Microsoft says Windows 11’s File Explorer ads were ‘not intended to be published externally’

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft appears to be testing a new type of ad inside File Explorer on Windows 11. Microsoft MVP and Twitter user Florian Beaubois discovered an ad in the latest test build of Windows 11, prompting users to check out the Microsoft Editor. While the ads might have appeared for some Windows 11 users, Microsoft says it was a mistake.

“This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off,” says Brandon LeBlanc, senior program manager for Windows, in a statement to The Verge.

Some people will go mad if Microsoft starts adding ads in explorer. pic.twitter.com/rusnyrYyX2

— Florian (@flobo09) March 12, 2022

While the ads weren’t intended to be tested externally, it’s clear Microsoft is capable...

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Microsoft improves Xbox Cloud Gaming performance on the iPhone and iPad

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft says it has improved the performance of its Xbox Cloud Gaming service on the iPhone and iPad. The cloud game streaming service, formerly known as xCloud, first launched fully on iOS and iPadOS nearly a year ago, accessible from the Safari web browser. While the web browser version isn’t as fully featured as a dedicated app, Microsoft is now improving its performance for Apple’s mobile devices despite being unable to launch a standalone xCloud app.

Improvements include optimized video output on iOS devices and optimized network data transmission to speed up the responsiveness of Xbox Cloud Gaming. “You asked for a better iOS experience, and as a result, we have brought major performance improvements to all supported iPhone and...

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Samsung’s One UI 4.1 update adds S22 camera features to older flagships

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Samsung is bringing some of the camera features that come with the flagship Galaxy S22 to older devices, the company announced on its site. The One UI 4.1 update will extend to a wide range of phones, including the Galaxy S20, Galaxy S21, Galaxy S10, Note 20, and a portion of the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip families.

The features won’t trickle down to all devices

The company details some of the features it’s handing down to older devices in a post on its Korean community forum (via Android Police). Unfortunately, not all devices will support every feature listed here, with the majority of features landing on previous-gen devices, like the Galaxy S21, Z Fold 3, and Z Flip 3.

If your device supports the update, it could introduce a number of...

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Google Stadia is subtly reinventing itself to attract new games and gamers

Image: Google

Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service didn’t stick the landing, and it’s been a rough ride since. But today, at the Google for Games Summit, it feels like Stadia might be moving in a promising direction — one that gives both gamers and game developers a reason to pay attention. And the magic word is “free.” Free demos, free trials, free for developers to offer, and hopefully free of the friction that made Stadia a difficult investment to start.

I want to start off with something I wrote last February, when I explained how Google had drastically reduced its Stadia ambitions from what was effectively “become a game company” to “offer a white-label service to game publishers” instead. I wrote:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with...

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Barack Obama is narrator and host of new Netflix nature documentary

Netflix

Former President Barack Obama is the surprise narrator of the upcoming Netflix documentary Our Great National Parks, a five-part series looking at wildlife around the world. The series was announced last February as part of a slate of programming that Barack and Michelle Obama are producing for Netflix via their Higher Ground Productions company — although the announcement didn’t mention that the former president would serve as host and narrator.

“A fish that can walk. Surfing hippos that want to catch the waves. Species found nowhere else on earth,” Obama says in the trailer for Our Great National Parks. “When humanity started to protect these wild places, we did not realize how important they would become: They’re a haven for...

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How to silence Google Assistant responses on your Android phone

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

You’re sitting in your office and decide to find out when your next appointment is. You pick up your phone and murmur quietly, “OK Google, when’s my next appointment?” And then, loud enough to be heard over the entire room, your Google Assistant announces, “Next up, you have an appointment with your urologist on September 3rd at 9AM.”

You don’t have to hide under your desk anymore. Google has now made it possible to silence all Google Assistant voice output and only show the answers to your questions on your phone. Here’s how to set it up.

First, you need to get to your Google Assistant settings. You can do it one of two ways:

• Use your voice by long-pressing on your power button or saying “Hey, Google” or “OK Google” and say “Open...

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David Mamet filed a short story about airplanes to back Texas’ terrible social media law

David Mamet, at the Rome Film Festival in 2016. | Photo by Ernesto Ruscio / Getty Images

David Mamet is known for plays like Glengarry Glen Ross_and Speed-the-Plow, films like The Spanish Prisoner and_Heist, books like On Directing Film and The Wicked Son, and as of last week, a short story about a lost airplane pilot filed as a legal brief supporting social media regulation in Texas.

Mamet’s amicus brief is titled “Lessons from Aerial Navigation,” and as it’s two pages long, you should really just go read it. Here’s a sample of the prose:

The Map is not the territory. The territory is the territory. The pilot’s answer to the question “where am I?” lies not on the map, but out the windscreen. That’s where he is. It doesn’t matter where he calculated he should be, the territory below him is where he is.

In case you’re...

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Vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars — or leave the platform

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands, joined Vimeo 13 years ago as a student studying animation, back when it was still an indie creator platform. When van Baarle started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020, Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos — Patreon itself didn’t offer video hosting, and YouTube didn’t have the same features to protect her work, like controlling where her videos could be embedded.

“I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive,” van Baarle says. “But I thought, well, it’s a quality platform.” She’s uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average, van Baarle says. Her most viewed video has around...

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RiffTrax: The Game tasks you with rewriting the worst B-movie scenes

“I want to be the new mascot for The Verge.”

Rifftrax: The Game is a new party game that’s all about creating the most crowd-pleasing text-to-voice dub to overlay B-movie footage. It’s launching for the current and previous generation Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Nintendo Switch, and on Steam (for PC and macOS) for $9.99 on May 5th. This game was made in collaboration with RiffTrax, a group of expert B-movie commentators consisting of former Mystery Science Theater 3000 stars Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy.

It was developed by Wide Right Interactive, and similar to its previous game, What The Dub?!, the goal is to create the most ridiculous and clever dubs for each clip so that other players can vote on which they like best. A big part of the fun is players vote...

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Ms. Marvel’s first trailer teases a cosmic take on Kamala Khan

Marvel Studios

Unlike her fellow Jersey teens who insist that superheroes aren’t cool, Kamala Khan, the heroine of Marvel’s upcoming _Ms. Marvel_series, thinks capes are the flyest thing in the world. Naturally, she wants to become one of them herself, and in Ms. Marvel’s first trailer, the young girl’s wish starts to come true.

From series creator Bisha K. Ali_, Ms. Marvel_tells the story of how Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a diehard Carol Danvers stan, first discovers her own burgeoning superpowers and starts putting them to good use as supervillainy begins to take root in Jersey City. Similar to her comics counterpart, the MCU’s Kamala doesn’t hide the fact that she’s something of a fanfiction-writing nerd, something that few of her peers really...

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Virtual podcast events are bringing in six-figure earnings

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Howdy, team! I’m here, on a Tuesday. And what a day to have a platform, because now I can tell you to go watch / listen to the premiere of MUNA’s new song at 11:45AM ET. May we sob together. (The teaser made the music sound somewhat upbeat, but you really never know.)

EXCLUSIVE: Big $$$ in virtual podcast events

In-person podcast tours have shown that people are willing to pay for something beyond a pre-recorded episode. But virtual versions of those shows? In this climate of Zoom fatigue? Oh yeah, baby. In fact, they’re booming.

Moment House has been live-streaming podcast recordings, called “Moments,” since March 2021, and I’m told that the company has sold 140,000 tickets over the course of the 56 that it’s hosted since then. The...

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Switch Joy-Con controllers are $10 off in time for new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe courses

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

There are few things as enjoyable as local multiplayer gaming, and nothing beats saving some coin on tech that doesn’t usually go on sale. The Nintendo Switch Joy-Con controllers are a prime example, costing $69.99 at Woot instead of its regular $79.99 price. Woot is running this deal until Sunday, March 20th, or until it sells out. The neon blue and red controller combo is not currently available, but the matching gray set is still for sale at this discounted price.

It’s rare to get any discount on Joy-Con controllers. In many games, an individual Joy-Con is usable as a small gamepad, meaning you can play four-player local multiplayer with just these Joy-Cons and the pair that came with your Switch. What perfect timing this is, as the...

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How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird

CEO Matt Mullenweg on why he bets big on small companies

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Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra review: this bot cleans its own bottom

A robot vacuum cleaner that can look after itself, for a hefty price

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Intel is building a new €17 billion semiconductor manufacturing hub in Germany

A rendering of Intel’s new Magdeburg fab | Image: Intel

Intel has announced a massive new investment in its European manufacturing sites, with a new €17 billion “leading-edge semiconductor fab mega-site” in Germany, and a €12 billion expansion of its existing Ireland fab.

The company is also building a new R&D and design hub in France, and plans to invest in additional areas in Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Spain for manufacturing, foundry services, and research. All told, Intel is planning to invest over €33 billion in its initial wave of European R&D and manufacturing, as part of a total of €80 billion invested in the EU over the next decade.

Intel plans to invest €80 billion in EU manufacturing over the next decade

The new German site will consist of two semiconductor fabs in Magdeburg,...

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Intel’s AMD bug find proves that Spectre is still looming over us

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

When doing some of its own research, Intel’s security team discovered a flaw in AMD’s years-old patch against Spectre-based vulnerabilities, according to a report by Tom’s Hardware. AMD has since provided an update on its security bulletin in response, where it suggests using an alternate mitigation option and has additional advice for software developers.

AMD’s years-old fix doesn’t adequately protect against Spectre

Spectre is a type of security flaw affecting nearly all modern Intel and AMD processors that can give attackers access to sensitive data while remaining undetected. Last week, researchers found that Intel and Arm processors are susceptible to a new kind of Spectre v2 attack — although it’s just a proof-of-concept — called...

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a Nic Cage meme as a movie

Lionsgate Entertainment

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent may achieve the highest concentration of Nicolas Cage possible in a piece of media without advanced scientific instruments. It’s a movie about Nic Cage (played by Nic Cage) teaming up with a possibly criminal fan of Nic Cage to make a movie about Nic Cage (played by Nic Cage playing Nic Cage) while occasionally yelling at and / or kissing a second, imaginary Nic Cage (played by Nic Cage run through a creepy de-aging filter). It features clips from several earlier Nic Cage movies as well as a Nic Cage memorabilia room containing a Nic Cage statue and that sequin pillow with Nic Cage on it. Nic Cage attended the film’s premiere at SXSW. So did at least one person holding a paper cutout of Nic Cage’s...

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Xiaomi 12 Pro global flagship announced for $999

Xiaomi has announced the international version of the Xiaomi 12 Pro, its first global flagship phone since dropping the “Mi” branding. As with earlier phones in the Mi series like last year’s Mi 11, it’s a high-end device that seeks to beat competitors like Samsung on price-performance ratio.

The design of the phone is straightforward but attractive. The grey model I’ve been testing has a matte finish on the frosted glass that’s almost impossible to mar with fingerprints. The screen is a slightly curved 6.73-inch 120Hz 1440p LTPO OLED panel that looks great. Like every other 2022 flagship, the processor is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. You can get 8GB or 12GB of RAM, and there’s 256GB of storage. The battery is 4,600mAh and charges at...

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AMD’s new Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor will be available on April 20th for $449

AMD’s latest desktop processor, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, has finally gotten a release date and price after being announced earlier this year at CES 2022. It’ll hit stores next month on April 20th for $449, ushering in what AMD proudly declares to be the “world’s fastest gaming processor.

The new Ryzen 7 5800X3D is extremely similar to the original Ryzen 7 5800X model, with eight cores, 16 threads, and compatibility with AMD’s AM4 socket. But there’s one major difference: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D marks the debut of AMD’s 3D-stacking V-Cache technology, allowing AMD to up the L3 cache from 32MB to 96MB. The company says that the additional cache should translate to about a 15 percent boost in overall performance compared to the Ryzen 5900X (despite...

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Volvo and ChargePoint will build EV charging stations at Starbucks in 5 states

Volvo

In the not too distant future, you’ll be able to sip coffee while your electric vehicle sips electrons. That’s because Volvo is teaming up with ChargePoint to build a network of EV chargers at Starbucks locations across five US states.

The companies plan on installing 15 DC fast charging stations at Starbucks along a 1,350-mile route that stretches from Seattle to Denver. Each station will feature four plugs, making it a total of 60 chargers. And they will also bear Volvo’s branding, making it one of the few EV charging stations in the US to feature an automaker’s logo aside from Tesla’s Supercharger network.

The chargers will be fully installed by the end of 2022

The chargers will be fully installed by the end of 2022, the companies...

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Arm to cut hundreds of jobs after Nvidia deal falls through

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Arm is preparing to cut hundreds of employees from its global workforce after being forced to abandon its $40 billion sale to Nvidia last month. _The Telegraph_reports that the company’s chief executive Rene Haas told staff on Monday that between 12 and 15 percent of the company’s employees could be affected. This could translate to almost a thousand employees if, as _The Guardian_reports, Arm has over 6,500 employees worldwide. Arm says the majority of roles affected will be in its UK and US-based workforce.

“This is going to be a tough time for everyone, so I want to be clear on why we are doing this,” Haas said in an email seen by The Telegraph. “We need to be more disciplined about our costs and where we’re investing. To stay...

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New video game company aims to develop therapeutic games

DeepWell Digital Therapeutics

Devolver Digital founder Mike Wilson is partnering with medical device expert Ryan Douglas to launch DeepWell Digital Therapeutics, a video game company that will both develop games that can treat health conditions. The company will also help outside companies identify existing games that have therapeutic value, the founders say.

Video game-based tools can help with conditions like depression and ADHD, research shows. DeepWell Digital Therapeutics plans to build on those studies. “There was an amazing amount of science that had already been done,” Douglas says. “We started to recognize exactly how therapeutic these games already were.”

Often, a game used as a therapy would be designed as a therapy first, with fun or engaging gameplay...

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Tesla raises prices across entire range, with its cheapest car now starting at $46,990

Photo credit should read Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Tesla has raised prices across its entire line-up of electric vehicles. Prices have increased by between 5 to 10 percent, with the cheapest car the company sells — the Model 3 Rear-Wheel Drive — now starting at $46,990, while its top-end Model X Tri motor saw a price increase of $12,500, from $126,490 to $138,990.

It’s the second price bump Tesla has implemented in less than a week, after it increased the cost of certain long-range models last Wednesday. However, today’s price raises are not only more substantial than last week’s but apply to every vehicle the company sells.

Here’s how those increases play out (with old prices sourced from archived copies of Tesla’s website via Wayback Machine, dated to March 10th or more recent):

• M...

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Samsung’s Galaxy A33 leaks in full before its ‘Awesome’ launch

The Galaxy A33. | Image: @Evleaks

Samsung’s Galaxy A33, rumored to be the most affordable of the three devices the company will announce on March 17th, has leaked in full. Evan Blass has posted a series of renders of the phone over on Twitter, while _Appuals_has its specs. These include a 6.4-inch 90Hz 1080p OLED display, a 5,000mAh battery, and four rear cameras. It’ll reportedly be priced at €379 in Europe, which is roughly $417 stateside.

Reports suggest the Galaxy A33 will be announced alongside the Galaxy A53 and Galaxy A73 at Samsung’s “Awesome Galaxy A Event” this week. Samsung’s midrange A-series are some of its most popular devices around the world. In fact, the Samsung Galaxy A12 was the sixth best-selling phone in the world in 2021 according to Counterpoint...

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EU Parliament backs off plans to phase out energy-hungry cryptocurrencies

Power cords for bitcoin mining machines are plugged into electrical outlets at a mining facility operated by Bitmain Technologies Ltd. in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, on Friday, Aug. 11, 2017.  | Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A de facto ban on Bitcoin and Ether died in the European Union Parliament today. The controversial proposal attempted to clean up pollution from the most energy-inefficient cryptocurrencies. But even though the proposal failed, cryptocurrencies are still likely to face scrutiny from policymakers as the EU tries to tackle twin climate and energy crises. Getting rid of their pollution has become a global game of whack-a-mole since China banned cryptocurrencies last year.

The EU Parliament’s committee on economic and monetary affairs voted on Mondayto move forward with a legislative framework for regulating digital assets. In the process, it decided to drop a proposed rule in the framework that would have prohibited people in the EU from...

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Microsoft releases DirectStorage: ‘a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games’

One of many fast NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market. | Samsung

18 months ago, Microsoft revealed that one of the most important advancements in its new Xbox Series X console would be coming to PC — the ability to stream tremendous amounts of data from a blazing fast NVMe solid state drive to your GPU, instead of relying on your pesky CPU to decompress it first. The so-called “DirectStorage API” would let games load more detailed worlds, and load them more quickly than before.

Now, Microsoft says the DirectStorage API has arrived. “Starting today, Windows games can ship with DirectStorage. This public SDK release begins a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games by allowing developers to more fully utilize the speed of the latest storage devices,” reads the company’s blog post.

...

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Reggie Fils-Aimé doesn’t believe in Meta’s verse

“Facebook itself is not an innovative company,” said the former Nintendo boss. | Image: Bloomberg

Reggie Fils-Aimé (who led Nintendo of America before Bowser took over) isn’t impressed with the company formerly known as Facebook, or its idea of the metaverse. He lobbed a few fireballs in Mark Zuckerberg’s direction during an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang at South by Southwest over the weekend, saying that Meta isn’t innovative and that it bought or copied almost all of its interesting ideas.

Just so we’re all on the same page when discussing this concept, Fils-Amié defines the metaverse as “a digital space where you interact with your friends in a social and gaming type of environment” during his interview. (You can also read our great explainer on the idea here if you want to go deeper.) In general, Fils-Amié doesn’t seem...

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How to enable cross-save with your Destiny 2 data

Playing Destiny on multiple platforms? Here’s what you need to know | Image: Bungie

If you’re playing _Destiny 2_on more than one platform, enabling cross-save allows you to maintain your progression regardless of which platform you’re playing on, meaning you can finally move your Guardians, with all of their loot, to a different platform and freely jump between console and PC at your leisure. Here’s how to do it, whether you want to transfer your account data between a PC and console or vice-versa.

First, there are a few important disclaimers to keep in mind before you go through with activating cross-save for your account:

• While the free-to-play release of Destiny 2, called Destiny 2: New Light, means you don’t have to purchase multiple copies of the base game to play on different platforms, you will need to purchase...

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Lawsuit claims Google’s ‘Order Online’ button directs customers away from restaurants’ sites

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google is facing a lawsuit from a Florida restaurant chain owner that accuses the company of directing users to “unauthorized” Google-branded food ordering webpages, where it uses restaurants names “without their approval,” as first reported by Ars Technica.

A copy of the lawsuit alleges Google employs “bait-and-switch” tactics by placing its “Order Online” button at the top of restaurants’ profile panels on the search engine. The large blue button redirects users to a food.google.com page where they can select items from a restaurant’s menu and then place an order through a variety of third-party services, like Postmates, DoorDash, and UberEats — not through the restaurant itself. These services take a commission from participating...

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Researchers find new destructive wiper malware in Ukraine

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Researchers have discovered a new type of destructive wiper malware affecting computers in Ukraine, making it at least the third strain of wiper to have hit Ukrainian systems since the Russian invasion began.

The malware, dubbed CaddyWiper, was found by researchers at Slovakia-based cybersecurity firm ESET, who shared details in a tweet thread posted Monday.

According to the researchers, the malware erases user data and partition information from any drives attached to a compromised machine. Sample code shared on Twitter suggests the malware corrupts files on the machine by overwriting them with null byte characters, making them unrecoverable.

“We know that if the wiper works, it will effectively render the system useless,” Jean-Ian...

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