Over 40 existing Aqara devices will be Matter compatible after the Hub M2 is updated in December. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Aqara just lifted the veil on its smart home roadmap at the Matter launch event in Amsterdam. It starts with a free software update in December for the Hub M2 to make many of Aqara’s existing Zigbee devices Matter compatible. That will be followed by the release of Aqara’s first two Matter-over-Thread devices in early 2023 and a new multi-protocol hub coming sometime in the future.
Starting in December, the maker of low-cost smart home devices will issue an over-the-air update to the Aqara Hub M2 to make over 40 of Aqara’s existing Zigbee devices Matter compatible when attached to the hub. That list will eventually expand to support more than 160 of the company’s Zigbee devices. Aqara’s other hubs, including the Hub M1S/M1S Gen 2, Hub…
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Google Lens is now built into its search bar. Google has been integrating its Lens image recognition tech into several of its products for quite a while now, including Google Photos and Chrome, but now it’s putting it front and center. As 9to5Google points out, Google’s added a Lens button right to its home page, in its famous search bar. That’s a big deal, according to Rajan Patel, a vice president of engineering at Google who’s in charge of Search and Lens — as he said on Tuesday, the Google homepage doesn’t change often.
Clicking on the Lens button (a little camera in Google-y colors) prompts you to upload an image or paste a URL to one. Once you do so, you’ll be taken to a page that’s pretty familiar if you’ve ever used the Lens app or any of its other integrations.
The…
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Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Behind the scenes at the wildest tech takeover ever, where everyone knows company-shaking changes are coming — and no one knows exactly when
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Now that he owns Twitter, Elon Musk has given employees their first ultimatum: Meet his deadline to introduce paid verification on Twitter or pack up and leave.
The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the…
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Laura Normand / The Verge Elon Musk ordered company-wide layoffs at Twitter on Saturday, according to a report from The New York Times. It’s unclear how many workers will be affected by the purported job cuts, but sources tell the NYT that some departments will be affected more than others.
Previous reports indicate Musk wants to cut down on Twitter’s workforce by 75 percent, although he reportedly told employees otherwise when he arrived at the company’s headquarters carrying an actual sink on Wednesday. Twitter currently has about 7,500 staff members, and as noted by the Times, some managers have been asked to come up with lists of employees to let go.
The layoffs could occur before November 1st — the same day when employees are supposed to receive their…
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Even though Amazon just wrapped its fall Prime Day event, Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain the biggest shopping days of the year. Thankfully, like in previous years, we’ll be working to highlight the best prices on tablets, phones, TVs, gaming gear, and other tech throughout the deals-packed week, whether you plan to shop in-person or online.
You can always count on us to publish the best deals that you need to know about, however, if you want to be among the first people to discover price drops on the products you’re interested in, you’ll want to get set up with a price-tracking tool. We’ve included a few of our favorite examples below, pointing out how each can help you track deals in slightly different ways, each with its own…
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It also improves the list of shorts. | Image: YouTube YouTube is updating its website and app so Shorts, live streams, and regular videos each have their own tab on a creator’s channel, instead of being thrown together in a single list (via 9to5Google). In a support post, the company says the change is based on user feedback, and that it’ll “make it easier for viewers to discover the kinds of content they’re most interested in when exploring a creator’s channel page.”
Before the update, if you went to a channel you’d see a single tab labeled “videos,” which showed you a list of all the user’s uploads, including shorts, live streams, and regular-length videos. While there is a filter that lets you change which format the list shows, it gets reset every time you leave the page, so when you…
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Other unspecified categories of apps have also been paused. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple has “paused ads related to gambling and a few other categories on App Store product pages” after developers and commentators criticized the types of advertisements showing up in the iPhone’s App Store, according to a statement from spokesperson Trevor Kincaid.
On Tuesday, Apple announced that companies could advertise their apps on the store pages for other apps, putting their icon in the “you might also like” section. Almost immediately, developers started showing examples of ads for gambling apps being recommended under their apps.
Twitter is also full of screenshots of very inappropriate ad placements: one Twitter user shows a slot machine app being advertised alongside gambling addiction recovery apps, and there are examples of…
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The new OM-5 is a small body, weighing 366 grams, designed to size up with the Zuiko line of f/4 zooms and compact prime lenses. | Image: OM System When Olympus sold its camera division and reformed as OM System, it hyped up a push toward computational photography with its new mirrorless cameras — this is not that camera. Today, OM System is announcing the new OM-5, a $1,199.99 mirrorless camera that launches late next month and looks like a zombified husk of Olympus. I’m sure it will be a fine camera, but I can’t help feeling depressed when I look at it.
Sure, the OM-1 was technically OM System’s first camera release, but it was still branded Olympus. Now, with the OM-5, it’s proudly wearing the OM System name on its forehead, something that’s sure to only please a handful of people in a marketing meeting somewhere.
Image: OM System We’ll have to get used to… Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge WhatsApp is down in a major outage affecting the communications app. The service started experiencing issues at around 3AM ET, with users greeted with a “connecting” message. If you’re attempting to use WhatsApp web, you’ll see a “Make sure your computer has an active internet connection” error.
Downdetector has more than 60,000 reports of issues with the service, but WhatsApp parent company Meta hasn’t issued a comment on the problems yet. The outage appears to be affecting users globally.
This is the first major WhatsApp outage since the service went down as part of a massive outage that also took down Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, and Facebook last year. That outage took nearly six hours before it was resolved and WhatsApp was back…
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