Meta’s latest layoffs cut employees in technical roles

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta has started its latest round of layoffs on Wednesday, and they affect employees in technical roles, according to CNBC.

It’s unclear how many employees are being laid off in this round, but Vox reported Tuesday that the cuts would be “in the range” of 4,000 people. On LinkedIn, I found posts from people laid off in roles including senior engineering manager, user experience researcher, data scientist, technical program manager, gameplay programmer, and content designer.

When reached for comment, spokesperson Elana Widmann pointed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s March 14th post announcing its plans to cut 10,000 more employees in addition to the 11,000 that the company already laid off. In that post, Zuckerberg said there would be three...

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Microsoft is reportedly working on a smaller Surface Pro and Arm-powered Surface Go 4

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Microsoft is reportedly working on a smaller Surface Pro with an 11-inch display and an Arm-powered Surface Go 4 model. Windows Central reports that the smaller Surface Pro is codenamed Luxor and will be similar in size and shape to the Surface Go, the more budget 10.5-inch tablet that’s designed to look like a tiny Surface Pro.

Currently, Microsoft only ships its Surface Pro 9 with a 13-inch screen, in both Arm- and Intel-powered models. A new 11-inch model will also reportedly include a 120Hz display, in keeping with the premium specs found on the current 13-inch models.

A move to an Arm processor on the Surface Go 4 is reportedly in the works, too. Codenamed Tanta, the Surface Go 4 is said to ship with a chip based on Qualcomm’s...

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Apple’s latest iPad Air is $100 off in both the 64GB and 256GB configurations

Blue, pink, purple, space gray, starlight — they’re all on sale. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The 2022 iPad Air is on sale once again for its best price to date. Right now, you can get a 64GB iPad Air with Wi-Fi for just $499.99 ($100 off) in one of its five colors at Amazon once the $59 discount is automatically applied at checkout. The deals don’t stop there, however, as the same iPad Air with 256GB of storage is also on sale for $649.99 ($100 off) at Amazon (it, too, reaches this price with an automatic discount at checkout). The latter is a worthwhile upgrade for users who need more storage to fit larger games, lots of photos, etc.

Apple’s latest iPad Air may not have a Mini LED display, Face ID, or some of the fancier features found on the newer iPad Pro models, but it has a similar, refined design and packs a more than...

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Everything spy movies get right (and wrong) about smart glasses

Smart glasses in spy movies aren’t as outlandish as you might think. | Illustration: Kyle Ellingson for The Verge

Obviously James Bond gets a bit of help from movie magic, but real-life smart glasses can do more than you might expect.

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The Verge’s 2023 Graduation Gift Guide

Image: Will Joel

We found a wide range of gifts that’ll help graduates as they embark upon their next adventure, whether that’s college or a career.

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Microsoft is giving hackers weather-themed names like storm, typhoon, and blizzard

Microsoft’s new weather-themed naming for attackers. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft has started naming hackers after the weather in a new naming taxonomy update. Hackers will now be named after events like storms, typhoons, and blizzards, as part of eight groups that Microsoft is using to track cyber attacks. That means the Lapsus$ hacking group that has targeted companies like Nvidia, Samsung, and Microsoft will now be referred to as Strawberry Tempest (no, it’s not a $15 cocktail).

The new taxonomy will include five key groups: nation-state actors, financially motivated actors, private sector offensive actors (PSOAs), influence operations, and groups still in development. If a new cybersecurity threat is new or from an unknown source, then Microsoft will assign it a temporary “Storm” designation and a...

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25 years later, Netflix finally won

Netflix’s DVD business was once so big it was 1.3 percent of all US mail. | Photo by Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Netflix was never going to be a DVD shipper forever. But to win the streaming wars, it might need to recapture what made DVDs by mail so special.

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Extreme heat scorches Asia, affecting at least a third of the world’s population

On April 16th, 2023, people gather to attend an award ceremony on the outskirts of Mumbai, India. Heatstroke killed more than a dozen people as early summer temperatures soared. | Photo by AFP via Getty Images

Record-shattering heat is cooking much of Asia. Brutal temperatures have been recorded across more than 12 countries in the past couple weeks. That includes oppressive heatwaves in India and China, which together represent a third of the world’s population.

It’s a “monster” heat spell “like none before,” climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera tweeted today after describing it as the “worst” April heatwave in Asia’s history last week.

A “monster” heat spell “like none before”

Thailand beat its national heat record over the weekend, with a temperature of 45.4 degrees Celsius (113.72 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded in the province of Tak. Neighboring Laos also likely hit its “highest reliable temperature in its history”...

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Google Meet now lets you turn off distracting video feeds

Image: Google

Google Meet is rolling out the ability to switch off individual feeds. This should help block out any potential distractions during a meeting, such as a colleague’s obnoxious virtual background or maybe even an adorable cat that pops up in front of someone’s webcam.

Google says it won’t notify anyone that you’ve turned off their feed, so you won’t have to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings if you’re just not a fan of their virtual background (or cat). The meeting layout won’t change for anyone else on the call, either.

You can turn off individual feeds on Meet’s mobile and desktop apps. To do this, pull up the list of people in the meeting and find the person you want to hide. From there, hit the three dots next to their name and...

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Everything we know about Apple’s mixed reality headset

Illustration: Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Apple is rumored to be announcing its long-rumored virtual and augmented reality headset at WWDC 2023. Here’s a timeline of all the details that have emerged about the device over the years.

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The Supreme Court is about to hear a landmark online threats case

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

In 2014, a Colorado singer-songwriter accepted a seemingly innocuous friend request on Facebook. This morning, nearly a decade later, the Supreme Court will hear a case about the fallout — and it might redefine what’s legal to say online.

Attorneys will present arguments today in Counterman v. Colorado, a closely watched case about the boundaries of unlawful “true threats.” The case’s petitioner, Billy Raymond Counterman, claims that he was convicted of stalking based on an overly broad definition of a threat. He argues that a series of Facebook messages weren’t intended to cause distress and shouldn’t be legally actionable. On the other side, the state of Colorado argues it should be sufficient for a reasonable person to find these...

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Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp shows that great games age beautifully

Image: Nintendo

Nintendo’s turn-based war series is back, and it feels as fresh as ever.

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BMW i7 xDrive60 review: the one with the 31-inch movie screen in the back

BMW’s 7 series has long held the place as the brand’s ultimate expression of luxury. | Photo by Abigail Bassett for The Verge

Want a glimpse of the future of luxury cars? The BMW i7 is where it’s at. And the 31-inch, 8K drop-down movie screen for rear passengers is just the icing on the cake.

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Here’s the world’s first Tesla V4 Supercharger charging a VW ID Buzz

Tesla’s V4 Supercharger now supports non-Tesla EV charging, like this all-electric VW ID Buzz. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge

Tesla has only one V4 Supercharger in the world — it opened in March to Tesla drivers and was recently made available to all EVs. The V4 Supercharger is located in Harderwijk, the Netherlands, which is just an hour away from my home in Amsterdam where Tesla has its EMEA headquarters. And since I’ve been testing an all-electric VW ID Buzz for the past few weeks (review coming!), well, I just couldn’t resist a visit.

Tesla has over 45,000 Superchargers worldwide. About 17,000 are in the US, and of those, only about a dozen stations in New York and California are open to other EVs. But in Europe most Supercharger stations are already available to other EVs, many have been for years. So it was no surprise to see Tesla open up its first V4...

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Tesla’s latest US price cuts bring the Model 3 below $40,000

The entire Model Y range has also been discounted by $3,000. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Tesla has cut the price of its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in the US for the second time this month, reducing the starting price of Tesla’s most affordable EV below $40,000 (before incentives). The adjusted pricing has been rolled out shortly before Tesla is expected to release its quarterly earnings report later today.

The Model 3 Standard Range RWD has been reduced from $41,990 to $39,990. That’s not the cheapest price we’ve seen for the EV — Tesla had previously offered the Standard Range model for $35,000 in 2019 prior to its 2021 update. As noted by Electrek, the Model 3 is Tesla’s only vehicle to have seen its federal tax credit cut from $7,500 to $3,750 under new guidance from the US Treasury regarding battery sourcing...

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For a few minutes, Google’s search results were pretty broken

Illustration: The Verge

For a little bit on Tuesday evening, if you tried search for something on Google, your search results may not have looked quite right: the actual list of blue links was missing. In searches I did while the issue was happening, I would see things like the Top Stories box and the info box on the side, but list of links just wasn’t there.

It wasn’t just me, either. There have been thousands of reports of issues on Downdetector as I write this, and I saw lots of people reporting problems on Twitter, too. It’s unclear if the issue is totally resolved, but things seem to be on the mend.

Even though the issue didn’t last long for me, it was really frustrating and highlighted just how much I rely on Google searches to bounce around the internet....

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Reddit’s upcoming API changes will make AI companies pony up

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit announced new API changes today that will eventually pinch its content pipeline from being used to train artificial intelligence tools, including the models that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing AI. AI chatbots’ abilities to provide powerful answers have data resources like Reddit to thank — and now Reddit is planning to put that robot food behind a paywall.

Social media resources, including Reddit, are some of the sources used to train large language models (LLM) that can provide cogent responses to human prompts. Some of this data can be scraped in an unstructured manner, but Reddit’s API has helped companies make it easy to directly find and package useful data.

Reddit’s API, which has been available...

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Leak: Google will announce the Pixel Fold at I/O and beat Samsung on battery

This is what Google’s foldable Pixel smartphone might look like. | Image: OnLeaks and HowToiSolve

When will we finally see Google’s first foldable phone? The smart money is now on May 10th, with availability in June. CNBC says it got hold of internal marketing materials showing Google will launch the repeatedly reportedly delayed smartphone at Google I/O.

Most of CNBC’s report corroborates what leakers like Roland Quandt and OnLeaks have already told us. You should expect a closed-book 5.8-inch phone that folds out into a 7.6-inch tablet, powered by Google’s Tensor G2 processor, starting at north of $1,700 — making it a direct competitor to Samsung’s $1,800 Galaxy Z Fold 4.

Unapologetically (slightly) heavier

But CNBCsays they may differ in one important way: the Pixel Fold will have a larger battery “that Google says will last...

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Meta is opening up its VR social platform to teens

Image: Meta

Meta is opening up its Horizon Worlds social VR platform to teens in the US and Canada in the coming weeks, the company announced on Tuesday. For teen players, which Meta defines as between the ages of 13 and 17, Meta will have some extra features in place to help provide a safer experience on the platform.

Teen profiles will be private by default, for example, and Meta won’t show a teen’s online status unless they choose to flip that on. Its “voice mode” feature that turns voices of people you don’t know into “quiet, friendly sounds” and garbles your own voice will also be on for teens by default. Meta won’t show any adults that a teen player doesn’t know in the “people you might know” tab. And the company says it has expanded its VR...

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The best phone to buy right now

Photo Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Bad news: flagship phones cost a small fortune these days. Good news: we can help you pick the right one and get the most for your money.

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Spotify loosens its grip on exclusive podcasts

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

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

Hello, Hot Podders! We’re kicking off the week with a big announcement.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who attended Hot Pod Summit in February, but I am very pregnant. Like baby-keeps-kicking-the-laptop-out-of-my-lap pregnant. This is my last week at The Verge before I go on leave. I will be back in September with what will likely be a lot of catching up to do on the audio business since my plans for the next five months mainly entail diapers and not sleeping. So if you see a frizzy, bedraggled new mom pushing a sage green UPPAbaby around Ditmas Park this summer, feel free to say hi! It might be me or one of the dozens...

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Fox and Dominion settle blockbuster defamation lawsuit for $787 million

Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

The Fox News defamation case was not, in fact, as entertaining as Succession. On the first day of trial, Fox settled with Dominion Voting Systems, heading off a process that could have aired embarrassing revelations about the news giant. Dominion says the settlement included a $787 million payout — apparently enough to compensate it for months of false claims about the 2020 presidential election.

As The New York Times reports, a Delaware judge announced the settlement after a morning of jury selection and just before attorneys’ opening statements. The dismissal means Fox Corporation won’t have to put some of its biggest names on the stand, including chairman Rupert Murdoch and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Dominion revealed the payment...

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Netflix delays its password-sharing crackdown to sometime before July

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Netflix is pushing back its plans to crack down on password sharing in the US until sometime before July. In an earnings report released on Tuesday, the streamer says it “shifted out the timing of the broad launch from late Q1 to Q2.”

Earlier this year, Netflix committed to cracking down on password sharing “more broadly” toward the end of the first quarter of 2023. While it did roll out new anti-password sharing rules in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain in February, these rules never reached the US.

Now, Netflix says that it’s “pleased with the results” of its paid sharing implementation in these four countries so far and that it has helped build up Canada’s paid subscriber base, which is “now growing faster than in the US.”

I...

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Netflix’s ad-supported plan is getting better resolution at no extra cost

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Netflix is making its $6.99 per month ad-supported plan a much better value. The company is upping the video quality from 720p to 1080p and will let subscribers watch two streams at once, Netflix said in its Q1 2023 letter to investors. Subscribers in Canada and Spain will get the improved features starting today and be available in all 12 of the markets where the company offers its ads plan sometime this month.

Netflix says it is “pleased” with the progress of Basic with Ads, which launched in November, and notes that its total average revenue per membership in the US for the ads plan already exceeds that of the standard plan. It also says that recent licensing deals mean the ads tier now offers “on average ~95 percent content parity...

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Netflix is shutting down its original DVD business after 25 years

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Netflix, which started as a company that shipped DVDs by mail, is winding down its DVD business. It will ship its final discs from DVD.com on September 29th, the company announced on Tuesday.

“After an incredible 25 year run, we’ve decided to wind down DVD.com later this year,” Netflix said in a blog post. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult.”

After an incredible 25 year run, we’ve decided to wind down https://t.co/6h2lrcGg2b later this year.

To everyone who ever added a DVD to their queue or waited by the mailbox for a red envelope to arrive: Thank you! https://t.co/McxJUlLlGF pic.twitter.com/nBXzgvvv7p

— Netflix...

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How to set up two-factor authentication on your online services

Illustration: Samar Haddad / The Verge

SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) — which sends a code via text messaging as a way to make sure your account is being accessed by you rather than an interloper — is better than nothing, but it isn’t that good. This was demonstrated recently when several members of our staff had password resets initiated on their Twitter accounts and then received messages trying to get them to text them a verification code. Messages like this one sent to senior news editor Richard Lawler:

Image: Richard Lawler

Phishing message sent to Richard Lawler

This is despite the fact that Twitter now offers SMS-based two-factor authentication only to its Twitter Blue members (costs begin at $8 a month). In fact, many of The Verge...

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What’s really going on with ‘Ghostwriter’ and the AI Drake song?

Image: Ghostwriter / YouTube

The generative AI music hype train only needed about 48 hours to go from “oh, that’s interesting” to full Balenciaga pope territory, and while it’s clear someone is using the technology to run a scheme, we’re still not sure who it is.

Here’s the short version:

• Someone made an AI-generated Drake voice rapping Ice Spice, to which Drake posts on Instagram, “This is the final straw AI.”
• The same weekend, an unknown TikTok user, @ghostwriter977, goes viral for an AI-generated Drake song featuring The Weeknd. The lyrics are apparently Ghostwriter’s, but the voices are unmistakable. There’s also a Metro Boomin tag in the song, though, as far as we know, he didn’t produce it. Nobody knows who Ghostwriter is, but the song, “Heart on My...

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The best magnetic chargers to buy for your MagSafe iPhone

The Verge

Making sense of Apple’s messy MagSafe charging ecosystem, where the first-party options are far from the best ones.

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Republicans demand a ban on lawmakers using TikTok

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

A group of Republican lawmakers are calling on their colleagues to stop using TikTok as pressure mounts to ban the app nationwide.

In letters to the Senate and House rules committees, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and more than a dozen other Republicans demanded that the panels ban elected officials from using TikTok. Last year, Congress and a handful of state legislatures banned the app on government-owned devices, but these rules do not currently apply to members’ personal phones and devices.

“It is troublesome that some members continue to disregard these clear warnings and are even encouraging their constituents to use TikTok to interface with their elected representatives — especially since some of these users...

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Intel just killed its crypto chip after less than a year

Image: Intel

Intel just shipped its first Bitcoin-mining chip last June, the Blockscale 100 ASIC, but it’s already dead — the company has discontinued it less than a year later, reports Tom’s Hardware, without announcing a new chip to succeed it.

Does that mean Intel’s already done with crypto chips after pumping the idea last February? Perhaps: Intel dodged a question from Tom’s Hardware about whether it’d exit the Bitcoin ASIC business, saying only, “We continue to monitor market opportunities.”

Intel’s timing seems to have been... unfortunate. Between the time Intel announced the chip and the time it shipped, Bitcoin had fallen by more than half — from a high of over $47,000 per coin to under $19,000 each. That said, Bitcoin is back over...

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