectively, shut out of the BEAD program. There will be few, if any, locations that are above any new cost limit that will be able to be more cheaply served by fixed wireless than low earth satellites.

You can read the remainder of the email in Silverman’s screenshots below.

A set of iPhone 17 dummies appeared last night in a new leak from Sonny Dickson, who has a long history of reliably leaking the nonfunctional versions of iPhones that case and accessory makers use to prepare for the next year’s crop of handsets. The images look very much like the renders we’ve seen in recent weeks, down to the phone-spanning camera bump that Apple is expected to add to all but the standard iPhone 17.

Dickson includes shots of the dummies from all sides. The edge-on shots here really do a good job showing how big of a difference there will be between the rumored iPhone 17 Air and the others. The rest of the iPhone line, which I have never thought of as especially thick, looks absolutely beefy by comparison. Take a look:

The dummies appear to back up rumors that the iPhone 17 Air will be a 6.6-inch phone, positioning it in between the 6.3-inch iPhone 16 Pro and 6.9-inch 16 Pro Max of this year. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reiterates that it’s going to have a 6.6-inch screen in today’s Power On newsletter. Apple had considered making it 6.9 inches, he writes, but “pulled the plug on that over fears that a thin device with a giant screen would be susceptible to bending.” He adds that the phone will get slim bezels like 16 Pro phones, a Dynamic Island cutout, and Camera Control button — which Dickson’s dummy photos seem to support.

The iPhone 17 Air is expected to be as thin as 5.5mm, with a single camera on the back like the iPhone 16E. Gurman writes that the phone will get a mix of high-end features, like a 120Hz ProMotion display, and low-end ones, like an Apple A19 chip instead of an A19 Pro. Despite its thinness, he says it will have battery life on par with other iPhones. Finally, he expects the phone will cost “roughly $900,” or about what the iPhone 16 Plus starts at now.

If people take to the 17 Air, Gurman says Apple plans to do more ambitious things with it, like make it the port-free iPhone that rumors have swirled about for years now. He says the company may bring the thin approach to other models, too, and again says that the methods and technologies used to make the 17 Air are part of Apple’s preparations to release its first folding phone — one similar to the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold, but with a less-visible crease — by 2026. The Information made a similar folding iPhone prediction in June last year.

There are probably a lot of simple tasks you do repeatedly on your phone, like muting it in a meeting, reducing the screen brightness late at night, or turning on the battery saver when you leave for work. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, then you have access to a Routines tool that can automate a lot of these for you.

Each Routine comes with a trigger and an action to carry out in response. Triggers cover times, locations, and phone states (like Do Not Disturb and low battery), while the actions cover most of the phone settings (including notifications, display settings, and Bluetooth) and can also launch apps or specific functions (like making your phone vibrate or turning on the flashlight).

There are lots of possibilities here. You can disable notifications while you’re using Samsung Health to exercise, mute your phone when you have a meeting, or bring up the weather forecast when you dismiss your morning alarm. You can also combine multiple triggers and actions, making the feature even more versatile. Routines can be launched manually, as well.

If you want inspiration, Samsung has provided some Routines you can use to get yourself started. From Settings, select Modes an …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Angry Miao is known for ridiculous, over-the-top mechanical keyboard designs, but now it’s made a gaming mouse that’s, you guessed it: ridiculous and over-the-top. It’s also cool as all hell, starts at $125 on a Kickstarter preorder special ending March 17th, and may be my new favorite mouse. 

The AM Infinity Mouse has a skeletonized magnesium-alloy shell that weighs just 49 grams, making it one of the lightest full-size mice on the market. Within its hollowed-out, super lightweight black chassis is a magnetic battery that can be popped out and swapped in seconds. A spare is kept charged and at the ready on the mouse’s 2.4GHz receiver. This functionality gives the mouse its name, as Angry Miao claims hot-swapping equals “infinite” battery. Just like how my fridge has infinite ice cubes, obviously.

The Infinity Mouse’s more conventional features include an 8,000Hz polling rate for minimal input latency, even with high-refresh monitors. Its PixArt PAW3950 optical sensor is capable of 30,000 DPI so you can make the mouse as ridiculously sensitive as you want. And its new TTC Orange Dot Optical V2 micro switches have a nice tactile click, sensitive enough to confidentl …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 75, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you have some time to kill this weekend, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) 

This week, I’ve been reading about Benson Boone and Tyler Cowen and EV factories and YouTube yoga, catching up on old episodes of Smartypants, making a rare trek to the theater to see Black Bag, swapping in Duck.ai for my chatbot and AI search needs, getting rehooked on the Tick, Tick… Boom! soundtrack, giving my Remarkable tablet another whirl, and desperately trying to find a pair of noise-canceling headphones with a half-decent microphone. No luck so far.

I also have for you a couple of big new Netflix releases, a great new podcast (and a new way to listen to it), a cozy game with great vibes, and much more. Streaming-heavy week this week! Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you watching / reading / playing / buying / building / cutting out of construction paper this week? Tell me everything: [email protected]. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tel …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Virgin Atlantic announced a partnership with California-based Joby Aviation to launch an air taxi service in the UK, becoming the latest airline to bet on a new class of electric aircraft vying to become taxis in the sky.

Joby’s all-electric aircraft has six rotors and seats five, including the pilot. The vehicle can take off vertically, like a helicopter, and then shift into forward flight using tilt rotors. Joby says it can reach a top speed of 200mph, travel 150 miles on a single battery charge, and is 100 times quieter than a conventional aircraft.

Under the partnership, customers will be able to book a seat in one of Joby’s multi-rotor aircraft through the Virgin Atlantic website and app. The vehicles will be co-branded with Joby and Virgin Atlantic logos. But the UK service will need to wait until Joby has acquired type certification, which means the aircraft meets all the FAA’s design and safety standards, and then launched its US-based service.

Air taxi operators face a number of hurdles before they become a reality, including safety regulations and airport designs. Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority has started looking into how airports would need to be reevaluated for air taxi flights, including charging and air space.

Joby and Virgin Atlantic envision 15-minute flights from Manchester Airport to Leeds, or 8-minute journeys from Heathrow Airport to Canary Wharf. Joby is planning a network of landing locations around the UK, and expects to offer prices that are comparable with “existing premium ground ridesharing options at launch.”

Virgin Atlantic isn’t the first airline to team up with Joby. The startup scored a $200 million investment from Delta Air Lines in 2022. (Delta owns a 49 percent stake in Virgin Atlantic.) And last year, Toyota said it would dump $500 million into Joby. However, Virgin Atlantic is not investing in Joby as part of the partnership, the companies said.

Air taxis, sometimes misidentified by the mainstream media as “flying cars,” are essentially helicopters without the noisy, polluting gas motors (though they certainly have their own unique noise profile). In addition to Joby, companies like Archer Aviation, Volocopter, and Beta Technologies have claimed they are on the cusp of launching services that will eventually scale up nationwide. But others have floundered; German company Lilium recently said that two of its subsidiaries were insolvent and could cease operations.

Joby said recently it has made record progress in completing four of the five stages required for commercial passenger service in the US, and expects to carry its first passengers late this year or early next. The company has also recently delivered a second aircraft to the US Air Force as part of a testing partnership.

Joby got a boost recently, when the Federal Aviation Administration published highly anticipated final regulations for eVTOL vehicles that it says will chart the path for the “air travel of the future.” But its unclear whether those rules will go into effect, after the FAA ordered a pause to allow the Trump administration to review them. A long review could stretch Joby’s timeline out beyond the 2025 target date it set for a taxi service launch.

Court documents filed Friday in an ongoing lawsuit against the US Treasury Department reveal that a 25-year-old staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) violated Treasury policy by sending a spreadsheet that had personal information to two other members of the Trump administration, reports Bloomberg. 

The staffer, a former employee at Elon Musk’s X and SpaceX companies named Marko Elez, had been tasked with combing through the Treasury’s payments system, but resigned in early February over racist social media posts that were linked to him. DOGE has since rehired him to work at the Social Security Administration.

19 state attorneys general sued the Treasury Department in February over DOGE’s access. Since then, the department has claimed that Elez was “mistakenly” given read and write access. DOGE’s access to its systems has been limited by a court order that the government is trying to have modified, Bloomberg writes.

According to the Treasury’s Friday filing, the department analyzed Elez’s laptop and email account, finding that he “did not make any alterations or changes to Bureau payment systems,” but did email a spreadsheet containing “a name (a person or an entity), a transaction type, and an amount of money” to two unnamed officials at the US General Services Administration.

The Treasury writes that the document is low-risk, as it didn’t contain sensitive identifiers like a social security number or birth date. However, it says Elez violated policy by not encrypting the document or getting proper approval to send it.

In a separate court document from Friday, the states suing the Treasury said that the results of the analysis “do nothing to allay any of the concerns expressed by the court in its opinion about the rushed and chaotic nature of the Treasury DOGE Team onboarding process.”

Sonos chief innovation officer Nick Millington says in an update published yesterday that he and his team are “100% focused” on understanding and addressing issues with the Sonos app. It’s the latest in a series of Millington’s posts sharing his team’s progress as it tries to restore features that were left out of the app’s controversial redesign in May last year.

Here’s what Millington, the original Sonos system architect who is tasked with fixing the app, has to say about the effort:

The team and I remain 100% focused on two important priorities:

1. understanding the root cause of every single customer issue, whether big or small, whether common or rare, and making sure the technical performance of the app meets or exceeds what you have come to expect from Sonos.

2. closing gaps in the functionality and usability of the new app relative to what you enjoyed before, in a priority order that is as responsive as possible to the feedback we receive from you.

Millington says users who have shared diagnostic information have “sharpened” the team’s focus, leading to several improvements. In previous updates on the page going back to October, he has promised several features were on their way, such as alarm snoozing, better queue management, and playlist editing. He points out that you can once again snooze alarms, and says users can check the battery of portable Sonos Move and Roam speakers when they’re in standby.

But the work has been slow-going and Sonos still hasn’t added playlist editing back, nor the ability for a user to queue an entire folder from their local music library. According to Millington, both are on their way in “upcoming releases.”

Columbia Pictures has tapped District 9 director Neill Blomkamp to write and direct a new Starship Troopers film, according to The Hollywood Reporter, giving the franchise its first live-action entry since 2008’s Starship Troopers 3: Marauder.

The movie will be based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 book of the same name, not a remake of or sequel to 1997’s Paul Verhoeven-directed Starship Troopers, say the outlet’s unnamed sources. In that movie, characters played by Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris, and Michael Ironside are part of a comically jingoist militaristic society at war with space bugs. Blomkamp’s wife, Terri Tatchell, will reportedly co-produce the new Troopers movie. The outlet does not say when it’s expected to debut.

Heinlein’s book has been criticized for celebrating military fascism — criticism that extended to Verhoeven’s movie when it was released, as The Hollywood Reporter notes. These days, it’s generally accepted that his movie was meant as a send-up of the book. In a Kennedy Center interview, Verhoeven said he’d hoped to show those who applaud the kind of over-the-top jingoism it presents that “what you have been admiring … might be evil.”

Blomkamp has unsuccessfully tried to make movies in other sci-fi franchises, including a sequel to the Verhoeven-directed RoboCop called RoboCop Returns. He’d also planned a new Alien franchise film, but that was put on hold in favor of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus follow-up, Alien: Covenant. Most recently, he directed Gran Turismo.

There’s a moment in Metallica, the new three-song concert video Apple released for the Vision Pro yesterday, where Metallica lead singer James Hetfield is kneeling on the edge of the stage, engaged with a single fist-pumping audience member. Hetfield leans in to within inches of his face as he and the fan scream, before the singer stands and moves on. The spotlight follows Hetfield away but the camera stays put, lingering as the concert-goer reacts to what just happened. He falls back against the crowd and then pitches forward, steadying himself on the stage, then buries his face in his elbow, crying.

In a lot of ways, Metallica is like any other concert video, frequently cutting between shots of the band members as they trot around the stage, others of the fans, both in closeups and in flyover shots that points straight down at them from above. (There are so many smartphones!) The roughly 25-minute video from a Mexico City show features three Metallica songs — “Whiplash,” “One,” and “Enter Sandman” — interspersed with documentary-style footage and voiceover from Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, bassist Robert Trujillo, and guitarist Kirk Hammett.

Apple’s 180-degree video format, combined with high production values and the Vision Pro’s sharp displays, ends up adding a lot of extra flavor. That moment with Hetfield and the fan is already very good concert video direction, but this presentation gives a visceral, emotional heft that I think would be hard to capture in 2D. The feeling that I was almost there as the camera tracked behind a cigar-smoking, life-sized-to-me Hetfield on his way to the stage made me think, “Oh wow, he’s tall.“ I got chills when “One” started (I’m a Person Of A Certain Age; I can’t help it), but I could practically feel my aging feet and lower back start to ache as Hammett stretched the song out with a lengthy solo and the crowd, which now had nothing to sing along to, lost some of its energy. The audience still went nuts for “Enter Sandman” after that, of course.

The Vision Pro’s Apple Immersive collection has gotten better in the last few months with the release of videos like The Weeknd: Open Hearts and the scripted fictional short film Submerged. Both are great, but although I’ve enjoyed the rest of the catalog, it often feels like its content is serving the immersive format, not the other way around. Metallica, on the other hand, isn’t just a good immersive video; it’s a good concert video, and it sets a bar that Apple should strive to keep meeting.

Spring has (almost) sprung, but if you’re looking to get a headstart on the array of seasonal sales that are surely on the horizon, Valve has you covered. That’s because now until 1PM ET on March 20th, PC gamers can save on a smorgasbord of great titles as part of the Steam Spring Sale, which encapsulates everything from classic Japanese RPGs and newer deckbuilding titles to one truly hellish shooter.

The bulk of the deals are not necessarily “new,” though they are a great way to catch up on newer games you may have missed and revisit landmark titles from gaming’s past. For instance, if you’ve been itching to revisit Chrono Trigger in honor of the game’s 30th anniversary this week, you can now snag Square Enix’s fabled SNES RPG for $3.74 (about $11 off). Want something modern? Cyberpunk 2077 is down to $42.76 (about $40 off) with its excellent Phantom Liberty expansion, while the 2016 Doom reboot is going for a mere $1.99 ($18 off).

It’s not all about studios with a AAA budget, either. Collectible card games like Inscryption (now $7.99) and Slay the Spire (now $6.24) — both of which offer deep mechanics and various roguelike elements — are steeply discounted this weekend, while the bullet hell survival game that is Vampire Survivors is going for $3.74 (about $1 off). And if you know nothing about the latter, well, rest assured there is now an official wiki that outlines any question you might ever think to ask.

More ways to save right now

• There’s been a spate of terrific Sonos deals over the last couple of weeks; however, if you’re looking for something somewhat budget-friendly, you can still grab Sonos Ray at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for $179 ($100 off). The 22-inch stereo soundbar makes some concessions to keep the cost down (RIP, HDMI), but it still manages to deliver excellent dialogue clarity and crisp, balanced sound that one-ups most other soundbars in its price range. It also taps into the rest of the Sonos ecosystem, naturally, and supports AirPlay 2 for streaming from various Apple devices. Read our review.
• Sleep Awareness Week is a thing, apparently, and the reason why Headspace has dropped the price of its annual subscription to $41.99 ($28 off) through March 18th. A subscription grants you access to a robust catalog of well-curated sleepcasts, not to mention guided meditation sessions, focus music, and daily inspirational videos. The app’s searchability and the gradual progression of the courses remain the best parts of Headpace, though, especially if you’re a relative newcomer to mindfulness exercises.
• If PC games aren’t your thing, Sony’s new Astro Bot PlayStation 5 bundle, which pairs a 1TB PS5 “slim” with last year’s Game of the Year, is now available for $449 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart. It doesn’t come with Team Asobi’s adorable Astro Bot Dualsense controller or any sort of limited edition styling, sadly, but it is $50 cheaper than picking up a standalone PS5 console. You can also grab the bundle in a Digital Edition configuration at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart for $399. Read our Astro Bot review.

As we inch closer to the end of Severance’s second season, there are still a lot of open questions. But it’s also become clear that the show isn’t in a rush to answer them. Whereas many mystery box shows race to their conclusions, speeding through plot points so quickly that it can be hard to keep up, Severance has spent the latter part of this season meandering through flashbacks and spending some quality time with its characters. It’s a slower pace than other prestige streaming shows, but these episodes have helped show just how fascinating a place Severance’s bizarre world is. They’ve also helped set the show up for the finale — and answers — to come.

Spoilers ahead for Severance, up to season 2, episode 9.

It all started with the seventh episode, which shifted the focus from the Macrodata Refinement crew to center on Gemma (Dichen Lachman) and the nightmarish procedures and tests she was put through to become the calm and collected Ms. Casey. That was followed by a trip down memory lane for Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who went back to her hometown, an isolated fishing village that was also previously home to a Lumon Industries ether plant. The story sp …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Star of Providence is like a retro game I would have loved as a kid. But the roguelike bullet hell shooter is also a modern twin-stick shooter, and the melding of the two eras results in a fun, fast, and challenging experience.

In Star, you control a ship and explore randomly generated dungeons. As you navigate room by room — similar to an old-school Legend of Zelda game — you’ll pick up powerful weapons to fight the many enemies you’ll stumble across in your dungeon crawling.

The weapons are a delight, filling your screen with bullets and lasers. Sometimes, you’ll get cool effects like the ability for your bullets to phase through one side of the screen and appear on the other. But enemies can also spew out huge amounts of bullets, and that means many rooms turn into chaos as you weave through attack patterns to line up a perfect shot. The game’s narrow aspect ratio makes rooms feel pretty small, too (though I appreciate how it adds to the retro vibe).

Star’s controls are tight, so it always feels like you can thread the needle to escape danger. A useful dash can get you out of rough spots. And you can deploy bombs to clear bullets from a room, but they can take …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When you’re starting a new sports league, or really a new anything, you’re always praying for your first viral moment.

For TGL, a new golf league hoping to reinvent the game for a new era and a new audience, that moment came before the first season ever started. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf world’s biggest name and both a player and co-founder in the upstart league, showed up to a not-quite-finished SoFi Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where all TGL matches would soon be held. He stood near the center of the stadium, on a football field-sized slab of turf, and started hitting balls into the 53-foot-high simulator screen. 

The next part seems to make TGL producer Jeff Neubarth laugh every time he tells it. He recounts it to me, months later, standing in almost the exact same spot. Neubarth points up to a tiny camera, barely visible five stories up atop that huge screen. “That’s camera 91,” he says. “I pointed it out to Tiger, and I said, ‘It’d be cool if you hit it.’ He said, ‘sure,’ dropped the ball, and hit it. First shot.”

The video of the ball flying upward and whacking the camera made the rounds on social media, before most people even knew …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Samsung’s flagship soundbar, the HW-Q990D, is being rendered useless for some owners after a faulty firmware update that the company rolled out this week. The sheer number of reports on Samsung’s community forums, Reddit, and AVSForum confirm that something has gone very wrong with the premium Dolby Atmos system in recent days. The issue isn’t limited to any specific region, with customers in the United States, Austria, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other countries all sharing in the frustration.

Customers say the soundbar has gone unresponsive and that none of the usual factory reset methods are working; affected units are also inaccessible via Samsung’s SmartThings app. The device powers on, but appears to freeze on the TV eARC input — with no sound output to speak of.

The culprit seems to be the latest firmware release, which is version 1020.7. Many Q990Ds are set to automatically install new updates, which has led to widespread complaints about the bad software over the last several days. If you’ve got a Samsung soundbar, it might be wise to disable automatic updates for the time being until this situation has cleared up. There are scattered reports of the same bug impacting other Samsung models like the HW-Q800D and HW-S801D, but the bulk of complaints pertain to the Q990D. It’s one of the most well-reviewed soundbars on the market, so this is an unfortunate development.

The Verge has reached out to Samsung for comment. Apparently some customers have already been instructed to send in their Q990D hardware for repair. That seems like a worst case scenario, so hopefully Samsung will have an easier, at-home solution once it realizes the scope of this problem. Can the malfunction be resolved with another firmware update in the coming days? Stay tuned.

Thanks for the tip, Eric.

Google is rolling out a Find My Device app feature update that shows a map of your friends and the family members who share their location with you, 9to5Google reports. The new feature was announced in the Android March feature update last week and is now available for more users.

There’s already a way for friends and family to see each other’s shared locations in Google Maps. Now, the Android Find My Device app does double duty, making it easier to find both things and people in one place. The map also shows the locations of friends who share from Google Maps on iOS.

In the app on Android, you can tap the new People tab to show the locations of any contacts that are sharing their location with you. You can also switch to a tab that shows who you’re sharing your location with and gives you options such as changing the duration you share your location with someone.

Google’s interface is now more reminiscent of Apple’s Find My app, which features a similar split-screen UI with a map on top and devices or people on the bottom, depending whether you’re viewing items or people.

The Trump administration is embarking on a massive university speech crackdown, starting with Columbia University, where it’s demanding external control of entire departments and punishment for student activists. Its first test case, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student with a green card, offers a hint of what’s to come: a state of intentional chaos that undermines free speech and due process rights. Thus far, Columbia appears to be complying with the administration’s demands, even as its students gear up to fight back.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents raided Columbia University’s campus on Thursday night, looking for students in two residential buildings, according to a university-wide email sent by Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong. At a press conference on Friday, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is investigating whether student protesters at Columbia violated federal terrorism laws and that it would prosecute “any person engaging in material support of terrorism.” Hours before the raids, Columbia received a joint letter from three government agencies demanding that it punish student protesters; empower “in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Ashly Burch, the award-winning voice and performance actor behind Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy — one of the most prominent characters on PlayStation today — has some news and some very strong thoughts about the leaked Sony experiment that saw her character voiced and performed by AI technology instead of her or any other human being.

The video, originally shared with The Verge by a tipster and later pulled off YouTube by a copyright enforcement company that counts Sony PlayStation as a client, was of an internal prototype — not necessarily something that’s in production for actual games. Burch says Horizon developer Guerilla proactively confirmed to her that it is not actively in development. Nor did it use her voice or facial data, Guerilla claimed. 

But Burch says having seen the demo, she is worried, and not just about her own career. “I feel worried about this art form,” she says. You can watch her video immediately below, or scroll down for a transcript. 

The transcript:

Hi. Let’s talk about AI Aloy. I saw the tech demo earlier this week. Guerilla reached out to me to let me know that the demo didn’t reflect anything that was actively in development. They didn’t use any of my performance for the demo, so none of my facial or voice data. And Guerilla owns Aloy as a character.

So all that said, I feel worried. And not worried about Guerilla specifically or Horizon or my performance or my career specifically, even. I feel worried about this art form. Game performance as an art form.

We are currently on strike. SAG-AFTRA is on strike against video games because of AI. Because this technology exists, because we know that game companies want to use it, we’re asking for protections.

So currently what we’re fighting for is that you have to get our consent before you make an AI version of us in any form. You have to compensate us fairly and you have to tell us how you’re using this AI double.

And I feel worried not because the technology exists. Not even because game companies want to use it. Because of course they do. They always want to use technological advancements.

I just imagine a video like this coming out that does have someone’s performance attached to it. That does have someone’s voice or face or movement. And the possibility that if we lose this fight, that person would have no recourse.

They wouldn’t have any protections. Any way to fight back. And that possibility… it makes me so sad. It hurts my heart. It scares me.

I love this industry and this art form so much and I want there to be a new generation of actors. I want there to be so many more incredible game performances.

I want to be able to continue, to do this job, and if we don’t win, then that future is really compromised.

In a slightly longer TikTok version of the video, which we’ve embedded above to replace the original Instagram copy, Burch adds that “I’m genuinely not trying to put any game company specifically on blast, certainly not Guerilla. The technology isn’t the problem. Game companies wanting to use the technology is not the problem. The problem is we’re currently on strike, and the bargaining group will not agree to give us common sense protections.”

It’s unusual for performers who have such a close relationship with game companies to speak out like this, but we’re also in an unusual moment: as she points out, video game actors are on strike right now, specifically because of AI, and the very idea that a company like Sony is explicitly building and demonstrating ways to potentially replace actors like Burch is exactly what the striking workers fear.

In addition to starring in Horizon Zero Dawn, Burch has had minor roles in other Sony games including The Last of Us Part II and Spider-Man, but is otherwise best known for playing Chloe Price in the Life Is Strange games, Tiny Tina in Borderlands, and from the live-action D&D roleplaying series Critical Role and Apple TV Plus’s Mythic Quest, where she also serves as a writer.

Update, March 14th: Swapped Instagram video for Burch’s longer uncut TikTok video and added its additional context.