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Gerard Barron, chairman and CEO of The Metals Company in San Diego, California on June 8, 2021. | Photo: Getty Images

The Metals Company, which has been trying for years to exploit battery materials strewn across the ocean floor, announced today that it has applied for a permit from the Trump administration to start commercially mining in international waters.

Together, the company and President Trump are circumventing a multilateral process to develop rules for deep sea mining that has so far prevented any commercial exploitation from happening.

Moving forward with mining now, before fully understanding the potential environmental impact or having international rules in place to mitigate the damage, is already angering other governments and conservation groups.

“An act of total disregard for international law”

“The first application to commercially mine the seabed will be remembered as an act of total disregard for international law and scientific consensus,” Greenpeace International senior campaigner Louisa Casson said in a press release. “Governments around the world must now step up to defend international rules and cooperation against rogue deep sea mining.”

Trump signed an executive order last week to try to fast-track deep seabed mining, which he framed as a way to counter China’s dominance in mineral supply chains. The Trump administration claims it has authority to grant permits to mine through the 1980 US Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act and because the US has not ratified the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Convention, ratified by more than 160 other nations, established the International Seabed Authority (ISA) that is in the process of crafting rules for deep sea mining.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said the executive order “violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community,” the BBC reported on Friday.

The island nation of Nauru initially sponsored The Metals Company (TMC) and its deep-sea mining effort, setting off a scramble to develop international regulations in 2021. The ISA missed a 2023 deadline to draft those rules after failing to reach consensus on thorny issues like who’s liable for paying for any damage that might occur. Scientists and environmental advocates have also argued that there’s still too little we know about the ocean’s abyss to fully understand the risks, let alone mine responsibly there.

The surface of the Moon is better mapped than the world’s seafloor, where scientists are still making surprising discoveries that raise questions about whether mining there could have far-reaching effects on marine life and coastal communities. More than 30 countries — including US neighbors Canada and Mexico — have called for a ban or moratorium on deep-sea mining until there are international rules in place.

TMC, apparently, is tired of waiting. It has applied for a permit from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to harvest materials from a 25,160 square kilometer-swath of seafloor roughly 1,300 nautical miles south of San Diego. It also applied for two licenses to explore more areas for mining potential. The permit is for an area that’s part of the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a region between Hawaii and Mexico that lies outside of US national jurisdiction and where mining is supposed to be regulated by the ISA, NOAA has previously said on its website. The Clarion Clipperton Zone is full of life that scientists have recently discovered; up to 90 percent of species collected for study here have been completely new to science.

The zone has also been a focus of proposed deep sea mining efforts because the seafloor is covered in rock-like polymetallic nodules full of nickel, cobalt, and manganese used in rechargeable batteries and deemed “critical minerals” by the US government. Trump has made sweeping threats in the name of securing critical minerals, from annexing Greenland to warning Ukraine of “big, big problems” if it backed out of a critical minerals deal.

Trump is reportedly fond of the nodules. “I’m happy to say, a nodule just like this one was presented to the president last week and now sits on the resolute desk,” Gerard Barron, chairman and CEO of The Metals Company, said during a House Natural Resources Committee oversight hearing held today.

“We are offering the United States a shovel-ready path to new and abundant supplies of nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese—critical metals for energy, infrastructure, and defense,” Barron said in a press statement announcing the permit application. “After continuous delay at the international level, the United States now has a clear opportunity to reclaim its leadership role in the deep sea.”

The Metals Company says it has invested more than half a billion dollars “preparing for this moment,” and believes it can recover up to 15.5 million metric tons of nickel, 12.8 million metric tons of copper, 2 million metric tons of cobalt, and 345 million metric tons of manganese from the Clarion Clipperton Zone. TMC also contends that mining at sea would be less harmful than mining on land and has repudiated a controversial study published last year — which the company had initially funded — that found evidence of mysterious “dark oxygen” rising from the deep sea.

Opponents of deep sea mining, meanwhile, point to alternatives that limit the need to pluck nodules from the seafloor. EV companies, including Tesla, have worked towards reducing the use of nickel and cobalt in batteries. And it’s been estimated that by 2050, half of cobalt and nickel demand for EVs in the US could be met through recycling.

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A geologist with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency collects samples of treated Lake Michigan water in a laboratory at the water treatment plant in Wilmette, Illinois, on July 3, 2021. | Photo: Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a new plan to address “forever chemicals” once widely used in non-stick and water-proof products that have since been linked to cancer, reproductive health issues, and liver damage. The vague details the EPA has shared so far, however, have health and environmental advocates wondering whether the EPA’s plan helps or delays action to keep the chemicals out of drinking water.

The agency says it’ll launch new efforts to study the chemicals and will develop new guidelines to limit pollution from manufacturers. But the announcement on Monday comes as the EPA under Donald Trump attempts to roll back dozens of other environmental protections. And, notably, the agency hasn’t decided whether it plans to enforce existing limits on the amount of forever chemicals in drinking water. Nor will the agency say whether it plans to defend a Biden-era rule to classify the two most common forms of PFAS as hazardous chemicals prioritized for cleanup under the federal Superfund law.

“It just feels like it offered a lot of words without saying anything,” says Mary Grant, a campaign director at the nonprofit Food & Water Watch. “It reminds me so much of the previous Trump administration, where they had PFAs roadmap after PFAs roadmap without actually taking any steps to really move the needle.”

“A lot of words without saying anything.”

The chemicals fall under the umbrella of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and earned the “forever” label because of how long they can persist in the environment and accumulate in the human body. They were used for decades in items such as nonstick pans, food packaging, fire-fighting foams, fabric protector, dental floss, and menstrual products. After facing a slew of lawsuits, some major companies have already pledged to stop using PFAS. But the chemicals have already made their way into at least 45 percent of the nation’s tap water and into most Americans’ blood streams.

“I have long been concerned about PFAS and the efforts to help states and communities dealing with legacy contamination in their backyards,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a press release yesterday. “This is just a start of the work we will do on PFAS to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water.”

The EPA said it would develop new water pollution regulations for PFAS manufacturers and metal finishers. Forever chemicals can be used in the electroplating process of applying an anticorrosive “chrome” finish to metal. The EPA also says it’ll “designate an agency lead” on PFAS initiatives, including new efforts to gather information on how to detect and destroy the chemicals.

Last year the Biden administration finalized the nation’s first legally enforceable federal limits on the most common types of PFAS in drinking water. It was the culmination of years of research and advocacy stretching back to Trump’s first term in office, when advocates and Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration of dragging its feet on the issue.

Industry groups filed suit over the national drinking water standards, claiming the EPA overstepped its authority in crafting them. Trade groups similarly filed suit against the Biden administration over the hazardous waste designation for PFAS, arguing the EPA misinterpreted the Superfund law.

The EPA’s announcement yesterday didn’t mention either suit, only saying that it will “address the most significant compliance challenges” related to national drinking water regulations for forever chemicals. When asked by The Verge whether it planned to defend those PFAS rules in court, EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said in an email that “New EPA leadership is in the process of reviewing the PFAS drinking water rule, and the issues presented in the litigation in the current case around it, and developing its position on how to proceed.” The agency faces May deadlines to decide whether to defend the drinking water and hazardous waste rules after asking for extensions in both cases.

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Since Slate Auto came out of stealth mode last week, the internet has been abuzz with speculation about the finer details of the ultra-barebones electric Truck, which is set to cost just $20,000 when it enters production next year — assuming our federal EV incentives are still in place by then.

One of those questions was where Slate will build the thing, with a TechCrunch report suggesting a factory in Indiana. Today we can officially confirm the details. Slate Auto will retrofit an existing 1.4 million square foot factory in Warsaw, Indiana, where the company plans to eventually produce 150,000 Trucks annually.

If you missed all the excitement last week, Slate’s Truck is a radically simplified EV with 150 miles of range, a barebones machine that could be considered a minimum viable car. It has no touchscreen, no radio, no power windows, and no paint.

Slate Auto will retrofit an existing 1.4 million square foot factory in Warsaw, Indiana.

Those were some of the concessions required to make an EV that inexpensively in the United States, but some of those seeming compromises enable a uniquely streamlined production workflow.

Because the Truck doesn’t have paint, Slate Auto’s factory doesn’t need an expensive paint shop. (Mercedes-Benz recently spent a reported $1 billion building a new one.) And, because the body panels are made of a form of plastic, that factory can skip the massive presses typically used to stamp metal body panels into shape.

Slate will build out their production hub at the former R.R. Donnelly facility in Warsaw, Indiana, a printing press that was once responsible for stuffing your mailbox with catalog pulp from retailers. It shuttered in September of 2023, putting over 500 people out of work.

When it reopens next year, Jeff Jablansky, Slate Auto’s head of public relations and communications, says the plan is to employ 2,000 people at the facility. Slate wouldn’t confirm the total investment the facility’s retrofit will require, or the terms of Slate’s use of the property, only that renovations will cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

All that will need to be completed before the Truck can begin production, which is currently scheduled for Q4 of 2026.

At 1.4 million square feet, Slate’s facility is roughly one-quarter the size of Tesla’s Fremont Factory, which currently produces approximately 650,000 vehicles per year. Again, Slate hopes to produce upwards of 150,000 Trucks annually at this facility, an annual production rate that took Tesla more than five years to achieve in Fremont. Given its simplified manufacturing process, Slate will surely be hoping to move more quickly.

Slate is committed to not only manufacturing the Truck in the U.S. but to using domestic suppliers as well. “The vehicle is designed, engineered, and manufactured in the U.S., with the majority of our supply chain based in the U.S.” Jeremy Snyder, Slate’s Chief Commercial Officer, told us ahead of the Truck’s debut. As global trade wars only escalate, that’s looking like a sound move.

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Last week, the US Department of Transportation announced a major change to the Biden-era rule that requires automakers and tech companies to report crashes that involve fully or partially autonomous vehicles. Under the revised rules, companies will no longer have to report certain crashes, such as those involving a vehicle equipped with a Level 2 advanced driver assist system (ADAS) that resulted in a tow-away, but no injuries, fatalities, or airbag deployments. The change was meant to, in Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s words, “slash red tape and move us closer to a single national standard that spurs innovation and prioritizes safety.”

One company that stands to benefit from the rule change is Tesla. Under the previous regime, Elon Musk’s company comprised the bulk of crashes reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) involving vehicles with Level 2 automated systems. But under the revised rule, Tesla’s load will be significantly lighter.

Tesla’s load will be significantly lighter

Under the previous rule, if a vehicle with a Level 2 driver assist system or above had a crash that resulted in the vehicle needing to be towed away, but didn’t involve a fatality, injury, any vulnerable road user like a pedestrian or cyclist, or an airbag deployment, it still needed to be reported to NHTSA. Now, under the revised rule, those specific tow-away crashes don’t need to be reported.

As the world’s foremost proponent of Level 2 automated systems, Tesla represents the majority of reported ADAS crashes. According to NHTSA, a total of 2,359 crashes involving vehicles equipped with ADAS were reported since the rule was first implemented in July 2021. Tesla reported 2,030 of those crashes, or approximately 86 percent, according to Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

To determine the number of fewer crashes that Tesla will need to report, the group searched the database for tow-away crashes, while filtering out non-Tesla vehicles and any crash involving an injury, fatality, vulnerable road user, and airbag deployment. Of Tesla’s 2,030 crashes, 240 met those criteria, which represents 12 percent of the company’s total reported crashes.

The idea behind the standing general order (SGO) was to create more transparency around the deployment of a new technology that purports to improve safety but has also been tied to a number of deadly incidents. Regulators argued that more data was needed to determine whether these new systems were making roads safer or simply making driving more convenient.

Tesla, in particular, came under scrutiny. The company’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features, which are considered Level 2 systems that require drivers to pay attention, are both covered under the rule. NHTSA has launched several investigations into Tesla’s driver-assist technology, most of which centered on crashes reported under the SGO.

Tesla reportedly despised the crash-notification requirement, believing that NHTSA presents the data in ways that mislead consumers about the automaker’s safety, two sources familiar with Tesla executives’ thinking told Reuters last December. Tesla CEO Elon Musk was one of Trump’s most vocal defenders during the campaign, spending at least $277 million of his own money to back his candidacy. And he now runs the Department of Government Efficiency with the goal of cutting government spending, eliminating humanitarian aid, and firing federal workers.

During his confirmation hear, Secretary Duffy said he would allow safety investigations into Tesla’s advanced driving technology to proceed unimpeded. But a few months into the administration, Musk’s DOGE fired about 30 employees of NHTSA, many of them part of a department that assesses the risks of self-driving cars.

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France’s President Emmanuel Macron attends a meeting with representatives of the sectors affected by US tariffs, at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on April 3, 2025. | Image: MOHAMMED BADRA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

In an unprecedented display of diplomatic aggression, French authorities publicly accused Russia of sponsoring several high-profile cyber attacks on French entities for over a decade to gather intelligence and destabilize the country. The incidents include everything from a faked Islamic State takeover of a French television broadcast signal in 2015 to the leak of President Emmanuel Macron’s emails in 2017.

On Tuesday, France’s Foreign Ministry formally attributed those cyberattacks and several others to APT28, a Russian military intelligence (GRU) hacking unit also known as Fancy Bear, best known in America for leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and sustained cyberattacks on U.S. political operations. APT28’s activities in France followed the same playbook:  the “Macron leaks” were published the day before France’s presidential election in the hopes of swaying voters, and the faked ISIS broadcast hijacking, which took place in the wake of the 2015 Bataclan terrorist attacks, were intended to “create a panic in France.”

According to the French government, the GRU has escalated its cyberattacks against France and other members of the European Union since 2021, shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine. (Ukraine itself has been a longtime frequent target of Russian cyberwarfare.) The intrusions targeted entities not just in government, but also in finance, aerospace and defense, sports organizations affiliated with the 2024 Paris Olympics, think tanks, and the media. To display its own cyber defense capacities, France revealed the geographical location of one of APT28’s units – a signal that its operators were able to trace the origins of Russian cyber incursions.

This is the first time France has publicly attributed a cyber attack to a foreign government’s intelligence service, according to Le Monde. The diplomatic environment has shifted profoundly, however: Vladimir Putin refuses to end his years-long invasion of Ukraine without getting to keep the territory he’s seized – an untenable position for both Ukraine and the EU, which views Russian territorial gains as a threat to the EU’s geopolitical integrity. Russian cyberattacks pose an additional threat, both to their national security apparatus and election integrity.In an interview the day before the Ministry’s public declaration, Macron told the media that he believed that France and their Western allies – including President Donald Trump – would increase pressure on Russia “over the next eight to ten days” to accept their terms. He also announced that France and Poland would soon sign a “friendship treaty” that will include joint efforts to combat Russian election interference via cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns in both countries.

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Electronic Arts is reportedly eliminating “between 300 and 400 positions” and scrapping a game set in the Titanfall universe, codenamed R7, that was in the works at Respawn Entertainment, according to Bloomberg.

“As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth,” EA spokesperson Justin Higgs said in a statement to Bloomberg.

In a statement posted on X, Respawn explains that it had to cancel two games that were in “early-stage incubation” and “make some targeted team adjustments” across Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi. “These decisions aren’t easy, and we are deeply grateful to every teammate affected,” the post says.

pic.twitter.com/zZ3cWwjRVI

— Respawn (@Respawn) April 29, 2025

IGN reports that about 100 employees at Respawn were laid off, including developers, QA workers, and publishing staffers. IGN also says that some workers were moved from Respawn over to EA Motive’s Iron Man game, the Battlefield series, “and other projects.”

Additionally, Respawn’s SVP of operations Daniel Suarez is now GM of the studio and will report directly to its co-founder and CEO Vince Zampella. In 2021, EA put Zampella in charge of the Battlefield franchise as part of an internal shakeup.

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It’s always a good time to lock in for a marathon watch of Alfred Hitchcock films, and Netflix is getting ready to make a bunch of the legendary director’s features a lot easier to watch in one place.

Today, Netflix announced that it plans to stream a number of Hitchcock’s films next month as part of a showcase tributing his impact on cinema. Starting on June 1st, Netflix subscribers will be able to watch Vertigo, Rear Window, Frenzy, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Family Plot, and The Birds. The showcase will also include a selection of films by other filmmakers like Jordan Peele’s Us and Zach Cregger’s Barbarian that drew inspiration from Hitchcock’s work.

For folks keen on seeing the films at the cinema, Netflix is partnering with the Paris Theater in New York City to present “HITCH! The Original Cinema Influencer,” a six-week-long screening series designed to “highlight [Hitchcock’s] evolving technique and influence on popular culture.” The theatrical screenings, which you can buy tickets to now, are set to run from May 16th through June 29th.

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Lyft has launched “Earnings Assistant,” an AI chatbot tool for drivers seeking to “optimize their time on the road.” With it, drivers can create plans based on information about things like airport arrivals or local events, announced Jeremy Bird, EVP of driver experience at Lyft in an email to The Verge.

The Earnings Assistant feature is in early access, and drivers will need to join a waitlist to use it. Once they have access and start planning with the tool, it can offer reminders, and drivers can also ask it for recommendations if they aren’t sure where to go next.

In Lyft’s hypothetical example, the driver asks for a plan that stays within a five-hour period in San Francisco and ends at an address in Oakland. It then creates a time-blocked visual that shows where they’re going to be and includes a mention of when the driver can expect a “Turbo” time, when earnings are higher.

Lyft says this builds on other recent roll-outs like tweaked Lyft Rewards, and a “Driver Accomplishment Letter” feature, another AI-powered tool that creates a “personalized document” summarizing their work for Lyft, complete with positive feedback from passengers.

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Snap is backing away from plans to simplify the design of Snapchat as it reports losing 1 million users in North America. As part of its Q1 2025 earnings report on Tuesday, Snap revealed that it’s instead going to start testing a “refined” layout that keeps the app’s five existing tabs.

The company first started testing the “Simple Snapchat” redesign last year, which would’ve removed the Snap Map and private chats tabs from the main navigation bar, leaving users with tabs for Stories, the camera, and its TikTok-like video feed, Spotlight.

Snap is now reversing these plans after months of testing, seemingly after seeing reduced usage or user frustration. “Our‬‭ most‬‭ engaged‬‭ Snapchatters‬‭ consistently‬‭ demonstrated‬‭ a‬‭ preference‬‭ for‬‭ a‬‭ five-tab‬‭ layout, favoring‬ the‬‭ familiarity‬‭ of‬‭ tile-based‬‭ content‬‭ discovery‬‭ and‬‭ a‬‭ dedicated‬‭ Map‬‭ tab,” Snap writes in a letter to investors. In 2018, Snap’s stock sunk and users fled following a redesign aimed at keeping content from friends and brands separated.

The newly revamped five-tab layout “combines the best of both approaches,” the company says, as it will bring more Stories to the messaging experience and make it easier to find Spotlight, which will appear directly to the right of the camera button.

Snap doesn’t say how widely the redesign was rolled out or where it was tested. But the company reported losing users in North America in the most recent quarter, falling to 99 million daily active users, down from 100 million users in Q4 2024. Snapchat’s usage in North America has been essentially flat for close to three years.

Despite a decrease in North American users, Snap reported a 14 percent year-over-year increase in revenue to $1.36 billion, which it attributes to growth in advertising and its Snapchat Plus subscription. Its global daily active users continue to grow, increasing to 460 million from 453 million last quarter.

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OpenAI is rolling back its latest GPT-4o update after CEO Sam Altman said the company would be making fixes to address the chatbot’s “sycophant-y and annoying” personality introduced with recent updates.

The rollback, which started Monday night, is “now 100%” rolled back for free ChatGPT users and will be rolled back for paid users “hopefully today,” Altman says in a post on X. “We’re working on additional fixes to model personality and will share more in the coming days.”

OpenAI updated GPT-4o with improved “intelligence and personality,” Altman announced on Friday. But less than ten minutes after making that post, an X user said that “it’s been feeling very yes-man like lately,” to which Altman responded soon after with “yeah it glazes too much” and “will fix.” Then, on Sunday, Altman announced that OpenAI was working on some fixes “asap” to address personality issues from “the last couple” of GPT-4o updates.

OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Meta's standalone ChatGPT competitor is mostly what you'd expect from an AI assistant. You can type or talk with it, generate images, and get real-time web results.

The biggest new idea in the Meta AI app is its Discover feed, which adds an AI twist to social media. Here, you'll see a feed of interactions with Meta AI that other people, including your friends on Instagram and Facebook, have opted to share on a prompt-by-prompt basis.

You can like, comment on, share, or remix these shared AI posts into your own. The idea is to demystify AI and show "people what they can do with it," Meta's VP of product, Connor Hayes, tells me.

It may seem obvious that Meta is the first to add a social component to its AI assistant. It definitely won't be the last, though. Across the industry, AI chatbots and social media are converging. Elon Musk's X has already integrated closely with Grok. OpenAI, meanwhile, is planning to add a social feed to ChatGPT.

The Meta AI app puts voice mode at the forefront. An opt-in, beta version makes Meta AI's voice more conversational like ChatGPT's advanced voice mode, though Meta's version currently lacks access to information from the web.

This opt-in v …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Apple has quietly launched a new website called “‎Snapshot on Apple” that presents viewers with a carousel of celebrities and information on where you can find their work across the company’s services.

The website, spotted by 9to5Mac reports, presents two slowly moving rows of celebrity images, with no way to manually scroll or search them. In total, we have counted 36 profiles, including Bad Bunny, Dua Lipa, Matt Damon, Serena Williams, Kendrick Lamar, and Drake.

The more useful part of the site is when you click into the cards. Each one takes you to a mini-profile of the celebrity and presents you with names and images of content they’re featured in with links out to Apple’s TV, Music, and Podcasts apps. They’re a bit like Apple-specific versions of the Feature.fm or Linktree pages that artists use to direct fans to their latest work.

For instance, if you explore Zendaya, the page says that she’s an American actress and singer, and includes a “more” button that can bring out her full text profile. Under that card you can click to access content Zendaya is in, like Spider-Man: No Way Home, or her Podcast appearance on The Late Show Pod Show with Stephen Colbert.

For now, Apple’s Snapshot seems like an unfinished product or perhaps something that’s meant to be part of an upcoming app or feature.

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Isuzu has started mass production of an all-electric version of its mid-sized D-Max pickup truck in Thailand, featuring a dual-motor four-wheel-drive system with 140kW of power that can “match the performance of existing diesel models,” according to the automaker.

As reported by Electrek, the new D-Max EV matches the towing capacity of Isuzu’s current diesel powered D-Max at 7,716 pounds (3,500kg) with just slightly less payload capability at about 2,226 pounds (1,010kg) compared to 1,200kg, likely due to the 66.9kWh battery it carries. The D-Max EV has a range of up to 163 miles (263km) per full charge based on Europe’s WLTP standard with a higher 224-mile range if driven in city mode.

Other than the electric power, the D-Max EV is built in the image of its diesel counterpart. The D-Max EV is about 207 inches long, which is nearly the same as Europe’s best selling pickup, the Ford Ranger (210 inches). Isuzu’s new truck will compete against the Ranger when it arrives in left-hand drive European countries in the third quarter of this year. A right-hand drive version is planned for the UK in February 2026.

Isuzu has yet to announce prices for the truck, but the diesel model currently sells for about $41,600. Isuzu plans to bring the truck to other countries “based on market needs,” but does not say if it will come to the US.

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Commenters on the popular subreddit r/changemymind found out last weekend that they've been majorly duped for months. University of Zurich researchers set out to "investigate the persuasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural online environments" by unleashing bots pretending to be a trauma counselor, a "Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter," and a sexual assault survivor on unwitting posters. The bots left 1,783 comments and amassed over 10,000 comment karma before being exposed.

Now, Reddit's Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee says the company is considering legal action over the "improper and highly unethical experiment" that is "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level." The researchers have been banned from Reddit. The University of Zurich told 404 Media that it is investigating the experiment's methods and will not be publishing its results.

However, you can still find parts of the research online. The paper has not been peer reviewed and should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, but what it claims to show is interesting. Using GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-405B, researchers instructed the bots to manipulate commenters by examining their posting …

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Cybersecurity firm Oligo has detailed a set of vulnerabilities its researchers found in Apple’s AirPlay protocol and software development kit that could serve as a point of entry to infect other devices on your network, Wired reports.

Oligo’s researchers refer to the vulnerabilities and attacks they enable as “AirBorne.” According to Oligo, two of the bugs it found are “wormable” and could let attackers take over an AirPlay device and spread malware throughout “any local network the infected device connects to.” That said, they would need to already be on the same network as the device to carry out the attack.

Other possible outcomes of an attack include hackers remotely executing code on your devices (also called an RCE attack), accessing local files and sensitive information, and carrying out denial-of-service attacks, Oligo says. It adds that an attacker could also show images on something like a smart speaker’s display — as demonstrated with an AirPlay-enabled Bose speaker in the video below — or tap into the speaker’s microphone to listen to nearby conversations.

Apple has already patched the bugs, but there are still risks via non-Apple-made AirPlay devices. And while there’s a relatively low chance of a hacker being on your home network, Wired points out that AirBorne attacks could also happen if you connect to a public network with an device that uses AirPlay — like a MacBook or an iPhone — that isn’t updated with the latest Apple software.

The risks extend to CarPlay devices, too. Oligo found that attackers “could execute an RCE attack” via CarPlay under certain conditions, like connecting to a car’s Wi-Fi hotspot that’s still using a “default, predictable or known wifi hotspot password.” Once they’re in, hackers could do things like show images on the car’s infotainment system or track the car’s location, according to Oligo.

As Oligo points out, there are tens of millions of third-party AirPlay devices, including things like standalone speakers, home theater systems, TVs. The firm also notes that CarPlay “is widely-used and available in over 800 vehicle models.” According to Wired, Apple created patches for affected third-party devices” as well, but a cybersecurity expert tells the outlet that Apple doesn’t directly control the patching process of third-party devices.

Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

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A former Disney employee will serve three years in federal prison for logging into the company’s servers to make changes to its restaurant menus’ allergen information, as well as carrying out “denial-of-service attacks” aimed at locking other employees out of their accounts. The court also ordered the man, Michael Scheuer, to pay nearly $690,000 in fines.

Scheuer, who pled guilty to the crimes in January, had access to the company’s menu creation and editing system as part of his job there. After he was fired in June last year, Scheuer used a login shared by his team to alter the company’s menus after he was fired, in some cases adding or replacing allergen information in item descriptions, while leaving a separate allergen information sheet alone, according to court documents. Still, US attorneys argued that his changes could mislead people into thinking foods were safe to eat that weren’t.

Other alterations included swapping menu fonts for Wingdings and replacing the names of dishes with joke names. (“Shellfish” became “Hellfish,” for example.) As CNN notes, “Disney identified and removed all altered menus before they were shipped to restaurants.”

Scheuer’s lawyer insists in a sentencing memorandum that Scheuer only made menu changes to get the company’s attention, as he believed he had been wrongfully fired over a mental health condition — he’d been let go after having a panic attack during a disagreement at work and requesting mental health accommodations, the lawyer says — but was having trouble finding an attorney to take his case or getting anyone at the company to respond to his concerns. But federal lawyers argued in their own sentencing memo that he made certain alterations discreetly, “specifically to avoid detection.”

Along with messing with Disney’s menus, the US accused Scheuer of launching “serial denial-of-service attacks against fourteen individual employees, some of whom were involved in his termination,” by “simulating thousands of incorrect login attempts to thus lock them out.” He was also found outside the home of one of those employees after the FBI searched his home. Attorneys for the US agreed that Scheuer’s actions were driven, at least in part, by “a mental health episode.”

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If you were hoping to get your hands on the “compact” phone OnePlus launched in China last week, you’re going to have your work cut out for you. OnePlus spokespeople have confirmed to The Verge that the 13T will not be sold in Europe or North America. That leaves our OnePlus options limited to “big phone” and “big phone.”

The OnePlus 13T isn’t strictly limited to China — it’ll be sold in India as the 13S. That gave us hope for a US release, but OnePlus quickly dashed it.

Celina Shi, OnePlus Europe’s chief marketing officer, told my colleague Dominic Preston over email that “currently, we have no plans to launch the OnePlus 13s in Europe. That being said, we have noted the interest in the product from our European users, and we will keep it in mind as we make product launch decisions going forward.” OnePlus North America’s head of marketing Spenser Blank gave me the same statement but with the United States and Canada swapped in place of Europe.

Before you start screaming into the void about how a phone with a 6.3-inch screen isn’t small, please know that I hear you. I see you. But that’s what passes for a small phone these days. The 13T comes with a 6.3-inch screen that’s decidedly smaller than what you’ll find on the OnePlus 13 and 13R, which both offer screens around 6.8 inches. The 13T also manages to squeeze in a battery with a higher capacity than its bigger siblings, which is a neat trick achieved thanks to its updated silicon-carbon technology.

Smaller, but with potentially better battery life? That’s awfully compelling, and all the more reason why it’s a shame we won’t get this phone stateside.

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Amazon’s annual Gaming Week sale might be the big focus this week as far as deals are concerned, but gaming peripherals and games aren’t the only discounts we’re seeing. Right now, for instance, Apple’s latest AirPods Pro with USB-C are on sale for $169 ($80 off) at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy, which is just $16 shy of the all-time low we saw during Black Friday and the best price we’ve seen so far this year.

If you’re an iPhone owner, the second-gen AirPods Pro are some of the best wireless earbuds you can buy. They combine superb audio with the best active noise cancellation available in a pair of AirPods, and their transparency mode sounds almost lifelike. They also deliver crystal-clear voice call quality and offer deep integration with other Apple devices, allowing for automatic device switching and personalized spatial audio that lets you fine-tune your audio profile based on your ear shape for a more immersive experience. They even double as FDA-approved hearing aids, courtesy of a recent iOS 18 update.

Furthermore, both the AirPods Pro and the included wireless charging case carry an IPX4 rating, meaning they should be able to withstand a little sweat and a splash of water from time to time. Conveniently, that same case also features a built-in speaker and a U1 chip for pinpoint location finding, allowing you to easily locate them when they’re within Bluetooth range or track them down via Apple’s vast Find My network should you happen to leave (or lose) them somewhere.

Read our full AirPods Pro 2 review.

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Poker Face’s Natasha Lyonne has a new project in the works that seemed poised to become a case study in the debate about how and whether Hollywood should be using generative AI.

Lyonne is teaming up with technologist and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier to produce a new sci-fi film that will feature elements generated by AI models. Titled Uncanny Valley, the feature will tell the story — which Lyonne co-wrote with The OA’s Brit Marling — of a teenage girl whose life is turned upside down by a popular virtual reality game. In addition to directing, Lyonne will star in the film alongside Marling. The film’s more fantastical visuals are being developed by Asteria, a new AI-focused production company Lyonne co-founded with her partner, director / producer Bryn Mooser (Body Team 12, Lifeboat).

In a statement about Uncanney Valley, Lyonne said that collaborating with Marling and Lanier was an “endlessly inspiring” experience, and likened the film to a Wachowski project.

“Imagine if Dianne Wiest and Diane Keaton, at their loquacious best, decided to take a journey through The Matrix for sport, only to find themselves holding up an architectural blueprint, and you’ll have a sense of the adventure we’ve been on,” Lyonne said. “Coming together as a trio in cahoots with the astounding imagineers at Asteria, to worldbuild this film at scale, has been a synergistic dream come true.”

Asteria is trying to differentiate itself from other AI entertainment outfits by emphasizing its use of Marey, an AI model created by generative text-to-video startup Moonvalley. Moonvalley markets Marey as of the first truly “clean” AI models due to it being trained entirely on licensed material whose original creators were properly compensated. Uncanny Valley does not yet have a production timeline, and there’s no word on whether Asteria intends to debut the film theatrically or on a streaming service. But news of the project’s existence comes at a time when it has become increasingly clear that Hollywood is open to the idea of working with AI companies, and incorporating the technology into their production workflows despite concerns about its exploitative potential.

Last month, more than 400 artists signed an open letter slamming OpenAI and Google for insisting that they should be allowed to train their models on copyrighted material as “a matter of national security.” And in 2023, the threat of AI being used to create digital replicas of / replace living actors was one of the contributing factors that ultimately led to an industry-wide strike.

Because Marey is purportedly trained on footage that Moonvalley compensated the original creators for, Uncanny Valley could sidestep some of the issues posed by other types of AI. But what’s not at all clear is whether this kind of workflow might produce a movie people actually want to see, and if the project has any real legs beyond making for a solid bit of tech hype.

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The release date for Borderlands 4has been moved up by two weeks, shifting from September 23rd to September 12th. This is according to a video posted by Randy Pitchford, CEO of Borderlands developer Gearbox Interactive, that was ironically deleted and reposted because it went up too early.

Announcement about the Borderlands 4 launch date – Please watch until the end: pic.twitter.com/cF85jG1p09

— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) April 29, 2025

“I wanted to be the one to tell you the launch date is changing,” Pitchford said in the video. He reassured players that development was going well, in fact, so well that it was determined the game should be released earlier. But when the news was announced (officially at 11AM) gamers and press immediately started speculating that the bumped up release date has nothing to do with how well development is going. Instead, Gearbox may be simply trying to get Borderlands 4 in as many hands as it can beforeGTA VI tears a big ole’ hole in the video game market.

GTA VI doesn’t have a set release date yet, and we’ve only been given the nebulous timing of Fall 2025. Well, September is technically fall in the US, and big AAA games like Borderlands don’t move up their release dates on a whim. Given that GTA VI and Borderlands 4 share a publisher in Take-Two Interactive, it seems even more likely that the new release date is merely getting out of the way of a late September launch window for GTA VI.

However, if what you want is more info on Borderlands 4, Pitchford closed his video by sharing that Sony will present  a 20-minute State of Play presentation on April 30th at 2PM PT/ 5PM ET.

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The generally accepted way to launch your new car company is by building something fancy and expensive. Call it Founder's Edition or name it after a precious metal, hope people pay for the privilege of exclusivity, and go from there. Slate Auto is doing… the opposite. The three-year-old company just announced its first vehicle, and it's building a sub-$20,000 pickup with no stereo, no paint, and practically no options at all. It's nothing like anything we've seen. And yet, at least according to the initial reaction to the Slate Truck, it might be exactly what we've been looking for.

On this episode of The Vergecast, freelance tech and auto journalist Tim Stevens joins the show to talk all about the Slate Truck. He tells us how the company's manufacturing process works, why it's placing such an emphasis on customizability, and whether Slate's big bets can actually pay off. The car is supposed to be available sometime next year, and there are reasons to be optimistic it'll hit that goal.

After that, Casey Johnston, who writes the She's a Beast newsletter (and has a book coming soon!), tells us about her screen time journey. Casey has spent months rethinking the way she uses he …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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On Tuesday morning, the social media platform Bluesky experienced back-to-back outages that prevented feeds from loading for many users around the world.

An initial outage started at about 6AM ET, as tracked by Downdetector, lasting about 40 minutes, and then things crashed again at about 8AM. Bluesky experienced another major outage on April 24th that lasted for around an hour, which the company attributed to PDS networking problems.

Many of us here The Verge were unable to refresh our Bluesky feeds across the desktop web service, or Bluesky’s iOS and Android apps, although its pages loaded while logged out, and some self-hosted users noted that they were able to continue posting to their decentralized servers even while the flagship app and service experienced problems.

It’s currently unclear what’s caused the issues or when access to the platform will remain steady, but during the outages, Bluesky’s status page noted that “some systems” were down. By 8:25AM ET, however, the site was loading again and, for the moment, it shows all green status lights across the board.

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The first teaser for New Line Cinema’s upcoming horror Weapons was already unsettling enough, but the movie’s latest trailer makes it seem like writer / director Zach Cregger is about to leave us all terrified once again.

Though Weapons’ new trailer doesn’t explain why an entire classroom of young children suddenly go missing one night, it does give us a clue about where they wind up and why the entire situation makes their teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), feel like she’s losing her mind. Justine doesn’t seem to know why her students are the only kids to have vanished, but Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) and all of the school’s other parents are certain she has something to do with the disappearances.

It’s clear from the trailer’s shots of the missing students sprinting through the streets at night that they might not actually be dead, per se. But there is obviously something alarming going on that keeps Justine and Archer up at night. It’s also still hard to say how Weapons might directly connect to to Cregger’s Barbarian, which is probably a sign that the new film will throw us for a loop when it’s in theaters on August 8th.

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Audio Overviews, the AI tool that turns your research into podcast-like conversations in Google’s NotebookLM app, is expanding beyond English. Now you can generate and listen to Audio Overviews in more than 50 languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Hindi, Turkish, Korean, and Chinese.

You switch to a different language by heading to NotebookLM, selecting your settings in the top-right corner of the screen, and choosing Output Language. From there, you can select from a list of languages, allowing you to receive responses and hear Audio Overviews in the language of your choice.

Google says this is only “an early look at what’s possible with this feature,” adding that it plans to continue “building and refining it” based on feedback. Since launching Audio Overviews last year, Google has expanded it to more than 200 countries and added a range of new features, giving you the ability to “guide” the AI hosts of the conversation and even interact with them.

Google has also brought Audio Overviews to its Gemini AI chatbot and Google Docs, allowing you to convert even more kinds of written material into AI podcasts.

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On the evening of April 28th, Amazon embarked on its latest venture to rival SpaceX Starlink: the first launch of its Project Kuiper satellites. With 27 satellites now in orbit around the Earth, Amazon joins a growing number of companies working to put more than 1,000 satellites each into space to create their own mega constellation. With all of these objects in orbit, the dangers of overcrowding are increasing, and if any of these objects were to collide, the results could be disastrous.

Aside from Amazon and SpaceX, UK-based OneWeb, which merged with French satellite operator Eutelsat in 2023, has its own constellation, and there are several planned by Chinese companies, too. There is the Chinese government-backed Guowang mega constellation, which began its launches last year but remains veiled in secrecy, as well as the commercial Qianfan or Thousand Sails project, which began launches in 2023 and plans to place a total of up to 15,000 satellites in orbit.

A recent report from the European Space Agency (ESA) found that over 2,500 objects were launched into low-Earth orbit in 2024, more than five times the number of objects launched in any year prior to 2020. The major chunk o …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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