Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub lose bid to block NYC’s new wage rules for delivery workers

Photo by Leonardo Munoz / VIEWpress

New York City’s delivery workers will get a significant pay bump after a judge rejected a request by Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub to block the city’s new minimum wage rules from going into effect.

The ruling by New York Acting Supreme Court Justice Nicholas Moyne will allow the law to go into effect, which requires companies to pay gig workers a minimum wage of $17.96 per hour. That wage will rise to $20 an hour by 2025.

Delivery worker advocates celebrated the ruling, claiming it puts them “one step closer” to earning a living wage for their work. New York City has the largest delivery workforce in the country, comprised of at least 65,000 mostly undocumented immigrants who earn less than $8 an hour after expenses.

View...

Continue reading…

The synthetic social network is coming

Image: Álvaro Bernis / The Verge

This is Platformer_, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer._ Sign up here.

Today, let’s consider the implications of a truly profound week in the development of artificial intelligence and discuss whether we may be witnessing the rise of a new era in the consumer internet.

I.

On Monday, OpenAI announced the latest updates for ChatGPT. One feature lets you interact with its large language model via voice. Another lets you upload images and ask questions about them. The result is that a tool which was already useful for lots of things suddenly became useful for much more. For one thing, ChatGPT feels much more powerful as a mobile app: you can now chat with it while walking...

Continue reading…

Google Pixel event: how to watch and what to expect

Image: Google

Google is gearing up to launch a new lineup of Pixel products during its upcoming Made by Google event. Even though Google has already said that it will reveal the Pixel 8 alongside the updated Pixel Watch 2, it may have some other surprises in store.

If you’re interested in watching the event, here’s when and where you can tune in as well as what exactly you can expect.

How to watch the Made by Google event

The Google Pixel event will take place on October 4th, 2023, starting at 10AM ET / 7AM PT. Google will host an in-person audience at the event’s New York City venue, but you can follow along by watching the livestream on Google’s website, YouTube channel, or via the video embedded at the top of this article.

All-around upgrades for...

Continue reading…

Apple fights to preserve major App Store loophole in China

Apple may be forced to remove apps that haven’t registered with the Chinese government from its App Store in the region. | Photo by Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Apple is looking for ways to circumvent incoming legislation in China that would prevent the company from listing foreign apps on the iPhone App Store in the region unless they’ve been given government approval. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Apple has met with Chinese officials over the last few months to express concerns about how the new rules will be implemented and how the changes could affect its Chinese customers.

In August earlier this year, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced that all mobile app providers in the country would be required to file business details with the government. The change would effectively close a prominent loophole in China’s Great Firewall...

Continue reading…

We’re at New York Film Festival 2023

Lincoln Center’s annual two-week lineup features new works from household-name filmmakers, as well as a strong slate of international debuts.

Continue reading…

Google Podcasts is going away but we’ve got some alternatives.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

And another one bites the dust — this time, it’s Google Podcasts, which is being discontinued in favor of YouTube Music.

Back in 2018, Google moved its Play Music service over to YouTube, and while some people felt it was an improvement, others weren’t so thrilled. I have to say that I count myself among the latter; I usually listen to rather than watch my music, and I didn’t find the YouTube Music interface any kind of improvement.

Now, as is its wont, Google has decided to drop yet another of its apps and instead add those features to another. It sent this letter out to its users:

Over the coming months, podcasts in YouTube Music will be made available globally and we will start rolling out tools that will enable you to transfer your...

Continue reading…

Passkeys: all the news and updates around passwordless sign-on

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Follow along as websites, apps, and services adopt passkeys in preparation for a passwordless future.

Continue reading…

Samsung Galaxy S24 leak shows a familiar design ahead of early 2024 launch

Early renders show a very similar looking phone to last year’s Galaxy S23. | Image: SmartPrix / OnLeaks

If you were hoping for a revolutionary design for next year’s Samsung Galaxy S24 you might be disappointed. Unofficial renders of the upcoming phone published by SmartPrix in collaboration with leaker OnLeaks show a very similar looking phone to this year’s Galaxy S23 including a squared off design, and no defined camera bump around its three raised camera lenses.

Based on this leak, any visible changes will minimal. SmartPrix reports that the Galaxy S24 is ever so slightly taller and thinner than the S23 that came before it, and the overall screen size is reportedly slightly bigger corner-to-corner at 6.17-inches rather than 6.1-inches. There are still three camera lenses visible on the rear of the phone, which SamMobile notes are...

Continue reading…

Watch Linda Yaccarino’s wild interview at the Code Conference

Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media

On Wednesday evening, X CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared on stage at the Code Conference with frustration and protest. “I think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage,” she told interviewer Julia Boorstin, senior media and tech correspondent at CNBC.

Yaccarino sounded rattled. She’d found out earlier in the day that Kara Swisher, a Code Conference co-founder, had booked a surprise guest to appear an hour before her: Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety. He has been an outspoken critic of the direction Elon Musk has taken the site.

In his interview with Swisher, Roth recounted how Musk put him personally in danger. Musk suggested on Twitter that Roth had advocated for sexualizing...

Continue reading…

The 2024 Honda Prologue EV will have 300 miles of range

That’s a lovely blue on the Prologue. | Image: Honda

Honda revealed that the upcoming 2024 Honda Prologue is “expected” to get an EPA-estimated 300 miles of range on a single charge while announcing a slew of new specs for its first all-electric SUV. Built on GM’s Ultium platform, it achieves this range thanks to the 85kWh battery inside, which is the same size as the Chevy Blazer EV.

The two vehicles have many similarities inside and out, from the 121.8-inch wheelbase to the 11-inch driver instrument display. However, the official EPA range for Chevy’s SUV is already known, at 279 miles on a full charge.

Both the Prologue and the Blazer have Google built-in software, but Honda’s EV includes the wireless Apple Carplay and Android Auto support that GM has decided its EVs will do without.

H...

Continue reading…

Microsoft reportedly pitched Apple on buying Bing to no avail

Illustration: The Verge

Executives from Microsoft and Apple met in 2020 to discuss a possible sale of Bing, according to a new report from Bloomberg. But the talks failed to progress beyond the exploratory phase, indicating that Apple’s top brass — including Eddy Cue, who was involved in the meetings — never seriously pursued the idea.

Testimony in the ongoing FTC antitrust suit against Google has made clear that Apple has never given much thought to replacing the leading search engine as the default on iPhones. Rather, Microsoft believes Apple has only raised the possibility to extract more money from Google to retain its spot. “It is no secret that Apple is making more money on Bing existing than Bing does,’’ Microsoft’s Mikhail Parakhin said Wednesday in US...

Continue reading…

Nvidia offices raided by French competition authority

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Nvidia’s France offices were raided by the country’s competition authority this week, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. While the French agency doesn’t mention Nvidia by name, it confirms it carried out a raid over concerns about anti-competitive practices in the graphics cards industry.

Sources tell the WSJ that French authorities specifically targeted Nvidia, which has seen demand for its chips skyrocket in recent months. Several companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI, have purchased thousands of the company’s high-end AI chips to power large language models.

That massive demand resulted in a lot more money for Nvidia. The chipmaker reported earning a record revenue of $13.51 billion in its latest report, marking a...

Continue reading…

Tesla sued for ‘severe’ racial harassment at its California factory, again

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Tesla subjected Black employees at its California factory to “severe or pervasive racial harassment” and helped perpetuate a hostile work environment for employees of color, according to a lawsuit filed by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Racist slurs and epithets and race-based stereotyping “permeated Tesla’s Fremont Factory subjecting Black employees to racial hostility and offenses,” the agency alleges. Black employees were also fired or subject to retaliation after raising complaints about their treatment, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit includes a lot of the language that was alleged to be used at Tesla’s factory and has also been echoed by former Black employees of the company in their own lawsuits. The EEOC...

Continue reading…

The best iPhones

Navigate Apple’s lengthy iPhone product catalog like a pro. | Image: The Verge

Whether you want a battery that lasts for days or the very best deal, we’ve got some recommendations for an iPhone you’ll love.

Continue reading…

The best entertainment of 2023

The Boy and the Heron. | Image: Studio Ghibli

Right now, we are absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to entertainment. TV shows, movies, and games all come out at such a fast and furious pace that it’s hard to keep up. Not all of them are worth your time, of course — which is where we come in.

Our team spends a lot of time immersed in the various realms of pop culture so that we can handpick our favorites for you. That could mean a hot new indie game you might’ve otherwise missed or the streaming series that will become your new obsession. Either way, if you’re finding it hard to sort through the flood, this is the place to find a curated selection of the best stuff.

And like last year, this page will be updated regularly throughout the year — so make sure to check back in...

Continue reading…

Castlevania: Nocturne is a revolutionary epic that does the franchise’s best games justice

Drolta Tzuentes as she appears in Castlevania: Nocturne. | Image: Netflix

Netflix’s newest Castlevania animated series reworks elements of the franchise’s best games into an epic history lesson about freedom and the French Revolution.

Continue reading…

Spotify is adding auto-generated transcripts to millions of podcasts

Image: Spotify

Spotify is rolling out auto-generated podcast transcripts to more creators in the coming weeks, the company announced Thursday.

The text transcripts will also be time-synced so listeners can visually follow along as a podcast episode progresses. Transcripts are available by scrolling down below the podcast player and tapping into a “read along” section. A transcription of a show makes the podcast more accessible to users and allows listeners to skip around and skim an episode without listening through.

Spotify says “millions” of podcast episodes will get the tool, and in the future, creators could add media to transcripts — a useful feature if a creator is describing an image on the show, for example.

Beyond transcripts, mobile...

Continue reading…

Google adds a switch for publishers to opt out of becoming AI training data

Illustration: The Verge

Google just announced it’s giving website publishers a way to opt out of having their data used to train the company’s AI models while remaining accessible through Google Search. The new tool, called Google-Extended, allows sites to continue to get scraped and indexed by crawlers like the Googlebot while avoiding having their data used to train the company’s present and future AI models.

The company says Google-Extended will let publishers “manage whether their sites help improve Bard and Vertex AI generative APIs,” adding that web publishers can use the toggle to “control access to content on a site.” Google confirmed in July that it’s training its AI chatbot, Bard, on publicly available data scraped from the web.

Google-Extended is...

Continue reading…

The best magnetic chargers for your MagSafe iPhone

Image: The Verge

Making sense of Apple’s messy MagSafe charging ecosystem, where the first-party options are far from the best.

Continue reading…

Newsrooms around the world are using AI to optimize work, despite concerns about bias and accuracy

Journalism and other fields are dealing with a new wave of tools like Google Bard. | Image: Google

The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has accelerated the use of AI in different fields, including journalism. AI is most visible in journalism when things go wrong. Some newsrooms have published AI articles riddled with errors or offensive suggestions. There’s widespread anxiety that AI will be used to replace journalists on the cheap. But a new global survey demonstrates the ways that AI has worked its way into the business, even as journalists worry about its implications — and they don’t just involve writing articles.

The report was published this week by JournalismAI, an initiative from Polis, the London School of Economics and Political Science’s journalism think tank. It is supported by the Google News Initiative.

“...

Continue reading…

Five ways the Meta Quest 3 will (let developers) change the game

On Wednesday, Meta didn’t announce an obvious killer app alongside the $499 Meta Quest 3 headset — unless you count the bundled Asgard’s Wrath 2 or Xbox Cloud Gaming in VR.

But if you watched the company’s Meta Connect keynote and developer session closely, the company revealed a bunch of intriguing improvements that could help devs build a next-gen portable headset game themselves.

Graphics — look how far we’ve come

This is the obvious one, but it’s also stunning to see just how much better the same games can look on Quest 3 vs. Quest 2. A lot of that’s thanks to the doubled graphical horsepower and increased CPU performance of the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, though there’s additional RAM, resolution per eye, and field of view as well:

...

Continue reading…

Google’s whiteboarding app is joining the graveyard

Google’s Jamboard software and the hardware are both shutting down starting October 1st, 2024. | Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

It’s never a dull day at the Google graveyard — the company has blogged a Workspace update today announcing the end of its collaborative Jamboard whiteboarding software. Google plans to wind down the app in late 2024 and is introducing the “next phase” of whiteboarding solutions: pointing users toward third-party apps that work with Workspace services like Google Meet, Drive, and Calendar.

Google says it will offer support to help transition customers to use other whiteboard tools, including FigJam, Lucidspark, and Miro. According to the blog post, Workspace customer feedback indicated the third-party solutions worked better for them thanks to feature offerings like an infinite canvas size, use case templates, voting, and more. So...

Continue reading…

How to choose which Apple Watch to buy

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Between the Apple Watch Series 9, the Ultra 2, and the second-gen SE, there are more options than ever. We’ll help you sort through them.

Continue reading…

Sega cancels live-service shooter Hyenas

Image: Creative Assembly / Sega

Sega is canceling the live-service shooter Hyenas before the game’s launch. Sega announced the news in a press release, stating the cancellation was due to “the lower profitability of the European region.” In addition to Hyenas, Sega will also cancel other unannounced in-development projects.

Hyenas was billed as a live-service extraction shooter that looked similar to the Payday games. However, instead of robbing banks for cash, players in Hyenas would steal high-value collectibles, some of which were based on various video game properties, including a Sonic the Hedgehog doll or an Atari 2600.

Hyenas was apparently a source of friction within Sega. During a quarterly earnings call back in August, Sega executives said they were...

Continue reading…

Trump and the GOP are trying to drive a wedge between autoworkers and EVs

Image: Getty

Last night, former President and current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump appeared before a crowd in suburban Detroit and tried out his new attack lines against electric vehicles.

EVs are too expensive, the former president argued (via The Detroit News); they don’t have enough range and will spur American job losses. EV batteries were another target. “They get rid of them,” Trump said, according to Discourse Blog, “and lots of bad things happen, and when they’re digging it out of the ground to make those batteries, it’s going to be very bad for the environment.” But those trying to protect the environment by promoting EVs are “environmental lunatics,” he said.

His comments were the latest attempt to make electric vehicles a major...

Continue reading…

‘Nerfball’ introduces Nerf’s smartest foam yet — it detects dart impacts

College basketball player Lyric Swann poses in the official Nerfball gear. | Photo: Hasbro

Here’s Nerfball, the first official ‘sport’ from the company behind the blasters.

Continue reading…

Epic Games cuts around 830 jobs

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Bloomberg reports that Fortnite developer Epic Games is expected to lay off 16 percent of its workforce.

In a statement from Tim Sweeney, Epic has confirmed the layoffs will impact around 830 employees. He wrote that the company intends to divest from Bandcamp — an independent music storefront company Epic acquired just last year — and spin off SuperAwesome, a “kid-tech” company that specializes in creating safe online experiences for kids. He also explains that the layoffs are a result of the company “spending way more money than we earn.” Notably, Sweeney does not apologize to his employees for making the business decisions that have resulted in the disruption of over 800 lives, saying only that his “optimism” that such spending would...

Continue reading…

SpaceX inks first Space Force deal for government-focused Starshield satellite network

Image: The Verge

SpaceX has won its first contract with the US Space Force to provide satellite communications via Starshield, Bloomberg reports. Announced last December, SpaceX describes Starshield as a “secured satellite network for government entities,” offered alongside its civilian-focused Starlink satellite internet service. Bloomberg notes that the Starshield services will be provided over SpaceX’s existing Starlink satellites.

The existence of the one-year contract was confirmed to Bloomberg by Air Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek, who said it was awarded on September 1st. Under the deal, SpaceX will provide “Starshield end-to-end service via the Starlink constellation, user terminals, ancillary equipment, network management and other related...

Continue reading…

Mark Zuckerberg can’t quit the metaverse

Meta

Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company Facebook to Meta — and since then, he has been focused on building the “metaverse,” a three-dimensional virtual reality. But the metaverse has lost some of its luster since 2021. Companies like Disney have closed down their metaverse divisions and deemphasized using the word, while crypto-based startup metaverses have quietly languished or imploded. In 2022, Meta’s Reality Labs division reported an operational loss of $13.7 billion.

But at Meta Connect 2023, Zuckerberg still hasn’t given up on the metaverse — he’s just shifted how he talks about it. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. Now, he aims to convince the public that the future is a blend...

Continue reading…

Microsoft is testing low-carbon concrete for its data centers

A worker smooths a sample of concrete mix in a canister that contains materials to lower the overall embodied carbon in concrete. | Image: Dan DeLong for Microsoft

To clean up some of the pollution stemming from its supply chain and data centers, Microsoft is experimenting with new kinds of concrete.

Cement, a key ingredient in concrete, happens to be a big culprit in climate change. It’s responsible for around 8 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally. Avoiding that pollution is no easy task, especially since concrete is the most widely consumed material in the world after water. A host of startups are looking for just the right recipe to make concrete minus the carbon dioxide emissions. And Microsoft wants to be a buyer.

“Something that we can do right now and we are doing right now is shopping around. You know, concrete supplier A might have lower embodied carbon [emissions] than concrete...

Continue reading…