Wi-Fi is how most of our electronic devices now connect to the internet, and, for the most part, Wi-Fi has been pretty good. Still, sometimes a Wi-Fi connection can feel slow, and it may not be obvious why that is. Wi-Fi relies on the use of shared spectrum with newer routers which use more spectrum than ever and offer blazing-fast speeds as a result. If youre looking to find out why your Wi-Fi isnt delivering the expected performance, here's what you should check out first.

Slack introduced its first three iPhone and iPad widgets today. | Screenshot: Slack Today, Slack introduced the first four widgets for the iOS version of its mobile app. Three of them are designed for the iPhone’s homescreen, while the fourth can be added to the lockscreen, allowing users to jump immediately into the Slack app after unlocking their device.The homescreen widgets include Catch Up, which provides an at-a-glance look at how many unread messages and mentions a user has without opening the app. It gives a little more detail than the Slack app icon’s badge, and tapping the Catch Up widget takes users directly to that section of the Slack app so they can quickly swipe through conversations they’ve missed.Three 3⃣new Slack iOS widgets are here to make your workday a whole lot easier. Add the Catch Up... Continue reading…

Photo: Evo / Stephanie Lindgren Evo 2024 wrapped up late Sunday night with Victor “Punk” Woodley beating Adel “Big Bird” Anouche in Street Fighter 6. With his victory, Woodley became the first American to win a mainline Street Fighter tournament at Evo in over 20 years.The match was nail-bitingly close with Anouche, who made it to the grand finals via the loser’s bracket, beating Woodley 3-0 to reset or “flip” the bracket requiring another best-of-5 match to determine the winner. Their second match went the distance, with each player having two set wins a piece and tied 1-1 in the final match. A well-executed super move from Woodley’s Cammy ended the match and America’s long Street Fighter Evo championship drought along with it. Americans actually fared exceedingly... Continue reading…

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro speaks at Tioga Marine Terminal on October 13th, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. | Photo: Getty Images With the US facing the prospect of another four years of former President Donald Trump rolling back environmental protections at the federal level, the Biden administration is putting billions of dollars of climate funding into the hands of local governments.The Biden administration announced $4.3 billion in funding today for locally led climate projects across the US. The money will fund 25 different initiatives led by state, municipal, and tribal governments as well as coalitions of local governments working to transition to cleaner energy and reduce greenhouse gas pollution. The money can be used to deploy a wide array of clean energy technologies — from solar and wind farms to EV chargers and heat pumps.All in all, the projects are... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Intel says it has found the source of the widespread instability issues affecting its Core 13th and 14th Gen processors. In an update on Monday, Intel confirmed that CPUs are experiencing “elevated operating voltage” and that a patch is on the way.“We have determined that elevated operating voltage is causing instability issues in some 13th/14th Gen desktop processors,” Intel employee Thomas Hannaford writes on the company’s forum. “Our analysis of returned processors confirms that the elevated operating voltage is stemming from a microcode algorithm resulting in incorrect voltage requests to the processor.”Intel says it’s working to release a microcode patch for motherboard manufacturers in mid-August and that anyone affected by the... Continue reading…

The cost of PC hardware has been steadily increasing for years, but GPU prices, in particular, have blown out of proportion as of late. The amount that could buy a decent gaming PC just a few years ago can barely get you a semi-decent mid-range graphics card these days.

Image: 9to5Google Google is seemingly about to move on from the HDMI dongle design of all its past streaming devices in favor of a more conventional set-top box. 9to5Google has published images of the upcoming product, which is apparently called the “Google TV Streamer.” So not only is the look of past Chromecasts going away, but so is the name. The new device has a slanted top, and the overall design is in keeping with Google’s other recent hardware. As for the included remote, it’s mostly similar to what came with the last-gen Chromecast, though this one is longer and has a volume rocker right on the face. The Google TV Streamer is likely to debut at the company’s August 13th hardware event alongside a litany of other products including the Pixel 9... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google is putting the brakes on a change that would have made it more difficult to track users across different websites to serve them targeted ads. After years of testing, planning, and delays, Google has scrapped a plan to turn off third-party cookie tracking by default like Safari and Firefox already do. The change was supposed to reach Chrome users soon, despite concerns raised by competitors, regulators, and privacy advocates.Now, Chrome will ask users to “make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing” instead of deprecating third-party cookies, writes Google Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez. That could work more like Apple’s app tracking opt-in, a setting that reportedly cost social media platforms nearly $10... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz was called to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee over the major outage affecting Windows PCs spurred by a faulty update that brought flights, hospital procedures, and broadcasters to a halt on Friday, The Washington Post reported.“Recognizing that Americans will undoubtedly feel the lasting, real-world consequences of this incident, they deserve to know in detail how this incident happened and the mitigation steps CrowdStrike is taking,” Homeland Security Chair Mark Green (R-TN) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) wrote in a letter later shared with The Verge. They asked that CrowdStrike schedule a hearing with the subcommittee by end... Continue reading…

Only 26 copies of this gold-finished cartridge were ever produced. | Image: Goldin Starting tonight, Goldin will be auctioning off one of the rarest Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges of all time. Nintendo originally created only 26 of these gold cartridges as prizes for Nintendo Power magazine readers in 1990. They’re so hard to come by that one sold on eBay for $100,088 a decade ago.Hundreds of cartridges were created for the 1990 Nintendo World Championships, an event that toured the United States trying to find the country’s best gamers. Players competed for high scores in timed versions of Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and Rad Racer, which were all bundled onto special cartridges featuring physical switches, allowing the games’ time limits to be modified. Most of these cartridges featured standard gray NES... Continue reading…

Yep, still bad at Minesweeper. | Photo: Wes Davis / The Verge Apple recently approved a new emulator app called UTM SE that enables your iPhone or iPad (or Vision Pro!) to masquerade as PC hardware and run honest-to-goodness computer desktop operating systems. Some of you asked in the comments section of my last story how it runs — a fair question that I couldn’t answer at the time. But now that I’ve tried it a little, I have answers, and I can say this much: it’s better than I expected, but I wouldn’t count on it for too much.That’s because it doesn’t use a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, which translates software into code that your device understands before it’s executed. JIT compilers go against Apple’s software guidelines for the App Store, so you’d have to jailbreak your phone to install a v... Continue reading…

Yes, the Cowboy Cross comes in “zune brown.” | Image: Cowboy Cowboy is rolling out a free over-the-air update to its single-speed, belt-driven e-bikes that promises to flatten steeper hills while also making its 250W rear-hub motor more efficient when the road levels out — no gear changes required. Specifically, Cowboy says its AdaptivePower 2.0 update will help take riders up hills that are 50 percent steeper while saving 10 percent more power on flat roads. These improvements are compared to the company’s first-generation adaptive power tech that Cowboy launched just over a year ago, which automatically adjusts power delivery based on incline, headwind, or extra hauling weight. As Cowboy explains it, adaptive power relies on a proprietary (and once contested) algorithm that monitors the... Continue reading…