The Cetra Open Wireless aren’t like most other gaming earbuds. They’re large, with an open-style design that rests just outside of your ears, letting game audio mix with sounds in your environment. These allow for immersion, but only if your environment is quiet enough. And turning them up might let those nearby hear what you’re […]

"Someone might be watching everything I'm doing on my screen," I tell myself in public. Even when I'm doing nothing of consequence - just making my little Wordle guesses - there's a sense of unease that stays with me. It's never bothered me too much, and I generally save the sensitive stuff like banking for […]

I just got back from the GDC Festival of Gaming, a big industry-focused event in San Francisco that was formerly known as the Game Developers Conference. While the show is mostly about educational sessions and networking opportunities for working developers, there were also a bunch of games that I got to play. Here are some […]

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 119, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope your agents are well, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about Pixar's future and flight MH370 and sports gambling […]

Some European retailers have stopped selling certain headphones after an EU-funded study found that they contained hormone-disrupting chemicals. The study included leading brands such as Apple, Beats, Samsung, Bose, JBL, and Sennheiser. Online stores Bol.com, Coolblue, and Mediamarkt didn't respond to inquiries from The Verge about which headphones they pulled, but local news outlets report […]

The Live Nation-Ticketmaster trial is back on. Dozens of states are expected to move forward with their claims against the company's alleged concert industry monopoly beginning on Monday, following a brief hearing on Friday. The Justice Department and a handful of states have accepted settlements with the company, but the majority of the 40 state […]

Spotify Premium users in New Zealand will be the first to experience the service's latest personalization feature. The company is letting users view and make changes to their Taste Profile directly. If your algorithm is serving up too much Bieber, you can politely tell the algorithm to ease up. Beta testers will be able to […]

Xbox is getting ready to launch its Gaming Copilot AI assistant on "current-generation consoles" this year, according to a report from GamesRadar. Sonali Yadav, Xbox's product manager for gaming AI, revealed the news during a panel at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), adding that the company will also add the assistant to "more services that […]

Where's the Trump phone? We're going to keep talking about it every week. This week, I wanted to see how Trump Mobile stacks up to its conservative carrier competition. Trump Mobile isn't unique. I mean, it is in some pretty specific senses - it's not every day the president's family launches a phone company while […]

It's only been a year since Digg founder Kevin Rose, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, and a few others announced the link-sharing site would relaunch, promising a "social discovery built by communities, not by algorithms." Now, two months after opening its Reddit-like platform to the public, Digg is announcing a "hard reset" that's shutting down operations […]