Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency turned identity verification startup Tools for Humanity is offering a new set of perks to people who scan their eyes at one of the company’s orbs. Among them, is a new tool called Concert Kit that could help bands and artists fight back against ticket scalping bots.

The new feature relies on the revamped World ID, the orb-based verification system that scans users eyeballs and faces to create a “proof of human” signature that lives on users’ mobile devices. “It’s basically like a little human passport for the internet that lets you prove on apps and websites that you are a real and unique human without revealing anything about yourself,” Tools for Humanity Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada tells Engadget.

Now, as more apps and services are starting to support World ID, that “human passport” can unlock some new abilities. Coupled with Concert Kit, it allows artists to designate a specific pool of tickets for “verified” humans only. The concept is a bit like how pre-sales currently work, with artists (or their teams) setting aside a specific number of tickets for people who have set up a World ID. Those folks can then use their World ID to get ticket codes for Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, AXS or other major ticketing platforms.

Because World ID is limited to actual, “verified,” humans the system won’t be susceptible to the same tactics that have enabled bots to ruin the ticket-buying process for so many, Tools for Humanity says. Artists are also in control of what level of verification they want to require from their fans. (The new World ID app will also allow people to set up an account with a selfie check if they don’t have ready access to an orb.)

Just how much of a dent Concert Kit will be able to make in the massive scalping bot problem that plagues the concert industry is less clear. So far, Bruno Mars is slated to use the solution on his upcoming world tour — no word on just how many of his tickets will be reserved for World ID-verified humans, though — and Concert Kit is available to other artists starting today.

Concert Kit is one of several new integrations and updates to World ID that Tools for Humanity announced at an event in San Francisco Friday. Tinder, which earlier this year started testing World ID as an age verification solution in Japan, will be rolling out support worldwide. In the US, Tinder’s integration won’t be for age verification, though. Instead, it will indicate whether there is an actual “verified” human behind a given profile.

On the enterprise side, Zoom and DocuSign are also adding support for World ID to help businesses verify that there is an actual person (and not a deepfake or bot) joining their video calls or signing important documents. Tools for Humanity is also introducing a standalone app for World ID that separates its identity verification tools from its existing crypto wallet app.

The updates are Tools for Humanity’s latest attempt to make their orb-based verification system, which has been widely mocked, more mainstream and perhaps a little less dystopian. (Elsewhere, orbs have begun appearing in some new places like a San Francisco Gap.)

On their part, Tools for Humanity seems aware that a lot of people aren’t ready to scan their faces at a bunch of orbs controlled by Altman just to “prove” they are humans. I asked Sada, Tools for Humanity’s Chief Product Officer, what he would say to people who think that the company is solving for the wrong problem: that really it should be up to ticketing platforms and dating apps and other services to strengthen their security and bot-fighting tools, rather than rely on their users to “prove” their humanness.

He said it was a “completely understandable question” and compared it to some people’s initial discomfort with things like Apple’s TouchID or FaceID. “Not everyone has to do it upfront, and that’s important,” he said. “It’s optional. If you want to have a World ID, you get access to that enhanced experience.”

The specter of price hikes caused by the current AI-driven demand for memory and storage appears to have convinced a fair share of people to buy a new computer. According to data analyzed by Counterpoint Research, global PC shipments grew around 3.2 percent year-over-year in Q1 2026, “driven by pre-emptive buying before memory-led price increases hit the retail level” and Microsoft forcing some customers to upgrade by ending support for Windows 10 last year.

Sales hit 63.3 million units during the first quarter, Counterpoint says, and were particularly concentrated in five high-end PC makers: Lenovo, ASUS, Apple, HP and Dell. Of the five, Lenovo commands the most PC market share at 26 percent, but sales increased for almost all of the companies, save for HP, whose year-over-year sales technically declined by 5 percent. Of particular note, Apple’s PC sales grew by 11 percent, likely on the strength of the M5 updates it made to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, and the introduction of the affordable $600 MacBook Neo. Counterpoint suggests the updates could drive even further sales growth next quarter.

Even with positive sales, the PC industry as a whole is by no means out of the woods. “The aggressive expansion in AI infrastructure investment is driving up overall component costs, which will likely impact the pricing of CPUs and other key components in [PCs],” Counterpoint Senior Analyst Minsoo Kang says. “Ultimately, the sustained upward pressure on costs and the resulting hike in retail prices are expected to have a significant negative impact on the PC market’s growth in 2026.”

A general sense that the worst is yet to come is consistent with what other analysts have warned about the current shortages of RAM and storage. In December 2025, IDC predicted that PC shipments could drop as much as 8.9 percent in 2026 in response to the price of RAM, and later revised its prediction to 11.6 percent this past March. Even if consumers aren’t feeling the worst of these price hikes just yet, new announcements of price increases seem to arrive like clockwork every few weeks — for example, this week, Meta raised the price of its Quest headsets — which means if they aren’t feeling them now, they will soon.

• China successfully demonstrates geosynchronous satellite tracking of moving maritime targets
• Persistent surveillance from orbit reduces reliance on low Earth satellite constellations
• Three satellites could provide continuous global monitoring of high-value naval assets

China has released radar images showing a geosynchronous orbit satellite successfully tracking a moving maritime target for the first time.

The satellite locked onto the Towa Maru, a 340 meter Japanese tanker traversing rough seas near the Spratly Islands, from an altitude of 35,800 kilometers above Earth.

The James Bond franchise has a long history of getting pop stars to record its theme songs (perhaps most memorably with Live and Let Die), and it looks like that tradition will now extend to video game adaptations about the fictional spy. IO Interactive has announced that Lana Del Rey co-wrote and performed the theme for 007 First Light, the developer’s playable James Bond origin story.

“First Light” is written and performed by Lana Del Rey and composer David Arnold, and like the moody and abstract opening credits released alongside the song, could vaguely gesture at the themes of the game. IO Interactive has previously said that its game focuses on a young, inexperienced and more reckless Bond, before he developed his trademark cool. The developer is also integrating the stealth mechanics it perfected in Hitman into the upcoming game.

Del Rey’s personal gaming experience may begin and end with her hit “Video Games,” which was apparently written about a former boyfriend’s love of World of Warcraft, but the artist does know how to write a song with Bond in mind. Lana Del Rey shared in 2024 that her song “24” from the album Honeymoon was originally written for 2017’s Spectre, one of several songs that were cast aside in favor of Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall.”

007 First Light is coming to Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC on May 27, 2026. A Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game is now coming out this summer.

Apple TV+ has quietly built one of the more interesting libraries among the popular streaming platforms. Somewhere between the buzzy dramas and the shows that everyone seems to be talking about, there are a handful of genuinely great series just sitting there, unwatched.

So let’s fix that this weekend. Whether you are in the mood for a thriller that messes with your grip on reality or something that will haunt you using nothing but sound, there is something here for you. Here are three underrated Apple TV+ shows worth your time.

We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.

Counterpart (2017)

Howard Silk has spent 30 years doing a quiet, unremarkable job at a Berlin-based UN agency, shuffling papers and exchanging coded messages he does not understand. One day, he is told the truth: there is a crossing beneath the building to a parallel Earth, one that split from ours in 1987 and has since gone in a very different direction. To make things worse, his counterpart from that other world, also called Howard Silk, is nothing like him. Same face, same history, but entirely different man.

J.K. Simmons plays both versions with such complete distinction that you never lose track of which Howard you are watching. It is one of the best dual performances I have seen in recent TV shows. The show wraps its parallel world concept in the thick atmosphere of Cold War espionage: Berlin backstreets, dead drops, sleeper agents, and the paranoia of never knowing whose side anyone is really on.

You can watch Counterpart on Apple TV.

Calls (2021)

There are no visuals here in this underrated Apple TV show. What you get instead is a series of phone calls between strangers, laid over abstract, shifting patterns of light and sound, as something catastrophic and inexplicable begins to unravel the world around them. Each of the nine short episodes drops you into a different conversation, most of them terrifying in the quietest possible way.

The cast is stacked: Pedro Pascal, Aubrey Plaza, Lily Collins, Rosario Dawson, and others, none of whom you ever see. You just hear them, and that turns out to be the point. Directed by Fede Álvarez, the filmmaker behind Don’t Breathe, the show understands that what your imagination fills in is always scarier than what any screen can show you.

You can watch Calls on Apple TV.

Shining Girls (2022)

Kirby Mazrachi is a newspaper archivist at the Chicago Sun-Times trying to hold her life together after surviving a brutal assault. The problem is that her reality keeps changing around her. She comes home and suddenly owns a dog instead of a cat. She discovers she is married to a man she only remembers as a colleague. Her desk at work keeps moving. No one else notices except for Kirby.

Elisabeth Moss carries the whole thing on her back, and she is extraordinary, calibrating Kirby’s confidence and anxiety differently across each shifting version of reality. Jamie Bell is quietly terrifying as the villain. The show uses time travel not as a gimmick but as a way of showing how one person’s violence can create ripples, trapping its victims in a reality they cannot fully trust. It is slow to start and deliberately disorienting, which is entirely the point.

You can watch Shining Girls on Apple TV.