Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 101, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you like silly accessories, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Intel factories and Nobel Prize winners and ATM thieves, watching this pop-punk "Defying Gravity" cover on repeat, reliving my teenage music taste now that The Format is back, catching up on the new Critical Role campaign, taking all my calls with the delightful Pop Phone handset, watching more Love Is Blind than I'm proud of, sending this deep dive on RSS readers to anyone …Read the full story at The Verge.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the downward spiral of the internet, follow Adi Robertson. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedBack in 2018, two years after the UK government decided to implement mandatory hard age gates on adult websites, it floated an idea called the "porn pass." The porn pass was a physical card you'd buy by handing over your ID to a brick-and-mortar shop attendant. It would contain authentication information that would act as a low-tech anonymization system, letting you verif …Read the full story at The Verge.

We’ve been so worried about deepfaked politicians, AI musicians, virtual actresses, and phony satellite imagery that we didn’t even consider the dangers posed by precocious teenagers. Kids are using AI to create images of a disheveled, seemingly unhoused person in their home and sending them to their parents. Understandably, they’re not thrilled and in some instances call the police. The prank has gone viral on TikTok and, in addition to giving parents agita, has become a headache for law enforcement.The premise is simple enough: kids use Snapchat’s AI tools to create images of a grimy man in their home and tell their parents they let them in to use the bathroom, take a nap, or just get a drink of water. Often they say the person claims to know the parents from work or college. And then, predictably, the parents lose their cool and demand they kick the man out. The kids, of course, record the whole thing, and post their parents reactions to TikTok, where some of the clips have millions of views.Where things go from problematic to potentially dangerous is when the prank carries on for too long and parents call the authorities. Calls of a home invasion, especially involving children are treated as high priority by police, so pranks like this tie up valuable resources and could actually put the pranksters in danger. Round Rock Police Patrol Division Commander Andy McKinney told NBC that it could even “cause a SWAT response.”The Salem, MA police department summed it up best in a statement saying, “this prank dehumanizes the homeless, causes the distressed recipient to panic and wastes police resources. Police officers who are called upon to respond do not know this is a prank and treat the call as an actual burglary in progress thus creating a potentially dangerous situation.” So, while we all love a good prank, maybe let this one go.

My NAS is already my central backup server, where I keep shared folders and run Docker containers. As a lightweight server, it's not just reliable but also always on and has more than enough performance for the kind of tasks I throw at it. But while all those qualities make it a great choice for everyday productivity use cases, it also positions it as a prime candidate for a fun, entertainment-focused side project that I've been thinking about — running a local game server. To be more specific, I'm not thinking of a Minecraft server, but more like a board game server. Turns out, there's an open-source project that is the perfect fit for the role.

Laptop docking stations are certainly a niche product, seemingly best suited for corporations where employees use laptops, but also need access to large screens, a proper keyboard, and a mouse when working at a table. I still remember them as the clunky plastic brick you’d snap a fat ThinkPad into, instantly connecting it to an array of beige peripherals. Today, a simple USB-C cable and sleek aluminum slabs have replaced these docks, while the fundamental purpose remains unchanged. For that, it works beautifully, but you should stop to think about how much potential is just left on the table now—literally—because we've switched to USB-C.

Paperless-ngx is a life-saving tool if you want to digitize and self-host all the documents, invoices, and receipts in a centralized store. I use it because I accumulate hundreds of purchases, documents, paperwork, contacts, quotations, and more in a year. While keeping a physical copy is a good practice, most of these resources exist in either image or PDF format. Paperless-ngx auto-tags documents, which makes it very easy to narrow down your search. I integrated it with Paperless AI a while ago, which utilizes a local LLM to analyze my entire collection.

Get ready to ask “WTF?” a lot. Spooky season is upon us, and traditional horror films like Bring Her Back (excellently gruesome) or The Evil Dead (stone cold classic) are obvious choices for a cozy movie night at home. But, if you're looking for something that's a bit more weird than wicked to get you in the Halloween spirit, I highly recommend the 1977 fantasy horror film House.Describing House is an exercise in futility. Here's the basic plot: A girl goes to spend the summer with her aunt after her widower father brings home a creepily sedate woman and declares that he intends to marry her. When she arrives at the countryside home, with six of her friends in tow, stra …Read the full story at The Verge.

Version History It's important to remember that two decades ago, text messages cost 10 cents. Each. Back when we measured our cell phone plans in minutes, and when even 3G connections felt fast, text messages were a huge business for wireless carriers and a huge expense for anyone whose kids learned to T9-type just a little too quickly. Then BlackBerry, nearing the peak of its powers, did something remarkable: it cut the carriers out entirely. Before WhatsApp and Telegram, before iMessage and RCS, there was BlackBerry Messenger. And while we don't use BBM anymore, we owe it a debt of gratitude. And a few dimes.In this episode of Version History, our new s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Gone are the days when Notion used to be, well, just Notion — the all-in-one workspace app every other person used to organize every aspect of their life. Similar to a lot of other companies that start with one simple tool that blows up, Notion eventually branched up and realized a single app wasn't enough.

For years, I ignored the security of my home network. I knew better than to click on sketchy links or visit dodgy websites, so I figured it didn't matter. But now that I have gotten married and my wife and I entertain guests much more often than I used to, I've started to discover the cracks in the armor of my network. My entire network can be put at risk by a single guest with a malware-infected laptop, including well-meaning but clueless parents.

Last week, for James Bond Day, Amazon revealed updated poster art for the movies. But fans immediately noticed that the super spy’s signature Walther PPK was conspicuously missing from every image. In some cases it had clearly and rather clumsily been Photoshopped out. Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan were left awkwardly holding thin air, in the posters for Dr. No and Goldeneye, respectively. Roger Moore seemingly received a body transplant on the cover Live and Let Die, and for A View to a Kill his arms were lengthened to inhuman proportions to coverup his firearm.Unsurprisingly fans went into a tizzy about the alteration. Some were simply astonished that Amazon would do this to such an iconic property, others accused the company of being “woke.” Since then the thumbnails have been quietly updated to use stills from the movies, though fans were quick to note that all the images chosen also gunless. At least one, the still for Skyfall, still appears to have been altered to remove a firearm. At the time of publication Amazon had yet to respond to a request for comment.On the plus side, Pierce Brosnan’s empty hand provides solid fodder for memes.

For years, Adobe Acrobat Pro has felt like the only way to get serious work done, whether you need to merge documents, edit text, sign an NDA, or convert files with reliability. However, that costly assumption is exactly why I regret spending money on it. Enter TinyWow: a powerful web-based tool that handles the vast majority of my PDF, image, and file conversion needs with zero installation and surprising speed.