Major record labels sue Charter Communications again for alleged copyright infringement

Several record labels are suing an ISP for copyright infringement | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A group of major record labels has filed a new lawsuit against Charter Communications alleging that the company has failed to address its subscribers’ copyright infringement of musical works. And it’s not the first time the labels have sued Charter for its subscribers’ alleged behavior.

In a complaint filed in US District Court in Colorado July 26th, Universal Music, EMI, Sony Music, and Warner Music, along with several subsidiaries, claim that Charter, which provides internet services as Spectrum, “has insisted on doing nothing despite receiving thousands of notices that detailed the illegal activity of its subscribers, despite its clear legal obligation to address the widespread, illegal downloading of copyrighted works on its Internet...

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Turtle Beach’s Recon is a multitalented wired Xbox controller

Much more utility than your average controller

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Report finds Doximity, a social network for doctors, is riddled with anti-vaccine comments

Vaccine misinformation appears rampant on a social media site for doctors | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A social media site for doctors is seeing “hundreds of comments”— many with false claims and conspiracy theories— on posts about the COVID-19 vaccine and the pandemic, according to a new report from CNBC. Doximity is limited to healthcare professionals in the US— it verifies members before they can join— and no one who posts to the site is anonymous.

Doximity also doesn’t allow users to post articles or stories; instead it posts items from medical and science publications and mainstream news articles. Each user has a feed of aggregated content that is customized for them, based on the user’s preferences including area of medical practice.

But Doximity members can comment on articles, which is where the misinformation and conspiracy...

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Twitter appoints “grievance officer” to comply with India’s new rules

Twitter has hired a grievance officer in India | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has appointed two new executives in India in an attempt to comply with the country’s new information technology laws, a company lawyer told the Delhi High court at a Friday hearing. First reported by Bloomberg, one of the new executives is a chief compliance officer who will also serve as grievance officer, and the other is a nodal officer, both required by the country’s Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code which took effect in May.

Twitter made the appointments a week after the Indian government found the social media platform’s efforts to comply with the new rules were insufficient. Under the rules, social media companies are required to remove content within 36 hours of receiving a legal order. The country...

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Save 50 percent on Nomad’s MacBook and iPad cases

Nomad

It’s time for another roundup of this week’s best deals. You may have already seen some of these if you’ve been keeping up with our deals coverage every day, but I’m sure there are some surprises in here. Before that, though, check out our newly-published Back to School gift guide. The beginning of August marks when many people who attend school realize how little time they actually have to prepare for the school year ahead. If that describes you or someone you know, I hope that our guide helps you. Otherwise, carry on to see what we’ve brought you this weekend.

Get a Nomad case for your MacBook or iPad for half off

Nomad is offering _Verge_readers an exclusive discount on some of its polyurethane (PU) leather cases and sleeves for the...

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Microsoft’s new Xbox night mode dims your screen, controller, and power button

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft is working on a new night mode for Xbox consoles. The software giant has started testing this night mode with Xbox Insiders in the Alpha Skip-Ahead ring today, and it allows Xbox owners to dim their screens, controller LED brightness, and even the Xbox power button.

The night mode has a lot of customization, including different dimming levels and an optional blue light filter. Microsoft is also allowing Xbox owners to dim the LED brightness on their controllers in this night mode and dim the Xbox power button light or turn it off. You can also set an Xbox to switch to the system dark mode and disable HDR when the night mode is enabled.

The Xbox night mode lets you dim a controller LED brightness.

This Xbox...

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WhatsApp lead and other tech experts fire back at Apple’s Child Safety plan

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

WhatsApp won’t be adopting Apple’s new Child Safety measures, meant to stop the spread of child abuse imagery, according to WhatsApp’s head Will Cathcart. In a Twitter thread, he explains his belief that Apple “has built software that can scan all the private photos on your phone,” and said that Apple has taken the wrong path in trying to improve its response to child sexual abuse material, or CSAM.

Apple’s plan, which it announced on Thursday, involves taking hashes of images uploaded to iCloud and comparing them to a database that contains hashes of known CSAM images. According to Apple, this allows it to keep user data encrypted and run the analysis on-device while still allowing it to report users to the authorities if they’re found...

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Amazon warehouse workers in the US are required to wear masks again

Photo by Ronny Hartmann / AFP via Getty Images

Amazon informed US warehouse employees on Friday that it is once again requiring them to wear masks to work in response to the spread of the more contagious COVID-19 delta variant (via CNBCand Bloomberg). The company says it offers access to vaccines to over half a million of its employees, but it will require employees to mask up, regardless of their vaccination status.

Amazon confirmed the mask mandate in an email statement to The Verge:

In response to the concerning spread of new COVID-19 variants in the U.S. and guidance from public health authorities and our own medical experts, we are requiring face coverings indoors regardless of vaccination status. We are monitoring the situation closely and will continue to follow local...

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There’s a better way for Facebook to resolve its fight with NYU researchers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

More and more, I find myself wondering why we built a world in which so much civic discourse takes place inside a handful of giant digital shopping malls.

So let’s talk about Facebook’s decision to disable the pages and personal accounts associated with the Ad Observatory project at New York University, which took data that had been volunteered by willing Facebook users and analyzed it in an effort to better understand the 2020 election and other subjects in the public interest.

In one corner, you have academic researchers working to understand the platform’s effects on our democracy. In the other, you have a company battered by nearly two decades of privacy scandals and regulatory fines, forever terrified that a Cambridge Analytica...

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Don’t wait up for AirPlay 2 support in the Spotify iOS app

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Spotify still hasn’t added AirPlay 2 support to its iOS app — and now, it seems like it might never happen, according to a forum postspotted by MacRumors. The reason offered by the company in the post is that “audio driver compatibility issues” forced including the feature to be put on hold for the foreseeable future.

AirPlay 2, added as part of iOS 11 update, introduced multiroom audio, Siri voice control, and fairly broad support across a wide swath of speakers, televisions, and streaming services. It was a real first for Apple’s “casting” feature, which had previously been somewhat poorly supported outside of Apple’s own devices.

I’m not going to call it petty, but...

Spotify has its own way to get audio from its service to other...

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Razer will let you sign up to beta test its RGB face mask

Image: Razer

Razer announced today that its lit-like-a-gaming-PC N95 mask has a new name and a beta program set up ahead of the planned fourth quarter launch. The futuristic-looking Project Hazel has been christened the Razer Zephyr, and you can sign up to be a beta tester right now on Razer’s site.

Razer has not provided any additional information on the timing of the Zephyr’s release or when beta testers can expect to receive their masks. Based on the video Razer shared alongside its announcement, beta testers might get a different mask design from what’s been shared up until this point.

The Zephyr seems a tad wider and rounder than Razer’s original Project Hazel, and there’s a grille at the bottom of the mask that’s a lot more visible than...

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The FCC finally made a new broadband map of the US

Image: FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has launched a new map designed to show consumers what kind of cellular coverage they can expect in a given area from AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon. It’s been a long time coming, and it looks like an improvement over the agency’s past attempts to show gaps in the nation’s broadband coverage, which were woefully inadequate and inaccurate.

As Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel pointed out on Twitter, it shouldn’t have taken this long for this map to be available. The law requiring that these maps be made, known as the Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act, was signed in March 2020, and the lack of details about broadband coverage has created confusion about...

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SEC charges crypto exchange execs for the first time over unregistered token sales

An employee wearing a protective face mask inspects Sapphire Technology Ltd. AMD graphics processing units (GPU) at the Evobits crypto farm in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2021. The worlds second-most-valuable cryptocurrency, Ethereum, rallied 75% this year, outpacing its larger rival Bitcoin | Photo by Akos Stiller / Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Securities and Exchange Commission issued its first charges against the decentralized finance industry Friday, accusing two people of illegally selling over $30 million of securities in unregistered offerings.

The SEC’s Friday order found that two executives from the Blockchain Credit Partners company used the Ethereum blockchain to sell cryptocurrencies to investors while misleading them about the company’s profitability. Specifically, investors purchased cryptocurrencies using digital assets like ether. The company then promised to pay investors over 6 percent in interest and that the funds would go toward physical investments like car loans to create additional income. The SEC determined that these “real-world” investments...

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The best laptop you can buy in 2021

Image: William Joel/The Verge

The best laptops for you, from ultraportables to high-powered editing machines

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Valve Steam Deck hands-on: the Nintendo Switch of PC gaming

Reservations are already sold out through mid-2022

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Vergecast: Pixel 6 preview and Apple’s new system for detecting illegal imagery

Image: Google

Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay and Dieter start the show with Verge managing editor Alex Cranz to discuss Google’s surprise preview of its next phone — the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro — along with a new custom-designed Tensor processor. The crew gives their first impressions of Google’s take on an “ultra high end” phone.

In the second half of the show, Verge policy editor Russell Brandom reports back from a briefing call with Apple about its new system meant to detect child abuse imagery by scanning photos stored on iPhones and...

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Apple VP acknowledges concerns about new scanning feature in internal memo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple’s forthcoming feature that will scan iOS devices for images of child abuse is an “important mission,” a software vice president at the company wrote in an internal memo. First reported by9to5 Mac, the memo by Sebastian Marineau-Mes acknowledges that the new protections have some people “worried about the implications” but that the company will “maintain Apple’s deep commitment to user privacy.”

As part of its Expanded Protections for Children, Apple plans to scan images on iPhones and other devices before they are uploaded to iCloud. If it finds an image that matches one in the database of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a human at Apple will review the image to confirm whether it contains child...

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Fires are growing worse at night

Flames rise during Dixie Fire near Chico in Greenville, California, United States on August 5, 2021.  | Photo by Neal Waters / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The nights have gotten hotter and drier in the Western US, which is making it harder to stop wildfires. Fires burn later into the night and pick back up earlier in the morning than they used to, firefighters say.

New research backs up what firefighters have seen and finds that there’s been a pretty dramatic shift in the night air in just the past few decades. The night air’s drying power, or vapor pressure deficit, has risen sharply in the past 40 years — as much as 50 percent above the previous average in the 1980s in the southern Sierra Nevada.

“I was surprised—it’s unusual to see geophysical data change that dramatically,” Andrew Chiodi, a research scientist at the University of Washington, said in a statement yesterday. Chiodi was...

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Google considered buying ‘some or all’ of Epic during Fortnite clash, court documents say

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google considered buying Epic Games as the companies sparred over Epic’s Fortnite Android app, according to newly unsealed court filings. Last night, Google lifted some of its redactions in Epic’s antitrust complaint against Google, which Epic amended and refiled last month. The complaint still omits many details about Google’s dealings with specific companies, but the new details reflect internal Google communications about competition on the Android platform.

Epic claims Google was threatened by its plans to sidestep Google’s official Play Store commission by distributing Fortnite through other channels, and in an unredacted segment, it quotes an internal Google document calling Epic’s plans a “contagion” threatening Google. Here’s...

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New Bitcoin tax plans could stifle greener blockchain tech

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge

Ongoing efforts to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill could reshape the cryptocurrency world, as lawmakers debate new tax-reporting requirements on various parts of the blockchain system. The Washington Post is reporting that, on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen directly lobbied lawmakers to keep stronger cryptocurrency tax provisions in the infrastructure bill.

It’s a sign of how committed the White House is to bringing cryptocurrency into the broader tax-reporting system, even as the details of the new requirements threaten to upset the delicate political balance of the infrastructure plan.

A broad new requirement on cryptocurrency brokers

From the beginning, the drafters of the bipartisan infrastructure framework hoped to...

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The Witcher’s anime spinoff keeps the bathtub, but adds a fun-loving lead

Image: Netflix

Perhaps the most emblematic image of Netflix’s take on The Witcher is Henry Cavill as Geralt, giant shoulders sunken, muttering a raspy “fuck” as he realizes the depths of the problem in front of him. Geralt’s gruffness is a big part of the appeal of The Witcher, as his down-to-earth nature stands in contrast to many other fantasy stories full of royalty and long-prophesied saviors. He’s not out to be a hero; he’s just here to do a job. Saving the world just seems to happen whether he wants to be involved or not.

When it came time to create The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, a prequel that stars Geralt’s mentor Vesemir, producer and screenplay writer Beau DeMayo knew he wanted a very different kind of character. Across video games,...

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Stranger Things 4 will premiere in 2022

Stranger Things season four teaser | Image: Netflix

The pandemic-delayed return of Netflix’s flagship nostalgia series Stranger Things has a release window: 2022. A brief teaser (stick around for a few new frames near the end) promises that “it” is almost here. While today’s news fulfills director Shawn Levy’s promise from the Free Guy press tour that we would know more about Stranger Things before that video game movie is released, it doesn’t go far into spoiler territory but wait, who is that holding the flamethrower?

Stranger Things returns in 2022! See you in the upside down pic.twitter.com/9scVCGzekF

— Netflix (@netflix) August 6, 2021

Maybe that’s for the best? There’s something to look forward to, albeit three years after the third season premiered. Season 3 set Netflix viewing...

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LG’s 27-inch QHD gaming monitor is 25 percent off at Best Buy and Amazon

Gaming monitors can be a very expensive component of building or upgrading your PC. If you don’t want to shell out $500 or more, Best Buy has an attractive deal on a monitor that ticks a lot of boxes for the cost. LG’s 27-inch UltraGear costs $300 at Best Buy and Amazon, down from $400, and it has a 1440p IPS panel with a 144Hz refresh rate and fast 1ms response time. For adaptive sync, it has both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility. It has slim bezels with up to 350 nits of brightness for its display. Around its back, there are two HDMI 2.0 ports and a DisplayPort 1.4 port.

If you’re ready to make the jump from 1080p to 1440p, this seems like a fantastic monitor at the right price. It doesn’t have HDMI 2.1 ports, but a...

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The best phone plans in 2021 (and how to pick one)

Photo by Avery White for The Verge

Shopping for a phone plan doesn’t have to be painful

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How to use DuckDuckGo’s email protection app

It’s well-known that filling in a form with your email address — say, to get a discount on a product, receive a newsletter, or get the results of a quiz — means you are going to get email from that vendor, and possibly from a bunch of other vendors and / or advertisers, forever.

One of the ways to subvert this has traditionally been to create a free email account to use for sites that you want to register with but that you suspect will be the gateway for a large amount of spam. This is what I did. However, over time, that designated email account can become so well-used that it stops being a hidey-hole for spam and becomes another account that offers advertisers and others a source for information to aggregate.

This is where...

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Microsoft’s ‘Super Duper Secure Mode’ for Edge trades speed for better security

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft’s browser vulnerability research team is working on a mode to make the Edge browser more secure, and it’s given it an incredible name: “Super Duper Secure Mode” (via The Record). The mode is currently very experimental, but could help make it harder for attackers trying to exploit bugs in Microsoft’s browser by turning off certain optimizations.

To make the browser “super duper secure,” the mode turns off a feature of Edge’s JavaScript engine that’s meant to make a website’s code run faster. The technology is called Just-In-Time compilation (or JIT), and while it can help improve performance, it’s also fiendishly complex. This makes it easy for bugs to slip in, which can lead to security exploits — Microsoft points to analysis...

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This PS2 mod is a handheld dream come true

Image: GingerOfOz

GingerOfOz, the console modder you might remember from his excellent Game Boy-sized portable Wii, is back with another home console-turned-handheld. This time it’s the turn of the PS2, objectively the best console ever made and the one that just so happens to be the first I ever owned.

Dubbed the “PS2 Eclipse,” the mod involved trimming down an original PS2 motherboard and packing it into a 3D printed chassis with a set of PlayStation Vita buttons, Nintendo Switch joysticks, a 5-inch 480p display, batteries, and a couple of extra custom circuit boards.

It’s a very neat little handheld, and the fact that it’s using original PS2 hardware rather than emulation means it doesn’t have any major compatibility issues with the console’s library...

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Facebook’s justification for banning third-party researchers ‘inaccurate,’ says FTC

Illustration by Alex Castro / Th

When Facebook banned the personal accounts of academics researching ad transparency and misinformation on its platform this week, it justified the decision in part by saying it was only following rules set out by the Federal Trade Commission. But the FTC itself says this is “inaccurate” and that its rules require no such action, reports The Washington Post.

Facebook claims it banned the accounts “to stop unauthorized scraping and protect people’s privacy in line with our privacy program under the FTC Order.” The order in question was put in place following the Cambridge Analytica scandal and says Facebook must obtain “affirmative express consent” from users before sharing their data with a third party (known as the “consent decree”) and...

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Microsoft is integrating Spotify into a new Windows 11 focus feature

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Microsoft is planning to integrate Spotify into a new Windows 11 feature. Panos Panay, Microsoft’s head of Windows and devices, teased the Focus Sessions Windows 11 feature on Twitter this week, and it appears to be a new way to focus on tasks and work. Focus Sessions includes Spotify integration, allowing you to create a focus timer to work through tasks while listening to playlist of music from Spotify.

Microsoft hasn’t started testing Focus Sessions in its public builds of Windows 11 yet, but from the video Panay teased it appears to be built into the operating system’s Clock app. It looks like it’s following the Pomodoro Technique, a method of managing time by breaking down work into smaller chunks with short breaks.

Another first...

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Overwatch League sponsors reevaluate support following Activision Blizzard lawsuit

Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Overwatch League sponsors Coca-Cola and State Farm are re-evaluating their support of the competition after the game’s publisher Activision Blizzard was sued by regulators over a culture of ‘constant sexual harassment,’ The Washington Post reports. The companies’ statements come as another sponsor, T-Mobile, appeared to pull its branding from the Overwatch League as well as the Call of Duty League, earlier this week.

In a statement, Coca-Cola told the Washington Post that it is aware of the allegations surrounding Activision Blizzard, and said it is “[taking] a step back for a moment to revisit future plans and programs.” However, a spokesperson for the company would not confirm whether or not the company would cease its sponsorship of...

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