The Fox News defamation case might be almost as entertaining as Succession

Logan Roy wishes! | Image: PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

Everything’s coming up Murdoch! Succession is back, Dominion Voting Systems won’t drop its suit, and our boy Rupert may be open to further [LCD sound system voice] discovery, discovery, discovery.

I am personally thrilled about this trial because I am a longtime Murdoch watcher. I love having more details about Rupert et al. blasted into the public sphere. This family, which owns News Corp, lurks over American journalism like Dracula’s brides over Jonathan Harker. This defamation suit is maybe the most serious challenge to their power in America I’ve seen so far.

Winning a defamation case is hard and expensive; usually people settle

The central claim of Dominion’s $1.6 billion suit is that Fox executives and hosts knew that the election...

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Twitter Blue’s new 10,000 character limit turns tweets into essays

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter Blue subscribers now have a maximum tweet length of 10,000 characters and support for bold and italic text formatting. The announcement comes just weeks after the character limit for Twitter Blue was first bumped up from 280 characters to 4,000 back in February, with the latest increase and additional formatting features seemingly designed to help Twitter compete with newsletter platforms like Substack — which has recently found itself in Elon Musk’s crosshairs.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has introduced long-form writing features. The company — under previous leadership — was testing a new Notes feature for writers and had previously purchased the Revue newsletter firm in 2021, which served as a rival to Substack. Both of...

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Hackers reportedly holding Western Digital data hostage

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Hackers who claim to have breached Western Digital have reportedly stolen around 10 terabytes of data from the company and are holding it hostage. TechCrunch spoke to the hackers who appear to have control over Western Digital’s code-signing certificate, private phone numbers belonging to company executives, stolen SAP Backoffice data, and even managed to gain administrator access to Western Digital’s Microsoft Azure instance.

Western Digital reported a “network security incident” earlier this month that allowed an “unauthorized third party” to access data from the company’s systems. The incident put Western Digital’s cloud network out of action for 10 days, and the company only just managed to bring its My Cloud service back online e...

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First look at Cybertruck’s comically large windshield wiper in action

A drone view of the giant wiper blade stretched across Cybertruck’s windshield. | Screenshot from video by Brad Sloan.

A new drone video has surfaced showing the Cybertruck’s ridiculously large windshield wiper in action. And you know what? It’s functional — and perhaps improved — but still doesn’t reach a good chunk of the glass in front of the passenger.

The video shot by Brad Sloan above Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory location on Thursday (and surfaced by Electrek) shows the Cybertruck undergoing a wind tunnel test. At the 13:42 mark you can see the truck’s single XL wiper blade start moving, with decent reach across the majority of windshield. Maybe it’s the angle, but it does seem like an improvement over some prototypes we’ve seen.

The Cybertruck’s giant windshield was one of the electric pickup’s most distinctive features when it was unveiled in 2019....

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The perfect Lego Nintendo Game Boy doesn’t exist...

Nintendo Game Boy, Lego edition — not authorized by Lego or Nintendo. | Image: Nick Lever

Nick Lever, video editor and Lego Masters Australia finalist, has recreated the original Nintendo Game Boy in bricks — and with such droolworthy detail and depth that I hereby petition Lego to make it into an official set.

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A post shared by Nick Lever (@clicklever)

It’s just 364 pieces, only 115 different parts, most of them common enough you can find ‘em dirt cheap. Almost every recognizable facet of the Game Boy is represented, from the angled rice-grain Start / Select buttons to the distinctive tint of the screen — achieved here by placing lime green tiles underneath a trans-blue window.

While there’s no removable battery tray or front speaker, you can indeed press down...

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Bungie is ready to ban XIM, Cronus cheaters from Destiny 2

Image: Bungie

Bungie is the latest online game developer to announce it’ll start monitoring, warning, and even banning Destiny 2 players who use controller-spoofing XIM hardware or similar to cheat. The company told The Verge in February that it was investigating ways to combat cheaters, and now its policy is drawing a clear line on what won’t be allowed. The move comes as other big online games, from Call of Duty to Overwatch, are also adopting methods to try to detect the hardware and either mess with or outright ban players using them.

In its blog post today, Bungie notes that “external aides” are a problem that the community is growing frustrated with — while avoiding actually mentioning the names of the devices to deter spotlighting them.

The...

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Here’s a collection of gifts you can give mom no matter the occasion

The Beats Fit Pro are a great gift for anyone who is active. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

What do you gift your mom? That’s a challenging question to answer, especially given mothers — the generous, unselfish beings they can be — are not likely to spill the beans when asked.

Luckily, we’ve done the hard work for you. With the help of The Verge staff, we’ve curated a list of some of the best tech gifts you can treat your mom — or any mother figure, really — to year-round. Whether it’s for her birthday, Mother’s Day, or Christmas, here you’ll find something that caters to all kinds of budgets and interests, ranging from smartwatches and Kindles to massage guns, robot vacuums, and more. You can rest assured that these are items we can personally vouch for as well, having tested and reviewed them ourselves.

Peruse this list...

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In Final Fantasy XVI, you can command the dog (and a whole lot more)

Square Enix

Not to be outdone byTears of the Kingdom in the summer video game blockbuster hype generation category, Final Fantasy XVI got its own State of Play, showcasing over 20 minutes of gameplay.

Final Fantasy XVI is a beautiful game, both within the cutscenes and gameplay. The combat looked slick and exciting. Clive flipped, dipped, and parried with a satisfying flourish, perfectly in line with the developers’ stated goal of making Final Fantasy XVI feel like a “high-speed rollercoaster.” The presentation went into detail on some of the smaller activities Clive can get up to when he’s not saving the world or doing whatever it is Clive does, as we’re not quite sure what his motivation is yet. Knowing the typical cadence of Final Fantasy...

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The best Xbox controller to buy right now

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Basic, premium, affordable, and customizable — lots to pick from.

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Anker, Bambu, Prusa, Creality: 3D printers suddenly have a need for speed

The $599 Creality K1. | Image: Creality

3D printers can take hours or even days to produce simple parts — but it only took two weeks for the biggest names in consumer 3D printing to declare that era is over.

On March 29th, Prusa announced the $799 Prusa MK4, its first new printer in four years. The company boasts it can print a “draft mode” 3DBenchy boat in under 20 minutes, four times faster than the 80 minutes it took with the previous generation.

Image: Prusa

The Prusa MK4 has a new mainboard, firmware, quick-swap nozzles, load cell sensor for a “perfectly smooth first layer without user interaction,” LCD screen, more precise stepper motors, and more.

On April 8th, Anker responded by doubling the speed of its already fast 250mm/s printer to...

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National Guard member arrested for leaking classified documents on Discord

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Law enforcement officials have linked a trove of classified government documents leaked on Discord to a 21-year-old Air Force National Guard member, as reported earlier by NBC News. The suspect, Jack Teixeira, was arrested at his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, on Thursday.

“Today, the Justice Department arrested Jack Douglas Teixeira in connection with an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

The Pentagon first discovered the sensitive documents posted to Discord, Twitter, Telegram, and 4chan last week. The leaks revealed details about the Russia-Ukraine war along with information about the US’s...

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EA shares new trailer for its single-player shooter with magic spells

Image: EA

EA on Thursday released a new trailer for Immortals of Aveum, a single-player “first-person magic shooter” the company is publishing under its EA Originals label. The game is being developed by Ascendant Studios, which is “made up of BAFTA and Game of the Year award-winning industry veterans,” according to a press release.

Based only on the trailer, it’s hard to tell exactly what to expect with Immortals of Aveum outside of a standard saving-the-world plot — the characters use a lot of in-world jargon. But here’s EA and Ascendant’s official description of the game from the press release:

Players experience this visceral and cinematic, story-driven game through the eyes of Jak, as he joins an elite order of battlemages, masters all three...

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Spotify finally adds iOS 16 support for home and lock screen widgets

Oh hey, a Spotify widget on the iOS 16 Lock Screen — finally! | Image: Spotify

The new version of Spotify now supports iOS 16 widgets, so you can have a swift way to get to your music from your iPhone or iPad’s Lock Screen or display album art of your recently played music right on your homescreen. Prior to the new version 8.8.26 update, Spotify support for iOS system integrations was almost nonexistent — save for crucial bare-bones support for things like Now Playing so iPhone listeners can have quick access to music controls.

Spotify is a bit late in the game to support iOS widgets in the home and lock screens. We mentioned the customizable iOS 16 lock screen as one of Apple’s greatest successes of last year (yes, you’re right, Android had it before), and competing music apps like Tidal already supported the iOS...

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Suicide Squad kills another release date

Rocksteady Studios

You could be forgiven at this point for not believing Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is ever coming out. Rocksteady Studios, of Batman: Arkham series fame, has delayed the game yet again. This is the second time the game has been delayed this year and the third overall, taking the release date from 2022 to May 26th, 2023, to some later date in 2023 to, now, February 2nd, 2024.

Earlier this year, Suicide Squad was heavily featured in Sony’s February State of Play. It was the first time players had an up-close look at the gameplay, and they were... less than enthused. Turns out, an always online, live service shooter with a battle pass is just not what people want right now. Who’da thunk?

According to the announcement, Rocksteady...

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Google Chat is getting a new look to match Docs, Sheets, and Gmail

Illustration: The Verge

Google Chat is getting a new look that matches the redesigned interfaces of Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Gmail. Like the makeovers it rolled out to its other Workspace apps, this one is also based on Google’s Material Design 3 system.

As you can see in the below GIF, you’ll notice some small tweaks to the entire interface, including rounded buttons (and a rounded search bar), along with some blue accents throughout. There have also been some minor changes to the main message view, compose setup, new topic button, and the thread panel within direct messages and spaces.

Image: Google

Earlier this week, Google also announced a new Chat feature that lets Space Managers create announcement-only channels, sort...

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How to keep Otter from automatically recording your meetings

Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge

Otter.ai is one of the more popular machine-powered transcription apps — and it’s easy to see why. Its algorithms do a good job of transcribing speech, including differentiating and identifying the people speaking. And if you use its Otter Assistant feature, it will attach to your calendar and automatically transcribe Zoom, Teams, and Meet meetings that are on that calendar — even if you don’t attend.

While that could be handy — if your boss asks you what happened at a meeting, you can have the info even if you were playing Wordle at the time — it could also be a problem. For example, what if you forgot (or didn’t notice) that the automatic function was on, and it recorded a meeting that might contain sensitive information or was...

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Twitter is rebranding Super Follows to Subscriptions

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is rebranding its “Super Follows” feature, which lets you subscribe to individual users to get access to some exclusive content, to just “Subscriptions.” Twitter owner Elon Musk promoted the feature on Thursday, noting that you can find it in the “Monetization” section of settings.

Super Follows were first announced in February 2021, and as far as we can tell, the rebranded Subscriptions have many of the same features. With Subscriptions, you can charge users so they can get access to things like exclusive tweets, subscriber-only Spaces, and special subscriber badges. Down the line, Twitter says that it hopes to include “newsletters and other Twitter features as potential bonus content.”

That line about newsletters makes this...

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Valve’s Steam Deck: all the news about the new gaming handheld

Valve’s Steam Deck and its carrying case. | Image: Valve

Catch up on our coverage of Valve’s new device

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Amazon offers free access to its AI coding assistant to undercut Microsoft

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon is making its AI-powered coding assistant free for individual developers, undercutting the $10 per month pricing of its Microsoft-made rival. In a post shared on Thursday, Amazon announced that its CodeWhisperer tool is now available to everyone who signs up to use it.

Amazon launched CodeWhisperer as a preview last year, which developers can use within various integrated development environments (IDEs), like Visual Studio Code, to generate lines of code based on a text-based prompt. While it was originally only made available to Amazon Web Services customers, the newly announced free tier should make it much more accessible to developers who don’t use AWS.

Image: Amazon

Here’s how Amazon’s CodeWhisperer...

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Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best.

Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge | Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

Can Substack handle the wrath of Elon Musk and the pain of content moderation?

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Why classic gaming names like Atari and MapleStory are still going in on the blockchain

Image: Nexon

Fans don’t seem interested, but that isn’t stopping some notable brands.

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Tears of the Kingdom is still shrouded in mystery, and that’s just the way I like it

What’s new out there? | Image: Nintendo

We’re less than a month away from the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and even though we just got a new trailer jam-packed with details, there’s still so much we don’t know about the game.

Here are a few concrete things I can point to after watching all of the released footage more times than I care to admit:

• It’s a sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
• There are a bunch of islands in the sky.
• Link somehow gets a new, glowy right arm.
• That glowy arm gives him a bunch of (incredible-looking) powers, including the ability to build and fuse things together (like vehicles).
• At some point, Zelda needs Link to find her.
• The Master Sword gets messed up.
• Ganondorf’s back.
• And so are some of Link’s friends. ...

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Here’s where you can preorder Nintendo’s Zelda-inspired Switch OLED

The Nintendo Switch OLED Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Edition is available to preorder for $359.99. | Image: Nintendo

After months of rumors, Nintendo finally confirmed recently that it’s releasing a Zelda-inspired Nintendo Switch OLED on April 28th. The special-edition console will retail for $359.99 and commemorates one of this year’s most anticipated video games, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which will drop alongside a new Zelda-themed controller and carrying case two weeks later, on May 12th.

Where to preorder the Nintendo Switch OLED Tears of the Kindom Edition

For those eager to get their hands on the limited-edition console first, Amazon, Best Buy, and Target are all currently still accepting preorders. Unlike the standard Switch, the Switch OLED boasts a vibrant seven-inch OLED display, 64GB of storage, and an improved kickstand,...

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A data scientist cloned his best friends’ group chat using AI

The group chat is “a hallowed thing.” | Image: The Verge

Izzy Miller downloaded 500,000 messages from his seven-year group chat, then trained an AI language model to replicate his friends — learning details about their lives and imitating the way they speak.

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The best entertainment of 2023

Suzume. | Image: Crunchyroll

Right now, we are absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to entertainment. TV shows, movies, and games all come out at such a fast and furious pace that it’s hard to keep up. Not all of them are worth your time, of course — which is where we come in.

Our team spends a lot of time immersed in the various realms of pop culture so that we can handpick our favorites for you. That could mean a hot new indie game you might’ve otherwise missed or the streaming series that will become your new obsession. Either way, if you’re finding it hard to sort through the flood, this is the place to find a curated selection of the best stuff.

And like last year, this page will be updated regularly throughout the year — so make sure to check back in...

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Suzume is everything that’s beautiful and moving about Makoto Shinkai’s imagination

Image: Crunchyroll

Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume is his most exuberant movie yet and a powerful rumination on holding space for the past.

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How to take screenshots on your Windows 11 PC

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Screenshots can be really handy. You can use them to show your grandparent how to use a new app. You can use them to send a shot of a strange error message to your company’s IT department. And you can use them to capture tweets before they disappear into the black hole of deletion. So, in case you need to capture a screenshot or two, here’s a quick and simple guide to taking screenshots on your PC.

Windows 10 introduced a screenshot tool called Snip & Sketch, but Windows 11 relies on the simpler Snipping Tool. And there are other ways you can take screenshots as well. We’ll start with the simplest.

Use the PrintScreen key

Until recently, if you wanted to take a quick screenshot of your entire screen, you could either just press the Print...

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New Arkansas bill to keep minors off social media exempts most social media platforms

The new bill signed in by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to come into effect in September later this year. | Image: Thomas Metthe / Arkansas Democrat-Gazette via AP

Arkansas is now the second US state to impose minimum age restrictions on social media, with Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing in a new bill on Wednesday that requires parents and guardians to consent to people under 18 opening a new account. The newly approved SB 396 — otherwise dubbed the Social Media Safety Act — comes into effect in September and aims to protect minors in online spaces.

The new law shares some similarities with Utah’s Social Media Regulation Act, which was signed into law last month. Both require users to be at least 18 years of age to open a new social media account and place responsibility on social media companies to verify the age of new users through personal information and government-issued ID.

The bill...

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Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headset is getting a Windows 11 upgrade

Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Microsoft is bringing Windows 11 to its HoloLens 2 headset. The update will be available free of charge, and Microsoft says it should appear by the end of June as an optional upgrade. HoloLens 2 owners can continue to use Windows 10, but Windows 11 will offer better app performance and some key developer-focused additions.

“The free upgrade to Windows 11 promises continuous platform support, meaning our customers can trust in the continued security of their devices,” explains Robin Seiler, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows and devices, in a blog post. “With the upgrade, HoloLens 2 users will continue to receive monthly security servicing updates that reinforce the protection of sensitive information while also improving app...

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — all the latest on Nintendo’s huge sequel

Link in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom_._ | Image: Nintendo

Nintendo’s sequel to Breath of the Wild launches on May 12th.

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