Technology

Mike Parson, Governor of Missouri, does not understand how websites work. He held a press conference earlier this week in St. Louis to once more reiterate his desire to prosecute a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist for looking at the source code of a state-run website. In October 2021 reporter Josh Renaud reported that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website source code had exposed the social security numbers of over 100,000 school teachers, administrators, and counselors. He published the story only after he’d reported the problem to the state and the vulnerability had been resolved. Parson and the DESE were apparently not grateful for the alert and immediately accused Renaud of “hacking” the DESE website. Missouri Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven sent a letter...

Starting today, eligible US residents can apply for help with their internet bills under the new Affordable Connectivity Program. The program launched today with $14.2 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law passed in November. Households can apply to take up to $30 a month off their internet service bill. For households on qualifying Tribal lands, the discount is up to $75 per month. The program could help to connect millions of people to the internet who haven’t had access to it at home, especially in communities that have historically faced more barriers to getting online. Almost a third of people living on Tribal lands lacked high-speed internet at home in 2017, according to a report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That’s compared to just 1.5 percent of city-dwel...

Devastating fires in Colorado cap off a year of awful drought across the US. Dry conditions helped set the stage for blazes that scorched hundreds of homes and forced tens of thousands to evacuate just ahead of New Year’s Eve. The fires have been raging through suburbs near Denver since December 30th. Strong winds fanned the flames and knocked out power. About 6,000 acres and at least 500 homes had burned by Friday morning. But there were no casualties, which Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle called “miraculous” given the severity of the fire in a press briefing. Families had “minutes” to evacuate their homes, Governor Jared Polis said. More than two-thirds of Colorado’s land is experiencing “severe” drought, according to the US Drought Monitor. Officials suspect that downed power lines mig...

Apple is sending independent auditors to investigate an iPhone assembly facility in India, after poor working and living conditions at the plant prompted workers to go on strike. The facility in southern India is operated by longtime Apple partner Foxconn. An investigation by Reuters found that women working at the plant were laboring in extremely difficult conditions, forced to sleep on the floor in crowded dorms and sharing toilets without running water. Recently, an outbreak of food poisoning left 150 individuals hospitalized, prompting workers to strike and shut down the plant on December 18th. In response, Apple says it’s put the plant on “probation” (though the company hasn’t said what this means for Foxconn or the workers who assemble its iPhones). The plant employs some 17,000 peop...

With the advent of platforms like the Oculus Quest 2, VR has never been more accessible. Setups that once required a massive commitment of time and resources — not to mention space — have become remarkably easy to use. While the Oculus Quest 2 is one of the more popular options when it comes to VR headsets, we’ve included titles that use HTC Vive, Steam VR, and Oculus Rift headsets as well. Once you get past the fact that you’re going to look silly, no matter what game you’re playing, you’re bound to have a great time with our list of the best titles you can play with your VR headset of choice. While the majority of our top picks for this year are available on all VR headsets, there are some notable exceptions. If you’re wondering if a game will work with your particular headset, we’ve out...

Illustrations by Alex Castro, photography by Philip Cheung & Richard Vogel This is an absolutely bonkers story literally about sex, drugs, and podcasting. A house rented in Beverly Hills meant to be a creative hub for podcasts was crushed under its weight and turned into a mismanaged party house. This story already had a great deal of strong visuals. Philip Cheung’s photography of Norm Steele is seriously stunning. Richard Vogel’s photos paint such a vivid picture of what a party at the house is like. We had decided early on we wanted an illustration, however, as the lead art. While we had the idea of showing the house falling apart, it took a few iterations and changing of hands to really capture the tone correctly. Ultimately, Alex Castro did such a fantastic job, especially with the...

It’s New Year’s Eve, and while that means we are very soon waving goodbye (and good riddance) to the year 2021, it just wouldn’t be special enough day without a selection of great tech deals from your friends at Verge Deals. This has certainly been a jam-packed year full of, well, chaos, but also some great gadgets and worthwhile savings that help you save some coin along the way. While we can’t wait to bring you even more in 2022, let’s not get ahead of ourselves too quickly. Below, we’ll highlight some of the best deals for you in the world of tech. Starting us off, there is no better bang-for-the-buck tablet on the market for most people than Apple’s latest base-model iPad. The 10.2-inch model mostly stands alone in terms of the price-to-performance ratio while also having such an expan...

BlackBerry‘s time has finally come to an end. According to a new report from Liliputing, the company will be shutting down support for both its BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry PlayBook OS, effectively rendering your mobile and tablet devices defunct. As of January 4, 2022, the two operating systems will cease some of their core functions, including making phone calls, text messaging, or even emergency calls to 9-1-1. BlackBerry says that WiFi and mobile data may also become “unreliable,” with apps like BlackBerry Link, BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Protect, BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry Blend and BlackBerry Desktop Manager all having “limited functionality.” The announcement probably doesn’t come as a surprise, given that the company had already closed down its app store back in 2019 a...

OpenSea has banned two NFT collections that take images of Bored Ape Yacht Club designs, flips them and mints them as NFTs. The two collections are similar not only in name but also in that they use the same Bored Ape source images in their pursuit of challenging copyright laws. One of the groups, called Phunky Ape Yacht Club (PAYC), launched earlier this month and said Bored Ape Yacht Club had become “a flex for rich douchebags mostly.” PHAYC, a play on the word “fake,” launched later in December with the tagline “PHAYC it til you make it.” “I think the project is a satirical take on the current state of NFTs and members of the NFT community who might be taking the NFT market a little too seriously,” one PHAYC community member told Coindesk. PAYC is currently listed on NFTtrade.com, ...

The rollout of the first major update for Google’s Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro has been slow and plagued by reports of problems. Now the company says it paused releasing the December 2021 update to investigate reports of calls dropping and disconnecting. The news arrived in a post on the Google Support forums (via Droid-Life) that says a new version with all the previously announced features and a fix for the disconnection issue should be ready by late January. If you’re not having any problems, then you can keep using the new software for now, but for those afflicted by the connection issues, Google only suggests reverting and factory resetting your device as an option. Hey Pixel Community, The Pixel team paused the December software update to Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro devices after some users ...

A pair of non-fungible token projects are testing the boundary between plagiarism and parody. Digital marketplace OpenSea has banned the PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club (or PAYC) collections, both of which are based on the same gimmick: selling NFTs with mirrored but otherwise identical versions of high-priced Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars. Now the dueling projects are selling their apes while dodging bans from other marketplaces, becoming the latest example of how the NFT world handles copied art. Bored Ape Yacht Club (or BAYC) NFTs are some of the most expensive crypto art assets — they recently overtook CryptoPunks as the highest-priced NFT avatars with the cheapest available ape selling for $217,000. Like other avatars, though, anybody can technically copy or modify the associated ape p...