Author: News Room

Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim is a legend in the history of the internet.He created HTML, the standard language for creating and structuring web pages, and the HTTP protocol that allows those pages to communicate using browsers and servers. It doesn’t really get more foundational than that — Tim was there at the very, very beginning of the modern internet.But right now, in a lot of ways, it feels like maybe we’re sitting at the end of that grand, world-changing project. Tim has been sounding the…

It was late June, and something strange was happening on Arizona’s online portal for political candidates. Images of the candidates were disappearing. Photos of the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were popping up in their place. The state would later come to believe it was an attack from an Iranian government-affiliated group. When they first discovered the threat, though, they were in the dark — and they needed help.Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ office took action to contain the threat, which he says did not impact personal voter information. But one thing he didn’t do was contact the federal agency…

There are plenty of other options for customers – election news information is very widely available across other broadcast stations and news networks on YouTube TV, as well as on the main YouTube service, for free. In fact, on the last two U.S. election days, the vast majority of tuned in YouTube TV subscribers chose not to watch ABC. Read the full article here

Arturia’s KeyStep is one of the most popular MIDI controllers ever made, especially with modular synth users and the DAWless crowd. It’s small, cheap, has an easy-to-use sequencer, and offers decent connectivity. But it was also released way back in January of 2016. The world of music gear moves more slowly than, say, smartphones, but Arturia has several controllers released after the KeyStep that are already on their third generation. The $139 KeyStep mk2 takes this classic and updates it with a host of new sequencing and composition features developed by Arturia over the years.Compared to the original, the KeyStep…

Do the ornaments you adorn your Christmas tree with reflect you or your family’s interests? If not, maybe you should rectify that. We recently went hands on with Hallmark’s realistic Xbox 360 replica ornament, which plays a snippet of audio from Halo 3. As it turns out, there are many other ornaments available that are specifically designed to evoke nostalgia and make us open our wallets (surprise, surprise). In fact, did you know that the company also makes a CRT monitor with The Oregon Trail displayed on it? It’s rad.Even if video games aren’t your jam, Hallmark has a stranglehold…

When Jeff Bezos decided Amazon needed to get in the smartphone game, he went all in. And the resulting device, the Fire Phone, wound up more densely packed with big ideas than just about any gadget you’ll find anywhere. There was just one tiny problem: they were mostly bad ideas.The Fire Phone shipped in 2014 with a feature list a mile long. The screen had a 3D effect! There were, like, 400 cameras! There was a whole home screen filled with something called “delighters!” But the Fire Phone was, above all, a way to buy things on Amazon. That was…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 105, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you’ve recovered from the clocks falling back, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about David Ellison and Common Crawl and Stephen Colbert, catching up on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Great British Baking Show, letting TikTok turn me on to a new Olivia Dean song and a new Broadway musical, testing the Boox Palma 2 Pro, spending way too many hours trying to…

Rumor has it, Apple is working on a low-cost MacBook. And not “low-cost for a Mac,” but a proper cheap laptop, possibly as low as $599. For a company that traditionally targets the more premium end of the market, this would be something of an about-face.Of course, Apple takes great pride in its design and aesthetics. So the company isn’t going to simply take the innards of a MacBook Air, slap them in a cheap plastic case, and call it a day. Instead, Apple is supposedly building a smaller laptop, with a lower-resolution screen and an “entirely new design” around…

Hey, all! The first week of November ushered in dozens of early Black Friday deals, and many of the best ones are still available as we delve further into the weekend. Some of our favorite fitness trackers have already plunged to new lows, for instance, and we’re even seeing early discounts on holiday decor. We’ve already published a full list of early Black Friday deals, which we aim to update on a weekly basis, but below is a quick overview of this week’s cream of the crop — including a few standouts that have nothing to do with the annual…

Robot vacuums are amazing machines, but they can also be a pain in the arse.In my home, testing a new robot vacuum often means digging it out from under my living room couch or unhooking it from the legs of my lounger. Then there’s being woken at 3AM by a cheery “resuming cleaning,” getting down on my hands and knees to retrieve a pencil from their brushes or scrub the gunk out of the “self-cleaning” dock. And — my favorite – holding my nose while dumping the contents of a giant dirty water tank into the toilet.Then I met Matic.…

Between all the new phones, smartwatches, and laptops we see throughout the year, it often feels like we’re constantly being nudged toward shinier, more expensive gadgets. And I get it. As a self-professed gadget nerd, few things are more exciting than unboxing and setting up a new device.But the truth is, you can still find plenty of great gifts for under $100. I use the Leatherman Free T4 every day, while Donkey Kong Bananza has provided me (and other Verge staffers) with hours of entertainment. If someone in your life loves the satisfaction of building and has shelves full of…

Samsung’s 65-inch Frame Pro is $1,447.99 ($752 off) — a new all-time low — at Woot. The 75-inch model is $1,897.99 ($1,302 off), also an all-time low at Woot. The TV’s main attraction is its “Art Mode,” which cycles through a gallery of famous paintings when you’re not actively using it. The artwork on the TV’s matte QLED display looks more like an actual painting display than they would on an LED or OLED screen.Art mode requires a subscription ($50 per year) to access. Once you have an account, you can select the paintings you’d like to display, including world-famous…