Star Wars Outlaws will get its next story DLC, called A Pirate’s Fortune on May 15th, Ubisoft announced during Star Wars Celebration Japan yesterday. The company also revealed that the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game will come out on September 4th.

The expansion, free for Outlaws Season Pass holders and $14.99 otherwise, picks up after the base game’s main storyline. In the trailer, Vess breaks Hondo Ohnaka, a space pirate who first showed up in The Clone Wars animated series, out of jail and the two team up against an outfit called the Rokana Raiders and their leader, Stinger Tash. The DLC also adds the Miyuki Trade League, a new group that offers smuggling contracts that pay out in rewards for Vess’s ship, the Trailblazer.

A Pirate’s Fortune also adds cosmetic items inspired by Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, including a speeder trophy and a new outfit for Nix, the adorable pet that accompanies main character Kay Vess throughout the game. And those who own the Ultimate and Deluxe Editions of the game will get Naboo Nobility and Desert Nomad cosmetic packs.

This is the second story expansion for Outlaws since the game came out last year. Ubisoft brought smooth-talking smuggler Lando Calrissian into the game with its first DLC, Wild Card, back in November.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger on the Apple Watch Series 10, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better time than now. That’s because Apple’s latest flagship is on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy right now in its 42mm base configuration starting at $299 ($100 off), matching its lowest price to date. You can also purchase the 46mm model with Wi-Fi at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for just $329 ($100 off), which remains the best price we’ve seen for the larger configuration since its debut in September.

Overall, the Series 10 is a relatively minor upgrade over the Series 9 — though, that’s not a bad thing. The last-gen model was an excellent smartwatch, and the Series 10 primarily builds upon it with a bigger, brighter wide-angle OLED display that makes reading texts and notifications that much easier. What’s more it does so without adding any unwanted bulk; in fact, the Series 10 is actually 10 percent thinner than the Series 9 and a whopping 30 percent thinner than the Apple Watch Ultra, ensuring it will likely never catch on your sleeves.

As for other changes, the Series 10 charges significantly faster than the last-gen model, allowing your watch to go from zero to 80 percent in just 30 minutes. It features Apple’s newest S10 SiP (System in Package), as well as FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection and a range of fitness-centric features. Some of those — such as the new Vitals app and the ability to pause your Activity Rings — come courtesy of watchOS 11 as opposed to the new hardware, though they’re welcome all the same.

Read our full Apple Watch Series 10 review.

More ways to save this weekend

• If you’re looking to outfit your home with some brick-ified, faux greenery, Lego’s Lucky Bamboo set is on sale at Amazon, Walmart, and Target for an all-time low of $23.99 ($6 off). It’s not quite as intricate as Lego’s Wildflower Bouquet or some of the other models in the Botanicals Collection, but the excellent 325-piece kit includes three stems, pebbles, and a pot with a wood-effect plenth.
• We’re big fans of Elgato’s macro controllers here at The Verge, so much so we’ve written an entire article rounding up our favorite hacks. Thankfully, if you don’t own one, the Stream Deck MK.2 is down to $129.99 ($20 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. The MK.2 is essentially the midrange model; it comes with a detachable stand, a swappable faceplate, and 15 programmable LCD keys, which you can use to carry out shortcuts across Windows and macOS.
• 8BitDo’s Ultimate 2 Wireless Controller is receiving its first discount at Amazon, where you can pick it up for $53.99 ($6 off) thanks to an on-page coupon. It’s not a vast departure from the original model 8BitDo launched in 2022, though the updated version adds color-changing LED lighting and an extra pair of customizable shoulder buttons. Best of all, it’s equipped with tunneling magneto-resistance (TMR) joysticks, which draw less power and are even more durable than Hall effect sticks.

Haste: Broken Worlds takes the relaxing loop of sliding down and leaping off hills from iOS classic Tiny Wings and turns it into a thrilling, high-speed, and 3D roguelike.

In Haste, you play as Zoe, a girl who typically delivers letters but has found herself mysteriously transported to the new worlds you run through. When I say run, I mean it: Zoe cannons through the game.

Levels are filled with rolling hills, and your goal is to leap off the upslopes and land on the downslopes. The better your landings, the more you’ll increase your speed and build a boost meter that can be used for things like a burst forward or a grappling hook.

You’re incentivized to keep your speed up. The faster you complete a level, the higher grade you’ll get; higher grades give you better bonuses of things like “sparks,” which you can use to buy items.

Throughout the vibrant, procedurally generated levels, you’ll also have to avoid obstacles like rocks, giant Sarlacc-like pits, and machines that shoot lasers and bullets at you. If you crash into an object, you’ll lose health and slow down. If you’re too slow, a crackling, damaging energy will sneak up behind you. If you run out of heal …

Read the full story at The Verge.

After half a decade fighting to keep its empire together, Google’s defenses are wearing thin.

The company is facing a two-front war that could fundamentally reshape its business, and, the US Department of Justice argues, open new opportunities for its competitors. Last year a federal judge deemed Google an unlawful monopolist in the online search market, and this past week, a different judge declared it had monopolized the ad tech market, too. On Monday, it will face a new stage in that first battle: a three-week trial in Washington, DC to determine the appropriate remedies to restore competition to online search. 

Google has vowed to appeal both rulings, but it can’t do so until after it’s gone through remedies trials for each case, letting the DOJ argue for its breakup and other restraints. In court starting Monday, the government will make the case for forcing Google to sell its Chrome web browser, share search data with competitors, keep the government abreast of new AI investments, and end exclusionary deals with browser and phone makers.

In this and the coming ad-tech remedies trial, the judges may find that less extreme measures can address the harms they believe Goo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

With over 108 million subscribers, WWE has truly colossal reach on YouTube. The company currently sits just behind PewDiePie at number 11 on the list of most-subscribed channels across the entire platform. When you’re at that level of popularity, there’s constant communication with YouTube about best practices, key viewership metrics, and the latest strategies for pulling in even more eyeballs. 

Last year, WWE decided to shake up (and split up) its YouTube strategy. The company introduced a new standalone channel called WWE Vault that became the new destination for classic live events, full matches, and rare archival footage — much of which fans are seeing for the very first time. For a company with a fanbase that’s never universally happy with anything, the Vault became an instant hit. Scroll down to the comments of any video, and fans heap praise upon the channel. For some, it has filled the void that was left when WWE Network went dark after WWE and Peacock announced their streaming partnership several years ago.

The Vault also helps the flagship channel stay focused on modern WWE programming as the company continues to do big business with stars like Cody Rhodes, R …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Lucas Pope, the solo creator of games like Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, received the Pioneer Award from the annual Game Developers Choice Awards this year. It’s a major achievement that puts him in a league with industry giants like Gabe Newell, Yu Suzuki, and Roberta Williams.

“Now that I’m an official pioneer, I have some requests,” he said in his brief acceptance speech. “World peace, obviously. But for this crowd, I’d be happy if you kept making the kinds of unique off-beat, experimental, creative, and especially personal games that I love.”

It was similar to something Pope had said to me earlier — especially the personal part. I had asked him what advice he might have for developers just starting out. “Make something personal, make it small, release on [Itch.io]. Try to find the people who like the same things you do and then make the things you enjoy.”

Games, for him, have always been about “making something that I want to play,” Pope said. With Papers, Please, where you have to make tough decisions while working as an immigration inspector in a fictional country, “it was, â …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It’s a familiar frustration for ridehail users: you open the Uber or Lyft app, enter your destination, and discover that your intended trip costs several times more than expected. The culprit is surge pricing, one of ridehail’s most important and controversial innovations. Customers grumble about higher fares, but Uber and Lyft executives have insisted that surge pricing benefits them by attracting additional drivers, which allows the companies to fulfill more trips and reduce wait times. 

That justification makes intuitive sense, but it raises an awkward question about robotaxis, which are expanding across the US, from San Jose, California, to Washington, DC. If surge pricing is intended to expand the driver pool, why is it now being used by companies with driverless vehicles?

Waymo, which offers robotaxi trips in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, charges surge pricing during peak times, as did Cruise, its now-defunct competitor. Assuming a robotaxi fleet is already fully deployed, higher fares cannot expand vehicle supply in the way they could for Uber or Lyft. Instead, riders simply need to pay extra, assuming they can afford to, or search for another way to travel.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Star Wars Zero Company will release sometime in 2026, according to an announcement from Disney and EA. The game’s title was revealed earlier this week.

Alongside the release year, the two companies also shared a bit more information about what you can expect from the game. “In Star Wars Zero Company, players will step into the shoes of Hawks, a former Republic officer, to command an elite squad of cunning operatives through a gritty and authentic story set in the twilight of the Clone Wars,” according to a press release.

You’ll be able to customize Hawks’ appearance and class, and team members you recruit can “be personalized from a range of original Star Wars character classes and species.” Your team members can also “forge bonds” to “unlock powerful combat synergies that can turn the tide of battle.”

Zero Company will launch on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X / S.

Bit Reactor is leading development on Zero Company alongside Respawn Entertainment and Lucasfilm Games. The game was initially announced without a title in January 2022 as part of a three-game set of Star Wars titles that Respawn would be working on. The other two games are Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and a new FPS game.

In a letter to the Social Security Administration’s Inspector General’s office requesting an investigation into DOGE, Ranking Member Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-VA) alleged that the government entity created by Elon Musk supposedly to reduce the size of the federal government is now constructing a “cross-agency master database” of sensitive personal information.

Wired appeared to back up Connolly’s allegations on Friday, detailing an effort at DOGE to fold this  database into the Department of Homeland Security, the counterterrorism agency founded after 9/11. Specifically, “mass amounts” of personal data harvested from the IRS, SSA, and voting records in Pennsylvania and Florida were recently uploaded into servers at the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes immigration cases.

Connolly cited testimony from SSA whistleblowers who witnessed DOGE engineers accessing the agency’s IT system with “backpacks full of laptops, each with access to different agency systems”, with the aim of combining them into one database. Connolly warned that not only would such a database pose a threat to government cybersecurity, which siloes its information across several agencies to prevent cyberattacks from accessing all information at once, it was also very likely violating several privacy laws.

The Committee has also received reports about troubling, fumbling efforts by DOGE to combine sensitive information held by SSA, the IRS, HHS, and other agencies into a single cross-agency master database. Improving how federal agencies share data to improve outcomes and customer service is a longstanding and bipartisan goal in Congress. Information obtained by the Committee, however, indicates that DOGE is carrying out its work in a manner that disregards important cybersecurity and privacy considerations, potentially in violation of the law. 

In an apparent attempt to sidestep network security controls, the Committee has learned that DOGE engineers have tried to create specialized computers for themselves that simultaneously give full access to networks and databases across different agencies. Such a system would pose unprecedented operational security risks and undermine the zero-trust cybersecurity architecture that prevents a breach at one agency from spreading across the government. Information obtained by the Committee also indicates that individuals associated with DOGE have assembled backpacks full of laptops, each with access to different agency systems, that DOGE staff is using to combine databases that are currently maintained separately by multiple federal agencies.

Though several other House investigations into DOGE’s activities have revealed their data harvesting efforts at other agencies, Rep. Connolly’s letter is the first to allege that DOGE, the government-shrinking agency founded by Elon Musk and now wreaking havoc across the federal government, is pooling everyone’s data into one giant database. 

“I have long championed efforts to improve data sharing across the government to combat improper payments and to increase government efficiency,” Connolly wrote. “But any efforts to reform our current systems must be undertaken with the utmost sensitivity and concern for privacy, security, and the Social Security payments that millions of people rely on.”

The privacy implications of this cross-agency database would not only violate numerous privacy laws and cause cybersecurity risks, but could also become a potent weapon for whomever can access said database: it could be used by the government to conduct mass surveillance of whomever they wished to target, such as immigrants, or become a target for outside actors seeking a trove of private and personal data. Either way, “it’s terrifying,” John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Nextgov, adding that this was exactly what the Privacy Act was supposed to prevent. “Aggregation of data is building a weapon, essentially, and it’s one that can be used in a lot of different ways.” 

The government should be scrutinizing Meta’s power. Unfortunately, its legal attack isn’t cutting to the heart of what keeps Meta big.

This week, I spent three days in a Washington, DC courtroom watching Mark Zuckerberg testify. He was there defending his company from being broken up by the Federal Trade Commission, which is seeking to unwind his acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on the grounds that they were anticompetitive. At times, he was made uncomfortable and challenged with evidence that he wanted to “neutralize” rivals. Primarily, what I observed was the FTC’s misunderstanding of how social media works. 

To establish the market it argues Meta has a monopoly in, the FTC has defined a subset of social media that it calls “personal social networking services.” This category includes apps that primarily facilitate sharing between friends and family, but for some reason, doesn’t include private messaging apps. The government argues that Meta’s only competitors in this market are Snapchat and MeWe, an obscure, blockchain-based social network that claims to have 20 million users. Conveniently for the FTC, including only these two companies gives Meta a de fac …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Tesla has plenty of Cybertrucks listed on its website, and they’ve got some hefty discounts, including many for about $10,000 off, Electrek reports. Many are from the 2024 model year and include limited “Foundation Series” Cybertrucks that ended production in October, plus some lightly used “demo” ones we saw that have racked up around 300 miles on the odometer.

Some Cybertruck models in stock won’t be eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit either due to their age or because the sticker price is too high. But as of this writing, interested buyers could get more than that with the available discounts, including as much as a $11,990 cut off a top Cyberbeast model that usually sells for $119,990. In January, the company offered up to $2,600 off inventory Cybertrucks.

Used Cybertruck prices are also taking a hit. CarGurus currently shows the average used Cybertruck selling for about $85,000, a steep drop from $104,300 on December 30th and $107,800 from November.

Business Insider reports Tesla is also slowing down Cybertruck manufacturing at its Texas factory and shrinking its production teams. Some line workers are being moved over to build better-selling Model Y vehicles, but it, too, has seen a year-over-year decline in sales as reported by the company earlier this month.

A federal judge in Nevada has ruled that it’s unconstitutional to obtain swaths of cellular records through “tower dumps” — but will still let police get away with using it as evidence, as reported earlier by 404 Media and Court Watch.

With tower dumps, authorities can dig through the cell records that pinged off a particular tower during a specific time. Though police may be looking for just one record, these dumps often expose the data of thousands of people, making it a major privacy concern. In a 2010 case involving the High Country Bandits, for example, officers caught the two bank robbers by looking through a tower dump containing more than 150,000 phone numbers.

In the ruling, Judge Miranda Du said that searching through these records violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. However, Du denies a motion to suppress using these records as evidence because the court seems to be the first “within the Ninth Circuit to reach this conclusion and the good faith exception applies.”

As noted in the filing, the tower dump exposed the data of 1,686 users, but the records helped authorities build their case against Nevada man Cory Spurlock, who faces charges related to a murder-for-hire conspiracy and conspiracy to distribute marijuana. In February, a federal judge in Mississippi similarly deemed tower dumps unconstitutional, preventing FBI officials from pulling information from cell towers spanning nine locations and four carriers, as reported by Court Watch. The Department of Justice has since appealed the decision.

This week, Kia announced its affordable EV4 electric sedan will launch in the US early next year. While the US won’t get a hatchback edition of the EV4 that was mentioned when it was revealed in February, there will be two battery configurations: a 58.3kWh battery with a Kia-estimated range of 235 miles, and a larger 81.4kWh battery with a Kia-estimated range of 330 miles. No EPA range estimates are currently available. 

The EV4 will get Tesla’s NACS charging port and can charge up from 10 to 80 percent in 31 minutes at a DC fast charging station. It also has vehicle-to-load capability that provides AC power for devices like computers. And on the inside, the EV4 features 30 inches worth of side-by-side screens that run Kia’s latest “connected car Navigation Cockpit (ccNC) software with apps like YouTube.

The automaker’s “first all-electric global sedan” will be built in Korea, and while Kia has not confirmed an official price, MotorTrend reports it could be about $37,000 before any incentives. That price would undercut Tesla’s most affordable and popular Model 3 electric sedan, which costs $42,490 before the Federal $7,500 tax incentive. However, by the time this sedan is ready to ship, President Trump’s tariffs on cars built outside the country may have a significant impact.

Building (or rebuilding) a gaming PC can be difficult. It’s complex stuff, making sure everything’s compatible and whatnot. The next toughest part is finding a deal — and having the patience to wait for price drops without getting so antsy you buy everything at full price (shamefully raises hand). If you’re considering an AMD build, Micro Center has a great deal on a hardware bundle that includes the Ryzen 7 7800X3D (last-gen, but still among the mightiest CPUs around for gaming, according to our review), a motherboard, and RAM. Normally around $579.99, you can snag the bundle in-store only for $499.99 if you have a Micro Center nearby.

In addition to the 7800X3D processor ($389.99 by itself), which was only recently supplanted by the higher-end 9800X3D processor, you’ll get an Asus TUF B650-E motherboard (valued at $194.99), plus 32GB of G.Skill Flare X5 DDR5-6,000MHz RAM (valued at $89.99). You’ll save $175 instead of paying $675 for all three components, giving you more pocket change for a GPU.

The 7800X3D utilizes the AM5 motherboard socket, used on the newer 9000-series processors. It seems likely that AMD will stick with AM5 in the near future, so you’ll have at least a couple of CPU generations to pick from should you ever need to upgrade. As for the motherboard, it has three M.2 slots (one of which is PCIe 5.0, while the others are PCIe 4.0), support for USB-C ports on the front and back of your case, and Wi-Fi 6E built-in, among other niceties. If you’d prefer to have Corsair Vengeance RAM instead of what’s included with this bundle, you can elect to pay a $15 price increase when you pick up the bundle in-store.

Nintendo said today that Switch 2 preorders in the US will begin on April 24th ahead of the console’s June 5th launch day, and now GameStop, Target, and Walmart have shared exactly when you can try to snag a preorder.

• GameStop said on X that in-store Nintendo Switch preorders will start when “doors open” on April 24th. Online preorders will kick off that day at 11AM ET. The company also says that “all stores” will open on June 5th at 12AM ET / June 4th at 9PM PT for console launch.
• Target’s Switch 2 preorders will kick off on April 24th at 12AM ET, according to Target’s website. The preorder time applies to consoles, games, and accessories.
• Walmart’s Switch 2 preorders begin on April 24th at 12AM ET, company spokesperson Leigh Stidham tells The Verge. Walmart’s website also says that you’ll get your console before 9AM on June 5th if you preorder by June 4th at 8AM ET “while supplies last.”
• Best Buy has not listed a specific preorder time, but according to a post on its website, preorders for “the console, games and accessories will be available April 24 via the Best Buy Mobile App and BestBuy.com.” We’ve asked Best Buy what time preorders open. Best Buy also says that “most stores” will open for preorder pickup on June 5th at 12AM ET / June 4th at 9PM PT.

We’ve also asked Amazon if it will offer Switch 2 preorders and when they may start.

Nintendo originally planned to have preorders start on April 9th, but it delayed them “in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions.”

As part of this morning’s announcement, Nintendo said that the Switch 2’s starting price would remain $449.99, and the bundle that includes Mario Kart World would also stay at $499.99. But accessories got price bumps, including $5 increases for the Switch 2 Joy-Con and Pro Controller.

Prices could also change down the line; Nintendo said today that “other adjustments to the price of any Nintendo product are also possible in the future depending on market conditions.”

Updates, April 18th: Added details from GameStop, Walmart, and Best Buy.

A judge has paused the termination of nearly 1,500 employees from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) while she considers whether the Trump administration violated a court order to avoid mass layoffs. As CNN reports, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the mass reduction in force was “not going to happen” for now and scheduled an evidentiary hearing for April 28th.

The ruling should temporarily prevent the CFPB from being nearly eliminated, a move that CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought announced to employees yesterday. Documents filed in court indicate that cuts were supposed to eliminate 1,483 of the agency’s 1,690 employees, drastically reducing headcount in several departments, including consumer response and data protection teams. They were accompanied by a statement shifting the CFPB’s mission away from investigating digital payment platforms, medical debt, and several other areas.

The administration has sought to eliminate high-level agency officials responsible for maintaining the privacy and security of sensitive information it’s collected over the years. A lawyer for the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents CFPB employees, said in a sworn declaration that they learned “virtually everyone” in the agency’s privacy, security, and cybersecurity units were told their jobs would be eliminated.

The NTEU alleged that this violated a March court order preventing the Trump administration from carrying out a previous, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-spurred attempt to dismantle the agency. Judge Berman Jackson’s ruling in that lawsuit barred terminations unless they resulted from a “particularized assessment” of employees’ roles, something the NTEU says is highly unlikely to have taken place here. Berman Jackson concurred that she had “concerns about whether agency is in compliance” with that order, and she’s instructed the administration to hand over documents about its actions to the union as the case progresses.

Erie Meyer, former chief technologist of the CFPB, tells The Verge that the layoffs threaten basic protections for Americans and their privacy. “With them firing every person in charge of protecting the data that the bureau has except for one person in cybersecurity, it’s officially open season on consumers and I’m extremely concerned about how vulnerable people are going to be targeted,” Meyer says.

The humble QR (or Quick Response) code has become ubiquitous. Invented back in the 1990s to scan car parts, the barcodes got a popularity boost during the pandemic when touchless tech became prioritized, and they’re now a regular part of daily life.

You’ll find them deployed to help you order food, connect to Wi-Fi, shop online, access tickets, prove your identity, and much more besides. They can either store information (about 3KB’s worth), or redirect you somewhere (like a website or an app page).

If you come across a QR code you want to read, you’ve got everything you need right on your phone.

How QR codes work

QR codes contain a small amount of data, typically under a hundred alphanumeric characters for the codes you’ll most often see day to day — although QR codes can get larger and more complex if more information needs to be stored. They can also have error correction built in, which adds to the size but means they’ll still work if part of the code is obscured or damaged.

A phone camera or other scanning device can read the information in a QR code, with the help of the three finder patterns at the corners: They tell the scanner where the QR code is, how big it is, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you didn’t catch Mythic Quest’s series finale when it first debuted last month, there’s a chance you may never be able to see the episode as it originally was.

Shortly after Mythic Quest’s fourth season and its Side Quest spinoff hit Apple TV Plus, the streamer announced that it was cancelling the series. The news came as a surprise given how “Heaven and Hell” — the open-ended finale — implied that Mythic Quest might return for a fifth season. And there were so many unresolved plotlines that the sudden cancellation meant that Mythic Quest would always feel incomplete. 

Apple seemed to understand that last point when it announced its plan to debut an “updated” version of “Heaven and Hell” meant to tie up all of the series loose ends. The episode went live today, and it does deal with some of Mythic Quest’s big cliffhangers. But in addition to dropping the updated episode, Apple confirmed to The Verge today that it has also removed the original cut of “Heaven and Hell” from its platform entirely.

You can kind of understand why Apple would want to direct viewers towards Mythic Quest’s proper ending. But the move smacks of revisionist history and streamers’ recent habit of completely disappearing their own content. Apple easily could have left both versions of the episode up and made clear why there were differences between the two of them. Netflix has been dabbling with something similar for Black Mirror’s latest season to make a brilliant point about the Mandela effect. But going that route with Mythic Quest would have meant acknowledging that Apple axed the show with little heads up, which is something the company probably didn’t want to do.

Wouldn’t it be nice to tidy up your home without breaking a sweat? The Roomba Combo 10 Max robovac / mop hybrid can make that dream a reality, as it delivers an almost fully hands-free cleaning experience. And now through tomorrow, April 19th, it’s on sale at Wellbots for $741.47 (about $658 off) when you use Verge-exclusive promo code VERGE47 at checkout.

The Combo 10 Max can empty its bin, wash its own mop, and even refill its mopping tank thanks to its new multifunction charging dock, which is one of the reasons it’s one of our favorite robot vacuums. It’s especially great for pet owners, thanks to its powerful suction and dual rubber roller brushes, which rotate in opposite directions to prevent tangling. It also comes with AI-powered obstacle detection, which uses a camera to spot and avoid pet waste. In fact, if it fails to avoid pet mess within the first year, iRobot will replace the robovac for free.

In addition to fur, the Combo 10 Max excels at other cleaning duties. It can identify and remember the dirtiest rooms in your home with its Dirt Detect feature, taking multiple passes to ensure a thorough clean. It functions as a decent mop, too, one that can lift its tiny mopping pad above your carpet or rug to keep it dry while it’s vacuuming.

In terms of smart home compatibility, the Roomba’s latest flagship supports the new Matter standard, allowing you to integrate it into your smart home routines and control it using Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Apple Home. What’s even more convenient is that iRobot makes some of the most self-repairable robot vacuums on the market, all of which come with replaceable parts that are readily available.

Three more deals worth a look

• The SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless is on sale for $139.99 ($140 off) at Best Buy, marking an all-time low. The wireless gaming headset features terrific audio quality with virtual surround sound and includes two hot-swappable batteries. It also comes with a USB-equipped base station for connecting it to your PC, Nintendo Switch, or PlayStation, along with Bluetooth support so you can pair it with your phone.
• Now through April 30th, Woot is selling the last-gen Echo Show 5 in refurbished condition with a 90-day warranty for just $27.99. The second-gen model isn’t as snappy as its successor, but it remains a solid 5.5-inch smart display, one you can use as a bedside alarm clock. It delivers loud, full sound for its size and offers the same set of Alexa-based functionality as other Echo speakers, allowing you to control the lights, check the weather, and manage other smart home devices with just your voice. Just don’t expect much from the abysmal 2-megapixel camera. Read our review.
• Best Buy is selling Lego’s incredible Rivendell set as a part of its Best Buy Drops program today, allowing you to pick it up for $424.95 ($75 off) when you use the company’s mobile app for Android and iOS. The highly detailed, 6,167-piece kit is an excellent little renditon of J.R.R. Tolkien’s elven sanctuary, one the let’s you play out iconic scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy in all their brick-ified glory. It also comes with 15 minifigs, including all nine members of the Fellowship, Bilbo, Elrond, and others. 

Covid.gov, the government website where you could previously find information about covid, now redirects to a page that pushes the conspiracy theory that the virus originated from a lab. Navigating to the website reveals a prominent banner with the words “Lab Leak” and a photo of Donald Trump, as spotted earlier by Wired’s Andrew Couts.

Covidtests.gov, where you could order free covid tests, also redirects to the new webpage.

The website purports to reveal the “true origins” of covid, blaming a Chinese lab’s “inadequate biosafety levels” for allegedly “leaking” the virus. It goes on to push other blatant conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the Biden administration misled the public about covid’s origins and “demonized alternative treatments.” The page also claims that the WHO “caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party” in its response to the pandemic.

It’s not clear exactly when the covid.gov page changed. As shown on an archived version of the webpage, covid.gov included resources about the virus up until at least April 10th. The page now includes a link to the House Oversight Committee report, which similarly promotes the lab leak conspiracy theory.

Since February, the Trump administration has been working to rip down webpages from federal websites that don’t align with its beliefs – particularly information related to climate change, racial equity, and gender identity. Though a court order brought some of these pages back online, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to include disclaimers around “gender ideology.”