Senior News Editor
Richard Lawler joined The Verge as Senior News Editor in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. He's been a tech blogger since before the word was invented, and will never log off.
If you’re still trying to get that Olympic feeling back, sprint athlete Nick Mayhugh has a reminder that the Paralympic Games are right around the corner and will be at least as exciting on social media as the Olympics were.
The Opening Ceremony takes place on August 28th, so you have until then to try to figure out unique sports, like murderball, aka wheelchair rugby, and exactly how classification works.
Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli explains why the problem started and why its autonomous cars are quieter now (shown in the livestream below):
We recently introduced a useful feature to help avoid low speed collisions by honking if other cars get too close while reversing toward us. It has been working great in the city, but we didn’t quite anticipate it would happen so often in our own parking lots. We’ve updated the software, so our electric vehicles should keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward.
As reported by AppleInsider and MacRumors, today Apple released a second developer beta for iOS / iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.1 updates with Apple Intelligence features.
There’s also a sixth set of developer betas for the initial updates set to hit iPhones, Macs, and other devices this fall, and an update for the AirPods Pro 2 set that’s in line for some new features.
Just weeks after the NYT profiled Blake Benthall about his Silk Road 2.0 role and post-prison endeavors, 404 Media has identified a co-founder, Thomas White, as its “Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0.”
Between his 2014 arrest and receiving a five-year prison sentence in 2019, White apparently launched DDoSecrets with Emma Best, which was eventually tagged a “criminal hacker group” after publishing the “BlueLeaks.”
The incredibly online Harris-Walz campaign cited Dril’s “im not mad. please dont that I got mad” tweet (which is somehow not among the dozens of their posts saved in our preservation effort) in a campaign press release sent to reporters.
That definitely says... something about this year’s presidential election, as does Dril’s immediate response.
With Simultaneous Opposing Cardinal Directions (SOCD) features like Wooting and Razer’s new Rappy Snappy / Snap Tap enabled, FPS players don’t have to let go of one key to press another, enabling near-instant changes of direction. Some players have called it “basically cheating.”
Now SteelSeries says a beta update for its GG software (68.0.0) adds the same thing for all Apex Pro keyboards.
BleepingComputer points out the notes for this month’s Android security patch, with fixes for flaws that could allow someone to take over your device. The 2024-08-05 patch level specifically addresses a kernel flaw tagged CVE-2024-36971 which “may be under limited, targeted exploitation” already, so be sure to update your devices ASAP.
[Android Open Source Project]
As we started testing Windows 11 on Arm with new Copilot Plus PCs, we noticed issues with the performance of Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe blocked the x86 software from Snapdragon X Elite laptops before their public launch, but now Windows Central says it’s available under emulation, and is “good enough for a basic video project,” while a planned Arm-native version is still in development.
404 Media reports, with screenshots of Slack conversations and excerpts from emails, on a massive undertaking by Nvidia to scrape online videos for AI training that appears to go well beyond research.
According to the messages, they were attempting to download full-length videos from a variety of sources including Netflix, but were focused on YouTube videos. Emails viewed by 404 Media show project managers discussing using 20 to 30 virtual machines in Amazon Web Services to download 80 years-worth of videos per day.