1Password is finally rolling out passkey management

eBay is one of the few websites to currently support passkey sign-on. | Image: 1Password

1Password customers are finally gaining access to the passwordless future we’ve been promised. Starting from June 6th this year, anyone with a 1Password account will be able to save and manage their passkeys — a biometric-based login technology that allows users to ditch passwords in favor of their device’s own authentication.

1Password hasn’t mentioned if this rollout will also allow users to replace their 1Password master password with a passkey, which was previously teased for a summer release.

The technology behind passkeys was developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Using public key cryptography, users can sign into apps and services using their device’s own...

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Verizon hits reset on its 5G Mix and Match plans with new streamlined ‘myPlan’ offerings

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

If you've been shopping for cellular plans at Verizon, you no longer need to sift through the complex Get More / Play More / Do More / Start 5G plans. The carrier has announced new simplified “myPlan” offerings that seem to ease initial choice fatigue and let you piecemeal the subscriptions and features you want instead.

In a press event on Monday, Verizon Consumer Group’s chief revenue officer Frank Boulben said survey data shows customers want control and flexibility. “Customers don’t like boated bundles, they want to pay for only what they want to use,” Boulben said.

Now when selecting an unlimited plan, Verizon will only show the premium “Unlimited Plus” or base “Welcome Unlimited” options. The new Unlimited Plus plan is basically...

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Samsung admits defeat and reportedly inks deal for LG’s OLED TV panels

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Samsung has reportedly signed a deal for LG’s OLED TV panels. Reuters reports that LG Display will supply high-end 77- and 83-inch white OLED panels to Samsung in a deal that could help it turn a profit amid fierce competition in LCD panels from Chinese rivals.

This is the first time Samsung has purchased OLED panels from its South Korean rival after years of rumors around similar deals. It’s also a huge admission of defeat after Samsung stopped making OLED TVs in 2015, citing the high costs of the panels in a miscalculation that the market wouldn’t be ready for such high-end TVs. Samsung pushed ahead with its cheaper but inferior QLED TVs — a variation of LED LCD — but OLED models have dominated the premium market.

LG has more than 50...

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The NFL will make one playoff game a streaming exclusive on Peacock next year

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The NFL just announced a new deal with Peacock that gives the NBCUniversal-owned streaming service national broadcast rights to one wild card playoff game next season. Described as the “first-ever exclusive live streamed NFL Playoff game,” it will feature two teams facing off in primetime on January 13th, 2024. The arrangement was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which cites sources saying the deal for this one game is worth around $110 million.

Of course, we don’t know which two teams will be playing, but for fans without Peacock, options for watching may depend on where you live. Along with a regular season game (Bills vs. Chargers on December 23rd, or as you may know it, the Burn It All game) that will also be a Peacock...

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A small cable company is going all-in on YouTube TV for video

YouTube TV | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Cable TV is on the way out, and YouTube TV is in for Wide Open West, or WOW!, a smaller US broadband operator with just over a half million internet customers and, as of March 31st, 117,000 households paying for cable TV.

The company said Monday that it would start migrating residential TV customers this summer:

The process of migrating WOW!’s residential video customers to YouTube TV will begin this summer as WOW! discontinues the marketing and selling of its TV services, including WOW! tv+, and sells YouTube TV across its footprint. WOW! will maintain and support its current video services as its existing base of video customers can switch from WOW!’s current video products to YouTube TV.

WOW! has been transitioning away from...

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Microsoft will pay to capture carbon from burning wood

Illustration by Hugo Herrera / The Verge

Microsoft just backed a big plan to capture carbon dioxide emissions from a wood-burning power plant. Today, the tech giant announced a deal with Danish energy company Ørsted to purchase credits representing 2.76 million metric tons of carbon dioxide captured at Ørsted’s Asnæs Power Station over 11 years.

It’s one of the biggest deals any company has made to date to draw down carbon dioxide emissions, according to a press release from Ørsted. The move is supposed to help Microsoft hit its goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030, the point at which the company is removing more planet-heating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it generates through its operations.

It’s one of the biggest deals any company has made to date to draw...

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Google will soon display prewritten texts people in crisis can use to ask for help

Illustration: The Verge

Google will soon start displaying prewritten text messages that appear when users search for suicide-related terms. These prompts are supposed to help people start a difficult conversation during a mental health crisis and were created in partnership with the International Association for Suicide Prevention.

The message options will appear directly beneath the information for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which Google already surfaces when people search for suicide-related terms. It will encourage users to “connect with people you trust,” with each prompt featuring a “send a text” button that opens and pastes the prompt into a user’s text messaging app. It’s not clear whether these messages will appear on Google’s desktop site, but...

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The Bear’s just trying to get it together in new season 2 trailer

Jeremy Allen White as Carmen Berzatto. | FX

By the end of The Bear’s first season, The Beef was on its last legs, and the restaurant’s staff knew that they were all going to have to embrace change if they wanted to survive. Whether or not the team’s all going to make it intact is hard to tell from The Bear’s newest season 2 trailer, but promising change is definitely in the air.

Though Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), and Sugar (Abby Elliott) are all hopeful about the future in The Bear’s new trailer, with only six months to open an all-new-all-improved restaurant, they can’t help but be stressed about all the work there is to be done before they’re ready to serve customers. Between renovations, renaming, getting a new menu together, and hiring more staff, The...

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In new trailer for Peacock’s Based on a True Story, murder’s just podcast content

Kaley Cuoco as Ava Bartlett and Chris Messina as Nathan Bartlett. | Peacock

Most true crime podcasters try to stress that, while their shows are for entertainment purposes, they come from a place of respect and aren’t just exercises in fantasizing about what it would be like to live as a crime scene investigator. But in the first trailer for Peacock’s new series Based on a True Story, a couple’s homemade show about their neighbor’s untimely death is just the first step toward them living their murder-solving dreams and maybe making a bit of cash along the way.

From executive producers Craig Rosenberg and Jason Bateman, Based on a True Story tells the tale of husband and wife duo Ava (Kaley Cuoco) and Nathan Bartlett (Chris Messina) — a happy couple who finds themselves strapped for cash just as they’re expecting...

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Amazon is building an AI-powered ‘conversational experience’ for search

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

It looks like Amazon will be joining the chatbot fray. As spotted by Bloomberg, the company has posted job listings describing how it is “reimagining Amazon Search” with a new “interactive conversational experience that helps you find answers to product questions, perform product comparisons, receive personalized product suggestions, and so much more,” according to a listing for a machine learning-focused engineer. You can see another cached job listing here.

Amazon is pitching these changes to search as absolutely massive. “This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search, just like the Mosaic browser made the Internet easier to engage with three decades ago,” Amazon wrote. “If you missed the 90s—WWW, Mosaic, and the...

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Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now

Apple’s second-gen AirPods Pro are $50 off, matching their all-time low.

If you know where to look, there are often some great discounts available on Apple’s ever-popular AirPods. Since Apple launched the third-gen AirPods toward the end of 2021, we’ve seen the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level model slowly dip to around $100. And now that you can buy the second-gen AirPods Pro at most retailers, we’re seeing even better discounts on the last-gen Pro and other models. Even other Apple earbuds, including the fitness-focused Beats Fit Pro, are on sale right now for as low as $159.95 ($40 off).

Below, 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 AirPods (second-gen) deals

In...

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Not even NYT bestsellers are safe from AI cover art

The UK cover for House of Earth and Blood beside the original AI-generated stock image from Aperture Vintage. | Graphic: The Verge | Image: Adobe Stock / Aperture Vintage / Bloomsbury

A prominent fantasy novel features a cover apparently generated with artificial intelligence, sparking complaints from artists and book enthusiasts. Earlier this month, readers noted that the back of the UK edition of Sarah J. Maas’ House of Earth and Blood credits Adobe Stock for the illustration of a wolf on its cover. The illustration matches an image created by user Aperture Vintage and marked as AI-generated on Adobe’s site. The move has led to criticism of both Maas and Bloomsbury Publishing, one of the world’s leading independent publishing houses.

While stock image services like Getty Images have prohibited AI-generated illustrations to avoid copyright disputes, Adobe has notably welcomed AI onto its Adobe Stock platform under...

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Elon Musk is stuck with his ‘Twitter sitter’ after court rejects bid to toss SEC settlement

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

Elon Musk’s so-called Twitter sitter is here to stay.

A federal appeals court rejected Musk’s bid to toss or modify his 2018 fraud settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, leaving in place a consent decree that requires his tweets to be approved by a lawyer before he can post them.

Given the frequency and volume of Musk’s tweets — and the fact that he now owns Twitter — it’s unclear whether Musk is abiding by the order to have the Twitter sitter review his tweets. But his argument that the SEC was exploiting the consent decree “to conduct bad-faith, harassing investigations of his protected speech” was found to be meritless by the court, according to a ruling released today.

The court notes that, to the contrary, the...

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Apple’s App Store was down, briefly

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple’s moneymaking source for apps, games, and more was having some issues on Monday. Reports of problems have spiked across social media, while Verge writers trying to access the App Store via iPhone, Mac, or iPad were seeing mostly blank spaces instead of descriptions and screenshots, but it’s now all working again.

Interestingly, staffers outside the US were able to use the App Store, despite the apparent outage. Downdetector has collected more than 2,400 reports of problems so far. MacRumors reports some users were having trouble with other services as well, including Apple Music and Apple podcasts, but they appear to be resolved.

Apple’s server status page doesn’t mention any known issues, and the company hasn’t yet responded to a...

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Ring founder is officially leaving Amazon

Image: Ring

Ring’s new CEO Liz Hamren announced in an email to employees today that founder Jamie Siminoff is leaving the video doorbell company and Amazon altogether. Siminoff says he founded Ring after looking for a way to answer his door from his smartphone while tinkering in his garage, and then Amazon reportedly paid more than $1 billion to acquire the company in 2018, adding it to a growing suite of smart home security products.

When Siminoff announced in March that Hamren would take over for him as CEO of Ring, he said, “I decided to shift my role to Chief Inventor,” but today’s message from Hamren explains that “Jamie is leaving Amazon to pursue a new opportunity” while saying the company’s focus hasn’t changed. Hamren previously worked on...

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The second-gen Apple Pencil for iPads has dropped to a new low price of $85

The Apple Pencil is great for drawing and sketching, but it’s also handy for photo and video editing. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

If you own a recent iPad Air, iPad Mini, or iPad Pro, then the latest Apple Pencil makes for a helpful — albeit expensive — accessory. Today’s deal helps a little with the costliness of it, as you can now get the second-gen Apple Pencil for $85 ($44 off) at Amazon or Walmart. That’s now the all-time low price for the pressure-sensitive stylus with convenient wireless charging.

Yes, you can spend a whole lot less and get a knockoff stylus that mostly does the job and looks the part, but you’re not going to get the tight software integration, such as seeing the Apple Pencil’s battery level displayed in a helpful widget. With Apple’s new launch of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on the iPad, it’s a good time to pick up a Pencil since they’re...

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Windows 11 users can now link their iPhones and use iMessage from a PC

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft promised to make its Phone Link app available for iPhone users (so you can use iMessage from a PC) by mid-May, and it’s May 15th now, so the company is delivering on that promise today. Phone Link now allows iPhone owners to connect to a Windows 11 PC and send and receive messages via iMessage, make and receive calls, and see any phone app notifications on a PC or laptop.

The Phone Link app update is now available in 85 countries and will work with an iPhone over Bluetooth for calls, messages, and notifications. Microsoft is able to send messages via iMessage on Phone Link by intercepting incoming ones over Bluetooth and sending them by taking advantage of how Apple forces you to send text messages to other iPhone users.

...

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Avatar: The Way of Water hits Disney Plus and Max on June 7th

Image: Disney

Avatar: The Way of Water is landing on not one but two streaming services on June 7th. In a press release on Monday, Warner Bros. Discovery shared that the James Cameron film is coming to the company’s combined Max streaming service in addition to Disney Plus.

It’s a bit of a rarity to see a high-profile film like Avatar make its debut on more than one streaming service at a time, but it seems the shared premiere is all thanks to a modified agreement Disney made with WarnerMedia in 2021. Under the terms of the deal, HBO Max (soon-to-be Max) can share the rights to films Disney’s 20th Century Studios released in 2022 with Hulu and Disney Plus.

The Way of Water first hit theaters in December 2022, and it proved to be another huge hit for...

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Sonos will stop playing local files on Android devices later this month

Sonos stopped supporting local playback from iOS several years ago. | Illustration: The Verge

Most people are drawn to Sonos for its vast audio streaming options, but it’s also possible to play your own audio files via line-in, Bluetooth, AirPlay, and network-attached storage (NAS). Android users have long had another option: they can easily play audio files stored locally on their device across a Sonos system at full quality. But that last option is going away soon.

Sonos has updated its website with a notice that says “starting May 23rd, 2023, we’re removing the ability to play audio files directly to Sonos using the ‘On this device’ menu in the Sonos app for Android.” The company recommends that customers either upload those tracks to a streaming service — YouTube Music is great for this — or get a NAS solution up and running...

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A day on the Acer Aspire 5

The Acer Aspire 5 has gotten a design upgrade, but it’s not as fancy on the inside.

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WhatsApp is getting locked conversations

Image: The Verge

WhatsApp is getting a new “Chat Lock” feature intended to make it easier to keep conversations more private. The new locked chats will live in a password- or biometrics-protected folder, and notifications from those conversations won’t display the sender or the actual message content. If you’re familiar with Apple’s hidden photos feature for iCloud, Chat Lock sounds like it will work similarly.

You can get an idea of how it will all look in this video from WhatsApp.

WhatsApp is already well-known for its end-to-end encrypted messages, but that won’t block somebody who already has your unlocked phone that’s opened to WhatsApp from potentially seeing a message with their eyes. Chat Lock adds an extra layer of protection that could be...

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Amazon is making a Lord of the Rings MMO (again)

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. | Image: Amazon

Amazon is taking another stab at making a massively multiplayer Lord of the Rings game. Today, the company announced that it is partnering with the Embracer Group — the media company that holds the IP rights for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit — for a new open-world MMO that takes place in “a persistent world set in Middle-earth.” Development will be led by Amazon’s Orange County studio, the same team behind the MMO New World, which launched in 2021. The game is described as being “in early stages of production,” with no details on release date. It’s coming to PC and consoles, according to Amazon.

This will be the company’s second attempt at a Lord of the Rings MMO. The first was announced in 2019 and was canceled two years later....

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T-Mobile is giving away free MLB.TV again

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

If you missed your chance to score T-Mobile’s free MLB.TV benefit earlier this year, you now have a second chance to sign up. The company says that it’s bringing back the deal on Tuesday, May 23rd, and will let you claim it through July 17th.

MLB.TV, which typically costs $149.99 at the start of the baseball season, allows you to stream out-of-market home and away games from the MLB app as well as watch pregame and postgame shows. T-Mobile has long offered an MLB.TV subscription as an added perk for customers and recently announced that it has extended its partnership with Major League Baseball to offer MLB.TV through 2028.

.@TMobile with the W.

#TMobilePartner https://t.co/UhnMWPZwcP pic.twitter.com/mzEO7CnGhz

— Patrick Mahomes II...

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Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition approved by EU regulators

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard has been approved by EU regulators just weeks after UK regulators blocked the acquisition. The European Commission has concluded that the deal can pass thanks to commitments from Microsoft related to cloud gaming.

The EU found that Microsoft “would have no incentive to refuse to distribute Activision’s games to Sony” and that “even if Microsoft did decide to withdraw Activision’s games from the PlayStation, this would not significantly harm competition in the consoles market.” But EU regulators, much like the UK, did find the acquisition could harm competition around the distribution of PC and console games through cloud gaming services.

The European Commission has identified...

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TCL aims to be the best bargain (again) as it launches its 2023 TV lineup

TCL is dividing this year’s TVs into the Q Class (above) and S Class. | Image: TCL

TCL’s latest crop of TVs will begin shipping over the next few weeks. If you didn’t catch the news back at CES, the company is taking a new approach to its naming conventions: the lineup is now split into the budget-friendly S Class and higher-performance Q Class. Within each of those are several models at different price points. Across the lineup, TCL is continuing its quest to prove a better value than similarly priced sets from Samsung, LG, Sony, and others. Over the last couple of years, Hisense has been on a similar path, releasing TVs that far exceed what’s typically expected for the money.

S stands for “smart” in smart TV, and the Q signifies QLED picture technology. Even with the step-down S Class, TCL highlights the metal...

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Congress called Huawei a national security risk — it’s still in US networks

Illustration by Hugo Herrera for The Verge

Before TikTok and semiconductors, the US was fighting a war against Chinese telecom. What happened?

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Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The internet could soon become a very different place.

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How to hardwire your home without ethernet in the walls

Illustration by Hugo Herrera for The Verge

Listen. I don’t have anything against Wi-Fi. High-speed wireless access to the internet is darn near miraculous, and there are a lot of situations where it doesn’t make any sense to use a wired connection. Can you imagine if your phone was connected to the wall?

But since we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of ethernet, I’d like to make a pitch for the humble, hardworking wired connection.

A wired connection is more stable than Wi-Fi, it’s almost always faster, and it has much lower latency. It’s just plain better to send a signal through a set of copper wires than turning it into radio waves and blasting it through walls, furniture, appliances, and people. (Wi-Fi isn’t bad for people; people are bad for Wi-Fi.) And every device you...

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TP-Link already has some Wi-Fi 7 routers for you to buy

Do you want your internet in tube form or whatever that other thing is? | Image: TP-Link

The Wi-Fi 7 spec isn’t totally finished yet, but you know TP-Link won’t let a pesky little thing like pending certification stop it, and why should it? Netgear and Asus aren’t. And so, the company is launching its first-ever Wi-Fi 7 routers — a mesh system called the Deco BE85, and a powerful single access point router that looks like a set piece designed for an old sci-fi show, the TP-Link Archer BE800.

Wi-Fi 7 means you can probably expect a laptop or a phone with a good Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 network card to get over a gigabit throughput wirelessly, possibly way more, particularly if you have a connection to your ISP that’s capable of it, such as those offered in some places by the likes of Google Fiber, AT&T, or Comcast.

TP-Link sent us...

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This free TV comes with two screens

Image: Telly

There’s a new type of TV coming for Samsung, LG, and Vizio, and it’s completely free — if you don’t count the price of your attention. Telly, a company created by Pluto TV co-founder Ilya Pozin, offers up a TV that makes up for its nonexistent price tag by showing constant advertisements in a second, smaller display.

The company calls this thin strip of a screen a “Smart Display,” which is separated from the main TV by a soundbar. In addition to showing ads, it’s also capable of displaying a variety of widgets, including sports scores, a news ticker, the weather, and stock prices. Ads could pop up on the far right side of the Smart Display, as shown in the pictures embedded in this article, but might also appear in the form of a...

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