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Microsoft brings Xbox back, scraps Microsoft Gaming

2026-04-23T13:19:35-04:00

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has had a busy week. Sharma held an internal town hall with Xbox employees today, just days after announcing an Xbox Game Pass price cut, commenting on the status of the Xbox mobile store, and teasing a mysterious Xbox and Discord partnership. One of the items on the agenda for the employee all-hands was scrapping Microsoft Gaming.

Sources familiar with the meeting tell me that Sharma announced that Microsoft is returning to using Xbox for its gaming division, instead of Microsoft Gaming. "Xbox needs to be our identity," said Sharma, noting that Microsoft Gaming was a departure from that.

Microsoft originally switched …

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Inside Microsoft’s wave of executive departures

2026-04-23T11:44:35-04:00

It feels like not a week has gone by this year without a senior Microsoft executive leaving the company. Some departures have triggered sweeping shakeups of Microsoft's biggest businesses, while others have seen fresh faces replace veteran employees. Executive departures at Microsoft are nothing new, but the pace feels notable this early in the year.

The timing points to a Microsoft that is struggling to retain talent in a market where competition is high and the stock price is low. Investors have been hammering Microsoft's stock price in recent weeks, and at one point last month it had dropped by more than 30 percent compared to six months …

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Xbox Game Pass ‘has become too expensive,’ says Microsoft’s new gaming chief in leaked memo

2026-04-13T20:03:52-04:00

Asha Sharma. | Image: The Verge, Microsoft

Microsoft's new Xbox chief, Asha Sharma, has signaled that Xbox Game Pass pricing is about to change. In an internal memo to Xbox employees, obtained by The Verge, Sharma admits that "Game Pass has become too expensive for players" and that Microsoft needs "a better value equation."

"Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox. It's also clear that the current model isn't the final one," says Sharma. "Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system which will take time to test and learn around."

Microsoft hiked the price of Xbox …

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Pinterest said he violated laid-off colleagues’ privacy. Now he’s going public

2026-04-02T15:27:52-04:00

It was late January, and Pinterest engineer Teddy Martin was on edge about recent layoffs at the company. Martin had just survived a round of cuts, but he and other employees were confused about who was being let go and why, and explanations from top executives including CEO Bill Ready had done little to quell the unease. So when Martin saw someone mention a tool that would shed light on the scope of the impact, he decided to share it in Slack.

The tool was a simple command known as ldapsearch - it aggregated a list of deactivated employee accounts from the directory, organized by office location, spitting out only the number of recently de …

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Nvidia’s head of autonomous driving opens up about his plan to beat Waymo and Tesla

2026-03-17T13:06:09-04:00

Nvidia is offering its DRIVE Hyperion platform to automakers who want to enable a range of autonomous features. | Image: Nvidia

Every six months or so, Nvidia's head of automotive, Xinzhou Wu, invites CEO Jensen Huang to go for a ride in a vehicle equipped with the company's hands-free autonomous driving system. But only when Wu has "good confidence" in the system's driving capabilities.

Recently, the two went for a drive from Woodside, California, to downtown San Francisco in a Mercedes CLA sedan with MB.Drive Assist Pro, a hands-free driver-assist system partly designed by Nvidia that's similar to Tesla's Full Self-Driving. The mood was light, even if the traffic was pretty heavy.

"Let me know when you're in autonomous mode," Huang said to Wu, according to a vid …

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Ring cancels its partnership with Flock Safety after surveillance backlash

2026-02-12T20:24:14-05:00

Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration.

In a statement published on Ring's blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safet …

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What 1,000 pages of documents tell us about DOGE

2025-12-18T11:59:20-05:00

Months after staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency were found in the Federal Communications Commission directory, the FCC is being accused of slow-walking demands for information about what they did there.

On February 24th, advocacy group Frequency Forward and journalist Nina Burleigh filed a public records request to the FCC, seeking details about DOGE's activities and whether they created conflicts of interest with DOGE creator Elon Musk. But the FCC has so far produced largely useless documentation that creates more questions than answers. Now, DOGE's role is among the many topics FCC Chair Brendan Carr could face during …

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OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 ‘code red’ response to Google is coming next week

2025-12-05T12:03:19-05:00

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" situation earlier this week, pushing staff to respond quickly to increased competition from Google and Anthropic. Sources familiar with OpenAI's plans tell me that the company is planning its first response to Gemini 3 with its upcoming GPT-5.2 update.

I understand GPT-5.2 is ready to be released, and could appear as soon as early next week. Sources tell me the 5.2 update should close the gap that Google created with the release of Gemini 3 last month - a model that topped leaderboards and wowed Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk.

The Information reported earlier this week that OpenAI's next reason …

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A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress

2025-12-01T10:42:50-05:00

For years, lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried a variety of measures aimed at making kids safer on the internet, from kids-tailored design standards to age verification for individual websites. More recently, a new model has caught on in the states, and now it's gaining steam in Congress: putting the onus on app stores nationwide.

The new approach to age verification orders mobile app stores to verify users' ages, then send that information to apps when users download them. The idea has been around for a while, but it was just this year that the first of these laws was passed in Utah, quickly followed by versions in several …

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Lawmakers want to let users sue over harmful social media algorithms

2025-11-19T11:07:28-05:00

Tech critics' least favorite law is under siege again, this time with a focus on its recommendation algorithms.

On Wednesday Sens. John Curtis (R-UT) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) introduced the Algorithm Accountability Act, which amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to make platforms responsible for preventing their recommendation systems from causing certain foreseeable harms. Section 230 is the law that shields online platforms - including social media sites, digital forums, blogs with comment sections, and their users - from being held liable for other people's unlawful posts, or for engaging in good faith content moderation. Bu …

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