The Mandalorian’s third season premieres on March 1st

It’s a slight delay — Disney previously announced the show would be coming February 2023. | Image: Disney

The Mandalorian’s long-awaited third season debuts on Disney Plus on March 1st, Disney announced on Thursday. Disney had previously said it would be out in February, but it turns out that we’re getting it just a little bit later than expected.

Season 2 premiered in October 2020, so it’s been some time since we’ve had new episodes of the show starring the galaxy’s favorite bounty hunter / baby alien duo. They made an appearance in a few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett, but soon, we’ll be able to see the both of them together once again.

The Mandalorian and Grogu return March 1, only on #DisneyPlus. pic.twitter.com/99K7JiDlbH

— Disney+ (@DisneyPlus) December 1, 2022

The third season comes on the heels of the excellent Andor, which...

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Nvidia’s melted power cables are an Nvidia problem, PCI standards body suggests

Image: Nvidia

Two weeks ago, Nvidia and tech watchdog GamersNexus agreed on one thing: if your Nvidia RTX 4090 graphic card’s 12VHPWR power cable starts smoking and melting, it’s probably because you didn’t plug it in all the way. But the PCI-SIG standards body is now suggesting that Nvidia and partners should have accounted for that.

GPU manufacturers “need to take all appropriate and prudent measures to ensure end user safety, including testing for the reported problem cases,” reads part of a statement from the PCI-SIG. The group also spends 49 words deflecting any blame away from itself:

Members are reminded that PCI-SIG specifications provide necessary technical information for interoperability and do not attempt to address proper design,...

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How to block a phone number on Android

Samar Haddad / The Verge

When a number that is obviously spam hits your phone, Android will almost always warn you and allow you to immediately block that number (and report it as spam). But what if a number is not immediately recognized as spam? Or what if you’re dealing with a harasser who won’t stop calling? You can still block the number quickly and easily.

In this article, we’ll look at how to block numbers on both Pixel and Samsung phones. If you have a phone from another manufacturer, the method shouldn’t be too different from these.

How to screen unfamiliar calls

If you’re like us, you will often get a call from an unfamiliar source that isn’t a known spam call. Is it a spam call that has slipped through? A charity looking for a donation? Or somebody...

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The Supreme Court battle for Section 230 has begun

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The first shots have been fired in a Supreme Court showdown over web platforms, terrorism, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. On Tuesday and Wednesday, petitioners filed briefs in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, a pair of lawsuits blaming platforms for facilitating Islamic State attacks. The court’s final ruling will determine web services’ liability for hosting illegal activity, particularly if they promote it with algorithmic recommendations.

The Supreme Court took up both cases in October: one at the request of a family that’s suing Google and the other as a preemptive defense filed by Twitter. They’re two of the latest in a long string of suits alleging that websites are legally responsible for failing to...

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Disney’s latest AI tool de-ages actors in seconds

Image: Disney

Remember when making actors look older or younger in movies was a huge deal? The amount of postproduction work to achieve realistic results was immense back in the day, but now, researchers from Disney have revealed FRAN, a new artificial intelligence tool that can convincingly age or de-age an actor in a fraction of the time.

In an academic paper, Disney Research Studios explains that FRAN (which stands for face re-aging network) is a neural network that was trained using a large database containing pairs of randomly generated synthetic faces at varying ages, which bypasses the need to otherwise find thousands of images of real people at different (documented) ages that depict the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background.

...

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Watch this live Nintendo concert featuring holograms of K.K. Slider and Splatoon 3’s idols

Image: Nintendo

Move over, Spotify Wrapped. My favorite music thing on the internet this week is Nintendo’s official English translation of its Splatoon 3 and Animal Crossing concert with holograms of the characters from the games.

The concert, starring the musical dog K.K. Slider as a DJ and the idol superstars from Splatoon 3, originally took place at the Japan-only Nintendo Live 2022 event in October. I watched it after the fact, thanks to generous fans who had uploaded the livestreamed concert, but the characters’ subtitles were in Japanese.

The music rocks. For the first half of the show, DJ K.K. plays a bunch of remixes of his songs from the Animal Crossing series that are easy to bob your head along to. Then, Deep Cut brings down the house with...

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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ first trailer is full of Maximal action

Optimus Primal in his beast mode. | Image: Paramount

After years of Paramount’s live-action Transformers movies feeling like they were coasting on their good looks, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ first teaser trailer is here to remind everyone that Beast Wars has always been the superior chunk of the larger Transformers franchise.

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, from director Steven Caple Jr., revolves around ex-military gearhead Noah (Anthony Ramos) and museum researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback), two humans who accidentally become embroiled in yet another conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons.

As tends to be the case with recent Transformers stories, neither Noah nor Elena know about the Cybertronians like Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) hiding in secret on Earth...

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OpenAI’s new chatbot can explain code and write sitcom scripts but is still easily tricked

OpenAI’s latest tool / toy is an AI chatbot. | Image: OpenAI

OpenAI has released a prototype general purpose chatbot that demonstrates a fascinating array of new capabilities but also shows off weaknesses familiar to the fast-moving field of text-generation AI. And you can test out the model for yourself right here.

ChatGPT is adapted from OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. While GPT-3 in its original form simply predicts what text follows any given string of words, ChatGPT tries to engage with users’ queries in a more human-like fashion. As you can see in the examples below, the results are often strikingly fluid, and ChatGPT is capable of engaging with a huge range of topics, demonstrating big improvements to chatbots seen even a few years ago.

But the...

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The EU wants to legitimize carbon removal schemes

The weekly meeting of the EU Commission on November 30th, 2022 in Brussels, Belgium. | Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

The European Union has taken a major step toward legitimizing attempts to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. Yesterday, the European Commission adopted a proposal for new rules on how to certify carbon removal, a still controversial strategy for limiting climate change.

The worry is that, without the proposed rules, ineffective carbon removal projects might derail climate goals and give polluters a sham to hide behind while presenting themselves as green. So, to weed out such projects, the European Commission wants to establish a framework for certifying “high-quality” carbon removals.

“Higher transparency will ensure trust from stakeholders and industry, and prevent greenwashing,” the Commission said in its announcement.

“The EU is...

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New Amnesia game offers ‘semi-open world’ gameplay and a gun

Frictional Games

Frictional Games, maker of SOMA and the Amnesia series, has announced it’s working on a new entry in its roster of survival horror titles with Amnesia: The Bunker.

With a release date sometime next year, Amnesia: The Bunker seems to be unlike any of its predecessors. For starters, in the game’s short announcement trailer, it looks like you’re not going to be forced to stare down unknown eldritch terrors with naught but a flashlight and thinking happy thoughts. No, you’re getting a gun.

Image: Frictional Games

“So anyway, I started blasting.”

The arrival of guns to Amnesia will no doubt cause major discussion as the series was lauded for specifically not giving you the means to just blast your enemies to bits....

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RDNA 2 quietly arrives in budget laptops

A very boring render of the IdeaPad 1 from Lenovo’s website. | Image: Lenovo

Back in September, AMD launched some of the first mobile chips from its upcoming Ryzen 7000 line, the budget-oriented “Mendocino” series. At launch, they were described as tailored to “the everyday laptop,” combining last-gen Zen 2 CPU cores with high-end RDNA 2 graphics.

That RDNA 2, generally seen powering much more expensive machines as well as the PS5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles, could become widely available at a budget price point was an exciting prospect. But Mendocino only announced one partner at launch: Acer and its Aspire 3 series. Since then, we’ve basically heard... crickets about the Mendocino series.

That is, until today. Kudos to Notebook Italiafor spotting several new items on Lenovo’s Product Specifications...

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A black hole ripped apart a star and brought together astronomers from around the world

An artist’s impression of a tidal disruption event. | Image: Carl Knox – OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of Technology

It was an event not seen in more than a decade: a sudden flash of energy launched out from the center of a distant galaxy, bright enough to be visible from 8.5 billion light-years away. With a burst of light equivalent to more than 1,000 trillion suns, the flash was first detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a survey of the entire night sky conducted from the Palomar Observatory in California.

“On Valentine’s Day this year, we found a source that was puzzling. It was just weird!” Igor Andreoni of the University of Maryland, lead author of one of two papers about the event, told The Verge. “And weird is good in science. It means it’s something you can learn from.”

Within days, astronomers around the world turned their telescopes...

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Annapurna is launching its own animation division

Teaser art of Ballister Blackheart and Nimona from Annapurna’s upcoming Nimona feature. | Image: Netflix

After co-producing a number of animated projects like Sausage Partyand Missing Linkwith the help of other studios, Annapurna Pictures is gearing up to launch its own in-house animation arm with two Disney alums leading the division.

Today, Annapurna announced that it has tapped former Walt Disney Animation Studios president Andrew Millstein and screenwriter Robert Baird (Monsters University, Big Hero 6) to head up its animation production arm, which will release the studio’s forthcoming Nimona adaptation in 2023 with Netflix. In a press release about the new studio, Annapurna founder and CEO Megan Ellison said that Millstein and Baird’s contributions to Nimona’s production were key to bringing the project home and described bringing...

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Google’s trying to prove it’s serious about Wear OS 3 with holiday updates

While the Pixel Watch had a decent debut, not everyone is convinced Google is serious about wearables. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Earlier this fall, Google finally launched the Pixel Watch. It wasn’t a perfect smartwatch, but it was a respectable first attempt in a category that Google notoriously neglected for years.

Even so, it’s hard to shake off the idea that Google might prematurely abandon its revived wearable ambitions if it doesn’t do “well enough.” This is why the company has been quietly chugging away at Wear OS improvements in the background. The latest is a round of “holiday” Android updates that bring new Tiles, an improved Google Keep app, and Google Assistant integration for Adidas Running.

GIF: Google

The Google Keep update adds nicer visuals.

GIF: Google

Just in time for New Year’s resolutions.

...

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Android is introducing an accessible reading mode and digital car key sharing

Android’s latest updates aim to boost accessibility and add fresh quality-of-life features for drivers and watchOS users. | Image: Google

Android has announced a batch of new features for mobile and smartwatch devices, introducing new accessibility tools and quality-of-life updates for digital car keys, Google TV, and watchOS. One of the major announcements is the introduction of a reading mode for Android — a new feature that creates a more accessible screen reading experience without being tied to specific apps.

To use Reading mode, you have to install an app from the Google Play store, which provides new adjustable display and audio options — such as contrast, font type, and size — allowing users to customize how content is viewed on their phone to best serve their individual needs. Additionally, a new text-to-speech function with speed control is available with a...

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Summer Game Fest 2023 kicks off just a few days before E3

Summer Game Fest host Geoff Keighley at The Game Awards in 2019. | Photo by JC Olivera/Getty Images

Summer Game Fest is back again in 2023 with its first-ever in-person kickoff show on June 8th, which just so happens to be a few days before E3’s big return.

For the past three years, Summer Game Fest has served as the gaming industry’s big June blowout while E3 has been in flux due to the pandemic. E3 hasn’t happened as a big in-person event for quite a while; it was canceled in 2020, held as a series of remote events in 2021, and canceled again in 2022. In its place, Summer Game Fest became one of the biggest virtual events of the June gaming season. (In 2021, it was where we saw the first gameplay trailer of Elden Ring.)

This year, both Summer Game Fest and E3 are back with major in-person components in the Los Angeles area, setting...

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Electric robot tractors powered by Nvidia AI chips are here

Monarch Tractor, an electric smart tractor company, says its first AI-powered farming vehicles, dubbed the MK-V, are rolling off the production line. It’s the Livermore, California-based startup’s first product, and it uses Nvidia’s Jetson edge AI platform to perform agricultural tasks with or without a driver behind the wheel.

“The NVIDIA Jetson enables the MK-V to run low-latency, real-time AI applications while at the same time conserving energy for longer battery life and extended run time,” said Monarch Tractor CEO Praveen Penmetsa.

Image: Nvidia

Each MK-V tractor runs on six Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX modules.

Each MK-V uses six of the Jetson Xavier NX system-on-modules that enable them to navigate fields...

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The $70 Echo Show 8 comes with a free Echo Show 5 at Amazon

The Echo Show 8 is the larger and more capable version of the Show 5. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Cyber Monday is in the past, but some new and great tech deals have arrived for us to tell you all about. The flashiest one is a bundle from Amazon that pairs the latest Echo Show 8 with a free Kids Edition of the Echo Show 5 for $69.99, knocking $155 off the usual cost of buying both of these Alexa-powered smart displays.

The Echo Show 8 is still our favorite smart display in Amazon’s lineup, partially because it can make Zoom calls with its built-in camera, unlike the second-gen Echo Show 5. Its display, performance, and sound quality have the advantage over the smaller option, and it offers snappy performance for the price. Read our review.

The Kids Edition of the Echo Show 5 that you’ll get for free with this deal is virtually...

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The Eternal Daughter is a quiet ghost story with a double dose of Tilda Swinton

Tilda Swinton as Julie in The Eternal Daughter. | Image: A24

The first thing that you should know about The Eternal Daughter, the latest film from director Joanna Hogg, is that it’s not as spooky as the trailer makes it seem. It is indeed a ghost story, one with some unsettling moments and themes, but the scariest thing about the movie is its frighteningly realistic depiction of familial relationships and how they can be damaged by grief. The second thing you should know is that Tilda Swinton plays her own mother, and she’s incredible.

The film appears to be set in the same semi-autobiographical universe as Hogg’s The Souvenir films and centers on a daughter and her elderly mother as they visit a quaint Welsh hotel. (Both characters are played by Swinton.) It’s the kind of old building that has...

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The Verge’s 2022 fitness and wellness gift guide

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Keeping your mind and body in tip-top shape takes work, but these gift ideas should make things a bit easier for the fitness buff in your life.

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Canoo repurposed its bubbly electric pickup truck for the US Army

Image: Canoo

Struggling EV startup Canoo has delivered its first electric pickup truck to the US Army for “analysis and demonstration.” The company’s Light Tactical Vehicle (LTV) is built on the same platform as Canoo’s Duplo toy-looking EV prototype truck that was first revealed in 2021.

Back in July, the army announced that it had awarded Canoo a $67,500 contract to produce a “new light to heavy duty Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) or series-hybrid electric wheeled vehicle, for Government analysis and demonstration,” according to the original solicitation.

Canoo, which was founded in 2017 by two former employees of Faraday Future, has developed several EV concepts, including a multipurpose delivery van and an electric truck. The company is also...

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Now 1Password remembers sites that use third-party accounts like Google or Facebook to log in

Image: 1Password

Password management provider 1Password just launched its new “sign-in with” feature that automatically saves and fills logins using third-party credentials. 1Password thus is now able to give customers an option to sign in to sites or apps that require, say, their Google, Apple, GitHub, or Facebook credentials with just one click.

Now, users don’t need to remember which provider they used for this specific service since 1Password can do it for them.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to sign in to Spotify, but you can’t remember if you usually sign in with your Gmail, Apple, or Facebook accounts. A 1Password pop-up will inform you which provider it’s linked to and ask whether you’d like to click to sign in with your stored login...

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EU warns Elon Musk’s Twitter has ‘huge work ahead’ to comply with its strict new rules

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images

A top European Union official has said that Twitter has “huge work ahead” to get ready for the bloc’s strict new rules for online platforms. Thierry Breton, the commissioner responsible for implementing the upcoming Digital Services Act (DSA), posted a short video clip of a meeting with CEO Elon Musk, saying that he welcomed Musk’s “intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA.”

According to the Financial Times, Breton said Twitter needed to make a number of changes to meet the DSA’s requirements. It will need to “aggressively” tackle disinformation, submit to an audit, provide clear criteria about which users are at risk of being banned, and carefully consider how it lifts bans in the future. Breton posted a full “DSA Checklist,” via his...

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Thursday’s top tech news: December is here, and there are security lapses under the tree

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Eufy and LastPass suffer security lapses, and Spotify Unwrapped takes over social media.

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Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial

Elon Musk speaking at the Neauralink 2022 event | screenshot from Neuralink

At a ‘show and tell’ event on Wednesday, Elon Musk saidthat his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, could implant one of its devices in someone’s head within the next six months — meaning it’s not happening this year. He also claimed that he would get the device implanted in his own head at some point in the future.

During the presentation, Musk said that the company had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States. Previously, Musk had said that he’d hoped for human trials to begin in 2020, and then 2022. Now, that’s slipped to at least 2023.

Neuralink’s goal is to create a device that can be implanted in the brain,...

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Valve will give away a free Steam Deck every minute during The Game Awards

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

One more reason to watch The Game Awards this year: Valve has announced it’ll give away a Steam Deck handheld gaming PC every single minute on December 8th. With a likely runtime of 2.5 hours — last year’s ran three — the company’s probably going to be giving away at least 150 Steam Decks.

It’s the highest-end model with 512GB of solid state storage and the anti-glare screen, and all you have to do to win is sign into Steam here on December 8th and watch the show at Steam.TV or at Steam’s 2022 The Game Awards page.

Well, you do also have to be living in the US, UK, Canada, or the EU, specifically these countries:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary,...

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Anker’s Eufy lied to us about the security of its security cameras

A Eufy security camera, from Anker. | Image: Anker/Eufy

Anker has built a remarkable reputation for quality over the past decade, building its phone charger business into an empire spanning all sorts of portable electronics — including the Eufy home security cameras we’ve recommended over the years. Eufy’s commitment to privacy is remarkable: it promises your data will be stored locally, that it “never leaves the safety of your home,” that its footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that it will only send that footage “straight to your phone.”

So you can imagine our surprise to learn you can stream video from a Eufy camera, from the other side of the country, with no encryption at all.

Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge

P...

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Elon Musk says Tim Cook told him Apple ‘never considered’ removing Twitter

Musk seems to be cooling on a beef with Apple. | Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

After a conversation with Apple CEO Tim Cook, Elon Musk now says that Apple actually wasn’t threatening to pull Twitter from the App Store. On Monday, Musk claimed that Apple had “threatened to withhold Twitter” from the store, but according to a Wednesday afternoon tweet, Musk said it was a “misunderstanding” and that “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

The clarification follows a cryptic tweet earlier in the day where Musk said Cook had given him a tour of Apple’s campus. In a video, you can see a shadow of two people: Musk and someone else that resembles Cook.

Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple...

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Twitter will recommend more tweets to everyone, even if you didn’t ask for them

Twitter is bringing recommended tweets to everyone. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is bringing recommended tweets from people you don’t follow to all users, the company announced on Wednesday. Twitter is doing this because it wants to “ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform,” so it’s expanding them even to people who “may not have seen them in the past.”

Recommended tweets appear in the “home” — or non-chronological — feed, which organizes tweets algorithmically. For me, the vast majority of those tweets are from people I follow, but every once and awhile I’ll see a tweet from somebody I don’t. I was under the impression that everyone saw recommended tweets, but based on Twitter’s update on Wednesday, people who don’t already see them now will.

We want to ensure everyone on Twitter...

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LastPass' latest data breach exposed some customer information

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

LastPass has experienced another data breach, but this time, it exposed user data. According to a post from LastPass CEO Karim Toubba, hackers accessed a third-party cloud storage service used by the password manager and were able to “gain access to certain elements” of “customers’ information.”

It’s still not clear what information hackers got access to or how many customers were affected, but Toubba says that users’ passwords weren’t compromised.

We recently detected unusual activity within a third-party cloud storage service, which is currently shared by both LastPass and its affiliate GoTo. Customer passwords remain safely encrypted due to LastPass’s Zero Knowledge architecture. More info: https://t.co/xk2vKa7icq p...

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