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PUBG Mobile returns to India after ban with green blood and a new name

Massively popular battle royale game PUBG Mobile is returning to India after being banned in September 2020, TechCrunch writes. The app is available in early access on Google’s Play Store under a new name, Battlegrounds Mobile India, and with some changes to the game itself, like green blood and a new account system. PUBG Mobile… Read more

Nielsen takes another crack at gauging our streaming habits

Nielsen, the nearly century-old research firm which produces the eponymous gold standard for television ratings, is taking a more serious look into how much Americans are streaming. The result of its labors: an ominously named rating system it calls The Gauge. While Nielsen has tried to calculate the popularity of various streaming programs before (through… Read more

Facebook will start putting ads in Oculus Quest apps

Facebook will soon begin testing ads inside its Oculus Quest virtual reality system. In the coming weeks, ads will start appearing inside the Resolution Games title Blaston as well as two other unnamed apps. Facebook will later expand the system based on user feedback, saying it aims to create a “self-sustaining platform” for VR development…. Read more

How Republicans and Democrats are gearing up to fight tech monopolies

In a surprise decision Tuesday, President Joe Biden tapped Lina Khan, one of the most prominent critics of Big Tech, to lead the Federal Trade Commission. In that role, Khan will have the authority to guide the FTC’s agenda — and it’s fair to assume she’ll be taking a hawkish stance toward Big Tech. The… Read more

Amazon appears to have removed RavPower, a popular phone battery and charger brand

One month ago, Amazon-first gadget brands Aukey and Mpow suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the giant online retailer’s storefront, with almost all their electronics vanishing from Amazon’s shelves. Today, popular battery and charger brand RavPower has completely disappeared as well, as spotted by the WSJ’s Nicole Nguyen. All of the company’s product listings have disappeared,… Read more

Slack is rolling out a new scheduled send feature

Slack has announced a new Scheduled Send feature that the company is starting to roll out today, which — as the name implies — will let users schedule messages to send at a later time and date. The scheduled send feature adds a new drop-down arrow to the green “send message” button in Slack’s desktop… Read more

China, Russia aim for first joint astronaut Moon landings in next decade

China and Russia expect to put their first crews of astronauts on the Moon sometime in the next decade, representatives said on Wednesday. Already established plans for their International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) include a lineup of robotic lunar missions and coming up with a legal framework for exploring the Moon, an effort similar to… Read more

The Twitch streamers fighting to keep minority languages alive

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Minority languages are often associated with aging rural communities, thought to have fallen out of use or confined to textbooks. Defined simply as a language spoken by less than half of the population in a country, they… Read more

Lenovo’s New ThinkPad Workstations Get Latest Intel Chips, Nvidia RTX A5000

Home News (Image credit: Lenovo) Lenovo’s lineup of ThinkPad workstation laptops are getting more powerful with the launch of the ThinkPad P1, P15 and P17. The notebooks are being bumped up to the latest Intel Core and Xeon mobile CPUs and Nvidia graphics, going up to the enterprise-grade RTA A5000 GPU. The new laptops are… Read more

Inland Performance Plus M.2 NVMe SSD Review: Fast and Cool

Our Verdict The Inland Performance Plus offers up very fast Gen 4 performance at a lower price than its competition, making it a compelling value for those on the hunt for a new high-performance M.2 NVMe SSD. For + Appealing aesthetics + Competitive performance + 5-year warranty + Keeps cool under most workloads + Heatsink… Read more

Royal Kludge RK84 Review: Lots of Features, One Serious Flaw

Our Verdict The Royal Kludge RK84 offers a compact design with wired, Bluetooth and 2.4-Ghz connectivity, and hot-swappable key switches. However, the 2.4-GHz option is nearly unusable and the software is awful. For + Sturdy construction + Compact design compared to traditional tenkeyless keyboards + Hot-swappable switches + Three Bluetooth profiles + USB 2.0 passthrough… Read more

AMD launches Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Edition with a performance bump

AMD is launching a new variant of its Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card that is liquid cooled. This extra cooling allows the card to run at higher clock speeds, delivering better performance in games. Videocardz reports that the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Edition also includes faster memory, at 18Gbps instead of the 16Gbps… Read more

Waymo raises $2.5 billion in second external funding round

Waymo just announced a second external funding round, raising $2.5 billion for the continued advancement of its autonomous driving technology. According to investor website PitchBook, the company is valued at just over $30 billion, though that figure does not include this most recent funding round. (A spokesperson didn’t respond to a request seeking clarification.) For… Read more

Facebook’s AI moderator will tell group admins when users are beefing in the comments

Facebook is launching a suite of new tools to help group admins get a grip on their communities. Some simply offer a clearer overview of posts and members, while others are designed to help admins tackle conflict — including an AI-powered feature that Facebook says can identify “contentious or unhealthy conversations” taking place in the… Read more

General Motors’ electric vehicle plan just got even more expensive

General Motors announced that it would increase its investment in electric and autonomous vehicles to $35 billion through 2025. The new figure represents a 30 percent increase over the amount the automaker said it would spend last November, and a 75 percent increase from its initial investment prior to the pandemic. It’s a staggering amount… Read more