Technology

Dell has finally revealed the $1,599.99 price attached to the UltraSharp 32-inch 4K video conferencing monitor it previewed at CES (via 9to5Mac). If that price sounds familiar, it’s because Apple’s 27-inch Studio Display costs almost the exact same amount — only Dell justifies the price with the monitor’s size and its camera sensor, while Apple’s sales pitch leans on that still-rare 5K resolution. The Dell monitor (U3223QZ) comes with a focus on videoconferencing, made clear by Dell’s built-in UltraSharp webcam with a 4K HDR Sony Starvis sensor that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help keep you in the frame during a call. This is a bit like Apple’s Center Stage feature used in the Studio Display and other Apple devices, a similar auto-framing functionality HP recently implemented in i...

Some TikTok users have started noticing a “Clear Mode” option, which lets them watch a video without the UI overlay that usually shows things like the favorite and comment buttons and other info about the video. TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s currently testing the feature, but it’s unclear how many people have access to it. Those that are in the test group (which includes at least two Verge staffers) can access clear mode by pressing and holding on a video, then tapping the Clear Mode button on the menu that pops up. The same method can be used to exit clear mode, and there’s also a button in the bottom right corner that will return you to the standard UI. Activating clear mode is a two-step process. (Apologies for the recording method, we’ll cover why it had to be done this way ...

A Texas law that would have banned much social media moderation is once again on hold. In a 5-4 ruling handed down today, the Supreme Court vacated an earlier decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning that HB 20 — which forbids banning, demonetizing, or downranking Texas users’ posts based on “viewpoint” — will be blocked while a lawsuit over its constitutionality proceeds. A lower court had already blocked the law in 2021 before the Fifth Circuit unblocked it this May. NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), who filed suit to stop HB 20, petitioned the Supreme Court for a ruling earlier this month — responding to a surprising and unexplained ruling from the Fifth Circuit. Justice Samuel Alito initially reviewed the emergency request and ref...

The first time I started a car by pressing a button, it felt too easy and convenient — like I had somehow stumbled into a tax bracket I don’t belong in. “You’re telling me,” I thought, “that I can just leave my keys in my pocket, and the car will let me get in and drive around?” The push-button ignition is one of those buttons that doesn’t really add any new functionality over the thing it’s replacing (in this case, the ignition system that has you insert and turn a key). It exists solely for the sake of convenience, a job that it excels at. You get in the car, press down on the brake pedal and a button, and you’re ready to drive. It’s barely more difficult than unlocking your phone. It’s also, for most of us, anyway, the most raw power we can generate with just our fingertips. Flipping a ...

The US is doing a pretty horrible job of following through on promises it’s made to tackle climate change, according to two separate new studies. A global ranking of countries completed by Yale and Columbia found that the US now ranks 43rd among 180 nations that Columbia and Yale evaluated in their most recent Environmental Performance Index (EPI). That’s a major plummet since the last time the researchers ranked countries in 2020, when the US was in 24th place. A major plummet When it comes to climate indicators alone (the evaluation also considers countries’ progress on other kinds of pollution and efforts to protect ecosystems), the US fell all the way to 101 from its previous spot at 15th place. The US’s ranking was reported by The New York Times today ahead of the full EPI scheduled t...

While we were(n’t) outside touching grass, Bo Burnham has pieced together an entire hour’s worth of outtakes and cut content from his 2021… movie / musical / comedy special / existential crisis, Inside. While a majority of The Inside Outtakes is exactly what it says on the tin (flubs, different takes, and behind-the-scenes clips from the original), there are also some new songs throughout — within the first minute, we hear a new musical piece about Jeffery Bezos, which leads into an absolute earworm of a new song that musically sounds like a downtempo version of “Problematic” and revisits the themes of depression and being stuck inside for days on end. In other words, it strikes just as much of a chord with me as the original, which isn’t a great sign, but what can you do? While the ...

Ahead of Geoff Keighley’s not-E3 but also sorta kinda E3 Summer Games Fest next week, Sonic Team has released an extremely short teaser for Sonic Frontiers. I know there’s a vocal subset of the gaming community that hates when a new, vaguely open world-looking game gets shown and the gaming press calls it “Breath of the Wild meets X,” so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to say it looks like Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn had a baby with Sonic. (Please don’t Google “X has a baby with Sonic.”) [embedded content] In it, Sonic freeruns across a light-drenched, flower-strewn landscape dotted with futuristic-looking ruins. Even though several games have featured Sonic roaming in a boundary-less world, the aesthetic in Frontiers is so wildly different from previous 3D Sonic ...

Podcast listeners could not access many of their favorite shows for more than eight hours on Monday night and early Tuesday morning due to an outage on Megaphone, a podcast hosting platform owned by Spotify. The outage stemmed from the company’s failure to renew Megaphone’s security certificate. “Megaphone experienced a platform outage due to an issue related to our SSL certificate,” Spotify spokesperson Erin Styles said in a statement. “During the outage, clients were unable to access the Megaphone CMS and podcast listeners were unable to download podcast episodes from Megaphone-hosted publishers. Megaphone service has since been restored.” It’s a simple mistake with big ramifications. Megaphone, which inserts dynamic ads into episodes, hosts many of the industry’s top shows. It also dist...

Fujifilm’s latest X-Summit event is happening today in Omiya, Japan, and it brings several new announcements for its X-series of APS-C mirrorless cameras, including two cameras and two lenses. The headliner is the 26-megapixel X-H2S camera, which Fujifilm calls its new high-speed flagship model. It is the successor to 2018’s X-H1 and will launch on July 7th for $2,499 (without a lens). Joining this camera at release is a new XF 150-600mm super-telephoto zoom lens costing $1,999, with an XF 18-120mm powered zoom due out later in mid-September for $899. Fujifilm also teased another camera, the X-H2, with a new 40-megapixel non-stacked sensor that’s also coming in September. These new cameras are more pro DSLR-like than anything else in Fujifilm’s X-series of cameras, eschewing classic shutte...

I t’s hard to know how much drinking will kill a person until it does. In the early ’00s, Chris was in Maine’s music industry. He was the baritone sax player for a screamo band called Animal Suit Driveby, later rebranded The Killing Moon after the label asked for a more serious name. But more importantly, he was part of the scene. “We were raging, we were rampaging, having a good time,” he recalls. Reviewing our interview transcript later, I realize, for how often we’re talking about drinking, Chris tends to avoid the word itself. That life — raging, rampaging, having a good time — extended into his 30s, even long after his moment in music passed. Gemma had her concerns. Before he went out, she’d ask him tough questions that were, in hindsight, easy questions: Could he go out to dinner and...