Currents was introduced in 2019. | Image: Google Currents Google has announced that it’ll shut down Currents, which was introduced in 2019 as a replacement for Google Plus for G Suite. In a blog post, the company says it’s “planning to wind down” Currents, and that it’ll push the people who were using it to Spaces, which is sort of like Google Chat’s version of a Slack channel or Discord room.
Google says that it’s making the change so users won’t have to work in a “separate, siloed destination” — instead, they’ll be using Chat and Spaces, which will soon be prominently integrated into Gmail. The company promises it’s going to make Spaces a more suitable replacement over the next year, saying it’ll “deliver new capabilities” like “support for larger communities and leadership communication,…
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A new voice command feature is available in the second PS5 beta. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Sony’s latest PS5 beta, which began rolling out Wednesday, adds support for a new “Hey PlayStation!” voice command you can use to open games, apps, and settings and control movies and songs. I’ve been able to test the new feature, and to my surprise, it actually works quite well, and I could see it being a genuinely useful way to navigate the console’s UI.
One thing I was happy to see was that the voice command feature was opt-in — if that holds once the software update is released widely, that means you’ll have to actively choose if you want your PS5 to be listening to your voice. After I installed the beta, I had to dig into the PS5’s settings to a new “Voice Command (Preview)” section to turn it on.
When you do, your PS5 will show…
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Photo by MARIANA SUAREZ/AFP via Getty Images Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink just got dealt an expensive blow — the company’s currently estimating that 40 of the 49 Starlink satellites it launched on February 3rd will be destroyed because of a geomagnetic storm.
The storm caused “up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches,” keeping the deployed satellites from reaching their proper orbit around the Earth. And while Starlink tried to fly them “edge-on (like a sheet of paper)” to reduce that drag, it now looks like as many as 40 of them will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere instead of reaching their destinations.
SpaceX recently crossed the 2,000 satellite launch milestone, and has plans to launch 12,000 if not a great many more — so losing 40 of…
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Image: evleaks (Twitter) The Galaxy S22 has leaked extensively, but there’s only so much you can tell from renders. For example, it turns out that Samsung has created a “new material” to use in the product — one made from the plastic in discarded fishing nets.
Samsung says it’ll soon “incorporate repurposed ocean-bound plastics” across its whole product lineup, and the first example will be the Galaxy devices introduced at the Unpacked event this Wednesday, February 9th. It’s not yet clear to what extent the material will be used or in which parts of the products; Samsung isn’t explicit about how it fits into any of the devices’ construction.
Citing a report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations that says 640,000 tons of fishing nets…
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The makers behind the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) are no longer a mystery — a BuzzFeed News report reveals them as Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, two men from Florida. Solano is a 32-year-old writer and editor behind the pseudonym Gargamel, while the 35-year-old Aronow goes by Gordon Goner.
Got doxxed against my will. Oh well.
Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN
— GordonGoner.eth (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022 After BuzzFeed’s article was posted, the two later responded to the situation with the “Web2 me vs. Web3 me” meme on Twitter, in which you essentially compare a photo of yourself in the real world with an NFT or avatar that’s supposed to represent you in the metaverse. Both Aronow and Solano compare pictures of…
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There’s a lot going on at the music streaming service. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Around 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast mysteriously disappeared from Spotify on Friday, as spotted by JREMissing.com, a web tool that tracks missing episodes. The show (and Spotify’s relationship to it) have faced heavy criticism over the past few weeks, but there’s no clear connection between that and the missing episodes, nor is there any immediately apparent link between the episodes that were removed.
For anyone who’s taken the sanity-preserving step of muting the phrase “Joe Rogan” on Twitter, here’s a brief recap of what’s been going on: Spotify, which has been the exclusive home of The Joe Rogan Experience since the streaming giant reportedly paid $100 million for the pleasure in 2020, has taken a lot of heat from people…
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Image: Google Google announced today via its Google for Education blog that it's starting a repairability program to help schools fix Chromebooks in-house, and turn it into a valuable training opportunity for students looking into the IT field.
Google says 50 million students and teachers are using Chromebooks while raising bold claims of the sustainability these laptops bring to the table via efficiency and extra durability. A Google-commissioned study cited on the page says its manufacturer partners build hardware that uses 46 percent less energy than competing products.
50M students & educators around the world use #Chromebooks. To repair broken devices sustainably and quickly, schools are creating in-house repair programs—which also teaches…
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Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch Two members of Google’s Ethical AI group have announced their departures from the company, according to a report from Bloomberg. Senior researcher Alex Hanna, and software engineer Dylan Baker, will join Timnit Gebru’s nonprofit research institute, Distributed AI Research (DAIR).
Today's my last day at Google. Starting tomorrow I'm joining @timnitGebru at @DAIRInstitute as Director of Research.
On my way out, here's some thoughts on the tech company as a racialized organization and the power of complaint. https://t.co/PQhAVo2r7M
— Alex Hanna (@alexhanna) February 2, 2022 In a post announcing her resignation on Medium, Hanna criticizes the “toxic” work environment at Google, and draws attention to a lack of representation of Black…
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After seven years in development, Albert Marin and his small team have completed their exhaustive reworking of Resident Evil 4’s graphics on PC. Compared to some other projects where developers upscale or otherwise modernize the visuals for a new generation or platform of hardware, this team pored over every image asset, using funds donated by fans of the project to improve upon Capcom’s PC port of the game.
In some cases where old textures just didn’t look all that good at a higher resolution, the team remade many of them from scratch using photos or AI, while striving to remain faithful to the aesthetic of the original game. When I interviewed Albert Marin in early 2021, the team had amassed over 4,500 Photoshop files and had put in…
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