Fired Rockstar employees’ plea for interim pay denied

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the e-bike movement, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers'...

The FBI went to Microsoft last year with a warrant, asking them to hand over keys to unlock encrypted data stored on three laptops as part of an investigation into potential fraud involving the...

Welcome to the weekend, friends! We’re still in a bit of a deals lull before the Presidents Day and V-Day sales begin, the bulk of which we anticipate kicking off the first week of February....

Some Gmail users may have noticed that promotional emails that normally go to their own siloed tab have started flooding their inbox. Reports hit the Google forums and Reddit that messages are...

Federal agents in Minneapolis repeatedly punched a man, forced him to the ground, and then shot him multiple times. The man was later pronounced dead. This is just the latest incident of deadly...

Every month, Circana video game analyst Mat Piscatella posts fascinating data about video game sales on Bluesky, highlighting trends like November's historically bad month for game hardware and...

I'll confess, with no shame whatsoever, that I really love ads. Artsy ones, funny ones, weird ones, emotional ones - TV commercials were my childhood TikTok before any of us were using terms like...

There's a lot about Perfect Tides: Station to Station's Mara that I find relatable. Like me, she's recently moved to a place simply called "the City" from the middle of nowhere, and like me, she's...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 113, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, please send hot cocoa to my freezing-cold house, and also you can...

By lots of metrics, Gemini is winning. It has raced ahead of OpenAI, become scarily good at creating convincing imagery, and even won Apple's business. So last week's news that it was enabling...

A dishwasher is a luxury item some people can't live without. It's one of the first major kitchen devices I bought just as soon as I could afford one, and the appliance I thought I'd miss most in...

Internal documents revealed as part of a child safety lawsuit hint at Google's plan to "onboard kids" into its ecosystem by investing in schools. In this November 2020 presentation, Google writes...

Intel and AMD have split the Windows laptop market for years, but the x86 players may be getting outnumbered. It's not just Apple MacBooks and MediaTek-based Chromebooks using Arm chips anymore....

TikTok finally closed a deal meant to bring it into compliance with the law that should have banned it a year ago, and the lawmakers who passed that law still don't seem to know what's going on....

Meta is "temporarily pausing" the ability for teens to chat with its AI characters as it develops a "new version" of the characters that will offer a "better experience." The company made the...

TikTok is officially under new ownership in the US, and that could spell big changes for the video-sharing app. On January 22nd, ByteDance - TikTok's Chinese parent company - and a group of...

Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad...

Even with the ability to take excellent photos with our phones and instantly share them across the world, there’s something magical about the old-school instant camera. With just a click of a...

Where's the Trump Phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. We've reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone's whereabouts. As usual, we're still waiting for a response. In...