Technology

WhatsApp won’t be adopting Apple’s new Child Safety measures, meant to stop the spread of child abuse imagery, according to WhatsApp’s head Will Cathcart. In a Twitter thread, he explains his belief that Apple “has built software that can scan all the private photos on your phone,” and said that Apple has taken the wrong path in trying to improve its response to child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Apple’s plan, which it announced on Thursday, involves taking hashes of images uploaded to iCloud and comparing them to a database that contains hashes of known CSAM images. According to Apple, this allows it to keep user data encrypted and run the analysis on-device while still allowing it to report users to the authorities if they’re found to be sharing child abuse imagery. Another prong of A...

Microsoft is working on a new night mode for Xbox consoles. The software giant has started testing this night mode with Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring today, and it allows Xbox owners to dim their screens, controller LED brightness, and even the Xbox power button. The night mode has a lot of customization, including different dimming levels and an optional blue light filter. Microsoft is also allowing Xbox owners to dim the LED brightness on their controllers in this night mode and dim the Xbox power button light or turn it off. You can also set an Xbox to switch to the system dark mode and disable HDR when the night mode is enabled. The Xbox night mode lets you dim a controller LED brightness. This Xbox night mode can also be set to a schedule, either a manual one or an automa...

Spotify still hasn’t added AirPlay 2 support to its iOS app — but despite the delay, it’s still “working to make [it] a reality,” the company tells The Verge. Some doubt was cast on AirPlay 2 inclusion when MacRumors spotted a forum post where a Spotify forum moderator claimed that “audio driver compatibility issues” might mean the feature wouldn’t be added for the foreseeable future. Spotify now claims that’s wrong. The Verge received the following statement from Spotify regarding AirPlay 2: A post on one of Spotify’s Community pages contained incomplete information regarding our plans for AirPlay2. Spotify will support AirPlay2 and we’re working to make that a reality. AirPlay 2, added as part of iOS 11 update, introduced multiroom audio, Siri voice control, and fairly broad support acro...

CryptoPunks — a collection of 10,000 unique characters on the Ethereum blockchain — and similar digital assets can now be “rented” and “lent” out through a new non-fungible token (NFT) rentals protocol called reNFT. reNFT has created a licensing service that allows CryptoPunk owners to sign a transaction giving borrowers the right to display the CryptoPunk avatar as their own for a specified time period of up to 99 days. ?WE ARE LIVE ON ETH MAINNET? You can now LEND and RENT #NFTs!?https://t.co/YKH1EQzwEE Join us in our Discord to watch us walk through the platform and answer any questions!⚡️ THANK YOU all for your support to this point and beyond, a big milestone for our entire team! pic.twitter.com/ldockBzI7c — reNFT (@renftlabs) July 23, 2021 “This transaction follows the ...

I have held the Steam Deck, and I’m nearly a believer. Not quite, but I like what I see. Three weeks after PC gaming giant Valve surprise-announced its own $400 portable game console, I flew to the company’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, for a whirlwind tour of the company’s latest prototypes — and a chance to compare them to the Nintendo Switch and an earlier AMD-powered handheld gaming system, the Aya Neo. I logged in with my Steam account, picked up The Witcher 3 and Control right where I left off weeks or months ago on my desktop gaming PC, and chewed through a few demons in Doom Eternal with thumbsticks, precision touchpads, and gyroscopic aiming. While I didn’t get answers to burning questions like how seamlessly you can install your own games, how the model with slower eMMC ...

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued its first charges against the decentralized finance industry Friday, accusing two people of illegally selling over $30 million of securities in unregistered offerings. The SEC’s Friday order found that two executives from the Blockchain Credit Partners company used the Ethereum blockchain to sell cryptocurrencies to investors while misleading them about the company’s profitability. Specifically, investors purchased cryptocurrencies using digital assets like ether. The company then promised to pay investors over 6 percent in interest and that the funds would go toward physical investments like car loans to create additional income. The SEC determined that these “real-world” investments wouldn’t generate the income advertised. “Full and honest di...

The Federal Communications Commission has launched a new map designed to show consumers what kind of cellular coverage they can expect in a given area from AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon. It’s been a long time coming, and it looks like an improvement over the agency’s past attempts to show gaps in the nation’s broadband coverage, which were woefully inadequate and inaccurate. As Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel pointed out on Twitter, it shouldn’t have taken this long for this map to be available. The law requiring that these maps be made, known as the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act, was signed in March 2020, and the lack of details about broadband coverage has created confusion about the so-called digital divide for years. It’s also ...

Razer announced today that its lit-like-a-gaming-PC N95 mask has a new name and a beta program set up ahead of the planned fourth quarter launch. The futuristic-looking Project Hazel has been christened the Razer Zephyr, and you can sign up to be a beta tester right now on Razer’s site. Razer has not provided any additional information on the timing of the Zephyr’s release or when beta testers can expect to receive their masks. Based on the video Razer shared alongside its announcement, beta testers might get a different mask design from what’s been shared up until this point. [embedded content] The Zephyr seems a tad wider and rounder than Razer’s original Project Hazel, and there’s a grille at the bottom of the mask that’s a lot more visible than previous images and photos have shown. It...

Gaming monitors can be a very expensive component of building or upgrading your PC. If you don’t want to shell out $500 or more, Best Buy has an attractive deal on a monitor that ticks a lot of boxes for the cost. LG’s 27-inch UltraGear costs $300 at Best Buy and Amazon, down from $400, and it has a 1440p IPS panel with a 144Hz refresh rate and fast 1ms response time. For adaptive sync, it has both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility. It has slim bezels with up to 350 nits of brightness for its display. Around its back, there are two HDMI 2.0 ports and a DisplayPort 1.4 port. If you’re ready to make the jump from 1080p to 1440p, this seems like a fantastic monitor at the right price. It doesn’t have HDMI 2.1 ports, but according to review site Rtings, it has variable refre...

The pandemic-delayed return of Netflix’s flagship nostalgia series Stranger Things has a release window: 2022. A brief teaser (stick around for a few new frames near the end) promises that “it” is almost here. While today’s news fulfills director Shawn Levy’s promise from the Free Guy press tour that we would know more about Stranger Things before that video game movie is released, it doesn’t go far into spoiler territory but wait, who is that holding the flamethrower? Maybe that’s for the best? There’s something to look forward to, albeit three years after the third season premiered. Season 3 set Netflix viewing records (at the time), as the streamer said more than 40 million accounts watched within four days of its release. If you can’t wait another five months or more to see how tall Wi...

Perhaps the most emblematic image of Netflix’s take on The Witcher is Henry Cavill as Geralt, giant shoulders sunken, muttering a raspy “fuck” as he realizes the depths of the problem in front of him. Geralt’s gruffness is a big part of the appeal of The Witcher, as his down-to-earth nature stands in contrast to many other fantasy stories full of royalty and long-prophesied saviors. He’s not out to be a hero; he’s just here to do a job. Saving the world just seems to happen whether he wants to be involved or not. When it came time to create The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, a prequel that stars Geralt’s mentor Vesemir, producer and screenplay writer Beau DeMayo knew he wanted a very different kind of character. Across video games, books, and a live-action show, we’ve seen plenty of the W...