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Jacob Kastrenakes

Jacob Kastrenakes

Executive Editor

Jacob Kastrenakes is an executive editor at The Verge where he oversees the publication's creators, tech, and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, Jacob has published more than 5,000 stories, produced special issues like Making It Work and Verge 10, and was the founding editor of the site's Creators section. You might have seen him in a video where he drank too much from a Wi-Fi-connected wine bottle.

You can contact Jacob by email or Twitter at the links below. If you want to reach out securely, you can use Signal (412-423-8889; calls and texts are not monitored) or PGP.

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Here’s why it’s so expensive for Twitch to operate in South Korea.

The streaming service shut off access this week, citing “prohibitively expensive” costs. Those costs stem from a tax on high bandwidth services, according to Rest of World:

The [“sender pays”] rule requires companies to compensate the receiving networks for the traffic they send. It’s meant to tax heavy senders like Netflix and YouTube. Livestreaming sites like Twitch face particularly steep fees, as low latency is critical for live content.


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Shoutout to random GitHub projects that do exactly what you need.

I needed to create a bootable MacOS installer over the weekend for an older version of the operating system — something Apple’s own instructions don’t actually support. Fortunately, a Reddit comment pointed me to the app Mist, which automated the whole process. It’s always nice to find that someone out there had the same problem as you, then just went ahead and solved it for everyone.


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Apple is going to be stunned when it finds out how the Mac works.

The company put out a new statement today criticizing Spotify’s complaint to the EU about restrictions on its iOS app:

Fundamentally, their complaint is about trying to get limitless access to all of Apple’s tools without paying anything for the value Apple provides.

What kind of computing platform could possibly offer developers that kind of flexibility? Who would make such a thing?


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T-Mobile says we should stop looking at Down Detector.

The site, which tracks web service outages, is showing blips for Verizon and T-Mobile. Turns out... those are probably just from Verizon and T-Mobile customers trying to call AT&T users.

“We did not experience an outage,” T-Mobile writes.


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Verizon says it’s doing just fine.

Its wireless network “remains fully operational,” the company wrote this morning. But its customers could have issues connecting to users of “another carrier” — AKA AT&T, which is suffering a widespread, ongoing outage.


The NFT world is consolidating.

Yuga Labs, the group behind Bored Apes, is purchasing Kevin Rose’s NFT group, Proof. Yuga previously bought CyrptoPunks, too.

As Yuga scoops up more of the NFT world, the question remains: who’s still buying? And is there anything worth doing with them?


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He was no longer in the Amazon with Madame Web’s mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.

RIP to an all-time great piece of exposition: Vulture reports that the jam-packed sentence from the Madame Web trailer that went viral for its tongue-twisting amount of story detail didn’t make it into the movie. Was it meme’d out of existence? To quote Dakota Johnson, “What a silly thing.”


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TikTok doesn’t want you to know too much about hashtags.

The company has started hiding details on how popular hashtags are... after researchers and journalists kept using them as a measure of how widely controversial and harmful topics had spread on the platform.