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by Sheena Vasani on (#6EY6V)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon executives were okay" with people being secretly signed up for its Amazon Prime membership program, the FTC said in an amended lawsuit on Wednesday (as reported by The Wall Street Journal).The original lawsuit, filed in June, claimed that Amazon had tricked millions into unwittingly subscribing to Prime through buttons that were presented prominently during checkout. The FTC added new details to back up its claims on Wednesday, including internal messages and the names of three senior Amazon leaders who allegedly played a key role" in the scheme.The executives include two of Amazon's most senior leaders at the time, Neil Lindsay - the senior vice president who oversaw Prime - and Russell Grandinetti, Amazon's senior vice... Continue reading...
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The Verge - All Posts
| Link | https://www.theverge.com/ |
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| Updated | 2024-11-25 18:45 |
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by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on (#6EY6W)
The third-gen Echo Show 8 has a new look and some excellent changes under the hood. | Photo by Alex Cranz / The Verge And Echo Show 8 makes three! Amazon now has three smart home hubs, with the Echo Show 8 (third-gen) joining the newly announced Echo Hub and existing fourth-gen Echo smart speaker in sporting both Thread and Zigbee connectivity. These wireless radios, along with Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi, and Sidewalk, mean the new Show 8 can be used to set up and control almost any smart home device (sorry, Z-Wave).This also rounds out Amazon's Echo options that fully support the new smart home standard Matter (over both Thread and Wi-Fi) quite nicely, although one at a lower price point than $100 would be good.The third-gen Echo Show 8 ($149.99) also has Amazon's latest AZ2 processor, which makes it 40 percent faster, Amazon's Dave Limp said at the fall... Continue reading...
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by Amrita Khalid on (#6EY42)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Climate change misinformation - including that which is funded by the fossil fuel industry - continues to thrive on social media. While Google, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok are all still lagging in their moderation of climate denial content, X (formerly Twitter) appears to have no clear policies on what to do with such content and is not transparent with what (if any) actions it is taking, according to an analysis published today by a coalition of environmental groups and researchers known as Climate Action Against Disinformation.Out of a possible 21 points, researchers scored platforms on how effectively they moderate factually incorrect information about the climate - using a combination of the company's community guidelines, terms of... Continue reading...
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by Wes Davis on (#6EY43)
The Panasonic SoundSlayer (GNW10). | Image: Panasonic Companies keep trying to make neck speakers a thing. People must be buying them, though, because Panasonic is releasing a new one: the GNW10 SoundSlayer, a wireless neck speaker with AI voice isolation (which it confusingly calls AI voice control") for phone calls and in-game voice chat. The SoundSlayer is $299 and will be available in late October of this year.This is essentially an updated version of the wired SoundSlayer neck speaker that Panasonic released two years ago. The biggest change is that the new SoundSlayer employs a small transmitter that plugs into your console or PC and sends audio with a proprietary 2.4GHz wireless protocol that Panasonic says is good for under 20ms of latency. That's less than you'd typically see... Continue reading...
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by Antonio G. Di Benedetto on (#6EY45)
Among many iterative updates, some of Amazon's new devices include the Echo Hub and Fire TV Soundbar. | Image: Amazon During Amazon's fall hardware event, the company announced a batch of new smart home devices across its Echo, Fire, Eero, and Blink lines. While some of these Amazon product announcements have led to a deluge of Alexa-infused smart home tech, this year's event was slightly more subdued, with a lot of time dedicated to Amazon's new large language model developments. But Amazon still found the time to unveil a bunch of new devices, including a third-gen Echo Show 8, a smart home controller, a pair of kid-friendly tablets, Fire TV Sticks, a Fire TV Soundbar, and more.Some of these devices are coming as soon as October (with one exception that's already in stock today). And while we'll have to review them to see just how well they perform,... Continue reading...
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by Umar Shakir on (#6EY46)
Yes, you can play your docked Nintendo Switch on your iPad like it's a portable monitor. | Image: Lux The developer behind the popular iPhone pro camera app Halide has a new app that lets you use your iPad as an HDMI display you can use to play console games on, monitor your camera on a production set, and more. The app is called the Orion Video System, which is available today on the App Store and features a simple modern design" interface - but with it comes fun retro-themed fonts and menus that remind you of the times you've attempted to set the clock on your VCR.Orion works because Apple's just opened the floodgates for USB video class (UVC) support on the iPad with iPadOS 17. You can now connect compatible webcams and video capture cards to USB-C iPad models (sorry, iPads with Lightning ports), including the cheap sub-$20 ones you... Continue reading...
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by Jay Peters on (#6EY07)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft-owned GitHub is rolling out its AI-powered coding chatbot to more people. The company launched its Copilot Chat tool in public beta for business users in July, and on Wednesday, GitHub announced that it's available in public beta for GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.Copilot Chat lets users talk to an AI assistant to get help as they're writing code. Now, teams of developers and individuals alike can use GitHub Copilot Chat to learn new languages or frameworks, troubleshoot bugs, or get answers to coding questions in simple, natural language outputs - all without leaving the IDE," GitHub wrote in a blog post. If you aren't already a subscriber and want to check the feature... Continue reading...
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by Allison Johnson on (#6EY08)
This is not good. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Folks, what you've heard so far is true. Apple's new FineWoven iPhone cases and accessories are bad. Like, really bad. I've been puzzling over them for the past week, looking at them from different angles. Picking them up, setting them down, petting them. Seven days later, I still can't make sense of them and have no other choice but to say it out loud: FineWoven is very bad.FineWoven is a new fabric option you'll find on iPhone 15 cases, AirTag holders, and MagSafe wallets. Apple calls it a luxurious and durable microtwill." It's silky, almost slippery to the touch, and costs $59 for any of the phone cases, $35 for an AirTag holder, and $99 for one of the new watch bands - not the most expensive phone cases you can buy, but pretty... Continue reading...
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by Andrew Webster on (#6EY09)
Battlefield 2042. | Image: EA Things haven't been going so well with the Battlefield franchise of late, so EA is bringing in some more help. The publisher says that starting today, Criterion is added to our world-class Battlefield studios dedicated to ushering in a new era for the franchise."Criterion was first acquired by EA in 2004 and is best known for its work on racing games, starting with Burnout before shifting to EA's Need for Speed franchise. But the publisher has also utilized Criterion on a number of non-racing projects, including Battlefield and the Star Wars Battlefront series.Today's news comes as part of a restructuring that began in 2021, not long after the rocky launch of Battlefield 2042, putting the franchise under the purview of Respawn boss... Continue reading...
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by Emilia David on (#6EY0A)
Image: OpenAI OpenAI announced the third version of its generative AI visual art platform DALL-E, which now lets users use ChatGPT to create prompts and includes more safety options.DALL-E converts text prompts to images. But even DALL-E 2 got things wrong, often ignoring specific wording. The latest version, OpenAI researchers said, understands context much better.A new feature of DALL-E 3 is integration with ChatGPT. By using ChatGPT, someone doesn't have to come up with their own detailed prompt to guide DALL-E 3; they can just ask ChatGPT to come up with a prompt, and the chatbot will write out a paragraph (DALL-E works better with longer sentences) for DALL-E 3 to follow. Other users can still use their own prompts if they have specific ideas... Continue reading...
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by Alex Cranz on (#6EY0B)
Yup, that's a soundbar. | Photo by Alex Cranz / The Verge Soundbars are tricky. They need to be big enough that they sound better than the dinky speakers on your TV, but they need to be cheap enough that you don't balk at upgrading your sound after just spending a lot of money on a TV. I didn't get to spend enough time with Amazon's $119.99 Fire TV Soundbar, but I can confirm it sounds bigger than it looks.What I didn't hear was a lot of detail. Voices rumble with appropriate amounts of bass - but in the very audio-unfriendly environment we listened to the soundbar in, dialogue was a little harder to track.Only people spending $120 on a soundbar don't necessarily want pristine detail. They want it to be loud and to have all the bass that TV speakers typically lack. With the garbled state of... Continue reading...
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by David Pierce on (#6EY0C)
They look mostly like glasses, right? That's the idea. | Photo by David Pierce / The Verge As soon as I put on Amazon's new Echo Frames, I did the only thing you should do in that situation: I hit the button on the glasses' left stem to turn the volume all the way up, and I said, Alexa, play Taylor Swift." A couple of seconds later, Lavender Haze" was blaring out of the Frames' internal speakers, but only I could hear it.Okay: blaring might be a little much. The $269.99 Echo Frames, Amazon's latest smart glasses with the Alexa voice assistant built in, won't exactly blow your eardrums off with their booming sound. I'd describe it more like coffee-shop music - that ambient playlist meant to be heard but not the only thing you hear - but for your ears only. Amazon's trying to create the same kind of open-ear personal audio... Continue reading...
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by Andrew J. Hawkins on (#6EY0D)
Photo by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Waymo announced a tour across Los Angeles" that allows curious residents the opportunity to ride in fully autonomous vehicles as the Alphabet-owned company begins to lay the groundwork for the launch of a commercial robotaxi service.Waymo says it will make six multi-week tour stops" in LA neighborhoods where people can hail a self-driving car without anyone in the front seat. Interested Angelenos can snag early access tickets at several pop-up events throughout the city or sign up for a waitlist. Once they receive a ticket, riders can use Waymo's fully driverless vehicles for free within the service area for one week during the allotted time.The tour is as follows: Santa Monica and Venice Beach October 11th-November 18th; Century... Continue reading...
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by Alex Cranz on (#6EXQT)
Amazon hardware exec Dave Limp on stage during the company's 2023 devices and services event. | Image: Amazon Amazon's big fall product event was all about AI, with upgrades for Alexa as well as new Fire TV, Echo, Ring, and Eero devices within its smart home platform. Continue reading...
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by Wes Davis on (#6EXVZ)
The Eero Max 7 three-pack. | Image: Amazon Eero has announced a powerful new top-of-the-line router called the Eero Max 7. It's Eero's first router to support the new Wi-Fi 7 standard, and it includes more networking options than the typical Eero unit.The Max 7 has three wireless bands - 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz - and Eero says the router is capable of up to 4.3 Gbps" wireless throughput and up to 9.4 Gbps" when wired. The company says it can cover 2,500 square feet per router or up to 7,500 square feet with a three-pack. Eero didn't specify how much channel bandwidth the router can support, but the Wi-Fi 7 spec offers 320MHz channels.The biggest perk of the Max 7, besides that it supports Wi-Fi 7, is that there are more than two ethernet ports - a first for the company. The... Continue reading...
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by Charles Pulliam-Moore on (#6EXW0)
Colin Woodell as Winston Scott. | Image: Katalin Vermes / Starz Entertainment Despite its strong action choreography and solid conceit, Peacock's new John Wick prequel series shoots itself right in the foot with one inexplicable casting choice. Continue reading...
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by Jay Peters on (#6EXW1)
Image: Amazon Amazon just announced the Ring Stick Up Cam Pro at its September 2023 event, and the big new feature is the addition of radar sensors that will help with detecting motion.Amazon says in a press release that the radar sensors will help the camera measure the distance of an object in its field of view." With that improved sensing, you'll be able to set more specific areas for the Stick Up Cam Pro to watch for motion, which could be useful if you want your security camera to keep an eye on a specific spot in your yard.The Stick Up Cam Pro also includes Ring's Audio Plus" feature, which Amazon says uses two array microphones for enhanced audio" and echo cancellation.The Ring Stick Up Cam Pro will be available to preorder on Wednesday.... Continue reading...
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by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on (#6EXW2)
Fourth- and fifth-gen Echo Dots will soon be able to automatically adjust your lights for you using their built-in ambient light sensor and ultrasound motion detection. | Image: Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Amazon Echo smart speakers are getting a new feature soon: automatic lighting. Smart lighting is one of the most popular use cases in the smart home, but it can be fiddly to set up and frustrating to control. With this new capability, Amazon is looking to make it as easy as just buying and screwing in a lightbulb.Later this year, with any compatible Echo or motion and ambient light sensor, Alexa will be able to automatically detect both brightness levels and activity in a room and intelligently decide whether to turn the lights on or off. The announcement came during an event held at Amazon's new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and via a blog post on Amazon.com from Melissa Cha, VP of smart home at Amazon.The feature requires no... Continue reading...
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by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy on (#6EXW4)
The Echo Hub is a new touchscreen tablet designed for controlling your smart home. | Image: Amazon Amazon announced the Echo Hub ($179.99) at its fall hardware event on Wednesday. Designed specifically as a smart home controller, the Echo Hub is a slimline version of an Echo Show 8 or a shrunken version of a Show 15. It should sit flush on your wall or could be propped up on a table or shelf with a desktop stand.An eight-inch touchscreen device, the Echo Hub shares the same DNA as an Echo Show smart display, but it is fundamentally a new device. Its slim look resembles a tablet, and while it runs the same OS as the new Show 5, Dave Limp, Amazon's SVP of devices and services, says the Echo Hub has a different processor, and there's no camera.The Echo Hub shares the same DNA as an Echo Show but is fundamentally a new deviceS... Continue reading...
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by Emma Roth on (#6EXW5)
Image: Amazon Amazon Alexa is getting Emergency Assist, a new feature announced during the company's 2023 hardware event that allows users to contact emergency services through their Echo device by saying, Alexa, call for help." The service costs $5.99 per month or $59 for an entire year.While Alexa can't contact 911 directly, it will connect users with an agent who can alert emergency services on their behalf. Additionally, users can pre-save essential information in the Alexa app, such as their home address, gate code, the medications they're taking, and any allergies they may have, which Emergency Assist will relay to first responders. The service will also inform responders which device the call was made from.
by Chris Welch on (#6EXW6)
Image: Amazon Today, Amazon is introducing its latest streaming players, the upgraded Fire TV Stick 4K ($49.99) and Fire TV Stick 4K Max ($59.99). During the company's fall hardware event, Amazon's Daniel Rausch said both devices feature upgraded processors for faster performance compared to their predecessors.The standard Fire TV Stick 4K is 30 percent more powerful than the previous model, offers Wi-Fi 6, and 4K streaming along with broad HDR support for Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HDR10 Plus. The Max builds on top of that with Wi-Fi 6E and twice the storage (now 16GB) than the prior version. For a difference of just $10, I'm not sure who wouldn't opt for the Max over the regular stick, but not everyone needs those frills for all of their TVs, I... Continue reading...
by Emilia David on (#6EXQM)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge More authors sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, joining other writers in pursuing legal action against generative AI companies for using their books to train AI models.The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs hope to get the filing classified as a class action.According to the complaint, OpenAI copied plaintiffs' works wholesale, without permission or consideration" and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models.These authors' livelihoods derive from the works they create. But the Defendant's LLMs endanger fiction writers' ability to make a living in that the LLMs... Continue reading...
by Jay Peters on (#6EXQN)
Image: CD Projekt Red I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 as part of its major new update.I dutifully played through Cyberpunk 2077 in the weeks after its rocky December 2020 launch, but I always felt that it was aggressively fine. I loved sneaking through levels as a netrunner that stealthily hacked into enemies. But things like the cringey edginess that permeated nearly every line of dialogue, a clothes / gear system that forced me to look like an absolute clown to get the best stats, and even small details like a frustratingly zoomed-in mini-map all brought down the experience.Nearly three years in, a lot of those quibbles are now fixed, and after spending more than a dozen hours with the new update 2.0 and Phantom... Continue reading...
by Wes Davis on (#6EXQP)
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro have several features that aren't on past iPhones, and now we can add new battery information and control features to the list. As pointed out in this post by @Tech_Reve, a new section in the iOS 17 About" screen shows how many charge cycles your battery has been through as well as its manufacturing date and when it was first used (via MacRumors).Those on older phones still have third-party options like CoconutBattery for the Mac to get more information about the battery, but it would be nice to just, you know, have it already there. iOS Shortcuts are also an option for accessing this information, though Verge editor Dan Seifert says the one he's been using for years no longer works after updating his phone to... Continue reading...
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by Chris Welch on (#6EXQQ)
Illustration: The Verge Donald Trump Jr.'s X account was compromised on Wednesday in one of the more high-profile security lapses during Elon Musk's ownership of the company. The account made several unusual posts, including one that falsely claimed former President Donald Trump had passed away" and that Trump Jr. would take his place in the ongoing 2024 presidential campaign. The bogus posts were eventually deleted later in the morning.Security at X, formerly Twitter, has always been a rocky issue - and it was a problem long before Musk took over. A massive hack in 2020 saw numerous popular accounts hijacked in an effort to push a Bitcoin scam; its perpetrators have since faced legal consequences. Earlier this year, a database posted online was claimed to... Continue reading...
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by Emma Roth on (#6EXQR)
Illustration: The Verge Apple came close to creating an investing feature for the iPhone that would've let users buy and sell stocks directly on the device, according to a report from CNBC. The company reportedly started working on the investing feature during the meme stock hype in 2020 but ultimately pivoted away from the idea last year as markets began to falter.Sources close to the situation tell CNBC that Apple was working on the feature with Goldman Sachs, the financial institution that Apple teamed up with to launch its credit card, buy now, pay later offering, and savings account. While Apple and Goldman Sachs aimed to release the feature in 2022, Apple shelved the project, as CNBC reports it feared user backlash if people lost money in the stock... Continue reading...
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by Emilia David on (#6EXQS)
Illustration: The Verge Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit alleging OpenAI violated privacy rights for training data dropped their case against the company. Court documents showed the case was dismissed without prejudice, and the plaintiffs can choose to refile.The lawsuit, first filed in June this year in the Northern District of California, alleged OpenAI's web scraper violated property rights and privacy rights of all individuals whose personal information was scraped and then incorporated through misappropriation into [OpenAI's] products." The lawsuit did not name the plaintiffs, who were identified with initials. The Clarkson Law Firm filed the class action suit on their behalf.OpenAI, like other generative AI companies, scrapes publicly available... Continue reading...
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by Justine Calma on (#6EXQV)
US President Joe Biden addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York City on September 19th, 2023. | Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP via Getty Images The Biden administration launched new climate funding and jobs programs today as world leaders - minus Joe Biden - gather for the Climate Ambition Summit in New York. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.6 billion in new funding for state, local, and tribal clean energy programs. Plus, details have finally emerged for a long-awaited American Climate Corps.But Biden is expected to skip the United Nations climate summit today, a conspicuous absence since UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stipulated that leaders present credible, serious and new climate action" in order to participate. Biden, who came to New York this week for the UN General Assembly, is reportedly sending climate envoy John Kerry to attend the... Continue reading...
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by Casey Newton on (#6EXM7)
Image: Google This is Platformer, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer. Sign up here.Today let's talk about an advance in Bard, Google's answer to ChatGPT, and how it addresses one of the most pressing problems with today's chatbots: their tendency to make things up.From the day that the chatbots arrived last year, their makers warned us not to trust them. The text generated by tools like ChatGPT does not draw on a database of established facts. Instead, chatbots are predictive - making probabilistic guesses about which words seem right based on the massive corpus of text that their underlying large language models were trained on.As a result, chatbots are often confidently wrong," to... Continue reading...
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#6EXM9)
1Password's passkey support is finally out of beta. | Image: 1Password Following months of teasing, 1Password has announced that support for passkeys - a new login technology that replaces passwords with authentication systems built into a user's own device - is now generally available across the password managers' mobile apps and web browser extensions. From today, 1Password users can create, manage, and sign in to supported websites with passkeys via the 1Password iOS and Android mobile apps and its browser extensions for all major web browsers on Mac, Windows, and Linux."This update doesn't include the ability to replace your 1Password account's master password with a passkey, however, which has been teased by the company since February. That's set to arrive later this fall," when the company says... Continue reading...
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by Victoria Song on (#6EXM8)
Iterative updates aren't flashy, but these smartwatches are mainly for folks who don't have Apple Watches yet. Continue reading...
by Sean Hollister on (#6EXMB)
The Bambu A1 Mini. Hands-on: Bambu's first mini might show the future of consumer 3D printing. Continue reading...
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by Jay Peters on (#6EXMA)
Illustration by The Verge After a tease in a blog post on Tuesday, Substack officially shared details about its redesigned app on Wednesday, which offers a new Home" tab and some adjustments to the app's current layout.The biggest change is the Home tab, which is intended to help people find stuff to read by providing entry to an exciting universe of stories, ideas, and people" on the platform. At the top, there's a queue of big cards highlighting posts from your subscriptions that you can swipe through. (The cards remind me of Apple's Up Next" suggestions in its Podcasts app.) Under those cards, you'll see a feed of Substack's tweet-like Notes feed, and you can sort them by Explore" (recommendations) and Following."Home, inbox, chatIn a blog post,... Continue reading...
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by Tom Warren on (#6EXMC)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is gearing up to share its vision for what's ahead" with AI integration into Windows, Microsoft 365 services, Surface, and more at a special event on Thursday. The event will take place just days after former Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay publicly announced his resignation.In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's head of consumer marketing, described Panay as a champion of our consumer business and our engineering teams." He also teased that Thursday's special event" will build on the existing OpenAI partnership and is only the beginning" of an AI-powered vision for Microsoft's key products.We have innovated on and shipped this incredible technology inside of Edge and Bing. Microsoft... Continue reading...
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by Sheena Vasani on (#6EXMD)
LG's last-gen Gram 17 offers a spacious screen without sacrificing portability. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Laptops are useful for many things, but your typical 13-inch screen just isn't spacious enough for hardcore multitaskers. If you want more screen real estate at a reasonable price, Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air is an obvious choice, as is LG's Gram 17 when you can find it at a steep discount. Thankfully, last year's version of the latter is currently on sale at Best Buy with 16GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and a 12th Gen Core i7-1260P processor for $999.99 ($800 off), one of its best prices to date.LG's 17-inch Gram 17 was once one of our favorite laptops for fans of big screens thanks to its quiet performance and spacious, high-resolution display. That extra screen real estate doesn't translate to extra weight, either, which is impressive... Continue reading...
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by Elizabeth Lopatto on (#6EXME)
Nick Offerman and Seth Rogen as dumb money in Dumb Money. | Image: Lacey Terrell / Sony Pictures Dumb Money thinks you're stupid - the title might as well be a reference to anyone paying to see the film.It's a bummer, too. I had such high hopes! The GameStop saga, which is the basis for the movie, is genuinely bizarre, and anyone with a flair for the absurd would have a fantastic time with it. To recap: a bunch of Redditors (and others) bought the stock of a flailing retailer that was heavily shorted, sending it soaring - and burning the shorts in the process.A financial Love Actually, minus the charmThink about the story of Keith Roaring Kitty / Deep Fucking Value" Gill for even a moment and you have one of the funniest possible superhero arcs of all time. By day, Gill is giving people decent, reasonable, sensible financial... Continue reading...
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#6EXJB)
We currently have no ideas what the Security Tag looks like, but it'll be compatible with Arlo's new video doorbell (pictured). | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Arlo is adding a new gadget to its smart home security lineup that should make it easier to disarm its Arlo Home Security system without digging through the company's companion app or using its keypad once you're in the house. The press release for Arlo's new Essential product series - which includes a new video doorbell, outdoor camera, indoor camera, and XL security camera - mentions an Arlo Security Tag" that can be held against the new doorbell itself to swiftly disarm the company's security system when the little fob launches in Q4 2023."When asked for comment about the product, Arlo spokesperson Hannah Block said that the Arlo Security Tag will be the first NFC Touchless Disarm device," and that further details would be... Continue reading...
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by Jess Weatherbed on (#6EXG5)
T-Mobile has yet to offer an explanation for the issue. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge There's some weirdness happening over at T-Mobile this morning. Multiple T-Mobile customers on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit have reported that they're able to see other users' account data - including their current credit balance, purchase history, credit card information, and home address - when signing into their own T-Mobile accounts.Some T-Mobile customers have mentioned seeing information from several other accounts, but the scale of the issue isn't yet clear. It's prevalent enough that the T-Mobile subreddit has asked its users to avoid posting any further information for security reasons."A few hours after initial reports, T-Mobile's support account on X says it's investigating the issue, but didn't provide any further... Continue reading...
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by Mia Sato on (#6EXCZ)
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Businesses on Meta platforms will soon be able to purchase a blue check to get exclusive features and support.The expansion was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event today. Earlier this year, the company announced Meta Verified for creators, a $12 per month subscription that gives creators a blue check and access to features like priority customer support and impersonation protection. Businesses can buy verification on Facebook or Instagram for $22 a month or $35 for both - an increase over creator pricing that ranges from $12 to $15. Testing on Facebook and Instagram will begin in the coming weeks, with WhatsApp to follow.Paying businesses will get similar perks as creators, including account security features and... Continue reading...
by Antonio G. Di Benedetto on (#6EXB6)
The Nikon ZF is the company's latest camera. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge After nine years of occasionally chasing the retro-camera-with-modern-features unicorn, Nikon may have finally gotten the formula right.The Japanese camera maker is announcing the Nikon ZF, a modern mirrorless camera packed with fairly high specs - like a 24.5-megapixel full-frame sensor, 299-point tracking autofocus with subject detection, in-body image stabilization, and dual card slots (of a sort) - in a body that looks just like one of the camera's analog forebears. Nikon may have done this dance before with its trifling ZFC and long-forgotten Df DSLR, but it's correcting its main mistakes with those cameras by giving the ZF a full-frame sensor and competitive price of $1,999.95 when it launches mid-October.While the Df may look a... Continue reading...
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by Amrita Khalid on (#6EX6M)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge This is Hot Pod, The Verge's newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.Happy Tuesday! Got a super-packed issue of Hot Pod today for everyone. First off, I'll take a look at Spotify's chief public affairs officer's lengthy new blog post about Apple's App Store policies. Also, Apple's iOS 17 will bring episode art to Apple Podcasts. What will that mean for podcasters?Before I hit the news, a couple of new developments. First off, Freakonomics Radio unveiled a new premium subscription today called Freakonomics Radio Plus. Members will pay $4.99 per month for a number of perks, including ad-free episodes of every podcast in the Freakonomics Radio Network. This includes Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid... Continue reading...
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by Adi Robertson on (#6EX6N)
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge The Justice Department has removed access to publicly posted trial documents in US v. Google amid a dispute over how files should be made available online, according to reporter Leah Nylen of Bloomberg. Nylen, reporting from the courtroom, said that Judge Amit Mehta will make a decision in the morning on future online access to exhibits.The Big Tech On Trial newsletter reported more details of the exchange, which apparently occurred during an exchange between the Justice Department and Google over whether an exhibit could be submitted as evidence. Google's attorneys apparently raised the fact that the Justice Department had been posting documents online, a fact Mehta said he hadn't been aware of. (The Verge has linked to the now-removed... Continue reading...
by Jay Peters on (#6EX6P)
Image: Roblox Roblox is now rolling out the ability for developers to create subscriptions that they can sell in their experiences, according to a forum post. The company announced in July that it was working on these tools, saying that they could help developers establish a recurring economic relationship with their users and potentially increase the predictability of their earning," and now developers can actually start to plan out their offerings.Roblox users won't be able to buy subscriptions just yet, however; that won't be possible until sometime in November, according to the post. When they can, users will pay for subscriptions in their local currency, but the money will make its way to developers as Robux, Roblox's on-platform currency.It's... Continue reading...
by Jay Peters on (#6EX4B)
Screenshot from Vincent Zhong's iPhone 15 Pro review. In a recent interview with IGN, an Apple executive claimed that the iPhone 15 Pro was going to be the best game console." I was skeptical; although Apple boasted about the capabilities of its new GPU in its A17 Pro chip and said high-fidelity games like Resident Evil Village, the Resident Evil 4 remake, and Death Stranding would all be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro, I didn't believe they would run very well in practice.But after actually seeing footage of Resident Evil Village in action on an iPhone 15 Pro, I'm coming around to the idea that Apple's vision isn't as far out as I thought.You can see the game in a video from YouTuber Vincent Zhong, starting at 13:48. First, Zhang plays Village on the 15 Pro on a mobile game controller... Continue reading...
by Jay Peters on (#6EX4C)
Is that a Charge 6 I see? | Image: Fitbit It's been a big day for Fitbit fans. On Tuesday morning, the Google-owned subsidiary started rolling out its new Fitbit app, and later in the day, it teased news on September 28th about a new Fitbit device.The news teaser is brief: it's a six-second video on X (formerly Twitter) showing a person swinging their arms and wearing a wrist tracker of some kind that looks a lot like something from the Charge family.A new Fitbit tracker crossed the FCC recently, so it's not a total surprise that Fitbit has something new in the works. 9to5Google reported last week that Fitbit is working on a Fitbit Charge 6 that will bring back the physical button, so the timing seems to check out for this new device being a new Charge. And the device in the... Continue reading...
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by David Pierce on (#6EX4D)
Go ahead, wear that new jersey right out of the store. | Image: Amazon Amazon's Just Walk Out technology is both extremely cool - just grab what you want and walk out the door, no checking out or paying necessary - and extremely complicated. Amazon's system uses computer vision, which requires a complex system of cameras and sensors just to make the whole thing work.But now, Amazon is rolling out a new, simpler way to Just Walk Out. It built a system that uses radio-frequency identification, known as RFID, to track your purchases as you leave the store. Amazon first tested the system at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle (so named by Amazon, which purchased the arena's naming rights in 2020) and is now also testing it at Lumen Field, the home of the Seattle Seahawks.The system is pretty straightforward:... Continue reading...
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by Tom Warren on (#6EX4E)
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge Xbox chief Phil Spencer has just emailed Microsoft employees about the massive Xbox leak that happened earlier today. In the internal memo, obtained by The Verge, Spencer says Microsoft's Xbox plans were unintentionally disclosed" as part of the FTC v. Microsoft case. Documents revealed a lot: a disc-less Series X redesign, a 2028 Xbox that could deliver cloud hybrid games," a new Xbox controller, unannounced Bethesda games, and even discussions about acquiring Nintendo.Spencer hints that Microsoft's plans may have changed, particularly as some documents were from last year, but others were from years prior. I know this is disappointing, even if many of the documents are well over a year old and our plans have evolved," says Spencer... Continue reading...
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by Sean Hollister on (#6EX4F)
Microsoft's new core gamepad, codenamed Sebile, may become the new default Xbox gamepad in May 2024. | Image via court documents, text removed by The Verge New Xbox for 2024! New hybrid Xbox for 2028! But can we just appreciate Microsoft's leaked Sebile controller for a sec?The $70 pad could arrive in 2024 chock-full of the best parts of Sony's DualSense, Valve's Steam Controller, Google Stadia, and - here's hoping - 8BitDo. Image: FTC v. Microsoft Sebile - The New Xbox Controller." Obviously, it's taking the Sony DualSense's precision haptic feedback."Right, here's hoping! It's the thing I'm most excited about because it seriously does add a new dimension to some of Sony's games, which just aren't the same when you take it away.Check out our DualSense X-ray below, versus this one of an Xbox pad, to see the difference in their haptic motors:
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by David Pierce on (#6EX0R)
Illustration: The Verge A few lucky WhatsApp beta testers got a surprising treat this week: the company appears to be testing a version of its iOS app that is also optimized for the iPad. As first spotted by WABetaInfo, version 23.19.1.71 of WhatsApp's TestFlight app includes the new iPad app as well.From what we can see in screenshots, the iPad app works exactly like you'd expect. You connect to it by scanning a QR code the same way you'd link your account to any other device. You'll see a list of your conversations on the left and your current chat on the right. It's pretty much the iOS app, but instead of seeing one pane at a time, you see both. It almost makes you wonder what took so long, especially when WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said all the way back... Continue reading...
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by Emma Roth on (#6EX0S)
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The UK's Online Safety Bill is ready to become law. The bill, which aims to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online," passed through the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday and imposes strict requirements on large social platforms to remove illegal content. It will be enforced by UK telecom regulatory agency Ofcom.Additionally, the Online Safety Bill mandates new age-checking measures to prevent underage children from seeing harmful content. It also pushes large social media platforms to become more transparent about the dangers they pose to children, while also giving parents and kids the ability to report issues online. Potential penalties are also harsh: up to 10 percent of a company's global annual revenue. The bill has... Continue reading...