The Verge

The FTC has taken action against Chegg for exposing sensitive student data | Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint on Monday against education technology provider Chegg, which has experienced four data breaches since 2017 (via The New York Times).In one 2018 incident, a former Chegg contractor gained access to one of its third-party cloud databases, exposing personal information such as names, email addresses, and passwords in addition to students’ religion, sexual orientation, disabilities, and parents’ income. Some of the stolen data was later found for sale online. Officials also said Chegg didn’t have a written security policy until January 2021 and failed to provide sufficient security training to its employees.Data stolen by an ex-Chegg contractor was later found for sale onlineNow the FTC says... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitch is partnering with Xbox this week to give away three months of PC Game Pass subscriptions when you purchase or gift two new Twitch subs. The free PC Game Pass offer will give new subscribers access to the service, which includes titles like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Persona 5, and Microsoft’s first-party games like Halo Infinite, Forza Horizon 5, and Sea of Thieves.The promotion will start at 1PM ET on November 3rd and run until 6PM ET on November 11th, and you’ll need to be a new PC Game Pass subscriber to be able to redeem the deal. Once two subs are gifted or purchased, a code will appear in your Twitch notifications inbox that can be redeemed on the Xbox site.Microsoft regularly offers three months of PC Game Pass for $1, so... Continue reading…

Tilda Swinton as Julie in The Eternal Daughter. | A24 Director Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter, starring Tilda Swinton, mesmerized audiences at this year’s Venice Film Festival with its quiet, arresting story about a woman and her elderly mother being haunted by the mysterious presence dwelling within a hotel. After watching the movie’s first trailer, it’s easy to see why it left such a lasting impression.The Eternal Daughter expands on the semi-autobiographical world of Hogg’s previous The Souvenir films with the story of Julie Hart (Tilda Swinton), an artist who decides to make a go of connecting with her elderly mother Rosalind (also Swinton) by traveling with her to a strange hotel. While Rosalind has fond childhood memories of the hotel from before it was renovated and turned into... Continue reading…

Ring recently added this image to its Android app. | Image: Zatz Not Funny! Ring may be getting closer to launching the car alarm it announced over two years ago. A new report from Zatz Not Funny! reveals an image of the device recently added to the Ring Android app as well as a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the Amazon-owned company submitted on Monday.The image of the alarm aligns with what we saw when Ring first revealed the thing: a black brick-like device with Ring’s branding and signature blue circle. As outlined in a support page on Ring’s website, the $59.99 alarm will connect to your car’s OBD-II diagnostic port and send notifications to your phone whenever it detects an attempted break-in or a bump from another car. It’s also supposed to come with a siren that you can trigger... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter’s getting rid of one of Blue’s best perks: ad-free articles. In a message sent out to publishers and forwarded to The Verge, Twitter says it “made the decision to discontinue Ad-free Articles, effective as of close of business today, October 31, 2022.” The news was first spotted by 9to5Mac.Twitter included ad-free articles when it rolled out its $4.99 Blue subscription last year. The feature lets subscribers read articles without ads from participating publishers while also giving a portion of Blue’s revenue to those sites. It’s based on the platform Twitter acquired from Scroll, a service that specialized in removing ads from news sites.But Twitter says eliminating ad-free news should allow it to focus its “resources on... Continue reading…

Image: Roblox Parsons School of Design students will soon be able to take a Roblox course as part of their studies.The class will “explore the intricate relationship between digital and physical fashion set in an immersive future” and teach Parsons students how to create 3D digital fashion using Roblox tools. Though it’s led by Parsons faculty, it’s created in collaboration with the gaming giant, with Roblox representatives in marketing, creative, and education collaborating with Parsons.Designing and dressing a digital avatar is a huge part of playing Roblox games. In the avatar shop, players can purchase anything from sneakers to designer gowns to outfit their in-game self, sometimes shelling out thousands of real-life dollars to buy digital... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon is expanding its music offering, opening up its full catalog of 100 million songs in Amazon Music to Prime subscribers at no extra charge. The company is also offering many of its in-house podcasts and a selection of others, ad-free, in the app. You’ll still need a separate subscription if you want Amazon Music to really rival Spotify and Apple Music, but Amazon’s service is becoming a seriously compelling (sort of) free option.The difference in tiers is all about access. All Prime members will be able to access the entire Amazon Music catalog, but not fully on demand; you can shuffle any artist, album, or playlist, Amazon says, but you can’t just select a song and hit play. For that — and to play songs in higher fidelity or with... Continue reading…

Custom interval workouts are a long overdue feature for Apple Watches. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge While you’ve always been able to customize Apple Watch workouts, the company finally added the ability to create custom interval workouts in watchOS 9. That’s clutch for any athlete itching to set a PR at their next race or just looking to switch up their training routine.Previously, the only workaround for interval training on the Apple Watch was the segments feature. At any time during an activity, you could double-tap the screen to make note of a significant section of your workout. While handy, it relied on users mentally keeping track of their own intervals. But in watchOS 9, you don’t have to worry about that. The new custom workouts will keep track of all that for you, automatically switching from one interval to the next. You’ll... Continue reading…

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in HBO’s The Last of Us. | Image: HBO HBO’s adaption of The Last of Us could premiere on Sunday, January 15th, according to text that’s appeared from HBO Max. Multiple users across Twitter are reporting seeing the date alongside a teaser trailer released for the show, and we’ve verified that the text is still appearing both in the HBO Max app and on its website. Image: HBO The January 15th date appears in the HBO Max app. In the UK, broadcaster Sky has allegedly distributed marketing materials suggesting the show will be broadcast in the country on January 16th. Differences in time zones mean that Sky typically broadcasts HBO’s Sunday shows early in the morning on Monday before repeating them on Monday evenings, hence why the listed date is a day... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google’s rolling out a handful of new shopping features that should make it easier to find good deals directly from search. When you search for a product, Google will now surface results with coupon codes that you can copy and paste during checkout.Any products with a coupon available will have a new “Special Offer” badge in the top-left corner of their thumbnail. Google previously only labeled products when they were on sale or when their price dropped, but this new badge makes it more obvious when coupons are available. The search giant’s launching this feature on desktop and mobile within the “coming weeks.” Image: Google You can copy and paste coupon codes directly from Search. In addition to adding... Continue reading…

Image: Disney Having a Disney Plus subscription isn’t just about entertainment anymore: customers will now get first dibs on Disney merchandise before it’s made available to the general public. Today, the company announced “a limited test” in the United States that will grant Disney Plus subscribers exclusive access to a curated mix of holiday merch from Star Wars, Black Panther, Frozen, and more.The window of exclusivity begins today and will last for seven days. After that, anyone will be able to purchase the merchandise — though a few Frozen and Lightyear items will remain available only to Disney Plus subscribers even after the test ends.You’ll be able to access the collection directly from the web, and Disney is also adding QR codes to a... Continue reading…

Primetime Channels are like any other channel in YouTube — just a little fancier. | Image: YouTube Streaming services are coming to YouTube. The company is rolling out a new feature called Primetime Channels that will bring shows and movies from more than 30 services directly into the YouTube interface. It’s a big bet for YouTube that it can be the cable bundle of the future and that its unparalleled audience will make streaming services buy into the idea.YouTube has signed up 35 partners for the launch, from big-name streaming services like Paramount Plus and Epix to niche offerings like The Great Courses and Magnolia Selects. (Another service, NBA League Pass, is coming soon.) Each one will operate essentially like any other YouTube channel, with a curated homepage and a bunch of videos. Those videos will show up in the Movies and... Continue reading…

Pantone Color Books now require a paid subscription for Adobe products, with even old PSD files now displaying black in place of used Pantone colors. | Image: Adobe Last week, Adobe removed support for free Pantone colors across its Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator Creative Cloud applications. PSD files that contained Pantone spot colors now display unwanted black in their place, forcing creatives who need access to the industry-standard color books to pay for a plugin subscription (via Kotaku).“As we had shared in June, Pantone decided to change its business model. Some of the Pantone Color Books that are pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were phased-out from future software updates in August 2022,” said Erin Di Leva, Public Relations Manager for Adobe in a statement to The Verge. “To access the complete set of Pantone Color Books, Pantone now requires customers to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The number of people subscribing to Sony’s PlayStation Plus fell from 47.3 million to 45.4 million this quarter, the company announced in its latest earnings release. It’s the subscription service’s third quarterly decline in a row, and comes despite Sony launching a revamped subscription lineup between May and June this year including new tiers that offer inclusive access to hundreds of games to download and stream.However, while subscriber numbers were down, revenue from “Network Services,” which includes earnings from PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Network advertising revenue, and the now-discontinued PlayStation Now, has increased from 100 billion yen to 117 billion yen (around $679 million to $794 million), year-over-year. These... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Two more executives are reportedly on their way out from Apple. According to Bloomberg, vice president of online retail Anna Matthiasson is leaving the company, and Chief Information Officer Mary Demby is retiring.The two women held important roles at Apple; Matthiasson was in charge of Apple’s online store, and Demby managed the tech that ran that store, as well as Apple’s services and manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that Karen Rasmussen will now be in charge of online retail, but says it’s unclear who will be replacing Demby. Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on the executives leaving.Demby and Matthiasson are just the latest in a string of higher-ups leaving the company in recent weeks. Evans... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge An Instagram outage that started Monday morning has been resolved, Instagram confirmed on its Twitter account. During the outage, Instagram locked users out and told many of them that “we suspended your account on October 31, 2022.” Reports of the issue seemed to have been concentrated among iPhone users, with some saying their app was recently crashing and unusable ahead of an update earlier this morning.“We’ve resolved this bug now — it was causing people in different parts of the world to have issues accessing their accounts and caused a temporary change for some in number of followers,” Instagram wrote. “Sorry!” The platform first confirmed the issue on Twitter at 10:14AM ET but didn’t say things were resolved until many hours... Continue reading…

Blizzard The scariest thing in Overwatch 2 right now isn’t the Junkenstein’s Revenge: Wrath of the Bride event but a bugged Mei. Players, take heed and take heart: the demon of quick play, the terror lurking the ladder, the creature of comp is being temporarily disabled to address a glitch.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Elon Musk wants Twitter to make money, and apparently, the first place he’s looking is its power users. Over the weekend, we learned that Musk plans to charge $20 per month for a Twitter verification badge, an update that might be rolled out next month. It’s a change that fits with Musk’s plans to make Twitter’s premium subscription service more valuable for its most active users. But verification serves a central trust-building role for Twitter — and Musk’s proposal could erode that trust just as the platform threatens to spiral out of control.Every social network produces a unique posting style, and Twitter’s design incentivizes something slightly paradoxical: it’s one part newswire, one part nonsense. On one hand, Twitter is like a... Continue reading…

Double-tapping the side of the Quest 2 triggers passthrough mode, letting you see what’s happening around you. | GIF by Owen Grove / The Verge Virtual reality is for checking out. The wider the field of vision and the less light peeking in, the better. But as VR becomes more mainstream, there needs to be a way to quickly check back in with reality. A safe word, so to speak, to pull you out of VR, whether you’re feeling overwhelmed by a game or if you want to feel more present.That’s exactly what the passthrough button offers on Meta’s Quest and Quest 2. It’s both a safety tool, as well as a practical one to let you see what’s going on outside of the headset without having to struggle to take it off. After firmly double-tapping either side of the headset where the straps attach to it, a view of your room — albeit a pixelated, monochromatic feed as seen through a handful of... Continue reading…

Jason Voorhees’ iconic hockey mask. | Image: Warner Bros. Pictures It’s been 13 years since Warner Bros.’ last Friday the 13th slasher feature hit theaters, made a bunch of money, and then never led to the sequel many fans expected would follow soon after. Though we may never know what might have come from a sequel to that 2009 film, Bryan Fuller has an idea or two about what Jason Voorhees has been up to in the distant past that’s set to be explored in a new “expanded prequel” series for Peacock.Peacock announced today that Fuller has signed on to write, showrun, and executive produce Crystal Lake, a new Friday the 13th series from A24.In a press release about the new show, Fuller reminisced about how he first became familiar with the Friday the 13th franchise as a kid while reading an issue of F... Continue reading…

Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. | Image: Marvel Studios The way Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s Talocan bears little resemblance to the Atlantis of Marvel’s comic books is one of the most intriguing things about the movie and its central villain: the sea-dwelling antiheroic King Namor, played by Tenoch Huerta. Namor’s short shorts, winged feet, and intense hatred of the surface world are all still important parts of his character that Wakanda Forever spotlights with a tale about how he’s moved to lead Talocan to war.But what Huerta was most moved by as he stepped up to the challenge of bringing Namor to the MCU is how Wakanda Forever’s story and its conceptualization of Talocan are celebrations of Latin American identity with a distinct focus on its shared Indigenous and African roots.U... Continue reading…

The Hummer EV e-bike was inevitable. | Image: Recon GMC joined forces with the world’s largest supplier of e-bikes for law enforcement to produce an over-the-top, dual-motor, fat tire electric bike to complement its equally over-the-top, dual-motor, fat tire Hummer EV truck. It’s the latest sign that automakers are trying to seize on the popularity of e-bikes to help promote the shift to electric vehicles.The Hummer EV all-wheel drive e-bike (as it’s referred to in its press release) features twin 750W hub motors with a peak output of 2,400W, a 48-volt / 17 amp-hour LG-made battery (with an option to upgrade to a 21Ah version) and will be available to purchase either online at gmcebike.com or at GMC dealerships for the price of $3,999. (A little expensive for an e-bike, but... Continue reading…

This tiny new feature has already improved my daily work. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Slack is now rolling out typing indicators in threads, and they’ve already dramatically improved my Slack experience.At The Verge, we use threads a lot. We’re constantly sharing interesting and potentially newsworthy stuff we find around the web, and we use threads to help corral conversations about links or topics into one zone. At any given time, there might be a lot of people talking in one thread, especially with everything going on right now. But because typing indicators used to appear in the main channel even if someone was typing in a thread, it could be hard to tell who might be workshopping a witty one-liner for the thread or drafting something new for the channel.These new in-thread typing indicators handily fix that. The... Continue reading…

Photo by Joao Laet/Getty Images He rose to power by exploiting online platforms — so what happens now that he’s lost? Continue reading…

The side panel is getting an upgrade. | Image: Google Google Chrome has a new sidebar that should make it faster and easier to check out a bunch of search results in a row without having to bounce back and forth between the search page and whatever websites it links to. Google also says that it’s bringing its price tracking feature to desktop after a few months of it being available on mobile versions of the browser.Google’s blog post explains how to access the new sidebar: after you click on a search result, you’ll be taken to the webpage, and a little Google logo will pop up in your address bar. Clicking that button opens the sidebar that shows you results for the search you did to get to the page (though you can search for something new if you like). From there, you can click on... Continue reading…

Outside of stellar game industry coverage, Nibel was best recognized for their Mob Psycho avatar, which displays the titular character Mob against a yellow backdrop. | Image: One / Dark Horse Comics Nibel (@Nibellion) has left the building. The popular Twitter user best known for their steady, reliable stream of gaming industry news and recognizable Mob Psycho avatar announced today that they would be leaving the platform, citing a lack of financial support and concerns over Elon Musk’s leadership.A final message was posted to the now-locked account announcing the departure, definitively saying, “After some introspection, I’ve made the decision to focus my time and energy elsewhere and move on from Twitter. This marks the end of my video games coverage and my active participation in this platform.” Nibel posted a more detailed message to their Patreon subscribers, confirming that the month-old Patreon account would also be... Continue reading…

Gwendoline Christie | Photo by Gareth Cattermole / Getty Images for BFI The second season of Severance has just started filming, and to mark the milestone, we have some new details on the cast. As Deadline reports, there are quite a few fresh faces joining the offices of Lumon Industries for season 2. That includes: Gwendoline Christie, Bob Balaban, Merritt Wever, Alia Shawkat, Robby Benson, Stefano Carannante, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and John Noble. That’s a lot of handshakes (available upon request).It’s still not clear when the next season of Severance is due to hit Apple TV Plus; it was first announced in April, just ahead of the season 1 finale. We also have essentially no details on what to expect in season 2, though today, Apple did release this photo of star Adam Scott’s face on Twitter:

Photo by Michael Zelenko / The Verge George Hotz is stepping down from Comma AI. The 32-year-old CEO, who rose to fame under his “geohot” hacker alias when just a teenager, made the announcement on his GitHub page, admitting that he doesn’t feel “capable” to continue running the driver assistance technology company he founded seven years ago.At age 17, Hotz made a name for himself in hacker circles as the first person to carrier unlock the iPhone. A few years later, he got in trouble with Sony for hacking the PlayStation 3 (the company sued and then later settled out of court). In 2015, he got in a fight with Elon Musk, after Musk allegedly tried to hire him, for claiming he could make a better version of Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving software Autopilot. Tesla called... Continue reading…

Image: Activision “We’re not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation” is the message from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer this week. Spencer has recently been discussing the future of Call of Duty if the Activision acquisition clears, and he’s made his clearest comments yet in a new podcast interview with YouTubers Justine and Jenna Ezarik.“As long as there’s a PlayStation out there to ship to, our intent is that we continue to ship Call of Duty on PlayStation,” says Spencer on the Same Brain podcast. “Similar to what we’ve done with Minecraft, since we’ve owned that, we’ve expanded the places people can play Minecraft. We haven’t reduced the places, and it’s been good for the Minecraft community in my opinion, and I want to do the same as we think about... Continue reading…

Image: Ralph Lauren Ralph Lauren is hopping on the battle bus. The brand is the latest fashion house to partner with Fortnite — and as part of the deal, the company’s iconic horse logo has been redesigned with a cartoon llama.There are two sides to the announcement. First, there’s the digital part, with two Lauren-designed in-game outfits that’ll be available in the Fortnite item shop starting on November 5th. You can check them out below: Image: Ralph Lauren There’s also a physical component with a capsule collection of IRL clothes that will be available starting on November 2nd. This will include hats, hoodies, and — of course — polo shirts. The company also says it’s working on a physical version of the boot the in-game characters... Continue reading…

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying satellites for the US Air Force ahead of a launch scheduled for June 24th, 2019, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. | Photo by Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images On November 1st, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch into space for the first time since 2019. The giant rocket is slated to send payloads into orbit for the US Space Force tomorrow in a mission called USSF-44.The mission is the first National Security Space Launch for the Falcon Heavy, the Space Force said in an emailed press statement. As with all national security launches, details are sparse. The Falcon Heavy is supposed to send a microsatellite called TETRA-1 into geosynchronous orbit, according to launch details posted on the Kennedy Space Center website. Other than that, not much is known about the satellites that are going up.As with all national security launches, details are sparseFalcon Heavy is scheduled to lift... Continue reading…

TuSimple may have defrauded investors by failing to disclose its ties to a Chinese firm. | Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images Autonomous trucking company TuSimple is under investigation for its ties to a Chinese company, The Wall Street Journal reports. The FBI and SEC are said to be looking into whether the San Diego-based company defrauded investors by financing and transferring technology to Hydron, a company led by one of TuSimple’s founders.It was the latest sign of the hard road ahead for many AV companies, as the industry shrinks, capital dries up, timelines are pushed out, and regulators spot cracks in the system. TuSimple, a leading supplier of autonomous truck technology, is already under scrutiny from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a crash involving one of its trucks earlier this year.It was the latest sign of the hard road... Continue reading…

Billions of voice messages are sent every day. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Over the past few months of peak TV, the voice message has emerged as one of my favorite ways to talk about what I’m watching. I’ll finish this week’s episode of Andor, mute the show’s credits, and immediately start recording a voice message of my thoughts to send to a friend.The main reason we use voice messages (or voice notes, depending on where you are in the world) is their asynchronicity — we don’t have to both be free at the same time to communicate. Sometimes, he’s managed to watch the episode hours or even days before me and has already sent a message for me to listen to, while other times, I’ll be the first one to share my thoughts. But every week, the format is the same. The recording starts with a spoiler warning, and then... Continue reading…