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Little phone, how I miss you. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

We’ve already heard rumblings about an iPhone Slim model taking the place of the iPhone Plus in 2025, making it the iPhone 17 Slim. Now, a new report from Apple supply chain expert Ming-Chi Kuo corroborates earlier claims, suggesting that the company’s incredible shapeshifting non-Pro iPhone is about to evolve yet again.
Kuo agrees it will come with a 6.6-inch screen and adds that it’ll have just one rear-facing camera along with the company’s beleaguered in-house 5G chip. Kuo says that the Slim model won’t be a direct replacement for the Plus; instead, it represents “new design trends beyond the existing iPhone lineup.” That tracks with rumors that it might cost more than the $1,200 Pro Max.
Apple has had one heck of a time trying to figure out what the second non-Pro iPhone in its lineup should look like. First, it was Mini. That didn’t sell very well, so then it became Plus.
The answer now seems to be to ax it entirely. According to Kuo, the Plus “only accounts for 5-10 percent of new iPhone shipments,” and Apple has deemed it redundant to the other high-end models it sells. Starting next year (potentially), the Plus is out, and Slim is in.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
The iPhone 15 Plus (right) is big, but it’s also nearly as expensive as an iPhone 15 Pro.

It all feels like a yearslong “is this anything?” exercise. iPhone owners are holding onto older phones longer than they used to, and Apple very much wants us to upgrade our iPhones more often, so it keeps spinning the big Price is Right wheel to see which combination of size and features will kick the almighty upgrade cycle into high gear again. It wasn’t a small phone, and it wasn’t a big phone.
If AI doesn’t do it, then maybe Skinny Phone will.
Personally, I’m all for a skinny iPhone. I’m excited about putting it in my back pocket, forgetting about it, and cracking it right in half. Or maybe I’ll brandish it like a Swiss Army knife the next time I’m at a birthday party and we’re looking for a knife to cut the cake. Maybe I’ll get two slim iPhones, tape them together on the long edges like a book, and make the world’s first foldable iPhone. I’m just saying we shouldn’t limit our imaginations here.

More realistically, the iPhone Slim would just be the latest manifestation of Apple’s fixation with slim devices. That’s cool! But I’m hoping this is a stepping stone toward an actual folding iPhone, which is coincidentally also back in the rumor mill. A clamshell-style folding phone like the Motorola Razr or the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip would come with meaningful benefits compared to a regular old iPhone. And if Apple expects me to upgrade my beloved tiny iPhone 13 Mini for anything less, it better think differently.

Little phone, how I miss you. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

We’ve already heard rumblings about an iPhone Slim model taking the place of the iPhone Plus in 2025, making it the iPhone 17 Slim. Now, a new report from Apple supply chain expert Ming-Chi Kuo corroborates earlier claims, suggesting that the company’s incredible shapeshifting non-Pro iPhone is about to evolve yet again.

Kuo agrees it will come with a 6.6-inch screen and adds that it’ll have just one rear-facing camera along with the company’s beleaguered in-house 5G chip. Kuo says that the Slim model won’t be a direct replacement for the Plus; instead, it represents “new design trends beyond the existing iPhone lineup.” That tracks with rumors that it might cost more than the $1,200 Pro Max.

Apple has had one heck of a time trying to figure out what the second non-Pro iPhone in its lineup should look like. First, it was Mini. That didn’t sell very well, so then it became Plus.

The answer now seems to be to ax it entirely. According to Kuo, the Plus “only accounts for 5-10 percent of new iPhone shipments,” and Apple has deemed it redundant to the other high-end models it sells. Starting next year (potentially), the Plus is out, and Slim is in.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
The iPhone 15 Plus (right) is big, but it’s also nearly as expensive as an iPhone 15 Pro.

It all feels like a yearslong “is this anything?” exercise. iPhone owners are holding onto older phones longer than they used to, and Apple very much wants us to upgrade our iPhones more often, so it keeps spinning the big Price is Right wheel to see which combination of size and features will kick the almighty upgrade cycle into high gear again. It wasn’t a small phone, and it wasn’t a big phone.

If AI doesn’t do it, then maybe Skinny Phone will.

Personally, I’m all for a skinny iPhone. I’m excited about putting it in my back pocket, forgetting about it, and cracking it right in half. Or maybe I’ll brandish it like a Swiss Army knife the next time I’m at a birthday party and we’re looking for a knife to cut the cake. Maybe I’ll get two slim iPhones, tape them together on the long edges like a book, and make the world’s first foldable iPhone. I’m just saying we shouldn’t limit our imaginations here.

More realistically, the iPhone Slim would just be the latest manifestation of Apple’s fixation with slim devices. That’s cool! But I’m hoping this is a stepping stone toward an actual folding iPhone, which is coincidentally also back in the rumor mill. A clamshell-style folding phone like the Motorola Razr or the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip would come with meaningful benefits compared to a regular old iPhone. And if Apple expects me to upgrade my beloved tiny iPhone 13 Mini for anything less, it better think differently.

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A screenshot of Apple Maps on the web. | Screenshot: The Verge

Apple Maps is finally available on the web. Through a beta that launched Wednesday afternoon, you can now get driving and walking directions, as well as view ratings and reviews from the web version of Apple Maps in a desktop or mobile browser.
Apple Maps is available through the beta.maps.apple.com site. You can do most of what you can in the iOS version of the app, including view guides, order food directly from Maps, explore cities, and get information about businesses. Apple says it’s going to launch additional features, like Look Around, in the coming months.

The web-based version of Apple Maps is only available in English for now, and is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, along with Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs. Apple plans on rolling out support for other languages, browsers, and platforms in the future. Apple notes that all developers using its MapKit JS tool can link out to Maps on the web.
Users have long requested Apple Maps on the web since the app’s launch on iPhone in 2012. Now that it’s finally here, Apple Maps will be able to directly compete with Google, which has long been available on the web. Apple has been gradually adding new features to its mapping service, including detailed city maps, multi-stop routing, cycling directions, EV routing, offline navigation, and more.
Developing…

A screenshot of Apple Maps on the web. | Screenshot: The Verge

Apple Maps is finally available on the web. Through a beta that launched Wednesday afternoon, you can now get driving and walking directions, as well as view ratings and reviews from the web version of Apple Maps in a desktop or mobile browser.

Apple Maps is available through the beta.maps.apple.com site. You can do most of what you can in the iOS version of the app, including view guides, order food directly from Maps, explore cities, and get information about businesses. Apple says it’s going to launch additional features, like Look Around, in the coming months.

The web-based version of Apple Maps is only available in English for now, and is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, along with Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs. Apple plans on rolling out support for other languages, browsers, and platforms in the future. Apple notes that all developers using its MapKit JS tool can link out to Maps on the web.

Users have long requested Apple Maps on the web since the app’s launch on iPhone in 2012. Now that it’s finally here, Apple Maps will be able to directly compete with Google, which has long been available on the web. Apple has been gradually adding new features to its mapping service, including detailed city maps, multi-stop routing, cycling directions, EV routing, offline navigation, and more.

Developing…

Read More 

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

The vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee is a cipher on many tech issues — here’s what we’ve been able to piece together. Vice President Kamala Harris is all but certain to become the Democratic presidential candidate. She was suddenly catapulted to front-runner status for the Democratic presidential nomination after President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed her for the position, and now key power brokers in the party have publicly backed her. If elected, Harris would be a president with roots in California’s Bay Area — the heart of the tech industry.
Despite her ties to this region, Harris is largely a cipher when it comes to tech policy. As vice president, she is inherently connected to every policy of the Biden administration, but it’s difficult to untangle which parts she would continue and which she would change. Her key focus areas as vice president — including artificial intelligence — and her interests as a senator and, before that, as California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney, provide a handful of insights into what she might prioritize if she should become president.
We know where she stands on climate, we have some sense of how she feels about privacy, and we have a whole array of tantalizing statements about AI, but there is a wide range of key questions that she has yet to be asked or has successfully avoided answering. She remains an enigma when it comes to tech antitrust and the TikTok ban. And she has yet to speak directly to the issues that most concern the moneyed donor class of Silicon Valley, such as crypto regulation.

“I think this is a big opportunity for the Democratic Party to do a little bit of introspection and say — where have they lost certain communities?” Box CEO Aaron Levie, who frequently donates to Democratic candidates, told The Verge in an interview. He said the party has seen “missed opportunities” with the tech and business community, like in pushing for taxes on unrealized gains and failing to update the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers. Ultimately, he hopes for “a bit of a reset on some of either the policy initiatives, or just the the tone and the message from the party.”
For those in the tech industry, Harris’ policy stances are not particularly well known, says venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk. A campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign, Tusk says that’s largely because most tech regulation occurs at the state level, “so it’s not like she had this track record in the Senate, simply because they just don’t do very much.” That means there’s a lot to be learned in the next few weeks on where Harris plants her feet on a variety of tech issues.
The Verge took a look into how the vice president’s background and legislative history could inform what a Harris presidency could mean for tech — the industry, the workforce, and its impact on consumers.
Antitrust
Many of the recent legislative efforts to rein in the power of the largest tech companies gained momentum after Harris left the Senate. She was never one of the more outspoken politicians on antitrust policy to begin with. During the 2020 election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was the candidate out front calling for the breakup of big tech companies. Naturally, in 2019, The New York Times asked Harris point-blank whether firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google should be broken up. Instead of giving a direct answer, she steered the conversation to privacy regulation.
Still, she’s left open the possibility of enforcement. Also that year, she told CNN that “we have to seriously take a look at” breaking up Facebook. She also called the platform “essentially a utility that has gone unregulated.”

The Biden administration’s antitrust policy — as enacted by the enforcers he appointed, such as the Federal Trade Commission’s Lina Khan and the Department of Justice’s Jonathan Kanter — has been aggressive, maybe even unprecedentedly so. It’s not clear whether a Harris administration would keep that up. The question she dodged in 2019 will be increasingly difficult to avoid now that she’s facing down a self-proclaimed tech antitrust advocate in Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (OH).
Whichever path Harris chooses, she’ll find some friends in Silicon Valley, which itself has split on the issue of antitrust. (The most direct beneficiaries of antitrust policy, after all, are the rival companies.) “There’s not a dinner that I’ve been at where three people can agree on an antitrust policy,” Levie said. “I have friends that are the most ardent supporters of capitalism, of free markets, that also like what Lina Khan does to keep Big Tech in check.”
Privacy
When avoiding the Times’ question about breaking up big tech in 2019, Harris said that “the tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure and the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised.” She added, “My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact.”
The statement sounds strong, but it doesn’t actually say much about what substantive policies she will endorse. She and other legislators grilled Mark Zuckerberg in a public hearing in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, but her adversarial comments at the time were more or less in line with the tenor of the entire hearing.
Non-consensual images and sexual exploitation
There is one area of privacy in which Harris has had a strong, substantive record: legislation and enforcement targeting the sharing of non-consensual images. But this specific issue has not materialized into a more generalized policy position on data privacy — it has rather been an extension of her work around online sex trafficking.
While serving in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, Harris’ legislative focus on tech mostly centered around preventing the spread of non-consensual images on the internet. For example, in 2017, she introduced the Ending Nonconsensual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act, which sought to make it a crime to knowingly distribute or threaten to distribute non-consensual intimate images. She also introduced the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act (SHIELD) Act in 2019, similarly criminalizing the distribution of these kinds of images. That bill recently passed the Senate after it was re-introduced by Harris ally Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
Her work in this area predates her entry to Washington, DC. While she was California attorney general, Harris secured a guilty plea over a hacking scheme to steal intimate images off of people’s Google accounts.

Non-consensual images and sex trafficking are not the same thing. But legislative and prosecutorial action directed at either have run into the same issue: Section 230, a legal liability shield for online platforms. While Section 230 does not immunize an individual from spreading nonconsensual images or sexually exploiting someone, when it comes to the modern era, the most sweepingly powerful action is to intervene at the level of the platform, whether that platform is a juggernaut like Google or a nonprofit like Wikipedia. The creation of carve-outs to Section 230 for both nonconsensual images and sexual exploitation follows more or less the same model with the same stakeholders and the same legal issues.
Notably, Harris pressed criminal charges against the top executives of Backpage.com, a personals website that hosted advertisements for sex work. After becoming a senator, Harris also voted in favor of FOSTA-SESTA, a law excluding sex trafficking from Section 230. (FOSTA-SESTA was, in part, a reaction to Backpage.) As with all laws implicating speech, there are concerns that FOSTA-SESTA was too broad. Sex workers and their allies have argued that the law puts them in more danger, since finding clients online allowed for a degree of vetting and information sharing with others in the industry that’s less readily available now. The controversy over FOSTA-SESTA likely isn’t over.
Artificial intelligence
As vice president, Kamala Harris was tasked with being a point person in the administration on AI policy, leading roundtables for both leading companies in the industry, and labor and civil rights leaders.
Companies and labs developing advanced AI are facing growing regulatory scrutiny due to the technology’s associated risks, including privacy issues, job displacement, bias and discrimination, deepfakes, AI-powered weapons, and the controversial potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could make these systems as intelligent as their human creators. To mitigate unforeseen risks, tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have urged the government to regulate AI.
Harris agrees, calling for “legislation that strengthens AI safety without stifling innovation” in an AI Safety Summit in the U.K. last November. At the summit, Harris said that they should “consider and address the full spectrum of AI risk threats to humanity as a whole as well as threats to individuals, communities, to our institutions, and to our most vulnerable populations.”
She has actively voiced concerns about how training data can introduce harmful biases
In March, Harris announced a government-wide policy that required U.S. federal agencies to show that their AI tools aren’t harming the public. (If they can’t meet those guidelines, they must cease using the system.) She has actively voiced concerns about how training data can introduce harmful biases and, when used at scale, could wind up discriminating against vulnerable populations.
“And when people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of A.I.-enabled mis- and disinformation, I ask: Is that not existential for democracy?” Harris said at the U.K. summit.
Levie said the current administration hasn’t had “major missteps in AI,” though he wishes they’d come out strongly in favor of open source AI. But he sees it as more of a forward-looking issue. “I think the concern you could have is, the next four years are the most important, probably, for AI regulation. And so to some extent, you do have to believe that the party has the wherewithal to make really good decisions,” he said.
TikTok
In April, the U.S. enacted a law that could ban the popular social media platform TikTok as soon as January (unless its parent company, ByteDance, decides to sell it off). Even though President Biden signed the bill, Harris told reporters that a ban was not the goal.
“We need to deal with the owner and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok,” Harris told ABC News in March. She also added that TikTok has “very important” benefits, like serving as an income generator and “allowing people to share information in a free way.”
When asked about her specific views on TikTok itself during an on-stage interview at The New York Times DealBook summit last November, Harris declined to comment.
Crypto
The Biden administration has had a less-than-rosy relationship with the crypto industry due to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler’s stance on how it should be regulated. Tusk said that he expects Harris will improve relations with the sector, even if it’s just by putting in her own SEC chair pick instead of Gensler.
Meanwhile, Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have indicated they would be open to a less regulated environment for crypto — Trump is even slated to speak at a crypto conference over the weekend. This deregulatory attitude has reportedly attracted $160 million in campaign contributions to the Republican party from the crypto industry, as well as public backing from the likes of prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz. (Their firm, a16z, has a $4.5 billion crypto fund.)
Immigration and H-1Bs
As vice president, Harris has been tasked with addressing “root causes” of immigration from Central America. In that role, she focused in part on strengthening the economics of the region and secured private sector commitments from companies including Meta to help train entrepreneurs and small business owners there, and help women build their online presence and access financial services. Under Biden, the Department of Homeland Security has ramped up its use of border surveillance technology, a practice that could continue during a Harris presidency.
The right has already zeroed in on Harris’s tenure as so-called “border czar,” even though her actual role was focused on diplomacy with Central America. But immigration is much more than a border issue, and Harris would likely continue Biden’s policies with regards to legal immigration and visas. A key interest of the tech sector is in maintaining or expanding the H-1B visa program, which lets high-skilled workers remain in the country to work in highly specialized jobs. As a senator, Harris worked with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), to introduce the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would “remove per-country caps for employment-based green cards,” according to a press release. “We must do more to eliminate discriminatory backlogs and facilitate family unity so that high-skilled immigrants are not vulnerable to exploitation and can stay in the U.S. and continue to contribute to the economy,” she said in a statement at the time. She has not spoken on the issue more recently.
Climate
Harris is much more of a known quantity when it comes to climate and energy policy. For that reason, she has already garnered support from some major environmental groups and business leaders in clean energy. That includes the League of Conservation Voters that rates lawmakers based on their environmental track records, and has given Harris a 90 percent on her scorecard.
The Biden administration managed to pass legislation marking the biggest investments in clean energy and climate yet in the US. And the Environmental Protection Agency under Biden and Harris has introduced sweeping new pollution regulations for cars, power plants, and industrial facilities. All in all, the measures could transform the way Americans get around, how their homes are built, and how they get their energy.
Nevertheless, the US is still not on track to meet climate goals it set under the Paris agreement of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by the end of the decade. Donald Trump could try to wipe existing climate policies off the books.
Harris has taken a tougher stance, for instance, on fracking
Harris is expected to defend those policies, of course. And there’s even some hope among climate advocates she could go farther than Biden to crack down on fossil fuels. Harris has taken a tougher stance, for instance, on fracking — going as far as filing suit against the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking back when she was California’s Attorney General.
Tech donations and connections
Having spent most of her political career either in California or representing it, tech and entertainment companies were among the top contributors to Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks political donations and groups together organizations’ political action committee (PAC) spending and employee donations, the University of California was the top contributor to her campaign at $209,00. Harris raised $144,00 from Alphabet, $137,000 from Disney, and $134,000 from AT&T.
Her 2016 Senate campaign saw support from people from similar groups, including Comcast, Apple, and Cisco. She also got support from Venable, a law firm where her husband, Doug Emhoff, worked at the time, overseeing its Los Angeles and San Francisco offices. Emhoff represented clients in the entertainment industry, as well as large corporations like Walmart and Merck, according to The New York Times.

Harris, who was born in Oakland, has some personal connections in the tech industry as well. Her brother-in-law, for example, is Uber’s Chief Legal Officer Tony West. She also attended the wedding of Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, according to The Washington Post.
None of these ties or donations elucidate what a Harris presidency means for tech. Despite being from the area, she is not a Silicon Valley politician; despite being one of those leading the most successful push to whittle down the immunity shield of Section 230, she is not an anti-tech politician, either.
But in an election year that saw both the passage of the TikTok ban and the once-in-a-generation DOJ antitrust suit against Apple, there are tech policy questions that Kamala Harris cannot avoid forever. The GOP ticket has already articulated its position — coherent or not — on some of those issues. It will be Harris’ turn soon enough.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

The vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee is a cipher on many tech issues — here’s what we’ve been able to piece together.

Vice President Kamala Harris is all but certain to become the Democratic presidential candidate. She was suddenly catapulted to front-runner status for the Democratic presidential nomination after President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign and endorsed her for the position, and now key power brokers in the party have publicly backed her. If elected, Harris would be a president with roots in California’s Bay Area — the heart of the tech industry.

Despite her ties to this region, Harris is largely a cipher when it comes to tech policy. As vice president, she is inherently connected to every policy of the Biden administration, but it’s difficult to untangle which parts she would continue and which she would change. Her key focus areas as vice president — including artificial intelligence — and her interests as a senator and, before that, as California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney, provide a handful of insights into what she might prioritize if she should become president.

We know where she stands on climate, we have some sense of how she feels about privacy, and we have a whole array of tantalizing statements about AI, but there is a wide range of key questions that she has yet to be asked or has successfully avoided answering. She remains an enigma when it comes to tech antitrust and the TikTok ban. And she has yet to speak directly to the issues that most concern the moneyed donor class of Silicon Valley, such as crypto regulation.

“I think this is a big opportunity for the Democratic Party to do a little bit of introspection and say — where have they lost certain communities?” Box CEO Aaron Levie, who frequently donates to Democratic candidates, told The Verge in an interview. He said the party has seen “missed opportunities” with the tech and business community, like in pushing for taxes on unrealized gains and failing to update the H-1B visa program for high-skilled workers. Ultimately, he hopes for “a bit of a reset on some of either the policy initiatives, or just the the tone and the message from the party.”

For those in the tech industry, Harris’ policy stances are not particularly well known, says venture capitalist and political strategist Bradley Tusk. A campaign manager for Mike Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign, Tusk says that’s largely because most tech regulation occurs at the state level, “so it’s not like she had this track record in the Senate, simply because they just don’t do very much.” That means there’s a lot to be learned in the next few weeks on where Harris plants her feet on a variety of tech issues.

The Verge took a look into how the vice president’s background and legislative history could inform what a Harris presidency could mean for tech — the industry, the workforce, and its impact on consumers.

Antitrust

Many of the recent legislative efforts to rein in the power of the largest tech companies gained momentum after Harris left the Senate. She was never one of the more outspoken politicians on antitrust policy to begin with. During the 2020 election, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was the candidate out front calling for the breakup of big tech companies. Naturally, in 2019, The New York Times asked Harris point-blank whether firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Google should be broken up. Instead of giving a direct answer, she steered the conversation to privacy regulation.

Still, she’s left open the possibility of enforcement. Also that year, she told CNN that “we have to seriously take a look at” breaking up Facebook. She also called the platform “essentially a utility that has gone unregulated.”

The Biden administration’s antitrust policy — as enacted by the enforcers he appointed, such as the Federal Trade Commission’s Lina Khan and the Department of Justice’s Jonathan Kanter — has been aggressive, maybe even unprecedentedly so. It’s not clear whether a Harris administration would keep that up. The question she dodged in 2019 will be increasingly difficult to avoid now that she’s facing down a self-proclaimed tech antitrust advocate in Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (OH).

Whichever path Harris chooses, she’ll find some friends in Silicon Valley, which itself has split on the issue of antitrust. (The most direct beneficiaries of antitrust policy, after all, are the rival companies.) “There’s not a dinner that I’ve been at where three people can agree on an antitrust policy,” Levie said. “I have friends that are the most ardent supporters of capitalism, of free markets, that also like what Lina Khan does to keep Big Tech in check.”

Privacy

When avoiding the Times’ question about breaking up big tech in 2019, Harris said that “the tech companies have got to be regulated in a way that we can ensure and the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised.” She added, “My first priority is going to be that we ensure that privacy is something that is intact.”

The statement sounds strong, but it doesn’t actually say much about what substantive policies she will endorse. She and other legislators grilled Mark Zuckerberg in a public hearing in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, but her adversarial comments at the time were more or less in line with the tenor of the entire hearing.

Non-consensual images and sexual exploitation

There is one area of privacy in which Harris has had a strong, substantive record: legislation and enforcement targeting the sharing of non-consensual images. But this specific issue has not materialized into a more generalized policy position on data privacy — it has rather been an extension of her work around online sex trafficking.

While serving in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, Harris’ legislative focus on tech mostly centered around preventing the spread of non-consensual images on the internet. For example, in 2017, she introduced the Ending Nonconsensual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act, which sought to make it a crime to knowingly distribute or threaten to distribute non-consensual intimate images. She also introduced the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act (SHIELD) Act in 2019, similarly criminalizing the distribution of these kinds of images. That bill recently passed the Senate after it was re-introduced by Harris ally Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

Her work in this area predates her entry to Washington, DC. While she was California attorney general, Harris secured a guilty plea over a hacking scheme to steal intimate images off of people’s Google accounts.

Non-consensual images and sex trafficking are not the same thing. But legislative and prosecutorial action directed at either have run into the same issue: Section 230, a legal liability shield for online platforms. While Section 230 does not immunize an individual from spreading nonconsensual images or sexually exploiting someone, when it comes to the modern era, the most sweepingly powerful action is to intervene at the level of the platform, whether that platform is a juggernaut like Google or a nonprofit like Wikipedia. The creation of carve-outs to Section 230 for both nonconsensual images and sexual exploitation follows more or less the same model with the same stakeholders and the same legal issues.

Notably, Harris pressed criminal charges against the top executives of Backpage.com, a personals website that hosted advertisements for sex work. After becoming a senator, Harris also voted in favor of FOSTA-SESTA, a law excluding sex trafficking from Section 230. (FOSTA-SESTA was, in part, a reaction to Backpage.) As with all laws implicating speech, there are concerns that FOSTA-SESTA was too broad. Sex workers and their allies have argued that the law puts them in more danger, since finding clients online allowed for a degree of vetting and information sharing with others in the industry that’s less readily available now. The controversy over FOSTA-SESTA likely isn’t over.

Artificial intelligence

As vice president, Kamala Harris was tasked with being a point person in the administration on AI policy, leading roundtables for both leading companies in the industry, and labor and civil rights leaders.

Companies and labs developing advanced AI are facing growing regulatory scrutiny due to the technology’s associated risks, including privacy issues, job displacement, bias and discrimination, deepfakes, AI-powered weapons, and the controversial potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could make these systems as intelligent as their human creators. To mitigate unforeseen risks, tech leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have urged the government to regulate AI.

Harris agrees, calling for “legislation that strengthens AI safety without stifling innovation” in an AI Safety Summit in the U.K. last November. At the summit, Harris said that they should “consider and address the full spectrum of AI risk threats to humanity as a whole as well as threats to individuals, communities, to our institutions, and to our most vulnerable populations.”

In March, Harris announced a government-wide policy that required U.S. federal agencies to show that their AI tools aren’t harming the public. (If they can’t meet those guidelines, they must cease using the system.) She has actively voiced concerns about how training data can introduce harmful biases and, when used at scale, could wind up discriminating against vulnerable populations.

“And when people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of A.I.-enabled mis- and disinformation, I ask: Is that not existential for democracy?” Harris said at the U.K. summit.

Levie said the current administration hasn’t had “major missteps in AI,” though he wishes they’d come out strongly in favor of open source AI. But he sees it as more of a forward-looking issue. “I think the concern you could have is, the next four years are the most important, probably, for AI regulation. And so to some extent, you do have to believe that the party has the wherewithal to make really good decisions,” he said.

TikTok

In April, the U.S. enacted a law that could ban the popular social media platform TikTok as soon as January (unless its parent company, ByteDance, decides to sell it off). Even though President Biden signed the bill, Harris told reporters that a ban was not the goal.

“We need to deal with the owner and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok,” Harris told ABC News in March. She also added that TikTok has “very important” benefits, like serving as an income generator and “allowing people to share information in a free way.”

When asked about her specific views on TikTok itself during an on-stage interview at The New York Times DealBook summit last November, Harris declined to comment.

Crypto

The Biden administration has had a less-than-rosy relationship with the crypto industry due to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler’s stance on how it should be regulated. Tusk said that he expects Harris will improve relations with the sector, even if it’s just by putting in her own SEC chair pick instead of Gensler.

Meanwhile, Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance have indicated they would be open to a less regulated environment for crypto — Trump is even slated to speak at a crypto conference over the weekend. This deregulatory attitude has reportedly attracted $160 million in campaign contributions to the Republican party from the crypto industry, as well as public backing from the likes of prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz. (Their firm, a16z, has a $4.5 billion crypto fund.)

Immigration and H-1Bs

As vice president, Harris has been tasked with addressing “root causes” of immigration from Central America. In that role, she focused in part on strengthening the economics of the region and secured private sector commitments from companies including Meta to help train entrepreneurs and small business owners there, and help women build their online presence and access financial services. Under Biden, the Department of Homeland Security has ramped up its use of border surveillance technology, a practice that could continue during a Harris presidency.

The right has already zeroed in on Harris’s tenure as so-called “border czar,” even though her actual role was focused on diplomacy with Central America. But immigration is much more than a border issue, and Harris would likely continue Biden’s policies with regards to legal immigration and visas. A key interest of the tech sector is in maintaining or expanding the H-1B visa program, which lets high-skilled workers remain in the country to work in highly specialized jobs. As a senator, Harris worked with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), to introduce the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which would “remove per-country caps for employment-based green cards,” according to a press release. “We must do more to eliminate discriminatory backlogs and facilitate family unity so that high-skilled immigrants are not vulnerable to exploitation and can stay in the U.S. and continue to contribute to the economy,” she said in a statement at the time. She has not spoken on the issue more recently.

Climate

Harris is much more of a known quantity when it comes to climate and energy policy. For that reason, she has already garnered support from some major environmental groups and business leaders in clean energy. That includes the League of Conservation Voters that rates lawmakers based on their environmental track records, and has given Harris a 90 percent on her scorecard.

The Biden administration managed to pass legislation marking the biggest investments in clean energy and climate yet in the US. And the Environmental Protection Agency under Biden and Harris has introduced sweeping new pollution regulations for cars, power plants, and industrial facilities. All in all, the measures could transform the way Americans get around, how their homes are built, and how they get their energy.

Nevertheless, the US is still not on track to meet climate goals it set under the Paris agreement of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by the end of the decade. Donald Trump could try to wipe existing climate policies off the books.

Harris is expected to defend those policies, of course. And there’s even some hope among climate advocates she could go farther than Biden to crack down on fossil fuels. Harris has taken a tougher stance, for instance, on fracking — going as far as filing suit against the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking back when she was California’s Attorney General.

Tech donations and connections

Having spent most of her political career either in California or representing it, tech and entertainment companies were among the top contributors to Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign. According to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks political donations and groups together organizations’ political action committee (PAC) spending and employee donations, the University of California was the top contributor to her campaign at $209,00. Harris raised $144,00 from Alphabet, $137,000 from Disney, and $134,000 from AT&T.

Her 2016 Senate campaign saw support from people from similar groups, including Comcast, Apple, and Cisco. She also got support from Venable, a law firm where her husband, Doug Emhoff, worked at the time, overseeing its Los Angeles and San Francisco offices. Emhoff represented clients in the entertainment industry, as well as large corporations like Walmart and Merck, according to The New York Times.

Harris, who was born in Oakland, has some personal connections in the tech industry as well. Her brother-in-law, for example, is Uber’s Chief Legal Officer Tony West. She also attended the wedding of Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, according to The Washington Post.

None of these ties or donations elucidate what a Harris presidency means for tech. Despite being from the area, she is not a Silicon Valley politician; despite being one of those leading the most successful push to whittle down the immunity shield of Section 230, she is not an anti-tech politician, either.

But in an election year that saw both the passage of the TikTok ban and the once-in-a-generation DOJ antitrust suit against Apple, there are tech policy questions that Kamala Harris cannot avoid forever. The GOP ticket has already articulated its position — coherent or not — on some of those issues. It will be Harris’ turn soon enough.

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The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman can now be ordered with plant-based upholstery made from bamboo. | Image: Herman Miller

Can you finally feel guilt-free about buying an iconic piece of furniture design that starts at $6,395? For the first time in 68 years, Herman Miller’s Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman are being offered with a plant-based upholstery option that looks and feels like leather, but is primarily made from bamboo.
The plant-based fabric, called Banbū, was developed by von Holzhausen and first launched back in 2020 as a durable alternative to both leather derived from animals and vegan leathers made using plastic-based materials like polyurethane. Banbū is made by chopping up bamboo and extracting fibers that are spun into a yarn that can be woven into fabrics. Those fabrics are then treated with a plant-based topcoat sealant, according to von Holzhausen’s website. The company describes Banbū as being “buttery-soft and smooth as lambskin,” and claims the material is one third the weight of cow leather while also taking less than 250 days to biodegrade in a landfill.
Bamboo plants are highly renewable, growing quickly without the need for fertilizers or irrigation, allowing the plant to be harvested sustainably without deforestation. Herman Miller claims the plant-based leather reduces the chair’s carbon footprint by “up to 35 percent,” but von Holzhausen hasn’t shared specifics on how it makes Banbū, including the environmental impacts of breaking down the bamboo and what other materials may be used in the manufacturing process.
Using bamboo to make pseudo-leather might have a smaller carbon footprint than using cows, but the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman still feature complicated designs with layers of wood veneers glued together and molded into shape using presses applying heat and pressure.
If you want to keep the environmental impact of your furniture in mind but still want a Herman Miller in your home, an alternative is the company’s Eames Molded Plastic Armchair. Although they use a similar manufacturing process involving heat, the molded seats are made using 100 percent post-industrial recycled plastic instead of lumber or bamboo, allowing them to be recycled again when you’re ready to redecorate. (Although they aren’t quite as lounge-able.)

The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman can now be ordered with plant-based upholstery made from bamboo. | Image: Herman Miller

Can you finally feel guilt-free about buying an iconic piece of furniture design that starts at $6,395? For the first time in 68 years, Herman Miller’s Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman are being offered with a plant-based upholstery option that looks and feels like leather, but is primarily made from bamboo.

The plant-based fabric, called Banbū, was developed by von Holzhausen and first launched back in 2020 as a durable alternative to both leather derived from animals and vegan leathers made using plastic-based materials like polyurethane. Banbū is made by chopping up bamboo and extracting fibers that are spun into a yarn that can be woven into fabrics. Those fabrics are then treated with a plant-based topcoat sealant, according to von Holzhausen’s website. The company describes Banbū as being “buttery-soft and smooth as lambskin,” and claims the material is one third the weight of cow leather while also taking less than 250 days to biodegrade in a landfill.

Bamboo plants are highly renewable, growing quickly without the need for fertilizers or irrigation, allowing the plant to be harvested sustainably without deforestation. Herman Miller claims the plant-based leather reduces the chair’s carbon footprint by “up to 35 percent,” but von Holzhausen hasn’t shared specifics on how it makes Banbū, including the environmental impacts of breaking down the bamboo and what other materials may be used in the manufacturing process.

Using bamboo to make pseudo-leather might have a smaller carbon footprint than using cows, but the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman still feature complicated designs with layers of wood veneers glued together and molded into shape using presses applying heat and pressure.

If you want to keep the environmental impact of your furniture in mind but still want a Herman Miller in your home, an alternative is the company’s Eames Molded Plastic Armchair. Although they use a similar manufacturing process involving heat, the molded seats are made using 100 percent post-industrial recycled plastic instead of lumber or bamboo, allowing them to be recycled again when you’re ready to redecorate. (Although they aren’t quite as lounge-able.)

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Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The Senate unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday letting victims of non-consensual intimate images created by AI — or “deepfakes” — sue their creators for damages.
The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE) Act lets victims of sexually explicit deepfakes pursue civil remedies against those that produced or processed the image with the intent to distribute it. Victims who are identifiable in these kinds of deepfakes can receive up to $150,000 in damages under the bill, and up to $250,000 if the incident was connected to “actual or attempted sexual assault, stalking, or harassment” or “the direct and proximate cause” of those harms. It’s now up to the House to take up the bill before it can be moved to the president’s desk to be signed into law.
Many people first learned about non-consensual intimate deepfakes when sexually explicit AI-created images of Taylor Swift flooded social media earlier this year. These types of images have also become an issue in schools around the country, where high school girls have learned of intimate AI-generated pictures being passed around by peers.
In a speech on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that sexually explicit deepfakes aren’t “just some fringe issue that happens to only a few people — it’s a widespread problem. These types of malicious and hurtful pictures can destroy lives.”
Schumer said the DEFIANCE Act is just “one of the examples of the AI guardrails I often talk about. AI is a remarkable technology that can spur incredible innovation, but we must pass guardrails to prevent its worst abuses from causing people grave harm.” He rolled out a roadmap for how Senate committees should approach AI legislation earlier this year.
He urged the House to take up the DEFIANCE Act. There’s already a companion bill in the chamber, though there’s only a week and a half left before Congress disperses for the August recess.
“By passing this bill, we are telling victims of explicit nonconsensual deepfakes that we hear them and we are taking action,” Schumer said.

Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The Senate unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday letting victims of non-consensual intimate images created by AI — or “deepfakes” — sue their creators for damages.

The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act (DEFIANCE) Act lets victims of sexually explicit deepfakes pursue civil remedies against those that produced or processed the image with the intent to distribute it. Victims who are identifiable in these kinds of deepfakes can receive up to $150,000 in damages under the bill, and up to $250,000 if the incident was connected to “actual or attempted sexual assault, stalking, or harassment” or “the direct and proximate cause” of those harms. It’s now up to the House to take up the bill before it can be moved to the president’s desk to be signed into law.

Many people first learned about non-consensual intimate deepfakes when sexually explicit AI-created images of Taylor Swift flooded social media earlier this year. These types of images have also become an issue in schools around the country, where high school girls have learned of intimate AI-generated pictures being passed around by peers.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that sexually explicit deepfakes aren’t “just some fringe issue that happens to only a few people — it’s a widespread problem. These types of malicious and hurtful pictures can destroy lives.”

Schumer said the DEFIANCE Act is just “one of the examples of the AI guardrails I often talk about. AI is a remarkable technology that can spur incredible innovation, but we must pass guardrails to prevent its worst abuses from causing people grave harm.” He rolled out a roadmap for how Senate committees should approach AI legislation earlier this year.

He urged the House to take up the DEFIANCE Act. There’s already a companion bill in the chamber, though there’s only a week and a half left before Congress disperses for the August recess.

“By passing this bill, we are telling victims of explicit nonconsensual deepfakes that we hear them and we are taking action,” Schumer said.

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Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple might start using Samsung camera sensors as soon as 2026, marking the end of Sony’s decade-plus run as the sole supplier of the phones’ camera sensors.
The phones are expected to use a Samsung-made “1/2.6-inch 48MP ultra-wide CMOS image sensors” starting “as early as 2026,” according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The rumor doesn’t suggest whether Samsung will replace Sony for any other iPhone camera sensors.

Although Apple doesn’t usually talk about who makes its components, CEO Tim Cook said in 2022 that Sony had been its iPhone camera supplier for more than 10 years. Indeed, past reports have suggested that Sony sensors were used in phones like the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 8.
Given software processing and Apple’s preference for creating “true to life” images (to quote Apple camera VP Jon McCormack’s interview with PetaPixel), the switch wouldn’t mean iPhone photos will suddenly look like they were taken with a Samsung phone.
But if the rumor is true, 48MP is a nice bump from, say, the iPhone 15 Pro’s 12MP ultrawide and could mean more detailed shots. And assuming the lens would go on a Pro phone (which isn’t a given, considering recent rumors of a single-camera iPhone 17 “slim” phone), it would greatly benefit the Vision Pro’s stereoscopic “spatial” videos, which are created by the ultrawide and main lens working in tandem. At the moment, those videos are very muddy even in good lighting and hardly worth making in low light.

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple might start using Samsung camera sensors as soon as 2026, marking the end of Sony’s decade-plus run as the sole supplier of the phones’ camera sensors.

The phones are expected to use a Samsung-made “1/2.6-inch 48MP ultra-wide CMOS image sensors” starting “as early as 2026,” according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The rumor doesn’t suggest whether Samsung will replace Sony for any other iPhone camera sensors.

Although Apple doesn’t usually talk about who makes its components, CEO Tim Cook said in 2022 that Sony had been its iPhone camera supplier for more than 10 years. Indeed, past reports have suggested that Sony sensors were used in phones like the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 8.

Given software processing and Apple’s preference for creating “true to life” images (to quote Apple camera VP Jon McCormack’s interview with PetaPixel), the switch wouldn’t mean iPhone photos will suddenly look like they were taken with a Samsung phone.

But if the rumor is true, 48MP is a nice bump from, say, the iPhone 15 Pro’s 12MP ultrawide and could mean more detailed shots. And assuming the lens would go on a Pro phone (which isn’t a given, considering recent rumors of a single-camera iPhone 17 “slim” phone), it would greatly benefit the Vision Pro’s stereoscopic “spatial” videos, which are created by the ultrawide and main lens working in tandem. At the moment, those videos are very muddy even in good lighting and hardly worth making in low light.

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You won’t find (most) of these on Apple’s official iOS App Store. | Image: Riley Testut / AltStore PAL

The first batch of third-party apps are making their way onto AltStore PAL, just over three months after the alternative iOS app marketplace first launched in the EU. Three out of the four apps being released today are exclusive to AltStore PAL and can’t be found on Apple’s official iOS App Store. The apps developed by people other than AltStore PAL co-creator Riley Testut include two torrenting apps and a social discovery app for dating.
Specifically, the new additions include iTorrent, an iOS torrent client that can be used without jailbreaking iPhones or iPads, and qBitControl, a qBittorrent remote client for iOS devices. PeopleDrop is a dating-focused “social discovery platform” that connects you with other users in the real world as they pass by. And finally, there’s the UTM SE app for emulating other operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS on iOS.

Image: qBitControl / Michael-128
The qBitControl qBittorrent remote client for iOS devices is one of the new third-party torrenting apps launching on AltStore PAL.

UTM SE is the only app from this batch that’s already available on the official iOS App Store, having gained approval from Apple earlier this month. UTM SE credited the AltStore team for helping it with the approval after Apple previously rejected the app in June.
Apple bans all torrent apps on its own iOS store, claiming that they’re “often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights.” But now that the EU’s Digital Markets Act has weakened the tech giant’s ability to police its walled garden, iOS users within the bloc can exercise a bit more freedom — and accept more risk — over the apps they choose to install.

You won’t find (most) of these on Apple’s official iOS App Store. | Image: Riley Testut / AltStore PAL

The first batch of third-party apps are making their way onto AltStore PAL, just over three months after the alternative iOS app marketplace first launched in the EU. Three out of the four apps being released today are exclusive to AltStore PAL and can’t be found on Apple’s official iOS App Store. The apps developed by people other than AltStore PAL co-creator Riley Testut include two torrenting apps and a social discovery app for dating.

Specifically, the new additions include iTorrent, an iOS torrent client that can be used without jailbreaking iPhones or iPads, and qBitControl, a qBittorrent remote client for iOS devices. PeopleDrop is a dating-focused “social discovery platform” that connects you with other users in the real world as they pass by. And finally, there’s the UTM SE app for emulating other operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS on iOS.

Image: qBitControl / Michael-128
The qBitControl qBittorrent remote client for iOS devices is one of the new third-party torrenting apps launching on AltStore PAL.

UTM SE is the only app from this batch that’s already available on the official iOS App Store, having gained approval from Apple earlier this month. UTM SE credited the AltStore team for helping it with the approval after Apple previously rejected the app in June.

Apple bans all torrent apps on its own iOS store, claiming that they’re “often used for the purpose of infringing third-party rights.” But now that the EU’s Digital Markets Act has weakened the tech giant’s ability to police its walled garden, iOS users within the bloc can exercise a bit more freedom — and accept more risk — over the apps they choose to install.

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Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta shut down 63,000 Instagram accounts based in Nigeria that it says were engaged in financial sextortion scams and connected to what Meta calls a “loosely organized” group of cybercriminals known as the “Yahoo Boys.”
Meta has been getting serious about cracking down on sextortion scams and educating users about how to avoid them. Earlier this year, Meta said it would automatically send suspected sextortion account messages to users’ hidden requests folder. If users were already talking to a potential scam or sextortion account, it would display a safety notice prompting them to report threats to share private images. Meta said it would also make it so that potential sextortion accounts wouldn’t be able to view the “Message” button on teens’ profiles, even if they’re already connected.
Meta said that the new technical signals it’s created helped track down the network of sextortion accounts. Of the 63,000 accounts Meta said it removed, 2,500 were part of a coordinated network linked to a group of 20 people. Meta said the network mostly targeted adult men in the US, and most of their attempts were unsuccessful. After identifying the network of 2,500 accounts, Meta said it was able to find more accounts in Nigeria engaged in similar scams, leading to the rest of the accounts it removed.
Meta also removed thousands of Facebook accounts, groups, and pages based in Nigeria that gave scammers tips, fake photos to use on accounts, and scripts. Its system is now identifying and blocking any attempts by these groups to return to the site.
The company has been working on new features to warn users about potential scams. Meta said in April it was testing a new feature that detected images with nudity as well as a prompt to tell users to think twice before sending a nude image via direct message. It also let them unsend the message later on. The feature would also display a warning to recipients who try to forward the image.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta shut down 63,000 Instagram accounts based in Nigeria that it says were engaged in financial sextortion scams and connected to what Meta calls a “loosely organized” group of cybercriminals known as the “Yahoo Boys.”

Meta has been getting serious about cracking down on sextortion scams and educating users about how to avoid them. Earlier this year, Meta said it would automatically send suspected sextortion account messages to users’ hidden requests folder. If users were already talking to a potential scam or sextortion account, it would display a safety notice prompting them to report threats to share private images. Meta said it would also make it so that potential sextortion accounts wouldn’t be able to view the “Message” button on teens’ profiles, even if they’re already connected.

Meta said that the new technical signals it’s created helped track down the network of sextortion accounts. Of the 63,000 accounts Meta said it removed, 2,500 were part of a coordinated network linked to a group of 20 people. Meta said the network mostly targeted adult men in the US, and most of their attempts were unsuccessful. After identifying the network of 2,500 accounts, Meta said it was able to find more accounts in Nigeria engaged in similar scams, leading to the rest of the accounts it removed.

Meta also removed thousands of Facebook accounts, groups, and pages based in Nigeria that gave scammers tips, fake photos to use on accounts, and scripts. Its system is now identifying and blocking any attempts by these groups to return to the site.

The company has been working on new features to warn users about potential scams. Meta said in April it was testing a new feature that detected images with nudity as well as a prompt to tell users to think twice before sending a nude image via direct message. It also let them unsend the message later on. The feature would also display a warning to recipients who try to forward the image.

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Illustration: The Verge

Reddit is ramping up its crackdown on web crawlers. Over the past few weeks, Reddit has started blocking search engines from surfacing recent posts and comments unless the search engine pays up, according to a report from 404 Media.
Right now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit.com” trick, 404 Media reports. This leaves out Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives — and that’s likely because Google has struck a $60 million deal that lets the company train its AI models on content from Reddit.
It’s a bold move for a massive website like Reddit to block some of the most popular search engines, but it’s not all that surprising. Over the past year, Reddit has become more protective of its data as it looks to open up another source of revenue and appease new investors. After making its API more expensive for some third-party developers, Reddit reportedly threatened to cut off Google if it didn’t stop using the platform’s data to train AI for free.
The Verge reached out to Reddit with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

Last month, to enforce its policy against scraping, Reddit updated the site’s robots.txt file, which tells web crawlers whether they can access a site. “It’s a signal to those who don’t have an agreement with us that they shouldn’t be accessing Reddit data,” Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, told my colleague Alex Heath in Command Line.
With AI chatbots filling the internet with questionable content, finding things written by a fellow human has never been more important. I, like many others, have started appending “Reddit” to many of my searches just to get human answers, and it’s pretty frustrating to know that I’ll now only be able to do that on Google (or search engines that rely on it) — especially when I do many of my searches on Bing.

Illustration: The Verge

Reddit is ramping up its crackdown on web crawlers. Over the past few weeks, Reddit has started blocking search engines from surfacing recent posts and comments unless the search engine pays up, according to a report from 404 Media.

Right now, Google is the only mainstream search engine that shows recent results when you search for posts on Reddit using the “site:reddit.com” trick, 404 Media reports. This leaves out Bing, DuckDuckGo, and other alternatives — and that’s likely because Google has struck a $60 million deal that lets the company train its AI models on content from Reddit.

It’s a bold move for a massive website like Reddit to block some of the most popular search engines, but it’s not all that surprising. Over the past year, Reddit has become more protective of its data as it looks to open up another source of revenue and appease new investors. After making its API more expensive for some third-party developers, Reddit reportedly threatened to cut off Google if it didn’t stop using the platform’s data to train AI for free.

The Verge reached out to Reddit with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

Last month, to enforce its policy against scraping, Reddit updated the site’s robots.txt file, which tells web crawlers whether they can access a site. “It’s a signal to those who don’t have an agreement with us that they shouldn’t be accessing Reddit data,” Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, told my colleague Alex Heath in Command Line.

With AI chatbots filling the internet with questionable content, finding things written by a fellow human has never been more important. I, like many others, have started appending “Reddit” to many of my searches just to get human answers, and it’s pretty frustrating to know that I’ll now only be able to do that on Google (or search engines that rely on it) — especially when I do many of my searches on Bing.

Read More 

Canadian soccer coach Bev Priestman will miss the Olympic team’s opening match against New Zealand. | Photo by Vaughn Ridley / Getty Images

A member of the Canadian Olympic women’s soccer team was caught using a drone to spy on New Zealand’s practice session on Monday. It’s said to be the second “drone incident” at a New Zealand practice over the past week.
As a result, the Canadian Olympic Committee has announced that soccer coach Bev Priestman will not coach the Olympic team’s opening match tomorrow. Two other staffers have been removed from the team and are being sent home from the games.
The Canadian women’s soccer team is the defending Olympic champion after winning gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021. According to TSN, the New Zealand team is currently ranked 28th. Taking Priestman’s place as head coach during tomorrow’s match will be the team’s assistant coach, Andy Spence.
An existing ban on flying drones around Paris is being strictly enforced by security during the 2024 Summer Olympics, which officially start tomorrow. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said Tuesday that security forces are intercepting an average of six drones each day using equipment such as electronic signal jammers, according to France 24.
On Monday, a drone was spotted flying over a practice session held by the New Zealand women’s soccer team in Saint-Étienne, France, a city located about six hours south of Paris. The incident was reported to French authorities who located and detained the drone’s operator, described by the COC as a “non-accredited” support member of the Canadian soccer team’s staff, according to the CBC.
The New Zealand Olympic Committee “formally lodged the incident with the [International Olympic Committee] integrity unit” and asked the COC for a full review, according to a statement released by the New Zealand Olympic Committee yesterday.
“This does not represent the values that our team stands for.”
The COC and head coach Priestman apologized to the NZOC and announced several disciplinary actions after reviewing Monday’s events and a previous drone incident during a New Zealand practice on July 19th.
In addition to accepting Priestman’s decision to be removed from coaching the team’s opening match against New Zealand, two other members — Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst with Canada Soccer,” and Jasmine Mander, an assistant coach — are being removed from the Canadian Olympic team and being sent home. The COC says that Canada Soccer staff will also “undergo mandatory ethics training.”

Canadian soccer coach Bev Priestman will miss the Olympic team’s opening match against New Zealand. | Photo by Vaughn Ridley / Getty Images

A member of the Canadian Olympic women’s soccer team was caught using a drone to spy on New Zealand’s practice session on Monday. It’s said to be the second “drone incident” at a New Zealand practice over the past week.

As a result, the Canadian Olympic Committee has announced that soccer coach Bev Priestman will not coach the Olympic team’s opening match tomorrow. Two other staffers have been removed from the team and are being sent home from the games.

The Canadian women’s soccer team is the defending Olympic champion after winning gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021. According to TSN, the New Zealand team is currently ranked 28th. Taking Priestman’s place as head coach during tomorrow’s match will be the team’s assistant coach, Andy Spence.

An existing ban on flying drones around Paris is being strictly enforced by security during the 2024 Summer Olympics, which officially start tomorrow. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said Tuesday that security forces are intercepting an average of six drones each day using equipment such as electronic signal jammers, according to France 24.

On Monday, a drone was spotted flying over a practice session held by the New Zealand women’s soccer team in Saint-Étienne, France, a city located about six hours south of Paris. The incident was reported to French authorities who located and detained the drone’s operator, described by the COC as a “non-accredited” support member of the Canadian soccer team’s staff, according to the CBC.

The New Zealand Olympic Committee “formally lodged the incident with the [International Olympic Committee] integrity unit” and asked the COC for a full review, according to a statement released by the New Zealand Olympic Committee yesterday.

The COC and head coach Priestman apologized to the NZOC and announced several disciplinary actions after reviewing Monday’s events and a previous drone incident during a New Zealand practice on July 19th.

In addition to accepting Priestman’s decision to be removed from coaching the team’s opening match against New Zealand, two other members — Joseph Lombardi, an “unaccredited analyst with Canada Soccer,” and Jasmine Mander, an assistant coach — are being removed from the Canadian Olympic team and being sent home. The COC says that Canada Soccer staff will also “undergo mandatory ethics training.”

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