Illustration: The Verge Google has offered a glimpse into its final arguments to a DC federal judge as it seeks to convince the court it’s not operating an unlawful monopoly in search.The company filed an unsealed version of its posttrial brief on Friday in its battle against the US Department of Justice over its search distribution agreements. The DOJ has argued that Google used exclusionary contracts with phone manufacturers and web browser operators to make it harder for other search engines to compete. The agency’s own brief, filed later in the day in conjunction with a coalition of states, contends that Google “exploited its monopoly power to ‘freeze the ecosystem’ of what should otherwise be a vibrant and competitive industry.”In the brief filed Friday,... Continue reading…

Bluetooth is a wireless technology that allows you to connect devices as long as they're relatively close to each other physically. Nowadays, Bluetooth can be used to power devices like wireless headphones, mice, keyboards, and more, and it's as essential to many people as Wi-Fi or even cellular connectivity.

The longer you use your computer, the more likely it is to become slower over time, especially as you pile up more files on your drives. Filling up your hard drive can significantly downgrade performance, and one good way to help address that problem is to optimize or defragment that drive. In this article, we'll show you how to defragment a drive on your Windows 11 PC.

It's clear that the AI chatbot market is getting saturated as tech companies flood the space with multi-purpose conversational interfaces powered by large language models (LLMs). A few weeks ago, Google announced that it is rebranding Bard to Gemini, along with offering an advanced version of the model via a paid subscription. Gemini also packs the ImageFX utility based on the Imagen 2 AI model for image-generation capabilities, but now, Google has decided to nerf access to this tool following widespread reports of inaccurate and potentially offensive imagery being generated by the service.

There’s something a bit different about this Slackbot icon... | Image: Tom McKay Hiding on Slack isn’t all that hard, apparently; you just have to pretend you’re a bot. That’s what IT Brew’s Tom McKay did when he left Gizmodo in 2022, and he went undetected by the site’s management for months.In a post on X, McKay shared some screenshots of the new “Slackbot” persona he took on after he officially left Gizmodo. He also confirmed to The Verge that this silly prank really happened.If you’re not glued to Slack for most of the day like I am, then you might not know that Slackbot is the friendly robot that lives in the messaging service. It helps you do things like set reminders, find out your office’s Wi-Fi password, or let you know when you’ve been mentioned in a channel that you’re not a part of.it's been long... Continue reading…

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do this again. Last year, it seemed like there was no reason to believe Spotify would ever roll out its long-delayed HiFi lossless streaming feature, which was announced in 2021 and then never mentioned again. But then, one of the company’s co-presidents kept hope alive, telling my colleague Alex Heath “we are going to do it.” That was in March 2023. And now here we find ourselves, three years and one day after Spotify HiFi’s buzzy original announcement, and still nothing. Like always, there are signs that the company is continuing to work on HiFi — although it’s unlikely to be called that anymore. And unlike rival services, you’re likely going to have to pay a lot more for it, whenever it actually... Continue reading…

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images Some laws operate like hidden trap doors — everyone walks across the trap at one point or another, but only a handful of us actually fall through. For the rich, it’s the law against insider trading; for the rest of us plebs, it’s the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. On Thursday, federal law enforcement arrested journalist Tim Burke and arraigned him in court in handcuffs. Twelve of the 14 charges levied against him in the since-unsealed indictment are under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the federal anti-hacking statute. The story begins with Tucker Carlson’s extremely cursed interview of Kanye West in 2022. Most interviews are edited for clarity; in this case, the interview was cut to exclude a rambling, antisemitic rant. That... Continue reading…

There are plenty of great tech gifts that can light up someone’s life for less than $25, from smart bulbs to everyday essentials. | Image: Nanoleaf Wanting to treat a friend or a loved one to some tech or a cool gadget while on a very lean budget can feel like an impossible task. Most of the everyday devices we use cost multiple hundreds of dollars, so what do you get when you just want a nice birthday or “just because” kind of gift but can’t break the bank? Sure, you could default to something basic like a pair of socks or a scarf, but that gets boring fast.Here, we’ve assembled a bunch of cool tech ideas on a budget of just $25 that are worth your money, including a headphone stand ($19.99), a quality USB-C cable ($9.99), a unique Bluetooth speaker, and other essentials. Some of these items might not sound very fun or exciting at first, but they’re all helpful gifts that any... Continue reading…

If you wanted a Ring Car Cam you’re too late. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Ring confirmed to The Verge that it has stopped selling its Ring Car Cam, a dashcam / security camera hybrid that records the road and the driver while in motion and acts as a security camera when a vehicle is parked. The product, which launched at CES 2023, has been hard to come by since going on sale last January, and customers who tried to purchase one in the last few months are finding those orders canceled."We've experienced ongoing delays with Car Cam and have decided to stop the sale of the device," Ring spokesperson Andrea McDonald told The Verge in an email. "Customers who purchased a Car Cam will continue to receive software updates and support. We remain excited about opportunities to innovate in the auto space." McDonald... Continue reading…

MWC’s venue, the Fira de Barcelona Grand Via. | Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images Europe’s big smartphone show is here, and big players like Xiaomi, OnePlus, HMD, Honor, and Lenovo have a new generation of devices to show off. Continue reading…

Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against tax prep company H&R Block for allegedly wasting consumers’ time and money. The company deceptively marketed its services and made them difficult to downgrade, the FTC claims in an administrative complaint issued Friday.“H&R Block designed its online products to present an obstacle course of tedious challenges to consumers, pressuring them into overpaying for its products,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Samuel Levine said in a statement.The administrative complaint is similar to a lawsuit but results in proceedings before the FTC’s in-house administrative law judge. Findings can ultimately be appealed to a federal court.The agency alleges that H&R Block steered... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google has issued an explanation for the “embarrassing and wrong” images generated by its Gemini AI tool. In a blog post on Friday, Google says its model produced “inaccurate historical” images due to tuning issues. The Verge and others caught Gemini generating images of racially diverse Nazis and US Founding Fathers earlier this week.“Our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range,” Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president, writes in the post. “And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.” S... Continue reading…