Everyone loves playing Roblox online, but there are a number of privacy hurdles that can be solved with a VPN. By encrypting your connection and masking your IP address, your privacy is protected from other users and host servers. The best VPNs allow you to enjoy Roblox sessions in countries like Jordan and the UAE that have banned the platform outright. Moreover, if your individual account has been banned by Roblox itself, you can get a second chance by changing your IP address and signing back up.

Illustration: William Joel / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 19, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) It’s the last Installer of the year, so we’re going to do something a little different! We’re going to talk about all our favorite things of 2023. Some ground rules / disclaimers: this list is not exhaustive, not everything in here is new this year it’s just new to us, this is not an Official List of Every Single Good Thing That Exists, and most importantly, if there’s something missing that you find outrageous and unacceptable you know where to find me: [email protected] and (203) 570-8663 on all the... Continue reading…

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 is the latest in the line of our favorite business laptops, packed with technology and software to make your working life more productive. Its sister device, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 2-in-1 Gen 9, drops the “Yoga” branding this time around for a shorter name. That’s not all it drops, as the pen garage is gone in favor of a magnetic stylus holder. While both of these ThinkPads have many similarities, they are aimed at slightly different users. This comparison breaks down the differences, so you can make an educated decision.

Image: Getty Michael Cohen, the former lawyer for Donald Trump, admitted to citing fake, AI-generated court cases in a legal document that wound up in front of a federal judge, as reported earlier by The New York Times. A filing unsealed on Friday says Cohen used Google’s Bard to perform research after mistaking it for “a super-charged search engine” rather than an AI chatbot.The document in question was a motion that asked a federal judge to shorten the length of Cohen’s three-year probation, which he’s now facing following prison time and a guilty plea to tax evasion and other charges. But after reviewing the letter brief, US District Judge Jesse Furman wrote in a filing that “none of these cases exist” and asked Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, to... Continue reading…

A lawsuit alleged that Vizio’s claims about refresh rates can be misleading. | Image: Vizio If you bought a Vizio TV in California after April 30th, 2014, Vizio may owe you some money. The company has agreed to pay out $3 million after a 2018 class action lawsuit alleged that its marketing of 120Hz and 240Hz “effective” refresh rates was “false and deceptive.” Vizio denies that it did anything wrong, according to the agreement. The deadline for filing claims is March 30th next year, and requires some sort of evidence of ownership, including proof of purchase or the serial number, to qualify. In addition to paying out for verified claims, Vizio would “stop the advertising practices” and “provide enhanced services and a limited one-year warranty to all Settlement Class Members,” according to details from the website set up for... Continue reading…

AMD's AM5 socket was a huge platform shift compared to AM4, with the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 processors being the first chips on the company's new platform. Barring some initial stumbles, the Zen 4 CPUs offered strong competition to Intel's 12th Gen, 13th Gen, and 14th Gen processors, especially in the budget and enthusiast gaming segments.

Amazon’s new Echo Show 8 brings a faster chip, better speakers, and the most important update of all: widgets. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Happy Friday, folks! Well, now that Christmas is officially behind us, the deals are quickly drying up. Nonetheless, there are still a few deals worth busting out those newly minted gift cards for. Amazon’s latest Echo Show 8 has dropped to a new low, for example, while the Tile Mate has returned to its best price to date. There’s also a bunch of other stuff on sale right now, including a terrific pair of noise-canceling earbuds and OnePlus’ first mechanical keyboard, so let’s begin.First off, Amazon has apparently decided to save some of its best deals for after the holiday season, or at least until after Christmas. Right now, the third-gen Echo Show 8 is on sale at Amazon for Prime members for $89.99 ($60 off). That’s a new all-time... Continue reading…

The Verge / Photos via Getty Images Layoffs are an unfortunate reality of any industry, but the scope and scale of video game layoffs in 2023 are far beyond a typical year. More than any specific video game or piece of news, layoffs defined the past 12 months. Companies large and small have felt their impact. Unofficial figures estimate 9,000 workers have been affected, and at the heart of it all are corporations that valued growth at all costs — including people.In September, Epic Games laid off 830 employees. In a statement, CEO Tim Sweeney wrote, “We’ve been spending way more money than we earn. [...] I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.” Some of that spending was on... Continue reading…

Have you managed to get hold of a Steam Deck and need a way to pack it full of all your games? There are two ways to expand the storage capacity of this portable console and change the way you play games. One is through the use of microSD cards and the other is the replacement of the internal SSD. The easiest method is adding a microSD card, the same form of storage that can be used to expand the capacity of a tablet or smartphone. The microSD card can be any size, but it should support the UHS-I speed standard, which most microSD cards support these days.

The LG Qube is so tiny, so boxy, so handle-y. | Image: LG LG announced the CineBeam Qube (model HU710PB) laser projector yesterday: It’s got a minimalist look and stature, weighing 3.28 pounds and measuring 135mm square on one side and just 80mm wide at the front. (For comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro is just shy of 147mm tall.) It also has an unspecified number of HDMI eARC and USB-C ports, and a 3W built-in mono speaker. Impressively, LG says it can project an up-to-120-inch image at full 4K resolution with a pretty standard 1.2 throw ratio. Oh, and it has a handle!There are some apparent drawbacks to this itty bitty projector. For starters, it pushes out a relatively dim 500 ANSI lumens (compared to 2200 ANSI lumens of the larger Xgimi Horizon Pro we reviewed two years ago). That means that,... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Just days after introducing a Copilot app on Android, Microsoft has rolled out an app for its AI chatbot on iOS and iPadOS. Both versions of the app are now available to download from the Apple App Store.The app gives you access to Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat) and works similarly to OpenAI’s ChatGPT mobile app. In addition to letting you ask questions, draft emails, and summarize text, you can also create images through an integration with the text-to-image generator DALL-E3. Image: Microsoft And, unlike the free version of ChatGPT which runs GPT-3.5, Copilot lets you access GPT-4, the latest large language model (LLM) from OpenAI, without having to pay for a subscription.With Microsoft’s rebrand of Bing... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Nvidia is launching a graphics card specifically for China to comply with US export controls. In a product page on the Chinese version of Nvidia’s website, the chipmaker introduces the RTX 4090D: a GPU that’s less powerful than the flagship RTX 4090 it sells elsewhere.The RTX 4090D has fewer CUDA cores than its RTX 4090 counterpart, topping out at 14,592 as opposed to 16,384. It also has a slightly lower power draw at 425W instead of 450W. Although most of the other specs remain the same between the two versions of the chips, the RTX 4090D is still around “5% slower in gaming and creating,” Nvidia spokesperson Benjamin Berraondo said in an emailed statement to The Verge. Image: Nvidia China Nvidia launched the GPU... Continue reading…