The biggest YouTuber in the world is looking beyond videos to build a multibillion-dollar empire. For the last several months, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has been talking with investors about raising $200 million in a funding round that would value his holding company, Beast Industries, at more than $5 billion. An investor pitch deck I’ve obtained gives an unprecedented look at the fast-growing, money-losing business of MrBeast and his future plans. (Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw first reported that MrBeast is raising money last week.)To justify that eye-popping valuation of at least $5 billion, investors are betting that the future of MrBeast’s business will be selling physical products, not making videos. Beast Industries and its roughly 500 employees see future revenue growth coming from a series of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Revenue from the company’s chocolate brand, Feastables, matched the core video business in 2024 and is expected to exceed it this year. Meanwhile, Beast Industries has never been profitable and doesn’t expect to be anytime soon. The company lost roughly $200 million over the last few years alone. Investors are planning to buy tens of millio …Read the full story at The Verge.

I usually have Nvidia's FrameView or MSI Afterburner running on my PC. I invest a lot in my hardware, I put it to good use, and I like to see how that hardware performs across various games and applications. But with the most recent iteration of my powerful gaming PC, fit with an RTX 5090 and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, I've turned these utilities off. I don't want to be reminded of the potential hazards I face when using such powerful -- and power-hungry -- PC hardware.

If you have an older AMD Ryzen CPU based on the Zen 1 through to Zen 4 architecture, your CPU can now be "jailbroken." This is thanks to an exploit that allows users to write their own microcode for those affected CPUs,

On August 5th, Judge Amit Mehta ruled in the case of United States of America v. Google, saying, “…the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”That ended the biggest tech antitrust trial since the US took on Microsoft in the 1990s — possibly aside from the government’s antitrust case targeting Google’s ad business — but it’s also just the start of the process. Now, lawyers for Google and the Department of Justice are arguing over the ruling, as well as what to do about the company and its products.The DOJ argued that Google struck anticompetitive deals with Apple and other companies for prime placement of its search engine. Google maintains that its dominant market share is the result of a superior product. The DOJ says options to resolve the situation include breaking up Google to separate products like Chrome, Search, and Android, but it may be a while until we hear about their full plan.Read on below for all of the updates and notes from the case. DOJ says it will let Google pay Apple for services unrelated to search. Apple’s attempt to intervene in the Google Search antitrust trial is denied Apple asks court to halt Google search monopoly case Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells employees to expect a hard 2025. Eddy Cue explains why Apple won’t make a search engine Apple would like to step in to defend its Google search deal. Google to court: we’ll change our Apple deal, but please let us keep Chrome Google’s counteroffer to the government trying to break it up is unbundling Android apps Google responds to DOJ’s ‘extreme proposal.’ DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly Google workers to DOJ: we need protections to make your breakup effective Could Chrome be ready to Rumble? US lawyers will reportedly try to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android Google is replacing the exec in charge of Search and ads How the DOJ wants to break up Google’s search monopoly A Google breakup is on the table, say DOJ lawyers The DOJ will have its proposed plan to deal with Google’s monopoly soon. The DOJ wants info on Google’s AI strategy to bust up its search monopoly Yelp sues Google for antitrust violations What Google rivals want after the DOJ’s antitrust trial win Google lost its first antitrust case, so what happens next? ‘There’s no price’ Microsoft could pay Apple to use Bing: all the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling Now that Google is a monopolist, what’s next? Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case Well, that’s an interesting name for it. As Google’s antitrust trial wraps, DOJ seeks sanctions over missing messages Multibillion-dollar Apple deal looms large in Google antitrust trial Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari’s default search engine. A Google witness let slip just how much it pays Apple for Safari search ‘Android is a massive tracking device.’ Here’s a rare look at Google’s most lucrative search queries Sundar Pichai argues in court that Google isn’t evil, it’s just a business Google agreed to not promote Chrome to Safari users. Google once asked Apple to preload its search app on iOS It’s Internet Explorer day in US v. Google! Hello again from DC District Court! Google paid a whopping $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine everywhere “Chrome exists to serve Google search.” Sundar Pichai will testify in US v. Google on Monday. Google reportedly pays $18 billion a year to be Apple’s default search engine The Google antitrust trial has been frustratingly locked down — the NYT just filed a motion to open it up Read Sundar Pichai’s full email conversation about the Apple-Google deal. The Google trial shows that Apple’s search deal is the most important contract in tech Back in 2007, Sundar Pichai thought Google shouldn’t be Safari’s only search option. Details of Apple’s talks to replace Google with Bing and even DuckDuckGo revealed in unsealed court testimony Today on The Vergecast: Big Tech goes to court. Satya Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google — and Apple could fix it An hour-long history lesson about Microsoft’s many failures in mobile. Microsoft doesn’t think AI is going to upend search competition – it thinks it could get even more locked-down. Satya Nadella says Bing was prepared to lose billions just to be Apple’s search default. Good morning from DC District Court! One of the documents Google wanted hidden in its trial compared the search ads business to “cigarettes or drugs.” Satya Nadella is testifying in US v. Google next week. The Google antitrust trial is opening back up… a little Apple defends Google Search deal in court: ‘There wasn’t a valid alternative’ Would Safari have been popular without its Google integration? Should Apple add a search engine choice screen to the iPhone setup process? Apple’s Eddy Cue says there’s really no “valid alternative to Google.” The US v. Google court is starting in closed session today. Again. Today’s an important day in US v. Google. Apple’s Eddy Cue will take the stand Tuesday in the Google antitrust trial The Google antitrust trial is still maddeningly locked-down. Clickbait? In my antitrust trial? Here are the documents the Google antitrust trial judge didn’t want you to see Okay, can we see Google trial documents or not? Will US v. Google evidence stay public? We still don’t know. Justice Department and Google spar over public access to antitrust trial files Google quietly raised ad prices to boost search revenue, says executive US v. Google, Week Two begins. In the Google antitrust trial, defaults are everything and nobody likes Bing Breaking down the Google antitrust trial. Opening arguments in US v. Google just ended! Only ten weeks left to go. “We don’t have good data on actual user switching.” Bing is already Google’s punching bag for the trial. There’s still an ads case inside this search case against Google. What makes a search engine a search engine? 50 percent of Google searches allegedly come through a paid-for default deal. “Defaults matter, but they’re not determinative.” The antitrust trial against Google Search starts today — here’s what to expect How Google plans to win its antitrust trial A federal judge says three Apple executives have to testify in the government’s Google antitrust case.

U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) speaks during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on sanctuary cities’ policies at the U.S. Capitol on March 05, 2025 in Washington, DC.Meta may have caved on their content moderation policies for the sake of “free speech”, but there’s a world of other Big Tech companies out there – and more social media platforms for conservatives to de-censor. On Thursday, Rep. Jim Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet, the parent company of Google, demanding documents that show whether YouTube removed content at the request of the Biden-Harris administration – acting, in his words, as “a direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”Although Republican party hardliners have long argued that Big Tech tilts algorithms and content moderation policies against their social media content, the overall right-wing momentum against Big Tech has further accelerated since 2021 after Donald Trump was removed from Twitter (now X) after January 6th. Jordan, who became chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 2023, has wielded his platform and subpoena powers to dig into the databanks of Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple among others, believing that they singled out conservative social media accounts on the behest of the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and engaged in unlawful suppression of free speech. So far, their attempts have notched one notable success: last May, the committee published a report claiming that Biden had repeatedly coerced Meta into removing content from their platforms.   “Following this oversight, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, admitted that it was wrong to bow to the Biden-Harris Administration’s demands, publicly committed to restoring free speech on its platforms, and reformed its policies,” Jordan wrote in the letter accompanying the Alphabet subpoena. “Alphabet, to our knowledge, has not similarly disavowed the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to censor speech.”“We’ll continue to show the committee how we enforce our policies independently, rooted in our commitment to free expression,” Google spokesperson Jose Castañeda told The Verge in response to a request for comment. 

Although the progenitor Raspberry Pi was designed as an inexpensive device to get students hooked on coding, the uber-popular SBC family has come a long way in terms of performance and functionality. With modern RPi SBCs equipped with faster cores, plenty of memory, and better I/O provisions, there's no shortage of cool projects you can build with them.

Containers are the crux of every self-hosted workstation, and for good reason. Thanks to their lightweight nature, you can deploy dozens of containerized services on low-power devices like the Raspberry Pi. Plus, you can set up hardcore container orchestration platforms to boost the functionality of your home server.

When designing products or protocols, there's often a trade-off to be made. Often, it's in favor of convenience instead of security, like with WPS pairing for Wi-Fi devices or UPnP, which lets devices open their own ports to the internet through a firewall. But did you know there's another network protocol that's similar to UPnP in scope that you should probably turn off in your router?

Deciding which graphics card will power your gaming or AI PC is a big decision. Whether you go for an AMD, Nvidia, or Intel GPU, you'll need to weigh the specifications, compatibility with your hardware, budget, and even software features. GPUs are complex pieces of hardware, and the drivers and the software package they come with can be just as important as the silicon specs. The software from all three makers does the job of controlling your graphics card's settings, but they're not equal, and there are a few important features that the AMD Adrenalin software has that the Nvidia app is missing.

Reddit’s automatic moderation tool is flagging the word “Luigi” as potentially violent — even when the content isn’t.Earlier this week, a moderator from r/popculture saw Reddit’s AutoModerator system flag a post about the video game Luigi’s Mansion 3 because it included the word “Luigi,” giving them instructions to “check for violence.”A Reddit spokesperson, who requested that The Verge not use their name due to the sensitive subject matter, said there is no “sitewide filter for the word ‘Luigi’ or expectation that users stop talking about Luigi Mangione,” the person who prosecutors accuse of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December.But Reddit does appear to be flagging comments that mention “Luigi” in some cases, even those unrelated to Mangione — just not in the way that it first appeared to be. The Reddit spokesperson said that because r/popculture had recently fallen down to a single moderator, automod features kicked in, including a way to filter for “keywords that could — but don’t necessarily — indicate violating content.” The remaining moderator of r/popculture told The Verge that the mod team didn’t add “Luigi” to the list of keywords, Reddit did. The r/popculture moderator posted about the Luigi issue to the r/FreeLuigi subreddit, a grassroots community where people discuss the Mangione case. The subreddit has strict rules in place to avoid violating Reddit’s moderation rules, like referring to Mangione’s by his initials and a blanket ban on content that calls for or endorses violence. But the moderators still fear that Reddit will decide to shut it down — even if they don’t run afoul of the platform’s rules.Meanwhile, r/popculture — which has over 125,000 members — is closing down due to issues that the remaining moderator pins on Reddit. The moderator who posted about the “Luigi” issue announced last night they were shutting down the entire community “due to Reddit admins being complete fucking morons.” In the post, the moderator says that another member of the team was suspended and that Reddit has been unhelpful in trying to resolve the suspension.The Reddit spokesperson said that the r/popculture moderator was suspended for approving content containing direct calls for violence, “including images celebrating [the Donald Trump rally shooter] and content calling to assassinate the president.” An r/popculture moderator denied this happened, and said the content in question was a photo of the shooter that did not celebrate him. The Reddit spokesperson notes that the automod features are temporary for r/popculture and that moderators can still approve the content for posting.The “Luigi” issue comes the same week as Reddit’s new crackdown on banned content. Earlier this week, the company announced it would warn users who upvote content that is banned on the platform. The policy applies to users who upvote such content several times in “a certain timeframe,” Reddit says in a post, and the company will begin with enforcing the rule on violent content. The spokesperson says that at this time nobody has been suspended under the new rule.

After a tough few years for the best graphics cards, it's not surprising that a crop of older, inexpensive GPUs still top the most popular cards among PC gamers. The GPU market is rapidly changing, though, as are games, and if you stick with the old guard, you'll find yourself being able to play fewer and fewer games.

If there’s anything we’ve learned over the years, it's that PC component manufacturers aren’t afraid to take a few risks with design. Not all products need to be mass-produced for a wide buying demographic. Sometimes making something a bit strange can pay dividends for brand recognition, even if nobody buys it. I appreciate it when brands put out some wacky stuff, and these 6 products are a perfect example of strange product design.