Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.
This week, Nilay and Dieter bring in Verge policy editor Russell Brandom and managing editor Alex Cranz to cover the series of unfortunate events for Facebook: the 60 Minutes whistleblower interview on Sunday, the massive Facebook outage on Monday, the whistleblower Senate hearing on Tuesday, and the fallout and response the following days.
The Vergecast crew discusses whistleblower Frances Haugen’s testimony, how these events stood out amongst the various Facebook scandals of the past, and what could happen next with tech regulation.
Later in the show, the team shift gears into the lighter tech news from this week: Google announcing its Pixel 6 event for this month, a review of Android 12, some updates on battery tests for the latest iPhones, and more.
Listen to the full discussion here or in your preferred podcast player.
Stories discussed this week:
- Verge Tech Survey 2021
- Facebook encourages hate speech for profit, says whistleblower
- Locked out and totally down: Facebook’s scramble to fix a massive outage
- Facebook is coming back after a six-hour outage
- Facebook is back online after a massive outage that also took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus
- Facebook explains the backbone shutdown behind its global outage on Monday
- What is BGP, and what role did it play in Facebook’s massive outage
- Everything you need to know from the Facebook whistleblower hearing
- The whistleblower hearing hits Facebook where the company is weakest
- The Facebook whistleblower hearing unearthed the danger of engagement algorithms
- Facebook’s whistleblower report confirms what researchers have known for years
- Facebook runs the coward’s playbook to smear the whistleblower
- What’s good, bad, and missing in the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony
- Mark Zuckerberg breaks silence to say the Facebook whistleblower’s claims ‘don’t make any sense
- Facebook reportedly slows feature development for ‘reputational reviews’
- Google just announced its Pixel 6 event on October 19th
- Android 12 review: it’s mostly about the looks
- Android 12 will be coming to Pixel phones in the ‘next few weeks’
- Pixel 6’s rumored 23W wireless charging stand and more details leak early
- iPhone 13 Mini and 13 Pro Max battery life: better, and a beast
- The latest iOS 15.1 beta includes iPhone 13 Pro camera features
- Halide’s latest update brings the iPhone 13 Pro’s Macro Mode to older iPhones
- After Epic v. Apple, a small developer is challenging Apple’s in-app payment system
- Apple is making it easier to delete accounts attached to third-party apps
- Apple’s healthcare division leaned on misleading data, report alleges
- Nintendo Switch OLED review: screentime
- Google’s latest Next doorbell and camera are not obvious upgrades
- Amazon is reportedly working on a smart fridge
- Twitch confirms major data breach after its source code and secrets leak out
- Taylor Swift fans are getting caught up in the Virginia gubernatorial race
- The Verge is now on your smart TV
- Announcing Springboard: The Verge’s documentary on the forgotten history of the Treo
