Reddit is about to get a little less accessible

Illustration: The Verge

r/TranscribersOfReddit, a Reddit community of volunteers who write transcriptions for media that appears on subreddits like r/ProgrammerHumor and r/technicallythetruth, will be closing down in a matter of days, according to a post from a moderator. The community’s final day will be June 30th, 2023.

“Our role in the Reddit community has always been to point out inadequacies in the platform — namely, the lack of accessibility features such as alt text — and provide a temporary, constructive solution while raising awareness of these problems,” wrote Rebekah Ginsburg, who goes by u/halailah on Reddit and is chairwoman of the board of Grafeas Group, the nonprofit that operates the system powering r/TranscribersOfReddit. Users on the subreddit...

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Final Fantasy XVI’s lack of diverse characters makes a huge world feel small

Image: Square Enix

Early in Final Fantasy XVI’s marketing cycle, producer Naoki Yoshida was asked about the apparent lack of inclusion of people of color in the game. His answer wasn’t great, essentially stating that including people of color would violate the narrative boundaries established by the fantasy world the developers created.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to follow up with Yoshida about that answer, asking him if he had the opportunity to hear the response to his words and if he had anything to say to the fans of color that he upset with them.

“I believe that with Final Fantasy XVI, we weave together a variety of peoples and cultures set in this kind of sweeping fantasy narrative and world, and one that we strived to create with care...

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Satellite internet is on the way after Arctic fiber cut unplugs part of Alaska

Illustrator by Alex Castro / The Verge

Satellite internet competitors OneWeb and SpaceX are in the running to reconnect Alaskans after ice damaged a sub-sea fiber-optic cable in the Arctic Ocean, as reported by numerous local outlets. While repairs are expected to take an additional six to eight weeks, satellites could help locals weather the widespread outage.

Last week, residents in the rural towns of Utqiaġvik, Point Hope, Wainwright, Kotzebue, Nome, and other communities found themselves without internet or cellular connectivity when the 1,200-mile fiber cable owned by the Alaska-based broadband company Quintillion suffered a break. Quintillion says the cable broke as “a result of an ice scouring event.”

“Our sub-sea system is currently out of service,” Quintillion...

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Hyundai is considering adopting Tesla’s EV plug as it readies its next-generation platform

Hyundai’s Ioniq 6 electric car. | Photo by Patrick George for The Verge

Hyundai might soon be following Ford, GM, and Rivian’s lead in adopting Tesla’s EV charging standard in its vehicles for the North American market. But it’s got some hesitations.

During the South Korean automaker’s Investor Day on Tuesday, where it also revealed its next-generation EV platform, Hyundai president and CEO Jaehoon Chang said the decision to adopt Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) will come down to customer interest. But a key issue Chang mentioned, as reported by CNBC, is that Tesla’s Superchargers don’t currently offer higher charging rates supported by Hyundai’s EV platform.

Hyundai and Kia’s current EV lineup have 800-volt architectures and were designed to accept fast-charging rates up to 350kW (although...

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Across the Spider-Verse’s animators allegedly worked under unsustainable conditions

Miles Morales going on a trip. | Image: Sony Pictures

In the years-long buildup to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s release, Sony — for understandable reasons — proudly touted how it had hired over 1,000 animators in order to bring the artistically ambitious project to fruition, and all of that intensive human labor definitely shows. According to a number of artists who contributed to the film, however, the working conditions they were made to operate under during the film’s production were unsustainable, erratic, and largely the result of producer Phil Lord frequently overriding Across the Spider-Verse’s three directors in order to make endless last-minute changes.

In a rather damning new report from Vulture, four animators who worked directly on Across the Spider-Verse described the...

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The best ebook reader to buy right now

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge

From reading in the bath to scribbling notes in the margins, from diving into the Amazon ecosystem to avoiding it outright, there’s an e-reader for everyone.

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Alexa can now play local weather news videos on Echo Shows — no cable subscription required

Echo Show devices can now show your local news weather forecast. | Image: Amazon

If you’re of a certain age and / or geographical location, then you likely rely on your local TV news station’s weather forecast. A new feature on Echo Show smart displays looks set to make it easier to watch these on demand. Amazon has partnered with local news channels to automatically surface their most recent weather news videos when you say “Alexa, what’s the weather?”

I live in a coastal city with frequent hurricane, flood, and severe weather warnings, and our local meteorologists are by far the best source of info for staying safe and dry (significantly better than any weather app — I’ve tried them all). But tuning in on the 8s isn’t always feasible (especially for cord-cutters!), and finding videos on local news station websites...

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Someone please fix the FCC, FFS

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Since President Joe Biden took office, the Senate has held four confirmation hearings for two separate nominees to break the ongoing deadlock at the Federal Communications Commission. The latest one was yesterday — and it might get the FCC closer to a full staff, but it’s a sad landmark to celebrate.

The Senate Commerce Committee held a confirmation hearing for several positions on Thursday, including Biden’s latest pick for FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez. (You may remember his previous three-time nominee, Gigi Sohn, dropped out in March.) She’s a veteran telecom lawyer who’s been working for the government for the better part of her career. Gomez has stayed out of the spotlight, so her opinions on controversial issues like net neutrality...

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The best early Prime Day deals

You know how the old saying goes, “The early smart speaker bird gets the deals worm”? Right? | Image: Amazon

Amazon Prime Day may not start until July 11th, but early deals are already trickling out. We’re expecting to see some worthwhile discounts on wireless earbuds, noise-canceling headphones, tablets, TVs, smart home tech, games, and other gadgets on the actual days of, with the early deals functioning as a kind of small temperature check.

As the ghosts of Prime Days past can tell us, the ahead-of-schedule deals are almost always on Amazon-owned devices and brands. There are sure to be more deals coming online in the days ahead — especially since Amazon has promised discounts from brands like Sony and Bose — but early bird shoppers already have some decent discounts to take advantage of.

Usually, these early deals will hold through the...

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The EPA is putting together a youth council

Photo by Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images

The EPA is assembling its first-ever National Environmental Youth Advisory Council, a group of young people to weigh in on issues that affect their communities.

“We can’t tackle the environmental challenges of our time without input from our younger communities, who’ve long been at the forefront of social movements,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a press release yesterday.

The worst effects of climate change are still ahead as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels keep building up in Earth’s atmosphere. The actions policymakers take today to curb that pollution will decide what kind of planet younger generations will inherit. So it makes sense for the EPA to create seats for them at the table.

“We can’t tackle the...

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SmileDirectClub forced to drop NDAs blocking customers from leaving bad reviews

Several thousand disgruntled SmileDirectClub customers are almost certainly smiling now. | Image: SmileDirectClub

SmileDirectClub, a mail-order orthodontic provider that sells cheap teeth aligners online, has agreed to release 17,000 US customers dissatisfied with its service from nondisclosure agreements that prohibited them from leaving negative reviews as part of a settlement with the District of Columbia’s attorney general. Announced on Thursday, the settlement requires SmileDirectClub to make changes to the company’s refund guarantee policy and inform customers who had signed such NDAs that they were now free to discuss their experiences.

A report from The New York Times back in 2020 revealed that SmileDirectClub had asked customers requesting a refund beyond the company’s 30-day guarantee policy to sign an NDA promising that they “will not...

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How to find the best deals during Amazon Prime Day

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year outside of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with this year’s festivities kicking off on July 11th and running through July 12th. The two-day shopping affair will likely grant Prime members access to some of the best prices of the year on Amazon devices, as well as products from Bose, Sony, and other well-known brands. This applies to items spanning a range of categories, including gaming peripherals, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories, and more.

As always, you can count on us to publish only the best deals during Prime Day — including those featured at Walmart, Best Buy, and other competing retailers. That said, if you want to be among the first people to know about...

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Microsoft opened the FTC hearing with a Sony bombshell

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Day one of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing was all about a surprise email, Xbox exclusives, and a costly cloud.

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Warner Bros. Discovery is reportedly looking to sell off half of its film and TV music catalog

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Under David Zaslav’s leadership, we’ve seen Warner Bros. Discovery cancel a lot of its programming while also memory holing other chunks of its IP for tax breaks, but now the company is reportedly looking to sell off a sizable portion of its catalog of music from films and television shows.

Both Hits and Variety are reporting that Warner Bros. Discovery is hoping to secure about $500 million by selling off the rights to “slightly less than half” of its movie and TV music catalog to a record label. Though it hasn’t been reported exactly which songs from which shows and films Warner Bros. Discovery is ready to part ways with, Sony is said to be one of the frontrunners who might close on the deal.

Given WBD’s recent focus on paying down...

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How to disconnect third-party apps from your Google account

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

If you’ve got an active Google account — or especially if you’ve got one you haven’t used in a while — you’ve probably got more apps and services hooked up to your account than you realize. There are all those places where you’ve “signed in with Google,” all those browser extensions you’ve given permissions to, all those add-ons that you’ve installed on top of Gmail and Google Drive, and so on.

While it’s always a good idea to be selective and cautious in choosing which apps and sites get these privileges, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using your Google account instead of an email address and password combination or in giving another app that may be useful access to your emails or Google storage (depending on the app, of...

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Dumb Money’s first trailer has us rooting for amateur Reddit investors

Image: Sony

There’s no shortage of movies already based on real-life, historical incidents surrounding the Stock Market, but everything in the first trailer for Sony’s upcoming Dumb Money film — a biographical comedy-drama covering the events of the GameStop short squeeze — beautifully demonstrates why we have such an appetite for them. Especially when it involves a David vs Goliath-like plot where “the little guy” takes on the Wall Street establishment.

Directed by Craig Gillespie of I, Tonya (2017) and Cruella (2021), Dumb Money is a dramatized retelling of how a bunch of amateur investors on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit intentionally inflated struggling GameStop’s stock to screw over the hedge funds who were shorting it while getting rich at...

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YouTube is making it easier for creators to choose that perfect thumbnail

YouTube plans for its tool to report which of your thumbnails performs the best. | Image: Google

The process of picking that all-important thumbnail for your latest YouTube video might be getting a lot easier soon. YouTube says it’s conducting early testing of a feature it’s calling “Test & Compare,” which lets creators upload up to three thumbnails for a single video and let YouTube experiment behind the scenes to see which one performs the best.

In a video announcement, YouTube says it’s currently testing the feature with “a few hundred creators,” but plans to roll out a beta version in the coming months to thousands more ahead of a broader launch next year.

Image: YouTube

A screenshot of YouTube’s Test & Compare feature, which is currently in early testing.

YouTube says the functionality, which is...

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NFC technology is getting better range and charging capabilities

Apple Pay uses NFC technology, and it requires you to effectively touch the terminal to make a connection. | Image: The Verge

Tap-to-pay services like Apple Pay may soon no longer need the actual tapping part to work. That’s because NFC, the technology that enables you to pay at shops by touching your phone to a payment terminal, is getting new capabilities over the next next two to five years, such as a communications range boost, more powerful wireless charging for tiny devices like earbuds, and more (via Android Authority).

NFC, which stands for Near Field Communication, is inside thousands of devices today ranging from smartphones to video game-enhancing figurines. Now the body that decides how to standardize the technology, the NFC Forum, is outlining key areas that will move NFC tech forward through 2028. The Forum is comprised of hundreds of companies,...

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Reddit pressures mods to end the blackout as they find new ways to protest

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit appears to be ramping up the pressure on moderators to open communities that closed in the blackout protest against recently announced platform changes. A Reddit admin — an employee of Reddit — has told unpaid volunteer moderators of a subreddit that the “expectation here is that communities reopen,” according to a message shared publicly by a moderator of r/DIY.

The pressure worked. The community was closed, but it reopened on Thursday, and a mod said that fears of Reddit actions forced the team’s hand: “We’re re-opening because if we don’t, the mods that Reddit appoint may not care about the subreddit the way we do,” the mod wrote.

The mod’s post also announced a vast number of changes to the subreddit’s rules that hew more...

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Meta is yanking news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta will be removing news from Facebook and Instagram in Canada now that the country’s Senate has passed the Online News Act, the company announced on Thursday. The legislation, officially Bill C-18, will force tech companies like Meta and Google to negotiate with news publishers and pay them for their content.

Meta has been a vocal opponent of the Online News Act for some time. “The world is constantly changing and publishers, like everyone else, have to adapt,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a statement in May. “Asking a social media company in 2023 to subsidize news publishers for content that isn’t that important to our users is like asking email providers to pay the postal service because people don’t send...

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YouTube is getting AI-powered dubbing

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube wants to make it easier to dub your videos in other languages by giving you some help with AI. The company announced Thursday at VidCon that it’s bringing over the team from Aloud, an AI-powered dubbing service from Google’s Area 120 incubator.

Here’s how it works, according to Aloud’s website. The tool first transcribes your video, giving you a transcription that you can review and edit. Then, it translates and produces the dub. This video has the details.

YouTube is already testing the tool with “hundreds” of creators, YouTube’s Amjad Hanif says in a statement to The Verge. And Hanif says that Aloud currently supports a “few” languages, with “more to come”; according to spokesperson Jessica Gibby, Aloud is currently...

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YouTube now requires users to declare if they are fan accounts

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube now requires users who run fan accounts to “make it obvious” in their channel name or handle that they don’t actually represent the company or artist that their account revolves around. That’s according to an update spotted earlier by 9to5Google, which says the new impersonation policy goes into effect on August 21st, 2023.

Previously, YouTube’s policies never carved out rules for fan accounts. It simply stated that channels designed to impersonate other channels or specific people aren’t allowed on the platform. But now, fan accounts must be clear that they aren’t affiliated with whoever their accounts are dedicated to or else risk having their account or channel deleted.

“Content intended to impersonate a person or channel is...

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E3 is not returning anytime soon

Image: Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images

E3 is dead, and it’s not coming back for at least a few more years. According to a report from the Los Angeles City Tourism Commission, E3 won’t be back in LA in 2024 or 2025.

The news was contained in a footnote on a chart highlighting the city’s projected and actual number of hotel rooms booked for fiscal year 2022 and 2023.

Apparently, the city does not expect E3 to return in 2024 or 2025. This news seems at odds with the messaging from E3’s organizers, ReedPop and the ESA. Earlier this year, the ESA — the trade organization that runs E3 — announced it was partnering with ReedPop, the entertainment company that runs large fan conventions like New York Comic-Con and Penny Arcade Expo, to run E3 2023. After the covid-19...

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The Apple Vision Pro could come with a ‘travel mode’ for plane rides

Image: Apple

The Apple Vision Pro may come equipped with settings specifically for plane rides. When digging into the first beta of visionOS, MacRumors found that the device’s operating system may have a Travel Mode option that you can use during a flight.

Several text strings uncovered by MacRumors indicate that you’ll be able to turn on the feature, with one noting, “If you’re on an airplane, you’ll need to keep Travel Mode on to continue using your ‌Apple Vision Pro‌.” It also prompts the user to “remain stationary in Travel Mode,” likely to avoid wearers flailing around while wearing the headset and disturbing whoever’s sitting next to them.

Other lines of text in visionOS state that “some awareness features will be off,” MacRumors notes,...

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Microsoft was working on a separate ‘dedicated’ version of Xbox Cloud Gaming

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft was working on a separate version of Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) that wouldn’t have been tied to its premium Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription. During the FTC v. Microsoft hearing today, the FTC’s counsel revealed that Microsoft had been working on a “dedicated xCloud SKU” last year.

“Xbox would very much like to do it,” said Sarah Bond, head of Xbox creator experience, in September 2022 — the same month Google announced its Stadia shutdown. Microsoft has now strangely changed its mind amid regulatory concerns over cloud gaming. So what’s changed since September 2022?

“We’ve continued to get more data about the success and the popularity of xCloud. We’ve gotten more clear on the costs related to it, and we have signed...

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Secret Invasion studio under fire for AI art says ‘no artists’ jobs’ were lost

Marvel Studios

After Marvel confirmed earlier this week that AI-generated images were used to create the opening credits sequence for its new Secret Invasion Disney Plus series, one of the biggest concerns woven into the general backlash was whether the move had put any traditional artists out of work. According to Method Studios, the VFX house that created the sequence, that couldn’t be further from the case.

At a time when traditional artists have been sharing their concerns about AI tools’ potential to take work from them, Secret Invasion prominently featuring AI-generated imagery as part of its opening credits has struck some as a sign of the entertainment industry’s willingness to embrace the technology regardless of the consequences. Previously, S...

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Kevin Scott, Craig Peters, and David Baszucki join Code 2023

This September, Code Conference enters a new era with a lineup of the most prestigious names in tech, business, and beyond. Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, will interview Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and Getty CEO Craig Peters —in two 1:1 conversations, they’ll tackle the latest in AI, from innovations and competition to what the immediate and long-term futures for these companies might look like. Roblox CEO David Baszucki will sit down with Alex Heath, deputy editor of The Verge, to discuss the impact of AI in gaming, how it will affect Roblox’s creator-backed economy, and more.

Kevin Scott | CTO & Executive Vice President of AI, Microsoft

Kevin Scott

Kevin Scott is EVP of AI, and the CTO of Microsoft....

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Amazon Prime Day 2023: the latest news, deals, and coverage

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Every ounce of coverage for Amazon’s big, made-up shopping holiday taking place July 11th and 12th.

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Titan submersible suffered ‘catastrophic implosion’

Image: OceanGate via Twitter

The Titan submersible, which disappeared after setting off to tour the wreckage of the Titanic on Sunday, experienced a “catastrophic implosion,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger announced during a press conference on Thursday afternoon.

“This morning, an ROV, or remote-operated vehicle from the vessel Horizon Arctic discovered the tail cone of the Titan submersible approximately 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic on the seafloor,” Mauger stated. “The ROV subsequently found additional debris. In consultation with experts from within the unified command, the debris is consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber.”

The Titan is a 22-foot long, 20,000-pound submersible owned by OceanGate Expeditions, a Titanic...

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Know the price-matching policies for Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and others

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Nothing is more frustrating than buying a new pair of headphones, an OLED TV, or a backpack just to find out that you could have gotten it for a lot cheaper somewhere else. In order to keep customers happy — and prevent them from going elsewhere — many retailers offer price-matching policies where they promise to match a lower price you’ve found elsewhere. That’s information that could come in handy now that we’re just a few weeks out from Amazon Prime Day, which will be taking place on July 11th and July 12th.

What follows are the price-matching policies for a variety of major retailers. There are a few things to make note of here. First, all price-matching policies have a number of rules attached to them. We’ve summarized some of the...

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