This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
How Last Samurai Standing adds kinetic action to the Battle Royale formula
23 Dec 2025, 3:00 pm by Geoffrey Bunting
Last Samurai Standing begins with a familiar premise. Desperate samurai dispossessed by the restoration of the emperor enter into a deadly game for a life-changing cash prize – all for the entertainment of anonymous elites. Unlike its inspirations Battle Royale and Squid Game, however, Last Samurai Standing‘s violence is chaotic, fast-paced, and kinetic, though it hides a careful choreography that makes the series a more electric proposition than its predecessors.
Viewers have Junichi Okada to thank for that. As well as starring in and producing Last Samurai Standing, he serves as the series’ action planner. Many will be familiar with the r …
The Vergecast RAM Holiday Spec-tacular
23 Dec 2025, 2:35 pm by David Pierce
Happy Holidays! As we like to do on The Vergecast, we take this time of year to see our families, relax and recharge, and go extremely deep into a specific technology that matters right now. This year, we picked the tiny chip in all your devices that is suddenly a precious and expensive commodity: RAM.
On this episode, David and Nilay are joined by The Verge‘s Sean Hollister to get a primer on all things Random Access Memory. The hosts talk through the history of the technology, what RAM made possible in our computers, how it became utterly ubiquitous in practically every electronic device we own, and why it’s so hard to get right now. (Her …
How AI broke the smart home in 2025Â
23 Dec 2025, 1:30 pm by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask.
It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.
The potential for generative AI and large language models to take the complexity out of the smart home, making it easier to set up, use, and manage connected devices, is compelling. So is the promise of a “ …
The year the government broke
23 Dec 2025, 1:00 pm by Lauren Feiner
The first crack showed right before Inauguration Day. The year before, Congress had overwhelmingly passed a bill banning TikTok unless it broke ties with its Chinese parent company. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld it, and it was clear what needed to happen next: either the president could give TikTok another 90 days to complete a deal or it would be banned immediately.
But neither of those things happened. Outgoing President Joe Biden punted the decision to incoming President Donald Trump, and after a dramatic few hours where TikTok took itself offline in the US, it returned with a triumphant message thanking Trump for saving it.
Nea …
Apple fined $116 million over app privacy prompts
23 Dec 2025, 12:46 pm by Jess Weatherbed
Apple has been fined more than €98 million (about $116 million) by Italy’s antitrust regulator over the “excessively burdensome” privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with “disproportionate” terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, compared to rules for native iOS apps.
The fine specifically targets the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy Apple launched in 2021, which requires third-party developers to ask users for consent twice to track their data across other apps and websites …
Dometic makes a better portable water faucet
23 Dec 2025, 10:44 am by Thomas Ricker
As a reluctant doomsday prepper and eager vanlifer, Dometic’s battery-powered Go Faucet has, for the last few years, played a central role in my bougie bug-out kit and my camping rig’s water system. So it took me all of two minutes with Dometic’s new Recon 360 Faucet to realize it’s an upgrade in every single way that matters – and then confirmed after a week of testing it.
The Recon 360 Faucet lets you pump water out of a storage container like a typical faucet in places that lack traditional plumbing, be it inside a boat, cabin, or van, or at the beach, job site, or campground. A long silicone water hose attaches to the back of the faucet …
The FCC’s foreign drone ban is here
23 Dec 2025, 1:13 am by Jay Peters
The Federal Communications Commission has banned new drones made in foreign countries from being imported into the US unless the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security recommends them. Monday’s action added drones to the FCC’s Covered List, qualifying foreign-made drones and drone parts, like those from DJI, as communications equipment representing “unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons.”
DJI is “disappointed” by today’s action, Adam Welsh, DJI’s head of global policy, says in a statement. “While DJI was not singled out, no information has been …
The 60 Minutes report on CECOT that Bari Weiss censored is now internet contraband
23 Dec 2025, 12:06 am by Elizabeth Lopatto
Yesterday, Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, censored a segment of its newsmagazine 60 Minutes about men who had been deported to an El Salvador prison. Today, it’s popping up online.
60 Minutes had already begun promoting the now-censored segment online. Because it was pulled so late, it seems that CBS missed at least one platform for distribution: Canada’s Global TV. Some people used a VPN to watch it; at least one person recorded it, distributing it through an iCloud account.
The segment, which has been reviewed by The Verge, is a little shy of 14 minutes long. It features video of men, chained and bent double, being “pa …
End of today’s The Verge roundup.
