Until now, most mobile phone companies have worked to ensure their phones won’t start fires. (Occasional Samsung devices excepted, of course.) But this week at Mobile World Congress, we found a company that dared to go in a different direction. Oukitel’s WP63 rugged smartphone includes a built-in fire starter, and this is what it looks […]
A package of child safety bills is headed to the House floor following an hours-long session that left Democrats and Republicans divided. On Thursday, lawmakers on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce voted to advance the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act; Sammy’s Law; and the App Store Accountability Act, which would require […]
After weeks of failed negotiations, public ultimatums, and lawsuit threats, the Defense Department has formally labeled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” escalating its fight with the AI company over their acceptable use policies and potentially bringing their fight to court. The decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, citing one source familiar, will […]
Today on Decoder, let’s talk about prediction markets, which continue to insert themselves into the news cycle and the news itself in increasingly weird, unsettling, and potentially illegal ways. My guest today is Liz Lopatto, senior reporter at The Verge, who owns what we cheerfully call the chaos beat. Liz has been writing a lot […]
John Abbamondi had orders to let the CEO of Ticketmaster down easy. In April 2021, Abbamondi was the CEO of BSE Global, the company that ran Brooklyn arena the Barclays Center. BSE Global’s existing Ticketmaster contract would expire at the end of September, and Abbamondi and his team had evaluated proposals from SeatGeek, AXS, and […]
On Wednesday, the White House posted a video of actual military strikes on Iran in the style usually seen in Call of Duty highlight videos, and started the video with a clip from Call of Duty. The real-life footage of missiles and other munitions hitting targets in Iran shows clips seen in other Trump administration […]
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney might be one of the most outspoken people in the history of the world. He fought two of the world’s most valuable and powerful companies almost all the way to the US Supreme Court, insulting them again and again: “crooked,” “deceitful,” “insanely sneaky,” calling Android a “fake open platform,” calling both […]
In November, Epic and Google jointly proposed a settlement that would change Android’s fate globally without cracking open Google’s Android monopoly quite the way it otherwise might. Today, Google has decided it’s not waiting for that settlement to be approved: it’s moving forward with many of its proposed changes right now, rolling them out globally […]
Hello and welcome to Regulator, the newsletter for Verge subscribers that goes inside Washington’s increasingly existential clashes between tech and politics. If this was forwarded to you, can I interest you in a full-fledged subscription to The Verge for only $40 a year? You’ll get so much more than doomer scenarios. We cover non-existential fun […]
In early January, a group of 90 or so political, community and thought leaders gathered in a New Orleans Marriott for a secret conference on artificial intelligence – so secret, in fact, that no one knew who else had been invited until they walked into the room. Church leaders and conservative academics were sitting next […]