The Xtra Muse and the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Last year, we told you about Xtra, the company that lets DJI sneak its popular cameras into the US, and Skyrover, a brand seemingly selling DJI drones in disguise. They're just two of the many firms DJI is suspected of starting to skirt the United States' foreign drone ban.But it appears the FCC is finally doing something about "DJI front companies," as watcher Konrad Iturbe dubbed them last year. Today, the FCC is fining eight of them $25,000 each - and giving them until Monday, July 20th, just 10 calendar days, to answer the FCC's questions before the agency takes further action.Those companies include Cogito Tech, Fixaxo Technology, …Read the full story at The Verge.

When I was getting to grips with Linux after using Windows for decades, I learned about immutable distros. They looked interesting at first, but the more I looked at them, the less I understood why people even bothered. The downsides looked massive, and the upsides seemed minimal at best.

When Niantic dropped the first Pokémon Go trailer in 2015, it was hard to grasp how a bunch of players could work together to catch a pokémon like Mewtwo. But this week at the game's 10th anniversary event in New York City, Pokémon Go showed the world how it's done. Almost 2,000 players (many of them Pokémon Go influencers) packed into Times Square on Thursday evening to participate in a special battle. It was cool to see Times Square briefly go dark before the billboards began lighting up, revealing an escaped Mewtwo Mega Evolving, and it was even wilder to see people living the fantasy depicted in the game's first trailer. Even though mo …Read the full story at The Verge.

I used to think the right streaming box was always one purchase away. I tried the polished ones, the cheap ones, the ones with great remotes, and the ones that promised every app I could possibly need. Each had something I liked, but there was always some weird compromise waiting for me once I started using it every day. The hardware usually wasn’t bad, but the control never really felt like mine.

Recently, Sony announced that from September 1st, 2026, 551 digital titles, including movies like Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, and Paddington, will vanish from the personal libraries of UK- and Europe-based PlayStation Store users with absolutely zero financial compensation or refunds. This rug being pulled out from under us exposes the true myth behind digital ownership.

Nvidia's push for AI has pervaded every aspect of gaming. Over the years, I've seen the pitch change from it being an "acceptable trade-off" against performance uplift to the bold claim that DLSS now matches or beats native resolution and hands you a stack of free frames at it. It's always been the kind of claim that's easy to repeat and harder to verify, so I decided to stop taking it on faith.

Apple has sued OpenAI, alleging that engineers stole Apple secrets to advance the AI startup's hardware plans. In its complaint, Apple says it uncovered "a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple." In addition to OpenAI, the lawsuit also names IO Products - Jony Ive's hardware startup, which OpenAI bought in 2025 - along with two specific employees, Tang Tan (OpenAI's chief hardware officer) and Chang Liu (who joined OpenAI from Apple in January).An Apple spokesperson shared this statement with 9to5Mac:At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the b …Read the full story at The Verge.

I once created a Video Overview with a style I thought looked nice in the picker. Heritage, with its bold colors and dramatic look. But the visuals kept pulling my eyes away from what the video was actually trying to teach me. NotebookLM’s Video Overview styles did more than just “decorate” my videos; they made me think about whether the style was really serving the video's purpose. And because Video Overviews have more than one style, I can choose the one that fits the person watching. The catch is that the style picker's little thumbnails don't tell you which one that is. I had to find out the more expensive way.

Back in late 2020/early 2021, both Nvidia and AMD launched Resizable BAR (ReBAR), or Smart Access Memory (SAM), which was meant to give the GPU a boost in gaming performance. Although the feature had been part of the PCIe standard since the late 2000s, it had gone largely unused until the RX 6000 and RTX 30 series formally rolled it out. ReBAR doesn't exactly increase your GPU's raw performance, but optimizes VRAM usage and the CPU-GPU communication to ensure your gaming performance isn't held back. Still, five years after ReBAR became common on modern PCs, I still come across customer builds and friends' PCs where it's mysteriously disabled in the firmware. Gamers either don't know about it or aren't aware that it's disabled on their systems. Since the performance difference isn't drastic enough to alert you that something's off, it can go undetected for years. On Intel GPUs, ReBAR is basically non-negotiable, so you should confirm if it's enabled in your UEFI.

Department of Homeland Security. | Image: The Verge Advocates are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security release bodycam footage of the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who was killed by ICE officers in Houston during a traffic stop earlier this week. But DHS claims the agents involved in the shooting weren't wearing body cameras because of the lengthy government shutdown that prevented ICE and Customs and Border Protection from receiving additional federal funding for 76 days - a shutdown that was itself spurred by congressional bickering over reforms to DHS after federal agents killed two civilians earlier this year.Two competing narratives have em …Read the full story at The Verge.

General-purpose local models are what most people reach for, and that includes me. They handle everything that isn't code, which is basically the entire day if you're not a developer. All I need most of the time is just chat, quick research, working through an idea out loud, doc synthesis, and so on.

AI models are getting better at understanding and summarizing documents, but they don't always produce the same results. I wanted to see how much the choice of model actually matters when working with a lengthy research report. So I ran the same test using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, then compared the summaries they produced. The differences weren't just about a single factor. They were about the usefulness of the final output, and one model clearly stood out for my workflow.