Image: Sebastien Martin-Schultz / Blizzard Hours after the Florida Mayhem were crowned the 2023 Overwatch League Grand Champions, the Overwatch League itself has likely come to its end. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) this morning, Blizzard said that it’s working on “building our vision of a revitalized esports program.” pic.twitter.com/PoV2NaI5fg— Overwatch League (@overwatchleague) October 2, 2023It is no secret that the league has been in dire straits. Over the last few years, there were numerous reports that the league was struggling financially. Advertisers had pulled out after stories of sexual harassment and abuse at Blizzard broke in 2021. Team organizations were struggling to pay franchising fees, strained by the depressed economic conditions facilitated by the... Continue reading…

Satya Nadella appears in DC for US v. Google. | Image: Getty Images On the stand in US v. Google, the Microsoft CEO said he’d do just about anything to make Bing better. Google’s lawyers said he should have been doing that for decades. Continue reading…

Photo by Rick Kern / Getty Images for The Sandbox X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has made a special revenue sharing deal with Paris Hilton and her media company, 11:11. It even includes a custom hashtag for a word that Hilton has been trying to popularize since at least 2019: “sliving.”A combination of the words “slaying” and “living,” sliving is supposed to be Hilton’s new “that’s hot,” her catchphrase that was inescapable in the early 2000s. Now the year is 2023, and Linda Yaccarino, fresh from her interview on the Code stage, is posting “#sliving” to a site called X.The queen of pop culture, music, business, and TV is #Sliving on X. @ParisHilton welcome to the @X family, we're excited to launch an official partnership with you and your next-gen media company 11:11.... Continue reading…

Over a month ago, we learned that despite not being a candidate for feature updates anymore, Windows 10 will receive the Windows Backup app, which was previously only available for Windows 11 users. While this utility is quite beneficial for many, it does come with a requirement that makes it a hard sell for certain customers. Although this category of affected users might want to remove the software, Microsoft has confirmed that it is not possible to do so, for now.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk alongside the Cybertruck at its 2019 launch event. | Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images Tesla didn’t end up holding a delivery event for its Cybertruck in the third quarter of 2023 as CEO Elon Musk had hoped. “We’re anticipating having [a] delivery event, a great delivery event probably in Q3,” Musk said in the company’s April earnings call. “The Cybertruck handover… will hopefully be around the end of Q3 this year,” he added later in the call.Although Musk’s comments read more as a target than an explicit promise, this is just the latest delay in its introduction of the Cybertruck, which was originally due to start rolling off the assembly line in 2021 when it was announced in 2019. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have paid a roughly $100 refundable deposit to reserve the vehicle. The Wall Street Journal notes... Continue reading…

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Samsung is reportedly set to formally launch cloud gaming inside the Samsung Game Launcher on Galaxy phones at its developer conference this week on October 5th, according to the Korea Economic Daily. The new cloud service, which has been in slowly expanding beta for a few months now, is targeted at mobile games, unlike most other cloud gaming plays, which generally offer PC and console games. It seems like Samsung’s approach is more or less designed to recover the game-install-ad revenue lost as various ad targeting restrictions have gone into place over the past few years. That’s not just cynicism — take it from Samsung’s Jong Hyuk Woo, who told VentureBeat in August that “90% of the people who have expressed interest in a game... Continue reading…

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), is being sued for defamation over posts he made falsely accusing a man of pretending to be a neo-Nazi to stir up a “false flag” operation earlier this year.The suit was filed in Texas court Monday by Ben Brody, a 22-year-old California man, as first reported by HuffPost. Brody accused Musk of having triggered a massive harassment campaign against him through a series of misleading posts about an Oregon neo-Nazi brawl this summer.In June, a fight broke out between two far-right groups at an Oregon City pride festival. Footage of the fight circulated across social media, and soon, users started falsely claiming one of the men was a federal agent and attempted to identify... Continue reading…

Katalin Karikó (left) and Drew Weissman’s (right) research into mRNA was used to develop covid-19 vaccinations. | Image: Nobel Prize American scientists Katalin Karikó (a Hungarian-born biochemist) and Drew Weissman (an immunologist and professor of vaccine research) have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), which contributed towards the development of effective covid-19 vaccines (seen via The New York Times). mRNA vaccines have an advantage over traditional vaccines in that they can be quickly designed and safely manufactured at scale with fewer errors.Seven years after they first met at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, Karikó and Weissman published their findings on mRNA. The scientists found that they could add altered mRNA to cells, prompting them to create any protein they desired.... Continue reading…

Image: Charlotte Hornets YouTuber MrBeast, aka Jimmy Donaldson, has struck a new partnership with the Charlotte Hornets that will plaster his snack company’s logo on the NBA team’s jerseys. The Charlotte Hornets announced that Feastables has become the team’s official jersey patch partner for the 2023–2024 season.Not only will the Feastables logo appear on the jerseys belonging to the Charlotte Hornets, but it will also be stitched on jerseys for the Greensboro Swarm, the NBA G League team affiliated with the Hornets, along with the Hornets Venom GT, an NBA 2K League esports team. The Charlotte Hornets will even include Feastables branding in the backdrops it uses for press conferences and interviews. Image: Charlotte Hornets Here’s... Continue reading…

This is the deal you've been looking for if you've needed to purchase a copy of Windows or wanted to upgrade the version of Windows on your current PC. During this limited-time promotion, you can snag a copy of Windows 11 Pro for only $29.97 at the XDA Depot. The price of the Windows 11 Pro license is being reduced by 84%, which makes this an absolutely phenomenal deal. The promotional offer provides access to one license that can be used on up to two devices. Normally, a Windows 11 Pro license will cost $199, so be sure to pick this up while you can because the deal's not going to be around for long.

The Surface Go 4 is the latest affordable tablet computer from Microsoft — at least, it would be if it were available for consumers to buy. It won’t be gracing stores, but your company could buy them if you wanted to put in a purchase order for an affordable Windows tablet. It joins the line of Surface 2-in-1 devices, which is led by the Surface Pro 9. The flagship is still our Editor-in-Chief Rich Woods’ “everything device,” blending the best of Windows and tablet usage. So, in this showdown of two of the best Microsoft Surface devices, which 2-in-1 is worth your time?

Image: Netflix The latest end-of-the-world movie coming to Netflix has some serious star power. Leave the World Behind — based on the book of the same name by Rumaan Alam — is helmed by Mr. Robot’s Sam Esmail and stars Mahershala Ali, Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon. It’s a post-apocalyptic thriller with a decidedly intense vibe, which you can check out in the trailer above.As for what it’s actually about, here’s the official synopsis:A family’s vacation is upended when two strangers arrive at night, seeking refuge from a cyberattack that grows more terrifying by the minute, forcing everyone to come to terms with their places in a collapsing world.Leave the World Behind will also continue Netflix’s dual-release strategy with theaters and... Continue reading…