The WSJ’s Joanna Stern wanted to find out just how it survived the fall — by dropping phones from a drone, of course.

Alex Garland isn’t the only filmmaker thinking about the current state the US’ political system. During a recent appearance on The Ringer’s The Town podcast, Aaron Sorkin shared that he’s in the early stages of writing a new The Social Network-esque movie about January 6th and Facebook’s role in galvanizing the attempted coup.

Jason Parham’s 2021 Wired article about Black Twitter detailed quite a bit about what made the community such an enriching space for Black people. But Hulu’s new docuseries based on the piece looks like going to be focused on detailing how Black Twitter became a broader cultural phenomenon. The series premieres on May 9th.

Early bird pricing starts at $399 via Indiegogo, with shipments expected to start in May. It’s advertised as the first device with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 that’s designed to chase the booming gaming handheld market.

There are Android gamers out there, right? We’ve been asking you to email The Vergecast about your Android gaming life, let us know!

One owner apparently plugged his into his car after recieving it at the swanky NYC event a few days back and it promptly bricked itself.

They said that Rabbit was quick to replace it, but not before they snapped a pic of what looks like an Android debugging UI.

It yanked the App Store listings days after a 404 Media report on the existence of Instagram ads advertising the apps as tools that can non-consensually remove the clothes of any person. Google also took down similar apps on the Play Store.

Overall, Apple removed three apps from the App Store, but only after we provided the company with links to the specific apps and their related ads, indicating the company was not able to find the apps that violated its policy itself. 

The WSJ reports that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Google’s Sundar Pichai also have a seat on the board, which the Department of Homeland Security formed to promote AI safety and security. Other members include academics, civil rights leaders, and government officials, according to the WSJ.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with China’s Xi Jinping today to discuss everything from AI to the war in Ukraine. But “TikTok did not come up,” Blinken told reporters at a short press conference following his meetings today. Seriously, that’s all he said. Maybe next time.

Equipped with laser sighting, lidar mapping, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, the Thermonator (yes, really) is apparently legal in 48 US states for things like “snow and ice removal.” It’s also purportedly being sold for $9,420, or about 3x more than buying the robot and flamethrower separately. But what good is a flamethrower if not for a marketing stunt?

Yes, this is a real AI-generated image that Microsoft has used in one of its corporate blog posts about Copilot (spotted by Albacore). I assume it’s supposed to say Copilot, but many AI models regularly fail at producing text correctly in images. Microsoft had a similar AI image fail earlier this year.

When the resurgent Chinese giant unveiled its new Pura 70 flagship phones last week, all eyes were on the chipset. Would it close the gap with the state-of-the-art 3nm fabrication process Taiwan’s TSMC uses to make chips in the latest iPhones, for example?

Not even close, says Verge alum Vlad Savov:

TechInsights, which was the first to identify the original 9000s in conjunction with Bloomberg News, said it found “with high confidence” that the Pura contained a Huawei Kirin 9010 fabricated using SMIC’s so-called 7nm N+2 process, an enhanced version of typical 7nm manufacturing.

So... sanctions are working?

G/O Media sold Deadspin, The A.V. Club, and The Takeout last month. Now Global Tetrahedron, which includes Twilio co-founder Jeff Lawson and former NBC News reporter Ben Collins, has acquired The Onion.

Taking over as CEO, Collins told the NYT:

We’re keeping all the writers, we’re going to work with the union, we’re going to make it so they can hopefully get paid a little bit more money, and we’re going to give them the room to grow.

The first article published? Give Us $1 Or ‘The Onion’ Disappears Forever.

There’s a lack of cybersecurity products devoted to iOS and macOS, and the startup DoubleYou thinks it can fix that problem, says co-founders Patrick Wardle and Mikhail Sosonkin.

DoubleYou will be like a “supplier of car parts” for Apple cybersecurity solutions, developing tools that it can license to companies, who can then build them in their security products.

We warned you about pause ads nearly six years ago, and again when YouTube started trialing them last May. Now, Google’s Philipp Schindler says the results of that trial is that advertisers unsurprisingly love them!

They are driving strong results and “commanding premium pricing from advertisers,” he said on today’s earnings call. No news about a wider rollout, but...

No need for a Kill-A-Watt — fleet management companies can deploy ChargePoint’s Home Flex residential charging stations to keep track, which can tap into cheaper residential electric rates, as well as save time and money on stops at chargers.

ChargePoint says its software can handle reimbursement at public charging stations, and integrate with other fleet management software thanks to an open API.

According to the WSJ, Amazon, YouTube, and Peacock are all in the mix alongside incumbents Warner and Disney, with the possibility of snagging global streaming rights for some games.

When these deals kick in after 2024-2025, they’ll exist alongside the three-headed effort from Disney, Fox, and WBD, standalone ESPN, Netflix and the WWE, the NBA’s FAST channel and who knows what else.

Hertz said in its first quarter earnings report today that it plans to sell an additional 10,000 Teslas, after committing to off-loading 20,000 of the electric vehicles earlier this year. That means the rental car company plans on selling 15 percent of the initial 200,000 EVs it said it was going to buy from Tesla and Polestar back in the heady days of 2021.

Alphabet’s first-ever dividend will pay shareholders 20 cents per share on June 17th, and the Google owner “intends to pay quarterly cash dividends in the future” too. Meta made a big splash when it announced a 50 cent per share dividend in February, and Microsoft increased its dividend to 75 cents per share last September.

Because this guy apparently was quoted at $30,000 to activate the truck’s bidirectional vehicle-to-home Powershare capabilities. That’s about twice the amount that GM said it would cost to do the same with the Chevy Silverado EV.

In her Soundbite newsletter this week, Ashley Carman covers Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. Lee is bucking the system by keeping the album, which earned a stellar Pitchfork review, off all the big music services like Spotify.

Instead, you can download WAVs from this Geocities site — I love that I just wrote that — or listen to it on YouTube.

Meanwhile, sources tell The Information that ByteDance is “internally exploring scenarios for selling.” It’s been literally one day since the divest-or-ban ultimatum became law, so I hope you’re ready for another nine to twelve months of spin.

The decentralized social network has awarded an $800 grant to SkyBridge, an “in-progress proxy web server that translates Mastodon API calls into appropriate Bluesky ones,” which will let people use their favorite Mastodon apps on Bluesky.

The funds came from Bluesky’s rather modest ($10,000 in its initial allocation) grant fund for developers on the AT Protocol.