Technology news

Image: Dbrand Dbrand, the phone case company known for its sassy attitude toward users and tech companies, gave $10,000 to a customer as an apology after it made a racist comment about their last name.On Tuesday, Dbrand reposted a complaint from a customer, Bhuwan Chitransh, who said that the skin they purchased for their MacBook changed color after just two months. Dbrand replied with a crude message that rhymed the customer’s name with “rash.” Chitransh later responded, sayin

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Following Paramount’s move to add Showtime programming to certain Paramount Plus streaming plans, the Showtime standalone streaming platform is coming to an end.
Variety reports that Showtime streaming subscribers have begun receiving notices that they will no longer be able to access the platform after April 30th. Going forward, subscribers will have to sign up for the $11.99 per month Paramount Plus with Showtime plan. Paramount Global announced it

Image: Apple Apple announced some Godzilla-sized updates for its streaming service. First up, the spinoff series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which premiered on Apple TV Plus last year, has been renewed for a second season. There aren’t any details on what the new season will entail or when it’ll start streaming, but showrunners and co-creators Chris Black and Matt Fraction will be returning.
On top of that, Apple says that it has signed a deal with Legendary for even more projects b

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The Sympathizer, one of our most anticipated shows of 2024, hits streaming in April. The new limited series from legendary filmmaker Par

Photo: Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry.
Hi, everyone — I’m starting off today with some big news to share: next week will be my last at Hot Pod and The Verge. Before coming here, all I wanted was to cover the podcasting industry, and I still can’t believe I managed to get a job doing just that. Even when the news was bad (which, let’s be real, was often), I was buoyed by the passion and

Meta is testing new tools and features to protect young people from unwanted nudity and sextortion scams, including Nudity Protection in DMs, a feature that automatically blurs nude images.Part of this crackdown is because Meta says it's seeing a trend of financial sextortion, in which someone gets nude photos from another person and says they'll post them online unless the victim sends money or gift cards."It is a really horrific crime that preys on making people feel alone and ashamed," Antigo

Dyson wants to make cleaning fun again, but I was already having fun letting the robots do it. | Image: Dyson Dyson has developed a new feature that uses your smartphone’s augmented reality sensors to virtually paint over areas you’ve vacuumed, so you can see if you’ve missed a spot.The feature, called CleanTrace, uses the lidar scanner found on Pro or Pro Max iPhones 12 and newer and requires you to attach your phone to the vacuum. For now, the $1,000 Gen5detect is the only du

The countdown to Google I/O starts now. | Image: The Verge / Android Android 15’s first public beta is available to download now, provided you have a Pixel phone and a bit of a sense of adventure. It’s the first consumer-facing release after two developer previews, and while we have a good idea of what to expect from Google’s next mobile OS version, we’ll certainly hear more at the company’s annual developer conference soon enough.
The blog post highlighting updates

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Uber has launched a new safety preferences section that gathers all of Uber’s safety tools in one place and lets users schedule them to switch on automatically.
Some of the safety tools you can customize include audio recording — which saves encrypted audio of the trip that Uber can use to investigate reported incidents — and PIN verification, so you can ensure you’re entering the right vehicle. You can also share your live location

Executives hold shovels during a groundbreaking ceremony at the Occidental Petroleum and 1PointFive carbon removal plant in Ector County, Texas, on April 28th, 2023.  | Image: Jordan Vonderhaar / Bloomberg via Getty Images Attempting to filter enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make a significant impact on climate change would require hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending, according to a new report.The suite of technologies emerging to attempt that task all fall

Image: DW / Esau Escorza ,Isaac Escorza, Samuel Plata, Luis Antonio Delgado Taking the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a bold new visual direction has worked out phenomenally for Paramount in the past, but the studio’s next experiment with the characters feels like something that’s going to be tricky as hell to pull off well.
According to The Hollywood Reporter — Paramount is in the early stages of developing a live-action, R-rated film based on The Last Ronin, IDW’s 2020

Andy Jassy is being persecuted by those meanies at the FTC, says Andy Jassy. | Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge Andy Jassy, CEO of the biggest e-commerce store in the world, is very upset with the regulators who won’t let him buy more companies.
In January, Amazon decided it wasn’t going to buy Roomba maker iRobot for $1.4 billion, after discovering that the EU probably wouldn’t approve the deal and that the FTC had some concerns. Regulators blocked the acquisition bec

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge TikTok plans to add an AI creator feature to its platform, which may compete with the sponsored ads human influencers make on the site.
The Information reports TikTok is developing virtual influencers to promote and sell items on the platform. The AI avatars can read scripts from prompts generated by advertisers or sellers on its TikTok Shop. The feature is not live yet and could still be changed.
According to The Information’s sources, TikTok staff

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple is getting ready to refresh its entire lineup of Macs with M4 processors that have an emphasis on AI, according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The new M4-equipped Macs will reportedly start arriving later this year, with the rest coming in early 2025.
Even though Apple just launched its first MacBook Pro with an M3 chip in November 2023, the company is “nearing production” on its M4 chip, sources tell Bloomberg. Apple

Image: The Verge Microsoft is trying to entice Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11 with fullscreen prompts 18 months before the end of support cutoff. Reddit user Woopinah9 spotted a notification “while in the middle of working,” where Microsoft thanks Windows 10 “customers” for their loyalty with a full-screen message and then explains the end of support date. You might be expecting a free upgrade as part of this interruption, but unfortunately for this Reddit user

Image: Bethesda Bethesda has smartly guessed that with the arrival of the new Fallout series from Amazon, folks are going get curious about all the Fallout games. In addition to making Fallout 3 and Fallout 76 available on Amazon Luna and updating Fallout Shelter to include a bunch of characters from the show, Bethesda has announced that Fallout 4 will get a next-gen update.Return to the Commonwealth April 25th! Learn more about the #Fallout 4 next-gen update coming to console and PC, and additi

Almost half of the countries in the world got a strange notification from Apple on Wednesday.At noon Pacific time on Wednesday, iPhone users in 92 countries got a notification warning them that they may have been targeted by "mercenary spyware attacks," per TechCrunch. Apple didn't disclose exactly which countries got the warnings, though personally, as a U.S. resident with an iPhone, I didn't see anything. SEE ALSO:How to clear cache on iPhone: Free up space on your iOS device
What did the mess

Apple's recent iOS 17.4.1 update made a change to the iPhone that has thrust the company into the middle of a debate it likely wants no part of.This week, pro-Israel social media users started to notice that the iPhone keyboard would recommend the Palestinian flag emoji when the word "Jerusalem" was typed out.Tweet may have been deleted"Dear @Apple @AppleSupport @tim_cook I’ve just upgraded my software to version iOS 17.4.1, and now, when I type the capital of Israel 🇮🇱, Je

Image: Yoto If your kid uses this Yoto Mini speaker, take it away immediately. Yoto has recalled the popular speaker due to a charging cable issue that causes the lithium-ion battery to overheat and catch fire, posing a burn and fire risk.
The recall affects the Yoto Mini speakers sold nationwide from November 2021 through April 2024. It includes 251,165 devices in the US and 19,721 in Canada with the PRPLXX00860 SKU. You can find the SKU number, along with the speaker’s serial number and

O.J. Simpson, perhaps the most infamous celebrity of his time, died of cancer on Wednesday. He was 76 years old. Those raised on the internet may not have a full awareness of Simpson and the murder trial that captivated the world in the mid-1990s. Simpson was accused of the 1994 killing of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and friend Ron Goldman. To those watching at home, the trial felt like the biggest event in the world, full stop. Simpson was eventually acquitted, though most people didn't believe he

Photo by Neilson Barnard / Getty Images for The Recording Academy Taylor Swift’s catalog of music has returned to TikTok, just a few months after it was purged alongside other popular artists represented by Universal Music Group (UMG).In January, UMG and TikTok’s licensing deal expired, and the companies took turns blaming each other for why fans would no longer be able to use UMG artists’ music on the app. UMG argued that TikTok wasn’t willing to pay what it wanted and t

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Listening to “I Fall Apart” by Post Malone on Sony’s new ULT Wear headphones made me feel like I was back in college, hotboxing a car with the music turned up to the point that the bass was shaking the car. And I mean that as the highest compliment.Sony announced a new line of headphones and speakers on April 11 as a follow-up to its Extra Bass and XE-Series lines. For haters of Sony’s typical nomenclature (me), you’ll be pleased to learn that this line has names th

There’s cause for celebration: Sony just announced a new line of products with names that don’t sound like strong password options suggested by your iPhone. The Sony ULT Power Sound series is all about bass (sorry for the accidental Meghan Trainor reference). The line consists of three speakers and a pair of headphones that are new variations of Sony’s Extra Bass and XE-Series lines.The speakers are called ULT Field 1 (a small portable speaker), ULT Field 7 (a large portable sp

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Sony is changing up the strategy around its mainstream wireless headphones and speakers. Today, the company is announcing several new products and introducing a new brand, ULT Power Sound, to go with them. Any kind of actual “name” is an improvement from years past, when Sony would typically just refer to devices by their model number. And as the branding implies, all of these new products — three speakers and one pair of headphones — focu

Image: Amazon It’s hard to say what, precisely, makes a design timeless. Some classic gadgets are simply beautiful, while others remain functional years after they come out. The list of truly timeless products in tech is small, but there’s one name that looms large: RobCo Industries’ Pip-Boy. Sure, it’s relatively simple, and some of its features only work if you’re stuck underground. But when a design hasn’t changed for 200 years, you know it’s doing so

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Since the escalation of the ongoing war on Gaza and in the age of Elon Musk's X/Twitter takeover, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate speech and the perpetrators of such content are finding growth on the platform, according to a new report.Released Thursday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the study found that such accounts have garnered a sharp rise in followers since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war on Gaza.The CCDH, a nonprofit aiming to curb the sprea

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