Facebook tries adding video and voice calls back into its main app

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Facebook is testing adding voice and video calls to the main Facebook app, _Bloomberg_reports. The features are currently part of the standalone Messenger app, which Facebook originally spun out of its big blue main app in 2011 and officially removed in 2014.

Voice and video calls are two of several Messenger features that Facebook has introduced in its other products like Portal video cameras and Oculus virtual reality headsets. The company hasn’t shared if it plans to bring other parts of Messenger back into the fold, but Messenger’s director of product management did tell Bloomberg that “you’re going to start to see quite a bit more of this over time.”

Messenger features in everything might make Facebook a harder knot to untangle

F...

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Disney fires back against Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow lawsuit

Disney

Disney has filed a motion to have Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against the company moved to private arbitration, the latest in the ongoing saga of her complaint against the company over Black Widow’s streaming release.

Disney’s lawyers filed the motion Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court on the grounds that Periwinkle Entertainment, which negotiated her deal, agreed that any claims related to her role in the Marvel film would be handled in confidential arbitration. But the motion also took several swipes at Johansson’s complaint that argued Marvel, compelled by its parent company Disney, breached an agreement when Black Widow debuted on Disney Plus through Premier Access the same day that it premiered in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter...

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The Fitbit Charge 5 and its features are shown off in leaked video

Image: @_snoopytech_ on Twitter

A leaked video seems to show off the rumored Fitbit Charge 5, just over a week after we saw renders of it hit the internet. The video shows off some of the features of the new wearable, including daily readiness and stress management scores, as well as ECG capabilities. The leaker also reveals that the device will cost $179.

The $179 price tag is $50 more than a Charge 4 costs now, but the new version features a color screen instead of a monochromatic one, and adds support for ECGs. Like the Charge 4, the Charge 5 will also have built-in GPS, according to the video.

Fitbit Charge 5
179 USDhttps://t.co/6bhJFPBI6x

— Snoopy (@_snoopytech_) August 22, 2021

The concept of rest days is something that the Apple Watch sorely lacks

The main...

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Google plans to customize Play Store app ratings for users’ country and device

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google announced changes to how it calculates and displays app ratings on the Play Store on Monday that could make them more useful and relevant to users and developers (via 9to5Google). In place of one rating for an entire app, which can come in a variety of forms and levels of relative goodness depending on the device, Google plans to break things down with specific ratings for the country your device is registered in and specific ratings for the form factor of the device you’re using to browse the Play Store.

There are some clear-cut reasons why this change might be helpful. First, not every app offers the same features or functionality everywhere because of national laws, and one universal law — Android fragmentation. If I’m a...

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Sex workers made OnlyFans valuable — then it sold them out

Graphic by James Bareham / The Verge

Pressure from payment processors is leaving OnlyFans creators with nowhere to turn

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See how the Playdate’s crank cranks in new teardown

Photo: iFixit

The Playdate is one of the most interesting pieces of new gaming hardware in years, with a fun, colorful design that evokes old handhelds like the Game Boy and a unique crank for interacting with games.

And thanks to the good folks at iFixit (to whom Panic sent a Playdate specifically for disassembly purposes), we’ve now gotten a good look inside at the upcoming handheld — and how that crank actually works.

Most of the internal pieces more or less track with what you’d expect from a diminutive console: a 2.74Wh battery (about a quarter of the size of an iPhone 12), an LCD display, and an easily replaced headphone jack.

Photo: iFixit

But the star of the show is, of course, the crank, which uses a Hall effect sensor....

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Poly Network hacker gave back more than $600 million in stolen crypto

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The hacker that stole around $600 million worth of crypto coins from Poly Network has now finished returning them after starting the process nearly two weeks ago (via CNBC). Poly Network says in a blog post that it’s now beginning the process of returning the stolen assets, which include Ethereum, Binance tokens, and Dogecoin, to their rightful owners. Poly Network says that there’s still work for it to do — it’s working on getting approximately $33 million worth of assets unfrozen and is continuing to restore the functionality of its Poly Bridge service, which lets users transfer crypto between blockchains.

After the attack, the hacker said that he’d stolen the funds to keep them safe, saying that putting the coins in a “trusted...

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New Oculus Quest feature can automatically sync VR photos and video clips to your phone

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Oculus has begun rolling out a set of new software features for Quest and Quest 2 virtual reality headsets. The v32 update introduces some small, but important tweaks to the in-headset user experience, as well as to the Oculus Move health tracking app. The feature that most piqued my attention is an option to automatically sync saved photos and videos captured within VR to the Oculus mobile app for iOS and Android.

In an earlier update, Oculus let you upload files from a headset through the Browser app within VR, an improvement over the original method of plugging the headset into a PC. But this update goes a step further in removing friction for viewing or sharing content, as it lets you do it without a headset on. To sync items from...

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Michigan Republicans run afoul of TikTok’s vaccine misinformation rules

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

As the Michigan governor’s race heats up, a handful of candidates are turning to TikTok to build followings ahead of the 2022 election. Two Republicans have already found sizable audiences, but they’re also testing TikTok’s limits on misinformation, espousing possible 2020 election fraud and spreading false vaccine information on the platform.

Garrett Soldano and Ryan Kelley are both running in Michigan’s Republican primary for governor, hoping to replace current Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Soldano, a chiropractor from Kalamazoo County, is one of the leading fundraisers, raising more than all other candidates combined, according to Michigan Live last month.

Both candidates have built large followings on TikTok, Soldano and Kelley boasting...

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Apple employees are organizing, now under the banner #AppleToo

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple employee organizing took another step this morning with the launch of a website called AppleToo. The goal is to collect stories from workers at all levels of the organization who’ve experienced harassment or discrimination.

“For too long, Apple has evaded public scrutiny,” the website reads. “The truth is that for many Apple workers ... the culture of secrecy creates an opaque, intimidating fortress. When we press for accountability and redress to the persistent injustices we witness or experience in our workplace, we are faced with a pattern of isolation, degradation, and gaslighting. No more. We’ve exhausted all internal avenues. We’ve talked with our leadership. We’ve gone to the People team. We’ve escalated through Business...

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Nightmare of the Wolf captures the soul of The Witcher, even without Geralt

Image: Netflix

If there’s one thing that ties the many iterations of The Witcher together — whether it’s the original books, the hit games, or more recently the live-action show — it’s Geralt of Rivia. The lovably miserable monster hunter is the core of the series in a way that’s rare for fantasy, which often follows stories bigger than just one person. But that’s also what makes Nightmare of the Wolf, an anime spinoff on Netflix, so interesting. It’s a prequel that shifts back in time to focus on Geralt’s mentor Vesemir, who can feel like the polar opposite of his protege: charming, playful, and with a voracious appetite for the finer things in life.

It’s a refreshing twist that also does a good job of exploring some of the mysteries at the heart of T...

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Instagram is retiring the swipe up

Instagram

The swipe-up will be no more. Instagram is planning to retire the feature, which allows people to visit external webpages by swiping up, starting August 30th, according to a notification viewed by _The Verge_and confirmed by Instagram. Instead of the swipe-up link, Instagram says people will be able to use link stickers, which are exactly as they sound: tappable stickers in stories that take people to external websites.

The company says it’s retiring the swipe up — a feature that’s spawned its own category of GIFs and a phrase that’s now part of the lexicon — to “streamline the stories creation experience” and offer more “creative control,” given that uses can format the look of stickers and not the swipe up.

This update builds on a...

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How to use Android 12’s clever new auto-rotate system

Google’s upcoming Android 12 update has plenty of eye-catching features, but don’t let yourself be fooled: sometimes, it’s the smaller, less obvious elements that are most deserving of your attention.

That’s certainly the case with the software’s new auto-rotate system. With Android 12, Google has introduced a smarter way to control when your screen switches between its vertical and horizontal orientations. And while the improvement isn’t getting all that much time in the spotlight, you’d better believe it has the potential to make your life a whole lot easier.

In short, instead of relying solely on your phone’s accelerometer to figure out which way you’re holding the device and then rotate your screen accordingly, Android 12 allows your...

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In Greece, heatwaves are so bad officials are considering giving them names

A woman protects her head from the sun during a heatwave in Athens on July 29, 2021. | Photo by LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images

During a summer of punishing heat, Greek officials and researchers are thinking about naming individual heatwaves to help keep people safe when temperatures soar. It’s part of a bigger push internationally to create a system for naming and ranking heatwaves, similar to the process for major storms.

“They’re a silent killer”

“Heatwaves cause a lot of deaths; they don’t make noise and they may not be visible but they’re a silent killer,” Kostas Lagouvardos, research director at the National Observatory of Athens, recently told The Observer, a Sunday paper published by Guardian Media Group. “We believe people will be more prepared to face an upcoming weather event when the event has a name.”

Extreme heat kills 5 million people a year around...

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The Pfizer vaccine will be officially called Comirnaty, for some reason

With official Food and Drug Administration approval, the Pfizer / BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine can now be marketed as Comirnaty in the US, great news for general vaccine acceptance, sure, but also anyone who loves to fixate on bizarre drug names.

Comirnaty is apparently supposed to be a portmanteau of several words — community, immunity, COVID-19, and mRNA — Fierce Pharma writes. The branding was produced for Pfizer-BioNTech by theBrand Institute — “The World’s #1 Naming Company” — and while it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, it is at least shorter than most drug names.

On the other hand, it’s not nearly as metal as Spikevax, the European brand name of the Moderna vaccine and another Brand Institute project. Spikevaxdirectly...

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Netflix’s holiday movie lineup includes a third The Princess Switch

Vanessa Hudgens in_The Princess Switch._ | Image: Netflix

Netflix has released a lot of information about its movie lineup through the end of the year, including details of its holiday slate of films. If you love cheesy holiday movies, it seems like Netflix will have you covered this year.

Fans of the ridiculous The Princess Switch movies starring Vanessa Hudgens will be pleased to know that there’s a third one set to release in November. There’s also A Castle for Christmas, a romcom about a woman who wants to buy a castle in Scotland, which is also scheduled for November.

There are a number of non-holiday movies on the way this fall and winter, too, and we’ve listed out the full schedule below. Note that movies will hit theaters shortly before they come to Netflix, and we’ve noted when that’s...

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The best gaming laptops in 2021: seven laptops to get your game on

The best gaming laptop is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales/ The Verge

The best gaming laptop at every size and price

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Ample raises $160 million on the promise of battery swapping

Image: Ample

Battery swapping has long been a dream solution for the infrastructure problem standing in the way of wide electric vehicle adoption. Tesla famously tried but then abandoned the idea half a decade ago. But now a startup called Ample has raised $160 million to try to make it work — first for commercial vehicles, then maybe passenger cars and SUVs.

Given the approach Ample founders John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah are taking, they’ll need every one of those dollars, and then some.

The goal with Ample is to convince automakers to make versions of their electric vehicles that have a sort of adapter plate instead of a full battery pack, while everything else stays the same. Then Ample plugs a bunch of battery modules into that adapter. The...

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Apple debuts new trailer for The Morning Show’s second season ahead of September premiere

Image: Apple

Apple has shared a new trailer for the second season of The Morning Show, one of its premier series for Apple TV Plus. The new 10-episode season debuts on September 17th, with new episodes hitting every Friday after. The show once again has an all-star cast, headed up by Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.

Here’s Apple’s summary for the new season:

Picking up after the explosive events of season one, season two finds “The Morning Show” team emerging from the wreckage of Alex (Aniston) and Bradley’s (Witherspoon) actions, to a new UBA and a world in flux, where identity is everything and the chasm between who we present as and who we really are comes into play.

Steve Carell also returns, and there are a number of new actors in the...

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Apple says it has pay equity, but an informal employee survey suggests otherwise

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

An early analysis of the informal Apple pay equity survey shows a six percent wage gap between the salaries of men and women, according to software engineer Cher Scarlett. It’s similar to the gender wage gap in San Francisco, which hovers around five percent, but disappointing for a company that claims people of all genders “earn the same when engaging in similar work with comparable experience and performance.”

The results are not scientific — employees opted into the survey and only 2,000 people responded (out of the 147,000 employees Apple estimated in 2020) — but they point to why some employees are suspicious of the company’s claim that it fixed its pay equity problem.

“We know pay equity was a problem in the past and Apple did...

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Shang-Chi made me excited about the Marvel Cinematic Universe again

Simu Liu takes on a whole lot of bad guys on a bus. | Courtesy of Marvel Studios

I’m ready for Shang-Chi to meet Thor

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MSCHF’s next project won’t wait for Mickey Mouse to enter the public domain

Photo by LMPC via Getty Images

After prodding Nike with a Lil Nas X collaboration for “Satan Shoes” and memorializing iconic failed startups as toys, the internet collective MSCHF is aiming bigger and further out with its next drop.

Image: MSCHF

MSCHF “Famous Mouse” token

Mickey Mouse is set to enter the public domain in 2024, at which point MSCHF could make a Mickey Mouse artwork. Today, in 2021, we cannot.

Instead, we are making and selling the idea of a MSCHF “Famous Mouse” artwork now, that will not exist–even as a design–until 2024. If you purchase this artwork, we give you a temporary token with a unique code that can be redeemed for the actual piece in 3 years.

Instead of waiting a few more years for copyrights on works from 1923...

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T-Mobile is giving customers a free year of Apple TV Plus

Photo: Apple

T-Mobile has announced a new promotional perk for its customers: starting on August 25th, both new and existing subscribers to its Magenta and Magenta Max plans can get a year’s subscription to Apple TV Plus.

The deal applies to virtually any of T-Mobile’s post-paid customers that it classifies as part of those plans, including its Magenta 55 Plus, Magenta Military, Magenta First Responders, Sprint Unlimited Plus, Sprint Premium, and T-Mobile for Business plans. Better yet, the deal isn’t just for newcomers to T-Mobile; it seems that anyone subscribing to those plans can get the free year of Apple TV Plus.

Customers under T-Mobile’s Magenta, Magenta Max, and T-Mobile for Business can find the offer listed under their rate plan details...

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Richard Branson’s satellite launch firm, Virgin Orbit, to go public via SPAC merger

Photo by Hugh R Hastings/Getty Images

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, a satellite-launching spinoff of the billionaire founder’s space tourism firm, is going public through a merger with a shell company, the firm announced on Monday. The company will be valued at $3.2 billion and includes an investment from Boeing.

Virgin Orbit plans to merge with the special purpose acquisition company (also known as a SPAC), NextGen Acquisition Corp. II around the end of 2021. It will be listed on NASDAQ under the ticker “VORB.” The deal will bring Virgin Orbit $483 million in new capital — $383 million stored in NextGen and $100 million from another round of funding. Investors in that round include Boeing, Virgin said, but it’s unclear how much they pitched in.

The $483 million will...

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Making It Work 2021

Illustration by Claudia Chinyere Akole

The Verge presents a second edition of Making It Work, a special issue about how small businesses and creators have found clever and creative ways to adapt to the current climate and get paid. Whether it’s taking farmers markets online, becoming a tour guide on TikTok, or moving bike part sales from Amazon to the real world, these are stories about how the internet has enabled scrappy underdogs and thoughtful problem-solving.

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Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine gets full FDA approval

The Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, another landmark in the historic immunization campaign. The vaccine was previously available to people over the age of 12 in the United States under an emergency use authorization. Now, it’s officially licensed in the United States.

With full approval, Pfizer and BioNTech can directly market the shot to consumers. The vaccine will be marketed under the name Comirnaty to people over 16. It will still be available to people 12-15 years old under an emergency use authorization.

“The FDA’s approval of this vaccine is a milestone as we continue to battle the COVID-19 pandemic,” acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said in a statement. “While...

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Bose’s QC35 II wireless headphones are $100 off at Woot

The Bose QuietComfort 35 Series II, often referred to in shorthand as the QC35 II, are just about the cheapest they’ve ever sold for today. Woot has new, black-colored units with a one-year Bose warranty for $195. According to pricing data from CamelCamelCamel, this is $5 cheaper than the previous best price on record. These aren’t the latest noise-canceling headphones to hit the market. They released in late 2017, and the reasons they’re still popular are because of their solid sound quality, comfort, a dedicated voice assistant button, and an effective noise cancellation effect. One thing you might not like about them, though, is that they recharge via a Micro USB port.

A new set of Bose headphones appeared in an FCC filing recently,...

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Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop is out on November 19th, check out the first photos

Photo: Geoffrey Short / Netflix

Four years after news broke that work had begun on a live-action adaptation of beloved sci-fi anime Cowboy Bebop, the series finally has a release date. Netflix announced today that Cowboy Bebop will come in for a landing on November 19th, and here are some new photos to prove it.

Since Netflix confirmed it was working on Cowboy Bebop,the streaming service has been decidedly tight-lipped on details. It announced the show’s cast in 2019 and, earlier this year, that original composer Yoko Kanno would return to the live-action series. But there still hasn’t been an official trailer or a casting announcement for series regular “Radical Edward.”

Photo: Geoffrey Short / Netflix

Now at least Netflix is sharing photos of...

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As demand for bikes surged, Amazon got in the way

Illustration by Claudia Chinyere Akole

A bike parts company ditched Amazon to support indie shops instead

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YouTube says its Partner Program now has 2 million members

YouTube’s Partner Program has passed the 2 million creator mark | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube’s Partner Program, which allows users to make money off their videos, has passed the 2 million creator mark, the company said Monday. The platform has helped turn YouTube into a viable business for top creators like PewDiePie and Jenna Marbles, but it’s also been the cause of consternation for the company when eligible partners — often those same top creators — do something that reflects poorly on the platform and temporarily drives away advertisers.

Creators who qualify for the Partner Program — you need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of overall watch time on your channel in the past 12 months — can earn money through ads, subscription fees, donations, livestreaming, and YouTube Premium revenue.

The Google-owned...

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