Technology

For millions of Americans, finding abortion services in the US just became a legal minefield. With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday, suddenly “how to find an abortion” is a lot more complicated than a simple Google search. Abortion is now illegal or restricted in nine states, with many more planning to outlaw procedures in the coming weeks. People seeking abortions in those states may now be at risk of investigation or prosecution, and many privacy advocates are warning that those people’s search history, medical records, or other data could be used against them in court. In some notable cases, they’ve seen it happen already. The Verge talked to experts about where they see the greatest privacy vulnerabilities for people seeking abortions in a post-Roe United States — and how people ca...

The original Overwatch’s days are numbered. Last week, Blizzard revealed in a Reddit AMA that when Overwatch 2 launches on October 4th, it will overwrite Overwatch prime, effectively ending the six-year-old game. “When OW2 launches on October 4th it will be a replacement for the current live service,” wrote game director Aaron Keller. While the changeover will add a wealth of new content — new heroes, new maps, and more — classic Overwatch will cease to be, ending the 6v6 format and banishing the assault game type to the relative obscurity of the custom game corner. The news came as a bit of a surprise since, originally, Overwatch prime and Overwatch 2 were supposed to coexist. During the Overwatch 2 panel at BlizzCon 2019, Aaron Keller, the game’s current director, and Jeff Kaplan, the fo...

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX is reportedly considering an acquisition of the trading platform Robinhood, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources close to the situation told Bloomberg that FTX is still weighing the possibility and hasn’t yet made an offer. When asked about the possible buyout, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried stated that the company currently isn’t in the process of trying to acquire Robinhood. “We are excited about Robinhood’s business prospects and potential ways we could partner with them,” Bankman-Fried said in a statement to Bloomberg. “That being said, there are no active M&A [mergers and acquisitions] conversations with Robinhood.” The Verge reached out to FTX with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back. Robinhood declined to comment on the story. I...

Apple’s rumored mixed reality headset has been shrouded in secrecy for the past few months. Recently Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted that the headset would launch sometime in early 2023 and is the most complicated piece of hardware the company has designed to date. A new report from Bloomberg has now revealed more information about the long-awaited headset. It was disclosed to reporter Mark Gurman at Apple Inc.’s Worldwide Developers Conference that the headset would run Apple’s flagship M2 chip. The M2 was announced earlier this month at the 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference by Apple Senior Vice President Johny Srouji. The first pieces of hardware to contain the chip are the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch (330 mm) MacBook Pro. Garnum went on to say that the headset would hav...

The Supreme Court has turned down a request to revisit a decades-old libel ruling, despite a dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas. This morning, the court denied a petition to hear Coral Ridge Ministries Media v. Southern Poverty Law Center, in which an evangelical Christian ministry accused the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) of falsely designating it as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. If it had overturned the ruling, the Supreme Court would have greatly increased the odds of public figures winning libel cases in the future. Instead, the decision delays (but likely won’t end) a long-running push to expand the scope of defamation law. Coral Ridge Ministries Media v. SPLC hinges on the “actual malice” standard — a protection that means public figures must show a false statement was made knowin...

After sunsetting Google Hangouts for Workspace users in February, Google’s now beginning the process of migrating free, personal Hangouts users to Chat. In an announcement posted to its blog, Google says people who still use the Hangouts mobile app will see a prompt to move to Chat. As for users who use Hangouts in Gmail on the web, Google says it won’t start prompting users to make the switch to Chat until July. Hangouts will remain usable on its desktop site until November, and Google says it will warn users “at least one month” in advance before it starts pointing the Hangouts site to Chat. Image: Google Confusingly, Google Chat isn’t the same thing as GChat (or Google Talk), which Google discontinued for good earlier this month. (Hangouts was originally supposed to be the successor to ...

Google’s top-tier flagship phone, the Pixel 6 Pro, is on sale for its lowest price yet. Woot is selling new unlocked Pixel 6 Pro phones for $779.99 for today only. You can choose from all three colors (including Sorta Sunny, the best one) until the end of the day or while supplies last. The only storage capacity on offer is the base 128GB amount, which is a fair amount, especially when you consider that total savings of $120 off the regular $899 asking price from Google and other retailers. We saw the Pixel 6 Pro previously drop by $100 for Father’s Day, but as the saying goes, the late dad gets the deal worm and saves… or something about bad jokes. Whatever, dad, it’s a good deal! Google Pixel 6 Pro $780 $899 14% off The Google Pixel 6 Pro is the larger sibling of the newest Pixel d...

Valve is doubling the number of Steam Decks it ships to customers, the company announced Monday. “Production has picked up, and after today we’ll be shipping more than double the number of Steam Decks every week!” Valve said in a tweet from the official Steam Deck account. And in response to a question from my colleague Sean Hollister, Valve designer Lawrence Yang spelled out the change more clearly: “in previous weeks we were shipping x units / week to customers, starting this week we’ll be shipping 2x units / week.” If you’ve been eagerly refreshing your inbox every Monday and Thursday for the chance to order your Steam Deck reservation, the increased production could be a sign that you might be able to buy your device sooner than you expected. My own reservation hasn’t changed from its ...

I don’t really care what the M2 MacBook Pro gets on benchmarks. I know that sounds like an odd statement coming from someone who runs benchmarks for a living, but this is not a device where they matter all that much because, if you’re the kind of person running benchmarks or the kind of person to whom benchmark scores are at all relevant, I’m going to tell you right at the top that you shouldn’t be buying this. Let us explore the current MacBook market. This MacBook Pro has the exact same chassis as the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro that was released in 2020 (which itself used a design that dates back to 2016). It’s the same 2560 x 1600 screen, the same Magic Keyboard, the same two Thunderbolt ports, the same Touch Bar, and the same slightly tapered sides. Remember all those cool new (technically...

The Nexus Q was such a misguided product that Google decided to pull the plug before the device was ever released to consumers. Ten years to the day after its introduction at I/O 2012, the $299 media player positioned as a “social streaming device” remains a unique debacle in Google’s hardware story. Say what you will about Google Glass, but the company’s first foray into wearable tech at least got people talking. The Nexus Q, in contrast, was an example of what can happen when a company becomes very lost in its own walled garden. There were promising aspects to the Q; in hindsight, you can clearly see the groundwork and early DNA of Google’s Chromecast within it. But everything about the execution was fundamentally shortsighted — and a little weird. In the below promo video that Google re...

Aaron Davies remembers being blown away by the colors. Instead of the muted tones and abstract motifs of traditional Persian carpets, the rug in front of him depicted a map of Afghanistan surrounded by guns and tanks, woven with fluorescent pink, green, and blue threads. Known as a “war rug,” the textile made by Afghan weavers had traveled all the way from Peshawar, Pakistan, to his home in the United Kingdom in a battered cardboard box. “I just thought they were amazingly interesting,” says Davies, “It’s just such a bizarre concept to put on a rug.” Peshawar, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, is home to a large Afghan refugee community and is a center of the country’s rug trade. Davies had purchased the rug online from a seller going by Imran Khan, who later told Davies that his st...