The Tongass National Forest on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, Friday, July 2, 2021. | Photo: Getty Images The Trump administration wants to open up tens of millions of acres of national forest to development. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced yesterday that it’s rescinding a landmark rule that prevents road construction and timber harvesting in the last unfragmented stretches of national forest. The USDA says the move will boost timber production, while helping officials manage wildfire-prone lands. Conservation groups say this is simply an industry-led land grab that could level pristine forests and increase the risk of wildfire.“Make no mistake: this administration will do whatever it takes to sell off the places where we hunt, fish, recreate, and partake in long-standing traditions,” Andy Moderow, senior policy director at Alaska Wilderness League, said in a press statement. “Today’s announcement is a clear attempt to sell off public land for industrial-scale clear-cut logging.” “A clear attempt to sell off public land for industrial-scale clear-cut logging”In a move that’s likely to face legal challenges, the USDA is tossing out the “Roadless Rule” that Bill Clinton enacted back in 2001 and that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins called “overly restrictive” in a press release. It follows an executive order signed by President Trump in March to expand timber production. Getting rid of the roadless rule will remove protections from nearly 59 million acres of forest, or roughly 30 percent of National Forest System lands, according to the USDA.Some forests will be more affected than others. The rule impacts 92 percent of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the largest old growth forest still standing in the US. It’s been one of the most contested areas since Trump first rolled back roadless rule protections there in 2020 before the Biden administration restored them a few years later. The USDA also claims that 28 million acres of the land previously protected under the roadless rule are “at high or very high risk of wildfire.” But allowing new roads and logging there won’t lessen wildfire risk — it’ll do the opposite by raising the risk of forest mismanagement, environmental groups contend.“When they say we will open [forests] up for responsible management. I almost laughed out loud when I saw that …  It’s the height of irresponsible management to open them up to roads and logging,” says Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Wildfires are likely to start near roads, she explains — perhaps from a stray cigarette butt or campfire. Loggers also target mature trees that tend to be more resilient to fires rather than smaller saplings that are more likely to burn.“It’s also a very nuanced topic, and it’s completely being exploited by the timber industry and the current administration,” Spivak tells The Verge.There’s an old-school mentality to firefighting that the logging industry has advocated for historically to preserve areas where they harvest timber. The old strategy has been to suppress any kind of forest fire, which has inadvertently exacerbated blazes in certain forests by allowing dry vegetation to build up into loads of tinder. In parts of the western US, fires are a natural part of the landscape that clear out debris that might otherwise turn into fuel for larger infernos. The timber industry has also promoted the idea that thinning forests will lessen fire risk. “Thin is just a euphemism for log, it sounds nicer, but there’s no difference on the ground,” Spivak says. More modern fire-busting tactics emphasize making communities less likely to burn. Climate change has led to more widespread wildfires in the western US, but tackling that problem is another protective measure that the Trump administration has thrown by the wayside. Trees and plants naturally store carbon dioxide, keeping the greenhouse gas from heating our planet. Forests in the US sequester more than 800 million metric tons of carbon each year. But they can only keep doing that if they stay intact.

The Steam Deck is designed to be easy. It might be built upon Linux, which is notoriously user-unfriendly, and it might run into bugs that your Nintendo Switch would never hope to encounter. But the Steam Deck gives you enough room to play without allowing you to break anything. There are some cases where you need to go outside the boundary set by Valve, though.

The Mavic 4 Pro, folded, with a DJI RC2 controller. Is DJI exiting the US drone market? The company says no - but it would not explain to The Verge what has changed such that it can't even keep a single drone on shelves. When I walked into my local Best Buy store today, June 24th, there were zero DJI drones available to purchase. There wasn't even an empty spot for each drone to go. The entire DJI aisle had been swept clean of price tags, lockers, and products - save a handful of motorized gimbals, action cameras, a single lone RC controller, and an almost empty premium endcap spot where a flagship drone would normally go. "We're not really carrying DJI drones anymore because of the US-China thing," a store employee told me. Best Buy is not alone. DJI's own US webstore no longer has any drones in stock, as DroneDJ reported Monday. Despite DJI having an official presence on Amazon, all remaining drones there are sold by third parties with low or unknown quantities of stock. Nor will Best Buy's website be much more help than its physical store: As of Tuesday, its only remaining DJI drones are the last-gen Mavic 3 Pro, priced at $3,890, a refurbished version of that same Mavic 3 Pro, and a refurbished version of the 2022 DJI Av …Read the full story at The Verge.

In the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, a health products company called Xlear began advertising its saline nasal spray to people desperately searching for ways to protect themselves from a new virus. In its marketing, Xlear pointed to studies that it said supported the idea that ingredients in the spray could block viruses from sticking to the nasal cavity. Based on its interpretation of the science, Xlear promoted the product as one part of a "layered defense" against contracting covid.In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission, in a bipartisan vote, decided to sue Xlear for making allegedly "unsupported health claims," saying the company had "grossly misrepresented the purported findings and relevance of several scientific studies" in its advertising. Earlier this year, the Trump Justice Department, on the FTC's behalf, asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed with prejudice, though it didn't explain its reasoning. But Xlear still wanted its day in court. Now, it's suing the FTC because it wants a court to make it harder for the agency to attempt to go after health claims.Xlear is filing the lawsuit at a time where the government's standard operating procedures around both science a …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Lenovo Legion Go is one of those gaming handhelds that burst onto the scene with so much potential. While it's gotten better, the initial software experience was sorely lacking, leaving many to put this device on the back burner so that it could mature. Luckily, Valve decided to take things into its own hands, making SteamOS available for third-party devices.

I've been using OPNsense since the start of April, deployed on my Ugreen DXP4800 Plus NAS running Proxmox. What started as a dip into more advanced home networking has turned into an incredibly lucrative and interesting hobby, giving me more control over how I connect to the internet, how devices within my network are handled, and teaching me a lot about both along the way. Plus, it's allowed me to make my internet in general more secure, something that nobody should ever take for granted.

Before the multiverse, magic, or any of Marvel's streaming series were important parts of the studio's cinematic universe, there was Iron Man. After years of so-so movies, Iron Man reminded everyone that Marvel's big-screen adaptations could be amazing with the right creative teams and stars attached. Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark was the MCU's centerpiece and a prime example of how the House of Ideas could make box office record-breaking icons out of its lower-profile characters. A couple of the Iron Man films were terrible, sure, but they each played a role in shaping the larger story. And by spending so much time building up Iron Man's presence, Marvel ensured that audiences would be emotionally invested when the franchise ultimately killed him off.A desire to recapture that old Iron Man magic seemed to be part of the reasoning behind Marvel's baffling decision to bring Downey back as Doctor Doom for its upcoming Avengers features. On its face, the move felt like a sign that the studio was scrambling to win viewers back by playing the hits in a slightly different key. And while Iron Man being a Doctor Doom variant might wind up appealing to diehard fans who've followed along …Read the full story at The Verge.

Pokémon Emerald is a fantastic game, and I'm sure many are hit with a wave of nostalgia thinking about the older Pokémon games in general. These days, those older Pokémon games have an incredibly interesting modding scene, with plenty of fan-made modifications extending their lifespan decades later. However, that modding scene has also made it possible to store a file inside Pokémon Emerald. A file up to 10.8 KB in size, to be precise... and I tried it out.

From its compatibility with Ceph storage and a dedicated backup utility to native support for LXCs and ZFS pools, Proxmox has several advantages over its rivals. However, Proxmox’s massive community is its most underrated perk, as you’ll find plenty of third-party resources to unleash the full potential of this virtualization platform.

It might look like a BlackBerry Passport, but this keyboard phone runs Android. | Image: Unihertz Despite the demise of the BlackBerry, there’s still a demand for smartphones with physical keyboards, if successful products like the Clicks keyboard case are any indication. Unihertz, a Chinese company best known for its small Android handsets, has announced the Titan 2: a follow-up to its first BlackBerry Passport-inspired smartphone that adds modern upgrades like 5G, a faster processor, and Android 15.The company is making the Titan 2 available through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that has already surpassed its $100,000 funding goal. Full retail pricing for the phone is expected to be around $399, with shipping starting as early as October 2025, but the early backers can preorder one for $269.The Titan 2 is powered by a Dimensity 7300 8-core 2.0-2.6GHz processor paired with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Not only is it more powerful than Unihertz’s original Titan, which launched in 2019, but the Titan 2 is also sleeker. It’s slimmed down from the previous 16.65mm to 10.85mm, and it’s 235 grams, which is about 68 grams lighter than its predecessor. Its slightly smaller 5,050mAh battery supports 33W fast charging but not wireless charging.The 4.5-inch screen on the Titan 2 is slightly smaller than the original’s, but the resolution has been increased from 1,430 x 1,438 pixels to 1,440 x 1,440 pixels. That’s relatively low by today’s screen standards, but the Titan 2 is designed to be a productivity tool first and foremost.Unihertz has also included a second 2-inch screen on the device’s back, with a resolution of 410 x 502 pixels, making it useful for monitoring notifications, using widgets, or framing selfies. The screen is integrated into the Titan 2’s rear camera bump, which includes an 8MP telephoto camera and a 50MP main camera; up front, you’ll find a 32MP selfie camera.The company says the Titan 2’s QWERTY keyboard has been redesigned so that it delivers a “more comfortable, reliable, and versatile tactile typing experience.” Custom long-press and short-press shortcuts can be configured for all of the keyboard’s letter keys, and you can slide your finger across the keys’ surface to scroll.Other upgrades include Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, an infrared port, dual-band GPS, and an FM radio, while features like a fingerprint sensor and a pair of programmable shortcut buttons on the side have been carried forward from the original Titan.

Build a Rocket Boy has confirmed previous reports from IGN that it is undergoing layoffs less than a month after the tumultuous release of its first game MindsEye.The Verge reached out to Build a Rocket Boy to confirm the layoffs, but they did not respond. In a statement made to IGN, Build A Rocket Boy wrote:We can confirm that we have had to make the painful decision to notify our hardworking team of some internal changes at Build A Rocket Boy. While we are working to reassign roles for as many of those impacted by these changes as possible, sadly we are initiating a formal consultation process that may result in redundancies. This decision has not been made lightly, and we are committed to handling this process with transparency, fairness, and respect for all employees. We will provide further details to the team over the coming weeks.MindsEye is a new futuristic, single-player narrative action game. It was billed as the starting point in an epic, interconnected universe by its creator, former Rockstar Games producer Leslie Benzies, who’s known for his work on the GTA series. Its release earlier this month was plagued by poor reviews, reports of major glitches, and even sponsored streams being cancelled moments before they were set to start.MindsEye was supposed to be big. Build A Rocket Boy posted an in-depth roadmap filled with lots of new content updates stretched out over the rest of the year. There were also plans to add multiplayer and open-world elements with additional hopes that the game’s community would step up and provide their own labor.  “Hopefully some [players] will create compelling content we can then promote and make that part of our plans to push to other players,” Benzies said in an interview with gameindustry.biz.Build a Rocket Boy has not confirmed the number of employees affected although IGN reporting suggested that around 100 workers would be impacted out of a total headcount of roughly 500. The company said in its statement it remains committed to delivering on its promises for MindsEye. But that will be exceedingly difficult in a climate where any new game with this kind of scope is fighting against forever games like Fortnite and Roblox.

Mechanical keyboards are an involved hobby in which you often walk away with more than just a typing device and electronics-related experience, like soldering and circuit design. In the five years I've spent going down the rabbit hole, I've found there are several misconceptions surrounding the community, which often overshadow its advantages, such as a comfortable and personalizable typing experience. The biggest aspect that contributes to both these benefits, among others, is the key switches you install on the PCB and underneath the keycaps.