Go read this story about Amazon workers fighting the company’s robotic HR response to COVID

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

NBC News has published a great report on the struggles Amazon employees face trying to get tested for COVID after the company stopped onsite testing last summer, and the HR quagmire they could end up in when reporting their results or dealing with illness-related PTO. The story is well worth a read, as it delves into Amazon’s policies and systems, and gives a voice to the employees they affect.

The author of the report spoke to workers who faced breakthrough cases and unexpected costs as they tried to get tested for COVID, struggling with an overburdened and difficult-to-navigate healthcare system. “I really wish they would bring free COVID testing back to us,” says one employee.

One employee says Amazon’s systems “take the human out of...

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School employee stole 3,000 Apple iPods earmarked for Native American kids

She ran a program that used iPods to teach reading and math to underprivileged Native American schoolkids living on tribal land. Now, 46-year-old Kristy Stock of New Mexico is getting 18 months in prison for stealing 3,000 of them, which she resold for a personal gain of over $800,000 between 2013 and 2018.

That’s according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland, and Stock isn’t the first who’s been sentenced as part of this scheme — it all seems to center around around 36-year-old Colorado resident Saurabh Chawla, who bought up stolen electronics and other goods and resold them on eBay and Amazon. Law enforcement raided him in 2019, according to an earlier press release, and he bought stolen iPads from another New...

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Virgin Orbit launches first satellite mission after SPAC merger

Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl and LauncherOne just after rocket separation on a previous flight | Image: Virgin Orbit

This afternoon, small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit successfully lofted seven tiny satellites into orbit around Earth, marking the third successful mission for the Virgin Galactic spinoff company. The payloads consisted of various research satellites for the Department of Defense, along with three small satellites from companies SatRevolution and Spire Global.

The launch comes less than a week after Virgin Orbit’s stock began publicly trading for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange. Virgin Orbit announced in August its plan to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, making it one of three small rocket launch companies to follow the trend in 2021. On Friday, January 7th, Virgin Orbit CEO...

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Here are some must-have accessories for your new Xbox Series X or Series S

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The Xbox Series X and Series S are excellent next-gen machines, yet, no matter how good they are, there will always be room for improvement. Accessories like the Elite Series 2 Controller and the Xbox Stereo Headset can help you get the most of your new console, while others, like Seagate’s Storage Expansion Cards, will help ensure you have ample storage space for years to come. Below, we’ve listed some of the best accessories available for the Series X / S, some of which are even on sale at most major retailers.

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Paramount Plus cancels 60 Minutes Plus streaming series after one season

Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

ViacomCBS has canceled 60 Minutes Plus at its tentpole streaming service Paramount Plus, axing a title that was touted as one of the service’s premium exclusives.

The company confirmed to The Verge that it will no longer produce 60 Minutes Plus, a spinoff of its award-winning broadcast news magazine 60 Minutes. The series had only streamed one, 30-episode season as of the cancellation announcement, which was shared with staffers Thursday morning, Varietyearlier reported, citing sources familiar with the situation. In a statement, the company said that the content the series produced will remain on Paramount Plus.

“The excellent work that has been done by the 60+ team will continue to be on Paramount+.”

“We are proud of the team at 60...

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Valve says the Steam Deck is on track to ship by the end of February

In November, Valve gave everyone some bad news, revealing a two-month delay for the Steam Deck, but it’s starting off 2022 on a better note. In its latest update, the company says it “looks like” Steam Deck shipments will start by the end of February. Of course, we’re in a pandemic, and things can always change, but the preorder windows for Verge staffers are holding steady with their original projections — you can check your status here.

Happy January! We have a small update for you today - tl;dr - we're still on track to ship in February.

Check it out here: https://t.co/pQXC101JCV

— Steam Deck (@OnDeck) January 13, 2022

Just as important as the hardware, however, is the games that you’ll try to play on the thing. Valve apparently...

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Congress subpoenas Meta, Alphabet, Twitter, and Reddit over January 6th Capitol attack

Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images

Congress has sent subpoenas demanding information from Meta (formerly Facebook), Twitter, Reddit, and Alphabet concerning the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The House of Representatives Select Committee that’s investigating the attack wants each company to disclose moderation policy details and other information that could illuminate how participants organized their efforts or spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

The committee requested records from dozens of companies on a voluntary basis last year, but it says the response from the aforementioned four has been “inadequate” so far. “Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed...

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The FCC proposes new data breach rules for phone companies

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Phone companies could have to follow new rules about how they notify customers and the government following a data breach if a proposal from the Federal Communication Commission’s chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel passes. The notice of proposed rulemaking, released on Wednesday, cites the “increasing frequency and severity of security breaches involving customer information” as a risk to consumers.

The current rules give telecommunication providers seven business days to notify the FBI and Secret Service of data breaches that leak customer proprietary network information, or CPNI. In most cases, the company cannot notify customers about the breach until seven business days after information has been relayed to federal law enforcement. The...

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Second Life joins the metaverse discussion with the return of its founder — and some key patents

A recruiter works on a computer, 19 June 2007 at the cyber cafe “Le Milk” in Paris, during the Neo Job-Meeting (NJM) event, the first virtual job fair on the 3-D “Second Life” on-line game.  | Photo credit should read STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP via Getty Images

Throughout months of metaverse hype, with all the new names and virtual real estate speculation, I can’t count how many times I’ve thought, “Didn’t Second Life already do that?” Apparently, the people behind _Second Life_agree and are trying to pull our attention back to their virtual world that (rather helpfully) exists somewhere you can visit on your existing computer.

BIG NEWS! @HighFidelityXR Invests in @SecondLife.@philiprosedale Returns as an Advisor, Along with Key #Metaverse Assets to Help Fuel Growth. Read the full announcement https://t.co/WqPS4V9WPv

— High Fidelity (@HighFidelityXR) January 13, 2022

A strengthened “commitment to growing an innovative, inclusive, and diverse metaverse” includes _Second Life_founder...

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What works (and doesn’t) in an NFT-backed newsletter

Silphwave / Dirt

Funding a media outlet is a tricky business, and in recent years, some journalists have looked toward the cryptocurrency world to do it. That includes Dirt, an entertainment newsletter co-founded by Kyle Chayka and Daisy Alioto in late 2020. Dirt has raised money since launch by selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and earlier this week, it announced plans to work those NFTs into a decentralized autonomous organization or DAO — giving its audience input into where Dirt spends its money.

Dirt isn’t the first blockchain-based media outfit. In 2017, for instance, a project called Civil funded a panoply of websites using its own cryptocurrency token. But Civil collapsed after a difficult launch and initial funding that quickly ran dry....

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Twitter will now let all iOS and Android users record Spaces

Twitter is opening up the ability to record Spaces. | Image: Twitter

Twitter is now letting all Android and iOS users record Twitter Spaces, the company announced Thursday. Users will be able to choose to record a Space when they’re setting one up and the recording will be available for public playback for 30 days after the Space has ended. If you’re in a Space that’s being recorded, you’ll see an icon at the top of the Space letting you know.

You can see how it all works in this tweet from Twitter’s support account.

Another update on Spaces Recording:

The option for hosts to record is now available for everyone on Android and iOS! When starting a Space, tap the “Record Space” switch to have it available for public playback for 30 days once the Space has ended. pic.twitter.com/fYzaOjQJlF

— Twitter...

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Activity data from wearables could help monitor blood sugar levels, study indicates

Activity data from a Fitbit can predict changes in blood sugar control for adults with prediabetes, a condition that affects around one in three adults in the United States, a new study shows. The findings point to a strategy that tech companies might use in their rumoredefforts to build diabetes technology into wearable products.

“It kind of makes sense intuitively — more movement, more physical activity leads to overall better health, and better health is one of the factors behind improved glycemic control,” says Jessilyn Dunn, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University who wasn’t involved with this study but has also done work on wearables and glucose monitoring.

People with prediabetes have elevated blood...

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Google’s Android 12 update has been the rockiest in years

From bugs to halted releases, Android 12 has seen an unusually troubled launch.

There are some unique complicating factors this year, but it’s the same old Android — the good and the bad

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GameStop is selling PlayStation 5 bundles in-store to Pro members on January 14th

The PS5 will be available in select GameStop stores as a part of a bundle. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

GameStop PowerUp Rewards Pro members still on the hunt for the ever-elusive PlayStation 5 may have another shot at nabbing the console. Once again, GameStop is selling PlayStation 5 bundles tomorrow, January 14th.

The retailer has announced its first special in-store PlayStation 5 sales event of this year will take place in select stores on Friday, January 14th. To participate, you must have a subscription to GameStop’s Pro membership, which sells for $14.99 per year.

The standard PlayStation 5, which offers a disc drive, typically retails for $499.99. However, as GameStop will be selling pre-built bundles, you should expect to pay more than that. An image published by GameStop also suggests the less expensive $399.99 PS5 Digital Edition...

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A new Degrassi show is coming to HBO Max

HBO

Hot on the heels of Euphoria’s season 2 premiere, HBO and partner WildBrain have just greenlit a new Degrassi series from co-showrunners Lara Azzopardi (The Bold Type) and Julia Cohen (Riverdale) that the network is billing as “a reprise of the original teen drama.”

Like the original Degrassi, which explored the tumultuous lives of Canadian youths, the new show will focus on a group of high schoolers from Toronto who are all on different journeys of self-discovery. Unlike its predecessors (there have been five _Degrassi_series to date), which all featured half-hour episodes, the newest series will see _Degrassi_become an hour-long drama, indicating that its approach to storytelling is going to be a bit different this time around.

While D...

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Google calls for new government action to protect open-source software projects

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Following a summit on open-source security hosted at the White House Thursday, Google has called for increasing government involvement in identifying and securing critical open-source software projects.

In a blog post published shortly after the summit, Kent Walker, president for global affairs and chief legal officer at Google and Alphabet, said that collaboration between government and the private sector was needed for open-source funding and management.

“We need a public-private partnership to identify a list of critical open source projects — with criticality determined based on the influence and importance of a project — to help prioritize and allocate resources for the most essential security assessments and improvements,” Walker...

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We have so many questions about Boba Fett’s new job in The Book of Boba Fett

Image: Nicola Goode / Lucasfilm Ltd.

The long-awaited Boba Fett spinoff, The Book of Boba Fett, is roughly halfway through its seven-episode season on Disney Plus, which follows the iconic bounty hunter as he attempts to reinvent himself as “literally anything other than a bounty hunter.”

Yes, Boba Fett has a new job in The Book of Boba Fett. After killing off Jabba the Hutt’s former majordomo, Bib Fortuna (who, we’re told, stepped in to fill the Hutt-shaped space in Mos Espa’s criminal underworld), Boba is now the new “daimyo,” the lord and master of the desert planet’s seedier elements.

As we noted in The Verge’s initial review, it’s not entirely clear why Boba Fett is chasing a sudden career change at this point in his life. And after a few more episodes, The Book of...

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Robinhood has to pay a trader around $30K for restricting trades on certain stocks

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Jose Batista, a retail investor, was awarded almost $30,000 from Robinhood after filing a complaint using the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (or FINRA’s) arbitration service. His case may end up being an example for other retail traders who are still upset at the trading platform’s actions in January of 2021.

On January 28th, Batista was planning on selling his stock in Koss and Express — but Robinhood had placed trading restrictions on them, limiting the amount of shares its users could buy. This meant that Batista had to watch helplessly as the prices of his stock fell to nearly half of what they were the day before the restrictions were put in place, according to MarketWatch. “Seeing it plummeting and plummeting, I felt...

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The Expanse season 6 makes me worry about the future of touchscreens

I hope the future can do better

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Want the ‘TLDR’ on a site’s terms of service? There’s a bill for that

Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Democrats and Republicans are getting behind a new bill, introduced Thursday, that would force tech companies to simplify the language in their terms of service agreements, making it easier for consumers to understand.

The Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability Act – or TLDR for short – would require websites to provide a “summary statement” for users before they opt in to a terms of service agreement. The statement would summarize the legal jargon into something more easily understood by the average user, along with disclosing any recent data breaches (from the three years) and the types of sensitive data the site may collect. The summary would also explain “whether a consumer can delete their data, and if so, provide...

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The real beauty of Wordle is how its emoji results tell a story

Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Did you struggle with Wordle today? I sure as hell did, racking up my second ever failure since I started playing the game at the beginning of the year. I was annoyed at myself more than the puzzle and eased that frustration by sharing my results on Twitter.

As I did, I realized why the game’s auto-generated grids of emoji are so brilliant. It’s not just that they’re social (though that certainly helps), nor is it that they’re intriguing (there’s no link to the game and no explanation for the uninitiated as to what the emoji mean). No, it’s because each grid tells a story with wonderful concision. With just 30 squares and three colors, Wordle’s emoji results convey narratives of luck, frustration, perseverance, and failure; each grid a...

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Baby Shark is the first YouTube video to surpass 10 billion views

Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo. | Image: Pinkfong

“Baby Shark” became the most-viewed YouTube video of all time in November 2020, and just over a year later, it has achieved another huge milestone: it has become the first YouTube video to surpass 10 billion views.

“Baby Shark” is a cultural touchstone at this point. I remember singing it at summer camps as a kid growing up, and given the record-breaking popularity of the music video (which was created by the entertainment company Pinkfong), it seems I’m not the only person who will never forget this song. (I’ve been idly tapping my foot to the beat in my head the entire time I’ve been writing this post.) But the song’s impact doesn’t stop with the earworm hit. There’s also a Baby Shark show on Nickelodeon, a Baby Shark movie, and yes,...

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Eternals’ awful sex scene is kind of clever the second time around

Marvel Studios

Marvel’s Eternalsfrom director Chloé Zhao was a film of many firsts for the studio, but it would be a bit inaccurate to say that it featured the MCU’s first sex scene, as a lot of people seem to think it did. _Daredevil_and the rest of the Netflix / Marvel gang spent seasons getting it in over in their neck of the cinematic universe, and those shows very much laid some groundwork for Eternals’ much-tamer take on superpowered sex. Eternals’ sex scene might not technically be Marvel’s first, or particularly “fun” to watch, but it’s one of the movie’s more clever ways of stating the obvious about how its story is going to end.

This essay contains spoilers for Marvel’s Eternals.

Throughout Eternals, an emotionally-inert foray into the cosmic...

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The best budget laptop of 2022

Photography by Monica Chin / The Verge

The best cheap laptops under $800 from HP, Lenovo, and more.

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Gap is launching NFT hoodie art that unlocks physical clothing

Image: Gap

Gap is selling NFTs, following other clothing retailers like Adidas, Nike, and Macy’s that in recent months have jumped into the NFT space. The NFTs are built on the Tezos blockchain, which touts itself as a more energy-efficient option.

The NFTs come in the form of a series of digital hoodie art, with different levels of rarity at different price points. Common level pieces starting at roughly $8.30, or 2 tez, are on sale today. Rare, epic, and one-of-a-kind tiers will roll out over the next few weeks. Gap is partnering with artist Brandon Sines, creator of the Frank Ape cartoon character, on the designs.

The gamified experience comes out to around $500.

For shoppers who’d prefer to buy something wearable, look no further than the...

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2021 was hot as hell, NASA confirms

Photo taken on Aug. 12, 2021 shows burned bushes after a wildfire caused by high temperature in Siggiewi, Malta. Matla was hit by a heatwave which has swept across the Mediterranean Sea. | Photo by Jonathan Borg/Xinhua via Getty Images

The last eight years have been the eight hottest years on record, NASA and the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) confirmed today. 2021 ranks as the sixth hottest year on record, the agencies said, as global average temperatures trend upward. Rankings aside, there were plenty of red flags throughout 2021 to show us how remarkable the year was for temperature extremes.

“The fact is that we’ve now kind of moved into a new regime ... this is likely the warmest decade in many, many hundreds, maybe 1000s of years,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “There’s enough change that it’s having impacts locally.”

In North America, those local impacts included epically bad summer heat, even for typically...

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Fortnite is technically back on iOS, thanks to a GeForce Now game streaming loophole

Fortnite is back on iOS today... sort of. The popular battle royale game isn’t back on the App Store (where it’s been missing since Apple pulled the app from its storefront in August 2020), but iPhone and iPad owners can now stream Fortnite to play on their phones and tablets through Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, which opened up a closed beta today to test the new streaming version of the game.

Nvidia and Epic Games have been promising that Fortnite would come back to iOS through GeForce Now running through Safari’s web browser (the only way that Apple currently allows game streaming services like GeForce Now, Stadia, xCloud, or Luna to operate on iOS) as far back as November 2020, when the service first launched on Apple’s hardware....

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White House hosts tech summit to discuss open-source security after Log4j

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The White House will meet with leaders of major tech companies including Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta, IBM, and Microsoft on Thursday to discuss the security of open-source software. The issue has become urgent in the wake of the extremely serious Log4j vulnerability, discovered in December 2021.

The summit will also include the Apache Software Foundation — the owner and maintainer of the Log4j library — and Oracle, owner of the Java software platform on which the Log4j library runs. GitHub and the Linux Open Source Foundation will also be represented.

Executives from the tech companies will meet with representatives of various federal agencies, including the departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security. Other agencies...

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Neurotech company will use Magic Leap 2 for dizziness

Magic Leap

Magic Leap announced Tuesday that it was giving four healthcare partners early access to its next-gen augmented reality headset, including neurotechnology company SyncThink. With the new partnership, the company is interested in targeting vestibular disorders, which cause dizziness, SyncThink chief clinical officer Scott Anderson told The Verge.

SyncThink has been collaborating with Magic Leap for a few years, Anderson says. Now, it’s expanding that relationship to bring Magic Leap 2 into the neurological health space and collaborate on clinical studies, he says. SyncThink already has FDA clearance for an eye-tracking VR device that helps diagnose concussions. Changes in eye movements are also linked to vestibular disorders.

The upgrades...

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HBO Max monthly plans are 20 percent off for a limited time

Both the ad-free and ad-supported HBO Max plans are currently on sale. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Whether it’s exclusives like the new Harry Potter reunion special, Return to Hogwarts, or access to new films like The Matrix Resurrections, an HBO Max subscription means you can watch some of today’s most popular titles from the comfort and safety of your home. Unfortunately, we rarely see deals on the popular streaming service — that is, until today.

Right now, HBO Max is offering 20 percent off both its ad-supported and ad-free monthly subscription plans, which throughout 2021 gave subscribers limited-time access to movies like Dune the same day they hit theaters. And while Warner Bros. has stated it doesn’t intend to keep simultaneously releasing movies in theaters and on HBO Max this year, it will release six exclusives on HBO Max...

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