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Image: Lego Lego's latest Marvel set is a big one. Standing nearly three feet tall and made up of 5,201 pieces, Lego's $499.99 Avengers Tower (76269) comes with a total of 31 mini figures - more than nearly every other Lego set.The set includes some of Marvel's most well-known heroes, villains, and supporting characters, such as Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Hulk, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, War Machine, Ultron, Loki, Pepper Potts, Nick Fury, War Machine, and more. There's even a minifig of Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. You can check out the full list here.While the Avengers Tower may have more minifigs than all of Lego's modern sets, there are still some older models that top it. That includes the 1970s-era Lego Fabuland 3695 Figure collection,... Continue reading...

Prices are dropping like Miles in a cool pose. | Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment The smaller PlayStation 5 with a detachable disc drive is expected to land soon, but why wait and pay full price when you can get the current console with one of its best new games thrown in for free?As part of an early Black Friday promo, retailers are discounting the standard disc-compatible PlayStation 5 console in a bundle with a digital copy of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 - marking the combo down to $499.99 (about $70 off, which is the cost of the included title). This deal is widely available now at Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and soon, Walmart.While the PS5 is nearly three years old, Spider-Man 2 does an excellent job of showing what the console is capable of. The action-adventure game starring both Miles Morales and Peter Parker uses... Continue reading...

The Ormanas RGB LED smart light strip looks like it has the right balance of features. | Images: Ikea Ikea launched the Ormanas, its first smart RGB LED light strip, in the Netherlands. The news comes by way of Dutch tech site Tweakers, which notes that the Ormanas is a four-meter, or roughly 13-foot, dimmable Zigbee affair for 29.99 (about $32) that works with the company's Dirigera smart hub. The light strip is only available in the Netherlands for now, but Ikea typically starts its rollouts there before bringing products to the US and beyond.The strip is simple and, judging from the images on Ikea's site, won't have individually addressable LEDs like some of the fancier strips on the market - which means the whole strip will show only a single color at a time. Still, it supports multiple control methods like the Ikea Home app and... Continue reading...

Image: WhatsApp Calls on WhatsApp are (optionally) getting even more secure for the app's most privacy-minded users. As outlined in this blog post, WhatsApp just added a new protect IP address in calls" toggle to its settings that shields your IP from whoever's on the other side of a call. When activated, calls will be relayed through Meta / WhatsApp servers, thus concealing your true IP address.Most calling products people use today have peer-to-peer connections between participants. This direct connection allows for faster data transfers and better call quality, but it also means that participants need to know each other's IP addresses," WhatsApp's Daniel Sommermann, Sebastian Messmer, and Attaullah Baig wrote in the post. IP addresses may contain... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge OpenAI's ChatGPT service is currently down and inaccessible for its 100 million weekly active users. ChatGPT went down shortly before 9AM ET / 6AM PT and has remained inaccessible for nearly an hour now. OpenAI says it's experiencing a major outage that's also impacting the company's API services. ChatGPT users are being greeted with a ChatGPT is at capacity right now" message.OpenAI says it has identified an issue resulting in high error rates across the API and ChatGPT, and we are working on remediation."This latest outage comes a day after a partial outage affected both ChatGPT and API services for a few hours last night. ChatGPT hasn't had any significant problems for months now, with the AI-powered service continuing to be one... Continue reading...

Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty Images Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of General Motors, says it is recalling 950 of its driverless vehicles in response to an October incident in which one of its robotaxis ran over a pedestrian.The recall, which was initiated by the company, will take the form of an over-the-air software update to the collision detection subsystem so the vehicle remains stationary during certain crash incidents, rather than pulling over to the side of the road.On October 2nd, a pedestrian was struck by a hit-and-run driver in San Francisco, throwing her in the path of a nearby Cruise vehicle. The driverless car then attempted to pull over to the side of the road, dragging the pedestrian 20 feet and seriously injuring her.In the recall notice,... Continue reading...

The Chamberlain MyQ smart garage door controller connects to a garage door opener so you can control it from anywhere. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge The Chamberlain Group - owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech - has announced it's shut off all unauthorized access" to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.The move comes a year after Chamberlain discontinued its official Apple HomeKit integration and a few months after it finally killed support for Google Assistant. It's sadly another example of how the company continues to be hostile to the... Continue reading...

Image: Rockstar It's finally happening: Rockstar Games has officially revealed that the next chapter of the Grand Theft Auto franchise will get a trailer next month. Likely to be called GTA VI, the new game is expected to feature the series' first female protagonist, influenced by Bonnie and Clyde. GTA VI will also reportedly be set in a fictionalized version of Miami, just like 2002's GTA: Vice City.After reports of a GTA VI reveal this week, Rockstar Games took to X (formerly Twitter) today to officially announce that a trailer for the next Grand Theft Auto" is coming in early December.It has been a long time coming for GTA fans. Grand Theft Auto V launched a decade ago in 2013 and, since then, has been ported to successive generations of hardware... Continue reading...

There's nothing wrong with the Galaxy S23 FE, but it feels like an uninspired collection of surplus components rather than one for the fans. Continue reading...

A Niron Magnetics employee takes quality measurements | Image: Sara Rubinstein for General Motors General Motors is eyeing a new type of magnet for its EV motors that's less dependent on rare earth minerals from China.The automaker is forming a strategic partnership" with Niron Magnetics, a Minnesota-based company that is developing magnetic technology based in iron nitride. GM's venture arm is also investing an undisclosed sum into the company as it seeks to incorporate new technologies into its EV production.The hope is that Niron's magnets can eventually be used in the motors for the company's electric vehicles, most of which currently use permanent magnets made from rare earth and heavy earth minerals from China. In contrast, Niron's magnets purport to use iron nitride, which is comprised of the much more common elements of... Continue reading...

Julia Nikhinson/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Amid growing concern that AI can make it easier to spread misinformation, Microsoft is offering its services, including a digital watermark identifying AI content, to help crack down on deepfakes and enhance cybersecurity ahead of several worldwide elections.In a blog post co-authored by Microsoft president Brad Smith and Microsoft's corporate vice president, Technology for Fundamental Rights Teresa Hutson, the company said it will offer several services to protect election integrity, including the launch of a new tool that harnesses the Content Credentials watermarking system developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance Authenticity's (C2PA). The goal of the service is to help candidates protect the use of their content and... Continue reading...

Green bubbles in Apple's Messages app. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge iMessage serves as an important gateway between business users and their customers" and should be regulated as a core" service under the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA), said Google and a group of major European telcos in a letter sent to the European Commission, and seen by The Financial Times. Being designated as a core platform service" would be significant for iMessage, as it could compel Apple to make it interoperable with other messaging services.The letter arrives as the European Commission investigates whether iMessage meets the requirements to be regulated under the bloc's strict DMA rules.Google has been very vocal about its desire for Apple to adopt RCS, the cross-platform messaging standard pitched as the successor... Continue reading...

Image: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images Samsung has started to detail its own generative AI model, Samsung Gauss, that can run locally on devices. Korea Times reports that Gauss will be integrated into the next Galaxy S24 handset, expected in early 2024. Samsung showcased Gauss during its own AI forum this week, revealing how the AI model can generate and edit images, compose emails, summarize documents, and even operate as a coding assistant.Parts of Samsung's Gauss model can run locally on the device, and Samsung executives teased last month that the company will start adding generative AI to core functions" of mobile devices starting in 2024. That comment followed reports of an AI focus for Samsung's Galaxy S24, which is widely expected to be announced in early 2024.S... Continue reading...

Grand Theft Auto V was a huge hit. | Image: Getty Rockstar Games reportedly plans to reveal Grand Theft Auto VI, the next installment in the hugely popular open-world franchise, as early as this week. Bloomberg reports that an announcement could come this week, with a trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI set to drop in December to mark 25 years of Rockstar Games.Rockstar first confirmed it was working on the next Grand Theft Auto in February 2022, and that active development for the unnamed title was well underway." Since then a report from Bloomberg claimed that Grand Theft Auto VI will feature the series' first female protagonist, influenced by Bonnie and Clyde. Grand Theft Auto VI will also reportedly be set in a fictionalized version of Miami, similar to the location used for 2002's G... Continue reading...

It's wide. | LG LG has a pair of new 45-inch ultrawide gaming monitors. That sounds very wide to me, though LG says it's the equivalent of two 24-inch monitors, which sounds almost compact compared to the 49-inchers from Samsung and LG, or the gargantuan Samsung Odyssey Ark we tested last year.The UltraGear 45GR65DC ($799) and 45GR75DC ($899) are slightly smaller and a few hundred bucks cheaper than the 49-inch 49GR85DC, which we wisely just called the 49-inch UltraGear when we wrote about it earlier in the year. I can't do that with these since there are two of them, but they're basically the same except that the 45GR75DC has USB-C with 90W power delivery and the 45GR65DC doesn't. If you preorder the fancier one before the 19th, LG will throw in a... Continue reading...

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge Soon, Instagram users will have a choice about using read receipts in direct message conversations.Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri both announced on their Instagram Broadcast channels that the change is currently in testing, and Mosseri included this picture showing the toggle as well as what it looks like in action. Image: Meta Instagram's read receipts toggle for DMs. What they didn't mention is if that option is coming to Messenger, which similarly forces users into using read receipts without any way to turn them off. We also have no idea how soon this could roll out more widely, but keep an eye on your conversations to see if those indicators suddenly start to disappear or if anyone is turning down your... Continue reading...

Photo by Stephen J. Cohen / Getty Images This is Hot Pod, The Verge's newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.Hope you all had a great weekend. Today, I've got news on James Corden's new SiriusXM deal, Theo Von's rise on the charts, and, in what I will admit is a significant tone shift, a look at which podcasts are actually helping the discussion around the Israel-Hamas war.James Corden inks SiriusXM dealDon't call it a podcast deal (so I've been told). The former Late Late Show host will have a new weekly program on SiriusXM that is exclusive to subscribers. This Life of Mine with James Corden will be a weekly celebrity chat show, because literally what else would it be? The show, which will launch in early 2024, was announced in the... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Reddit is beginning to test the first of its own add-ons built through its Developer Platform. The company's first add-ons, available to a small number of subreddits and only to mods, will include tools for mods to more easily monitor and remove comment threads; ban spammers and remove their content; and for sports-focused subreddits, create posts that are live scoreboards, spokesperson Courtney Geesey-Dorr tells The Verge.Reddit announced the Developer Platform in August 2022 as a way for developers to more easily host and develop things like apps, bots, and mod tools for Reddit. At the time, Reddit opened up a waitlist for interested developers, and although the platform is still in closed beta, Geesey-Dorr says a handful" of... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge WhatsApp might still deploy ads on the platform alongside the app's Instagram Stories-like Status feature, company head Will Cathcart recently said in an interview. As pointed out by TechCrunch, Cathcart stated that WhatsApp ads could show up in different places within the app, including the newer Channels feature and statuses, though no timeline was provided for the change.In the Brazilian publication Folha De S.Paulo, the interviewer asked Cathcart if WhatsApp would continue to be free and without ads. Cathcart responded that WhatApp will not have ads within the inbox or in the messaging experience." Cathcart also added that Channels could charge people to subscribe, and the owners could promote ads for it within Channels.The... Continue reading...

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge A new program called Lantern aims to fight online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) with cross-platform signal sharing between online companies like Meta and Discord. The Tech Coalition, a group of tech businesses with a cooperative aim to fight online child sexual exploitation, wrote in today's announcement that the program is an attempt to keep predators from avoiding detection by moving potential victims to other platforms.Lantern serves as a central database for companies to contribute data and check their own platforms against. When companies see signals, like known OCSEA policy-violating email addresses or usernames, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) hashes, or CSAM keywords, they can flag them in their own systems.... Continue reading...

Waze will warn you when a route is crash-prone. | Image: Waze Waze has a new safety feature that launches an alert when drivers are coming up on a particularly crash-prone section of their route. Waze's blog post says the feature, which has been in beta since last year, uses historical crash data and key information about your route" like traffic levels or what kind of road it is to generate the warnings.Seeing if a route is crash-prone means drivers can be more alert, or that seems to be Waze's hope. A Google help page says the crash history alerts don't distinguish between major and minor incidents, so knowing what you're in for - and whether you should consider another route - might be hard. But alerts like this have to strike a balance between being informative and not becoming a distraction,... Continue reading...

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Though negotiators from both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) met this past weekend in hopes of bringing Hollywood's ongoing labor strike to an end, contract talks have reportedly stalled once again due to the desire of studios to own performers' digitally scanned likenesses in perpetuity.Previously, the AMPTP insisted that its most recent proposed contract was its best and final" offer. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, SAG-AFTRA refused and walked away from the negotiations over the AMPTP's insistence on pushing for new rules regarding the use of people's likenesses that would ultimately leave actors in the lurch. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the AMPTP's... Continue reading...

The Sony A9 III features the company's first global shutter in a full-frame mirrorless camera. | Image: Sony Sony has announced the latest in its line of popular professional mirrorless cameras: the A9 III. It's a $5,999 full-frame camera with a stacked 24.6-megapixel sensor that succeeds the A9 II released four years ago. But the most important thing about the A9 III is its new shutter.The A9 III is the first full-frame camera to use a global shutter. This allows it to expose every pixel at the same time so there is no distortion in both stills and video. Within most mirrorless cameras, such as the Canon R5, Panasonic GH5, and Nikon Z9, there is a rolling shutter. Rolling shutters capture an image by exposing row by row of pixels, which can lead to distortion. Below is a graphic from Lensrentals.com that shows this difference well. ... Continue reading...

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge As YouTube tightens its restrictions on ad blockers, privacy advocates in the European Union are betting that government regulations can put a stop to the crackdown.One privacy expert, Alexander Hanff, filed a complaint in October with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC). Hanff argues that YouTube's ad blocker detection system is a violation of privacy - a charge Google denies - and illegal under EU law. AdBlock detection scripts are spyware - there is no other way to describe them and as such it is not acceptable to deploy them without consent," Hanff tells The Verge. I consider any deployment of technology which can be used to spy on my devices is both unethical and illegal in most situations."The fight against ad blocker... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge A group of Google contract workers who helped train the company's Bard AI chatbot and write Google Help articles voted overwhelmingly to form a union on Monday. The workers, who are contracted to work for Google through Accenture, unionized to secure better working conditions and protections.The contractors will join the Alphabet Workers Union, the labor organization that represents employees at Google and its Alphabet parent company. They first started unionization efforts in June after they were directed to work on the then-unannounced Bard chatbot. As part of their efforts to help train the bot, they were asked to handle obscene, graphic and offensive prompts," according to a report from Bloomberg.When one of the contractors filed... Continue reading...

The former president joined me on Decoder to discuss AI regulation, the First Amendment, and of course, what apps he has on his homescreen. Continue reading...

Image: Redwood Redwood Materials has recycled e-bike batteries and Tesla batteries. Now, it's ready to level up a few sizes.The electric vehicle battery recycling and manufacturing venture founded by the former chief technologist of Tesla announced today that it will help decommission and recycle a 4MWh stationary storage substation in Kauai, Hawaii, as part of a massive solar array. The decommissioning recently wrapped and the batteries are now being transported to the company's facility in north Nevada for recycling.It will be one of Redwood's first battery energy storage systems and an important step in the company's broader effort to prove that lithium-ion batteries and energy storage products of all sizes can have a new life beyond their... Continue reading...

The Aftermath logo. | Image: Aftermath They've started Aftermath, a new website about video games and culture. Continue reading...

Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge Phone accessory maker Popsocket will now let people design their phone grips with AI via Stable Diffusion and award up to $100,000 in a holiday giveaway for the best designs.Popsocket's AI Customizer allows people to make their phone holders or cases exude as much personality as they want, and bring their wildest visions to life," says Popsocket. While the company previously offered a way to design cases and grips, that feature used a library of backgrounds or asked users to upload their own photos. Image: Popsocket Generate an image from a text prompt or with the help of an upload. The AI customizer uses a highly optimized version of Stable Diffusion XL," the company tells The Verge in an email. Users... Continue reading...

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Co-working office space provider WeWork has filed for bankruptcy covering its locations in the US and Canada, and in a filing, it said it had liabilities of between $10 and $50 billion.It's the latest turn for a company that went from being valued at $47 billion in January 2019 to unsuccessfully attempting an IPO later that year.Investors were unimpressed with a company that counted its founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, as a significant risk factor. Its fall was eventually captured in both a documentary for Hulu, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, and the podcast-turned-TV show for Apple TV, WeCrashed.As Elizabeth Lopatto described its IPO paperwork: