Telegram CEO breaks silence after arrest

Pavel Durov. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Twelve days after he was arrested in France, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has broken his silence with a 600-word statement on his Telegram account that blames “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”
French authorities had charged Durov with enabling various forms of criminal activity on Telegram, including an unnamed person’s distribution of child sexual abuse material on the platform. An

Illustration: The Verge Instagram might roll out a way to share comments on other Instagram posts to Threads, according to Alessandro Paluzzi, who often reverse engineers Meta’s social media apps to find coming features.
Paluzzi shared an image showing that when commenting on an Instagram post, there could be a new dropdown menu that lets users choose to share the comment only to Instagram or “also share on Threads.”Meta has made a few moves to integrate Threads with its other

Image: Nilay Patel Apple has hiked the price of its battery repair service for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max. Now, it will cost $119 to get your battery replaced in either phone — a $20 jump over its older fee. The price remains the same for the standard and “Plus” models, as do those for last year’s phones, as MacRumors notes.
The company doesn’t seem to have started charging more for other battery replacements yet, but it wouldn’t be unexpected. In 2022, App

The new take on Flappy Bird will include alternate game modes. | Screenshot: The Flappy Bird Foundation Last week, The Flappy Bird Foundation announced a game called Flappy Bird. But while the group has been framing it as the triumphant return of a classic mobile game, Flappy Bird’s original developer, Dong Nguyen isn’t calling it a comeback — in fact, he says he’s not involved at all.
Nguyen posted as much on X (for the first time since 2017!) this morning, saying he did

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge For so many years, the Evernote elephant was a truly iconic logo. Evernote was one of the first productivity apps to embrace smartphones, to enable cross-platform sync, and to make it really easy to store and create almost anything. And so Evernote was huge.
But Peak Evernote was roughly a decade ago. Since then, the product has often felt stagnant (or worse), the company churned through executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning

Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 52, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I swear I don’t always just share absurdly expensive gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been reading about Chappell Roan and college football and the problem with pennies, watching Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist and Jennifer Garner’s delightful AD

Image: Goblinz Publishing Shogun Showdown sometimes breaks my brain. The new deckbuilding roguelike is all about tactics, and a key part of the game is that you can always see what the enemies plan to do next. Every once in a while, that gets me in a quandary where I know I’ll lose. But when things click into place and I clear everyone out in one fell swoop, I feel like a strategic genius.
In the game, which just left early access, you’re constantly trying to position your character

Back in the early 2000s, Estonia was rapidly modernising, shaking off the remnants of Soviet influence. It was ambitiously transforming itself into a digital society with innovations such as e-government and online voting.  And, of course, it gave birth to Skype, the company that would launch the small Baltic nation’s journey towards becoming a startup powerhouse and a “unicorn country.” Since then, Estonia has established itself as a leader in breeding high-profile softw

Adam Driver in a Megalopolis trailer. | Screenshot: YouTube Francis Ford Coppola wanted voice recognition software to let audience members ask Adam Driver’s Cesar character a question during theatrical showings of Megalopolis, according to a Telegraph interview with the director. Then, the software would trigger the theater’s projector to play a clip of “the most relevant response” from Driver.
Apparently, it was actually in the works. Amazon had agreed to make a “c

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore spoke about their continued stay aboard the International Space Station during a press conference held yesterday. The two are now fully incorporated into the ISS crew, as the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that was meant to take them home last week was instead sent back to Earth uncrewed.
Early on, the two were asked if they felt “let down” by Boeing.“Absolutely not,” said Wilmore:
“This operation is not easy. NASA does

A GameCube controller, post-mod. | Image: 8BitDo 8BitDo announced it’s taking preorders for a new mod kit that lets you retrofit a wired GameCube controller with Hall effects joysticks and Bluetooth connectivity. The company is charging $25.98 for the kit, which it says is a simple, solderless mod.
8BitDo has made a few of these in the past for old Nintendo controllers, including those for the N64 and earlier consoles, and now it’s the GameCube’s turn. The kit replaces your con

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge Courtesy of iFixit, a new teardown video of the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold reveals what the repairability advocate organization’s Shahram Mokhtari says is “the most exciting foldable we’ve seen on the iFixit teardown table.”iFixit offers very clear shots of the phone’s internals in the video and its accompanying blog post, along with some very detailed Lumafield CT scans of the foldable. Mokhtari notes in the video that Google is offe

Not included: a desk that’s a country mile wide. | Image: Samsung A running gag here at The Verge and on The Vergecast is that ever since Samsung switched to a six-day workweek for its executives, it’s made some particularly wild decisions — like throwing out its own unique earbud design for glorified Apple knockoffs with light strips. And right now, Samsung will not only sell you its impressive 49-inch Odyssey OLED G9 (G95SC) 49-inch curved ultrawide gaming monitor for $1,099.

Image: The Verge The iPhone 16 lineup has 8GB of RAM, from the base model to the 16 Pro Max, and it’s all thanks to Apple Intelligence. Apple VP of hardware tech Johny Srouji confirmed as much in an interview with Geekerwan, published yesterday, that 9to5Mac spotted.Srouji explained in the interview that “DRAM is one aspect” when it comes to deciding hardware characteristics needed for Apple Intelligence, saying that the feature “led us to believe we need to get to 8GB.&r

A demo of Visual Intelligence from Apple’s iPhone 16 announcement video. | Image: Apple Apple’s new “Visual Intelligence” feature was one of the most impressive things shown at Monday’s iPhone 16 event. The tool lets users scan the world around them through the iPhone’s camera to identify a dog breed, copy event details off a poster, or look up just about anything around them.
It’s a handy-looking feature that fits right in with the iPhone’s new ca

Image: The Verge Disney and DirecTV are back in business with each other after a carriage dispute that has kept ESPN, ABC, and other Disney-owned networks off of the cable provider since the beginning of September. ESPN and other channels Disney had blocked have been restored, giving DirecTV subscribers access, once again, to Monday Night Football, college football games, and other programming from Disney’s channels.
As part of the deal, DirecTV will offer packages that include Disney Plus