Tech

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 64, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, get ready for some weird documentaries, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)  This week, I’ve been reading about raw milk and $HAWK and WhatsApp, watching A Man on the Inside …

This week, Google announced it’s rolling out ChromeOS M131 to non-beta users, bringing with it a handy “Safety reset” feature that lets Chromebook users reset their laptops without totally wiping them. The update also introduced a new “Flash notifications” accessibility option to help those who might not otherwise easily hear or see them. Like Powerwash in ChromeOS, Safety reset will …

Microsoft’s Phone Link app is warning that Android smartphones using the latest version of Android 15 won’t display certain “sensitive” notifications, according to a post from Mishaal Rahman spotted by Windows Central. The warning is the result of an Android 15 privacy feature that automatically categorizes notifications like those containing 2FA codes as “sensitive” and prevents third-party apps from seeing …

When I was a kid, my mom and auntie would retreat into the bathroom, hands wrapped in latex gloves, newspaper covering the counters and floor as they mixed together a dark, foul-smelling paste in a plastic bowl. For hours, they’d alternately gossip and brush the paste into each other’s hair. When the monthly ritual was done, their gray hairs had …

YouTube announced a hefty subscription price increase this week that will shoot the monthly cost up by $10 to $82.99 on January 13th for existing members (or now, if you sign up today). Some subscribers are staving off the hike using the time-honored tradition of threatening to cancel, as one Verge reader indicated in a comment on our original story …

The group behind the HDMI standard, HDMI Forum, says that it will detail a new spec release in a press conference on January 6th that will enable “a wide range of higher resolutions and refresh rates.” The new capabilities will be “supported with a new cable,” according to the HDMI Forum’s email to IMR announcing the presser. The spec …

If you missed the first sale on the 2024 Kindle Paperwhite during Black Friday, now’s your chance to write your own redemption arc. Right now, you can get Amazon’s newest ad-supported ebook reader at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target for $134.99 ($25 off). That’s still $5 shy of its all-time low, but it’s a pretty good discount this early into …

Rhode Island took its RIBridges system for applying for public assistance programs like Medicaid offline Friday following a cyberattack that may have exposed the personal data of hundreds of thousands of people, reports CBS affiliate WPRI 12. With its RIBridges system offline, Rhode Islanders won’t be able to log into RIBridges’ web portal or app, used to apply for Medicaid, …

You know that flavor of internet conversation where one familiar item is identified as another, wholly different item in a way that shouldn’t make sense but weirdly does? Like how a hot dog could be classified as a sandwich, or because it has a filling enclosed by dough, a Pop-Tart is ravioli. Despite Infinity Nikki’s looks of a high-quality dress-up …

RaMell Ross considers himself more of a visual artist than a movie director. His second film, Nickel Boys, attempts a visual artist’s feat: a feature shot entirely from the first-person point of view. Every decade, it seems, first-person camerawork reemerges in film. Kathryn Bigelow’s dystopian thriller Strange Days (1995) cut to it when its characters deployed a sci-fi technology to …