CVS Pharmacy’s Spoken Rx prescription labels are now available at all locations

All CVS Pharmacy locations in the US now offer Spoken Rx prescription labels for blind and vision-impaired patients. | Photo by Victoria Arocho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

CVS Pharmacy is expanding its Spoken Rx audio prescription labels to be available in all its pharmacies, after a trial run last year. The feature, developed as part of a collaboration with the American Council of the Blind, is part of the CVS Pharmacy mobile app and can read prescription information — like dosage and directions — aloud in English or Spanish.

To use the spoken labels, CVS Pharmacy patients register for a CVS account, download the smartphone app, and enroll in Spoken Rx. The patient’s future prescription labels will then be tagged with an RFID label. The enrollment process can be done over the phone or in person at a CVS pharmacy. When the patient holds the prescription bottle four inches from their smartphone, the app...

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Microsoft Teams Essentials is a new standalone version for small businesses

Microsoft is creating its first standalone version of Microsoft Teams for small businesses. Microsoft Teams Essentials will be priced at $4 per user per month and provide access to the core meeting features of Teams without the typical Office app bundling that requires a more expensive Microsoft 365 plan. This standalone version makes Teams even more of a Zoom competitor, as Microsoft is dropping its Slack-like channels functionality in favor of a more simplified chat interface and a focus on meetings and video calls.

“It’s the first standalone offering of Microsoft Teams designed specifically with small businesses in mind,” explains Jared Spataro, head of Microsoft 365. “It brings together features small businesses need to serve...

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Biden administration issues new framework for space policy, with a focus on climate change

Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at an event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on November 5th, 2021 | Image: NASA/Taylor Mickal

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris’ office released a new framework for US space policy, detailing how the Biden administration plans to approach commercial, civil, and military space activity moving forward. Called the United States Space Priorities Framework, the document keeps many of the same space priorities from the previous administration but adds a new emphasis on using space to help combat climate change and investing in STEM education.

The new framework comes ahead of today’s National Space Council meeting, the first one to be held under the Biden administration. Harris, who chairs the National Space Council, will convene the policy advisory group at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, at 1:30PM ET today.

T...

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Reddit is adding new real-time features, including a live upvote count

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit is introducing some big changes on Wednesday by adding new real-time features. Perhaps the biggest update is that the number of upvotes, downvotes, and comments will go up or down as they happen. That could give you a more accurate idea of the popularity of a post as you’re reading it, but I could also see people hitting an upvote or downvote in response to seeing others do the same.

Another change is that Reddit will show the number of people reading a post when there are five or more people looking at it. Reddit won’t just show who’s reading, though; it’s also introducing a typing indicator that will pop up when two or more users are typing a comment. And when new top-level comments come in, Reddit will show a new pill-shaped...

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Match Group will pay Tinder’s co-founders $441 million over valuation lawsuit

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Match Group will pay Tinder’s co-founders and original team $441 million to settle a years-long lawsuit over allegations that Match Group purposely undervalued the startup in an effort to avoid paying out billions of dollars in equity. The settlement comes a few weeks after the trial began in the New York Supreme Court, which has included testimony from the plaintiffs, including Tinder co-founder and former CEO Sean Rad, and the defense, including IAC chairman and founder Barry Diller. (IAC owned Match Group up until last year when it spun out into its company.)

The plaintiffs were originally seeking a $2 billion payout. They first filed the lawsuit in 2018, a year after Match Group merged Tinder into its dating app portfolio, resulting...

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Amazon acknowledges its Appstore is breaking on Android 12

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Shortly after Google rolled out the Android 12 update in October, users started noticing that they’re unable to use any of the apps in the Amazon Appstore, as reported by 9to5Google. Reports of the issue cropped up on the Amazon forum over a month ago, and there’s no timeline for a possible fix (via Liliputing).

“We are aware and working to resolve an issue impactingapp performance and launches for the small number of Amazon Appstore users that have upgraded to Android 12 on their mobile devices,” Amazon spokesperson Troy Edwards told The Verge. “This issue does not impact Amazon Fire Tablets or Fire TV devices.”

One user, Lovingboth, describes their experience with the issue in the thread on Amazon’s forum:

My rain radar app from the...

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Qualcomm’s new always-on smartphone camera is a privacy nightmare

The front-facing camera on a Samsung smartphone. Next year’s Qualcomm processor will allow these cameras to always scan for your face, even when you’re not using the phone. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

“Your phone’s front camera is always securely looking for your face, even if you don’t touch it or raise to wake it.” That’s how Qualcomm Technologies vice president of product management Judd Heape introduced the company’s new always-on camera capabilities in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor set to arrive in top-shelf Android phones early next year.

Depending on who you are, that statement can either be exciting or terrifying. For Qualcomm, it thinks this new feature will enable new use cases, like being able to wake and unlock your phone without having to pick it up or have it instantly lock when it no longer sees your face.

But for those of us with any sense of how modern technology is used to violate our privacy, a camera on our...

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Samsung refreshes two budget A-series phones with 5G and higher prices

The Samsung Galaxy A13 will be an AT&T exclusive starting December 3rd, 2021, before being available on T-Mobile andSamsung.comin early 2022. | Samsung

With 2022 and CES just around the corner, Samsung is ready to introduce new updates to its popular and budget-friendly A-series, which has helped keep sales strong for the Korean company despite supply woes for the flagship Galaxy S21. This time around, both the Galaxy A13 5G and A03S are getting a bit more expensive while confirming some new hardware and 5G connectivity for the A13.

Samsung Galaxy A13 5G

Unlike the 4G-only Galaxy A12, the new A13 will be able to access 5G networks, specifically, with the sub-6GHz bands available on T-Mobile and AT&T. The A13’s 5G readiness partly explains its new $249.99 price. That’s a whopping $70 increase from its $179.99 predecessor and slightly cheaper than the $279.99 Galaxy A32 5G with similar...

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Nintendo’s new Big Brain Academy turns brainteasers into a party game

2021 is shaping up to be the year of party games on the Switch. This year, Nintendo has released new entries in the WarioWare and Mario Party franchises, and now it’s completing the party trilogy with Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain. It’s the continuation of a series that started with Brain Age on the Nintendo DS, which, alongside the likes of _Wii Sports_and Wii Fit, helped solidify the company’s “blue ocean” strategy of reaching a nontraditional gaming audience. Each “Brain” game is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of digital brainteasers. The twist in the latest is that its focus is almost exclusively on multiplayer play.

At its most basic, Big Brain Academy is a mini-game collection where each of the games is divided into...

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Big tech’s first generation of founders are starting to step aside

Massive tech companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix, and more have had a huge impact on the way we live our lives, and have had incredible levels of financial success. Another thing many of these companies have in common is that their founders are no longer necessarily in control; they’ve either stepped down, started sharing power with others, or in some cases possibly even been pushed out.

This week alone, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO, and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff became a co-CEO. They’re not alone.

• Amazon— In July 2021, Jeff Bezos officially handed the CEO position of Amazon over to former Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy.
• Apple— Tim Cook was temporarily left in charge of Apple in 2009 while Steve...

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The Apple Watch Series 6 is still available for $100 off at Best Buy

The last-gen Apple Watch Series 6 is just $299 at Best Buy. | Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Cyber Monday may be over, but Cyber Week continues. If at any point this past weekend you missed out on an Apple Watch deal you were keeping tabs on, fret not, you can still pick up the 40mm, GPS version of the Apple Watch Series 6 for just $299 at Best Buy. That’s a $100 discount on the otherwise $399 wearable, which offers built-in sleep tracking, a blood oxygen sensor, and an always-on display. It’s a more affordable alternative to Apple’s new Series 7, with features you won’t find in the similarly priced Apple Watch SE.

For new subscribers, Best Buy’s also throwing in six months free of Apple Fitness Plus, an exercise service that integrates nicely with the Apple Watch and offers fitness classes. Note, however, this deal is only...

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California is getting its first real autonomous delivery service thanks to Nuro and 7-Eleven

Nuro, a leader in autonomous delivery vehicles, is kicking off a new service in California in partnership with 7-Eleven. The company will deliver convenience store products to customers in its autonomous Toyota Prius vehicles, which will include a safety driver behind the wheel, before eventually shifting over to its fully driverless R2 delivery vehicles.

The service will only be available to residents who live in proximity to the 7-Eleven store at 1905 Latham Street in Mountain View, from 8AM–9PM, seven days a week. Customers can order items like pizza, chips, beverages, and household items through 7-Eleven’s “7NOW” delivery app, although age-restricted items, like alcohol and cigarettes, won’t be available.

Orders will be delivered...

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Fortnite’s new ‘Party Worlds’ put the focus firmly on socializing

Walnut World is one of the two debut Party Worlds. | Image: Epic

“Party Worlds” are new spaces coming to Fortnite which are designed to focus on socializing over combat, the game’s developer Epic Games has announced. “These are experiences that are designed as places for players to hang out, play fun mini-games, and make new friends,” the developer says, adding that Party Worlds cannot be centered on “combat or damage.”

To kick off the initiative, Epic has collaborated with community members fivewalnut and TreyJTH on a pair of example Party Worlds. One is an amusement park called Walnut World, and the second is called Late Night Lounge and has more of a nightclub vibe. The developer says it’s taking submissions for more community-made spaces. Just use the tag “Party World” for an island, and submit...

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Nothing’s debut earbuds now come in black

The Ear 1 earbuds and case, now in black. | Image: Nothing

Nothing’s Ear 1 earbuds, which launched earlier this year in a fetching white and transparent plastic color scheme, will soon come in black. The new Nothing Ear 1 black edition still features transparent plastic in its construction, but now it’s accompanied by matte black plastic. The new color scheme will be widely available from December 13th at the same price as the original white versions: $99 / £99.

Aside from the new design, these earbuds are functionally identical to what Nothing released earlier this year. You still get up to 5.7 hours of battery life from the earbuds with noise canceling turned off, dropping to four hours if you turn it on. Alongside the case, you get a maximum of 34 hours. The earbuds are also IPX4 water...

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Polaris’ new Ranger XP Kinetic is an all-electric side-by-side with a lot of horsepower

Polaris has unveiled the Ranger XP Kinetic, an all-electric side-by-side and the first vehicle to emerge from the collaboration between the Minneapolis-based company and Zero Motorcycles.

Polaris is hoping the electric Ranger will help attract new customers to the world of power sports vehicles, which also include ATVs, snowmobiles, personal watercraft, and heavy motorcycles. The segment, which currently represents over $9 billion in sales globally, is expected to grow to over $12 billion by 2027, according to market researchers. And Polaris, through its partnership with Zero Motorcycles, is hoping to expand its lineup of electric vehicles.

two trim levels, Premium and Ultimate, priced at $24,999 and $29,999

The first will be the...

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Elizabeth Holmes admits that she was CEO of Theranos, the company she founded

Getty

‘The buck stops with you?’

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Microsoft is selling ugly Windows sweaters again, and this time, it’s Minesweeper

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has launched a new Windows software-themed ugly sweater on its Xbox Gear Shop dedicated to the infamous Windows game Minesweeper.

It’s well done: not only is the whole Minesweeper level shaped like a Christmas tree, but it’s also got mines masquerading as snowflakes and “buttons” to minimize the window or exit the game if you so desire, plus the classic wavy Windows logo that hearkens back to Windows 3.1. (If you’re wondering why the sweater has “1990” remaining mines, that’s a reference to the year Minesweeper first came out.)

Whatchu know about Minesweeper? #UglyChristmasSweater#WindowsUglySweaterpic.twitter.com/nWnn42uyw2

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) November 29, 2021

This is Microsoft’s second year of Windows-themed...

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Edge users aren’t happy about Microsoft’s built-in ‘buy now, pay later’ tool

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft is tacking on a “buy now, pay later” extension to Edge that prompts users to use short-term financing service Zip (formerly QuadPay) when making a purchase on the browser.

The option to sign up and use Zip will appear on checkout pages

The company introduced the service earlier this month, and now some users are reportedly seeing it integrated into their browsers after updating to Edge version 96, as noted by Ars Technica. The option to sign up and use Zip will be displayed on checkout pages, appearing in the same area where you’d enter your credit card number on Edge (or access a previously used one), and will sometimes be ingrained in the checkout page itself. Zip will pop up when Edge detects that your purchase costs...

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Amazon faces new pressure over COVID protections in warehouses

Amazon workers protested outside a warehouse last year | Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Amazon is facing new questions over failed COVID protections in its fulfillment centers, spurred on by New York Attorney General Letitia James. After more than a year of protests from workers and inquiries from legislators, James is now seeking a court order to require Amazon to appoint a monitor to oversee health and safety measures at its warehouse on Staten Island. As part of the same motion, James asked the company to reinstate fired worker Christian Smalls, who led public protests against Amazon last year, accusing the company of failing to keep employees from contracting the virus at work.

According to James, Amazon has rolled back many of its health and safety measures at the warehouse, known as JFK8. The Staten Island warehouse,...

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Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip is here to power the Android flagships of 2022

Qualcomm has a new flagship smartphone processor: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, announced at the company’s annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, giving an early preview at the brains behind the most powerful smartphones of 2022.

The successor to last year’s Snapdragon 888, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the first chipset to bear Qualcomm’s new naming scheme (which the company had previously teased last week), ditching the triple-digit numbering system that Qualcomm has previously used for new, generation-based monikers.

As is the case every year, Qualcomm is promising some major improvements in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, with better performance, camera technology, AI capabilities, security, and 5G.

20 percent better CPU performance and up to 30 percent...

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Twitch will use machine learning to detect people evading bans

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitch is furthering its efforts to reduce harassment with a new tool that uses machine learning to detect people who may be attempting to evade bans. It’s the company’s latest addition to combat things like hate raids, where streamers’ chats are overrun with trolls sending hateful messages.

The new tool, called Suspicious User Detection, can identify users as “likely” or “possible” people who have evaded bans from a streamer’s channel. The machine learning model powering the tool identifies potential evaders by evaluating things such as their behavior and characteristics about their account and compares that information against accounts that have been banned from a streamer’s channel.

Messages from “likely” evaders won’t be sent to...

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The latest Quest update brings cloud backups and a mixed reality view

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Meta has delivered a new batch of features for Quest headsets in an update rolling out today. The changes include cloud backups, a mixed reality camera mode, and other settings that round out the Quest’s already impressive feature set.

I’m most excited about the cloud backups feature, which gives you a way to restore user-specific data to your apps, including game saves and headset settings, if you need to replace, update, or reset your Quest. This is one of those things that I’m surprised the Quest didn’t support already, and I found out the hard way that it didn’t a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, I’m glad that it’s here now. It can be activated within the “Device” tab in the settings menu.

The mixed reality camera also...

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These transparent Apple prototypes clearly show the greatness of see-through gadgets

Image: Giulio Zompetti

Apple device collector Giulio Zompetti has photographed a prototype 29W Apple charging brick, and it may be one of the rare instances where the product-in-progress may look better than the final version. What makes it special is that you can literally see Apple’s design process because of the clear plastic shell, unlike the retail version where the internals are hidden by opaque white plastic.

Zompetti also tweeted another clear prototype, a pair of AirPods that live up to the “Air” name. The retro-futuristic look of the densely packed electronics makes me wish Apple would actually sell see-through gadgets again.

#AirPods, translucent prototype earbuds pic.twitter.com/zE4dt47H0J

— Giulio Zompetti (@1nsane_dev) November 30, 2021

29W...

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Android 101: How to stop location tracking

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Location tracking can be very handy — it’s convenient when an app can tell you, say, where the nearby restaurants or gas stations are — but it’s also a privacy issue. Do you want all your wanderings registered by Google? Are you comfortable knowing that Mark Zuckerberg’s minions know where you are at all times? (Well, not that Mark Zuckerberg has minions, but you know what I mean.)

In this article, we’ll take a look at how to stop location tracking on your Android phone (and your Google account) and how to delete your location history from your OS and from some of the more popular apps. As always, note that versions of Android can differ, and many manufacturers use overlays as well, which can change the locations of various commands —...

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Why Red Notice was able to beat Bird Box as Netflix’s biggest movie debut ever

Image: Frank Masi/Netflix

Netflix’s heist drama Red Notice has officially overthrown Bird Box as the streaming service’s biggest movie debut to date, with over 328 million total hours viewed as of today. That beats out Bird Box’s prior record — 282 million hours in its first 28 days — by a good margin, and _Red Notice_still has ample time to expand its debut-month record.

That might seem like great news for Netflix: a movie it wanted to be a huge hit was in fact a huge hit. It commanded views up against an eight-hour Beatles documentary as well as big theatrical releases like a Ghostbusters spinoff and multiple titles from Disney. But the film’s success isn’t quite as remarkable as the numbers make it appear. Sure, the hours viewed figure indicates that...

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Star Trek creator’s signature will live long and prosper in new NFT

DECEMBER 7: Actors Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and William Shatner pose for a portrait with writer Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Wise during the filming of the movie “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” which was released December 27, 1979 in the United States. | Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s signature on the show’s first contract with Lucille Ball’s Desilu Productions is now an NFT. Roddenberry Entertainment is calling it the first “Living Eco-NFT,” which seems straight out of science fiction itself.

The NFT’s creators implanted the signature, signed in 1965, into a living bacteria cell in the form of DNA code. As the cell duplicates, it creates new copies of the NFT — over a billion in one night. Even though there will quickly be billions of replicas, the NFT is called “El Primero,” which means ‘the first’ in Spanish. It will be exhibited at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair that kicks off on December 2nd.

DNA is nature’s way of storing data. But instead of encoding that data as zeros...

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Cyber Monday spending was reportedly down due to early shopping

Cyber Monday sales were down 1.4 percent year over year, according to a report from Adobe Analytics. Shoppers spent $10.7 billion this year, $100 million less than the $10.8 billion consumers spent in 2020.

“Consumers were not waiting around for discounts on big shopping days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday”

Amazon’s holiday shopping report only backs Adobe’s claims that Cyber Monday sales took a dip — the commerce giant didn’t report that this year’s Cyber Monday was the “biggest” day of shopping as it has done in the past. In 2019, Amazon said that Cyber Monday was the platform’s “single biggest shopping day in the company’s history,” while in 2020, Thanksgiving weekend was described as the “largest holiday shopping season” in...

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The leader of Facebook’s stalled cryptocurrency project is leaving the company

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Facebook cryptocurrency chief David Marcus announced today that he’s leaving the company. The former PayPal executive joined Facebook in 2014 to run Messenger but eventually took over plans to launch a new cryptocurrency and wallet, known at the time as Libra and Calibra, respectively.

After some pre-Meta name changes, the digital wallet launched with a small pilot in October under the name Novi but only in two countries (the US and Guatemala) and support for a single form of crypto, the Paxos stablecoin. The currency that spurred so much ire from regulators and politicians around the world, now called Diem, has yet to appear.

In posts on his Facebook page and Twitter, Marcus says, “While there’s still so much to do right on the heels of...

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This browser extension shows how many brands on Amazon are actually just Amazon

Image: The Markup

A new browser extension promises to show you which products in your Amazon search results are sold by brands that are either owned by or are exclusive to Amazon, giving you a better idea of who’s selling what you’re buying. It’s called Amazon Brand Detector, and it uses a list of Amazon brands created by The Markup, along with filters and other techniques (detailed here) to detect and highlight products that are a part of Amazon’s Our Brands program.

_The Markup_created this extension after its investigation into how Amazon ranks its in-house brands in search results and says the tool (available for Chrome-like browsers and Firefox) is designed to make searches more transparent. When we tested it, it obviously highlighted Amazon Basics...

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Levels Health review: optimize your fitness with a $400 glucose tracker

The key to the Levels Health system is a device that constantly monitors glucose levels in your bloodstream

Real-time glucose tracking for fitness-based purposes is here, but it’ll cost you

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