If you've been looking for a charging device that's compact and can handle pretty much anything you can throw at it, this Anker Charging Station is going to be just for you. Not only does it pack tons of USB ports, but it also has AC outlets too. Furthermore, it's sleek and compact design makes it perfect for home, office, or even on the go.

Player data from a single match on Call of Duty: Warzone’s Caldera map. | Image: Activision Activision is sharing an open-source dataset pulled from Call of Duty: Warzone’s Caldera map for researchers to study and to help support AI model training. “This first-of-its-kind data set release for Call of Duty, now available in OpenUSD, contains the near-complete geometry of Caldera as well as a collection of randomly selected anonymized time samples showing how players move around the map,” Activision writes in a blog post. According to Michael Vance, an Activision SVP and fellow software engineer, it’s one of “the largest production-validated open data set releases from the gaming industry in terms of complexity of geometry and instance counts.” It’s also one of the largest publicly available OpenUSD (a file format for 3D... Continue reading…

Former President Donald Trump. | Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Meta’s AI assistant incorrectly said that the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump didn’t happen, an error a company executive is now attributing to the technology powering its chatbot and others.In a company blog post published on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head of policy, calls its AI’s responses to questions about the shooting “unfortunate.” He says Meta AI was first programmed to not respond to questions about the attempted assassination but the company removed that restriction after people started noticing. He also acknowledges that “in a small number of cases, Meta AI continued to provide incorrect answers, including sometimes asserting that the event didn’t happen – which we are quickly working... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon, not third-party sellers, is responsible for properly recalling hazardous items that were sold on its marketplace, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) decided on Tuesday. The CPSC says Amazon failed to adequately notify the public about more than 400,000 recalled products. Even though Amazon stopped selling those products and attempted to alert their buyers, the CPSC decided Amazon needs to follow approved recall procedures designed to keep the public from using, giving away, or reselling dangerous items. (When the CPSC helps a company recall a product, it doesn’t just warn buyers; it warns everyone.)The Amazon products, sold between 2018 and 2021, include faulty carbon monoxide detectors, hairdryers that pose an... Continue reading…

Microsoft Excel is quite a popular spreadsheet tool utilized by consumers and enterprise users alike when it comes to managing data-related needs. As such, the Redmond tech firm continuously adds new features to the software in order to retain existing customers and attract more. In the past few weeks, we have seen new capabilities arriving in Excel for web, better integration for Python Editor, and more. Now, Microsoft has published a roundup of all the features it added to Excel during the past four weeks, just like it does every month.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images StubHub is facing a new lawsuit that accuses the ticketing service of hiding fees from customers until the very end of the purchasing process. In the lawsuit filed on Wednesday, District of Columbia Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb claims StubHub engages in “a series of deceptive, manipulative, and unfair practices.”Attorney General Schwalb alleges StubHub uses a “bait-and-switch” technique where it advertises “deceptively low” ticket prices and adds extra charges after a multi-page purchase process. During that process, StubHub displays a countdown timer giving customers 10 minutes to complete their purchase — something Schwalb calls a dark pattern designed to create a “false sense of urgency.”In addition, Schwalb accuses StubHub of... Continue reading…

If you're looking to make improvements to your gaming experience, getting some new hardware might be a good way to go if you're not already using a mouse or keyboard that's tailored for gaming. Of course, you're going to find a wide variety of options, but don't let the high prices scare you away, as you can still find some awesome hardware at affordable prices.

Image: Meta Meta has shut down its AI chatbots that let you have conversations with alter-ego versions of celebrities, as reported by The Information. The celebrity chatbots were a big part of Meta’s announcements at its Connect event last September, now, you can’t talk with them anymore. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tom Brady (@tombrady)The shutdown follows Meta’s Monday rollout of AI Studio, a tool that lets creators in the US make AI chatbots of themselves. Based on a statement, the company seems to be favoring this direction rather than the more handcrafted celebrity bots.“You can no longer interact with AI characters embodied by celebrities,” Meta spokesperson Liz Sweeney says to The Verge.... Continue reading…

The Nothing Phone 2A Plus will be available in the UK first, followed by limited availability in the US a few days later. | Image: Nothing A little more than four months after the Phone 2A’s debut, Nothing is already introducing a follow-up with the Phone 2A Plus, which has a handful of performance improvements and a more premium look while maintaining a sub-$400 price tag. Plus is often used in smartphone naming to delineate a larger model with a bigger screen, but that’s not the case here. The Phone 2A Plus has the same 6.7-inch OLED screen up front to go with the same flashing Glyph Interface in the back, the same 5,000mAh battery, and NFC, just like the 2A. The biggest upgrade for the Phone 2A Plus is a new MediaTek Dimensity 7350 Pro 5G processor, currently exclusive to Nothing, which the company claims is nearly 10 percent faster than the processor used in the Phone... Continue reading…

There’s a custom case for this and everything. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s advertising for its Galaxy Z Flip series typically revolves around Gen Z photo shoots and showing off specific features like interpreter mode. But today, the company has taken quite a turn by highlighting the foldable phone’s use as... a policing tool. In a post on Samsung’s newsroom titled “Samsung Technology Is Helping Police Authorities Protect the Public’s Safety,” we learn that two police departments in Missouri participated in a pilot program that led them to integrate the Z Flip into their daily operations. “This included their use as a body-worn camera to promote transparency, marking the first time that police have used a foldable device in this way,” the article says. Eventually, two other departments joined in. T... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge AMD just announced its second quarter 2024 earnings today, and the highlight was this: nearly half the company’s sales are now data center products — not chips for personal computers, not game consoles, not embedded chips for industry or vehicles. The company’s data center business has doubled in a single year, and this quarter’s growth was primarily due to a single chip: the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator, which competes with Nvidia’s infamously influential H100 AI chip. The AMD chip just did over $1 billion in sales in a single quarter, according to CEO Lisa Su, up from its previous milestone of $1 billion cumulatively since its December 2023 debut. (AMD says its Epyc server CPUs also contributed.) Image: AMD A... Continue reading…

Image: Ring On Monday evening, Amazon Web Services sent a notice about issues in the US-EAST-1 region of its server networks, which supports many of the internet’s services. So far, the only problem we’ve seen that appears to be linked to the issues is an outage affecting Amazon-owned Ring, with owners of the security cameras and doorbells reporting that features like history, events, and Neighbors are unavailable.At 1:20AM ET, Ring’s status page was updated to announce the incident had been resolved, with a note at the bottom of the page saying the issues had affected Ring.com, Ring Protect (Video Recording), Live Calls (Doorbell Dings & Motions), Video On Demand, and Partner Integration. The Ring outage began starting at 6:40PM ET on Tuesday.... Continue reading…