The Verge

Grand Theft Auto V now has ray-traced reflections on PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles. A new patch, spotted by Eurogamer, brings ray-traced reflections to the game’s fidelity mode (30fps), adding a lot more realistic detail to vehicles, characters, windows, and basically any glossy surfaces. The results are truly impressive.Now if you walk up to a window your character’s reflection will appear, or if you venture into areas where there is water or puddles you’ll see reflections of the objects nearby. Much like the ray tracing we’ve seen in Cyberpunk 2077, it makes the game feel more immersive.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison after being convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia, Reuters and NBC News report. Ahmad Abouammo was employed by Twitter between 2013 and 2015, during which time he used his position as a media partnerships manager for the Middle East and North Africa to access personal information of users critical of the Saudi government and pass it to Saudi officials.Reuters notes that Abouammo received a $42,000 watch as a gift from a Saudi official, as well as two $100,000 wire transfers. In exchange he looked up information on two Twitter users, including phone numbers and birth dates. After leaving the company in 2015 Abouammo continued to attempt to... Continue reading…

I think Lady Dimitrescu will be very scary in VR. | Image: Capcom Resident Evil Village’s VR mode will be available on the PlayStation VR 2 the same date Sony’s new VR hardware launches in February, Capcom announced on Wednesday. And even better, it’s being added as a free update for owners of the game.You’ll be able to play the game’s entire campaign in VR, according to a PlayStation blog post from Capcom’s Kanda Tsuyoshi. You’ll be able to use the PSVR2’s new Sense controllers to “feel the vibration, recoil, and resistance as you interact with objects in the world and fire weapons,” Tsuyoshi says. Image: Capcom Dual-wielding will (hopefully) make the game a little less frightening. In combat, the Sense controllers “enable intuitive movements like putting your arms up to... Continue reading…

Twitter doesn’t seem to like the jet-tracker’s creator. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Hours after suspending @ElonJet, an account that tracked the trips taken by Elon Musk’s private plane, Twitter banned the account’s creator, Jack Sweeney, and dozens of other accounts he operates. Twitter then un-suspended @ElonJet, which was briefly tweeting to try and get its account back before Twitter banned it again.If you try and visit @ElonJet or Sweeney’s account, you’ll see a message that the account has been suspended. Twitter has also been blocking links to versions of the Elon Jet tracker on other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook. Attempting to tweet certain links to Sweeney’s Elon Musk jet tracker on other platforms will display a message that the link is “potentially harmful,” as spotted by Tony Webster.

Code blocks in Docs. | Illustration: The Verge Google Docs is getting a new feature that will make it easier to show code in an easy-to-understand way. The company announced that it’s adding code blocks to its “smart canvas” system, which will automatically add the proper spacing and color-coding for a variety of programming languages, such as Python, C, and Javascript.Before this, getting code to look nice in Google Docs required workarounds or add-ons, which weren’t necessarily the most convenient. While that wasn’t the end of the world, making sure code displays properly is important for documentation, and having different parts of the code display in different colors makes it much easier to read if there’s more than a single line or two. GIF: Google D... Continue reading…

A dust devil captured by instruments on the Perseverance rover. From the study authors: “These are images taken of the direct dust devil encounter by the rover’s Navigation Camera (Navcam). The images have been processed to show the quantity of dust. The colour scale ranges from lowest dust content (blue) to highest dust content (yellow).” | Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/ISAE-SUPAERO On September 27th, 2021, a dust devil whirled past the Perseverance rover on Mars. The rover not only caught the dust devil on its cameras and with its weather sensors but also picked up the faint, eerie sounds of the dust devil on its microphone, the first instrument of its kind to record sounds on Mars.“We were convinced that the microphone was going to give us a whole load of new observations of atmospheric features on Mars that we hadn’t been able to see before,” Naomi Murdoch of the University of Toulouse, lead author of a Nature Communications paper about the research, said to The Verge. “And we haven’t been disappointed!”Rovers have been exploring Mars for decades with cameras, spectrographs, and weather sensors, giving us a... Continue reading…

The goo gun was the best. | Image: Epic Games Epic just closed some doors, but it may be opening a very attractive window indeed. Today, it appears to have inadvertently announced a new completely free version of the excellent Unreal Tournament 3 that you’ll be able to crossplay with friends across Steam, the Epic Games Store, and even GOG (via Wario64).It’s called Unreal Tournament 3 X, and according to its Steam page, there’s no catch — “No microtransactions and no strings attached. This is the fully-featured, award-winning first-person shooter you fell in love with... completely free.” Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge The Unreal Tournament 3 X page on Steam. And, assuming the listing is accurate, the game will still include all its primary... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Verizon’s launching the beta of its Plus Play service and is offering a year-long subscription to Netflix’s $19.99 per month premium plan to those who sign up. That adds up to savings of about $240, but as is the case with many Verizon products, there’s a catch: you’ll have to sign up for an annual subscription to one of the platforms offered through Plus Play first.Introduced by Verizon earlier this year, Plus Play provides a consolidated hub where you can access and manage your streaming subscriptions in one place, including Netflix, Discovery Plus, HBO Max, Disney Plus, NBA League Pass Premium, AMC Plus, and the recently added NFL Plus. It also offers access to other non-streaming services, like Peloton, the Calm relaxation app, and... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Twitter will be shutting down its newsletter product, known as Revue. Reports have been saying that the service would be axed for over a month, but now we finally have confirmation and a date: January 12th, 2023.People won’t be able to access their accounts after that date, and all the service’s data will be deleted, according to a help article on the Revue site. Before then, authors who used the service will be able to download lists of their subscribers, as well as an archive that includes their analytics and writing. Revue also alerted its users to this information via email and has said that it’ll cancel paid newsletter subscriptions starting December 20th, so people won’t be charged for newsletters they won’t get.

Population: One’s new Sandbox mode will be available on Wednesday. | Image: Meta Population: One, Meta’s VR battle royale title, is opening up its new Sandbox mode in early access to all players on Wednesday, allowing them to make their own levels with custom rules. With the new mode, developer BigBox VR follows in the footsteps of big multiplayer games like Epic Games’ Fortnite and Microsoft’s Minecraft in giving players tools to create their own 3D environments, but with Population: One, you’ll be able to do it in VR.I got to try Sandbox mode myself last week, and I was impressed with the tools at my fingertips. While building, you’ll be able to pick from a big catalog of objects and structures to place around your level. And there are a lot of ways you can manipulate those pieces, like scaling them up and down or... Continue reading…

The Beatles: Rock Band is just one of many games affected. | Image: Harmonix Epic Games is beginning to shut down online services for a large selection of its older games, including Rock Band 1 through 3, The Beatles: Rock Band, and Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004. The company is making the changes as “we move to solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features,” it said in a blog post on Wednesday.The shutdowns will begin on Wednesday. For the below games, online services will be fully disabled by January 24th, though you can still play single-player or offline multiplayer. Epic is also beginning to remove the games from digital storefronts (where you could still buy them) and disabling in-game DLC purchases.

The Verge WhatsApp is working on a picture-in-picture mode for iOS that will let you open up other apps while on a video call. In a post on the WhatsApp blog, the company says the feature’s currently in beta testing and that it will become widely available starting next year.The feature, which WABetaInfo first spotted earlier this month, should minimize your call while allowing you to access other apps. While some Android devices already let you use picture-in-picture mode with certain apps, including WhatsApp, the messaging service doesn’t support the iPhone’s picture-in-picture feature released in iOS 14. Either way, it sounds like natively integrating the feature should come in handy when collaborating on a project during a video call (or... Continue reading…

Adam Driver as 65’s protagonist Mills. | Sony The idea of the modern-day world becoming overrun by genetically engineered dinosaurs is only but so alarming because, at the end of the day, they’re just animals who probably aren’t well-suited to survive on the planet as it currently exists. But the situation in Sony’s upcoming sci-fi survival thriller 65 from co-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods is far, far more unsettling as it flings humans from the distant future into the prehistoric past and leaves them with nothing but their wits (and a few guns) to battle against T. rexes.65 tells the story of pilot Mills (Adam Driver) and his passenger Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) as the pair fight to survive on what at first appears to be an alien planet after their spaceship collides with an... Continue reading…

The star of Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure. | Image: Netflix Of all the many Sanrio characters, none speak to me quite like Gudetama: a genderless, aimless egg that wants nothing besides some soy sauce and to be left alone. Same. The character makes for adorable stickers and T-shirts, and now it’s being stretched out into its own series on Netflix. It seems entirely unnecessary, and it mostly is — we don’t really need to know any more about Gudetama other than its distinct lack of motivation. Even still, the show — dubbed Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure — manages to be just charming enough to justify its brief run. Whereas many TV shows can be exhausting, Gudetama is instead viewing for when you’re exhausted.The premise is, naturally, pretty goofy: Gudetama and a baby chick both somehow hatch... Continue reading…

Image: Warner Bros. Director Patty Jenkins pushed back on rumors that she walked off the Wonder Woman 3 project, saying on Twitter that there was “nothing” she could do to “move anything forward at this time.” Jenkins instead blames the film’s cancellation on the massive restructuring that’s underway at Warner Bros. following its merger with Discovery.“I never walked away. I was open to considering anything asked of me,” Jenkins explains. “DC is obviously buried in changes they are having to make, so I understand these decisions are difficult right now.” Jenkins’ response comes after last week’s report from The Wrap, which indicates that she exited Wonder Woman 3 after rejecting the studio notes on her treatment.

The new Air’s display is noticeable taller and larger than the old one, and it includes a notch. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge The 2022 MacBook Air laptop with the M2 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage is now $999 at Amazon (in the starlight color, which will arrive after Christmas) and B&H Photo. This is the first time that its starting price has sunk below the $1,000 mark, which is $50 less than it usually costs on a deal. Compared to the 2020 version that impressed us with its smooth performance and long battery life, this newer laptop has those qualities and an assortment of other selling points. Its design is thinner and lighter and its 13.6-inch screen is bigger and sharper, housing a much-improved webcam in its center notch. Like the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, it uses the convenient MagSafe magnetic charging port.This laptop is great in... Continue reading…

Owners of VW’s electric ID cars all over the world have reported problems with infotainment screens. The German automaker’s ID family of electric cars are plagued with buggy software, causing customer headaches and leading to major setbacks for the company’s next-gen Trinity project. How can VW patch the problem? Continue reading…

Google has launched chatbots like Assistant, but has kept AI improvements to its search engine in the background. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The launch of ChatGPT has prompted some to speculate that AI chatbots could soon take over from traditional search engines. But executives at Google say the technology is still too immature to put in front of users, with problems including chatbots’ bias, toxicity, and their propensity for simply making information up.According to a report from CNBC, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean addressed the rise of ChatGPT in a recent all-hands meeting. One employee asked if the launch of the bot — built by OpenAI, a company with deep ties to Google rival Microsoft — represented a “missed opportunity” for the search giant. Pichai and Dean reportedly responded by saying that Google’s AI language models are just as... Continue reading…

Image: Microsoft Microsoft is planning to add Teams chat integration into Outlook. The software giant has started testing this new feature recently, and Microsoft says it will be available for all users in March 2023.“This feature provides an easy Teams chat experience from Outlook in the context of a meeting for participants to send a quick message or review the chat,” reads an item on Microsoft’s roadmap for its productivity and cloud services.The chat integration appears to be limited to Outlook calendar items, and will be useful for meeting organizers and participants to discuss a meeting in real time rather than sending emails back and forth.Teams messages will also appear in Outlook on the web search resultsMicrosoft is also planning to... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of FTX, was denied bail on Tuesday after a Bahamian judge deemed him a flight risk, according to Reuters. An extradition hearing is scheduled for February 8th.Bankman-Fried, nicknamed “SBF,” was arrested in the Bahamas Monday evening after US prosecutors informed the Bahamas of sweeping criminal charges expected to be filed against the disgraced crypto darling. In an unsealed indictment Tuesday, prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York charged Bankman-Fried with eight counts of fraud, including lying to investors and violating US campaign finance law.Earlier on Tuesday, Bankman-Fried appeared before a Bahamas court in his first public appearance since FTX’s November... Continue reading…

The now-playing screen shows a red DJ button that enables the live streaming-like function. | Image: Tidal Tidal, the high-bitrate quality music streaming service, is testing a new feature that lets its HiFi Plus subscribers play DJ. Participants of the service’s Early Access Program can switch from playing music just for themselves to a DJ session, which then provides a link that can be sent to friends who can listen in.Tidal DJ works like running your own live radio broadcast or a headphones-only silent party. It’s similar to remote sharing features from other streaming services, like Spotify’s remote group session or Apple’s SharePlay — except you don’t have to know who the listeners are. In that way, it’s more like Turntable.fm or the old Spotify add-on (when Spotify wanted to be the “OS of music”) SoundDrop.The Tidal feature can let... Continue reading…

The company also said its improved its spam detection. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube says it will begin to warn users when it’s spotted and removed their comments for violating the company’s guidelines, according a post signed by “Rob” at TeamYouTube. Big creators have been increasingly drawing awareness to comment spam on the platform, and this change and other updates shared Tuesday could help reduce the volume of spam.If the user keeps posting abusive comments, YouTube may block them from posting further for up to 24 hours. “Our testing has shown that these warnings / timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again,” Rob writes in the post. The notification is only available for English comments for now, “but we hope to bring it to more languages in the coming months,” Rob says. The... Continue reading…

Image: Viz Media Netflix is making yet another live-action anime adaptation, and this time, it’s taking on My Hero Academia. In an announcement on its website, the streamer says filmmaker Shinsuke Sato (I Am a Hero, Kingdom) will serve as director, while Obi-Wan Kenobi producer Joby Harold is penning the script.My Hero Academia takes place in a universe where the majority of humans are born with superpowers — called quirks — and centers around the once-quirkless Izuku Midoriya (or Deku). When Midoriya’s granted super strength from the hero he idolizes the most, All Might, he’s accepted into the prestigious UA High School for heroes-in-training. There, meets other quirk-wielding students while working toward unlocking his true strength and coming... Continue reading…

NPR will not host its usual throngs of summer interns this year due to financial pressures. I hope you all had a great weekend. We have a lot to dive into today, so let’s get to it: NPR cuts its summer internship program, Proof leads to justice, and SiriusXM keeps a longtime podcast in the fold with a new deal.Facing $10 million in budget cuts, NPR axes summer internship programNPR, which instituted a near-total hiring freeze last month, is taking another drastic step to save money by canceling its prestigious summer internship program.The news was first tweeted out Tuesday morning by All Things Considered technical director Stu Rushfield. “This makes me truly sad,” he said. “@NPRinterns are part of NPR’s lifeblood & a pipeline of great talent.” Former interns chimed in that many owe their careers in radio to the training... Continue reading…

T-Mobile is doing spectrum stuff again. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has enjoyed an undeniable head start in 5G in the US, thanks to its lucrative Sprint deal, and it’s turning some old spectrum around to pad out its lead. The company has deployed its 1,900MHz spectrum nationwide on its mid-band Ultra Capacity 5G network. The 1,900MHz band has a new lease on life after previously serving the now-defunct Sprint LTE and T-Mobile 3G networks.T-Mobile used its 1,900MHz holdings in a past life to host 3G HSPA+ service while it built out an LTE network using 1,700MHz spectrum. This was also instrumental in making sure unlocked 3G iPhones could use T-Mobile’s network — the 1,700MHz spectrum it relied on for 3G wasn’t compatible with the iPhone. Meanwhile, Sprint used its 1,900MHz spectrum to build out... Continue reading…

Image: Apple It’s not every day that Apple releases a brand new app, but you’ll likely notice a new icon in your library after updating to iOS and iPadOS 16.2 or macOS 13.1. On Tuesday, Apple launched the Freeform app, which its press release describes as “an infinite canvas” for “creative brainstorming and collaboration.” In short, it’s a virtual whiteboard you can use with friends — so we tried it out to see how well it handled that task.Apple announced Freeform during its WWDC keynote earlier this year, showing off the ability to add photos, files, drawings, links, notes, and more to a virtual canvas, either by yourself or with others. Of course, Freeform also integrates with other Apple apps — the app has buttons that let you launch a discussion... Continue reading…

Yuga Labs may have landed the Bored Ape Yacht Club in hot water. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge On Thursday, December 8th, Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP filed a class action complaint on behalf of plaintiffs Adam Titcher and Adonis Real with the United States Central District Court of California, Western Division. The complaint targets the company Yuga Labs Inc., most famously known for its Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. However, other defendants include a long list of celebrities deemed responsible for unrealistically hyping up the value of Yuga Labs’ intangible goods.A report by Deadline also pointed out that some of the defendants cited in the class action include Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Madonna, Jimmy Fallon, and Kevin Hart, among others.Some of the specific charges include violations of unfair competition... Continue reading…

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s been arrested. | Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images And an important fusion energy announcement is expected later today. Continue reading…

Race Routes is now officially live in watchOS 9.2. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge watchOS 9.2 started rolling out today along with the iOS 16.2 update, and with it comes two new running features: Automatic Track Detection and Race Routes. The former uses Apple Maps and GPS to detect the exact lane of a track you’re running on, while the latter lets you race against your past self on your favorite routes. Additionally, the Apple Watch Ultra can now get up to 17 hours in Low Power Mode during multisport activities.Automatic Track Detection can tell whenever you arrive at any standard 400-meter outdoor track. Runners will be prompted to select the lane at the start of an Outdoor Run workout. (If you have to run to the track itself, you’ll be prompted during the workout after arriving.) During track workouts, you’ll also... Continue reading…

The App Store may no longer be the only place to get software for your iPhone or iPad. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Apple is planning to let users install alternative app stores on iOS, according to a report from Bloomberg. The shift would be a remarkable change from the company, which has famously only allowed iPhone and iPad users to download apps from the App Store.The plans are reportedly being spurred on by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is meant to enact “rules for digital gatekeepers to ensure open markets” when its restrictions become a requirement in 2024, according to a press release.

Amazon shrunk its second-gen Echo for your car, but it hasn’t gotten any more useful. Continue reading…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge It sounded like a really nice holiday extra: you could tip your hard-working Amazon delivery driver by simply using your Alexa device (or the app on your phone) to thank your driver, and they would get a $5 tip from the company.The program started on December 7th and was probably meant to publicize Amazon’s new feature that allowed users to thank their drivers through their Alexa apps. Available to all US delivery drivers delivering on behalf of Amazon, it didn’t last long. Amazon only offered the virtual tips in response to the first one million thank you’s — and that $5 million was apparently used up within a couple of days. When you thank your driver, you will get an acknowledgment. According to Lauren Samaha,... Continue reading…