LG’s 27-inch OLED gaming monitor does 240Hz and costs $1,000

This OLED monitor stands out with its adjustable stand, giving you more versatility than the legs included with OLED TVs. | Image: LG

LG’s OLED panels are getting even smaller. With no fanfare, the company posted a product page for a new 27-inch OLED gaming monitor (model 27GR95QE-B). Reddit noticed first; then, it got picked up by TechSpot and the HDTVTest YouTube channel. It’s the company’s first OLED panel of this size that’ll deliver 1440p (QHD) resolution, an increasingly popular resolution for PC and console gamers since it’s not as demanding as 4K. The dip from 4K to 1440p shouldn’t impact its ability to produce stunning image quality, though its anti-glare coating will probably give off a different look than a glossy TV screen. The new display is listed at $999.99, but there’s no specific release date provided.

I’m excited for its adjustable stand that lets you...

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Sony and Honda might stick a PS5 in their upcoming autonomous electric car

Sony’s Vision-S concept on display at CES 2020. | Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Sony and Honda are mulling cramming a PS5 into their upcoming entertainment-focused electric vehicle as they set up to challenge Tesla (via Eurogamer).

Speaking to the Financial Times, Izumi Kawanishi, the joint venture’s president, said that it’s “technologically possible” for Sony to integrate the PlayStation 5 platform into the car it intends to build with Honda.

Tesla started delivering its latest Model S and X vehicles with larger horizontal screens last year and added an AMD RDNA 2 graphics chip that Tesla CEO Elon Musk said is “literally at the level of a PlayStation 5” during a demo. Over a year later, Musk’s promises for big games like Cyberpunk 2077 and a demo for Steam in August have yet to be fulfilled, with the most notable...

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Ubisoft is back to releasing games on Steam, including Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Key art for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla_._ | Image: Ubisoft

Ubisoft is bringing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Anno 1800, and Roller Champions to Steam, arguably its first major releases on Valve’s PC distribution platform since 2019.

“We’re constantly evaluating how to bring our games to different audiences wherever they are, while providing a consistent player ecosystem through Ubisoft Connect,” reads part of a statement from Ubisoft spokesperson Jessica Roache to The Verge. Roache declined to say whether that means Ubisoft will now regularly bring games to Steam or if it’ll be on a case-by-case basis.

It’s not clear why Ubisoft stopped putting its PC games on Steam or why it’s coming back now, but it appears to be picking up where it left off: Valhallawas the 2020 flagship game in the Assassin’s...

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Waymo’s new robotaxi is an all-electric people mover with no steering wheel

Waymo teamed up with Geely to debut its new purpose built autonomous taxi. | Photo by Abigail Bassett for The Verge

Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous taxi company that currently operates in a small handful of cities, showed off a brand-new prototype vehicle made by Geely’s luxury Zeekr brand last week at a splashy invite-only event in downtown Los Angeles.

While Waymo has largely used production vehicles like the Chrysler Pacifica and Jaguar i-Pace to shuttle passengers around cities like Phoenix and San Francisco, this is the second ground-up design that Waymo has unveiled. The first was the Firefly, which was retired in 2017.

This time, the company partnered with Chinese automaker Geely to design a purpose-built, passenger-first autonomous vehicle. Geely owns automakers like Volvo, Lotus, and Polestar, as well as a stake in the luxury British...

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Sonic Frontiers buries its great ideas under soul-crushing design flaws

Image: Sega

What the game does right is obscured under layer after layer of poor design, glitches, and an inscrutable story.

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Elon Musk is laying off even more Twitter workers

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

Elon Musk announced a new wave of layoffs affecting Twitter’s sales teams on Monday, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources familiar with the situation told Bloomberg that Musk is cutting more workers to balance out each team, but it’s still not clear how many people lost their jobs.

Musk began weighing additional layoffs last week and fired Robin Wheeler, the company’s head of ad sales, and Maggie McLean Suniewick, Twitter’s vice president of partnerships, after they didn’t agree to terminate more workers. Sarah Rosen, Twitter’s head of US content partnerships, also left the company last Friday.Platformer was the first to report this most recent round of layoffs.

This comes after hundreds of workers resigned from Twitter last...

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Facebook is making teens’ accounts more private by default

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Facebook will enable more private settings by default for anyone under the age of 16 who signs up for the platform, the company announced on Monday. As for teens who already have accounts, Facebook will display a prompt encouraging them to use these settings, as well as a toggle that turns them on in a single tap.

What Facebook’s billing as “more private” settings restricts details on an account so that only a teen’s friends can view the posts they’re tagged in, their friends list, and the pages, people, and lists they follow. They also require users to review the posts they’re tagged in and allow only friends to comment on their public posts.

Image: Facebook

Facebook will display a toggle that lets young users...

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The latest AirPods Pro are $50 off at multiple retailers

It’s tough to tell the newer second-generation AirPods Pro from the previous model by looks alone. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

In case you missed out on Woot’s recent $50 off deal on the second-generation AirPods Pro (it happened very early Saturday morning, inconveniently), Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart have your back. Each of those retailers is selling them for $199.99, matching that all-time low price. The cost for this newer model keeps falling week by week, and it’s possible that Black Friday’s arrival will sink the cost by a little more, but I wouldn’t expect it to dip much further.

Compared to the first-gen AirPods Pro, this model has better sound quality and more effective active noise cancellation. Beyond those improvements, it’s possible to adjust the volume by touching the earbuds. The charging case included with this newer AirPods Pro model got a few...

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Mario Kart 8 Deluxe’s third wave of new tracks hits in December

Image: Nintendo

The next wave of downloadable tracks for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is almost here. Nintendo announced that Wave 3 of its “Booster Course Pass DLC” will be available on December 7th, bringing eight new tracks to the racer.

The tracks are split into two cups, and each one is an updated version previously found in a past Mario Kart game. The Rock Cup includes Tour London Loop (Mario Kart Tour on mobile), Boo Lake (GBA), Rock Rock Mountain (3DS), and Maple Treeway (Wii). Meanwhile, the Moon Cup includes Tour Berlin Byways (Mario Kart Tour), Peach Gardens (DS), Merry Mountain (Mario Kart Tour), and the 3DS iteration of the iconic Rainbow Road.

The update is part of a huge expansion for the game, which includes a total of 48 tracks that will be...

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The Verge’s 2022 home tech holiday gift guide

Photography by Joel Goldberg for The Verge

The wrong gift for someone’s home can quickly become clutter, which is why we’ve put together a selection of great gift ideas they’ll cherish, appreciate, and — most importantly — put to use.

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Hyundai wants to help you put solar and batteries in your home

Hyundai Home aims to be a one-stop shop for sustainable energy products. | Image: Hyundai

A sustainable future requires a multipronged approach. It’s more than just replacing a gas car with one that runs on electrons or sitting back and hoping that your local utility moves as quickly as possible to renewables.

For those with the means, solar panels paired with a home battery can add an additional layer of eco-consciousness and power stability to their lives. Yet navigating the myriad solar panel and home battery options is a daunting process fraught with confusion as more and more players enter the market and reviews of each system are nonexistent.

Enter Hyundai Home, a marketplace launched last week during the Los Angeles Auto Show with the goal of alleviating the perplexity of picking solar panels, a home battery storage...

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Black Friday sales on Sonos soundbars are live at Best Buy

The second-gen Sonos Beam and other Sonos speakers are on sale at Best Buy. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Best Buy is rolling out its Black Friday sales on Sonos soundbars in addition to its existing Black Friday sales. From now through November 28th, you can find a number of excellent Sonos speakers, all discounted to their lowest price ever. There are plenty of options when it comes to soundbars and speakers, but Sonos makes some of the best on the market, making this sale worth checking out if you’re looking for ways to upgrade your home audio.

To stay in the loop regarding Black Friday sales at Best Buy and elsewhere, make sure to check out our Black Friday hub and retailer-specific roundups for a breakdown of all the best deals you can find at Walmart and Target on all of your favorite tech.

Normally, the Sonos Arc soundbar is...

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An offshore workforce is training Amazon’s warehouse-monitoring algorithms

Adrián Astorgano / The Verge

This report is published in partnership with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Inside a vast Amazon warehouse in Beaumont, California, squat blue robots carrying eight-foot yellow shelving units perform a jerky, mechanized dance around each other as they make their way to human workers.

Amari* works 42 hours a week there as a stower, placing products on the shelves robots bring to him. “Cameras are trained on your station at all times,” he said. “It’s kind of demeaning to have someone watching over your shoulder at every second.”

But it’s not just Amari’s managers who are watching. An AI camera system also monitors the stowers’ movements — and if it fails, a video is sent to someone thousands of miles away whose input helps to...

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Time’s up: the leap second is being scrapped

Leap seconds depend entirely on how quickly the Earth spins, which can be a nightmare for managing technology hardware infrastructures. (Pictured: the World Time Clock in Berlin.) | Photo by INA FASSBENDER/AFP via Getty Images

A global panel of scientists and government representatives have voted to scrap leap seconds by 2035. The ad hoc time adjustment is occasionally inserted to account for the gradual slowdown of the Earth’s rotation and has caused headaches for numerous tech companies over the years.

The leap second was introduced in 1972 as a way to adjust Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) roughly every 21 months. As these seconds are irregular and hard to predict due to the varying speed of the Earth’s rotation, they can disrupt systems that require precise timekeeping. Meta published a blog post earlier this year calling for leap seconds to be scrapped, highlighting that Reddit went down for around 40 minutes back in 2012 when a new leap second...

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Continuous glucose monitor startups still have to prove their worth

I have rarely, if ever, thought about my blood sugar. I think about sugar on occasion — the dentist demands it, and I get a headache when I eat an entire bag of Haribo dinosaur gummies.

But a new spate of startups wants me, and everyone, to start thinking about our blood sugar all the time. Over the past few years, companies like Levels, January, and Nutrisense started selling programs that promise to help people start managing their blood sugar levels. They sell devices called continuous glucose monitors: small sensors that embed a tiny needle in someone’s body to track the way their blood sugar (their glucose) levels rise and fall.

Continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) are usually used by people with Type 1 diabetes, a chronic condition...

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These vibrating LG Display panels turn car dashboards and headrests into speakers

LG Display’s Thin Actuator Sound Solution is just 30 percent of the weight and 10 percent of the thickness of a conventional car speaker. | Image: LG Display

LG Display has developed a new “invisible” speaker technology for vehicles that uses a passport-sized vibrating panel to generate sound. It was developed with an unnamed “global audio company” and is expected to be ready for car interiors next year for installation in places like the dashboard and headliner.

The south-Korean tech giant’s Thin Actuator Sound Solution is being promoted as a replacement for traditional speaker systems within cars and other vehicles. Unlike current in-car speaker systems that use heavy components like voice coils, cones, and magnets, the Thin Actuator Sound Solution uses LG Display’s film-type exciter technology to generate sound by vibrating off display panels and various materials within the vehicle, which...

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Monday’s top tech news: Don’t call it a comeback

Nick Barclay / The Verge

Bob Iger’s back at Disney, and Ye, Trump, and others are back on Twitter.

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Bob Iger steps back in as Disney CEO, replacing Bob Chapek

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In a sudden turn of events, Disney has reversed the CEO swap that surprised us in early 2020, with Bob Iger returning to his post, replacing his own successor, Bob Chapek. Iger, who is also the company’s largest shareholder, is now set to serve a new two-year term as CEO. Part of Iger’s job in those two years will be to pick and groom his long-term successor.

Of course, Chapek was an Iger choice too. Chapek had been called the “Tim Cook to Iger’s Steve Jobs,” but during his tenure, their handover got off to a rocky start, while blowups like the Scarlett Johansson Black Widow lawsuit and Disney’s initial lack of reaction to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida scuffed its all-important reputation.

During an episode of the Decoder podcast...

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Tesla recalls over 321,000 vehicles due to taillight software issue

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla’s recalling over 321,000 vehicles over a software glitch causing the taillights on some cars to illuminate improperly (via Reuters). According to a filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the recall covers certain 2023 Model 3 vehicles and 2020 to 2023 Model Y vehicles.

Tesla says the rear lights on one or both sides of the vehicle may “intermittently illuminate” due to an issue “that may cause false fault detections during the vehicle wake up process.” The NHTSA says this could “increase the risk of a collision” in dark conditions, but Tesla hasn’t received any reports of injuries or accidents related to this problem. Like most Tesla recalls (except this one affecting the Model 3’s seat belt buckles), the...

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Power Rangers star Jason David Frank has died at age 49

Jason David Frank originally starred as the Green Ranger. | Photo by Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images for Saban Brands

Jason David Frank, an actor and mixed martial artist best known for his role as Tommy Oliver in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, has died at age 49, as first reported by TMZ (via Gizmodo). Fellow Power Rangers stars Walter Jones and Blake Foster have since confirmed his death on Instagram.

Born on September 4th, 1973, Frank originally starred as the Green Ranger in the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which ran from 1993 to 1996, before swapping to the White Ranger in the show’s second season. His role as Tommy Oliver spans numerous Power Ranger spinoffs, including Wild Force, Turbo, Zeo, Dino Thunder, Megaforce, and HyperForce. In 2017, Frank reprised his role in the Power Rangers reboot before making a final appearance in episode 10 of P...

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Feds arrest Russians allegedly behind ‘world’s largest’ pirated ebook library

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Federal law enforcement arrested and charged two Russian individuals with criminal copyright infringement over their alleged involvement with the pirated ebook Z-Library. Z-Library, which has been around since 2009, billed itself as the “world’s largest ebook library” before the US government shut down the site earlier this month.

According to the Department of Justice, the pair in question, Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova, were arrested in Argentina at the request of the US government on November 3rd. In addition to criminal copyright infringement, the two are also facing charges of money laundering and wire fraud. The US government shut down and seized the domains associated with Z-Library at the time of their arrest, but, as...

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How a Pomodoro timer app helped me regain my focus

Focus To-Do helped rebuild my shattered attention span | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

Focusing never used to be a problem for me. I was the annoying kid who could study for eight to 10 hours at a time without complaint. That continued well into adulthood until I experienced my own series of unfortunate events. In the last four years, my parents and our 17-year-old dog all died in rapid succession from incurable neurodegenerative diseases. It didn’t help that it happened alongside a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. And because I’m a genius, I decided to make digital media my bread and butter, an industry held together by fraying duct tape and brain worms.

Needless to say, I started off 2022 as a hot mess. All that time spent doomscrolling and grieving left my focus in shambles. Things spiraled to the point where I’d...

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Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for her Theranos fraud

Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for Fortune

The former billionaire has been convicted and sentenced after it was revealed that her blood-testing company hadn’t achieved the breakthroughs it claimed.

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Crypto collapse: it’s looking like a long, cold, contagious winter

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

FTX is just the latest company facing an uncertain future as cryptocurrency values drop, revealing flaws in risky financial strategies that fueled the recent crypto and NFT boom.

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Elon Musk bought Twitter. Now, what’s next?

Laura Normand / The Verge

Elon Musk is now the owner, CEO, and sole director of Twitter.

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Elon Musk says he’s letting Donald Trump back on Twitter

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Donald Trump is allowed to rejoin Twitter, Elon Musk has announced. Musk justified that decision based on the results of his own personal Twitter poll. The @realDonaldTrump account and its tweets are fully visible again.

Shortly after taking control of the social network, Musk said he wouldn’t be reinstating any banned accounts until the company had set up and convened a content moderation council with “widely diverse viewpoints.”

Instead, on Friday evening, as people drifted off for the pre-Thanksgiving weekend, he decided to poll his own followers on Twitter. “Reinstate former President Trump,” he tweeted, alongside a poll with buttons to pick “Yes” or “No.”

“Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he added in a follow-up tweet, Latin for “the voice...

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The US government still isn’t sure about Elon Musk’s Twitter

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter hasn’t escaped government scrutiny just yet. According to a report from Bloomberg, the US government is looking into whether Musk’s foreign investment partners have access to users’ private data on the platform.

Sources close to the situation told Bloomberg that the government’s asking for more details about Musk’s private agreements with the international investors who hold stakes in the company, which include Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud and the Qatar Investment Authority. Musk’s business dealings in both Ukraine and China have also drawn concern.

Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is also the head of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US...

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Wickr’s free encrypted messaging app is shutting down next year

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Wickr Me, the free encrypted messaging app owned by Amazon Web Services, is shutting down on December 31st, 2023. In a post on its website, Wickr says the app will stop accepting new user registrations on December 31st, 2022 before going away completely next year.

AWS acquired Wickr last year and started packaging the paid version of the secure messaging app within its offerings for businesses. This version of the app, Wickr AWS, isn’t going away, and neither is Wickr Enterprise. The shutdown only affects the consumer-facing Wickr Me, which is often used by journalists, whistleblowers, and anyone looking to keep their messages away from prying eyes.

However, recent reports suggest the app has become an outlet for criminals, with NBC...

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Waymo can now provide fully driverless rides in San Francisco

Waymo received approval to offer rides without anyone behind the wheel in San Francisco. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Waymo can now provide driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco. On Friday, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) said it granted the Alphabet-owned Waymo a permit to participate in its driverless pilot program, which lets autonomous vehicle (AV) companies transport passengers in test AVs without anyone at the wheel.

Waymo still isn’t allowed to charge for these rides, though. The state of California requires companies to obtain a series of incremental permits from both the CPUC and the Department of Motor Vehicles before they’re able to charge for driverless rides. Waymo just needs to secure the driverless deployment permit from the CPUC to fully launch its robotaxi service, as it already received clearance from the...

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A few tips to get started in Marvel Snap

Image: Second Dinner

Marvel Snaphas been here for officially one full month, and in that time, it has, for better and for worse, taken over my life. I cannot get enough of playing this game, and in a short 30 days, I’ve managed to claw my way up the collection rank into the mid-700s. In that time, I’ve learned a thing or two about this little game and thought I might share some best practices.

Image: Second Dinner

Card pools

Is there a card you’ve encountered that’s the final missing piece for that deck you’ve been building? Have you climbed rank after rank, frustrated that your silver bullet hasn’t shown up yet? Did you know that there is an invisible tier system integrated in the collection ranks that determines which cards you get?...

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