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The past two years have been a whirlwind of changes at Netflix — and it’s all to transform the company into a revenue-driving machine that outlives other streamers.
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Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 23, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, so psyched you found us, and also, you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about the sudden rise in freight train heists and the strange state of Air Jordans, watching Jon Stewart’s Mark Twain Prize speeches all over again, wondering if I should buy an original Macintosh on eBay instead of continuing to pay my mortgage, scheming to get my hands on the “real” Star Wars lightsaber, tracking at-home workouts with Weller, and trying to replace doomscrolling on my phone with the Chess.com app.
I also have for you a new show from the Silicon Valley creator,...
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X says it will hire 100 full-time employees for a new trust and safety office in Austin, Texas, according to a Saturday report by Bloomberg. The plan comes, as the article notes, just a few days before CEO Linda Yaccarino’s scheduled January 31st hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding X’s handling of child sexual exploitation moderation.
The team would reportedly focus mainly on CSE and would be the first proper trust and safety team since Elon Musk gutted it shortly after purchasing the platform formerly known as Twitter. X updated a blog post about its CSE moderation approach to mention the new office yesterday, as well, though it doesn’t reveal what the new team will be doing, nor when the office will open.
The...
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X appears to have blocked searches for Taylor Swift as a reaction to a recent trend of graphic AI fakes of the world-famous recording artist being posted to the site. Right now, if you search “Taylor Swift” or “Taylor Swift AI” on X, formerly Twitter, you may see a “Something went wrong” message. After Platformer’s Casey Newton posted about the apparent block, we tried some other searches. If X is intentionally blocking searches for illicit AI-generated images of Swift, it doesn’t seem to have gotten very far.
That’s because if you run into a blocked search term and decide to put the barest amount of effort into trying something else, you’ll get around it. “Taylor AI Swift” or simply putting quotation marks around her name both returned...
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Microsoft released a new Canary test build for Windows yesterday that brings the company’s Voice Clarity feature, which previously only worked on Surface devices, to all Windows machines, including those using ARM CPUs. The company says in a blog post that the feature uses “low complexity AI models” to filter out background noise, echo, and reverberation in real-time.
If Voice Clarity works well enough, its obvious best use case is to make Zoom or Teams meetings less insufferable — after all, how many times have you found yourself lost because someone is giving a presentation while standing 10 feet away from a laptop, their voice awash in a sea of reverb or echo? Or been unable to concentrate on what you’re saying because your every...
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Nomad’s minimalist Base One Max 3-in-1 is on sale for $95. | Image: Nomad
Fancy phone chargers are nice, but they’re often too expensive to justify the cost. Nomad’s Base One Max 3-in-1 is one of those rare unicorns that delivers a lot of value for your money, however, thus making it worth the splurge. After all, the device can simultaneously charge a MagSafe-compatible phone, your Apple Watch, and a pair of AirPods (or another Qi-compatible device) — that’s something not even Nomad’s forthcoming Qi2 charger can do. What’s even better is that Nomad is currently selling the hefty, MagSafe-certified charger in both black and silver for its Black Friday price of $95 ($55 off).
Designed with metal and glass, Nomad’s minimalist slab will look slick on any desk or bedside table. It’s also powerful, delivering up to...
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Still frame from a teaser reel of Lumiere clips | Image: Google
Google’s new video generation AI model Lumiere uses a new diffusion model called Space-Time-U-Net, or STUNet, that figures out where things are in a video (space) and how they simultaneously move and change (time). Ars Technicareports this method lets Lumiere create the video in one process instead of putting smaller still frames together.
Lumiere starts with creating a base frame from the prompt. Then, it uses the STUNet framework to begin approximating where objects within that frame will move to create more frames that flow into each other, creating the appearance of seamless motion. Lumiere also generates 80 frames compared to 25 frames from Stable Video Diffusion.
Admittedly, I am more of a text reporter than a video person, but...
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The Jamstik Classic.
For many years now, my Stratocaster has been a memento hanging on my wall representing the time before I got a MacBook. I swapped my electric guitar out for a 25-key keyboard controller and a library of virtual instruments once my career headed to podcasting. In Logic Pro or Ableton, the Stratocaster could only sound like a Stratocaster, but the MIDI keyboard could be anything I needed it to be for my music or sound design work.
But recently, I bought a new guitar that offers those very same strengths: Jamstik’s Classic MIDI Guitar, which has brought my unused fretboard skills back into the digital audio workstation (DAW), with almost as much flexibility as the musical keyboard.
The Jamstik Classic is a fully traditional electric guitar...
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Many of us are hyperaware of the multitude of ways we can be tracked with modern technology, so you may feel like you don’t need to add another to the mix. But knowing the whereabouts of trusted friends and family can be useful a lot of the time, and it’s something you can do from your Android phone.
It’s worth saying at the start that you stay in control of who can see you and when — and you can stop location sharing at any time if someone in your life goes from being trusted to distrusted.
I’ve used this many times to figure out where to meet someone or to check when guests are going to arrive so I know exactly how much time I’ve got left to tidy up. It can be helpful for parents, too, to know their kids are safe and where they’re...
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The entry-level Apple Watch SE is a gateway smartwatch if there ever was one. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Editor’s note: Apple was recently banned from selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 due to a patent dispute with medical device maker Masimo. A federal appeals court recently stayed the resulting import ban, however, forcing Apple to begin selling both models without blood oxygen measuring features. Read more about the ban here.
In September, Apple launched its latest batch of smartwatches, introducing the Apple Watch Ultra 2 ($799) alongside the new Apple Watch Series 9 ($399). Each wearable has its own pros and cons, as does the second-gen Apple Watch SE ($249), but the introduction of the new wearables also means there are now more Apple Watch models on the market than ever before — and a lot more deals to be had.
But with all...
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has responded to a controversy over sexually explicit AI-made fake images of Taylor Swift. In an interview with NBC Nightly News that will air next Tuesday, Nadella calls the proliferation of nonconsensual simulated nudes “alarming and terrible,” telling interviewer Lester Holt that “I think it behooves us to move fast on this.”
In a transcript distributed by NBC ahead of the January 30th show, Holt asks Nadella to react to the internet “exploding with fake, and I emphasize fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift.” Nadella’s response manages to crack open several cans of tech policy worms while saying remarkably little about them — which isn’t surprising when there’s no surefire fix in sight.
I would...
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Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Legislation needs to be passed to protect people from fake sexual images generated by AI, the White House said this afternoon. The statement, from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, came in response to a question about the spread of fake sexualized photos of Taylor Swift on social media this week.
Jean-Pierre called the incident “alarming” and said it’s among the AI issues the Biden administration has been prioritizing.
“Of course Congress should take legislative action,” Jean-Pierre said. “That’s how you deal with some of these issues.” She did not refer to any specific legislation that the White House was backing.
“There should be legislation, obviously, to deal with this issue.”
The images spread across X in particular on...
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The Fossil Gen 6 Wellness Edition. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Fossil Group has decided to call it quits on smartwatches.
The company announced this afternoon that it would leave the smartwatch business and redirect resources to its less-smart goods instead. The company has been one of the most prolific makers of Wear OS smartwatches over the years, and its absence will leave a large gap in the market.
“As the smartwatch landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years, we have made the strategic decision to exit the smartwatch business,” Fossil spokesperson Amanda Castelli tells The Verge. “Fossil Group is redirecting resources to support our core strength and the core segments of our business that continue to provide strong growth opportunities for us: designing and distributing...
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Spotify — one of Apple’s biggest critics — says Apple’s new plan to comply with the European Union’s tech regulations is “a complete and total farce.” In a post published on Spotify’s website, the company calls Apple’s new app installation fee “extortion, plain and simple” and says Apple is trying to force developers not to leave its store.
The fee, which Apple calls the Core Technology Fee, will require developers using third-party app stores to pay €0.50 for each annual app install after 1 million downloads. Spotify says the new tax will hurt developers, especially if they’re offering apps for free. “From our read of Apple’s proposal, a developer would have to pay this fee even if a user downloaded the app, never used it and forgot to...
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Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in! I’ll be writing today’s Insider edition of Hot Pod while Ariel Shapiro is getting some R&R in sunny Puerto Rico with her family (meanwhile, it’s been an uncharacteristically rainy and gray week here in Los Angeles).
For today’s Insider issue, I’ll take a look at why the estate of legendary comedian George Carlin has sued the Dudesy comedy podcast over an AI-generated comedy special. Finally, a lightning round of deals, announcements, and further reading.
Last night I attended a press event in West Hollywood for Wondery’s podcast series Dr. Death. Its latest season, Dr. Death: Bad Magic, launched this week.
It’s not a secret that streamers love podcast IP,...
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Image: Beeper
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Beeper announced it’s removing the Beeper Mini app from the Google Play Store and moving the iMessage bridge to the “Labs” section of its cloud version. No new users will be able to use Beeper Cloud to gain entry into Apple’s messaging service, but the chat app acknowledged that iMessage may still work on Beeper Cloud for some existing users. Beeper also made the iMessage bridge (which it noted cost $750,000 to build) open source.
The company doesn’t plan to provide help or troubleshooting to current users who run into problems with the iMessage fix, as it’s now fully focused on “our mission beyond iMessage” and building “a universal, multi-network chat app.”
After Apple blocked Beeper’s iMessage for...
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Apple’s new rules in the European Union mean browsers like Firefox can finally use their own engines on iOS. Although this may seem like a welcome change, Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte tells The Verge it’s “extremely disappointed” with the way things turned out.
“We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple’s proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps,” DeMonte says. “The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.”
In iOS 17.4, Apple will no longer force browsers in the EU to use WebKit, the underlying engine that...
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Is this what Gen Z really looks like? | Image: Getty
Okay, Gen Z. Sit down, babes. It’s time to talk.
I have seen multiple reports that you are worried about whether you are “aging like milk.” (I guess this is a thing on TikTok, an app I am too old to care about.) Like, yes, I think it is extremely funny to tease you, but also, generally, I like you guys and am kind of worried about how neurotic you are making yourselves. It is — to borrow a phrase — time to stop, drop, and roll yourself back to sanity.
Do you know how many times since my 40th birthday I have uttered the magic words: “I am 40. I don’t have to care about this”?
I am not interested in the question of whether you are aging faster than millennials. I don’t think you’re scared of looking old. I think you’re scared of being old....
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In case the hubbub of the holidays made you forget all about (or completely miss) Amazon’s news about putting ads in Prime Video next week, we’re here to remind you that commercials are coming on Monday, January 29th — unless you pay more money, of course.
Amazon just so happened to break the news right after Christmas, leaving a lovely email in users’ inboxes (that most people probably weren’t even checking at that time) to announce the rollout of ads. The new ad-free plan will cost an extra $2.99 per month, bringing your $14.99 per month Prime subscription to $17.98 per month or your $8.99 per month standalone Prime Video subscription to $11.98 per month. You won’t be automatically transferred to the new ad-free plan, but you can...
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OnePlus’ no-frills flagship stands tall against the competition. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
With the impending launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series, OnePlus surely hopes to hitch a ride on the buzz train as upgrade season begins. The newly announced OnePlus 12 arrives on February 6th, however, you can currently get a free storage upgrade if you place a preorder before then. Both Amazon and Best Buy are selling the 512GB model with 16GB of RAM in black or green for $799.99 ($100 off). You’ll note that the price tag is identical to the price of the lower-end, 256GB model, so there’s no good reason to pass up double the storage if you plan on buying OnePlus’ latest Android phone at launch.
We’ve already had some personal time with the OnePlus 12, and while it’s not exactly blowing the competition away in any specific area, we...
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Is it a joyous outage where you get to relax, or something mission critical going wrong? Either way, “a portion” of Microsoft Teams is down — with outages in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to the latest status update from Microsoft’s official account.
So yeah, if you can’t communicate with your colleagues right now via Microsoft’s biz comm platform, that’s probably why. Some users are reportedly not able to log into Teams, while others may see missing messages, missing attachments, delays, etc.
We've completed the failover in the EMEA region and service telemetry is showing some improvement. The failovers for the North and South America regions are ongoing and we continue to monitor....
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Apple is finally opening up the iPhone to sideloading and alternative app stores — at least in the European Union. It’s also allowing developers to use third-party payment processors in their apps. This is all part of Apple’s efforts to comply with the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), and at the surface, these changes make it seem like Apple is giving in to regulatory pressure.
But some developers are already responding with criticism about Apple’s new guidelines. Epic Games CEO (and part-time Apple critic) Tim Sweeney notably called out the changes as “hot garbage,” even as Epic announced it would be launching its own app store through them. That’s because Apple’s new business terms come with some pretty big disadvantages —...
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Apple is finally opening the iPhone to third-party app stores in the European Union, kicking off a potentially vibrant, unwieldy, and eclectic new era for its app ecosystem. At least, it might, depending on how developers respond to a hurdle that is at once tiny and immense: a €0.50 fee.
Apple is introducing a new fee structure for apps that want to operate on these third-party stores. On the surface, it looks great: apps pay no cut of sales to Apple if they’re distributed via a third-party store. And if a developer still wants to be distributed via Apple’s App Store, too, the cut drops from the traditional 30 percent fee down to 17 percent. It’s an even lower 10 percent fee for qualifying “small business” apps, down from the original 15...
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For the past few years, Lionsgate has dominated the stylish, hyper-choreographed, bullet-hole-ridden action-thriller genre with a steady stream of John Wick movies as well as a spinoff series. But the first trailer for Universal and Blumhouse’s Monkey Man from director Dev Patel makes it seem like a glorious challenge to viewers to understand how much bigger, wilder, and more visually inspired these kinds of movies can be.
Set on the streets of modern-day Mumbai, Monkey Man tells the story of a man named Kid (Patel), an ex-con whose return to society is a brutal reminder of how India’s caste system keeps poor, vulnerable people trapped in cycles of violence and systemic poverty. Kid has fond memories of an idyllic childhood being raised...
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Microsoft revealed last week that it had discovered a nation-state attack on its corporate systems from the Russian state-sponsored hackers that were behind the SolarWinds attack. Hackers were able to access the email accounts of some members of Microsoft’s senior leadership team — potentially spying on them for weeks or months.
While Microsoft didn’t provide many details on how the attackers gained access in its initial SEC disclosure late on Friday, the software maker has now published an initial analysis of how the hackers got past its security. It’s also warning that the same hacking group, known as Nobelium or as the “Midnight Blizzard” weather-themed moniker Microsoft refers to them, has been targeting other organizations.
N...
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Putting the temperature sensor on the rear... was certainly a choice for body temperature scans. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Earlier this week, Google updated the Pixel 8 Pro to let its strange new temperature sensor finally take readings of human bodies.I regret to inform you that, having used it, it doesn’t make this feature any less baffling.
To measure body temperature, you have to sweep the phone’s infrared temperature sensor over the side of your forehead, right above the temporal artery. So far, nothing super odd here. Just this month, I got to check out the Withings BeamO, a 4-in-1 multiscope that also has you scan the same kind of sensor over the same artery to measure your temperature. The difference is the BeamO was quite easy to use, while the Pixel 8 Pro was incredibly finicky.
Screenshot: Richard Lawler / The Verge
You’ve...
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Whatever it’s called, it sounds like it’s coming soon.
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Twinkly’s smart string lights can make any room look dreamy for less than $50. | Image: Twinkly
If “budget-friendly” and “high-quality” sound like oxymorons to you, you’re in for a surprise. As it turns out, youcan buy many great gifts without completely draining your savings account, which makes it easy to pick up a present for your anniversary, a birthday party, or one of the many other gift-giving occasions strewn throughout the year.
Finding the right gift can still be tough, though, even when there is a sea of inexpensive items for under $50 to choose from. That’s why we’ve put together a selection of techy gift ideas, ranging from disposable cameras and wireless earbuds to home security gadgets. We’ve also highlighted an array of last-minute gifts that are more unique than your run-of-the-mill gift card — including game...
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In this marshy coastal region between Texas and Louisiana, the proliferation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal projects, massive facilities that receive and liquefy gas from pipelines, then transfer the LNG to ships for export, unsettles residents, who consider the plants to be a threat to their coast. | Photo by FRANCOIS PICARD/AFP via Getty Images
The Biden administration announced a pause on new gas export projects today, saying it needs to better assess each project’s economic and environmental impact. The decision won’t affect ongoing exports, just pending decisions on liquified natural gas (LNG) exports to countries with which the US has no free trade agreement.
“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our environment,” Biden said in a statement today. “This pause on new LNG approvals sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time.”
“During this period, we will take a hard look at the impacts of LNG exports on energy costs, America’s energy security, and our...
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I fully get why some people might be wary of letting other people see their location constantly, but for me, location sharing tools such as Find My and Google Maps have only had advantages. They mean not having dozens of back-and-forth texts about which bar everyone is currently at, for example, or not needing to text “I’ll be five minutes late” because everyone can see I’m en route. And while tracking the location of older teens probably won’t happen without some intense negotiation, it can be handy to see when younger kids have made it to school or a friend’s house.
In other words, while you only want to do this with the people in your life you trust the most, you might find you come to rely on it more than you thought you would. And...