How to turn your photos into stickers in iOS 17

Turning your cat photos into shareable stickers is a cinch in iOS 17. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Last year, iOS 16 gave us the ability to cut subjects out of our photos. It was fun! But it wasn’t totally clear what you should do with them. That changes in iOS 17, which offers an excellent way to use your photo cutouts: turn them into stickers.

I know. I was skeptical, too. But you have to trust me on this: stickers in iOS 17 are well worth your time, particularly in iMessage. You’re going to thrill and impress all of your friends when you turn a grumpy picture of your cat into a tapback reaction, and everyone will want to know how you did it. You can tell ‘em we told you, or just keep it to yourself and take all the credit like some kind of Apple Genius Bar genius. No judgment.

Here’s how to do it. (I originally followed these...

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How to set up your own Contact Poster in iOS 17

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

Apple has added numerous features to the iPhone with iOS 17, and one of the most notable is Contact Poster — a way for you to create your own digital calling card through images, colors, and text.

Here’s how it works: when you call someone iPhone to iPhone and you’re saved in their contacts, your Contact Poster will appear on their screen. It replaces the much smaller notification and thumbnail picture that was previously displayed and gives you an opportunity to get creative with how you want to appear to your friends, family, or colleagues.

While you’re setting up your Contact Poster, you can also make changes to your Apple ID avatar based on the poster. If you head into Settings on your iPhone or Mac, for example, you’ll see your...

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George R.R. Martin and other authors sue OpenAI for copyright infringement

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

More authors sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, joining other writers in pursuing legal action against generative AI companies for using their books to train AI models.

The Authors Guild and 17 well-known authors like Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs hope to get the filing classified as a class action.

According to the complaint, OpenAI “copied plaintiffs’ works wholesale, without permission or consideration” and fed the copyrighted materials into large language models.

“These authors’ livelihoods derive from the works they create. But the Defendant’s LLMs endanger fiction writers’ ability to make a living in that the LLMs...

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Cyberpunk 2077 is finally where it should have been from the start

Image: CD Projekt Red

I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 as part of its major new update.

I dutifully played through Cyberpunk 2077 in the weeks after its rocky December 2020 launch, but I always felt that it was aggressively fine. I loved sneaking through levels as a netrunner that stealthily hacked into enemies. But things like the cringey edginess that permeated nearly every line of dialogue, a clothes / gear system that forced me to look like an absolute clown to get the best stats, and even small details like a frustratingly zoomed-in mini-map all brought down the experience.

Nearly three years in, a lot of those quibbles are now fixed, and after spending more than a dozen hours with the new update 2.0 and Phantom...

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The iPhone 15 will now tell you how many charge cycles are on its battery

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro have several features that aren’t on past iPhones, and now we can add new battery information and control features to the list. As pointed out in this post by @Tech_Reve, a new section in the iOS 17 “About” screen shows how many charge cycles your battery has been through as well as its manufacturing date and when it was first used (via MacRumors).

Those on older phones still have third-party options like CoconutBattery for the Mac to get more information about the battery, but it would be nice to just, you know, have it already there. iOS Shortcuts are also an option for accessing this information, though Verge editor Dan Seifert says the one he’s been using for years no longer works after updating his phone to...

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Donald Trump Jr. said his father ‘passed away’ in apparent X account hack

Illustration: The Verge

Donald Trump Jr.’s X account was compromised on Wednesday in one of the more high-profile security lapses during Elon Musk’s ownership of the company. The account made several unusual posts, including one that falsely claimed former President Donald Trump had “passed away” and that Trump Jr. would take his place in the ongoing 2024 presidential campaign. The bogus posts were eventually deleted later in the morning.

Security at X, formerly Twitter, has always been a rocky issue — and it was a problem long before Musk took over. A massive hack in 2020 saw numerous popular accounts hijacked in an effort to push a Bitcoin scam; its perpetrators have since faced legal consequences. Earlier this year, a database posted online was claimed to...

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Apple reportedly stopped short of bringing a stock trading feature to iPhone

Illustration: The Verge

Apple came close to creating an investing feature for the iPhone that would’ve let users buy and sell stocks directly on the device, according to a report from CNBC. The company reportedly started working on the investing feature during the meme stock hype in 2020 but ultimately pivoted away from the idea last year as markets began to falter.

Sources close to the situation tell CNBC that Apple was working on the feature with Goldman Sachs, the financial institution that Apple teamed up with to launch its credit card, buy now, pay later offering, and savings account. While Apple and Goldman Sachs aimed to release the feature in 2022, Apple shelved the project, as CNBC reports it “feared user backlash if people lost money in the stock...

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A lawsuit alleging privacy violations by OpenAI was dismissed

Illustration: The Verge

Plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit alleging OpenAI violated privacy rights for training data dropped their case against the company. Court documents showed the case was dismissed without prejudice, and the plaintiffs can choose to refile.

The lawsuit, first filed in June this year in the Northern District of California, alleged OpenAI’s web scraper “violated property rights and privacy rights of all individuals whose personal information was scraped and then incorporated through misappropriation into [OpenAI’s] products.” The lawsuit did not name the plaintiffs, who were identified with initials. The Clarkson Law Firm filed the class action suit on their behalf.

OpenAI, like other generative AI companies, scrapes publicly available...

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Joe Biden launches climate and jobs programs — but no new pollution-cutting goals

US President Joe Biden addresses the 78th United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York City on September 19th, 2023. | Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP via Getty Images

The Biden administration launched new climate funding and jobs programs today as world leaders — minus Joe Biden — gather for the Climate Ambition Summit in New York. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced $4.6 billion in new funding for state, local, and tribal clean energy programs. Plus, details have finally emerged for a long-awaited American Climate Corps.

But Biden is expected to skip the United Nations climate summit today, a conspicuous absence since UN Secretary-General António Guterres stipulated that leaders present “credible, serious and new climate action” in order to participate. Biden, who came to New York this week for the UN General Assembly, is reportedly sending climate envoy John Kerry to attend the...

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All the news from Amazon’s September 2023 product launch event

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon’s big fall product event comes from a smaller company and with big AI expectations.

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How to add Markdown support to Google Docs

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

If you’d rather format your Google Docs document using text shortcuts than keyboard ones, you can — Google Docs offers Markdown support. Back in March 2022, in a blog post announcing the feature, Google explained it was doing this through its autocorrect feature so that Docs will automatically format the text for you after you type it in Markdown format. For example, if you type “# Google Docs is getting more Markdown support,” it’ll automatically get converted to a level one heading.

Before you can use Markdown, you have to activate the feature.

The feature is off by default — probably a good choice, as it’s easy to imagine a lot of people getting confused if typing a pound sign in front of something automatically...

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Our 12 favorite movies from TIFF 2023

Smugglers. | Image: TIFF

From the uncomfortably comedic horror of Dream Scenario to the outlandish heist / revenge movie Smugglers, there was a lot to love in Toronto this year.

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How Google taught AI to doubt itself

Image: Google

This is Platformer_, a newsletter on the intersection of Silicon Valley and democracy from Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer._ Sign up here.

Today let’s talk about an advance in Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, and how it addresses one of the most pressing problems with today’s chatbots: their tendency to make things up.

From the day that the chatbots arrived last year, their makers warned us not to trust them. The text generated by tools like ChatGPT does not draw on a database of established facts. Instead, chatbots are predictive — making probabilistic guesses about which words seem right based on the massive corpus of text that their underlying large language models were trained on.

As a result, chatbots are often “confidently wrong,” to...

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1Password rolls out public passkey support to its mobile apps and web extensions

1Password’s passkey support is finally out of beta. | Image: 1Password

Following months of teasing, 1Password has announced that support for passkeys — a new login technology that replaces passwords with authentication systems built into a user’s own device — is now generally available across the password managers’ mobile apps and web browser extensions. From today, 1Password users can create, manage, and sign in to supported websites with passkeys via the 1Password iOS and Android mobile apps and its browser extensions for “all major web browsers on Mac, Windows, and Linux.”

This update doesn’t include the ability to replace your 1Password account’s master password with a passkey, however, which has been teased by the company since February. That’s set to arrive “later this fall,” when the company says...

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Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 review: small but smart improvements

Iterative updates aren’t flashy, but these smartwatches are mainly for folks who don’t have Apple Watches yet.

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This $459 Bambu A1 Mini is almost the ‘easy button’ of 3D printers

The Bambu A1 Mini.

Hands-on: Bambu’s first mini might show the future of consumer 3D printing.

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Substack’s redesign makes it feel like a more traditional social media app

Illustration by The Verge

After a tease in a blog post on Tuesday, Substack officially shared details about its redesigned app on Wednesday, which offers a new “Home” tab and some adjustments to the app’s current layout.

The biggest change is the Home tab, which is intended to help people find stuff to read by providing “entry to an exciting universe of stories, ideas, and people” on the platform. At the top, there’s a queue of big cards highlighting posts from your subscriptions that you can swipe through. (The cards remind me of Apple’s “Up Next” suggestions in its Podcasts app.) Under those cards, you’ll see a feed of Substack’s tweet-like Notes feed, and you can sort them by “Explore” (recommendations) and “Following.”

Home, inbox, chat

In a blog post,...

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Microsoft will lay out its AI vision for Windows and more at special event, leaked memo says

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Microsoft is gearing up to share its “vision for what’s ahead” with AI integration into Windows, Microsoft 365 services, Surface, and more at a special event on Thursday. The event will take place just days after former Windows and Surface chief Panos Panay publicly announced his resignation.

In an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, described Panay as a “champion of our consumer business and our engineering teams.” He also teased that Thursday’s “special event” will build on the existing OpenAI partnership and is “only the beginning” of an AI-powered vision for Microsoft’s key products.

“We have innovated on and shipped this incredible technology inside of Edge and Bing. Microsoft...

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LG’s monstrous Gram 17 is nearly half off just for today

LG’s last-gen Gram 17 offers a spacious screen without sacrificing portability. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Laptops are useful for many things, but your typical 13-inch screen just isn’t spacious enough for hardcore multitaskers. If you want more screen real estate at a reasonable price, Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Air is an obvious choice, as is LG’s Gram 17 when you can find it at a steep discount. Thankfully, last year’s version of the latter is currently on sale at Best Buy with 16GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and a 12th Gen Core i7-1260P processor for $999.99 ($800 off), one of its best prices to date.

LG’s 17-inch Gram 17 was once one of our favorite laptops for fans of big screens thanks to its quiet performance and spacious, high-resolution display. That extra screen real estate doesn’t translate to extra weight, either, which is impressive...

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Dumb Money is the Funko Pop version of the GameStop story

Nick Offerman and Seth Rogen as dumb money in Dumb Money. | Image: Lacey Terrell / Sony Pictures

Dumb Money thinks you’re stupid — the title might as well be a reference to anyone paying to see the film.

It’s a bummer, too. I had such high hopes! The GameStop saga, which is the basis for the movie, is genuinely bizarre, and anyone with a flair for the absurd would have a fantastic time with it. To recap: a bunch of Redditors (and others) bought the stock of a flailing retailer that was heavily shorted, sending it soaring — and burning the shorts in the process.

A financial Love Actually, minus the charm

Think about the story of Keith “Roaring Kitty / Deep Fucking Value” Gill for even a moment and you have one of the funniest possible superhero arcs of all time. By day, Gill is giving people decent, reasonable, sensible financial...

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Arlo’s new security tags can disable your security system with a doorbell tap

We currently have no ideas what the Security Tag looks like, but it’ll be compatible with Arlo’s new video doorbell (pictured). | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Arlo is adding a new gadget to its smart home security lineup that should make it easier to disarm its Arlo Home Security system without digging through the company’s companion app or using its keypad once you’re in the house. The press release for Arlo’s new Essential product series — which includes a new video doorbell, outdoor camera, indoor camera, and XL security camera — mentions an “Arlo Security Tag” that can be held against the new doorbell itself to swiftly disarm the company’s security system when the little fob launches in “Q4 2023.”

When asked for comment about the product, Arlo spokesperson Hannah Block said that the Arlo Security Tag will be the “first NFC Touchless Disarm device,” and that further details would be...

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T-Mobile users say other people’s account information is appearing in their app

T-Mobile has yet to offer an explanation for the issue. | Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

There’s some weirdness happening over at T-Mobile this morning. Multiple T-Mobile customers on X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit have reported that they’re able to see other users’ account data — including their current credit balance, purchase history, credit card information, and home address — when signing into their own T-Mobile accounts.

Some T-Mobile customers have mentioned seeing information from several other accounts, but the scale of the issue isn’t yet clear. It’s prevalent enough that the T-Mobile subreddit has asked its users to avoid posting any further information for “security reasons.”

T-Mobile has yet to officially acknowledge the concerns or provide an explanation as to what’s causing them. We have reached out for...

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Meta is expanding its paid verification badge to business accounts

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Businesses on Meta platforms will soon be able to purchase a blue check to get exclusive features and support.

The expansion was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event today. Earlier this year, the company announced Meta Verified for creators, a $12 per month subscription that gives creators a blue check and access to features like priority customer support and impersonation protection. Businesses can buy verification on Facebook or Instagram for $22 a month or $35 for both — an increase over creator pricing that ranges from $12 to $15. Testing on Facebook and Instagram will begin in the coming weeks, with WhatsApp to follow.

Paying businesses will get similar perks as creators, including account security features and...

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Nikon’s new ZF is a retro-styled full-frame camera aimed right at our nostalgic hearts

The Nikon ZF is the company’s latest camera. | Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge

After nine years of occasionally chasing the retro-camera-with-modern-features unicorn, Nikon may have finally gotten the formula right.

The Japanese camera maker is announcing the Nikon ZF, a modern mirrorless camera packed with fairly high specs — like a 24.5-megapixel full-frame sensor, 299-point tracking autofocus with subject detection, in-body image stabilization, and dual card slots (of a sort) — in a body that looks just like one of the camera’s analog forebears. Nikon may have done this dance before with its trifling ZFC and long-forgotten Df DSLR, but it’s correcting its main mistakes with those cameras by giving the ZF a full-frame sensor and competitive price of $1,999.95 when it launches mid-October.

While the Df may look a...

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The case for creating new art for every podcast episode

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

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

Happy Tuesday! Got a super-packed issue of Hot Pod today for everyone. First off, I’ll take a look at Spotify’s chief public affairs officer’s lengthy new blog post about Apple’s App Store policies. Also, Apple’s iOS 17 will bring episode art to Apple Podcasts. What will that mean for podcasters?

Before I hit the news, a couple of new developments. First off, Freakonomics Radio unveiled a new premium subscription today called Freakonomics Radio Plus. Members will pay $4.99 per month for a number of perks, including ad-free episodes of every podcast in the Freakonomics Radio Network. This includes Freakonomics Radio, No Stupid...

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Justice Department and Google spar over public access to antitrust trial files

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

The Justice Department has removed access to publicly posted trial documents in US v. Google amid a dispute over how files should be made available online, according to reporter Leah Nylen of Bloomberg. Nylen, reporting from the courtroom, said that Judge Amit Mehta will make a decision in the morning on future online access to exhibits.

The Big Tech On Trial newsletter reported more details of the exchange, which apparently occurred during an exchange between the Justice Department and Google over whether an exhibit could be submitted as evidence. Google’s attorneys apparently raised the fact that the Justice Department had been posting documents online, a fact Mehta said he hadn’t been aware of. (The Verge has linked to the now-removed...

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Roblox is rolling out in-experience subscriptions, but you can’t buy them yet

Image: Roblox

Roblox is now rolling out the ability for developers to create subscriptions that they can sell in their experiences, according to a forum post. The company announced in July that it was working on these tools, saying that they could help developers “establish a recurring economic relationship with their users and potentially increase the predictability of their earning,” and now developers can actually start to plan out their offerings.

Roblox users won’t be able to buy subscriptions just yet, however; that won’t be possible until sometime in November, according to the post. When they can, users will pay for subscriptions in their local currency, but the money will make its way to developers as Robux, Roblox’s on-platform currency.

It’s...

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Resident Evil Village on the iPhone 15 Pro actually looks pretty good

Screenshot from Vincent Zhong’s iPhone 15 Pro review.

In a recent interview with IGN, an Apple executive claimed that the iPhone 15 Pro was “going to be the best game console.” I was skeptical; although Apple boasted about the capabilities of its new GPU in its A17 Pro chip and said high-fidelity games like Resident Evil Village, the Resident Evil 4 remake, and Death Stranding would all be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro, I didn’t believe they would run very well in practice.

But after actually seeing footage of Resident Evil Village in action on an iPhone 15 Pro, I’m coming around to the idea that Apple’s vision isn’t as far out as I thought.

You can see the game in a video from YouTuber Vincent Zhong, starting at 13:48. First, Zhang plays Village on the 15 Pro on a mobile game controller...

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Fitbit updates its app and teases something for September 28th

Is that a Charge 6 I see? | Image: Fitbit

It’s been a big day for Fitbit fans. On Tuesday morning, the Google-owned subsidiary started rolling out its new Fitbit app, and later in the day, it teased news on September 28th about a new Fitbit device.

The news teaser is brief: it’s a six-second video on X (formerly Twitter) showing a person swinging their arms and wearing a wrist tracker of some kind that looks a lot like something from the Charge family.

A new Fitbit tracker crossed the FCC recently, so it’s not a total surprise that Fitbit has something new in the works. 9to5Google reported last week that Fitbit is working on a Fitbit Charge 6 that will bring back the physical button, so the timing seems to check out for this new device being a new Charge. And the device in the...

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Amazon made a new version of its cashierless tech that doesn’t need cameras

Go ahead, wear that new jersey right out of the store. | Image: Amazon

Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology is both extremely cool — just grab what you want and walk out the door, no checking out or paying necessary — and extremely complicated. Amazon’s system uses computer vision, which requires a complex system of cameras and sensors just to make the whole thing work.

But now, Amazon is rolling out a new, simpler way to Just Walk Out. It built a system that uses radio-frequency identification, known as RFID, to track your purchases as you leave the store. Amazon first tested the system at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle (so named by Amazon, which purchased the arena’s naming rights in 2020) and is now also testing it at Lumen Field, the home of the Seattle Seahawks.

The system is pretty straightforward:...

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