Twitter expands downvote test worldwide

An orange downvote button? Sure, nothing like Reddit. | Image: Twitter

If you’ve seen the option to downvote replies on Twitter, you’re not alone. The experimental feature, which Twitter started testing last year, is now being shown to a global audience, says the company.

The option to downvote was initially given to a select group of web users, but Twitter says it will soon be expanding the feature to iOS and Android users as well. Unlike on sites like Reddit, total tallies for upvotes and downvotes aren’t public, but are being used by Twitter behind the scenes to tweak what replies it shows users.

Twitter’s downvote tallies are private

The company said results of the experiment so far found that users downvoted replies they found offensive or irrelevant. “This experiment also revealed that downvoting is...

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Google highlights repairable Chromebooks for education as it battles cheap Windows laptops

Image: Google

Google announced today via its Google for Education blog that it's starting a repairability program to help schools fix Chromebooks in-house, and turn it into a valuable training opportunity for students looking into the IT field.

Google says 50 million students and teachers are using Chromebooks while raising bold claims of the sustainability these laptops bring to the table via efficiency and extra durability. A Google-commissioned study cited on the page says its manufacturer partners build hardware that uses 46 percent less energy than competing products.

50M students & educators around the world use #Chromebooks. To repair broken devices sustainably and quickly, schools are creating in-house repair programs—which also teaches...

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Elon Musk’s first Starship update in two years is next week

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced plans to give an update on his company’s next-generation Starship rocket next Thursday evening. The presentation will come more than two years after Musk’s last update on the vehicle in 2019.

Starship is the massive new deep-space rocket that SpaceX has been developing at the company’s test facility in Boca Chica, Texas, for the last few years. The fully reusable vehicle is designed to launch on top of a giant booster called Super Heavy, carrying people and cargo to distant destinations like the Moon and eventually Mars. So far, SpaceX has conducted a few high-altitude test flights with the vehicle but has yet to launch Starship to orbit. The company is currently awaiting approval from the Federal Aviation...

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GoPro says it’s going to expand its camera lineup

The company is moving beyond the Hero and the Max. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

GoPro will be expanding its camera lineup in the next year, adding two more models alongside its current Hero and Max cameras. According to Nick Woodman, the company’s founder and CEO who spoke during the company’s earnings presentation on Thursday, GoPro wants to offer more specialized cameras, while still using a lot of the same tech.

GoPro used to have several models in its Hero lineup, from the White, Silver, and Black models of cameras like the Hero 3 and 7, to the rear screen-less Session cameras. Since the Hero 8’s release, though, it’s only released flagship models, opting to sell older flagships in lieu of introducing lower-spec but still current-gen cameras.

GoPro isn’t going back to “good / better / best”

More models doesn’t...

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Google’s making a free Workspace tier for businesses that don’t need its email

Workspace Essentials Starter is basically Workspace without Gmail. | Image: Google

Google has announced a new, free tier of its Workspace suite, Workspace Essentials Starter. Basically, it lets workers use tools like Google Docs, Sheets, Chat, etc. with their co-workers without requiring them to switch over to Gmail if they’re already using something like Exchange or Zoho. While employees have long been able to replicate this use case with personal Google accounts, having an official product for it could help with security and make it easier to manage a team of people working together.

According to Google’s blog post, users will be able to sign up for Essentials Starter using their existing email accounts and will then be able to invite their co-workers to work on projects with them. Google’s providing 15 GB of Drive...

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Snapchat and Facebook agree that the future of social media looks like TikTok

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Snapchat invented the Stories format of sharing pictures and videos that disappear. Now the company is indicating, along with Facebook, that the future of social media looks more like TikTok.

In remarks to investors for its quarterly earnings report on Thursday, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that less time is being spent watching Stories from friends in the app, even though the company had hoped Stories engagement would pick up as pandemic lockdowns eased and people started leaving their houses more. Instead, Snapchat users are increasingly flocking to watch videos on Spotlight, Snapchat’s TikTok rival for viewing viral videos posted by random creators, and its Discover section for premium shows.

“This is a continuation of the trend we have...

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Ghostwire: Tokyo looks incredibly creepy in lengthy new gameplay trailer

Sony’s latest showcase event was dedicated exclusively to _Ghostwire: Tokyo_with an in-depth gameplay trailer — and the game sure does look creepy. The paranormal action game from Tango Gameworks, the studio behind the Evil Within series, takes place in a modern version of Tokyo full of folklore creatures. It’s described as a “reimagining” of the Japanese metropolis, just, you know, with supernatural creatures lurking around.

The gameplay trailer is nearly 10 minutes long (it’s followed by an inside look at development), making it the best look we’ve had at the game so far, and it’s full of terrifying creatures and slick first-person action. It also provides a bit more detail on Ghostwire’s story, which takes place after a mystery event...

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Blizzard is planning a new Warcraft mobile game

Nestled in today’s Activision Blizzard’s quarterly earnings report (which was curiously delivered as a press release and not a traditional call ostensibly because of its pending acquisition by Microsoft and possibly the myriadotherthings going on over there) is the news Blizzard is working on a new Warcraft mobile title slated for a 2022 release.

According to the press release, “Blizzard is planning substantial new content for the _Warcraf_t franchise in 2022, including [...] getting all-new mobile Warcraft content into players’ hands for the first time.” The press release doesn’t go into detail about the new game or when we can expect to hear more. For now, all we know is that it’s Warcraft, and it’ll be mobile.

The news coincides...

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The Verge’s 2022 Valentine’s Day gift guide

Photo by Alex Castro / Amelia Holowaty Krales

These gift ideas ran Cupid’s arrow right through us

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How to stream the 2022 Winter Olympics

Photo by LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA/AFP via Getty Images

It’s hard to believe we’re just coming off the heels of the last big Olympic event in Tokyo, which took place in summer 2021. But the XXIV Olympic Winter Games are officially here, with the opening ceremony kicking off on Friday, February 4th.

Whether you’re planning to tune in with Peacock, watch with a cable subscription, find highlights through a streaming service, or are hoping to find it bundled in with your live cord-cutting solution, we gathered everything you need to know in order to stream the Olympic Games.

How to watch the Winter Olympics opening ceremony

Coverage of the opening ceremony starts on Friday, February 4th, beginning at 6:30AM ET / 3:30AM PT. (Beijing is 13 hours ahead of the East Coast, and the event is scheduled...

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Mozilla is retiring its VR version of Firefox

Mozilla

Mozilla is retiring its virtual and augmented reality web browser Firefox Reality, passing the baton to an outside team that plans to relaunch it under a new name. Free software consultancy Igalia is developing a browser using the source code underlying Firefox Reality, aiming to launch a comparable VR / AR browser called Wolvic next week. Meanwhile, Mozilla will remove Firefox Reality from app stores in the next few weeks.

In a blog post, Mozilla framed the change as a natural evolution for Firefox Reality, which launched in 2018. “We’ve been at the forefront of developing new technologies,” the organization said, citing the WebVR and WebAR standards. “In some instances, Mozilla continues to remain the host and incubator of those new...

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A tiny DJI drone smuggled its own weight in drugs over the US border wall

Photo by Ryan Loughlin

If you’ve ever wondered whether drug dealers might just fly packets of powder over the border wall with inexpensive consumer drones, wonder no more — the US Border Patrol caught a DJI Mini 2 dead to rights dropping off its own weight in meth last October.

That’s according to a recently released search warrant from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which is trying to search the drone for evidence that might help them track down the pilot.

On October 7th, according to the affidavit, Tecate’s Campo Border Patrol Station radioed that a drone was spotted flying over the 25-foot-high fence. An agent spotted the drone buzzing over a parking lot just the other side of the wall; watched it land; watched a grey Mercedes roll up with a...

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Amazon Prime’s price is going up to $139 per year

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon is raising the price of Prime in the US to $139 per year, up from the $119 annual fee that was instated four years ago. The price hike is meant to address higher costs Amazon is facing across the board, from shipping to labor to construction, according to analysts.

The price change will go into effect for new members on February 18th and for current members after March 25th. The price for a monthly membership to Prime is also going up to $14.99 per month from $12.99 per month.

Amazon cited higher shipping costs and increased benefits

Amazon cited “the continued expansion of Prime member benefits as well as the rise in wages and transportation costs” as reason for increasing the service’s price.

Higher costs across led Amazon’s...

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Congress is still spinning its wheels on autonomous vehicle regulation

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

On Wednesday, Congress held its first hearing on autonomous vehicles in over two years, and there was not a lot to show for it. At the end of the four-and-a-half-hour event, there was no indication that lawmakers were any closer to a consensus on how best to regulate this rapidly emerging technology.

AV legislation has been stalled in Congress for over five years now, with lawmakers unable to reconcile differences over proposals to increase the number of autonomous vehicles on the road and prohibit states from setting their own performance standards. And after yesterday’s hearing, it was clear that a new set of concerns has risen in the interim, including the need to protect workers displaced by automation and to differentiate between...

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Halo Infinite’s Big Team Battle is fixed, again, maybe

Image: 343 Industries

If you ask me, the best part of Halo Infinite is Big Team Battle, an epic 24-player mode that lets you squad up with up to 11 friends across Xbox, cloud, and Windows PC — but it’s been riddled with matchmaking bugs that keep games from starting, kick out your buddies, or even crash the game. Today, 343 Industries is taking another stab at making things better with a new patch that’s now live.

The February 3rd patch’s changelog is pretty basic, primarily just saying that there have been unspecified “service improvements” to Big Team Battle’s matchmaking and that “[p]layers should find full matches quicker and more consistently.”

But 343 Industries had previously telegraphed that today might be the substantial fix we’ve been waiting for....

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Microsoft to test new experimental Windows 11 features

Image: Microsoft

After revealing last week that Windows 11 is getting a bigger than usual update in February with Android apps, taskbar improvements, and much more, Microsoft is now detailing its plans for Windows 11 testing throughout 2022. The software maker says it plans to experiment more with features for Windows 11 testers to evaluate that may never ship.

“As part of this ongoing evolution, Insiders will see us lean more heavily on the Dev Channel as a place to incubate new ideas, work on long lead items, and control the states of individual features,” explains Amanda Langowski, the lead for the Windows Insider Program. “In some cases, these concepts will never ship, but by experimenting more, we can better refine experiences, and deliver solutions...

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Bungie wants to make your Destiny 2 weapons matter more in The Witch Queen

Bungie is getting ready to launch what could be one of the biggest expansions to Destiny 2 we’ve ever seen later this month, The Witch Queen. While the expansion will follow the story of Savathûn, it also introduces new exotic weapons, weapon crafting, and big changes to the Destiny 2 sandbox.

Bungie is previewing some of those weapon changes today, alongside detailing exactly how Destiny 2 players will be able to craft their own weapons in The Witch Queen. Players of the new expansion will be given the opportunity to forge a new Glaive weapon type early on, including all the necessary materials to craft this initial weapon.

Image: Bungie

Get ready to craft weapons in Destiny 2.

Weapon crafting in Destiny 2...

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Offshore wind’s ship problem is growing

Dominion Energy hired the Luxembourg-flagged vessel Vole Au Vent  | Image: Dominion Energy

The short supply of ships capable of deploying giant wind turbines at sea is becoming an even bigger problem as offshore wind ambitions grow. By 2024, demand for wind turbine installation vessels will likely outpace supply, according to a recent analysis by Norwegian firm Rystad Energy. That’s even sooner than a prediction the firm made back in 2020 when it said that the global fleet wouldn’t be enough to meet demand after 2025.

Massive, specialized vessels are required to carry wind turbine components out to sea and install them. With just over 30 of these vessels navigating the world’s seas in 2020, according to Rystad, offshore wind projects already have to vie for time with a limited number of ships. A growth spurt in turbine...

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MSI GS76 Stealth review: big-screen gaming for a better price

A big gaming laptop with a price tag that’s only kind of extravagant

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Moonfall is a hollow, galaxy-brained spectacle

Halle Berry as Jocinda Fowler and Patrick Wilson as Brian Harper in Moonfall. | Lionsgate

For movies like Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall that are ostensibly about mysteries meant to keep you guessing, it’s never a good sign when the studios behind them more or less spoil their own plots with overstuffed trailers. If you’ve caught any of Moonfall’s bombastic TV spots or seen some of its busier print ads, you’ll probably see each of the film’s uninspired twists coming long before any of its characters do. But that might not be enough to prepare you for how breathtakingly bad Moonfall— a movie that feels like it could have been great — ends up being.

Like many of Emmerich’s far better action / disaster epics, Moonfall’s story orbits around a small group of embattled heroes who step up to the challenge of saving humanity when no one...

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Wormhole cryptocurrency platform hacked for $325 million after GitHub error

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

On Wednesday, the decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Wormhole became the victim of the largest cryptocurrency theft this year — and among the top five largest crypto hacks of all time — when an attacker exploited a security flaw to make off with close to $325 million.

The attack seems to have resulted from a recent update to the project’s GitHub repository, which revealed a fix to a bug that had not yet been deployed to the project itself.

The attack took place on February 2nd and was noticed when a post from the Wormhole Twitter account announced that the network was being taken “down for maintenance” while a potential exploit was investigated. A later post from Wormhole confirmed the hack and the amount stolen.

The wormhole...

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Philips Hue outdoor lights add an old-timey vibe to your smart home

Philips Hue’s new smart outdoor light fixture the Inara harkens back to a less high-tech time. | Image: Signify

Spring is coming (soon, we promise), and smart lighting company Philips Hue has some new products that can help you spruce up your outdoor space, so you can enjoy spending more time outside when the ice finally melts.

Signify, which owns Philips Hue, has announced three new additions to its outdoor smart lighting line, all arriving in the US on March 1st, 2022. Plus, two new lighting effects are scheduled to arrive on the Hue app later this year to add features to its indoor smart bulbs.

The Philips Hue Inara wall light ($99.99, available on March 1st) is a vintage-style outdoor wall light featuring a filament bulb. Also known as an Edison bulb, a filament bulb has its “electric” filament visible through the bulb, resembling that...

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Netflix’s 2022 movie slate looks absolutely stacked

Netflix

Netflix has never been one to slump during summer movie season, but it would be fair to say that the streaming studio’s been gearing up to make sure that you won’t be able to turn around without seeing one of its new feature-length projects this year. The good news is, more than a few of the new movies Netflix announced today sound like they might be worth tuning in to.

The Adam Project

Netflix

Zoe Saldana as Laura and Ryan Reynolds as Big Adam.

Director Shawn Levy’s (Free Guy) _The Adam Project_bucks conventional time-traveling wisdom with the story of Adam (Ryan Reynolds), a pilot who journeys into the past in order to save the future with the help of a younger version of himself and their father, who’s...

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Meta’s stock price plunges 25 percent overnight

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The price of shares in Meta — the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Meta Quest (fka Oculus) — has dropped more than 25 percent from the previous day’s close, the morning after it revealed its first-ever sequential decline in Facebook’s daily active users. After closing at $323 Wednesday, they dropped as low as $238.90 before recovering slightly.

Image:Google

Bloombergreports that the $200 billion plunge may rank as the biggest single-day drop in market value ever, as Meta struggles with waning relevance among young people and CEO Mark Zuckerberg refocuses its aim toward “metaverse” plans.

Meta wasn’t the only company having a rough Thursday; the entire Nasdaq exchange was off by nearly 2 percent...

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Scientists are building an AI-powered robot to take apart your phone

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

In 2016, Apple announced that it had developed a recycling robot, called Liam, that could deconstruct an iPhone in 11 seconds. Six years and severalmachine generations later, Apple still won’t disclose how many iPhones its robots have recycled for parts.

But the potential impact of artificially intelligent robots on e-waste recycling more broadly might soon become clear, thanks to a new research project that seeks to develop AI-powered tools that allow a robotic recycler to harvest parts from many different models of phones. If such technology can be commercialized, researchers are hopeful it could vastly improve the recycling of smartphones and other small, portable electronics.

While today’s e-waste recyclers are mostly handling...

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PS5’s console covers make it feel more like my own

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

Sony has tip-toed its way into making its PS5 console more customizable. First, there was a batch of DualSense controllers in red and black, and more recently, it released a variety of vibrant color options that I really dug. At last, after threatening legal action against Dbrand, which beat Sony to the punch with PS5 console covers of its own, Sony has launched its own swappable console covers in midnight black and cosmic red, with more colors on the way.

I got to slap some of these new console covers on my PS5, helping me to see the console in a different light and giving me some much-needed practice at removing the covers (it still feels less intuitive than it should). There isn’t much to say about the console covers; they’re...

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TCL 6-Series Google TV review: a great Mini LED TV at a good price

After a rocky beginning, TCL’s flagship Google TV is a winner

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Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak are coming to Fortnite

The celebrity ranks of Fortnite’s battle royale continue to grow, with the game adding two more musical stars in the form of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak. The duo, who perform together under the moniker Silk Sonic, will be available in the Fortnite item shop starting on February 10th. (Though players will have a chance to get them early via an in-game tournament on February 7th.)

While the game is known for mashing up pop culture worlds from Marvel, Star Wars, and elsewhere, real-world celebrities are also some of the most popular characters. That includes athletes like LeBron James and Neymar, streamers like Bugha and Ninja, and other musicians such as Marshmello and Ariana Grande. This also isn’t the first time the members of Silk...

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New company run by former NASA leader aims to build robotic outpost near the Moon

An artistic rendering of the robotic outpost, servicing satellite, and other pathfinder vehicles that Quantum Space hopes to build. | Image: Quantum Space

A new startup run by a former acting NASA administrator hopes to capitalize on the recent zeal for lunar space exploration by building robotic outposts and spacecraft to send to space near the Moon. Their goal is to create a fleet of robotic helpers that can do a variety of tasks near the Moon, such as providing internet capabilities, collecting data, refueling spacecraft, and assembling structures in lunar space.

The company called Quantum Space was formed in 2021. At the helm is Steve Jurczyk, who served as NASA’s associate administrator beginning in 2018, before becoming the agency’s acting administrator when President Biden was inaugurated. After retiring in May, Jurczyk decided to team up with three additional entrepreneurs and...

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Microsoft’s 15-inch Surface Laptop 4 is selling for its best price yet

Image: Microsoft

Need a sleek 15-inch laptop that’s powerful but won’t totally break the bank? Today, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 is available at a new all-time low. Amazon is currently selling the laptop with an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, ‎8GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD for $1,288.99 instead of $1,499.99. In her review, The Verge’s Monica Chin praised the device for being such a massive improvement over its predecessor, the aptly-titled Surface Laptop 3. She was also impressed by the laptop’s excellent battery life, lightweight build, and tall 3:2 display. While it released in April 2021, it remains a good buy if you’re looking for an efficient Windows machine and don’t mind its distinct lack of ports.

While _slightly_more expensive, Best Buy is also offering a...

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