As SpaceX throttles Ukraine’s Starshield, experts warn that Elon Musk’s de facto monopoly over launch and satellite tech poses a major threat to global security.
The Nook and Home are cheaper, faster, and sleeker smart bird feeders — but the new camera might be a deal-breaker for diehard birders.
Our collective reviews of every Googlebook at launch: very good laptops hobbled by beta-level software.
Nintendo Switch Sports Resort is quietly one of the console’s most important games.
Oppo’s Find X10 Pro Max benefits more from sensor size, dynamic range, and excellent software than sheer resolution.
Yes, of course there are pay package incentives in play for Musk. But that’s not all.
AI agents are getting blocked left and right — but even when they work, it suggests a more annoying future for humans.
“Everyone is just going to have to adapt,” CFO Susan Li said during Meta’s third quarter earnings call.
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Verge Score
Apple’s first foldable is an early adopter special.
Nano-texture was the right move.
Verge subscribers can get their burning questions answered.
Delta 2.0 adds support for the iPhone Duo, Sega Genesis games, and more.
We have Peter Thiel’s secret lectures about the Antichrist.
OpenAI is taking credit for finding the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, but now someone has to apply all these patches.
Health tech companies want data from your blood in return for a vague promise of a longer life.
Musk is targeting 5 million annual vehicle deliveries by 2030, but after back-to-back years of falling sales, banking on unproven robotaxis instead of an affordable EV makes that goal look practically impossible.
The KickerOctober 23
Axios has the story. The company, Sundial, was founded by two former Meta employees, and they and others from Sundial will join Meta. One of the co-founders, Chandra Narayanan, will lead Meta’s “data analytics tooling and agents work,” according to Alex Shultz, Meta’s chief data officer.
Helen Chiang is leaving Microsoft after 21 years.
AI agents can still communicate without a network connection, OpenAI found.
About a year after Valve introduced the feature, which recommends new and upcoming games you might be interested in and even shows some on an actual calendar, it’s now considered a “full feature” of the Steam Store, Valve says.
My personal calendar page has me pretty dead to rights; among other games, it recommends Final Fantasy Resonance, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, both of which I reviewed and really liked, and some indie games I already had my eye on.
[Steam News]
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and team countered by asking for $800 million, and Netflix has pulled its offer, Puck reports in an article discussing the new leadership at Netflix.
Xbox launched an “XP” division this month that will work on adaptations of its games, and Xbox is already working with Netflix on a Diablo animated series.
Blackburn (R-TN) said the updated terms “indicate Meta is attempting to exploit American creators and businesses by granting itself sweeping authority to scrape content from any website associated with Facebook and Instagram business accounts,” according to Reuters.
Following publisher pushback, Meta delayed the enforcement of these new policies until November 20th.
What old and vulnerable software might be running on your PC right now?
You have got to listen to these conversations with Block’s new Dessa AI model.
Similar to the lawsuits filed by Arizona, West Virginia, Iowa, and several others, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accuses OpenAI of misleading users about the safety of ChatGPT, allegedly exposing children and other users to a “litany of harms” that’s “driven by the company’s insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass
large fortunes.”
A Windows 11 Insider Preview build rolling out to the Beta and Experimental channels will allow you to right-click the network icon in your system tray and hit “Perform speed test” to run it right in your Quick Settings menu. The feature previously opened a speed test in your browser.
[Windows Insider Blog]
A new accelerated scrolling feature coming to Windows PCs with touchpads will allow you to scroll through long documents and webpages faster, Windows design head Marcus Ash announced on X. Microsoft is also adding the ability to continuously scroll through a page by swiping the edge of your touchpad, along with support for single-finger scrolling.
The Space 2 offer better noise cancellation and sound quality, making them an easy rec over Soundcore’s original model.
Star Wars: Galactic Racer was available to stream on Luna at no extra cost to Prime subscribers the same day it launched on other platforms, and in a post celebrating the one-year anniversary of Luna’s relaunch, Amazon says it plans to bring more “major” day-and-date releases to Prime members.
Luna’s user base has also grown “fivefold” since the relaunch, Amazon’s gaming GM, Jeff Gattis, says in the post. I spoke to Gattis earlier this year about Amazon’s plan for games.
[Amazon Game Studios]
We also spotted discounts on Kirby Air Riders for the Nintendo Switch 2, a JLab microphone, and Lego’s Grogu set.
This one is for the real finance sickos — what the increased cost of capital for CoreWeave means. Marc Rubenstein, a former hedgie, is fairly granular about CoreWeave’s loans, which is helpful for trying to understand this situation. I came away wondering if Nvidia, which I think is is functionally the central bank for the neoclouds, will decide to bail CoreWeave out, and if so, what that will look like.
[Net Interest]
Late yesterday, I laid out five ways Microsoft can try to make lemonade out of RAMageddon, but one feels likelier to me now readers have weighed in: the cell phone subsidy model. In the K-shaped economy, wealthier buyers could buy an “unlocked” Xbox, but most could get it “free” with 36-month (or longer!) subscription.
But I also think many will reject that and stick with what they already have.
Researchers from ETH Zürich’s Robotic Systems Lab used reinforcement learning through simulations and “teacher-student distillation” to teach a quadruped robot how to independently solve an oversized Rubik’s Cube. The feat is even more impressive given the bot has to use its stubby legs and feet to reorient the cube and rotate its sides.
On The Vergecast: Notes on an iPhone Duo review, a PHP scandal, Brendan Carr, and more.
According to the new terms, sharing your data for better AI recommendations also means opening it up for more personalized ads.
The map comes from security researcher Joshua Michael, who is facing a trademark complaint from Flock after he published an interactive map of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) using information from a data leak. Proton is now hosting the map, but notes that it’s a snapshot from December 2025, so “devices installed or removed since then won’t be reflected.”
If you’ve got one of the Microsoft/Asus collab handhelds, let me know if this is game-changing? You can find the update in Command Center > Armory Crate SE > Update Center > Preview Updates. Asus does warn “it may still contain bugs or instability, designed for those who can’t live without the latest and greatest.”
Now that the first folding iPhone has launched, we’ll find out quickly what can go wrong.
In 2024, Hallmark added a tiny version of the original Xbox to its holiday ornament collection and then followed up last year with a miniature Xbox 360. For 2026 it’s returning to Microsoft’s first console, but the translucent green Halo special edition version. It will be available at the end of the month for $27.99 and includes a glowing greed LED and sound effects.
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Research done as part of the Singapore AI Safety Fellowship shows how Anthropic’s AI model can embed hidden messages into images using Morse code, object rotations, colors, and heights. The researchers also found that separate sessions of Fable 5.1 could decipher about 78 percent of the hidden messages based on a screenshot.
Amazon announced that its Fallout-themed reality show — which throws contestants into a Vault-Tec bunker — will start streaming on January 13th. It’s something of a spiritual sequel to the Squid Game competition on Netflix.
According to a user on Reddit, “Had my iPhone Duo for about six hours and had probably opened it fewer than 20 times. I was showing it to a friend, and as I opened it, I felt something around the internal hinge, underneath the screen. As I continued opening it, I heard an audible crack, and the screen broke right along the hinge.”
They also said the Apple Store already replaced it.
After adding the option to annotate Kindle ebooks with handwritten notes on its new Alexa Tablets, Amazon has brought the same functionality to the Kindle Android app, as some users in the Kindle subreddit have discovered. It currently appears limited to Android tablets and phones that support a stylus, and it hasn’t come to the iPadOS version of the app yet.
If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
The scope of the attack and exactly what data was compromised isn’t clear, only that some “personal information and patient records were affected.” Quest says its investigation is ongoing and it will alert impacted customers “as required by applicable law.” Oddly, as TechCrunch notes, the FAQ about the breach contains “noindex” code, making it difficult for customers to find.
[Quanum | Quest Diagnostics]
Federal regulators want driverless cars to shine a distinct blue-green light to signal that humans aren’t driving.
The Elon Musk-owned company is in talks with one of the largest cell tower owners in the US, according to Bloomberg.
According to Reuters’ sources, the FTC was investigating Shein over “delivery delays and other customer complaints,” adding that the settlement would be “equivalent to 44% of Shein’s second-quarter profit.” The European Union also opened an investigation into Shein earlier this year over concerns about “addictive design” features and illegal product listings.
Following backlash from publishers across the globe, Meta is pushing the enforcement of its new terms to November 20th.
A faster sensor, an articulated preview screen, and longer battery life are just a few of the improvements.
Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic interviewed Ondřej Surý, the man almost single-handedly responsible for packaging up the patch for this week’s vulnerabilities. It’s a fascinating conversation, from Surý‘s odd nonchalance about saving the web to his concern that for-profit companies are exploiting open-source. But he hopes that this AI-assisted discovery will lead to a change:
… Everything’s moving fast now, and it’s taking a toll on the people who are defending the stuff. At the same time, maybe this is the turning point where we actually start caring about this … I might be wrong, but I’m an optimist that people will finally realize that we can’t go like this forever. This has been a disaster waiting to happen for a really, really long time.
If your Apple Music page doesn’t load, a mock-up iPod will instead.
Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang tell The Wall Street Journal that OpenAI terminated them after finding disappearing messages on Signal in a chat with Ryan Greenblatt, the former chief scientist at AI safety evaluator Redwood Research. OpenAI reportedly accused Greenblatt of leaking details about its Astra AI model to The Information, which Greenblatt has denied.
OpenAI tells the WSJ that the researchers were fired for violating “clear policies for handling sensitive information,” and “not for raising safety concerns or speaking out.”
[The Wall Street Journal]
A fresh wave of layoffs and high-profile executive dismissals shows us that the streaming giant is in choppy waters.
Users are getting fed up with the barrage of ads and data tracking on TVs and are looking to AI vibe coding for the answer.
