You’ll be able to use a USB mouse with the Nintendo Switch 2 in at least one game, as a Koei Tecmo developer commentary video for the upcoming Nobunaga’s Ambition: Awakening Complete Edition revealed this week. That’s great news if your wrists, like mine, started preemptively cramping the first time you saw video of someone tipping a Joy-Con 2 controller on its edge for mouse mode.
While demonstrating the game’s use of the Joy-Con 2 as a mouse, producer Michi Ryu stops and plugs in a USB mouse. The Switch 2 displays a message that says a mouse has been connected, and he continues to play with both a mouse and his left Joy-Con 2, switching between them seamlessly, the same way you’ll be able to go back and forth between gyro and mouse control in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.
As VideoGamesChronicle notes, the original Switch had mouse and keyboard support, though only some games took advantage, like the Nightdive-developed Turok port. (If you own that game and never noticed the “Mouse” option in its input settings, go plug in a USB mouse and keyboard and try it out — you won’t want to go back.)
This time around, Nintendo is embracing mouse support more. For instance, the company published a video to its Nintendo Today app earlier this month, showing that when you put a Joy-Con 2 on its edge for mouse mode, an onscreen pointer appears for navigating the system’s menu.
So does the Nobunaga’s Ambition video, mean a standard mouse works interchangeably with a Joy-Con 2 controller anywhere where mouse control is supported? I sure hope so, but we don’t know that yet. And Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s email asking if that was the case.
It’s finally time to upgrade for many owners of the earliest Amazon Fire TV devices, as Netflix is ending support for them next month, reports German outlet Heise.
The cutoff for US users is June 3rd, according to ZDNet, which writes that the company has been emailing those who would be affected by the change. Netflix is specifically ending support for the 1st-generation Fire TV streaming box and Fire TV Stick, as well as the 2016 Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, ZDNet writes. If you didn’t get the email but want to be certain whether your Fire TV device is one of those reportedly losing Netflix, the outlet writes that you can check the “About” section under Settings > My Fire TV.
According to Heise, Amazon is offering discounts on new Fire TV Sticks to those affected by the change. Amazon didn’t immediately respond when The Verge reached out to ask whether that’s true for US users, as well.
In a FAQ added to a Netflix help page sometime in the last couple of months (March 15th is when it first showed up on The Internet Archive), the company says it may end support for devices that “can no longer get necessary updates from its manufacturer or support new features.” The company also added new references to error codes R4, R12, and R25-1.
Netflix did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Users of Whoop’s fitness trackers have been reporting that their Whoop MG fitness trackers are turning unresponsive, in some cases within under an hour of setting them up. Now, the company is apparently replacing the trackers, in some cases before the users even ask, TechIssuesToday reports.
Launched alongside the Whoop 5.0 earlier this month, the Whoop MG (which stands for “Medical Grade”) comes with EKG capabilities and blood pressure insights and requires a premium Whoop Life subscription that’s $359 per year. Users started reporting issues with the tracker almost immediately.
On May 11th, a user reported in the Whoop community forum that their MG “stopped working overnight after working for 8 hours. No green light, no bluelight nothing. It won’t now pair with the app.” Others replied to say the tracker failed even sooner for them, with one person reporting that it went inert after just half an hour of use. Some also report that their 5.0 has failed.
Whoop recommends a few troubleshooting steps — the usual things like making sure your device is charged or trying to reset it — but users in the community thread say it didn’t work.
The company appears to be trying to rectify the situation by sending out replacement units, sometimes without users even asking for one, as the Reddit user who posted the screenshot above wrote further down in the thread. The same goes for a user who posted two days ago to say they got the same notification despite having not noticed any problems with their MG. Some in that thread even write that the company replaced their MGs without ever telling them it would be doing so.
It’s already been a troubled launch for Whoop. Earlier this month, some users were outraged when Whoop said they would need to add another 12 months onto their memberships to avoid the upgrade fee for the Whoop 5.0. Previously, users only needed to have 6 months left on their subscription to get a Whoop 4.0. The company soon walked its new terms back, posting on Reddit that those who had at least 12 months left would be eligible for an upgrade.
Whoop did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
The Twelve South HiRise 3 Deluxe is down to $79.99 for Memorial Day. | Image: The Verge
Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer, and if you somehow managed to skip your spring cleaning earlier this year, the turning of the season offers a fresh chance to declutter your space. Thankfully, the Twelve South HiRise 3 Deluxe offers a stylish way to organize your desk or bedside table, and it’s currently available for a new low of $79.99 ($20 off) from Amazon and Twelve South.
Twelve South’s sturdy HiRise 3 Deluxe is a great 3-in-1 charging stand for a number of reasons. Not only can it deliver up to 15W of power to MagSafe-compatible iPhones, but it’s also capable of fast-charging an Apple Watch Series 7 and newer models. It includes a 7.5W wireless charging pad as well, which you can use to top off a pair of AirPods or any other Qi-compatible device you might have on hand, including a second phone, a Samsung Galaxy Watch, or other electronics.
What truly sets it apart from a lot of other 3-in-1 chargers, though, is its design; instead of placing the charging pads side-by-side, Twelve South has arranged them in a front-to-back layout to reduce desk clutter. Plus, thanks to the charger’s support for StandBy mode — an ultra-handy feature Apple first introduced in iOS 17 — you can also use your phone as a mini smart display when you place it horizontally on the adjustable charging pad, allowing you to quickly check the time, view your daily schedule, and take advantage of useful widgets with ease.
More Memorial Day savings
The Sony ULT Field 3 is available at Amazon and Walmart for $148 ($52 off), which is its best price to date. The portable Bluetooth speaker features a dedicated ULT button to boost bass and volume, and delivers up to 24 hours of playback on a single charge. With a detachable shoulder strap and an IP67 rating for dust and water resistance, it’s also a great companion for beach days.
You can purchase Lego’s Polaroid OneStep SX-70 Camera for $67.99 ($12 off) at Amazon, Target, and Walmart, which is $8 shy of its all-time low. The 516-piece set allows you to build a replica of Polaroid’s classic SX-70 camera. It’s a true delight to behold, thanks to details like a shutter button that ejects one of three illustrated “photos” — including one of Polaroid inventor Edwin H. Land.
You can buy the latest Apple Watch SE with GPS at Amazon and Walmart starting at $169 ($80 off), which is its best price of the year. The entry-level wearable includes a host of essential health and safety features, including heart rate tracking, fall detection, and emergency SOS. It also offers Apple Pay and a variety of watchOS 11 features, such as support for the Vitals app and rest day tracking, though it lacks some of the more advanced sensors and the larger display found on the newer Series 10. Read our review.
X is back up for most users after what appeared to be a significant outage that spiked early this morning around 9AM ET.
Global internet monitor NetBlocks posted this morning that X “has been experiencing international outages for some users for a second time in a week,” adding that the issue isn’t “related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.” Downdetector showed complaints of an outage rose sharply after 8AM ET before beginning to fall about 45 minutes later. As of this writing, those reports have dropped from tens of thousands of reports to only hundreds.
Elsewhere on social media, people had been complaining about issues with the network for a couple of days — one of the top posts on the r/Twitter Reddit community is a screenshot of an error message on the X login screen, with many replies complaining about login issues. The X developer platform site’s incident history log shows that a sitewide outage started Thursday and lasted roughly a day. At the moment, there’s still an error message on the platform status page that reads, “Login with X (OAuth) and other X platform login flows are experiencing degraded performance.”
The issue comes after a fire reportedly broke out in an Oregon data center owned by X on Thursday morning. Wired writes that multiple unnamed sources told it that the fire, which forced “an extended response from emergency crews,” involved batteries in one of the data center’s rooms. Following reports of the fire, there were complaints that X was down, but the outage then seemed comparatively small.
X did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Update May 24th: Outage reports have mostly subsided.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy starts off by asking a simple question: what happens when you pluck a handful of colorful teenagers from their homes, plop them in a state-of-the-art school filled with every convenience, then force them to fight for their lives? Your guide as you navigate this question is an unsettling and creepy-cute mascot that knows more than it's let on, and there's an overarching mystery to the world that you can't quite put your finger on.
If you, like I, answered "Danganronpa!" - as this premise sounds very much like the plot of the quirky and irreverent murder-mystery series from Spike Chunsoft - then congratulations! We're both totally wrong! And after 45 in-game days with LDA, I still have no idea what's going on, and I love it.
I'm going to be gentle with myself and you for thinking LDA is another entry in the genre of high school-themed killing games. After all, it was developed by Kazutaka Kodaka, creator and writer of the Danganronpa franchise, in collaboration with Kotaro Uchikoshi, known for his work on the adventure-puzzle game series Zero Escape. And though LDA oozes with the DNA from both series, it stands so completely apart mechanical …
These boots were not made for walking, but you can use AI to make them do it anyway.
Even at first glance, there's something off about the body on the street. The white sheet it's under is a little too clean, and the officers' movements are totally devoid of purpose. "We need to clear the street," one of them says with a firm hand gesture, though her lips don't move. It's AI, alright. But here's the kicker: my prompt didn't include any dialogue.
Veo 3, Google's new AI video generation model, added that line all on its own. Over the past 24 hours I've created a dozen clips depicting news reports, disasters, and goofy cartoon cats with convincing audio - some of which the model invented all on its own. It's more than a little creepy and way more sophisticated than I had imagined. And while I don't think it's going to propel us to a misinformation doomsday just yet, Veo 3 strikes me as an absolute AI slop machine.
AI generated video: Made with Veo 3
Google introduced Veo 3 at I/O this week, highlighting its most important new capability: generating sound to go with your AI video. "We're entering a new era of creation," Google's VP of Gemini, Josh Woodward, explained in the keynote, calling it "incredibly realistic." I wasn't completely sold, but then, a few days lat …
Hot water is like internet connectivity for most Verge readers: you just expect it to be there. But that's unlikely to be the case this summer when tent camping at a music festival or road-tripping into the great unknown. That's where BougeRV's battery-powered shower comes in.
The $310 "Portable Propane Outdoor Camping Water Heater" from BougeRV is not only optimized for search engine discovery, it also delivers a luxurious spray of hot steaming water to the unwashed, be they human, canine, or stubborn pots and pans. Charge up the battery, attach a propane canister, drop the pump into a jug of water, and you're ready to get sudsing.
It's so useful and flexible that I've ditched my plans to install a permanent shower cabin and expensive hot water system inside my adventure van, even if I don't completely trust it.
My current portable shower consists of an 11-liter water bag, a manual foot pump, and a spray nozzle. To make it hot, I have to heat water on the stove or hang the bag in the sun for several hours, yet it still costs over $150. For $310, the BougeRV heated shower seems like a bargain.
The BougeRV system can produce a maximum heat output of 20,500 BTUs - about half o …
Valve CEO Gabe Newell pretends to get a hole drilled into his head for a brain-computer interface.
Valve co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell, the company behind Half-Life and DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike and preeminent PC game distribution platform Steam, has long toyed with the idea that your brain should be more connected to your PC. It began over a decade ago with in-house psychologists studying people’s biological responses to video games; Valve once considered earlobe monitors for its first VR headset. The company publicly explored the idea of brain-computer interfaces for gaming at GDC in 2019.
But Newell decided to spin off the idea. That same year, he quietly incorporated a new brain-computer interface startup, Starfish Neuroscience — which has now revealed plans to produce its very first brain chip later this year.
Starfish’s first blog post, spotted by Valve watcher Brad Lynch, makes it clear we’re not talking about a complete implant yet. This bit is the custom “electrophysiology” chip designed to record brain activity (like how Neuralink can “read your mind” so patients can interact with computers) and stimulate the brain (for disease therapy), but Starfish isn’t claiming it’s already built the systems to power it or the bits to stick it into a person’s head.
“We anticipate our first chips arriving in late 2025 and we are interested in finding collaborators for whom such a chip would open new and exciting avenues,” writes Starfish neuroengineer Nate Cermak (bolding theirs), suggesting that Starfish might wind up partnering with other companies for wireless power or even the final brain implant.
But the goal, writes Starfish, is a smaller and less invasive implant than the competition, one that can “enable simultaneous access to multiple brain regions” instead of just one site, and one that doesn’t require a battery. Using just 1.1 milliwatts during “normal recording,” Starfish says it can work with wireless power transmission instead.
Here’s the chip’s current spec sheet:
Low power: 1.1 mW total power consumption during normal recording
Physically small: 2 x 4mm (0.3mm pitch BGA)
Capable of both recording (spikes and LFP) & stimulation (biphasic pulses)
32 electrode sites, 16 simultaneous recording channels at 18.75kHz
1 current source for stimulating on arbitrary pairs of electrodes
Onboard impedance monitoring and stim voltage transient measurement
Digital onboard data processing and spike detection allows the device to operate via low-bandwidth wireless interfaces.
Fabricated in TSMC 55nm process
Neuralink’s N1, for comparison, has 1,024 electrodes across its 64 brain-implanted threads, a chip that consumed around 6 milliwatts as of 2019, a battery that periodically needs wireless charging, and the full implant (again, not just the chip) is around 23mm wide and 8mm thick. The Elon Musk-led company has reportedly already implanted it in three humans; while some of the threads did detach from the first patient’s brain, he still has functionality and has been giving interviews.
Starfish says it could be important to connect to multiple parts of the brain simultaneously, instead of just one region, to address issues like Parkinson’s disease. “there is increasing evidence that a number of neurological disorders involve circuit-level dysfunction, in which the interactions between brain regions may be misregulated,” Cermak writes.
In addition to multiple simultaneous brain implants, the company’s updated website says it’s working on a “precision hyperthermia device” to destroy tumors with targeted heat, and a brain-reading, robotically guided transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system for addressing neurological conditions like bipolar disorder and depression.
In case you’re wondering how any of this might make its way back to gaming, I’ll leave you with Valve’s talk from GDC 2019 about brain-computer interfaces.
The winners of the $TRUMP meme coin contest did get to see President Donald Trump speak at a private dinner closed to the press - but his speech was probably the least exciting part of their night. They did get a better, more valuable, and potentially more lucrative experience: the opportunity to network with the biggest crypto traders in the game, win watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and attend a not-so-exclusive afterparty at the Capitol Hill Marriott afterward - all without having to complete particularly thorough background checks.
The vetting process for entering the dinner was a 'pretty light' KYC check
After being whisked behind the gates of the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, past a throng of journalists snapping photos and protesters screaming at them for being corrupt, the 220 attendees went through security and had their IDs checked. According to one attendee, many were wealthy but some were living on normal-ish paychecks. The other guests, he said, were largely foreigners from overseas, all with an extremely high risk tolerance for gambling with crypto. The attendee said the vetting process for entering the dinner was a "pretty light" …
After three seasons, Amazon’s live-action take on Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Timeseries is coming to an end.
Though The Wheel of Time‘s third season was hailed by fans as the show’s strongest chapter yet, Deadline reports that Amazon has decided not to bring it back due to its relatively high production costs and flagging viewership numbers. Similar to Amazon’s Rings of Power series, The Wheel of Time was clearly a play to produce another Game of Thrones-style hit. When the series first debuted in 2021, it managed to capture an impressively large audience and become one of Amazon’s most-watched programs. But those numbers dwindled in subsequent seasons, leading Amazon to call it quits.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporterback in April right after The Wheel of Time‘s third season concluded, showrunner Rafe Judkins said that when when he and his team were first shopping the series around to studios, they ultimately chose Amazon as a production partner because it “felt like a place where they do want to invest in shows for the long term.”
“There are not a lot of places doing that anymore,” Judkins said. “For Wheel of Time, it’s really important for us to be somewhere that does want to invest in shows for the long term and not just for the splash and leave.”
The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other's heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week's I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT's advanced voice mode.
This time, OpenAI dropped its bombshell the day after.
OpenAI buying the "io" hardware division of Jony Ive's design studio, LoveFrom, is a delightfully petty bit of SEO sabotage, though I'm told the name stands for "input output" and was decided a while ago. Even still, the news of Ive and Altman teaming up quickly shifted the conversation away from what was a strong showing from Google at this year's I/O. The dueling announcements say a lot about what are arguably the world's two foremost AI companies: Google's models may be technically superior and more widely deployed, but OpenAI is kicking everyone's ass at capturing mindshare and buzz.
Speaking of buzz, it's worth looking past the headlines to what OpenAI actually announced this week: it's paying $6.5 billion in equity to hire roughly 55 people from LoveFrom, including ex-Apple design leaders E …
President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to strip Harvard of its ability to enroll international students — an effort blocked by a federal judge on Friday, just hours after the university filed a lawsuit claiming Trump was violating its First Amendment rights.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded Harvard’s access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a government database of international students attending universities in the United States. The students’ visas weren’t canceled, but DHS’s revocation of Harvard’s SEVIS certification could, in theory, make nearly 6,800 international students enrolled at Harvard deportable immediately.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” DHS secretary Kristi Noem said on Thursday. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”
A month earlier, DHS demanded that Harvard turn over information on its international students, including their “known illegal activity,” “known dangerous or violent activity,” “known threats to other students or university personnel,” and “known deprivation of rights of other classmates or university personnel.” The department also requested information on any disciplinary action that had been taken against international students who participated in protests. DHS threatened to rescind Harvard’s SEVIS certification if the university didn’t turn over student records by April 30th.
Since taking office, Trump has used allegations of antisemitism at universities across the country to retaliate against students involved in campus protests against the war on Gaza — and against the universities themselves, which the administration claims haven’t done enough to quell antisemitism on their campuses. In addition to pulling billions of dollars in federal funding, the administration has also had Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest several students over their pro-Palestine activism. Some of these students, like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, are green card holders whom ICE has accused of engaging in behavior that is contrary to the US’s foreign policy interests. Others are international students whose visas were revoked by the State Department, thus making them deportable.
Instead of targeting individual students at Harvard, the Trump administration is going after the university’s ability to enroll international students altogether. Unlike Columbia, which capitulated to a list of Trump’s demands, Harvard has generally refused to comply with the administration’s requests that it hand over data on its international students; “audit” its academic programs, as well as students’ and faculty’s political views; and change its governance structure and hiring practices.
Harvard sued the administration on Friday. In a complaint filed in Massachusetts federal court, the university’s lawyers called DHS’s revocation of its SEVIS certification a “blatant violation of the First Amendment.”
“It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” the complaint alleges. “With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.”
Moreover, the suit claims, revoking Harvard’s SEVIS status puts students in an impossible position. “Termination of SEVIS records presents student visa holders whose school loses its certification with two bad choices,” the complaint claims: transferring immediately, or leaving the country.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked DHS’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s SEVIS certification. The university’s international students are safe — for now.
The Google I/O keynote may have been all about AI, but there were a handful of other meaningful updates that didn’t make it to the main stage. In addition to updates coming to Google Wallet, the company’s developer sessions also revealed handy features that will roll out to smartwatches, the Google Play Store, and Google TV.
Here are some of the updates Google didn’t highlight during the keynote.
Live Updates are coming to your smartwatch
Google is preparing to bring Live Updates — a feature that lets users track the status of certain activities in delivery, rideshare, and navigation apps — to your smartwatch. We already knew about Google’s plans to bring it to smartphones with Android 16, but in a developer session spotted by Android Authority, Google’s Aaron Labiaga confirmed that it will also work on wearables “later in 2026.”
Google Wallet can take out your boarding pass when you get to the airport
Google announced a bundle of upgrades for Google Wallet, including a new “Nearby Passes notification.” If you enable the feature, Google Wallet will prompt you to take out your pass when you reach a location where you might need to use it, like a coffee shop, airport, or gym. “This notification serves as a direct gateway, allowing users to seamlessly access the associated pass with a single tap,” Google says.
Additionally, Google revealed that it’s expanding digital IDs to Arkansas, Montana, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia, and is also adding support for UK passports. It will also allow airlines with loyalty cards to “automatically push” boarding passes to users’ wallets upon check-in.
Google Play will let you ask someone to pay for you
The Google Play Store is adding a new “Ask someone else to pay” button. The feature is exactly what it sounds like: it will let users “request purchases” from people outside their Google Family by sending them a payment link. It launched in India first, but now it’s coming to the US, Japan, Indonesia, and Mexico.
Google is also trying to streamline checkouts by letting users buy subscription add-ons with a base subscription with “one price and one transaction.”
Additionally, Google is trying to make it easier to stop the rollout of buggy apps as well. The company says it will let developers “halt fully-live releases” to prevent “the distribution of problematic versions to new users.” The Play Store is also letting developers enhance their listings with a content carousel and YouTube playlist, along with audio samples for health and wellness app developers.
There are new topic pages, too, that will let users browse through “timely, relevant, and visually engaging content” for shows, movies, and sports on the Play Store.
Google and Samsung’s audio codec is coming to Google TV
Android 16 is coming to Google TV, introducing some Material 3 Expressive design changes, according to 9to5Google. It also adds new features like MediaQualityManager, which will let apps automatically “take control over selecting picture profiles.” Google TV will support the Eclipsa Audio codec, the spatial audio format that Google and Samsung are working on, as well.
There are plenty of great deals to be found, but a few standouts include The Lord of the Rings 4K trilogy for $41.99 ($25.81 off), which is nearly matching its Black Friday low. Along with all three movies in the series, it also includes the extended versions. Another highlight is HBO’sChernobyl on 4K Blu-ray, with the complete series available for just $14.99, down from $39.99.
Pocket is no longer available, but there are several other bookmarking apps you can try. | Screenshot: Pocket
Eight years after it was acquired by Mozilla, the popular bookmarking tool Pocket has been sent to the apps graveyard. According to the company, Pocket is being trashed in order to let Mozilla turn its "resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs."
While Pocket might have lost its gloss in recent years, it was still useful for tracking online articles and other resources that you didn't have time for at the moment but wanted to get back to later. If you're a disappointed Pocket loyalist, or if you're just looking for some way to keep your bookmarks and saved sites in some kind of order, here are a few possibilities. Most offer free versions and sync across a number of devices, including web browsers, Android devices, and iPhones.
Like Pocket, Instapaper started out as a simple web add-on and has gone through several iterations (and owners); currently, it is part of an independent company called Instapaper Holdings. The web app has a nice and simple UI; while there is no grid view, you can turn thumbnails on and off. It works with (and syncs across) web browsers (using a Chrome extension, Safari extension, Firefox extension, or boo …
Apple CEO Tim Cook personally intervened in an attempt to stop a Texas age verification bill, The Wall Street Journal reports. SB 2420 — passed by the legislature but awaiting a signature by Gov. Greg Abbott — would require app store operators like Apple to verify the age of users accessing their stores. The company’s opposition puts it in conflict with social media giant Meta in an escalating fight over whether and how the internet should be age-gated.
In a statement to The Verge, Apple expressed its opposition to the bill. “We share the goal of strengthening kids’ online safety but are deeply concerned that SB 2420 threatens the privacy of all users. If enacted, app marketplaces will be required to collect and keep sensitive personal identifying information for every Texan who wants to download an app, even if it’s an app that simply provides weather updates or sports scores,” says spokesperson Peter Ajemian.
As the Journal notes, several states have proposed sweeping age verification measures, at least nine of which specifically place the burden for checking ages on app stores; one state, Utah, has such a law already passed. These measures are frequently accompanied by plans to ban minors from accessing social media, either without parental consent or entirely, as in a Texas law that’s on the verge of passing. Texas, among other states, already requires age verification for adult websites; the law implementing that requirement has become the center of a Supreme Court battle over age verification that’s expected to be resolved in the coming months.
According to the Journal report, Cook and Abbot had a “cordial” conversation in which Cook asked for either amendments to or a veto of the bill. An Abbott spokesperson told the outlet that the governor will “thoughtfully review this legislation, as he does with any legislation sent to his desk.”
Civil liberties advocates staunchly and consistently oppose mandating digital age-verification systems, which tend to either pose significant privacy problems or be ineffectual. But over the past couple of years, the fight has evolved into a game of ping-pong between web services and device makers.
Meta and some others — including the Free Speech Coalition, which filed the suit against Texas’ porn age-verification law and represents the operators of adult websites — support making companies like Apple and Google build age-check systems into their products. Both phone makers already offer voluntary parental control systems, but a legal requirement would create substantial risk for them in the case of failure, on top of privacy concerns for users themselves.
Apple’s statement on SB 2420 instead pushed for the passage of the Kids Online Safety Act: a federal bill that would place liability on web platforms to prevent young users from harm. Google, meanwhile, has reportedly backed lobbying against both bills — as owner of the Android operating system and video platform YouTube, it’s stuck in the middle.
“The FAA conducted a comprehensive safety review of the SpaceX Starship Flight 8 mishap and determined that the company has satisfactorily addressed the causes of the mishap, and therefore, the Starship vehicle can return to flight,” the FAA said in a statement released yesterday.
Similar to how SpaceX’s 7th Starship test flight played out in January, Flight 8 saw the ship successfully separate from the Super Heavy booster rocket that returned to the launch site at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas where it was caught by the launch tower. But at around nine minutes into its flight, Starship began to tumble and eventually exploded before reaching its engine cutoff stage.
Previously failed test flights resulted in Starship debris raining down over Turks and Caicos and parts of the Bahamas. Although SpaceX has said the debris has been limited to pre-planned Debris Response Areas, on multiple occasions the FAA has briefly slowed and diverted flights, and initiated full ground stops at several Florida airports.
SpaceX plans to reuse a previously launched Super Heavy booster rocket for the first time for Flight 9 – specifically the rocket from Flight 7. As a result, the FAA is expanding the Aircraft Hazard Area (AHA) as an added safety precaution. For Flight 8, the AHA covered approximately 885 nautical miles. For Flight 9, it’s nearly twice the size at 1,600 nautical miles and covers parts of Texas and Florida, as well as the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos.
In addition to expanding the hazard area, the FAA is also requiring the Flight 9 launch window “to be scheduled during non-peak transit periods” in order to “minimize disruption to U.S. and international airspace users.”
Thursday’s update follows the FAA’s decision to issue a launch license earlier this month for SpaceX’s 9th Starship test flight and modify the license to expand the company’s annual operations. “The approval includes final action allowing SpaceX to increase Starship operations from five up to 25 per year at Boca Chica, Texas.”
The FAA is still without a leader after Michael Whitaker stepped down as its administrator on January 20th following clashes with Elon Musk.
The first thing I noticed about the Fujifilm X Half is just how small and light it is. The camera is designed to give you no excuses - you should be able to bring it with you everywhere. And after spending a few hours walking around LA with the camera, I'm starting to understand why you'd want to.
Fujifilm's latest doesn't necessarily impress on paper. The X Half is an $850 camera with a vertically oriented 1-inch sensor capable of taking 18MP photos. There's no electric or hybrid viewfinder, no stabilization, no hot shoe, and it can't even take RAW photos. It's very easy to look at that list of missing features and disregard the camera altogether.
But the X Half's simplicity is very much the point. This is a camera for taking scrappy, quick photos and capturing memories. A lot of its flaws are masked with film simulations, filters, and superimposed grain. Its limitations are a feature, not a bug.
The camera comes with a fixed 32mm equivalent f/2.8 lens. Even with all the added grain and filters turned off, I found it to perform very well. The dynamic range is acceptable with natural highlight falloff, edges are sharp, and there's even some bokeh if you plan accor …
A Microsoft employee has managed to circumvent a block instituted earlier this week that limited mentions of "Palestine," "Gaza," and "Genocide" in email subject lines or in the body of a message. Nisreen Jaradat, a senior tech support engineer at Microsoft, emailed thousands of employees on May 23rd with the subject line: "You can't get rid of us."
"As a Palestinian worker, I am fed up with the way our people have been treated by this company," the note, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, reads. "I am sending this email as a message to Microsoft leaders: the cost of trying to silence all voices that dare to humanize Palestinians is far higher than simply listening to the concerns of your employees."
It's not immediately clear how Jaradat got around the block. The email calls on Microsoft employees to sign a petition by the No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) group, which urges Microsoft to end its contracts with the Israeli government. NOAA is behind several high-profile protest actions in recent weeks, and Jaradat, a member, also encourages colleagues to join the group in different capacities. Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw directed The Verge to a previous statement it s …
