Technology

EVgo is changing how it prices the electricity that gets doled out on its electric vehicle charging networ, and is launching a nationwide rewards program for its customers. Starting in September, the company will start offering three ways to pay for charging on its network across the country. There’s the typical pay-as-you go option, which has the highest price-per-minute of charging and requires a $1.99 fee for each charging session. There’s a basic membership program that requires $4.99 per month of pre-payments toward charging, but which waives the session and (in most locations) offers per-minute rates that cost a few cents less. And now there’s a higher-tier $6.99 per-month subscription plan called EVgo Plus that drops the session fees and offers even more affordable pricing, and waiv...

Apple has updated Safari’s design in the latest iOS 15 beta (Developer Beta 6), making the address bar look and act more like what users are used to and giving you the option to put it at either the top or bottom of the screen. Safari’s redesign, especially on iPhones, has been controversial since it was first announced, but it seems like Apple is starting to walk back the floating design that’s persisted throughout the beta. MacStories founder and podcaster Federico Viticci has posted screenshots of the new design on Twitter, showing off the changes. If the user chooses to have the address bar on the bottom, it sits above a row of controls, including back and forward buttons, a share button, and the tab button. (In previous versions of the beta, these buttons were one with the address bar...

For over a year, Anti-Defamation League researcher Daniel Kelley has been finding re-creations of a horrific mass shooting on Roblox — and every time he looks, he says he finds more. Kelley told The Verge it’s happened three times: first in January 2020, then again in May 2021. The most recent incident came on August 13th, as he was preparing a presentation on how to report offending content. “I would like one time,” Kelley said on Twitter after the last incident, “to search for ‘Christchurch’ on Roblox and not find a new recreation of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting on a game platform aimed at very young children.” The mosque shooting, which killed more than 50 people, has been condemned as one of the most violent single acts of religious hatred undertaken in recent years. In the wa...

Google is offering a new promotion to YouTube Premium subscribers — three free months to try the games included in Stadia Pro, as long as you’re a new subscriber (via 9to5Google). While there’s a chance someone willing to pay to remove ads from YouTube may have already messed around with Stadia, three months is a solid amount of time to see if cloud gaming makes sense for you, and it’s two months longer than Stadia’s usual free trial. The deal comes with a few caveats, naturally. Besides limiting the free months to new subscribers, Google is also only offering the promotion in the following countries: the US, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. You can claim the offer until January 31st, 2022, and you h...

Google is revealing a phone this year where it’s pulling out all the stops and going big on a cutting-edge, in-house designed SoC, upgraded camera specs, and a bold new look. That phone is not the Pixel 5A. If those kinds of show-stopping improvements are what you’re looking for, then I’d like to point you to the Pixel 6, coming this fall. The new Pixel 5A on the other hand, is kind of a boring update by comparison. The screen is a bit bigger this time around, there’s an IP rating for water resistance, and the battery gets a decent boost. That’s about it. Here’s the thing, though: the Pixel 4A and 4A 5G were already really good midrange phones, and rather than messing with a winning formula, Google has made some strategic tweaks to keep the 5A at the top of its class. Even better, the 5A c...

Google has officially revealed the Pixel 5A 5G, a phone it kind of announced in April to contradict rumors that it had been canceled. It comes with a short list of updated features compared to its 4A 5G predecessor, including a slightly bigger screen, a much bigger battery, and an IP67 rating for water resistance. Few though they may be, these are some important tweaks to an already good midrange phone, and the best part is that the price has gotten smaller: in the US it will cost $449, which is $50 less than the Pixel 4A 5G’s introductory price. The 5A goes on sale in the US and Japan on August 26th. The 5A supports wired charging only, and Google says it’s the last Pixel phone that will ship with a charger in the box.Image: Google The Pixel 5A’s screen gets a slight boost to 6.34 inches,...

Google is the latest manufacturer to bid farewell to the in-box charging brick, saying it expects the Pixel 5A will be the last phone to include one. That means the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro won’t include one when they arrive this fall. The company says that most people already have a USB-C charging brick, so there’s no longer a need to include one with its phones. Apple and Samsung made similar arguments when they announced they would no longer be offering an in-box charger. That may be true, but it’s likely that the cost savings of not including a charger played a big role in those decisions. Google says it expects the Pixel 5A to be the last phone to include the charger.Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge There’s also an environmental argument for ditching the charger: fewer redundant ch...

Social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are coming under new scrutiny for the way they treat Taliban accounts, as the militant Islamist group emerges as the dominant power in Afghanistan in the wake of the US withdrawal. While none of the platforms have publicly changed their policies on the group, moderation practices have come under close scrutiny, and many are shifting resources to ensure the policies are appropriately enforced. A particular question raised by The Washington Post is whether the group will be allowed to wrest control of the official Facebook and Twitter accounts for the government of Afghanistan. While the Taliban has seized effective control over the government, granting access to official accounts could be seen as legitimizing their control over the c...

Mastercard is phasing out the use of magnetic stripes on its credit and debit cards over the next decade, as the industry moves towards more secure or convenient alternatives like chips and contactless payments, the company has announced. It says it will be the first payments network to phase out the technology, which dates back to the 1960s. Mastercard says the transition will start in 2024, when the stripe will no longer be required on new cards in regions like Europe where chip cards are already widely used. In the US, where the adoption of chip payments has been slower, the transition will start in 2027. From 2029, no new Mastercard debit or credit cards will come with a magnetic stripe, and they’ll be gone completely by 2033. The magnetic stripe was invented in the 1960s Magnetic stri...

Gigabyte is offering a return and exchange service for two of its power supply units (PSUs), following complaints that the products were “exploding” or failing. PSU reviewer Aristeidis Bitziopoulos and Gamers Nexus both found that Gigabyte’s GP-P850GM and GP-P750GM models could fail catastrophically, with some sparking and others arriving dead out of the box. These models had been the subject of many negative reviews on Newegg, and were previously part of a forced bundle with RTX 30-series cards. After spending months testing the two PSUs, Gamers Nexus found a surprisingly high rate of failures. Out of the PSUs that Gamers Nexus sourced from YouTube viewers or purchased, 50 percent of the GP-P750GM failed. Gamers Nexus even managed to fry a Gigabyte RTX 3080 card during its testing, althou...

OnlyFans is a juggernaut of NSFW content, but its abundance of nudity has stopped the platform launching as an app on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Now, though, the company is pushing a new app available on iOS and Android called OFTV. It features many regular OnlyFans creators but the content is strictly safe-for-work. The app has been in development for a while and launched back in January, but OnlyFans is only now promoting it, according to a report from Bloomberg. It’s part of the company’s attempt to move beyond adult content and position itself as a neutral platform like Patreon, allowing entertainers, musicians, and creators to monetize their relationships with fans. “There’s no adult content on OFTV” “OFTV provides a super convenient way for fans to watch content from ...