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Products on a conveyor belt are scanned at an Amazon fulfillment center, where they are being sorted and shipped out during Cyber Monday on November 27th, 2023, in Tampa, Florida. | Photo by Octavio Jones / Getty Images Despite making pledges to cut down on plastic packaging, a new report from the nonprofit conservation organization Oceana estimates that Amazon’s plastic waste has continued to grow in the US. The company created 208 million pounds of plastic waste from its packaging in the...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Just as Elon Musk said, X is doling out free Premium and Premium memberships to accounts with a high number of verified followers. Multiple X users on Wednesday reported seeing the familiar blue “Verified” checkmark next to their handles despite not paying for either paid X subscription tier. Musk last week announced that X accounts with over 2,500 “verified subscriber followers” would receive a free Premium membership; while accounts with over 5,000...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple’s online services appear to be having some problems, with an outage cutting many of us off from the App Store, Apple TV, and Apple Music. The system status page for Apple’s online service has noted an outage beginning at 6:31PM ET affecting those services, as well as Arcade, Audiobooks, Books, Podcasts, Fitness Plus, and its new Apple Sports app. Others have noted problems accessing services like TestFlight and Apple Business Manager. Apple...

The Lunar Dawn LTV from Lunar Outpost, Lockheed Martin, General Motors (GM), Goodyear, and MDA Space. | Image: Lunar Outpost NASA has selected Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab to develop the lunar terrain rover for its Artemis lunar explorations. All three companies are in the running for task orders with a potential value of $4.6 billion over the next 13 years. The trio will develop their team’s ideas for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) to help astronauts explore the...

Nothing but respect for MY president. | Image: OpenAI OpenAI’s DALL-E is getting a couple of upgrades today that help you shape your AI-generated masterpieces. First, you’ll now find image editing tools when using DALL-E within ChatGPT, both on the web and on mobile. Second, DALL-E now offers preset style suggestions to help inspire image creation — not unlike Android’s AI-generated wallpaper prompts. Because how else could you dream up a sci-fi polar bear on vacation? DALL-E is on its...

Image: Roblox Roblox asked a federal judge in California to dismiss a suit from two mothers who allege the platform allowed an illegal gambling ring to prey on their children. Instead, the judge has allowed the case to proceed — though some of the claims, including RICO allegations, have been dismissed. The company argued that the plaintiffs’ claims were barred by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prevents any “interactive computer service” — in this case, Roblox — from...

Proba-3’s occulter blocks the Sun’s light for the coronagraph. | Image: European Space Agency The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing to create its own solar eclipses so that researchers can study one of the more difficult-to-observe parts of the Sun’s anatomy: its blazing-hot corona. To do that, it hopes to fly two separate spacecraft, 150 meters apart and aligned so that one satellite (called the “occulter”) blocks all but the corona from the other satellite, which will observe it...

Image: Annapurna Interactive You could breeze through Open Roads, the new mystery game from publisher Annapurna Interactive. It’s only around two hours long, and it isn’t the kind of game where you’re likely to get stuck. There are no real puzzles to solve or obstacles to overcome. Instead, you steadily move through a story about a mother and daughter discovering long-lost family secrets while on a road trip together. But the game is filled with so many fun details and intriguing mysteries...

Photo by Chance Yeh / Getty Images for HubSpot This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more. I have never gotten so many responses to an issue as I did with last week’s on Andrew Huberman. He seems to elicit an even stronger response than Rogan, though perhaps response to Rogan has calmed down as we have all gotten more used to his shenanigans. Today, I have a look at what some of you all had to say about the value of his podcast...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge WhatsApp is down worldwide, impacting the 2 billion users of the messaging service. Users started experiencing issues connecting to WhatsApp in multiple countries just after 2PM ET today, with the service stuck on “connecting” for many. The Meta-owned messaging service appears to be experiencing a major outage worldwide. WhatsApp doesn’t have its own status page, and it’s not listed on Meta’s own service status, either. Other Meta services like...