Netflix’s heist series Kaleidoscope can be watched in any order

Giancarlo Esposito in Kaleidoscope. | Image: Netflix

There are a lot of crime shows on Netflix, but the upcoming series Kaleidoscope offers something a little different: the option to watch in whatever order you want. The nonlinear series is a heist drama that stars Giancarlo Esposito, Paz Vega, and Tati Gabrielle and is loosely based on a true story. Here’s the basic setup:

Spanning 25 years, Kaleidoscope is an all-new anthology series following a crew of masterful thieves and their attempt to crack a seemingly unbreakable vault for the biggest payday in history. Guarded by the world’s most powerful corporate security team, and with law enforcement on the case, every episode reveals a piece of an elaborate puzzle of corruption, greed, vengeance, scheming, loyalties and betrayals. How did...

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Everyone thinks Apple’s negotiations with the NFL are dragging on

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

While Apple’s still the “front-runner” when it comes to securing the rights to the NFL Sunday Ticket, negotiations are taking unexpectedly long. That’s according to a report from The Athletic (via 9to5Mac), which indicates things have slowed down because Apple may be looking to score the rights to more than just the football games.

The rights to NFL Sunday Ticket — which DirecTV has held for nearly three decades — expire after this football season. Amazon, YouTube, and Disney are also said to have placed bids to secure the rights to the out-of-market games package, which the NFL reportedly wants $3.5 billion for.

But The Athletic reports that Apple expected it would gain the rights to aspects not specifically mentioned in its contract...

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Are crypto bros really selling their Lamborghinis?

Photo by Andrew Hawkins / The Verge

Cryptocurrency traders love Lamborghinis. Hang out in the parking lot of any Bitcoin conference or lurk around on Instagram, and you’ll see plenty of evidence of this. So with crypto prices plummeting and high-profile exchanges like FTX collapsing, it stands to reason that the used car lots would be overflowing with six-figure Italian supercars, right?

It’s a nice theory, and while there is some evidence that the exotic car market is seeing a slight uptick in appraisals and used models for sale, it may be too early to conclusively connect it to the collapse in crypto.

Yeah, I know. Buzzkill. But that said, there is certainly some interesting data out there, so let’s dive into it.

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Meta Quest Pro review: get me out of here

Meta’s $1,499 headset is better at showcasing VR’s weaknesses than its new strengths.

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Tee up with golf in Nintendo Switch Sports

Image: Nintendo

Listen up, birdies and bogeys. Today, Nintendo announced that golf is finally coming to Nintendo Switch Sports. The free update launches on November 28th and will include 21 holes from the Wii Sports games. The update also includes a survival golf game mode, which sounds so much more fun than actual golf.

The Nintendo Switch Sports golf update is right on time as quirky golf games seem to be all the rage, with Cursed to Golf, Golf Story, and What the Golf exploding in popularity.

Golf was not included in the base Nintendo Switch Sports game and was sorely missed by Wii Sports golf fans (including a couple of my colleagues at The Verge). Since its spring launch, Nintendo Switch Sports got a free update that improved soccer’s motion...

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Hyperkin is remaking the Xbox 360 controller for modern consoles and PC

An early render of the Xenon controller in the original Xbox 360 white. It will also come in black, pink, and red. | Image: Hyperkin

Hyperkin is introducing an officially licensed remake of Microsoft’s original Xbox 360 controller, which looks poised to bring the 2005 nostalgia trip to modern Xbox consoles and Windows PCs. The Xenon controller, named after the Xbox 360’s first internal development codename, brings back the 17-year-old design and modernizes things with Menu, View, and Share buttons, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack and detachable USB-C cable. In addition to the original white, it will come in black, pink, and red.

Pricing and availability have not been announced yet, but if Hyperkin’s $70 Duke controller remake is any indication, this may be quite a faithful and somewhat pricey recreation. Perhaps even too faithful in some small aspects, as these...

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There’s a huge amount of new (and expensive) tech behind Avatar: The Way of Water

Avatar: The Way of Water is out December 16th. | Screenshot: Avatar: The Way of Water

There’s a new trailer out for Avatar: The Way of Water, the upcoming film from James Cameron that is also the sequel to the highest-grossing movie of all time. It’s as visually spectacular as you’d expect while also diving a bit deeper into the family-first story at the heart of the film. Here it is — it’s fun!

However you feel about Avatar as a story (if you even remember the story at all), there’s no denying the technical achievements Cameron and his crew pulled off to make these movies happen. And in an excellent new GQ profile, Cameron explains the AI, algorithms, entirely new cameras, and all sorts of other tech behind this one:

The process for how Cameron builds the Avatar films is complex; it involves creating a data-rich but...

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Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite is down to its lowest price to date

The latest Kindle Paperwhite starts at $94.99 instead of $139.99 at Amazon. | Image: Amazon

Want to gift the bibliophile in your life something a little more creative than, well, a book? Amazon’s latest Kindle Paperwhite makes for a great gift, one that may not stay in stock for long when Black Friday officially lands on Friday. Thankfully, the ad-supported version with 8GB of storage is available right now for $94.99 instead of $139.99 at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, while the ad-free version is on sale at Amazon for just $10 more.

Although we can’t be sure that Amazon’s terrific e-reader won’t drop further in price in the run-up to Black Friday or on the actual shopping holiday, the current sale price represents an all-time low on the 2021 Paperwhite. It's a terrific e-reader (even at full price), with months-long battery...

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Wyze’s new BR30 smart bulb is designed for downlighting

Wyze launches a new BR30 smart light bulb. | Image: Wyze

Wyze’s new Wi-Fi BR30 color bulb fills a gap in the budget smart home company’s lighting lineup — recessed can lighting. BR30s generally fit into holes in your ceiling and, with their directional light, are great for larger rooms such as kitchens and living areas. The new bulbs cost $23.99 plus $5.99 shipping for a two-pack or as low as $12.50 per bulb in a four-pack (plus shipping), making the Wyze Bulb Color BR30 a well-priced, if not spectacular bargain.

Comparatively, Philips Hue’s color BR30s go for $100 for two, but you can find good, budget Wi-Fi BR30 bulbs in two-packs from the likes of Wiz ($28) and Sengled ($35). Both of those have lower lumen outputs, though, making Wyze the brighter budget bulb.

The Wyze bulbs work with...

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What to expect at Fortnite’s ‘otherworldly and unexpected’ chapter 3 finale

Image: Epic Games

The third chapter of Fortnite is ending with a live event — and it kicks off very soon. Today, developer Epic Games provided some details on the event, which is called “Fracture” and starts at 4PM ET on December 3rd. As with past live events, you only have one chance to check it out. You’ll be able to log in 30 minutes before it kicks off, and Epic also says you should still be able to hop on while the event is in progress, which will apparently be until 4:40PM ET, and you can be solo or in a group with up to four friends.

Of course, we don’t have many details about what the actual live experience will be like. The fun of these is experiencing them live in the moment. Epic does say that “Fracture” will be “an otherworldly and unexpected...

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The only constant at Elon Musk’s Twitter is chaos

Laura Normand / The Verge

From restoring Trump to continuous layoffs, more scenes from inside Elon Musk’s Twitter

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The best noise-canceling headphones to buy right now

Sony’s WH-1000XM5 headphones have an all-new design. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Get some peace and quiet with the best noise-canceling headphones for a variety of uses

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DJI introduces new O3 Air FPV camera, starting at $229

The new DJI O3 Air FPV camera can capture video at 4K/60 fps and transmit a live video feed from up to 10 km away. | Image: DJI

DJI has introduced the O3 Air Unit, its latest combined first-person view camera and transmission system for drone pilots looking to explore FPV racing and experiences.

The O3 Air Unit uses a 1/1.7-inch sensor to capture video at 4K/60 fps. A 155° field-of-view is available, but only when the aspect ratio is set to 4:3 and recording quality is reduced to 2.7K at 50/60fps or 1080p at 50fps/60fps. Footage can be stabilized with DJI’s RockSteady technology and shot in D-Cinelike, DJI’s unique video color profile that preserves shadows, highlights, and mid-tones for post-production.

Image: DJI

The O3 Air Unit costs $229 and includes the Camera Module, Transmission Module, Antenna, and 3-in-1 cable.

The unit’s 2T2R...

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Instagram should have rejected police pressure to ban rap song, says Oversight Board

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The Meta Oversight Board says the company shouldn’t have accepted police demands to remove drill music — a rap genre some politicians and officials have blamed for gang violence — from its platform. The board says Instagram erred in banning a UK drill song after a request from London’s Metropolitan Police.

Additionally, the board is pushing Meta to offer more transparency about its relationship with law enforcement in the future, as well as stronger consideration of a work’s artistic context. Meta must reverse the ban and respond to policy recommendations within 60 days.

The board’s decision, published today, covers a January incident over a song called “Secrets Not Safe” by musician Chinx (OS). Police emailed Meta a request soon after...

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Tax filing websites have been sending users’ financial information to Facebook

Image: Gabriel Hongsdusit

The Markup found services including TaxAct, TaxSlayer, and H&R Block sending sensitive data.

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Lyft is recycling its e-bike and scooter batteries with ex-Tesla founder’s firm

Photo by: Lindsey Nicholson / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Lyft is partnering with Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company founded by a former Tesla executive, to ensure its fleet of shared e-bikes and scooters have a second life.

It’s a noteworthy deal considering Lyft’s status as the largest electric bike-share operator in North America thanks to its bike-share business, including the extremely popular Citi Bike in New York City. The company claims that Citi Bike was the “25th most-ridden transit network in the United States.”

Redwood Materials was founded in 2017 by Jeffrey “JB” Straubel, a co-founder and former chief technology officer of Tesla. In addition to breaking down scrap from Tesla’s battery-making process with Panasonic, Redwood also recycles EV batteries from Ford, Toyota,...

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Even PowerPoint succumbs to portrait mode

Office Insiders can now create slides in portrait mode in PowerPoint for iOS on iPads and iPhones. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is introducing the ability to create slides in portrait mode in its mobile PowerPoint app. The feature is available in public beta via the Microsoft Office Insider program (running Version 2.68 or later) and is currently limited to iPhone and iPad devices.

The increased demand for portrait mode content has been driven by the popularity of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. As people have adjusted to consuming content in their phone’s native vertical orientation, tools optimized for portrait content creation have to follow suit.

Image: Microsoft

The new Portrait Mode orientation can be accessed from the Design tab.

Microsoft acknowledged this “shift towards mobile-first content creation”...

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Tuesday’s top tech news: Twitter rebuilds

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

After cutting two-thirds of its workforce, Elon Musk’s Twitter is ready to hire.

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Musk antagonist George Hotz hired to fix Twitter search — he’s got 12 weeks

Hotz demonstrating his former company’s advanced driver assistance technology. | Photo by Michael Zelenko / The Verge

George Hotz, the noted iPhone hacker who was reported to have once turned down a job at Tesla working on its driver-assistance technology, has embarked upon a 12-week “internship” at Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership. Hotz said his priority at the social media company is to fix its search feature, as well as to remove the prompt that prevents you from browsing the service on the web without logging in.

The internship came about after Hotz expressed support for Musk’s “extremely hardcore” ultimatum to Twitter’s employees, which demanded that they work “long hours at high intensity” or else depart the company. Hotz said that “this is the attitude that builds incredible things” and that he’d be willing to do an internship at the company....

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Twitter is making DMs encrypted and adding video, voice chat, per Elon Musk

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, has been public about his desire to improve how the social network’s direct messages work. In a meeting with employees today, he spelled out exactly what that looks like.

Framed by presentation slides titled “Twitter 2.0” at Twitter’s San Fransisco headquarters on Monday, Musk told employees that the company would encrypt DMs and work to add encrypted video and voice calling between accounts, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Verge.

“We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, [or] without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on...

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Domino’s is building an all-electric pizza delivery fleet with Chevy Bolts

Domino’s outfitted Chevy Bolts. | Image: Domino’s

Domino’s is gearing up to put more than 800 all-electric pizza delivery vehicles into service in the coming months, starting with over 100 of them rolling out in November. The company went with the compact Chevy Bolt EV and is wrapping the vehicles with custom branding but no other bells and whistles — just combustion-free deliveries (via electrek).

Domino will have a fleet of 855 new electric vehicles, to be exact, and while that’s not quite enough to reach all 6,135 of the pizza shops in the US, it's more than the Chevy Spark-based (gas version) ones it built with custom pizza warming oven doors in 2015. Those were called the Domino’s DXP, and only 155 of them were made. For the new Bolts, drivers will need to toss the HeatWave bags in...

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Twitter won’t restart paid verification until ‘significant impersonations’ stop, Elon Musk tells employees

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Elon Musk told Twitter employees on Monday that the company won’t relaunch its paid verification subscription, Twitter Blue, until “we’re confident about significant impersonations not happening,” according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Verge.

Musk said last week that his $8 per month Blue subscription would be made available again on November 29th. But in the meeting with employees, he said the timing of the launch was unclear: “We might launch it next week. We might not. But we’re not going to launch until there’s high confidence in protecting against those significant impersonations.”

After taking over Twitter, Musk’s first big change was to quickly introduce the ability for users to buy a blue checkmark through...

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Apple changed how reading books works in iOS 16, and I may never be happy again

Am I being dramatic? Yes. Has this change made me read on my phone less? Also yes. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Apple Books has been my main reading app for years for one very specific reason: its page-turning animation is far and away the best in the business. Unfortunately, that went away with iOS 16 and has been replaced by a new animation that makes it feel like you’re moving cards through a deck instead of leafing through a digitized version of paper. And despite the fact that I’ve been trying to get used to the change since I got onto the beta in July, I still feel like Apple’s destroyed one of the last ways that my phone brought joy into my life.

For those unfamiliar with Apple’s Books app (formerly known as iBooks), I’ll try to explain the hole that’s suddenly been punched into my reading life. Before iOS 16, the app would play a...

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iOS developers say Apple’s App Store analytics aren’t anonymous

Image: Apple

The detailed analytics data Apple records about what you do in the App Store can be tied directly to your Apple account, according to app development and research team Mysk. In a Twitter thread, Mysk shows that Apple sends what’s known as a “Directory Services Identifier” along with its App Store analytics info and argues that the identifier is also tied to your iCloud account, linking your name, email address, and more.

The thread also notes that the data is still sent even if you turn off device analytics in settings, and that Apple sends your DSID in other apps as well. In the last tweet in the thread, Mysk says: “You just need to know three things: 1- The App Store sends detailed analytics about you to Apple. 2- There’s no way to...

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The best Black Friday deals you can already get at Amazon

Amazon’s Black Friday discounts extend to more than just Amazon devices. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Black Friday is right around the corner, but Amazon is wasting no time by rolling out some excellent deals in the run-up to the main event on Friday. If you’re looking to knock out some of your holiday shopping early, we’ve rounded up a small collection of all the best discounts you can currently get on wireless headphones, 4K TVs, tablets, and more.

If you’re looking for discounts at other retailers, we’ve also put together roundups of the best deals you can find ahead of Black Friday at Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. To stay up to speed with everything happening over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, make sure to bookmark our Black Friday hub and check back for regular updates.

The best Amazon Black Friday deals on Echo...

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Elon Musk says Twitter is done with layoffs and ready to hire again

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

After purging nearly two-thirds of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce in three weeks, Elon Musk is hiring again.

During an all-hands meeting with employees on Monday, Musk said that Twitter is done with layoffs and actively recruiting for roles in engineering and sales and that employees are encouraged to make referrals, according to two people who attended and a partial recording obtained by The Verge. His comments were made the same day an unspecified wave of cuts hit Twitter’s sales department, which has lost almost all of its senior leadership since Musk took over.

Musk didn’t specify the kinds of engineers or sales roles Twitter was hiring for, and the company doesn’t currently have any open roles listed on its website. The Verge r...

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The best early Black Friday deals you can already get

You can save $300 right now on LG’s C2 OLED when you buy the 55-inch configuration. | Image: LG

Want to get a head start on your holiday shopping before the Black Friday madness officially begins on Friday? Despite the fact the annual shopping holiday is still a few days away, many major retailers are already offering a number of 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 dip even lower once the big day arrives, the discounts we’re currently seeing are nothing to scoff at. Target, Best Buy, and Walmart 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...

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Three big takeaways from this year’s United Nations climate conference

Activists demand “Loss and Damage” reparations at the COP27 UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, on November 12th, 2022. | Photo by Dominika Zarzycka / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Trying to save the planet looks less like a Marvel movie and more like tense climate negotiations that just wrapped up in Egypt over the weekend.

Tens of thousands of delegates and activists from around the world gathered for the United Nations climate summit called COP27. It’s become more urgent than ever to figure out how to live in a much more hazardous world. And the only way to stop things from getting worse is for every country to live up to pollution-cutting commitments they made in the landmark 2015 Paris agreement. But they’ll have to overcome their own drama and in-fighting to get there.

They’ll have to overcome their own drama and in-fighting to get there

There were a few major victories and some disappointing losses at the...

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Where to buy refurbished products

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Buying a refurbished device rather than one that’s brand-new can save you a ton of money. However, these products don’t usually get the spotlight from retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, or B&H Photo. You also won’t find them sitting on the homepage of Apple, Google, Nintendo, Sonos, or Microsoft, to name a few. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t find refurbs on these sites.

First, a quick description of what “refurbished” means. If it has been refurbished, that likely means the product was either broken or roughed up enough to warrant a repair. It could also mean that whoever bought it simply decided they didn’t want it and returned it to the store. The definition of what makes for a refurbished product varies depending on the seller,...

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The best free apps for video meetings

Illustration by Samar Haddad / Photo by Becca Farsace

The pandemic has had long-lasting effects on the way we work. As things have opened up, many of us are still using videoconferencing apps to keep in touch with work colleagues, family, and friends. Zoom continues to top the list of these meeting apps, but there are a bunch of other free applications out there that will allow you to meet others online.

What follows is a list of some of the most interesting. We’ve concentrated on applications that allow at least 10 or more participants on their free version.

Rather than simply assume that Zoom is best for you, you may want to try one or two of these out for yourself to see how well they fit in with your style and that of your friends. This list is a good place to start.

Zoom

The most...

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