Technology

Last month, The Verge broke news of Mark Cuban and Falon Fatemi’s new app Fireside, which promises to deliver a “next-gen podcast platform,” and today, we can provide a better sense of the app’s functionality and interface. It’s currently in beta on iOS with a limited number of testers, most of whom appear to work in venture capital or as podcasters. However, their chats are visible to anyone, even non-users, through a browser, and from this desktop view, as well as screenshots of the app that The Verge has viewed, we can get a sense of what Fireside is trying to achieve. Broadly, the app is best described as a hybrid between Spotify’s Anchor software and Clubhouse. Although it prioritizes live conversation, like Clubhouse, it tries to make off-the-cuff conversations sound more professiona...

When my editor told me about Window’s built-in battery report, my first thought was: “How have I never heard of this before? Also, that sounds pretty useful!” So I looked at the guide he sent (from Laptop Magazine) and tried it out. It ended up being just as interesting as it sounded, so I figured I’d share, in case you also haven’t come across this handy built-in tool. Windows has been keeping track of how your laptop’s battery is doing since it was installed. The report, which you can run using just two command prompt commands, will show how many cycles you’ve used on your battery and how it’s been used in the past three days. It will also give you a picture of what Windows estimates your battery life should be versus what it actually is. So if you’re curious about your battery sta...

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is suing AT&T for providing nonpublic information to 20 different analyst firms so they would lower revenue estimates ahead of earnings, according to a press release. That let AT&T “beat” expectations for the quarter when the information-sharing took place, turning what could have been some nasty headlines in the financial press into a win instead. According to the SEC’s complaint (PDF), AT&T learned in March 2016 that its quarterly results would fall short of estimates due in part to “a steeper-than-expected decline in smartphone sales.” As you might recall, we used to live in a world where carriers like AT&T subsidized part of the cost of your smartphone, but by then AT&T had passed that cost along to the customer — whic...

The Verge lives on news, and Jay Peters is one of the news writers who keeps it going — searching out the latest info about what’s going on in technology, entertainment, and culture, and writing it up for the site. As with the rest of us, Jay has been doing most of his work from home over the last year — here’s how he manages it. Tell me a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge? I’m a news writer here at The Verge, and I’m fortunate to get to cover all sorts of things in tech, gaming, entertainment, and more. On any given day, I might write about things like the iPhone 13, Pokémon gadgets, Marvel movie titles, Fortnite skins, or even the Monopoly Longest Game Ever edition. I had a bit of a roundabout path to this job. Out of college, I worked in tec...

Paramount Plus is maybe one of the best streaming services for people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are looking to get nostalgic about the television of their youth. Outside of that, Paramount Plus is a bit of a head-scratcher. There certainly seems to be a bunch to choose from, but with missing seasons, incomplete film collections, and no immediate “must watch” TV or movie options, the question is still why would anyone sign up for this right now? The good thing is that Paramount Plus’ positives are hard to deny, but most of those positives fall on the TV side. As someone in their late 20s who grew up on a hearty breakfast of Nickelodeon shows, MTV reality series, and crime procedurals, Paramount Plus has everything I would have wanted a decade ago. Last night, I watched a bit of All Tha...

In Hades, the legendary Greek hero who killed the Minotaur, Theseus, is a pain in the ass. He’s a bossfight, a blowhard who treats each encounter like an overproduced wrestling match. Zagreus, the cool, collected prince of the Underworld, may have good reason to want to leave, but in Theseus’ eyes, he’ll never amount to more than hellspawn. This dynamic helped highlight just what made Zagreus, Hades’ protagonist, a fan-favorite. But in early versions of the game, Theseus’ role was reversed. Theseus is hero material in legend only, a sentiment that developer Supergiant Games eventually came to share. During a recent talk on Clubhouse, Supergiant co-founder Amir Rao said that early concepts for Hades starred Theseus. It was creative director Greg Kasavin who flipped the Hades pitch into the ...

I don’t usually work with any music — it often distracts me — but recently, when I’ve needed a little music on in the background, I’ve become obsessed with lo-fi remixes of video game music on YouTube. I’ve already gone on record that I sometimes listen to video game music while working because a) I’m a huge nerd, and b) a lot of video game music is already designed to be pleasant background noise that can loop endlessly without becoming annoying. It wouldn’t be all that much fun spending hours upon hours in the worlds of Pokémon if the music was always in-your-face and distracting, after all. (I will give Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire’s hilariously prominent horns a pass here.) It makes sense, then, that the infinitely listenable quality of video game music, much of which has become seared to...

Tim Wu — the Columbia law professor who coined the term “net neutrality” — is joining the Biden administration, where he’ll be working on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council. Happy to say I’m joining the Biden White House to work on Technology and Competition Policy at the National Economic Council. Putting this twitter feed on hold for now — so long! — Tim Wu (@superwuster) March 5, 2021 Wu is a prominent voice online, as one of the most well-known advocates for a free and open internet. He’s spent years arguing for the concept of net neutrality — the idea that the internet should be free of throttling or control from the government or companies that provide it. He’s also been a prominent voice in recent years on the subject of antitrust regulati...

Amazon has always tried to push its Alexa-enabled smart speakers as a platform, boasting about the number of third-party “skills” available (more than 100,000 in the most recent count). In our experience, the majority of these skills are useless gimmicks; one-note jokes you install and forget about. But it turns out they might pose a privacy threat, too. The first large-scale study of privacy vulnerabilities in Alexa’s skill ecosystem was carried out by researchers at North Carolina State and Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. They found a number of worrying issues, particularly in the vetting processes Amazon uses to check the integrity of each skill. Here’s a quick summary of their findings: Activating the wrong skill. Since 2017, Alexa will automatically enable skills if users ask the r...

Eight weeks and nine episodes later, WandaVision has come to an end. It may not have delivered the bang some fans were expecting, but there is still plenty of story that WandaVision sets up for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s fourth phase. Before we get into that, the biggest question is whether WandaVision nailed the ending. Like too many third acts within the MCU, big, splashy CGI fights in lieu of more nuanced storytelling can sometimes get in the way of providing a satisfying, emotional closure for fans. At the same time, WandaVision never lost sight of the story it wanted to tell, the show it wanted to be, and the finale does a mostly decent job of hitting those final notes. Sure, there are some rushed sequences and scenes compacted into a couple of minutes that could have stretched o...

Hogwarts Legacy developer Troy Leavitt has left the project following criticism of videos that defended the reactionary Gamergate harassment movement and dismissed sexual misconduct complaints against media executives. Leavitt tweeted the news last night, saying he had resigned from studio Avalanche Software despite feeling “absolutely secure in my position.” Leavitt was the lead designer on Hogwarts Legacy, an open-world roleplaying game set in the Harry Potter universe. Last month, Did You Know Gaming? contributor Liam Robertson highlighted a YouTube channel where Leavitt posted videos between 2016 and 2018. The videos attacked social justice activism and defended figures like Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, both of whom have been accused of sexual har...

A potential animation for Twitter’s long-rumored “undo send” feature has been discovered by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, giving us our best look yet at how it might work. The interface shows Twitter’s familiar “Your Tweet was sent” dialog above a new “Undo” button. The undo button doubles as a progress bar, which appears to show you how long you have to undo a tweet before it gets sent. Gmail offers a similar option for emails, where it provides a short window to stop messages from being sent after clicking the “Send” button. “Undo send” has been a rumored part of a paid Twitter subscription tier after it was first mentioned in a user survey last year. It might not be the “edit button” that Twitter users have been requesting forever (and which will probably never happen), but it would...