Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images The US, UK, and European Union have signed the first “legally binding” treaty on AI, which is supposed to ensure its use aligns with “human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” according to the Council of Europe.The treaty, called the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence, lays out key principles AI systems must follow, such as protecting user data, respecting the law, and keeping practices transparent. Each country that signs the treaty must “adopt or maintain appropriate legislative, administrative or other measures” that reflect the framework.Historic moment! The #CoE opens the first-ever legally binding global treaty on #AI and human rights. Signed by EU , this Framework Convention ensures AI... Continue reading…

These are some of the best headphones you can buy right now. Not only are they extremely comfortable, but they also sound good too, while also providing an extraordinary amount of battery life. And while they're normally priced at $380, you can now score this awesome deal that drops them down to their lowest price yet.

Instead of a boring number or some dots of light to show battery level you get a silly face. | Image: Ugreen Ugreen has a new collection of iPhone and USB accessories for IFA 2024 that really turn up the charm. The Uno line is a collection of GaN and Qi2 chargers, cables, a power bank, and a USB-C hub — each featuring tiny a screen solely for displaying robot-like emoji faces. The most endearing ones by far are the $60 Uno Charger 100W four-port USB charger and $70 15W Qi2 magnetic power bank that sticks to MagSafe phones — each looks like a helpful little bot friend you’ve appointed to live on your desk and help with your charging duties. They’re also the most expressive, with their TFT screens showing up to half a dozen different faces to give some idea of the actual charge levels / rates of your device. For example, the faces on the Qi2... Continue reading…

Pavel Durov. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Twelve days after he was arrested in France, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has broken his silence with a 600-word statement on his Telegram account that blames “growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.”French authorities had charged Durov with enabling various forms of criminal activity on Telegram, including an unnamed person’s distribution of child sexual abuse material on the platform. An unnamed statement from Telegram at the time of his arrest said Durov had “nothing to hide.”While the vast majority of his statement today paints his arrest as surprising and unfair, he also admits that policing Telegram has become harder. Durov says it’s now his “personal goal” to “significantly improve things in this... Continue reading…

The Osom OV1 smartphone was created by former Essential engineers and designers. | Image: Osom Osom Products Inc. — the mobile phone company founded by former employees of Essential, which shut down after releasing a single phone — is shutting down this week, having released a single phone. The news comes shortly after Osom’s former chief privacy officer sued the company, claiming that it was out of money after its CEO used business funds to pay for personal trips and exotic cars.During an internal meeting on Tuesday, Osom executives announced their decision to shutter the company, according to multiple sources who spoke to Android Authority. The report said most of the company’s employees will be laid off on Friday but will receive severance pay and be eligible for continued healthcare.After this article was published, we... Continue reading…

Network-attached storage (NAS) are home servers at this point but the same question remains: which drives should you use inside one? Consumer-grade drives and those designed for server use come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from 3.5-inch mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs) to ultra-fast M.2 NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs). Every one of them can store data, so they should all be compatible with a NAS, right? So long as the interface of the drive matches that of the NAS slot you wish to use, you're good to go, but should you spend more on NAS-grade storage drives?

If you have a Hisense TV, you’ll be able to easily link up Yeelight’s lighting — like these smart cubes. | Image: Yeelight Yeelight’s array of smart lighting products will now automatically sync with Hisense VIDAA TVs. During the IFA tech conference in Berlin, Yeelight revealed that its app now integrates directly with Hisense TVs, allowing it to capture the audio and video on your screen while relaying matching effects across Yeelight’s devices.That means you can quickly link up Yeelight’s light strip and its stackable cube-shaped lights to your TV (given that you have a Hisense, of course). That makes it even simpler to set up when compared to some other ambient lighting options from brands like Philips, which requires you to either purchase a Hue Play HDMI sync box to sync your lighting or the Hue Sync TV app, that’s only available on some Samsung TVs... Continue reading…

As great as Windows 11 can be, it's also flawed and lacking in many ways, and the experience is far from perfect out of the box. Over the years, I've tried my fair share of software that helps tweak the Windows experience in one way or another to make it work better for me, and there are a few that have stuck with me in such a way that I really wish they would just be built into Windows itself.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Telegram has quietly removed language from its FAQ page that said private chats were protected from moderation requests. The change comes nearly two weeks after its CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France for allegedly allowing “criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.”Earlier today, Durov issued his first public statement since his arrest, promising to moderate content more on the platform — a noticeable change in tone after the company initially said he had “nothing to hide”.“Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform,” he wrote in the statement shared on Thursday. “That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly... Continue reading…

Proxmox is an easy-to-setup virtualization platform that offers a rich set of features to help you in building your ideal home lab. If you have multiple devices running Proxmox in your computing environment, you can use the clustering facility to access all the nodes from a single interface. Its also quite simple to set up, though there are a couple of issues you need to be aware of before you attempt this process.

We've long said that the best way to keep an old device up and running for longer is to swap out the slow hard drive it came with for an SSD. But does that same advice apply to an old iPod? You may have forgotten that early iPods shipped with custom hard drives 1.8-inch HDDs for the iPod Classic and 1-inch HDDs for the iPod Mini with the same spinning disks as the drives on old laptops and PCs. However, unlike laptops and PCs with hard drives, iPods are far from stationary devices. They were kept in pockets, dropped, and mishandled. That's why many old iPods have hard drives that no longer work, or are on their way to breaking.

There are tons of great TVs out there, but if you want a 4K model for cheap, then this is going to be the deal for you. Right now, you can score this 43-inch Pioneer Xumo smart TV for an incredible price, with a discount that knocks $120 off, dropping it down to its lowest price to date, coming in at just $149.99.