A one-ton tungsten cube was just bought by a crypto cabal for $250,000

What’s 14.545 inches across, weighs one ton (around 907kg or 2,000lbs), and just sold to a group of anonymous crypto investors for roughly $250,000? Why, it’s the biggest tungsten cube ever to be manufactured by Midwest Tungsten Service of Willowbrook, Illinois.

Confused? Yes, that’s understandable. But consider this: tungsten cubes are one of the most popular memes in the world of cryptocurrency right now, a realm where value is defined as much by attention as anything tangible. (Call it the stonk market if you like.) Tungsten, if you’re not familiar, is a metal 1.7 times as dense as lead, and since 2015, nerdy types have been able to buy small cubes of tungsten manufactured by outfits like the Midwest Tungsten Service. Owning one has...

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Nokia G50 review: affordable but awfully average

Why suffer for a $300 budget 5G phone?

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Biden admin’s bug fix mandate aims to prevent the next major cybersecurity attack

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Biden administration is requiring civilian federal agencies to fix hundreds of cybersecurity flaws, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. As the_WSJ_ states, the BOD 22-01 directive from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) covers around 200 known threats that cybersecurity experts discovered between 2017 and 2020, as well as 90 more flaws that were found in 2021. Federal agencies have six months to patch older threats and just two weeks to fix the ones that were discovered within the past year.

The_WSJ_ report points out that federal agencies are usually left to their own devices when it comes to security, sometimes resulting in poor security management. The goal is to force federal agencies to fix all...

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Microsoft’s GitHub CEO steps down

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down after three years at the company. Friedman originally joined Microsoft after the company acquired Xamarin, which Friedman helped found. He then took over as the head of GitHub when Microsoft acquired GitHub three years ago.

Friedman is now returning to his startup roots. “With all that we’ve accomplished in mind, and more than five great years at Microsoft under my belt, I’ve decided it’s time for me to go back to my startup roots,” says Friedman in a GitHub blog post today. “I’m moving on to my next adventure: to support, advise, and invest in the founders and developers who are creating the future with technology and tackling some of the biggest opportunities of our day.”

Microsoft’s new GitHub...

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The 2022 Volkswagen ID 5 is a sporty electric SUV with over 300 miles of range

Volkswagen revealed the ID 5, a smaller, sportier version of its landmark ID 4 electric SUV that will only be available in Europe. It’s the latest vehicle to join VW’s growing “ID family” of electric vehicles as the company gets closer to its 2035 deadline to stop selling gas-powered vehicles in its home continent.

VW is releasing two versions of its new EV: the entry level ID 5, and the more premium ID 5 GTX, with dual electric motors on both the front and rear axel. (GTX is for VW’s ID models what GTI, or Grand Tourer Injection, means for the Golf.) The entry-level ID 5 will be equipped with a single rear-wheel-drive motor with an output of 174 horsepower and a 77kWh battery pack — theoretically enabling over 320 miles of range. (VW...

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Brydge’s 11-inch Max Plus iPad keyboard is now available

The Brydge 11 Max Plus keyboard with an 11-inch iPad Pro in it.

Following the launch of the 12.9-inch Max Plus keyboard for the iPad earlier this year, Brydge is now releasing an 11-inch version. The new, smaller keyboard has all of the same features as its bigger sibling, including Brydge’s new magnetic mounting system and Instant-On Bluetooth tech, but is sized to fit all generations of the 11-inch iPad Pro and the fourth-generation of the 10.5-inch iPad Air. It’s available starting today, November 3rd, from both Brydge’s online store and Amazon for $199.99.

Despite its smaller size, the 11-inch Max Plus’ pitch is exactly the same as the 12.9-inch model’s: it’s meant to provide a MacBook-like experience with an iPad. That includes a full keyboard layout with a function row, plus a large trackpad...

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Asus’ VivoBook 13 Slate is a detachable laptop with an OLED screen

The Asus Vivobook 13 Slate OLED has a keyboard and kickstand. | Image: Asus

Asus is known for delving into unconventional form factors, and its latest experiment is no exception. The VivoBook 13 Slate OLED is a 13.3-inch Windows tablet with an OLED screen and a detachable keyboard which starts at $599.99.

OLED screens are unusual, though not unheard of, in the detachable form factor. Asus claims that this one is capable of displaying 1.07 billion colors, covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, and has a 0.2-millisecond response time. It’s said to have blue-light levels “up to 70 percent lower than an LCD display” (although many modern LCD PCs also have technology to reduce blue light).

Rather than framing the Slate as purely a tablet for artists, though, Asus seems to be pushing it as an entertainment...

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Amazon confirms its support for Matter

The Amazon Echo Show 10 | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Amazon has affirmed its support for the smart home connectivity standard Matter, announcing in a blog post today that it will support Matter over Thread in its Echo devices and Eero Wi-Fi routers. Eero had previously confirmed its support of the standard. Amazon says the announcement is about “further expanding Amazon’s commitment to Matter and reinforcing its smart home philosophy of flexibility, privacy, collaboration, and interoperability.”

Additionally, Amazon has joined Apple, Google, and Samsung on the Thread Group Board of Directors — it has been a member for five years. Alongside Wi-Fi, Thread is a primary protocol for Matter. It provides a low-power, low-bandwidth, and low-latency mesh network for smart home devices to connect...

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Stack Overflow’s copy / paste keyboard is no joke

Hear me out

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Eero’s Pro 6 highlights the latest early Black Friday sales

November has come roaring out of the gates with some strong deals and early Black Friday sales. It’s not every year that you can start buying holiday gifts and know you’re getting the best deals possible, even before we push the clocks back, but that’s what we’re looking at here with these discounts on Eero mesh routers.

You can pick up a one-pack, two-pack, or three-pack of Eero Pro 6 tri-band mesh Wi-Fi 6 routers at Amazon and Best Buy for all-time low prices. Eero mesh routers are popular for good reason. They offer one of the simplest and streamlined ways to bring a solid Wi-Fi connection to all corners of your house, regardless of its size or tricky layout. And, you can add more routers to your mesh Wi-Fi system later on.

When we r...

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There will never be another Pokémon Go

Pokémon Go. | Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge

Creating a follow-up to Pokémon Go is an impossible task. The game was the kind of breakout success that had never been seen before — and might never happen again; it’s hard to overstate how the game was absolutely everywhere when it first launched in 2016. People were trespassing to catch Squirtles as the game set App Store download records. The wish fulfillment that came from seeing pokémon in the real world created a sensation that, even years after its peak, remains one of the biggest games in the world.

It was only natural that developer Niantic would try to follow that with something new. But re-creating the lightning in a bottle that is Pokémon Go hasn’t gone quite as planned, despite Niantic snapping up some enviable properties...

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Indiegogo switches gears to more closely screen crowdfunding campaigns

Indiegogo and GoFundMe have partnered to form the Crowdfunding Trust Alliance | Indiegogo

Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo is changing the way it does business, shifting from an open platform where anyone can raise money for just about any purpose to a closed model where every campaign will receive a manual review before it can go live.

“Candidly, we have not always lived up to our backers’ expectations,” said Will Haines, vice president of product and customer trust at Indiegogo. When the company launched in 2008, there were few restrictions on would-be entrepreneurs seeking to raise money from like-minded backers. But Haines says that “open” isn’t what the crowdfunding community really wants now, more than a decade later.

“Crowdfunding is not shopping — people generally understand that now — but it also shouldn’t be a leap...

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Amazon’s inexpensive Air Quality Monitor plays nice with Alexa

The air quality monitor (right) can show information on Echo Show devices. | Image: Amazon

Amazon’s latest smart home device is the $69.99 Smart Air Quality Monitor, a small puck around half the size of the latest Amazon Echo that’s designed to keep an eye on the quality of the air in your home. It can track your home’s temperature and humidity, and the presence of dust, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

A key selling point of the Smart Air Quality Monitor is its Alexa integration. It lets you ask compatible Alexa-enabled devices for an update on the air quality of the home at any time or view trends via the Alexa app or an Echo Show device. Importantly, the Smart Air Quality Monitor’s temperature sensor can also integrate with Alexa Routines. That allows it to function as a trigger for things like smart...

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GE wants you to trust its smart oven to cook the perfect turkey

A new Turkey Mode coming to GE’s Wi-Fi connected ovens and ranges this week promises to cook the perfect turkey | IMAGE: Kriech-Higdon Photography

The smart kitchen is getting a little more intelligent this holiday season. Appliance manufacturer GE Appliances has a new Turkey Mode for its smart ovens that promises to take the prep and guesswork out of roasting that big bird. It arrives on over half a million GE connected ovens and ranges this week via an over-the-air software upgrade.

The Kentucky-based GE Appliances gave me a demo of the new tech, and it’s pretty impressive. You put the bird in the roasting tin, pop it in a cold oven, insert the temperature probe built into the oven, push the Turkey Mode button (either on the LCD screen of the oven or in the GE SmartHQ smartphone app), and sit back and relax.

Image: Kriech-Higdon Photography

GE Appliances...

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How to print a document when you don’t own a printer

It can be difficult to figure out what to do when you’re asked to provide a hard copy of a document but don’t have access to a printer at home. While it used to be a safe bet that everyone had a printer at home, that’s no longer the case — but if you don’t have one, odds are that at some point, you’ll come across someone who hasn’t gotten the memo and insists on a hard copy.

If you’ve found yourself in this situation, you’ve got options. To help, I’ve researched the various methods you can use to get a document from your computer to whoever needs it and have come up with a few tips and considerations for printing without your own printer.

Before I get to that, though, you’ll have to...

Prepare to print

Presumably, the file you want...

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Waymo is bringing its autonomous vehicles to New York City for (manually driven) mapping

The latest autonomous vehicle company to tackle the mean streets of New York City will be Waymo. The Google spinoff is bringing a handful of cars to the Big Apple, where they will start mapping the city streets using manually driven vehicles with two people riding inside.

Waymo cited New York’s vibrant street life, “unusual road geometries” (which is a nice way of saying utterly confusing), and the likelihood of heavy rain and snow as being among the reasons the company is eager to test there. Presumedly the company is also curious to see how its vehicles will react when down-on-their-luck street hustlers slap their hoods and shout “I’m walking here!”

Waymo won’t have more than five vehicles on the street at a time to start out, a...

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Marvel’s Eternals is big, beautiful, and empty

Sophie Mutevelian

Marvel’s epoch-spanning epic has too many heroes but still feels empty

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Democrats’ infrastructure bills don’t go far enough on cleaning up the power grid

US President Joe Biden during the World Leaders’ Summit of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, on November 2, 2021. | Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

On a call Tuesday morning, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rallied Democrats to pass two ambitious bills at the heart of President Biden’s agenda, aiming for a final house vote later this week. But the climate provisions of the $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation bill that progressives want to pass alongside a bipartisan infrastructure bill are newly uncertain after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) pushed to further delay the vote during a surprise press conference on Monday.

It’s the latest twist in a long struggle for Congress to pass meaningful legislation in support of the ambitious climate goals President Biden set on entering office. The reconciliation framework released last week puts $555 billion into clean energy, the first major effort to...

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Google News to relaunch in Spain after mandatory payments to newspapers scrapped

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Who should get paid when big tech platforms aggregate news stories? This was the question that prompted Google to shut down its Google News platform in Spain in 2014, after the country decided the US tech giant should cough up a monthly fee to Spanish papers. Today, though, Google announced that Google News will return to Spain “early next year” after the country overhauled its online copyright laws in line with EU regulation.

The big difference from Google’s point of view is that it no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers. Some may want to charge Google for sharing stories in Google News, and Google can pay them or exclude them, depending on its preference....

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Clearview AI ordered to delete all facial recognition data belonging to Australians

Controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI has been ordered to destroy all images and facial templates belonging to individuals living in Australia by the country’s national privacy regulator.

Clearview, which claims to have scraped 10 billion images of people from social media sites in order to identify them in other photos, sells its technology to law enforcement agencies. It was trialled by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) between October 2019 and March 2020.

Now, following an investigation, Australia privacy regulator, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), has found that the company breached citizens’ privacy. “The covert collection of this kind of sensitive information is unreasonably intrusive...

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Happy Halloween! Theranos showed up in a Pfizer costume

Getty

With a logo on a memo and a little bit of language trickery, Theranos snookered rich investors

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Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now

Apple’s AirPods Pro wireless earbuds are a go-to pick that’s often on sale | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Tis’ the season for AirPods discounts galore. Last week, Apple finally launched its third generation of AirPods, introducing a new AirPods lineup and dropping the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level AirPods from $159 to $129. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also just around the corner, meaning many retailers are also starting to discount the AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, and even the aforementioned third-gen model.

Even this far ahead of the shopping holiday, there are sizable discounts to be had on the second-gen AirPods as well as the more expensive AirPods Pro and Max, which offer noise cancellation and better sound quality than the standard model.

Here, we’ll run through the best deals available on the entry-level AirPods,...

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You can now, technically, build your own USB-C iPhone

Robotics engineering student Ken Pillonel wowed the internet last month with a wild hack that managed to put a working USB-C port inside an iPhone X for a fully functional USB-C iPhone. And now, Pillonel has published a far more detailed video showing just how he managed to pull off the hack, along with a Github repository with technical details, CNC instructions, and information on the custom PCB that he designed for anyone brave enough to try and put together a similar hack.

The 13-minute-long video shows off the nitty-gritty of Pillonel’s mod, which is simple in theory: combining a Lightning to USB-C connection together in a daisy chain to mimic a proper USB-C port.

The video shows off virtually the whole development process. It’s...

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Zillow is moving out of the home-selling business

Zillow has announced that it’s winding down the Zillows Offers program, a day after reports surfaced that it’s selling over 7,000 of the houses it purchased with the intent of flipping them to would-be home buyers. In a press release announcing its Q3 results, the company says that Zillow Offers only served “a small portion” of its customers and that the company had “determined the unpredictability in forecasting home prices far exceeds what [it] anticipated.”

With the program shutting down, the company says it’s reducing the estimated value of the houses it’s purchased in Q3 or will purchase in Q4 by more than $500 million. Zillow also says that winding down the business in the coming months will mean having to let go of almost 25...

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Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV delayed again with no release date in sight

Blizzard Entertainment

During Activision Blizzard’s third-quarter earnings call, the publisher announced that Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 will now launch later than expected.

“As we have worked with new leadership in Blizzard and within the franchises themselves, particularly in certain key creative roles, it has become apparent that some of the Blizzard content planned for next year will benefit from more development time to reach its full potential,” a Blizzard executive said during the call.

Activision Blizzard mentioned “higher voluntary turnover” and “the departure of a number of individuals across the company” as factors contributing to this new delay.

Blizzard Entertainment suffered a large number of firings and high-profile departures, including Diablo...

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Blizzard co-lead Jen Oneal steps down three months after taking the role

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Jen Oneal is stepping down as a co-lead of Blizzard just three months after taking the role in the wake of the sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Activision Blizzard by the state of California. Mike Ybarra, a former Xbox executive who had stepped into the co-lead role alongside Oneal, will now be the sole lead of the studio, effective immediately.

“I want you to hear from me personally that I have made the decision to step away from co-leading Blizzard Entertainment and will transition to a new position before departing ABK at the end of the year,” Oneal said in a statement on Blizzard’s website. “I am doing this not because I am without hope for Blizzard, quite the opposite — I’m inspired by the passion of everyone here, working...

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If you haven’t gotten a Switch N64 controller yet, you’ll have to wait until next year

The Nintendo Switch N64 controller. | Image: Nintendo

The special Nintendo 64 controller for the Nintendo Switch briefly went on sale again on Tuesday, but if you missed buying one before they sold out, you won’t get a chance to pick one up until 2022, according to the controller’s listing on Nintendo’s website. We don’t know exactly when it will be back in stock, as all Nintendo says is that “more controllers will be available in 2022.”

Switch N64 controllers are out of stock until 2022.

The Nintendo 64 controller was released in October ahead of the availability of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack, a premium Nintendo Switch Online tier that gives you access to Nintendo 64 games and Sega Genesis games. You don’t need the controller to play Nintendo 64...

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Googler who helped lead 2018 walkout will reportedly join the FTC

illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Former Google employee Meredith Whittaker could soon be working at the Federal Trade Commission as an AI policy advisor, according to a report by The Information. Whittaker may be best known for helping to organize a 2018 walkout at Google, where 20,000 employees protested against how the company handled alleged sexual harassment, and for leaving Google afterward, claiming that it had retaliated against her and other organizers. Now, the FTC seems to be in the process of hiring her to help shape regulations around AI and Big Tech.

According to The Information, Whittaker hasn’t been officially appointed yet, as steps like running a background check aren’t complete. If she is hired, though, she’ll bring a good deal of experience — she...

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Ford’s selling electric crate motors based on the one in the Mach-E

Ford has started selling an electric crate motor based on the one that powers the GT version of the Mustang Mach-E. The “Eluminator e-crate motor” makes 281 horsepower, 317 pound-feet of torque, and costs $3,900.

The motor is just the first in a series of EV building blocks Ford says it plans to sell, like battery systems, motor controllers, and inverters, all of which would make it easier to retrofit internal combustion engine vehicles with all-electric drivetrains. Right now, those types of conversions are still mostly limited to specialty shops and hobbyists who often cobble together parts from all sorts of random places in the supply chain.

To promote the new motor, Ford built a one-off all-electric version of a 1978...

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Here are the best iPad deals right now

Select iPad models go on sale quite regularly. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, the best iPad deals of the year are just around the corner, yet we’re already starting to see some solid discounts for those who can’t wait to grab one now. Whether you’re after the new 2021 entry-level iPad, the high-end iPad Pro, or something in between like the iPad Air or the latest iPad Mini, there’s a sale going on somewhere you may be interested in. Of course, it’s difficult to know exactly where you can find those deals unless you’re looking around at all of the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at _The Verge_are doing each and every day, so let us help you out. Below, we’ve listed each iPad model that is currently available, some of which are...

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