YouTube is bringing unskippable 30-second ads to TV

The longer unskippable ads should only be applied to the top-performing YouTube content. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Watching YouTube on your TV is about to get more frustrating if you’re not paying to avoid ads. As announced at the YouTube Brandcast event on Wednesday, YouTube will soon add 30-second unskippable ads to top-performing content watched on connected TVs.

YouTube says viewers will see a single 30-second ad instead of two consecutive 15-second ads, though that doesn’t mean that those shorter ads will be disappearing entirely. 30-second ads will be available to advertisers via YouTube Select, a curated advertising platform that targets the top five percent of YouTube content. YouTube claims 70 percent of YouTube Select impressions come from TVs, making it the ideal platform for longer ads.

YouTube is also testing ads that will appear on...

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Sony’s Access controller has a PS5 accessibility UI and virtual controller feature

Sony’s Access controller. | Image: Sony

Sony’s Project Leonardo PS5 accessibility controller now has an official name: Access controller. The customizable controller is designed for players with disabilities and includes swappable buttons and stick caps to adapt to many needs. Sony has also built an Access controller UI into the PS5 console that offers control over button mapping and profiles, and a special virtual controller option.

“On the PS5 console, players can select their preferred orientation for the Access controller, map different inputs to the various buttons, toggle buttons on or off, or even map two different inputs onto the same button,” explains Hideaki Nishino, senior VP of platform experience at Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Image: Sony ...

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Montana bans Telegram, WeChat, and Temu from government devices

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

On Wednesday, Montana governor Greg Gianforte didn’t only ban TikTok state-wide. He also accused Telegram, WeChat, and the shopping app Temu of being “tied to foreign adversaries” and directed that they and similar apps be banned from government devices and all state business. Gianforte also cited TikTok owner ByteDance’s CapCut video editor and Lemon8 as examples of offending apps.

With this ban, Gianforte largely seems to be targeting apps with ties to China, given that ByteDance, Temu owner Pinduoduo, and WeChat owner Tencent are all based in the country. Telegram is the exception: it was founded in Russia but is currently headquartered in Dubai. Gianforte’s letter claims that the Russian government uses the app to “monitor users and...

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TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge

Here’s a roundup of all the news about politicians pushing to ban TikTok in the US and around the world.

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Beepberry is a Blackberry keyboard tinker toy from the founder of Pebble

The ‘Beepberry’ with other fruits accompanying it. | Image: SQFMI

Are you a hacker who happens to miss their Blackberry? Looks like there’s a new product that’s just your speed: the “Beepberry.” It literally grafts the keyboard of a Blackberry Classic onto a pocketable custom board designed to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero W, all paired with a 400 x 240 “Memory LCD” screen that looks like it was ripped from an old graphing calculator — but is a bit more sophisticated.

Beepberry is designed by Eric Migicovsky, founder of the gone-but-not-forgotten Pebble smartwatch and more relevantly co-founder of Beeper: the hacky all-in-one messenging app that stuffs every service from WhatsApp to iMessage (using a jailbroken iPhone) into one place.

I’m excited to introduce a little side project I’ve been working on:...

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TikTok is now banned in Montana

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified in Congress to fight a federal ban. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has signed a bill banning TikTok within the state — the first ban of its kind in the United States. The bill, SB 419, prohibits TikTok from operating “within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana” and demands mobile app stores make the app unavailable for Montana residents.

“To protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party, I have banned TikTok in Montana,” Gianforte tweeted today.

TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter responded with a statement on Twitter. “Governor Gianforte has signed a bill that infringes on the First Amendment rights of the people of #Montana by unlawfully banning #TikTok, a platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of people across the state,” O...

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The IRS is going to test a free online tax prep service next year

The IRS may debut its own Direct File tax prep system if its test goes well. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

We’re a little closer to getting to file our taxes directly with the IRS. The agency just submitted a report to Congress detailing plans to launch a test run of free, government-run tax filing software for the 2024 filing season. If the free direct e-file system is successful and the government rolls it out to the rest of the country, maybe we’ll get to do an end run around tax filing corporate giants like Intuit when we file without poring over endless convoluted forms and calculations.

Who knows? Maybe this will even open the door to pre-filled tax forms that we only have to confirm rather than anxiously filling out numbers the government already knows. After all, the IRS seems to know when you got it wrong, so why not let it just...

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Wendy’s latest test will have robots deliver food orders through tunnels

Cars will pull up beside an “Instant Pickup portal.” | Image: The Wendy’s Company

After announcing plans to use an AI chatbot at its drive-thrus, now Wendy’s is piloting a robot-powered “underground delivery system” for online order pickups. The system, which will be built through a partnership with the autonomous logistics company Pipedream, will have robots travel through tunnels to transport online food orders from Wendy’s kitchens to the “Instant Pickup portals” that sit beside parking spaces.

When a customer arrives at a space, they talk to the restaurant crew through the Instant Pickup portal’s speaker to confirm their order. From there, an autonomous robot will traverse a set of tunnels to deliver the food to the customer’s parking space. Wendy’s says Pipedream’s system uses “temperature-controlled delivery...

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The company behind World of Jumanji wants to turn even more Sony IP into theme parks

Image: Chessington World of Adventures

While Nintendo’s Super Nintendo World might be the video game theme park most people are making plans to visit in the near future, it sounds like Sony very much wants to get in on some of the IP-to-destination attraction action while the getting’s good.

During a recent interview with Variety tied to the opening of the new Jumanji rides at Chessington World of Adventures in England, Merlin Entertainments (which runs multiple parks, including Chessington and Legoland) CEO Scott O’Neil and Sony Pictures partnerships executive VP Jeffrey Godsick were emphatic about how this new era of theme parks is being defined by technology “merging with IP which is merging with imagination.” Translated into more regular English, what the companies seem...

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The free TV company briefly wasn’t sure what it should do with data from kids

Image: Telly

Telly, the company that will give you a free TV in exchange for showing you persistent advertisements on a second display, made a pretty big slip-up in a now-deleted part of its privacy policy. In a thread on Twitter, reporter Shoshana Wodinsky spotted a line that questioned whether there’s a way to avoid deleting the data it collects on children. _Yik_es.

The gaffe appeared in the “PersonalData of Children” section (typo is Telly’s). “If we learn we have collectedPersonal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete thatinformation as quickly as possible.” That sounds pretty normal, right? Well, the next line goes full first-person and states: “(I don’t know that this is accurate. Do wehave to say we will delete the...

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The New York Times launches an audio app to court its heaviest podcast listeners

Image: The New York Times

The New York Times is leveling up its audio game. Today, the publication launched New York Times Audio, an iOS app for subscribers that serves as a one-stop shop for all of its audio journalism — including its current slate of podcasts like The Daily and The Ezra Klein Show. If you’re partial to a certain podcast platform like Spotify or Stitcher, no need to worry — the Times’ biggest podcasts will still be available for free on other players.

Instead, the app appears to be an attempt by the Times to build a dedicated audience around all of its audio offerings — not just podcasts. It’ll serve as a home for even more audio journalism, including exclusives that the outlet is creating solely for the app.

This will include a 10-minute daily...

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Here are the best Kindle deals right now

The latest Kindle Paperwhite is on sale at Amazon with a power adapter and a fabric cover starting at $169.97. | Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge

When it comes to finding a device to use to read your ebooks, you have a few options to choose from. You can always buy a tablet or use your phone, but those devices are multipurpose and can be used for a ton of things, like surfing the web or doom-scrolling on Twitter. If you are looking for something to strictly read books, e-readers, while niche, are designed to store all of your books in a virtual library with limited functionality.

Amazon, one of the pioneers of the e-reader, has dominated the space for years with its ever-expanding Kindle lineup, which consists of several unique models with their own pros and cons. The bulk of the devices function as simple ebook readers; however, with the Kindle Scribe, Amazon looks to be moving...

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A history of metaphors for the internet

Illustration by Hugo Herrera for The Verge

When I wrote about this web surfing competition, it got me thinking about different metaphors for the internet. Surfing seemed like an odd one, an artifact from a very particular time in the mid-1990s when people used terms like “information superhighway” and “cyberspace” unironically. Where did these metaphors come from, and where did they go? Have any persisted, and have new ones taken their place?

The more I read, the more it seemed that these old metaphors hadn’t died out at all, though their meanings had changed. No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a...

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Apple iPhone 14 Pro review: early adopter island

The Dynamic Island is a potentially good idea that’s waiting for the next step

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Trial of Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes: news, updates, and more

Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for Fortune

The former billionaire has been convicted and sentenced after it was revealed that her blood-testing company hadn’t achieved the breakthroughs it claimed.

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The first Five Nights At Freddy’s film teaser looks frightening

Image: Universal Pictures

The hugely popular Five Nights At Freddy’s is being turned into a movie, and you can watch the first frightening teaser trailer for the film right now.

Based on the teaser, it seems like this film has a similar premise as the first game, where you’re on security duty for a Chuck E. Cheese-like restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza that houses scary-looking animatronic animals. Spoiler, those animals are alive, and it seems like the characters in the movie are going to have to find various ways to escape their clutches.

I’ll fess up: I’ve never actually played a Five Nights At Freddy’s game. They look way too scary for me! I’d rather not have to suffer through jumpscare after jumpscare. But I’ll admit that I’ve watched a lot of YouTube...

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Cars would be required to keep AM radio under new bipartisan bill

Photo by Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images

Automakers would be required to keep AM radio in their vehicles under a new bipartisan, bicameral bill introduced today. The legislation was introduced in response to an increasing number of vehicles coming out without the first-generation radio broadcast technology.

The bill, titled the AM for Every Vehicle Act, would direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to issue a rule that “requires automakers to maintain AM broadcast radio in their vehicles without a separate or additional payment, fee, or surcharge.” Prior to the new rule from NHTSA, automakers selling vehicles without AM radio would be required to disclose that fact to potential customers. And the Government Accountability Office would be tasked with...

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Roblox really wants you to know that it isn’t just for kids

Image: The Verge

Roblox’s founder and CEO published a blog post this morning stressing just how much the company believes the popular gaming platform isn’t just for kids.

The platform’s audience is starting to trend older, David Baszucki wrote in a blog post. He noted that more than 55 percent of the platform’s users are older than 13, the platform’s “fastest-growing demographic segment” is users between 17 and 24 years old, and that the 17–24 age bracket represents 22 percent of Roblox’s player base. Developers older than 17 make “the majority of our top 1000 experiences,” Baszucki wrote, and “many seek to create experiences for older audiences so they can interact exclusively with those their age.”

Right now, Roblox lets creators make experiences that...

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Max promises shorter ad breaks than other streamers when it launches May 23rd

Image: Jeff Kravitz / Warner Bros. Discovery

Warner Bros. Discovery’s new combined streaming app, Max, will keep the ads down to three to four minutes per hour. During the company’s Upfront event on Wednesday, Warner Bros. Discovery said that Max will feature one of the “lightest ad loads in streaming.”

“Max Ad-Lite subscribers get all the same content as ad-free subscribers,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said during the event. “See only three or four minutes of ads per hour and pay just $9.99 a month.”

That puts the service on par with HBO Max, which currently offers four ads per hour on its ad-supported plan. In addition to sharing similar commercial break lengths, Max will also have the same $9.99 per month or $99 per year pricing for its “Ad-Lite” plan, with options...

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The N64 controller for the Switch is available at the Nintendo store again

Nintendo’s remake of the classic Nintendo 64 controller is available for $49.99. | Image: Nintendo

If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on Nintendo’s remake of the classic Nintendo 64 controller — perhaps to tackle a certain Zelda title that launched last week — today is your lucky day. Right now, you can buy the controller for $49.99 from Nintendo if you’re a Nintendo Switch Online subscriber. We’re not sure how much longer it’ll stick around, so it might be smart to buy it sooner rather than later. In most instances, we’ve seen it sell out in a matter of hours.

In case you’re unfamiliar with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, it’s basically split into two tiers. The base subscription starts at $19.99 a year and grants you access to online multiplayer, cloud saves, and a library of classic NES and SNES games. A higher tier...

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Artificial intelligence has humanity on the ropes in The Creator’s first trailer

John David Washington as Joshua in The Creator_._ | Image: 20th Century Studios

As concerned as people are about the ways artificial intelligence stands to upend our society, there’s likely to be a sharp uptick in films about humanity having a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to thinking machines and fully committing to wiping them off the face of the Earth. There’s definitely going to be some of that energy in 20th Century Studios’ The Creator from director Gareth Edwards, but what stands out most in the movie’s first trailer is how inexplicably surprised everyone seems to be at finding themselves smack dab in the middle of a robo-pocalypse.

Set in a world devastated by a nuclear cataclysm launched by rogue AI, The Creator tells the story of Joshua (John David Washington), a grieving widower and special forces...

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It looks like Google’s working on a dashcam feature for Android phones

The best dashcam might be that old Pixel phone in your drawer. | Image: iOttie

Google appears to be working on a native dashcam recording feature for some Android phones that could run in the background for up to 24 hours, and it sounds pretty great. 9to5Google grabbed screenshots of an update to the Personal Safety app for Android phones with the option that appeared to be part of an internal test that was accidentally uploaded to Google Play.

The app apparently uses compressed video to save space and lets you turn your screen off or pop over to another app — say Waze or Google Maps — while recording continues in the background. You’ll also be able to set up triggers, like connecting to a specific Bluetooth device, to begin recording automatically as soon as you start your car. And you can configure it not to...

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BlizzCon 2023 takes place in person in November

Image: Blizzard

We already knew that BlizzCon would return as an in-person event in 2023, and on Wednesday, Blizzard announced that the show would take place on November 3rd and 4th at the Anaheim Convention Center. Blizzard is promising details “next month” about things like ticketing information and competition details, but you can book accommodations now through Blizzard’s hotel blocks if you want.

There’s a lot going on with Blizzard right now, so it should be a big show. We’re just weeks away from the release of Diablo IV. The studio might try and make some big Overwatch 2 announcements to ease the pain of scrapping the hero mode. And I have to imagine there will be some major updates for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, too.

This BlizzCon will...

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Summer gaming events 2023: with E3 canceled, here’s what’s next

Starfield. | Image: Bethesda Softworks

E3 isn’t happening, but the news isn’t stopping.

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Anker’s noise-canceling Liberty 3 Pro earbuds are half off right now

The Liberty 3 Pro pack a lot of functionality into a fairly inexpensive package. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Suffice it to say, with the introduction of the Beats Studio Buds Plus and Amazon’s latest pair of Echo Buds this morning, it’s been a busy week on the wireless earbud beat. But if you’re someone who doesn’t need the latest and greatest pair of earbuds, Anker’s Soundcore Liberty 3 Pro are currently matching their all-time low of $84.99 ($85 off) at Amazon, Walmart, and direct from Soundcore (with offer code WS24A3952BD).

Anker may not have the same kind of brand recognition in the earbuds space as Apple, Sony, or Bose, but the Liberty 3 Pro offer a lengthy list of features and an affordable price tag. They pack in active noise cancellation and powerful sound as well as multipoint Bluetooth support, IPX4 water resistance, and a robust...

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Baidu boss charged with stealing Apple’s self-driving car tech

Illustration: The Verge

A former Apple engineer and the executive at an electric vehicle startup owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu has been charged with stealing Apple’s self-driving technology, as reported earlier by CNBC. On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice indicted and charged Weibo Wang with the “theft and attempted theft” of Apple’s autonomous driving tech.

As noted by the indictment, Wang started working at Apple as a software engineer in 2016, where he signed a confidentiality agreement and worked on the company’s secretive autonomous driving project. Wang resigned from his role in 2018, but unbeknownst to Apple, Wang accepted employment at “the U.S.-based subsidiary of another company that was headquartered in the People’s Republic of China and...

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TikTok has a new font

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

TikTok is introducing its own custom font, called TikTok Sans. The font is optimized for “legibility and reading retention” and is supported in many languages from the jump, according to a blog post. Previously, TikTok used Proxima Nova.

TikTok says the TikTok Sans letters have “bigger openings and clearer strokes, making them much easier to distinguish from one another” as well as “slicker and simpler shapes, enabling better recognizability and reliability across languages.” The new font is a bit bigger “and overall line height has been increased to improve readability.” You’ll see the new font first in languages including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Turkish, and Vietnamese, with “plans to add more...

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Hyper Light Breaker’s composers on making roguelike music that doesn’t get old

Exus, one of the bosses in Hyper Light Breaker_._ | Image: Heart Machine

Hyper Light Breaker looks like it’s made just for me: a challenging roguelike from the creators of the indie hit Hyper Light Drifter but with Breath of the Wild-like exploration. While there’s still a lot we don’t know about the game — it won’t be in early access until this fall — when I was presented the opportunity to talk with two of the game’s composers, I jumped at the chance. I hoped they could answer my questions about how composers think about writing music for roguelikes.

Hyper Light Breaker is an open-world, online co-op roguelike that takes place in a futuristic, ruined world. If you’re familiar with the neon, 2D aesthetic from Hyper Light Drifter, imagine the way that looks but in 3D. For Breaker, a key consideration during...

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Instagram comments can now be overrun by GIFs

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

RIP to the comment sections on Instagram because now everyone can finally drop in GIFs to posts and Reels in lieu of a thoughtful analysis or a masterful quip. So if you’re only on Instagram for the comments, you can finally just add a Michael Jackson-eating popcorn GIF.

The feature was already enabled for some users in a limited availability phase. Now, Meta has unlocked the feature for global use, and it should be available for everyone today. The GIFs are sourced through Giphy’s library and can be accessed by tapping a new GIF button that’s on the side of your comment typing box.

Image: Meta

GIF comments in Instagram, via Giphy.

Meta is also rolling out new Instagram Reels editing abilities that are being...

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Mark Zuckerberg seems to think people can’t wait for in-car VR

A research demo from Meta and BMW of in-car mixed VR and mixed reality, where the avatars are still legless. | Image: Meta

If you’ve listened to The Vergecastlately, then you know Nilay is sold on the mix of cars and VR when it comes to Gran Turismo 7. And we’ve seen many attempts at in-car headset experiences from the likes of Holoride, Nissan, and Toyota, but it still seems like an instant recipe for motion sickness.

Now Meta and BMW say they’ve made progress on using augmented reality and virtual reality in cars that might alleviate any issues of interacting with virtual objects while moving through the real world at high speed.

Image: Meta

Meta / BMW research demo

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Their deal was originally announced in 2021, but the two...

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