Senior News Editor
Richard Lawler joined The Verge as Senior News Editor in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. He's been a tech blogger since before the word was invented, and will never log off.
Hours after posting that a notarization submission for the Epic Games Store had been rejected by Apple, Epic and its CEO Tim Sweeney now say it has been un-rejected (a familiar situation here).
We’re still months away from EU residents actually getting the store on their iPhones and iPads, complete with Fortnite, but one barrier has been removed.
With one year completed for Instagram’s Twitter-like app, Meta illustrator Jez Burrows is showing off some of the other options that were on the table to represent Threads.
According to Not a Tesla App, the 2024.26 update in testing has features like parental controls that limit speed and acceleration or notify about late-night drives, an AQI symbol for poor local air quality, and scheduled charging.
It also adds built-in apps for Amazon Music and YouTube Music streaming in the US if you have Premium Connectivity or an active Wi-Fi connection.
Tech giants are rewriting the rules on web scraping, blaming unnamed third parties for disregarding robots.txt, and seemingly claiming the right to reuse anything posted anywhere for AI.
Now, Cloudflare is telling customers on its CDN that it can find and block AI bots that try to get around the rules.
The upshot of this globally aggregated data is that we can immediately detect new scraping tools and their behavior without needing to manually fingerprint the bot, ensuring that customers stay protected from the newest waves of bot activity.
Weeks after negotiations between Skydance and Paramount’s parent company, National Amusements, ended without a deal, the New York Times reports not only have they restarted, but “the two sides have reached a preliminary deal to create a new Hollywood giant.”
This follows a report from CNBC that Warner Bros. Discovery or Comcast could also be interested and Bloomberg saying Paramount might sell BET for $1.6 billion.
Updated: Added new reporting of a preliminary deal.
Google seems to have identified the “issue” locking up Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6A phones that were factory reset recently.
Now, there are two recommended ways shared by Google in the Pixel Phone Help forum to avoid the problem:
Leaving your device powered on and idle for 15 minutes after it has rebooted following a system update
Factory reset your device before taking the latest (June) system update.
Meta’s AI research team has a new system to create or retexture 3D objects based on a text prompt. It combines text-to-3D and text-to-texture generation models to go beyond AI-generated emoji or still images,
Their paper (pdf) claims 3D Gen’s output is “3× to 60× faster” and preferred by professional artists in comparison to alternatives.
Last week, an outage disconnected wireless customers trying to use international roaming, and now we know why,
Syniverse says the problem was not a cyberattack but a “misconfiguration” that flooded its network with a near-infinite loop of error messages. Things are finally back online, and AT&T says it will credit customers for the days — but we haven’t heard more from T-Mobile or Verizon.
Days before Boeing’s deferred prosecution agreement over 737 Max crashes would’ve expired, a door plug blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight, and the case was reopened. Now, attorneys for family members of the crash victims have been told federal prosecutors will seek a guilty plea from Boeing to resolve a criminal fraud charge, which one lawyer called “another sweetheart deal.”
The plea deal would include a $244 million fine, a three-year probation and an independent monitor appointed to oversee the company’s progress on safety and quality improvements.
[The Seattle Times]