Category: Technology

The Echo Pop is a tiny speaker with Alexa-enabled smarts, and is currently down to its best price. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Believe it or not, we’re now just a few days away from Christmas. Don’t panic if you’ve yet to start your holiday shopping, though! While it might be too…

Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images As people scramble for last-minute gifts and late-year bargains, everyone is double-checking their lists and figuring out the fastest way to get their purchases. Thankfully, many retailers are offering generous shipping policies for their products, with some offering free two-day shipping or even same-day delivery if you pay extra….

Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks. | Naveen Rao / The Verge For my last issue of the year, I’m focusing on the AI talent war, which is a theme I’ve been covering since this newsletter launched almost two years ago. And keep reading for the latest from inside Google and Meta this week….

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has filed a lawsuit against Zelle and three banks that own it — Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase — claiming they failed “to protect consumers from widespread fraud.” Zelle is a payment network designed to compete with payment…

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a new “voluntary national framework for the evaluation and oversight” of autonomous vehicles, a bureaucratic first step that could eventually open the floodgates for fully driverless cars. But there’s a twist: the agency wants self-driving car companies to…

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge For the last day of ship-mas, OpenAI previewed a new set of frontier “reasoning” models dubbed o3 and o3-mini. The Verge first reported that a new reasoning model would be coming during this event. The company isn’t releasing these models today (and admits final results may evolve with more…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is taking a tougher stance on clickbait, saying it will remove content with titles or thumbnails that promise viewers “something that the video doesn’t deliver,” as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. This change will “slowly” roll out in India first, according to YouTube’s blog post, but will “expand…

Sanwa Supply’s new USB-C cable’s design solves a common point of cable failure. | Image: Sanwa Supply Japanese accessory maker Sanwa Supply has released a new 240W USB-C cable with a flexible design that could help prevent damage, as spotted by Tom’s Hardware. The USB-C connectors on either end of the cable can rotate 360…

The iPhone 14 and 14 Plus lack USB-C ports. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Starting December 28th, all new phones sold in the European Union must have USB-C. And while that deadline is still about a week away, Apple has begun pulling the iPhone SE, iPhone 14, and iPhone 14 Plus —…

Image: Netflix In Squid Game, schoolyard games are turned into nightmares, as players compete to survive and — if they’re lucky — earn a massive cash prize. But in Unleashed, a new mobile spinoff that’s part of the streamer’s fledgling gaming efforts, those games are fun. It’s a strange experience that sands off much of…