Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström confirmed on this week's earnings call that the company is trying to catch Spotify Family plan users who don't actually live together with a new QR code verification method that requires scanning the plan manager's phone. TechCrunch reports that in response to a question about the "crackdown," he called it a "routine improvement" instead:This is not as much a crackdown as it is actually a routine improvement of our verification methods for our Family Plan. Family Plan has existed for a long while. It has been around for, I think it is now close to 12, 13 years in Spotify history, and it makes up a pretty signi …Read the full story at The Verge.

An Xbox Elite controller. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge Fortune dropped a bombshell report on the future of gaming this week. According to the publication's Microsoft insiders, the next Xbox is projected to cost between $1,200 and $1,800 when it arrives in 2028. My first reaction: The next Xbox is dead on arrival. It's DOA. My second thought: Microsoft knows people won't pay that much. It couldn't possibly charge that much money if it wants next gen to be a success. "I wouldn't release it at all," former Microsoft exec Mike Ybarra recently said.My third thought: Didn't Microsoft already say out loud that it knows people won't pay that much? Didn't old Xbox boss Phil Spencer say "We're no …Read the full story at The Verge.

I write about AI coding agents a lot, and somewhere along the way I'd decided the model was doing all the heavy lifting. Swap Claude Code for Codex or Cursor, keep the same brain underneath, and you should get the same work back. So I put that to the test.

Meta has re-enabled Muse sharing after security researchers had reported that public conversation links could be easy to find. The researchers said they had been able to find Muse pages like a marketing company's internal revenue review and a small business owner's loan application.Researchers at Claroc reported earlier this week that Muse the web addresses for shared conversations from Muse were named after a conversation's title and written into public DNS. Ars Technica said Tuesday that Meta paused the sharing feature after it reached out about what was going on.In a post today on X, Meta's David Singleton says that "The underlying is …Read the full story at The Verge.

Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft, uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for "greater precision, consistency and control," according to an announcement on Thursday.Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social media posts and marketing content, it's also supposed to create realistic scenes, digital art, environmental imagery, and more. The model's two-stage sy …Read the full story at The Verge.

On October 13th, Brendan Carr's FCC gave itself a new power - it can block gadgets for containing any computer chip made by any company on its list of potential threats to national security. Today, it's exercising that power for the first time, blocking two gadgets because they contain "foreign surveillance chips," the FCC claims.The agency doesn't say which specific gadgets it blocked, and it didn't immediately respond to our request for comment, but it does name the "surveillance chip": it's a HiVision Hi3516CV610 UHD Smart Vision SoC, a chip that turns a raw camera sensor into a home security camera, a dashcam, or the like. It's often s …Read the full story at The Verge.

Since its launch, the Xbox 360 controller has been the gold standard for PC gaming (and, frankly, a bar every console controller needs to meet). If you've ever used one, it's not hard to see why; the Xbox 360 controller fits most hands comfortably — yes, even the tiny ones — and is incredibly durable.

I have lost count of how many productivity tools I have experimented with over the years. Notion was my go-to for organizing information. Obsidian Bases also looked promising, and Trello kept my projects moving with its intuitive Kanban boards and automations.

Meta has tweaked its business terms to remove language suggesting that it could freely train its AI models on news sites, like The Verge - but legal experts say these changes aren't enough to address their concerns. "This does nothing to restrict the 'associated with your products or services' [language] that would let Meta scrape entire sites," James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, tells Nieman Lab.Initially, Meta's new terms for business accounts appeared to give the company permission to train its AI on news sites. The terms, which go into effect October 30th, stated that Meta "may use any …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every company is suddenly an AI company. Compute is an asset. Cars are flying. We’ve been promised robots — again. It’s time again to dig through earnings reports, listen to investor calls, and call out the latest wins and losses from around the tech sector and what it means for where the companies go next. Sure, let’s smoosh SpaceX and Tesla together, who cares Just because Tesla’s Optimus is in production doesn’t mean it’s actually ready In Meta’s version of the future, I’ll have my Muse call your Muse Tesla says customers can add their own vehicles to the robotaxi fleet next year — will it happen? Meta to create a new class of shares to fund AI push Meta says it would’ve made over $22 billion if it didn’t have to pay a child safety settlement Not even flying Roadsters can lift Tesla’s flat Q3 revenues Tesla and SpaceX are discussing a possible merger, Musk says SpaceX will try catching Starship and its booster for first time, Musk says Netflix is telling investors not to worry, even though you’re watching less and less SpaceX says big AI growth fueled revenue jump

Demand for new PCs took a hit after months of price hikes, with Counterpoint Research reporting global PC shipments fell 21 percent year-over-year in Q3 2026. That's in line with earlier reports from IDC and Omdia. It's not just PCs, either - that same quarter, smartphone shipments also hit a 14-year low.Counterpoint linked the decline in PC shipments to higher component prices. Up until Q2 2026, PC shipments had been growing for over two years straight. But over the last several months, RAM, SSDs, and chips from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have all gotten more expensive, leading to price hikes on everything from MacBooks to Raspberry Pis. C …Read the full story at The Verge.

A lot of what you can do with your PC seems to be limited by the VRAM its GPU has. It decides what resolution your games run at, how large a video project you can edit without the timeline stuttering intermittently, and most recently, which local AI models you can self-host. A lot of these examples feel like hard limits, but there are workarounds for almost all of them.