Perfect Days is a tidy look at Tokyo’s toilets

Courtesy of Master Mind Ltd

In Perfect Days, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a bathroom cleaner. He starts his day early, gets a coffee from the vending machine, pops a classic rock tape into the stereo, and drives his van to various public restrooms, where he gets to work. He scrubs and tidies the sink meticulously. The various parts of a bidet are wiped. He uses a small mirror to check the underside of a toilet to make sure it’s sparkling in places no one will ever see.

I don’t love work, but I love stories about work. The stakes of a job are so obvious and familiar that you get to skip the explanations of motive (we don’t need to know why Don Draper wants to be a good ad man). What you gain instead is usually a process story — the illustrative part, where you get to...

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Every smart home device that works with Matter

The Verge

All the Matter-compatible devices you can buy now, plus what’s coming soon to the Apple, Amazon, Google, and Samsung-backed smart home standard.

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Watch as NASA reveals asteroid samples collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission

NASA curation team members, along with Lockheed Martin recovery specialists, look on after the successful removal of the sample return canister lid. | Image: NASA / Robert Markowitz

Seven years after the OSIRIS-REx mission launched, a capsule containing rocks captured from the asteroid Bennu in 2020 landed in Utah last month.

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TikTok is overhauling how it pays creators of viral filters and effects

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

TikTok is making major changes to its creator fund for the people who make the app’s viral filters and effects.

The fund sets aside $6 million to pay creators of effects on TikTok — aesthetic filters, mini-games, and more — that regularly go viral on the platform and become trends in their own right. The Effect Creator Rewards program, first announced in May, has a lower set of eligibility requirements and updated payment structure and will be open to more regions, TikTok announced today in a blog post.

First, the fund is opening up to creators in more than a dozen new regions, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and the Philippines. The requirements to join are also changing: previously, creators needed to have 500,000 videos...

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Microsoft’s new AI Copilot arrives in OneNote in November

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is bringing its new Microsoft 365 Copilot assistant to OneNote in November. Originally unveiled earlier this year, Copilot in OneNote will be able to generate lists, draft plans, rewrite your notes, and much more.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is launching November 1st for Microsoft 365 customers on certain business and enterprise plans, and OneNote will be part of the lineup of launch apps, according to a Microsoft 365 roadmap entry.

Image: Microsoft

Copilot running inside OneNote.

A small number of Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers have been testing the new Copilot system over the past six months in apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft announced in July that it plans to charge $30 per month...

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California’s newest law will make it easier to delete personal online data

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Delete Act yesterday, making it possible for Californians to either ask data brokers to delete their personal data or forbid them to sell or share it, with a single request. Right now, Californians have similar rights under a 2018 state law, but they had to ask each company individually, and that’s a tall order given the almost 500 data brokers operating in the state.

The California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) must create a way for people to make this request by January 1st, 2026. The CPPA was established in 2020 by the California Privacy Rights Act.

By August 1st, 2026, data brokers will have to check for and honor new requests every 45 days. After removing the data as requested, brokers...

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Sonos vows to keep fighting Google for the benefit of small companies — and its own revenue

Illustration: The Verge

Despite being dealt a considerable setback in its patent infringement proceedings against Google, Sonos appears confident that it will ultimately prevail against the Big Tech competitor it has for years accused of copying its technology.

In a statement provided to The Verge late Tuesday night by spokesperson Erin Pategas, Sonos described itself as “the primary innovator in the wireless home audio category” and said, “We have proven that Google — a latecomer — has infringed on our invention of foundational customer experiences including setting up and syncing speakers, as well as other important features like group volume and stereo pairing.”

The statement also goes over Sonos’ motivations for taking the fight to Google in the first...

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FTC lays out new rule that could end hidden fees

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is proposing a new rule that it hopes will put an end to hidden junk fees that some businesses often add as a surprise when consumers are checking out.

The agency is currently seeking public comment on the rule, known as the Trade Regulation Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, after having already collected 12,000 comments last year from individuals, businesses, law enforcement groups, and others on how deceptive fees affect them.

FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement that “by hiding the total price, these junk fees make it harder for consumers to shop for the best product or service and punish businesses who are honest upfront.” FTC adds that tackling junk fees through its nearly 100-year-old legal...

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Polar announces new Vantage V3 watch for preorder

Image: Polar

Polar announced the Polar Vantage V3 with more ways to measure activity, faster processing, and offline maps.

The Vantage V3, the latest version since 2020’s Vantage V2, is now available for preorder and retails for $599.90 / €599.90 in three colors: night black, sky blue, and sunrise apricot. It can be bought as a set with Polar’s H10 heart rate monitor for $649.90 / €649.90.

The watch will be available in stores by October 25th

Polar Vantage V3 uses the company’s biosensing technology, Polar Elixir, which it says measures cardiovascular activity, the nervous system, and body temperature and then translates those numbers into data. Users could use the data — blood oxygen saturation, skin temperature, and the heart’s electrical signals...

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The Halloween 2023 StoryScream: things to play and watch this spooky season

Image: A24

Get ready for the holiday with a list of the latest in horror across film, TV, and gaming.

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Uber Eats will now let you order from two stores at once

Image: Uber Eats

Uber Eats announced multi-store ordering, a new feature that allows customers to order from two stores or restaurants at the same time without an additional delivery fee.

The scenario in which this can be useful is if you want tacos and your roommate or significant other wants pizza. With this new feature, you can get both.

With this new feature, you can get both tacos and pizza

Customers can select which items they want from a store’s menu and add them to their cart. At the bottom of the menu, there will be a button indicating that they can bundle their order with another order from a different store. They can then add items from that second store and head to checkout.

Uber says after testing convenience-store-only bundling and making...

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Framework Laptop 13 (AMD) review: buy this one — if you can

The 2023 Framework Laptop 13 has a new AMD option, and it’s a stellar performer.

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Adobe previews AI upscaling to make old, fuzzy videos and GIFs look fresh

Image: Adobe

Adobe has developed an experimental AI-powered upscaling tool that greatly improves the quality of low-resolution GIFs and video footage. This isn’t a fully-fledged app or feature yet, and it’s not yet available for beta testing, but if the demonstrations seen by The Verge are anything to go by then it has some serious potential.

Adobe’s “Project Res-Up” uses diffusion-based upsampling technology (a class of generative AI that generates new data based on the data it’s trained on) to increase video resolution while simultaneously improving sharpness and detail.

In a side-by-side comparison that shows how the tool can upscale video resolution, Adobe took a clip from The Red House (1947) and upscaled it from 480 x 360 to 1280 x 960,...

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The best October Prime Day deals available on Day 2

Illustration by Lucia Pham / The Verge

Welcome to the second half of Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days. There are still a ton of discounts on all kinds of tech products, but here are the ones that are worth your time.

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Dropbox redesigns its web interface and releases AI-powered Dash in open beta

A screenshot of Dropbox Dash, an AI-powered search tool that pulls together information from across apps and services, not just Dropbox. | Image: Dropbox

Dropbox has announced several changes coming to its file hosting service including a new web interface, an open beta for its AI-powered universal search feature, upgrades to another AI feature that’s in alpha, and another early alpha of a new video collaboration tool.

Let’s start with the new web interface, since it’s something most Dropbox users are likely to encounter as it rolls out, regardless of whether they engage with the service’s more advanced features. There’s a new action bar that’ll sit across the page to offer quick access to features like screen recording, folder creation, and file uploading. File previews have also been redesigned, with Dropbox claiming these will make it easier to edit images, videos, and PDFs. There’s a...

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Firefox tests a built-in checker for fake reviews

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Mozilla is testing a new built-in “Review Checker” feature for its Firefox browser that rates how reliable a product’s customer reviews are. The experimental feature was initially spotted by MSPowerUser, and Firefox’s senior director of product management Byron Jourdan confirmed that the company is testing the functionality “with a limited audience in the United States,” in a statement given to The Verge.

Fake reviews are a big problem for online retailers, which have had to take increasingly aggressive measures to stop malicious actors from using them to boost the ratings of their products. Amazon has previously taken down tens of thousands of reviews deemed to be fraudulent, and has even taken legal action against individuals who...

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Utah sues TikTok for getting children ‘addicted’ to its algorithm

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Utah’s Division of Consumer Protection (UDCP) is suing TikTok over allegations that the app’s “addictive nature” harms children and that TikTok deceptively obscures its relationship with ByteDance, its parent company in China. The state’s lawsuit is the latest in a long-and-growing string of bans and legal action from US-based governments and organizations to rein in TikTok’s popularity, generally on espionage fears.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox accused the company of “misleading parents that its app is safe for children” in a press release announcing the lawsuit today. He said the app “illegally baits children into addictive and unhealthy use” with features that encourage young users to scroll endlessly in order to make more advertising...

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One third-party Reddit app on iOS is going charge you $3.99 per month to use it

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit’s new usage-based API pricing is now in effect, and while the potential costs forced many third-party apps to shut down, a handful of apps are pivoting to paid subscriptions to help pay for Reddit’s API fees. On Monday, the developer of one surviving iOS app, Narwhal, announced the monthly fee for the app: $3.99 per month.

Narwhal’s developer, who goes by det0ur on Reddit, went into more detail about the fee in a Monday post. “Reddit is now charging a substantial fee to use the API to power Narwhal,” det0ur wrote. “This fee will be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands a month depending on how many people subscribe. The only goal of this subscription is to cover the costs of using the API.” The monthly fee is set to come...

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Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend

She didn’t even get equity! | Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Bloomberg, Getty Images

Bankman-Fried thought Alameda’s brand wasn’t as good as FTX’s — so he put his sometime-lover in charge of it.

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The $180 Intel Arc A580 is Team Blue’s new budget GPU

Can’t wait to put a Sparkle Orc into my computer. | Image: Sparkle

One YouTuber says it humiliates Nvidia’s RTX 3050! Another says it takes on AMD’s RX 6600. But while both these things are true and it sounds like a decent 1080p card, the new $180 Intel Arc A580 probably isn’t the budget GPU you’ve been waiting for.

For one thing, both that Nvidia card and that AMD card weren’t great when they were new! Ars Technica called the RTX 3050 “an overpriced 1080p GPU” over 20 months ago. The AMD RX 6600 is two years old this month. Still, those are the cards in the same price band as the new Intel A580 — since the RX 7600, RTX 3060, and RTX 4060 cost more.

The better comparison, and problem for Intel, is that the company’s own Intel Arc A750 is a superior gaming card for just $10-$20 more, as Tom’s Hardware...

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The best Apple deals available for Amazon’s October Prime Day event

Even the updated second-gen AirPods Pro with USB-C are on sale right now. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Amazon’s fall Prime Day event is underway. For more deals we recommend across all categories, check out our full roundup here.

Apple rarely discounts its own products, so if you want to score a great deal on a pair of AirPods or a MacBook, it’s best to set your eyes on third parties like Amazon. If you missed out on the Apple discounts we saw during the first Prime Day, however, Amazon’s October Prime Day event has brought some of them back. We’re once again seeing steep discounts on Apple Watches, tablets, and even the new second-gen AirPods Pro with USB-C, which launched less than a month ago.

Below, we’ve rounded up the best Apple deals you can currently get at Amazon and other retailers, so even non-Prime members can save.

...

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Google Meet adds support for 1080p in group video calls

Illustration: The Verge

Google is enabling the ability to stream 1080p-quality webcam feeds during group calls for Workspace subscribers. The company first enabled the high-quality video feature back in April; however, it only worked during one-on-one sessions at the time. Now, the feature is extending to group calls on the web that include three or more participants.

To opt in to the new feature, participants who have Full HD (or better) webcams will need to turn it on by accepting a prompt that’ll automatically appear on the join screen. Once enabled, a 1080p icon will appear on the upper right of the video box to confirm it’s on. People in the meeting can view the higher-quality video if the enabled user is pinned or if the viewer has a large enough screen...

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Right-to-repair is now the law in California

Fixing it!

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed SB 244, or the Right to Repair Act, into law, making it easier for owners to repair devices themselves or to take them to independent repair shops. Because California is one of the world’s largest economies, this iFixit-cosponsored bill may make it easier for people all over the US to repair their devices.

The law, which joins similar efforts in New York, Colorado, and Minnesota, is tougher than some of its predecessors.

Breaking! @CAGovernor @GavinNewsom just signed #SB244 for the #RightToRepair! Getting what we need to fix our stuff is a win for the consumers and the planet, and it just makes sense. Thanks to years of advocacy from @SenSusanEggman @CALPIRG @iFixit @cawrecycles @...

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The iPhone 12 will soon be legal in France again

Remember this phone? | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Big day for the non-Olympic sport of regulatory hoop-jumping: iOS 17.1 will make the iPhone 12 legal in France again. At the very end of the developer notes for iOS 17.1 Beta 3 is this little tidbit:

Updates the iPhone 12 for users in France to accommodate a test protocol for Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) testing. For more information, visit this website: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT213923 (116601274)

En bref: In September, France temporarily banned sales of the iPhone 12 after the Agence nationale des fréquences (ANFR), the country’s regulator of radio-frequency emissions, tested 141 phones for their specific absorption rate (SAR) and found that theiPhone 12 exceeded the legal limit for on-body emissions. Specific absorption rate...

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Amazon’s kid-friendly Kindle Paperwhite has hit an all-time low for Prime Day

Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite Kids is exactly the same as the base model except it comes with a few welcome add-ons. | Image: Amazon

As far as ebook readers are concerned, it’s hard to do better than the Kindle Paperwhite. Luckily, if you’ve been trying to get your kids into reading or have been waiting to pick up a Kindle for yourself, Amazon is offering a big price cut on the latest Kindle Paperwhite Kids as part of its October Prime Day event, dropping it to just $109.99 ($60 off). Alternatively, you can pick up the standard Paperwhite with ads and 8GB configuration for $94.99 ($45 off), its best price to date.

Boasting a vibrant, 6.8-inch display and adjustable color temperature, Amazon’s mid-tier ebook reader is our top choice for most people. The Kids edition is exactly the same as the ad-free Kindle Paperwhite released in 2021, with the only difference being...

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EU asks Elon Musk to prove X isn’t breaking Europe’s disinformation rules

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

EU commissioner Thierry Breton warned Elon Musk in a letter today that X, formerly Twitter, “is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU” after Hamas attacks in Israel. Breton also reminded Musk that the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in August, “sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation.”

The commissioner wrote that illegal content flagged by “relevant authorities” was still on the site, signifying that nothing had been done about it. The DSA, he noted, requires X to remove such content quickly and objectively. He added that Musk’s platform needs to have “proportionate and effective mitigation measures” to deal with “risks to public security and civic discourse” that...

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The best Prime Day smart home deals

The new Deebot X2 Omni robot vacuum launched last week and is already on sale. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

It’s another Prime Day — or Prime Big Deal Days, in Amazon parlance — which means another day to save a dollar or two on some great new gear for your smart home. Whether you’re looking for a robot helper to clean your floors, an extra set of eyes to watch over your property, or another smart speaker to bark commands at Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, there are some good bargains to be had during Amazon’s fall Prime Day event.

As usual, robot vacuums are seeing some decent sales, including on the top-of-the-line models that don’t see discounts as often as the rest of the bunch. (My advice is to never buy a bot that’s not on sale because they’re always on sale.) Ecovacs’ newest flagship robot vacuum, the X2 Omni, launched last week and is...

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These new security cameras from TP-Link match Arlo and Nest for style but, thankfully, not price

The Tapo Wire-Free MagCam is the newest indoor / outdoor smart security camera from TP-Link. | Image: TP-Link

TP-Link’s latest entry to the smart security camera market is a high-spec camera that undercuts the competition on price — even as it matches or beats them on many features. The new Tapo Wire-Free MagCam is a versatile indoor / outdoor Wi-Fi security cam that brings with it a more stylish look than prior Tapo cameras, for $120.

I’ve tested a number of TP-Link’s outdoor cameras, and some have a slightly awkward design, even adopting the same ridiculously techy antennas found on the company’s Wi-Fi routers. In comparison, these new Tapo MagCams ($119.99 for one at Amazon or $299.99 for a three-pack at Best Buy) have a bit of style, which I think is important for a device you might put on the outside of your home.

Image:...

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iRobot’s Roomba i4 Evo and j7 Plus are down to their best price to date

The budget-friendly Roomba i4 Evo is on sale for Prime Big Deal Days starting at just $199.99, which is $100 less than its typical sale price.

Much like smart locks, video doorbells, and other smart home tech, budget robot vacuums have come a long way in the past few years. Case in point? iRobot’s ultra-affordable Roomba i4 Evo, an exceptional cleaning companion that’s receiving a big markdown as part of Amazon’s October Prime Day. Right now, you can get it for just $199.99 ($200 off), which is $100 below its usual sale price of $299.99.

If you’re looking for something more capable, Walmart is taking 50 percent off the high-end iRobot Roomba j7 Plus and selling it for $399, which is essentially the typical asking price of a midrange model. That’s not bad, given the premium model comes with an automatic disposal tank, unlike the standard Roomba i4 Evo.

At this point, it’s safe...

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Drop CTRL V2 review: the keyboard gateway drug gets a glow-up

Drop’s updated keyboard features a host of important updates to help it compete against its modern counterparts.

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