Escape Academy is the escape room game you never wanna leave

Coin Crew Games

I’ve been in the mood for a good puzzle game. No, that’s not accurate enough. If a good puzzle game came to my door and proposed marriage, I would blow up my life and career for it the same way that journalist did for that pharma bro. (But I’d at least have the good sense to take the inevitable L privately.)

I wanted Escape Academy to ruin my life like that, the same way Inscryption did.

And while the escape room puzzle game / visual novel isn’t the equivalent of Tessa Thompson or Tom Hiddleston — or Tessa Thompson and Tom Hiddleston — showing up at my door on bended knee; I can say it’s more like that greasy guy from The Bearcooking an intimate dinner for two in his furniture-less apartment — absolutely incredible but sparse and far...

Continue reading…

BTS is coming to Disney Plus

Photo by Nathan Posner / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

BTS fans have quite a lot of content to look out for on Disney Plus. The streaming service has announced a collaboration with Hybe, BTS’s label, to bring what Disney describes as “five major content titles” to the platform. At least three of those titles are confirmed to feature BTS in some form.

The two exclusive projects include BTS: Permission to Dance On Stage — LA, a 4K film of the band’s live performance at Sofi Stadium last November, and BTS Monuments: Beyond the Star, a docuseries about the band that’s said to feature “unprecedented access to a vast library of music and footage over the past nine years.”

Also coming to Disney Plus is In The Soop: Friendcation, a travel reality show starring BTS member V and other entertainers,...

Continue reading…

Wink says it’s down but not out

The Wink Hub has been offline for two weeks, the longest ever for the smart home platform. | Image: Wink

Wink, the once-innovative smart home platform, has been down for two weeks with no sign of a fix. The outage has left customers of the Will-i-am-owned company — who pay $5 a month for the service to run their connected lights, locks, sensors, and other devices through the Wink Hub — completely in the lurch. It’s so bad that even Wink’s website and email are affected, which gives off strong whiffs of “somebody didn’t pay the bill this month.”

There was initially no formal word from Wink, but an email to users posted on Reddit arrived 10 days after the outage began. It states in part, “Starting on July 1st, our systems have regrettably become temporarily unavailable …. We assure you that we’re working hard on a resolution for the ongoing...

Continue reading…

Home Assistant Amber is a ready-to-use smart home platform

Home Assistant Amber is a smart home hub for the free, open source home automation platform. | Nabu Casa

Home Assistant, the powerful-yet-prickly smart home automation platform, is finally moving toward the mainstream. Nabu Casa, the company behind the free, open-source software, has launched Home Assistant Yellow, its first ready-to-use hub that can run Home Assistant software out of the box. Unlike with prior methods of using Home Assistant, there’s minimal programming required and no need to build your own computer when you have the Yellow.

Debuting on the creators’ crowdfunding platform Crowd Supply this week, the $149 box is designed for both beginners and experienced HA fans. Shipping is targeted for June 2022, provided the $140,000 funding goal is met (it’s about a third of the way there as of publish).

Image: Nabu...

Continue reading…

Alphabet’s Wing is working on larger drones that can handle heavier deliveries

Wing, the drone delivery company operated by Google parent Alphabet, unveiled a series of new prototype aircraft designed to handle a variety of payloads. The company said the new drones will share the same underlying components with the aircraft currently in use delivering pharmaceuticals and other small packages in the suburbs outside of Dallas-Fort Worth.

According to Wing CEO Adam Woodworth, the aim is to right-size the delivery industry in order to match the appropriate package with a similar sized vehicle. “Just as the ideal vehicle for carrying a ton of gravel would be a dump truck rather than a sedan, the ideal aircraft to carry a bottle of medication is not the same as the best one to deliver a gallon of milk, and neither is...

Continue reading…

Hot and hyped: inside the strange launch of the Nothing Phone 1

One of the launch event’s attendees holds Nothing’s Ear 1 earbuds on its Phone 1. | Image: Nothing

Hype giveth, and hype taketh away

Continue reading…

Omegle can be sued for matching child with sexual predator, says court

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Chat service Omegle is on the hook for a lawsuit after its matching system paired an 11-year-old girl with a man who then sexually abused her. A district judge in Portland, Oregon, said the company’s system wasn’t protected by the legal shield that covers much user-generated content. The case isn’t concluded, but it opens the door to more prosecutions based on how a platform designs its services.

The legal complaint, filed late last year, alleges that Omegle’s service was defective and falsely represented. It’s a common strategy that’s often failed in court before, including with Grindr in a harassment case, typically due to the legal protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This time, however, Judge Michael Mosman...

Continue reading…

macOS Ventura preview: the march to continuity continues

Venture into Ventura. I know, sorry, didn’t have time to workshop this one.

As my colleagues downloaded the public beta of macOS Ventura, the underwhelmed reactions began to roll in. “Everything looks the same,” one of my colleagues lamented. “This kinda sucks,” another complained. Nothing was particularly wrong with the operating system — it just looks and feels exactly the same as Monterey did. Many of the most significant features of this operating system are things that many users may not ever know about or use.

But things could definitely be worse. Unlike with Monterey (I feel like we literally just got Universal Control a few days ago), those significant features are basically all up and running in the beta now, and they seem mostly solid.

Ventura also isn’t full of bugs or glitches that are ruining...

Continue reading…

Texas’ fragile grid isn’t ready for crypto mining’s explosive growth

An aerial view of the Whinstone US Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9th, 2021. | Photo by MARK FELIX / AFP via Getty Images

Bitcoin mining could bring higher electricity bills and more pollution to Texas

Continue reading…

Beyoncé — and her music — is now on TikTok

Cover artwork for Beyoncé’s upcoming album, Renaissance | Image: Carlijn Jacobs / Beyoncé

The world’s biggest pop star just joined one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.

Beyoncé joined TikTok Thursday morning, announcing her presence with a video compilation of fans dancing to her latest single, “Break My Soul,” which has been trending on the app since its release last month.

“Seeing y’all release the wiggle made me so happy! Thank you so much for all the love for BREAK MY SOUL! - Love B,” she wrote.

Along with her TikTok, Beyoncé’s entire catalog will be available on the platform for people to use as sounds in their own videos, as reported by Variety. Even before Beyoncé joined,“Break My Soul” was a popular sound used on TikTok, with thousands of fans dancing, lip syncing, and using it as backing audio.

B...

Continue reading…

Stray is getting a line of cute accessories for your IRL cat

Image: Annapurna Interactive

I am an avowed cat-disliker, a certified hater, and yet I want the Stray cat backpack. In the mother of all video game branded merchandise crossovers, Annapurrrrna (sorry, I had to) Interactive has announced it is launching a limited-edition cat backpack and harness and leash set in collaboration with Travel Cat — a company that makes all sorts of feline transportation devices that your cat probably thinks are torture devices.

Image: Travel Cat

Look at that cat. They’re either high or terrified.

The cat-pack holds “up to 25 lbs of cat,” which is a delightful-sounding metric, and has a little bubble window so your cat can peer out into the wide world. If your feline friend prefers to do their exploring up close...

Continue reading…

President Joe Biden’s broadband billions are finally making their way to rural communities

Image: Alex Castro / The Verge

On Thursday, the Treasury Department announced that it would provide millions of dollars to build out high-speed broadband projects in four states.

The funding is part of the American Rescue Plan’s Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund (CPF), which provides $10 billion for states and tribal governments to fund new broadband networks. The combined projects — in Kansas, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota — will expand high-speed broadband to over 83,000 homes and businesses, according to a Treasury Department Thursday press release.

“The pandemic was many things but one thing that was for sure was a national teaching moment of the need for accessible strong broadband in the home that was strong enough that multiple people could both work and learn...

Continue reading…

Skate’s developers say going free to play is a ‘natural evolution of the franchise’

An early screenshot from Skate_._ | Image: EA

EA’s new Skate is going to be a live-service free-to-play skateboarding game, developer Full Circle announced in a video on Thursday. Fans have been eagerly asking for some kind of Skate 3 follow-up for years, but this new title won’t be the Skate 4 they might have been expecting; instead of a numbered iteration, Full Circle is imagining Skate (that’s the name, though EA stylizes it with a period at the end) as a constantly evolving world with community-created content that’s easy for everyone to ollie into.

“It’s an authentic evolution of the franchise and taking what Skate 3 was in 2010 and bringing it to now and to the future,” Deran Chung, a creative director on Skate, said in an interview with The Verge. “That is not only an...

Continue reading…

The new South Park movie is basically just one long crypto roast

Matt Damon making that “Fortune Favors The Brave” commercial for Crypto.com will go down in history as one of the best things that ever happened to South Park. (And the worst thing that happened to a lot of crypto investments: if you put $1,000 into Bitcoin when the ad first aired last October, you’d have about $325 today.) The show has been making fun of crypto, Damon, and that phrase ever since. But with South Park The Streaming Wars Part 2, which just hit Paramount Plus, the show’s crypto jokes hit a new level.

Knowing the plot of South Park The Streaming Wars Part 2 is not important to enjoy the videos below. Though, if you haven’t watched the Damon commercial, you should. Actually, here it is, it’s always worth a rewatch:

Anyway,...

Continue reading…

Google’s Chrome OS Flex is now available for old PCs and Macs

Image: Google

Google is releasing Chrome OS Flex today, a new version of Chrome OS that’s designed for businesses and schools to install and run on old PCs and Macs. Google first started testing Chrome OS Flex earlier this year in an early access preview, and the company has now resolved 600 bugs to roll out Flex to businesses and schools today.

Chrome OS Flex is designed primarily for businesses running old Windows PCs, as Google has been testing and verifying devices from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, Toshiba, and many more OEMs. Flex will even run on some old Macs, including some 10-year-old MacBooks.

The support of old hardware is the big selling point of Chrome OS Flex, as businesses don’t have to ditch existing hardware to get the latest...

Continue reading…

Amazon Prime Day 2022: the best deals you can still get

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

Prime Day may be done and dusted, but there are still plenty of awesome deals to be found at Amazon and other retailers.

There are still plenty of discounts to be found on wireless earbuds, laptops, TVs, games, and more. A few of the highlights still available include the Beats Fit Pro, currently still discounted to $159.95 (normally $200). You can also find the 40mm Apple Watch SE discounted to $219 — $60 off the regular retail price.

We’ll continue to update this page by adding any products that we might have missed and removing anything that’s no longer available, so make sure to check back regularly.

Some of the best Prime Day deals still standing

• The HP Envy x360 15 is a convertible laptop that typically goes for $799.99 but is...

Continue reading…

Porter Robinson on crafting a new anthem for League of Legends

Porter Robinson. | Image: Riot Games

‘Everything Goes On’ is out now as part of the game’s Star Guardian event

Continue reading…

Razer’s Stream Controller takes on the Stream Deck for $269.99

Image: Razer

Razer is going head to head with Elgato’s Stream Deck with the launch of its new Stream Controller. The $269.99 touchscreen device is designed to sit on a desk alongside a keyboard and allow content creators — or anyone, really — to quickly launch shortcuts and control hardware and software on a PC.

If you’re a regular Twitch viewer, chances are the streamer you’re watching is using Elgato’s Stream Deck to control every aspect of their stream. The Stream Deck has become so popular in the streaming world that Elgato has even launched a pedal so you can control your PC with your feet. Razer now wants to be part of this side of PC gaming with the Stream Controller.

Image: Razer

Razer’s Stream Controller has dials to...

Continue reading…

Ms. Marvel’s finale brought Kamala Khan’s MCU journey full circle by saying the m-word

No, it wasn’t ‘Mephisto’

Continue reading…

Don’t rely on iMessage’s new unsend feature yet

iMessage’s undo send only works in the public beta so far. | Screenshot by Nathan Edwards / The Verge

The upcoming version of iMessage will let you unsend and edit messages for up to 15 minutes. Sounds great, very convenient — Signal and WhatsApp and Viber have had similar features for years. You can try it out right now in the public betas for iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura. Just one small caveat.

If the recipient of your attempted rug-sweeping isn’t running the public betas on every device they use for iMessage, you’re the only one who will see history as you wish you’d written it.

Screenshots by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

In which I feign interest in my colleague’s NFT. On the left is what they saw on an iPhone running the iOS 16 public beta; on the right is how it looked on an iPod Touch running 15.5.

...

Continue reading…

White Houses pushes for chips funding as Intel loses patience

Photo by Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

It’s been over a year since the Senate passed its bill to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing — but with time running out before Congress’ August recess, the White House is pushing hard to make sure that funding gets through.

On Wednesday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo led a classified briefing with senators stressing the importance of chip funding as a national security concern. If Congress couldn’t agree on the broader bill before its upcoming recess, Raimondo urged it to pass the $52 billion in chip manufacturing incentives by itself.

“The message is, ‘Time’s up,’” Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told CNN after the briefing. “It’s time to make it happen.

“It’s time to make it happen”

Passed as the US Innovation and...

Continue reading…

Instagram now lets creators publish feed posts just for their subscribers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After getting off to a small start with paid subscriptions for creators earlier this year, today, Instagram is announcing more features to further build out the experience — and better compete with Twitter in this area. In a video, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said the platform aims to be “the best place online for creators to make a living” and that the new additions are the direct result of feedback from creators who’ve participated in the early phase of subscriptions.

The most significant new feature is the ability to publish feed posts that are only visible to subscribers. Creators could previously do this with stories, but now they can give their paying supporters access to exclusive, traditional Instagram feed posts. Mosseri said...

Continue reading…

Netflix is bringing back its Tudum event in September

Stranger Things 4 | Image: Netflix

Netflix’s “global fan event” is returning for a second-straight year. The streaming service announced that Tudum — not to be confused with Netflix’s troubled fan site of the same name — will be streaming on YouTube on September 24th. There aren’t many details yet, but Netflix says the event will cover more than 100 movies and series. And the day will be divided by region: things will kick off with news from Korea, followed by India, the US, Europe, and Latin America, before closing out with Japan.

At last year’s Tudum, Netflix showed off some of its biggest series, including Bridgerton, Stranger Things, and The Witcher, while also revealing first looks at the likes of The Sandman and Cowboy Bebop. Outside of Tudum, Netflix also has its...

Continue reading…

Sony’s PlayStation Stars loyalty program has points and collectibles but not NFTs

Image: Sony

Sony is launching a new PlayStation Stars loyalty program later this year, and it includes “digital collectibles” rewards. PlayStation Stars will be a free service that allows PlayStation players to earn loyalty points and rewards by completing activities. Points can be redeemed for benefits, including a PSN wallet fund to put toward a game purchase.

“Points can be redeemed in a catalog that may include PSN wallet funds and select PlayStation Store products,” explains Grace Chen, Sony’s vice president of PlayStation network advertising, loyalty, and licensed merchandise. “As an additional benefit, PlayStation Plus members enrolled in PlayStation Stars automatically earn points for purchases on PlayStation Store.”

Nothing to do with the...

Continue reading…

The Oura Ring goes a little more mainstream with Strava integration

The Oura Ring is expanding third-party integrations to include Strava. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Consolidating all your fitness data into one place can be a royal pain, and for many athletes, Strava is the obvious choice as it integrates with nearly every fitness platform. Today, Oura announced it’s joining the club by introducing Strava integration for the Oura Ring.

The integration goes both ways. Oura Ring users will be able to import Strava activities into the Oura app, ensuring that data will be incorporated into their Readiness and Activity Scores. Those scores are meant to tell Oura users how well they’ve recovered from strenuous activity and gauge whether they’re meeting their exercise goals. Meanwhile, users can also decide to share certain Oura activities directly to their public or private Strava feeds, as well as their...

Continue reading…

Apple’s new MacBook Air M2 is the start of a whole new Air-a

New design, new display, new processor, new price

Continue reading…

Nanoleaf goes to the dark side

Image: Nanoleaf

Nanoleaf is turning 10, and to celebrate, the Kickstarter-founded smart lighting company is releasing a limited edition set of its iconic Shapes lighting tiles.

The Nanoleaf Shapes Ultra Black Triangles cost $219.99 for a set of nine LED light panels and are an all-black version of its Shapes Triangle panels. The original triangle panels are all white when not displaying any of their 16 million colors; the new panels are all black when dormant.

Nanoleaf says the black light panels, which it is only making a thousand of, are slightly dimmer due to the finish, with a more saturated look when lit. This makes them even more suited to ambient, mood lighting as opposed to the functional lighting their brighter counterparts can provide.

...

Continue reading…

Corsair’s latest mechanical keyboard is its first with hot-swappable switches

Included tools can be used to remove both the keyboard’s keycaps and switches. | Image: Corsair

Corsair’s K70 Pro Mini Wireless is the company’s first mechanical keyboard to feature hot-swappable switches, which means you can easily remove and replace them with an included tool — no soldering required. The $179.99 (£169.99 / €189.99) keyboard is also wireless, lasting up to 200 hours on battery with its RGB lighting turned off.

Hot-swappable switches have become increasingly popular on enthusiast mechanical keyboards, giving owners an easy way to get a completely different typing feel without the need to buy an entirely new keyboard. The feature also provides the option of trying out less common hobbyist switches, which can be hard to find preinstalled on off-the-shelf keyboards. Support for hot-swappable switches is still...

Continue reading…

Amazon offers to level the playing field with third-party sellers to avoid EU fines

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon has offered a number of concessions to third-party sellers on its platform in Europe in an attempt to settle an antitrust investigation opened by the EU in 2019.

The European Commission accused Amazon of abusing its dual-position as both marketplace operator and retailer; using the sales data it collects from smaller vendors to outmaneuver them. To remedy this, the EU says Amazon has offered to “refrain from using non-public data relating to, or derived from, the activities of independent sellers on its marketplace, for its retail business that competes with those sellers.”

It’s long been suspected that Amazon uses its insight into sales on its platform to produce copies of popular products like Allbirds shoes and Peak Design...

Continue reading…

Watch the latest epic trailer for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV show

A new trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been released ahead of the Amazon Prime series’ debut on September 2nd. The clip gives a deeper look following the initial trailer broadcast during the Super Bowl and a second short teaser that was exclusive to Prime subscribers when released last week. Amazon describes it as the “main teaser,” so expect at least a few more trailers between now and when the series premieres.

The Rings of Power is one of Amazon’s highest-profile shows in years. The e-commerce giant is reported to have paid $250 million for the franchise rights alone and estimates have pegged the budget for its rumored five seasons plus a potential spinoff to be north of $1 billion. That could make it one of...

Continue reading…