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Longtime Verge readers might recall the unusual story of how the music video for a Janet Jackson song, “Rhythm Nation,” could cause certain Windows laptops to crash just by being around when it’s playing. Now, in a blog post spotted by PCWorld, Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has revealed that a filter created to deal with the problem stuck around until “at least Windows 7.”

For those not familiar: in 2022, Chen wrote a pair [of posts](https://dev

Apple is planning to shuffle its iPhone release schedule next year as it releases the first foldable iPhone to make things more manageable, reports The Information. The plan is for the foldable to come out with the iPhone 18 Pro and “Air” models, while the standard iPhone 18 gets shunted back to the spring of 2027, releasing alongside an iPhone 16E follow-up, according to the outlet.

With the slimmer model in the lineup and a foldable expected in 2026, The Information says Apple needs to shuffle things around to keep a ballooning six-iPhone lineup manageable. As for what the foldab

The Trump administration has released a proposal to cut about a quarter of NASA’s 2026 budget, slashing both International Space Station crew sizes and the amount of research done there. At the same time, it sets up new funding that would likely benefit Elon Musk’s SpaceX by prioritizing human missions to Mars, and refocuses on “beating China back to the Moon.”

The suggested cuts are part of President Trump’s budget proposal for next year. It would slash $508 million from the ISS, cutting its crew size and focusing its “reduced research capacity … on efforts critical to the Moon and Mars exploration programs.” It also cuts $2.265 billion from space science missions, and includes terminating things like the Mars Sample Return missi

While we all wait to find out what effect the upcoming — well, maybe upcoming — tariffs will have on prices, many of us are making mental lists of some of the items we might need that, hopefully, won’t demand a bank loan to be affordable. Last year, we asked the staff members here at The Verge whether they had any favorite items that cost $50 or less. This year, because things are getting more expensive, we thought about upping the limit to $75, but it turns out that our staff has a good instinct for finding great, low-cost tech gadgets, cooking gear, tool kits, and other items that not only don’t

The Gigabyte Aorus Master 16 is a gaming laptop, and it sure looks like one. It's an inch thick, weighs 5.5 pounds, and is awash in RGB lighting, stylized text, and curved plastic.

This Aorus Master offers powerful hardware and a lovely high-res, high-refresh OLED display. It's the first of several laptops we're reviewing with the GeForce RTX 5080, Nvidia's second-fastest laptop graphics card of this generation. At $3,100, it's actually a few hundred dollars less than similarly powerful models from Razer, Lenovo, and Asus, and over a thousand dollars less than laptops

Polygon, The Verge's former sister site dedicated to covering gaming and entertainment, is now owned by Valnet, a company that owns more than 27 different brands covering gaming, entertainment, sports, travel, and more. The transition is, let's say, ongoing: a day after the acquisition, the site still said it was a Vox Media property, and the site's coverage continued more or less uninterrupted.

But Valnet has indeed acquired Polygon, so to learn more about the deal, why the company acquired it, and the future of the site, I got on the phone with Valnet's head of mergers and acquisitions, Rony Arzoumanian.

Polygon is a "triple-A gaming brand" that Valnet has been of "high interest" for "some time," Arzoumanian said. Valnet's gaming portfolio also inclu

Google is notifying parents using its Family Link parental controls via email that their kids will soon be able to access Gemini AI Apps on their monitored Android devices, The New York Times reports.

The company says kids will be able to use Gemini to do things like help them with homework or read them stories. Like its Workplace for Education accounts, Google says children’s data will not be used to train AI. Still, in the email, Google warns parents that “Gemini can make mistakes,” and kids “may encounter content you don’t want them to see.”

Besides sillie

Sam Altman and Elon Musk aren't just competing in the AI race; they both have ambitions to build Silicon Valley's holy grail: an "everything" super app encompassing finance, social media, gaming, and more.

Earlier this week, I got a peek at Altman's plan from a cavernous event space on the northern edge of San Francisco. He was not there as the CEO of OpenAI, but as the co-founder and chairman of Tools for Humanity, the parent company of a cryptocurrency called Worldcoin that's now available in the US. Worldcoin is distributed to people who scan their eyes at one of the startup's orbs, which are rolling out in retail stores across America. At the same tim

On the evening of April 30th, the hottest ticket in San Francisco was a buzzy crypto startup's coming-out party at a warehouse-like complex on the northern edge of the city. It had all the makings of an event you'd only find near Silicon Valley: Anderson Paak, champagne, and a bunch of eye-scanning orbs.

Onstage, Sam Altman and co-founder Alex Blania announced that the cryptocurrency Worldcoin is coming to the US for the first time, along with a bevy of orbs. The idea is straight out of science fiction. It may be too far-fetched to work, but given Altman's involvement, it's something worth paying attention to.

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Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

The DOJ wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that [Google has an illegal monopoly in search](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-s

Nothing cements your relationship status with a new hobby like buying a special bag for it.

Hiking? Cycling? Photography? You bet there's a special bag designed for just that. Getting into a new thing and accumulating gear for it is a joy. An important and underappreciated subcategory of that enjoyment is finding a special bag to hold all of those gadgets. Finding and using that perfect bag - with all the right compartments, hooks, and snaps - is its own particular delight. And it's high time we gave it the recognition it deserves.

There are some purchases that just can't hold up the hopes we have for them. Who among us hasn't stood in line to check out at Uniqlo thinking "These are the wide-leg jeans that are going to change everything fo

Apple and Anthropic are building an AI-powered coding tool that will work in Xcode, Apple’s code-writing tool, Bloomberg reports. A new version of Xcode will integrate Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model to “write, edit and test code on behalf of programmers,” Bloomberg says.

Apple is slowly rolling this new version out internally initially and apparently has not decided if it will release it to the public. Developers will be able to enter requests in a chat interface, test user interfaces, and help manage bug fixing, according to Bloomberg. Apple and Anthropic didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge.

Big tech CEOs have touted

A beta build of Android 16 contains an early version of Google’s new Android Desktop Mode that, in the future, could let users simply plug their smartphone into a monitor and use it like a laptop or desktop computer.

The new feature was shared by Android tinkerer Mishaal Rahman reporting for Android Authority. Rahman manually enabled Android Desktop Mode under developer options on his Google Pixel 8 Pro running the latest Android 16 beta. After plugging it into a USB-C compatible monitor, it immediately displays a PC-like interface on the external display, as you can see as in his video:

It looks similar

Microsoft increased the price of Xbox Series consoles by up to $100 earlier this week, but thankfully, not all retailers have raised the price (yet). Dell, for instance, is still offering the digital-only Xbox Series X (1TB) for $449.99, saving you $100 on the new MSRP. The smaller, 512GB Xbox Series S is also available at Walmart for just $273.99 ($106 off), while the 1TB model is going for $347 ($83 off) at [Walmart](https://www.w

The end-to-end encryption (E2EE) available on the WhatsApp messaging app gets you off to a good start when it comes to privacy and security. It means no one else - hackers, law enforcement, or Meta staff - can see your chats. Your stuff stays just between you and the person or persons you're chatting with.

On top of that, the app comes with a variety of other features for locking down your data as tightly as possible. Get all of these precautions in place, and you're as well protected as you can be when it comes to keeping your conversations private.

Stop others from exporting your chats

If you want to export your chat, it's easy to have it served up in a plain text file, complete with m

The 8BitDo Ultimate C Wired Controller for Xbox and PC is on sale at Amazon for $19.61 (44 percent off), its lowest price to date. But the sale is only for the dark green model. The dark gray and orange alternatives are only available for $31.49 (10 percent off) at checkout. Don’t get mad at me! I’m just trying to save you money while Microsoft is out here increasing the prices of everything, including its controllers.

The 8BitDo Ultimate features Hall e

If you live in the US, congratulations - you are now a foot soldier in what has been called "the dumbest trade war in history." And if you live in one of the top three countries that trade most with the US (Canada, Mexico, and China), apologies: you are part of this as well.

Donald Trump loves tariffs despite regularly misrepresenting how they work, and after months of saying he would impose them on goods coming into the US, he made good on his promise this week: there is [a 10 percent tax](https:

Fubo is continuing its quest to cut a deal with sports broadcasters that can bring upon the holy grail of sports bundles later this year, just in time for football season.

As reported by Deadline, Fubo CEO David Gandler said on an earnings call on Friday that the company is working hard to line up content from other broadcasters outside of Disney’s umbrella of sports content. When one analyst asked about how progress is going with a deal, Gandler only said that the service is a key “growth opportunity.”

“It is critical for Fubo subscribers that we are able to negotiate content licensing agreements at fair rates and terms. Our goal remai

The delay of Grand Theft Auto VI into next year is a big deal. The game is the follow-up to arguably the biggest entertainment release of all time, one that originally debuted well over a decade ago. Even if GTAV is still going strong, now spanning multiple console generations and with a surprisingly enduring online component, the hype for its sequel has been steadily building since 2013. Adding to the sheer amount of time is the mystery — we still know very little about what GTAVI actually is. So it’s a good time to revisit what we do know; namely, [the single trailer re

We hit the 100-day mark in Donald Trump’s second presidential term this week and, well — a lot of things have happened in that time.

Verge policy editor Adi Robertson has been running a series of stories about the impact of these 100 days on the site all week. They’re great; we’ve linked them below and in the show notes. And so I wanted to have Adi on the show to talk about six big themes — six big stories we’ve been following — to see what has and hasn’t gone the way we might have expected.

Up front are a couple of the biggest. First, the tariff situation has thrown a wrench in basically the entire global economy. It’s [no