Obi-Wan Kenobi’s premiere will be two days late, but you’ll get two episodes at once

Image: Disney

Disney’s highly anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney Plus series will now debut two days later than previously planned, but there will be two episodes available to watch instead of just one. The new schedule means you’ll be able to watch the show starting Friday, May 27th.

The company announced the news on Thursday with a video featuring Obi-Wan Kenobi star Ewan McGregor. Disney first introduced Wednesday debuts with Loki in 2021 (also with a video, though this one featuring star Tom Hiddleston), and that move was apparently successful enough that the company soon moved the release dates for all of its original series to Wednesdays. Despite the shift for Obi-Wan Kenobi’s premiere, subsequent episodes will still debut on Wednesdays, Disney...

Continue reading…

Joe Biden invokes Defense Production Act for EV batteries and clean energy

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 08: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House March 8, 2022 in Washington, DC. During his remarks, Biden announced a full ban on imports of Russian oil and energy products as an additional step in holding Russia accountable for its invasion of Ukraine. | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

The Biden administration plans to use the Defense Production Act (DPA) to ramp up the mining and processing of key minerals used in batteries for renewable energy and electric vehicles. That could include nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite, and manganese, according to the White House fact sheet.

“The President is also reviewing potential further uses of DPA – in addition to minerals and materials, to secure safer, cleaner, and more resilient energy for America,” the fact sheet says.

That could include nickel, lithium, cobalt, graphite, and manganese

Biden made the announcement as part of a broader set of actions aimed at addressing soaring energy prices. The move is also part of an immediate pivot away from Russian imports since...

Continue reading…

US will now offer gender-neutral X option on passports

US passports will soon offer an X gender marker

US citizens will have the option to choose the gender-neutral X marker on passports beginning April 11th, the Department of State announced. The agency said the X option will be available for other forms of documentation next year, according to a statement from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“After thoughtful consideration of the research conducted and feedback from community members, we concluded that the definition of the X gender marker on State Department public forms will be ‘Unspecified or another gender identity,’” Blinken said. “This definition is respectful of individuals’ privacy while advancing inclusion.”

The State Department first said last June that it would add a third gender marker to passports, but it didn’t provide...

Continue reading…

Microsoft rebrands its Android Your Phone companion app to Phone Link

Phone Link is the new Your Phone. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is rebranding its Your Phone app to Phone Link and updating it with a Windows 11 design overhaul. Your Phone launched more than three years ago as a key way to link an Android phone to Windows and avoid picking up your device to check calls or notifications. Phone Link is naturally a better description for the app, and it has now been updated to match the Windows 11 design changes.

Phone Link now places the notification panel upfront, and the notifications tab is now pinned to the left-hand side panel. Microsoft has also moved the Messages, Photos, Apps, and Calls sections into a navigation bar that sits at the top of Phone Link. The notifications section has also been cleaned up to make it easier to see the notifications that...

Continue reading…

Amazon is prepping another round of PlayStation 5 consoles today for Prime members

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Yesterday’s restock of PlayStation 5 Digital Edition consoles at Amazon left a lot to be desired, but today presents a new opportunity. Amazon is preparing for another drop of the $499.99 PlayStation 5 (the standard model with a disc drive) today, and it already has Xbox Series X consoles available for $499.99. If recent events tell us anything, the PS5 is going to sell out quickly once it goes live, and the Xbox may stick around for much longer, as it’s been regularly available at Walmart. Though once again, you need to subscribe to Amazon’s popular Prime service to even have a chance at a console.

You have to act quickly, especially if you’re going for a PS5. Amazon’s site does not have the same level of bot protection and timed...

Continue reading…

The best robot vacuum you can buy right now

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

These wonderful little robots do all the hard work for you

Continue reading…

OnePlus 10 Pro review: settling in

It’s a likable device, but OnePlus still has some work to do

Continue reading…

OnePlus 10 Pro hits the US on April 14th for $899

Over three months after OnePlus’ latest flagship was released in China, the OnePlus 10 Pro has finally launched in the US and Europe. In the US, OnePlus is taking preorders for the model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage for $899 starting today and will ship the phone on April 14th. Meanwhile, in Europe, the 8GB model will start at €899 / £799, and there’ll be a higher capacity version with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage costing €999 / £899. The phone will ship on April 5th in Europe.

Alongside the OnePlus 10 Pro, the company has also announced a new metallic silver version of its Buds Pro true wireless earbuds, which are set to retail for $150 / €149 / £139. But there’s no base-level OnePlus 10 being announced today, and I couldn’t...

Continue reading…

Schlage’s latest smart lock makes unlocking your door as easy as using Apple Pay

The Encode Plus brings support for Apple’s new Home Key feature

Continue reading…

The BlackBerry Storm showed why you should never turn a touchscreen into a button

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

In 2007, the iPhone ushered in an era of touchscreen gadgets that caused most buttons to vanish from our phones forever. But there was one brief moment in the gray, transitory haze between buttons and touchscreens that an unlikely company tried to fuse the two together. BlackBerry split the difference by boldly asking, “What if a touchscreen was also a hardware button?”

Thus was born the BlackBerry Storm, a device whose entire touchscreen doubled as a pressable button. The Storm was one of the first (and last) attempts to bridge the legacy world of physical keyboards and the modern world of touchscreens. But to understand the existence of the BlackBerry Storm and its bizarre clicking screen, we first need to go back and understand...

Continue reading…

The GoPro Volta is a handle, remote, tripod, and external battery all in one

It’s Mod-friendly. | Becca Farsace / The Verge

GoPro is announcing a new accessory for its action cameras that’s a jack of all trades — the Volta acts as a grippable handle / tripod, a wired or wireless remote, and has a 4,900mAh battery that the company says can triple your camera’s battery life, providing four hours of record time when paired with a completely charged internal battery if you’re shooting 5.3K footage.

The Volta uses an integrated USB-C cable to plug into and charge your GoPro with the press of a button and has an additional USB-C port for charging up its internal battery. GoPro says the integrated battery can be charged in as little as two and a half hours and that there’s a quick-charge mode that takes it from 0 to 60 percent in an hour.

Becca...

Continue reading…

The US can’t seem to quit Russian uranium

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Biden banned Russian fossil fuels, but uranium has been trickier to tackle

Continue reading…

Watch Blue Origin launch its fourth crewed mission to space

This morning, space tourism venture Blue Origin will launch its fourth passenger flight to the edge of space and back — but this time, there won’t be any big name celebrities on board. Six crew members — five paying customers and one company employee — will be flying this mission, as Blue Origin transitions into regular commercial flights.

Originally, SNL star and comedian Pete Davidson was supposed to be on this mission as a guest, back when the flight was supposed to take place on March 23rd. But Blue Origin wound up pushing the trip back a week, and Davidson was no longer able to participate with the new launch date. To fill his seat, Blue Origin swapped in Gary Lai, the chief architect of the New Shepard — the rocket the crew will...

Continue reading…

Google Search’s new highly cited label helps you get to the source of a story

The “Highly Cited” label shown on an article’s preview image. | Image: Google

Google is adding a new “highly cited” label to search results frequently sourced by other publications, the company is announcing today. Anything from local news stories, to interviews, announcements, and even press releases will be eligible for the new label being added to the search result’s preview image, so long as other websites are linking to it. More info is also being added to Search’s “rapidly evolving topics” and “About this Result” notices.

The search giant’s hope is that its highly cited label will help highlight original reporting, which can include important context that’s stripped out when a story gets picked up more widely. But it should also be helpful to find press releases, where you can get information directly from...

Continue reading…

Xbox won’t stop you sharing clips to Twitter from your console after all

“Don’t talk to me or my son ever again.” | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft’s latest Xbox beta software reverses a potentially controversial change to how the console shares gameplay captures to Twitter. Rather than having to use a phone to post content to the social media network, as a previous Xbox Insider build forced users to do, the update restores the ability to share it directly from the console. The change was confirmed by Microsoft’s Brad Rossetti on Twitter.

Being able to use your phone to share gameplay from the Xbox is a useful feature, and is handy if you want to quickly type out a tweet to accompany your latest clip. But it’s nice to also have the option to share it directly from the console itself, for those times when you might not have your phone to hand. Thankfully, Microsoft’s...

Continue reading…

Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK for posting ‘offensive’ tweet

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A Twitter user from the UK named Joseph Kelly has been sentenced to 150 hours of community service for posting a “grossly offensive” tweet about Captain Sir Tom Moore, a British Army officer who raised money for the NHS during the pandemic.

Moore became a national figure in the UK after walking 100 laps around his garden before his 100th birthday. He was later knighted by the Queen. The day after his death, Kelly, 36, tweeted “the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn.”

Kelly was found guilty in February last year and faced possible jail time. His case brought attention to an often-criticized piece of UK legislation that allows social media users to be prosecuted for sending “grossly offensive” messages.

As r...

Continue reading…

Disney Streaming’s new CTO is a former Google exec who worked on the tech behind YouTube

Image: Disney

Direct-to-customer streaming is now a focus for Disney, and today it took another step in organizing that business by announcing a new CTO for the Disney Streaming business unit that includes Disney Plus, Hulu, ESPN Plus, and Star Plus. Jeremy Doig is a tech industry veteran with several decades of experience including stints with the BBC and Microsoft, and who has worked for Google for the last 18 years. Variety reports that Doig will take over for Joe Inzerillo, who helped build Disney Plus and joined SiriusXM earlier this year.

Image: Google/Weinberg-Clark Photography

According to a press release announcing the hire, while there he worked on compression tech for audio and video and streaming protocols that are...

Continue reading…

TweetDeck might become a paid Twitter Blue feature

It’d be a big selling point for the subscription service. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It’s starting to look like the upcoming version of TweetDeck, the power-user-focused version of the Twitter app, won’t be free. Security researcher Jane Manchun Wong has discovered a work-in-progress sign-up page for the app, which boasts that it’s a “powerful, real-time tool for people who live on Twitter” and offers an ad-free experience.

While the page doesn’t explicitly say you’ll have to pay Twitter to access TweetDeck, companies don’t usually advertise “helps you avoid the thing that makes us money” as a feature of free products (even if, like the current version of TweetDeck, it is). And wouldn’t you know it, Twitter’s already got a paid subscription service that it’s trying to sell to its power users.

TweetDeck is essentially...

Continue reading…

I’m done with Wyze

Image: Wyze

I just threw my Wyze home security cameras in the trash. I’m done with this company.

I just learned that for the past three years, Wyze has been fully aware of a vulnerability in its home security cameras that could have let hackers look into your home over the internet — but chose to sweep it under the rug. And the security firm that found the vulnerability largely let them do it.

Three years

Instead of patching it, instead of recalling it, instead of just, you know, saying something so I could stop pointing these cameras at my kids, Wyze simply decided to discontinue the WyzeCam v1 this January without a full explanation. But on Tuesday, security research firm Bitdefender finally shed light on why Wyze stopped selling it: because...

Continue reading…

Apple and Meta shared data with hackers pretending to be law enforcement officials

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple and Meta handed over user data to hackers who faked emergency data request orders typically sent by law enforcement, according to a report by Bloomberg. The slip-up happened in mid-2021, with both companies falling for the phony requests and providing information about users’ IP addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses.

Law enforcement officials often request data from social platforms in connection with criminal investigations, allowing them to obtain information about the owner of a specific online account. While these requests require a subpoena or search warrant signed by a judge, emergency data requests don’t — and are intended for cases that involve life-threatening situations.

Fake emergency data requests are becoming...

Continue reading…

YouTube is finally rolling out picture-in-picture mode for YouTube TV on iOS

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube is rolling out a picture-in-picture mode for YouTube TV on iOS devices running iOS 15 or newer, the company announced Wednesday. YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan promised on The Vergecast that the feature was on the way, and now it’s finally here.

The Vergecast gets results ;) https://t.co/z57srOSCLQ

— nilay patel (@reckless) March 30, 2022

With picture-in-picture, you’ll be able to keep watching YouTube TV when you navigate away from the YouTube TV app. The feature could come in handy if, for example, you’re watching a sports game but want to scroll through Twitter to see reactions to what just happened on the field. It’s a feature that’s been available on Android for years, so it’s good to see that Google has...

Continue reading…

Apple will allow Dutch dating apps to use other payment options within existing apps

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

To help bring an end to wrangling with Dutch regulators that stretched over the last several months, today, Apple published a new version of its App Store rules that allow local dating apps to take payments through third-party processors. Until now, its proposals to comply with a December ruling mandating the change had not satisfied the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) and earned Apple 50 million euros worth of fines.

Among three key changes, the one that jumps out is Apple giving up on its insistence that any app choosing to use an external payment processor has to create and use a separate binary from its existing app. According to Apple, “This change means that developers may include either entitlement in their...

Continue reading…

Sony’s new PlayStation Plus makes retro games an expensive option

The new PlayStation Plus Premium subscription will have PS1 games, but it’s the most expensive tier. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Sony has just announced its new PlayStation Plus subscription tiers, which will be available later this year, and with the new “Extra” and “Premium” levels, you’ll get access to back catalogs of many PlayStation games. However, if you want to play classic PS3, PS2, PS1, and PSP games, you’ll have to pay for “Premium,” the most expensive option, meaning that Sony is joining Nintendo in putting some of its older games behind its highest-cost subscription.

Using a subscription to access classic games isn’t new for Sony. For years, the company has offered access to PS4, PS3, and PS2 games as part of PlayStation Now, which is an entirely separate subscription service from PlayStation Plus. But instead of using the Plus shakeup to bring more...

Continue reading…

Apple finally lets ‘reader’ apps like Kindle, Netflix, and Spotify link to their own sites

It promised this change in September, 2021. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple is making good on its promise to let some developers link out to their own sites from within their apps, according to an announcement from the company on Wednesday. The new rules, which go into effect today, let developers of “reader apps” (apps that are primarily meant to provide access to digital content, like Netflix, Kindle, or Spotify) link out to their sites for things like account management or creation.

This should help improve the historically bad user experience for these types of apps caused by Apple’s previous rules. Previously, if you downloaded the Netflix app but didn’t have an account, Netflix wasn’t allowed to give you a link to sign up or tell you where you could go to create an account. That made apps frustrating...

Continue reading…

WhatsApp is getting better voice messages in the next few weeks

WhatsApp announced on Wednesday that it will roll out some improvements to voice messages over the coming weeks, including the ability to listen to a message while reading other chats and play messages at 1.5 or 2 times speed (yes, please, put this feature everywhere).

The experience of recording messages is also improving. WhatsApp now lets you pause and resume your recording, so you don’t have to leave large gaps of silence if you’re thinking of what to say next or redo a recording if you need to have a brief conversation in real life. You’ll also be able to listen to a message before you send it to make sure you didn’t accidentally get cut off or include something you didn’t want to.

Image: WhatsApp

An...

Continue reading…

Chrome OS 100 brings new Launcher design to Chromebooks

Like its Chrome browser counterpart, Chrome OS has finally reached its 100th version. Google fully updates its operating system every four weeks or so. The new release comes with a new design for Chrome OS’s launcher meant to make it more intuitive and customizable for Chromebook users.

The launcher (for Windows users, it’s the equivalent of the start menu) has a friendlier design than previous launchers have, with more rounded corners. It now opens from the side of the screen rather than the center. (This is around where the Windows start menu was for ages — it has, funnily enough, moved to the center in Windows 11).

There are new options for sorting icons as well — you can manually arrange them and can organize them by name or color....

Continue reading…

Lapsus$ gang claims new hack involving Apple Health project

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After a short “vacation,” the Lapsus$ hacking gang is back — and both Facebook and Apple may be on its target list.

In a post shared through the group’s Telegram channel on Wednesday, Lapsus$ claimed to have stolen 70GB of data from Globant — an international software development firm headquartered in Luxembourg, which boasts some of the world’s largest companies as clients.

Screenshots of the hacked data, originally posted by Lapsus$ and shared on Twitter by security researcher Dominic Alvieri, appeared to show folders bearing the names of a range of global businesses: among them were delivery and logistics company DHL, US cable network C-Span, and French bank BNP Paribas.

Also in the list were tech giants Facebook and Apple, with the...

Continue reading…

Sony’s PS Plus tiers complicate the simplicity of subscription services

Sony’s PlayStation Plus. | Image: Sony

Sony has announced a new range of PlayStation Plus subscriptions: PlayStation Plus Essential, PlayStation Plus Extra, and PlayStation Plus Premium. Prior to their official unveiling, the plans were characterized as an attempt to respond to Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, offering various selections of games to download or stream as part of a single monthly subscription. But now that they’re official, the truth is a lot more complicated.

Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass pitch is relatively simple. You get access to a broad array of games as part of a subscription, and Microsoft has committed to releasing its major first-party games on its subscription service the day they release. $9.99 gets you games on either Xbox _or_PC, or $14.99 gets you both,...

Continue reading…

Microsoft Build 2022 will take place May 24th–26th

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference is back as a virtual event for 2022. Much like the past two Builds, this year’s event will be hosted online from May 24th to May 26th. Microsoft hosts Build every year as an event for developers, engineers, IT professionals, students, and startups to learn the latest about Microsoft technologies, Windows, Office, and more.

While it’s traditionally hosted live in Seattle, Microsoft was first forced to make the event virtual in 2020, and the pandemic has once again kept this event digital for 2022. Microsoft is making some changes, though. This year will include “market-specific content” for France, Germany, Japan, Latin America, and the UK. With repeated sessions, Microsoft already does a good...

Continue reading…

Russian regulator says it will fine Google over Ukraine war videos

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has threatened to fine Google over its failure to follow the country’s orders to remove certain “illegal” YouTube videos, as first reported by The Washington Post. In a translated version of its post on Telegram, the Roskomnadzor warns it may fine the tech company up to 8 million rubles (about $94,675 USD), an amount that will increase to 20 percent of Google’s annual revenue in case of a repeat offense.

The Roskomnadzor alleges YouTube “promotes the distribution of false content” about what it calls the country’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, and it accuses the platform of “discrediting” the Russian army. It also says YouTube houses “extremist” content “with calls to carry out...

Continue reading…