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Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

There are going to be times when you’ve only got one hand free to use your phone. You may be walking the dog, carrying groceries, hanging on to a subway pole, or you just don’t have another hand available. But with just about every modern phone sporting a screen at least six inches corner to corner, using one hand to work your phone could be a difficult balancing act.
Luckily, both Android and iOS phones come with integrated features to make one-handed phone use less tricky. There are also some helpful options inside individual apps you can turn to.
Methods for Android phones
One-handed mode
Android has a dedicated one-handed mode that lets you shrink any app down to the bottom half of the screen to make it easier to reach. The way to enable that mode can be slightly different, depending on the manufacturer.

From Settings on a Pixel phone (or most other Android phones), go to System > Gestures > One-handed mode and enable the toggle switch.
From Settings on a Samsung Galaxy phone, tap Advanced features > One-handed mode and enable the toggle switch.

Either way, you can then simply swipe down on the screen to pull the top half of an app into reach. Make sure you swipe down close to the bottom of the screen, as otherwise, you’ll simply refresh the screen in whatever app you’re in. Tap anywhere above the app to go back to a full-screen view.

Screenshot: Google
Android comes with a dedicated one-handed mode.

Screenshot: Google
You can adjust the Gboard keyboard to be more toward the side of the screen.

Enable a one-handed keyboard
Whatever app you’re in, you can make sure Android’s default Gboard keyboard is easier to get to for one set of fingers and a thumb. With the keyboard on screen:

Tap the four-box icon above the keyboard to the left.
Choose One-handed from the pop-up menu.

The keyboard then pushes up against one side of the screen. Tap the arrow button to switch it to the other side or the expand button (four arrows) to go back to normal. (You don’t get this on the default Samsung keyboard on Galaxy phones, but you can always install Gboard on any Android phone.)
Make homescreen apps easier to access
It helps if the app shortcuts you rely on most often are down towards the bottom of your home screen, rather than up at the top. You can organize this manually, but on Pixel phones you can also have a row of your most-used apps pop down to the bottom.

Open Settings then tap Apps > Default apps.
Tap the gear icon next to Pixel Launcher.
Tap Suggestions and enable Suggestions on Home screen.

Make browsing easier
If you’ve got a Samsung phone and you use the Samsung Internet Browser, you can move the web address and search bar down to the bottom of the screen as well. (Weirdly enough, Chrome for Android doesn’t currently let you do this, though Chrome for iOS does — go figure.)

Tap the hamburger menu (bottom right) then Settings.
Choose Layout and menus.
Enable Show toolbar at bottom and Show address bar at bottom.

(Note: Some Android phones will not have the Show toolbar at bottom feature listed.)
You can find the same option inside Firefox for Android: tap the three dots (top right), then Settings > Customize and choose Bottom for the toolbar.
Methods for iPhones
If iOS is your mobile platform of choice, you can do many of the same tricks as you can on Android.
One-handed mode
The one-handed mode that covers the whole of iOS is called Reachability. You can find it from Settings on your iPhone:

Tap Accessibility > Touch.
Turn on the Reachability toggle switch.

A downward swipe toward the bottom of the screen will then shrink down whatever app or system menu you have on screen, making it easier to get at with one hand. Tap the arrow at the top of the window to go back to normal.

Screenshot: Apple
You can place the address bar at the bottom in Safari on iOS.

Screenshot: Apple
The Reachability mode on the iPhone helps with one-handed operation.

One-handed keyboard
The iOS keyboard has a one-handed mode as well. With the keyboard on screen:

Long -press on the icon in the lower left corner (it’ll show a globe or emoji symbol, depending on the keyboards you’ve got installed).
Tap on the left or right keyboard layout to pin the keyboard to that side.

You can use the white arrow that fills the space left by the keyboard to go back to the normal layout again.
Make browsing easier
As mentioned above, Chrome for iOS lets you move the address and search bar down to the bottom of the screen:

Tap the three dots (bottom right).
Choose Settings.
Tap Address bar, then (at the top of the screen) Bottom.

This is the layout Safari for iOS uses by default. If it’s been changed for whatever reason, you can reset it via Safari in iOS Settings, under the Tabs heading.

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

There are going to be times when you’ve only got one hand free to use your phone. You may be walking the dog, carrying groceries, hanging on to a subway pole, or you just don’t have another hand available. But with just about every modern phone sporting a screen at least six inches corner to corner, using one hand to work your phone could be a difficult balancing act.

Luckily, both Android and iOS phones come with integrated features to make one-handed phone use less tricky. There are also some helpful options inside individual apps you can turn to.

Methods for Android phones

One-handed mode

Android has a dedicated one-handed mode that lets you shrink any app down to the bottom half of the screen to make it easier to reach. The way to enable that mode can be slightly different, depending on the manufacturer.

From Settings on a Pixel phone (or most other Android phones), go to System > Gestures > One-handed mode and enable the toggle switch.
From Settings on a Samsung Galaxy phone, tap Advanced features > One-handed mode and enable the toggle switch.

Either way, you can then simply swipe down on the screen to pull the top half of an app into reach. Make sure you swipe down close to the bottom of the screen, as otherwise, you’ll simply refresh the screen in whatever app you’re in. Tap anywhere above the app to go back to a full-screen view.

Enable a one-handed keyboard

Whatever app you’re in, you can make sure Android’s default Gboard keyboard is easier to get to for one set of fingers and a thumb. With the keyboard on screen:

Tap the four-box icon above the keyboard to the left.
Choose One-handed from the pop-up menu.

The keyboard then pushes up against one side of the screen. Tap the arrow button to switch it to the other side or the expand button (four arrows) to go back to normal. (You don’t get this on the default Samsung keyboard on Galaxy phones, but you can always install Gboard on any Android phone.)

Make homescreen apps easier to access

It helps if the app shortcuts you rely on most often are down towards the bottom of your home screen, rather than up at the top. You can organize this manually, but on Pixel phones you can also have a row of your most-used apps pop down to the bottom.

Open Settings then tap Apps > Default apps.
Tap the gear icon next to Pixel Launcher.
Tap Suggestions and enable Suggestions on Home screen.

Make browsing easier

If you’ve got a Samsung phone and you use the Samsung Internet Browser, you can move the web address and search bar down to the bottom of the screen as well. (Weirdly enough, Chrome for Android doesn’t currently let you do this, though Chrome for iOS does — go figure.)

Tap the hamburger menu (bottom right) then Settings.
Choose Layout and menus.
Enable Show toolbar at bottom and Show address bar at bottom.

(Note: Some Android phones will not have the Show toolbar at bottom feature listed.)

You can find the same option inside Firefox for Android: tap the three dots (top right), then Settings > Customize and choose Bottom for the toolbar.

Methods for iPhones

If iOS is your mobile platform of choice, you can do many of the same tricks as you can on Android.

One-handed mode

The one-handed mode that covers the whole of iOS is called Reachability. You can find it from Settings on your iPhone:

Tap Accessibility > Touch.
Turn on the Reachability toggle switch.

A downward swipe toward the bottom of the screen will then shrink down whatever app or system menu you have on screen, making it easier to get at with one hand. Tap the arrow at the top of the window to go back to normal.

One-handed keyboard

The iOS keyboard has a one-handed mode as well. With the keyboard on screen:

Long -press on the icon in the lower left corner (it’ll show a globe or emoji symbol, depending on the keyboards you’ve got installed).
Tap on the left or right keyboard layout to pin the keyboard to that side.

You can use the white arrow that fills the space left by the keyboard to go back to the normal layout again.

Make browsing easier

As mentioned above, Chrome for iOS lets you move the address and search bar down to the bottom of the screen:

Tap the three dots (bottom right).
Choose Settings.
Tap Address bar, then (at the top of the screen) Bottom.

This is the layout Safari for iOS uses by default. If it’s been changed for whatever reason, you can reset it via Safari in iOS Settings, under the Tabs heading.

Read More 

Image: The Verge

CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft. Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.
Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.
CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:
The configuration files mentioned above are referred to as “Channel Files” and are part of the behavioral protection mechanisms used by the Falcon sensor. Updates to Channel Files are a normal part of the sensor’s operation and occur several times a day in response to novel tactics, techniques, and procedures discovered by CrowdStrike. This is not a new process; the architecture has been in place since Falcon’s inception.

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

I don’t do Windows but here are some (initial) details about why the CrowdStrike’s CSAgent.sys crashed Faulting inst: mov r9d, [r8]R8: unmapped address…taken from an array of pointers (held in RAX), index RDX (0x14 * 0x8) holds the invalid memory address@_JohnHammond pic.twitter.com/oqlAVwSlJj— Patrick Wardle (@patrickwardle) July 19, 2024

Other excerpts from CrowdStrike’s blog explain more about what went wrong:
On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems.
And which systems were affected and when:
Systems running Falcon sensor for Windows 7.11 and above that downloaded the updated configuration from 04:09 UTC to 05:27 UTC – were susceptible to a system crash.
CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

As CrowdStrike continues to work with customers and partners to resolve this incident, our team has written a technical overview of today’s events. We will continue to update our findings as the investigation progresses. https://t.co/xIDlV7yKVh— George Kurtz (@George_Kurtz) July 20, 2024

Image: The Verge

CrowdStrike’s faulty update caused a worldwide tech disaster that affected 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday, according to Microsoft. Microsoft says that’s “less than one percent of all Windows machines,” but it was enough to create problems for retailers, banks, airlines, and many other industries, as well as everyone who relies on them.

Separately, the technical breakdown from CrowdStrike released Friday explains more about what happened and why so many systems were affected all at once.

CrowdStrike’s breakdown explains the configuration file that was at the heart of the issue:

The configuration files mentioned above are referred to as “Channel Files” and are part of the behavioral protection mechanisms used by the Falcon sensor. Updates to Channel Files are a normal part of the sensor’s operation and occur several times a day in response to novel tactics, techniques, and procedures discovered by CrowdStrike. This is not a new process; the architecture has been in place since Falcon’s inception.

CrowdStrike explained that the file is not a kernel driver but is responsible for “how Falcon evaluates named pipe1 execution on Windows systems.” Security researcher and Objective See founder Patrick Wardle says that the explanation aligns with the earlier analysis he and others provided about the cause of the crash, as the problem file “C-00000291- “triggered a logic error that resulted in an OS crash” (via CSAgent.sys).”

Other excerpts from CrowdStrike’s blog explain more about what went wrong:

On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems.

And which systems were affected and when:

Systems running Falcon sensor for Windows 7.11 and above that downloaded the updated configuration from 04:09 UTC to 05:27 UTC – were susceptible to a system crash.

CrowdStrike’s channel file updates were pushed to computers regardless of any settings meant to prevent such automatic updates, Wardle noted.

Read More 

Image: Capcom

Despite its confusing trailers, Kunitsu-Gami is a highly stylized and pleasantly challenging ‘maiden defense’ game. When Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess debuted during Capcom’s digital summer showcase last year, I didn’t pay much attention. It looked like a high-concept action RPG based in Japanese mythology that took some of its artistic cues from another one of Capcom’s highly stylized games, Okami. And while I have nothing but love for action RPGs and Japanese folklore, nothing in that initial trailer, nor the ones that followed, showed me enough of what the game was about to be interesting.
It was only after trying the game’s demo at this year’s Summer Game Fest, and later getting my hands on a copy, that I finally got it. And damn is this game worth getting into.
In Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, you play as Soh, the guardian of the priestess Yoshiro who you must protect and guide through the land helping her purge it of evil demons. In an email to The Verge, art and game director Shuichi Kawata wrote that it wasn’t intentional that the marketing surrounding Kunitsu-Gami made it unclear what kind of game it was.
“This title is a mix of several genres,” Kawata wrote. “And we imagined the possibility that there would be a range of impressions people would have.”

I defy you to guess what kind of game this is based on this launch trailer.
Kawata described Kunitsu-Gami as a “maiden” defense game. Gameplay is divided into three parts: day, night, and a base-building cycle. During the day, Soh goes about mountain villages blighted by demonic corruption. He cleanses the corruption and rescues villagers who will help him in the night cycle to come. At night, demons attack, hoping to make their way to Yoshiro to kill her. To stop them, Soh assigns villagers different jobs, each with their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and positions them throughout the village to prevent the demons from reaching Yoshiro. Once Yoshiro gets to the end of a village, it is permanently cleansed, making it a new base Soh and the villagers must repair before moving on to the next location.
I love how Kunitsu-Gami cleverly iterates on tower defense games. You assign roles to villagers with crystals, a resource gained through defeating demons at night and cleansing a village in the day. Not every villager can perform every role, and some roles aren’t combat viable, though they have other benefits. During a day cycle, I might assign a couple of my people to the thief role, sending them out to dig up more crystals or rations that act as health potions for Soh and the villagers. But thieves are useless at night, requiring me to burn up precious time and crystals to reassign and redeploy them. Sometimes, I might not have enough crystals, having used them all to buy the expensive sumo wrestler role — who draws demons’ attention to themselves and away from Yoshiro — or the acetic who uses their power to freeze demons in their place, making them easy pickings for the archer’s bow or the woodcutter’s axe.
Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle and strategy-obsessed brain sizzle with excitement
In addition to simply completing a stage, each village battle also comes with a set of special parameters that, if met, will get you extra goodies. One parameter required that I use no more than 1,900 crystals. While that initially seemed trivial, that goal got a lot harder to meet because that stage also required that I give 1,500 crystals to Yoshiro to complete it. I was then left with only 400 crystals for my villagers — an extremely tight budget when the basic roles like the archer and the woodcutter are 50 crystals a pop, while the more powerful roles cost between 150 to 300.

I really enjoyed that tension between strategic assignment and deployment. Do I spend the crystals to get the powerful roles, leaving me with fewer defenders? Or do I risk my larger but weaker army getting overrun? Kunitsu-Gami is also special in that it never fell into the trap of being too trivial. In other tower defense games, it’s possible to set your defenses so well that you can sit back and watch the game play itself. That never happened for me. No matter if I had a glut of resources and well-placed villagers, I always had to stay on high alert, often coming to Yoshiro’s rescue with one of Soh’s ultimate attacks. At every level, Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle and strategy-obsessed brain sizzle with excitement.
While it’s not a prominent feature, there’s also an interesting bit of narrative to the game. Each villager you rescue has a name and a bio, and I enjoyed reading their stories and how they all intertwined. These people became more than nameless units to throw at a demonic horde, but members of a living, breathing community made up of married couples, family, and friends. It made for a beautiful message that reminded me of the aphorism “we all we got.”
In Kunitsu-Gami, Soh is the only one with martial training while everyone else is farmers, fishermen, and housewives. Instead of waiting for outside help or succumbing to the relentless demons, those ordinary people took up what little arms they had to defend their homes and families. In a political climate that seems determined to roll back protections for women, queer people, and people of color, it’s nice to see that message. Help isn’t coming — we are the help. It’s a sentiment supported by what Kawata shared as Kunitsu-Gami’s main theme.
“Challenge is the driving ethos for this game,” he wrote. “We face various conditions seriously and push forward without fear.”
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is out now on PlayStation, PC, Xbox, and Xbox Game Pass.

Image: Capcom

Despite its confusing trailers, Kunitsu-Gami is a highly stylized and pleasantly challenging ‘maiden defense’ game.

When Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess debuted during Capcom’s digital summer showcase last year, I didn’t pay much attention. It looked like a high-concept action RPG based in Japanese mythology that took some of its artistic cues from another one of Capcom’s highly stylized games, Okami. And while I have nothing but love for action RPGs and Japanese folklore, nothing in that initial trailer, nor the ones that followed, showed me enough of what the game was about to be interesting.

It was only after trying the game’s demo at this year’s Summer Game Fest, and later getting my hands on a copy, that I finally got it. And damn is this game worth getting into.

In Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, you play as Soh, the guardian of the priestess Yoshiro who you must protect and guide through the land helping her purge it of evil demons. In an email to The Verge, art and game director Shuichi Kawata wrote that it wasn’t intentional that the marketing surrounding Kunitsu-Gami made it unclear what kind of game it was.

“This title is a mix of several genres,” Kawata wrote. “And we imagined the possibility that there would be a range of impressions people would have.”

I defy you to guess what kind of game this is based on this launch trailer.

Kawata described Kunitsu-Gami as a “maiden” defense game. Gameplay is divided into three parts: day, night, and a base-building cycle. During the day, Soh goes about mountain villages blighted by demonic corruption. He cleanses the corruption and rescues villagers who will help him in the night cycle to come. At night, demons attack, hoping to make their way to Yoshiro to kill her. To stop them, Soh assigns villagers different jobs, each with their own abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and positions them throughout the village to prevent the demons from reaching Yoshiro. Once Yoshiro gets to the end of a village, it is permanently cleansed, making it a new base Soh and the villagers must repair before moving on to the next location.

I love how Kunitsu-Gami cleverly iterates on tower defense games. You assign roles to villagers with crystals, a resource gained through defeating demons at night and cleansing a village in the day. Not every villager can perform every role, and some roles aren’t combat viable, though they have other benefits. During a day cycle, I might assign a couple of my people to the thief role, sending them out to dig up more crystals or rations that act as health potions for Soh and the villagers. But thieves are useless at night, requiring me to burn up precious time and crystals to reassign and redeploy them. Sometimes, I might not have enough crystals, having used them all to buy the expensive sumo wrestler role — who draws demons’ attention to themselves and away from Yoshiro — or the acetic who uses their power to freeze demons in their place, making them easy pickings for the archer’s bow or the woodcutter’s axe.

In addition to simply completing a stage, each village battle also comes with a set of special parameters that, if met, will get you extra goodies. One parameter required that I use no more than 1,900 crystals. While that initially seemed trivial, that goal got a lot harder to meet because that stage also required that I give 1,500 crystals to Yoshiro to complete it. I was then left with only 400 crystals for my villagers — an extremely tight budget when the basic roles like the archer and the woodcutter are 50 crystals a pop, while the more powerful roles cost between 150 to 300.

I really enjoyed that tension between strategic assignment and deployment. Do I spend the crystals to get the powerful roles, leaving me with fewer defenders? Or do I risk my larger but weaker army getting overrun? Kunitsu-Gami is also special in that it never fell into the trap of being too trivial. In other tower defense games, it’s possible to set your defenses so well that you can sit back and watch the game play itself. That never happened for me. No matter if I had a glut of resources and well-placed villagers, I always had to stay on high alert, often coming to Yoshiro’s rescue with one of Soh’s ultimate attacks. At every level, Kunitsu-Gami offered the kind of challenge that makes my puzzle and strategy-obsessed brain sizzle with excitement.

While it’s not a prominent feature, there’s also an interesting bit of narrative to the game. Each villager you rescue has a name and a bio, and I enjoyed reading their stories and how they all intertwined. These people became more than nameless units to throw at a demonic horde, but members of a living, breathing community made up of married couples, family, and friends. It made for a beautiful message that reminded me of the aphorism “we all we got.”

In Kunitsu-Gami, Soh is the only one with martial training while everyone else is farmers, fishermen, and housewives. Instead of waiting for outside help or succumbing to the relentless demons, those ordinary people took up what little arms they had to defend their homes and families. In a political climate that seems determined to roll back protections for women, queer people, and people of color, it’s nice to see that message. Help isn’t coming — we are the help. It’s a sentiment supported by what Kawata shared as Kunitsu-Gami’s main theme.

“Challenge is the driving ethos for this game,” he wrote. “We face various conditions seriously and push forward without fear.”

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is out now on PlayStation, PC, Xbox, and Xbox Game Pass.

Read More 

A worker sealing drums of uranium yellowcake at a mine in 2006. | Photo: Getty Images

Next-generation nuclear reactors are heating up a debate over whether their fuel could be used to make bombs, jeopardizing efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Uranium in the fuel could theoretically be used to develop a nuclear weapon. Older reactors use such low concentrations that they don’t really pose a weapons proliferation threat. But advanced reactors would use higher concentrations, making them a potential target of terrorist groups or other countries wanting to take the fuel to develop their own nuclear weapons, some experts warn.
They argue that the US hasn’t prepared enough to hedge against that worst-case scenario and are calling on Congress and the Department of Energy to assess potential security risks with advanced reactor fuel.
Some experts argue that the US hasn’t prepared enough to hedge against that worst-case scenario
Other experts and industry groups still think it’s unfeasible for such a worst-case scenario to materialize. But the issue is starting to come to a head as nuclear reactors become a more attractive energy source, garnering a rare show of bipartisan support in Congress.
Nuclear reactors generate electricity without producing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. And unlike solar and wind energy, which fluctuate with the weather and time of day, nuclear reactors provide a steady source of electricity similar to gas and coal power plants. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation into law meant to speed the development of next-generation nuclear reactors in the US by streamlining approval processes.
Next-generation reactors are smaller and modular, meant to make them cheaper and easier to build than old-school nuclear power plants. Aside from generating electricity, small reactor designs could also be used to produce high-temperature heat for industrial facilities.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) certified an advanced small modular reactor design for the first time last year. And we’re likely still years away from seeing commercial plants in action. But if the US ever wants to get there, it’ll also have to build up a supply chain for the fuel those advanced reactors would consume. The Inflation Reduction Act includes $700 million to develop that domestic fuel supply.

Today’s reactors generally run on fuel made with a uranium isotope called U-235. Naturally occurring uranium has quite low concentrations of U-235; it has to be “enriched” — usually up to a 5 percent concentration of U-235 for a traditional reactor. Smaller advanced reactors would run on more energy-dense fuel that’s enriched with between 5 to 20 percent U-235, called HALEU (short for high-assay low-enriched uranium).
That higher concentration is what has some experts worried. “If the weapons usability of HALEU is borne out, then even a single reactor would pose serious security concerns,” says a policy analysis penned by a group of nuclear proliferation experts and engineers published in the journal Science last month (including an author credited with being one of the architects of the first hydrogen bomb).
Fuel with a concentration of at least 20 percent is considered highly enriched uranium, which could potentially be used to develop nuclear weapons. With HALEU designs reaching 19.75 percent U-235, the authors argue, it’s time for the US to think hard about how safe the next generation of nuclear reactors would be from malicious intent.
“We need to make sure that we don’t get in front of ourselves here and make sure that all the security and safety provisions are in place first before we go off and start sending [HALEU] all around the country,” says R. Scott Kemp, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy.
That 20 percent threshold goes back to the 1970s, and bad actors ostensibly have more information and computational tools at their disposal to develop weapons, Kemp and his coauthors write in the paper. It might even be possible to craft a bomb with HALEU well under the 20 percent threshold, the paper contends.
“This is not minor theft.”
Fortunately, that would still be incredibly difficult to do. “This is not minor theft,” says Charles Forsberg, a principal research scientist at MIT and previously a corporate fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A group might have to steal a couple years’ worth of fuel from a small advanced reactor to make the kind of bomb described in the paper, he says.
Even with a working weapons design, he says it would take a sophisticated team of at least several hundred people to go through all of the steps to turn that fuel into uranium metal for a viable weapon. “Unless they’re a whole lot better than I am, and the colleagues I work with, a subnational group [like a terrorist group] doesn’t have a chance,” he tells The Verge.
An adversarial nation would have more capacity than a small group. But he still doesn’t think it would be worth it for them. With their resources, they could go ahead and build a plant to produce weapons-grade uranium, typically enriched above 90 percent U-235.
A more credible risk, he says, would be if another country starts to produce and stockpile HALEU for future reactors — but actually has more nefarious intentions in mind. Once they’re enriching uranium for HALEU, they’ve already started to build up their capacity to reach weapon-grade uranium. “That’s the concern we have with any nation-state that decides to produce HALEU,” Forsberg says. “They’ve taken some of the steps … they’re edging right up to the race line.”

Aside from asking Congress for an updated security assessment of HALEU, the paper suggests setting a lower enrichment limit for uranium based on new research or ramping up security measures for HALEU to more closely match those for weapons-usable fuels.
Unlike the authors of the Science paper, Forsberg thinks the appropriate precautions are already in place to keep next-generation nuclear reactors and HALEU secure in the US. The security risks have been well understood and discussed for decades, he says, although much of that is classified information. That’s part of what makes it difficult to assuage fears.
“The views from the authors of this study do not present any new information that should discourage the development and deployment of HALEU in accordance with already strict requirements set by U.S. and international regulatory bodies,” Jennifer Uhle, vice president of technical and regulatory services at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in an emailed statement to The Verge.
Some of the fears surrounding nuclear energy in the wake of disasters in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 have faded with the need to find energy sources that don’t contribute to climate change and with promises of more advanced technologies. But not everyone’s convinced, and the security concerns cropping up with HALEU dovetail with other issues critics take with nuclear energy.
“Unless there’s a really good reason to switch to fuels that pose greater risks of nuclear proliferation, then it’s irresponsible to pursue those,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and another author of the paper. Lyman has also raised concerns about the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors over the years. “There is no good reason.”

A worker sealing drums of uranium yellowcake at a mine in 2006. | Photo: Getty Images

Next-generation nuclear reactors are heating up a debate over whether their fuel could be used to make bombs, jeopardizing efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Uranium in the fuel could theoretically be used to develop a nuclear weapon. Older reactors use such low concentrations that they don’t really pose a weapons proliferation threat. But advanced reactors would use higher concentrations, making them a potential target of terrorist groups or other countries wanting to take the fuel to develop their own nuclear weapons, some experts warn.

They argue that the US hasn’t prepared enough to hedge against that worst-case scenario and are calling on Congress and the Department of Energy to assess potential security risks with advanced reactor fuel.

Other experts and industry groups still think it’s unfeasible for such a worst-case scenario to materialize. But the issue is starting to come to a head as nuclear reactors become a more attractive energy source, garnering a rare show of bipartisan support in Congress.

Nuclear reactors generate electricity without producing the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. And unlike solar and wind energy, which fluctuate with the weather and time of day, nuclear reactors provide a steady source of electricity similar to gas and coal power plants. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation into law meant to speed the development of next-generation nuclear reactors in the US by streamlining approval processes.

Next-generation reactors are smaller and modular, meant to make them cheaper and easier to build than old-school nuclear power plants. Aside from generating electricity, small reactor designs could also be used to produce high-temperature heat for industrial facilities.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) certified an advanced small modular reactor design for the first time last year. And we’re likely still years away from seeing commercial plants in action. But if the US ever wants to get there, it’ll also have to build up a supply chain for the fuel those advanced reactors would consume. The Inflation Reduction Act includes $700 million to develop that domestic fuel supply.

Today’s reactors generally run on fuel made with a uranium isotope called U-235. Naturally occurring uranium has quite low concentrations of U-235; it has to be “enriched” — usually up to a 5 percent concentration of U-235 for a traditional reactor. Smaller advanced reactors would run on more energy-dense fuel that’s enriched with between 5 to 20 percent U-235, called HALEU (short for high-assay low-enriched uranium).

That higher concentration is what has some experts worried. “If the weapons usability of HALEU is borne out, then even a single reactor would pose serious security concerns,” says a policy analysis penned by a group of nuclear proliferation experts and engineers published in the journal Science last month (including an author credited with being one of the architects of the first hydrogen bomb).

Fuel with a concentration of at least 20 percent is considered highly enriched uranium, which could potentially be used to develop nuclear weapons. With HALEU designs reaching 19.75 percent U-235, the authors argue, it’s time for the US to think hard about how safe the next generation of nuclear reactors would be from malicious intent.

“We need to make sure that we don’t get in front of ourselves here and make sure that all the security and safety provisions are in place first before we go off and start sending [HALEU] all around the country,” says R. Scott Kemp, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy.

That 20 percent threshold goes back to the 1970s, and bad actors ostensibly have more information and computational tools at their disposal to develop weapons, Kemp and his coauthors write in the paper. It might even be possible to craft a bomb with HALEU well under the 20 percent threshold, the paper contends.

Fortunately, that would still be incredibly difficult to do. “This is not minor theft,” says Charles Forsberg, a principal research scientist at MIT and previously a corporate fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. A group might have to steal a couple years’ worth of fuel from a small advanced reactor to make the kind of bomb described in the paper, he says.

Even with a working weapons design, he says it would take a sophisticated team of at least several hundred people to go through all of the steps to turn that fuel into uranium metal for a viable weapon. “Unless they’re a whole lot better than I am, and the colleagues I work with, a subnational group [like a terrorist group] doesn’t have a chance,” he tells The Verge.

An adversarial nation would have more capacity than a small group. But he still doesn’t think it would be worth it for them. With their resources, they could go ahead and build a plant to produce weapons-grade uranium, typically enriched above 90 percent U-235.

A more credible risk, he says, would be if another country starts to produce and stockpile HALEU for future reactors — but actually has more nefarious intentions in mind. Once they’re enriching uranium for HALEU, they’ve already started to build up their capacity to reach weapon-grade uranium. “That’s the concern we have with any nation-state that decides to produce HALEU,” Forsberg says. “They’ve taken some of the steps … they’re edging right up to the race line.”

Aside from asking Congress for an updated security assessment of HALEU, the paper suggests setting a lower enrichment limit for uranium based on new research or ramping up security measures for HALEU to more closely match those for weapons-usable fuels.

Unlike the authors of the Science paper, Forsberg thinks the appropriate precautions are already in place to keep next-generation nuclear reactors and HALEU secure in the US. The security risks have been well understood and discussed for decades, he says, although much of that is classified information. That’s part of what makes it difficult to assuage fears.

“The views from the authors of this study do not present any new information that should discourage the development and deployment of HALEU in accordance with already strict requirements set by U.S. and international regulatory bodies,” Jennifer Uhle, vice president of technical and regulatory services at the Nuclear Energy Institute, said in an emailed statement to The Verge.

Some of the fears surrounding nuclear energy in the wake of disasters in Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 have faded with the need to find energy sources that don’t contribute to climate change and with promises of more advanced technologies. But not everyone’s convinced, and the security concerns cropping up with HALEU dovetail with other issues critics take with nuclear energy.

“Unless there’s a really good reason to switch to fuels that pose greater risks of nuclear proliferation, then it’s irresponsible to pursue those,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and another author of the paper. Lyman has also raised concerns about the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors over the years. “There is no good reason.”

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The DC-1 is very much an outdoor tablet in a world filled with indoor tablets. | Photo: David Pierce / The Verge

So far, this thing doesn’t seem like a very impressive tablet. But Daylight is more a display company than a tablet company — and the display is pretty great. There’s a big piece of paper in the San Francisco offices of Daylight Computer, with a list written in purple ink of all the kinds of devices the company hopes to one day make. The list is long: Daylight wants to make a phone, a laptop, different kinds of tablets. Basically anything you can think of with a screen, Daylight wants to make it with a better, different screen, one that doesn’t blare brightly into your eyes in a dark room but instead looks like paper and works just fine outdoors.
I should mention another big piece of paper right next to the one with product ideas — an equally long list of reasons Daylight might fail. And as CEO Anjan Katta shows me around the office, the rest of the team is preparing for a launch party for its first device, a tablet called the DC-1, it’s clear he’s worried about how the world will respond to his big idea about the future.
Daylight wants to be more of a lifestyle brand than a gadget maker. In recent months, Katta has been on a tour of podcasts and YouTube channels preaching the high-minded gospel of minimalist gadgets, arguing that blue light exposure is killing our sleep and that we need devices that incentivize us to use them less and more deliberately rather than luring us in with bright lights and notifications. Instead of modeling themselves off of purveyors of high tech like Apple or Samsung, Katta and Daylight seem to idolize companies like Patagonia, which both made good things and stands for something. And I suppose if Patagonia can sell vests to VCs, Daylight can sell tablets to tech enthusiasts.
The DC-1 costs $729, which is a lot for an Android tablet, and it’s especially a lot for a tablet that feels very much like a company’s first product. It’s thick, it’s heavy, it’s powered by old chips. I like the speckled back and the clicky buttons, but I can’t stop noticing the very slightly misaligned ports or the fact that I can slide my fingernail between the display and the case and literally pry the thing apart. I’ve had no actual hardware issues using the tablet so far, but the lack of manufacturing polish feels like a first try.
Katta tells me that the DC-1 isn’t yet finished, especially the software. The device is meant to run software called Sol:OS, a customized version of Android meant to help you keep things minimal and quiet. Right now, my test model is running a lightly customized version of the popular Niagara Launcher, and at one point, when I factory reset the device, it lost a lot of the features the team had loaded on for me to test. All of that is to say this device isn’t ready for a full review — we’ll get to that when it launches Sol:OS for real, which Katta tells me should be this fall.

Photo: David Pierce / The Verge
You can see the DC-1’s hardware imperfections without trying very hard.

For now, I mostly just want to talk about the screen. The DC-1 has a 10.5-inch screen, and Daylight calls it a “Live Paper” display. Just to be clear: Live Paper is not E Ink. E Ink is the tech you find in a Kindle and most other e-readers and uses actual ink. That means it looks really good in the sunlight and only uses power when it’s moving the ink around. (Technically E Ink is a brand and “electronic paper” is the technology, but everyone uses them interchangeably. E Ink is Kleenex.) Live Paper is actually designed to solve some of the weaknesses of E Ink — particularly its slow refresh rate and the ghosting that leaves faint impressions of stuff on the screen for too long.
What Live Paper actually is, Katta tells me, is an adaptation of a reflective LCD display tech that has been around for a long time. Reflective LCDs are LCD displays without a backlight; they use a mirror at the bottom of the stack to reflect natural light back through the pixels. That makes them great and comfortable to use in bright light, means they don’t use much power, and allows them to be cheaper, thinner, and lighter. All good things! But there are just as many downsides: RLCDs, as they’re known, obviously struggle in bad lighting. They’re also hard to find in color, at large sizes, or at high resolutions.
There are some well-liked RLCD devices out there already. (The HannsNote2 is a favorite of the r/RLCD subreddit, and the HiSense Q5 got some good reviews a few years ago.) Katta says he’s spent the last five or so years trying to solve RLCD’s problems and improve on the whole system. He hasn’t solved all of them — the DC-1 doesn’t do color, which Katta tells me is technically possible but causes a bunch of other compromises — but the Daylight team has managed to make a 10.5-inch reflective LCD that is almost as easy on the eyes as E Ink and almost as responsive as a typical tablet screen.
I say “almost” because it’s not all the way there in either case. On the E Ink side of the spectrum, Live Paper has a little more glare, uses a lot more power, and has significantly worse viewing angles than my Kindle. The viewing angles are maybe E Ink’s most obvious advantage — you’re always going to get glare on an LCD, and while the Live Paper is an improvement, it’s still not as clear and crisp in the sunshine as an E Ink screen. E Ink feels like paper; Live Paper feels like a screen.
Meanwhile, compared to an iPad or smartphone, when you scroll quickly in an app, the DC-1 lags a bit (though not as much as any E Ink screen I’ve tried), and you get a bit of that wiggly “jelly scroll” that used to plague lots of devices. I also see a tiny bit of ghosting if I’m moving things around quickly; Daylight says the Live Paper screen refreshes at 60 frames per second, but I definitely notice it stuttering sometimes.
There’s a case to be made that Live Paper is actually a jack-of-all-trades in just the right way
Basically, the DC-1’s screen isn’t as good as a Kindle in ideal Kindle conditions or as good as an iPad in ideal iPad conditions. But there’s a case to be made that Live Paper is actually a jack of all trades in just the right way. It’s responsive and fast enough that I can easily type on the DC-1 or even watch a video (albeit in black and white). E Ink is often fine in a pinch, but you can get much more done smoothly on the DC-1 than on a Kindle or a Boox tablet.
The DC-1 is also much easier to look at in bed or any kind of bright light than something like an iPad. Personally, I’d most like this display in slightly smaller form — I’m on record for loving the Boox Palma as a pocketable Android device, and I suspect I’d like it even better with a Live Paper display — but if you’re the type to use an iPad for reading, web browsing, and maybe journaling and crosswording, the DC-1 does it all really well. It’s just not a good Netflix machine, you know?

Photo: David Pierce / The Verge
The orange glow takes a minute to get used to — but it’s easy on the eyes.

As for the backlight, Daylight’s clever idea was to let you control not only the brightness but also the temperature of the light. (You can do this on lots of e-readers, too, by the way — some recent Kindle models have a “warm light” mode that I like much better than the default light.) It can go from normal, daylight-blue light to a deep, warm, amber glow, which is ostensibly better for reading at night without screwing up your circadian rhythm and sleep. The overall theory is sound, but whether your phone screen is enough light to really do huge damage is harder to say. But even from a comfort perspective, I really like it; I now read in bed with the light pretty low and very warm, and I don’t know if I sleep any better, but it’s certainly easier to look at in the dark.
The cooler thing is that you can turn the backlight all the way off. At the lowest setting, the DC-1 emits no light at all. It relies entirely on ambient light to show you what’s on the screen. (An RLCD with a backlight is sometimes also called a “transflective LCD,” for whatever that’s worth.) With no light on, though, the DC-1 looks very dim and low-contrast even in bright sunshine. I hardly ever turn the light all the way off.
Everything in Daylight’s office feels as frantic and new as the DC-1 does. There’s a guy outside, barefoot, putting tablets into tiny grass boxes to give to people later in the day. There’s a table filled with plush cases for the DC-1 and another with Patagonia slings for the early buyers. There’s outdoors-focused art everywhere. This company seems to know exactly what it’s about, but maybe not exactly what to do about it. After using the tablet for a while, I’m skeptical about the case for the DC-1 at $729, but I’m pretty bullish on what a lineup of Live Paper devices might look like. Maybe the middle ground of iPad and Kindle can exist after all. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, Daylight asks a fun question: what if you just changed the screen? I think it might change a lot more than that.

The DC-1 is very much an outdoor tablet in a world filled with indoor tablets. | Photo: David Pierce / The Verge

So far, this thing doesn’t seem like a very impressive tablet. But Daylight is more a display company than a tablet company — and the display is pretty great.

There’s a big piece of paper in the San Francisco offices of Daylight Computer, with a list written in purple ink of all the kinds of devices the company hopes to one day make. The list is long: Daylight wants to make a phone, a laptop, different kinds of tablets. Basically anything you can think of with a screen, Daylight wants to make it with a better, different screen, one that doesn’t blare brightly into your eyes in a dark room but instead looks like paper and works just fine outdoors.

I should mention another big piece of paper right next to the one with product ideas — an equally long list of reasons Daylight might fail. And as CEO Anjan Katta shows me around the office, the rest of the team is preparing for a launch party for its first device, a tablet called the DC-1, it’s clear he’s worried about how the world will respond to his big idea about the future.

Daylight wants to be more of a lifestyle brand than a gadget maker. In recent months, Katta has been on a tour of podcasts and YouTube channels preaching the high-minded gospel of minimalist gadgets, arguing that blue light exposure is killing our sleep and that we need devices that incentivize us to use them less and more deliberately rather than luring us in with bright lights and notifications. Instead of modeling themselves off of purveyors of high tech like Apple or Samsung, Katta and Daylight seem to idolize companies like Patagonia, which both made good things and stands for something. And I suppose if Patagonia can sell vests to VCs, Daylight can sell tablets to tech enthusiasts.

The DC-1 costs $729, which is a lot for an Android tablet, and it’s especially a lot for a tablet that feels very much like a company’s first product. It’s thick, it’s heavy, it’s powered by old chips. I like the speckled back and the clicky buttons, but I can’t stop noticing the very slightly misaligned ports or the fact that I can slide my fingernail between the display and the case and literally pry the thing apart. I’ve had no actual hardware issues using the tablet so far, but the lack of manufacturing polish feels like a first try.

Katta tells me that the DC-1 isn’t yet finished, especially the software. The device is meant to run software called Sol:OS, a customized version of Android meant to help you keep things minimal and quiet. Right now, my test model is running a lightly customized version of the popular Niagara Launcher, and at one point, when I factory reset the device, it lost a lot of the features the team had loaded on for me to test. All of that is to say this device isn’t ready for a full review — we’ll get to that when it launches Sol:OS for real, which Katta tells me should be this fall.

Photo: David Pierce / The Verge
You can see the DC-1’s hardware imperfections without trying very hard.

For now, I mostly just want to talk about the screen. The DC-1 has a 10.5-inch screen, and Daylight calls it a “Live Paper” display. Just to be clear: Live Paper is not E Ink. E Ink is the tech you find in a Kindle and most other e-readers and uses actual ink. That means it looks really good in the sunlight and only uses power when it’s moving the ink around. (Technically E Ink is a brand and “electronic paper” is the technology, but everyone uses them interchangeably. E Ink is Kleenex.) Live Paper is actually designed to solve some of the weaknesses of E Ink — particularly its slow refresh rate and the ghosting that leaves faint impressions of stuff on the screen for too long.

What Live Paper actually is, Katta tells me, is an adaptation of a reflective LCD display tech that has been around for a long time. Reflective LCDs are LCD displays without a backlight; they use a mirror at the bottom of the stack to reflect natural light back through the pixels. That makes them great and comfortable to use in bright light, means they don’t use much power, and allows them to be cheaper, thinner, and lighter. All good things! But there are just as many downsides: RLCDs, as they’re known, obviously struggle in bad lighting. They’re also hard to find in color, at large sizes, or at high resolutions.

There are some well-liked RLCD devices out there already. (The HannsNote2 is a favorite of the r/RLCD subreddit, and the HiSense Q5 got some good reviews a few years ago.) Katta says he’s spent the last five or so years trying to solve RLCD’s problems and improve on the whole system. He hasn’t solved all of them — the DC-1 doesn’t do color, which Katta tells me is technically possible but causes a bunch of other compromises — but the Daylight team has managed to make a 10.5-inch reflective LCD that is almost as easy on the eyes as E Ink and almost as responsive as a typical tablet screen.

I say “almost” because it’s not all the way there in either case. On the E Ink side of the spectrum, Live Paper has a little more glare, uses a lot more power, and has significantly worse viewing angles than my Kindle. The viewing angles are maybe E Ink’s most obvious advantage — you’re always going to get glare on an LCD, and while the Live Paper is an improvement, it’s still not as clear and crisp in the sunshine as an E Ink screen. E Ink feels like paper; Live Paper feels like a screen.

Meanwhile, compared to an iPad or smartphone, when you scroll quickly in an app, the DC-1 lags a bit (though not as much as any E Ink screen I’ve tried), and you get a bit of that wiggly “jelly scroll” that used to plague lots of devices. I also see a tiny bit of ghosting if I’m moving things around quickly; Daylight says the Live Paper screen refreshes at 60 frames per second, but I definitely notice it stuttering sometimes.

Basically, the DC-1’s screen isn’t as good as a Kindle in ideal Kindle conditions or as good as an iPad in ideal iPad conditions. But there’s a case to be made that Live Paper is actually a jack of all trades in just the right way. It’s responsive and fast enough that I can easily type on the DC-1 or even watch a video (albeit in black and white). E Ink is often fine in a pinch, but you can get much more done smoothly on the DC-1 than on a Kindle or a Boox tablet.

The DC-1 is also much easier to look at in bed or any kind of bright light than something like an iPad. Personally, I’d most like this display in slightly smaller form — I’m on record for loving the Boox Palma as a pocketable Android device, and I suspect I’d like it even better with a Live Paper display — but if you’re the type to use an iPad for reading, web browsing, and maybe journaling and crosswording, the DC-1 does it all really well. It’s just not a good Netflix machine, you know?

Photo: David Pierce / The Verge
The orange glow takes a minute to get used to — but it’s easy on the eyes.

As for the backlight, Daylight’s clever idea was to let you control not only the brightness but also the temperature of the light. (You can do this on lots of e-readers, too, by the way — some recent Kindle models have a “warm light” mode that I like much better than the default light.) It can go from normal, daylight-blue light to a deep, warm, amber glow, which is ostensibly better for reading at night without screwing up your circadian rhythm and sleep. The overall theory is sound, but whether your phone screen is enough light to really do huge damage is harder to say. But even from a comfort perspective, I really like it; I now read in bed with the light pretty low and very warm, and I don’t know if I sleep any better, but it’s certainly easier to look at in the dark.

The cooler thing is that you can turn the backlight all the way off. At the lowest setting, the DC-1 emits no light at all. It relies entirely on ambient light to show you what’s on the screen. (An RLCD with a backlight is sometimes also called a “transflective LCD,” for whatever that’s worth.) With no light on, though, the DC-1 looks very dim and low-contrast even in bright sunshine. I hardly ever turn the light all the way off.

Everything in Daylight’s office feels as frantic and new as the DC-1 does. There’s a guy outside, barefoot, putting tablets into tiny grass boxes to give to people later in the day. There’s a table filled with plush cases for the DC-1 and another with Patagonia slings for the early buyers. There’s outdoors-focused art everywhere. This company seems to know exactly what it’s about, but maybe not exactly what to do about it. After using the tablet for a while, I’m skeptical about the case for the DC-1 at $729, but I’m pretty bullish on what a lineup of Live Paper devices might look like. Maybe the middle ground of iPad and Kindle can exist after all. In a world increasingly mediated by screens, Daylight asks a fun question: what if you just changed the screen? I think it might change a lot more than that.

Read More 

Image: Happiest Baby

The Snoo, a very expensive but widely regarded smart bassinet, now has some of the best features of its app locked behind a new $19.99 monthly premium subscription. The change, which went into effect this week, has infuriated many Snoo owners, as the subscription puts some previously free features that new parents rely on behind a pricey paywall.
A bunch of threads in the Snoo subreddit have exploded with complaints since the plan was announced last month. “Wild choice,” wrote one user. “It’s actually disgusting to take advantage of parents who are just trying to get their kids to sleep and already paying a large sum for the pleasure of something that a) may not work, b) can only be used for a short period before becoming useless, c) requires ongoing payment to use full features.”
“I am not opposed to the concept of premium membership if they want to add more features. I am surprised to see existing features that were advertised as coming with the Snoo suddenly being paywalled,” Sarah, a Snoo owner in Australia, tells The Verge. (Sarah’s name has been changed at her request for privacy reasons.) “It’s like a mechanic intentionally breaking your car just so they can sell you the repair.”

Image: Happiest Baby

You get the most out of your Snoo by connecting it to Wi-Fi via the app for Happiest Baby, which makes the bassinet. When you turn the Snoo on, the floor of the bassinet rocks back and forth to soothe your baby while droning white noise plays. If your baby fusses or cries, the Snoo can respond by increasing the intensity of the motion and sound, and you can control many settings from the app. The app also offers features like sleep tracking and a “weaning mode” that helps when you need to eventually transition the baby to a bigger bed.
Before now, all the features in the app have been free. But as of July 15th, the Happiest Baby app puts many features behind the Premium subscription, including some of the app’s best tools, like sleep tracking and the weaning mode.

Image: Happiest Baby

The full list of the features in each subscription tier.

The paywall especially stings because the Snoo isn’t cheap to buy outright. At its full retail price from Happiest Baby, the Snoo costs $1,695, while a certified preowned Snoo costs $1,195. The resale market is a common way to find one for less, but Happiest Baby is now incentivizing potential buyers to purchase a Snoo directly from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner.
If you buy a Snoo from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner after July 15th, 2024, you get a Premium subscription for one baby for nine months, Harvey Karp, CEO of Happiest Baby, tells The Verge. If you rent a Snoo — which costs $159 per month — you’ll get access to Premium features for the duration of your rental plus one extra month.
(People who bought a Snoo from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner before July 15th, 2024, get the best deal. If that’s you, you’ll get access to a Premium subscription with every baby you have. A second baby can be added via the app, and for additional babies, you can contact Happiest Baby’s customer support.)
If you buy a Snoo on the resale market, on the other hand, you’ll have to choose if you want to pay the subscription. The company gets a lot of support requests from people who have received their Snoo secondhand, according to Karp, and “the subscription allows us to provide the same level of care — from tech support, to troubleshooting, to sleep consultations — to SNOO users who have purchased their SNOO through the resale market.”
“I’ve already shelled out a lot of money for the device itself. It would be a shame to miss out on some of the benefits I bought it for.”
Sarah, the Snoo owner from Australia, says she bought her Snoo from a company that buys and refurbishes Snoos but isn’t affiliated with Happiest Baby. That means she won’t get any free months of Premium, but she says she will pay for it. “I’ve already shelled out a lot of money for the device itself. It would be a shame to miss out on some of the benefits I bought it for.”
Jordan Leventhal, who is expecting a baby in September, tells The Verge that he and his wife found a Snoo on Facebook Marketplace at a price they could afford. While he says they can pay the $20 monthly fee for the Premium subscription, “I don’t know if we would have gotten the Snoo” if they knew they’d be charged.
For my wife and I, the Snoo was a lifesaver. Before we got it, our baby wouldn’t sleep on anything except for us, meaning we stayed up in shifts all night for the sake of the baby for weeks. We were desperate for anything that would let her get independent sleep.
We eventually found someone on Facebook Marketplace selling their barely used Snoo for much cheaper than Happiest Baby’s official options. (Our family very generously gifted the Snoo to us, for which we are extremely thankful, as even the lower cost still would have been a big bite.) We used the Snoo for months, and our baby just graduated to a bigger bed with a lot of help from the weaning mode — a feature we would have had to pay for if our baby had been born just a few weeks sooner.
Despite the outcry, Happiest Baby has moved forward with the subscription. “In order to continue to make Snoo even more accessible, we have to be able to be agile and adjust our business structure,” Karp says.

Image: Happiest Baby

The Snoo, a very expensive but widely regarded smart bassinet, now has some of the best features of its app locked behind a new $19.99 monthly premium subscription. The change, which went into effect this week, has infuriated many Snoo owners, as the subscription puts some previously free features that new parents rely on behind a pricey paywall.

A bunch of threads in the Snoo subreddit have exploded with complaints since the plan was announced last month. “Wild choice,” wrote one user. “It’s actually disgusting to take advantage of parents who are just trying to get their kids to sleep and already paying a large sum for the pleasure of something that a) may not work, b) can only be used for a short period before becoming useless, c) requires ongoing payment to use full features.”

“I am not opposed to the concept of premium membership if they want to add more features. I am surprised to see existing features that were advertised as coming with the Snoo suddenly being paywalled,” Sarah, a Snoo owner in Australia, tells The Verge. (Sarah’s name has been changed at her request for privacy reasons.) “It’s like a mechanic intentionally breaking your car just so they can sell you the repair.”

Image: Happiest Baby

You get the most out of your Snoo by connecting it to Wi-Fi via the app for Happiest Baby, which makes the bassinet. When you turn the Snoo on, the floor of the bassinet rocks back and forth to soothe your baby while droning white noise plays. If your baby fusses or cries, the Snoo can respond by increasing the intensity of the motion and sound, and you can control many settings from the app. The app also offers features like sleep tracking and a “weaning mode” that helps when you need to eventually transition the baby to a bigger bed.

Before now, all the features in the app have been free. But as of July 15th, the Happiest Baby app puts many features behind the Premium subscription, including some of the app’s best tools, like sleep tracking and the weaning mode.

Image: Happiest Baby

The full list of the features in each subscription tier.

The paywall especially stings because the Snoo isn’t cheap to buy outright. At its full retail price from Happiest Baby, the Snoo costs $1,695, while a certified preowned Snoo costs $1,195. The resale market is a common way to find one for less, but Happiest Baby is now incentivizing potential buyers to purchase a Snoo directly from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner.

If you buy a Snoo from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner after July 15th, 2024, you get a Premium subscription for one baby for nine months, Harvey Karp, CEO of Happiest Baby, tells The Verge. If you rent a Snoo — which costs $159 per month — you’ll get access to Premium features for the duration of your rental plus one extra month.

(People who bought a Snoo from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner before July 15th, 2024, get the best deal. If that’s you, you’ll get access to a Premium subscription with every baby you have. A second baby can be added via the app, and for additional babies, you can contact Happiest Baby’s customer support.)

If you buy a Snoo on the resale market, on the other hand, you’ll have to choose if you want to pay the subscription. The company gets a lot of support requests from people who have received their Snoo secondhand, according to Karp, and “the subscription allows us to provide the same level of care — from tech support, to troubleshooting, to sleep consultations — to SNOO users who have purchased their SNOO through the resale market.”

Sarah, the Snoo owner from Australia, says she bought her Snoo from a company that buys and refurbishes Snoos but isn’t affiliated with Happiest Baby. That means she won’t get any free months of Premium, but she says she will pay for it. “I’ve already shelled out a lot of money for the device itself. It would be a shame to miss out on some of the benefits I bought it for.”

Jordan Leventhal, who is expecting a baby in September, tells The Verge that he and his wife found a Snoo on Facebook Marketplace at a price they could afford. While he says they can pay the $20 monthly fee for the Premium subscription, “I don’t know if we would have gotten the Snoo” if they knew they’d be charged.

For my wife and I, the Snoo was a lifesaver. Before we got it, our baby wouldn’t sleep on anything except for us, meaning we stayed up in shifts all night for the sake of the baby for weeks. We were desperate for anything that would let her get independent sleep.

We eventually found someone on Facebook Marketplace selling their barely used Snoo for much cheaper than Happiest Baby’s official options. (Our family very generously gifted the Snoo to us, for which we are extremely thankful, as even the lower cost still would have been a big bite.) We used the Snoo for months, and our baby just graduated to a bigger bed with a lot of help from the weaning mode — a feature we would have had to pay for if our baby had been born just a few weeks sooner.

Despite the outcry, Happiest Baby has moved forward with the subscription. “In order to continue to make Snoo even more accessible, we have to be able to be agile and adjust our business structure,” Karp says.

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A new approach to power stations that does more than fast-charge (select) DJI drones. DJI isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to big-ass batteries — quite the opposite since the batteries that fit inside the company’s drones have to be as small and light as possible. But all that time spent finding the right balance between weight, size, flight time, and charging speeds has prepared the company to enter the power station market with the $599 Power 1000 and smaller $379 Power 500.
DJI’s approach to portable power stations is unique, I’ve learned while testing its flagship Power 1000. It features a powerful 2200W AC inverter that’s unheard of in such a small package that also hosts a modest 1024Wh battery made from safe and long-lasting LFP cells. It’s also one of the first power stations to ship with a pair of USB-C PD 3.1 outputs capable of 140W.
And to keep things as small and portable as possible, it eschews other inputs and outputs you’ll find standard on most power stations. Instead, DJI developed a versatile “Smart DC,” or SDC, port that allows you to add more I/O via proprietary adapters. But those SDC ports can also charge a selection of DJI’s own drones faster than anything else currently on the market.
The big question I have, then, is who is this for? Just owners of compatible DJI drones or anyone looking to buy a general-purpose power station?

If you want to turn the Power 1000 into a full-featured solar generator, then you’ll need to buy lots of proprietary DJI cables. You’ll need a $59 cable attached to a chunky MPPT solar controller if you want to charge the Power 1000 from the sun or a $49 cable to charge it from your car’s 12V cigarette output when driving. You’ll also need to buy $22 cables if you want to add 12V DC outputs to the power station. These include a car charger port to power things like a portable fridge, an XT60 connector to power an RV’s lights, or a charger for RC aircraft.
You’ll then need to buy a $19 cable to fast-charge the Intelligent Flight Batteries from DJI’s compatible Matrice 30 series, Air 3, Mavic 3 series, or Inspire 3 drones. I tested my Power 1000 review unit with a DJI Air 3 because the batteries used on the other drone DJI sent me to test — a Mini 3 Pro — aren’t compatible with DJI’s SDC ports.

Charging the Air 3’s battery with the Power 1000 has one main advantage over other DJI charging solutions: speed. Unfortunately, charging with the SDC cable is limited to just one battery at a time since DJI doesn’t yet offer a multi-battery charging hub compatible with DJI’s own SDC port. You can, of course, buy a second $19 SDC cable.
In my testing, both SDC ports charge the Air 3’s battery at up to 124W, according to the display on the Power 1000, just shy of the 125W DJI quotes. However, it only hits this max charge rate briefly, which is to be expected. Charging from 0 to 90 percent took 34 minutes, but the next 10 percent took another 19 minutes, or 53 minutes to charge from 0 to full — nine minutes longer than the 44 minutes DJI promotes. That’s still better than the 70 minutes it’ll take using DJI’s 100W USB-C charger.
I do like that the Power 1000 shows the real-time charging percentage of the drone battery with a precision of two decimal points!

Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

The Power 1000 has two USB-C ports capable of charging compatible devices at 140W.

DJI says its other compatible drones can take better advantage of Power 1000’s SDC ports. The Mavic 3 can pull up to 150W, for example, while the Inspire 3 can draw up to 200W and the Matrice 30 series up to 230W to easily trounce the DJI’s own USB-C fast chargers. The SDC ports can handle up to 400W of input and 240W of output.
Speaking of USB-C, DJI’s Power 1000 is one of the first power stations to ship with dual USB-C PD 3.1 ports supporting a max output of 140W per port when using compatible PD 3.1 devices and cables that meet the Extended Power Range (EPR) specification. I was able to confirm with a random white-label power bank purchased from Amazon, as you can see in the image above. Unfortunately, those USB-C ports are outputs only, so they can’t be used to charge the power station.
The AC inverter is impressive and specced to power most household appliances, including microwaves, space heaters, and window air conditioners — albeit briefly. It’s rated at 2200W of “stable output” or 2,600W for “thirty seconds.” In my testing, I managed to pull a steady 2400W (using two hair dryers) for about one to two minutes before the unit shut off gracefully with a warning message on the display. I was able to then power the hair dryers at 2000W uninterrupted for a full five minutes before I switched them off.
Charging the Power 1000 from an AC wall jack has its own quirks. A switch on the front lets you set the charging speed at either 1200W or 600W. The fan is whisper quiet even at that max charge rate — I was measuring just 26dB from a meter away, slightly more than the 23dB quoted on marketing materials. DJI says it’ll charge to 80 percent in about 50 minutes, or 70 minutes to reach 100 percent — and that’s almost exactly what I saw, plus or minus two minutes.
I should note, however, that the Power 1000 seems to have a narrow temperature band for that 1200W max charge rate. I saw it regularly throttle charging to 900W after a heavy test session, which makes sense, but also after it had been just sitting idle for several hours in a room measuring just 63 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius).
Other observations:

DJI’s SDC-to-MPPT solar adapter has a theoretical input of 400W. However, the controller’s input range is just 12–30V, too low to attach a single portable 400W panel that typically produces at least 40V and could damage the power station. Attaching two 200W panels should be fine. DJI’s own Power 1000 solar bundles ship with one to six 100W panels to reduce the “overvolting” risk.
Leaving the AC inverter turned on will drain the fully charged battery in about two days, based on my testing. By default, it turns off in 30 minutes when no load is detected.
You can combine SDC charging inputs for faster charging. For example, it can be charged over solar and your car’s cigarette lighter socket simultaneously.
You cannot, however, charge from both AC inputs and SDC inputs simultaneously.
The Power 1000 can function as a UPS for places susceptible to blackouts.
There’s no iOS or Android app to remotely control or monitor the ports on the Power 1000, but there is a Mac or Windows app to manage firmware updates — a procedure I found to be laborious when performed the first time on my MacBook.
While being generally very quiet, its fans will produce a loud 46dB when under heavy load, but they quickly spin down once the load is removed.
The display is informative and generally readable both indoors and out.

If you’re a professional content creator who already owns one of the DJI drones that can take advantage of the Power 1000’s (or Power 500) fast charging, then there’s little reason to look elsewhere for a new power station, especially if you’re only looking to keep a simple mobile studio charged.
But if you’re looking for an all-purpose power station with gobs of solar input that’s ready for anything, then you should probably look elsewhere. While the Power 1000 can certainly expand its selection of inputs and outputs thanks to those versatile SDC ports, nobody wants to manage all those dongles and risk getting caught out in the outback after losing a cable that’s only sold by a single company.
The Power 1000 costs $599 before adding any SDC adapters. That’s more expensive than the $499 EcoFlow Delta 2 and a little cheaper than the $650 Bluetti AC180, both of which include all the inputs and outputs you’ll need from similarly sized batteries but fall short of DJI’s freakish ability to provide 2200W of sustained AC output.
All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

A new approach to power stations that does more than fast-charge (select) DJI drones.

DJI isn’t the first name you think of when it comes to big-ass batteries — quite the opposite since the batteries that fit inside the company’s drones have to be as small and light as possible. But all that time spent finding the right balance between weight, size, flight time, and charging speeds has prepared the company to enter the power station market with the $599 Power 1000 and smaller $379 Power 500.

DJI’s approach to portable power stations is unique, I’ve learned while testing its flagship Power 1000. It features a powerful 2200W AC inverter that’s unheard of in such a small package that also hosts a modest 1024Wh battery made from safe and long-lasting LFP cells. It’s also one of the first power stations to ship with a pair of USB-C PD 3.1 outputs capable of 140W.

And to keep things as small and portable as possible, it eschews other inputs and outputs you’ll find standard on most power stations. Instead, DJI developed a versatile “Smart DC,” or SDC, port that allows you to add more I/O via proprietary adapters. But those SDC ports can also charge a selection of DJI’s own drones faster than anything else currently on the market.

The big question I have, then, is who is this for? Just owners of compatible DJI drones or anyone looking to buy a general-purpose power station?

If you want to turn the Power 1000 into a full-featured solar generator, then you’ll need to buy lots of proprietary DJI cables. You’ll need a $59 cable attached to a chunky MPPT solar controller if you want to charge the Power 1000 from the sun or a $49 cable to charge it from your car’s 12V cigarette output when driving. You’ll also need to buy $22 cables if you want to add 12V DC outputs to the power station. These include a car charger port to power things like a portable fridge, an XT60 connector to power an RV’s lights, or a charger for RC aircraft.

You’ll then need to buy a $19 cable to fast-charge the Intelligent Flight Batteries from DJI’s compatible Matrice 30 series, Air 3, Mavic 3 series, or Inspire 3 drones. I tested my Power 1000 review unit with a DJI Air 3 because the batteries used on the other drone DJI sent me to test — a Mini 3 Pro — aren’t compatible with DJI’s SDC ports.

Charging the Air 3’s battery with the Power 1000 has one main advantage over other DJI charging solutions: speed. Unfortunately, charging with the SDC cable is limited to just one battery at a time since DJI doesn’t yet offer a multi-battery charging hub compatible with DJI’s own SDC port. You can, of course, buy a second $19 SDC cable.

In my testing, both SDC ports charge the Air 3’s battery at up to 124W, according to the display on the Power 1000, just shy of the 125W DJI quotes. However, it only hits this max charge rate briefly, which is to be expected. Charging from 0 to 90 percent took 34 minutes, but the next 10 percent took another 19 minutes, or 53 minutes to charge from 0 to full — nine minutes longer than the 44 minutes DJI promotes. That’s still better than the 70 minutes it’ll take using DJI’s 100W USB-C charger.

I do like that the Power 1000 shows the real-time charging percentage of the drone battery with a precision of two decimal points!

DJI says its other compatible drones can take better advantage of Power 1000’s SDC ports. The Mavic 3 can pull up to 150W, for example, while the Inspire 3 can draw up to 200W and the Matrice 30 series up to 230W to easily trounce the DJI’s own USB-C fast chargers. The SDC ports can handle up to 400W of input and 240W of output.

Speaking of USB-C, DJI’s Power 1000 is one of the first power stations to ship with dual USB-C PD 3.1 ports supporting a max output of 140W per port when using compatible PD 3.1 devices and cables that meet the Extended Power Range (EPR) specification. I was able to confirm with a random white-label power bank purchased from Amazon, as you can see in the image above. Unfortunately, those USB-C ports are outputs only, so they can’t be used to charge the power station.

The AC inverter is impressive and specced to power most household appliances, including microwaves, space heaters, and window air conditioners — albeit briefly. It’s rated at 2200W of “stable output” or 2,600W for “thirty seconds.” In my testing, I managed to pull a steady 2400W (using two hair dryers) for about one to two minutes before the unit shut off gracefully with a warning message on the display. I was able to then power the hair dryers at 2000W uninterrupted for a full five minutes before I switched them off.

Charging the Power 1000 from an AC wall jack has its own quirks. A switch on the front lets you set the charging speed at either 1200W or 600W. The fan is whisper quiet even at that max charge rate — I was measuring just 26dB from a meter away, slightly more than the 23dB quoted on marketing materials. DJI says it’ll charge to 80 percent in about 50 minutes, or 70 minutes to reach 100 percent — and that’s almost exactly what I saw, plus or minus two minutes.

I should note, however, that the Power 1000 seems to have a narrow temperature band for that 1200W max charge rate. I saw it regularly throttle charging to 900W after a heavy test session, which makes sense, but also after it had been just sitting idle for several hours in a room measuring just 63 degrees Fahrenheit (17 degrees Celsius).

Other observations:

DJI’s SDC-to-MPPT solar adapter has a theoretical input of 400W. However, the controller’s input range is just 12–30V, too low to attach a single portable 400W panel that typically produces at least 40V and could damage the power station. Attaching two 200W panels should be fine. DJI’s own Power 1000 solar bundles ship with one to six 100W panels to reduce the “overvolting” risk.
Leaving the AC inverter turned on will drain the fully charged battery in about two days, based on my testing. By default, it turns off in 30 minutes when no load is detected.
You can combine SDC charging inputs for faster charging. For example, it can be charged over solar and your car’s cigarette lighter socket simultaneously.
You cannot, however, charge from both AC inputs and SDC inputs simultaneously.
The Power 1000 can function as a UPS for places susceptible to blackouts.
There’s no iOS or Android app to remotely control or monitor the ports on the Power 1000, but there is a Mac or Windows app to manage firmware updates — a procedure I found to be laborious when performed the first time on my MacBook.
While being generally very quiet, its fans will produce a loud 46dB when under heavy load, but they quickly spin down once the load is removed.
The display is informative and generally readable both indoors and out.

If you’re a professional content creator who already owns one of the DJI drones that can take advantage of the Power 1000’s (or Power 500) fast charging, then there’s little reason to look elsewhere for a new power station, especially if you’re only looking to keep a simple mobile studio charged.

But if you’re looking for an all-purpose power station with gobs of solar input that’s ready for anything, then you should probably look elsewhere. While the Power 1000 can certainly expand its selection of inputs and outputs thanks to those versatile SDC ports, nobody wants to manage all those dongles and risk getting caught out in the outback after losing a cable that’s only sold by a single company.

The Power 1000 costs $599 before adding any SDC adapters. That’s more expensive than the $499 EcoFlow Delta 2 and a little cheaper than the $650 Bluetti AC180, both of which include all the inputs and outputs you’ll need from similarly sized batteries but fall short of DJI’s freakish ability to provide 2200W of sustained AC output.

All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

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Image: Bethesda Game Studios

More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). 241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.
Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers. The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica. (Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

We, a majority of developers at Bethesda Game Studios Dallas, Rockville, and Austin, are ecstatic to announce the formation of our union with @CWAUnion. Together as #OneBGSUSA, we advocate for the betterment of every developer at BGS, setting the new standard for our industry.— OneBGS_USA (@OneBGS_USA) July 19, 2024

The Bethesda workers will be members of CWA Local 2108 in Maryland and CWA Local 6215 in Texas.
Microsoft didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios

More than 200 developers at Bethesda Game Studios, the studio behind hit franchises like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). 241 workers, including “artists, engineers, programmers and designers,” have signed union authorization cards or “indicated that they wanted union representation via an online portal,” according to a CWA press release.

Microsoft has recognized the union, the CWA says; the company has already recognized unions formed by Activision QA workers and ZeniMax Studios QA workers. The CWA describes this as “the first wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft video game studio,” meaning that all eligible job titles will be represented by the CWA instead of just one type of worker, according to the CWA’s Catalina Brennan-Gatica. (Until now, all of the unions at Microsoft-owned studios have only been formed by QA workers.)

The Bethesda workers will be members of CWA Local 2108 in Maryland and CWA Local 6215 in Texas.

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

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Police in the UK have arrested a 17-year-old boy in connection with last year’s cyberattack on MGM Resorts, as reported by the BBC and 404 Media. With the help of the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency, the West Midlands Police took the teen into custody on Friday on suspicion of violating the UK’s laws on hacking and blackmail.
The West Midlands Police say the suspect has been released on bail while the department investigates. It will also perform a forensic examination on a “number of digital devices” recovered from the teen’s address in Walsall, England.

Today, the #FBI joins the UK’s @NCA_UK, @WMPolice, and @ROCUWM to announce the arrest of an individual connected to a global cybercrime group which has victimized major companies, including MGM Resorts. Read more about the arrest here: https://t.co/8Vq8BIDf3V pic.twitter.com/AshG1Om0ts— FBI (@FBI) July 19, 2024

Last September, ransomware hackers broke into MGM’s systems using social engineering techniques, bringing the company’s networks of hotels and casinos down for days. The hackers responsible for the attack appear to have teamed up with the prolific ransomware group ALPHV (also known as BlackCat) to deploy ransomware on MGM’s systems, according to The Washington Post.
“The FBI, in coordination with its partners, will continue to relentlessly pursue malicious actors who target American companies, no matter where they may be located or how sophisticated their techniques are,” Bryan Vorndran, the assistant director of FBI’s Cyber Division, says in a press release.
A report from Reuters last year said that the FBI was aware of the casino hackers six months before the breach and that the agency “struggled” to stop them despite knowing the identities “of at least a dozen members.”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Police in the UK have arrested a 17-year-old boy in connection with last year’s cyberattack on MGM Resorts, as reported by the BBC and 404 Media. With the help of the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency, the West Midlands Police took the teen into custody on Friday on suspicion of violating the UK’s laws on hacking and blackmail.

The West Midlands Police say the suspect has been released on bail while the department investigates. It will also perform a forensic examination on a “number of digital devices” recovered from the teen’s address in Walsall, England.

Last September, ransomware hackers broke into MGM’s systems using social engineering techniques, bringing the company’s networks of hotels and casinos down for days. The hackers responsible for the attack appear to have teamed up with the prolific ransomware group ALPHV (also known as BlackCat) to deploy ransomware on MGM’s systems, according to The Washington Post.

“The FBI, in coordination with its partners, will continue to relentlessly pursue malicious actors who target American companies, no matter where they may be located or how sophisticated their techniques are,” Bryan Vorndran, the assistant director of FBI’s Cyber Division, says in a press release.

A report from Reuters last year said that the FBI was aware of the casino hackers six months before the breach and that the agency “struggled” to stop them despite knowing the identities “of at least a dozen members.”

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The wheel features a handcrafted carbon fiber shell keeping it rigid but lightweight. | Image: Sim-Lab

Sim-Lab has just released a new $2,499 steering wheel it claims is an “authentic as possible” replica of the wheels Lewis Hamilton uses while driving the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team’s race cars. It’s a lovely piece of hardware to just stare at, but a reminder that getting really into simulators can be dangerous for your budget.
If that price tag has your jaw on the floor, don’t bother picking it up. You can’t just plug the steering wheel into your PC and hit the simulated streets of Montreal. It needs to be attached to a wheelbase, which translates the steering wheel’s turning motions and button inputs to a racing game while also providing force feedback. Those can also set you back several thousand dollars, and one isn’t included with this wheel.

What makes Sim-Lab’s new wheel so pricey? For starters, it’s officially licensed from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, who shared the computer aided design (CAD) data it uses to build the steering wheels for its multi-million dollar cars. Sim-Lab’s wheel is as close as you can get to racing with one without replacing Lewis Hamilton as the team’s driver when he moves to team Ferrari next year.

The steering wheel’s body is also a handmade carbon fiber shell. That not only helps it weigh 1,240 grams, but it also ensures it’s extremely rigid, so vibrations and resistance provided by a wheelbase are precisely translated to a gamer’s hands. It’s not going to creak and flex as you steer into a simulated corner at over 150MPH.
Scattered across the wheel are nine rotary dials, 12 buttons, two switches, carbon fiber shifting paddles, anti-static silicone rubber grips, and 25 controllable RGB LEDs providing telemetry data at a glance. If that’s not enough data, the center of the wheel also features a 4.3-inch LCD display with data layouts that match what Mercedes F1 drivers see.
To most of us, it might seem like an obscene splurge, but for racing sim fans striving to recreate an authentic F1 experience, the only thing seemingly missing is race engineer Bono telling them “Ok Lewis, it’s hammer time.”

The wheel features a handcrafted carbon fiber shell keeping it rigid but lightweight. | Image: Sim-Lab

Sim-Lab has just released a new $2,499 steering wheel it claims is an “authentic as possible” replica of the wheels Lewis Hamilton uses while driving the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team’s race cars. It’s a lovely piece of hardware to just stare at, but a reminder that getting really into simulators can be dangerous for your budget.

If that price tag has your jaw on the floor, don’t bother picking it up. You can’t just plug the steering wheel into your PC and hit the simulated streets of Montreal. It needs to be attached to a wheelbase, which translates the steering wheel’s turning motions and button inputs to a racing game while also providing force feedback. Those can also set you back several thousand dollars, and one isn’t included with this wheel.

What makes Sim-Lab’s new wheel so pricey? For starters, it’s officially licensed from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, who shared the computer aided design (CAD) data it uses to build the steering wheels for its multi-million dollar cars. Sim-Lab’s wheel is as close as you can get to racing with one without replacing Lewis Hamilton as the team’s driver when he moves to team Ferrari next year.

The steering wheel’s body is also a handmade carbon fiber shell. That not only helps it weigh 1,240 grams, but it also ensures it’s extremely rigid, so vibrations and resistance provided by a wheelbase are precisely translated to a gamer’s hands. It’s not going to creak and flex as you steer into a simulated corner at over 150MPH.

Scattered across the wheel are nine rotary dials, 12 buttons, two switches, carbon fiber shifting paddles, anti-static silicone rubber grips, and 25 controllable RGB LEDs providing telemetry data at a glance. If that’s not enough data, the center of the wheel also features a 4.3-inch LCD display with data layouts that match what Mercedes F1 drivers see.

To most of us, it might seem like an obscene splurge, but for racing sim fans striving to recreate an authentic F1 experience, the only thing seemingly missing is race engineer Bono telling them “Ok Lewis, it’s hammer time.”

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