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The next privacy crisis

Imagine a world where you barely notice the barriers between digital and physical space. Instead of looking at a TV or phone, you have a pair of glasses that can project a screen anywhere. You can seamlessly pull up translations for any street sign or instructions for any task. You can amplify a difficult-to-hear conversation through an earpiece or highlight a hard-to-see detail in your surroundings.

Now imagine the same world — but your glasses scan every conversation to personalize a barrage of advertising. Some locations are replete with helpful holographic instructions, while in other places, neglect and poor connectivity make them few and far between. A sophisticated facial recognition system tracks every stranger you encounter......

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The simple solutions to better games

Game accessibility has come a long way, but there’s still more to do

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The metaverse, the multiverse, and the end of your free time

In a decade, entertainment will try to be everything

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The future of AI is a conversation with a computer

Illustration by Micha Huigen

AI writing tools can tell us a lot about artificial intelligence

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Meta’s Andrew Bosworth on moving Facebook to the metaverse

Andrew Bosworth

Grayson Blackmon

‘The magnitude of technological shifts that we are trying to manifest here hasn’t been attempted in a long time’

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Social media vs. the world

What comes after deplatforming?

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Welcome to the stonk market

Illustrations by Michelle Rohn

Is finance just another meme?

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Pinterest hops on the live shopping trend with Pinterest TV

Pinterest live shopping

Photo by Pinterest

Pinterest is diving deeper into the e-commerce game with its upcoming shoppable live series, Pinterest TV, which is set to debut on November 8th. Each episode will star a creator from the platform, airing Monday through Friday at 6PM ET on iOS and Android. Shows will cover different topics every day, ranging from fashion, beauty, home, food, and more.

On Fridays, episodes turn into a QVC-style shopping show, where viewers can purchase exclusive products from different brands, such as Patagonia, Crown Affair, Allbirds, Outdoor Voices, Mented, and Melody Ehsani, using special discounts. Some Pinterest-exclusive shows are already in the works, like Christian On, in which fashion designer Christian Siriano will replicate the most popular...

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Public transportation can save the world — if we let it

Caleb Spronk, 35, has a lot of great memories — and some not-so-great ones, too — of riding public transportation in Minneapolis. There were the random conversations with strangers, late-night rides after last call at the bar, and those raucous times packed onto a Metro Transit train with dozens of other Twins fans after a big win at Target Field. Even the time he was slapped in the face by a teenager who didn’t take kindly to Spronk’s request to stop holding the doors open wasn’t enough to taint the overall experience of riding transit in the Twin Cities.

Then Covid hit, and Spronk, like many people, stopped using the train. As a software developer, he was privileged to be able to work from home. But when he eventually returns to the...

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The smartphone, circa 2031

Small improvements can go in surprising and strange directions

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Rise of the super app

Social media companies are increasingly super apps that encompass more of what we do online, for better or worse

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Power Shift

The sun was still shining when Marcia McWilliams lost power in her New Orleans East home. She had been cooking steaks on her stovetop on Sunday, August 29th, just before Hurricane Ida would tear through the city, and was planning to hunker down in her two-story house with her husband, elderly uncle, and granddaughter. But the blackout had arrived early. Up and down the block, neighbors ventured outside to check in with each other. “We’re all looking at each other like, ‘What’s going on?’ The sun was shining!” McWilliams says.

An aging network of power lines connects McWilliams’ home and her neighbors’ to energy sources outside of the city. Ida’s hurricane-force winds started severing those connections soon after the storm made landfall...

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Feature Packed

The Verge has been committed to longform journalism since our very first day. We launched with a story called “Condo at the End of the World,” and we’ve been publishing deeply reported stories about the world technology has created ever since.

As part of our look back at the last 10 years of The Verge, we wanted to highlight (and, in some cases, remaster) a number of those stories we’re particularly proud of — pieces that had an outsized impact, exposed wrongdoing, or simply brought to life the complicated world behind our screens.

Making this list was both a delight — we have published a lot of terrific feature journalism in the past decade, and reading it all again brought back a flood of memories — and incredibly difficult, as we had...

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Our favorite gadgets of the last 10 years

When The Verge launched on November 1st, 2011, the iPhone 4S was Apple’s newest phone. The Galaxy Nexus was imminent. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were modern game consoles. The original Amazon Echo was three years away. The first Apple Watch was more than four years away. So many gadgets that we take for granted nowadays looked a lot different 10 years ago or just didn’t exist at all.

But ever since day one of The Verge, we’ve diligently covered all of the gadgets we could possibly get our hands on. And over the course of the site’s life, some have wormed their way into our hearts (and in one case, a finger), so we wanted to write about them. We’re celebrating a lot for The Verge’s 10th anniversary, but this story is our place to...

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Dear Vergecast fans, thank you

Vergecast Logo lede image

It’s been 10 years! You’re still here

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The unexpected health impacts of wearable tech

Illustration by Micha Huigen

We didn’t realize how much doctors would be seeing of our health data

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Launching myself into this decade’s space race

Illustration by Micha Huigen

It’s pure chaos

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The worst gadgets we’ve ever touched

Over its 10-year history, The Verge has reviewed hundreds of products: smartphones that have changed the way that we communicate, take photos, and engage with the world; incredible laptops that pack the power of a gaming PC into a portable package; and consoles that have revolutionized how we play.

These are not those products, though. As The Verge turns 10, we’ve taken the time to look back at some of the highest highs of the world of consumer technology… but also the biggest duds that ended up on our desks.

Welcome to The Verge’s gadget hall of shame. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Red Hydrogen

What else could top this list other than the Red Hydrogen, which has the dubious honor of receiving the lowest review...

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Microsoft resurrects Clippy again after brutally killing him off in Microsoft Teams

Clippy is back inside Microsoft Teams. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is bringing Clippy back to Microsoft Teams, after first resurrecting the annoying paperclip two years ago and then killing it off after a few days. A sticker pack will be available in Microsoft Teams soon that includes lots of different versions of the anthropomorphic paperclip.

“Yes, it’s true – Clippy has agreed to come out of retirement!” explains Microsoft, confirming the return of Clippy to Microsoft Teams. “Whether you loved him or hated him, Clippy is back with a Retro Sticker Pack in Teams.”

#MicrosoftTeams stickers: game over.#Clippypic.twitter.com/LVLGr2GeCM

— Harri Mikkanen (@_haba) October 28, 2021

The new retro sticker pack looks a lot like the same stickers that a team of Microsoft employees created for Teams...

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A decade of tech reporting from Japan

Illustration by Micha Huigen

The rest of Asia has risen in importance

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A wild ride through the electric vehicle boom

Illustration by Micha Huigen

Racing in a Tesla that wasn’t ready for the track

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10 reviews that defined The Verge’s first decade

Reviews have been part of _The Verge’_s DNA since the very beginning. Before the beginning, actually — in the site’s prehistory as This Is My Next, reviews were one of the core elements of continuity in the months before we launched The Verge for real. In those days, we were tackling terrible Android and BlackBerry tablets, evaluating the first wave of Intel ultrabooks, and heaping praise on the then-revolutionary Galaxy Nexus.

Since then, we’ve been there for the rise of drones, VR, smartwatches, foldables, OLED screens, mirrorless cameras, voice assistants, video doorbells, and streaming media boxes, not to mention the best smartphones and the most impractical laptops. From the beginning, The Verge has picked the products...

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What The Verge covered in our first 120,000 stories

The Verge launched on November 1st, 2011. In the 10 years since, we’ve published more than 120,000 stories — or more than 230 stories a week, every week, since the day we got started.

To celebrate our 10th birthday, we’re taking a look back at our first decade of coverage. And to start, we’re breaking down exactly what those 120,000 stories were about.

This isn’t just the story of what The Verge covered, though. It’s the story of how the technology industry evolved over the last decade: companies tangled over high-stakes lawsuits, powerful new figures reshaped how we communicate, companies rose and fell competing over slivers of market share. Even the way we talk about tech has changed.

Inside the headlines, you can see the shape of...

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A note from our editor-in-chief

Illustration by Richard Parry

Reflecting on 10 years of The Verge

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‘Historic’ global minimum corporate tax rate formally endorsed by world leaders

G20 leaders in Rome. | Source: G20

World leaders have formally agreed to an overhaul of international tax rules that would impose a new global minimum tax on business profits of 15 percent, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has announced. The agreement at this year’s G20 summit in Rome is intended to curb the benefits seen by large companies that shift profits overseas to tax havens, which supporters of the deal argue has limited the amount of tax revenue countries are able to collect.

The deal also intends to update international tax rules to reflect the realities of the digital era. Rather than taxing a company where its operations are, the rules would allow countries to tax a company where its services are sold, The New York Times notes....

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Roblox is back online after an outage that lasted three days

In this photo illustration Roblox logo seen displayed on a...

Roblox went down Thursday evening | Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

After an outage that began Thursday evening, Roblox appeared to be back online Sunday evening. The company said in a tweet at about 4PM ET Sunday that it was “incrementally bringing regions back online.”

Quick update as we work to get things back to normal. We are incrementally bringing regions back online.

— Roblox (@Roblox) October 31, 2021

The problems began October 28th around 7PM ET, when the platform first reported it was having issues, and said it was “working hard to get things back to normal.” Some speculated that the outage was caused by a cross-promotion with Chipotle that went live about a half hour before the problems began, but the company said the outage was “not related to any specific experiences or partnerships on...

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Apple’s app tracking policy reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10 billion

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

An investigation by The Financial Times found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lost around $9.85 billion in revenue following Apple’s changes to its privacy practices. Last year, Apple announced the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy that requires apps to ask permission to track users’ data. The policy went into effect in April, barring apps from tracking users if they opt out.

Facebook notably criticized the move with a full-page newspaper ad, and thanks to the FT’s report, now we know why company leaders were so frustrated. According to the report, Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms” when compared to other social platforms due to its massive size. Meanwhile, Snap “fared the worst as a percentage of its...

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Leaked images show ASUS may be releasing a Surface Pro competitor that docks to an external GPU

ASUS Flow Z13 leak

Photo by Evan Blass

ASUS may be releasing a successor to the ROG Flow X13, the convertible laptop that doubles as a gaming PC. Evan Blass (@evleaks), a reliable leaker, tweeted out a photo of the ROG Flow Z13 — at a glance, it looks fairly similar to the new Microsoft Surface Pro 8.

If the leaked ROG Flow Z13 is anything like the X13, we already know how it may perform. The X13, a convertible laptop, can be connected to ASUS’ external graphics card (eGPU) called the XG Mobile, which we found to boost the lightweight convertible’s performance.

+ ROG Flow Z13 (not to be confused with Flow X13) pic.twitter.com/DLH7fmNHVt

— Ev (@evleaks) October 31, 2021

The eGPU also serves as a USB dock with a number of ports, transforming the 13-inch convertible into a...

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Leaked Lenovo Thinkbook Plus image shows a second screen next to the keyboard

A leaked image that shows a Lenovo ThinkBook Plus with a second screen next to the keyboard. | evleaks

Reliable tech gadget leaker Evan Blass (@evleaks) on Sunday posted an image to Twitter that showed a 17-inch Lenovo ThinkBook Plus with a second screen to the right of the keyboard. The screen looks like it is being used to draw or write on a color image on the laptop’s main screen, and appears that the computer would include a full keyboard and a large trackpad along with an extra-wide display. The image also shows what looks like a pen or drawing stylus, giving further credence to the idea that it’s meant for drawing.

Have you guys seen this yet? 17-inch ThinkBook Plus from Lenovo... pic.twitter.com/OElc5ZM3pb

— Ev (@evleaks) October 31, 2021

There weren’t any further details about the image, which Blass posted as part of a thread...

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New Trailers: The Wheel of Time, The Witcher, Lightyear, House of Gucci, and more

Rosamund Pike stars in The Wheel of Time | Amazon Prime Video

I’m close to giving up on The Morning Show; the latest episode spends a lot of time building up to a twist that makes very little sense given the season so far. They only have three episodes left and a lot of plot to push forward. Luckily, Succession is getting good and juicy with the Roy siblings choosing sides, and I’m also getting caught up in Maid, mainly because of Margaret Qualley’s strong performance as Alex.

So much to watch, so little time.

We’re heavy into the sci-fi and fantasy realms in this week’s roundup, but there’s a little fashion and murder-mystery as well.

The Wheel of Time

We’ve seen a few glimpses of_The Wheel of Time_ series based on the books by Robert Jordan, but this latest trailer shows us the beginning of...

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