Skip to main content
All Stories By:

Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler

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.

R
Intuit fires 1,800 employees to hire 1,800 employees and focus on AI.

Last spring, Business Insider noted that Intuit was unusual among its peers because it hadn’t done mass layoffs.

Following shutdowns of the Mint app and MailChimp-owned TinyLetter, CEO Sasan Goodarzi today announced layoffs, saying they include “approximately 1,050 employees leaving the company who are not meeting expectations.” as it accelerates investing in data and AI like its Assist bot.


R
Google Gemini x Samsung.

Google and Samsung confirmed that their deal for Gemini AI features on Galaxy devices will bring updates (announced at I/O earlier this year) that let it read and respond to what’s on your phone screen or in a video you’re watching, as well as new Circle to Search features.


Gemini AI feature shown in split screen on a Galaxy Z Fold 6, with the video on one side and AI chat responses on the other side.
Image: Google
R
Hacktivists release Heritage Foundation data allegedly stolen in response to “Project 2025.”

A group that has previously claimed responsibility for breaching NATO, as well as satellite systems used by Halliburton and Shell, tells CyberScoop they’ve released 2GB of data from the conservative think tank behind “Project 2025” policy proposals for a second Trump administration.

The data includes the “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associating with Heritage, vio said, including users with U.S. government email addresses. “This itself can have an impact to heritage’s (sic) reputation,” they added, “and it’ll especially push away users in positions of power.” 


R
After years of delays, the European Space Agency has successfully launched Ariane 6.

The Ariane 6 vehicle was supposed to begin service in 2020, but then... some things happened.

At about 3PM ET, it finally took off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana and successfully reignited its Vinci engine in orbit, beginning the journey’s second of three planned stages that you can continue to follow live.


R
Epic is one step closer to relaunching Fortnite on iPhones — in the EU.

Hours after posting that a notarization submission for the Epic Games Store had been rejected by Apple, Epic and its CEO Tim Sweeney now say it has been un-rejected (a familiar situation here).

We’re still months away from EU residents actually getting the store on their iPhones and iPads, complete with Fortnite, but one barrier has been removed.


R
The Threads icons that weren’t.

With one year completed for Instagram’s Twitter-like app, Meta illustrator Jez Burrows is showing off some of the other options that were on the table to represent Threads.


R
Tesla tests an update with more music apps and some parental driving controls.

According to Not a Tesla App, the 2024.26 update in testing has features like parental controls that limit speed and acceleration or notify about late-night drives, an AQI symbol for poor local air quality, and scheduled charging.

It also adds built-in apps for Amazon Music and YouTube Music streaming in the US if you have Premium Connectivity or an active Wi-Fi connection.


R
Cloudflare is offering to block crawlers scraping information for AI bots.

Tech giants are rewriting the rules on web scraping, blaming unnamed third parties for disregarding robots.txt, and seemingly claiming the right to reuse anything posted anywhere for AI.

Now, Cloudflare is telling customers on its CDN that it can find and block AI bots that try to get around the rules.

The upshot of this globally aggregated data is that we can immediately detect new scraping tools and their behavior without needing to manually fingerprint the bot, ensuring that customers stay protected from the newest waves of bot activity.


A line graph showing user agent matches for known AI bots over the last year.
The most popular AI bots seen on Cloudflare’s network in terms of request volume.
Image: Cloudflare