Ted Cruz hosts a podcast for free — a Ted Cruz super PAC gets paid

Photo by Nathan Howard / Getty ImagesThis is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.I hope you all had a great weekend/eclipse/first moment of NYC sunshine. Today, I’ve got a look at Ted Cruz’s eyebrow-raising arrangement with iHeart and news on two new acquisitions. Let’s get into it.iHeart doesn’t pay Ted Cruz for hosting Verdict. It pays a Ted Cruz super PAC.This is certainly one way to raise campaign money. Sen. Ted Cruz hosts an iHeartMedia podcast, Verdict, which performs reasonably well among right-wing political shows. He does not get paid for hosting the podcast, but reporting in recent weeks from Forbes and the Houston Chronicle shows that iHeart has paid more than $630,000 to a super PAC that supports…

Matteo Lefevre
France

I tested an Android launcher that learns your habits and stops making you search for apps

Google's attempt at the stock flavor of Android found on Pixel phones has a unique charm since it is utterly devoid of bloat, perhaps except for the recently added AI bits.

Maciej Bouwknegt
Netherlands

More than a decade later, the team behind N++ is back with a multiplayer sequel

Back in 2015, the two-person studio Metanet released N++, a brutally hard 2D platformer that was a decade in the making, building off of previous releases dating back to the freeware Flash title N. At the time, cofounder Raigan Burns issued some famous last words: "We hope it's not another...

Michael Johnson
Chicago

Here comes new Siri again

Our first glimpse of the new AI Siri came all the way back at WWDC 2024. Apple has been on its back foot, AI-wise, for the past few years. But in a strange way, playing from behind might not be such a bad move. At WWDC on Monday, Apple appears...

Madeleine Riese
Germany

Proton Drive just got 3x faster, and Linux users will finally get what they’ve been asking for

It's easy to believe that there are only a handful of cloud storage services out there. Everyone knows about Google Drive, OneDrive, and the other big names, but there are alternatives you may be missing out on. Proton Drive is but one option, and people like using it as an...

William Garcia
Boston

Google’s $100 AI Ultra is still overpriced, and here’s what I use instead

When picking between AI model subscriptions, the focus is usually on what you can do with them, or how fast they can generate output, or a myriad of other benchmarks that directly compare how the model performs. And that's fine, the whole tech world is built on benchmarks as the...

John Doe
New York

ChatGPT just gave Free users a powerful defense against prompt injection attacks

The world of cybersecurity was almost totally reshaped with the introduction of LLMs. We saw both hackers and security experts use the new tech to develop bigger and better programs to fight one another, and the battle is still escalating to this day. However, the rise of AI also created...

Olivia Miller
Seattle

Final Fantasy VII’s remake trilogy will conclude with Revelation

Square Enix has officially announced the third and final game in its Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy: Final Fantasy VII Revelation. It will release on multiple platforms simultaneously - PC, PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and Nintendo Switch 2 - in spring 2027. In footage shown onstage at Summer...

Egon Becht
Germany

Grand Theft Auto VI is warping the video game release calendar

Who's afraid of the next GTA? Based on the last few days of Summer Game Fest, just about everyone. Grand Theft Auto VI hasn't been present at any of the keynote events, but its presence was felt every time a release date was announced. The month of November, when GTA...

Ronny Burkart
Germany

These 5 long-dead PC brands shaped modern computing but nobody remembers why they disappeared

PC hardware brands have come and gone, and the vast majority of the time, they don't go defunct due to bad products. They die from strategy errors, mismanagement, reputations that curdle, or simply getting swallowed by a bigger fish and never resurfacing. These 5 brands in the PC space are...

William Garcia
Boston

Old laptops are the home server upgrade nobody talks about, and they beat a Pi every time

Single-board computers sound exciting when you try to step into the world of home labbing. They seem like a good idea because you get a tiny computer that can surprisingly run real apps for an astonishingly low price. It's one of the reasons I also got into the world of...

Sophia Wilson
Atlanta

I used my spare PCIe slot for something boring, and it became my favorite PC upgrade

Before I got into the home server ecosystem, I’d only use PCIe slots to pair graphics cards to my gaming rigs and then forget about them altogether until my next PC building misadventure. But little did I know that every unoccupied PCIe slot was a free expansion header that’s as...

بهاره سهيلي راد
Iran

Obsidian Bases turned my notes into a database, and I cancelled my Notion plan

Notion has been off my radar for a while now. The open-source and local app world is where most of my note-taking and PKM stuff lives these days, and Obsidian is the one I'd point to as my favorite out of that batch. So Notion doesn't really come up for...

Andrea Christensen
Denmark

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