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.
Samsung gave 17,000 of its Galaxy Z Flip 6 phones to athletes and others around the Olympic and Paralympic games, and here’s one more unboxing.
The phone itself isn’t more impressive than anyone else’s, but British rower Imogen Grant chose a tough upgrade path — the phone she’s replacing was another freebie from Samsung that she picked up at the Tokyo Olympics.
On the Decoder podcast, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe points the finger at automakers for copying instead of seeking out customers who want a vehicle with a slightly different profile than Tesla’s alphabet series of Models.
Oh, and he had some news about the R3X and why you probably won’t see CarPlay in a Rivian anytime soon.
Can a Windows handheld beat Valve’s Steam Deck OLED? This sequel to last year’s ROG Ally answers with more storage, faster RAM, double the battery, and USB4. We’ll need more time for benchmarking and battery testing before we can publish our review, but if you can’t wait, it is available now from Asus and Best Buy.
Note: If you buy something from these links, we might get affiliate revenue.
Another IRL Blue Screen of Death, as captured by one of our own at JFK, highlights the slow recovery from Friday’s crash affecting millions of Microsoft Windows machines.
FlightAware data showed more than 600 Delta flights canceled on Monday as of 7AM ET, reports Reuters. That’s reportedly about 16 percent of its total and among more than 5,000 flights Delta canceled since Friday.
Just when you thought we’d learned (and seen) everything there is to know about the Pixel 9 lineup, Android Authority reveals details about iPhone-like satellite features hinted at within Android 15 beta 4.
There’s notification text saying, “Your Pixel has been updated to support satellite communication,” and other text about two years of free satellite service, although that may be just placeholder text.
[Android Authority]
The FTC called Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass price hike “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it had predicted ahead of the company’s Activision-Blizzard buy.
Microsoft’s response (PDF) claims that with included multiplayer and the upcoming day-and-date release of Call of Duty, the offering isn’t degraded at all.
In a tweet and blog post, George Kurtz says:
As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.
We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well.
Other updates from CrowdStrike about Friday’s global IT misadventure warn about threat actors impersonating it in phishing attempts and other attacks or advise automated methods (PDF) to track down systems that have been affected.
The State of Connecticut DMV reported a return to normal services this afternoon, while CyberScoop points out some of the other entities that have reported issues to varying degrees in NYC, Ohio, Pennsylvania — you name it.
That should just about cover the various federal agencies looking into this global problem, right? Even if it took them...12 hours to mention it, although maybe their systems were down too?
According to 404 Media, the list of directly impacted agencies included the Treasury and the Department of Energy.