Inscryption, the delightfully unsettling card-battling roguelike, comes to Mac and Linux

Look, you should really just play Inscryption. | Image: Inscryption

One of the best games of last year, Inscryption, has been released on Mac and Linux after previously being exclusively available for Windows PCs, its director Daniel Mullins has announced. Inscryption is a deck-building card-battling roguelike but with a fantastically dark and mysterious metanarrative that elevates it from “interesting” to “utterly engrossing.” Both my colleague Ash Parrish as well as our friends over at Polygon picked it as their game of the year for 2021.

Inscryption isn’t a particularly graphically intensive game, and the system requirements listed on its Steam page aren’t very arduous. This means you shouldn’t have any issues running it on any relatively recent MacBooks, though be sure to check the specifics of your...

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Street Fighter 6 is designed to be a fighter ‘that everyone can play’

Street Fighter has been around since 1987, starting life as an arcade phenomenon before eventually selling an estimated 47 million copies across various iterations and platforms. Even still, Takayuki Nakayama believes it can reach a much larger audience. “I want to make a Street Fighter game that everyone can play, not just core fans,” he says. “I want to share the love that I have for Street Fighter with as wide of an audience as possible.”

Nakayama is the game director on Street Fighter 6, which is due to launch next year. It’s a game that looks incredible in motion but also one that makes some key changes to the series’ formula in an attempt to broaden the audience, not just for Street Fighter but for fighting games in general.

“I see...

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Talk therapy apps face new questions about data collection from senators

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

At the start of the pandemic, demand for talk therapy apps skyrocketed. Prominent players, like BetterHelp and Talkspace, saw their downloads nearly double throughout the first few months of lockdown in 2020. Now, lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are demanding details on how these companies protect the privacy of their users.

In letters to BetterHelp and Talkspace executives on Thursday, Warren — along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) — called on the mental health companies to explain how their apps collect and use data obtained from their patients. Specifically, lawmakers requested information on the apps’ relationships with online advertisers, data brokers, and social media platforms like Facebook as well...

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No Man’s Sky takes off on Nintendo Switch in October

The game is coming to Switch in just a few months. | Image: Hello Games

The huge space exploration game No Man’s Sky will be available on the Nintendo Switch on October 7th, developer Hello Games revealed Thursday. That’s a bit later than the summer timeline announced in February, but it’s good to have a concrete date to look forward to. Physical and digital editions will be released on launch day.

In No Man’s Sky, you explore a universe that’s largely procedurally generated, and the game has so far been available on more powerful platforms: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X / S, and PC. We’ll have to wait and see exactly how well the game performs on Nintendo’s comparatively less powerful console, but Hello Games’ years-long commitment to improving the game (one update hit just last month) indicates the...

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Xiaomi shows us what we’re missing in the US with the Poco F4 and X4 GT

The Poco F4 (left) and X4 GT (right) feature rapid charging and screens with fast refresh rates. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Xiaomi has announced the Poco F4 and Poco X4 GT, offering global versions of budget-oriented devices previously released in China. The €399 (about $418) Poco F4 is mostly a rebranding of the Redmi K40S, with a Snapdragon 870 processor, an OLED screen with fast refresh rate, stabilized main camera, and fast wired charging. The performance-focused Poco X4 GT will cost €379 (about $398) includes a MediaTek Dimensity 8100 chipset, 6.6-inch 144Hz LCD, and high-capacity battery, also with fast wired charging. Simply put, they offer specs that put our current crop of midrange phones to shame — if they ever made it to the US.

The Poco F4’s 870 processor is carried over from the Poco F3, and it’s a capable flagship-ish chipset with 5G support....

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Urban Sky’s Earth-imaging stratospheric ‘microballoons’ are ready for a close-up

Urban Sky, a Colorado-based company focused on collecting images and data of the Earth using small stratospheric balloons, says it is officially entering commercial operations after three years of operating partly in stealth and raising funding. The company says it is ready to start serving customers with its balloons, which can be deployed from the back of a pickup truck and ascend into the sky in just minutes.

Specifically, the company offers what it calls “microballoons,” high-altitude balloons that can float to the stratosphere carrying a small payload and maintain a constant position over an area. About the size of a Volkswagen bus at launch, these balloons ultimately inflate to be the size of a small car garage in the air. That’s...

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iOS 16’s editable iMessages may not play nice with older iPhones

How edited messages are supposed to look. | Image: Apple

The ability to edit and unsend messages was one of the flagship features of iOS 16 announced earlier this month, but the functionality may not work well if you’re messaging anyone who’s not using the latest version of Apple’s software. The latest iOS developer beta 16 includes a messy workaround to allow newly editable iMessages to be received on iPhones without iOS 16, 9to5Mac reports. It could prove annoying for anyone in an iMessage group chat using an older iPhone or Android.

Rather than simply seeing the edited version of a message, if someone running iOS 16’s second beta tries to edit an iMessage sent to a device with an older version of the software, then the latter will receive the edit as a second text, preceded by the words...

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Amazon shows off Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Amazon has revealed an experimental Alexa feature that allows the AI assistant to mimic the voices of users’ dead relatives.

The company demoed the feature at its annual MARS conference, showing a video in which a child asks Alexa to read a bedtime story in the voice of his dead grandmother.

“As you saw in this experience, instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the kid’s grandma’s voice,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI. Prasad introduced the clip by saying that adding “human attributes” to AI systems was increasingly important “in these times of the ongoing pandemic, when so many of us have lost someone we love.”

“While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last,”...

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TikTok comes to Vizio TVs

TikTok on a Vizio TV. | Image: Vizio

Vizio has become the latest smart TV manufacturer to get a TikTok app, allowing owners to watch the short-form focused video platform on the big screen. It’s just the latest manufacturer to add TikTok to its TV platform, after the app came to Samsung and LG’s TVs, Android TV, and Amazon’s Fire TV platforms last year. Vizio says you’ll be able to browse TikTok’s Discover feed, or link an account to watch video content from the For You and Following feeds.

The apps are arriving as TikTok is allowing users to upload longer and longer videos to its historically short-form service. In February, TikTok expanded its maximum video length to 10 minutes, at which point it probably makes sense to watch it on the big screen. That said, TikTok’s...

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Instagram is testing an AI tool that verifies your age by scanning your face

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Instagram is testing new methods for users to verify their age, including an AI tool built by a third-party company, Yoti, that estimates how old you are just by scanning your face.

Officially, you have to be at least 13 years old to sign up for an Instagram account, but for years the company made little effort to enforce this rule. Until 2019, it didn’t even bother to ask new users their birthdate, let alone try to verify this information. After being raked over the coals by privacy and child safety experts, though, Instagram has introduced more and more age-verification features, as well as methods to separate younger users from adults.

Users can ask friends to verify their age, or have their face scanned by AI

Currently, Instagram...

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Brave’s search engine lets you customize your results

Image: Brave

Brave Search has launched a new feature that gives you a way to create or apply custom filters that change the way its results are ranked. It’s called “Goggles,” and it could potentially help uncover sources you might not find right away on traditional search engines like Google.

Brave has some demos ready for users to try today, including ones that prioritize posts from smaller tech blogs and filter out posts from the 1,000 most-viewed sites on the web. There’s even a Goggle to exclude posts from Pinterest — because Brave clearly knows the frustration of trying to find an image and getting a Pinterest post with no source. Brave says these Goggles are just for demonstrative purposes, and developers can expand on or fork them. It will...

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iPads might lose their smart home hub abilities in iOS 16

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple will no longer let you use an iPad as a home hub to control HomeKit accessories starting with iOS 16, MacRumors reports. Text apparently found in iOS 16’s second developer beta by MacRumors contributing writer Steve Moser spells out the change.

“A home hub is required to take advantage of features like receiving accessory notifications and allowing other people to control your home,” text in the Home app reportedly reads. “You will not be able to view shared homes until those homes are also upgraded to the latest HomeKit. iPad will no longer be supported as a home hub.”

“Only Apple TV and HomePod are supported as home hubs.”

If the change goes into effect as the found text suggests, it means you’ll need to use a HomePod, HomePod...

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How CRISPR rice could help tackle climate change

Farmers weed their rice fields in Rarampadende Village, Indonesia, on September 18th, 2020. | Photo by Basri Marzuki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Can gene-editing technology CRISPR create new crops that help fight climate change as they grow? That’s what a group of researchers hopes to do with $11 million in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The funding will go toward efforts to enhance plants — starting with rice — and soil so that they’re better at trapping carbon dioxide. The effort, which was announced last week, is being led by the Innovative Genomics Institute, which was founded by Nobel laureate and co-inventor of CRISPR Jennifer Doudna.

“[Jennifer] and I saw eye to eye on climate and how big of a problem it is in the world. And we just didn’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore,” says Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) executive director Brad Ringeisen.

“We...

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FedEx will soon photograph your package to prove it was delivered

Photo by Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

FedEx will soon take photos of packages at your doorstep to provide proof of delivery when they don’t require a signature.

“This is something e-commerce merchants and customers have been asking for, and we are proud to be the first to announce this service will be available to residential customers,” Brie Carere, FedEx’s chief customer officer, said in a press release announcing the program today.

The free service will be available for both FedEx Express and FedEx Ground delivery customers with and without a login to the FedEx Delivery Manager, the company’s free portal.

The new program will obviously be a good source of protection for FedEx, and it should also help business owners whose customers report that their package hasn’t been...

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Zuckerberg details his plan to move your digital items across the metaverse

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday that Facebook Pay has officially become Meta Pay, but his post is mainly focused on what the company hopes to build in the future — “a wallet for the metaverse.” While Meta Pay is essentially the same tool as it was before, just with Meta branding, Zuckerberg says the company is working on something that will let users manage their identities, items, and payment methods while making their way through the digital world that Meta bets will be the future.

The company has hinted at these plans before — its May announcement of the Meta Pay rebranded also mentioned that it was “scoping out what a single wallet experience might look like” with regards to making payments and storing your identity and...

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How to add Instagram close friends

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

For the first few years of Instagram’s existence, it was a pain to hide Stories from people. You had to dig into an individual Story’s settings and select followers to hide it from. Then, if you wanted to let those followers see the next Story, you had to go into that Story’s settings and undo the block.

But in 2018, Instagram launched the close friends feature, which makes it much easier to share content with a limited group. Once you’ve created a close friends list, you’ll have the option to share a Story with just that list. If you’re posting content that could be controversial, personal, or NSFW, the option can save you some stress.

In case you don’t know how to add folks to your close friends list, we’ll show you how to get...

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General Motors is using AI to speed up the vehicle inspection process

General Motors is bringing artificial intelligence into the vehicle inspection process.

The automaker is making an undisclosed “strategic investment” in Israeli startup UVeye, which makes vehicle diagnostic systems that use sensors and AI to quickly identify damaged parts or maintenance issues. The investment in UVeye was made by GM Ventures, the automaker’s venture fund, which also has investments in a variety of other AI-themed startups.

GM will sell UVeye’s technology to its dealer network to upgrade their vehicle inspection systems

As part of the collaboration, GM will sell UVeye’s technology to its dealer network to upgrade their vehicle inspection systems. (The company’s systems are already being trialed at a small number of GM...

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eBay now has an established NFT marketplace at its bidding

Image: eBay

eBay made its biggest move yet into the world of digital collectibles with news today of the company acquiring NFT marketplace KnownOrigin. The online auction company is keeping lips sealed on the deal’s value but confirmed in the press release that the deal is closed as of June 21st.

“This partnership will help us attract a new wave of NFT creators and collectors,” said KnownOrigin co-founder David Moore.

KnownOrigin describes itself as “one the world’s first, and largest, NFT Marketplaces,” and it currently ranks No. 12 on all-time trading volume for Ethereum-backed NFTs at $7.8 million, according to DappRadar. Higher ranked, more popular marketplaces include OpenSea (No. 1) with an all-time trading value at $30.43 billion and...

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Ms. Marvel’s MCU powers may be connected to Captain Marvel’s classic comics tech

Image: Marvel Studios

Though Kamala Khan’s powers were significantly reworked for the MCU, the latest episode of Disney Plus’ Ms. Marvel series might be setting up a reveal that connects its hero and her abilities to the original Captain Marvel of Marvel’s comic books.

Kamala doesn’t initially think all that much of the vintage bangle she receives in a gift package from her grandmother Sana (Samina Ahmad) in Ms. Marvel’s first episode. But when she actually puts it on, she immediately realizes that there’s much more to the heirloom than meets the eye. In addition to transporting Kamala (at least mentally) to another plane bathed in neon light, the bangle unlocks her power to generate glowing constructs made out of an unidentified energy that comes from within...

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Epic Games thinks it has a solution for review bombing

Epic’s ratings system will use a five-point scale. | Image: Epic Games

Epic Games has finally introduced a ratings system to its online store, and it’s designed in a way that’s intended to prevent waves of negative user reviews from happening all at once, a practice more commonly known as review bombing.

Instead of allowing anyone to review a game they own, random players who have played a game for more than two hours will be asked to review it on a five-star scale, according to a blog post by Epic’s Craig Pearson. Those scores will then be collected to create the “Overall Rating” for each game.

Occasionally, review-bomb campaigns can point out legitimately harmful consumer practices, but they’re often used in bad faith to protest a creator taking a political stance or if the media in question features...

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Tim Cook is getting a lot less coy about Apple’s AR headset

More or less confirmation that an AR headset is coming. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tim Cook teased that Apple’s working on an augmented reality, or AR, product in an interview with state-run outlet China Daily, telling AR fans to “stay tuned and you will see what we have to offer.” It reads as a direct hint that the company is working on some sort of headset, which has been rumored for years — unless, of course, he thinks people will actually be excited about using ARKit apps on their phones.

In the clip, brought to our attention by 9to5Mac, the interviewer asks Cook what he thinks the key factors are for an AR product to be successful. Cook responds by saying that he “couldn’t be more excited” about AR, despite it being “in the very early innings” of its evolution.

In this @ChinaDailyUSA interview, @tim_cook was...

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The best noise-canceling headphones to buy right now

Sony’s WH-1000XM5 headphones have an all-new design. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Get some peace and quiet with the best noise-canceling headphones for a variety of uses

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Obi-Wan Kenobi is entirely predictable — but that doesn’t make it any less fun

Ewan McGregor in Obi-Wan Kenobi_._ | Image: Lucasfilm

You may know where the story is headed, but the journey is still worth it

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Pornhub owner’s CEO and COO resign

CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo left MindGeek following a report from The New Yorker. | Photo by Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic

Pornhub owner MindGeek has lost two high-level executives: CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo, as first reported by Variety. Their resignation comes shortly after The New Yorker released a scathing report detailing the holes in the company’s content moderation system, which has failed to address videos depicting underage and non-consenting individuals.

Despite the timeliness of The New Yorker’s report, a spokesperson for the company told Variety that MindGeek had been planning a leadership change since earlier this year. The representative also said Antoon and Tassillo will remain shareholders in the company and that MindGeek is currently searching for their replacements. MindGeek didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request...

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Polestar now supports Apple CarPlay after an over-the-air software update

Polestar, one of the first automakers to adopt Google’s Android Automotive operating system for its electric vehicles, is now throwing a bone to all the iOS users. The company announced that its Polestar 2 electric sedan now supports Apple CarPlay, thanks to a recent over-the-air software update.

People who own both a Polestar 2 and an iPhone will now be able to mirror their phone’s display on the vehicle’s 11-inch portrait-oriented touchscreen. In addition to accessing some of their apps, CarPlay users will also be able to use Siri to change music or find locations on Apple Maps.

Polestar made a name for itself by establishing a direct link to Apple’s main rival, Google

The introduction of CarPlay support is interesting because P...

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The best deals on Nintendo Switch games right now

Right now, there are discounts on Stardew Valley and a handful of other essential Switch titles. | Image: ConcernedApe

The Nintendo Switch is one of the most popular consoles ever released, one with an ever-expanding library of games to choose from. Odds are if a game is capable of working on the Switch’s hardware, it’s either already available or it will be soon.

Thankfully, a number of games are currently receiving price breaks if you’re looking to expand your collection, including first-gen offerings like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and remasters likeTony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2. However, if you want to add some less conventional titles to your collection, pixelated platformer Thomas Was Alone and Metro: Redux,a brutal post-apocalyptic FPS, are also discounted right now.

Below, we’ve rounded up some of the deals on Nintendo Switch games....

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Geoff Keighley isn’t worried about E3 making a comeback

Image: Summer Game Fest

Geoff Keighley isn’t sure what E3 is anymore. Even before COVID forced the cancellation of the in-person version of the giant video game commercial masquerading as an industry trade show three years running now, the event was already a pale, big-three-publisher-less imitation of its former self.

E3 is coming back. The organizers said so in a very “for realsies this time, you guys” kind of way. But when I asked Keighley about the prospect of E3 and Summer Game Fest — affectionately known as Not-E3 or, my personal favorite, Keigh-3 — coexisting next year, he just didn’t seem convinced they would need to.

“E3 said they’re coming back. Which I don’t know what that means, right?” he told me at Summer Game Fest’s new in-person component in Los...

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Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation for better access to information

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is paying the Wikimedia Foundation to help serve up the most accurate and up-to-date information on its search engine. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, says Google is one of the first companies to buy into its commercial Enterprise service.

Launched last year, Wikimedia Enterprise allows customers (like Google) who reuse massive chunks of information from Wikimedia’s services to access its content more efficiently. Instead of relying on free data dumps and publicly available APIs (application programming interfaces) to scrape information from Wikipedia’s web pages, Wikimedia Enterprise lets customers use APIs better suited to recycling and spitting out information on a much larger scale. The service...

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Welcome to our new Wednesday edition of The Vergecast

We have big news for listeners of The Vergecast_, The Verge’_s flagship podcast. We are now publishing twice a week — on Wednesdays and Fridays!

On Fridays, it’ll be the same show you know and love, with Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz hanging out and talking about tech news. On Wednesdays, we’re going to change it up a bit, and use the show to share even more of the stories The Verge team is covering. David will be joined by The Verge’s expert staffers in a deep exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into yours.

So, here is our first Wednesday edition of The Vergecast. David starts the show talking to Verge senior reporter Adi Robertson about the prototype VR headsets from...

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The best early Amazon Prime Day deals you can get right now

The actual start of Prime Day is July 12th, and it will continue through the 13th. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon Prime Day is inching ever closer, and there’s already some momentum building with early deals. July 12th is slated as the start of the two-day sales event, but you can bet on some nice discounts popping up ahead of that date. We may see a slow crescendo of deals building up or the occasional deluge. It’s also likely other retailers will be looking to get into the mix, so keep on the lookout for sales from the likes of Walmart and Target, the latter of which already has a “Deal Days” event planned for the same time period. While Amazon is obviously the star of its own show, it also bears mentioning that Prime Day deals are exclusive to Prime members while competing sales from other retailers are open to all.

In the meantime, we’re...

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