Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Back in 2017, Equifax announced that hackers stole half of the US population’s Social Security numbers in what, we said, “will likely end up being one of the worst data breaches to ever affect the country.” Perhaps — until this year, when about 2.9 billion rows of data were collected through a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a company that resells collected personal data for background checks. This data included names, Social Security numbers, and other personal information. As usual, when this sort of thing hits the news, our immediate reaction is to wonder what we can do to prevent ourselves from falling prey to identity theft, unauthorized withdrawals, false credit applications, and other nasty consequences. And, also, as... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple is splitting its App Store division in half, according to a report from Bloomberg. While one group of employees will run the App Store, the other will manage its approach to alternative marketplaces that have started opening up in the European Union.As part of the change, App Store vice president Matt Fischer will leave the company after more than a decade in the role. “This has been on my mind for some time, and as we are also reorganizing the team to better manage new challenges and opportunities, now is the right moment to pass the baton to two outstanding leaders on my team,” Fischer writes in an email to employees seen by Bloomberg. Fischer has also posted the email on LinkedIn.Now, Apple senior director Carson Oliver will... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge In a new letter, OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon insists that AI regulations should be left to the federal government. As reported previously by Bloomberg, Kwon says that a new AI safety bill under consideration in California could slow progress and cause companies to leave the state.A federally-driven set of AI policies, rather than a patchwork of state laws, will foster innovation and position the U.S. to lead the development of global standards. As a result, we join other AI labs, developers, experts and members of California’s Congressional delegation in respectfully opposing SB 1047 and welcome the opportunity to outline some of our key concerns.The letter is addressed to California State Senator Scott Wiener, who... Continue reading…

Summer's coming to a close and that means schools are going to start back up and folks are going to need to come back from their vacations. Of course, we're also seeing plenty of great deals on a variety of tech and gadgets, with laptops from every brand seeing sharp discounts ahead of the new school year. Of course, it's not every day we get to see some of the best laptops of 2024 on sale, especially our top-choice for this year, the HP Spectre X360 14.

Lil Jon joins the Georgia delegation at the DNC roll call to raucous applause. | Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images Compare clips from the Democratic National Convention, which kicked off on Monday in Chicago, to the Republican National Convention in July. They feel like different universes.At the RNC, during the roll call of votes nominating Donald Trump, states were called out to scattered applause along with the number of votes. The room was mostly quiet, and it sounded more like a jury delivering bad news than it did a political party affirming its future.The DNC roll call, meanwhile, included a playlist of music related to each state, like “Sweet Home Alabama” for Alabama and “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar for his home state of California. Delegates huddled around microphones, screaming and cheering as they announced their support for Vice... Continue reading…

A screenshot from the Megalopolis trailer. | Image: Lionsgate Hours after it was released, Lionsgate pulled a trailer for Megalopolis that was clearly “gunning for the haters” with a selection of negative quotes about director Francis Ford Coppola’s previous works. That’s because reports like this one from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri showed that critic quotes in the trailer lambasting films like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now were fabricated.“Lionsgate is immediately recalling our trailer for Megalopolis,” a Lionsgate spokesperson said in a statement to Variety. “We offer our sincere apologies to the critics involved and to Francis Ford Coppola and American Zoetrope for this inexcusable error in our vetting process. We screwed up. We are sorry.”That all led some people to immediately wonder whether... Continue reading…

Photo by Brandon Bell / Getty Images A telecom company that transmitted the deepfake robocall of President Joe Biden’s voice has agreed to pay $1 million to resolve an enforcement action from the Federal Communications Commission, the agency announced.Lingo Telecom relayed a fake Biden message to New Hampshire voters in January, urging them not to turn out for the Democratic primary. The FCC identified political consultant Steve Kramer as the person behind the generative AI calls and previously proposed Kramer pay a separate $6 million fine.Under the new settlement with Lingo, the FCC said the company will need to strictly adhere to its caller ID authentication rules, including “know your customer” principles. The FCC will also require Lingo to “more thoroughly verify the... Continue reading…

Image: GMC GMC says its limited “Denali Edition 1” launch versions of the new Sierra EV pickup truck are now being delivered to their first customers and are available for purchase at dealerships nationwide.GMC’s 2024 Sierra EV is parent company GM’s third electric pickup truck built on the Ultium EV platform after the just-launched Chevy Silverado EV. It’s also GM’s second GMC-branded EV after the beastly Hummer EV pickup (which now also comes in SUV format).The Denali’s main claims to fame are the same diagonal-driving CrabWalk mode party trick featured in the Hummer EV (see video above) and its promised range estimate of 440 miles on a single charge, matching the Silverado EV and besting the Rivian R1T’s Max battery range of 420 miles. (... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge If you subscribe to Twitch channels from Twitch’s mobile app, you might have to pay a bit more starting in October.Twitch announced on Wednesday that Tier 1 and gift subscriptions in more than 40 countries will have a higher price on the iOS and Android apps starting on October 1st. According to emails from Twitch shared by Dexerto and on Reddit, Tier 1 subscriptions will cost $7.99 per month, an increase from the current Tier 1 price on the app of $5.99 per month. The cost of Tier 2 and Tier 3 subscriptions will remain the same.The July price hike, which affected subscriptions on the web, upped a Tier 1 subscription to $5.99 per month in the US, an increase of $1. (Once the new mobile price increase takes effect, subscribing via the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AI-enabled ammunition vending machines could facilitate mass shootings and let people circumvent federal bans prohibiting people with certain criminal convictions from buying ammunition, two senators warn.Massachusetts Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) asking it to “closely examine” facial recognition-enabled ammunition vending machines that have recently been installed in supermarkets in certain states.“Easy access to ammunition helps to fuel our country’s gun violence epidemic, which now claims more than 44,000 lives annually.”The machines, distributed by the Texas-based company American Rounds, began appearing in grocery stores in Alabama, Texas,... Continue reading…

Image: Chick-fil-A The streaming space has become so crowded that it’s hard to imagine why any company would want to break in now, but that is apparently what Chick-fil-A (yes, the fast food chain) is planning to do.Deadline reports that Chick-fil-A is working with a number of production companies and traditional studios to create multiple original shows for a streaming platform debuting sometime later this year. Initially, the restaurant is said to be focused on family-friendly unscripted programming, including a game show produced by Glassman Media and Sugar23. But down the line, the currently unnamed service could also feature original scripted series, animation, and content that’s either licensed or acquired from other entertainment outfits.C... Continue reading…

A line worker tends to fallen power lines in the East End neighborhood of Houston, days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall, on Thursday, July 11th, 2024. | Raquel Natalicchio / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images The US has dealt with 60 percent more weather-related outages during warmer months over the past decade than it did during the 2000s, according to data crunched by the nonprofit research organization Climate Central. It’s a trend that raises health risks as the planet heats up. Climate change supercharges disasters like storms and wildfires that often cut off power. Soaring demand for air conditioning also stresses out the grid. All of this can leave people without life-saving cooling or electric medical devices at times when they’re most vulnerable. Image: Climate Central Climate Central collected data from the Department of Energy on outages that took place between 2000 and 2023. It looked specifically at periods... Continue reading…