Roku turns to layoffs (again) and removes streaming content to cut costs

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Roku will be laying off 10 percent of its employees — more than 300 people — in its third round of workforce cuts in under a year. As reported by Variety, Roku revealed the move in an 8-K SEC filing early on Wednesday and says it made the decision in an effort to reduce operating expenses.

“The company determined to implement additional measures to continue to bring down its year-over-year operating expense growth rate,” the filing reads. Roku said these measures will include consolidating office space, cutting back on outside expenses, and limiting new hires — the typical steps companies take in these moments.

Roku has had three rounds of layoffs in under a year

Roku expects the “workforce reduction” to be largely complete by the end...

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iMessage and Bing avoid strict DMA rules, for now

The investigations should take a maximum of five months. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple and Microsoft have managed to temporarily prevent iMessage and Bing from being targeted by the EU’s strict new Digital Markets Act. Instead, the European Commission announced on Wednesday that it’s opened four market investigations into Bing, Edge, Microsoft Advertising, and iMessage, to determine whether they should be designated as ”core platform services” under the DMA.

The DMA — one of several new EU laws designed to restrict the power of tech companies and help create a level playing field — creates a host of new obligations for large tech companies. Messaging services like iMessage are required to offer other companies some level of interoperability if they’re deemed to be big and important enough. Bing would be obligated to...

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MSI fixes Windows 11 BSOD ‘unsupported processor’ errors with new BIOS updates

Image: Microsoft

MSI has started issuing BIOS updates to fix Windows 11 Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) “unsupported processor” errors that started appearing with its Intel 700 and 600 Series motherboards last month. Microsoft initially investigated reports of errors that appeared after the latest KB5029351 update, and MSI now confirms it has found and fixed the source of the problems.

MSI had been issuing updates for its 600 and 700 series motherboards in preparation for Intel’s upcoming 14th Gen desktop CPUs, codenamed Raptor Lake-S Refresh. These BIOS updates were marked with a “support next-gen CPUs” update note, which clearly introduced the BSOD problem.

The BSOD will only appear with the latest Intel components

MSI and Intel “found the root cause of...

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Microsoft to detail OneDrive AI plans in ‘future of file management’ event

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is holding a special OneDrive event on October 3rd where the company plans to offer a “sneak peek at our AI plans” for the cloud storage service. “The future of file management” event will be live streamed on Microsoft Teams and looks like it will include a redesigned OneDrive interface, alongside new AI-powered search and sharing features.

“Join Jeff Teper and the OneDrive product team as they showcase the next generation of file management across Microsoft 365,” reads Microsoft’s announcement of the OneDrive event. “We’ll give a sneak peek at our AI plans which include new search, sharing, and information queries across all your files in OneDrive.”

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft’s OneDrive teaser.

The...

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Waymo is using insurance data about self-driving cars to bolster its safety case

Image: Getty

Waymo is using insurance data to make the case that its self-driving cars are safer than human drivers. The report, a result of the collaboration first announced last year between the Alphabet-owned company and the insurer Swiss Re, is intended to show how driverless vehicles crash less often and damage less property than human-driven vehicles.

Waymo’s data comes at a time of increased scrutiny of self-driving vehicles after California regulators voted to dramatically expand the ability of robotaxi companies to operate in San Francisco despite warnings from city officials about driverless vehicles blocking roads and delaying emergency responders.

The study compares Waymo’s liability claims data with those claims filed by human drivers...

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GoPro is back at making 360-degree cameras

GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman confirmed a new 360-degree GoPro Max camera “is in the works and will be worth the wait” at the GoPro 12 launch event. This update was a long time coming – the original GoPro Max was released all the way back in October 2019.

We reached out to GoPro to find out more about the upcoming 360-degree camera, including its availability, but have been met with a simple “no comment” from a spokesperson. Personally, I hope this camera gets released before the ski season officially opens.

GoPro was one of the first companies to start shipping 360 cameras for consumers. In 2017, GoPro released a $699 Fusion, years after producing a six-camera rig called Omni, which could capture 360 or VR videos as long as you...

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The EU targets Google, WhatsApp, and more with tough new DMA rules

A graphic showing the companies and services being designated as gatekeepers. (Click here for higher resolution image.) | Image: European Commission

The European Commission has officially confirmed which tech companies, and which of their services, count as “gatekeepers” under its strict new Digital Markets Act (DMA). The companies listed all appeared on a provisional list released in early July, and mostly consist of American tech giants. There’s Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft from the US, plus ByteDance from China. 22 core platform services provided by gatekeepers must now comply with the DMA’s obligations by March 6th, 2024.

Broadly, the DMA is the EU’s attempt to rein in the market power of Big Tech by opening up entrenched platforms and curbing ecosystem lock-in and anti-competitive behavior, making them compete on the merits of their products and services alone....

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The new UE Epicboom is a beefy $350 Bluetooth speaker

Image: Ultimate Ears

Where do you go next after branding your speakers with names like the Boom, Megaboom, Hyperboom, and Wonderboom? Well, apparently the natural progression has led Ultimate Ears to none other than “Epicboom.” That’s the new speaker that the company just announced today. It’s a chunky device that gives off more of a Sonos Move aura as opposed to UE’s signature cylindrical Bluetooth speakers. Priced at $349.99, the 4.36-pound Epicboom promises 360-degree audio output from its 4.6-inch woofer and two high-frequency 45mm transductors.

This speaker is rated IP67 against dust and water — that’s a win over the Move’s IP56 rating and means you can submerge it for up to 30 minutes — and it’ll last for 17 hours of playback on a charge, the company...

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Google leaks Pixel 8 Pro again with a 360-degree preview

A composite of images from Google’s Pixel 8 Pro simulator. | Images: Google

If you had any remaining questions about what the Pixel 8 Pro looks like, Google is here to answer them. The company has put online a 360-degree simulator that lets you turn the device over back to front and top to bottom, with helpful indicators pointing out where various sensors and ports are located. The simulator shows the phone in three colors and confirms that the Pixel 8 Pro will be getting a new temperature sensor on the back beside the cameras.

The simulator was spotted by José Rubén and highlighted by Mishaal Rahman, who both posted about it on X. Google doesn’t appear to have published a link to the website — but all you have to do is plug the new phone’s name into the URL of Google’s other Pixel simulators, and the new phone...

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Apple signs new agreement with Arm that goes past 2040

Illustration: The Verge

Apple has struck a deal with the chip design company Arm that goes past 2040, as reported by Reuters. A disclosure noting the arrangement appeared in new documents Arm filed as part of its planned IPO.

The statement about the deal doesn’t have much additional detail. “We have entered into a new long-term agreement with Apple that extends beyond 2040, continuing our longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and Apple’s access to the Arm architecture,” Arm said in the document. But given how much Apple relies on Arm’s designs for the custom chips powering its most popular and profitable products, like the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch, in addition to the upcoming Vision Pro, it signals that Apple plans to continue...

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Here’s Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s public memo on Google at 25

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Google usually celebrates its birthday on September 27th for no particularly obvious reason, but for its 25th anniversary, the company’s getting out ahead — with CEO Sundar Pichai “kicking off celebrations” with a 2,400-word public memo reflecting on where the company’s been.

There’s very little in here that will surprise anyone who’s heard Pichai speak at length, and... it’s mostly brags, which makes sense. But I expect you’ll want to hear what the second-highest paid CEO of the world’s fourth-most valuable company has to say in this moment of transition!

Before I present the whole memo, here are a few passages that caught my eye:

The questions I’ve asked Google have evolved over time: “How do you fix a dripping faucet?” “Fastest...

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Zoom is even less happy about Microsoft Teams than you are

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Hot on the heels of the EU forcing Microsoft to stop bundling Teams into Office in Europe, Zoom’s CEO is suggesting that the US Federal Trade Commission might want to look into doing the same stateside.

Bloomberg reports that Zoom CEO Eric Yuan made the remark at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conferencein response to a question about Microsoft unbundling Teams in Europe. The unbundling comes after EU regulators opened an investigation in July in response to a complaint by Slack, another Teams competitor that Microsoft more or less crushed by adding Teams to Office 365 for no additional cost. “You should ask this question to the FTC as well,” Bloomberg quotes Yuan as saying.

He’s got a point about bundling! Vox Media...

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All 50 states call on Congress to address AI-generated CSAM

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The attorneys general from all 50 US states want lawmakers to establish a commission dedicated to investigating the impact of AI on child exploitation, as reported earlier by The Associated Press. In a letter to Congress, the attorneys general say that the proposed commission should come up with solutions to prevent the creation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

As outlined in the letter, the attorneys general point out that bad actors can train an AI using images of abused and non-abused children to create deepfakes while also animating “new and realistic sexualized images of children who do not exist, but who may resemble actual children.” The letter adds that readily available AI tools make this process “easier than...

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Elon Musk paid for our attention, but the price to keep it is getting higher

Say what? | Illustration: Laura Normand / The Verge

I see Elon Musk has pivoted from pretending he’s going to physically fight Mark Zuckerberg to pretending he is going to sue the Anti-Defamation League. Okay. There are people who still take Musk seriously, and I wish them well on their journey. This blog is for the rest of us.

Obviously, there’s a level of attention-seeking behavior at play. Some of this is financially motivated: Musk is perhaps the most important influencer in the world. His tweets move markets. And he faces the same problem as other influencers. The danger of being too famous is overexposure — people get sick of you.

Why make this threat in the first place?

Musk’s public persona is an important marketing tool. Consider his appearance on Saturday Night Live: Tesla...

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These Steam Deck custom resin buttons look phenomenal — and they’re for sale

GIF by DeckButtons

Would you spend $40–$60 on artisan buttons for your Steam Deck? What if they were cast by hand from custom resin molds, made by just one guy in the USA?

I imagine it would depend on how they look — but thankfully, they look amazing.

GIF by DeckButtons

Such shimmer.

Today, Greg Leddy is following up his TouchProtect touchpad and button skins and custom-painted ColoredControllers with the new DeckButtons.com, a shop where he exclusively sells buttons and D-pads for your Steam Deck. Each one is cast in a custom two-part silicone mold of his own design, itself created from a master button he 3D prints from resin, hand-sands, and finishes to emulate the Steam Deck’s own slightly sandy shell texture.

Leddy sent me...

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iPhone and iPad apps will be available in the Vision Pro App Store by default

Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Apple’s upcoming App Store for its Vision Pro headset will include all compatible iPhone and iPad apps “by default.” In an update on Tuesday, Apple said it will release the new App Store with the developer beta of visionOS this fall.

Both iPad and iPhone apps will appear alongside visionOS apps in the new App Store. As Apple has said previously, it will automatically import iOS and iPadOS apps to its new mixed reality operating system “with no additional work required.” Developers can still optimize their apps if needed.

“By default, your iPad and/or iPhone apps will be published automatically on the App Store on Apple Vision Pro,” Apple notes. “Most frameworks available in iPadOS and iOS are also included in visionOS, which means...

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TikTok appears to be gearing up for a big push into messaging

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

There are messaging features inside of TikTok, but nobody really thinks of TikTok as a messaging app. The company appears intent on changing that, though: its parent company ByteDance is hiring for a slew of roles on a team called “TikTok Social,” which seems to be tasked with turning TikTok into a much more powerful messaging system.

The listings, which were first spotted by Axios, are vague in the way that all job listings tend to be, but they make TikTok’s ambitions clear. “We are the messaging team on TikTok,” a listing for an engineering lead says. “Our team’s mission is to facilitate meaningful user connections through TikTok’s messaging experience, which is still in its infancy.” Another listing, for a backend tech lead, says the...

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Amazon’s in-garage delivery service is going to cost a little extra for the convenience

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon will charge $1.99 per delivery for in-garage deliveries that used to be free if the customer wants to get them made outside of their designated weekly “Amazon Day,” as described in an update to Amazon’s blog post. Screenshots of in-app notifications posted on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit by subscribers note the new policy kicks in starting on October 4th.

Amazon spokesperson Amanda Gan confirmed the new policy and said in an email to The Verge, “We will change the free default option for Amazon Key In-Garage Delivery to Amazon Day with Key Delivery. Customers will have more flexibility and control over their Amazon deliveries using Amazon Day with Key Delivery, including the ability to choose their delivery day and combine...

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Nintendo isn’t revealing Mario’s new voice actor until Wonder comes out

Getty Images

Nintendo’s going to let us figure out who the next voice of Mario is on our own. In an interview with IGN, Nintendo of America’s president, Doug Bowser, said that the company doesn’t plan on revealing Charles Martinet’s replacement until folks roll credits on Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

“I think people have recognized this when they see Super Mario Bros. Wonder, they’ll hear a different voice,” Bowser told IGN. “And we’ll let that play out and that’ll be within the credits, and people will learn who the new person is at that point in time, but we don’t plan to make any announcement in advance of that.”

Last month, Nintendo announced that Martinet, the longtime voice of video games’ most iconic character, would be stepping back from the...

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Cinebench can now test GPU power

Image: Maxon

Cinebench, the classic benchmark test that PC enthusiasts (not to mention Verge laptop reviewers like myself) use to measure the CPU performance of their devices, has gotten a major update, developer Maxon announced. The main thing to know is that the new release, dubbed Cinebench 2024, will introduce GPU benchmarking. This is a feature that Cinebench hasn’t had since version 15, which came out a decade ago.

The way Cinebench has worked in the past, for those unfamiliar, is that it renders an image over and over for a set period of time and measures how quickly your hardware can do it. Interestingly, it looks like Cinebench will use the same image (Maxon calls it “a consistent scene file”) for both CPU and GPU testing. This means you’ll...

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Star Trek is getting five new ‘very Short Treks’

Animated Neelix! | Image: CBS Studios

CBS Studios just announced Star Trek: very Short Treks, a set of five animated shorts from Casper Kelly (the “Too Many Cooks” guy). The first of them will debut this Friday — Star Trek Day — in honor of the 50th anniversary of Star Trek: The Animated Series. You can catch the (brief) trailer below.

The shorts will feature characters from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, The Original Series, Discovery, and The Lower Decks. Animation styles visible in the trailer run the gamut from “indistinguishable from The Animated Series” to “just the regular Lower Decks style.”

After the first episode (“Skin a Cat”) launches Friday, the rest will follow on Wednesdays, starting on September 13th; they’ll stream on StarTrek.com and the Star Trek...

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How to disable Chrome’s new targeted ad tracking

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

This summer, Google began rolling out its new Topics API, which “allows a browser to share information with third parties about a user’s interests while preserving privacy.” A part of Google’s new Privacy Sandbox, the API is supposed to replace the third-party cookies that have been following us around for many years now, reporting where we go and what we buy, among other info.

The Topics API was included in July’s Chrome 115 release. If the idea of sharing information about your interests with third parties doesn’t thrill you, you can easily turn it off. Here’s how:

In Chrome, start at the three dots in the upper-right corner and go to Settings > Privacy and Security > Ad privacy. (Or just type chrome://settings/adPrivacy into your...

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Spotify is testing making lyrics a Premium-only feature

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

A number of Spotify users began to notice something strange over the last day or so: the in-app lyrics, which typically pop up under the currently playing song, were suddenly locked away under a paywall. Instead, they saw only a notification bubble saying, “Enjoy lyrics on Spotify Premium,” with a link to sign up. Many Spotify listeners were not enthused.

Spotify tells us that the feature is only a test. “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests, some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning,” says CJ Stanley, Spotify’s co-head of global communications. “We don’t have any further news to share at this time.”

Blud now they even added lyrics to...

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Meta is back in the office three days a week, as WFH continues to die

Meta didn’t build those massive offices in the Bay Area just for them to sit empty, you know? | Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Starting today, Meta’s offices are going to be full again. The company has been saying since June that any employee assigned to an office — which means anyone not formally designated as a remote employee — will be required to be in that office at least three days a week. Now, CNBC reports that the mandate has gone into effect.

Over the last three years, Meta went through the same cycle of remote work as an increasingly large number of other tech companies. When the pandemic began, the company found it was surprisingly productive even with everyone at home, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others began to wax poetic about the remote and distributed future of work. Zuckerberg himself estimated that in the next decade, “we could get to about...

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Baldur’s Gate 3: all the news and updates on one of the best RPGs of the year

Image: Larian Studios

You’re gonna be spending a lot of time down, down, down by the river.

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Reddit’s replacement mods may be putting its communities at risk

Image by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit’s moderator purge could have real impacts on reliability and information safety as it rushes to replace mods with inexperienced, poorly vetted volunteers, according to Ars Technica. With testimony by both expelled former moderators and some of those who replaced them, Ars Technica’s report shows the trouble with the company’s push to quickly replace the mods who sent their subreddits dark, marked them NSFW, or turned them into jokey John Oliver fan forums earlier this year.

Reddit began removing protesting moderators in June and said it would continue doing so ~~until morale improves~~ unless subreddits opened back up. Since then, Reddit has been trying to replace those it’s expelled.

The Ars Technica piece lists several examples...

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Baldur’s Gate 3 will defy everyone’s wishes, make characters less horny

Larian Studios

The companions in Baldur’s Gate 3 have redefined the term “player-sexual,” or the idea that a character’s romantic and sexual orientation are firmly and solely fixed on the player. Usually, in a game that allows you to romance other characters, it takes a moment for the sparks to really start flying. There’s a general buildup of flirtations before you get to have a romantic interlude with your chosen somewhere around a game’s climax. (See what I did there?)

In Baldur’s Gate 3, there is so little time between the initial “I like you” and visiting Boning’s Gate that a whole speedrun category has been developed around getting to a sex scene as quickly as possible, with the world record currently sitting at two minutes and four seconds....

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The best Bluetooth trackers for finding your stuff

Bluetooth trackers come in all shapes and sizes. | Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge

For those of us who can’t ever seem to know where our keys, wallets, and remote controls have disappeared to.

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The best fitness trackers to buy right now

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

From simple fitness bands to rugged sports watches to rings, these are the best trackers you can get.

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United Airlines briefly pauses all flights nationwide for ‘technology issue’

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

On the heels of the Labor Day weekend, United Airlines briefly issued a nationwide ground stop order, citing a “systemwide technology issue.” The order was lifted around 10 minutes later.

“We are experiencing a systemwide technology issue and are holding all aircraft at their departure airports. Flights that are already airborne are continuing to their destination as planned. We will share more information as it becomes available,” the airlines said in a tweet on X (formerly Twitter). “Thank you for your patience as we work on a resolution to get you on your way as soon as possible.”

United did not immediately provide any details about why it issued a ground stop and how it was able to lift it so quickly.

We are experiencing a...

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