Technology

Luke Ross* has a hard time telling friends what he does for a living. He can’t quite believe it himself. “I’m a kid with a fake steering wheel in the backseat who pretends to know where they’re going,” he tells The Verge. In 2020, he released a free mod for one of the most popular video games, Grand Theft Auto V, that lets you play the entire game in VR. Now, thousands of people pay him every month to stick their heads into some of their favorite video game worlds. Today, he currently makes over $20,000 a month modding PC games like Elden Ring, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Horizon Zero Dawn to run in VR headsets instead of the traditional monitors and TVs they were designed for. Every one of his Patreon backers signs up for a $10 monthly fee, and — incredibly — he says two-thirds of them sti...

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, ending the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, social media platforms have buzzed with anger, dismay, and offers of assistance, particularly from people in states with stronger abortion protections. But a particular type of offer has captured media attention. In viral tweets, TikToks, and screenshotted and reshared Instagram posts, people are opening their homes up to abortion patients who must travel for care. “If you choose to have an abortion, and need a place to stay, there is always a bed for you at my apartment in Portland. Free. No questions asked,” reads one tweet, liked more than 150,000 times and retweeted by more than 20,000 people. Providing lodging or transportation to appointments has long been part of pract...

There are many reasons why you might want to factory reset your smartwatch. Perhaps an update got borked during download and no amount of troubleshooting has helped. Maybe you want to upgrade to a new model and plan to gift your current watch to a friend. Apple requires you to do it if you happen to forget your passcode. Or, it’s possible that smartwatches just aren’t your thing and you’re ready to sell. Whatever the reason, it’s important that you wipe the data from your device. Wearables are personal devices and store a ton of sensitive data — especially if you primarily use your smartwatch for health and fitness tracking. As a general reminder, if you’re not totally throwing in the towel on smartwatches, it’s a good idea to back up your data before you reset. Each smartwatch has a sligh...

Google has offered to pay out $90 million to small app developers to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company’s Play store policies violated federal antitrust laws. The suit claimed that Google maintained polices that effectively forced developers to use its Google Play billing system — which for many years had a default 30 percent charge on all transactions. In July 2021, in a concession to smaller developers and in response to this suit, Google cut this fee to 15 percent for the first $1 million earned through any app. According to Hagens Berman, the law firm representing the plaintiffs in this class-action, some 48,000 small app developers in the US will be able to claim a payment from the $90 million fund. Hagens Berman says some claimants could receive as much as $200,0...

The Supreme Court just gutted a major policy tool the US might have used to tackle climate change. Its decision today on West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency essentially says that the EPA shouldn’t be allowed to determine whether the US gets its electricity from clean or dirty sources of energy. That derails previous efforts by the agency to transition the US away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources like wind and solar by regulating the power sector. With the new decision, the agency might be able to push a power plant to install technology to reduce its emissions on-site, but it can’t influence states’ decisions on where they get their energy from in the first place. To make things worse, the premise of the court’s decision could erode any federal agency’s ability to reg...

Update 6/30/2022: The Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental protection agency came out today, limiting the agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. Read the ruling and dissent here, and read more about what the ruling means for climate action here. Our original article continues below. This week, the Supreme Court is expected to decide a major climate case that could determine what tools the federal government can use to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, started out years ago as a battle over how much authority the EPA has to force power plants to cut down their pollution — but it’s turned into a bigger fight over how much power federal agencies have to enforce all kinds of regulations. A bigger fight over ...

T-Mobile has announced that its 5G home internet service is now available in more cities, spanning parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas. The service now covers more than 40 million homes, and earlier this spring, the company said it signed up its one-millionth customer. That’s good news in our landscape of cable internet provider monopolies, but T-Mobile has some real work to do if it plans to meet its goal of 7 to 8 million customers by 2025. Providing fixed wireless internet to a broad portion of the nation was a big selling point in T-Mobile’s case to the FCC when it argued to be allowed to acquire Sprint. The gist of the whole deal was that we’d lose one of our four wireless carriers temporarily while T-Mobile absorbed Sprint and Dish Network got its 5G service off t...

Bitcoin miners in New York state faced a regulatory blow today as the state denied air permits for a gas-fired power plant used to mine Bitcoin. It’s the latest step that New York has taken to crack down on crypto mining as it tries to meet its goals on climate change. The decision was made for the Greenidge Generating Station in New York’s Finger Lakes region. Bitcoin mining brought new life and renewed controversy to the embattled plant in 2020. That drew outrage from some local residents worried about how the plant could affect fish and tourism by discharging hot water into nearby Seneca Lake. At the state level, Greenidge’s revival has sparked fears that pollution from the energy-intensive process of mining Bitcoin could revive other zombie power plants and derail New York’s climate go...

Months after General Motors started delivering its first Hummer EVs, the company is reportedly only producing around 12 of the massive electric trucks a day, according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s an abysmally slow pace, even compared to how many electric trucks other automakers are making: the Journal says Ford’s producing around 150 F-150 Lightings a day, whereas Rivian’s Q1 production numbers indicate it’s making somewhere between 30 and 40 EVs a day (Rivian didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for more specific numbers). Recently, GM announced that it was raising the Hummer EV’s price by $6,250, citing “higher prices for parts, technology and logistics,” according to CNBC. Around 77,500 people have signed up for GM’s Hummer EV waitlist, according to Chad Lyons, a GM ...

Sega may have only announced the Mega Drive Mini 2 for release in Japan so far, but there’s a pretty cool accessory for it that appears to work with PCs and can be shipped stateside. As of this writing, Amazon has the Mega Drive Mini 2 Cyber Stick controller up for preorder on its Japanese storefront, and as video game deals expert Wario64 points out (ad), the controller also ships to the US. You’ll be able to use the Cyber Stick controller with games like After Burner II (a jet fighter game), Night Striker (where you fly an armored car to shoot baddies), and Starblade (an on-rails space shooter), according to text on Amazon’s store page run through Google Translate. Those three are among the 50 included games on the Mega Drive Mini 2, and you can catch some brief glimpses of those games a...

Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted SpaceX authorization to use its Starlink satellite internet system on vehicles in motion — including cars, trucks, boats, and aircraft. It’s a big win for SpaceX’s Starlink system, potentially opening up the service to a more diverse range of use cases and customers. SpaceX requested regulatory approval from the FCC in March of last year to allow Earth Stations in Motion (ESIM) Starlink terminals to be used in moving vehicles. To tap into the system and receive broadband internet coverage, customers must purchase a personal ground-based antenna, or user terminal, that is designed to connect with any orbiting Starlink satellites that happen to be overhead. Up until now, those dishes have had to remain in a fixed location in order to...

A former Apple lawyer who was in charge of preventing insider trading has pleaded guilty to six counts of securities fraud for insider trading, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release. Gene Levoff, once the company’s former corporate secretary and director of corporate law, “misappropriated material, nonpublic information about Apple’s financial results and then executed trades involving the company’s stock” from February 2011 to April 2016, the release says. Charges against him were initially filed by the SEC as a civil complaint in 2019. Levoff also served on Apple’s Disclosure Committee, a group that looked over company earnings reports and SEC filings before they were published. Using information he was privy to, he was allegedly able to realize profits of “approximate...