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Photo: Adrienn Szabo / Paramount Plus From the first trailer alone, I could tell Halo season 2 would go in a different direction than the first. Where season 1 was bogged down in strange storytelling choices that didn't leave much room for its characters - namely, the Spartans - to do what they do best - namely, kick Covenant ass - season 2 feels more in line with what a Halo show should be about.According to Pablo Schreiber, the difference mostly comes down to tone. The biggest place where we succeed on a level that we didn't quite reach in season 1 is that I think the tone of this season feels darker," he said in an interview with The Verge.Schreiber, who plays Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, thinks the action has gotten better, too - I agree - and attributes these... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Friday that his company has logged 100 million subscriptions to Google One, its all-in-one subscription service that opens up additional storage for free services like Gmail, Drive, and Photos, as well as access to more features.Hitting the milestone highlights the company's efforts to move people away from its free plans, such as discontinuing unlimited Google Drive storage for photos. Google's YouTube Premium service took nine years to get there, but it, too, recently hit 100 million subscribers, thanks to ad removal and extra features like music or high-quality streaming (and at the same time as YouTube made changes to crackdown on ad blockers).

The Sushi Restaurant, by Brickproject. | Image via Bricklink Designer Program On Wednesday, Lego sold 30,000 copies of a Lego castle designed by a fan - the Mountain Fortress - earning him half a million dollars for his work. For a while, the company's website was flattened under the load, and my Verge story about these fan-designed sets was pretty popular, too.So I suspect you might also be interested in a future wave of limited-edition, fan-designed Lego sets - and the chance to vote on them yourself!Today marks one week before voting wraps in the Lego BrickLink Designer Program Series 4, where many incredible ideas are currently vying for the chance to become an actual product packaged, sold, and shipped by The Lego Group.And while Lego will have the final say, it wants to know which sets you prefer. Here... Continue reading...

Image: Peacock Another adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem will be streaming for English audiences. While Netflix's 3 Body Problem is set to premiere on March 21st, today, Peacock announced that it has acquired rights to the original Chinese adaptation, dubbed simply Three-Body. And it's coming very soon - the series premieres on February 10th.Three-Body was produced by Tencent and originally premiered in China last year, and the Peacock version will be available in the original Chinese with English subtitles. Given that they're adaptations, 3 Body Problem and Three-Body will follow the same story, but the Chinese adaptation appears to be much more expansive; it spans 30 episodes in total, compared to eight episodes for the Netflix... Continue reading...

The update will allow users to see less political content in their recommended feeds. | Illustration: The Verge It'll soon be easier to avoid seeing political content across Instagram and Threads unless users explicitly choose to have it recommended to them. In a blog post published on Friday, Meta announced that it's expanding an existing Reels policy that limits political content from people you're not following (including posts about social issues) from appearing in recommended feeds to more broadly cover the company's Threads and Instagram platforms.Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each person's appetite for it, said Instagram head Adam Mosseri, announcing on Threads that the changes will be applied over the next few weeks. Facebook is also expected to roll out... Continue reading...

Image: Brilliant Labs There's a new pair of smart spectacles in town - and this time, it's the $349 Frame glasses said to give you multimodal AI superpowers." The open-source eyewear comes from a startup called Brilliant Labs, which touts Frame as a way to get AI translations, web search, and visual analysis right in front of your eyes.As shown in a video posted by Brilliant Labs, you can use your voice to ask the glasses to do things like identify a landmark you're looking at, search the web for a particular pair of sneakers you're seeing, or even look up nutrition information for the food you're about to eat. The information appears as an overlay that shows up directly on the lens.Frame comes in three colors you can preorder now: black, gray, and clear.... Continue reading...

You can score a big TV at a big discount ahead of the big game, and most of them can hit your doorstep by Sunday. | Image: LG February is a star-studded month, with the Grammys, Oscar noms, and America's biggest sporting event taking center stage. This year, the Super Bowl will play out on February 11th between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers. Whether you're hosting a party for the big game or simply want to equip a spare room in your home with a new 4K set, the days leading up to the Super Bowl remain one of the best opportunities of the year to add a new TV to your wall for cheap.You could just trek to your local big-box retailer and pick out the biggest, cheapest TV you can find, but the selection can be dizzying, and many of those sets aren't worth the trouble (even if they only cost a couple hundred dollars). To help you make sense of... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft has started hinting at how it will further integrate AI features into Windows 11 ahead of a big update to the OS that focuses on AI. The software giant started testing a new experience" for Copilot in Windows this week, which includes an animated Copilot in the taskbar that appears when you copy text or images.The Copilot icon will change appearance and animate to indicate that Copilot can help," explains Microsoft in a blog post. When you hover your mouse over the Copilot icon, it will provide a menu of actions that you can take, such as summarizing or explaining the copied text."I've tested the experience in the latest Windows 11 Canary builds, and it works well for text, summarizing anything you copy. While the icon... Continue reading...

Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge Stop me if you've heard this one before: Disney, in an effort to work in a complicated new media era, is partnering with its competitors in the hopes of creating a single destination where viewers can watch everything they want.You're shouting Hulu!" at your screen, right? Well, Disney's back at it again, launching a sports-specific streaming hub later this year that will combine all the channels and games of ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros.On this episode of The Vergecast, we dig into why these companies need to band together, why sports still rule TV, and why it took so long to get the one-stop sports shop fans have been looking for for years. Then we get into the other Disney news, including the company's $1.5 billion investment in Epic... Continue reading...

The price to record visitors at your Ring video doorbell is about to go up. | Image: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge In what is fast becoming a trend, another security camera company is raising the price of its subscription plan. According to a Ring support article, starting March 11th, 2024, it will cost $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly to subscribe to the Ring Protect Basic plan, an increase of $1 a month or $10 a year.The Basic is Ring's cheapest plan and gives you access to cloud storage of recorded videos from one camera or video doorbell. If you subscribe, you'll see the bump on your next renewal date after March 11th unless you cancel before then.Just last month, Arlo increased its single-camera subscription price to $7.99 monthly from $4.99. Google Nest's cheapest plan went up to $8 a month from $6 late last year, but that covers all cameras... Continue reading...

A rendering of the PACE spacecraft as seen from afar. | Image: NASA Who knew you could see plankton from space? NASA, of course. The space agency successfully launched a new mission today called PACE - short for the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem satellite - that will study its namesake.It'll examine microscopic plants and particles - things so small they're invisible to the naked eye - from hundreds of miles above Earth. The goal is to better understand how such teeny tiny things can actually impact the whole planet.PACE will help us learn, like never before, how particles in our atmosphere and our oceans can identify key factors impacting global warming," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, said in a press release.The goal is to better understand how such teeny tiny things can actually... Continue reading...

Image: Cory Hendrixson (YouTube) Windows 11 will soon have a built-in sudo command designed for developers. Sudo, short for superuser do," is widely used on Unix-based operating systems like Linux and macOS to run programs with higher security privileges or as another user. It's useful for developers wanting to test scripts, for example.Microsoft is using sudo inside Windows to let developers run elevated tools directly from an unelevated console session. It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console," explains Jordi Adoumie, a product manager at Microsoft. Image: Microsoft Sudo can be controlled in developer settings in a future version of Windows 11. S... Continue reading...

Lego Fortnite. | Image: Epic Games In 2021, Facebook's parent company got a new name and a new goal. Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. He later called the metaverse the successor to the mobile internet" and noted that the concept would be so big that it was too much for any one company to take on, spanning an entire industry.That hasn't happened yet. Even Meta employees barely use the company's flagship metaverse app, Horizon Worlds, and over the last few years, Zuckerberg's definition of the metaverse seems to have shifted from a Ready Player One-style virtual world to one that blends the real and the virtual as new buzzwords like AI have taken root. Either way, this vision of the internet hasn't exactly... Continue reading...

You can use the $50 to add the wireless charging functionality these earbuds should have shipped with. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge There are no better earbuds for muting the world than the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds, which remain our pick for the best noise-canceling earbuds. While there aren't enough meaningful changes for QuietComfort Earbuds II owners to upgrade, the $249 price ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Bose makes them easier to recommend for newcomers or those whose QC II buds have failing batteries. Coincidentally, the original QuietComfort Earbuds II are also discounted by $80, bringing them down to $199 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Bose.It's been hard for Bose fans to swallow the $299 upgrade pill for the QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds, which unceremoniously kicked the QuietComfort Earbuds II off their perch to become the company's marquee earbuds.... Continue reading...

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Federal Communications Commission is making it illegal for robocalls to use AI-generated voices. The ruling, issued on Thursday, gives state attorneys general the ability to take action against callers using AI voice cloning tech.As outlined in the ruling, AI-generated voices are now considered an artificial or prerecorded voice" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This restricts callers from using AI-generated voices for non-emergency purposes or without prior consent. The TCPA includes bans on a variety of automated call practices, including using an artificial or prerecorded voice" to deliver messages, but it wasn't explicitly stated whether this included AI-powered voice cloning. The new ruling clarifies that... Continue reading...

A technician will be dispatched to your location for prices starting at 69/69. | Image: Cowboy Cowboy, the boutique Belgian maker of e-bikes, is taking the training wheels off its On-Demand offering of ad hoc services previously being tested in just a few cities.That means owners of Cowboy e-bikes across Europe can now request flat tire fixes, bike setup, general maintenance, and the installation of child seats or rear racks right in the Cowboy app with prices starting at 69 / 69. Best of all, you don't have to visit one of the company's bike store partners since a technician will be dispatched directly to your doorstep. The On-Demand service is meant to complement Cowboy Care, the company's subscription maintenance service. Image: Cowboy Appointments can be booked and managed directly in the Cowboy... Continue reading...

Image: Toei Animation Funimation is shutting down on April 2nd, 2024. The anime streaming service will start migrating existing subscribers to Crunchyroll - a move that will not only affect subscription prices, but will also wipe digital libraries.A support page on Funimation's website says the service will automatically transfer existing subscribers to Crunchyroll, noting that the transfer may vary depending on your specific payment platform, subscription type and region." But the page - unhelpfully - doesn't say how much subscribers will have to pay following the transition, only that legacy subscribers will see a price increase. You'll have to check your email to see how much you'll have to pay. Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge S... Continue reading...

Dyson's new Supersonic r will have RFID attachments. | Image: Dyson Dyson first launched its Supersonic hairdryer in 2016, but the high-tech hairdryer hasn't really changed much since then - until now. Just in time for New York Fashion Week, Dyson is announcing the Supersonic r, an upgraded $569.99 hairdryer for professional stylists.Right away, you can tell the Supersonic r is, well, r-shaped. Steve Williamson, Dyson's hair care category manager, says that's to accommodate the different ways pros use hairdryers compared to how you or I might use one. In short, the Supersonic r had to be lighter and more maneuverable. Compared to the original Supersonic, the r is 30 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter, weighing 325g or 11oz.If you're using it at home, maybe you do a half-hour blow dry session.... Continue reading...

JBL is the first to make Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant coexist on the same speaker, and it works quite well. But the price you pay for that convenience feels a little uneven. Continue reading...

Paramount's most recent Sonic movie really reinforced how its titular hedgehog is nothing without his friends, but the studio's new Knuckles spinoff series starring Idris Elba looks like it'll be a lesson in how echidnas handle business (mostly) by themselves.Set between the events of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and the upcoming third movie, Knuckles zooms in on Knuckles' (Idris Elba) new life in Green Hills, Montana, where he, Sonic (Ben Schwartz), and Tails (Colleen O'Shaughnessey) have become a kind of alien family. After years of trying to be a good parental figure to Sonic, Maddie Wachowski (Tika Sumpter) couldn't be happier to have people like Knuckles around, if only because he can actually keep up with the hedgehog. But as good as... Continue reading...

Photo by Jean Chung / Getty Images TikTok isn't just a place to offload your celebrity opinions, give strangers a complete home tour, or share a DIY hack. Each video - at least in TikTok's view - is also a possible advertisement.As I was scrolling through my feed this week, a video from an account I don't follow popped up discussing actor Hunter Schafer's Grammys afterparty outfit. The account has a modest 43,000 followers, and the video has less than 8,000 views. It followed the typical outfit breakdown format: identifying the designer of Schafer's dress, showing a few different angles, and adding close-up shots of her shoes.As the video was ending, a button popped up prompting me to view items in TikTok Shop related to the shoes. The blue and orange embellished heels... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google is famous for having a million similar products with confusingly different names and seemingly nothing in common. (Can I interest you in a messaging app?) But when it comes to its AI work, going forward there is only one name that matters: Gemini.The company announced on Thursday that it is renaming its Bard chatbot to Gemini, releasing a dedicated Gemini app for Android, and even folding all its Duet AI features in Google Workspace into the Gemini brand. It also announced that Gemini Ultra 1.0 - the largest and most capable version of Google's large language model - is being released to the public.Gemini's mobile apps will likely be the place most people encounter the new tool. If you download the new app on Android, it can... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple is officially launching its Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Devices apps on Windows this week. The apps were originally launched in preview last year, but Apple has now removed the preview tag after working with Microsoft to launch the apps.The trio of apps, in combination with an overhauled iCloud for Windows app, are designed to move Windows users away from the reliance of iTunes, according to MacRumors. If you use Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple Devices then iTunes is only required for access to podcasts and audiobooks on Windows. Image: Apple The Apple TV app on Windows. The Apple Music app provides access to the iTunes library, alongside song and album purchases. Apple TV also lets Windows users... Continue reading...

It's just as fast, the magnet is just as strong, but it costs half as much as those proprietary Apple mounts. Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Danish privacy regulator Datatilsysnet has ruled that cities in Denmark need considerably more assurances about privacy to use Google service that may expose children's data, reports BleepingComputer. The agency found (translated) that Google uses student data from Chromebooks and Google Workplace for Education for its own purposes," which isn't allowed under European privacy law.Municipalities will need to explain by March 1st how they plan to comply with the order to stop transferring data to Google, and won't be able to do so at all starting August 1st, which could mean phasing out Chromebooks entirely.The regulator ruled that municipalities aren't allowed to send Google data unless the laws change or Google provides a way to... Continue reading...

Photo by Buda Mendes/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Disney has won the streaming competition for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour film. This afternoon the company announced that Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour (Taylor's Version) will be available exclusively on the service starting March 15th.This is being billed as the concert film in its entirety for the first time," since this version will include Cardigan" and four additional acoustic songs that weren't part of the theatrical film or the video-on-demand rental, which itself tacked on several bonus tracks.The Eras Tour film grossed over $260 million worldwide at the box office, enough to make it the top-selling concert film of all time. It was released for digital rental in December, and now is finally making the move to a streaming... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Apple researchers released a new model that lets users describe in plain language what they want to change in a photo without ever touching photo editing software.The MGIE model, which Apple worked on with the University of California, Santa Barbara, can crop, resize, flip, and add filters to images all through text prompts.MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, can be applied to simple and more complex image editing tasks like modifying specific objects in a photo to make them a different shape or come off brighter. The model blends two different uses of multimodal language models. First, it learns how to interpret user prompts. Then it imagines" what the edit would look like (asking for a bluer sky in a photo becomes... Continue reading...

Toyota is investing $1.3 billion in its Kentucky plant to support the production of EVs. Toyota is pumping $1.3 billion into its factory in Kentucky for future electrification efforts," including the production of a currently unnamed three-row electric SUV for the US market. The news comes as a bit of a surprise, as the largest automaker in the world is also one of the most hostile toward the industry-wide shift to EVs.Toyota says the money will fund an EV assembly line at its Kentucky plant, as well as battery pack assembly with EV batteries supplied by its facility in North Carolina. The company has said it would invest a total of $17 billion in its US operations to support the shift to EVs.Of course, this may come as cold comfort to environmentalists, who have been battling the automaker for years over its anti-EV... Continue reading...

Here's how to opt-out where you can, and fight back where you can't. | Samar Haddad / The Verge AI-generated imagery feels inescapable. It's in the video games you play, in the movies you watch, and has flooded social media platforms. It's even been used to promote the physical hardware that real, human artists use to create digital paintings and illustrations, to the immense frustration of those who already feel displaced by the technology.The pervasive nature of it seems especially egregious to creators who are fighting to stop their works from being used, without consent or compensation, to improve the very thing that threatens to disrupt their careers and livelihoods. The data pools that go into training generative AI models often contain images that are indiscriminately scraped from the internet, and some AI image generator... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge X hit the number one slot among free apps on Apple's App Store Wednesday, just as another celebrity image scandal was going viral on its platform.The hashtag drakevideo" was trending as of Wednesday in the US, after a video that users speculated to be the rapper Drake half nude and engaged in a sexual act spread across the service.The incident comes less than two weeks after X struggled to stop the spread of another salacious celebrity image. In late January, fake, AI-generated explicit images of Taylor Swift circulated on the platform, leading the company to at one point block all searches for the artist's name.But the scandals hardly seemed to hurt X in terms of downloads. X owner Elon Musk bragged about the app's ascension to the... Continue reading...

Photo by JASON HENRY/AFP via Getty Images A driverless Waymo vehicle struck a cyclist in San Francisco, causing minor injuries. It was the latest incident in the city at a time when tensions around autonomous vehicles are particularly high after a driverless Cruise vehicle injured a pedestrian.The incident, which was first reported by Reuters, occurred at 3:02PM on February 6th at the intersection of 17th and Mississippi streets in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. A Google Maps Street View of the intersection shows a flat, well-lit area surrounded by warehouses with unprotected bike lanes on both streets.Police officers arriving at the scene found an autonomous vehicle had struck a cyclist, who only reported non-life threatening injuries," according to Eve... Continue reading...

T-Mobile wants to be more than just your network. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile wants you to see it as more than a wireless company, so it's flattering its customers with status. The company is launching a new program called Magenta Status, which includes a set of new perks for subscribers as well as the benefits already offered by T-Mobile Tuesdays. The company is partnering with Hilton, Hertz, and Live Nation to offer discounts, which can all be managed by the rebranded T-Mobile Tuesdays app, now called T Life.Only T-Mobile's own subscribers will be eligible for Magenta Status - Metro by T-Mobile customers aren't. The new program adds discounts on top of the existing T-Mobile Tuesday promotions, including a $5 ticket to a different movie every month, 25 percent off some Live Nation tickets, discounts on... Continue reading...