Twitter’s delaying the launch of Blue with verification until after the elections

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter’s pushing back the launch of its new Blue subscription with verification until after this week’s midterm elections, according to a report from The New York Times. According to an internal memo viewed by the outlet, a manager working on the project said they’ve “made the decision to move the launch of this release to Nov. 9, after the election.”

Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, announced the new $7.99 per month Twitter Blue earlier this month with perks like fewer ads, search priority, the ability to post longer videos, and the ability to pay your way to verification. Under Musk’s new rules, anyone can get a verified checkmark if they pay for Blue, sparking concern over whether users will be able to tell real accounts from fake...

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Apple’s copyright claims ripped down a fan’s archival WWDC YouTube channel

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After Apple issued several copyright claims, YouTube took down an archival channel containing hundreds of decades-old videos from past Apple Worldwide Developer Conferences (WWDC). Brendan Shanks, the owner of the Apple WWDC Videos channel, says his account’s been permanently disabled after receiving well over three copyright strikes — the maximum number of violations you can incur before YouTube removes your account.

In screenshots of emails shared by Shanks, Apple issued a number of takedown requests against his videos, some of which dated back to the early 2000s. Shanks says he still has all the original video files and descriptions, and is currently trying to get the content over to the Internet Archive. Apple didn’t immediately...

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Apple reportedly wants to swap the ‘Hey Siri’ trigger phrase for just ‘Siri’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple’s looking to change Siri’s trigger phrase from “Hey Siri,” to just “Siri,” according to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This means you would just need to say “Siri” followed by a command to activate the smart assistant.

As noted by Gurman, Apple’s been working on this feature for the past several months and is expected to roll it out next year or in 2024. But Apple will have to put in a “significant amount of AI training and underlying engineering work,” to get the feature to function properly, as the smart assistant will need to understand the single wake word in multiple accents and dialects. The current, two-word trigger phrase, “Hey Siri,” increases the chance of Siri picking up on it.

Switching to a single wake word...

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HP Victus 15 review: an $800 laptop that can game

It’s a budget laptop with budget frame rates.

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Riot teamed Lil Nas X up with a holographic mech for 2022’s Worlds opening ceremony

Image: Riot Games

This year’s edition of the League of Legends World Championship featured Lil Nas X, Jackson Wang, and some impressive technology.

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Jack Dorsey takes responsibility for Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter

Laura Normand / The Verge

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO, responded to the mass layoffs under Elon Musk’s ownership by saying he owns “the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation” and that he grew the company “too quickly.” On Friday, Musk laid off about half of Twitter’s workforce, affecting employees across all departments.

“Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment,” Dorsey writes. “I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.”

I am grateful for, and love, everyone who has ever worked on Twitter. I don't expect that to be mutual in this...

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Elon Musk’s $7.99 ‘Twitter Blue with verification’ is launching on iOS

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Twitter’s app on iOS has been updated to support Elon Musk’s $7.99 per month Twitter Blue. The app’s latest update on the Apple App Store says you have to pay for Blue to get verified on the platform “just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.”

The new Twitter Blue subscription isn’t available just yet, though. Esther Crawford, a product manager at Twitter confirmed it’s not live right now but says some users “may see us making updates because we are testing and pushing changes in real-time.”

Twitter shipped its new Blue subscription for verification ahead of Musk’s Monday deadline given to employees. I updated and verified accounts are now the first tab of notifications. pic.twitter.com/xfTl3b3GYk

— Alex...

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Apple’s reportedly building an advertising network for its Major League Soccer games

Image: Apple

Apple’s building an advertising network for the Major League Soccer (MLS) games it’ll start streaming next year, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sources familiar with the situation told the outlet that Apple’s in talks with advertisers and MLS sponsors to display ads during soccer games and “related shows.”

Apple struck a 10-year deal with the MLS in June and will start streaming soccer games through its Apple TV app in February 2023. While the company plans on introducing a separate, Sunday Ticket-like subscription dedicated to streaming every MLS game, it says it’ll make a “broad selection” of MLS and Leagues Cup matches available to Apple TV Plus subscribers, with a “limited number” available for free.

There still isn’t any...

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Sony’s all-around excellent WF-1000XM4 earbuds are on sale for $100 off

The best deal on the best earbuds is a hard combo to beat. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

There’s no telling what another day might bring — especially if you too are glued to our coverage of a certain social media hellscape — but you can rest assured that The Verge’s deals team is always on the lookout for ways to help you save, both in the form of early Black Friday deals or whatever we can scrounge up for you on a random Saturday.

And we’ve got some bangers for you this week because Sony’s WF-1000XM4 earbuds are on sale for an all-time low of around $178 at Amazon and Target until tomorrow. That’s around $100 off their regular price of $278, and much better than the typical $30 discount we see.

The WF-1000XM4 frequently come up when we’re talking earbuds, namely because they’re just that good. The excellent all-rounders...

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Matter is here, but it’s still a long road to the simple smart home

A Matter QR code on an Eve Energy smart plug. To pair a device to a Matter app, you’ll just need to scan this code.

At the official launch event for Matter this week, I saw a lot of exciting things: a Google Nest Hub controlling an Eve Energy smart plug; a Wiz light bulb working with Apple Home; a Yale smart lock talking to a SmartThings hub over Thread. None of these things were possible before Matter. And all of these things worked well in their demos using voice, app, and other smart home control interfaces — even in the interference hell of a mini-trade show floor.

But I also saw that Matter has a long way to go before it fully delivers on its promise of an interoperable and simple smart home. A phrase I heard a lot throughout the two-day event was, “Matter is a journey,” followed by, “This is just the beginning.”

In the short term, don’t expect...

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The most interesting EV concepts at the 2022 SEMA conference

Image: Nissan

The Specialty Equipment Market Association, or SEMA, held its annual conference in Las Vegas this week. Billed as one of the biggest car shows in the world, the event typically brings together more than 135,000 attendees in the automotive aftermarket industry to see the newest trends in vehicle repairs and modifications.

And this year, EVs were a particular focus. The event featured a dedicated space for EVs, labeled “SEMA Electrified,” and according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, it was 740 percent larger compared to 2019, when it was first debuted. Several major automakers showed up with a bunch of unique EV concepts in tow. Here are some of the ones that stood out the most.

Ford

Image: Ford

I...

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Overwatch 2’s newest hero is the scary but sexy Ramattra

Image: Blizzard

In the perfect prelude to the Overwatch League2022 grand finals, Blizzard has revealed Overwatch 2’s newest character. Ramattra is the game’s 36th hero, and his abilities and story seem like they’ll make for the most interesting addition to the roster yet.

Ramattra is the leader of Null Sector, a group of sentient robots called omnics committed to the liberation of their people by any means necessary. In Overwatch’s overarching story (yes, there is one) Null Sector is one of the biggest baddies, responsible for touching off the war between robots and humans that became the instigating event for the creation of the Overwatch task force.

Ramattra is a tank like you’ve never seen before. Rather than being the kind of tank that shields...

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Apple has finally approved a MagSafe car mount charger, and it only costs $99.95

Imagine: mounting your phone with magnets, and charging it at 15W at the same time. | Image: Apple

A mere two years after Apple introduced MagSafe for iPhones, we're finally getting the accessory that probably should've launched with it: a magnetic car mount that's also capable of actually charging your phone. As 9to5Mac spotted, Belkin has announced its Boost Charge Pro Wireless Car Charger With MagSafe, which is available for pre-order on the Apple store.

I know what some of you may be thinking: “wait, Amazon is flooded with MagSafe car chargers, and they’re nowhere even close to $100. What makes this one special?” The answer is that this one is actually MagSafe, where the rest are MagSafe compatible. Thatmeans that they use a ring of magnets to hold your phone, and standard Qi charging that can’t pump as much power into your...

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Twitter cut 15 percent of its trust and safety staff but says it won’t impact moderation

I guess we’ll see. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter just laid off about half of its workforce, but the company’s “core moderation capabilities” are still in place, the company’s head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth said in a tweet thread Friday evening.

The layoffs affected “approximately” 15 percent of Twitter’s Trust and Safety group, “with our frontline moderation staff experiencing the least impact,” according to Roth. The company restricted access to some internal tools last week for “security reasons” — Roth didn’t say exactly when, but that would put the timing around when Elon Musk took over the company — but “most” content moderators who did frontline reviews weren’t impacted, and access to those tools will be “fully restored in the coming days.”

Daily volume of...

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Starlink is getting daytime data caps

Be careful not to use too much data with Dishy McFlatface. | Image: Starlink

Starlink is about to feel a little more like other ISPs, with a new data policy that mimics Anytime Minutes from the bad old days of highly restricted cellphone service. The satellite internet division of SpaceX will start throttling home internet for customers who use more than 1TB of Priority Access data per month during peak hours beginning in December. The change is being rolled out as part of a new “Fair Use policy” in the US and Canada.

Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of “Priority Access” data that tracks what you’re using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you’ll be moved to...

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Apple settles with former employee accused of stealing trade secrets

Apple has settled its lawsuit against Simon Lancaster. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Apple has settled its lawsuit against Simon Lancaster, a former design architect, who the company accused of stealing trade secrets and sharing them with a journalist. The company filed its suit in March 2021, and the settlement order was approved by a judge this week.

“Despite over a decade of employment at Apple, Lancaster abused his position and trust within the company to systematically disseminate Apple’s sensitive trade secret information in an effort to obtain personal benefits,” Apple wrote in its original complaint. “He used his seniority to gain access to internal meetings and documents outside the scope of his job’s responsibilities containing Apple’s trade secrets, and he provided these trade secrets to his outside media...

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Here are the best AirPods deals you can get right now

Apple’s first-gen AirPods Pro are one of our go-to picks and are often on sale. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

If you know where to look, there are often some great discounts available on Apple’s popular — yet oftentimes expensive — AirPods. Since Apple launched the third-gen AirPods last year, we’ve seen the starting price of the second-gen, entry-level model drop from $159 to $129. And now that you can buy the second-gen AirPods Pro and Black Friday is just around the corner, we’ll likely start seeing even better discounts on the last-gen Pro and other models.

If you can’t wait until then, though, fret not: we’re already beginning to see some good discounts ahead of the holiday season. Below, we’ve curated the best deals currently available on each model, including the entry-level AirPods, the AirPods Pro, the third-gen AirPods, and the AirPods...

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We finally have an idea of what kind of stuff David Zaslav wants Warner Bros. Discovery to make.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The swiftness with which Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav began canceling shows and entire movies as part of his plan to boost the company’s revenue was cause for much alarm earlier this year. As series like Infinity Train and Summer Camp Island began disappearing from HBO Max, that alarm only intensified and led many to wonder just what Zaslav hoped to gain by essentially killing off pieces of its catalog just months ahead of its fusion with Discovery Plus. But in a recent WBD earnings call, Zaslav said that he’s confident those cuts were all the right decision because none of those series were performing in a way that benefited the company.

In response to a question about Warner Bros. Discovery’s free cash flow as the company...

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The execs behind the MoviePass debacle are now facing criminal charges

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Mitch Lowe and Ted Farnsworth already settled with the FTC over fraudulent activity affecting MoviePass customers, but now the former heads of MoviePass and its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), are facing criminal allegations of securities fraud and wire fraud.

The Department of Justice announced the charges today, saying false statements made by both men defrauded investors in HMNY when the execs pretended like the company’s money-losing $9.95 “unlimited” moviegoing plan had any hope of profitability.

HMNY’s own auditor cast doubt on the company’s viability in a report in 2018, but at the time, Farnsworth downplayed the advisory, telling Insiderthat “pretty much most” companies running at a loss would have a...

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Westworld is over

Image: HBO

Westworld has been canceled. The Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan show about robots and apocalypses captivated and then confused audiences and finally seemed to have forgotten what it was about entirely by the time its fourth and final season aired earlier this year. So while it’s a bummer the show is gone, it’s also not much of a surprise.

HBO emailed a statement on the cancellation, saying:

Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It’s been a thrill to join them on this journey.

The...

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Watch iFixit’s teardown of the ‘largely unfixable’ Meta Quest Pro

At this point, you might have a pretty good idea of what the inside of a smartphone is like, but how about a highly advanced VR headset? The experts at iFixit have posted their video teardown of Meta’s new Quest Pro, and while they conclude that it’s a “fascinating, if largely unfixable device,” it’s an extremely interesting look at the insides of the high-end VR headset.

One of the first things iFixit digs into is the battery, which lives in the back part of the headset. It’s a twin-cell 20.58Wh battery that’s curved, which is something I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s a different approach than what Meta took with the Quest 2’s Elite battery strap, which had two connected flat batteries (as shown in this picture from a Redditor).

...

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Fanfiction was the guilty pleasure that helped me unlock the internet

The hours I have spent on this site... | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

My taboo teenage pastime introduced me to the wide world of internet subcultures.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs leave whole teams gutted

Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

About half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees are now gone, with teams focused on trust and safety issues hit the hardest.

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TikTok is back after a brief outage

Not the best day for TikTok. | Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

For a little while this afternoon, many people get a message that there’s “no internet connection” while trying to browse their For You page inside the TikTok app. After an outage that lasted from 1:25PM ET until around 1:45PM ET, everything appears to be functional again.

We haven’t seen an update from TikTok about the outage yet, but while it was happening it was widespread, with tracker Downdetector identifying more than 75,000 reports of the issue. Global internet connectivity monitor NetBlocks also weighed in on the outage, noting that TikTok was unplugged internationally, with no sign of country-level filtering of the oft-criticized app.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

Even if you have internet, you...

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Elon Musk bought Twitter. Now, what’s next?

Laura Normand / The Verge

Elon Musk is now the owner, CEO, and sole director of Twitter.

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How to use Continuity Camera on macOS

You can now mount an iPhone above your Mac’s display and use it as a webcam. | Photo by Mitchell Clark / The Verge

Continuity Camera is one of the most exciting features of macOS Ventura. It allows you — if you’re taking a call from your MacBook — to substitute an iPhone’s camera for the webcam. The feature can be a bit of a hassle to set up, but once you’ve got all the appropriate settings, it’s very easy to use.

In order to use Continuity Camera, make sure your hardware and software are compatible. You can be on any Mac computer that’s running iOS Ventura. iPhone requirements get a bit more complicated — Continuity Camera technically works with an iPhone XR or later, but only the 11 and later can use certain fancier features like Center Stage and Desk View, while you need a 12 or later if you want to use Studio Light. Then, whatever phone you...

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Asteroid surveys are on the hunt for ‘city killers’

An artist’s impression of an asteroid lurking inside the orbits of Earth and Venus. | Image: DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/

This week, astronomers announced the discovery of three previously unknown near-Earth asteroids that had been hiding in the glare of the Sun — and one of them is a giant. At nearly a mile (1.5 kilometers) across, it is big enough to cause planet-wide destruction if it hit the Earth, though it won’t come anywhere close enough to be a threat for a hundred years or so.

The search for potentially hazardous asteroids like this one has ramped up in recent years, with multiple ongoing efforts to identify and catalog large space rocks passing close by. From twilight observations from the ground to space-based telescopes peering into hard-to-see regions of the sky, these programs are focused on identifying potentially dangerous asteroids as...

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Here are the best iPad deals right now

Select iPad models go on sale quite regularly. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

While some of the best iPad deals are most likely to arrive soon for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you can still find plenty of great discounts at all times of the year if you know where to look. Whether you’re after the high-end iPad Pro or the most affordable entry-level iPad, there’s likely a sale going on somewhere you may be interested in.

Of course, it’s difficult to know exactly where you can find the most notable deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing each and every day, so let us help you out. Below, we’ve listed the best deals you can get on each iPad model that is currently available, including the latest ones equipped with Apple’s...

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The best early Black Friday deals you can already get

The iPad Mini is just one of many Apple devices currently on sale in the run-up to Black Friday. | Image: Dieter Bohn / The Verge

Want to get a head start on your holiday shopping before the Black Friday madness begins? Despite the fact it’s still a few weeks away, many major retailers are already launching early Black Friday sales, making the days leading up to the shopping event an ideal time to avoid the rush.

While it’s possible prices will go even lower once the big day finally rolls around, the discounts we’re currently seeing are nothing to sneeze at. Target, Best Buy, and Amazon are offering some seriously steep discounts on a number of popular tech and gadgets, ranging from Apple devices to TVs, tablets, smart displays, and more.

To make your life a little easier, we’ve curated a list of some of the best deals available so far. These are the cream of...

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Elon Musk tries to distract from Twitter layoffs by claiming advertisers are fleeing the platform

Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

We’re one week into Elon Musk’s stewardship of Twitter, and according to Musk, it has already spurred a “massive drop in revenue.” Or not, and that’s just what Musk is saying to distract everyone from the absolutely heartless layoffs of thousands of people that have already spurred one federal lawsuit. But you know, here’s the tweet:

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

It’s not unreasonable to assume Twitter has had a drop in revenue: many huge companies —...

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