Technology

Tillie Kottmann, a 21-year-old hacker, has been raided by Swiss authorities and their devices seized, Bloomberg reports — days after helping to reveal how Silicon Valley security startup Verkada’s own security was so poor that that hackers were able to access over 150,000 of the company’s cameras to see the insides of schools, jails, hospitals, police stations, and Tesla factories. The raid doesn’t have anything to do with Verkada, according to Bloomberg, but instead an “alleged hack that took place last year,” and interestingly, a Swiss authority pointed Bloomberg to the US Department of Justice for further questions. (The DOJ declined to comment.) It’s not clear which hack the DOJ might be interested in, as Kottmann has been continually sharing leaked files from various companies for mon...

Update March 12th, 2021 3:55PM ET: Best Buy currently has both the PS5 Digital Edition and PS5 consoles in stock and available for purchase. But you can only request a pickup at your local store and cannot have the console shipped to your home address. The PlayStation 5 has been quite challenging to find ever since its launch in November. And when it is available, sales have been, for the most part, limited to online-only, with stock selling out almost instantly. Despite this, we here at The Verge are dedicated to helping you keep track of when and where the PS5 is available in the hopes you can get another shot at buying Sony’s next-gen console. We’re keeping a lookout across the web to find where, when, and how you can buy either the PS5 (with a disc drive) or the PS5 Digital Edition, as...

Many current password managers allow you to share your passwords with family members or other individuals or groups. (You do use a password manager, don’t you?) Managers such as Bitwarden and 1Password have specific methods by which you can share passwords or groups of passwords, making it easier for a family to, say, access a shared streaming service. Now Bitwarden has upped the ante by adding a feature it calls Send, which allows you to send files or text (including, if you wish, passwords) securely via end-to-end AES-256 bit encryption, using a link on its site. Bitwarden Send generates a link and includes a number of security options Here’s how it works: If you wish to send a file (it can be up to 100 MB), you go to Bitwarden’s website and click on the Send button. After you upload the...

Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass platform just got a huge boost with the addition of 20 new Bethesda Softworks titles starting today, and now a quarter of those games will be getting performance boosts on the next-gen Xbox consoles in an upcoming update. The performance gains are in frame rate thanks to an appropriately named new feature Microsoft revealed last month called FPS Boost, which can roughly double frame rates of older games using new Xbox hardware without requiring developers do any manual work. The games that will see performance boosts with frame rate jumps up to 60 frames per second include Arkane Studios’ Dishonored: Definitive Edition and Prey and Bethesda Game Studios’ The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. [embedded content] The announcement wa...

The best kind of door in a video game is the one no one remembers. Sure, everyone can appreciate a big, beautiful door with great animations, says Owlchemy Labs developer Pete Galbraith. But in a video game, doors are often synonymous with a massive design headache. Forgettable means a developer has done their job well. “If it fits into the environment, makes sense for its context, and works exactly how the player expects, then in that instant it was simply a door as real as any other in the player’s real life,” says Galbraith. “I can’t imagine higher praise for a door in a game.” Over the past week, dozens of developers across multiple disciplines and teams shared their frustrations on Twitter. Death Trash creator Stephan Hövelbrinks explained that doors “have all sorts of possible bugs.”...

Over the last decade, hundreds of newspapers have disappeared largely due to Big Tech’s disruption of the ad market. Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on much when it comes to tech reform, whether it be content moderation or spinning off acquisitions, but they do seem to agree that local journalism needs saving. On Friday, a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing focused on the way Google and Facebook distribute news, and a new bill introduced earlier this week has already found Republican support. It’s one of the biggest legislative threats to tech that’s come out of the years-long antitrust debate, and much of its political force comes from the precarious state of local journalism. “The crisis in American journalism has become a real crisis in our democracy and civic life,” Cicilline s...

MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of MetaPurse, is the buyer behind the $69 million winning bid for a Beeple NFT at Christie’s yesterday. It was the third-highest sale price ever for a work from a living artist. “When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” MetaKovan said in a statement published by Christie’s. “And here’s why — it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.” The $69 million NFT represented a collage containing 5,000 mostly digital illustrations from Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, that were created for his Everydays series, in w...

Pocket, an app for saving articles to read later, is rolling out a sorting option to Android users over the next few weeks that could solve my paralysis when choosing something to read. The new sort by time-to-read feature, spotted by The Verge’s Dan Seifert, means articles can be organized where they fit best, whether it’s the five minutes it takes to microwave lunch, or a 20-minute wait for the late bus. The feature appears in both the search section of the app, and as a sorting feature in your main list. A reader can sort their saved article search by length, choosing from Quick (less than five minutes), Medium (six to ten minutes), Long (eleven to twelve minutes), and Very Long (over twenty-one minutes). Your list of saved articles can also be organized by newest saved, oldest saved, l...

Microsoft is going to adjust its release cycles for Microsoft Edge to match the every-four-weeks release cadence for Chrome that Google announced last week. “As contributors to the Chromium project, we look forward to the new 4-week major release cycle cadence that Google announced to help deliver that innovation to our customers even faster,” Microsoft said in a blog post on Friday. The change will go into effect with Edge 94, which is targeted for a September release. Google has committed to making the switch with Chrome in Q3 with Chrome 94, but hasn’t given a specific month like Microsoft has. Like Google, Microsoft is also offering enterprises the option of a longer release cycle enterprise customers. On that Extended Stable schedule, there will be a new release every eight weeks. How...

Writing in USA Today on Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) made a surprise endorsement of a fledgling union at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. In the op-ed, Rubio frames the union drive as a necessary response to the encroaching power of Amazon, a longtime target for Republicans. “When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers,” Rubio writes in the op-ed. “And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.” Rubio says Amazon “wages culture war against working-class values” Workers at the Bessemer warehouse are in the process of voting on whether to unionize, as overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Amazon had sought to...

PmsProxy, a partnered Twitch streamer who has 147,000 followers, was tired. Tired of streaming Grand Theft Auto roleplay, and of streaming herself playing games more generally — something she’d been doing nearly every day for around six years. “I didn’t just want to sit and play games all day, I realized,” she says when I reach her by Discord. “I want to either tell a story through roleplay or just do something that made it feel fulfilling, and roleplay wasn’t that.” So she decided to make a change: instead of streaming herself playing games, she’d stream herself making things for her business. That business was leatherworking. Proxy made the jump from full-time game streamer to full-time crafting streamer at the beginning of this year; it was a nerve-wracking but ultimately necessary step...

Woot has discounted Samsung’s Galaxy Note 20 line today, with up to $500 in savings available depending on which phone you buy. You can buy the Galaxy Note 20, which comes in mystic green and features 8GB of RAM and a 6.7-inch 1080p LCD screen for only $600. Alternatively, you can get the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra for $200 more, which comes in mystic bronze and features 12GB of RAM and a 6.9-inch 1440p OLED screen. These prices are for the unlocked versions, and both include 128GB of storage; however, only the Note 20 Ultra features a microSD slot, allowing you to expand your storage if you choose. Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra (128GB, unlocked) $800 $1,300 39% off Prices taken at time of publishing. One of two phones in the Note 20 line, the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra has a 6.9-inch 1440p OLED screen...