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Adi Robertson

Adi Robertson

Senior Reporter

Adi Robertson has been covering the intersection of technology, culture, and policy at The Verge since 2011. Her work includes writing about DIY biohacking, survival horror games, virtual and augmented reality, online free expression, and the history of computing. She also makes very short video games. You have probably seen her in a VR headset.

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The System Shock remake comes to consoles on May 21st.

That’s almost a year after its 2023 PC release, but good news for anyone who’d rather try the surprisingly good retro shooter revamp on Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, or PlayStation 5.


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Bad news for Cohost.

The Twitter/X alternative’s latest financial update is dire: it may run out of money in April after losing contact with a single person who’s provided its funding so far. While the operators lay out backup plans like crowdfunding, the site’s future seems uncertain to say the least.


March 2024 Financial Update

[cohost dot org on cohost]

The final frontier of qualified immunity: copyright law.

404 Media obtained internal emails about how a controversial Call of Duty-themed police recruiting poster was created — and before the backlash, the department was more worried about the publisher’s IP lawyers than comparing law enforcement work to a bloody military shooter. The department pulled and apologized for the ad last month; as far as we know, Activision has not publicly responded.


A recruitment poster featuring police officers pointing guns with the slogan “stop playing games and answer the call of duty.”
The poster shows a Peoria SWAT team because “I didn’t want to cross any legal lines with Activision,” per one email.
Peoria Police Department
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The post office is not an interactive computer service.

Legal blogger Eric Goldman covers a weird (and rightfully smacked down) attempt at getting Section 230 immunity for nonconsensually distributing nude pictures through the mail — including some brief, useful observations on the state of nonconsensual pornography law both on- and offline.


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The TikTokers are revolting.

Apparently TikTok’s push notification warning is working, because congressional staffers say they’re flooded with calls protesting a new play to make Chinese owner ByteDance sell the app:

“It’s so so bad. Our phones have not stopped ringing. They’re teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day on the app and we can’t take it away,” one House GOP staffer told POLITICO, granted anonymity to speak candidly.


The Affordable Connectivity Program for cheap broadband is staggering to a halt.

The FCC has issued a formal notice that ACP funding, which subsidizes broadband access for 23 million households, runs out at the end of April. As Karl Bode at Techdirt notes, Congress (particularly congressional Republicans) didn’t find the Biden administration’s request for $6 billion to fund it worth granting. Those households will lose out on a $30 monthly broadband discount — which FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel warns will cause some to lose access altogether.


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Play Store developers can link to outside payment offers in the EU this week.

Google noted the change as part of an update on its compliance with the Digital Markets Act. The update highlights more options it’s already announced or rolled out, including new choice screens and data sharing options, plus changes to how Play Store developers can collect payments — all preparing for the deadline of March 6th.


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X’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate sounds like it’s on the rocks.

The parties held a conference call to argue about whether the nonprofit’s anti-hate speech researchers illegally scraped data from Elon Musk’s social network, and a judge seems dubious.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer was skeptical that when the nonprofit entered the standard user contract governing all Twitter and X users, it could have foreseen that Musk would buy Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and welcome back users it had banned for posting hateful content. [...] “I am trying to figure out, in my mind, how that’s possibly true, because I don’t think it is.”

Judge Breyer didn’t indicate when we might get a ruling, Reuters says.


Tumblr’s AI opt-out feature is live.

As mentioned yesterday, Tumblr now has info about opting out of AI data scraping on its help page — it’s available via the “prevent third-party sharing” toggle. For visual artists who are still worried about the prospect of AI tools training on their work, there are less official ways to stop that, too.


A screenshot of the “prevent third-party sharing” toggle as described in the link posted above.