News

Over the last few days, a flood of reports used those words to describe a phenomenon of musicians suddenly canceling big tours, with people speculating that it’s because they couldn’t sell enough tickets, leaving the blue icons visible at venue after venue in Ticketmaster’s seating charts.

What happened in the second week of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman? The Verge senior AI reporter, Hayden Field, can help you catch up.

All 42 “regular part-time and full-time employees” of the studio, behind games like Psychonauts and Kiln, will be part of the union, Aftermath reports.

For more than an hour on Friday, many people were having trouble connecting to Discord, with the platform showing a message saying that there were “increased API errors.” Discord confirmed it was investigating issues at 3:08PM ET, and by 6:38PM ET, it reported that all “critical functionalities have recovered for all users.”

Google gave Snapseed its first major update in years on iOS last June, and now the Android app is getting a big upgrade, too, 9to5Google reports. Both apps are now on version 4.0.

Less than two months after shutting down its open beta relaunch and downsizing its team, Digg has launched a new version at di.gg. This updated version of the platform, instead of functioning similar to Reddit, is more like an online sentiment tracker. Right now, it’s focused only on tracking AI news, but “it’s going to be all the things,” according to Kevin Rose.

As Bloomberg reports, Lime finally filed for an IPO on Friday, five years after it originally announced plans to go public. The Uber-backed micromobility company notes in its SEC filing that it intends to use the proceeds from the IPO to pay off debt.

The Trump Administration has made another website, this time a dedicated Pentagon page with “new, never-before-seen files on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).

If the pointy-toothed grin of Labubu dolls wasn’t unsettling enough, a group of MIT grad students has turned 12 of them into a rolling robot capable of following you around. There’s more details about Labububot here, but the video should be all you need to keep you wide awake tonight.

Meta recently began tracking employees’ computer activity to train its AI models, plans to cut 10 percent of staff later this month, and is pushing “employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents,” sparking “anger and anxiety,” reports the New York Times:

Earlier this week I wrote about the social media “clippers” that get paid to semi-covertly promote podcasts, TV shows, and other media through anonymous accounts. One of the clipping campaigns was for Perplexity AI — but nobody can tell me who, exactly, is responsible for the clips:

Similar to the “Copy Fail” exploit revealed a week ago, the two “Dirty Frag” exploits (CVE-2026-43284) also allow a local user to give themselves root privileges on nearly any Linux distribution. The researcher who found it says that, “Because the embargo has now been broken, no patches or CVEs exist for these vulnerabilities.”

The two companies are forming a joint venture that will combine Sony’s designs with TSMC’s manufacturing capabilities to develop next-gen image sensors. The joint venture, majority owned by Sony, will also allow the companies to explore opportunities in physical AI applications in the robotics and automotive industries, the press release says.

The Google Docs-style editing feature won’t appear in the upcoming WordPress 7.0 update, according to an announcement on Thursday. WordPress.org co-founder Matt Mullenweg cites concerns surrounding recurring bugs and memory efficiency, but plans to launch the feature in a future version of WordPress.

Takashi Tezuka is stepping down at the end of June. He joined the company in 1984, and worked on the original Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda games, before directing titles including Super Mario Bros. 3 and A Link to the Past. More recently, he was a producer on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

The beloved British environmentalist has his own Google Doodle when you search his name today. He’s celebrating with a special concert in London, and a thank you message to fans: “I had rather thought that I would celebrate my 100th birthday quietly, but it seems that many of you have had other ideas.”

Capcom has launched a free “Leon Must Die Forever” minigame for Resident Evil Requiem that you can play once the main campaign is completed. You race against the clock to fight through areas you’ve visited previously, all with stronger enemy variants, five increasing difficulty ranks, and new “enhancer abilities.”

Meta argues that the UK communications regulator has “disproportionate” fine calculations — up to ten percent of the company’s global revenue for Online Safety Act breaches — that should instead be “based on the services being regulated in the countries they’re being regulated in.” The EU uses a similar methodolgy for fines.

Google says it’s rolling out a feature for its Help me write tool that lets it generate emails personalized to your tone and style. Depending on your prompt, Help me write can also pull in relevant context from Google Drive and Gmail.

Following The Academy Awards saying last week that only humans can get acting Oscars, the Golden Globes’ eligibility rules seem to have slightly more wiggle room allowing for AI to be used for acting awards.

“Codex can now use Chrome on your computer to complete work inside the websites and apps where you’re already signed in,” according to the Chrome Web Store listing for the extension. It works in “task-specific” tab groups so you can keep using your active tabs.

The US Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 against the tariffs, Reuters reports. The tariffs originally went into effect in February, with Trump invoking a section of the Trade Act of 1974.

Mozilla:

Following a missed April court date, French prosecutors have formally opened a criminal investigation into Elon Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino over the platform’s role in spreading sexualized AI deepfakes and illegal content, as reported by CNBC.

Here’s what Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said about the decision: