Lead Hacker

Kallie Plagge, The Verge ’s senior copy editor, has been working in the media for over 10 years now, mainly at gaming websites. She was primarily a video game critic for a lot of that time and was the reviews editor at GameSpot for about three years, before eventually becoming the senior copy editor at Polygon . “I was there for three years before Vox Media sold the brand, and I was fortunate enough to be offered the same role at The Verge ,“ she explains. We asked Kallie to tell us about her home office setup. That looks like a great space. Where in your home is it? I currently live with my parents, and they were generous enough to give me a separate office space. It’s next to my bedroom, and then my dad’s office is just down the hall. When I lived here during the covid lockdown, I worked from the dining room table, so it’s a big upgrade! Could you tell us about your L-shaped desk? It looks like you have separate working and gaming spaces . I was intent on getting an L-shape...

The Insta360 Link 2 is more than just a webcam — it’s a smart camera that actively follows your movements whether you’re presenting, streaming, or pacing during a call. It’s also packed with an impressive array of productivity features. And right now, it’s available at a new all-time low of $149.99 ($50 off) at Amazon . The webcam is a modest upgrade over the original Link , which was our favorite 4K webcam when it launched in 2022 , boasting all the same impressive features with slight refinements. Like the original, it offers sharp, detailed 4K/30fps video even in low-light settings. But what really sets the Link 2 apart is its motorized three-axis gimbal, which keeps you perfectly centered in frame as you move around the room. The Link 2 also comes with a magnetic mount, letting you attach it to a wider range of surfaces without the need for additional mounting gear. In addition to its exceptional tracking abilities, the Link 2 features an AI-powered framing tool that automatica...

Google’s watchOS Calendar app isn’t as robust as the Apple Watch’s native one. | Image: Apple After retreating from watchOS several years ago, Google now only offers a handful of apps for the Apple Watch. That list is expanding to four in total with the launch of a new Google Calendar app rolling out alongside the existing iPhone version , as spotted by 9to5Google . Apple’s native calendar app on watchOS  includes customization options that let you see alternate views, like a week summary and a full month. But the Google Calendar app only shows a week’s worth of events on your Apple Watch with their time and location, as well as Google Tasks in a simple list view showing the day of the week in the upper corner as you scroll. You can click on an event to see additional details, but it’s very limited. You’re prompted to instead “Open Calendar on your phone to view more” if you want more specifics. According to 9to5Google , the app’s functionality is very similar to what’s offe...

Joby Aviation is getting ready to take flight. The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) company has delivered its first production aircraft to Dubai, where it plans to launch a commercial air taxi service in early 2026. Joby, which has successfully completed multiple flight tests with a pilot onboard, says it has begun in-market testing ahead of the anticipated launch of commercial operations. It’s a significant milestone for Joby, which has been developing the technology to power its multi-rotor aircraft since 2009. And its a significant milestone for the fledgling air taxi sector, which has been leaning on hype and promises for the future of air travel to attract investors and potential clients while its aircraft trudge through years of safety testing and certification. Dubai is aiming to become a launchpad for advanced air mobility, granting Joby a six-year exclusive operating agreement last year. The agreement, signed at the World Governments Summit, provides Joby wit...

Serious security flaws have been found in hundreds of Brother printer models that could allow attackers to remotely access devices that are still using default passwords. Eight new vulnerabilities, one of which cannot be fixed by patching the firmware, were discovered in 689 kinds of Brother home and enterprise printers by security company Rapid7 .  The flaws also impact 59 printer models from Fujifilm, Toshiba, Ricoh, and Konica Minolta, but not every vulnerability is found on every printer model. If you own a Brother printer, you can check to see if your model is affected here . The most serious security flaw, tracked under CVE-2024-51978 in the National Vulnerability Database , has a 9.8 “Critical” CVSS rating and allows attackers to generate the device’s default admin password if they know the serial number of the printer they’re targeting. This allows attackers to exploit the other seven vulnerabilities discovered by Rapid7, which include retrieving sensitive information, ...

Spotify is adding new personalization features to Discover Weekly, the popular and influential playlist streamed by millions of users. The regularly updated playlist will now have buttons for genres like pop, R&B, and funk at the top, allowing users to tell Spotify what they want more of. The Discover Weekly playlist is one of the more noteworthy things Spotify has introduced: the company says songs on the playlist have been streamed more than 100 billion times. The weekly mixtape — generated via Spotify algorithms — promised to introduce users to new music that they might enjoy, pulling from listener data. But more recently, there have been complaints that Discover Weekly playlists, meant for finding new music, were spitting out the same songs, and that the platform’s systems weren’t accurately classifying genres. (Spotify told Business Insider in May that it had updated genre accuracy and the Discover Weekly recommendation algorithm.) In addition to the genre options, the D...

The insights are more repackaging data you already know with common sense advice than deductive analysis. After nearly a decade of wearables testing, I've amassed a truly terrifying amount of health and fitness data. And while I enjoy poring over my daily data, there's one part I've come to loathe: AI summaries. Over the last two years, a deluge of AI-generated summaries has been sprinkled into every fitness, wellness, and wearable app. Strava introduced a feature called Athlete Intelligence , pitched as AI taking your raw workout data and relaying it to you in "plain English." Whoop has Whoop Coach , an AI chatbot that gives you a "Daily Outlook" report summarizing the weather, your recent activity and recovery metrics, and workout suggestions. Oura added Oura Advisor , another chatbot that summarizes data and pulls out long-term trends. Even my bed greets me with summaries every morning of how its AI helped keep me asleep every night. Each platfo...

A screenshot from Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. | Image: Pocket Trap / PM Studios, Inc When I was a kid, there was a moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with yo-yos. I never got better than just being able to make the yo-yo go up and down. But with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo , I could pretend like I was halfway decent - all while playing a silly game that feels like a spiritual successor to the Game Boy Advance titles I loved growing up. Pipistrello is a top-down adventure game, in which you use your yo-yo to attack enemies and traverse the world. You play as Pippit, a goofy bat who has dreams of yo-yo excellence but is also a freeloader who relies on financial support from his wealthy aunt, an energy magnate. In the opening minutes of the game, the aunt gets merged with your yo-yo as four big baddies steal her Mega Batteries, and your goal is to get the batteries back and help free her. The game is quite charming. Pippit is a lovable doofus, and you'll al...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 88, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy heat dome , and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .) This week, I've been reading about crypto crimes and egg thieves and Gap , watching Last Breath and Tires and The Four Seasons , testing the super simple Min browser, learning a ton from The Magic of Code , playing too much Ridiculous Fishing , vibe-coding a tracker for baby feedings, finally winning a Knockout Tour in Mario Kart World , lusting after the new Teenage Engineering scooter , taking photos with Project Indigo , and listening to Star Wars Lofi all day every day. This is the last Installer for me this summer! It's baby time. Starting next week, you'll be in the very good hands of Jay Peters , who has some awesome stuff lined up for you. He'll be in the Installer inbox, so please, send him emails, hit him up with questio...

Recalibrate your relationship with phone photography. Adobe's Project Indigo is a camera app built by camera nerds for camera nerds . It's the work of Florian Kainz and Marc Levoy, the latter of whom is also known as one of the pioneers of computational photography with his work on early Pixel phones. Indigo's basic promise is a sensible approach to image processing while taking full advantage of computational techniques. It also invites you into the normally opaque processes that happen when you push the shutter button on your phone camera - just the thing for a camera nerd like me. If you hate the overly aggressive HDR look, or you're tired of your iPhone sharpening the ever-living crap out of your photos, Project Indigo might be for you. It's available in beta on iOS, though it is not - and I stress this - for the faint of heart. It's slow, it's prone to heating up my iPhone, and it drains the battery. But it's the most thoughtfully designed came...

The Supreme Court has upheld a Texas law requiring age verification to access adult websites, saying despite First Amendment claims, the law “only incidentally burdens the protected speech of adults.” The ruling, in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton , opens the door to age-gating in states nationwide. The court ruled in Texas’ favor by a margin of six to three — with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting — and the majority opinion was delivered by Clarence Thomas. “The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective,” writes Thomas. “That power includes the power to require proof of age before an individual can access such speech. It follows that no person — adult or child — has a First Amendment right to access such speech without first submitting proof of age.” FSC v. Paxton , argued in January , concerns the Texas law HB 1181, which requires sites with ...

Microsoft's "This is an Xbox" marketing campaign in November always felt a little too early. If you ask a friend or family member what an Xbox is, the response is likely going to be "it's a game console." Xbox is ingrained in popular culture as a box under your TV that you play games on, but Microsoft's ads over the past six months have been attempting to redefine the Xbox as a platform that spans across phones, laptops, TVs, handheld gaming PCs, and even VR headsets. The ads did a great job of drawing attention to the platform, but the perception of the Xbox brand as just a console is still a huge challenge that Microsoft needs to overcome if its latest strategy is going to be successful. I can already sense some trouble ahead. Ever since Microsoft unveiled its ROG Xbox Ally handheld devices earlier this month, I keep hearing from friends that are asking about an "Xbox handheld." YouTubers with millions of followers have positioned these ...

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen. The simplified BSOD looks a lot more like the black screen you’d see during a Windows update. But it will list the stop code and faulty system driver that you wouldn’t always see during a crash dump. IT admins shouldn’t need to pull crash dumps off PCs and analyze them with tools like WinDbg just to find out what could be causing issues. “This is really an attempt on clarity and providing better information and allowing us and customers to really get to what the core of the issue is so we can fix it faster,” says David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at M...

Control. In the quiet city of Espoo, a short drive west from Helsinki in Finland, is an unassuming building that's home to one of the most confounding studios in games. Remedy Entertainment is known for getting weird . It started with the meta horror of Alan Wake , and has since expanded with Control , a game that turns a bureaucratic government office into a sinister and unsettling battleground. Their worlds merge the surreal and the mundane - which is not a bad description of Remedy itself. On the day I visited, the studio's energy was relaxed and subdued - in true Finnish style, there are even multiple onsite saunas - and frankly a little boring, especially for a creative team known for the likes of the mind-bending Ashtray Maze or " Old Gods of Asgard " musical. But that contrast is also one of the keys to Remedy's recent success. In the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, the video game industry has experienced studio closures , persistent layoffs , corporat...

Some products like the Philips Hue Play Wall Washer light already cost more in the US. You’ll soon have to pay more for various Philips Hue smart lighting and security gadgets if you live in the US. After vaguely notifying customers that prices will “go up” on July 1st in a promotional message, Philips Hue’s parent company Signify has confirmed that it’s inflating prices across the Philips Hue portfolio “as a direct result of tariffs.” “We remain committed to providing consumers with high-quality products and features that make smart lighting extraordinary,“ Signify said in a statement to Hueblog . ”Signify reserves the right to modify prices based on new or additional tariffs becoming effective in the future.” Signify hasn’t provided updated pricing or specified exactly which products will be affected, but its statement suggests the changes may impact the entire Hue lineup. The company is already starting to charge US customers more for products like the new $219.99 Hue Play Wal...

Roblox is introducing two new systems that are designed to further encourage creators to bring players onto the social games platform on a regular basis. The systems, part of what Roblox is calling Creator Rewards, will roll out beginning July 24th. One is the Daily Engagement Reward program, which gives Roblox creators 5 Robux for an “active spender” on the platform who spends at least 10 minutes in their experience in one day. 5 Robux isn’t a lot on its own — depending on where you buy Robux , that can translate to about five cents — but if an experience brings back thousands or millions of people every day, that could add up quickly. Roblox may also change the payout in the future, it says in a blog post . To be eligible for the reward, a creator’s experience must also be one of the first three experiences an active spender (which the platform defines as a user who has spent at least $9.99 in the last 60 days) launches each day. The choice to offer these payouts after the firs...

The House of Representatives has banned staff members from using WhatsApp on government devices, according to a report from Axios . In an email viewed by the outlet, the House’s chief administrative officer (CAO) tells staffers that the Office of Cybersecurity “has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk” because of a “lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks.” The email says that congressional staff members can’t download or use the mobile, desktop, or web browser version of WhatsApp on any government device. “If you have a WhatsApp application on your House-managed device, you will be contacted to remove it,” the email reads. Meta communications director Andy Stone pushed back against the decision in a post on X , saying the company disagrees with the CAO’s characterization of WhatsApp “in the strongest possible terms.” Stone adds that messages on WhatsApp are end-to-end encrypted by default, meaning third parties — no...

Update, June 23rd: Best Buy has sold out of the standalone console, but it still has stock of the $499.99 Mario Kart World bundle . The Nintendo Switch 2 has been difficult to find in stock since its June 5th launch, though restocks are beginning to ramp up. If you’re looking for one, head over to Best Buy’s site or use the app. Those who have a free account can get the standalone system ($449.99) and a console bundle ($499.99) that includes Mario Kart World available. The latest Mario Kart costs $79.99 on its own, so picking up a system with the game included will end up saving you $30 compared to buying them separately.  The Switch 2 has become the fastest-selling console of all time, having sold over 3.5 million units in its first four days. The system is a hybrid handheld console just like the original Nintendo Switch, which has gone on to sell over 150 million units after eight years. The Switch 2 can play most digital and physical games released for the first Nint...

It took me a long time to appreciate Death Stranding . I'm not even sure I fully got it after my initial playthrough, which was equal parts mesmerizing and dull . The game, in which you play as a postapocalyptic delivery man in a world ravaged by a breach with the afterlife, demands a lot from players. The gameplay is fiddly and frustrating, and the storyline is often inscrutable, at times seeming to make no sense. While it borrows elements from walking sims and stealth games, there's nothing like Death Stranding , and so it's hard to calibrate your expectations accordingly. It really wasn't until the end of the game that I felt I finally understood what director Hideo Kojima and his team were going for. And with all of that out of the way, playing the sequel was a more rewarding experience. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a direct follow-up. You once again control Sam (played by Norman Reedus), who now is living in hiding with his adopted child, Lou, after previ...

Its certainly an aquired taste. | Image: nothing_fan_account While Nothing is gearing up to officially unveil its first over-ear headphones next week, leaked images and videos have given us a good idea of what they look like. The Nothing Headphone 1 sports an unusual design that appears consistently across leaks from multiple sources, featuring a squircle earcup with the company’s signature transparent elements and support for what looks like a 3.5mm audio cable. Nothing announced in a video last month that it would be launching over-ear headphones in “summer 2025,” but remained largely tight-lipped about what to expect. What little was teased — including Nothing’s Tom Ridley saying the company was making “a more interesting looking pair of headphones that say something about you,” and Adam Bates suggesting its buttons would feature distinct designs for each control function — appears to have been realized in these design leaks. View Link Images shared by Nothing_fan_blog on In...

A vehicle Tesla is using for robotaxi testing purposes on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, US, on Sunday, June 22, 2025. Tesla finally did the damn thing. The company launched its hotly anticipated robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22nd — and we’re now starting to see some of the first reactions roll in. But first, we have to get a few important caveats out of the way. Tellingly, the service is not open to the general public, nor is it completely “unsupervised,” as Elon Musk once promised . The vehicles will include Tesla-employed “safety monitors” in the front passenger seat who can react to a dangerous situation by hitting a kill switch. Other autonomous vehicle operators would place safety monitors in the driver or passenger seats, but typically only during the testing phase. Tesla is unique in its use of safety monitors during commercial service. The rides are limited to a geofenced area of the city that has been thoroughly mapped by the company. And in ...

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware. OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory. The announcement blog post and a nine-minute video featuring Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are no longer available. The blog post from Ive and Altman announcing the deal said, “The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco.” OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood: This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the...

Andru Marino is an audio and video producer at The Verge . “I make videos on our YouTube / TikTok / Instagram channels, and have produced our podcasts like Vergecast , Decoder , and Why’d You Push That Button? ” He also keeps a lot of notes, and his latest favorite places to keep them are the Triangle and Sidekick notebooks. I asked him about them. Where did you first hear about these notebooks? I don’t really remember when I first saw the Triangle Notebook. It was probably an Instagram ad. I had kept a link to the notebook’s website in a browser tab on my phone for a few months and kept thinking about it.  When did you buy it, and what went into the decision? I bought it in April, and what really attracted me was how weird it was. Why does the notebook need to be a triangle? Oh, it opens up into a square! Wow, I love that! The main reason I use paper is to doodle, and I thought this shape would inspire me to doodle differently.  And then I saw this company also made...

Monotype is keen for you to know what AI might do in typography. As one of the largest type design companies in the world, Monotype owns Helvetica, Futura, and Gill Sans - among 250,000 other fonts. In the typography giant's 2025 Re:Vision trends report , published in February, Monotype devotes an entire chapter to how AI will result in a reactive typography that will "leverage emotional and psychological data" to tailor itself to the reader. It might bring text into focus when you look at it and soften when your gaze drifts. It could shift typefaces depending on the time of day and light level. It could even adapt to reading speeds and emphasize the important portions of online text for greater engagement. AI, the report suggests, will make type accessible through "intelligent agents and chatbots" and let anyone generate typography regardless of training or design proficiency. How that will be deployed isn't certain, possibly as part of proprietarily tra...

Image: The Verge I jumped on the smartwatch bandwagon a bit late, but now I can’t go a day without mine. Beyond delivering helpful notifications, it’s perfect for setting timers, tracking workouts, and monitoring my sleeping habits (which are terrible). If you haven’t yet joined the smartwatch party or you’re looking to upgrade, Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 is down to $199.99 ($100 off) in the 40mm / Bluetooth configuration at Amazon and Walmart . If you prefer a larger display, the 44mm model is on sale at Amazon starting at $229.99 ($100 off). While the Galaxy Watch 7 isn’t as flashy as other Samsung wearables, its more simplistic approach is part of its charm. It retains the signature circular design and slim profile of prior models, which remains a stark contrast to the adventure-ready Galaxy Watch Ultra . It’s comfortable to wear while sleeping and working out — as our own Victoria Song noted in her review last year — and it comes with a selection of welcome features, includin...