Instagram has started putting ads in search results

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

More ads are coming to Instagram, and this time, they’re invading the platform’s search results. In a post on its blog, Instagram says it has started letting companies slip ads into the feed that appears when you tap into a post in Instagram’s search results. The change is just a test for now, but Instagram plans on launching the new placement globally “in the coming months.”

Instagram says the ads will “reach people actively searching for businesses, products and content,” so it’s not entirely clear if ads will appear for everything that you search or if it’s only for searches within those three (extremely broad) categories. We’ve reached out to Instagram for clarification and will update this article if we hear back.

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ChatGPT comes for radio

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

This is Hot Pod_,_ The Verge_’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry._ Sign up here for more.

It’s been pretty slow in the audio world for the past few weeks — except when it comes to AI, which seems to be progressing at a clip.

Today, ChatGPT comes to radio, NPR employees prepare for layoffs, and Spotify expands its audiobook business.

Widespread layoffs expected this week at NPR

Last month, NPR CEO John Lansing announced that the network would lay off 10 percent of its workforce to cover an expected $30 million budget shortfall this year. This is the week final decisions are expected to come down, and employees are bracing for the cuts. Many have taken to Twitter to garner support for their colleagues, while others implored...

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Oops, Windows’ screenshot tool may be saving stuff you cropped out, too

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

You know how researchers recently discovered that the Pixel’s built-in cropping tool didn’t actually get rid of the data you removed and that a little digging let you see the parts of the image that had been supposedly cut out? One of those researchers is now reporting that Microsoft’s Snipping Tool for Windows 11 as well as the Snip & Sketch tool in Windows 10 have a very similar exploit, which could mean that information people thought they’d gotten rid of is now floating around on the internet.

According to a tweet from David Buchanan, if you take a screenshot with the tool, press the save button, and then crop it and save it to the same file, the data may still be available in the file. Buchanan says you can even use pretty much the...

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The best laptop you can buy in 2023

Image: William Joel/The Verge

The best laptops for you, from ultraportables to high-powered editing machines

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SpaceX’s Starlink and other satellite internet providers are making light pollution worse for astronomers

People watch the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 21 second-generation Starlink satellites at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on February 27th, 2023. | Photo by Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images

The swift rise of internet satellites, forming megaconstellations, and accumulating space junk are already starting to mess with astronomers’ research. The problem is growing exponentially, scientists warn in a series of papers published recently in the journal Nature Astronomy. And they want regulators to do something about it.

The swarm of satellites functioning in low Earth orbit has more than doubled since 2019, when space-based internet initiatives really started to take off. That year, SpaceX and OneWeb launched their first batches of satellites with the goal of providing global internet coverage. Orbiting the planet at a closer range than other satellites is supposed to make those services faster, cutting down how far signals have...

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Intel graphics chief Raja Koduri leaves after five years battling Nvidia and AMD

Raja Koduri, wearing a jersey celebrating the Intel Arc GPUs and holding a silicon wafer. | Image: Intel

After five years attempting to make Intel into a competitor for Nvidia and AMD in the realm of discrete graphics for gamers and beyond — with limited success — Raja Koduri is leaving Intel to form his own generative AI startup.

Thank you Pat and @intel for many cherished memories and incredible learning over the past 5 years. Will be embarking on a new chapter in my life, doing a software startup as noted below. Will have more to share in coming weeks. https://t.co/8DcnNdso3r

— Raja Koduri (Bali Makaradhwaja) (@RajaXg) March 21, 2023

Intel hired him away from AMD in 2017, where he was similarly in charge of the entire graphics division, and it was an exciting get at the time! Not only had Intel poached a chief architect who’d just...

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Beats is preparing new ‘Studio Buds Plus’ with more powerful noise cancellation

9to5Mac uncovered images showing a black and gold finish. | Image: 9to5Mac

Beats is preparing to release an upgraded version of its wireless Studio Buds. In the latest iOS 16.4 beta released today, 9to5Mac uncovered details about new “Beats Studio Buds Plus” earbuds and images revealing a black and gold finish. The design is largely identical to the original Beats Studio Buds released in 2021.

The Verge has learned from people familiar with the company’s plans that the upcoming earbuds will feature more powerful active noise cancellation and an improved transparency mode compared to the original Studio. Similar to the first model, the Studio Buds Plus will not contain an Apple audio chip like the H1. Nor will they include automatic device switching between Apple devices.

If you’re after those Apple ecosystem...

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Google’s Bard chatbot doesn’t love me — but it’s still pretty weird

Image: Google/David Pierce

After a few hours of chatting, I haven’t found a new side of Bard. I also haven’t found much it does well.

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You can now download Nintendo’s official Breath of the Wild guidebook for free

Image: Nintendo

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Explorer’s Guide, an official guide for the game, is now available as a free PDF that you can download from Nintendo’s Zelda website (via Polygon). The guide was originally bundled with the “Explorer’s Edition” of the game, but now you can peruse it even if you don’t own that specific version.

The Explorer’s Guide is jam-packed with screenshots and tips to help you make the most of exploring the vast land of Hyrule, which could be handy if you still haven’t played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or are doing a new run ahead of the launch of the game’s nearly-here sequel, Tears of the Kingdom. (That launches on May 12th.) But the guide is also fun to look through as a refresher on what’s...

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Amazon is shutting down DPReview, the go-to camera reviews website

Take a good look — this may only be available “for a limited period.” | Image: DPReview.com

Amazon will be shutting down DPReview, the trusted and comprehensive camera reviews website, as part of the 18,000 job cuts it announced in January. According to an announcement posted on the site, the DPReview team will continue publishing reviews and other content until April 10th, after which “the site will be locked, with no further updates made.”

The site, started in 1998, has become a cornerstone of camera journalism through thorough and thoughtful reviews. If you were ever researching a DSLR mirrorless camera (or lenses), you’ve almost certainly come across its content. Personally, I spent hours pouring over the outlet’s charts, image samples, and notes on autofocus performance before I bought my first big camera, a Nikon D500.

U...

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EA is delisting three Battlefield games and Mirror’s Edge in April

Battlefield: Bad Company 2. | Image: EA

EA plans to delist Battlefield 1943, Battlefield: Bad Company, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Mirror’s Edge from digital stores on April 28th, the company announced on Tuesday. The delistings are happening ahead of online services shutting down for the games on December 8th.

Offline features for Bad Company, Bad Company 2, and Mirror’s Edge will still work after December 8th, EA says, so if you own those titles, you’ll still be able to play through their single-player campaigns. But it’s frustrating that the games are being removed from digital storefronts entirely even though parts will still work once their servers for online play are shut down.

The delistings are yet another recent reminder of the impermanence of games on digital...

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The Daniels are directing an episode of Disney Plus’ next Star Wars show

Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert and their Oscars at the 95th Academy Awards. | Image: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images

Disney and Lucasfilm have been tight-lipped about what exactly Jon Watts’ upcoming Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, which stars Jude Law, is about, but we now know at least two of the directors who will be helming the series.

Apropos of recent reports from The Hollywood Reporter that Everything Everywhere All at Once co-directing duo the Daniels were in talks to work on an unspecified Star Wars project, Daniel Kwan took to his Instagram page this week to clear up the speculation by announcing that he and Daniel Scheinert are slated to direct an episode from Skeleton Crew’s first season.

In his post, Kwan assured fans any rumors of them “getting sucked up by the ‘corporate machine’” were wholly out of pocket and explained that their decision to...

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The best Bluetooth speakers to buy right now

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Water resistance and lengthy battery life are now standard

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Jabra’s $99 Elite 4 earbuds come with active noise cancellation

Image: Jabra

Jabra’s new entry-level Elite 4 earbuds offer active noise cancellation, but they still come at a budget-friendly price tag. For $99.99, the buds promise 5.5 hours of listening time with ANC switched on or 22 hours with the case.

The Elite 4 offer a handful of upgrades over their $79.99 Elite 3 predecessors, which made our list of the best wireless earbuds. In his review of the buds, my colleague Chris Welch said the Elite 3 offer “good sound for the price” and a comfortable fit but noted two major drawbacks: the lack of ANC and multipoint.

Fortunately, Jabra has addressed both of these weaknesses with the Elite 4. In addition to ANC, the Elite 4 now come with Bluetooth multipoint, allowing them to connect to multiple devices at the same...

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TikTok CEO appears on TikTok to warn users about the TikTok ban

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

TikTok is rolling out a charm offensive ahead of Thursday’s congressional hearing, putting CEO Shou Zi Chew in users’ feeds to warn them about a looming ban. Chew posted a minute-long video to the ByteDance subsidiary’s official TikTok account, rallying users to defend the app.

Chew’s video outlines points he’ll probably hit in his House Energy and Commerce Committee testimony later this week, where legislators will question whether the app’s Chinese ownership makes it untrustworthy. That includes the news that TikTok now has 150 million American users — something news outlets recently reported based on advance information about his testimony. “That’s almost half of the US coming to TikTok,” he observes, noting the number includes 5...

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Nvidia DGX Cloud: train your own ChatGPT in a web browser for $37K a month

Last week, we learned — from Bloomberg — that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing’s AI chatbot and ChatGPT.

Don’t have access to all that capital or space for all that hardware for your own LLM project? Nvidia’s DGX Cloud is an attempt to sell remote web access to the very same thing.

Announced today at the company’s 2023 GPU Technology Conference, the service rents virtual versions of its DGX Server boxes, each containing eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory. The service includes interconnects that scale up to the neighborhood of 32,000 GPUs, storage, software, and “direct...

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The best mechanical keyboards to buy right now

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge

Whether wired, wireless, or low profile, here are our picks for the best readily available boards.

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Ford introduces an all-electric Explorer SUV, but it’s only for Europe

Image: Ford

Ford’s third-ever all-electric vehicle is a Europe-only crossover SUV with one of the automaker’s most popular nameplates. The Explorer EV will also be the first in a wave of new plug-in vehicles for the automaker’s overseas lineup, as it works toward an electric-only portfolio in Europe by 2030.

The Explorer EV may carry a familiar nameplate, but it will be built on top of an unfamiliar platform — for Ford, at least. The automaker is using Volkswagen’s flexible MEB architecture for the new EV, which will be built at Ford’s factory in Cologne, Germany. The Explorer EV will be the first of two vehicles from Ford that will utilize VW’s electric platform as part of an agreement that was established when the two companies formed a global...

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Meta security manager was reportedly hacked by Greek intelligence agency

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

A former security policy manager at Meta had her phone wiretapped and hacked by Greece’s national intelligence agency, according to a report from The New York Times. Artemis Seaford, who worked for Meta while partly living in Greece, was reportedly surveilled with the help of spyware called Predator.

Seaford worked for Meta from 2020 to 2022, where she addressed cybersecurity policy issues and often spoke with Greek and other European political officials. As noted by the Times, she first became aware that she may have been hacked when she saw her name included on a leaked list of spyware targets in November 2022. Cybersecurity researchers at Citizen Lab later confirmed that her phone had been infected with Predator in September 2021 for...

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After a string of creator controversies, Twitch is pretty sure it made the right changes

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

With new tools like Guest Star and improvements to existing monetization programs, Twitch believes it’s the best place for creators right now.

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Google says its Bard chatbot isn’t a search engine — so what is it?

Bard looks like a search engine, though Google says it isn’t one. | Image: Google

“Bard is a complement to search.” That’s how Google describes the relationship between Bard, the new chatbot entering into beta testing today, and its monolithic search engine. The way the company sees it, Bard is less a tool for finding information and more a way to automatically generate ideas and emails. And poems. And poem-emails. You want answers to search queries? That’s what Google search is for. There’s even a “Google It” button at the bottom of most Bard responses.

But the thing about Bard — and really the thing about every chatbot including ChatGPT and the new Bing — is that Google doesn’t actually get to choose how you use it. People have spent the last few months using ChatGPT to replace a search engine... and wondering what...

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Taylor Swift vs. Ronald Reagan: the Ticketmaster story

Photo illustration: Alex Parkin / The Verge

This special episode dives deep into Taylor Swift, Ticketmaster, and how a handful of policy changes in the 1980s led to one firm so thoroughly dominating the live events business in the United States that Congress held a hearing in 2023 because Taylor Swift fans were so upset about antitrust law. That sentence is wild. We’re going to unpack all of this with the help of some experts. Here we go.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL): I’d now like to turn to the subject of today’s hearings. The ticketing and live entertainment markets lack competition, and they are dominated by a single entity, Live Nation.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN): To have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition. You can’t have too much consolidation, something...

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Google opens early access to its ChatGPT rival Bard — here are our first impressions

Google is stressing that Bard is an experiment rather than a finished product. | Image: Google

Today, Google is opening up limited access to Bard, its ChatGPT rival, a major step in the company’s attempt to reclaim what many see as lost ground in a new race to deploy AI. Bard will be initially available to select users in the US and UK, with users able to join a waitlist at bard.google.com, though Google says the roll-out will be slow and has offered no date for full public access.

Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard offers users a blank text box and an invitation to ask questions about any topic they like. However, given the well-documented tendency of these bots to invent information, Google is stressing that Bard is not a replacement for its search engine but, rather, a “complement to search” — a bot that...

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Microsoft’s Bing chatbot now lets you create images via OpenAI’s DALL-E

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft is adding an AI-powered image creator to its Bing search engine today. The Bing Image Creator will be powered by an “advanced version” of OpenAI’s DALL-E model and will let Bing users create images by simply writing what you want to generate.

“For those in the Bing preview, Bing Image Creator will be fully integrated into the Bing chat experience, rolling out initially in Creative mode,” explains Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing. “By typing in a description of an image, providing additional context like location or activity, and choosing an art style, Image Creator will generate an image from your own imagination.”

Image: Microsoft

Bing’s chatbot can generate images for you.

M...

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Microsoft is building a cryptocurrency wallet into its Edge browser

Image: The Verge

Microsoft is building a cryptocurrency wallet for its Edge browser even as the crypto markets struggle. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing the Microsoft Edge built-in crypto wallet internally in recent months, with plans to eventually ship it to consumers. It’s just the latest feature coming to Microsoft’s increasingly bloated Edge browser.

Screenshots of the crypto wallet leaked online last week thanks to Twitter user Albacore, who regularly documents unreleased features in Windows. Microsoft’s description of the crypto wallet says it has “simplified experiences that make Web3 easier to interact with” and that it has “integrated security features to protect you from unsecure...

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Adobe Express is trying to make everyone at the office a designer

By integrating with Adobe’s AEM application, both company assets and completed designs can be shared freely across the organization without jumping between platforms. | Image: Adobe

Adobe has unveiled Adobe Express for Enterprise, a new version of the Adobe Express cloud-based design platform that’s meant to make content creation more accessible for those without professional design experience. Announced today at the Adobe Summit conference, Adobe Express for Enterprise is available now as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud Enterprise subscription (starting at $36 a month per license) and is meant to support collaboration across organizations.

Adobe is also introducing new generative AI tools to the service that’ll enable users to quickly create designs or word art that is safe to use in commercial applications, freeing up graphic designers to focus on more pressing workloads.

Adobe Express (previously called Adobe...

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How to take control of another computer using Google Chrome Remote Desktop

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

You bought your parents / grandparents / other relatives a new computer, set it up, and showed them all of its nifty new features. You’ve gone home, knowing that you’ve made them very happy. But deep down, you know that this isn’t the end of the story.

It’s not going to be long before that dreaded call comes in asking for support. “I can’t find the draft of the email I started!” “Why can’t I get on that Zoom conference?” “My speaker / mouse / keyboard isn’t working!” They’re going to want you to talk them through a fix, which (depending on how computer-savvy they are) is probably going to take a minimum of several hours out of your day.

But there is a solution. If both you and your troubled relative use the Chrome browser (or own a...

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Adobe made an AI image generator — and says it didn’t steal artists’ work to do it

Adobe’s AI image generator in Adobe Firefly. | Image: Adobe

Adobe is finally launching its own AI image generator. The company is announcing a “family of creative generative AI models” today called Adobe Firefly and releasing the first two tools that take advantage of them. One of the tools works like DALL-E or Midjourney, allowing users to type in a prompt and have an image created in return. The other generates stylized text, kind of like an AI-powered WordArt.

This is a big launch for Adobe. The company sits at the center of the creative app ecosystem, and over much of the past year, it’s stayed on the sidelines while newcomers to the creative space began to offer powerful tools for creating images, videos, and sound for next to nothing. At launch, Adobe is calling Firefly a beta, and it’ll...

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Comedians are trying to make the metaverse cool, but it won’t let them

Illustration by Vincent Kilbride / The Verge

Dedicated creators have built their own communities and spaces in Meta’s Horizon Worlds. But they feel the company isn’t supporting them as well as it could.

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TikTok bans deepfakes of nonpublic figures and fake endorsements in rule refresh

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

As the prospect of a US TikTok ban continues to grow, the video app has refreshed its content moderation policies. The rules on what content can be posted and promoted are largely unchanged but include new restrictions on sharing AI deepfakes, which have become increasingly popular on the app in recent months.

The bulk of these moderation policies (or “Community Guidelines,” in TikTok’s parlance) is unchanged and unsurprising. There’s no graphic violence allowed, no hate speech, and no overtly sexual content, with gradated rules for the latter based on the subject’s age. One newly expanded section, though, covers “synthetic and manipulated media” — aka AI deepfakes, which have become increasingly popular on the app in recent months.

P...

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