Unlike previous models, the latest Fire TV Stick 4K Max can showcase artwork and widgets when idle.
Planning on spending your Sunday watching the 97th annual Academy Awards or catching up on the latest episode of Severance? If you don’t already own a smart TV, Amazon’s latest Fire TV Stick 4K Max can make setup easy and inexpensive, especially now that it’s down to just $39.99 ($20 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target. That’s just $7 shy of its lowest price to date and the best price we’ve seen this year.
Amazon’s newest 4K-capable streaming device functions a lot like its predecessor, only with a few added benefits. It features an upgraded processor for faster performance, for one thing, along with twice the storage (16GB vs. 8GB) and support for Wi-Fi 6E. It also can function more akin to an Echo Show when idle, allowing you to check the weather, gloss reminders, and view a host of widgets at a glance. You can also have it display famous works of art or a series of AI-generated images, which you can personalize with a simple Alexa prompt.
Additionally, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max provides access to a wide selection of streaming apps and Dolby Atmos, allowing for more immersive audio. It offers broad HDR support — including support for Dolby Vision and HDR10 Plus — and works impressively well with Alexa, to the point where you can make commands as specific as “Alexa, turn to ESPN on Sling TV” via the included Alexa remote. Admittedly, the interface is too Prime-centric for some of us at The Verge, but hey, they can’t all be as slick as Google’s TV Streamer.
More deals and discounts
All eyes were on Framework’s 4.5-liter gaming desktop this week, but if you could care less for customizable aesthetics and AMD’s Strix Halo, Apple’s M4 Mac Mini is on sale at Amazon with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage starting at $557 ($42 off). The step-up M4 Pro model offers faster Thunderbolt 5 storage and the option to upgrade to 10-gigabit ethernet; however, the compact entry-level configuration remains a fantastic value with outstanding performance and plenty of I/O. Read our review.
Nomad’s annual Overstock Saleis in full effect, giving you a chance to save up to 70 percent on chargers, cables, cases, and a variety of other goods through Monday, March 3rd. Personally, I’m partial to the Modern Leather Foio case for the iPhone 16 (now $49 $70) and the second-gen Stand One charger (now $88 $110), the latter of which features a hefty metal-and-glass design and can provide up to 15W of power to MagSafe-equipped iPhones. That being said, Nomad is also discounting a ton of “vintage” accessories, meaning you’re in luck if you’ve been holding out for a premium leather case for your *checks notes* Google Pixel 4.
I’ve been eagerly awaiting Thomas Ricker’s review of the forthcoming Aurzen Zip, which is still available on Kickstarter for $299 ($100 off) thanks to early bird pricing. The tri-fold projector — which is slated to launch later this month — can mirror your iPhone or Android device in portrait or landscape orientation, yet it’s compact enough that you can place it just about anywhere. It also offers 100 lumens of brightness and up to 80 minutes of battery life, though, sadly, it can’t stream from services like Netflix, Disney Plus, or Amazon Prime due to DRM restrictions.
Google Photos makes backing up photos and videos from your phone pretty seamless: set it to work in the background and all your precious memories are saved to the cloud without you having to do anything else. Â
The smoothness of this process does tend to mean you can find yourself with a rather gigantic collection, however â which then creates its own problems when it comes to finding specific items in your ever-growing library. But even if you have a photo library spanning decades, there are tools to help.
These are some of the search tricks you can try to find images and videos in Google Photos.
Search by person (or pet)
Google Photos can recognize people and pets in your photos, and it can even recognize individuals as they age over time.Â
In the web app, you search for a person or pet via the search box atop the Google Photos interface or via the People and pets link on the left-hand navigation panel.Â
In the mobile app, use the search icon at the bottom right of the screen.
If youâve never identified the person before or if the algorithm doesnât recognize them, you will have to help out with the identification.
First, make sure face grouping is enabled …
Of all of my favorite games, Sayonara Wild Hearts might be the hardest to describe. Itâs a rhythm game, but also you ride on a motorcycle and a dragon, wield giant swords while dodging fireballs, and teleport to a retrofuturistic VR world. Itâs structured like a pop album, telling a story of love and loss, and is narrated by Queen Latifah. Itâs Tony Hawkâs Pro Skater meets R-Type crossed with Rhythm Heaven as directed by Carly Rae Jepsen. It makes sense once you play it, trust me.
This was all true when the game first launched in 2019 on the Switch and PS4 (it was also on Apple Arcade, but has since been removed). But now is a good time to check it out if you havenât. The game just launched on the PS5 â itâs a free upgrade if you have it on PS4 â which adds some performance improvements and a new endless mode called remix arcade that you can read more about here. Really, though, the new platform is just an excellent excuse to dive back into this world.
Sayonara Wild Hearts follows the story of a young heartbroken woman who is transported to an alternate realm where she must restore harmony by collecting lots of hearts. To do this, you play through a series of 23 …
It may look a little like a Surface Pro, but if you squint you’ll notice it’s not boring.
The beefy Windows gaming tablet is back, and itâs done two things I thought impossible. It made me respect integrated graphics, and it convinced me a Windows tablet can be fun.
The Asus ROG Flow Z13 is a 13-inch tablet with a detachable keyboard, a bright screen, and the guts of a gaming laptop. I knew it was something special when I used a clamp-on controller to turn a preproduction model into some kind of superpowered, supersized Steam Deck. In daily use, it’s more like a husky Surface Pro, with an AMD Strix Halo processor featuring powerful integrated graphics for gaming and a battery that lasts a full workday in non-gaming tasks. It’s a charming and versatile device that could plausibly replace a desktop, laptop, and a tablet or handheld for a certain type of PC gamer â one who doesnât mind the $2,100 starting price.
The ROG Flow Z13 is a tablet thatâs also trying to be a hardcore gaming machine. It has a 13.4-inch, 180Hz IPS touchscreen with pen support, 32GB of unified memory (up to 128GB), a 1TB m.2 SSD, and ample port selection, starting at $2,099.99. The Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 APU in our $2,299.99 review unit offers surprisingly good gaming performance, especial …
Amazon’s Panos Panay announced Alexa Plus last week, representing a renewed focus on software for the company’s troubled consumer electronics division.
The biggest surprise at Amazonâs press conference last week was the lack of hardware announcements. Traditionally, Amazon announces dozens of new gadgets at its events, but this time, Amazon spent 70 minutes talking about software. Specifically, Alexa Plus, its new generative AI-powered Alexa voice assistant. And that was exactly the right move.
Over the past decade, the company has spent way too much money building cheap hardware for Alexa that no one really likes, developing home robots and flying indoor cameras no one really needs, and wasting efforts on failed ways for people to interact with Alexa (the Loop, the Microwave, the Clock, and so on), all while the core technology itself stagnated.
But with the launch of Alexa Plus, Amazon has finally taken a big step toward that goal. The voice assistant has been âone hundred percent re-architected,” Amazonâs head of …
Mozilla is revising its new Terms of Use for Firefox introduced on Wednesday following criticisms over language that seemed to give the company broad ownership over user data. With the change, “we’re updating the language to more clearly reflect the limited scope of how Mozilla interacts with user data,” the company says in a Friday post.
The particular language that drew criticism was:
When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.
That language has been removed. Now, the language in the terms says:
You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.
“We’ve been listening to some of our community’s concerns with parts of the TOU, specifically about licensing,” the company says. “Our intent was just to be as clear as possible about how we make Firefox work, but in doing so we also created some confusion and concern.”
Friday’s post additionally provides some context about why the company has “stepped away from making blanket claims that ‘We never sell your data.’” Mozilla says that “in some places, the LEGAL definition of ‘sale of data’ is broad and evolving,”and that “the competing interpretations of do-not-sell requirements does leave many businesses uncertain about their exact obligations and whether or not they’re considered to be ‘selling data.’”
Mozilla says that “there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners” so that Firefox can be “commercially viable,” but it adds that it spells those out in its privacy notice and works to strip data of potentially identifying information or share it in aggregate.
Friday’s post follows an update added to the original Wednesday announcement to try and clarify things.
For the last couple years, it has been evident that Google co-founder Sergey Brin is back in the building. This week, he sent a clear message to hundreds of employees in Googleâs DeepMind AI division, known as GDM: the pressure to win the AGI race is on.
âIt has been 2 years of the Gemini program and GDM,â begins his note, which The New York Times first reported on yesterday and Iâm publishing below in full. âWe have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. At the same time competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot. I think we have all the ingredients to win this race but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.â
Brin goes on to recommend that Googleâs AI teams work longer hours (â60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivityâ), come into the office âat least every week day,â prioritize âsimple solutionsâ to problems, and generally move faster (âcan’t wait 20 minutes to run a bit of pythonâ). What stuck out the most to me was his last point: that Googleâs AI products âare overrun with filters and punts of various kinds.â According to Brin, Google needs to âtrust o …
Zapier informed customers on Friday that an âunauthorized userâ accessed âcertain Zapier code repositoriesâ and may have gained access to customer information as a result. The customer data had been âinadvertently copied to the repositories for debugging purposes,â according to an email obtained by The Verge.
The company says it became aware of the unauthorized access on Thursday. When it did, the company âimmediately secured access to the repositories and invalidated the unauthorized user’s access,â the email says. Zapier says that the incident âdid not affect any Zapier database, infrastructure or production, authentication, or payment systems.â
The code repos shouldnât have included customer data. But after auditing them, Zapier discovered that some information had been âinadvertentlyâ copied over. Zapierâs platform allows users to create automations that work across other companiesâ apps and services, potentially putting it in the middle of a lot of sensitive information.
The hacker was able to access the repositories because of a âtwo-factor authentication (2FA) misconfiguration on an employee’s account.â The company says it is now conduct …
It may be difficult to believe in this time of Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack, but at one point, Skype was one of the primary ways to make contact with friends, family, and colleagues. First released in 2003 and, after going through several owners, finally purchased by Microsoft in 2011, the app allowed you to make phone calls and eventually video calls over the internet. For its time, it was a major convenience.
Unfortunately, the once-popular app was fated to be neglected and ignored, and it has finally reached its end. Microsoft has announced that it is shutting Skype down on May 5th; current users will be encouraged to move to Teams or to export their data. But although Skype will be gone, the memories it evokes — not to mention the sound of its weird and wonderful ringtone — will stay with many of us for years to come.
Here are some thoughts from The Verge’s staff on Skype’s passing.
“Skype was my lifeline back home.”
In 2006, I was 18 and did a thing only brash teenagers could do: I left the country on my own to live in Japan for seven years. This was before smartphones, when you had to have international calling cards, and my family had only gotten high-speed internet access the year before. On the one hand, I was excited about an adventure in a place where I knew no one and wasn’t fluent in the local language. On the other hand, I was petrified.
Skype was my lifeline back home. All of my high school friends were on it, and it was cheaper than calling my family with expensive international minutes. The call quality wasn’t always great, and the time difference between Tokyo and New York City was tough. But in those early days, it was comforting to set up Skype dates with people who I knew loved me. That distinctive Skype ringtone was a reminder that I could always go home if I wanted to. Nearly a decade later, when my dad had to leave the US to receive more affordable medical treatment in Korea, Skype was the only video chat software he knew how to use. It became the main way I could see him for several months before his health declined.
Eventually, we all moved on to other chat and video apps. My Japanese friends all use LINE, and my Korean family all uses KakaoTalk. FaceTime, Zoom, and Google Meet pretty much cover the rest of my friends. I haven’t thought of Skype in a hot second. But now that it’s going away, I am grateful it was there for me during some of the hardest moments of my life. – Victoria Song, senior reviewer
“Those long-distance calls were expensive if you didn’t use Skype”
Remember the first iPhone? No, not that one. Infogear sold products under the name beginning in 1998. It was acquired by Cisco, which later sold Linksys-branded iPhones. (Yes, there was a lawsuit over it.) I remember reviewing the Linksys iPhone CIT400 — otherwise known as a “Skype phone” — in 2007.
Although there were a couple of competitors, it was relatively unique at the time since it allowed you to use Skype to place voice calls like you would on a normal household phone (remember those?). It was useful because my girlfriend (now wife) was living in Italy. And those long-distance calls were expensive if you didn’t use Skype! – Todd Haselton, deputy editor
“It became a cherished lifeline”
I actually avoided Skype right up until a few years before its demise. I don’t remember it being a popular “thing” in the UK when I was growing up. When I started jobs that required me to make overseas calls, however, it became a cherished lifeline. My mobile carrier outright blocked me from dialing non-UK numbers, and every attempt to correct the issue fizzled out. Instead, I found it was easier and cheaper to just download Skype and use credits when I needed to make those calls. It was good while it lasted :’-( – Jess Weatherbed, news writer
“We were using Skype for a lot of our productions”
When I first started producing podcasts at The Verge in 2015, we were using Skype for a lot of our productions. Before each taping of our show Ctrl-Walt-Delete, I’d sit in our VO booth on Skype with veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg in DC to make sure his Blue Yeti microphone was still operating with the software.
For our show Verge ESP, I remember having to buy Skype credits to call the phone numbers of guests who didn’t have / want to use a Skype account.
When The Vergecast was live on YouTube every Thursday, we used Skype’s NDI (Network Device Interface) to bring remote guests onto the show, which was the best software for our needs in the live control room at the time.
However, once Zoom took over, that was the end of using the buggy Skype software. – Andru Marino, senior producer
“If a writer couldn’t get to the studio … Skype worked”
For decades now, my partner Jim Freund has been the host of a radio show called Hour of the Wolf on listener-sponsored NYC station WBAI-FM. He talks about science fiction and fantasy, and over the years, he has interviewed a lot of authors.
For many of those years, if a writer couldn’t get to the studio to talk and read from their work, Skype worked. It was easy to use — the most tech-nervous author could be talked through the downloading and registering process — and the quality of the resulting recording was better than you’d get over a phone. And if the writer was overseas, the cost wasn’t as prohibitive as if you’d used the landline.
But as time went on, Skype didn’t keep up. When Microsoft bought it in 2011, Jim was hopeful that this would mean better quality calls and more features — in other words, increased product support and development. However, Skype was, for the most part, ignored. As a result, especially with the increased popularity of Zoom and other apps, it became pretty much forgotten.
These days, if a guest is having trouble installing or understanding the video / podcasting software that Jim uses, and he suggests, “Well, we could use Skype instead,” the current answer is often, “Skype? What’s that?” When he told me that, I knew Skype was a thing of the past. – Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor
“All the actual components [were] recorded organic sounds like wind, water, pops, people’s voices,” says [Steve] Pearce. Wind, he says, provided the white noise in a notification. A bubble pop could be recorded from a ketchup bottle, a glass, or a human gasp or gulp. “We don’t like technical things, even though we are a technical company,” he adds.
“If you actually ask people to hum or sing the Skype ringtone, they can’t.”
Ironically, I listened to that ringtone so many times that, almost 10 years later, “doo dee doo, dee doo dee” popped into my head immediately. – Adi Robertson, senior editor, tech and policy
DOO DEE DOO — DEE DOO DEE. – Jay Peters, news editor
The United Kingdom dealt a significant blow in its war on encryption last week that, aside from blemishing Appleâs meticulously curated privacy commitments, could have worldwide ramifications for personal data protections. And while several days have passed since Apple pulled its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature from UK customers, other end-to-end encryption providers like Meta, Signal, and Telegram have yet to meaningfully take an official stand beyond some of their execs posting about it on social media.
The UK may have set a precedent for other global governments to follow when it reportedly ordered Apple to give it backdoor access to iCloud data. Under the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), the British government can legally demand user data be handed over for the purpose of national security and crime prevention. That seemingly includes worldwide data access, even if itâs tightly encrypted.
Some of these demands would be facilitated by controversial changes that were made to the IPA in April 2024 to expand its surveillance capabilities, like allowing intelligence services to access bulk personal datasets held by third parties and the UK government to interfere w …
You can show off your vinyl on the PP-1 which doesn’t have a visible tonearm or stylus. | Image: Waiting For Ideas
A Paris-based creative studio has announced a minimalist turntable with controls streamlined to just a play button and a volume knob. Waiting For Ideas’ PP-1 — short for Plug and Play — doesn’t even have a visible tonearm, and it’s made from a solid block of anodized aluminum requiring about 12 weeks of production time to manufacture. That makes it easier to understand why the PP-1 has a €5,800 (around $6,012) price tag.
Although companies like ELP of Japan sell turntables that swap needles and tonearms for laser pickups, the PP-1 does feature more traditional record player hardware. The studio worked with a company called Miniot that created a similarly minimal turntable lacking a visible tonearm. Waiting for Ideas adapted Miniot’s technology so that the PP-1’s inverted cartridge and stylus are hidden behind a closing door system and kept out of sight when there’s no record sitting on its platter.
There’s also no speed control dial on the PP-1. Miniot’s technology can automatically detect if a record needs to be played at 33 or 45 RPM, and constantly recalculates the speed of the motor to ensure optimal playback at all times.
It’s not only a striking piece of design, it’s also a high-quality turntable. But if you’re a vinyl enthusiast, you’ll need to remember to place your records upside down on the PP-1 to hear the tracks you want.
Power is supplied by a single 5V USB-C port, and the PP-1 features just a single 3.5-millimeter audio jack for connecting it to either active or passive speakers that require an additional amplifier.
If you’re looking for a complete sound system, Waiting For Ideas has also created a set of passive 85-decibel 80W speakers matching the dimensions of the PP-1. They’re now available for preorder for €3,200 (around $3,320) and will take 12 weeks to make. You’ll just need to budget for a separate amplifier because the studio unfortunately doesn’t make a matching one of those.
Tesla is planning to install dozens of Supercharger sites at Steak ‘n Shake locations across the country, according to an exchange between the companies on X. The companies have signed an agreement for over six sites, with over 20 more to come. And if Steak ‘n Shake gets its way, possibly 100 restaurants will see future Supercharger installations.
The way the news trickled out was a little weird, yet typical of how Elon Musk likes to use his social media platform, X, to publicize new information about his various companies.
Musk, a major Trump supporter who is fronting the DOGE-led effort to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, replied to the post that “the fries taste way better!” Steak ’n Shake responded by thanking him and asking whether Tesla planned on installing charging stations at its restaurants. To which Tesla’s Supercharger account replied:
6 sites signed already, 20+ sites in design review
Steak ‘n Shake responded again, suggesting 100 locations could serve as Supercharger sites.
Tesla has formed partnerships with restaurant and convenience store chains in the past, including Ruby Tuesday and Sheetz. The company is also currently building its own 1950s-style diner and drive-in movie theater, with over 30 charging stalls.
Tesla likely won’t be able to rely on federal funding for any new charging locations, after the Trump administration halted a $5 billion federal program to install new EV chargers. Tesla has received $31 million in funds from the program to install 539 DC fast-charging ports, which represents 6 percent of all funds distributed so far, according to a dashboard that tracks the spending.
Tina Nguyen is joining The Verge as a senior reporter, covering the Trump administration, Elon Muskâs takeover of the federal government, and the tech industryâs embrace of the MAGA movement. Nguyen joins The Verge from Puck, where she was a founding partner and national correspondent covering the evolution of the MAGA political ecosystem. Before that, Nguyen was a White House reporter for Politico and covered politics and media at Vanity Fair. She is the author of The MAGA Diaries: Life Among the Fanatics, Extremists, and True Believers that Created the Modern Right. She starts at The Verge this week.
âTina is deeply sourced in the world of MAGA politics and has extensively explored how Trump and his movement use the power of modern tech and social media,â says Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief at The Verge. âThatâs always been a Verge story, and it will only get more important as the tech giants work to curry favor and protection from an administration that is always and forever posting through it.â
âWhat I’ve observed over the past decade, and what the second Trump administration understands innately, is that technology and data is the river through which cultural …
Cold Wallet, Well Go USAâs new darkly comedic home invasion thriller from director Cutter Hodierne, becomes increasingly more absurd as it unfolds. At every turn, the movieâs heroes â a group of excitable retail investors â make unhinged choices that make them feel more like cartoons than people who have complex lives outside of Reddit. But in the filmâs story about how quickly big bets on crypto can go left, you can feel Cold Wallet tapping into something very real about what makes people believe that rugs can never be pulled from beneath their feet.
Cold Wallet tells the tale of Billy (Raúl Castillo), a down-on-his-luck father, who, after a nasty separation from his ex, decides to bet everything he has on a hot, new crypto coin called Tulip. Like his twitchy hacker friend Eva (Melonie Diaz) and MMA-obsessed buddy Dom (Tony Cavalero), Billy sees Tulip as an opportunity to radically change his lot in life. Itâs easy for the trio to pour their money into Tulip because they genuinely believe that the coinâs creator, Charles Hegel (Josh Brener), wants to make the world a better place for people like them. But when Tulipâs value suddenly tanks one day and Hegel â a …
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to fire the “vast majority” of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), agency employees — some using pseudonyms for fear of retaliation — told a federal court in sworn declarations.
Seven current and five former CFPB employees submitted the declarations as part of the National Treasury Employees Union case against Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought, who’s currently serving as the acting director of the CFPB. The union is seeking to halt the already in-progress dismantling of the financial services watchdog, which fields thousands of consumer complaints each week about financial products, and as of 2023, had returned $17.5 billion to consumers over 12 years through things like monetary compensation and canceled debts. Earlier this month,The Verge reported that roughly 20 technologists at the agency were suddenly fired on a weeknight, amid a broader swath of layoffs. The court has temporarily barred the CFPB from making further cuts.
Four of the seven current employees declined to provide their names publicly but offered to identify themselves to the court under seal. In the declarations, provided under penalty of perjury, the employees described a hasty firing process orchestrated by DOGE, with cursory thought as to who would handle consumer protection issues and CFPB data once the agency was gutted. The stop-work order at the agency has prevented staffers from even conducting necessary work “to maintain the security and stability of the CFPB’s computer systems,” according to one of the declarations.
One current employee, using the pseudonym Alex Doe, says that, around February 13th, their team “was directed to assist with terminating the vast majority of CFPB employees as quickly as possible.” Alex Doe described a three-phase approach: first, firing probationary employees who are newer to the agency; second, firing “approximately 1,200 additional employees, by eliminating whole offices, divisions, and units”; and third, terminating most of the remaining employees within 60-90 days, “leaving a Bureau that could not actually perform any functions, or no Bureau at all.”
The speed of the recent layoffs necessitated “bypassing several ordinary procedures, safeguards, and rules”
The CFPB is responsible for ensuring that companies offering financial services are not misleading consumers or skirting the law. Consumers could submit complaints to the agency about credit cards and loans, and the agency could also initiate enforcement actions and rulemakings, like the one it previously finalized to monitor large digital payment providers as it does banks.
The speed of the recent layoffs necessitated “bypassing several ordinary procedures, safeguards, and rules,” according to Alex Doe, who says that the timeline of the terminations was specifically dictated by DOGE employee Jordan Wick. Only a court order that temporarily prevented further firings stopped the remaining terminations from going through on Valentine’s Day, they add. The CFPB and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a meeting after the court order, CFPB chief operating officer Adam Martinez told staff that “he did not yet know what agency would perform a similar role for the CFPB or whether the Bureau itself would technically continue to exist with a small staff to perform those functions,” according to Alex Doe.
A second current employee, using the pseudonym Blake Doe, disputes Martinez’s declaration to the court that consumers who would have been served by the CFPB’s now-eliminated Student Loan Ombudsman could just turn to the agency’s general Ombudsman office. “That is not possible, however, because the employees of the general Ombudsman Office have been ordered not to perform any work,” writes Blake Doe. Contrary to Martinez’s declaration, Blake Doe says they’ve seen evidence that the CFPB was in communication with the Federal Reserve about how to return money there or to the Treasury.
“The hasty termination of almost all of the Bureau’s contracts resulted in systems and services being turned off before CFPB or contract personnel returned CFPB data.”
Other declarations raise issues about DOGE staffers’ privacy and security training to handle CFPB systems and concerns about where agency data — which could include HR and reasonable accommodation records — might end up.
A CFPB contracting officer going by the name of Charlie Doe says that contract termination notices they saw did not include the usual data preservation notices to ensure CFPB data is not lost. Between February 11th and 14th, the agency issued termination notices for over a hundred contracts, Charlie Doe says, including ones that maintain the consumer complaint database and ensure it’s scrubbed of personally identifiable information, ignoring feedback from employees about which contracts were necessary to keep to follow the law.
“The hasty termination of almost all of the Bureau’s contracts resulted in systems and services being turned off before CFPB or contract personnel returned CFPB data,” a fourth employee, Drew Doe, writes. “Because not all systems have off-line backups, some of the CFPB’s data may have been deleted. Among other things, this data may include CFPB Human Resource records, Reasonable Accommodation records, Ombudsman records, and Equal Employment Opportunity records. The data may not be recoverable and as of February 25th, CFPB is trying to now figure out which systems and services have records.”
Some of the seemingly hasty work is apparently deliberate. CFPB director of digital services Adam Scott submitted an email exchange he was copied on to the court, in which the agency’s chief information officer, Christopher Chilbert, told an employee that it was his understanding that the CFPB’s deleted homepage was a decision made by Vought, “and it was not an error made by the members of the DOGE team.”
Drew Doe claims that DOGE staffers “were given full privileged access to CFPB systems and data, without following the process that the CFPB ordinarily requires to do so,” including signing documents about the governance of CFPB systems and data. In meetings over the past couple of weeks, they add, senior executives told agency staff “that the CFPB would exist in name only.”
Steam Next Fest is going on until March 3rd, and Iâve spent a considerable amount of time wading through a seemingly endless carousel of games, filling up my Steam Deckâs internal and external memory looking for the Good Shitâ¢. Iâve landed on four standout game demos that are worth your time now and whenever their full games release.
The Talos Principle Reawakened
The best way to describe The Talos Principle: Reawakenedis if Portal was harder, less funny, and written by C.S. Lewis if he knew what a robot was. Reawakened is a remaster of 2014âs The Talos Principle. But according to the developers at Croteam, Reawakened doesnât just take the original and slap on a next-gen coat of paint; it also adds new story content and a new puzzle editor so players can create their own challenges.Â
Reawakened strikes the perfect difficulty balance â not too simple, not too frustrating â that makes its puzzles delightful to figure out. In the demo, you play as a robot tasked with solving puzzles using lasers, signal jammers, and your own burgeoning sentience. The game gives you no tutorial on how exactly to use the tools youâre given. And while that can be annoying if t …
Mozilla introduced its first Terms of Use for Firefox this week, but the company has already had to post an update to address criticisms of language that appeared to give Mozilla overly broad ownership over user data.
Specifically, some users took issue with this line in the terms, as reported by TechCrunch: “When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
In response, Mozilla added this update to its blog post. “We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible,” Mozilla says. “Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox, for example.
The company adds that “it does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice.” (In the Privacy Notice, Mozilla spells out how it uses your data for things like the core functionality of Firefox and its features, as well as how to adjust what data you provide.)
To TechCrunch, Mozilla shared its reasoning over some of the language in the terms:
Mozilla also further clarified why it used certain terms, saying that the term “nonexclusive” was used to indicate that Mozilla doesn’t want an exclusive license to user data, because users should be able to do other things with that data, too.
“Royalty-free” was used because Firefox is free and neither Mozilla nor the user should owe each other money in exchange for handling the data in order to provide the browser. And “worldwide” was used because Firefox is available worldwide and provides access to the global internet.
Mozilla spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel also told TechCrunch that “these changes are not driven by a desire by Mozilla to use people’s data for AI or sell it to advertisers. As it says in the Terms of Use, we ask for permission from the user to use their data to operate Firefox ‘as you indicate with your use of Firefox.’ This means that our ability to use data is still limited by what we disclose in the Privacy Notice.”
In its original blog post, Mozilla said that “some optional Firefox features or services may require us to collect additional data to make them work, and when they do, your privacy remains our priority.” The company added that “we intend to be clear about what data we collect and how we use it.”
Electric vehicle charging network EVgo changed its terms of service Thursday to include new language explicitly prohibiting the use of high-speed DC extension cables and breakaway adapters at the company’s stations. The terms, which go into effect March 8th, are another bump in the road for enterprising companies looking to cash in on EV charging accessories.
EVgo added the following terms in bold to the Authorized Charging Adapters section of its Terms of Service: “EVgo prohibits the use of all other adapters, including break-away adapters and DC extension cords (“Unauthorized Equipment”) on EVgo’s network and Charging Stations.” The company continues to authorize “automaker-manufactured charging adapters” (such as J3400 “NACS” to CCS1) and have UL2252 certification.
Another bump in the road for enterprising companies looking to cash in on EV charging accessories
Tesla’s Terms of Use for its Superchargers similarly prohibit any adapter not “sold or provided by Tesla or by other automakers,” without specifically calling out specific types.
EV accessory maker A2Z EV recently put up for preorder its $248 6ft-plus DC extension cord that lets you plug an EV into a short-corded fast-charging station. EV owners may want this to charge their non-Teslas at Tesla Superchargers using supported NACS adapters without blocking out multiple charging stalls. Superchargers are known for their short cords that can’t reach around to varying port locations on different EV makes. Some early testing by YouTube channel State of Charge shows the extension cable working without overheating.
Last year, a startup called EVject built a breakaway adapter designed to let you drive away from a Tesla Supercharger (or other station) without getting out of your car in case of a dangerous situation. However, Tesla sued the company after the automaker’s testing found that the adapter could overheat. Tesla eventually dropped the case later in the year, and EVject maintains that its product is safe.
However, should other competing EV accessory makers decide to make cheaper versions of extension cables and breakaway adapters for people to buy, it may not work as safely. And if both EVgo and Tesla networks are saying no to these accessories, then others might join — which means companies like A2Z EV and EVject might have a tough time selling their solutions.
Intel is delaying the opening of its $28 billion Ohio chip plants yet again. In an update on Friday, Intel executive vice president Naga Chandrasekaran said the company now expects its first factory to begin operations between 2030 and 2031 – years later than its initial plan to kick off production in 2025.
Meanwhile, the second fabrication plant on Intel’s Ohio campus isn’t expected to open until 2032. “We are taking a prudent approach to ensure we complete the project in a financially responsible manner,” Chandrasekaran said in the post. “We will continue construction at a slower pace, while maintaining the flexibility to accelerate work and the start of operations if customer demand warrants.”
Intel’s Ohio fabrication units have been beset by delays since the very beginning. In 2022, the chipmaker postponed the groundbreaking ceremony over a lack of government funding. It later bumped the opening of its plants to 2027 or 2028.
As noted by TheColumbus Dispatch, Intel has invested $3.7 billion into its Ohio chip plants since 2022. The company says it has completed the basement level of its fab and has since started to work on the above-ground structure. Chandrasekaran added that the delay “allows us to manage our capital responsibly and adapt to the needs of our customers.”
The Verge is heading to Barcelona, Spain, for Mobile World Congress 2025. We’re fresh off CES, where we saw plenty of new gadgets, from TVs to gaming handhelds and smart glasses. But, as it says right in the name, MWC 2025 is more focused on… mobile stuff. And it’s for a global audience, which means not everything will make its way to the US.
Expect announcements from companies like Xiaomi and Nothing, the latter of which will unveil the Nothing Phone 3A, and other global phone makers. Larger firms like Samsung and Google will be there, though it’s still unclear if they’ll have news. But we’re still waiting for more details on Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, so maybe that’ll pop up at the show.
