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Joan Donovan is a prominent expert on disinformation campaigns. | Image: Whistleblower Aid A prominent expert in online disinformation campaigns, Joan Donovan, says Meta pushed her former employer Harvard to shutter a major research project on media manipulation.Donovan, who led Harvard's Technology and Social Change Project (TaSC) until it ended this year, revealed her allegations earlier this week in a whistleblower complaint obtained by The Washington Post. She claims that Harvard scuttled her research after the charity of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $500 million to the university in 2021. Around that time, Donovan and her colleagues at TaSC were working with the infamous Facebook Files, a cache of leaked documents that revealed the inner workings of how Facebook handled... Continue reading...

Google's 4K-ready Chromecast makes for a great gift under $50. | Image: The Verge I don't know about you, but now that I'm finally starting my holiday shopping, I'm kicking myself for not taking advantage of all those great Cyber Monday deals. Yet, while many of the best have since disappeared, one of our favorites has luckily just resurfaced. Right now, you can buy the Chromecast with Google TV (4K) for around $38 from Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which was a new all-time low first set during Black Friday.If you're looking for something budget-friendly, we think this streaming device is one of the best on the market. For less than $40, you're getting a 4K-ready device with Dolby Atmos support, along with a remote that lets you find content with voice via Google Assistant. Unlike others in this price range, the... Continue reading...

Image: Meta WhatsApp has officially announced that you'll soon be able to set voice messages to disappear after their recipient hears them. The View Once" feature has been available for photos and videos since 2021, but it's now expanding to cover audio messages.While it's a little confusing that WhatsApp is using the View Once" branding for messages that you listen to rather than look at, it's nice to see the protection available for another of the messaging service's formats. As a public defender of voice messages, I, for one, am thrilled.In a press release, the company suggests you might want to use the feature for reading out your credit card details to a friend, or when you're planning a surprise." To that list, I would also add bitching... Continue reading...

The Teal Mask - Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's first DLC drop - was short and sweet and felt more like an encapsulated side quest experience than a significant update to the overall game. But the latest trailer for The Indigo Disk - the second planned DLC - makes its many new features seem like the sort of thing that might lure quite a few trainers back to the Paldea region.Set largely in the Unova region originally introduced in Pokemon's fifth-generation games, The Indigo Disk will follow players to Blueberry Academy, where they will be reunited with exchange students Carmine and Kieran, who first debuted in The Teal Mask. Along with bringing back every previous generation's starter pokemon and a large selection of legendary monsters... Continue reading...

Image: Ample Stellantis struck a deal with California-based EV battery swapping company Ample to power a fleet of shared Fiat 500e vehicles in Spain. But the company says the deal could eventually expand to include personally owned EVs in Europe and the US as well.By becoming one of the first Western automakers to embrace battery swapping technology, Stellantis is betting that EV charging infrastructure in Europe and the US will remain a barrier to adoption in the near future, necessitating other solutions. Battery swapping could theoretically help EV owners power up and get moving without having to wait for long stretches at a charging station.Stellantis will work with Ample to launch a battery swapping system for a fleet of Fiat 500e vehiclesS... Continue reading...

I felt like a Kardashian reject roaming the streets of New York City, but hey, Alexa could tell me the weather. Continue reading...

Illustration by Sisi Kim for The Verge Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found - and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one. Continue reading...

Illustration by Sisi Kim for The Verge Smarter tech and new recycling techniques might just mean our EVs get even greener. Here's how Redwood Materials is putting recycling at the heart of the burgeoning battery belt. Continue reading...

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one chats and calls on Messenger, finally fulfilling a promise that's been in the works for quite awhile. When end-to-end encryption is on, only you and the person you send a message to in Messenger can see its contents, the company claims.Encrypted chats were first introduced as an opt-in feature in Messenger in 2016, but after a long windup, end-to-end encrypted messages and calls for conversations between two people will now be the standard going forward.This has taken years to deliver because we've taken our time to get this right," Loredana Crisan, VP of Messenger, said in a statement shared with The Verge. Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product... Continue reading...

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images Alan Rosa, former head of security for Twitter, filed a lawsuit against X, Elon Musk, and company adviser Steve Davis, alleging that he was wrongly fired for protesting Musk-led cost-cutting measures. Lawyers for Rosa wrote in the complaint that the cuts hampered Twitter's ability to comply with the regulatory demands of the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission.The lawsuit alleged that Musk hired Steve Davis as an adviser and gave him broad authority, with which he immediately began cutting Twitter's products and services that supported and complied with the Twitter FTC Consent Decree." Twitter had settled with the FTC over its inappropriate use of users' personal information only a few months before, prompting the... Continue reading...

Image: HBO The second season of HBO's The Last of Us will debut in 2025. A new teaser dropped by Max confirmed the date and also offered a glimpse into its 2024 lineup.The news comes after showrunner Craig Mazin revealed production will start on February 12th, 2024, which is later than originally planned because of the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Despite the delay, work on the second season is still underway with an outline already prepared and the first episode's script submitted before the strike.The forthcoming season will take place a few years after the first. It will likely be an adaptation of The Last of Us Part II video game, which is getting a remastered version for PlayStation 5 on January 19th, 2024. Bella Ramsey... Continue reading...

Image: A24 Indie powerhouse A24 has a new home for its theatrical releases - both new and old. The production company has inked a multiyear exclusive deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to bring its entire slate of new releases to HBO, Max, and Cinemax after they leave theaters. On top of that, the two companies extended a licensing deal for its films that are already on HBO and Max - and will grow to include over 100 films in total, including The Whale, Uncut Gems, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and others.The agreement is a Pay 1 output deal - which will mean that after new A24 films complete their run in theaters, they'll only be available on these WBD-owned platforms for a set period of time. A24 had a similar Pay 1 deal with Showtime it... Continue reading...

GameStop's current promo takes $25 off Nintendo's latest holiday bundle as long as you're willing to visit a brick-and-mortarstore. | Image: Nintendo Unsurprisingly, Black Friday and Cyber Monday brought a flurry of discounts on the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and all three iterations of the Nintendo Switch. Some of those deals have since dried up - pour one out for the $349 Xbox Series X deal we saw last week - but a few newcomers have popped up in their stead. Take GameStop's current promo on the Smash Bros.-inspired Nintendo Switch OLED bundle, which drops the excellent console bundle to $324.99 ($25 off) when you purchase in-store or order online and pick it up in-store.While not as slick as the previous Super Smash Bros.-themed Switch, Nintendo's latest holiday bundle makes up for it in sheer value (especially at this price). It includes a Nintendo Switch OLED and a pair of... Continue reading...

The Verge / Photo by Steve Jennings, Getty Images Dream Scenario's Nic Cage wants you to know that there's a difference between maximalism and pushing the boundaries of filmmaking as an art. Continue reading...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta detailed a bunch of updates to its Meta AI tools today in a blog post, including some new features for its AI image generators.One that caught my eye was a tool that will let you remix AI-generated images your friends share in a Messenger or Instagram chat. The images are made with a tool Meta calls imagine," and the company says you'll now be able to reimagine" images other people make in the group chat by pressing and holding on the picture and adding a text prompt. Image: Meta Meta's new reimagine" tool for AI-generated images. Meta is also bringing the imagine tool out of chats and letting users in the US access it on the web at imagine.meta.com. The company says that the tool is designed for... Continue reading...

Hulu now has its own tile on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. | Image: Disney Disney is rolling out the beta version of its combined Disney Plus and Hulu experience today. The new hub, called Hulu on Disney Plus, puts content from both services on the Disney Plus app.If you're subscribed to a Disney Plus and Hulu bundle, you'll see a new Hulu card that appears next to the Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic titles at the very top of Disney Plus' interface. Selecting the Hulu option will bring you to a Hulu Hub," where you'll gain access to the thousands of movies and TV shows available through the service. The experience is also available to people who subscribe to Disney Plus and Hulu separately, as long as both accounts are associated with the same email address.I found that I already... Continue reading...

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple, which many had considered very conservative in its approach to AI, quietly released frameworks and model libraries designed to run on its chips and maybe bring generative AI apps to MacBooks.The company's machine learning research team released MLX, a machine learning framework where developers can build models that run efficiently on Apple Silicon and deep learning model library MLX Data. Both are accessible through open-source repositories like GitHub and PyPI.According to Apple on GitHub, frameworks like PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire inspired the design of MLX, with the notable difference of having a shared memory, meaning any task run on MLX works on supported devices (right now, CPUs and GPUs) without moving data. C... Continue reading...

Squid Game: The Challenge gets a second season. | Image: Netflix In the least surprising move ever, Netflix has greenlit its popular Squid Game: The Challenge for a second season and is recruiting contestants right now. The company also mentioned it's making a video game in the Squid Game universe" - missing an opportunity to coin the term Squidiverse." Actually, I'm sorry I just typed that.Netflix didn't offer any details about the video game except to say that players will compete with friends in games they'll recognize from the series." We asked for more details, but the company didn't respond by press time.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a marketplace for predators in search of children," a new lawsuit from the New Mexico attorney general alleges, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit, filed in state court on Tuesday, also claims Meta's algorithms recommend sexual content to children.As outlined in the complaint, the New Mexico attorney general's office conducted an investigation that involved creating test profiles on Facebook and Instagram that appeared to be teenagers or preteens. Not only did the office find inappropriate recommendations for each of the decoys, such as an account that openly posted adult pornography, but it also found that they attracted predators as... Continue reading...

Boris Eldagsen Promptography" is what Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen calls his creative process. He inputs highly specific and deliberate text prompts into generative AI programs like DALL-E or Midjourney and tweaks their outputs repeatedly to create thought-provoking photographs - or at least, what look like photographs. His work is so convincing that he fooled Sony into giving him a photography award, only to decline the honor and reveal that his work was made using AI.In this episode of Status Update, senior video producer Becca Farsace takes a flight to Berlin, Germany. There, she attends Eldagsen's gallery opening and learns what it takes to be a promptographer.Watch to find out if Becca could answer The Verge's favorite question of the... Continue reading...

While the Consumer Electronics Show looks to be a little light on auto-related announcements next year, Honda said it will use the event to launch a new global series of electric vehicles. And today it dropped its first teaser.The photo shows what appears to be a sloping rear section of a car with no visible tail lights or bumper. There's a wheel covering featuring lined triangles, and apparently a lot of glass and purple lighting. Beyond that, we don't know much else. Such is the nature of the teaser: all flair, no substance.A sloping rear section of a car with no visible tail lights or bumperHonda will showcase the global EV series models and several key technologies that illustrate the significant transformation Honda is... Continue reading...

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge It's the most wonderful time of the year: when TikTok publishes its annual roundup of the biggest hits, and I get to see what everyone else has been doing on the app all year.Despite the hold TikTok has on our cultural and political psyche, it's hard to tell what exactly is going on across the platform. Seeing something served up on your For You page doesn't mean it's a thing all the kids are doing - it just means that the algorithm decided you might watch it based on what you spend your time doing on the app. Out of the bottomless supply of videos posted each day, you're being fed everything from celebrity clips with millions of views to videos from random accounts with zero likes and zero comments. None of our For You pages look the... Continue reading...

Illustration by Sisi Kim for The Verge Every day, Mitch Stults commutes about 60 miles each way from his home in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a town of 17,000 people, to his job as a sales manager for a manufactured homebuilder in Cullman.Stults was driving a King Ranch pickup 110 miles per day, spending an estimated $1,000 on gas per week, and getting just 13 miles to the gallon. That was when I decided to give a Tesla a try," he said.Stults, 29, began hunting for a Tesla Model Y and found one at a dealership in Tupelo, Mississippi, 87 miles away. He traded in his King Ranch a few days later.But the thrill of an electrified ride didn't last long. Three months later, Stults returned the Tesla and traded it in for a GMC half-ton Duramax diesel pickup.That was when I decided... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Several groups mainly tackling climate change and disinformation said the Biden administration's approach to artificial intelligence regulation does not respond to AI's impact on the climate and how it can be used to spread disinformation.The groups sent a letter to the White House urging the Biden administration, including national climate advisor Ali Zaidi, to add more climate-centered policies in its AI executive order released earlier in October. Seventeen groups signed the letter, including Accountable Tech, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, Climate Action Against Disinformation, Greenpeace USA, and the Tech Oversight Project.The letter accuses the administration of neglecting AI's impact on spreading disinformation on... Continue reading...

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge's newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.The dust is still settling on Spotify's latest round of layoffs. On Monday, Spotify announced it was cutting 17 percent of its workforce, or approximately 1,500 employees, as a means of making the company even more efficient. This round of layoffs dwarfs the past two this year, with the company cutting about 600 employees in January and another 200 employees (mostly from podcasting) in June. Details are still coming out, but it appears the cuts are impacting people across the company, from product to content to advertising.I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive... Continue reading...

The iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone 14 Pro. | Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple just pushed the release candidate of iOS 17.2, and the upcoming update brings support for the Qi2 wireless charging standard to iPhone 13- and iPhone 14-series smartphones, according to the patch notes. Apple says the iPhone 15 and 15 Pro already support Qi2, though there aren't actually any Qi2 chargers to buy yet (which might change soon).Qi2 adds a MagSafe-like ring of magnets to the Qi wireless charging standard and brings the charge rate up to 15W. For Android phones, that means faster, more convenient wireless charging and access to the huge ecosystem of magnetic wireless chargers that have sprung up to support MagSafe iPhones. For iPhones, it means MagSafe-speed charging without paying MagSafe prices. Right now, if you... Continue reading...

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images xAI - the AI company founded by Elon Musk - seeks to raise up to $1 billion in equity investments, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (as spotted by CoinDesk). The company has raised $134.7 million so far.Founded in April, xAI is Musk's attempt at jumping on the AI hype train. The company's purpose is to understand the true nature of the universe," according to its website, something the launch of its Grok AI chatbot is apparently supposed to further.Grok pulls real-time information from X (formerly Twitter) to power some of its responses, but it's currently only available in early access to X's Premium Plus subscribers. Despite the close ties between Grok and X, xAI is separate from X Corp., X's parent... Continue reading...