It’s been nearly six years since we warned you that ads were coming for your pause button and 18 months since Google revealed that YouTube would serve them up, too.

Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge.

Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google.

Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be...

Continue reading…

Roughly 25 years after it launched payment processing, PayPal is “ushering in a new era for customers” with some generic black text. The company has a new logo, designed by Pentagram, that looks incredibly plain — especially compared to previous iterations of the logo that featured a rakish slant, two shades of blue, and prominent PayPal P’s.

The company justifies the change by saying that the new black standalone wordmark won’t be confused with the rest of the payments processing world — especially “the blue that has become synonymous with fintech.”

And yet:

Continue reading…

The first Thunderbolt 5 cables arrived in July, and now it looks like we’re finally getting the first Thunderbolt 5 dock! Kensington has just announced the Intel-certified SD5000T5 EQ is now available to buy, seemingly beating every rival to the 120Gbps single-cable docking punch. (I just checked: Hyper, J5Create and OWC’s docks aren’t yet available.)

The new dock claims to support up to three 4K monitors or two 8K monitors on Windows, or dual 6K monitors on MacBook Pros with M1 Pro chips or better. It also offers up to 120Gbps speeds for connected peripherals — assuming your computer has a Thunderbolt 5 port, anyhow. Last we checked, only a single $4,500 version of the Razer Blade 18 has that port, though PCWorld points out the $3,899...

Continue reading…

Tile, one of the leading makers of Bluetooth item finders, has just added a twist — its newest trackers can now send SOS alerts that notify friends, family, and possibly even emergency services.

The 2024 Tile Pro, Tile Mate, Tile Slim, and Tile Sticker are the first new products since Life360 bought the company nearly three years ago, and many facets are unchanged: they should each ring slightly louder and have slightly better water resistance, but the credit card, key fob, and sticker configurations are all roughly the same size and weight. There’s no mention of UWB signals for precision tracking, unlike Apple’s AirTags and Samsung’s SmartTag 2. The Tile Pro is once again the only model that offers a user-replaceable battery.

All but...

Continue reading…

When Bungie and Hasbro decided to create a real-life, dart-blasting Nerf version of one of the most famous Destiny 2 guns, someone got lazy — stealing a fan artist’s nine-year-old work instead of creating the Ace of Spades from scratch.

To Bungie’s credit, the game company has just announced it will “make sure” to compensate and credit Tofu Rabbit “for their incredible artwork,” after a rapid investigation.

As you can see in Tofu’s examples below, this is an incredibly clear-cut case of copying, despite the changes that Bungie or Hasbro’s artists made to the blaster.

Continue reading…

We’ve got lossless screenshots, but you’ll have to download them.

Continue reading…