Are you filthy enough for a $700 portable shower?
Hot showers, like electricity, are a luxury that's easy to take for granted. That all changes after a few nights camping at a music festival, a week toiling at a backcountry job site, or overlanding all summer in the great unknown. An itchy scalp and the vague smell of warm clams suddenly make the idea of spending hundreds on a portable shower seem less absurd.
I've been testing the Hottap Go from Australia-based Joolca while vanlifing to shower after surfing and to wash up after cooking. It features a 12L integrated water tank which is an improvement on other portable showers that require an external container and long, cumbersome hose th …
No, Flock isn’t threatening people for debating surveillance
On Thursday, the Instagram account for a lecture series in Newport Beach, CA posted a photo of what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Flock has received significant backlash over its technology and work with law enforcement agencies, and this letter kicked off yet another wave of criticism against the company for allegedly trying to shut down discussions of its work.
"WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED," the group, The Saturday Salon, wrote in the Instagram post, which has more than 3,000 likes. A separate post about the letter on Bluesky has more than 360 reposts. The text of the letter de …
Meta turns off the Instagram feature that let users make AI deepfakes of public accounts
Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that content from any public Instagram account could be used in AI creations without the account owner's permission.
"Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference," Meta says in an update to a blog post about its new Muse Image AI model. "Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give pe …
The FCC is cracking down on DJI tech that dodged the foreign drone ban
Last year, we told you about Xtra, the company that lets DJI sneak its popular cameras into the US, and Skyrover, a brand seemingly selling DJI drones in disguise. They're just two of the many firms DJI is suspected of starting to skirt the United States' foreign drone ban.
But it appears the FCC is finally doing something about "DJI front companies," as watcher Konrad Iturbe dubbed them last year. Today, the FCC is fining eight of them $25,000 each - and giving them until Monday, July 20th, just 10 calendar days, to answer the FCC's questions before the agency takes further action.
Those companies include Cogito Tech, Fixaxo Technology, …
Apple sues OpenAI for allegedly stealing hardware secrets
Apple has sued OpenAI, alleging that engineers stole Apple secrets to advance the AI startup's hardware plans. In its complaint, Apple says it uncovered "a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple." In addition to OpenAI, the lawsuit also names IO Products - Jony Ive's hardware startup, which OpenAI bought in 2025 - along with two specific employees, Tang Tan (OpenAI's chief hardware officer) and Chang Liu (who joined OpenAI from Apple in January).
An Apple spokesperson shared this statement with 9to5Mac:
At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the b …
A decade later, Pokémon Go finally made good on its original promise
When Niantic dropped the first Pokémon Go trailer in 2015, it was hard to grasp how a bunch of players could work together to catch a pokémon like Mewtwo. But this week at the game's 10th anniversary event in New York City, Pokémon Go showed the world how it's done. Almost 2,000 players (many of them Pokémon Go influencers) packed into Times Square on Thursday evening to participate in a special battle. It was cool to see Times Square briefly go dark before the billboards began lighting up, revealing an escaped Mewtwo Mega Evolving, and it was even wilder to see people living the fantasy depicted in the game's first trailer.
Even though mo …
ICE is threatening to deport witnesses of its latest shooting
Advocates are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security release bodycam footage of the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who was killed by ICE officers in Houston during a traffic stop earlier this week. But DHS claims the agents involved in the shooting weren't wearing body cameras because of the lengthy government shutdown that prevented ICE and Customs and Border Protection from receiving additional federal funding for 76 days - a shutdown that was itself spurred by congressional bickering over reforms to DHS after federal agents killed two civilians earlier this year.
Two competing narratives have em …
Nvidia’s biggest RAM supplier just had a trillion-dollar debut on Wall Street
As the AI boom boosts demand for RAM, SK Hynix - one of the world's biggest suppliers of memory chips - launched on Wall Street Friday. The South Korean chipmaker opened at $170 per share and raised $26.5 billion, surpassing Alibaba's record as the largest debut of a foreign company, according to reports from The Associated Press and CNN.
After reaching a $1 trillion valuation in May, SK Hynix briefly overtook Samsung as South Korea's most valuable company. SK Hynix is one of three major companies benefitting from a surge in demand for DRAM and high-bandwidth memory (HBM). These components have become essential for the widespread buildout o …
Spotify will let you fine-tune your weekly Release Radar playlist
Spotify is giving listeners control to fine-tune what gets surfaced for them in Release Radar - one of its most popular weekly playlists. The new options allow you to narrow the playlist to a specific genre, focus on artists that are new to you, and more. Listeners can choose from up to five options like "Discover new artists," "Editors' picks," and "Pop." They're rolling out now across mobile and desktop apps and will appear at the top of your Release Radar playlist once they're available.
Spotify also says it's making tweaks to the algorithm to serve up "more personalized recommendations," along with a new look featuring updated cover and …
Netflix is turning into YouTube
Netflix has shows and movies. And video games. And live sports. And podcasts. And also, apparently, YouTube videos? For a company that used to seem like the next big thing in TV, it all feels a little frenetic, and maybe a tad desperate. For a company that sees sleep as its primary competitor, it might all make perfect sense.
On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay try to figure out why Netflix continues to expand its content machine and whether the company's ongoing YouTube-ification makes any sense at all. Many have tried to compete with YouTube; none have succeeded. Does that mean Netflix might inch its way up the Go90 Scale of …