Wolverine part of massive Insomniac Games leak after ransomware deadline passes

Officially released artwork of Insomniac’s Wolverine. | Image: Insomniac Games

Footage of Insomniac’s upcoming Wolverine game has started widely circulating on X after hackers published troves of internal data from its developer. Cyber Daily reports that a total of 1.67 terabytes of data comprising over 1.3 million files has been released by the Ryhsida ransomware gang, which announced that it had stolen the data in a hack on December 12th. At the time, the group announced an auction price for the data starting at 50 bitcoins, roughly $2 million, and a seven day deadline to pay.

Alongside level design and character materials from Wolverine, the leak seemingly includes several internal company presentations containing details on unannounced Insomniac and Sony games, screenshots of internal spreadsheets, and details...

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Google to pay $700 million and make tiny app store changes to settle with 50 states

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

On December 11th, a jury decided that Google has an illegal monopoly with its Google Play app store, handing Epic Games a win. But Epic wasn’t the only one fighting an antitrust case. All 50 state attorneys general settled a similar lawsuit in September, and we’ve just now learned what Google agreed to give up as a result: $700 million and a handful of minor concessions in the way that Google runs its store in the United States.

The biggest change: Google will need to let developers steer consumers away from the Google Play Store for several years, if this settlement is approved.

You can read the full 68-page settlement for yourself at the bottom of this story, but here’s the TL;DR about what it includes:

• $700,000,000 from Google in...

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The Verge’s favorite holiday gifts under $25

Photo Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales and Cath Virginia / The Verge

Whether you need a stocking stuffer or a white elephant present, we’ve got an inexpensive gift idea for nearly every occasion.

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NASA’s GUSTO balloon telescope will map part of the Milky Way

Gusto will launch from Antarctica. | Image: Geoffrey Palo / GUSTO Team

NASA is preparing to begin an experiment named GUSTO — short for Galactic / Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory — to gather data that will be used to create a 3D map of a portion of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The GUSTO experiment involves a telescope that will float 120,000 feet over Antarctica on a high-altitude balloon for at least 55 days, soaking up high-frequency radio waves percolating through the cosmic interstellar medium — a term that refers to the gases, dust, radiation, and other materials that make up the space between stars. NASA has a fun guide to its scientific balloons that explains the zero-pressure and super-pressure balloons it uses for missions like this.

Image: José Silva / GUSTO Team...

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The Verge’s 2023 holiday gift guide for kids

Photo Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales and Cath Virginia / The Verge

Let us help you find all kinds of gifts for all kinds of kiddos.

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Xfinity discloses a data breach — but doesn’t say how many users are affected

Image: Xfinity

Xfinity is notifying customers of a “data security incident” it says resulted in the theft of customer information, including usernames, passwords, contact information, and more. In a notice on Monday, Xfinity says “there was unauthorized access” to its systems from October 16th to October 19th, 2023.

Xfinity traces the breach to a security vulnerability disclosed by cloud computing company Citrix, which began alerting customers of a flaw in software Xfinity and other companies use on October 10th. While Xfinity says it patched the security hole, it later uncovered suspicious activity on its internal systems “that was concluded to be a result of this vulnerability.”

The hack resulted in the theft of customer usernames and hashed...

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Pakistan’s former prime minister is using an AI voice clone to campaign from prison

YouTube

Former prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan has been in prison since August for illegally selling state gifts — but that hasn’t stopped him from campaigning. The leader’s political party released a four-minute video on Sunday evening that used AI-voice cloning technology to replicate his voice. In the video, which aired during a “virtual rally” in Pakistan, the dubbed audio is accompanied by a caption that states, “AI voice of Imran Khan based on his notes.”

Jibran Ilyas, a social media leader for Khan’s party (known as the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, or PTI), posted the video on X.

Founding Chairman Imran Khan's speech in AI voice. Can't stop praising Dr Asma for staying up 36 hours to get this done in time, Nausheen for...

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Disney drops Marvel lead Jonathan Majors following assault verdict

Image: Disney

Disney has dropped Jonathan Majors from his leading Marvel role as Kang the Conqueror after he was found guilty of reckless assault in the third degree and of harassment, according to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The verdict comes after a two-week trial following Majors’ arrest last March after an altercation with his ex-partner Grace Jabbari.

Marvel had been setting up for Majors to be the next supervillain for the franchise, but now the company is changing course. It’s unclear if Disney plans to recast Kang or change its planned storylines more drastically. Majors had already appeared in both seasons of Loki and in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,and was set to star in one of the next planned Avengers movies, subtitled The...

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Here are the best iPad deals right now

Select iPad models go on sale quite frequently. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

While the best iPad deals usually come around during major sale events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon’s various Prime Days, you can still find plenty of great discounts throughout the year if you know where to look. Whether you’re after the high-end iPad Pro or the most affordable entry-level iPad, there’s likely a sale going on somewhere that you may be interested in.

Of course, it’s difficult to know exactly where you can find the most notable deals unless you’re scouring the major retailers on a daily basis. But that’s often what our deal hunters at The Verge are doing each and every day, so let us help you out. Below, we’ve listed the best deals you can get on each iPad model that is currently available, from the cheapo...

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Game preservationists dig for lost apps in TestFlight ‘teraleak’

Image: Rovio

A huge number of old mobile games and apps from TestFlight, which lets developers share in-development versions of their apps, have been discovered on the Internet Archive, as reported by Eurogamer. The 1.2TB cache, which is being called the “teraleak,” could be a really big deal for preservationists, especially because many older apps are no longer available to download in any form.

The apps are from “roughly” 2012 through 2015, according to an account on X (formerly Twitter) that’s focused on the leak. It appears that the apps were scraped from the TestFlight website in early 2015, perhaps from misconfigured cloud storage; links on the Wayback Machine include mentions of Amazon’s CloudFront and S3 services for AWS.

Before it was a...

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New York City council member-elect used AI to answer questions

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Susan Zhuang, a Democrat who will soon represent the 43rd Council District in Brooklyn, New York, admitted to using AI when answering questions from a local news publication, according to a report by the New York Post. In a text message sent to the Post, Zhuang wrote that she uses “AI as a tool to help foster deeper understanding” because English is not her first language.

The responses in question were included in an article from City & State, which asked local council member-elects to fill out a questionnaire about their personal interests and policies. However, the Post noticed something was off with Zhuang’s answer to the question, “What makes someone a New Yorker?”:

New York City, the concrete jungle where dreams come true. It’s not...

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Here are the shipping deadlines to get your holiday gifts on time

Amazon Prime members may be eligible for free same-day delivery. | Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

The same thing happens year after year. Things get busy with work, school, and life in general until you’re suddenly up against the clock as you race your gifts to your local post office, FedEx store, or UPS location. We’ve all been there, but we’d like to be of some help as you plan your next move and begin sending out your holiday packages.

If you plan on sending your gifts via traditional mail, what follows are the upcoming domestic shipping deadlines for various retailers and shipment carriers so you can ensure that your packages arrive before Christmas, Kwanzaa, or whatever holiday it is you celebrate this time of year. Hopefully, it’ll help you avoid some holiday stress, if at all possible.

With UPS, you have until Thursday,...

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Nikola founder Trevor Milton sentenced to four years in prison in EV truck fraud case

Trevor Milton, the founder and former CEO of electric truck company Nikola, was sentenced to four years in prison after a jury found him guilty of misleading investors about the company’s technology. Milton was also ordered to pay a $1 million fine.

Federal prosecutor said Milton had lied about Nikola’s capabilities, including an assertion that it had built its own electric truck, the Nikola One, from the “ground up.” They also accused him of staging a video that purportedly showed its Nikola One semi driving under its own power when it was actually rolling down a hill.

During the sentencing hearing, Milton made several bizarre statements. He claimed that his resignation from Nikola was not a result of the fraud allegations but because...

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Wrapped 2023: what you’ve been doing in every app, analyzed

Spotify Wrapped 2023 summaries | Image: Spotify

You were listening, walking, and playing, and they were watching. Now Spotify and other apps are repackaging that data to recap your 2023.

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Acura opens up reservations for all-electric ZDX SUV

Image: Acura

Acura’s first fully electric vehicle is now available for customers to reserve, with the first deliveries scheduled for early 2024.

The 2024 Acura ZDX starts at $60,000 and will come in several trims, including the base-model A-Spec, with single-motor rear-wheel drive. A more expensive Type S dual-motor powertrain with 500 horsepower starts at $70,000. Acura previously said that the ZDX will get up to 325 miles of estimated range and have an operating system powered by Google.

The 2024 Acura ZDX starts at $60,000 and will come in several trims

The ZDX will start customer deliveries around the same time as the 2024 Honda Prologue. Like the Prologue, the ZDX will be the product of the three-year partnership between Honda and General...

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Jeff Bezos wants Elon Musk to know Blue Origin is serious now

He’s not a spaceman, he’s a... business, man. | Laura Normand / The Verge

I was about halfway through Lex Fridman’s interview with Jeff Bezos, which is longer than Citizen Kane, when I realized what Bezos was up to: this is a warning shot across SpaceX’s bow. “Blue Origin needs to be much faster,” Bezos said. “It’s one of the reasons I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago. I wanted to come in — Blue Origin needs me right now.” The goal, he said, was to make it clear that Blue Origin, his rocket company, needed to speed things up.

Bezos also demonstrated that he understands how shade works: “When I was the CEO of Amazon, my point of view on this is, ‘If I’m the CEO of a publicly traded company, it’s going to get my full attention.’” He didn’t say “Tesla” and didn’t have to. Anyone who watches...

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Expedia wants to use AI to cut Google out of its trip-planning business

Travel website Expedia wants to get people to start their travel search on its site with AI instead of using an external search engine.

Expedia already uses AI for some customer service features and to help property owners describe their homes and hotels. The company hopes in the future that AI will help it recommend travel destinations to customers based on previous trips and bring more direct traffic to its site. It’s a long-term plan to shift the balance of power on the web — albeit one that’s still in its earliest stages for the company.

Rajesh Naidu, chief architect and head of data management at Expedia, says the goal is to get users started on their trips in one place. Expedia hopes to produce recommendations trained with its...

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Flipboard is pivoting to ActivityPub and the fediverse

Flipboard has been experimenting with fediverse integration for months now. | Image: Flipboard

Flipboard is taking its biggest step yet into the fediverse. The company announced on Monday that it is beginning to switch its user accounts to ActivityPub, which means that everyone curating stuff on Flipboard is now doing so in a way that apps like Mastodon can see and interact with.

Right now, only 25 accounts (including The Verge’s) have been federated with ActivityPub, but by March Flipboard says it plans to allow anyone on the platform to open their account to the fediverse and allow any Flipboard user to follow any fediverse account from within the Flipboard app. At that point, Flipboard will essentially be an ActivityPub-based platform like Mastodon or Pixelfed but with an interface designed for reading articles instead of...

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The best action game of 2023 is now selling for $20 off

One-on-one mech duels in Armored Core VI are a thing of beauty — and stress. | Image: FromSoftware

2023 has been filled wall to wall with great games, but one of the low-key best is now selling for its best price. FromSoftware’s Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon is available in disc form for $39.99 ($20 off) at Amazon (PS5 / Xbox / PS4), Best Buy (PS5 / Xbox / PS4), and direct from the Bandai Namco Store. The game is still fresh off its win for Best Action Game at the Keighleys, but it’s not gotten many notable discounts before now.

The Armored Core series has always been a bit niche, mostly appealing to mecha sickos who love battling through postapocalyptic sci-fi worlds with robots they’ve customized out the wazoo, and FromSoftware brought it back for 2023 with a true-to-form installment. AC6 may be from the same developer that...

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Netflix’s The Kitchen turns London into a cyberpunk dystopia in new trailer

Image: Chris Harris / Netflix

Netflix is kicking off 2024 with a vision of our dystopic future. The streamer just released a new trailer for The Kitchen, which imagines a near-future version of London, complete with reckless biker gangs and lots of holographic displays to complete the cyberpunk look. The film is helmed by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya (who also serves as co-writer and co-producer) and starts streaming on January 19th, 2024.

According to Netflix’s description, in this version of London “the gap between rich and poor has been stretched to its limits,” which leads to the titular setting of the movie.

All forms of social housing have been eradicated and only The Kitchen remains. A community that refuses to move out of the place they call home. This is...

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How to choose which Apple Watch to buy

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Between the Apple Watch Series 9, the Ultra 2, and the second-gen SE, there are more options than ever. We’ll help you sort through them.

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Southwest Airlines fined $140 million for holiday meltdown that stranded millions

Image: Jason Fochtman / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

Southwest Airlines is facing a $140 million fine after last year’s holiday meltdown left millions of passengers stranded at airports across the US. On Monday, the Department of Transportation announced it’s imposing the civil penalty over “numerous violations of consumer protection laws” during and after the mass cancellations.

Following an investigation, the DOT found Southwest failed to “provide adequate customer service assistance,” stating passengers stranded at airports were met with busy signals, long queues, and dropped calls when trying to get in touch with the airline. The DOT says Southwest didn’t provide timely or accurate flight status notifications to customers, either, and also failed to provide prompt refunds to...

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Apple to pull Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 this week due to ITC ban

Apple will pause selling the Series 9 and Ultra 2 starting December 21st. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

After 3PM ET on December 21st, you won’t be able to buy the Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2. The last day for pickup or delivery of these models from Apple’s retail stores is December 24th. The reason? The company says it’s to preemptively comply with an ITC import ban following a patent dispute with medical device maker Masimo over its SpO2 sensor.

The news was first reported by 9to5Mac, and Apple confirmed the news to The Verge. The ban only affects the flagship Series 9 and Ultra 2 models. Since the Apple Watch SE does not have the SpO2 sensor, it remains unaffected. Previous models of the Apple Watch with the blood oxygen sensor will also not be impacted. The ITC ban also only impacts sales of the Series 9 and Ultra 2 within the US...

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US lawmakers push DOJ to investigate Apple following Beeper shutdowns

Image: Beeper

Following a tumultuous few weeks for Beeper, which has been trying to provide an iMessage-compatible Android app, a group of US lawmakers are pushing for the DOJ to investigate Apple for “potentially anticompetitive conduct” over its attempts to disable Beeper’s services. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT) as well as Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Ken Buck (R-CO) said in a letter to the DOJ that Beeper Mini was a threat to Apple’s leverage by “creating [a] more competitive mobile applications market, which in turn [creates] a more competitive mobile device market.”

In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky and 16-year-old developer James Gill talked about the fight to keep Beeper Mini...

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Eve’s new smart outlet has Matter, Thread, and energy monitoring

Eve is releasing a Thread smart switch that works with the Matter smart home standard. | Image: Eve Systems

There’s finally a Thread-enabled, Matter-compatible wall outlet, and it has energy monitoring! (But there’s a catch). Today, Eve Systems, maker of the excellent Eve Energy smart plug, announced the Eve Energy Outlet, which will launch on February 6th, 2024. As a Matter device, this $49.99 smart duplex outlet can work with Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and any Matter-compatible platform. It uses the Thread wireless protocol and, as with all Eve devices, doesn’t require a cloud connection.

While Aqara has announced an EU wall outlet and Leviton has pledged Matter support for its line, which includes wall outlets, you can’t currently buy a Matter-enabled outlet. (But there are dozens of smart plugs.) Wall...

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The Verge’s favorite books from 2023

The Verge / Photo Courtesy of Apple Books

There are podcasts, videos, games, live performances — and then there are books, one of the oldest and still most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world. We asked the staff of The Verge what their favorite reads were over the last year. Their answers ranged from science fiction novels to autobiographies to lessons on how to draw and an examination of the addiction of gambling.

Read on, and see if there’s anything here that you may want to check out during the holidays.

Thar She Blows: A Novel

By Susan Emshwiller

This maybe-but-not-quite-fantasy centers on two people, a woman named Ann and her adult son Brian, who through the course of the story learn to trust their own inner...

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Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma

The merger between Adobe and Figma was announced in September 2022. | Image: Figma

Following mounting pressure from regulators in the UK and EU, Adobe and Figma announced on Monday that both companies are mutually terminating their merger agreement, which would have seen Adobe acquire the Figma product design platform for $20 billion.

As a result of the termination, Adobe will be required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1 billion in cash.

“Adobe and Figma strongly disagree with the recent regulatory findings, but we believe it is in our respective best interests to move forward independently,” said Adobe chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen in a statement. “While Adobe and Figma shared a vision to jointly redefine the future of creativity and productivity, we continue to be well positioned to capitalize on our...

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2023 in smartwatches: the Googlefication of Fitbit

The Verge / Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales

This year has been a relatively quiet one for smartwatches. It makes sense. The smartwatch renaissance of 2022 was always going to be a hard act to follow, let alone top. But among the slew of iterative updates, there was one thing that kept catching my eye: the messy Googlefication of Fitbit.

Basically, Google, which owns Fitbit, spent this year taking two steps forward before shooting itself in the foot and taking a step back. Every time I felt encouraged by what I was seeing, unforced errors would leave me doubting again.

2023 kicked off with a massive, multiday Fitbit server outage. Shortly after, Fitbit announced it was shuttering legacy community features like Challenges, Adventures, and Groups. Google said these social features...

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Adobe refuses to compromise on its bid for Figma

The CMA has a deadline of February 25th to make a final decision. | Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Adobe is, unsurprisingly, standing its ground after the UK’s competition watchdog slammed the brakes on its $20 billion plan to purchase the cloud-based product design platform Figma. Last month, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) provisionally determined that the deal would harm the product design software market should it go ahead — effectively blocking the acquisition until Adobe addressed the regulator’s concerns, which involves the divestiture of “overlapping operations” like Figma Design and the company’s competing Adobe XD app.

A response to the CMA’s request for remediations, dated December 14th, was published on the Authority’s website on Monday. In short, Adobe is refusing to make any of the suggested compromises to...

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X under formal DSA investigation in EU over handling of Israel-Hamas war

Image: The Verge

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union’s tough new Digital Service Act rules, regulators said as they announced the opening of a formal investigation today. A key concern of the investigation is “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel,” the European Commission says.

In a press release, the Commission said it will look at X’s attempts to counter the spread of illegal content on its platform and will examine X’s efforts to stop “information manipulation” via its Community Notes system and other policies. It’s also looking into matters beyond content moderation, including “deceptive design” relating to “the so-called Blue checks,” advertising...

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