Russian pipeline company Transneft hit by data leak dedicated to Hillary Clinton

Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine moves into its fourth week, unconventional actors continue to target Russian state-backed businesses with a string of hacks and data leaks — the latest apparently referencing pro-hacktivism comments made by Hillary Clinton.

The targeted organization is Transneft, the Russian state-controlled oil pipeline giant. On Thursday, leak hosting website Distributed Denial of Secrets published a link to 79GB of emails from the Omega Company, the research and development division of Transneft.

Headquartered in Moscow, Transneft is the largest pipeline company in the world. As a state-owned Russian enterprise, it is now blocked from receiving investments from the US market under the terms of sanctions against...

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Samsung announces its first QD-OLED TV, shares pricing for 2022 lineup

Image: Samsung

We’re getting closer to seeing all the new TVs announced back at CES start making their way to consumers. Today, Samsung announced that it’s officially taking preorders for its sizable 2022 lineup. And for the first time, the company is sharing the full details and pricing on its long-rumored, semi-announced QD-OLED consumer TV, which is now officially called the S95B.

The S95B is a 4K QD-OLED set that will come in two sizes: the 55-inch model runs $2,399.99, and the 65-inch model costs $3,499.99. (Amazon is already offering discounts on both sizes.) Those are significantly higher prices than you’d pay for a standard LG OLED, but Samsung Display’s QD-OLED panel should deliver superior color accuracy at high brightness levels, even...

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The Flight Attendant’s season 2 trailer promises a turbulent spycraft turn

Kaley Cuoco as Cassie Bowden in The Flight Attendant. | HBO Max

Though Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie Bowden was still a mess by the end of The Flight Attendant’s first season when she’d become one of the top suspects in a high-profile murder, she had made a more than respectable amount of progress towards getting her life together on all fronts. In addition to helping find the real killer, Cassie also resolved to finally get sober after years of struggling with alcoholism, and it all seemed very much like things might be looking up for the well-meaning flight attendant.

That may still be the case on some level, but in the first trailer for The Flight Attendant’s second season, Cassie once again finds herself smack dab in the middle of another convoluted set of circumstances despite all the work she’s put into...

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Android 13 will ask your permission to send notifications

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Google is releasing the second Android 13 developer preview on Thursday, and it includes a major new feature: apps will have to ask your permission to post notifications. iOS has had a similar feature for years, and it’s a very useful way to make sure only certain apps send you notifications. I’m glad to see that Google plans to bring something like it to Android.

Based on Google’s blog post, it sounds as if asking for permission will be a requirement for Android 13 apps. “Apps targeting Android 13 will now need to request the notification permission from the user before posting notifications,” Dave Burke, a VP of engineering for Android, says in the post.

Image: Google

Google’s example of what a notification...

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Tile’s new ‘Scan & Secure’ feature will let you use its app to find unwanted tracking tags

Tile has announced that it’s rolling out its new “Scan & Secure” feature in its app this week, allowing anyone with the Tile app to run a scan to see if there are any unwanted Tile tags or trackers near you that shouldn’t be there.

The safety feature (which was announced last fall alongside Tile’s newest tracking tags) has been a long time coming and offers both iOS and Android users the ability to check for unwanted tags. Apple offers a similar app for Android, which lets users scan for similarly malicious AirTag trackers, too.

All trackers — whether they be Tile tag, Apple AirTags, or from another company — carry the potential for abuse by stalkers, and while these devices have been around for years, the recent surge in popularity h...

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Apple’s charts set the M1 Ultra up for an RTX 3090 fight it could never win

Image: Apple

When Apple introduced the M1 Ultra — the company’s most powerful in-house processor yet and the crown jewel of its brand new Mac Studio — it did so with charts boasting that the Ultra capable of beating out Intel’s best processor or Nvidia’s RTX 3090 GPU all on its own. The charts, in Apple’s recent fashion, were maddeningly labeled with “relative performance” on the Y-axis, and Apple doesn’t tell us what specific tests it runs to arrive at whatever numbers it uses to then calculate “relative performance.”

But now that we have a Mac Studio, we can say that in most tests, the M1 Ultra isn’t actually faster than an RTX 3090, as much as Apple would like to say it is.

To hear Apple tell it, the M1 Ultra is a miracle of silicon, one that...

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Anker’s noise-canceling Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro are on sale for $40 off today

Anker’s impressive Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro earbuds, which illuminate when placed into the charging case, are on sale for just $129.99 today. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

This St. Patrick’s Day, you’re certainly in luck — that is, if you’re on the market for an affordable pair of noise-canceling earbuds. That’s because Anker is currently selling the excellent Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro for $129.99 on Amazon today, which is a $40 discount and the best price we’ve seen on the true wireless earbuds this year. These platform-agnostic earbuds deliver a lot of features and value for the price. We were impressed by their powerful sound quality as well as the fact they support LDAC (Sony’s higher-bitrate wireless streaming protocol) and multipoint Bluetooth, which allows you to connect them to two devices at once. That’s a feature not even Sony’s flagship 1000XM4 earbuds, which is our top pick for best...

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How to turn your Echo Show into a digital photo frame

Smokey the cat is his full glory on the Echo Show 15’s large display. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

As screens proliferate in our homes, it’s nice to put them to good use outside of when you’re using them. Just like your computer has a screensaver, your Echo Show smart display can be set to show pretty pictures when it’s not on active duty serving up YouTube recipes or streaming your favorite tunes and TV shows. In fact, all the smart displays in the Echo Show line double as more-than-capable digital photo frames.

The current Echo Show range includes the Echo Show 5, Echo Show 8, Echo Show 10, and the newest picture-perfect addition, the Echo Show 15, The simplest way to use one of these devices as a digital photo frame is to use Amazon’s Photos service, which has free unlimited storage of photos for Amazon Prime members. But there...

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NASA’s new monster rocket set to roll out after more than a decade of delays

The rocket is headed to the launch pad with a lot of baggage

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The creators of Until Dawn are making another interactive teen slasher

Image: Supermassive Games

Supermassive Games, the studio behind interactive horror games like Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology, has announced its next foray into the genre: The Quarry.

It’s described as a “teen-horror narrative game where your every choice, big or small, shapes your story and determines who lives to tell the tale.” Much like Until Dawn, the game appears to start from a very familiar place for horror fans, in this case a summer camp where players can control nine different counselors. It’ll also feature a multiplayer aspect: there’s a co-op mode where two players control different characters, and a mode for up to seven players where everyone can vote on the choices made.

Image: Supermassive Games

Until Dawn made a...

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Elden Ring patch nerfs speedrunners’ favorite weapon ability

Bandai Namco

The latest Elden Ring patch nerfs two extremely popular abilities, adds some sorely needed quality of life updates, and provides a significant buff to caster builds. Late last night, Bandai Namco announced patch 1.03 for Elden Ring. The patch fixes several bugs including one that prevented players from obtaining items after a boss kill. The developers have also seemingly heard the many complaints about the game’s lack of quest tracking, and while they didn’t add a quest log, they did make it easier for players to find the appropriate NPCs.

Added a function to record an icon and the name of an NPC on the map when you encounter that NPC

They’ve also increased the number of situations in which you can summon an NPC which, of course, comes...

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Maserati unveils new luxury EV lineup, commits to going fully electric by 2030

The Maserati GranTurismo will be the Italian automaker’s first electric vehicle. | Maserati

Italian luxury automaker Maserati announced an all-electric range of vehicles called Folgore, including a next-generation GranTurismo sports coupe, an electric version of the best-selling Levante, the all-new Grecale SUV, and several other luxury sports cars and convertibles. The company said it would offer electric versions of all of its models by 2025 and shift to EV-only sales by 2030.

In a press conference with reporters, Maserati CEO Davide Grasso said that the automaker will also aim to completely phase-out sales of its internal-combustion engine vehicles by 2030 — though that will depend on individual markets and customer demands.

“That’s the landing spot,” Grasso said of the target date of 2030. “It will affect different parts...

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UK threatens tech execs with jail time if they fail to meet online safety standards

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The UK has outlined new legislation that could see top managers at tech companies sent to jail if they fail to meet the demands of regulators. The rules are part of the government’s mammoth Online Safety Bill, a new draft of which was introduced to Parliament today — a major milestone to the bill becoming law.

Tech execs could be jailed if they fail to respond to requests for information from newly-empowered regulator Ofcom “in an accurate and timely manner,” according to the bill. The latest draft stipulates that senior managers will be liable for criminal prosecution just two months after the bill becomes law (instead of two years, as previously outlined).

New offenses have also been added, including suppressing, destroying, or...

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Humble’s indie lineup includes Monaco 2 and a musical RPG

It may be best known for its regular bundles of games and other entertainment, but Humble Games is also an indie publishing label. And today the company detailed its upcoming slate of games which includes everything from a sequel to the classic heist game Monaco to a roleplaying musical called Stray Gods.

We don’t know much about Monaco 2 — it doesn’t have a release date yet — but it is once again being developed by Pocketwatch Games, and is described as a game that “will test players’ skills in brain-bending 3D environments, procedurally generated by an AI mastermind designed to concoct high-stakes challenges and infinite sneaky, stealy fun.”

Stray Gods, meanwhile, was previously known under the name Chorus, and is being developed by...

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T-Mobile teams up with BMW for the first 5G-connected cars in the US

T-Mobile and BMW are partnering to debut the first 5G-connected cars available in the United States: as of today, the new 2022 BMW iX and i4 models now work with the company’s 5G network, essentially allowing owners to use their cars as a gigantic Wi-Fi hotspot.

Adding a BMW to your T-Mobile plan will tack on $20 a month and will allow your car to get unlimited data and voice calls — even if you don’t happen to have a phone with you. (SMS, however, is not included.) In addition to unlimited data in the US, subscribers also will get 200MB of roaming data, should you be driving somewhere where T-Mobile’s network doesn’t reach, along with 5GB of 4G data per month in Canada and Mexico (once that 5GB allotment is used up, you’ll still get...

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How the EU is fighting tech giants with Margrethe Vestager

Margrethe Vestager | Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

The European Commission’s competition watchdog is thinking bigger than lawsuits

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Samsung’s really good midrange phone just got a bigger battery and a price cut

Not much has changed on the outside, but there are a couple important tweaks under the hood. | Image: Samsung

Last spring, Samsung announced a trio of Galaxy A-series phones that were all destined for US retailers’ shelves. This year, it’s promising just one new model for US customers: the Galaxy A53 5G. It offers some modest upgrades, which is fine because the A52 5G was a really good phone. But its best new feature is a $50 lower price tag, which at $449 for 128GB of storage, puts it juuuuust under Apple’s $479 iPhone SE with 128GB. Maybe that’s a coincidence! Probably not!

The A53 5G’s most notable hardware change is the switch to Samsung’s new Exynos 1280 5nm processor. The version of the A52 5G sold in the US included a Qualcomm processor, so using the house-brand chip represents a shift in strategy, maybe to accommodate a lower price...

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MGM is now part of Amazon

Image: Metro Goldwyn Mayer

Amazon’s purchase of MGM for $8.45 billion is complete, without a public response from the FTC on whether or not it will challenge the deal. Reports have suggested for months that the FTC was considering a challenge, and The Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month that Amazon certified it had given the FTC all necessary information, setting a mid-month deadline that it would close the deal, with or without a response from the agency and its new leader, Lina Khan.

Earlier this week, the European Union’s antitrust commission gave Amazon’s purchase the green light, noting the “transaction would raise no competition concerns,” as the “overlaps” between both companies are “limited.” Amazon seems to have taken that as approval enough and...

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If you’re a Russian YouTuber, how do you get paid now?

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Niki Proshin was already a year into making a living as a vlogger — he had a YouTube channel, a TikTok channel, and an Instagram. He also ran an online Russian club for anyone who wanted to learn the language. His website, like his videos, is in English.

Instagram no longer functions in Russia. Google has stopped selling ads in Russia. It is no longer possible to subscribe to his Russian club via PayPal, which has suspended its services in Russia. Patreon, his other payment option for the Russian club, “kind of works,” but because many Russian banks have been kicked out of SWIFT, he can’t withdraw his money.

“With everything going on in the world, you can officially call me hairy and bankrupt.”

“It is quite...

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Want to make robots run faster? Try letting AI take control

MIT’s Mini Cheetah robot takes off running. | Image: MIT

Quadrupedal robots are becoming a familiar sight, but engineers are still working out the full capabilities of these machines. Now, a group of researchers from MIT says one way to improve their functionality might be to use AI to help teach the bots how to walk and run.

Usually, when engineers are creating the software that controls the movement of legged robots, they write a set of rules about how the machine should respond to certain inputs. So, if a robot’s sensors detect x amount of force on leg _y,_it will respond by powering up motor a to exert torque _b,_and so on. Coding these parameters is complicated and time-consuming, but it gives researchers precise and predictable control over the robots.

AI uses trial and error to develop...

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Netflix gives a peek at its upcoming Resident Evil series

The new Resident Evil series comes to Netflix in July | Netflix

Netflix released teaser art for its upcoming Resident Evil live-action television series, based on Capcom’s popular Resident Evil video games. The show will have “the best of the Resident Evil DNA,” Netflix said in a news release, including bad-ass heroines, a battle for survival, creatures both new and familiar, and a mystery to be solved. We see a vial of what looks like blood, a pill marked “joy” set against a yellow backdrop, and some bubbles of blood in a third image. So far: no zombies.

Netflix

Netflix

Netflix first announced the series in August 2020 and said it would take place across two timelines, one with sisters Jade and Billie Wesker (fans will recognize that last name), who move...

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Lego’s new Back to the Future set finally does the DeLorean right

Lego has debuted a new Back to the Future DeLorean set, recreating the time-traveling car from the film series with its most accurate brick model yet — one that, unlike the original 2013 version, actually looks like the iconic vehicle.

The $169 set has 1,856 pieces (compared to the 401 pieces in the original model) and is considerably bigger and more detailed in virtually every way. There’s functional gull-wing doors, a far less blocky hood, a brand-new windshield piece that Lego created specifically for the new set to match the real car, and a light-up flux capacitor (especially notable given the rarity of light-up pieces on Lego’s modern sets).

Image: Lego

The DeLorean set can be built in_Back to the Future,_B...

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Apple Mac Studio review: finally

This computer is a historic achievement

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Matter smart home standard delayed until fall 2022

The Matter standard promises to unify the smart home | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Matter, the new smart home interoperability standard being developed by Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and others, has been delayed. Again. Expected this summer, the launch has been rescheduled for fall of 2022, Michelle Mindala-Freeman of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) which oversees Matter, told The Verge.

The delay is needed to finalize the software development kit (SDK) device manufacturers will use to incorporate their products into the Matter ecosystem. According to Mindala-Freeman, because of a larger than expected number of platforms adopting Matter, the code for the SDK needs more work to ensure everything will operate together smoothly – which is the overall promise of the Matter standard.

Additionally, she says...

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Apple Studio Display review: nothing to see here

A 5K iMac’s panel, six speakers, three mics, and one terrible camera

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One of the Steam Deck’s best features just came to an AMD GPU near you

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Valve’s Steam Deck has a lot of cool tricks up its sleeves — but one of them wasn’t exclusive to the gaming handheld PC for long. You know how the Steam Deck can turn on FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling for any game of your choice, no need for the game’s developers to formally offer support? As promised, AMD just brought that same driver-level version of the framerate-boosting tech to every Radeon RX 5000-series or newer graphics card as “Radeon Super Resolution.”

Image: AMD

Today, you’ll be able to download the new AMD Adrenalin drivers, turn on the in-game overlay with Alt + R, and lower your game’s render resolution to theoretically get a big framerate boost in most games — at the expense of some quality, of...

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How to manage your iPhone lock screen

From your wallpaper to the functions in your control center, you’ve got lots of options to make your iPhone lock screen feel more you. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

Compared to Android, iOS has historically been the less customizable, more you-get-what-you-get operating system. While that remains true to an extent, it has come a long way, with customization options that didn’t exist three or four years ago. For example, these days, you can do a lot more with your lock screen than you might realize.

Here’s how to customize what you see — and how it looks — on your iPhone lock screen. (This was tested on an iPhone running iOS 15.3.)

First: the basics.

Your lock screen shows the time, date, and current notifications on the default view. We all know and love it.

Other features can be accessed on the lock screen if they’re enabled in settings. To choose which features appear, go to Settings > Face ID...

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Ukrainian scientists face tough choices as international community offers aid

The hopes and fears driving an online movement to help Ukrainian researchers

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iRobot adds new features to its robot vacs, including Siri support

A software update for iRobot’s line of vacuuming and mopping robots is coming this spring. | Image: iRobot

Roomba robot vacuums have worked with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa voice commands for a while, and now Apple’s Siri is getting in on the party. Today, iRobot announced native Siri Shortcut integration for its line of vacuums and mops, joining Roborock as one of only a handful of smart vacuum manufacturers to work with Apple’s voice assistant.

The update is part of iRobot’s version 4.0 of its iRobot Genius Home Intelligence software, which was described by CEO Colin Angle at its launch in 2020 as “a lobotomy and replacement of the intelligence systems in all of our robots.”

The rollout of Genius 4.0 includes about a half dozen new features for the company’s connected Roomba robot vacuums and Braava Jet robot mops. In addition to...

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Ukraine legalizes cryptocurrency as it receives millions in crypto donations

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge, Icons by Shutterstock

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has signed into law a bill that effectively legalizes the cryptocurrency sector in the country. The decision comes as Ukraine has received cryptocurrency donations worth tens of millions of dollars from individuals and groups hoping to help the country’s war effort against Russia.

The bill signed by Zelenskyy was approved by Ukraine’s parliament last month and “creates conditions for the launch of a legal market for virtual assets in Ukraine.” It allows Ukrainian banks to open accounts for crypto firms; appoints the National Bank of Ukraine and the National Commission on Securities and Stock Market as financial watchdogs for the sector; and, as reported by CoinTelegraph, means crypto exchanges and...

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