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Illustration: The Verge Google is running tests that block access to news for some Canadian users in response to a new bill that could force it and other large platforms like Meta’s Facebook to negotiate deals with news publishers to pay them for content, Reuters reports. The tests will reportedly impact less than four percent of Canadian users, run for around five weeks, and will “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees.”The tests come in response to Canada’s Online News Act, also known as “Bill C-18,” which is currently being considered by the Canadian Senate, according to The Globe and Mail.In a tweet, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Canadians won’t be intimidated by Google’s behavior. “It’s... Continue reading…

After a year-long struggle, the boutique maker of stealthy electric bikes finally gets it right. Continue reading…

Image: Eli Ade Michael B. Jordan’s directorial debut feels like an experimental remake of Rocky V that finally lets Adonis Creed step outside of his mentor’s shadow. Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube has confirmed that it’s experimenting with a higher-quality 1080p option for Premium subscribers after some Reddit users noticed a new “1080p Premium” option in the quality settings menu. The option is currently available to “a small group of YouTube Premium subscribers,” according to Paul Pennington, a spokesperson for the company.“1080p Premium is an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p which provides more information per pixel that results in a higher quality viewing experience,” said Pennington, adding that “there are no changes to the existing quality offerings for 1080p (HD) resolution on YouTube.” There have been concerns that YouTube is nerfing the standard 1080p mode to make the Premium version more appealing, but the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Binance.US’s proposed deal to purchase the assets from the collapsed cryptocurrency brokerage Voyager Digital is facing scrutiny from federal and state regulators, as reported earlier by CoinDesk. In a set of court filings submitted on Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and New York’s financial regulator expressed opposition to the $1 billion deal.Voyager Digital filed for bankruptcy last year after the now-defunct crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital defaulted on a $670 million loan provided by Voyager. Binance.US — the US version of the Binance trading platform — later announced its plans to purchase Voyager’s assets for $1 billion, stating at the time it could help free up some of the funds locked up in the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav touted the success of the company’s turbulent megamerger during the company’s earnings call on Thursday, with repeated assurances that things are “working” — even though the company axed several shows and lost another $2.1 billion over the past few months, according to the company’s Q4 2022 earnings report. The combined company earned $11 billion in revenue this past quarter.“It’s working in an increasingly challenging environment,” Zalslav affirms. “It’s working on direct-to-consumer — we are making meaningful progress on our goal to achieve real profitability in streaming... It’s working, and our new studio heads are hard at work putting their unmatched creative stamp on our future slate.”HBO,... Continue reading…

Image: Enhance Humanity, the newest game from Tetris Effect publisher Enhance, has you play as a glowing Shiba Inu to direct crowds of marching humans through Lemmings-like puzzles. Yes, it sounds strange, but you’ll be able to get your hands on it starting Thursday, so at least you can pass judgment on it for yourself.I’d recommend watching the trailer first, though. As the dog, it seems you’ll help direct the faceless humans across all sorts of environments, obstacles, and opposing humans to lead them to safety. The game’s campaign mode will include 90 levels, but you’ll also be able to make your own maps and puzzles for others to try.The game, which was first announced in 2019, is coming to PS4, PS5, the original PSVR (yes!), PSVR 2, and PC. A... Continue reading…

Image: Rocksteady Games During Sony’s first State of Play of 2023, we were offered an extended look at Rocksteady’s first game in a handful of years — Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.In Kill The Justice League, the titular doomed heroes are tasked with saving Metropolis from a Justice League corrupted by Brainiac. Despite the fact you won’t be playing as Batman, Kill The Justice League knows what players want, and that’s to swoop around a dark metropolis — one of the first scenes of gameplay is Harley Quinn grappling through the air. It looks like the villains you’ll get to play as (Harley Quinn, King Shark, Captain Boomerang, and Deadshot) will have their own unique flying mechanics, which looked pretty sick in the featurette.Kill The Justice League... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter Spaces, the company’s social audio rooms, no longer lets you use captions if you’re listening on iOS. Twitter still advertises that you can turn on captions through the three-dot menu in a Space, but on iOS, that option currently isn’t there.On other platforms, it seems like captions should work but don’t. When listening to a Space on the web, captions don’t show, and while the “CC” closed captions button is present, clicking it on or off doesn’t change anything. On Android, the option to turn on captions is there, but it didn’t work for one Verge staffer.The loss of captions in Spaces is a major blow to accessibility on the platform, as captions can be useful for those who are hard of hearing or who may want to follow a... Continue reading…

Eighty percent of the 40 most downloaded Android apps were found to have discrepancies between their actual privacy policies and the information listed on Google Play’s data safety section. | Photo: STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images An investigation into data safety labels on the Google Play Store has allegedly uncovered “serious loopholes” that allow apps like Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook to easily provide false or misleading information regarding how user data is shared. The study, conducted by the Mozilla Foundation, identified 40 of the most globally downloaded Android apps on the Google Play Store and discovered almost 80 percent had discrepancies between their privacy policies and the information listed on Google Play’s data safety section.Google launched its data privacy section for the Play Store last year, noting that developers had sole responsibility to provide “complete and accurate declarations” for the information collected by their apps by filling... Continue reading…

Automating your finances can make it more convenient to pay bills, save, and budget. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge Few things are more stressful than money. Between paying bills, buying necessities, investing for retirement, and saving up for a rainy day, personal finance can feel like a full-time job. But it doesn’t have to be. The best part about online banking is that everything can be automated — even if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.There are several benefits to automating your money. You’ll always pay your bills on time, which in turn eliminates late fees and protects your credit score. If you’re bad at saving money, you can automatically transfer a set amount per week or month to a savings or retirement account. Budgeting sound like a total nightmare? That can be automated, too.But while automating your finances can be convenient,... Continue reading…

Getty Images Federal prosecutors hit FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried with four new charges Thursday as part of their criminal case against the former crypto wunderkind.The new 12-count superseding indictment adds new bank fraud and money laundering counts against Bankman-Fried as well as modified campaign finance charges. In the new document, prosecutors describe how Bankman-Fried and two unnamed defendants conspired to defraud the Federal Elections Commission by using straw donors to “evade contribution limits on individual donations to candidates to whom” the former CEO had already donated.Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators are alleged to have organized the straw donor scheme in a Signal group chat called “Donation Processing.” The chat is said... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google has announced that the Magic Eraser feature, which tried to automatically remove unwanted parts of a picture and debuted with the Pixel 6, will no longer be exclusive to phones with its custom chips. Starting on Thursday, it’s going to be rolling out to Google One subscribers who use the Google Photos app on Android or iOS as well as “all Pixel users.”Magic Eraser, as well as the “Camouflage” function that lets you desaturate potentially distracting background objects rather than erasing them from a picture completely, will come with any level of Google One plan. If you have a Pixel, you won’t have to have a plan at all to get it.Google says it’s also adding editing features like an HDR effect for videos and exclusive collage... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Google’s Workspace apps are getting a makeover. Google plans to refresh the design of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides in the coming weeks to more closely align with its Material Design 3 design system, the company announced on Thursday.If you’re familiar with Gmail’s refreshed look, the new designs take a lot of cues from that. Google appears to be adding a few more darker hues to things like the toolbar and comments to make them stand out from the white page of a document. The “Share” button is also more rounded, a change from the rounded-corner rectangle Google currently uses for the button.You can get an idea of what the changes will look like in the image below of Google Docs. Image: Google You can get a look... Continue reading…

Image: Google When it comes to browsing entertainment, is there really a big difference between organizing content in different tabs or splitting it into totally separate pages? Google seems to think so. Today, the company is announcing some tweaks to the Google TV interface. “Movies” and “Shows” are being dropped from the main navigation bar at the top and will now be found beneath the row of your favorite streaming apps in the “For You” tab.In that spot, they’ll be joined by two new sections: Family and Español. Both are pretty self-explanatory. “With content ratings of PG or lower, it’s easy to find something the whole family can watch together,” Google says of the family page. (Kids will still be able to have their own profiles that are limited... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Podcasts are coming to YouTube Music. The streaming music service plans to add podcasts “in the near future,” YouTube’s head of podcasting, Kai Chuk, told Ariel Shapiro at Hot Pod Summit this morning. The addition will pit YouTube Music even more directly against Spotify, which has looked to podcasts — and big exclusives like Joe Rogan — as a way to retain users and grow its audience.“If someone wants to watch a podcast, we have a solution,” Chuk said. “If someone wants to listen to a podcast only, we should have a great experience for that as well.”“Our focus is on creators”YouTube Music will allow free ad-supported background listening to podcasts and offer “enhanced library tools,” Chuk said. There’ll also be a podcast badge to... Continue reading…

Samar Haddad / The Verge Many of us have more than one Google account, whether it’s for work, a side hustle, or simply a backup email address — and with modern browsers now keen to manage all of our logins for us, navigating sites such as Gmail and Google Docs with multiple accounts can get complicated.It needn’t be: Google actually has a straightforward switching mechanism built into its websites and web apps that works in any browser. In addition, the browsers themselves (and especially Chrome) have features for keeping different accounts separate so you always know which one you have open.Basic account switchingWhichever browser you use, you can manage multiple Google accounts inside it.

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot history dates back at least six years, with Sydney first appearing in 2021. Continue reading…

Janelle Monáe in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. | Image: John Wilson / Netflix Later today, Netflix will be releasing a director’s commentary for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery; subscribers will be able to check it out starting at 1PM ET. This isn’t the first time Netflix has released a commentary track, but the feature is something of a dying art, with DVD and Blu-ray releases largely supplanted by streaming, where special features are much less common.When the news was first announced, writer and director Rian Johnson, who signed on to direct a pair of Knives Out sequels for Netflix, wrote: “Sorry it took a minute but it’s a good one I think.” And given the sheer number of Easter eggs and cameos in the film — including an appearance from this very website — the commentary track will likely make it worth a... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is going to let thousands more creators include multi-language audio tracks with their videos. The company was already testing the feature with a small number of creators, and beginning Thursday, many more will be able to include multi-language dubs with their videos to make them accessible to broader audiences.If you want to try this feature for yourself, check out this video on MrBeast’s YouTube channel. If you click on the gear icon, you’ll see an option for “audio track,” and if you click that, you’ll see the different language options available. Videos will also default to a user’s preferred language.In its early tests, YouTube says that, as of January, “we’ve already seen over 3,500 multi-language videos uploaded in... Continue reading…

The developer used information it had gathered about a prevelant third-party cheating software to catch and punish players using it red-handed. | Image: Valve Over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts have been permanently banned in the last few weeks after they were caught red-handed using third-party software to cheat the game. In a blog post published on Tuesday, Valve revealed that it had recently patched a known issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota while simultaneously setting a honeypot trap to catch players using the exploit.According to Valve, the cheating software gave its users an unfair advantage by accessing information used internally by the Dota client that shouldn’t be visible during gameplay. After investigating how it worked, the developer then decided to identify and remove the “bad actors” from the active Dota playerbase.

Illustration by William Joel Plus more musical features come to Snapchat, and the Dynamic Island could come to an Android phone. Continue reading…

The Fira de Barcelona convention center during last year’s Mobile World Congress. | Image: David Zorrakino/Europa Press via Getty Images In less than a week, some of the world’s biggest mobile players will be crowded into the Fira de Barcelona convention center, ready to show off their latest generation of mobile devices. In previous years, that’s meant everything from flagship smartphone announcements from Samsung and LG (RIP), smartwatches, and even the launch of the original HTC Vive.These days, however, things feel a little different. Despite the “World” in Mobile World Congress, MWC Barcelona feels increasingly focused on Europe. The global smartphone market has never been a cohesive whole, but the US and China feel more than ever like they’re diverging from everywhere else. And that’s left MWC in a weird spot.I mean, just look at what we’re expecting from Honor,... Continue reading…

A reproduction of the cover page and the second page of Zarya of the Dawn, from the US Copyright Office’s letter. | Image: Zarya of the Dawn — Kris Kashtanova / Midjourney The US Copyright Office has reconsidered the copyright protection it granted last fall to Kristina Kashtanova for her comic book Zarya of the Dawn, reports Reuters. It featured pictures created by feeding text prompts to Midjourney, an artificial intelligence image generator.According to this letter (PDF) sent to her lawyer by Robert Kasunic, the associate Register of Copyrights, the US Copyright Office has decided that Kashtanova “is the author of the Work’s text as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements.”The images themselves, however, “are not the product of human authorship,” and the registration originally granted for them has been canceled. To justify the decision, the... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge If you typically access your Hotmail or Outlook account using the Gmail app, there’s a reason you probably haven’t seen any new emails today: Google says it’s investigating an issue it’s having syncing with Microsoft’s servers. According to Google’s status page, the company has been working to figure out what’s wrong since around noon ET, and has been in touch with Microsoft about the problem.At first glance it seems like this partial outage would be a pretty niche issue — Outlook has its own app, who’s using the Gmail one? But for many Android phones the Gmail app is the default mail client, and it encourages you to add email address from any service, not just Google’s. If you’ve gone that route, it is worth noting that Outlook itself... Continue reading…

The Verge Valve has shared a schedule of when the big sales on Steam will take place in 2023, meaning you now have some advance notice about when you should get ready to open your wallet to snap up some great deals.As established last year, there will be a major sale every season, so look forward to big spring, summer, autumn, and winter deals. There will be a handful of themed sales and events, like Puzzle Fest, Visual Novel Fest, and SHMUP Fest, which all sound very promising. And Valve is also sharing details about the next two Next Fests, where you can try a bunch of free demos of upcoming games. (If you want an idea of what a Next Fest is like, you can check out the February Next Fest, which is happening now through February 28th.)Here’s... Continue reading…

Apple’s Dynamic Island lacked third-party support at launch. That’s starting to change. | Image: Nilay Patel / The Verge Realme, a subbrand of Chinese phone maker Oppo, might be the first Android OEM to clone Apple’s Dynamic Island, a deleted tweet from a company executive and a leaked animation suggest. It comes at a time when Apple seems like it might prove that Dynamic Island is worth copying, as the mostly ornamental UI fixture is finally getting some real third-party support.This doesn’t come as a major surprise. As 9to5Google points out, Realme basically told everyone it wanted to clone Dynamic Island back in September. It appears that a feature called the “Mini Capsule” has been in the works since then. A photo in the removed tweet indeed shows a pill-shaped UI element at the top of the screen with Oppo’s SuperVOOC charging logo displayed. The... Continue reading…

Photo by Cooper Neill / Getty Images Netflix is getting into football. On Wednesday, the streaming giant announced a new sports docuseries, Quarterback, that will focus on three NFL quarterbacks: Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs (who just collected his second Super Bowl win and second Super Bowl MVP award); Kirk Cousins of the Minnesota Vikings; and Marcus Mariota of the Atlanta Falcons. The series is set to debut this summer.“For the first time ever, the NFL allowed quarterbacks to be mic’d up for every single game of a season,” Netflix wrote in a post about the series. “The upcoming show will feature behind-the-scenes access to some of the biggest moments of the season, as Mahomes set an NFL record for total offense on his way to winning the league and Super... Continue reading…

Unlike the Blade 16, the 2023 Blade 15 keeps the same aspect ratio we’ve seen on Blades past. | Image: Razer Razer has launched a new Blade 15 model refreshed with Intel’s 13th Gen processors and Nvidia’s RTX 4000 GPUs.The company announced a 16-inch Razer Blade a few weeks ago, and some assumed that it would replace the 2022 Razer Blade 15. The Blade 16 threw a number of new features into the Blade 15’s formula — most notably, a 16:10 Mini LED dual-mode display.But the Blade 15 is a much more minor upgrade from last year’s Blade 15. While the chips are new, the 2023 Blade 15 keeps the same 16:9 aspect ratio as its direct predecessor, just in case you’re one of those old-fashioned people (sorry, I said what I said) who prefers a shorter and wider screen. It’s also the same size and weight as last year’s Blade 15, which means it’s noticeably... Continue reading…

Image: NBA Top Shot NBA Top Shot developer Dapper Labs and its CEO, Roham Gharegozlou, will face a lawsuit accusing the company of selling unregistered securities in the form of its “Moments,” which are non-fungible tokens for sports fans.Despite Dappers’ lawyer’s claims that “Basketball cards are not securities. Pokémon cards are not securities. Baseball cards are not securities. Common sense says so. The law says so. And, courts say so,” Judge Victor Marrero decided to let the case go forward.As he wrote in his decision (Friel v. Dapper Labs, Inc. et al., 1:21-cv-05837-VM):

Tinder bracket fungus / hoof fungus / horse’s hoof (Fomes fomentarius) on a fallen tree trunk in Belgium. | Photo: Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Here’s one more reason to love a good mushroom: one day, you might be able to make headphones, memory foam for shoes, or even aircraft exoskeletons with it. Researchers just assessed the engineering possibilities with one particularly impressive mushroom and found that it might be able to replace plastic in a whole bunch of different use cases.Using mushrooms instead of plastic could cut down on the mountains of waste humans create. Plastics made out of fossil fuels are actually really difficult to recycle and usually wind up cluttering landfills, landscapes, and waterways. Materials made with mushrooms, on the other hand, would be biodegradable and could be reused at the end of a product’s life to make more of the same stuff.The... Continue reading…

Image: Artifact Instagram’s co-founders are throwing open the doors to their new personalized news app, Artifact. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s new app launched last month with a waitlist, but now anyone on iOS or Android can download Artifact to try it for themselves.Despite the pedigree of Artifact’s creators, it hasn’t revolutionized the way I consume news on my phone. There’s a home tab with a feed of articles Artifact thinks I will like, and while the feed generally has stuff that I’m interested in, the app’s algorithmic sorting means I’ll often be served days-old news that I don’t care about.A “Headlines” tab offers collections of articles sorted by topics, but I don’t tend to swipe to it much. The profile tab, however, might be more... Continue reading…

Image: Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz unveiled the 2024 E-Class’ interior, and while its cabin is not a radical departure in design from existing Benzes, the new E-Class is packed full of interesting and advanced features that will influence the rest of the lineup — like a selfie camera and built-in apps for TikTok and Zoom.One of the major upgrades in the 2024 E-Class is the Superscreen, which combines the large standard central touchscreen with a second display in front of the passenger. (Unlike the EQS’s Hyperscreen, the digital gauge cluster remains a standalone display.) It looks beautiful, with slim air vents that curve around the top of the screen and a row of touch-capacitive buttons sitting below the center display.The new E-Class is packed full of... Continue reading…

Image: Mercedes-Benz AG Mercedes-Benz will add lidar sensors to “a broad range” of its vehicles by the middle of the decade, the company announced at an investor event in California on Wednesday. The laser sensors will help power the German automaker’s next-generation driver-assist system, which allows for hands-free unsupervised driving on certain highways.The lidar will be supplied by Luminar, a Florida-based company in which Mercedes owns a small investment stake. The German automaker has no plans to increase its stake in Luminar, though the lidar deal is said to be worth several billion dollars. (Mercedes owns less than 1 percent of the company.)The German automaker has no plans to increase its stake in LuminarMercedes is the latest automaker to commit... Continue reading…