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Kanye West Loves Megaupload

A dozen years later, New Zealand is extraditing Kim Dotcom to face trial in the US. After a protracted battle with record labels, file sharing site Megaupload — regarded by some as a haven for piracy — was taken down in 2012 by the US Department of Justice with a number of high-profile arrests of Megaupload employees.
We’ve been tracking the full saga right here ever since.

Kanye West Loves Megaupload

A dozen years later, New Zealand is extraditing Kim Dotcom to face trial in the US.

After a protracted battle with record labels, file sharing site Megaupload — regarded by some as a haven for piracy — was taken down in 2012 by the US Department of Justice with a number of high-profile arrests of Megaupload employees.

We’ve been tracking the full saga right here ever since.

Read More 

This Snapdragon-powered laptop is a productivity machine, but unless work foots the bill, you can do better. The freshman class of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has its battery champ, and it’s even a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop. But it’s also business-class boring, with a middling screen and subpar trackpad.
HP’s new OmniBook X 14 is one of the first laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the ones we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and stuffed with AI fluff. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD screen, 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD — with an optional upgrade to a 1TB drive for $1,200, though it’s often on sale for less.

Most of the other Windows laptops we’ve seen with these new Arm chips have bright, beautiful screens and other creature comforts. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is a near-clone of the HP EliteBook Ultra, a machine built for high-volume office deployment, and it shows.

At 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is about the same size as the 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the mark most of these Copilot Plus PCs are gunning for. And it does come closer to the battery life of my work-issued Air than any other laptop we’ve tested.
The OmniBook X lasts me up to 15 hours of my regular workload, which includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music and background Twitch streams, and taking remote meetings. It rarely stutters or slows down, even as my active Chrome tabs swell to over 20 or 30 across a few virtual desktops. It holds its charge well overnight — even going a whole weekend unplugged with its lid closed and losing only 10 percent battery.

This is the first time in a while I’ve used a Windows laptop that doesn’t give me battery anxiety. It’s a welcome benefit of the Snapdragon X’s efficiency combined with the OmniBook’s generous 59Wh battery. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have larger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD uses less power than their brighter and faster OLED displays (more on that in a bit).
If battery life is more important to you than anything else, the OmniBook is worth considering. It’s certainly a more concrete benefit than any of the overhyped AI features that make it a Copilot Plus PC. But the hardware it inherits from the EliteBook Ultra — like the trackpad, speakers, and screen — makes those long hours away from the outlet a slog.
The trackpad is mostly okay, but its top-hinged clicking mechanism means you feel more resistance as you click higher up the pad. It doesn’t feel nearly as nice as modern haptic ones on MacBooks or the Surface Laptop, which let you click anywhere with ease. And two-finger right-clicks all too often result in an unintentional left click. The only thing worse than something that doesn’t work is something that doesn’t work consistently.

But that takes me to the speakers, which are consistently bad. They’re serviceable for video calls, but their downward-firing orientation, toward the front of the case, makes music sound thin when the laptop sits on a desk. Put it on your lap, and it sounds like it’s underwater. The upward-firing speakers on many other laptops, including ones under the MacBook Air’s keyboard, are far superior. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds a little better, with the OmniBook’s only advantage being that its two speakers are spread about seven inches apart to give it just the tiniest bit of a soundstage. But that positioning also means your wrists frequently block the speakers when you type.

The OmniBook’s battery life can take you places, but its screen can’t promise you’ll use it there.

The 14-inch, 2240 x 1400 resolution touchscreen LCD looks crisp and fairly colorful, covering the full sRGB color space and 78 percent of DCI-P3 in my testing. The screen’s max claimed brightness of 300 nits (337 nits in my testing) is fine indoors but pretty dim for outdoor use. If you sit next to a bright window or go outside, it may feel like you’re trying to work on a mirror. Its refresh rate is a similarly modest 60Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD screen is twice as fast, gets nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, and supports HDR, for a similar price.
At the OmniBook’s sides are a total of four ports: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40Gbps and one 10Gbps, with each capable of DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor) and, on the right, a single USB-A port (10 Gbps) beside a 3.5mm combo headphone / mic jack. The chiclet-style keyboard feels good to type on for many hours straight and has a Copilot button I wager you’ll use as little as I do. My only real gripe with the keyboard is the tall left and right arrow keys. I’d prefer them to be the same height as the down arrow, as it makes finding the keys without looking much easier.
Windows on Arm support is already in a much better place than a few years ago now that Snapdragon X is here and the first swath of Copilot Plus PCs are in the wild. But if an app you absolutely need is unsupported, the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) is a nonstarter. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator remain absent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a dealbreaker. I loathe editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely rearranged layout and shortcuts. App compatibility should keep getting better, but you should never buy something now based on what it may do in the future.

Apple realized the error of its ways on this arrow key layout years ago, and I wish Windows laptop makers would do the same.

The OmniBook’s AI features are mostly boring and inconsequential — especially since Windows Recall remains delayed. These consist of the “AI Experiences” that ship with Copilot Plus PCs, plus HP’s AI Companion app. It’s basically bloatware: just another ChatGPT wrapper along with some hardware performance monitoring. (It can also download drivers. How innovative!) The current beta version limits you to eight follow-up prompts for each inquiry, which I wager is to tamp down the chances for hallucinations.
You can also feed AI Companion documents, which it will attempt to summarize. In an early briefing with HP, a rep demonstrated how a hiring manager can upload three resumes and ask the AI to compare the candidates. I cannot stress this enough: this is something you should not do.

This is what happens when a manufacturer doesn’t want to risk its laptops getting flirty.

A good screen, trackpad, and speakers are table stakes in a modern laptop. Compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11 with high-refresh displays and haptic trackpads, the OmniBook X is lackluster — with the exception of its outstanding battery life.
But the reason the OmniBook’s a bit humdrum is because it’s an enterprise laptop in disguise. Aside from the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s nearly identical to the EliteBook Ultra, which is the kind of “BoringBook” issued en masse by company IT departments. The corporate world isn’t concerned with treating you to a bright, butter-smooth OLED display or bumping bass — it just wants you to feed the beast and get your work done with tools that are adequate and not too expensive.

The sleek white finish is the only thing that prevents me from falling asleep the moment I look at the OmniBook X.

If you truly worship at the altar of battery life, then maybe the OmniBook is fine. But there’s no reason to pay a thousand dollars of your own money for this screen, those speakers, or that trackpad. Maybe you can use the OmniBook X for 15 hours straight, but for around the same price, you can get something like the Surface Laptop, with a much better trackpad, screen, and speakers — even if you do have to plug it in a little sooner.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

This Snapdragon-powered laptop is a productivity machine, but unless work foots the bill, you can do better.

The freshman class of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has its battery champ, and it’s even a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop. But it’s also business-class boring, with a middling screen and subpar trackpad.

HP’s new OmniBook X 14 is one of the first laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the ones we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and stuffed with AI fluff. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD screen, 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD — with an optional upgrade to a 1TB drive for $1,200, though it’s often on sale for less.

Most of the other Windows laptops we’ve seen with these new Arm chips have bright, beautiful screens and other creature comforts. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is a near-clone of the HP EliteBook Ultra, a machine built for high-volume office deployment, and it shows.

At 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is about the same size as the 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the mark most of these Copilot Plus PCs are gunning for. And it does come closer to the battery life of my work-issued Air than any other laptop we’ve tested.

The OmniBook X lasts me up to 15 hours of my regular workload, which includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music and background Twitch streams, and taking remote meetings. It rarely stutters or slows down, even as my active Chrome tabs swell to over 20 or 30 across a few virtual desktops. It holds its charge well overnight — even going a whole weekend unplugged with its lid closed and losing only 10 percent battery.

This is the first time in a while I’ve used a Windows laptop that doesn’t give me battery anxiety. It’s a welcome benefit of the Snapdragon X’s efficiency combined with the OmniBook’s generous 59Wh battery. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have larger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD uses less power than their brighter and faster OLED displays (more on that in a bit).

If battery life is more important to you than anything else, the OmniBook is worth considering. It’s certainly a more concrete benefit than any of the overhyped AI features that make it a Copilot Plus PC. But the hardware it inherits from the EliteBook Ultra — like the trackpad, speakers, and screen — makes those long hours away from the outlet a slog.

The trackpad is mostly okay, but its top-hinged clicking mechanism means you feel more resistance as you click higher up the pad. It doesn’t feel nearly as nice as modern haptic ones on MacBooks or the Surface Laptop, which let you click anywhere with ease. And two-finger right-clicks all too often result in an unintentional left click. The only thing worse than something that doesn’t work is something that doesn’t work consistently.

But that takes me to the speakers, which are consistently bad. They’re serviceable for video calls, but their downward-firing orientation, toward the front of the case, makes music sound thin when the laptop sits on a desk. Put it on your lap, and it sounds like it’s underwater. The upward-firing speakers on many other laptops, including ones under the MacBook Air’s keyboard, are far superior. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds a little better, with the OmniBook’s only advantage being that its two speakers are spread about seven inches apart to give it just the tiniest bit of a soundstage. But that positioning also means your wrists frequently block the speakers when you type.

The OmniBook’s battery life can take you places, but its screen can’t promise you’ll use it there.

The 14-inch, 2240 x 1400 resolution touchscreen LCD looks crisp and fairly colorful, covering the full sRGB color space and 78 percent of DCI-P3 in my testing. The screen’s max claimed brightness of 300 nits (337 nits in my testing) is fine indoors but pretty dim for outdoor use. If you sit next to a bright window or go outside, it may feel like you’re trying to work on a mirror. Its refresh rate is a similarly modest 60Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD screen is twice as fast, gets nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, and supports HDR, for a similar price.

At the OmniBook’s sides are a total of four ports: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40Gbps and one 10Gbps, with each capable of DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor) and, on the right, a single USB-A port (10 Gbps) beside a 3.5mm combo headphone / mic jack. The chiclet-style keyboard feels good to type on for many hours straight and has a Copilot button I wager you’ll use as little as I do. My only real gripe with the keyboard is the tall left and right arrow keys. I’d prefer them to be the same height as the down arrow, as it makes finding the keys without looking much easier.

Windows on Arm support is already in a much better place than a few years ago now that Snapdragon X is here and the first swath of Copilot Plus PCs are in the wild. But if an app you absolutely need is unsupported, the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) is a nonstarter. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator remain absent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a dealbreaker. I loathe editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely rearranged layout and shortcuts. App compatibility should keep getting better, but you should never buy something now based on what it may do in the future.

Apple realized the error of its ways on this arrow key layout years ago, and I wish Windows laptop makers would do the same.

The OmniBook’s AI features are mostly boring and inconsequential — especially since Windows Recall remains delayed. These consist of the “AI Experiences” that ship with Copilot Plus PCs, plus HP’s AI Companion app. It’s basically bloatware: just another ChatGPT wrapper along with some hardware performance monitoring. (It can also download drivers. How innovative!) The current beta version limits you to eight follow-up prompts for each inquiry, which I wager is to tamp down the chances for hallucinations.

You can also feed AI Companion documents, which it will attempt to summarize. In an early briefing with HP, a rep demonstrated how a hiring manager can upload three resumes and ask the AI to compare the candidates. I cannot stress this enough: this is something you should not do.

This is what happens when a manufacturer doesn’t want to risk its laptops getting flirty.

A good screen, trackpad, and speakers are table stakes in a modern laptop. Compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11 with high-refresh displays and haptic trackpads, the OmniBook X is lackluster — with the exception of its outstanding battery life.

But the reason the OmniBook’s a bit humdrum is because it’s an enterprise laptop in disguise. Aside from the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s nearly identical to the EliteBook Ultra, which is the kind of “BoringBook” issued en masse by company IT departments. The corporate world isn’t concerned with treating you to a bright, butter-smooth OLED display or bumping bass — it just wants you to feed the beast and get your work done with tools that are adequate and not too expensive.

The sleek white finish is the only thing that prevents me from falling asleep the moment I look at the OmniBook X.

If you truly worship at the altar of battery life, then maybe the OmniBook is fine. But there’s no reason to pay a thousand dollars of your own money for this screen, those speakers, or that trackpad. Maybe you can use the OmniBook X for 15 hours straight, but for around the same price, you can get something like the Surface Laptop, with a much better trackpad, screen, and speakers — even if you do have to plug it in a little sooner.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

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Dotcom has been fighting US extradition for 12 years. | Photo by MICHAEL BRADLEY/AFP via Getty Images

Kim Dotcom is being extradited to the United States to face long-standing criminal charges relating to his defunct file-sharing service Megaupload. The order was signed by New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith according to Stuff, saying he received “extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter” and that “Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”
As the founder and former CEO of Megaupload, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) was accused by US authorities of having cost film studios and record companies over $500 million by enabling users to share pirated content. The German-born Internet mogul moved to New Zealand in 2010, and has been fighting extradition since local police, at the behest of the FBI, raided his Auckland mansion in 2012 over charges of racketeering, money laundering, and copyright infringement. The Department of Justice shut down Megaupload that same year.
Dotcom, who has spent the last several years pushing various conspiracy theories and digital disinformation, responded to the deportation ruling on X, saying “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited.” Two former Megaupload officers, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, were handed 31 and 30-month prison sentences respectively last year after signing a plea deal to avoid extradition.

Dotcom has been fighting US extradition for 12 years. | Photo by MICHAEL BRADLEY/AFP via Getty Images

Kim Dotcom is being extradited to the United States to face long-standing criminal charges relating to his defunct file-sharing service Megaupload. The order was signed by New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith according to Stuff, saying he received “extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter” and that “Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”

As the founder and former CEO of Megaupload, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) was accused by US authorities of having cost film studios and record companies over $500 million by enabling users to share pirated content. The German-born Internet mogul moved to New Zealand in 2010, and has been fighting extradition since local police, at the behest of the FBI, raided his Auckland mansion in 2012 over charges of racketeering, money laundering, and copyright infringement. The Department of Justice shut down Megaupload that same year.

Dotcom, who has spent the last several years pushing various conspiracy theories and digital disinformation, responded to the deportation ruling on X, saying “the obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited.” Two former Megaupload officers, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, were handed 31 and 30-month prison sentences respectively last year after signing a plea deal to avoid extradition.

Read More 

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

GitHub, the popular code repository and developer platform, is currently dealing with some major issues affecting its main website and many GitHub services. “We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back,” GitHub wrote at 7:29PM ET on its status website. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018.
When we first published this story, navigating to the main GitHub website showed an error message that says “no server is currently available to service your request,” but the website now seems to be working again. (The error message also featured an image of an angry unicorn.) GitHub’s report of the current incident lists problems with things like pull requests, GitHub Pages, Copilot, and the GitHub API.
Things seem to have escalated rapidly; GitHub’s first status message was at 7:11PM ET, but in the minutes after, GitHub reported issues with several of its services.
The issues appear to be widespread, with Downdetector showing more than 10,000 user reports of problems and that the problems were reported quite suddenly. Internet monitoring service NetBlocks is also recognizing that GitHub is “currently experiencing international outages.”
GitHub didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

GitHub, the popular code repository and developer platform, is currently dealing with some major issues affecting its main website and many GitHub services. “We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back,” GitHub wrote at 7:29PM ET on its status website. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018.

When we first published this story, navigating to the main GitHub website showed an error message that says “no server is currently available to service your request,” but the website now seems to be working again. (The error message also featured an image of an angry unicorn.) GitHub’s report of the current incident lists problems with things like pull requests, GitHub Pages, Copilot, and the GitHub API.

Things seem to have escalated rapidly; GitHub’s first status message was at 7:11PM ET, but in the minutes after, GitHub reported issues with several of its services.

The issues appear to be widespread, with Downdetector showing more than 10,000 user reports of problems and that the problems were reported quite suddenly. Internet monitoring service NetBlocks is also recognizing that GitHub is “currently experiencing international outages.”

GitHub didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris’ campaign page shared a Truth Social post from Donald Trump. In it Trump blamed “the complexity of modern day equipment” for making his voice sound “somewhat different and strange” during a live interview on X with Elon Musk. But while the Harris campaign shared what looked like a screenshot of the post, they cut off the last line, where Trump explained that he released “an actual, and perfect, recording of the conversation.”
Exactly why the original broadcast sounded so odd is not totally clear — the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about what led to the sound quality issues and what tech they used to fix it. But the Harris campaign’s post left out key context that Trump had released a cleaner version of the recording, making the post look purely like an excuse. “Trump blames his confused, slur-filled disaster of an interview with Elon Musk on ‘the complexity of modern day equipment,’” the KamalaHQ account wrote alongside the truncated post on Threads.

What Trump shared on Truth Social.

What the Harris campaign posted.

It’s not the only example of subtle narrative tweaks the campaign has made to put itself in a more favorable light, or Donald Trump in a less favorable one. On Tuesday, Axios reported that the campaign has bought several ads linking to news stories from outlets like The Associated Press, CNN, and USA Today that show up at the top of Google search results pages. While these sponsored links send users to real news articles, the headline and text of the ads are written by the campaign, though it’s presented by Google in a way that appears like the outlet itself wrote it. Google allows for this and the Harris campaign is certainly not the first to use this tactic. But Facebook actually got rid of a similar feature in 2017 after The Wall Street Journal flagged examples of advertisers changing news site headlines in promoted content. Google’s ad library shows the Trump campaign has not run ads on Google Search.
The headlines are far more glowing than would appear on most news sites. “VP Harris Protects Democracy – Trump Defends Jan 6 Comments,” reads one Harris-sponsored headline linking to The Independent. It’s not clear which specific article it linked to, but The Independent wasn’t happy. A spokesperson said it would seek for the ads to be removed and that it’s “entirely wrong for anyone to put fake headlines under The Independent brand. We object fiercely and believe it is undermining of what politics and journalism should be about.”
Trump, of course, has made far grander, more numerous, and more deceptive statements over the course of his campaign. Just recently, he falsely said Harris “A.I.’d” a crowd of thousands that showed up to see her at a rally in Michigan. He also created a false narrative that Harris “happened to turn Black” as she aspired to higher office. Harris attended the historically black college Howard University, and her father is Jamaican-American.
The Harris campaign has generally favored the informal language and style of modern social media — quickly adopting the “brat” aesthetic in a nod to Charli XCX’s popular album, for example. It’s raising a new set of questions about how to fairly present information and how viewers process internet content. Is an incomplete quote in what looks like a social media screenshot different from a carefully cropped soundbite in an attack ad? For Harris’ campaign, the answer seems to be no.
The Harris campaign declined to comment.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

On Wednesday, Kamala Harris’ campaign page shared a Truth Social post from Donald Trump. In it Trump blamed “the complexity of modern day equipment” for making his voice sound “somewhat different and strange” during a live interview on X with Elon Musk. But while the Harris campaign shared what looked like a screenshot of the post, they cut off the last line, where Trump explained that he released “an actual, and perfect, recording of the conversation.”

Exactly why the original broadcast sounded so odd is not totally clear — the Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about what led to the sound quality issues and what tech they used to fix it. But the Harris campaign’s post left out key context that Trump had released a cleaner version of the recording, making the post look purely like an excuse. “Trump blames his confused, slur-filled disaster of an interview with Elon Musk on ‘the complexity of modern day equipment,’” the KamalaHQ account wrote alongside the truncated post on Threads.

What Trump shared on Truth Social.

What the Harris campaign posted.

It’s not the only example of subtle narrative tweaks the campaign has made to put itself in a more favorable light, or Donald Trump in a less favorable one. On Tuesday, Axios reported that the campaign has bought several ads linking to news stories from outlets like The Associated Press, CNN, and USA Today that show up at the top of Google search results pages. While these sponsored links send users to real news articles, the headline and text of the ads are written by the campaign, though it’s presented by Google in a way that appears like the outlet itself wrote it. Google allows for this and the Harris campaign is certainly not the first to use this tactic. But Facebook actually got rid of a similar feature in 2017 after The Wall Street Journal flagged examples of advertisers changing news site headlines in promoted content. Google’s ad library shows the Trump campaign has not run ads on Google Search.

The headlines are far more glowing than would appear on most news sites. “VP Harris Protects Democracy – Trump Defends Jan 6 Comments,” reads one Harris-sponsored headline linking to The Independent. It’s not clear which specific article it linked to, but The Independent wasn’t happy. A spokesperson said it would seek for the ads to be removed and that it’s “entirely wrong for anyone to put fake headlines under The Independent brand. We object fiercely and believe it is undermining of what politics and journalism should be about.”

Trump, of course, has made far grander, more numerous, and more deceptive statements over the course of his campaign. Just recently, he falsely said Harris “A.I.’d” a crowd of thousands that showed up to see her at a rally in Michigan. He also created a false narrative that Harris “happened to turn Black” as she aspired to higher office. Harris attended the historically black college Howard University, and her father is Jamaican-American.

The Harris campaign has generally favored the informal language and style of modern social media — quickly adopting the “brat” aesthetic in a nod to Charli XCX’s popular album, for example. It’s raising a new set of questions about how to fairly present information and how viewers process internet content. Is an incomplete quote in what looks like a social media screenshot different from a carefully cropped soundbite in an attack ad? For Harris’ campaign, the answer seems to be no.

The Harris campaign declined to comment.

Read More 

Google’s bringing the ‘party’ back to the party line with emoji reactions for group calls. | Illustration: The Verge

Google’s Meet app is getting a few more features designed for calls. Meet, the video calling app Google rolled Duo into a couple of years ago, is designed to handle both meetings and personal video calls. The update, which will roll out over the coming months, focuses on the personal side. It offers an updated UI and features like in-call messaging — things that have only been available in meetings until now.
With this latest update, the call UI will look more like the meeting interface, with call controls becoming more readily available. In-call messaging is now supported so you can share links and rude comments, if you’re so inclined, while you’re muted. Emoji reactions will also be available in group calls, you’ll be able to stack effects like backgrounds and filters, and screen sharing will be an option in calls, too.
We’re not all as excited about showing our faces on a call as we were in say, 2020. To that end, Google is updating the mobile app interface for a better audio-only experience with bigger buttons. The company also claims you’ll be able to easily switch a call from your PC to your Android phone or tablet.
This update is one more step in the slow, unsteady rollout of the combined Duo and Meet experience. The new version is rolling out slowly, and everyone on your call will need to be running the updated app version to use the new features. It might be a minute before you see those new features come through.

Google’s bringing the ‘party’ back to the party line with emoji reactions for group calls. | Illustration: The Verge

Google’s Meet app is getting a few more features designed for calls. Meet, the video calling app Google rolled Duo into a couple of years ago, is designed to handle both meetings and personal video calls. The update, which will roll out over the coming months, focuses on the personal side. It offers an updated UI and features like in-call messaging — things that have only been available in meetings until now.

With this latest update, the call UI will look more like the meeting interface, with call controls becoming more readily available. In-call messaging is now supported so you can share links and rude comments, if you’re so inclined, while you’re muted. Emoji reactions will also be available in group calls, you’ll be able to stack effects like backgrounds and filters, and screen sharing will be an option in calls, too.

We’re not all as excited about showing our faces on a call as we were in say, 2020. To that end, Google is updating the mobile app interface for a better audio-only experience with bigger buttons. The company also claims you’ll be able to easily switch a call from your PC to your Android phone or tablet.

This update is one more step in the slow, unsteady rollout of the combined Duo and Meet experience. The new version is rolling out slowly, and everyone on your call will need to be running the updated app version to use the new features. It might be a minute before you see those new features come through.

Read More 

Image: AltStore

AltStore PAL, a third-party iOS app store that’s available in the EU, is dropping its annual €1.50 (plus tax) subscription after receiving a “MegaGrant” from Fortnite developer Epic Games. AltStore originally charged the subscription to help cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee (CTF), which is a fee third-party app marketplaces have to pay for each annual app install.
Epic uses MegaGrants as a way to “sponsor the development of exciting projects that may not otherwise have enough funding to fully realize,” the company says. The grants are typically meant for smaller teams using Epic’s technologies to “bring bold, challenging, and insanely creative dreams to life,” but in this case, Epic awarded the grant for “innovation in app distribution,” according to AltStore.

AltStore didn’t share the dollar value of the grant, and the company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Current subscribers won’t be charged when their renewal date rolls around, AltStore says. The AltStore team also plans to “show our appreciation for our existing subscribers in a future update” but didn’t specify what that might look like.
Epic is also working on a version of the Epic Games Store for iOS and said earlier this week that the store, Fortnite, and Rocket League Sideswipe have been submitted to Apple for “final notarization.”

Image: AltStore

AltStore PAL, a third-party iOS app store that’s available in the EU, is dropping its annual €1.50 (plus tax) subscription after receiving a “MegaGrant” from Fortnite developer Epic Games. AltStore originally charged the subscription to help cover Apple’s Core Technology Fee (CTF), which is a fee third-party app marketplaces have to pay for each annual app install.

Epic uses MegaGrants as a way to “sponsor the development of exciting projects that may not otherwise have enough funding to fully realize,” the company says. The grants are typically meant for smaller teams using Epic’s technologies to “bring bold, challenging, and insanely creative dreams to life,” but in this case, Epic awarded the grant for “innovation in app distribution,” according to AltStore.

AltStore didn’t share the dollar value of the grant, and the company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Current subscribers won’t be charged when their renewal date rolls around, AltStore says. The AltStore team also plans to “show our appreciation for our existing subscribers in a future update” but didn’t specify what that might look like.

Epic is also working on a version of the Epic Games Store for iOS and said earlier this week that the store, Fortnite, and Rocket League Sideswipe have been submitted to Apple for “final notarization.”

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Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Logitech is running a 10 percent off sale on its site through August 17th, extending some solid deals to a wide range of its G Gaming PC and console peripherals (with other retailers matching or beating Logitech’s pricing). Some notable deals include the G Pro X Superlight 2 gaming mouse and Astro A50 X headset. The former is down to $134.99 ($25 off) in white at Amazon and $139.99 at Best Buy (or $143.99 in all three colors from Logitech), while the latter is discounted to $341.99 ($38 off) at Best Buy, Amazon, and Logitech’s online storefront.

While we’ve seen the black version of the Superlight 2 fall a little lower in the past, it doesn’t go on sale very frequently, unlike previous generations. Part of what makes the G Pro X Superlight 2 so good is the way it balances its gaming chops with everyday good looks. It features a new Hero 2 sensor that offers up to 32,000 DPI and weighs just 60 grams, so it’s capable enough for tournament-level play without looking out of place even in a professional work environment (or if you’re just not the type for the flashiest looks on your desk). I’d say it’s closer to a “forever mouse” than whatever Logitech’s own CEO was talking about during her recent interview on Decoder.

As for the Astro headset, this is one of the few times it’s been discounted from its $380 price point since it launched at the end of 2023. The A50 X is a bit pricey for a gaming headset, but if you frequently game on different platforms, it has a unique docking station that allows it to act as a central hub for all your systems. By routing your consoles through its HDMI passthrough ports, you can take up one less HDMI 2.1 port on your monitor or TV and switch between your consoles or PC with a tap of a button on the headset. The earcups are also incredibly comfy for long play sessions, with some great audio coming through the 40mm drivers.

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Logitech is running a 10 percent off sale on its site through August 17th, extending some solid deals to a wide range of its G Gaming PC and console peripherals (with other retailers matching or beating Logitech’s pricing). Some notable deals include the G Pro X Superlight 2 gaming mouse and Astro A50 X headset. The former is down to $134.99 ($25 off) in white at Amazon and $139.99 at Best Buy (or $143.99 in all three colors from Logitech), while the latter is discounted to $341.99 ($38 off) at Best Buy, Amazon, and Logitech’s online storefront.

While we’ve seen the black version of the Superlight 2 fall a little lower in the past, it doesn’t go on sale very frequently, unlike previous generations. Part of what makes the G Pro X Superlight 2 so good is the way it balances its gaming chops with everyday good looks. It features a new Hero 2 sensor that offers up to 32,000 DPI and weighs just 60 grams, so it’s capable enough for tournament-level play without looking out of place even in a professional work environment (or if you’re just not the type for the flashiest looks on your desk). I’d say it’s closer to a “forever mouse” than whatever Logitech’s own CEO was talking about during her recent interview on Decoder.

As for the Astro headset, this is one of the few times it’s been discounted from its $380 price point since it launched at the end of 2023. The A50 X is a bit pricey for a gaming headset, but if you frequently game on different platforms, it has a unique docking station that allows it to act as a central hub for all your systems. By routing your consoles through its HDMI passthrough ports, you can take up one less HDMI 2.1 port on your monitor or TV and switch between your consoles or PC with a tap of a button on the headset. The earcups are also incredibly comfy for long play sessions, with some great audio coming through the 40mm drivers.

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Detecting an offside violation can be difficult. | Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images

The UK’s top soccer league is switching up the tech it uses to detect offside violations on the football pitch. The English Premier League (EPL) has contracted with a company called Genius Sports, which will use dozens of iPhones combined with machine-learning models to help game officials make an offside call.
Offside violations aren’t always clear-cut, especially when players are grouped in a way that blocks officials and even multiple camera angles from seeing enough detail to accurately call them. That’s where video assistant referee (VAR) systems usually come in, ostensibly filling in the gaps using cameras and machine learning.

Soccer leagues have used VAR systems for years. FIFA, soccer’s global league, started officially using machine learning-powered limb-tracking tech and embedded soccer ball sensors in 2022 after a trial run the previous year. The software could track 29 points of players’ bodies, but those systems have limits and often cause “extensive delays and human process errors” and “concerns about the precision of in-game calls,” writes Wired in a report about EPL’s deal with Genius Sports.
Genius calls its offside detection tech “Semi-Assisted Offside Technology” (SAOT), chief product officer Matt Fleckenstein told The Verge in an interview. It’s part of the company’s GeniusIQ system, which also powers its fan-facing offerings that create features like real-time, dynamic graphics (think trails that follow a soccer ball).
Genius says its SAOT tech can accurately create 3D renders of each player, and that this helps officials define exactly where the offside line is on the field and where all the players are in relation to it. To do that, the company needs a lot of cameras.
“We were moving away from 4K cameras that were significantly more expensive,” Fleckenstein said. “We wanted to see if we could move to a more off-the-shelf mobile phone.” The company ended up using iPhones, largely because it’s what the company’s employees were most familiar with when it comes to things like software development.
Fleckenstein said that “the key is to deploy 24 to 28” iPhones — mostly iPhone 15 Pros — to get even coverage of the pitch and the sidelines, usually in pairs of custom rigs that each hold two phones at a time, and are angled slightly differently to make sure an area is covered.
This approach apparently gives Genius “between 7,000 and 10,000” data points that allow it to generate a kind of 3D virtual mesh of each player. Having so many data points means the system can tolerate missing details from things like lighting issues, Fleckenstein said.
On top of that, iPhones can record at very high framerates — Genius records at 100fps but has tested as much as 200fps — and the phones offer some local computer vision processing, too. All of the data is sent to an on-premise server to be processed by its GeniusIQ system.
GeniusIQ’s computer vision and predictive algorithms process the data to identify individual body parts — down to players’ individual fingers — and predict where they are when they’re blocked from view. The company trained its system on “several seasons” of soccer matches to be able to do this, according to Wired.

Image: Genius Sports
The difference between center of mass, skeletal, and object semantic mesh tracking.

All of this is in service of figuring out where every player is in relation to each other, the ball, and the goalkeeper. Offside calls are made “when the ball leaves the offensive player’s foot,” Fleckenstein said, so having more frames captured makes it more likely the cameras will capture the exact moment that happened.
The official rules of soccer are very specific about what makes a player “offside,” but its not clear if more granularity makes GeniusIQ better than existing alternatives. Fleckenstein wouldn’t offer any performance comparisons but pointed out that other VAR systems may only use “30 or 40 points of the body,” building a sort of rough stick figure version of the player. Or they may only use “center of mass” tracking, where each player is represented by a single data point.
We’ll find out soon enough if Genius Sports’ offside detection technology really can do a better job than the VAR systems of the last few years. It’s expected to go into full use by the EPL before the end of this year and continue through the season. Fleckenstein said the exact date hasn’t been announced.

Detecting an offside violation can be difficult. | Photo by Dan Istitene/Getty Images

The UK’s top soccer league is switching up the tech it uses to detect offside violations on the football pitch. The English Premier League (EPL) has contracted with a company called Genius Sports, which will use dozens of iPhones combined with machine-learning models to help game officials make an offside call.

Offside violations aren’t always clear-cut, especially when players are grouped in a way that blocks officials and even multiple camera angles from seeing enough detail to accurately call them. That’s where video assistant referee (VAR) systems usually come in, ostensibly filling in the gaps using cameras and machine learning.

Soccer leagues have used VAR systems for years. FIFA, soccer’s global league, started officially using machine learning-powered limb-tracking tech and embedded soccer ball sensors in 2022 after a trial run the previous year. The software could track 29 points of players’ bodies, but those systems have limits and often cause “extensive delays and human process errors” and “concerns about the precision of in-game calls,” writes Wired in a report about EPL’s deal with Genius Sports.

Genius calls its offside detection tech “Semi-Assisted Offside Technology” (SAOT), chief product officer Matt Fleckenstein told The Verge in an interview. It’s part of the company’s GeniusIQ system, which also powers its fan-facing offerings that create features like real-time, dynamic graphics (think trails that follow a soccer ball).

Genius says its SAOT tech can accurately create 3D renders of each player, and that this helps officials define exactly where the offside line is on the field and where all the players are in relation to it. To do that, the company needs a lot of cameras.

“We were moving away from 4K cameras that were significantly more expensive,” Fleckenstein said. “We wanted to see if we could move to a more off-the-shelf mobile phone.” The company ended up using iPhones, largely because it’s what the company’s employees were most familiar with when it comes to things like software development.

Fleckenstein said that “the key is to deploy 24 to 28” iPhones — mostly iPhone 15 Pros — to get even coverage of the pitch and the sidelines, usually in pairs of custom rigs that each hold two phones at a time, and are angled slightly differently to make sure an area is covered.

This approach apparently gives Genius “between 7,000 and 10,000” data points that allow it to generate a kind of 3D virtual mesh of each player. Having so many data points means the system can tolerate missing details from things like lighting issues, Fleckenstein said.

On top of that, iPhones can record at very high framerates — Genius records at 100fps but has tested as much as 200fps — and the phones offer some local computer vision processing, too. All of the data is sent to an on-premise server to be processed by its GeniusIQ system.

GeniusIQ’s computer vision and predictive algorithms process the data to identify individual body parts — down to players’ individual fingers — and predict where they are when they’re blocked from view. The company trained its system on “several seasons” of soccer matches to be able to do this, according to Wired.

Image: Genius Sports
The difference between center of mass, skeletal, and object semantic mesh tracking.

All of this is in service of figuring out where every player is in relation to each other, the ball, and the goalkeeper. Offside calls are made “when the ball leaves the offensive player’s foot,” Fleckenstein said, so having more frames captured makes it more likely the cameras will capture the exact moment that happened.

The official rules of soccer are very specific about what makes a player “offside,” but its not clear if more granularity makes GeniusIQ better than existing alternatives. Fleckenstein wouldn’t offer any performance comparisons but pointed out that other VAR systems may only use “30 or 40 points of the body,” building a sort of rough stick figure version of the player. Or they may only use “center of mass” tracking, where each player is represented by a single data point.

We’ll find out soon enough if Genius Sports’ offside detection technology really can do a better job than the VAR systems of the last few years. It’s expected to go into full use by the EPL before the end of this year and continue through the season. Fleckenstein said the exact date hasn’t been announced.

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Image: The Verge

Valve has started publicly testing sorting reviews in the Steam store based on how well they help players make purchase decisions about games.
Historically we’ve sorted reviews by the number of ‘helpful’ votes given to each review by other players. However, we’ve seen that many players use reviews for sharing jokes, memes, ascii art and other content that might not be the most helpful for a potential purchaser.
Its solution to the problem is the new “helpfulness system,” which introduces an enabled-by-default “most helpful” toggle that skips past highly upvoted ASCII art or memes to show reviews Valve deems more informative.

Screenshot: Steam
These are some of the top reviews for popular games if you look with Valve’s new filter disabled.

Valve says it uses a combination of machine learning algorithms, user reports, and the assistance of the Steam moderation team to categorize reviews and consider both positive and negative comments. The platform’s already started the process but says it will “likely take quite a while” to evaluate the more than 140 million existing reviews as well as newly published ones.
Users have the option of returning to the old review categorization system if they choose. They just need to head to the “Display” drop-down located right above user reviews and unselect the “Use new helpfulness system” checkbox.
The news comes just a day after Valve also announced it will no longer allow Steam store descriptions to include links starting in “early” September. Steam says it’s trying to prevent its store pages from becoming advertisements for other Steam store pages, as well as prevent confusion over “prologue” games.

Image: The Verge

Valve has started publicly testing sorting reviews in the Steam store based on how well they help players make purchase decisions about games.

Historically we’ve sorted reviews by the number of ‘helpful’ votes given to each review by other players. However, we’ve seen that many players use reviews for sharing jokes, memes, ascii art and other content that might not be the most helpful for a potential purchaser.

Its solution to the problem is the new “helpfulness system,” which introduces an enabled-by-default “most helpful” toggle that skips past highly upvoted ASCII art or memes to show reviews Valve deems more informative.

Screenshot: Steam
These are some of the top reviews for popular games if you look with Valve’s new filter disabled.

Valve says it uses a combination of machine learning algorithms, user reports, and the assistance of the Steam moderation team to categorize reviews and consider both positive and negative comments. The platform’s already started the process but says it will “likely take quite a while” to evaluate the more than 140 million existing reviews as well as newly published ones.

Users have the option of returning to the old review categorization system if they choose. They just need to head to the “Display” drop-down located right above user reviews and unselect the “Use new helpfulness system” checkbox.

The news comes just a day after Valve also announced it will no longer allow Steam store descriptions to include links starting in “early” September. Steam says it’s trying to prevent its store pages from becoming advertisements for other Steam store pages, as well as prevent confusion over “prologue” games.

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