Uber and Lyft now required to pay Massachusetts rideshare drivers $32 an hour

An Uber and Lyft vehicle in New York. | Photo: Lindsey Nicholson / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images Rideshare drivers in Massachusetts will soon get company-provided benefits, as well as a minimum pay of $32.50 per hour, starting on August 15th. That’s thanks to a new settlement between the state and rideshare companies Uber and Lyft, four years after Attorney General Andrea Campbell sued the companies, asserting their drivers ought to be considered employees under state law.T

Leon Kennedy in the Resident Evil 4 remake. | Image: Capcom Capcom is developing a new Resident Evil game, Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi confirmed during a summer “Capcom Next” livestream on Monday.“We’re making a new Resident Evil,” Nakanishi said during the show. “It was really difficult to figure out what to do after 7. But I found it, and to be honest it feels substantial. I can’t share any details just yet but I hope you’re excited

Image: Samsung SmartThings Samsung has launched a new demand response program for its SmartThings smart home platform. Flex Connect allows your SmartThings connected appliances to communicate with the grid and automatically reduce energy use when there’s a spike in demand, which could help avoid blackouts. While demand response programs have made for some scary headlines, many experts believe connecting our smart homes to the grid is critical for managing the strain on our energy network.

It looks even more ancient than a Fallout terminal, and that’s awesome. | Image: Atari It’s always worth revisiting the classics, and there’s no shortage of retro consoles and emulators to enable that. The Atari 400 Mini is more niche than we’re used to, however, and that’s what makes it so intriguing. The 8-bit retro replica console has dropped to $102 ($18 off) at Amazon in a limited-quantity opportunity that’s nearly halfway claimed.The Atari 400 was one of

Photo by Getty Images Car dealerships hamstrung by outages following two cyberattacks against CDK Global in June might finally be able to use their systems again this week, as the company says it aims to get dealers back online by July 4th.
“We are continuing our phased approach to the restoration process and are rapidly bringing dealers live on the Dealer Management System (DMS),” Lisa Finney, a CDK Global spokesperson, says in a statement to The Verge. “We anticipate all deal

Photo: Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images At some point in the future, a new “Multi-Purpose Tap” concept will let payment cards or devices like smartwatches and phones accomplish multiple things at once when using NFC. With this in play, a customer in a store might tap their phone with Apple Wallet or Google Pay on a terminal that simultaneously checks their ID if they’re buying booze, add points to their loyalty account, pay for their goods, and provide them with a digital

Thunderbolt 5 cables, like their TB4 and TB3 predecessors, have USB-C tips. | Image: Cable Matters Intel’s Thunderbolt 5 might be the best USB-C cable ever, with 120Gbps of single-direction bandwidth, 240 watts of power, and enough oomph to drive external SSDs, eGPUs, and high-resolution, high-refresh-rate monitors from a single cable at unheard-of levels. But first, it’d have to ship! Today, Cable Matters is shipping the first three certified Thunderbolt 5 cables, which bring us one

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Silvergate Bank, once a cornerstone of the crypto financial world until its collapse in early 2023, defrauded its investors by lying about its anti-money laundering controls and misleading investors about how the fallout from the FTX collapse would affect it, the Securities and Exchange Commission says in a lawsuit. Also named in the suit were the company’s chief executive officer, chief risk officer, and chief financial officer.
Silvergate said it h

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. | Photo by Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.She asked about Microsoft’s hiring of the team behind Inflection, a would-be OpenAI competitor that Hoffman co-founded. It was an acquisition in everything but name, clearly designed to avoid the scrutiny of antitrust regulators. Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is

Image: Vaio Would you believe today marks an entire decade since Sony spun out its Vaio computer brand? Vaio has stood for lightweight laptops pretty much ever since — and now the company’s announcing one of the lightest-ever portable monitors to go with them.The Vaio Vision Plus 14 goes on sale today in Japan as a 14-inch, 1920 x 1200 USB-C monitor that weighs just 0.72 pounds (325g). That’s less than half as much as most of the monitors you’ll find in a typical “b

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images While the majority of Americans would like to see more clean energy from solar and wind farms — support for new renewable energy projects has started to wane, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. It also found a drop in interest in electric vehicles following Biden administration policies to slash greenhouse gas emissions and Republican backlash.
The share of people who favor more solar power has dropped from 90 to 78 percent since 2020,

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Some folks are reporting being left with bricked Pixel 6, 6 Pro, and 6A phones after they factory reset them. Google is aware of the issue and is investigating, according to a comment from a member of the Pixel support forums’ product expert program.Users in the forum thread, which was spotted by Indian tech outlet Tech-Issues Today, say that after attempting to reset their phone, the phone doesn’t boot, throwing up an error message:
“Cannot l

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Apple says the iPhone X, first-generation AirPods, and first-generation HomePod are now considered “vintage,” as reported by MacRumors. So, if you own a first-generation HomePod — or multiple, like the person I sold my HomePod to in 2022 — it might sting to hear that Apple already considers the six-year-old speaker “vintage.”Apple’s vintage label technically refers to products that it stopped distributing between more t

Image: Meta On Monday, Meta announced that it is “updating the ‘Made with AI’ label to ‘AI info’ across our apps, which people can click for more information,” after people complained that their pictures had the tag applied incorrectly. Former White House photographer Pete Souza pointed out the tag popping up on an upload of a photo originally taken on film during a basketball game 40 years ago, speculating that using Adobe’s cropping tool and flattening

Photo: Getty Images The Supreme Court ruled that presidents are “absolutely” immune from criminal prosecution when their actions involve allegedly official acts while they were in office. Former presidents also have a “presumption of immunity” for their official acts while in office — but, the court ruled, there is no immunity for “unofficial acts.”
The decision in Trump v. United States means that the special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution again

The Stream Deck Neo comes in a simple and clean white color. | Image: Elgato Last week saw healthy savings on Elgato’s jumbo Stream Deck XL macro pad controller for serious Twitch streamers and power users, but today’s best deal is a chance for us normies to feast. That’s because the recently launched Elgato Stream Deck Neo is selling for just $84.99 ($10 off) at Best Buy, Target, and direct from Elgato. This is the first time the nifty controller has gone on sale since its int

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in two consequential cases about the future of speech on the internet.
The Supreme Court vacated the appeals court decisions in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, ruling that neither court adequately analyze whether the social media content moderation laws in Florida and Texas would be unconstitutional no matter what they applied to. The court sent the cases back down to

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, two consequential cases about the future of speech on the internet. The court explicitly extended First Amendment protections to how social media platforms organize, curate, and moderate their feeds, drawing a comparison between internet content moderation and “traditional publishers and editors.”The decision elaborates th

Samsung is bringing Matter 1.2 to its SmartThings smart home platform. | Image: Samsung SmartThings Samsung SmartThings looks set to become the first major smart home platform to fully support Matter 1.2. According to a press release, the SmartThings platform now works with Matter 1.2, so manufacturers and developers can start integrating their compatible devices with the platform. The SmartThings app won’t be updated to support Matter until later this summer — so you won’t be

Samsung is bringing Matter 1.2 to its SmartThings smart home platform. | Image: Samsung SmartThings Samsung SmartThings looks set to become the first major smart home platform to fully support Matter 1.2. According to a press release, the SmartThings platform now works with Matter 1.2, so manufacturers and developers can start integrating their compatible devices with the platform. The SmartThings app won’t be updated to support Matter until later this summer — so you won’t be

Image: The Verge The EU has formally charged Meta with violations of its Digital Markets Act (DMA), marking its second such charge in as many weeks. The European Commission writes in a preliminary ruling that the “pay or consent” advertising model that launched last year for Facebook and Instagram users runs afoul of Article 5(2) of the DMA by not giving users a third option that uses less data for ad targeting but is still free to use.
Regulators found in their investigation that Me

Buzz buzz. | Image: Bananbin I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that not everyone agrees on the best way to handle their computer’s trash directory. Some folks like to let it go until their computer yells at them about storage, while others empty it every single day. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I do try not to let it go too far. And I think I found the best tool for that job a couple of days ago: Bananabin.
When the data kept in your Trash folder passes

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge For all its impressive technical chops, Apple’s all-singing, all-dancing Vision Pro hasn’t set the world on fire, but it’s early yet, and the company continues throwing its weight behind the headset. It reportedly has plans to add AI features to visionOS and is readying an updated approach to in-store demos.Apple is working through the challenge of incorporating Apple Intelligence into the augmented reality interface of the headset, Bloomberg&r

Illustration: The Verge If you’re disappointed that the only AI model that will integrate with Apple devices so far will be ChatGPT, it sounds like you won’t have to wait long for that to change. Apple will announce “at least” one other deal — to add Google Gemini, too — this fall, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter today.
Gemini has been part of the iOS 18 chatbot rumors for as long as OpenAI has. Apple software boss Craig F

Photo by Ivan “Porkchop44” for Games Done Quick It’s summer, which means it’s time for sun and speedruns. The 2024 edition of Summer Games Done Quick (SGDQ), the annual speedrunning marathon for charity, kicks off on Sunday and runs until July 6th. This year’s lineup is once again packed with runs for some of my favorite games, including Balatro, Alan Wake 2, Elden Ring, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1, 2, 3, and 4 (all in one run), a glitchless Baldur’s Gate 3

Image: David Pierce / The Verge Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 44, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)This week, I’ve been writing about why I love the Boox Palma, reading about hot dog contests and the history of Markdown and the future of streaming, watching Shoresy and Federer and a lot of soccer (it’s been a very sports-y

Willem Dafoe in Nosferatu. | Screenshot: YouTube I’m stuck in a weird spot when it comes to movies and TV, these days. On one hand, the constant churn of remakes, reboots, franchise movies, and sequels often feels like it comes at the expense of original storytelling. But on the other, I am unabashedly looking forward to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I’m really enjoying The Acolyte, and I’m sorry, but I’m the reason Nintendo just keeps remaking games, and I will continue to be