The Verge

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Image: Getty Images A judge rejected Elon Musk’s request to move his upcoming securities fraud trial out of San Francisco, Bloomberg reports. Musk had argued that the jury pool from the city would be biased against him.Musk is facing a civil trial next week stemming from a lawsuit filed by Tesla shareholders who accuse the billionaire of making false statements in his tweets from 2018 about taking the electric vehicle company private. The shareholders argue that Musk’s tweets, in which he claimed he had “funding secured” to take the company private, caused wild swings in Tesla’s share price, costing them billions of dollars.The deal to take Tesla private never materialized, and Musk ultimately lost his chairmanship of the company and was forced to pay a... Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge; Getty Images Retro Pod played right into TikTok’s love affair with the iPod. From demos of defunct Minis to outfits showcasing Shuffles as hair clips, an app turning your iPhone into an iPod was naturally going to be a hit. When Retro Pod started making the round in late December, TikTokers praised the app’s ability to replicate the iPod’s “tactile, bumpy, vibratey feels” that have been lost in the era of music streaming. Videos featuring the app racked up nearly 5 million views, but by the second week of January, viewers started commenting they couldn’t find the app at all. Retro Pod had disappeared from the App Store.It is not confirmed why Retro Pod was removed from the App Store — neither the developer of the app nor Apple returned The Verge’s... Continue reading…

The Pixel 7 Pro (left) and Pixel 7 (right) support Clear Calling as of December’s feature drop. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge You probably haven’t been on the phone with someone who’s using a serger sewing machine. I have, and I’m here to tell you it sounds like talking to someone who’s in the middle of a raging tornado as it tears through a bus depot. That is, until Google’s Clear Calling feature kicks in. When that happens, the tornado dissipates into a mild windstorm, making it possible to carry on with your conversation. It’s the sort of helpful background feature that Google’s Pixel phones can be so good at delivering. It’s just a shame that most of them won’t get it.When Google announced the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, it talked up a feature that would be coming after launch. Dubbed Clear Calling, it’s designed to reduce background noise on the line when you’re... Continue reading…

Norma, Pugsley, and Barney. | Image: Netflix Though Hamish Steele’s Dead End: Paranormal Park was one of the better animated series to hit Netflix last year with its two back-to-back seasons, the streamer’s decided not to bring it back for a third season.In a Twitter post, Steele explained today that while he’s known for some time that Netflix wasn’t planning to renew Dead End, he was “hoping that we could reverse it, change it, make something good out of it” and even began working with a writers room for a third season.“We have scripts and designs and outlines ready to go,” Steele said. “It was always the plan to give these characters the proper ending they deserve. But sadly, the powers that be don’t want any more. Honestly, we were lucky to make it through everything... Continue reading…

I can’t prove or disprove whether this wearable impacted my stress levels, but wellness gadgets need to be better about using science in marketing. Continue reading…

Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre. | Image: Netflix Horror master Junji Ito is bringing his particular blend of scares to Netflix very soon — and you can get a brief taste in a new trailer. The show, which has the somewhat unwieldy title of Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, adapts 20 different stories from the manga artist, from iconic pieces like Tomie to cult material such as Layers of Terror. Netflix says that all of the included stories have “the shared theme of madness,” which, of course, is pretty standard for Ito.The trailer is a brisk run through the included material, giving you a hint of what to expect (namely, lots of body horror and disturbing creatures) without giving too much away. If nothing else, the show appears to do a very good job of sticking to Ito’s... Continue reading…

Meta claims to have disabled over 60,000 fake Facebook and Instagram accounts used by Voyager Labs. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Meta has filed a legal complaint against a company for allegedly creating tens of thousands of fake Facebook accounts to scrape user data and provide surveillance services for clients.The firm, Voyager Labs, bills itself as “a world leader in advanced AI-based investigation solutions.” What this means in practice is analyzing social media posts en masse in order to make claims about individuals. In 2021, for example, The Guardian reported how Voyager Labs sold its services to the Los Angeles Police Department, with the company claiming to predict which individuals were likely to commit crimes in the future.Voyager Labs is accused of creating over 38,000 fake Facebook user accounts to scrape dataMeta announced the legal action in a... Continue reading…

Newly discovered Earth-size planet TOI 700 e orbits within the habitable zone of its star in this illustration. Its Earth-size sibling TOI 700 d can be seen in the distance. | Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Robert Hurt NASA’s planet-hunting telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), has discovered a second Earth-size planet within the habitable zone of a nearby star.Named TOI 700 e, the planet is one of four known planets orbiting a cool star approximately 100 light-years away. The system was already known to host one planet, called TOI 700 d, in the habitable zone, but recent research that will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters reveals it is joined by another planet inside its orbit. The other two planets in the system, TOI 700 b and TOI 700 c, orbit closer to the star and, as such, are likely to have higher temperatures, putting them outside of the habitable zone.The new planet “is nestled in there between planets... Continue reading…

The effect is very impressive in stills, but wait until you see it in motion. | Image: Nvidia Nvidia’s streaming software now has an option to make it appear like you’re making eye contact with the camera, even if you’re looking somewhere else in real life. Using AI, the “Eye Contact” feature added to Nvidia Broadcast 1.4 will replace your eyes with “simulated” ones that are aligned with your camera — an effect that worked really well when we tested it ourselves, except for all the times it didn’t.In an announcement post, the company writes the feature is meant for “content creators seeking to record themselves while reading their notes or a script” without having to look directly at a camera. Pitching it as something you’d use during a public performance, instead of something you’d use socially, does kind of sidestep the... Continue reading…

My tool. My friend. My electric air duster. | Photo by Christopher Person / The Verge I have always had a complicated relationship with canned compressed air. For a neat freak, it’s a vital tool. It keeps your keyboards clean, it blasts dust out of your gaming PC, and it gets gunk out of those hard to reach parts of devices. It’s an invaluable tool, an ally — heck, even a friend.But the waste!I’m not trying to be a cheapskate here, but a can of compressed air costs like five bucks, and I got air at home. Like, a whole lot of it, just floating around, not paying rent. Can’t I just shove that into a can? I think you see where this bit is going. Image: XPower Manufacture The XPower A-2S Cyber Duster. It also comes in a “B” variant that is battery-powered. Say hello, dear reader, to the XPower... Continue reading…

Joe Burrow in Madden NFL 23. | Image: EA Madden NFL 23’s newest title update briefly locked players out of the game on Thursday, EA confirmed on Twitter. It’s the latest in a string of issues to plague the popular football title over the past few weeks.At 11:43AM ET Thursday, EA’s Madden NFL Direct Twitter account shared that “we are aware of players being unable to access the game after downloading the latest Title Update.” Many players reported problems on Downdetector, while fans on the Madden Reddit posted threads expressing their frustrations with the issues. At 12:12PM ET, the Madden NFL Direct account said the issue had been resolved.

Idris Elba in Luther: The Fallen Sun. | Image: Netflix Idris Elba is jumping back into one of his most iconic roles for the upcoming Netflix film Luther: The Fallen Sun. Today, the company revealed that the movie will start streaming on March 10th but will also be available in select theaters starting February 24th.For the uninitiated, Luther was a psychological crime thriller that ran for five seasons between 2010 and 2019 and starred Elba as the titular detective. The new movie will pick up where the series left off, which means that Luther is in, let’s say, a bad spot. Here’s the premise:

Switching phones? Here’s how to make sure you keep getting all of your texts. | Image: Samar Haddad; Allison Johnson / The Verge If you recently switched from an Android phone to an iPhone and suddenly stopped receiving texts from your Android phone-owning friends, don’t panic. It’s a nerve-racking but easily solvable problem, and it’s one that we’re all too familiar with at The Verge since some of us tend to switch phones a lot.The likely culprit is the protocol called RCS, which is short for Rich Communication Services. There are a lot of reasons to like RCS in Google’s Messaging app. It provides read receipts and emoji reactions and enables higher-quality media sharing than the older SMS protocol it replaces. But as much as Google would like it to be, RCS isn’t a universal standard — Apple uses its own iMessage protocol, so if you’re switching between Android... Continue reading…

This illustration reflects that exoplanet LHS 475 b is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth based on new evidence from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. | Illustration: NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI) The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its first new exoplanet, an Earth-sized rocky planet called LHS 475 b. Located just 41 light-years away, the planet orbits very close to a small, dim star, completing a full orbit in just two days.The discovery, presented at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting on Wednesday, January 11th, is notable as most exoplanets discovered are typically large gas giants similar to Jupiter. It is harder for most telescopes to detect Earth-like planets because they are much smaller, at less than a tenth of the diameter.The planet orbits very close to a small, dim starPrevious research with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, another space-based telescope that was launched in 2018... Continue reading…

The Verge / Getty Images Almost until the moment of his arrest in the Bahamas a month ago, Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) post-FTX collapse media tour included days of back-to-back Twitter Spaces and Zoom calls. Now, top executives of companies in his crypto empire have pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges of fraud and money laundering and are cooperating with the prosecution, while Bankman-Fried — free on a $250 million bond and still giving interviews — pleaded not guilty to eight similar charges and has followed up by launching a newsletter while he awaits trial.Published this morning on Substack, the “FTX Pre-mortem Overview” message from the former CEO says, among other things, that “I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions away.”

Intel’s latest 13th Gen CPU breaks the 6GHz barrier. | Image: Intel Intel is launching its fastest desktop processor to date, breaking the 6GHz barrier at stock speeds for the first time. The new Core i9-13900KS is based on the 13th Gen Core i9-13900K that came close to the 6GHz barrier with its 5.8GHz turbo frequency last year. The new i9-13900KS will be available in stores today, priced at $699.The 13900KS is the first CPU to reach 6GHz without overclocking, using Intel’s Thermal Velocity Boost technology to reach that 6GHz barrier and improve PC gaming performance. It does it by using more electricity, though. The base power of the 13900K was 125 watts, and Intel has bumped this up to 150 watts on the 13900KS. At max turbo power, it will hit slightly above 250 watts — just like the 13900K.Other... Continue reading…

The four color options are listed as Phantom Black,” “Botanic Green,” “Mystic Lilac,” and “Cotton Flower.” WinFuture has plenty of additional images available to view in its report. | Image: WinFuture Samsung’s Galaxy S23 series is expected to be unveiled for the first time at the upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event on February 1st, but we already have a solid idea of what the device will look like. Leaked renders posted by WinFuture reveal both the design and color options available for the base model Galaxy S23 handset.According to WinFuture’s Roland Quandt, these are official marketing images from Samsung, and not fan-made renders based on previous models or design predictions. If you want a better look at the new handset, WinFuture has other images listed on its report.Available in four colors: black, white, green, and a pinkish-lilacIf legit (WinFuture has an excellent track record), then the Galaxy S23 will rid itself of the... Continue reading…