SpaceX tells US government that it can no longer pay for Ukraine’s Starlink service

A Starlink terminal in Ukraine. | Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images

After providing tens of thousands of Starlink terminals to help Ukraine’s war effort, SpaceX has told the Department of Defense that it may not be able to provide future funding for the service, CNN reports. In a letter dated September 8th, the company’s director of government sales reportedly wrote that SpaceX is “not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time.”

The terminals have provided essential connectivity to Ukraine during its war with Russia. Putin’s war machine has targeted Ukraine’s communications infrastructure as part of its invasion of the country, but Starlink’s satellite-based internet connectivity has provided an effective way for Ukraine’s...

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Microsoft’s DirectStorage 1.1 will soon boost PC game load times with GPU decompression

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is bringing GPU decompression to Windows PC games soon. After launching DirectStorage earlier this year, GPU decompression promises to be the next step in the ongoing effort to improve game load times on PCs. Microsoft says it’s “one of our most highly requested features” from game developers.

GPU decompression works by offloading the work needed to decompress assets in games to the graphics card instead of the CPU. Modern games include massive amounts of assets like characters, landscapes, and objects that are all compressed to reduce the total size of a game.

“Typically, decompression work is done on the CPU because compression formats have historically been optimized for CPUs only,” explains Cassie Hoef, a senior program...

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Did Mark Zuckerberg’s little dance actually show us real metaverse legs?

Image: Meta

During Meta’s Connect conference on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg made a huge announcement: the avatars in the company’s Horizon VR app will be getting legs soon. To demonstrate this groundbreaking technical achievement, Zuckerberg’s digital avatar lifted each leg in the air, then did a jump, while Aigerim Shorman’s avatar kicked into the air.

It may have all been for show. According to UploadVR editor Ian Hamilton, an unnamed Meta spokesperson said that the “the segment featured animations created from motion capture,” meant to “enable this preview of what’s to come.” To me that reads like what we saw wasn’t actually a demo of what Horizon’s legs will look like, but rather an artist’s interpretation of what Horizon’s legs may end up looking...

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The National Science Foundation won’t rebuild the Arecibo Observatory telescope

The Arecibo Observatory after its collapse in 2020. | Photo by RICARDO ARDUENGO/AFP via Getty Images

The National Science Foundation (NSF) won’t rebuild the massive Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico following its collapse in late 2020. The agency instead plans to build an education center focused on STEM education and outreach, according to an NSF announcement.

The Arecibo Observatory was an important tool for deep-space observation and featured in films such as Contact and GoldenEye. But in August 2020, an auxiliary cable fell, with another cable failing in November. The NSF feared that others might have followed, which would have put Arecibo at risk, and said that it planned to demolish the observatory. But before that could happen, Arecibo collapsed in on itself.

The unnamed new center is set to open sometime in 2023. The NSF is...

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T-Mobile social media support workers are trying to form a union

The organizers have dubbed it the “T-Force Social Care Alliance.” | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Workers on T-Mobile’s social media customer service team, who respond to customer questions, comments, and complaints on sites like Twitter and Facebook, are trying to start a union. On Wednesday, they announced the creation of the “T-Force Social Care Alliance,” posting a letter tying their decision to pay cuts, layoffs, and management’s lack of response to employees raising concerns about those issues.

The letter says that T-Mobile has cut monthly bonuses for T-Force (the carrier’s name for its social media support team), instead replacing them with “micro-raises” and an annual bonus, which the alliance claims there are very few details about. According to the letter, workers may end up with thousands of dollars less per year —...

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The best anti-Prime Day deals you can still get at Target

Google’s budget-friendly Pixel 6A is still on sale for $349.99 in all three colorways. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

As expected, Target’s recent “Deal Days” event has officially come to a close. The two-day shopping event — which served as a counter to Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale — brought with it discounts on a variety of tech products, including gaming accessories, headphones, 4K TVs, and a range of other items that were on sale by as much as 50 percent off. However, just because the sale is over doesn’t mean there aren’t still deals to be had. In fact, a number of popular items are still clinging to their Prime Day prices following the event.

To help you make sense of what’s still on offer, we’ve sorted through the remains of Target’s recent sales event to compile a list of the best tech deals you can still buy. The current batch of discounts...

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Google Fiber is launching 5-gig and 8-gig plans early next year

Google Fiber will soon offer some really fast internet speeds. | Image: Google Fiber

Google Fiber will offer 5Gbps and 8Gbps tiers starting in early 2023 (via 9to5Google). The company is pitching these new offerings for people like creative professionals, those that regularly work “in the cloud” or with large data, and households with many people sharing the internet, according to a blog post from director of product management Amalia O’Sullivan.

“5 Gig will make it easier to upload and download simultaneously, no matter the file size,” writes O’Sullivan. “And 8 Gig will make sure that everything you are doing online is happening in near real time (without jitter and with low latency).” The tiers each come with a Wi-Fi 6 router and up to two mesh extenders with professional installation, but you can use your own router...

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Samsung SmartThings is now Matter certified

SmartThings hubs will be among the first devices to be Matter certified. | Image: Aeotec

An over-the-air update coming later this month will turn Samsung’s standalone SmartThings hubs into controllers for the new smart home standard Matter. The v2 hub will control Matter devices over Wi-Fi and ethernet, while the current hub and SmartThings dongle will also act as Thread border routers. Samsung is the first company to publicly announce Matter certification.

Jaeyeon Jung, Samsung Electronics corporate vice president and head of SmartThings’ mobile experience business, told The Verge in an interview that the company received its Matter certification early on Wednesday, October 12th, a week after Matter launched. Michelle Mindala-Freeman of the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which oversees Matter, confirmed that it started...

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The best budget laptop of 2022

Here are the best cheap Chromebooks and laptops you can buy. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales

The best cheap laptops from HP, Lenovo, and more.

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Google built a spam backdoor for Republicans — and they aren’t using it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

With only weeks until Election Day, the Republican National Committee is escalating its war over Gmail’s spam filters in what critics deem a bad-faith effort to bully Google into letting them spam user inboxes.

The GOP has long complained about tech bias, but the latest fight hits the organization’s fundraising apparatus directly. In response, Google has launched a controversial program allowing campaign committees to effectively opt out of spam filters — a huge concession to mounting political pressure from Republicans. But Verge reporting shows the RNC has not taken advantage of the program and made few efforts to alter the core practices that might result in their emails being labeled as spam.

A source familiar with the matter...

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Samsung’s One UI 5 is coming soon with some very iOS-like vibes

Personalized lock screens are so hot in 2022. | Image: Samsung

Samsung’s take on Android 13, called One UI 5, is ready to come out of public beta testing “in the coming weeks,” according to a company press release issued today. Highlights include a more personalized lock screen and new modes to filter out unwanted disruptions based on your activity. Sounds an awful lot like iOS 16, and you know what? That’s fine! These are all great features on iOS, and Samsung is smart enough to copy them.

One UI 5’s lock screen customization works about the same way that Apple’s does: long-press your lock screen, and you’ll see options to customize your wallpaper and clockface. There’s an option to create a wallpaper using a short video clip, too. Samsung says there are more wallpapers to choose from for your home...

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The best Chromebook for 2022

Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 | Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge

The best Chromebook for anyone who wants Chrome OS on their laptop

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Twitter is working on an official don’t @ me feature

Keep my name out of your tweet. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is working on a feature that lets you control who can mention you, with the test version discovered by app researcher and engineer Jane Manchun Wong letting you block mentions completely. Twitter privacy designer Dominic Camozzi confirmed that the feature is in the works in a now-deleted tweet, and solicited feedback on it from the community.

Letting Twitter users limit who can @ them would be a pretty fundamental shift in how the platform works, making it so you may not be able to reach out across the platform to a stranger to say hi or point something out to them. Of course, it could also prevent bullying or harassment campaigns and give marginalized users another tool to protect themselves.

Twitter is working on letting you...

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Take-Two is shutting down the developer of the puzzle game Two Dots

Although Playdots is going away, Two Dots will live on. | Image: Take-Two

Take-Two is shutting down the gaming studio Playdots, the creator of puzzle games like Two Dots and the just-released Apple Arcade title Garden Tails, as first reported by Bloomberg. Due to the closure, Take-Two will cut 65 jobs beginning in January, per a New York Department of Labor notice.

Take-Two confirmed the decision to shut down the studio in a statement to The Verge. Affected employees will be able to apply for other jobs at Zynga, which was recently acquired by Take-Two, and people who don’t find new roles will be eligible for severance, according to spokesperson Alan Lewis. Take-Two will continue to operate Two Dots through one of its Zynga studios, but the future of other Playdots games like Garden Tails is unclear, and Lewis...

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Amazon’s set to launch its prototype internet satellites early next year

Just over 3,230 to go. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon is getting ready to launch two test satellites for its Project Kuiper satellite internet constellation, built to compete with services like SpaceX Starlink and OneWeb. In a press release on Wednesday, the company says the prototypes, charmingly named Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2, will be riding into orbit on a Vulcan Centaur rocket from the United Launch Alliance (ULA) in early 2023.

The company says the launch will let it perform tests on its satellite network technology with data from space and that the data will “help finalize design, deployment, and operational plans for our commercial satellite system.” The timeframe marks a slight delay from Amazon’s original plan; last year, the company announced it would launch the...

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The best smart locks you can buy right now

Illustration: The Verge

Never get locked out again with a smart lock you can control from your phone, with your voice, or with just a touch of your finger

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Yale Assure Lock 2 review: a promising all-rounder

For $160, this sleek Bluetooth smart lock supports Apple Home and will auto-unlock for you as you walk up to your door. Yale’s Wi-Fi and Z-Wave modules add more smart home support for $80 each, but I’m waiting for the Matter version.

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Check out these jarring images of urban wildlife

When Dmitry’s boat approached the small island of Kolyuchin, which had been abandoned by humans since 1992, he was surprised to spot movement in one of the houses. Binoculars revealed polar bears — over 20 in total — exploring the ghost town. Dmitry used a low-noise drone to document the surreal experience. | Image: Dmitry Kokh via Natural History Museum

As a science reporter, I chase down plenty of stories about how humans interact — often carelessly — with the environment around us.Even so, the stunning photos from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have me shook. It puts furry faces on some of the thorny issues I cover. The images are such an intimate view of wildlife forced to navigate our unnatural world.

Humans have engineered a collision course between ourselves and our wild neighbors — through urban sprawl that destroys habitats and climate change that pushes animals into new territory as the world they’ve adapted to transforms. There’s plenty to wonder at and protect in the natural world, as the wildlife photography competition shows us, too. The winning...

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TikTok’s Profile Kit is an embeddable collection of your best videos

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

TikTok users will soon have a new way of highlighting their videos — and their TikTok presence — on other platforms.

As part of the TikTok for developers program, the short-form video platform announced a new feature called Profile Kit today, allowing creators to easily showcase up to six TikTok videos off-platform. To begin, users will be able to integrate their TikTok profiles with Linktree, which already serves as a landing page for TikTok creators to share social links and contact information.

Image: Linktree

The Linktree integration shows up to six TikTok videos.

Users will be able to highlight their latest or most popular clips or handpick videos they want to appear on their Linktree. Viewers,...

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Fossil’s first Wear OS 3 watch is a wellness-focused Gen 6

The Fossil Gen 6 Wellness Edition will be the company’s first Wear OS 3 watch. | Image: Fossil

Hot on the heels of the Pixel Watch, Fossil has announced it’s launching its first-ever Wear OS 3 watch — the Gen 6 Wellness Edition. It’ll also introduce a new Wellness mobile app for health and fitness tracking, but unfortunately, this watch doesn’t feature Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon W5 Plus platform. The Gen 6 Wellness Edition will retail for $299, and it’s available starting October 17th.

The Gen 6 Wellness Edition looks like your typical Fossil device with its fashion smartwatch aesthetic. It’ll come in a 44mm case with a 1.28-inch always-on OLED display, as well as three color options: black, silver, or rose gold. It’ll be powered by the last-gen Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus chip with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of onboard storage. That’s the...

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The Verge’s 2022 Fall Gift Guide

Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Our fall gift guide includes plenty of ideas for enjoying the turning of the season, whether you want to admire it outside or bundled up at home.

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Netflix’s ad tier will cost $7 a month and launch in November

Image: Netflix

Starting in November, Netflix will finally roll out its new ad-supported tier for just a few bucks a month, yet another sign that the onetime disruptive upstart streaming service has slowly become a cable package by another name.

Netflix announced today that its new Basic with Ads tier is slated to launch on November 3rd, 2022, for $6.99 in the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. In exchange for making you watch an average of four to five ads per hour that run anywhere from 15–30 seconds, Basic with Ads will give subscribers access to a large swath of Netflix’s programming but not the platform’s full catalog.

A small selection of television shows and movies will not be...

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Nvidia’s ‘priority access’ program is one way to get your hands on an RTX 4090

Some lucky shoppers will get to buy these early. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

In a recent post on the GeForce forums, an Nvidia community manager announced that the company is testing a new program called “verified priority access.” The program will give some potential shoppers the opportunity to reserve a GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition graphics card without the kerfuffle that can sometimes be required to get their hands on a new GPU.

The program, as VideoCardz correctly pointed out, is a similar idea to EVGA’s Elite Priority Access system, which gave the company’s “Elite” members 24 hours of exclusive early access to its new products. Elite status didn’t cost money — users who were active in the company’s forums and Twitch streams or who had purchased and registered EVGA products recently were eligible....

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Huge Elden Ring update will seemingly make players a lot harder to kill

Image: FromSoftware

Elden Ring, the game that feels like it was released several years ago but was in fact launched just this February, has announced a massive update. According to Bandai Namco on the game’s website, the patch intends to “encourage more versatility in terms of gameplay” — if “encourage” also means “make you a nigh unkillable god in single player.” A lot of weapons and spells were buffed, very few things were nerfed, and it seems like it’s going to get a lot harder to kill your friends in PVP. The patch notes are indeed massive, but I’ve picked out a few highlights.

Glintstone Pebble / Shard Spiral: increased attack power

The single best offensive spell, great for chip damage and sniping enemies you don’t want anywhere near you, is getting...

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It’s not just you — Slack says it’s having issues with threads, channels, and more

No, boss, I’m not slacking... and that’s the problem. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

If you’ve been having some issues with Slack, you’re not alone — the service’s status page reports that “something’s not quite right” with messaging, apps, integrations, APIs, and connections. The issues, which seem to affect threads, channels, notifications and group DMs, started around 9:40AM ET this morning and are still ongoing. Slack says that it’s “actively investigating.”

Here at The Verge, the problems seem to manifest themselves differently for different people; one of my co-workers described Slack as acting “funky all morning,” noting issues with threads in particular, while another reported that their notifications weren’t showing up correctly and that threads would load at random. For me, the app sometimes hangs when I try to...

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Apple looks even more like a bank now that it’s adding a savings account to Apple Card

Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Soon, Apple Card users will be able to open a “new high-yield Savings account,” Apple says. There’s just one hitch: Apple won’t say what interest rate it’s offering.

There’s also no specific timeline for when consumers can access these savings accounts.

Apple has been moving into fintech with the Apple Card, which it partners with Goldman Sachs on. As one of its perks, card users get Daily Cash, Apple’s special branding on the more mundane cashback rewards, on their purchases. The promise of this “high-yield” savings account is that cardholders can have their Daily Cash deposited into it “with no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements,” the company says.

This isn’t the first savings account offered by a tech...

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Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales launches on PC in November

The game will be available on Steam and the Epic Games Store. | Image: Sony

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales for PC will be released on November 18th, Insomniac Games announced on Thursday. You can preorder the game now on Steam and the Epic Games Store for $49.99.

Similar to Sony’s other PC ports, Miles Morales will have a number of PC-specific enhancements. Sony says the game is “fully optimized” for ultrawide monitors, with support for aspect ratios of 21:9, 32:9, and 48:9 (for “triple monitor setups”). You’ll be able to turn on ray-traced reflections and mess with different graphics quality options, and the game supports upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS 3. And if you plug in a DualSense controller, you can take advantage of controller-specific features like differing levels of trigger feedback...

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Adderall is officially in short supply

Adderall is hard to find. | Image: Patrick Mallahan III

For weeks, pharmacists around the United States have been struggling to fill prescriptions for Adderall, and on Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration confirmed the nationwide shortage.

“There is not sufficient supply to continue to meet US market demand,” the agency said in a statement.

In August, over 60 percent of pharmacists had trouble getting Adderall, which can treat ADHD, according to a survey from the National Community Pharmacists Association.

Most of the challenges are attributed to manufacturing problems at the pharmaceutical company Teva, which produces more of the stimulant medication than any other company in the US. The company said in August that it was having delays because of labor shortages. Other companies...

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Sony’s new ZV-1F vlogging camera comes with a lower price but a lot fewer features

The ZV-1F’s tiny wind screen is included with the purchase. | Image: Sony

Sony has announced a new point-and-shoot camera centered on vlogging, and it is targeted at beginners with a low price point. The ZV-1F is an offshoot of its ZV-1 camera from 2020, but unlike that model, it’s not a twist on the long-running RX100 camera formula. Sony put a Zeiss-branded 20mm-equivalent f/2.0 prime lens in the new ZV-1F and paired it with a Type 1 (13.1mm x 9.8mm) 20-megapixel BSI CMOS sensor that can record 4K at up to 30 frames per second or 1080p up to 120fps for slow motion. The ZV-1F will run $499 in all black or white with a silver lens, and it’s due out in late October.

While the Sony ZV-1F’s price sounds appealing for anyone looking at an affordable way to get into vlogging, there are some key omissions that...

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I want to skip out on the Disney Plus Skip Intro button

Disney Plus’ convenient feature is an excessively bright intrusion. | Screenshot: Disney Plus

Disney Plus, I hate your damn Skip Intro feature, and I wish I could stop its annoying, bright, immersion-breaking icon from popping up at the start of every show. It’s assaulting my eyes every week when I sit down to watch Andor, and I wish there was a way of disabling it. Please, and thank you.

The Skip Intro button isn’t new, of course. The feature has been available on Netflix for years and in Disney Plus since its launch in 2019. But its appearance at the start of each episode of Disney’s latest Star Wars TV show is grating on me in a way that it hasn’t with others.

Part of it has to do with how prestige-y (sorry) Andor feels. This isn’t She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’s comedic riff on legal dramas or WandaVision’s love letter to the...

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