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Metal Gear Solid Delta screenshot showing gorgeous view of Snake himself.

Pull out the tuxedo and order a martini — shaken, not stirred — because Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater’s James Bond-esque opening has finally been revealed, and it’s different. Konami rolled out the 3-minute clip on YouTube, showing off new footage and audio from the forthcoming espionage game that reimagines Metal Gear Solid 3’s cinematic introduction.

Some key visual differences include the skeletal snakes from the original opening being more prominent in the remake. Additional shots of Snake being badass are scattered through the remade sequence, alongside shots from the original, now realized in incredible detail.

While Colonel Volgin is solely shown in the OG version, the new iteration includes even more key characters from the Cobra Unit, like The End (with his enormous eye), The Pain, and The Fear, with subtle redesigns that honor the original game’s vision. For good measure, Konami also throws in a shot of the dramatic showdown between Snake and The Boss.

The clip features new vocals from the great Cynthia Harrell, giving a softer performance compared to her original 2004 “Snake Eater” recording. Harrell’s ballad features noticeably less bass and fewer horn instruments than the 2004 edition, and leans heavier into psychedelic ambiance, emphasizing Harrell singing, “I’m still in a dream.”

Regardless of the changes, the sentiments from the original song — “concepts of why we have to live and why we have to go on,” as the song’s composer Norihiko Hibino told Polygon — remain intact.

At this point, you’re probably wondering whether or not players can still control the on-screen snakes like it’s 2004. Well, the short answer is yes.

According to the YouTube video’s description, players can engage with “interactive elements from the original, included in the in-game version of the opening.” And if Konami is honoring the snake mini-game, there’s a chance players can expect to hear a version of the song when you’re back climbing that unrealistically long ladder towards the end of the game — for James Bond dramatics, of course.

Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater will be released on Aug. 28 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC.


From Polygon via this RSS feed

 

A Microsoft employee has managed to circumvent a block instituted earlier this week that limited mentions of "Palestine," "Gaza," and "Genocide" in email subject lines or in the body of a message. Nisreen Jaradat, a senior tech support engineer at Microsoft, emailed thousands of employees on May 23rd with the subject line: "You can't get rid of us."

"As a Palestinian worker, I am fed up with the way our people have been treated by this company," the note, a copy of which was obtained by The Verge, reads. "I am sending this email as a message to Microsoft leaders: the cost of trying to silence all voices that dare to humanize Palestinians is far higher than simply listening to the concerns of your employees."

It's not immediately clear how Jaradat got around the block. The email calls on Microsoft employees to sign a petition by the No Azure for Apartheid (NOAA) group, which urges Microsoft to end its contracts with the Israeli government. NOAA is behind several high-profile protest actions in recent weeks, and Jaradat, a member, also encourages colleagues to join the group in different capacities. Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw directed The Verge to a previous statement it s …

Read the full story at The Verge.


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Howard Shore won multiple Oscars, Grammys, and Golden Globe awards for his score for the Lord of the Rings series. Performed originally by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with choral contributions from the London Voices and London Oratory School Schola, the score has become a favorite for film screenings with live accompaniment. Now you can get a vinyl version of the soundtrack to set the stage for your next Dungeons & Dragons game — or the epic task of cleaning your apartment.

Available exclusively on Rhino.com, the $149.98 box set includes six LPs on 180-gram black vinyl, two for each of Peter Jackson’s films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy. Along with the iconic instrumental music, the tracklist includes Enya’s “May It Be” and “Aníron (Theme For Aragorn And Arwen)” and Annie Lennox’s Academy Award-winning song “Into the West,” which closes out The Return of the King. The box features sepia-toned art, with a great image of Treebeard carrying Merry and Pippin, plus a booklet filled with stills from the film.

Only 2,000 copies of the set are available worldwide, so if this soundtrack is precious to you, be sure to order it quickly.


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The Vestaboard Note attached to an off-white wall showing a message with a heart at the end. The Vestaboard Note uses 45 split-flap modules compared to the larger version that has 132. | Image: Vestaboard

The original Vestaboard revived and modernized the split-flap mechanical displays that were once a mainstay of airports and train stations around the world, but at $3,499 it put a steep price on nostalgia. Its creators are back with a new version called the Vestaboard Note that’s much smaller and more affordable. It’s available for preorder now, starting at $899 – discounted from $1,299 – with deliveries expected to begin in December 2025.

The company had spent over a year developing a new version of the Vestaboard called the Smart Bits that was “a completely new way to experience Vestaboard’s patented character units” that also “pushed the limits of design, engineering, and manufacturing,” according to the company’s founder and CEO, Dorrian Porter. But, when faced with economic uncertainty as a result of President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made goods, the company pivoted and instead created the Note.

A short video showing how the split-flap mechanisms in the Vestaboard Note work.

Functionally, the Note is nearly identical to the original Vestaboard. But instead of using 132 split-flap mechanisms, which the company calls Bits, the Note only features 45. Each can display 64 alphanumeric characters plus other symbols like punctuation, solid colors, and a newly added red heart. The display measures 24.5 inches wide, or 28.4 inches with an optional bezel frame that adds $169 to the full retail pricing.

The Vestaboard Note on the wall of a kitchen showing a forecast for three days of the week.

Messages, patterns, and images can be created using a web interface or a free accompanying mobile app for iOS and Android. They’re sent to the Note over Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable. In addition to a library of existing designs and inspirational quotes, the app allows messages to be scheduled, sent to other Vestaboard users you’re friends with, or even silenced during certain hours of the day. As hypnotic as the sound of over 2,800 spinning flaps may be, you probably don’t want the Vestaboard Note waking you up in the middle of the night.


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The circus moves on.

Elon Musk isn't as publicly, obviously involved in Washington as he used to be, that much is clear. But celebrations of his political exile are premature.

Sure, it's true that Musk and Donald Trump's bombastic joint press conferences have faded. Trump is no longer shooting Tesla ads on the White House lawn. And Musk has said that he'll be stepping away from government and focusing on Tesla.

But Musk loves to lie. He's said he'll spend "a lot less" on politics in the future, but I am also old enough to remember "funding secured." The government is still infested with his lackeys, such as Steve Davis, Chris Young, and Jehn Balajadia. Even in an announcement that was widely reported as Musk stepping back from DC, Musk made it clear he'd spend "a day or two per week" on politics for the rest of Trump's term.

I tend to view the credulous political obituaries people have written as wishful thinking, but I do understand the impulse. So much of Musk's whole thing is spectacle that when he's no longer publicly performing, it's possible to believe nothing is happening. This is a mistake. We don't even know the extent of what DOGE has done so far, and in the absence of a serious GAO repo …

Read the full story at The Verge.


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A person using Sony’s GP-VPT3 grip to film themselves in a lush field. The GP-VPT3 is $20 more expensive than its predecessor, but also more functional. | Image: Sony

Sony announced a new version of its multi-function shooting grip and compact tripod that puts its wireless controls on a removable remote. Previous versions featured controls that could operate basic functions of an attached camera while holding onto the grip. The new GP-VPT3 makes them even more useful for solo content creators who can now operate a camera while standing in frame in front of it.

Sony still sells the older version for $139.99, but the added functionality of the new GP-VPT3 Multi-Function Shooting Grip comes with a small price bump to $159.99. The bundled remote, which Sony calls the RMT-VP2 Wireless Remote Commander, is sold separately for $89.99 for those who don’t need the grip or don’t want to replace their existing one.

The GP-VPT3 is compatible with Sony’s Alpha Series cameras and smaller vlogging cameras like last year’s ZV-E10 II. It can support up to 3.3 pounds, which means you can potentially use it with larger lenses too, as long as they don’t protrude too far off the camera and shift its center of balance.

Sony’s new GP-VPT3 grip attached to an Alpha camera being used as a mini tripod.

The RMT-VP2 remote connects to Sony’s cameras over Bluetooth and has a range of about 33 feet. It includes a shutter button, a dedicated movie record button, a rocker that can be used to control zoom or focus, a button for turning autofocus on and off, and a C1 button that can be customized to control other functions.

As with previous versions of the grip, the new GP-VPT3 connects to a camera using its tripod mount and has a flexible head allowing an attached device to tilt forwards and back and swivel 360 degrees. It can function as an ergonomic handle, putting the most important camera controls at finger’s reach when shooting one-handed. It also unfolds and becomes a stubby tripod, making it easier to set the camera up at a specific angle for timelapses, or for filming yourself.


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Eiza González, John Krasinski, and Natalie Portman stand in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Fountain of Youth

Throughout Guy Ritchie’s Indiana Jones knockoff movie Fountain of Youth, characters repeatedly argue that the joy of adventure is more valuable than whatever prize they’re seeking. The “journey over destination” ethos isn’t a bad one if it offers surprises and opportunities for growth along the way, but this movie just aimlessly wanders toward a dull, predictable ending.

Fountain of Youth actually starts off strong, with adventurer and art thief Luke Purdue (The Office star and A Quiet Place mastermind John Krasinski) in a zany Ong-Bak-style chase through the streets of Bangkok. As he tries to escape a gang he stole a painting from, he winds up driving a motorcycle through a market and stealing a food truck.That’s quickly followed by an equally frenetic close-quarters fight scene in the dining car of a train that involves clever use of a ladle to buy time.Krasinski’s extensive experience at playing snarky and smug fits very well with Ritchie’s love of fast-talking protagonists, seen from his earliest movies — Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — to his spin on Sherlock Holmes starring Robert Downey Jr. Krasinski feels especially at home in Ritchie’s wheelhouse during the early scenes, where he explains the meaning of “ambiguous” while surrounded by angry gangsters, or engages in some flirtatious sparring with Esme (Ash and 3 Body Problem star Eiza González), the leader of a mysterious group that’s chasing the same clues about the Fountain’s location that he’s also gathering.

The fun quickly dries up, as the action gives way to a slew of dull exposition and bland characters. Hired to find the Fountain of Youth by billionaire Owen Carver (Ex Machina’s Domhnall Gleeson), Luke seeks the help of his estranged sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), trying to rekindle her love of the globe-trotting adventures the family shared before their father died. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 2018’s Tomb Raider,and The Venture Bros.all did a far better job at exploring the challenges of bringing your family along to pursue ancient, maybe-magical relics than this script. Zodiac and The Amazing Spider-Man screenwriter James Vanderbilt doesn’t show an ounce of sympathy for Charlotte’s decision to settle down to raise a kid and become a museum curator, siding entirely with Luke’s assessment that he is cool and right about everything, and his sister is boring and wasting her life.While Krasinski has great chemistry with González, Luke’s sibling banter with Charlotte falls entirely flat. Vanderbilt doesn’t even try to come up with credible reasons for Charlotte to join the quest, instead repeatedly using Gilligan Cuts to just show that she’s still at Luke’s side on the next phase of the journey. Charlotte’s young son Thomas (The Devil’s Hour’s Benjamin Chivers) tags along mostly to reiterate how lame his mom is, but at least gets a surprisingly compelling scene grilling Owen about his wealth and motivations. Charlotte occasionally hints that she knew things about their dad that Luke didn’t, particularly in relation to a golden mask that haunts Luke’s dreams. But there’s no real payoff to that plot, or explanation of what their adventures meant to her.

That backstory could have been fleshed out a bit by the members of her dad’s old crew, who Luke teams up with — inexplicably, they’re just a few years older than the Purdue siblings, rather than from their father’s generation. But Patrick Murphy (Laz Alonso) and Deb McCall (Carmen Ejogo) just feel like a hollow attempt to replicate Ethan Hunt’s support team in the Mission: Impossible movies, providing functional help without any real motivations or personalities of their own.

Instead, the script just delivers exposition dumps straight out of a Dan Brown story, about an alliance of famous artists hiding clues to the Fountain of Youth’s location in their masterpieces, and a secret society sworn to make sure its power remains hidden. Because Ritchie loves fight scenes with as many factions trying to kill each other as possible, Luke’s team is also pursued by multiple other groups who are upset about everything his team stole to solve the puzzle.

Some fun sequences make clever use of the environment, like a playful skirmish between Luke and Esme in the Austrian National Library. But a mission to find a clue on the back of the Rembrandt painting the businessman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Sr. — the screenwriter’s great-grandfather — brought on the Lusitania and conveniently stored in a waterproof safe is highly self-indulgent, and just another example of Charlotte being a useless buzzkill. Rather than feeling stylish or clever, signature Ritchie touches like a slow-motion fight scene and a flashback explaining part of the climax only add to the film’s clunkiness. He could have easily cut 30 minutes of repetitive foreshadowing and building suspense for an ending that turns out to be blatantly stolen from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.If Fountain of Youth kept up the simple fun of its first few scenes, it could have been a solid tribute to the adventure genre. But Vanderbilt and Ritchie’s attempt to find some profound meaning in the search for lost treasure never really works, because their characters are too thin to make their emotional catharsis meaningful. There is nothing at the end of this journey worth the time spent getting there.

Fountain of Youth releases on Apple TV Plus on May 23.


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A rumored Elden Ring movie became a little more of a reality on Thursday night when Bandai Namco announced that Alex Garland (Civil War, Ex Machina) was set to direct a film adaptation of the FromSoftware action role-playing-game for indie-studio darling A24. George R.R. Martin, who provided game director Hidetaka Miyazaki with a murky amount of mythological foundation for the original game, will serve as a producer on the film.

Garland might look like an odd choice for Elden Ring based on his filmography; the writer-director has never made a fantasy epic, nor has he orchestrated the kind of medieval combat that would make him an obvious choice to bring Miyazaki’s tough-as-hell boss fights to live action. But Garland’s “gamer cred” is indisputable and an understanding of play is core to much of his work. Hot take time: I’d say his 2012 film Dredd is the greatest video game movie that isn’t actually based on a video game ever made.

Starting out as a novelist before pivoting to screenwriting and directing, Garland has made his gaming inspirations known throughout his career. He has said that his time outrunning zombie dogs in Resident Evil was the direct inspiration for the fast zombies in 28 Days Later, which he wrote for director Danny Boyle. When he and Boyle teamed up to adapt Garland’s own novel, The Beach, the collaboration resulted in the closest thing we will ever get to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Banjo-Kazooie movie.

In 2005, riding high off 28 Days Later’s success, Garland was tasked by Microsoft with adapting Halo into a feature film — a project that stalled out and sat on a shelf for so long that streaming television was invented and Halo became a decent Paramount Plus show instead. He also went on to collaborate on actual video games: He worked with Ninja Theory and Bandai Namco on 2010’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and he served as a story supervisor on 2013’s DmC: Devil May Cry. At some point around that time, he played and fell hard for The Last of Us. (In fact, Garland thinks TLOU is better than 28 Days Later, but hey, none of us are right about everything.)

Garland’s gaming tastes are all over the map — in 2020 he aggressively kept up an Animal Crossing island like the rest of us — but his visible influences veer toward the AAA action experience. His adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation has the pace and encounters of an open-world game. His FX show Devs seems right up the alley of anyone looking for Deus Ex or Control vibes. Both Civil War and his 2025 film Warfare bring audiences closer to the kind of tactical military action that we rarely see in movies, but that is all over multiplayer shooters. But for my money, his off-the-leash translation of video game aesthetics and experience in cinematic form happened with Dredd.

Written and produced by Garland and technically directed by Pete Travis (Vantage Point), Dredd drops the classic 2000 AD comic antihero, played by The Boys’ Karl Urban, into a The Raid-esque action scenario: To stop a violent drug lord (Lena Heady), the Judge must blast his way through 200 stories of a highly barricaded Mega-City One high-rise. Between the slo-mo effects induced by the illicit drug (appropriately named “Slo-Mo”) and the psychic abilities of Dredd’s sidekick Cassandra, Dredd is a dizzying array of action beats that plunges viewers into a bullet hell without resorting to any gimmicky first-person shooting.

By all accounts, the making of Dredd was a fraught experience for all involved, with the studio losing enough faith in Travis that Garland remained on set for the entire shoot and supervised the edit. Urban even claims Garland “actually directed the movie.” When you see it, that makes sense — even the Slo-Mo effects feel specifically like a bullet-time mechanic rather than a complete acid trip.

Will Garland make a great Elden Ring movie? What does that even look like? The good news is he’s probably been thinking about it for years, as a fan of FromSoft games. In interviews over the years, the filmmaker has cited Dark Souls as a particular favorite franchise, and even offered an explanation for why an adaptation would be such a challenge.

“The Dark Souls games seem to have this embedded poetry in them,” Garland told Gamespot in 2020. “You’ll be wandering around and find some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken song with a bit of armor outside a doorway and it feels like you’ve drifted into some existential dream. That’s what I really love about Dark Souls. These spaces are so imaginative and they seem to flow into each other and flow out of each other. It’s very dreamlike […] I can’t imagine how that would [be adapted]. The quality that makes Dark Souls special is probably unique to video games.”

The joy Garland finds in Dark Souls games isn’t far off from what Elden Ring offers him as a director — in the end, a successful adaptation will ride on mood and pace and some wicked fights. That’s what Dredd nails, even without a game as actual source material. Dredd broods without relying on too much exposition. Cassandra’s ethereal psychic powers thread a bit of innocence and whimsy into a heavy-metal dystopia. The action is brutal to the point that it often feels like a horror movie (a style Garland pushed to even more gut-wrenching, realistic extremes in Warfare).

Elden Ring from the guy who brought us Dredd” makes a lot of sense. Now to find an actor with eight arms


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Attack on Titan The Last Attack key art, featuring many of the characters in a montage

On May 25, the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards will present Attack on Titan with its inaugural Global Impact Award, celebrating anime that redefines pop culture and makes a lasting mark worldwide. After the negative reactions certain fans had toward the manga after its 2021 ending, and the way that response soured online conversation about the anime adaptation, it’s vindicating to see a formal recognition for the series, and the impact it left on the world.

Attack on Titan’s evolution from a story about giant people eating normal-sized people to a profound reflection on humanity’s endless cycle of destruction is truly remarkable. It’s obvious that creator Hajime Isayama carefully planned the series’ progression, from its intimate beginnings to its expanding scope: The manga and the anime adaptation were carefully planned and skillfully executed, with each arc seamlessly building on the last. It’s also clear that Isayama understood the need to initially frame the story as a typical shonen adventure to draw audiences into a much deeper narrative about humanity’s cyclical nature.

Following the release of each manga chapter had a profound impact on me. Attack on Titan’s lessons about human nature, its hope for a better tomorrow, and the message that everyone is the hero of their own story resonated with me, especially amid the COVID-19 outbreak and George Floyd protests. So it was disheartening to see newer fans who discovered it during lockdown distort the story into their own male power fantasy.

[Ed. note: Broad spoilers ahead for a key arc in Attack on Titan.]

Many “we live in a society” types gravitated toward protagonist Eren Yeager as a symbol of anarchy, burning the world down because it’s broken. Isayama aimed for a far more nuanced moral. While the series covers many themes, it ultimately centers on an idea voiced by Artur Braus, father of Eren’s murdered friend Sasha. Artur talks about getting the children, the next generation, out of the proverbial forest, lest society keep circling the same traumas: “That’s why it is the burden of us adults to shoulder the sins and hatred of the past.”

Eren is a tragic product of his circumstances; by the end of the series, his genocidal actions can’t be justified, but they are understandable. Eren’s desire for freedom is so consuming that he becomes enslaved by it. Having grown up under oppression, he imposes that same oppression on the world, blind to the irony of his actions until it’s far too late.

Unfortunately, many fans missed this nuance and revolted over the series’ ending, glorifying Eren’s destructive choices as justified or heroic. Many felt betrayed when he didn’t become the avenging figure they envisioned, and when he died without getting a happy ending. Much like Joker: Folie à Deux, the narrative strips the character to his core, showing that no matter what he’s done or endured, he’s ultimately always been a victim with no freedom of his own.

Isayama reportedly received death threats from fans who were upset with the series’ ending. His editor was harassed for supposedly forcing him to rewrite the final chapter. A coordinated review-bombing campaign was launched to tank the anime series’ ratings. Petitions to have Isayama rewrite the ending grew so large that a Kickstarter-funded fan project depicting a new ending came together.

On November 19, 2022, Hajime Isayama made his first-ever U.S. appearance at Anime NYC, opening up about the series that defined his career. Reflecting on Attack on Titan’s polarizing ending, he admitted through a translator, “I still have doubts within myself. Did I land it? I’m not even so sure, and I still struggle with this point. I’m very sorry about that.” The room responded with a wave of sympathy, culminating in a standing ovation — including from me, watching in person.

As I left the panel, one thought stayed with me: I could never forgive the toxic elements of Attack on Titan’s fanbase for how they made Isayama feel. Their backlash wasn’t about a flawed finale or a story that missed its mark; it was about viewers misinterpreting the work and using their anger to justify horrible behavior. To me, the series’ ending wasn’t about Eren and the Eldians achieving revenge for generations of oppression — it was a reflection on the fleeting nature of peace and the inevitability of human conflict. Its messages apply cleanly to the real world: Even in a world constantly on the brink of war, there are moments, found in life and the people we hold close, that make existence beautiful even when it’s terrifying.

It’s perfectly valid to interpret art in different ways, but undermining the legacy Attack on Titan built over a decade can’t be justified, especially considering its pivotal role in shaping the Western anime market. That’s why seeing the industry finally recognize Isayama and the team behind the anime, now that the dust has settled, feels deeply earned. It also serves as vindication for the fans whose lives and perspectives were genuinely affected by the series. Like Neon Genesis Evangelion before it, Attack on Titan defines a generation, and its story and cultural impact far outweigh the noise of a few discontented voices.


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Here's what we know: it's probably not smart glasses. Beyond that, we don't know much about what Jony Ive and OpenAI are building through their newly combined company io, except that it's some kind of AI super-gadget. But after a couple of years of watching the industry try and shove AI into every form factor you can imagine, we have some guesses.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David are joined by The Verge's Alex Heath to talk through all the things we know, kind of know, and don't know at all about what io is up to. There's some interesting reporting on the notion of the device as a companion to your phone and laptop, some connections to the original iPod Shuffle, and still a lot of questions about how this will work and whether you'll want it. We won't see this device for a while, but don't worry - we'll surely keep talking about it.

After that, the hosts run down all the news from Google I/O, which both Alex and Nilay attended in person. We talk about Google's wildly ambitious and wildly confusing set of AI products, the ways Gemini and Search are encroaching on one another, and what this all means for the future of the web. It was an impressive, confident d …

Read the full story at The Verge.


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An image showing the Glitch logo

Glitch, the coding platform where developers can share and remix projects, will soon no longer offer its core feature: hosting apps on the web. In an update on Thursday, Glitch CEO Anil Dash said it will stop hosting projects and close user profiles on July 8th, 2025 — but stopped short of saying that it’s shutting down completely.

Users will be able to access their dashboard and download code for their projects through the end of 2025, and Glitch is working on a new feature that allows users to redirect their project subdomains. The platform has also stopped taking new Pro subscriptions, but it will continue to honor existing subscriptions until July 8th.

Without these key features, it’s not clear what will be left of Glitch. When The Verge reached out to Dash for clarification, he said the dashboard, app redirects, and code download tools are the “only user features that we’ve confirmed availability” for after July 8th. “Anything else that we would have to share would come in a future update, but it’s just that very minimal feature set for now.”

Dash launched Glitch in 2017 under Fog Creek Software, but it was acquired by the cloud service provider Fastly in 2022. In the blog post announcing the update, Dash said the time and money required to host apps “has greatly increased as the platform has gotten older and bad actors try to misuse the platform.” However, Dash tells The Verge the team is “still figuring out what plans might be possible for Glitch and its community going forward.”


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President Donald Trump has threatened Apple with a tariff of “at least 25 percent” just for its iPhones unless it moves production to the United States.

“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”

The threat comes a week after Trump declared that he’d “had a little problem with Tim Cook,” following reports that Apple intends to source all of its US iPhones from India, which will require ramping up Indian production. Just yesterday the Financial Times reported that FoxConn, Apple’s main manufacturer, is developing a $1.5 billion plant in southern India’s Chennai to supply iPhone displays. Apple has been diversifying its production for several years, which was accelerated by both covid and US animosity towards China.

India is currently subject to the “baseline” 10 percent tariff that applies worldwide, while China is at a higher 30 percent rate, though that could rise substantially in August once a 90-day reduction in rates lifts. Phones, and most of Apple’s other products, are exempt from the majority of those rates anyway, but the ongoing uncertainty gives Apple good reason to continue expanding production outside China.

While Apple has pledged to invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years (and CEO Cook personally invested $1 million in Trump’s inauguration fund), it’s widely acknowledged by industry experts that a “Made in America” iPhone isn’t realistic. As Steve Jobs reportedly told Barack Obama in 2011: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”


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