Google is adding another layer of testing for Chrome updates

A new “early stable” release will be available to a small group of people one week earlier than the scheduled stable release date. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is changing the release cycle for its Chrome web browser, the company announced in a blog post, adding a new early preview of updates available via the Stable channel for a small set of users starting in February 2023. This early stable release will be available one week before the scheduled stable release date, allowing Google to address any reported issues before updates are rolled out to the wider public (via Android Police).

Chrome’s release cycle currently pushes updates to the Google Chrome Canary channel first (an experimental version of the browser used for testing unstable code), then to the Dev, Beta, and Stable channels, in that order. The new early stable release sits between the Beta channel testing and the final...

Continue reading…

Two men arrested for allegedly hacking JFK taxi dispatch system

Prosecutors allege that the pair enabled up to 1,000 taxi trips to fraudulently bypass the computer-controlled JFK taxi dispatch system a day. | Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Two US citizens have been arrested and accused of conspiring with Russian nationals to hack the taxi dispatch system at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), charging cab drivers a $10 fee to access the front of the queue between September 2019 and September 2021.

Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman (both 48 and from Queens, New York) first successfully hacked the dispatch system in 2019 with the help of unnamed Russian nationals, according to a DOJ indictment filed in the Southern District of New York. Leyman and Abayev accessed the system to move specific taxis to the front of the line, says the DOJ, charging drivers a $10 fee for the privilege. Members of the hacking scheme also offered to waive the $10 fee in exchange for...

Continue reading…

Twitter view counts start appearing prominently

Making it easier to quantify how much of a banger your tweet was. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

View counts for tweets are starting to show up for some Twitter users — at least for their own tweets. On December 1st, Musk promised the feature would be coming for “all tweets, just as view count is shown for all videos,” an announcement he reiterated a week later adding that it would be coming “in a few weeks.”

One Verge staff member has started to see a counter when he clicks into his posts. While a few other Twitter users have reported getting the feature as well, it doesn’t seem to be available to everyone yet (for example, at time of writing I’m currently not seeing view counts on any tweets besides videos). My coworker also says that he’s currently not able to see view counts on other users’ tweets.

Screenshot:...

Continue reading…

Sam Bankman-Fried’s former friends pleaded guilty and are cooperating in the FTX fraud case

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, two executives in Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen crypto empire, have pleaded guilty to federal charges and are cooperating with prosecutors. The news was announced late Wednesday by Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Williams didn’t specify what charges the two pled to, but said the guilty pleas were in relation to their roles as insiders at FTX and its sister company Alameda Research. Wang was a co-founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, and Ellison served as CEO of Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research.

Bankman-Fried and a select group of insiders, including Ellison and Wang, are alleged to be the only people who knew that FTX was engaging in fraud. The...

Continue reading…

Attorney says facial recognition got her kicked out of a Rockettes show

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Kelly Conlon, an attorney from New Jersey, says she wasn’t allowed to see a Rockettes show at Radio City Music Hall after she was identified by a facial recognition system, according to a report from NBC New York. Conlon told the outlet that guards approached her while she was in the building’s lobby and said she wasn’t allowed to be there because of her connection to a legal case against the company that owns the hall.

“I believe they said that our recognition picked you up,” she told NBC, saying that she was asked to identify herself and that “they knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them.” She says she ended up waiting outside while her daughter watched the show with other members...

Continue reading…

NASA’s InSight lander loses power, enters retirement on Mars

The last image sent back from Mars by the InSight lander. | Image: NASA

On Mars, another machine just bit the dust. The marsquake-detecting, photo-snapping InSight lander has now officially completed its mission and will now spend its retirement in the same place it spent its career — sitting on a flat plain on the Martian surface, as dust slowly accumulates on its solar panels and other instruments.

We’ve known this was coming for a while. InSight’s solar panels, which generate electricity for the lander, have been getting covered with dust ever since they unfurled. The mission, officially known as the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight), was expected to run out of power this summer, but a spate of good weather bought it a few additional months of work on...

Continue reading…

Meta is making the Quest 2’s GPU more powerful

It will be a little clunky to activate at first, but a boost is a boost. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Meta is giving Quest 2 developers 7 percent more GPU compute power to work with, meaning apps and games on the headset you already own might look a little bit better sometime soon.

For developers, the increased power should “improve your ability to leverage higher pixel density without substantially reducing the resolution in order to hit the target frame rate,” Meta wrote in a blog post. Phrased a different way, “this means your apps’ visuals will look even better—without sacrificing resolution quality,” Meta says.

The change is possible thanks to the Quest using a new 525MHz GPU frequency, which is up from the previous 490MHz, and Meta’s “dynamic clocking system” will automatically up the frequency when it senses an app could use it....

Continue reading…

Mobvoi is the latest smartwatch maker to jump on the subscription bandwagon

Mobvoi is just the latest wearable company to start charging users for “premium” features. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

One thing that’s guaranteed to rile up consumers? Tacking on a monthly fee where there was once none. Mobvoi, which is known for making affordable Wear OS smartwatches, is the latest to join the subscription bandwagon. The company will start rolling out new sleep features to its TicWatch lineup this week, but if you want ‘em all, it’ll cost you $4.99 a month.

In a tweet, Mobvoi announced the new features would include sleep aid songs, AI sleep insights like sleep cycle reminders, historical sleep data, and more sleep-related metrics like maximum and minimum heart rate and SpO2. Of these new features, in-depth data like SpO2, min / max heart rate, and sleep trends will be available to subscribers only. Members will also get 50 sleep aid...

Continue reading…

Netflix will start streaming Nike Training Club classes next week

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Netflix is taking a page from Peloton’s playbook. Starting December 30th, you’ll be able to stream classes from Nike Training Club on the platform. In total, Netflix subscribers will have access to 30 hours of content in multiple languages and exercises.

For the uninitiated, Nike Training Club is a popular fitness app where users can take strength, yoga, and high-intensity interval training led by Nike trainers. It’s geared toward improving your strength, endurance, and mobility across all fitness levels. While some classes require equipment, many don’t. It’s very much in the vein of Apple Fitness Plus or Peloton, albeit without any Nike-branded hardware.

According to Netflix, the episodes will be released in two batches. While the...

Continue reading…

FCC proposes $300 million fine for massive auto warranty robocaller scam

The fine would be the FCC’s largest ever. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a $299,997,000 fine against a massive auto warranty scam robocall campaign, the agency announced on Wednesday. The fine, which would be the FCC’s largest ever, targets a huge operation; in just three months in 2021, it made more than 5 billion calls to more than a half-billion phone numbers using just over 1 million caller ID numbers. As the FCC put it, that’s “enough calls to have called each person in the United States 15 times during just those three months.”

According to the FCC, the operation is run by Roy Cox Jr. and Michael Aaron Jones via “their Sumco Panama company, other domestic and foreign entities, and a host of international cohorts located in Panama and Hungary...

Continue reading…

Channel your inner Ash with Samsung’s new poké ball Galaxy Buds case

Samsung used nostalgia trip. It’s super effective. | Image: Samsung

Samsung is launching a new line of Pokémon-themed accessories on December 26th for its Galaxy Buds, Z Flip 4, as well as the Galaxy Watch 4 & 5. The collection is mostly what you would expect, with a new strap for the Galaxy Watch and a themed case for the Z Flip 4, but the real star of the show, however, is the case for the Galaxy Buds, which just looks like a poké ball.

This case was initially made available in limited quantities for South Korean markets and was priced around $105 USD. This new lineup, though, will be available globally and won’t cost nearly as much.

Image: Samsung

The poké ball case also comes with a small lanyard

The case is perfectly round, save for a small flat edge on the bottom that...

Continue reading…

Lenovo’s Mini LED monitors can charge some of the thirstiest laptops with 140W USB-C PD

And they come in 27 and 31.5-inch varieties. | Image: Lenovo

Lenovo has announced two 4K monitors using Mini LED tech, and they seem like very interesting choices for someone who wants a nice display but won’t be doing any hardcore gaming. The 27-inch ThinkVision P27pz-30 and 31.5-inch P32pz-30 come packed with 1,152 dimming zones, a bevy of ports, and even the potentially unprecedented ability to send 140W of power to a laptop — and despite the high price points of many Mini LED monitors, they’re both expected to cost well under $2,000 when they arrive in August 2023.

You can connect to the monitors with a single USB-C cable, which Lenovo’s press release says can handle “40Gbps of data and video transfer.” That’s plenty for a 4K monitor running at 60Hz — in fact, Lenovo says you can even...

Continue reading…

Netflix unveils a terrifying AI in the first teaser for Jung_E

Image: Netflix

Current AI concerns revolve mostly around art and chatbots, but in the future of Jung_E, things are a little more intense. The first teaser for the sci-fi film features a company called Kronoid Lab introducing what it describes as the “most advanced AI combat warrior.” We don’t actually get to see it in action — it’s just a brief teaser, after all — but it seems pretty clear that things aren’t going to go as planned. I mean, this is the premise:

In a post-apocalyptic 22nd century, a researcher at an AI lab leads the effort to end a civil war by cloning the brain of a heroic soldier — her mother.

Jung_E is the latest project from Yeon Sang-ho, best known for the zombie film Train to Busan, as well as the Netflix series Hellbound. The cast...

Continue reading…

Where to find Verge staff on Mastodon

Twitter has gotten just a little chaotic lately, and several of us here at The Verge are exploring the alternatives. One of the more popular options so far is Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging (yes, I will call the Twitter format “microblogging” till my dying day) network that’s exploded since November. It’s a service with lots of rough edges, but it’s gotten more useful as some of my favorite Twitter accounts have jumped ship.

The Verge doesn’t have an official Mastodon presence right now, but we’ve gotten requests for a list of individual members to follow on the platform. So here’s a collection of Verge staff active to varying degrees on Mastodon; we’ll update it periodically as people join.

• Adi Robertson, senior reporter – @...

Continue reading…

The Verge’s 2022 in review

Micha Huigen / The Verge

Nobody can say that 2022 was an uneventful year. But if you wanted to escape reality occasionally by playing a really great game, enjoying a fantastic movie, or marathoning an exciting series, there were plenty of options to be found.

Now that the end of the year is approaching, we thought we’d share our recommendations and thoughts from 2022. We’ve got roundups of our favorite movies and series from Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, and a variety of other streaming services, along with our best-loved games for the Switch, Xbox, PC, and other devices. We also offer our thoughts on some of the best and worst tech that the year brought — including that strange phenomenon known as crypto — and an account of some of the most exciting space...

Continue reading…

Apple Watch Ultra review: an aspirational debut

A new player has entered the multisport watch game

Continue reading…

Apple Watch Ultra video review: let’s see what it can really do

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

We may have reviewed the Apple Watch Ultra back in September, but you didn’t think we were done, did you? The $799 Ultra was billed as the Apple Watch for outdoor adventurers and triathletes. So we spent the last three months devising a series of mini-reviews targeting several of the Ultra’s marquee features.

For starters, we wanted to see how well the Ultra’s revamped Compass app and 86db emergency siren worked on an off-the-grid hike. So, my colleagues Becca Farsace and Vjeran Pavic got lost with the Ultra in Yosemite National Park to test the limits of the Ultra’s navigational capabilities and its Backtrack feature. Plus, we pitted the Ultra’s Siren against a $4 safety whistle to see which had the wider range.

While I got to splash...

Continue reading…

Fails of 2022: the Intel P-series was a step back

Illustration by Micha Huigen / The Verge

It has been difficult to find great laptops this year. That’s partially because 2022 has been a bit of a building year for some companies, especially on the consumer side. It’s also because of the Intel P-series.

I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year — that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home — because, with Apple’s MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side.

For many of these models, I found myself writing the same review over and over and over. They were generally...

Continue reading…

LG’s gamer-friendly C2 OLED has dropped to its lowest price to date

LG’s brilliant C2 OLED is on sale in the 42-inch configuration for just $796.99 right now. | Image: LG

We may be only a few days out from Christmas, but you still have time to save on popular presents without paying extra for expedited shipping. Right now, for example, you can buy LG’s 42-inch C2 OLEDat Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo, and Target for around $797 ($500 off), which eclipses the TV’s previous low.

The C2 is a terrific 4K TV that touts many of its predecessor’s impressive specs, like a speedy 120Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision support, and variable refresh rate with AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync. At the same time, it boasts better performance and a brighter display than the prior C1 model, not to mention great contrast and the kind of black levels for which OLED is known. It even touts a few new features, including the...

Continue reading…

2022 was the year of crypto’s climate reckoning

Illustration by Micha Huigen / The Verge

Lawmakers cracked down on the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions, and one major cryptocurrency cleaned up its emissions big time.

Continue reading…

The Vergecast Bluetooth Holiday Spec-tacular

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Happy holidays! Here is our gift for you: over an hour of audio content dedicated to Bluetooth.

If you’re lucky this holiday season, you may be given a brand-new phone, tablet, or gadget equipped with the short-range wireless standard we’ve dealt with for decades. Though it has improved significantly since its introduction in 1998, it still has a lot of room to grow. Will Bluetooth get better next year? That’s the impetus for today’s Vergecast.

Naturally, we start the show with a game. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Chris Welch sit in for a round of Bluetooth Jeopardy! — hosted by senior editor Sean Hollister. We’ll refresh your mind on the basics of Bluetooth and perhaps teach you a few interesting facts too. How well do...

Continue reading…

Twitter won’t let you write Community Notes until you can be trusted

Users will need to unlock the ability to write notes by increasing their “Rating Impact,” a ranking system that indicates how often a contributor has rated other notes on the platform. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has announced that its recently released Community Notes feature will now require all contributors to rate a sufficient number of notes before they can unlock the ability to write notes themselves.

Rating notes on the platform will increase a user’s “Rating Impact,” a ranking system that reflects how often a contributor’s ratings have helped notes to be identified as “Helpful” or “Not Helpful” by the Twitter community. The ability to write Community Notes will be unlocked when a contributor has achieved a Rating Impact of at least five. Notes in need of ratings can be found under the “Needs your help” section of Community Notes in order to boost your Rating Impact.

In September, we began requiring that new contributors unlock...

Continue reading…

Successes of 2022: Google Maps helped me get out and explore more

Micha Huigen / The Verge

I had the privilege of using lots of incredible new phones in 2022, packed with the latest hardware and capable of impressive performance. But there’s one app I turned to again and again when I was using each of those devices, and it’s far from new or cutting-edge: Google Maps.

As in-person events (both professional and personal) resumed over the course of the year, I found myself with a lot more opportunities to get out of the house. From navigating unfamiliar transit systems to finding toddler-friendly playgrounds, Google Maps was the app I opened up when it was time to go somewhere. But even beyond that, Google Maps has become more than a “get me from point A to point B” service. It’s become a kind of everything app for me, and I’ve...

Continue reading…

Netflix’s ad-supported tier is reportedly off to a slow start

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Only nine percent of new Netflix subscribers in the US opted for the streaming service’s new ad-supported streaming tier last month, according to data from analytics firm Antenna. That’s compared to the 15 percent of new signups that reportedly opted for competitor HBO Max’s ad-supported subscription during its launch month in 2021. Netflix’s “Basic with Ads” plan launched on November 3rd at $6.99 a month, compared to between $9.99 and $19.99 per month for an ad-free subscription.

The figures aren’t surprising after Digiday reported that Netflix has returned money to advertisers after failing to meet viewership guarantees by as much as 20 percent. But the new data is more evidence that Netflix’s transition from a solely subscription...

Continue reading…

Ukraine nets 10,000 additional Starlink terminals, claims funding issues are ‘resolved’

Starlink terminals have provided essential satellite internet service to Ukraine as the Russian invasion targets Ukraine’s communications infrastructure. | Photo by Metin Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov has announced that over 10,000 additional Starlink terminals will be sent to Ukraine in the coming months, confirming that issues regarding how to fund the country’s critical satellite internet service have been resolved.

The governments of several European Union countries are ready to share payment said Fedorov (who is also Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation) in an interview with Bloomberg, affirming that “As of now all financial issues have been resolved.” Fedorov did not publicly identify which governments are contributing towards the payments but confirmed that there’s currently no contract in place and that Ukraine will need to find additional funding by spring 2023.

...

Continue reading…

Wednesday’s top tech news: Musk looks for a way out

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Meanwhile, the controversy around Anker’s security cameras rumbles on.

Continue reading…

Don’t expect a Raspberry Pi 5 next year

A close up of the Raspberry Pi logo on a Pi 3 Model B. | Photo by Olly Curtis/Future via Getty Images

The twinned impacts of the pandemic and subsequent supply chain problems mean that Raspberry Pi is unlikely to update its flagship miniature computer next year, its CEO Eben Upton has said. Upton made the comments during an interview with Explaining Computers (via Ars Technica), in which he referred to 2023 as a “recovery year” for the company.

“Don’t expect a Pi 5 next year. Next year is a recovery year,” the CEO said. “There’s merit, I think, in us spending a year before we look at introducing anything new, spending a year recovering from what just happened to all of us.”

“Next year is a recovery year”

While there have been supply chain problems across much of the technology sector, Raspberry Pi has been a particularly high profile...

Continue reading…

Elon Musk isn’t serious about giving power to a new CEO

Instead, he’ll run other teams at the company. | Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he’ll still be in charge of Twitter’s software and server teams after he resigns his CEO seat to “someone foolish enough to take” it. He broke the news in a response to a poll he ran earlier this week, where around 58 percent of respondents said that he should step down as CEO.

Given that the social networking site is mainly made up of software and servers (especially after the massive layoffs), it’s clear Musk will still have direct control over the company, even if he doesn’t have the explicit CEO title. That’s not necessarily a surprise; Musk has de-facto control over product at most of his companies, and he’s still Twitter’s owner at the end of the day. But the announcement likely means disappointment for...

Continue reading…

Geohot resigns from Twitter

George Hotz is moving on from his Twitter internship. | Photo by Michael Zelenko / The Verge

George Hotz, known for being the first person to carrier-unlock an iPhone and jailbreaking the PS3, both under his hacker alias “geohot,” has resigned from his Twitter internship, he announced Tuesday evening on Twitter.

“Appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there,” he wrote. He also said it was “sad” to see his GitHub “withering.”

Resigned from Twitter today.

Appreciate the opportunity, but didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there. Besides, it was sad to see my GitHub withering. Back to coding! pic.twitter.com/Jbs9LxNB2K

— George Hotz (@realGeorgeHotz) December 20, 2022

Hotz offered to join Twitter on November 16th after voicing support for CEO Elon Musk’s proclamation...

Continue reading…

Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now

Apple’s first-gen AirPods Pro are one of our go-to picks and are often on sale. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you know where to look, there are often some great discounts available on Apple’s popular — yet oftentimes expensive — AirPods. Since Apple launched the third-gen AirPods last year, we’ve seen the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level model drop from $159 to $129. And now that you can buy the second-gen AirPods Pro, we’re seeing even better discounts on the last-gen Pro and other models. For your convenience, we’ve curated the best deals currently available on each model, including the entry-level AirPods, the AirPods Pro, the third-gen AirPods, and the AirPods Max.

The best entry-level AirPods (second-gen) deals

Last year, Apple lowered the list price of the second-gen AirPods — now the entry-level model — from $159 to...

Continue reading…