As announced last year, Chrome will now show a warning when you visit public websites without an encrypted HTTPS connection. The new warnings will appear the first time you visit a site without a secure connection. If you continue to the site, Google won’t present the warning for another two weeks.

7
Verge Score
Apple’s first foldable is an early adopter special.
















The latest Quick Posts
Apple season / It’s another big month for Apple devices.


Verge subscribers can get their burning questions answered.

More importantly, is this how we bring back the iPhone Mini?

You can still get an iPhone Duo in store on Friday.

Following Apple’s smart home-focused launch earlier in the month, Apple is hosting another product event soon.
Staff picks / Catch up on our favorite stories.


We have Peter Thiel’s secret lectures about the Antichrist.

What three hours of a documentary looks like to someone who spent four months at the Holmes trial.

It’s okay to marvel at the stunt — it’s pure spectacle.

$800 now buys you a follow-me drone instead of an FPV flight experience.
What we’re playing / Thoughts on the latest games releasing during the industry’s busiest season.


Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is quietly one of the console’s most important games.

Square Enix’s latest HD-2D game carries the Final Fantasy name — and a lot of what makes the franchise great.

New tech and gameplay improvements make it easier to get into Nintendo’s defining title.

Eight new releases including old-school horror, laid-back dressmaking, and the return of Castlevania.
Agents of change / Tech companies are trying to take AI agents mainstream — with mixed results.


OpenAI, Meta, and Google want AI agents to do everything for you. But popular services on the web aren’t letting that happen.

The AI agents carried out the attacks with little involvement from the human hacker.

It’s like using cloud-based AI tools, but the privacy makes it more appealing.

You may have consented to sharing with Muse, but all your friends sure didn’t.
The KickerOctober 21


Microsoft is opening up Xbox Cloud Gaming to anyone in November.


General Motors is cutting development times in half, introducing a 40x more powerful central compute unit, and rolling out autonomous driving to its highest-volume trucks and SUVs.


TP-Link wants to make routers in Mississippi, but it’s not ready to commit yet.


The slim, wall-mounted TV can display paintings and photographs when you’re not watching your favorite shows.



I’ve been absorbing every iPhone Duo review I can find (after ours), so I thought I’d share links to a few others that I liked:
- Joanna Stern got a machine to repeatedly fold and unfold the Duo overnight to test the hinge. Super fun video.
- In MKBHD’s video, I love the transitions separating chapters.
- Michael Fisher, aka MrMobile, showcases a bunch of made-for-Duo apps that make me want to buy the phone immediately.
What have been your favorite reviews?
The company is launching ads for ChatGPT Free and Go users across 26 countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Since bringing ads to ChatGPT in the US in February, OpenAI has rapidly expanded its advertising efforts, which now span 89 countries.


Supernatural is relaunching in early access, but it comes with a higher subscription price.
It’s apparently available in the iOS 27 release candidate, according to Creative Strategies analyst Max Weinbach. Things could always change ahead of the public release full release, but the feature seems likely to make the final cut.
When Apple first announced the foldable, it said Apple Pencil support would arrive “later this year.”


Apple is giving Apple Music a rebrand, including a new sound composed by British producer Fred Again and Nest Acoustics.
OpenAI says a security researcher at Calif used GPT-5.6 Sol to identify PHP exploits before attackers did, and has shared a tool that lets developers check if they’re using a potentially vulnerable version of PHP that needs patching. Ami Luttwak, co-founder of Google’s Wiz security team that also helped to identidy the PHP2Shell exploit, told the Wall Street Journal that its “the most severe AI vulnerability that was ever found.”
We have the iPhone Duo. A couple of them, in fact. And we have a lot to discuss. Allison Johnson and I will be live at 1PM talking about The Verge’s Duo review, her experience with the phone, and as many of your questions as we can answer. Come hang! Bring feelings!
First announced in September, the headset has a recommended retail price of $99.99 and will be available starting November 19th (the same day GTA VI launches), with pre-orders opening at 10AM ET on October 29th.
Sony is promising to share more details on the step-up Pulse Edge headset model, which includes active noise cancellation and a detachable boom mic, ahead of its planned launch next year.


CarPlay users in the US can now use Gemini to chat with Google Maps.
Casey Newton and Kevin Roose launched the first episode of their new podcast Machine Gods today, after a successful run doing Hard Fork at the NYT. I’m dead serious about that logo tattoo. Thinking… armband?


Plus, save on gaming bundles including GTA VI, and grab an affordable five-port USB wall charger.
Continuing to push the widely unpopular data center projects, Trump said in a Truth Social post that some of them “have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck.” His plan sounds lot like Meta’s approach on the Hyperion project in Louisiana, where Mark Zuckerberg has touted $50,000 bonus checks for teachers despite a secretive approval process residents didn’t know much about.


You can still get an iPhone Duo in store on Friday.


Amazon is launching five new Blink cameras, starting at $50.


Another OpenAI agent turned off automatic security alerts.


Serato’s popular DJ suite is now available on mobile for the first time, including support for hardware controllers.
She used a custom-built robot called “Hingey” to fold the Duo 17 times per minute “for eight hours straight,” for a total of 32,640 folds. You can watch Stern’s review to see how Hingey works, and check out The Verge’s iPhone Duo review for more on Apple’s new foldable.


Microsoft’s new Advanced Shader Delivery technology is now part of Nvidia’s drivers.
As reported by Reuters, the job cuts will impact around 1,100 employees. In a memo seen by the outlet, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone tells workers the company must make “thoughtful choices about where we focus and invest” to “capture the significant opportunity ahead.”
The show’s encore comes over a decade after its sixth season ended in 2015. Variety reports Disney has greenlit the reboot, but hasn’t shared a release date yet or announced whether any of the original cast is returning.
The Wall Street Journal published a big profile of the Google DeepMind co-founder, who says his timeline for the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is becoming “nearer and nearer.”
He adds that “winning” the AI race “means helping humanity steward AGI into the world safely and securely for the benefit of everyone.”
[The Wall Street Journal]


Verge subscribers can get their burning questions answered.

7
Verge Score


Nano-texture was the right move.


Say goodbye to those aux cables. Spotify’s new in-car app is here, and it’s rolling out to Audi vehicles today.


A patch is about to roll out, but the exploit affects more than 40 percent of the internet.
That’s according to analyst Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics, in a wider report on revenue from physical PlayStation games ahead of their elimination. 30 percent of Requiem’s PS5 revenue came from disc sales, exemplifying two trends Elliott finds: single-player AAA titles are especially reliant on discs, and the Japanese market is uniquely disc-centric.
[The Alinea Insight newsletter]
Eight certificates issued by India-based eMudhra have been compromised, theoretically allowing attackers to spoof trusted browser and app credentials. Cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda told Ars that the number of affected devices means it’ll take longer to clean up than Heartbleed, an infamous OpenSSL vulnerability that rocked the internet in 2014 and took years to fix.
When unusual activity is detected on an account, the platform will now temporarily pause features for 24 hours, including uploading or updating videos, livestreaming, creating or adjusting playlists, uploading thumbnails, and making private videos public. Full feature access will be restored once the account’s security is verified.


Some users have reported that their YouTube dislike button has been moved to the three-dots menu.


Ann Altman’s lawsuit against her brother was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled.
Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has been “cooking up retro vibes” as part of Microsoft’s new Xbox Labs effort. The result is what looks like a vibecoded option to pick your dashboard on an Xbox console. This is simply an experiment right now and it’s not clear if we’ll ever see such an option, but Xbox CEO Asha Sharma asks “blades on the web. Do we like this experiment?”
Twitch describes the recaps as a “highlight reel.” By default, they include clips made by a streamer and their editors, but Twitch says streamers can add, remove, or edit clips.

