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Sonos has a speaker for practically every price point. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Sonos has an ever-growing lineup, and after you’ve bought your first speaker, you’ll likely want to put one in every room.
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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The US Department of Justice has charged eight online finance influencers with criminal securities fraud for running a $114 million pump-and-dump scheme on their collective 1.5 million Twitter followers.
According to an indictment, members of a Discord-based forum called Atlas Trading used that platform and Twitter to promote stocks they’d purchased in large quantities, making misleading statements about the stocks’ value and their intent to hold it. Once followers had driven up the price, the group allegedly secretly sold off the stock to maximize their profits. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a parallel civil complaint. Both complaints charge seven of the men directly with securities fraud, while an eighth member is...
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The star of Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure. | Image: Netflix
Of all the many Sanrio characters, none speak to me quite like Gudetama: a genderless, aimless egg that wants nothing besides some soy sauce and to be left alone. Same. The character makes for adorable stickers and T-shirts, and now it’s being stretched out into its own series on Netflix. It seems entirely unnecessary, and it mostly is — we don’t really need to know any more about Gudetama other than its distinct lack of motivation. Even still, the show — dubbed Gudetama: An Eggcellent Adventure — manages to be just charming enough to justify its brief run. Whereas many TV shows can be exhausting, Gudetama is instead viewing for when you’re exhausted.
The premise is, naturally, pretty goofy: Gudetama and a baby chick both somehow hatch...
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Super Nintendo World Hollywood. | Image: Universal Studios
Nearly two years after Universal Studios opened its first Super Nintendo World park in Japan, the second one will debut in the US as promised at Universal Studios Hollywood next February. When it opens, there will only be one ride, the augmented reality-enhanced Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge.
When we tried out the version in the Japan park, we experienced “an AR action game set on a go-kart track, where you’re drifting through the virtual course and firing virtual shells at virtual opponents — as the kart moves through the track in real life.”
According to Universal Studios, it’s built to be a repeatable ride with plenty of interactivity and “a variety of outcomes.” It doesn’t appear that the other ride in the Japan park, a Yoshi’s...
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Redwood Materials is locating its new EV battery recycling facility in the “heart of the ‘Battery Belt’”. | Image: Redwood Materials
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company founded by a former Tesla executive, announced today that it will build a massive $3.5 billion facility in South Carolina.
The 600-acre plant, which will be located just outside Charleston “in the heart of the ‘Battery Belt,’” will employ approximately 1,500 people over 10 years and will produce 100 GWh of cathode and anode components annually, Redwood said. Ground will be broken on the new factory in the first quarter of 2023, with an eye toward initiating the first recycling process by the end of the year.
Those components are not currently manufactured in North America, forcing automakers to source most of the materials needed for electric vehicle batteries from overseas. That has had...
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Image: Warner Bros.
Director Patty Jenkins pushed back on rumors that she walked off the Wonder Woman 3 project, saying on Twitter that there was “nothing” she could do to “move anything forward at this time.” Jenkins instead blames the film’s cancellation on the massive restructuring that’s underway at Warner Bros. following its merger with Discovery.
“I never walked away. I was open to considering anything asked of me,” Jenkins explains. “DC is obviously buried in changes they are having to make, so I understand these decisions are difficult right now.” Jenkins’ response comes after last week’s report from The Wrap, which indicates that she exited Wonder Woman 3 after rejecting the studio notes on her treatment.
— Patty...
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Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images
@ElonJet, the account tracking the movements of Elon Musk’s personal jet, has been suspended from Twitter. Musk said in November that the account was a “direct personal safety risk” but that he would not ban it as part of his “commitment to free speech.”
It’s not clear what changed in the month since that tweet. Posts from @ElonJet are published to Instagram and Facebook, too, and neither show the account doing anything out of the ordinary in the past few days. The account’s last posts were yesterday, showing Musk’s jet landing in Los Angeles after a 48-minute flight.
The ban comes less than a week after the account’s creator Jack Sweeney claimed the jet tracker was being quietly restricted by Twitter. Sweeney posted a screenshot of an...
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The new Air’s display is noticeable taller and larger than the old one, and it includes a notch. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge
The 2022 MacBook Air laptop with the M2 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage is now $999 at Amazon (in the starlight color, which will arrive after Christmas) and B&H Photo. This is the first time that its starting price has sunk below the $1,000 mark, which is $50 less than it usually costs on a deal. Compared to the 2020 version that impressed us with its smooth performance and long battery life, this newer laptop has those qualities and an assortment of other selling points. Its design is thinner and lighter and its 13.6-inch screen is bigger and sharper, housing a much-improved webcam in its center notch. Like the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, it uses the convenient MagSafe magnetic charging port.
This laptop is great in...
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Owners of VW’s electric ID cars all over the world have reported problems with infotainment screens.
The German automaker’s ID family of electric cars are plagued with buggy software, causing customer headaches and leading to major setbacks for the company’s next-gen Trinity project. How can VW patch the problem?
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Polestar’s Cake moped will come in a Sky Blue exterior paint. | Image: Polestar
EV maker Polestar is extending its collaboration with Swedish e-bike company Cake to release a new battery-powered moped that, for the first time, will be available in North America.
The limited-edition, customized version of Cake’s Makka moped will feature a Sky Blue exterior color inspired by Polestar’s O2 roadster concept, which was first unveiled earlier this year. The concept is expected to go into production as the Polestar 6 starting in 2026.
Image: Polestar
This is the second model to be released by Polestar and Cake since the two Swedish companies first got together in 2021. The first model was also a Makka moped, but with a white exterior color called Snow Matte.
Cake’s Makka moped has a top speed of 28...
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Google has launched chatbots like Assistant, but has kept AI improvements to its search engine in the background. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The launch of ChatGPT has prompted some to speculate that AI chatbots could soon take over from traditional search engines. But executives at Google say the technology is still too immature to put in front of users, with problems including chatbots’ bias, toxicity, and their propensity for simply making information up.
According to a report from CNBC, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean addressed the rise of ChatGPT in a recent all-hands meeting. One employee asked if the launch of the bot — built by OpenAI, a company with deep ties to Google rival Microsoft — represented a “missed opportunity” for the search giant. Pichai and Dean reportedly responded by saying that Google’s AI language models are just as...
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TikTok has started testing a new horizontal full-screen mode. TechCrunch reports that select TikTok users are starting to see a new full-screen button on regular square and rectangular videos. The button, much like a similar one on YouTube, shifts the TikTok video into a horizontal full-screen mode.
TikTok confirmed the limited test to TechCrunch, after several users have been noticing the full-screen button appear in recent weeks. It now brings the social video network even closer to YouTube. What’s largely set TikTok and YouTube apart is TikTok’s focus on portrait video, with creators having to create separate videos for both TikTok and YouTube to utilize the different platform’s strengths.
why can i fullscreen a tiktok☠️☠️ p...
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Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba is unable to purchase Arm’s most advanced chip designs due to US and UK export controls. The Financial Times reports that Arm has concluded that its latest Neoverse V series chip designs can’t be sold to Alibaba because the US and UK wouldn’t approve the sale and provide licenses to export the chip designs to China.
The US introduced sweeping restrictions on chip sales to China in October, meant to impair Beijing’s military and technological capabilities. Manufacturers like Intel and Micron have to obtain a license from the US Commerce Department to export chip-making equipment and semiconductors to Chinese companies, and the UK has followed with similar export restrictions.
Arm, owned by Japanese investor...
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Image: Microsoft
Microsoft is planning to add Teams chat integration into Outlook. The software giant has started testing this new feature recently, and Microsoft says it will be available for all users in March 2023.
“This feature provides an easy Teams chat experience from Outlook in the context of a meeting for participants to send a quick message or review the chat,” reads an item on Microsoft’s roadmap for its productivity and cloud services.
The chat integration appears to be limited to Outlook calendar items, and will be useful for meeting organizers and participants to discuss a meeting in real time rather than sending emails back and forth.
Teams messages will also appear in Outlook on the web search results
Microsoft is also planning to...
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Laura Normand / The Verge
Jack Dorsey has responded to Elon Musk’s purported exposé known as “The Twitter Files,” and he’s done so in an essay that’s mercifully not written as a Twitter thread. In it, the social network’s co-founder and former CEO says that he believes the company has nothing to hide, contrary to how the files have been presented. He also says he wishes the information had been “released Wikileaks-style,” and asks that the internet not go after Twitter employees for perceived slights. Of course, his article also promotes his own social networking protocol and Bitcoin.
Dorsey’s response comes after Elon Musk has spent over a week promoting five selective document releases known as the Twitter Files, which show internal documents, Slack logs, and...
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The Steam Beta in a Tesla. | Image: Tesla
Tesla’s new “Holiday Update” adds a few long-awaited new features, including the ability to play games from Steam in your car and support for Apple Music.
Tesla already offers a bunch of games for owners like Cuphead and Stardew Valley, and the official addition of Steam doesn’t come as a total surprise, as CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company was “making progress” with a Steam integration in July. But now that Steam for Tesla is finally here, owners could have a lot more games available to them.
Tesla says Steam will be available on “new” Model S & X vehicles. While that’s a somewhat vague description, it seems likely to refer to the “Plaid” versions of those cars, as those are equipped with an AMD Ryzen processor and a discrete AMD...
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Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of FTX, was denied bail on Tuesday after a Bahamian judge deemed him a flight risk, according to Reuters. An extradition hearing is scheduled for February 8th.
Bankman-Fried, nicknamed “SBF,” was arrested in the Bahamas Monday evening after US prosecutors informed the Bahamas of sweeping criminal charges expected to be filed against the disgraced crypto darling. In an unsealed indictment Tuesday, prosecutors at the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York charged Bankman-Fried with eight counts of fraud, including lying to investors and violating US campaign finance law.
Earlier on Tuesday, Bankman-Fried appeared before a Bahamas court in his first public appearance since FTX’s November...
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Turns out reading the terms of service wouldn’t have saved FTX customers. | The Verge
The US government says it was fraud from the jump. The complaint made public today by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has some hair-raising details — and if it’s right, Sam Bankman-Fried hasn’t been telling the truth for quite some time. According to the complaint, Bankman-Fried operated Alameda Research and FTX as a common enterprise, for instance. This complaint is civil.
In a press conference today, US attorney Damian Williams characterized Alameda Research and FTX as “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”
Bankman-Fried said that he “didn’t know exactly what was going on” at Alameda Research and that he “wasn’t running Alameda.” According to...
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The now-playing screen shows a red DJ button that enables the live streaming-like function. | Image: Tidal
Tidal, the high-bitrate quality music streaming service, is testing a new feature that lets its HiFi Plus subscribers play DJ. Participants of the service’s Early Access Program can switch from playing music just for themselves to a DJ session, which then provides a link that can be sent to friends who can listen in.
Tidal DJ works like running your own live radio broadcast or a headphones-only silent party. It’s similar to remote sharing features from other streaming services, like Spotify’s remote group session or Apple’s SharePlay — except you don’t have to know who the listeners are. In that way, it’s more like Turntable.fm or the old Spotify add-on (when Spotify wanted to be the “OS of music”) SoundDrop.
The Tidal feature can let...
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The company also said its improved its spam detection. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube says it will begin to warn users when it’s spotted and removed their comments for violating the company’s guidelines, according a post signed by “Rob” at TeamYouTube. Big creators have been increasingly drawing awareness to comment spam on the platform, and this change and other updates shared Tuesday could help reduce the volume of spam.
If the user keeps posting abusive comments, YouTube may block them from posting further for up to 24 hours. “Our testing has shown that these warnings / timeouts reduce the likelihood of users leaving violative comments again,” Rob writes in the post. The notification is only available for English comments for now, “but we hope to bring it to more languages in the coming months,” Rob says. The...
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Image: Viz Media
Netflix is making yet another live-action anime adaptation, and this time, it’s taking on My Hero Academia. In an announcement on its website, the streamer says filmmaker Shinsuke Sato (I Am a Hero, Kingdom) will serve as director, while Obi-Wan Kenobi producer Joby Harold is penning the script.
My Hero Academia takes place in a universe where the majority of humans are born with superpowers — called quirks — and centers around the once-quirkless Izuku Midoriya (or Deku). When Midoriya’s granted super strength from the hero he idolizes the most, All Might, he’s accepted into the prestigious UA High School for heroes-in-training. There, meets other quirk-wielding students while working toward unlocking his true strength and coming...
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Like Amazon’s Echo speakers, its various smart displays come in a range of sizes. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
Amazon’s current Echo lineup offers a broad selection of smart speakers and displays that can fit just about anywhere in your home. Whether you want to place a voice assistant in your living room, replace the bulletin board in your office, or pick up a touchscreen-enabled device to showcase recipes in the kitchen, there's an Echo device for just about every occasion and use case.
Regardless of why you might want one, there’s also always a way to save on Echo devices, from the last-gen Dot to the wall-mounted Echo Show 15. Even when they’re selling at full price, for instance, Amazon offers a 25 percent discount when you trade in select devices, meaning there are still other ways to save money when none of the models are on sale.
Below,...
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NPR will not host its usual throngs of summer interns this year due to financial pressures.
I hope you all had a great weekend. We have a lot to dive into today, so let’s get to it: NPR cuts its summer internship program, Proof leads to justice, and SiriusXM keeps a longtime podcast in the fold with a new deal.
Facing $10 million in budget cuts, NPR axes summer internship program
NPR, which instituted a near-total hiring freeze last month, is taking another drastic step to save money by canceling its prestigious summer internship program.
The news was first tweeted out Tuesday morning by All Things Considered technical director Stu Rushfield. “This makes me truly sad,” he said. “@NPRinterns are part of NPR’s lifeblood & a pipeline of great talent.” Former interns chimed in that many owe their careers in radio to the training...
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T-Mobile is doing spectrum stuff again. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
T-Mobile has enjoyed an undeniable head start in 5G in the US, thanks to its lucrative Sprint deal, and it’s turning some old spectrum around to pad out its lead. The company has deployed its 1,900MHz spectrum nationwide on its mid-band Ultra Capacity 5G network. The 1,900MHz band has a new lease on life after previously serving the now-defunct Sprint LTE and T-Mobile 3G networks.
T-Mobile used its 1,900MHz holdings in a past life to host 3G HSPA+ service while it built out an LTE network using 1,700MHz spectrum. This was also instrumental in making sure unlocked 3G iPhones could use T-Mobile’s network — the 1,700MHz spectrum it relied on for 3G wasn’t compatible with the iPhone. Meanwhile, Sprint used its 1,900MHz spectrum to build out...
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Image: Apple
It’s not every day that Apple releases a brand new app, but you’ll likely notice a new icon in your library after updating to iOS and iPadOS 16.2 or macOS 13.1. On Tuesday, Apple launched the Freeform app, which its press release describes as “an infinite canvas” for “creative brainstorming and collaboration.” In short, it’s a virtual whiteboard you can use with friends — so we tried it out to see how well it handled that task.
Apple announced Freeform during its WWDC keynote earlier this year, showing off the ability to add photos, files, drawings, links, notes, and more to a virtual canvas, either by yourself or with others. Of course, Freeform also integrates with other Apple apps — the app has buttons that let you launch a discussion...
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Yuga Labs may have landed the Bored Ape Yacht Club in hot water. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
On Thursday, December 8th, Scott+Scott Attorneys at Law LLP filed a class action complaint on behalf of plaintiffs Adam Titcher and Adonis Real with the United States Central District Court of California, Western Division. The complaint targets the company Yuga Labs Inc., most famously known for its Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection. However, other defendants include a long list of celebrities deemed responsible for unrealistically hyping up the value of Yuga Labs’ intangible goods.
A report by Deadline also pointed out that some of the defendants cited in the class action include Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Madonna, Jimmy Fallon, and Kevin Hart, among others.
Some of the specific charges include violations of unfair competition...
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Race Routes is now officially live in watchOS 9.2. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
watchOS 9.2 started rolling out today along with the iOS 16.2 update, and with it comes two new running features: Automatic Track Detection and Race Routes. The former uses Apple Maps and GPS to detect the exact lane of a track you’re running on, while the latter lets you race against your past self on your favorite routes. Additionally, the Apple Watch Ultra can now get up to 17 hours in Low Power Mode during multisport activities.
Automatic Track Detection can tell whenever you arrive at any standard 400-meter outdoor track. Runners will be prompted to select the lane at the start of an Outdoor Run workout. (If you have to run to the track itself, you’ll be prompted during the workout after arriving.) During track workouts, you’ll also...
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I contributed a fair number of those meows. | Image: Annapurna Interactive
PlayStation’s new 2022 Wrap-Up is available now, giving you a look at things like your personal playtime and some accomplishments from the broader PlayStation community.
The recap is broken into four main sections: total playtime, top games, trophies earned, and PlayStation Plus. Within each section, not only will you see your own stats but also community statistics for some of PlayStation’s biggest games of the year, including Horizon Forbidden West and God of War Ragnarök. The recap also reveals that players were absolute terrors in Stray, with 1 billion meows and 12 million “things ruined.” (I admit to contributing significantly to those numbers.)
As part of the recap, you’ll get a summary card you can share with your friends or on...
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The App Store may no longer be the only place to get software for your iPhone or iPad. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Apple is planning to let users install alternative app stores on iOS, according to a report from Bloomberg. The shift would be a remarkable change from the company, which has famously only allowed iPhone and iPad users to download apps from the App Store.
The plans are reportedly being spurred on by the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is meant to enact “rules for digital gatekeepers to ensure open markets” when its restrictions become a requirement in 2024, according to a press release.
Changes would also come to NFC chip and camera access, Find My network for rivals to the AirTag, web browsing engines and other areas of Apple’s software. The company still plans to charge developers for access to iOS even with side loading.
—...
The VergeAmazon shrunk its second-gen Echo for your car, but it hasn’t gotten any more useful.