Technology

I’m a chronic oversharer on social media — and usually an intentional one. Mostly, I write about my severe mental health struggles and things that deeply enrage me, but that constant oversharing can be hard to maintain. As much as I post, I delete a lot too, either because posts are too vulnerable, too hurtful, or too likely to spark conflict. It’s hard to know if the defiant overshares are really helping, or if I’m just worried about how a judgmental world will respond. The intimacy of social media can lead us to share a lot, and being vulnerable in those spaces can give us a rare sense of power. The #MeToo movement brought on a flood of women disclosing their experiences with sexual violence and other issues, leading to increased accountability for perpetrators, a deeper sense of communi...

Hacked data stolen from CD Projekt is circulating online, the company says. The studio behind Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 says it can not confirm the exact contents of the data being circulated, but believes it relates to its games, contractors, and both current and former employees. It also warned that the data may have been manipulated or tampered with. The disclosure comes four months after the studio first announced that it had fallen victim to a ransomware attack. It initially said hackers had managed to access “certain data” from the company. CD Projekt posted the ransom note it received in which the hackers claimed to have access to source code from its games including Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, and Gwent. The note also said the hacked data included details relating to its ...

While the PS5’s divisive two-tone design has led some to swap out large pieces of plastic for a more unified look, this month did at least see Sony release some official new color options for the excellent DualSense controller. There are now “cosmic red” and “midnight black” models that might appeal to you more than the black and white default. The black controller doesn’t seem all that interesting, but as a fan of red objects I ordered the red one in to see how it looks in person. The color is actually quite unusual — Sony’s marketing info places the controller in front of a bright red nebula, in keeping with the “cosmic red” name, and it’s a pretty good match. Basically, it’s a little pinker than you might expect, falling somewhere between crimson, ruby, and raspberry. I think it looks g...

Have you even made it as an artist if you’re not singing in a made up language for a Sims game? There’s a proud tradition of popular musicians like Carly Rae Jepsen or Janelle Monáe re-recording songs in Simlish, the in-game language of The Sims, and now, celebrated alternative artist Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner) is joining their ranks with a cover of her single “Be Sweet” for The Sims 4 Cottage Living. Zauner’s track is summer-y and eminently danceable, and it feels just the same underneath a trailer hawking more features for The Sims 4, even with the chorus transformed to “Ya wana baleesh da voo ya wana baleeeeeeeeesh”. It’s also delightfully weird in the way all covers in “Simlish” are — I just love hearing famous musicians sing nonsense! Check out the song in English (with an X...

A lucky 25 customers received Tesla’s redesigned Model S “Plaid” at an event hosted by CEO Elon Musk in Fremont, California on Thursday night. The Silicon Valley automaker has billed this new $130,000 version of the Model S — first announced in January and originally slated to ship in March — as the “quickest production vehicle ever made,” with the ability to go from 0-60mph in under 2 seconds. Its name is a reference to the unthinkable speed beyond “Ludicrous” in the comedy classic Spaceballs. It’s also expected to get around 390 miles of range. (Tesla is selling a less powerful version of the redesigned Model S with more range — 412 miles — that starts at just a hair under $80,000. Deliveries of those start later this year.) Why so fast? “We’ve got to show that an electric car is the bes...

Microsoft is hosting another Summer Game Fest event to give you a chance to play demos of some unreleased Xbox Series X / S and Xbox One games. This year’s event is coming up soon, running from June 15th through June 21st, and there will be more than 40 demos to check out, the company said in a blog post. While Microsoft hasn’t released the full list of games just yet, it has shared a few that you can look forward to. One that I have my eye on is Sable, which looks like a comic from Jean “Moebius” Giraud come to life and takes inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. After years in development, Sable is set to release on September 23rd, and you can see some footage from it in this performance from Thursday’s Summer Game Fest Kickoff live event by Japanese Breakfast, who wr...

Disney is set to launch its standalone Star+ streaming service in Latin America in August, but Starz has filed complaints in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina alleging Disney is infringing on its brand identity and that the soon-to-launch service will only confuse consumers. In an English language translation of the complaints seen by The Verge and previously reported by The Wrap, Starz argues that Disney’s “Star Plus” service — which will host content from Disney, FX, 20th Century Studios and National Geographic, as well as Star originals — sounds too phonetically similar to its own StarzPlay offering also available in the regions where it filed its complaints. Starz, a premium cable offering and streaming app, has been operating under the name since the mid-1990s and now has a presence in 58...

By now, you may have heard that Trump’s Department of Justice secretly seized the phone records of journalists working for The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post, in the hopes of revealing their sources and stopping leaks to the press. But the NYT is now reporting that Trump didn’t stop at journalists — in 2017 and 2018, it forced Apple to cough up metadata on at least two Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, including current chairman Adam Schiff, and as many as a dozen people tied to that committee in total, including family members and at least one child. Like the media outlets, Apple was under a gag order and unable to tell anyone until it expired this year — the only reason we’re learning about this now is because the new administration’s Justice Departmen...

Frontier Communications, an ISP that serves around 3 million subscribers, has been sued by Warner, Sony, and Universal’s record labels for allegedly not taking action against its users who pirate music (via Ars Technica). The record labels allege in their complaint (PDF) that not only did Frontier fail to disconnect people who repeatedly pirated, but it even encouraged them by advertising the ability to “download 10 songs in 3.5 seconds” and profited from the result. The labels also allege that Frontier ignored its subscribers’ piracy so it could keep collecting subscription fees, saying that the ISP valued profit over legal responsibility. Frontier denies wrongdoing, telling The Verge that it has terminated customers when copyright holders complain. The ISP plans to “vigorously defend its...

Elden Ring, the long-awaited action RPG made in collaboration between FromSoftware and writer George R.R. Martin, has finally shown new signs of life. We got a surprise trailer today at the end of the Summer Game Fest Kickoff Live event as well as a release date. January 21, 2022 is when you’ll be able to play it on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and last-gen consoles. Publisher Bandai Namco says the Xbox version of the game will support Smart Delivery, and players who purchase the PS4 version of the game will get a free upgrade to the PS5 version. The first gameplay from the elusive title that was announced during E3 2019 shows plenty of PvE magic and swordplay while traversing through fantastical environments on horseback. I’m sure we’ll see more gameplay in the near future, but this first look...

New Line Cinema and Warner Brothers Animation are working on a new Lord of the Rings movie that’s bound for theaters, with an anime twist (via Variety). The movie will be called The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, and it will cover the history behind the fortress at Helm’s Deep — whose battle is one of the most exciting parts of the entire original trilogy with its exploding walls, shield surfing, and incredible horse stunts. In case you need your memory jogged: [embedded content] Kenji Kamiyama will be directing the movie, and it’ll be interesting to see how well his style maps to a medieval fantasy setting — he’s mostly tackled futuristic sci-fi projects before, including Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, 009 Re: Cyborg, and Netflix’s Ultraman. The movie is being writt...

Last summer, former President Trump cast TikTok as the mascot for the US’s growing concerns over China when he signed a series of executive orders to erase the popular short video platform off app stores. It set off a wave of lawsuits keeping the orders from going into effect but left the door open for a future administration to take more serious action. That’s what President Joe Biden did Wednesday when he signed his own order revoking these Trump-era bans and beginning the process to set new rules for software tied to the Chinese government. Biden’s order laid out a fresh framework for identifying the actual national security risks posed by these apps — a stark contrast with the chaos spurred on by Trump’s individual bans. WHAT IT MEANS Over the last few days, the Biden administration ha...