Bitcoin miners win legal battle to keep mum about energy use

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge

Crypto miners have successfully blocked the Department of Energy’s (DOE) survey of Bitcoin’s energy consumption in the US. A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order that prevents the DOE from moving forward with data collection.

More Bitcoin is mined in the US than anywhere else in the world, a trend that has sparked legal battles over the impact energy-hungry crypto mines have on the power grid, nearby communities, and the environment. The DOE announced last month that it would start to collect data on the electricity consumption of crypto mines, mandating that companies comply with the “emergency collection of data request.”

Industry groups were quick to challenge the move in court. The Texas Blockchain Council and...

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Ford, Mercedes, and Tesla have the least problematic EV supply chains

Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images

Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Tesla occupy the top three spots in a new ranking of 18 global automakers based on their efforts to eliminate carbon emissions, environmental harms, and human rights violations from their supply chains. US automakers in particular made the most progress in cleaning up their supply chains, with Tesla showing the biggest increase of all the automakers.

The rankings were compiled by Lead the Charge, a global coalition of leading climate, environment, and human rights organizations that includes the Sierra Club, The Sunrise Project, and Public Citizen, among others. The group started evaluating automaker supply chains last year, with the goal to release an updated ranking each year.

Overall, automakers made a lot...

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The VGHF built an archive of gaming history — and is making it available online

Collage by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Super Sushi Pinball, a game that does not prominently feature sushi, never actually launched. It was meant to be Sony’s second game in the US, intended for the NES during a time when such news would not have melted the brains of console diehards, and was marketed in video game magazines for over a year. “This is a game that was last seen by anyone in 1990 at a trade show,” said Frank Cifaldi, founder of the Video Game History Foundation. “It just disappeared from the world.”

That is until Cifaldi found it in the basement of Ed Semrad, retired editor-in-chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly. “One day, when I was planning a trip to Chicago, I just kind of shot my shot and ... he invited me to his basement,” Cifaldi said. In that basement,...

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Why Uber and Etsy came up so much in the Supreme Court’s social media arguments

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images

During Monday’s Supreme Court arguments in a pair of consequential social media cases, the justices prodded for ways they could rule without giving either side everything they asked for.

The justices seemed largely skeptical of the most sweeping provisions in Florida’s and Texas’ social media laws, which would force certain tech platforms to carry speech even when they don’t want to. But they also looked for the boundaries of tech companies’ First Amendment rights — seeking to understand when they become conduits for the transfer of information, rather than expressive platforms themselves.

The laws at the center of the fight, Florida’s SB 7072 and Texas’ HB 20, were created in the name of countering what conservative legislators have...

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Limited Run gives digital games a physical legacy

Photo by Kate Medley for The Verge

The future for physical video games looks bleak. Major console hardware makers seem to be inching toward removing ways to play discs at all: leaked Microsoft documents revealed a potential disc-less Xbox Series X (though the company says it isn’t completely giving up on the format), while the “slim” PS5 has a detachable disc drive that requires an internet connection to pair with a new console. You can get most games digitally nowadays, but there are plentiful stories about people losing access to games they’ve purchased when digital storefronts shut down or because of licensing issues or unexplained bans.

Because of the many issues with digital ownership, Josh Fairhurst, the CEO of physical game maker Limited Run Games, thinks that...

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Pokémon Legends: Z-A teased for 2025 release

Image: The Pokémon Company

The big news out of today’s Pokémon Presents is that the next major Pokémon game is in the works — and it’s launching next year. There aren’t many details yet, but the game is called Pokémon Legends: Z-A (yes, that’s the real title), and it takes place in Lumiose City, where 2013’s Pokémon X and Y were set. The game is expected to launch in 2025 with a simultaneous global release, and it’s coming to the Nintendo Switch. It’s being developed by Game Freak.

The initial teaser video doesn’t show any actual gameplay but does hint at some changes coming to the city. According to the YouTube description, the game takes place while “an urban redevelopment plan is under way to shape the city into a place that belongs to both people and pokémon.”

...

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I’ve seen the future of wireless charging, and I want it in my kitchen counters

FreePower for Countertop is a Qi wireless charger built into your countertops. This is a demo unit I tried out to get a feel for the experience. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

I recently remodeled my kitchen, and my first thought during the design process was, “Can I embed wireless charging in my new quartzite countertop?” But I couldn’t find a solution that didn’t involve sticking bulky black boxes under the counter and requiring precise placement of my phone on a vast counter landscape. I wish I’d waited a year or two.

This week at KBIS, the annual Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas, FreePower launched its latest technology: wireless Qi charging built into countertops.

FreePower for Countertop puts all the technology into a slimline device that fits inside stone or wood countertops. Once installed and powered (hardwired or plugged in), it can charge up to three devices simultaneously at Qi2 speeds...

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Honda doubles down on hydrogen with new fuel-cell powered SUV

Image: Honda

Honda announced a new hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle for the US market, in a sign that the automaker has not given up on the most abundant element in the universe for its vehicle lineup.

The 2025 Honda CR-V e:FCEV may not roll off the tongue easily, but Honda insists it can find a fanbase, especially as hybrid powertrains are proving to be more popular with US car buyers than pure battery-electric vehicles. The fuel cell electric vehicle will have an EPA-rated range of 270 miles, which includes 29 miles of all-electric driving range.

The CR-V e:FCEV is a compact crossover SUV that is co-developed with General Motors using fuel cell modules produced by the companies’ Fuel Cell System Manufacturing (FCSM) joint venture in Michigan....

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Tales of a shopping influencer

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

Everywhere you go on the internet, it feels like someone’s trying to sell you something. TikTok is being overrun by sales pitches for stuff on the TikTok Shop; Instagram is making it easier to buy everything you see in a post; platforms from Pinterest to Prime Video are adding ever more ads, ever more hungrily trying to get you to buy something.

The new app Flip, in a sense, is just saying the quiet part out loud: it’s a social media platform that is absolutely, unequivocally, unabashedly about shopping all the way down. The Verge’sMia Sato recently threw herself into the Flip ecosystem to figure out what life is like as a shopping influencer and what it says about the future of the internet that Flip even exists in the first place.

O...

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Pokémon Presents 2024: all the biggest news and trailers

Image: Nintendo

You won’t want to Pokémon Sleep through it.

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The best alternatives to Spotify for listening to music

Image: Sony

When this article was originally written in February 2022, the big Spotify controversy was that artists were abandoning the audio service in protest of the company’s contract with podcaster Joe Rogan, and some subscribers were deciding to follow the musicians’ example. More recently, the issue that has users irritated is the continued lack of HiFi and the layoffs that have made music discovery even harder.

Although Spotify is probably the best-known music service, there are quite a few alternatives available for good music listening. If you’re someone who has decided to explore what music services are out there, here’s a quick rundown of some of the possibilities. But in the interest of being complete, we will start with Spotify itself.

...

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Sony is laying off 900 PlayStation employees

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Sony says it’s laying off around 900 employees of its PlayStation division, a reduction of its global headcount of around 8 percent. Sony’s layoffs are the latest in a wave that has been impacting the gaming and tech industries throughout 2024.

“We have made the extremely hard decision to announce our plan to commence a reduction of our overall headcount globally by about 8 percent or about 900 people, subject to local law and consultation processes,” says PlayStation chief Jim Ryan. “Employees across the globe, including our studios, are impacted.”

Several PlayStation studios are affected, with Sony closing its London Studio in the UK. There will also be layoffs impacting Sony’s Firesprite studio. Overall, employees across the Americas,...

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Stardew Valley is getting a massive March game content update

The 1.6 update will be available for macOS, Windows, and Linux on March 19th. | Image: ConcernedApe

Stardew Valley developer Eric Barone — better known as ConcernedApe — has revealed when players can expect the next major update to drop, adding fresh content and expanded multiplayer options to the game. Announced on Monday in line with Stardew Valley’s eighth anniversary, update 1.6 will be available for PC (Windows/macOS/Linux) players on March 19th, with console and mobile to follow “as soon as possible.”

We have some idea of what content is coming thanks to a “sneak peak” that ConcernedApe shared back in September. This includes three unnamed festivals — one “major” and two “mini” — alongside new items, crafting recipes, rewards for billboard quests, and late-game content that expands each of the five skills: farming, fishing,...

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Nvidia’s free-tier GeForce Now will soon show ads while you’re waiting to play

Nvidia’s GeForce Now is a cloud gaming platform that spans many devices. | Image: Nvidia

Nvidia’s completely free, no-strings attached trial of its cloud gaming service GeForce Now is about to be very slightly less of a deal — on Wednesday February 28th, Nvidia tells The Verge, users will start seeing ads.

They’re only for the free tier — not Priority or Ultimate — and even then, it sounds like they won’t interrupt your gameplay. “Free users will start to see up to two minutes of ads while waiting in queue to start a gaming session,” writes Nvidia spokesperson Stephanie Ngo.

Currently, the free tier does often involve waiting in line for a remote computer to free up before every hour of free gameplay — now, I guess there’ll be a few ads too. Nvidia says the ads should help pay for the free tier of service, and that it...

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Netflix confirms it’s cutting off Apple billing for grandfathered subscribers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Netflix confirms to The Verge that it has begun booting longtime subscribers off their Apple iTunes billing plans, and will require them to pay Netflix directly using a credit card or debit card instead. Earlier today, The Streamable reported that Netflix had begun telling customers in “some territories,” but Netflix representative Momo Zhao confirms to us that all “members on the basic plan who were using an iTunes method of payment” will need to sign up directly.

It’s been a good run for anyone who signed up before Netflix stopped accepting subscriptions through Apple’s payments system. One person indicated today on X that they’d kept the streaming service’s old $9.99 price for years.

Netflix stopped working with Apple Pay and...

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The Odysseus lunar lander is on its side and will likely run out of energy soon

“Odysseus captured this image approximately 35 seconds after pitching over during its approach to the landing site.” | Image: Intuitive Machines (X)

The Odysseus lander is likely to remain operating for another 24 hours on the Moon’s surface, despite being tipped over onto its side. Intuitive Machines, the private space company behind Odysseus, tweeted a few images taken by the spacecraft and gave more updates on how long the team expects it will remain operational.

Because of Odysseus’ landing position, the panels and antennas aren’t oriented exactly as planned, making it harder for it to generate power and communicate. Controllers on Earth will continue to collect data until its solar panels are no longer exposed to sunlight, which they anticipate will happen on Tuesday morning.

Flight controllers intend to collect data until the lander’s solar panels are no longer exposed to...

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Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra Headphones have plunged to a new all-time low

Bose’s foldable QuietComfort Ultra Headphones are an excellent pair of noise-canceling headphones, if you don’t mind the color white. | Image: The Verge

Traveling can be stressful, which is why, if you’re planning on enjoying a relaxing spring break next month, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones can make for a great travel companion, especially if you’re flying. The noise-canceling headphones can help ensure you get some peace and quiet even before you land at your destination, and right now, they’re down to a new low of $349.99 ($80 off) at Staples.

Unlike the last-gen Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, the QC Ultra fold down for easy storage, which is one of the reasons they remain our favorite pair of noise-canceling headphones for traveling. The long-lasting headphones are also more comfortable to wear than our top pick, the Sony WH-1000XM5, so you won’t need to worry about ear...

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The Queen’s Blood card game is just as good as Final Fantasy VII Rebirth itself

Image: Square Enix

I have a pet conspiracy theory.

The greatest minds in card game design don’t work at Wizards of the Coast on Magic: The Gathering or at Ravensburger on the Disney-themed breakout hit Lorcana. But somehow, through some eldritch pact made with the gods of the collectible card game, Square Enix managed to snag the greatest minds in card game design and has kept them in a vault for the last 30 years working on Final Fantasy card minigames. That’s the best explanation I can come up with for how good Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Queen’s Blood card game is.

This minigame has nearly eclipsed my enjoyment of Rebirth itself, a game a number of critics are saying is possibly the best game of this generation. I didn’t gasp in awe when I first saw...

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Two words: poker roguelike

Image: Playstack

In Casino Royale, James Bond gets a bit of poker advice: you never play your hand; you play the man sitting across from you.

Okay, but what if you just played your hand? What if no one was sitting at the other end of the table? Balatro, a new turn-based card game available on most platforms, takes the mechanics of poker and turns them into the basis of a compelling roguelike, the subgenre of games where each playthrough is a single perilous attempt.

Balatro is a poker game inasmuch as Scrabble is a word game. Knowing the language and probabilities of poker will help you, but ultimately, this is a logic game. There are no bluffs, no pots, just the pure composition of poker hands satisfyingly paired with a thrilling game loop.

This makes B...

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Seagate’s Xbox Storage Expansion Card is cheaper than ever at nearly $100 off

Seagate’s speedy storage expansion cards are reminiscent of retro memory cards but also expensive without these periodic sales. | Image: Seagate

We’ve griped long enough about the ballooning install sizes of the latest AAA games, but complaining won’t slow the trend. Without some miraculous development in data compression technology, the only remedy today is to buy extra storage. Xbox Series X and S gamers have had it the roughest with the exorbitant markups on its proprietary storage cards, but regular discounts are starting to make them a little more affordable. For example, Seagate’s 1TB Storage Expansion Card is down to $125.99 at Amazon ($94 off), which is the lowest price we’ve seen so far. The 2TB card is also on sale for $249.99 ($110 off) at Amazon, which is only $20 more than its all-time low.

Seagate’s storage expansion cards are officially licensed by Microsoft, and u...

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Fiat is turning its Panda city cars into a whole family of ‘multi-energy’ vehicles

Image: Fiat

Stellantis-owned Fiat revealed five new concepts that it says will serve as inspiration for a future family of vehicles that will come in a variety of powertrains while sharing the same platform.

The new lineup, inspired by the Italian automaker’s Panda city cars, will kick off in July 2024 with a new city car, followed by a new vehicle each year for the following three years. In addition, the concepts preview a pickup truck, a fastback sedan, an SUV, and a camper.

Fiat is hedging its bets, committing to producing not only electric versions of each vehicle but also hybrid and internal combustion engine versions. The automaker says this is to “ensure maximum relevance to customers wherever they live in the world.”

The new lineup,...

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Apple’s decision to drop iPhone web apps comes under scrutiny in the EU

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Apple could soon face an investigation over its decision to discontinue iPhone web apps in the European Union, according to a report from the Financial Times. The European Commission has reportedly sent Apple and app developers requests for more information to assist in its evaluation.

“We are indeed looking at the compliance packages of all gatekeepers, including Apple,” the European Commission said in a statement to the Financial Times. “In that context, we’re in particular looking into the issue of progressive web apps, and can confirm sending the requests for information to Apple and to app developers, who can provide useful information for our assessment.”

The European Commission didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request...

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Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene

The first computery thing I do in the year 2024 is nudge a 3.5-inch floppy disk into a USB floppy drive that I bought from an online merchant working out of Singapore’s onetime hotbed of ’90s computer piracy. I’m briefly startled by the drive’s low mechanical whirring — a warm, ambient background score that instantly transports me back to my childhood. Some of my first painfully preteen journals were hidden poorly on nondescript floppies just like this one. I click on the disk’s sole file, an MP3 titled “Inability to Perform Social Activities Is Considered Inferior,” and Yasuyuki Uesugi’s growling wall of experimental noise rolls through my apartment like a rogue wave at the beach. The track is one minute, 27 seconds long,...

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Microsoft partners with Mistral in second AI deal beyond OpenAI

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft has announced a new multiyear partnership with Mistral, a French AI startup that’s valued at €2 billion (about $2.1 billion). The Financial Times reports that the partnership will include Microsoft taking a minor stake in the 10-month-old AI company, just a little over a year after Microsoft invested more than $10 billion into its OpenAI partnership.

The deal will see Mistral’s open and commercial language models available on Microsoft’s Azure AI platform, the second company to offer a commercial model on Azure after OpenAI. Much like the OpenAI partnership, Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral will also be focused on the development and deployment of next-generation large language models.

Mistral is announcing a new AI model...

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Funimation’s solution for wiping out digital libraries could be good, if it works

The Verge

The president of Crunchyroll, Rahul Purini, announced that the company is working to compensate customers who will lose their digital libraries in the upcoming Funimation / Crunchyroll merger on April 2nd.

“[We] are working really hard directly with each [customer] to ensure that they have an appropriate value for what they got in the digital copy initially,” Purini tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel during this week’s Decoder podcast. “As people reach out to us through customer service, we are responding and handling each of those requests as they prefer.”

When asked what “appropriate value” meant, Purini said, “So it could be that they get access to a digital copy on any of the existing other services where they might be able to...

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Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of online speech: all the news

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images

The court hears arguments in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton on Monday.

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Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini on how anime took over the world

Photo illustration: The Verge / Photo by Crunchyroll

The head of the fast-growing streaming service discusses the Funimation merger and shutdown and where he sees growth in anime.

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Wear OS is revamping notifications to improve battery life

Google’s new hybrid notification interface was added specifically for the OnePlus Watch 2. | Image: OnePlus

Google just announced a handful of new Wear OS updates at Mobile World Congress 2024. At the heart of it is a way of handling notifications that will purportedly improve performance and battery life. Wear OS watches are also getting public transit directions in Google Maps as well as Google Wallet passes.

Since 2018, Wear OS watches generally have had an application processor (AP) to handle power-intensive tasks and an ultra-low-power co-processor microcontroller unit (MCU) for always-on tasks like step counting and heart rate. The update will letwearable makers offload notification processing to the MCU. That includes the ability to read and dismiss notifications as well as send quick replies.

This capability was added specifically...

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The OnePlus Watch 2 is a bid to redeem its smartwatch reputation

The OnePlus Watch 2 looks good on paper, but I’ve been burned before. | Image: OnePlus

OnePlus is keenly aware that its first smartwatch was a disaster. Nearly three years later, I’m still haunted by that launch and the abysmal experience I had reviewing it. News that OnePlus is back with a second-gen smartwatch fills me with trepidation, but on paper, the updates seem promising. Not only will the $299.99 OnePlus Watch 2 run on Google’s Wear OS 4 but it’ll also use a novel dual-engine architecture that will purportedly enable up to 100 hours of battery life. Oh, and it’ll have Google Assistant.

The most interesting thing about the OnePlus Watch 2’s hardware is it features two separate chipsets: the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 and the BES 2700 MCU. The result is a dual-OS structure that sounds a smidge like Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro...

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My streaming fatigue got so bad I started collecting DVDs

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Amelia Holowaty Krales and Getty Images

Here I am at Walmart, elbow-deep in decades of movies as other shoppers wheel by without so much as a glance. The bin, about four feet tall, is overflowing with DVDs, to the point where I have to start piling them up on one side just to get anywhere near the center. I’m picking out the movies I’m going to indulge in over the weekend, shuffling through copies of Sonic the Hedgehog, an all-in-one Ben Affleck movie collection, Gremlins, and a hodgepodge of other flicks.

I pull out some old films I’ve never gotten around to watching, like The Ring and the Crank collection (yes, I know I’m behind), and toss them into my shopping cart. The variety in Walmart’s DVD bin is seemingly endless: and for a price of about $5 per disc that you can hang...

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