TikTok is reportedly giving up on its live shopping plans in the US and Europe

Live shopping is big in Asia, but not so much elsewhere. | Image: TikTok

TikTok may seem like an unstoppable global entertainment machine, but at least one part of the company’s offering isn’t quite taking over: TikTok is scaling back its live commerce plans in Europe and the US, the Financial Times reported, after early launches simply haven’t been successful.

TikTok has been testing live shopping in the UK since late last year, starting with a multi-brand event called “On Trend” last December. But the FT reported that those shopping livestreams haven’t drawn big audiences and haven’t sparked many sales, and some of the creators involved in early TikTok Shop projects have dropped out altogether. TikTok had been planning to roll out Shop in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain by now, and was hoping to launch...

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Xbox input lag for Apex Legends is finally fixed, two weeks later

Apex Legends: Awakening Collection Event | Image: EA

Update July 5th, 2:30PM ET: On Tuesday afternoon Respawn and EA released a new patch saying it should address the issue, and after playing a bit I can confirm it has fixed input lag with all the controllers I used on Xbox Series X.

Last week, EA’s battle royale shooter Apex Legends launched a “collection event,” which is shorthand for a limited-time setup that is mostly about players buying a bunch of cosmetic items from the in-game store. The only problem is that this time, the massive update has made the game nearly unplayable for many people on consoles.

Without warning, the battle royale shooter’s usually tight and responsive controls — a known quantity for Respawn Entertainment games since Titanfall and a reflection of its Call of...

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Twitter is struggling with India’s tightening rules for online speech

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter announced on Tuesday that it has launched a lawsuit against the Indian government, the latest salvo in an ongoing fight over the country’s aggressive speech laws. The lawsuit comes after Twitter was ordered to remove a series of accounts and posts that violate Indian obscenity and defamation laws, as first reported by The New York Times. Twitter has now removed the posts, but is seeking judicial protection from such orders in the future.

The fight started last May when India issued new IT rules for online content, shortly followed by a police raid on Twitter’s India offices. The following July, Indian regulators threatened to hold Twitter liable for any future infractions by its users.

Broadly, Twitter has long argued that it...

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James Cameron says Avatar 4 is a ‘motherfucker’ — but he might not direct it

Avatar’s first sequel releases later this year. | Screenshot: Avatar: The Way of Water

It’s okay if you’ve lost track, but here’s a quick reminder that this year’s Avatar: The Way of Water is just the first of a potential four sequels to the 2009 sci-fi epic. And now, in a new interview with Empire, director James Cameron has given an update on where the rest of the series is headed.

The most interesting detail? Cameron might not actually direct the fourth and fifth Avatar films, which were originally announced in 2013 and 2016. (Like I said, it’s okay if you’ve lost track.) “The Avatar films themselves are kind of all-consuming,” Cameron tells Empire. “I’ve got some other things I’m developing as well that are exciting. I think eventually over time – I don’t know if that’s after three or after four – I’ll want to pass the...

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Go read this story about the guy behind RadioShack’s insane, sex-crazed Twitter account

RadioShack: dying IRL, thriving on social. | Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

There are no good, practical, rational reasons to care about RadioShack anymore. So what do you do when your once-venerable electronics store goes the way of Blockbuster, Sears, and the local mall? You get super horny on the internet, apparently.

Input has a very good, very fun story today about RadioShack’s increasingly unhinged and sex-crazed Twitter account, and the marketing executive who runs it. “You really have to make an impression in order to basically get known with youngsters,” Ábel Czupor, RadioShack’s chief marketing officer, told Input. (Czupor didn’t share his age, but appears in photos to be much younger than the average person who uses words like “youngsters.”) Czupor says there’s a team of people thinking about...

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HTC quietly announced a new Android tablet — and nobody noticed

The HTC A101. | Image: HTC

HTC, the once-impressive Android smartphone manufacturer, has a surprise tablet to accompany its bizarre metaverse-focused Desire 22 Pro. The new A101 is an Android tablet with a 10.1-inch display, entry-level specs, and a design that’s straight out of the middle of the last decade. The device, which we spotted via AndroidPolice, appears to have been quietly announced last month — according to the Wayback Machine — and is aimed at the African market. It follows the A100 tablet, which was launched in Russia last year to a similar non-reaction.

Given that the tablet appears to be marketed solely at emerging markets, I don’t want to be too snarky about its specs or design. But it’s still just plain weird to see HTC — makers of literally the...

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Xbox 360 games will no longer be part of Xbox Games with Gold in October

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft is planning to remove Xbox 360 games from its monthly Games with Gold offer in October. The software maker has started emailing Xbox Live Gold subscribers to warn them of the change, noting that the company has “reached the limit of our ability to bring Xbox 360 games to the catalogue.”

Games with Gold is a monthly benefit for subscribers of Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Microsoft hand picks free games each month, and all Xbox 360 titles are playable on the latest Xbox Series X / S consoles and Xbox One.

Microsoft’s Xbox backward compatibility program briefly returned with 76 new games last year, but the company made it clear it had “reached the limit of our ability to bring new games to the catalog from the past...

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How one senator’s broken hip puts net neutrality at risk

Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images

One of the strange features of American government is that an 82-year-old’s broken hip can cause a sea change in telecom policy. The 82-year-old in question is Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who had surgery after a fall on Thursday and is said to be resting comfortably. But while Leahy recuperates, he won’t be able to cast votes and Democrats won’t be able to flex their razor-thin Senate majority — which could cost the administration its last chance to institute net neutrality rules.

The temporary stalemate caused by Leahy’s recovery has lots of downstream effects. The Washington Post has a good piece running down the panic over federal judicial appointments, which require confirmation from the Senate. But the same also applies to Gigi Sohn,...

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Have you heard the one about the crab and the underwater volcano?

A spider crab at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. To the best of our knowledge, this crab is innocent of any scientific crabotage. | Photo by Doug Duran/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News via Getty Images

Studying an underwater volcano is hard enough without a spider crab getting in the way. In an absolutely delightful field dispatch, Jes Burns of Oregon Public Broadcasting tells the story of a crab, some geologists just trying to set up their equipment, and a remotely operated vehicle named Jason that, from the sound of it, is locked in seemingly eternal crustacean combat.

“We expect sabotage, crab sabotage. Because there’s obviously a battle going on between Jason and the crabs at Axial Seamount,” Oregon State University volcanologist Bill Chadwick told Burns.

Burns is embedded on a ship with Chadwick and other researchers, reporting on the serious scientific effort to study the Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano 300 miles off the...

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Asus launches the ROG Phone 6 and 6 Pro to bring even more gaming power to Android

The ROG Phone 6 Pro comes with an extra screen on the back. | Image: Asus

Asus announced two new devices in its gaming-focused Republic of Gamers phone lineup, the ROG Phone 6 and the ROG Phone 6 Pro. They’re gamer phones for gamers who like to game, and the upgraded displays look pretty impressive.

Both models run Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, and come with up to 512GB of storage. They have 6.78-inch OLED screens, the same size as the previous ROG Phone 5S, but their 165Hz refresh rates and 720Hz touch-sampling rates are both substantial improvements over the last model. They have 6,000mAh batteries, same as previous models, and an upgraded three-camera setup. The Phone 6 will start at €999 and the 6 Pro at €1,299 — they’re set to launch in the UK and Europe first, and Asus says they’ll come to...

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Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro review: letting flex-workers flex

When renewable portable power is more important than emergency backup

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Thor: Love and Thunder’s a scattershot fairy tale about being friends with your ex

Natalie Portman as Jane Foster, the Mighty Thor, and Chris Hemsworth as Thor Odinson. | Image: Marvel Studios

Marvel’s fourth Thor movie is about as messy as any complicated breakup

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Ubisoft to shut down multiplayer for older games, including Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. | Image: Ubisoft

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, the first game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise to feature multiplayer, will see its online services shut down on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in September, its publisher Ubisoft has announced. It’s part of a collection of over a dozen games that will see their online elements discontinued that month, which means players won’t be able to play their multiplayer components, access their online features, link Ubisoft accounts in-game, or install and access downloadable content.

“Closing the online services for some older games allows us to focus our resources on delivering great experiences for players who are playing newer or more popular titles,” Ubisoft’s help page reads. With Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood having...

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Microsoft’s new Outlook Lite for Android app is coming this month

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is working on a smaller and faster Outlook Lite app for Android. The software giant has detailed the app in its Microsoft 365 roadmap, where it describes Outlook Lite as “an Android app that brings the main benefits of Outlook in a smaller app size with fast performance for low-end devices on any network.”

The roadmap reveals that the Outlook Lite app will be available worldwide at some point this month. ZDNet reports that an Outlook Lite app already exists in a few countries, so Microsoft appears to be readying it for a broader release. Microsoft’s own documentation on Outlook Lite suggests the app will be limited to only Outlook, Hotmail, Live, and MSN accounts, and won’t support work or school accounts.

Outlook Lite will...

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FIFA will track players’ bodies using AI to make offside calls at 2022 World Cup

FIFA, the international governing body of association football,* has announced it will use AI-powered cameras to help referees make offside calls at the 2022 World Cup.

The semi-automated system consists of a sensor in the ball that relays its position on the field 500 times a second, and 12 tracking cameras mounted underneath the roof of stadiums, which use machine learning to track 29 points in players’ bodies.

Software will combine this data to generate automated alerts when players commit offside offenses (that is: when they’re nearer to the other team’s goal than their second-last opponent and receiving the ball). Alerts will be sent to officials in a nearby control room, who will validate the decision and tell referees on the...

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EU forces Amazon to make it easier to cancel Prime subscriptions in Europe

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon has agreed to simplify the process of canceling Prime in Europe, meaning customers in the region will be able to end their subscription in just two clicks, the European Commission has announced. The changes, which were implemented as of July 1st, should bring to an end the “multiple pages” filled with “distracting information” and “unclear button labels” that Amazon has previously used to add friction to the cancellation process.

The European Commission says the changes apply to the European Union and European Economic Area. Despite the UK having left the former as of the beginning of 2020, The Guardian reports that UK subscribers will also benefit from the two-click unsubscribe process. But when contacted for comment, a...

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YouTube, Instagram, Discord appear to pull pages belonging to Illinois shooting person of interest

The Verge

YouTube, Instagram, Discord, and Twitter moved to quickly pull social media pages that appeared to belong to Robert Crimo III, a person of interest in the Chicago suburb shooting that left six dead and dozens injured this afternoon. Under a pair of aliases, Crimo seems to have posted more than a dozen videos to YouTube and hosted a Discord channel named “SS,” which was open to the public through an invite link.

Crimo’s apparent YouTube account hadn’t posted in around eight months, based The Verge’s viewing before the account was pulled. The most recent video included concerning language and imagery that appeared to involve classrooms and stick-art depictions of people being shot. Another clip seemed to be a music video for a rap song,...

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This vault of SNES manuals is an amazing resource for fans of gaming history

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

They might often be an afterthought nowadays, but in the console generations of yesteryear, game manuals were often essential reading. Compared to the scant pack-ins that come with games today, those vintage instruction manuals were on a completely different level in terms of the care and detail that went into them — and the page count was much higher, too.

Now, as noted by Kotaku, a community project led by led by streamer Peebs has successfully scanned and uploaded every last English-language game manual for the Super Nintendo. You can check out the entire collection here. Peebs was motivated to assemble one central resource for manuals during an eight-year quest to play and beat every SNES game for his Twitch viewers.

Perusing...

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Amazon expands Prime Video’s Watch Party feature to Roku, smart TVs, and more

Image: Amazon

It just got way easier and more convenient to remotely watch Amazon Prime Video’s TV shows and movies together with your friends. The service’s “Watch Party” feature has received a much needed expansion from the limited use cases where it worked before — on Fire TV devices, desktop web browsers, and the Prime Video mobile app — and it now supports non-Amazon streaming devices, smart TVs, and Xbox / PlayStation gaming consoles. TechCrunch first reported on the expansion.

Watch Party allows for up to 100 people with a Prime subscription to view content at the same time. The host is able to play, pause, skip, and fast forward or rewind for the group, and everyone can chat about what they’re watching.

For now, Amazon’s Watch Party feature...

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Minecraft adds tribute to Technoblade after streamer’s death

The launcher image for Minecraft: Java Edition. | Image: Microsoft

Minecraft has been updated with a tribute to the popular streamer Technoblade, whose death from cancer was announced by his family last week. The splash image for Minecraft in the game’s launcher now features a pig wearing a golden crown — a callout to Technoblade’s Minecraft character, a royal pig-man wearing a bejeweled crown.

The Minecraft team tweeted on Friday that the team was ”heartbroken over the loss of Technoblade,” writing that he “brought so much joy” to the game’s community.

We have been trying to find the words, but all of us here at Minecraft are heartbroken over the loss of Technoblade. He meant so much to our community and brought so much joy. He will be missed dearly. ️

— Minecraft (@Minecraft) July 1, 2022

T...

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Amazon is using electric cargo bikes that look like mini-trucks to make deliveries in the UK

Amazon has launched its first “micromobility hub” in the UK with the aim to swap “thousands” of polluting delivery trucks with electric cargo bikes — and, in some cases, walking. The project is intended to help Amazon achieve its climate goals to have 50 percent of its deliveries be carbon neutral by 2030.

Starting in the London borough of Hackney, the company says that it will deliver 1 million packages a year using walking and electric cargo bikes, in addition to deliveries that are made with electric vans. Delivery workers on foot and e-bikes will help displace “thousands” of traditional van trips, Amazon said.

E-bikes will help displace “thousands” of traditional van trips

The carbon neutral trips will take place within a tenth of...

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Crosby, Stills & Nash return to Spotify after Joe Rogan protest

David Crosby in 2019. | Photo by Scott Dudelson/Getty Images

Crosby, Stills & Nash are back on Spotify, five months after the supergroup abandoned the platform in protest of Joe Rogan’s spread of COVID misinformation. The group will donate streaming profits to COVID-19 charities for “at least a month,” according to Billboard.

The musicians’ return to Spotify marks a quiet and relatively unglamorous end to their protest, which has largely had the effect of boosting Rogan’s subscriber numbers, if the podcaster is to be believed. Crosby, Stills & Nash originally announced back in February that they would pull their music in solidarity with sometimes-bandmate Neil Young, who kicked off a series of artist protests of Spotify when he removed his music and published an open letter criticizing the company...

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Xiaomi put a huge camera sensor in its new Mi 12S Ultra flagship smartphone

Xiaomi’s Mi 12S Ultra | Image: Xiaomi

Xiaomi is introducing a trio of new smartphones today, and one of them comes with a pretty huge new feature: a 1-inch camera sensor, which is relatively giant for a smartphone.

Everything about Xiaomi’s new flagship smartphone, the Mi 12S Ultra, is big. It has a 6.73-inch OLED display, a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 system on a chip, and a camera-lens shaped bulge on that back that takes up about a third of the phone’s rear side.

Inside that faux-lens are the phone’s three cameras: a 48 megapixel ultrawide, a 48 megapixel telephoto with 5x optical zoom (and “120x” digital zoom that will probably not look very good), and finally, the 50 megapixel main camera, which uses that 1-inch sensor.

A few different companies have put...

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Tesla can now scan for potholes and adjust vehicle suspension to avoid damage

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

Tesla’s latest software update includes a cool-sounding feature that could prevent a lot of underbody damage — and perhaps some driver damage too, Electrek reports. According to release notes, the update (2022.20) will enable Tesla vehicles to scan the road ahead of potholes and adjust the suspension to account for rough roads.

Tesla owners can activate the new feature by selecting “Comfort” under the Adaptive Suspension Damping setting. But the new feature may be dependent on where the vehicle is being driven — meaning it may not be available for every pothole and road crack. “This adjustment may occur at various locations, subject to availability, as the vehicle downloads rough road map data generated by Tesla cars,” the release notes...

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How arson led to a culture reboot at Traeger, with CEO Jeremy Andrus

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

Riding the wave of the outdoor cooking revolution

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No bids on Chevy’s first NFT, even though it came with a free Corvette Z06

Chevy’s first foray into non-fungible tokens was a non-fungible dud. The automaker netted zero bids for its first NFT during an auction last month,even though the digital drawing came with a free 2023 Corvette Z06, according to Corvette Blogger.

The NFT, which depicts a lime green Corvette Z06 blasting through a cyberpunk landscape, was created by artist Nick Sullo, who goes by xsullo online. The winning bidder would have also received a unique “Minted Green” Corvette Z06, which will be the only car painted in that color, and an option code RFN, which will “forever associate” the car with the NFT auction. And the Corvette’s VIN number will be in binary because NFTs are digital and computers use binary and you get it.

But...

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How to clear your browser cache

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

One of the best ways to restore space to your computer or phone — or to fix a problem that may have been caused by a temporary file screwing up the works — is also one of the simplest: to clear the browser cache. However, unless you’ve been instructed sometime in the past to clear your cache, you may be unaware of this otherwise invisible feature.

Here’s how to clear your cache on the major browsers and on your Android or iOS devices. We’ve also included instructions on how to clear the data for a single site if you need to.

Chrome

Check the cached images and files box.

• Click on the three dots in the upper right corner
• On the desktop version, select More Tools > Clear Browsing Data... On the mobile app, select S...

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Formula One driver survives horrific crash thanks to halo cockpit requirement

Photo by Peter J Fox/Getty Images

Formula One driver Zhou Guanyu likely wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for the partially closed titanium device that formed a protective layer around the cockpit of his race car. Zhou credited the protection device, known as a halo, for saving his life after a horrific crash during the first lap of Sunday’s British Grand Prix, according to CNN.

“I’m ok, all clear. Halo saved me today,” Zhou tweeted Sunday, along with a selfie. “Thanks everyone for your kind messages!”

Zhou was one of several drivers involved in the turn one crash, which saw his Alfa Romeo flipping over and skidding across the track before crashing into the fencing. The halo, which forms partial protection around the cockpit, prevented Zhou from sustaining serious...

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The phone is terrible for cloud gaming

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

The promise of cloud gaming is that you can do it from anywhere using any device with internet access and a good enough browser (each cloud gaming service seems to have its own requirements on the browser front). You should be able to play super demanding games whether you’re on a work trip with nothing but a work laptop or at home and the main TV is being hogged — or even if you just don’t feel like sitting on the couch. But the biggest promise of cloud gaming is that, no matter where you are, if you’ve got a phone then you’ve got all your games.

In practice, this is a bad idea. After spending the last few weeks rapturously using my Steam Deck near daily to play games in the cloud, I am never going to willingly attempt cloud gaming on...

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Now Android users on Twitter can pay to drop the Spaces button too

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter Blue has finally started letting subscribers on Android customize the app’s navigation bar. The feature, which was previously available only on iOS, lets you get rid of the Spaces icon that’s smack-dab in the middle of your navigation bar (and of course, remove some of the other tabs if you want, too).

With custom navigation, you can reduce the number of displayed tabs to as few as two, or keep all five that appear by default — handy if you’re tired of stretching your finger over the Spaces tab just to get to your DMs and notifications. Twitter first started testing the Spaces tab on iOS last year and rolled out the tab on Android in May, which seemed to only give more inconvenienced users a reason to sign up for the $2.99 /...

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