Mercedes-Benz EQE SUV is a more down-to-earth luxury electric vehicle
The EQE SUV will be out by 2023. | Image: Mercedes-Benz
The Mercedes-Benz EQE has been SUV-ified. The German automaker revealed a higher riding, more utility-focused version of its EQE sedan, and while the price is still being kept under wraps, the EQE SUV is expected to hit US dealerships starting in 2023.
We’ve known that we’d be getting an SUV version of the EQE sedan since it was first revealed last year. Mercedes did the same for its flagship EV, the EQS, coming out with the SUV version earlier this month. It’s the fourth EV to be built on the automaker’s new EV platform.
With the EQE SUV, we’re getting three trim levels — one rear-motor and two dual-motor versions — as well as an AMG performance variant. The main difference between the EQE sedan and its SUV counterpart is size and interior space, with Mercedes positioning it as “the most spacious representatives of its class.”
In fact, the five-seater EQE SUV is more compact than the sedan: at 119.3 inches, it has a wheelbase that is 3.5 inches shorter. This gives it more agility and maneuverability when on the road, the company claims.
Image: Mercedes-Benz
The interior is almost all screen.
The rear-wheel drive launch model of the EQE SUV will use the same 90.6kWh battery pack that powers the base model of the EQS, which the company says will be good for up to an impressive 550 kilometers (341 miles) of driving on a full charge — though that figure is based on the more forgiving European WLTP standard, so a more realistic range estimate will likely be lower.
Still, that’s less range than the EQE sedan, which has a similar battery size but a more aerodynamic shape and smaller wheels, leading to 660 kilometers (410 miles) of range. The EQE SUV will put out 288 horsepower, or 536HP for the all-wheel drive version. The AMG variant will churn out up to 677HP on two electric motors and 21-inch wheels.
Image: Mercedes-Benz
The EQE SUV will get 410 miles of range on a 90kWh battery.
The EQE SUV will feature a 12.8-inch OLED touchscreen in the center dashboard as well as a 12.3-inch instrument cluster behind the steering wheel. The EV will include many of Mercedes’ other luxurious trappings, such as its MBUX digital assistant for help finding charging stations and the like and an HVAC-plus-audio experience that the automaker describes as “Energizing Comfort.” (Think nature sounds.) The EQE SUV will get over-the-air updates and upgrades, too.
In addition to the EQE sedan and EQE SUV, Mercedes is also releasing an electrified G-Wagen in mid-2024. The company says it will go all-electric by 2030, committing to invest €40 billion (about $47 billion) in the effort.
The EQS already looks like a worthy competitor to Tesla’s Model S Plaid — the company said it sold 30,000 EVs between July and September — so the forthcoming EQE and its 2023-arriving SUV version are all about trying to offer a somewhat more affordable and approachable way into what Mercedes-Benz is doing at the high end with its electric cars.
And as long as it executes, the EQE SUV could be a far more promising entrant into the market than some of Mercedes-Benz’s other early attempts, like the EQC, which was full of compromises due to being built on a combustion engine platform instead of being a ground-up electric vehicle — one of the goals that it established when it first revealed the Vision EQS concept in 2019.
Image: Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes has said it will go all-electric by 2030.
Bayonetta actor asks fans to boycott video game over pay row
Hellena Taylor, who voiced title character, says she was offered an ‘insulting’ $4,000 to reprise role
The English actor who stars in the hit Bayonetta video game series has asked fans not to buy the latest release in the franchise, after revealing that she was offered just $4,000 (£3,500) to reprise the role.
In an emotional series of videos posted to social media, Hellena Taylor, who voiced the title character of Bayonetta,said she had been replaced in the forthcoming third game in the series because she the proposed fee was an “insult”.
Microsoft’s out-of-date driver list left Windows PCs open to malware attacks for years
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Microsoft failed to properly protect Windows PCs from malicious drivers for nearly three years, according to a report from Ars Technica. Although Microsoft says its Windows updates add new malicious drivers to a blocklist downloaded by devices, Ars Technica found these updates never actually stuck.
This gap in coverage left users vulnerable to a certain type of attack called BYOVD, or bring your own vulnerable driver. Drivers are the files your computer’s operating system uses to communicate with external devices and hardware, such as a printer, graphics card, or webcam. Since drivers can access the core of a device’s operating system, or kernel, Microsoft requires that all drivers are digitally signed, proving that they are safe to use. But if an existing, digitally-signed driver has a security hole, hackers can exploit this and gain direct access to Windows.
The Microsoft recommended driver block rules page states that the driver block list "is applied to" HVCI-enabled devices.
Yet here is an HVCI-enabled system, and one of the drivers in the block list (WinRing0) is happily loaded.
I don't believe the docs.https://t.co/7gCnfXYIyshttps://t.co/2IkBtBRhkspic.twitter.com/n4789lH5qy
As noted by Ars Technica, Microsoft uses something called hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI) that’s supposed to protect against malicious drivers, which the company says comes enabled by default on certain Windows devices. However, both Ars Technica and Will Dormann, a senior vulnerability analyst at cybersecurity company Analygence, found that this feature doesn’t provide adequate protection against malicious drivers.
In a thread posted to Twitter in September, Dormann explains that he was able to successfully download a malicious driver on an HVCI-enabled device, even though the driver was on Microsoft’s blocklist. He later discovered that Microsoft’s blocklist hasn’t been updated since 2019, and that Microsoft’s attack surface reduction (ASR) capabilities didn’t protect against malicious drivers, either. This means any devices with HVCI enabled haven’t been protected against bad drivers for around three years.
Microsoft didn’t address Dormann’s findings until earlier this month. “We have updated the online docs and added a download with instructions to apply the binary version directly,” Microsoft project manager Jeffery Sutherland said in a reply to Dormann’s tweets. “We’re also fixing the issues with our servicing process which has prevented devices from receiving updates to the policy.” Microsoft has since provided instructions on how to manually update the blocklist with the vulnerable drivers that have been missing for years, but it’s still not clear when Microsoft will start automatically adding new drivers to the list through Windows updates.
“The vulnerable driver list is regularly updated, however we received feedback there has been a gap in synchronization across OS versions,” A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Ars Technica. “We have corrected this and it will be serviced in upcoming and future Windows Updates. The documentation page will be updated as new updates are released.” Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Pushing Buttons: the ghostly echo of games past sustains me
Climbing my first wall in Tomb Raider, playing Sonic the Hedgehog with my dad … snatches of games I’ve played over the years deliver a world unclouded by nagging doubts
It occurred to me recently that I’ve been playing video games for more than 40 years. Sitting on a bus home that evening, I tried to recall my actual real first memories of them. All I could catch were odd scraps. Seeing Pong on a neighbour’s TV, courtesy of a Grandstand 2000 console – I guess that would have been the late 1970s. Playing Space Invaders somewhere – in a pub? A chippy? I remember the first alien laser blast hitting one of my forcefield defences – a memory I possibly share with Hideo Kojima: he said those very shields gave him the idea for making a stealth game.
My memories of Commodore 64 games are similarly fractured. The voice synthesis at the start of Ghostbusters, the knocking at the spaceship door in Rescue on Fractalus!, the microchip mini-game in Paradroid. Little snatches of innovation that took my breath away. To me, the PlayStation/Saturn era is about glimpses of worlds opening up. Spinning through a curve in Colin McRae Rally and seeing the muddy countryside rolling out in front of me. Climbing that first wall in Tomb Raider and stumbling into the cavern network beyond. Those moments you open a new door in the Resident Evil mansion and a scene of opulent horror oozes out, as bright and icky as decaying fruit.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen on the alliance to hold social media accountable: ‘We need to act now’
The former Facebook manager joins the Council for Responsible Social Media, a new coalition created to press big tech to change
Frances Haugen left her role as a product manager at Facebook in 2021, bringing with her a cache of internal documents illustrating allegations of wrongdoing at the company.
But a year later, despite congressional hearings and investigations, Meta has made few meaningful changes to its policies, Haugen says, and as the US midterm elections approach, the stakes are high.
Elon Musk says Starlink will keep funding Ukraine’s government ‘for free’ despite losing money
Laura Normand / The Verge
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reversed his decision to stop funding the Starlink terminals sent to Ukraine, saying on Twitter that the company will continue to provide “free” satellite internet service to the government even if it means the company loses money.
“The hell with it,” Musk writes on Twitter. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free
On Friday, a report from CNN revealed that SpaceX asked the government if it can pay for any additional terminals sent to Ukraine, as well as for existing internet services. These expenses could reportedly amount to about $124 million by the end of 2022 and nearly $380 million over the next 12 months. Musk later added on Twitter that Starlink can’t fund services in Ukraine “indefinitely,” noting in another tweet that Starlink’s losing about $20 million a month to maintain its services.
According to Musk, Starlink has sent about 25,000 terminals to help Ukraine’s war efforts. The service has played an important role in keeping the Ukrainian military and civilians online during the war, as the country continues to suffer blackouts from Russia’s missile strikes, and the risk of cyberattacks remains high.
Musk faced criticism after polling Twitter users whether Ukraine should achieve “peace” with Russia by surrendering Crimea and other annexed regions. This prompted a reply from Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, who said “fuck off is my very diplomatic reply.” Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov later tweeted that Musk “is among the world’s top private donors supporting Ukraine,” and that “Starlink is an essential element of our critical infrastructure.”
One designer’s quest to build the world’s greatest desk accessories
Jeff Sheldon’s desk is a well-known thing on the internet – now he’s trying to upgrade it.
Ugmonk started as a T-shirt store — now founder Jeff Sheldon is trying to turn it into something much more ambitious. But as he knows, hardware is hard.
Jeff Sheldon’s desk is sort of famous. You might have even seen it before: Sheldon, the founder and CEO of a high-design shop called Ugmonk, uploaded a few photos to Unsplash several years ago, and his ultra-clean setup filled with natural wood and white colors has since been viewed more than 400 million times. People have been asking him for a decade where he got his cool monitor stand, even though it’s actually just an Ikea hack. The desk sits in Sheldon’s home office in suburban Pennsylvania, in the corner of a sun-soaked room with so many windows and so many trees just outside the windows that commenters occasionally ask if he lives in the jungle.
The day I meet Sheldon, he’s looking at that desk from the other side of his home office on a bright, hot day near the end of summer. He’s in jeans and a black T-shirt, and limping ever so slightly thanks to a recent soccer injury. His workspace looks normal enough — a little cleaner than usual, maybe, and Sheldon did just spend a few minutes making sure all the accessories were at perfect 90-degree angles. But a few feet away stand a handful of people and a heaping mound of camera gear. Two of them push a makeshift dolly with a Red camera on it, slowly, steadily in the direction of the desk, as Sheldon walks into frame and sits down. The shot ends in a perfect modern still-life: Sheldon hard at work, his dog Pixel lying on a bed a few feet behind him.
The crew is here to shoot a video for Ugmonk’s latest Kickstarter project for a line of desk accessories called Gather. Gather’s unofficial mission statement is, essentially, that it’s okay to be messy, but it should also be easy to clean up. Sheldon, who has young kids, seems to wage a perpetual battle between his minimalistic and fussy designer tendencies and the simple realities of life. And so Gather is, in one sense, just a set of beautiful containers: a wooden pen holder, a padded stand for your phone, an all-metal bin where you can stash business cards and random detritus, a monitor stand with a dedicated slot for your papers. A place for everything, Gather promises, even if everything’s not always in its place.
For Sheldon, though, Gather is also the most complicated, most ambitious, most difficult thing he has ever made. It’s actually his second attempt to make these kinds of products after the first didn’t go to plan. This time, all the pieces are extremely high quality and extremely high priced. Sheldon admires designers like Dieter Rams, Saul Bass, and Paul Rand and aspires to build things akin to the classic Eames chair. Maybe they won’t be heirloom desk accessories, maybe that’s not even a thing, but Sheldon’s aiming for “definitely heirloom quality.” In a world of cheap crap and planned obsolescence, Ugmonk wants to make things that last as long as you need them.
As the crew resets and director Jon Rothermel watches the footage on a monitor in the hallway, Sheldon obsesses about the details of the shot. He notices the clock on his computer and the clock on his wall are different; will anyone notice? He’s also worried about too many cables being visible and the way the desk shakes when he sits down and the way the sun hits his face when he leans slightly forward and the fact that, whoops, Pixel just left. They do five takes of this shot — which will be the all-important intro for the Kickstarter video — before Sheldon and Rothermel are happy with it.
A few minutes later, after a lot of close-up shots of Sheldon’s desk and the stuff on it, a grand switchover happens. The Ikea-hack monitor stand, the phone holder, the various bins and containers for all of Sheldon’s stuff, almost everything in those viral photos — all gone, all replaced with Gather components. The whole thing feels oddly ceremonious: Sheldon spent years working on a new set of desk accessories but hasn’t upgraded the home office that started it all until right now. His home office and his desk reflect more than a decade of work since he started Ugmonk to sell T-shirts. And now, with a few new pieces, he’s just moved into a new era.
Maybe I’m reading too much into all that. But after spending time with Sheldon, I can tell you confidently he felt it, too. To him, Gather is much more than a bunch of desk accessories.
The Gather pieces include a monitor stand, a headphone stand, and a bunch of organizing tools.
Learn by shipping
Sheldon started a company in 2008 as a side project. He was working full-time at a design firm in Vermont, not making much money and not having much to do thanks to the ongoing recession. Since college, he’d enjoyed entering T-shirt design contests hosted by companies like Threadless, Woot, and DesignByHumans and eventually started to win them. “You’d get, like, $500, and they send you five of the shirts.” In college, this felt like a fair trade, but as Sheldon started to win more often and enter the working world, he realized he was getting the short end of the stick. “They owned all the rights to my artwork,” he says, “and they’re printing five, 10, 15,000 of these shirts, and they’re making all the money. And I’m sitting here with a $500 check.”
Confident that people liked his designs, Sheldon decided to start selling the shirts himself. He borrowed $2,000 from his dad, set up a store on the Big Cartel platform, drew up some new designs in his trademark minimalistic style, printed them onto 200 American Apparel T-shirts, and started posting his stuff in forums and online. He named his shop Ugmonk — a meaningless word that Sheldon doesn’t want to explain because he’s worried people will be disappointed with how boring the story is — mostly because he didn’t want to call it something like “Jeff’s T-Shirt Designs.” He and his wife did most of the shipping, and much of the inventory lived in his parents’ basement.
In 2017, Sheldon decided to take a bigger swing and design a product from scratch. He wanted a place to put his phone, a home for his pens, just a simple organizer to stick behind his keyboard. So he designed a small, modular set, named it Gather, and launched a Kickstarter campaign. Sheldon hoped to get about $18,000 in preorders through the campaign and instead ended up with $430,960. It was a big enough deal that the Shark Tank producers called, he says, though Sheldon had to turn them down since he hadn’t actually made the product yet.
At the time, this seemed like a good problem to have. Sheldon even launched Gather as a separate brand on a separate website, thinking it might be bigger than Ugmonk and could ultimately replace it. He thought Gather might end up in Target. This was going to be huge.
Eager to fill all those orders and capitalize on the interest in Gather, Sheldon turned to a company in Texas that had a factory in China. And he quickly discovered exactly how it works to make products at scale. “We were injection-molding the parts,” he says, “which means the parts cost less than $1, but the molds cost between $20,000 and $30,000.” That meant no small batches, no experiments, only giant orders. The factory in China had never worked with wood before, it turned out, and the first models that came back were warped and wonky and generally nowhere near Sheldon’s standards. So he gave feedback to his contact in Texas, who took that feedback to China, and weeks later, more products showed up at his door. Rinse and repeat, over and over. For months.
Even after all the back and forth, Sheldon estimates now that 30 percent of the products he shipped to Kickstarter backers ultimately had to be replaced. Most users actually liked the product, and he eventually sold out his inventory, but too much of it just wasn’t up to Sheldon’s standards. He thought more than once about just scrapping the whole idea. “I was so disconnected from the process,” he says now. “I didn’t go to the factory, and I should have. I wasn’t the person communicating. I would just wait for photos or prototypes to show up at my house.” He decided, right then and there, that he didn’t want to be a big Target brand if this was what it took.
Gather has been two years in the works, with a huge amount of prototyping with local manufacturers.
“Hardware is hard” is a much-repeated maxim in the tech industry, and for good reason. Countless companies have built and marketed cool prototypes, only to discover that there’s a massive difference between making one product and 100 and an even bigger one between 100 and 100,000. Sheldon learned this lesson every step of the way. One of his first-ever batches of shirts came back unusable, which he says taught him a valuable lesson: “how to eat costs.” As the stakes got higher, he decided the only way to get what he wanted was to exert much more control over the process — and to aspire to making a few great things instead of countless crummy ones.
Even that was harder than it sounded, though. With his next product, a paper-based productivity system called Analog, another Kickstarter hit, Sheldon resolved to think smaller and more locally. He contracted with a printer in Indiana for the cards, hoping working domestically would help. It didn’t. There were just too many orders, and the quality suffered as a result. Sheldon had to throw away most of what was produced — though he kept a few of the failures as a reminder of how things really work. But then, through a friend, Sheldon got connected to a woodworker down the road in Pennsylvania who grew up working for his Amish father’s furniture business and eventually started his own. “They bailed us out of the Analog Kickstarter by replacing all the bad ones,” Sheldon says, “and got us connected to the Amish and Mennonite communities.”
Analog is now Ugmonk’s biggest product — Sheldon says it accounts for about 80 percent of Ugmonk’s sales. But he never stopped thinking about Gather. He still wanted to design desk accessories and had lots of ideas for new components. He found an industrial designer, Jack Marple, who agreed to help him figure out how to design and manufacture desk accessories in a more local, more predictable, higher-end way. They started sending 3D-printed prototypes back and forth and began reaching out to more local shops and fabricators.
They ultimately built a local supply chain, made up of largely Mennonite and Amish manufacturers, who they hoped could make Gather at a much higher quality. But getting up and running took a huge amount of work. A Mennonite-run company that mostly does metalwork for dairy farms agreed to be one of Ugmonk’s suppliers, for instance, but only after some convincing. “They’re making cattle shoots and plow pieces,” Sheldon says, “and I tell them it’s a stand for an iPhone... they still have flip phones.” But once Sheldon told them about the quality and craftsmanship he was looking for, they were in.
Over the last couple of years, Sheldon and his team — which was, for a long time, mostly Sheldon’s wife and family but now includes five part-time helpers and Tim Fortney, who became Ugmonk’s second full-time employee earlier this year — have spent countless hours driving between factories and warehouses, looking at prototypes and endlessly refining the Gather products.
Sheldon and Ugmonk spent years obsessing over every tiny detail of the Gather system.
Sheldon offers one example: “the edges of the metal” for the large monitor stand, he says, “when they came off the laser cutter, [the manufacturers] were doing the bending and the powder coating. Well, if you don’t file the edges just right, the powder coating will stick to the edge. And it’ll glob up and actually accentuate little imperfections.” If you’re cutting metal for a construction vehicle, nobody cares about the globs. But close up, those details matter — at least, they do to Sheldon. So now there’s another step in the process, “where they’ll file all the edges where it gets powder coated.” It’s more work and costs more to do, but for Ugmonk, it’s worth it.
All this makes everything slower and vastly more expensive. Sheldon estimates that building the new generation of Gather this way costs “four or five times” more than doing it the old way, with injection molds in foreign factories. But he likes that he can stand in the factory and watch the test runs happen. He likes being able to take the four or five bad eggs back and have them quickly replaced. “There’s a level of relationship,” he says, “of looking someone in the eye and sitting across the table from someone that you can’t hide from.” He acknowledges he’s a bit of a control freak but says he’s willing to do what it takes — and push others to do the same — to make great stuff. “It doesn’t scale,” he says, “and I’m okay with that.”
Making the Gather video required building beautiful office sets in otherwise rugged spaces.
Embrace the mess
After a few hours of shooting inside Sheldon’s house, the crew finishes by mimicking their opening shot — the slow roll toward Sheldon’s desk — with the full line of new Gather accessories now in place. Satisfied they’ve gotten it right, they relocate to Ugmonk’s new headquarters, a converted paper mill a few miles down the road from Sheldon’s house.
In a backroom of the building, Sheldon and Rothermel have spent weeks building two separate office sets into an otherwise barren and messy concrete space. In one corner, a dark, gamer-style setup with a full suite of black Gather gear. In the other, next to the window, a lighter wall with white accents, plants spilling off of shelves, a pink iMac, and all the white Gather components. Both are clean and camera-ready, at least once Sheldon finishes taping all the cables to walls and table legs. (Yes, he knows accepting some untidiness is part of the point. But he can only take so much.)
The point of these setups is to show how Gather can work for anyone. It drives Sheldon crazy that people are content to prop their monitor on a stack of books or put up with a crappy Amazon Basics laptop stand that is perpetually falling apart. But when he looks around at the people who work on their spaces, he says, caring about your setup is a tech-geek thing, somehow. He wants to bring a design-geek energy to the space.
After a 12-hour day, they’re still not done; another long shoot day follows soon after. Finally, with the video shot, the Ugmonk team spends weeks on every other detail of the launch. They oversee a test run of 30 full Gather sets, in both color options, to see how things come off the manufacturing line. (There are some small defects, like a slightly wobbly headphone stand, but those are quickly fixable.) They touch up the photos, debate the Kickstarter taglines, and sort out the prices. At the last minute, Sheldon remembers he needs to get the project approved by Kickstarter before it can go live, but luckily that goes well.
The Kickstarter launches on October 18th with a modest goal of $12,500. By the end of its first day, it hit $80,000. Sheldon knew this would happen — he just picked a low number because Kickstarter’s recommendation algorithms like projects that crush their goal quickly. By the time the campaign ends in December, he’s hoping for a number closer to $500,000, and if he’s really dreaming, it might even hit seven figures.
It’s a big dream and hardly guaranteed. Even with a Kickstarter discount, the Gather laptop stand is $129, the organizer set is $159, and the full 10-piece set — large monitor stand, laptop stand, organizers, and a magnetic base plate to hold them all in place — is $779. When everything goes on sale in April 2023, that set will cost $1,000. A grand for some desk accessories is a lot to ask.
Sheldon’s confident that people will see the value, though. He has collected a lot of devoted customers over the years — when he announced Ugmonk would stop selling T-shirts, which Sheldon says was because his supplier had become a problem, people flocked to the site to buy as many as they could. What he’s really worried about is whether he can deliver. “What if we get 5,000, 10,000 pieces,” he says, “and they’re all bad?” That would be an expensive and time-consuming problem.
But he has a decade of hard-won lessons in how the industry works and rests secure in the knowledge that, at the very least, that problem would be down the road and not across the world. “We’ve looked everybody in the eye, and we can go there,” he says. “That feels a lot better than the container coming from China, we open up the doors, and we’re like, ‘Oh no.’”
I asked Sheldon if the long-term goal was to become a full-on furniture manufacturer, to move from desk accessories to desks and chairs and tables and everything else. He initially said he might but then immediately began to fret about how the shipping logistics alone would change his small company for the worse. It might be more fun, he says, to find other places where these small things could be useful. “Maybe it goes on your kitchen table or your entry table.”
Then he starts to riff: “I want to do special editions of Gather, like, in a bright orange and just do 100 of them. I want to lean more into the artists’ way of doing it. I could literally just make one.” For him, making one is way more fun than making millions. And he knows exactly how to get it done.
AT&T ‘committed to ensuring’ it never bribes lawmakers again after $23 million fine
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
AT&T Illinois will pay $23 million after it admitted to making payments to former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan’s political ally in return for his “vote and influence over a bill,” according to a Friday press release from the Department of Justice (via Ars Technica). The company will also have to cooperate with the government’s investigation into the alleged misconduct and will have to set up a compliance and ethics program that the government will receive reports on. If the company keeps up its end of the bargain, the government will dismiss its prosecution.
According to the DOJ, in 2017 AT&T paid one of Madigan’s allies $22,500 through a lobbying firm that it worked with. AT&T employees tried to make it seem as if the ally had been hired for a specific purpose, but the person wasn’t actually expected to do any work. The president of AT&T Illinois was aware of the deal, and signed off on it being done covertly through the firm, saying in an email that the method was okay “as long as you are sure we will get credit and the box checked.” (In other words, as long as Madigan and his cohorts knew the company had scratched their backs.)
According to Ars Technica, AT&T Illinois was trying to influence a bill that would let it off the hook for providing landline telephone service to everyone in the state. The bill ended up passing, with the state house and senate voting to override the governor’s veto.
An unnamed AT&T spokesperson told Ars Technica: “We hold ourselves and our contractors to the highest ethical standards. We are committed to ensuring that this never happens again.” Given the hefty compliance program it signed with the government (the details take up seven pages in a document posted by the Department of Justice, and you can read them all below if you really feel like it), you’d hope that wouldn’t be the case.
Of course, that’s not to say that AT&T won’t try to use money to influence politics; it, along with other carriers and ISPs, spend millions in donations and lobbying to try and make sure the government passes laws that benefit them. All that’s usually above board, though; just don’t try to directly buy votes via a shady deal.
Peter Thiel’s midterm bet: the billionaire seeking to disrupt America’s democracy
Re-energized this election cycle, the tech entrepreneur joins other mega-donors apparently out to undercut the political system
Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.
The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley “disrupter” who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this year’s midterm elections.
Peter Thiel, Major U.S. Political Donor, Is Said to Pursue Maltese Citizenship Obtaining citizenship in Malta would provide another passport for Mr. Thiel, who is one of the largest individual donors for the U.S. midterm elections.
The quirks and oddities of a social network affect the community that grows up around it. Instagram’s lack of a repost feature pushed users to rely on hashtags to spread their pictures across the network, sowing the seeds of the heavily interest-based communities that still live there today. The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. TikTok – built by people who knew what they were doing – carefully sculpted its quirks to nudge users in its preferred direction, boosting harmless dance trends and discouraging political rants of the sort that litter competitor YouTube.
Over the years, some of the largest social networks have filed those quirks off, pushing for a homogeneity that is more accessible to all, even at the expense of what makes them unique. Twitter’s strict text-only, reverse-chronological, 140-character timeline is now algorithmically curated, offering 280 characters plus a range of multimedia; Instagram posts can be reshared in Snapchat-style stories, which can also contain TikTok-style videos; TikTok pivoted towards political content and now plays a leading role in the culture wars.
“No modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with ‘go nuts, show nuts’ in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible.”
Apple Store workers in Oklahoma vote to unionize
Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Workers at Apple’s Penn Square store in Oklahoma City have voted to unionize with the Communications Workers of America, with 56 yeses, and 32 nos. According to the National Labor Relations Board, which oversaw the election, all regular full-time and part-time employees at the store were eligible to vote, 95 in total.
The election was only the second one carried out for a US Apple store. In June, workers in Maryland voted to unionize in association with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Another election was scheduled to happen in Atlanta, but the CWA called it off, claiming that the company had made a fair election “impossible” by intimidating workers.
Apple has faced several complaints about anti-union tactics, including in Oklahoma — earlier this month, the CWA filed charges against the company with the NLRB. According to the union, Apple interrogated and surveilled workers at the Penn Square store, held captive audience meetings (even during the busy iPhone 14 Plus launch day, according to a report from Public Radio Tulsa), and told that they wouldn’t receive the same benefits as non-unionized stores if they voted to organize. The latter point has been backed up by a report from Bloomberg that said Apple told employees at the unionized store in Maryland that they’d have to bargain for benefits being given to workers at its other stores.
Apple Store in Oklahoma City Becomes Second to Unionize Workers said pay was adequate and benefits were good, but complained that managers’ practices often seemed arbitrary.
A tweet about hair relaxer kits connected models from the boxes with women who grew up seeing them
A burst of tweets from women who, as children, modeled for relaxer brands is one of the latest instances of the Black Twitter community finding an unexpected connection and reminiscing over a shared experience.
The discussion kicked off after @prettiestluxury tweeted a collage of models who posed on a box of no-lye relaxer saying, “I remember wanting to be the face of a hair relaxer so bad.” That was followed by a quote tweet asking these women to “show themselves,” which became the centerpiece of a wider trend.
Jaelyn Evans, who was a model on ORS’ Olive Oil Girls No-Lye Relaxer box, said that she has since gone natural. Nomsa Sasa Madida, a makeup artist, also posted a photo update on Twitter showing prominent braids that she’s now wearing long after posing for a relaxer brand.
One connection people quickly made from the posts is that nearly all of the relaxer models appear to have decided to stop using those products and instead now have natural hairstyles. Going through the tweets, I thought most of all about how much I had wanted to achieve the same styles shown in the pictures.
The conversations caught my eye as so many women reminisced on the days when they used relaxer products. Though it’s been five years since I used a relaxer on my hair, the first thing that came to mind was the memory of going to the beauty supply store and seeing the boxes lined up with the models on the front.
Tarkor Zehn, an audio producer here at Vox Media, recalled what she felt when she came across the tweet thread:
I thought it was adorable! It was the best “where are they now” that I never knew I needed. It was super interesting to see how the vast majority of them had either transitioned to being natural or a few of them had alway been natural in the first place. Truly a direct representation on the evolution of Black hair and the impact of the natural hair movement.
BuzzFeed caught up with some of the models who shared some of their experiences and some details about where they are today. While some women in the threads said they hadn’t used the products they were posing for, all of the models quoted by BuzzFeed said that wasn’t the case for them.
A tweet from @chigirlmakeup read, “I heard y’all were looking for the hair box girls...here I go I was the original ORS perm box girl,” showed the box model posing with her natural hair in a photo collage next to a box of Olive Oil ORS relaxer. She followed up on her tweet saying that she’s been natural for over 10 years and modeled when she was in her early twenties.
The journey from pursuing those looks to presenting the world with braids, curls, and other styles based on how our hair looks naturally was a common thread among the models and the people who were happy to see them come on their timelines.
Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime – podcast
Hackers are increasingly taking users’ data hostage and demanding huge sums for its release. They have targeted individuals, businesses, vital infrastructure and even hospitals. Authorities have been slow to respond – but there is help out there
Twitter and TikTok Lead in Amplifying Misinformation, Report Finds A new analysis found that algorithms and some features of social media sites help false posts go viral.
The best budget laptop of 2022
Here are the best cheap Chromebooks and laptops you can buy. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales
The best cheap laptops from HP, Lenovo, and more.
The best cheap laptops are getting better and better. The question to ask is: what’s most important, and what are you willing to sacrifice? Even the best cheap laptops aren’t perfect in every area — they have some strengths but cut corners to achieve their price tags. You can almost certainly find a budget laptop with a touchscreen, a premium-looking chassis, an HDMI port, a backlit keyboard, or stylus support, but you may need to consider which of those features you want the most, and which you can go without.
Our pick for the best cheap laptop of 2022 is the HP Envy x360 13, running Windows 10. We feel that the Envy has build quality, performance, and battery life that surpass those of many premium laptops, as well as the best cheap laptops on the market. But we’ve tested dozens the best laptops under $500, and we’ve got a number of additional models on this list from Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, HP, and more.
Many of our picks for the best cheap laptops are currently Chromebooks. We believe that Chromebooks are, in many cases, the best-value option for shoppers seeking a laptop under $500 and tend to offer better specs, features, and build quality than most Windows laptops at that price point. We hope to add more Windows laptops under $500 to this page in the future and are keeping a close eye on those releases.
Best Cheap Laptops 2022
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales
The Asus Chromebook Flip CX5 is the best cheap laptop of 2022.
The Chromebook Flip CX5 really is that good. It’s sturdy enough to withstand all kinds of jolts and jostles in a backpack or briefcase, and has a unique velvety texture that’s very pleasant to hold. Add a wide port selection, a smooth and comfortable keyboard, and a vivid display, and you’ve got a chassis that can hold its own against plenty of midrange Windows laptops.
Performance is equally impressive. We never once heard its fan in our testing, even when pushing a workload that slowed most devices down. Battery life is quite satisfactory, easily lasting us a day. And the speakers delivered some of the best audio we’ve ever heard from a Chromebook. While the CX5 isn’t a perfect device, it’s one of the best ones we’ve ever tested under $700. Overall, budget shoppers who don’t mind Chrome OS won’t be disappointed in this machine.
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge
The Acer Chromebook Spin 713 is the clamshell Chromebook to buy, and one of the best cheap laptops under $800.
If you’d prefer a more traditional Chromebook with a clamshell form factor, the $395 Acer Chromebook Spin 713 is an affordable option that’s all-around excellent. It has a gorgeous 3:2 display that delivers a sharp picture and bright, vibrant colors with plenty of vertical space. The screen alone would make the Chromebook Spin 713 a standout, but it has a number of other strengths as well, including a great keyboard, all-day battery life, and a comprehensive port selection, including an HDMI, in addition to USB-C, USB-A, and a microSD slot.
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge
The Asus Chromebook Detachable CM3 is the best cheap laptop with a built-in stylus.
If you like the Duet’s size and detachable form factor but are willing to spend on something a bit more upscale, you may find the Asus Chromebook Detachable CM3 to be a better choice. Like the Duet, the CM3 is a 10.5-inch 16:10 Chrome OS tablet with a fabric cover, kickstand, and detachable screen. But the CM3’s kickstand folds multiple ways: you can crease it lengthwise to stand the tablet up like a laptop or fold it the short way and stand the tablet up horizontally. Plus, it comes with a built-in USI stylus and roomy keys with a surprising amount of travel. Battery life was also quite impressive: we averaged close to 13 hours of continuous work.
Where the CM3 lags a bit behind the Duet (and other cheap laptops you may try) is the power. Its MediaTek processor can be a bit sluggish compared to more pricier offerings. But the CM3 still offers a surprising number of perks for its sub-$400 price and makes a great student driver or secondary device.
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge
The HP Pavilion Aero 13 is a 13-inch powerhouse that weighs almost nothing.
If you’re looking for a budget Windows laptop that’s thinner and lighter than the Envy x360 while delivering similar category-topping performance, the $669 HP Pavilion Aero 13 is a good choice for you. It has a powerful eight-core Ryzen processor, which is one of the fastest processors for thin and light laptops that you can get. Not only does it perform well, but it’s also unbelievably light at just 2.1 pounds, and it comes with a blindingly bright 16:10 screen. It’s a standout in battery life, too — I averaged almost 11 hours of continuous work.
HP did have to cut a few corners to achieve those benefits at this price point. The audio on our model wasn’t great, and the device shipped with some cheap bloatware installed. But the Pavilion Aero 13 is excellent in almost every other way, and it won’t disappoint if you’re looking for a functional, cheap Windows PC.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 is the reddest Chromebook you can buy and one of the best cheap laptops under $800.
If you’re looking for an affordable Chromebook that stands out from the crowd, the $549 Galaxy Chromebook 2 should be on your list. It comes in a bold “fiesta red” color (as well as a regular gray, if you prefer to blend in). It’s a touchscreen convertible with stylus support (though the stylus isn’t included).
On top of the design, the Galaxy Chromebook 2 includes an excellent QLED panel, which is one of the best displays we’ve ever seen on a Chromebook. You also get a solid keyboard, decent battery life (we averaged 7 hours and 21 minutes of continuous work), and a port selection that includes two USB-C ports, a microSD slot, and a headphone jack. It’s easily one of the best Chromebooks you can buy and one of the best cheap laptops as well.
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge
The Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 is the best cheap laptop under $500.
If you’re looking for an absurdly cheap Chromebook that absolutely gets the job done, you should definitely be looking at the Duet 3. This is a great, tiny laptop for budget shoppers with a magnetic detachable keyboard and kickstand. The screen even supports USI styluses, though a stylus is not included in this price. The keyboard is included, however, as are the keyboard and kickstand, which makes for a pretty solid package for a sub-$400 price.
While we don’t recommend the Duet 3 for work use, we found it quite usable for social media use, leisure, and multimedia viewing. It has a sharp, bright, 11-inch screen, and the keyboard and touchpad are surprisingly comfortable. As a bonus, it’s just 2.09 pounds, which makes it great for carrying around in a backpack or a purse.
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge
The Lenovo ThinkBook 13S is the best cheap business laptop, and one of the best cheap laptops under $900.
The Lenovo ThinkBook 13S looks a lot like Lenovo’s high-end ThinkPad laptops. But it’s much more affordable than those ThinkPads, with models currently starting under $900. We were pleasantly surprised by its sharp 16:10 display and its generous port selection, which includes Thunderbolt 4. The audio is loud and clear. The device lacks some of the artistry of the ThinkPad line, but brings the same functionality and high-quality build. If you’re looking for a sub-$900 Windows laptop for business, the ThinkBook should be on your list.
Photo by Monica Chin / The Verge
The Acer Swift 3X is one of the best creator laptops you can buy, and one of the best cheap laptops under $700.
Many of the best cheap laptops might be good choices for schoolwork or leisure, but the Acer Swift 3X is intended for creative professionals shopping on a budget. Models are available with Intel’s Iris Xe Max, a discrete graphics card that isn’t meant for intense gaming, but can lend a hand for amateur creators and students who work with photos and video for class. Those who want the cheapest model can go for integrated graphics, which will deliver a great experience (and are currently available for under $700).
In our testing the 3X offered good performance for its price — including surprisingly long battery life for a device with a discrete GPU. There’s a nice matte screen that’s available in a touch model. And at just over three pounds, it’s also much easier to carry around than most creator-oriented laptops out there. It’s not bad looking either — we particularly liked the “steam blue” color that our model came in.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The Microsoft Surface Go 3 is one of the best cheap laptops under $500 for 2022.
The Surface Go 3, currently available for under $500, is a 10.5-inch tablet that’s best for young students or anyone else who needs a small device for on-the-go use. It offers the same excellent build quality and premium design as the rest of Microsoft’s acclaimed Surface line, but carries a much lower price tag.
Windows 11 runs quite well on this device, andwe found Snap Assist helpful for sizing apps and tabs for the smaller screen. We could run all the Windows apps we wanted, and even found the small keyboard surprisingly comfortable. The battery life was a bit short, however, so make sure you won’t need to have this device away from an outlet for too long if you’re considering buying it.
Election Firm Knew Data Had Been Sent to China, Prosecutors Say The executive of a small Michigan elections software company was charged with grand theft by embezzlement and conspiracy to commit a crime.
World’s largest crypto exchange hacked with possible losses of $500m
Binance, the latest crypto company to experience a targeted hack, temporarily suspends transactions and the transfer of funds
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, may have lost half a billion dollars after a hack of its network.
The company temporarily suspended transactions and the transfer of funds after detecting an exploit between two blockchains, a method of digital theft that has been used recently in at least one other major hack.
The best Amazon Prime Day deals under $25
Amazon’s premium Fire Stick 4K Max and mid-range Fire Stick 4K streaming dongles look identical, though the latter is currently discounted to just $24.99. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Day two of Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale is under way, and while all the attention may be on big-ticket items like TVs, laptops, or wearables, we know not everyone can throw money around on that kind of stuff on a whim. There are also deals going on that can appeal to any tech fiend on a tight budget, so we’re pooling together all the best deals under $25 that we can find.
But you’d be remiss to think of these deals as just “cheap stuff.” We carefully comb through the myriad sales to find budget-friendly items that are worth your time and dollars, even at these lower-stakes prices: like a 4K-capable Fire TV Stick or a small and lightweight wireless earbuds. Frankly, sometimes it’s these inexpensive buys that can be some of the handiest accessories and add-ons in our daily lives — so let’s dive in.
Thethird-gen Echo Dotfrom 2018with two GE Cync color smart LED bulbs is $17.99(about $46 off) is$17.99 ($22 off). This Echo Dot is a bit old now, andsoon to be two generations behind, but it’sstill finefor issuing voice commands for an Alexa-connected house. The bundle with the GE bulbs is like a smart home starter pack.
The Roku Express 4K Plus streaming box is down to $24.99 ($15 off). The compact streaming box supports HDR10 Plus and dual-band Wi-Fi with the option to attach a Micro-USB-to-Ethernet adapter for a faster, wired connection.
Kasa’s Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Plug-In Dimmer is an outdoor smart lighting plug that can dim compatible lights as well as set schedules and timers. It’s selling for $17.99 instead of $29.99 and works with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
The Skullcandy Dime earbuds are just $19.49 ($6 off) in several unique colors. They may not have the greatest battery life or sound quality, but they’re incredibly compact, colorful, and even at this low price support solo use with either earbud.
The SooPii (don’t laugh) USB-C cable with a built-in power meter can carry up to 100W of output to a phone or laptop and show you a live wattage measurement on its small LED. It’s currently $9.79 for a four-foot cable or $12.79 for a 6.6-foot one, exclusively for Prime members.
That Satechi charger has a nice design, but if you want an even longer cable the no-frills Belkin Magnetic Wireless charger is 6-feet long, comes with a power adapter, and is also selling for $14.99 ($15 off). Like the Satechi, it tops out at 7.5W charging for iPhones.
Anker’s PowerWave Sense 2-in-1 wireless charging station is $19.99 ($5 off). It charges a Qi-compatible Android phone at up to 10W or iPhone up to 7.5W, with a second spot for wirelessly charging a pair of earbuds. It includes a USB-C cable but not a power adapter.
The SteelSeries pudding-style Prism Keycaps are just $18.99 ($11 off) for a full set in black or white. They may not be hoity-toity artisan or premium keycaps you find around the mechanical keyboard community, but they’re simple and allow bright RGB to really shine.
Supergiant Games’ popular roguelike dungeon-crawler Hades (physical) is on sale for $19.99 ($10 off) for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox versions.
Alan Wake Remastered (physical) is on sale for $19.99 ($10 off) for PS4 and Xbox. The remaster of the 2010 action-adventure mystery thriller from developer Remedy is being sold by a third party but shipped by Amazon.
Olli Olli Worldis on sale for $19.99 ($10 off) through Amazon as a Steam download code. This pastel-tinted skateboarding game mixes in some rhythm game vibes for a unique experience that feels incredibly charming and fun to play. Read our review.
Amazon is selling Apple’s AirTag loop, which you can use to attach your AirTags to luggage and other accessories, in blue and yellow for $9 instead of $29. Amazon is also selling Apple’s Leather Key Ring in orange for $19 instead of $35.
TP-Link’s AC1200 Wi-Fi Extender isdown to just $24.99 ($25 off) at Amazon, easily besting its previous all-time low of around $34. It’s not guaranteed to fix all of your network woes, but it’s a cheap option to consider if you’re struggling with reliable Wi-Fi in a small space.
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