Technology news

Amsterdam-based startup CarbonX has secured €4mn to industrialise a new anode material that could help Europe reduce its reliance on China for graphite, a substance which makes up half the weight of a typical lithium-ion battery.  Netherlands-based VC Energy Transition Fund Rotterdam led the round. It’s an extension on CarbonX’s €10mn capital injection announced in February, capping off the funding round at a cosy €14mn.   Graphite is the go-to material

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Sonos will soon encourage employees on its various product teams who live near its US office locations to come in for at least two days per week, The Verge has learned. That’s a notable break from the company’s history, throughout which Sonos has enthusiastically supported fully remote and hybrid work. Job listings at Sonos routinely state that “it’s about impact, not location.” Glassdoor reviews have long backed this up, with employ

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is rolling out two new updates to its unknown tracker alerts feature that should make it easier for Android device owners to detect unfamiliar trackers, the company announced on Wednesday. Introduced in July 2023, the safety feature automatically sends notifications if an unwanted Bluetooth tracker is traveling with you.
The first update lets Android phone owners temporarily stop sending location updates to the Find My Device network if an unknown c

Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images The NewsGuild of New York announced Wednesday that it has reached a tentative deal with The New York Times on behalf of the Times Tech Guild. The tentative three-year contract would be the first for the guild, which was initially formed in 2021.The tentative deal follows a strike that kicked off the day before the US presidential election in November and lasted for just over a week. During the strike, the guild asked people not to play NYT game

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Eight years and $10 billion later, GM has decided to pull the plug on its grand robotaxi experiment.The automaker’s CEO, Mary Barra, made the surprise announcement late on Tuesday, arguing that a shared autonomous mobility service was never really in its “core business.” It was too expensive and had too many regulatory hurdles to overcome to make it a viable revenue stream. Instead, GM would pivot to “privately owned&rdq

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge The Department of Justice during the Trump administration defied agency policy in an attempt to identify journalists’ sources, the agency’s inspector general alleges in a new report.
The IG alleges the agency sought “non-content communications records” — information like email logs, rather than the content of those conversations — on eight journalists across The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. The Times had previo

Image: Apple Apple is bringing layered recordings to the Voice Memos app on the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. With the new feature, you can record vocals while listening to an instrumental track out loud in iOS 18.2.
Even though the microphone will technically pick up the instrumentals, Apple says the iPhone 16’s A18 Pro chip allows it to isolate vocals with “advanced processing and machine learning,” letting Voice Memos create a separate track with just your voice. From there, yo

Illustrations by Alex Castro / The Verge For millennia, the Arctic tundra has helped stabilize global temperatures by storing carbon in the frozen ground. Wildfires have changed that, according to the latest Arctic Report Card released yesterday at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference.Fires, intensified by climate change, release carbon trapped in soil and plants. More frequent infernos have now transformed the tundra into a net source of carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a dramati

Image: Roku Roku City, the purple-tinted cityscape screensaver that debuted in 2018, might look a little sharper and more detailed the next time you see it scrolling by. This week, Roku is increasing the screensaver’s resolution to 1080p; it was still stuck at 720p until now — despite running on millions of 4K Roku TVs and 4K-capable streaming players. That’s blasphemous, if you ask me, so it’s nice to see some progress.
The surprisingly popular, fictional skyline is also

Image: Krispy Kreme Krispy Kreme is currently dealing with a cybersecurity breach that has brought down parts of its online donut ordering service in the US. The company has been working to resolve the issue for over a week now after detecting unauthorized access to its systems on November 29th.
In a filing issued to the SEC on Wednesday, Krispy Kreme says it was “notified regarding unauthorized activity on a portion of its information technology systems” and pulled in “leading

My favorite dynamic wallpaper floating in the desert. | Screenshot: Mac Virtual Display Since its release, I’ve mostly used Apple’s Vision Pro like a movie theater. The VR headset is an amazing way to watch Dune — but beyond that, it hasn’t really lived up to its potential as a general-purpose computing device.
Today, that’s finally starting to change. With the update to visionOS 2.2, Apple is seriously upgrading the headset’s ability to work with a Mac. It&rs

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge A bunch of Meta apps are down right now. For many staffers at The Verge, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads aren’t loading right now and are showing error messages when you try to load them. Reports across Bluesky, X, and Reddit show that many people see the same thing.
On Facebook, it simply says “We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.”
Downdetector is showing big and sudden spikes for Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger,

The Homey smart home platform, which works with the Homey Pro or Homey Bridge hubs, has launched a Home Energy Dongle and energy management tab for its app. Smart home company Homey has added a new energy management tab to its app to track and monitor energy use from compatible smart devices such as plugs, appliances, thermostats, and EV chargers. This week, the company also announced the Homey Energy Dongle for Europe, which can connect directly to a smart meter to monitor a home’s energy

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is going to let Xbox Insiders who also subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate test the ability to stream some Xbox games they already own to their Xbox starting today. The feature could be useful if you want to jump into a game without having to install the whole thing; given how big game file sizes can be nowadays, streaming a game via the cloud might be a faster way to play or save you from hitting a data cap.Microsoft has published a list of games th

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has started testing some improvements to its Phone Link app for iPhone users. Windows Insiders can now try out a new way to share a file from an iPhone to a PC and vice versa, making the experience a little more like file sharing with an Android device.
Windows Insiders can download the latest Phone Link app update, version 1.24112.89.0 or higher, and it will include a new setup dialog to enable sharing files between iPhones and PCs. The sharing

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge Nvidia must face an investor lawsuit claiming it misled shareholders about the impact of the cryptocurrency market on its sales after the Supreme Court dismissed the company’s appeal.
The court said it had “improvidently granted” Nvidia’s petition, meaning it decided it shouldn’t have taken it up in the first place. That means the case will have to continue on in the lower courts. During oral arguments last month, some justi

Image: The Verge Microsoft is updating the Xbox app on Windows today with hundreds of PC games that weren’t previously available and a new home experience. It’s part of a broader effort to make the Xbox app the place to find PC games, regardless of whether they’re part of PC Game Pass or not.
“Earlier this summer, we began working with partners to bring all PC games with Xbox features into the Xbox app,” explains Chris Charla, general manager of content curation and

It should be simple to stream live TV at home.
But depending on the sport, you might be signing up (and paying handsomely) for a lot of different services just to keep up.
There are the rare leagues, like Major League Soccer, that can be watched on a single channel. (In the US, every match can be viewed live on Apple TV Plus.) But keeping up with most sports resembles, say, tennis, where the rights for its four major tournaments are scattered across several different platforms.
And in general,

We never thought such a simple attachment would be so difficult to come by. | Image: Sony Sony’s detachable disc drive for the PlayStation 5 has been hard to come by as of late, and it’s disappointing that the $700 PS5 Pro doesn’t include one. However, GameStop is now offering a rare window for GameStop Pro members to pick one up for its original MSRP of $79.99.
GameStop’s loyalty program costs $25 a year, so you can consider that an added premium if you’re not inte

Photo by Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images The Onion’s acquisition of InfoWars isn’t happening — at least for now. In a ruling on Tuesday, a Texas bankruptcy judge rejected The Onion’s purchase of the conspiracy-ridden website founded by Alex Jones, according to a report from The New York Times.
Last month, The Onion announced that it had purchased InfoWars during a bankruptcy auction of Jones’ assets. It had the support of the families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School

The Series 10 has the biggest display of any non-Ultra Apple Watch. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge If you happened to miss out on the Apple Watch Series 10’s all-time low Black Friday price, now is a good chance for redemption. The 42mm GPS model of Apple’s latest smartwatch has dropped to $329.99 (about $70 off) at Amazon when you click a coupon. The 46mm GPS Series 10 is also on sale for $359.99 ($70 off) at Amazon with a coupon and matching its lowest price.The Appl

Image: Google I stepped into a room lined with bookshelves, stacked with ordinary programming and architecture texts. One shelf stood slightly askew, and behind it was a hidden room that had three TVs displaying famous artworks: Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon, and Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa. “There’s some interesting pieces of art here,” said Bibo Xu, Google DeepMind’s lead product manager for Project Astra. &ldqu

Here’s what Google’s latest smart glasses prototype looks like. | Image: Google Google is working on a lot of AI stuff — like, a lot of AI stuff — but if you want to really understand the company’s vision for virtual assistants, take a look at Project Astra. Google first showed a demo of its all-encompassing, multimodal virtual assistant at Google I/O this spring and clearly imagines Astra as an always-on helper in your life. In reality, the tech is somewhere betwee

Illustration: The Verge Google has announced an experimental AI-powered code agent called “Jules” that can automatically fix coding errors for developers. Jules was introduced today alongside Gemini 2.0, and uses the updated Google AI model to create multi-step plans to address issues, modify multiple files, and prepare pull requests for Python and Javascript coding tasks in GitHub workflows.
Microsoft introduced a similar experience for GitHub Copilot last year that can recognize an

Illustration: The Verge Google’s latest AI model has a lot of work to do. Like every other company in the AI race, Google is frantically building AI into practically every product it owns, trying to build products other developers want to use, and racing to set up all the infrastructure to make those things possible without being so expensive it runs the company out of business. Meanwhile, Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI are pouring their own billions into pretty much the exact sa

Clash of Clans. | Image: Supercell Google just announced Gemini 2.0, and as part of its suite of news today, the company is revealing that it’s been exploring how AI agents built with Gemini 2.0 can understand rules in video games to help you out.
The agents can “reason about the game based solely on the action on the screen, and offer up suggestions for what to do next in real time conversation,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu write in a blog post

Illustration: The Verge Google has just revealed a new AI tool called Deep Research that lets you call upon its Gemini bot to scour the web for you and write a detailed report based on its findings.
Deep Research is currently only available in English to Gemini Advanced subscribers. If you have access, you can ask Gemini to research a particular topic on your behalf, and the chatbot will create a “multi-step research plan” that you can either edit or approve. Google says Gemini will

TCPi / Aardman Aardman Animation, the studio behind the Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep, and Chicken Run franchises, is working with The Pokémon Company International on a mysterious new project.
In a surprising turn of events, TCPi and Aardman announced today that they’re teaming up for “a special project” that’s set to be released some time in 2027. In a press release about the collaboration, TCP marketing and media VP Taito Okiura describe

Image: The Verge. Photos: Getty Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m David Pierce, editor-at-large of The Verge. As you may have noticed, we’re dropping some extra episodes in the feed this week. You’ll have Nilay back on Friday and for next week, as we run toward the end of the year.
But I’m really excited to be here with you all today because I’m getting to talk about one of my favorite things: podcasts. There’s something strange happening these days in the po

2024 had some stand-out moments in tech: from AI-generated images to TikTok’s near ban, to beigecore, Windows BSOD, the best smart ring of them all, and the list goes on. If you want to see the technology that we just couldn’t ignore, check out our video here.But now, we’re looking toward 2025, and it’s gearing up to be another eventful year. Will we have an actual fulfilling X replacement? Will more health and wellness features be cleared by the FDA on wearables? Will n

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube just released some new stats that show how the service is being consumed on televisions, and the numbers are enormous. Watch time on TV for sports content was up 30 percent year over year; viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts on their TVs every month.This is YouTube we’re talking about, though, so of course the numbers are huge. The living room has been YouTube’s fastest-growing platform for years — Alphabet&rsq

iOS 18.2 is now available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. | Image: Apple Apple announced the release of iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2, adding many new Apple Intelligence features, including Image Playground, Genmoji, and integration with ChatGPT. According to Apple’s press release, the updates are available now, but we’re not seeing them on our (non-beta) devices yet. If you get the update, let us know in the comments.
With Image Playground, users can generate an image fro

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge Apple has released iOS 18.2, and the update adds a bunch of new Apple Intelligence features, including Image Playground, Genmoji, and integration with ChatGPT.With Image Playground, users can generate an image from a prompt or make something based off of one of Apple’s suggestions. However, Image Playground seems to opt for cartoony or stylistic photos instead of photorealistic images, which could prevent potential misuse. And with Genmoji, users can genera

At TNW, we are all about supporting and elevating startups and entrepreneurs who are doing epic stuff with tech. When Red Bull reached out to talk about their innovation competition, my first thought was what on Earth do we have in common with an energy drink company that has people jumping off cliffs and surfing really large waves? Apart from fuelling — in different ways — founders and developers across the world, of course. (Although, I guess, building a company could be considere

A police force in the UK is using Bluetooth tracking wristbands for people with dementia in a high-tech bid to keep them safe.   Starting this month, Avon and Somerset Police will start giving out Bluetooth wristbands for free to families. It’s part of a broader initiative to protect dementia patients, who often suffer from extreme memory loss and confusion as a result of the incurable condition. The wristbands are fitted with Tile, a popular tracking device similar to the Apple