Valve has finally, officially announced Deadlock, in the most minimal way imaginable. The game now has a Steam page that lists Valve as its developer and publisher, and a simple notice: Deadlock is in early development with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay. Access is currently limited to friend invite via our playtesters.Valve provides no other details, just an animated teaser image. (You can see a still screenshot of it above.) The system requirements only mention that the game requires a 64-bit processor and operating system.While the game has ostensibly been a secret until now, details about it have been trickling out for months. Information started to emerge from closed playtests in May. By August, tens of... Continue reading…

Plenty of people upgrade their phones yearly or every two years. Some people upgrade less frequently than that, but the point is that chances are, you've had an old phone lying around that you weren't sure what to do with. While there are a ton of great projects that you can use for your phone, Nextcloud is one that I personally found a lot of interest in. You can basically turn an old phone into a NAS, but in a more robust way than just remotely accessing it and copying files back and forth.

Image: Google Google is making a new desktop app called Essentials that packages a few Google services, like Messages and Photos, and includes links to download many others. The app will be included with many new Windows laptops, with the first ones coming from HP.The Essentials app lets you “discover and install many of our best Google services,” according to Google’s announcement, and lets you browse Google Photos as well as send and receive Google Messages in the app. A full list of apps has not yet been announced, but Google’s announcement art showcases icons including Google Sheets, Google Drive, Nearby Share, and Google One (a two-month free trial is offered through Essentials for new subscribers). HP will start including Google Essentials... Continue reading…

If you really want to up your gaming experience, a great monitor is going to be an absolute must. And we know, some of the best monitors you can buy in 2024 aren't cheap. But if you're serious about your entertainment, then this is going to be one upgrade you're going to want to splurge on. With that said, we're all about finding fantastic discounts on superb products, which is why we think this LG UltraGear OLED monitor deal is going to be just for you.

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures Middle-earth is looking a little different in The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. Warner Bros. Pictures just released the first trailer for the animated prequel, which is directed by Kenji Kamiyama (Blood: The Last Vampire, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and set 183 years before the original film trilogy. Peter Jackson is involved as an executive producer.According to the official description, the new movie “tells the fate of the House of Helm Hammerhand, the legendary King of Rohan.” Here’s the full setup:A sudden attack by Wulf, a clever and ruthless Dunlending lord seeking vengeance for the death of his father, forces Helm and his people to make a daring last stand in the ancient stronghold of the Hornburg — a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An appeals court has revived the District of Columbia’s antitrust case against Amazon, which the District claims illegally drives up prices on rival platforms. In a decision on Thursday, the DC Court of Appeals ruled that the District’s allegations “plausibly suggest” that Amazon already has monopoly power over online marketplaces or is close to achieving it. Former DC Attorney General Karl Racine filed the antitrust lawsuit against Amazon in 2021, but it was tossed out in court in 2022. The lawsuit alleges Amazon engages in anticompetitive behavior by restricting third-party sellers from offering products on other online stores, including their own websites, for less than they charge on Amazon — effectively controlling the price of... Continue reading…

Fans of handheld retro gaming devices are really eating well this year, aren't they? We're just over halfway through 2024 and we're already neck-deep in stellar handheld consoles to replay the classics on. Now, get ready to make room on the shelf for one more, because Retroid just hot-dropped a trailer for the Pocket Mini.

Image: Cruise Uber has signed up another robotaxi company to offer driverless rides inside its app. Starting sometime next year, for “qualifying” rides, Uber will give you the option to take the trip in one of Cruise’s autonomous vehicles. The two companies announced a “multiyear strategic partnership” on Thursday. Uber already partnered with Waymo on autonomous rides and announced a long-term deal with driverless truck company Aurora earlier this year. It also offered driverless rides with Motional before Motional paused its robotaxi deployments in May. The original date for Elon Musk’s event revealing Tesla’s robotaxi developments passed a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s supposed to take place October 10th.Cruise halted its robotaxi service in... Continue reading…

If you're looking for a new smartphone, you can go the usual iPhone or Android routes, but a foldable is the exciting choice, especially the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. But foldable phones are expensive, so you'll need to make sure yours is protected with a solid case.

Image: The Verge AI audio startup ElevenLabs has now made its text-to-speech Reader app available across the world, adding support for 32 different languages — including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Mandarin, and Hindi.The app, which is available on both iOS and Android, was first released in June in the US, UK, and Canada. It allows users to listen to PDFs, articles, newsletters, ePub files or “any other text content” according to the developer, but that support seemingly doesn’t extend to files from Kindle or Apple Books. There’s a good selection of AI-generated voices available for the text-to-speech tool, including deceased celebrities like Judy Garland, James Dean, and Burt Reynolds. The few I’ve listened to are impressive enough to avoid... Continue reading…

There are plenty of things to consider when assembling a PC from old server parts. If youre going for a budget Xeon build, youll need to decide whether you want a single or dual CPU motherboard. Depending on your workload, you may also need to pick out plenty of ECC memory modules to avoid getting bottlenecked on the RAM front.

In May 2024, around 200 employees at Google DeepMind (representing roughly 5 percent of the division) signed a letter urging the company to end its contracts with military organizations, expressing concerns that its AI technology was being used for warfare, Time magazine reported.The letter states that employee concerns aren’t “about the geopolitics of any particular conflict,” but it does link out to Time’s reporting on Google’s defense contract with the Israeli military, known as Project Nimbus. The letter also points to reports that the Israeli military uses AI for mass surveillance and to select targets in its bombing campaign in Gaza, with Israeli weapon firms mandated by the government to purchase cloud services from Google and... Continue reading…