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Elon Musk has changed his mind again: he does want to buy Twitter, actually. This, after months of drama! He signaled his intent in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission — but there’s a catch: Twitter has to drop its lawsuit.We understand if you have questions about the whole situation; honestly, we do too. So we talked to some legal experts in hopes that would give us at least a fighting chance at providing some answers. Let’s get into it.First of all, how did we get here?Sigh. This all started after Musk announced that he purchased a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter in April 2022. Twitter promptly offered Musk a seat on the company’s board of directors, an offer Musk initially accepted before changing his mind about a week later.The reason for the change of heart? Musk wouldn't be able to acquire a stake larger than 14.9 percent if he were to stay on the board. He also hinted that he would’ve had to give up his pastime of tweeting about how Twitter sucks. So, Musk’s brilliant solution to this conundrum was to buy all of Twitter in a deal valued at $44 billion.Things went downhill from there. Musk soon accused Twitter of not providing him with adequate information about the number of spam bots on the platform, then claimed this was enough reason for him to back out of the deal altogether. Twitter (understandably) didn’t take too kindly to that and struck back at Musk with a lawsuit demanding that he close the deal.Twitter and Musk were set to duke it out in court on October 17th, but, in typical Musk fashion, on Tuesday, he decided he would go through with his deal to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share after all — if the judge overseeing the lawsuit adjourned the case.So, why doesn’t Musk want to cancel his deal anymore?We can’t get inside Musk’s brain to find out for sure (and frankly, we’re not sure we’d want to), but there are a few things that might’ve made him change his mind. First of all, the pretrial discovery process revealed some embarrassing text messages that showed how the deal imploded and how Elon went from being amped about investing in Twitter to saying that the only way to fix it was to take it over.Musk
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Overwatch 2 launched today — in theory, at least. The game’s servers clicked on this afternoon, but for the last few hours, many people trying to check out its removed 5v5 team shooter action are seeing nothing but this screen.Overwatch 2 “server connection failed...retrying” error screen Image: Richard LawlerAt least some of the issues can likely be chalked up to a “mass DDoS attack” targeted at Blizzard’s servers. “Teams are working hard to mitigate/manage,” Blizzard president Mike Ybarra said on Twitter. “This is causing a lot of drop/connection issues.” Ybarra hasn’t shared an estimate for when the problems may be resolved. Not everyone is locked out, as we’ve seen a bunch of Twitch streamers in matches. But if you’re having trouble getting into a game, this DDoS attack may be part of the reason why.Blizzard is also tracking other known issues and bugs in a forum thread. Some players who have merged PC and console accounts may see an “Unexpected Server
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Pat Gelsinger is the CEO of Intel. I’ve been excited to have this conversation for a very long time — ever since Pat took over as CEO a little over a year and a half ago. Intel is a very important company with a huge series of challenges in front of it. It’s still the largest chip manufacturer by revenue and makes more chips than any other company in the United States.The Intel Pat took over was struggling and losing ground in a variety of markets. But in the past year and a half, Pat restructured the company, turned over almost all of its leadership positions, opened a new line of business that competes with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and makes chips for other companies including Intel’s competitors, and generally tried to reset Intel’s famous engineering culture. He’s also done a lot of handshaking with politicians. Gelsinger lobbied hard for the US to pass the Chips and Science Act, which will put $52 billion in subsidies toward chip manufacturing in the United States — a lot of which will go toward Intel. He’s expanding Intel’s chip fab in Arizona and building new fabs in Ohio and Germany.In addition to that, he’s shipping products: we spoke about Intel’s new GPUs and the roadmap he’s been planning for the future.Pat Gelsinger is the CEO of Intel. Welcome to Decoder.It’s my pleasure to join you today, Nilay.There is a lot to talk about. You just announced some new processors and GPUs at your developer conference. There is the CHIPS Act, which passed back in July. You are also building some new fabs in the United States, most notably in Ohio. Let’s start at the beginning. You have been back at Intel for a little over 18 months now. You had been at the company for a long time before you left, and I don’t think that was the happiest departure for you. You were then the CEO of VMware. Why did you come back to Intel?Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!I joke that I went through puberty at Intel since I started there so young. From age 18, I grew up at the feet of Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore — who I call the Trinity of Intel — and I had deep interactions with all of them. When my wife and I had been approached about joining the board of directors of Intel, we said, “Okay.” We were interviewing and meeting the board, then, just before Christmas, they asked if I would consider being the CEO. I joke that it ruined my Christmas because, all of a sudden, there were all these emotions. “Should we come back? What would it take to turn the company around?” I had written 30 years earlier that I wanted to be the CEO of the company, and I thought that vision was dead many years ago. Fundamentally, the decision boiled down to three things. First was restoring the iconic Intel, the company that I grew up in. Second was believing in Intel being foundational for the technology industry. A healthy industry is part and parcel to a healthy technology future. Third was rebuilding the Western supply chains, fabs, and all the things associated with chips, EU chips, and balance resilience supply chains. Oil reserves defined geopolitics for the last five decades, but technology is more important for the next five decades as every aspect of humanity becomes digital. Everything digital runs on semiconductors, so this is really important to the world. It was really for those three reasons that Linda and I took the dive and said, “We’re going to come back and turn it around.” I say “Linda and I” because anytime you take on an assignment like this, you better have your spouse or significant other aligned with you as well.There is a lot to your answer. There is restoring the iconic Intel, which is really about the engineering culture of the company, and I definitely want to dig into that. Then there’s chips and supply chains, which is really about geopolitics. There is no “United States Strategic National Reserve of chips” — there’s kind of just Intel. That is the answer for a lot of what has been going on lately. As I’ve watched you doing this job, I think there is a lot of pressure and a lot of redefinition for what it means to be the CEO of Intel.Let’s start with the engineering side. When you came back, you gave a big talk, which did go out to the public, but it was very obvious the audience was Intel’s employees and engineers. It was a storming talk about resetting the engineering culture, letting go of some baggage, and reinventing the company. You have now been in charge for a little over 18 months. Were your instincts about that culture correct? Was the biggest problem resetting the engineering culture?It really boils down to two things. First is the culture, the methodologies, and the processes that we were using. Twenty years ago, we had established what was called the tick-tock methodology, a risk-managed cadence of execution, which had been undone when I was gone. It was like, “Why’d we stop? That was super successful. Let’s do it again. Put it back in place.” It’s how we have consistent life cycle management across the company and how we have quality A step tape-outs (the end of the design cycle), move bugs and software emulation. When an A zero goes to fab, there is no reason it can’t go to production. This kind of discipline is data-driven. We had stopped doing OKRs (objectives and key results). People wrote books about that as other companies adopted it. We invented it at Intel, but we stopped doing it.I think most listeners of Decoder think that Google invented OKRs, by the way.Well, guess what? It wasn’t. It was Intel. Go back and read Andy Grove’s book High Output Management about where it first began. A lot of it was, “What’s old is new again.” Engineering, the Valley, so much of the technology has obviously moved on. It’s not like we are just repeating what we had before. Many of the core concepts need to be brought forward, modernized, and reestablished up and down the organization. The other aspect is that we inherited a lot of products in flight. Much has been said about Sapphire Rapids (the codename for Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon server processors) and the difficulties we had in getting that out. That project was started five years ago, so it’s in-flight. I can’t just reset the methodology of a product that began five years ago.It didn’t start well, either. It had way too much complexity in it, with three major new systems, or interfaces, in that design — a new CXL (Compute Express Link), a new PCI Gen 5 (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), and a new DDR5 (RAM) — and there were no backups on any of them. It was like, “How did we take on so much risk and technical challenge in one program?” I can’t undo those products. We have to gut it out and get those finished, even as we are launching the new products on new methodologies with new approaches. So I said, “We have to flush the pipe of those projects. We have to finish them, get them done, and get the quality culture back.” We do this even as we are starting new projects with the disciplined culture that we expect and are going to be executing in the future. “Not only do we have to rebuild the internal culture and execution, but we also have to rebuild our customer’s confidence.”In the middle of that, not only do we have to rebuild the internal culture and execution, but we also have to rebuild our customer’s confidence. In some cases, we have earned our customers’ distrust. We have not executed the quality, the capacity, and the performance that they would expect from Intel’s products.We are re-earning their confidence that they can build their business on us. We have made so much progress in a year and a half, but there is still a lot of work to do. If you ask our top 10 customers, they would say, “Oh, there is a defined shift. They are back to focusing on quality, on engineering, and on giving us transparency on schedules. We are rebuilding our confidence.” That is a lot of work to do for what was largely a lost decade in that respect. That
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Elon Musk will actually buy Twitter — for real this time — at $54.20 a share. Musk confirmed the offer in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In the SEC filing, he says he will “proceed to closing of the transaction” on the terms he negotiated with Twitter in April, as long as the lawsuit Twitter brought against him to force him to close the deal is adjourned.The filing follows reporting from Bloomberg that suggested Musk would close the deal under the original terms he proposed in April before trying to back out of it.On Tuesday evening, Musk tweeted as though he is once again intrigued by the idea of owning Twitter — bots and all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he wrote.“The only thing that’s surprising is that he didn’t manage to knock a dollar off the deal price.”“We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC,” Twitter’s investor relations account said — where else? — on Twitter. “The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.” Musk and Twitter have been battling for months now about the Twitter takeover. After offering to buy the company, Musk tried to cancel the deal, claiming that Twitter had lied about the number of bot accounts on the platform. Twitter sued Musk to try to get him to abide by the contract he negotiated, and a trial date has been set for October 17th.“What’s ultimately strange about it is that it’s the most predictable ending,” says Ann Lipton, a professor of business law at Tulane University. “Of course cases settle before trial, of course cases settle before the deposition of the top guy. The only thing that’s surprising is that he didn’t manage to knock a dollar off the deal price.”That suggests Twitter’s position was really strong, Lipton says. “It looked bad [for Musk] from the very first letter he sent,” she says. “It’s colorful, it’s funny, there are poop emojis, but from a legal perspective nothing here is new.”Eric Talley, a law professor at Columbia University, says he’s also surprised there wasn’t a lowered deal price. On the other hand, i
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Amazon is discontinuing the Amazon Glow, its video calling / interactive gaming device designed to let families interact remotely with each other, as reported by Bloomberg. The device is already unavailable on Amazon’s website.“At Amazon we think big, experiment, and invest in new ideas to delight customers,” Amazon spokesperson Tim Gillman said in a statement to The Verge. “We also continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments. We will be sharing updates and guidance with Glow cus
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According to a report by Karen Weise of The New York Times, Amazon is freezing corporate hiring for its retail business for the remainder of 2022 in an effort to hedge its bets against a rough economic forecast.The hiring freeze includes all corporate and technology positions for Amazon’s retail and operations, which account for the bulk of Amazon sales. However, Amazon’s more profitable cloud computing division won’t be affected. Student hiring and field positions are also exempt from the pause, and Bloomberg notes the warehouse network will not be affected, either.The announcement come
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Rivian made over 7,000 electric vehicles over the last three months and reaffirmed its goal to produce 25,000 vehicles by the end of the year. It was a sign that the company is continuing to rise above its early stumbles as it seeks to dominate the EV market with its beautifully designed emissions-free, adventure-themed trucks and SUVs. The positive production report came on the heels of a less-than-positive update about the buzzy EV startup’s plans to build a $5 billion factory in Georgia. A judge ruled last week that the state’s economic development authority failed to justify the use of taxpayer-funded money to subsidize the project, throwing the whole project into question. A judge blocked a $1.5 billion tax subsidy plan for RivianEarlier this year, Georgia’s state government offered Rivian $1.5 billion in tax incentives for its plan to build a factory east of Atlanta, which the buzzy EV company claimed will cost $5 billion to construct, and eventually produce 400,000 electric vehicles a year and employ upwards of 7,500 workers. Georgia officials called it the largest economic development deal in the state’s history. That plan is now in jeopardy after Ocmulgee Superior Courts Chief Judge Brenda Holbert Trammell ruled that the state failed to prove that the factory is “sound, reasonable and feasible” as required under state law. She also agreed with a group of local residents who oppose the plan that Rivian’s factory shouldn’t be exempt from local property taxes. It was a surprise outcome to what is considered a normally routine request by a local government to validate a bond agreement. Over the past year, Rivian’s plan to build a factory in Georgia has been a “lightning rod” in the state, with The New York Times reporting opponents holding rallies, dabbling in conspiracy theories, and even threatening local officials.Rivian declined to comment on the judge’s ruling, deferring to the state’s economic development council. A spokesperson for the council said the group is exploring its “legal options.” “As the entire country is looking to revitalize and grow domestic manufacturing, protect American jobs, and secure the country’s economic independence, we are disappointed and respectfully disagree with Judge Trammell’s decision,” said Marie Gordon, communications director for the Georgia Department of Economic Devel
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Normally, Prime Day happens but once a year. The retailer has different plans for 2022, however, and plans to hold a Prime Early Access Sale ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Prime members will be able to get in on the deals starting Tuesday, October 11th, through Wednesday, October 12th. Like Prime Day, this is a two-day stretch wherein Amazon Prime members will likely find some of the best prices yet on popular tech products, including video games, peripherals, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, and more.If you plan to shop for Prime Early Access deals on Amazon, you’ll need to sign up for Amazon Prime. However, as was the case for Prime Day, not all of the best deals will live on Amazon. Many other retailers, including Best Buy and Target, will likely be running competing sales events that we’ll tell you all about with our upcoming coverage. So, stay tuned.You can count on us to publish only the best deals, but if you want to be among the first people to know about price drops on products you’re already interested in, you’ll want to get set up with a price-tracking site. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, with their own special features.All of them are free to use, and once you’ve added products that you’re interested in, you can rest easy knowing that you don’t need to take any action until it comes time to make a purchase.CamelCamelCamel tracks the price of every product sold on Amazon and can send you alerts when they reach the price that’s right for you. Once a product reaches the desired price you’ve set or lower, you’ll get an email about it. CamelCamelCamel only works for products on Amazon, however, so you’ll need to use a different one below if you want to track price movement on Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and other retailers.To track prices and get alerts via email, you’ll need to create a free account. Also, I suggest installing the site’s browser extension, called The Camelizer, which lets you see pricing trends on a product-by-product basis and allows you to set your desired price without navigating away from Amazon. It’s fantastic and easy to use.As soon as one of the products falls below the amount set on your price alert, you’ll instantly get an email. And if you already have a wishlist saved on Amazon, you can import it into CamelCamelCamel.Like CamelCamelCamel, the Honey browser extension can track the prices of items that you’re interested in, and it will alert you when it finds a deal. However, unlike the price-tracking site above, Honey will also scour each site you visit for offer codes that can be applied to your checkout total to save you even more money.Honey works with Amazon and many other retailers, and you can add items to your “Droplist,” which is basically just a wishlist. On Best Buy, for example, the option to add an item to your list pops up on the product’s image, and you can select the price watch duration as well as the percentage off you’re looking for.Slickdeals aggregates some of the best deals around the internet, as discovered by its team and community of users. It’
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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been carrying one of the new iPhone 14 models with me as my daily driver. When I’ve met up with friends — blissfully unaware of consumer tech goings-on — they’ll ask how work is going, as a matter of etiquette. At that point, my eyes gleam, and I pull the phone out of my tote bag. “Well,” I say, “I’m testing the new iPhones.” I pause for dramatic effect, and my friend nods politely as I continue. “It has this new feature called Dynamic Island. Here, let me start a timer and show you...” nodding continues but eyes glaze over at this point. “And because the sub-pixel array...” At this point in the presentation, my friend is glancing desperately around the room for a convenient out as I explain how it’s meant to feel like a hardware feature. The reaction when I talk about iOS 16 is very different. My husband got the same iPhone 14 Pro demo — he displayed mild interest — and then I showed him how to copy and paste a photo of our cat just by long-pressing the image. His reaction: “How do I get that?” My husband and most of my friends aren’t what I would call consumer-tech-savvy, but I think even people with a mild interest in mobile technology would agree: this year’s iPhones are boring, but iOS 16 rules. iOS 16 lets you easily copy and paste a photo cutout of your pet and text it to your spouse.That’s the bluntest way to put it. The more nuanced version is that the regular iPhone 14 is boring — the 14 Pro and Pro Max are interesting but more because they’re a kind of blueprint for the future of the iPhone. The Dynamic Island is an interesting solution to some hardware and software problems, which is neat. But it’s not something that’s meant to stand out and call for attention as you use your phone; its job is to seamlessly blend into your experience so you hardly notice it after a while.Until foldables take off in a bigger way, I think that’s just where we are with phone hardware lately: incremental new features that improve the experience of using your device. It’s not supposed to impress or awe you. It’s just supposed to work. New software tricks, though, feel more tangible. A feature that my friends will use every day on the next iPhone they buy in two or three years is mildly interesting; copying and pasting a photo cutout of their cat with the phone they already own is more exciting. Same goes for the always-on display. In a few years’ time, everyone’s new iPhone will probably have one, and it’ll just be something we all get used to. But right now, a new customizable lock screen to show off a photo of your kid is much more impressive.This may seem like an obvious point. After all, pretty much every iPhone owner gets a new iOS version in the fall, while far fewer will get a new iPhone. But it feels more pronounced this year than in recent history. This year’s iPhones feature minor upgrades over last year’s models, while iOS 16 provides more dramatic, dare I say fun, new features than other OS version upgrades in recent history. The new lock screens are fun! Photo cutouts are fun! Editing an iMessage after you sent it is... potentially relati
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Meta will be shutting down its newsletter platform, Bulletin, “by early 2023,” according to a statement emailed to The Verge by spokesperson Morgan White. A report from The New York Times says that Meta sent creators on the platform an email letting them know that the service would be going away.Meta announced Bulletin in June 2021, pitching it as a platform “focused on empowering independent writers, helping them reach new audiences and power their businesses.” The idea was similar to Substack; readers could subscribe to newsletters from writers they liked, and writers could charge money for their work and other perks. Some of the writers that were signed onto the service (Meta manu
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On Thursday, April 14th, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. On April 25th, Twitter accepted the deal. By July 8th, Musk wanted out. Then, Twitter sued Musk. For a while, i
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Today, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of new legislation that would eventually require all mobile phones sold in the EU to use a USB-C port for wired charging. The proposed rules, which lawmakers reached an initial agreement on back in June, mean that Apple is likely to have to remove the decade-old Lightning connector from its phones and switch to USB-C if it wants to continue selling them in one of its most lucrative global markets. The EU’s aim is to reduce e-waste. If more devices are interoperable with the same cables, then the EU thinks fewer electronic devices and chargers will get thrown away. According to its estimates, every year, 11,000 tonnes of disposed
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Apple includes excellent safety features on all its Apple Watch models, but there’s one that's exclusive to the new Apple Watch Ultra: the siren. The siren is designed to draw attention to yourself
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Samsung has announced a five-year plan to expand its production capacity for advanced chips by 2027. The timeline could help the company regain ground from semiconductor giant TSMC.In its Tuesday press release, following an announcement at the annual Samsung Foundry Forum event, Samsung committed to expanding its production capacity for advanced nodes “by more than three times” by the year 2027. The company also plans to introduce a two-nanometer process in 2025 and a 1.4nm process by 2027.The company says it’s responding to “significant market growth in high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), 5/6G connectivity and automotive applications,” which has made “innovation in semiconductor process technology critical to the business success of foundry customers.”“The technology development goal down to 1.4nm and foundry platforms specialized for each application, together with stable supply through consistent investment are all part of Samsung’s strategies to secure customers’ trust and support their success,” Si-young Choi, president and head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. “Realizing every customer’s innovations with our partners has been at the core of our foundry service.” “Realizing every customer’s innovations with our partners has been at the core of our foundry service”Samsung did not, in this announcement, detail concrete plans for specific chips that it plans to build on this process. That’s an important reminder that we may not actually see 1.4nm products on the market in the year 2027. That timeline will depend on other variables, including how quickly Samsung’s customers actually adopt the new transistors. All Samsung is saying here is that it will be ready to take customers to a 1.4nm node at that time. Samsung’s chip arm is currently fighting an uphill battle in a market heavily dominated by TSMC. The firm previously counted Nvidia among its customers — the recent RTX 30 series was based on its 8nm process — but Nvidia has ditched them in favor of TSMC’s 4nm process for its high-end RTX 40 series after Samsung reportedly experienced yield issues. Appl
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When it comes to finding a device to use to read your ebooks, you have a few options to choose from. You can always buy a tablet or use your phone, but those devices are multipurpose and can be used for a ton of things, like surfing the web or doom-scrolling on Twitter. If you are looking for something to strictly read books, e-readers, while niche, are designed to store all of your books in a virtual library with limited functionality. Amazon, one of the pioneers of the e-reader, has dominated the space for years with its ever-expanding Kindle lineup, which consists of several unique models with their own pros and cons. The bulk of the devices function as simple ebook readers; however, with the forthcoming Kindle Scribe, Amazon looks to be moving beyond books and into the realm of writing — something that should allow it to function more akin to physical paper.Below, we’ve listed each Kindle model currently available. Sometimes, there isn’t a deal for one or any of the products, but we’ve mentioned the most recent sale price in those instances. Also, keep in mind that Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale will take place on October 11th and 12th, meaning we may see even steeper discounts on last-gen models or the first price cuts on the latest entry-level Kindle and Kindle
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The past two years have seen relatively quiet flu seasons — a welcome development as hospitals and the public health system focused on managing waves of COVID-19. But experts are expecting flu to make a comeback this winter, and people will need to differentiate between the two illnesses with very similar symptoms. At-home testing companies are asking the Food and Drug Administration to authorize combination tests that can scan for both COVID-19 and influenza in a single sample. Lucira Health asked the agency to sign off on its dual test in May, and Cue Health just submitted its request Tuesday. The FDA authorized a combination test made by Labcorp in May, but that test requires people to swab their nose and mail it to a lab.Having a fast way to differentiate flu from COVID-19 would be particularly useful in figuring out what types of medications to treat people with. Antiviral medications for both diseases have to be given quickly after someone starts feeling sick. If someone has a fever and body aches and tests negative for COVID-19, the extra wait to get a positive flu test might make something like Tamiflu less effective. “We believe delivering a highly accurate at-home test for both COVID-19 and flu can greatly improve access to appropriate therapeutics in the window of time when they are most effective,” Erik Engelson, president and CEO of Lucira Health, said in a statement. Both companies make at-home molecular virus tests, which look for bits of viral genetic material in a sample. They’re more accurate than at-home antigen tests — the type of tests most people use for at-home COVID-19 testing — but they’re also more expensive. Cue’s reader and three tests are over $300, which leaves it inaccessible to many people. Both Lucira and Cue asked the FDA for emergency use authorization of their combination tests — a designation that lets the agency clear tests more quickly during an emergency when other options aren’t available. They might be able to get that type of sign-off because they’re new types of tests. The FDA said in September that it would ask most new COVID-19 tests to go through the normal regulatory pathway but carved out an
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CD Projekt Red (CDPR) is working on more games set in The Witcher and Cyberpunk universes, as well as a brand new franchise that’s being created entirely in-house, the studio announced in a strategy update on Tuesday.Let’s start first with what was announced for The Witcher. CDPR announced what it called a “new saga” in March, and we now know that the first game in what is planned to be a trilogy will be codenamed “Polaris.” The game is set to be developed using Unreal Engine 5. CDPR plans to deliver the games over a six-year period “starting from the release of Polaris,” Adam Kiciński, joint CEO of CDPR, said in a video. There are two other new Witcher games in the works, too. One, referred to as “Canis Majoris,” is a “full-fledged” Witcher title but separate from the new trilogy. It will be developed by an external studio. In Tuesday’s update, CDPR said it is open to working on more games with external partners.The other new Witcher title, codenamed “Sirius,” will have multiplayer gameplay “on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story,” CDPR said in a tweet. Sirius is in development by the Boston-based The Molasses Flood, which CDPR acquired in October 2021. CDPR is also working on the next-gen release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which is set to launch before the end of this year. The next Cyberpunk game is codenamed Orion, “which will take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe,” CDPR tweeted. Orion will be developed by a new studio based in Boston alongside the company’s Vancouver team, which CDPR is collectively referring to as CD Projekt Red North America. (The new Boston studio is separate from The Molasses Flood.) CDPR has previously said that it’s developing a major Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, titled Phantom Liberty, that’s set to release in 2023.CDPR’s new and third major franchise is codenamed Hadar, and it’s very early in development. “The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new settin
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The Connectivity Standards Alliance has released the final Matter 1.0 standard and announced that the certification program is now open. An official Matter launch event is scheduled for November 3rd, but the first Matter devices could show up any day now. Companies can start selling Matter devices or upgrading existing ones as soon as they’re certified. When the idea of Matter was first floated in 2019, there were a lot of people (myself included) who thought it would never happen. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung sitting at a table together and coming up with a plan to fix the fractured smart home? Fierce competitors in the manufacturing space, such as lock makers Yale and Schlage and light makers Philips Hue and GE Lighting, developing a universal standard that would make their prod
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A Russian court fined TikTok 3 million rubles (about $51,000) for failing to delete content on the platform that violates the country’s anti-LGBTQ “gay propaganda” law, Reuters reports. The fines are based on charges that TikTok was promoting “non-traditional sexual values, videos featuring LGBT, feminism, and distorted representation of traditional sexual values,” according to Russian news outlet Interfax. The 2013 law restricts individuals and entities from discussing and promoting LGBTQ rights and has been used to crack down on content online. Russia warned TikTok of the fines in August. Along with the fine on TikTok, Russia also issued a 4 million rubles ($68,000) penalty on Twitch for hosting an interview with Ukrainian adviser to Ukrainian presidential advisor Oleksiy Arest
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The developers at EA revealed a new Dead Space remake gameplay trailer just in time to mark the arrival of spooky season. In the trailer, engineer Isaac Clarke arms himself with all sorts of industrial tools to make bloody work of the vicious Necromorphs that have overrun the USG Ishimura.EA is remaking the 2008 survival horror game, splattering it with a fresh coat of dark and grimy paint. Rebuilt in the Frostbite engine, the dark corners of the haunted spaceship seem even darker, and the enhanced wet squelching noises that come when Isaac curbstomps a Necromorph will undoubtedly send the misophonia sufferers running for the hills. (It’s me, I’m misophonia sufferers.) In a press release, EA shared that this new Dead Space also features additional narrative elements to further, ahem, flesh out the game’s storytelling.The Dead Space remake, due out on Xbox, PC, and PlayStation on January 23rd, comes as the original Dead Space’s co-creator, Glen Schofield, is gearing up to release his own horror game, The Callisto Protocol. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait long past spooky season to play either game.
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One of the neat things about seeing fancy features spread across high-end laptops is the hope that those features will, one day, appear in affordable laptops as well. This year has been the year of the cheap OLED screen in that respect — at least when you look at Asus. The company has been plonking truly incredible screens onto otherwise-unremarkable budget laptops for years, and the new Vivobook S 14X OLED is no exception. This new, $1,099.99 Vivobook targets a more price-conscious audience than Asus’ high-end Zenbook line, with a more utilitarian chassis and a heavier build. The panel is what sets it apart from the sea of identical black notebooks that litter the midrange market. Asus is touting it as the “world’s first 14.5-inch 120Hz 2.8K OLED panel,” which is one of those hilariously specific accolades that Asus loves to crown itself with. But the significant kernel of verisimilitude in there is that this is the closest to a MacBook Pro 14 viewing experience you’re likely to find at this price point.Now, there is not too much else to say about this laptop. Compromises were certainly made throughout the rest of the chassis in order to hit this price, and the high resolution has its downsides in the battery life department. But the $1,099 tag (and there’s an $899.99 model as well, with the same display) is this Vivobook’s saving grace. It has many of the same flaws that we see on other premium OLED machines with powerful processors (quintessentially, Dell’s XPS 13 Plus). But at this price, that package is a lot more reasonable — for a very specific user.This display has everything you’d want. It’s a 16:10 OLED with 2880 x 1800 resolution. That,
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Researchers at Kaspersky have found malware hidden in a modified version of the anonymity-preserving Tor Browser, distributed in a way that specifically targets users in China.According to details published in a blog post on Tuesday, the malware campaign reaches unsuspecting users through a Chinese-language YouTube video about staying anonymous online. During the research period, the video was the top result for the YouTube query “Tor浏览器,” which translates to “Tor browser” in Chinese. Beneath the video, one URL links to the official Tor website (which is blocked in China); another provides a link to a cloud-sharing service that hosts an installer for Tor, modified to include malicious code.Once the file is executed, it installs a working version of Tor Browser on the user’s machine. But the browser has been modified so as to save details of browsing history and any form data entered by the user, which the genuine version of Tor Browser forgets by default.Even more concerning, the malicious version of the browser also attempts to download a further malware payload from a remote server, which the researchers say is only installed on machines with an IP address located in China. When the second-stage malware is installed on a target machine, it retrieves details like the computer’s GUID — a unique identifying number — along with system name, current user name, and MAC address (which identifies the machine on a network).All of this information is sent to a
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Arise, ye art... and get on my wall. Ahem. While Elden Ring is perhaps best known for its epic scale and punishing difficulty, it also happens to be one of the most beautiful fantasy realms I’ve ever explored (with a controller in hand, at least). Now you can bring the dark fantasy world into your living room with a new collection of “museum-grade-quality” Elden Ring prints from Cook and Becker. No longer will your home look maidenless.There are 10 prints in total, featuring everything from the iconic Erdtree to locations like the Academy of Raya Lucaria and one of those always-tempting
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Disney has announced that a new Disney Plus app is now available globally for Sony’s PlayStation 5. Unlike the previous version, which was just a PS4 app running on the newer console, the new software is designed natively for PS5. The key difference for viewers is that Disney Plus now supports 4K HDR playback; the previous app had been limited to 1080p for all this time. That means you can now watch the service’s catalog and recent originals like Andor, Hocus Pocus 2, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law in all their Ultra HD glory. You can download the new PS5 Disney Plus app from the media sect
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Semiconductor company Micron is pledging $100 billion to build a chip factory near Syracuse, New York, the company announced in a press release on Tuesday. Micron says it's the “largest semiconductor fabrication facility in the history of the United States.”The move comes as Micron looks to take advantage of the funding from the Biden administration’s $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act, which was passed in August. As part of the legislation, President Joe Biden is allocating $52 billion in funds to encourage chip companies to build fabrication sites in the US and recently signed an execu
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It’s been nearly 10 years since Windows 8 launched to the world as part of Microsoft’s big tablet push. While we’ve seen two heads of Windows since then, former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has shared some early concept images for Windows 8 in a new video. The images show concepts for the Start menu, multiple monitor support, File Explorer, Internet Explorer, and lots more.Windows 8 development began in the spring of 2010, and Microsoft held an all-team event for the Windows org (around 5,000 people) at the Seattle Convention Center. “This video was played as the meeting ended and the team departed the Seattle Convention Center,” explains Sinofsky. “It is a highlight or sizzle reel of the many months we spent planning the release and all of the inputs into the Windows 8 projec
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Google is previewing a completely new Home app for controlling its smart home devices and the many more gadgets it anticipates people will add to their homes once the new smart home standard Matter arrives. The new app is rolling out initially as a public preview starting in a few weeks, and you can sign up to try it out soon.Anish Kattukaran of Google Nest described the new Home app — which adds a new Favorites page and support for sensors to trigger automations and brings over the camera interface from the Nest app — as “the single best place to set up, control, and automate Nest devices and every Matter device.” The new Google Home app arrives on Wear OSThe company’s also bringing Google Home to the web later this year, allowing you to view Nest camera and doorbell feeds from
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Google has finally released its long-awaited successor to the Nest Hello video doorbell. The new Nest Doorbell (wired, 2nd gen), which was first teased last year, costs $179.99 and is available now at retailers such as Best Buy and at the Google Store.A wired version of Google’s Nest Doorbell (battery), the new Nest Doorbell is meant for homes with existing doorbell wires. A wired doorbell doesn’t need to be recharged frequently, although if the power goes out, it won’t record video, unlike its battery-powered counterpart. The design of the new doorbell is almost identical to the existing battery version; it’s just slimmer and, at 5.2 inches tall, about an inch shorter. It comes in the same four colors as the Nest Doorbell (battery): white, beige, gray, or green. It also costs the
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Xiaomi has officially announced its flagship smartphone lineup for the second half of the year — the Xiaomi 12T and 12T Pro. The latter is notable for being the first Xiaomi phone to make use of Samsung’s 200-megapixel HP1 camera sensor, while the non-Pro version “only” has a 108-megapixel camera. In mainland Europe, both phones will be available on October 13th, with the 12T starting at €599 and the 12T Pro starting at €749. Meanwhile, in the UK, both phones will be available on October 20th. The 12T will start at £499, while the 12T Pro will start at £699. Xiaomi is offering early bird pricing on both handsets between October 20th and the 24th, which reduces the starting price of the 12T to £399 and the 12T Pro to £599. Both are unlikely to be available in the US given t
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YouTube is running a test that places its 4K videos behind a YouTube Premium subscription. In recent weeks, some users have reported seeing playback of 2160p resolution video restricted with text labeling it as a premium feature. YouTube has since confirmed via Twitter that those seeing the new restrictions were part of an experiment to better understand the feature preferences of Premium and non-Premium viewers.It isn’t clear if YouTube will actually restrict all non-Premium users to 1440p video quality, and the company is direct users to leave feedback on the restrictions in order for the Google subsidy to “make improvements.” Google did not provide further clarification when contacted by The Verge for comment.A YouTube Premium subscription will set you back $11.99 per month in the
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Skip to main content / Overwatch 2 starts at 3PM on the East Coast. Other regions might have to wait until early October 5th. Oct 3, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC|BlizzardAs the servers for Overwatch prime sunset sometime around 12PM ET today, heroes old and new are now looking forward to when we can officially welcome Overwatch 2. Image: BlizzardDepending on where you are in the world, your Overwatch 2 launch time may vary from the 12PM PT / 3PM ET start time. London and Paris will get their game late on October 4th, while Seoul and Sydney will get access early on October 5th. If you’re an Overwatch prime player or purchased an Overwatch 2 Watchpoint Pack, you have the ability to preload Overwatch 2 on your PC right now. Unfortunately, console players will have to wait until 9AM PT on October 4th f
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Google has released this month’s Pixel security patch, and as Android Police points out, it’s the last one that the Pixel 4 and 4 XL are scheduled to receive. By no coincidence, the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro are set to be announced later this week. (When one device’s software support window closes, another one opens.)While the more recent Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6A all come with a promised five years of security updates, the Google Pixel 4 and 4 XL launched in 2019 with three years of guaranteed security updates. This isn’t necessarily the very end of the road for the Pixel 4 since Google tends to issue one final security patch for end-of-life devices a bit after the official support window has closed. More than anything, it’s kind of symbolic: closing one chapter for an earlier Pixel device
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The Federal Communications Commission is threatening to block calls from voice service providers that have yet to take meaningful action against illegal robocalls.On Monday, the FCC announced that it was beginning the process to remove providers from the agency’s Robocall Mitigation Database for failing to fully implement STIR/SHAKEN anti-robocall protocols into their networks. If the companies fail to meet these requirements over the next two weeks, compliant providers will be forced to block their calls.“Fines alone aren’t enough”“This is a new era. If a provider doesn’t meet its obligations under the law, it now faces expulsion from America’s phone networks. Fines alone aren’t enough,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement on Monday. “Providers that
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The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support to LGBTQ-plus youth, will cut ties with student-focused monitoring software company Gaggle after the partnership sparked backlash from activists. The organization began listing Gaggle as a “corporate partner” on its website in May, according to a report from The 74, and took what it’s since confirmed to be a $25,000 donation. Gaggle still has The Trevor Project listed as a resource for LGBTQ students in multiple areas of its website.Gaggle makes and markets software products purporting to review students’ online behavior in school-issued accounts and, using machine learning technology, flag “concerning content” for their districts. Items that its products can monitor, per Gaggle’s website, include everything from em
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The latest trailer for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shows a kingdom in mourning with the passing of King T’Challa (played by the late Chadwick Boseman) and opens with Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) holding the Black Panther’s helmet. It also gives us a closer glimpse at a new underwater nation, called Talokan, led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta), a “feather serpent god,” along with a look at Dominique Thorne in Iron Man-style armor that suggests a major role for Ironheart in this flick. It closes with a shot of a new Black Panther without telling us who is in the suit, but from the poster and what’s shown in the trailer, you can probably make a guess.Black Panther: Wakanda Forever follows Queen Ramonda, Shuri (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and the Dor
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