Author: News Room

Apple is working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch in order to enable AI features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On Newsletter.The cameras will be “inside the display” for the standard Series Watch, while the Apple Watch Ultra would feature it on the side, next to the digital crown and button, according to Gurman. With them, the Apple Watch would be able to “see the outside world and use AI to deliver relevant information,” which he says is also the plan for camera-equipped AirPods Apple is rumored to…

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 76, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry if your bracket’s busted, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I have been shirking most of my responsibilities to watch March Madness. But I’ve also been reading about Polymarket and the future of social media and Taylor Sheridan, watching the Severance finale and immediately starting a full season two rewatch, listening to Amy Poehler’s delightful new podcast, testing out the new base-model iPad and the Nothing Phone 3A…

In recent weeks, airport Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have drawn public outcry for denying travelers US entry based on searches of their phones. A doctor on an H-1B visa was deported to Lebanon after CBP found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders. A French scientist was turned away after a device search unearthed messages criticizing the Trump administration’s cuts to research programs, which officers said “conveyed hatred of Trump” and “could be qualified as terrorism.” As the administration ratchets up pressure to turn away even legal immigrants, its justifications are becoming thinner and thinner — but travelers…

An update to the Philips Hue app this week appears to have leaked a new Hue Secure video doorbell, reports Hueblog. The unannounced product shows up in a section offering instructions for adding devices that you have no QR code for.From the screenshots below, taken in the iOS Hue app by my colleague Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, the Hue Secure doorbell is a straightforward video doorbell — tall, rectangular, and with what looks like a large button inside of an LED circle. As of this writing, the app still shows it on my phone.I could only get so far in the…

Cloudflare, one of the biggest network internet infrastructure companies in the world, has announced AI Labyrinth, a new tool to fight web-crawling bots that scrape sites for AI training data without permission. The company says in a blog post that when it detects “inappropriate bot behavior,” the free, opt-in tool lures crawlers down a path of links to AI-generated decoy pages that “slow down, confuse, and waste the resources” of those acting in bad faith.Websites have long used the honor system approach of robots.txt, a text file that gives or denies permission to scrapers, but which AI companies, even well-known…

Infinity Nikki and Assassin’s Creed Shadows have become my twin obsessions for their meticulously detailed environments, textures, and weather. With open-world dress-up game Infinity Nikki, I continue to be agog at how clothing textures are rendered with such detail and fidelity that by mere sight, I know exactly what a piece of fabric will feel like. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows, an action-packed romp through feudal Japan, I’m constantly in a state of awe at the natural beauty of the Japanese countryside, a feature that has been widely celebrated since its release. Both games are so visually arresting they made me…

SwitchBot will integrate more than 45 of its products with Home Assistant during the first half of this year, the company said in an email to The Verge. That expansion includes The SwitchBot Hub 3 that was first revealed in a filing with the Connectivity Standards Alliance last week.Many of these integrations are coming in April, according to a list on SwitchBot’s website that includes the Robot Vacuum K10 Plus Pro, Curtain 3 smart shades, and its garage door opener. They will join other SwitchBot devices that have Home Assistant integration, like the SwitchBot Lock Pro.Given its varied and ever-growing…

When Apple introduced the iPhone 15 Pro, Greg Joswiak, the company’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said the device’s three rear cameras would give consumers “the equivalent of seven camera lenses in their pocket.”We could spend multiple podcasts debating the technical validity of that statement, but what Joswiak was trying to imply was that the iPhone now had sensors with a resolution that was big and high enough that it could crop in to emulate various focal lengths.Now, Fujifilm is trying the same thing.With a 35mm lens stuck to a body shockingly similar to the super-popular X100VI, it would…

Forget the sleek, sterile sheen of an Apple Watch. For those of us who spent our formative years waggling joysticks while gawping at chunky pixels on flickering screens, the Atari 2600 My Play is a glorious, blocky anachronism. It’s a wrist-based time capsule that screams 1977 louder than a roll of beige wallpaper glued to a VHS copy of The Only Game in Town. But this isn’t yet another retro-themed trinket. Unlike many other watches based on classic games – Casio’s Pac-Man collab; Nubeo’s Space Invaders line – this one attempts to jam an entire 1970s console inside a wearable brick. Natch, you don’t quite get…

“Perplexity is singularly positioned to rebuild the TikTok algorithm without creating a monopoly, combining world-class technical capabilities with Little Tech independence,” the company wrote.They claim they’re uniquely positioned to do this “without creating a monopoly,” unlike potential acquisitions by competitors or investor consortiums that might maintain ByteDance’s influence. The plan includes: Read the full article here

The new souped-up Alexa voice assistant, Alexa Plus, is scheduled to arrive in the next few weeks in an early access preview. The good news is that as long as you have (or buy) an Echo Show 8, 10, 15, or 21 smart display, you’ll be able to use the generative-AI powered Alexa across any compatible Echo device you own. It will also work on Fire TV devices, Fire tablets, on the web at Alexa.com, and in the Alexa app. Sadly, a few Echo devices will be left out of the party. Several early models, including the first-gen Echo Dot,…

Meta has aggressively pushed to discredit and silence Sarah Wynn-Williams, the author of Careless People, her memoir about working at the company as a policy director. Now, she’s fighting back. Attorneys for Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion seeking to dismiss the gag order that Meta won via an arbitrator. A copy of her motion, which I’ve seen, argues that the nondisparagement agreement she signed when she left the company isn’t enforceable, while Meta has used it as the legal basis for banning her from talking about the book. Naturally, the Streisand effect is on full display. Careless People…