Tech

This is so rad — and if you have a Quest 3 or 3S and a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee (1.02), you can try it too. It’s called Xelee, and yes, the mixed reality part is AI-coded: “Claude wrote every line of code.” The game part is from the Melee decompilation, though. I hope game companies are paying attention to the possibilities in this brave new world!

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.