Author: News Room

It’s sold as an outdoor camplight, but BougeRV’s very bright LED lantern is really a multifunctional work lamp for any place that needs an extra dose of lighting. It’s rechargeable and compact enough to serve as a long-lasting flashlight with three swiveling LED panels that can direct 3000 lumens onto your table, campsite, workspace, or engine block from a height of more than five feet thanks to its telescoping aluminum pole.I’ve found it impressively versatile and useful over the last week of testing at home, at the beach, or tooling around in my camper van. It provides warm or cold…

Halfway through its first season, Apple’s Mythic Quest threw a wild curveball with “A Dark Quiet Death” — an unexpectedly dramatic episode that chronicled the rise and fall of another video game development team. “A Dark Quiet Death” was the first instance of Mythic Quest switching up its comedic formula to tell an earnest story about what makes people fall in love with games. And since then, every season of Mythic Quest has featured a backstory episode that felt emblematic of the series’ narrative strengths.Side Quest, Apple TV Plus’ new Mythic Quest spinoff miniseries, feels a lot like a collection…

The SteamOS-powered version of Lenovo’s Legion Go S handheld gaming PC debuted at CES 2025 with a somewhat attractive $499.99 price tag. At that price, The Verge’s Sean Hollister considered it a true Steam Deck rival, wedged neatly between the cost of Valve’s $399 LCD and $549 OLED models. The handheld recently went up for preorder at Best Buy with a higher $549.99 price (and a May 25th release date), and Lenovo communications director Jeff Witt confirmed to The Verge that this is the new cost for the base model.What’s done is done, I suppose, but the $499.99 price seemed…

But Quick Machine Recovery should at least help prevent similar outages. It prompts a device to enter the Windows Recovery Environment, where the machine can access the network and provide Microsoft with diagnostic information. Microsoft can then remotely deploy fixes via the Windows Update system.The feature is enabled by default for home users, and Windows Insiders can try it out now using a simulated environment. Read the full article here

@xAI has acquired @X in an all-stock transaction. The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt).Since its founding two years ago, xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.X is the digital town square where more than 600M active users go to find the real-time source of ground truth and, in the last two years, has been transformed into one of the most efficient companies in the world, positioning it to deliver scalable future growth.xAI and X’s…

Microsoft is no longer playing around when it comes to requiring every Windows 11 device be set up with an internet-connected account. In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview, the company says it will take out a well-known bypass script that let end users skip the requirement of connecting to the internet and logging in with a Microsoft account to get through the initialization process of a new PC.As reported by Windows Central, Microsoft already requires users to connect to the internet, but there’s a way to bypass it: the bypassnro command. For those setting up computers for businesses or…

A court took action on Friday to keep the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from shutting down a consumer watchdog agency while its court case plays out.Judge Amy Berman Jackson granted a preliminary injunction to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from being further gutted while she decides whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to dismantle it in the first place. “Absent an injunction freezing the status quo – preserving the agency’s data, its operational capacity, and its workforce – there is a substantial risk that the defendants will complete the destruction of…

“As we have previously shared, Fitbit is now a part of Google, and Fitbit Account holders will need to transition to Google Accounts to continue using Fitbit,” the email says. “If you want to keep using Fitbit, you must move to a Google Account by February 2, 2026.”In addition to not being able to continue to use the Fitbit service after the new deadline, the email also warns users that “your historical data will not be retained beyond February 2, 2026 (except as needed to comply with laws), and your account and data will be deleted.” Those not wanting to…

MrBeast teamed up with Alex Cross author James Patterson to co-write a thriller novel with Squid Game-like elements, according to a report from Deadline. The upcoming book, which doesn’t have a title yet, has reportedly fetched eight-figure bids for the publishing rights.The book’s logline, which reads, “Players fight to survive deadly tests held in dangerous locations around the world, as they battle to become ‘The One,’” sounds exactly like something the popular YouTuber, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, would be involved in.MrBeast has leaned into the Squid Game genre as of late, with many of his viral YouTube videos…

When I saw my colleague Kylie Robison’s story about OpenAI’s new image generator on Tuesday, I thought this week might be fun. Generative AI images raise all kinds of ethical issues, but I find them wildly entertaining, and I spent large chunks of that day watching other Verge staff test ChatGPT in ways that covered the entire spectrum, from cute to cursed.But on Thursday afternoon, the White House decided to spoil it. Its X account posted a photograph of a crying detainee that it bragged was an arrested fentanyl trafficker and undocumented immigrant. Then it added an almost certainly AI-generated…

Google will pay $100 million to settle a class action lawsuit accusing the company of charging for clicks on ads placed outside the geographic locations selected by advertisers, as reported earlier by Reuters. The proposed settlement was filed in a California court on Thursday and still requires approval by a judge.The lawsuit, first filed in 2011, centers around Google Adwords — now called Google Ads — and claimed Google broke California’s Unfair Competition law by misleading advertisers about the locations it would show their ads. It also alleged Google didn’t follow through on its promise to provide “Smart Pricing” discounts.“This…

If you hadn’t heard of Signal before this week, chances are you’re well aware of it now. The messaging app was thrust into the news on Monday when The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to a group chat involving top military officials planning an airstrike. Even though it entered the discourse for extremely unusual reasons, Signal has been, and remains, a well-regarded messaging platform for secure communication. It’s not foolproof — emphasis on fool, in this case — but it’s worth understanding what it is and how it works, even if you’re not a person who deals with…