Author: News Room
For the longest time, the iPhone was my favourite games platform. In fact, I considered it the greatest gaming device I’d ever owned. Which probably sounds bonkers if you’ve spent your life welded to an Xbox or PlayStation gamepad. But for me, mobile gaming rekindled something I’d long felt lost. These days, though, Netflix Games has me wondering if mobile gaming’s magic is gone for good. Let’s rewind. My formative gaming years were during the 8-bit era. People donning rose-tinted specs would have you believe everything back then was amazing and new. It wasn’t. The market was rife with rip-offs.…
Electronic instruments have come a long way since New Order sequenced Blue Monday using binary code. Now it’s all quantised beats, USB-C, and expensive noise-cancelling headphones. And if you’re in the market for modern melodies, these are the machines you need. From MIDI keyboards to beat pads, below you’ll find an orchestra of tools for making electronic music. Whether you’re tinkering with your first track or ready to lay down another lo-fi banger, the kit listed here will help you sample, sequence and synthesise your way to a smash hit. Or at least something worth sharing on SoundCloud. Don’t know…
Our water, health, and energy systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack. Now, when tensions escalate — like when the US bombed nuclear facilities in Iran this month — the safety of these systems becomes of paramount concern. If conflict erupts, we can expect it to be a “hybrid” battle, Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety & resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), tells The Verge. “With great connectivity comes great responsibility.”Battlefields now extend into the digital world, which in turn makes critical infrastructure in the real world a target. I first reached out to IST…
For years, Meta’s trained its AI programs using the billions of public images uploaded by users onto Facebook and Instagram’s servers. But apparently, Meta has decided to try training its AI on the billions of images that users haven’t uploaded to those servers.On Friday, TechCrunch reported that Facebook users trying to post something on the Story feature have encountered pop-up messages asking if they’d like to opt into “cloud processing”, which would allow Facebook to “select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on a regular basis”, to generate “ideas like collages, recaps, AI restyling or…
Things are looking bright for those who want to nab a great TV in 2025 at a substantial discount. There’s usually a great deal happening on a mid- or high-end TV from LG, TCL, Hisense, or Amazon’s own Fire TV brand — even if the biggest discounts remain reserved for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day, and during the lead-up to the Super Bowl.Right now, there are a number of discounted 4K TVs to choose from, spanning a wide variety of prices, sizes, and feature sets. Whether you want a secondary screen for the bedroom, or a high-end OLED…
After a long week, the last thing I want to do is clean my floors (they’re seriously overdue for a cleaning). Busting out the vacuum and mopping can be tiring. That’s why I’m a big fan of robot vacuums, especially ones with built-in mops that can handle all the cleaning on their own. Speaking of, you can pick up the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni C20 at Amazon and Eufy for $399.98 ($300 off), matching its all-time low. This deal may be around for just a matter of hours.The Omni C20 is one of Eufy’s newer vacuum and mopping combo units…
Gaming laptops come in various shapes and sizes, though many of the heavy hitters remain thick and beefy machines that maximize cooling to get the most out of their powerful chips. Most are awash in RGB lighting and edgy designs geared towards capital-G Gamers, but there are also thinner, lighter options that are more portable and less showy. Our go-to recommendation that checks the boxes for most people is, and has been for a while, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14. It’s a gaming laptop that doesn’t forget the “laptop” part. The G14 is a versatile machine for both play and…
Google’s carbon emissions jumped yet again as the company continues to push ahead in AI. The company’s 2025 sustainability report emphasizes that its “ambition-based emissions” grew 11 percent last year to reach 11.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution, marking a 51 percent increase compared to 2019.That puts Google farther away from its goal of slashing planet-heating pollution in half by 2030 compared to a 2019 baseline. But what it calls “ambition-based” emissions excludes certain categories of supply chain pollution it considers out of its control or“peripheral” to the core business of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. That includes certain…
Threads has taken another step towards decoupling from Instagram by introducing its own word blocking filters. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Thursday that the Hidden Words setting on Threads includes “newly added custom filters to block words, phrases, and emojis in batches, with optional time limits.”A previous version of Hidden Words was tied to Instagram, meaning you could only mute the same words and phrases across both platforms. This change enables users to tailor what they want to filter out of their feeds, search, profiles, and replies on both services. “Threads is about fostering an open exchange of perspectives,…
With the Wear OS 5.1 update that was released last March, Google quietly introduced a new feature called Channel Sounding for the Pixel Watch 3 that could improve the accuracy of pinpointing the location of other devices using its existing Bluetooth hardware. But while Channel Sounding is now supported by the smartwatch, it’s not yet in use because the wearable is one of the first Android devices to implement it, according to Android Authority, and you need multiple devices supporting the feature for it to work.The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the latest iteration of its wireless communication protocol…
Adobe’s Project Indigo is a camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds. It’s the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter of whom is also known as one of the pioneers of computational photography with his work on early Pixel phones. Indigo’s basic promise is a sensible approach to image processing while taking full advantage of computational techniques. It also invites you into the normally opaque processes that happen when you push the shutter button on your phone camera — just the thing for a camera nerd like me.If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look,…
A lot of the future of AI will be settled in court. From publishers to authors to artists to Hollywood conglomerates, the creative industry is picking a big copyright fight over the vast quantities of data used to train AI models — and the ultimate output of those models. (Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.) This week, we got rulings in two early cases, involving groups of authors suing Anthropic and Meta. In both cases, the tech companies won. Sort of.On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay, David, and Jake talk…