Tech

According to a release by French prosecutors, Joseph Lombardi, the “unaccredited analyst” with Canada’s Olympic women’s soccer team, accepted a suspended eight month imprisonment sentence after admitting to spying on New Zealand’s team to learn its tactics.

The sport’s governing body has opened proceedings against Canada Soccer, while New Zealand has asked that no points be awarded to Canada if it wins today.

iPhone owners love the feature and get up in arms when automakers resist it. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said this week on Decoder that CarPlay can’t “leverage other parts of the vehicle experience” and takes control away from automakers.

Meanwhile, friend of The Verge, Patrick George, has the so-far unpopular opinion that while CarPlay is familiar, it’s rapidly becoming out of date.

Reuters reports that Meta could be slapped with fines as high as $13.4 billion for tying classified advertisements service Marketplace with its Facebook social network.

The ruling, which is expected in the coming weeks, would come over 18 months since the European Commission accused Meta of “abusive practices” that enabled it to distort competition in the online classified ads market.

Substack has launched a mobile editor on its iOS app and will release it on Android soon.

Right now, the mobile editor only offers simple text and image publishing functionality. You can’t create video and podcast posts, edit published work, or schedule posts from within the app. However, Substack says it’s working on adding these features and others in the future. 

Here’s an incredible WSJ piece about zoo visitors connecting with gorillas by showing them videos of themselves, and zoo officials trying to push back:

A few self-proclaimed gorilla groupies come almost daily to the world-renowned San Diego Zoo, filming and then showing the “home videos” to the apes. [...] Tears came to the woman’s eyes as she said the zoo might want to block her and others from showing the animals videos. “Any enrichment is good enrichment,” she said. 

Debatable!

First revealed earlier this year, Ayaneo’s Pocket DMG and Pocket Micro will be available for pre-order starting on July 31st at 8AM ET through Indiegogo.

Pricing details are still unknown, but the Pocket DMG will feature the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 platform paired with an OLED screen, while the Pocket Micro will have an aluminum housing.

A new Rivian or easy access to your iPhone apps from your vehicle’s console? CEO RJ Scaringe says you can’t have both.

No, this isn’t another cardboard bed situation — the reasons for blocking the app make sense and mirror similar actions that Grindr took during the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, after it was used to out a number of athletes during the previous Rio Games.

Before he left The Verge, my colleague Jon Porter was able to try the Optimus Popularis — the LCD keyboard that paved the way for every LCD keypad since. While we weren’t quite able to feature Jon’s hands-on images in our feature story, we figured you might appreciate them!

Psst: if you’ve got the even earlier Optimus Maximus lying around, I’d love to try it!

“For the first time, U.S. subscribers can stream MLB Network 24/7 including select out-of-market games,” writes MLB. It’s $5.99 a month — or $6.99 to bundle live audio for every MLB team.

For football, NFL Plus costs $6.99 a month. Basketball is $14.99 a season for NBA League Pass, though the 2025-2026 season will now come to Amazon Prime Video as well.

Look, I know unsightly stickers on Windows laptops have been with us since long ago when “Intel Inside” was something people actually wanted boast about. But come on, HP.

Musk famously challenged the Meta CEO to a cage match last year that Zuckerberg agreed to but never happened.

Now, more than a year later, a reporter from Fox News got Musk to say today that he’s again open to fighting — this time on Zuckerberg’s terms.

Update, July 24th: Zuckerberg’s response on Threads: “Are we really doing this again?”