Rooster Teeth pulls Red vs. Blue and other shows from YouTube

Red vs. Blue is now all but gone from YouTube. | Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

Rooster Teeth has moved some of its popular content, including most Red vs. Blue seasons, off the YouTube platform entirely and onto its own website. Rooster Teeth senior writer and showrunner for RWBY Kerry Shawcross posted a video on Thursday announcing the change, explaining that “YouTube revenue is just not cutting it for us right now.”

Shawcross said Rooster Teeth also moved Camp Camp to the site, where episodes will continue to be ad-supported and free to watch. He added Rooster Teeth gets “approximately 5 – 10 times more value” from ads it runs on its own website, adding that “animation’s hard and it’s expensive.”

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Apple’s next Vision headset might ship from the factory with custom lenses

The next Apple Vision headset could get built-in prescriptions. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg today that a future Apple virtual reality headset could be smaller and lighter, and each unit could ship customized from the factory for people with impaired vision. With the first-generation Vision Pro, the company’s solution for glasses wearers is to stock optional Zeiss-made lenses in its retail stores, which creates its own problems with managing the supply, and turning its electronics store into a health provider.

The article points out how fraught tying a product to a custom display could be, given how prescriptions can change with time and how it would limit the ability to share the headset or resell it.

But Apple has almost certainly already thought about this, and...

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Meta’s plans to beat Apple’s Vision Pro include cheaper headsets and no controllers

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta is looking down the road at a follow-up to the Quest 3, which is releasing this week, and plans to take cues from Apple’s Vision Pro while it races to mainstream its VR tech. That’s according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, who writes that the company’s Quest headset marketing plans have changed in response to Apple’s Vision Pro announcement earlier this year. Part of the plan is to release a VR headset without controllers to get the cost down next year.

Gurman says a person within Meta told him the company is “in the ‘afraid of Apple’ stage,” comparing it to the mobile phone industry just before the iPhone’s launch. He writes that the company’s shift away from a heavy focus on the metaverse and more to...

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The chilling distance of The Zone of Interest

Image: A24

During World War II, the Germans designated the area surrounding Auschwitz the “zone of interest.” The dullness of the phrase was intentional, another euphemism as operative as “concentration camp.”

In Jonathan Glazer’s sorta adaptation of Martin Amis’ eponymous novel, this self-delusion is on display. Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) runs a stately home. She raises her children, bosses maids around, and tends to the garden. Their house is on a plot beside Auschwitz. Jews are being slaughtered on the other side of the wall.

Whereas Amis’ novel fictionalized its characters, Glazer centers it on the real-life Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the camp and a rising star in the Nazi party. A powerful and frightening early scene...

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The AI gadgets are coming

Image: William Joel / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 9, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, hurray! I’m so happy you’re here, and also, you can catch up on all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I’ve been reading Zeke Faux’s excellent crypto book and the story of the viral cookies that suddenly disappeared, trying desperately to figure out what the heck the Humane AI Pin actually does, pouring all my notes and tasks into NotePlan, watching the new-to-Netflix season of The Great British Baking Showand anything at all I can find about The Sphere in Vegas, and am on like my fourth week of being totally obsessed with the history of the AltaVista search engine.

This week, I also have for you...

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MGM didn’t pay up after hackers broke into its system and stole customer data

K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

The Wall Street Journal wrote on Thursday thatMGM Resorts International didn’t pay the ransomware attackers who broke into its systems last month, forcing the company to shut down systems at several of its hotels and casinos. The hack kept many waiting to check into their rooms, including FTC chair Lina Kahn, who was in Las Vegas, Nevada to attend meetings about a merger between Kroger and Albertsons.

MGM said in a press release that hackers made off with customer data, including names, contact information, date of birth, and driver’s license numbers, as well as a “limited number” of customers’ social security numbers, passport numbers, or both.

The company didn’t specify how many people were affected by the hack, but according to its...

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The Epic v. Google witness list: Andy Rubin, Sundar Pichai, and more to testify

Illustration: The Verge

It’s been almost 10 months since a trial date was set in Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, and with all of the other big tech cases going on right now, including Google’s other antitrust proceedings, you’d be forgiven for forgetting about this one. But believe it or not, the trial will start in less than a month, on November 6th, in the United States District Court in California’s Northern District.

The court released a tentative list of witnesses, mostly executives and leads from both companies, on Thursday. Epic listed 53 witnesses it either will or might call, including Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

Andy Rubin, one of the co-founders of the Android...

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Hisense’s affordable, HDR-ready U6K TV has hit an all-time low

Hisense’s latest entry-level model offers a lot for the price, including Mini LED backlighting and full-array local dimming. | Image: Hisense

Happy Saturday, dear readers! As you might have seen, Amazon has already begun to roll out a bevy of deals and discounts ahead of its fall Prime Day event next week. However, Amazon isn’t the only retailer currently slinging noteworthy discounts on Echo speakers, robot vacuums, and 4K TVs. Best Buy is also matching many of Amazon’s current promos, including Amazon’s terrific discount on the Hisense U6K, which drops the 55-inch TV down to just under $400 ($80 off).

Although TCL TVs have been the go-to budget recommendation for the last decade or so, Hisense has really upped the ante in recent years. The U6K Series is a great example of a 4K ULED TV that punches above its weight with great color and contrast, low input lag, and Google’s...

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X users report unlabeled clickbait ads that you can’t block or report

Illustration: The Verge

Mashable reports that users on X, formerly known as Twitter, have seen unlabeled ads in their feeds while scrolling through the company’s mobile apps. When users tap them, they’re taken to other websites, with no way to block or report them.

Unlike normal ads that are just posts from company X accounts and have an “Ad” label, these new ones have no account associated with them. Here, this post shows what they look like:

This is new. A Twitter ad without an account attached that I can’t block or interact with. Glitch or trial balloon? pic.twitter.com/Nn05vJGkeb

— I Hate My Favourite Teams (@CarcelMousineau) September 30, 2023

If you’re just scrolling, the embedded image and clickbait-style text might make you think it’s just another...

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Hackers are selling the data of millions lifted from 23andMe’s genetic database

Illustration: Beatrice Sala

23andMe acknowledged this week that data from users of its genetic testing and analysis platform has been circulating on dark web forums after what it says was a credential-stuffing attack, according to BleepingComputer. The outlet wrote that a hacker reportedly leaked what they said was “1 million lines of data” for Ashkenazi Jewish people before saying it would sell the data it had stolen for $1 – $10 per account. The data includes users’ names, profile photos, genetic ancestry results, date of birth, and geographical location.

In to a statement provided to BleepingComputer, the company confirmed the data is legitimate, but says attackers hadn’t breached its internal systems. According to the company, "the preliminary results of this...

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Assassin’s Creed Mirage goes back to basics — and ends up basic

Image: Ubisoft

A richly constructed world and a pared-down gameplay experience refocusing on stealth and assassinations don’t save a game that is largely just okay.

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Discogs’ vibrant vinyl community is shattering

Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge; Photo by Sean Gladwell / Getty Images

A home for music diehards has been fractured by increased fees that are pushing sellers and shoppers to other platforms.

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Quick fix: what are those circles on my Chrome tabs?

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

The issue

You may have noticed recently that of the tabs on your Chrome browser have circles around the tab’s icon and that the icon itself is smaller and slightly faded. What’s that all about — and can I change them back?

You can see how much memory has been freed up by hovering your cursor over the inactive tab.

Quick fix

Chrome’s recent Memory Saver feature, according to Google, “automatically frees up memory from tabs you haven’t used in a while.” The circled tab icons indicate which tabs are currently inactive. To make them active again, you just have to click on them.

The full story

I have a tendency to use a lot of tabs over the course of a working day — and I’m sure a lot of our readers do the same. Some of...

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What’s up with the temperature sensor on the Pixel 8 Pro?

Temperature sensor. Temperature sensor? Temperature sensor. | Image: Google

The Pixel 8 Pro has an infrared temperature sensor. Why does the Pixel 8 Pro have a temperature sensor?

For an unusual feature on a $1,000 flagship phone, Google really isn’t saying much about it. The Pixel 8 Pro announcement mentions it almost in passing:

And on the back of the Pixel 8 Pro, a new temperature sensor lets you quickly scan an object to get its temperature. Use it to check if your pan is hot enough to start cooking or if the milk in your baby’s bottle is at the right temperature. We’ve also submitted an application to the FDA, to enable Pixel’s Thermometer App to take your temperature and save it to Fitbit.

Any off-the-shelf infrared thermometer can tell you the temperature of a hot pan or a baby bottle. But the instant...

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Anatomy of a Fall’s slow-burn murder mystery turns the heat up on a difficult marriage

Image: Neon

Before Anatomy of a Fall gives us a body, we get a booming steel drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” It’s coming from upstairs, where Sandra’s (Sandra Hüller) husband is insulating the attic. But he’s playing the music loudly — possibly out of spite. Sandra is downstairs answering a grad student’s questions about her career as a successful novelist, speaking pretentiously, and predictably, about how reality informs her fiction. Samuel (Samuel Theis), the husband, is also a writer but has never been able to publish a book. Blasting horrible music is perhaps how he expresses that bitterness to his wife. An hour later, he’ll be found outside, head cracked open after tumbling from the third floor.

That’s the initial assumption at least. But...

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The Pixel 8 and the what-is-a-photo apocalypse

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

One of the first known photo fakes, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, was made just decades after the dawn of photography itself. Since then, photographers have found themselves in endless arguments about what truly constitutes a photo — what’s real, what’s fake, and when is editing too much? Now, as we head into an era where AI-powered tools are everywhere and easily accessible, the discussion is going to be messier than ever. And with the Pixel 8, Google has turned the question of “what is a photo” right on its head.

Google has been leading smartphone photography down this path for many years now. The company pioneered the concept of computational photography, where smartphone cameras do a huge amount of behind-the-scenes processing to...

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Two words: jazz anime

Image: GKids

The setup of Blue Giant is familiar anime territory: a young boy from a small town moves to Tokyo to pursue his dream. This boy, Dai, is a saxophone obsessive. He practices all day under a bridge, honking and warbling until he wears out his reed. Naturally, Dai wants to be the greatest jazz musician in the world.

For all his audacious ambition, Blue Giant is largely restrained. The movie focuses on the trio that forms the band — and even shifts its attention away from Dai at around the halfway mark. There’s also Sawabe, a savvy and smug pianist who knows how the club performance circuit operates. And then there’s Dai’s roommate, Tamada, a high school friend who improbably becomes the band’s rhythm section after trying the drums just...

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Intel teases Windows ‘refresh’ coming in 2024 as Windows 12 launch is rumored

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Intel has teased a “Windows refresh” for 2024 which it hopes will boost its revenues. During Citi’s analyst conference last month Intel CFO David Zinsner discussed a Windows refresh next year, suggesting that consumers might upgrade their PCs because of a new release of Windows.

“We actually think 2024 is going to be a pretty good year for client, in particular because of the Windows refresh,” said Zinsner at the Citi analyst conference on September 6th. “We still think that the install base is pretty old, and does require a refresh. We think next year may be the start of that given the Windows catalyst.”

Zinsner’s comments from a month ago were spotted by PC Gamer, and come months after references to Windows 12 were leaked from internal...

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Redfall finally gets a performance mode on Xbox

Image: Bethesda Softworks

Remember Redfall? The blood-sucking shooter with soul-crushing problems? The game that released in May without a 60fps performance mode on Xbox? The game that, according to a Eurogamer article from earlier on Friday, hardly anyone has been playing on Steam? Well, it got a big new update on Friday — including that long-awaited performance mode.

Arkane Studios detailed everything new in Redfall’s Game Update 2 in a blog post on its website. In addition to the performance mode, the update adds things stealth takedowns, more enemies in the open world, some changes to controller settings, improvements to screen narration, and a lot more. It seems like a pretty substantial patch.

Will it be enough for a Cyberpunk 2077-style turnaround, though?...

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Amazon now lets you buy games on its cloud gaming service — but only Ubisoft ones

Image: Ubisoft

Amazon now offers the ability to buy games on its Luna cloud gaming service, but the new feature comes with a big catch: at least for now, you’ll only be able to buy select Ubisoft titles.

For me, Amazon was advertising games you can buy right on the main Luna homepage, including the just-released Assassin’s Creed Mirage. However, if you end up buying an Ubisoft game on Luna, you’ll need an Amazon Prime or a Luna Plus subscription to be able to stream that purchased game, according to an Amazon blog post about the feature.

The ability to buy games is all well and good on its own; previously, you could only play games on Luna by subscribing to specific channels of content, accessing a rotating set of games available to...

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The best phone to buy right now

Photo Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

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

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Today the FTX jury suffered through a code review

What did Gary Wang commit? | Photo Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

Gary Wang supervised the code that gave Alameda special privileges at FTX. But it’s hard to conclude anyone but Sam Bankman-Fried gave the orders.

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The BBC is blocking OpenAI data scraping but is open to AI-powered journalism

Image: BBC

The BBC, the UK’s largest news organization, laid out principles it plans to follow as it evaluates the use of generative AI — including for research and production of journalism, archival, and “personalized experiences.”

In a blog post, BBC director of nations Rhodri Talfan Davies said the broadcaster believes the technology provides opportunities to deliver “more value to our audiences and society.”

The three guiding principles are that the BBC will always act in the public’s best interests, prioritize talent and creativity by respecting the rights of artists, and be open and transparent about AI-made output.

The BBC said it will work with tech companies, other media organizations and regulators to safely develop generative AI and...

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Podcasting’s fallout continues

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

The pain is not over yet for the podcast industry, with layoffs and cancellations continuing to pile up. Amrita covered the WNYC layoffs yesterday, which, thanks to negotiations between management and the union, were not as steep as initially expected (6 percent laid off versus 12 percent previously announced). Last week, Pushkin laid off another 30 percent of staff in its third round of cuts this year, with shakeups even targeting its C-suite. And live audio took another hit on Wednesday, with Amazon shutting down Amp.

I have been talking to people from the business side of podcasting about how the ad market has changed and why it is hitting podcasts so hard, especially when the economy seems to actually be doing… fine? As I wrote...

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The best price ever on Sharge’s transparent batteries and retro Mac chargers

Sharge’s transparent batteries and retro Mac charger. | Image: Sharge

Ever heard of Sharge? The company is arguably just as responsible as Nothing for bringing transparent gadgets back — its see-through batteries swarmed social media and have inspired a wave of copycats. Less famously, it sells a kickass charger shaped like a classic Mac that offers 67 watts of USB-C PD charging across three ports despite its tiny frame.

They all tend to be pricey, but through October 11th, almost all of its chargers and power banks are on sale for their best prices ever — after you clip the Amazon coupon codes, anyhow.

I do want to caution you: while the transparent batteries are very cool, they run a little hot — I’ve sometimes found they stopped charging my most demanding devices due to overheating. That and an...

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Lenovo exec promises 80 percent of its devices will be consumer-repairable by 2025

Lenovo’s rollable laptop concept. | Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge

At first, Lenovo only seemed casually jealous of Framework’s modular repairable laptops — first, it sent a cease-and-desist over a Framework power button, then it unveiled its own modular concept laptop dubbed Project Aurora with no promise to actually build such a thing.

But it looks like the ThinkPad and Motorola owner might actually be serious about ramping up repairability. “More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer,” Lenovo executive Luca Rossi told the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023, according to The Register.

“Batteries, SSD, many things will not any longer be sealed into the product but will be available for the customer to be to repaired on site and then save a lot of waste,” he reportedly said.

L...

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Castlevania: Nocturne is coming back for a second season

Richter Belmont. | Netflix

Castlevania: Nocturne’s season 1 finale made it crystal clear that there was even more to Richter Belmont’s story still waiting to be told. But just in case there was any doubt that Netflix planned to bring the show back, the streamer’s already teasing what’s coming next.

Along with a brief teaser video featuring production footage from the series, Netflix announced today that Castlevania: Nocturne will return for a second season following the adventures of Richter Belmont, Maria Renard, and Annette as they continue to wage war against demons. Both Sam and Adam Deats will return to direct the second season, and studios Project 51 Productions and Powerhouse Animation will continue to produce.

Though Netflix didn’t share a release date for...

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EV buyers will get an instant rebate of as much as $7,500 starting in 2024

Image: Getty Images

The Treasury Department released new guidance Friday outlining how car dealers can give customers instant access to the electric vehicle rebate starting in January 2024. It’s the latest move by the Biden administration to bring down the cost of EVs in the hopes that more people will buy them.

The new guidance lays out how dealers can effectively reduce the price of an EV by as much as $7,500 at the point of purchase rather than the customer having to wait until they file their taxes to claim the credit.

The administration hopes that by applying the credit immediately, more people will be convinced to consider an EV for their next purchase, which will help toward achieving the goal of making EVs 50 percent of new car sales by 2030.

The...

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The best wireless earbuds to buy right now

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

The best from Apple, Bose, Samsung, Sony, Beats, Google, and more

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Google’s seven-year Pixel update promise is historic — or meaningless

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

I can’t believe Google finally did it. I’m still in disbelief. An Android phone with seven years of updates — not security patches, but real OS and feature updates? It’s unheard of. It’s historic.

It’s the opposite of what we’ve come to expect from Google over the past decade and change — so many great smartphone features sadly left locked away because of Android fragmentation, so many products buried in the Google graveyard. With “seven years of OS upgrades, security updates, feature drops, and AI innovations,” will the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro finally break the cycle?

I was ready to buy a Pixel this week, and I still might. I want to believe.

But during Google’s keynote, I noticed a gaping hole in Google’s promise — and though we...

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