Ted Cruz hosts a podcast for free — a Ted Cruz super PAC gets paid

Photo by Nathan Howard / Getty Images

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I hope you all had a great weekend/eclipse/first moment of NYC sunshine. Today, I’ve got a look at Ted Cruz’s eyebrow-raising arrangement with iHeart and news on two new acquisitions. Let’s get into it.

iHeart doesn’t pay Ted Cruz for hosting Verdict. It pays a Ted Cruz super PAC.

This is certainly one way to raise campaign money. Sen. Ted Cruz hosts an iHeartMedia podcast, Verdict, which performs reasonably well among right-wing political shows. He does not get paid for hosting the podcast, but reporting in recent weeks from Forbes and the Houston Chronicle shows that iHeart has paid more than $630,000 to a super PAC that supports...

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The MPA has big plans to crack down on movie piracy again

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is going off on piracy again. During CinemaCon in Las Vegas, MPA CEO Charles Rivkin announced that the organization plans on working with Congress to pass rules blocking websites with pirated content.

The MPA is a trade association representing Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Disney (it’s also behind the ratings board that gives you an R if you say curse words too often). It has long lobbied for anti-piracy laws, but it seems the battle is heating up again. In his speech on Tuesday, Rivkin highlights what a major problem piracy in the US has become, saying it costs “hundreds of thousands of jobs” and “more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”

It’s true: piracy has...

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How to tame notifications on iOS

Take back control of your lock screen. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that notifications are a nuisance. There are simply too many of them, and the helpful ones are often drowned out by the spam. Whether promotional notifications should be allowed at all on our phones is an open question (I have my own feelings on that!). In the meantime, it is possible to coexist peacefully with your phone — it just takes a little work.

iPhone owners have more ways to fight the firehose of notifications than they used to, but it’s not necessarily an easy system to navigate. Here’s a quick primer on how iOS handles notifications and your options for taking control of them.

iOS notification basics

There are two places where your notifications can live on iOS: in recent notifications or...

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Acer announces its first two 14-inch gaming laptops

The new Acer Predator Helios Neo 14. | Image: Acer

Acer announced Tuesday its first 14-inch gaming laptops: the Nitro 14 and Predator Helios Neo 14. It’s exciting to see Acer’s fabulous and well-beloved budget-friendly Nitro enter the 14-inch gaming laptop space, but even more so for the new Predator since it’s priced and specced competitively with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and Razer Blade 14. The company is also releasing an updated Nitro 16 that can be configured with either a current-gen AMD Ryzen or Intel Core processor.

The new Nitro 14 starts at $1,299.99 and can be configured all the way up to an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 graphics card, 32GB of LPDDR5X SDRAM, and 1TB of NVME SSD memory. It’s available with 120Hz G-Sync displays at either 2560 x 1600...

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Asus’ new OLED laptops run on the latest AI-capable chips

The new Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406) starts at $999.99.

Asus has released two new laptop models: the Asus Vivobook S series and the Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406). Along with offering OLED displays, the laptops run on some of the latest AMD and Intel processors.

We’ve yet to put the laptops to the test, but the new chips should be able to better handle AI with neural processing units built for it, while improving power efficiency and making gaming, multitasking, and editing faster. The keyboard even sports dedicated Copilot keys that allow for easy access to Windows 11’s AI tools.

Three of the Vivobook S laptops range in size from 14 to 16 inches and are powered by the Intel Core Ultra 9, while a fourth model, also 16 inches, comes with the AMD Ryzen 8040 Series chip. The 14-inch Vivobook S model...

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Miku fans wanted a hologram concert — they got a TV show instead

Miku Expo 2024 in Portland, Oregon. | Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

If you made it through that headline and you’re confused, don’t worry — I was, too, at first. Hatsune Miku is an internet fandom thing. She’s not a real person, and she didn’t get her start in some obscure anime — she’s a Vocaloid, which is a synthetic voice that can be fed melodies and song lyrics to output as vocal performances, and she puts on concerts. Here’s a succinct summary from my colleague, Jess Weatherbed:

Okay, a quick crash course is that Miku is the mascot and most recognizable character for Vocaloid voice synthesizer software. Each Vocaloid “character” has a specific, unique voice that’s resulted in some of them gaining fan followings like real human performers.

404 Media called Miku a “bonafide virtual pop idol with a...

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Destiny 2: The Final Shape is going to break the game in a good way

Image: Bungie

Destiny 2’s The Final Shape expansion has a lot riding on it. It’s the culmination of a 10-year story and the conclusion of Destiny’s light and darkness saga. After a four-month delay, fans haven’t really seen much of The Final Shape, but today, Bungie delivered a preview of what’s to come. The teaser left me thinking that Destiny 2 is about to feel very different — and very broken — as players will be able to wield Light and Darkness abilities together for the first time ever.

A new Prismatic Subclass merges the powers of the Light and Darkness, allowing players to combine certain class abilities from different damage types. So you could throw a Stasis grenade into a stack of enemies to freeze them and then use a Solar ability to wipe...

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SwitchBot’s robot vacuums now work with Matter, but the platforms need to step up support

The SwitchBot K10 Plus robot vacuum now works with Matter. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

This week, SwitchBot announced that almost its entire line of smart home devices can now work with Matter through its SwitchBot Hub 2. This includes its mini K10 Plus robot vacuum — one of The Verge’s picks for best robot vacuum — as well as the soon-to-be-launched SwitchBot S10.

Along with Ecovacs’ recently launched Deebot X2 Combo and Roborock’s S8 Max Ultra V (coming April 22nd), there are now a handful of robot vacuums that support Matter. The problem is that none of the smart home platforms support robot vacuums through Matter.

This chicken-and-egg situation is characteristic of the overall frustrations of the Matter rollout to date. Robot vacuums, in particular, are a category many were excited to see come to Matter. Smart home...

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Star Wars Outlaws preorders are up, bringing exclusive skins and DLC in tow

The open-world Outlaws could be the biggest single-player Star Wars game ever made. | Image: LucasArts

It’s official: Star Wars Outlaws launches on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC on August 30th. Ubisoft shared the news alongside a new trailer for the upcoming next-gen title, which is an original adventure set in the ever-expanding galaxy of games based on Lucasfilm’s beloved franchise. You can preorder the game starting today, April 9th, and there are several incentives for punching your ticket early to play it.

Developed by Massive Entertainment_, Outlaws_ follows main character Kay Vess and her trusty alien companion Nix as they navigate a galactic criminal underworld. It takes place throughout a range of familiar locales, including Tatooine and Canto Bight, along with Kijimi, Akiva, and an all-new planet named Toshara. The...

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Adobe overhauls Frame.io to make it a little more Trello-like

Image: Adobe / Frame.io

Adobe has introduced the latest version of Frame.io, overhauling the cloud-based media collaboration service with oodles of new workflow and tagging capabilities that make it easier for creatives to manage their entire projects on the platform. Initially launching in beta, Frame.io V4 starts rolling out to Free and Pro customers today on web, iPhone, and iPad, with a launch for Team and Enterprise users expected “later this year.”

The easiest way to explain the update is that Frame.io now feels more like a workflow management tool (such as Trello, Asana, or Monday) than just something used for reviewing and approving media assets. Not only could that prevent users from needing multiple applications to fully manage their projects, but it...

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The best iPad to buy

The Verge

There are more iPads than ever, and it can be tough to sort out which one is the best for you. Fortunately, we’re here to guide you through your next iPad purchase.

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The creators of Fallout want the show to have the game’s mix of silly and serious

Ella Purnell in Fallout_._ | Image: Amazon

Fallout is a mixture of contradictions. In one moment, the games are dark and gruesome; in the next, silly and playful. So when it came time to adapt the series into a streaming show on Amazon, nailing that eclectic tone was key. “I think it’s very fundamental to what Fallout is,” says series co-creator and showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet, “this mix of weird comedy and drama and violence and really compelling moral dilemmas.”

Unlike other video game adaptations like The Last of Us, Amazon’s Fallout isn’t a direct translation of an existing story. Instead, it takes place in its own corner of the universe. It’s set in Los Angeles, more than two centuries after the nuclear detonation that rendered America a wasteland, which gave the...

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A period piece, a contemporary drama, and a speculative sci-fi movie all in one

Léa Seydoux in The Beast_._ | Image: CMPR

A period piece, a contemporary drama, and a speculative sci-fi film all in one, The Beast’s director, Bertrand Bonello, explains how he used three parallel narratives to explore a single idea.

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In a first, international court upholds right to be safe from climate change

A woman shows a placard reading “For feminist and social ecologic justice” in Toulouse, France, March 19th, 2021. | Photo by Alain Pitton / NurPhoto via Getty Images

An international court has, for the first time, ruled that a country violated human rights by not protecting people from the effects of climate change. A Swiss association representing more than 2,000 older women (a third of whom are over the age of 75) filed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights saying that their government put them at heightened risk during heatwaves.

The court decided that the European Convention on Human Rights “encompasses a right for individuals to effective protection by the State authorities from the serious adverse effects of climate change on their lives, health, well-being and quality of life.” Swiss authorities violated the Convention, the court says in its judgment, by failing to adequately limit...

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The new Star Wars Outlaws trailer introduces you to the criminal underworld

Image: Lucasarts

It already seemed like Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws was going to play like Grand Theft Auto in space, and the game’s latest trailer only heightens that vibe. It also reveals a proper release date: the game will be hitting the PS5, Xbox Series X / S, and PC on August 30th.

The new glimpse at the game is mostly a story trailer, and it focuses on the criminal underworld, a key part of Outlaws. You’re introduced to a crime family called the Zerek Besh, which is described as “new, rich, and lethal.” They also seem to hold plenty of sway over the rest of the underworld, including groups like the Hutts and Crimson Dawn. Naturally, they’re after the main character, Kay Vess, as well.

According to the trailer, Kay (along with her adorable...

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Meta may release smaller Llama AI model before the big version

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta will reportedly release smaller versions of its Llama language model as companies look to offer more cost-effective AI models to the public.

The Information reports that the company plans to launch two small Llama 3 versions this month before putting out the flagship model this summer. The Verge reached out to Meta for comment.

The move underscores the growing trend of AI developers adding lightweight AI model options. Meta already has a smaller version of its Llama 2 model, Llama 2 7B, which it launched in February last year. Google came out with the Gemma family of models in February, and the French AI company Mistral also has Mistral 7B.

These models typically cannot handle long strings of instructions from users but are...

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Beeper was just acquired by Automattic, which has big plans for the future of messaging

Beeper is a messaging app for your messaging apps. | Image: Beeper

Beeper, the upstart messaging app that attempts to corral all your messaging services into one inbox, is being acquired by Automattic, the giant that runs Wordpress.com, Tumblr, and a number of other hugely popular web properties. The deal closed last week and was announced officially on Tuesday. Along with the announcement, Beeper is also opening up its app to everyone for the first time across platforms, shutting down its waitlist for good.

There’s a fascinating backstory here on all sides of this acquisition. For Beeper, it comes a couple of months after Beeper launched a new app called Beeper Mini that found a way to let Android users tap into the iMessage protocol and become blue bubbles in the Messages app. Apple didn’t like that;...

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Fallout’s TV show is arriving a little earlier than expected

Image: Prime Video

Fallout’s TV adaptation is coming to Prime Video a day early. The new series will now make its debut on Wednesday, April 10th, 2024, at 9PM ET / 6PM PT, rather than on April 11th.

Walton Goggins, who plays nuclear wasteland survivor The Ghoul, made the announcement on Monday, saying the early premiere comes as a “thank-you” to fans. All eight episodes will appear on the platform at the same time, so you might have to restrain yourself from watching them all in one go.

FALLOUT, now arriving April 10 @ 6 p.m. PT. pic.twitter.com/a31D8Q5AqL

— Prime Video (@PrimeVideo) April 9, 2024

The Fallout series takes place 200 years after a nuclear war devastated the planet, forcing people into underground vaults to survive. It follows three...

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The Aboard app is a totally different take on what an AI bot can do

Aboard is for tracking stuff — and for building the tools for tracking stuff with AI. | Image: Aboard

Aboard is not an easy app to explain. It used to be easier: at first, it was a way to collect and organize information — Trello meets Pinterest meets that spreadsheet full of links you use to plan your vacation. The company’s founders, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, are two longtime web developers and app creators (and, in Ford’s case, also an influential writer about the web) who previously ran a well-liked agency called Postlight. They did a bunch of interesting work on parsing websites to pull out helpful information, and they built a handy visual tool for displaying it all. “People love to save links,” Ziade says, “and we love to make those links beautiful when they come in.” Simple!

But now I’m sitting here in a co-working space in New...

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Peloton is a media company now, with media company problems

Jessica Fernandez uses Peloton about two hours a day — maybe even four if she’s training for a marathon. In her house, you’ll find not one but two Peloton machines. There’s the bike that the company is known for, and in her garage, there’s the company’s smaller treadmill. A rack of running medals hangs on the wall right near it. On our video call, she shows up in a Peloton shirt, a little shy, but her enthusiasm practically buzzes through the screen.

Many owners of Peloton bikes wind up using them as very expensive drying racks; Fernandez is not one of those people. Her love for the beleaguered fitness company stretches back to 2018. On a day-to-day basis, she has her regular workout. That includes runs, bike, strength, or bootcamp...

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The Fairbuds noise-canceling earbuds have an easily swappable battery

The buds’ modularity have made for a chunkier design. | Image: Fairphone

Fairphone, the makers of the ultra-repairable Fairphone 5, have launched a new pair of easy-to-repair wireless earbuds. Instead of tossing away your earbuds when the batteries eventually die, Fairphone’s new Fairbuds let you replace the batteries inside the buds themselves and their charging case.

In addition to replacing the batteries, you can repair or exchange the left or right earbud, the silicone ring, earbud tips, the charging case outer shell, and the charging case core. The new buds also come with a standard two-year warranty, but you can add one extra year if you register them online.

Image: Fairphone

These earbuds aren’t meant to be thrown away (or stuffed in a drawer) after a few years.

Just like...

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The Meta Quest 3 headset has a lying down mode now

Photo: David Pierce / The Verge

Thanks to the latest software update for the Meta Quest 3, Meta’s newest headset now has the lying down mode that came to the Quest 2 and Pro headsets last month. A Meta community post says the update began rolling out to the Quest headsets on Monday.

To try it out, go to Settings > Experimental and toggle Use Apps While Lying Down. This should be a nice feature for when you just want to get prone and watch a movie — something the much more expensive Apple Vision Pro could do at launch. But it’s also a boon for those who have health problems and aren’t able to stay upright for long periods of time while using their Quest device. The feature was in the v53 software beta last year but was removed before the update rolled out.

In addition...

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Google’s first Arm-based CPU will challenge Microsoft and Amazon in the AI race

Illustration: The Verge

Google is making its own custom Arm-based CPU to support its AI work in data centers and introducing a more powerful version of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips. Google’s new Arm-based CPU, dubbed Axion, will be used to support Google’s AI workloads before it rolls out to business customers of Google Cloud “later this year.”

The Axion chips are already powering YouTube ads, the Google Earth Engine, and other Google services. “We’re making it easy for customers to bring their existing workloads to Arm,” says Mark Lohmeyer, Google Cloud’s vice president and general manager of compute and machine learning infrastructure, in a statement to Reuters. “Axion is built on open foundations but customers using Arm anywhere can easily...

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The TikTok ban and the iPhone monopoly

Image: The Verge

A few weeks ago, it looked like the US government was on a fast track to banning TikTok. A committee in the House of Representatives voted unanimously in favor of a bill that would see the app either banned or sold, before the broader House passed the same bill in sweeping fashion, and even President Joe Biden said he’d sign the bill if it hit his desk. Then, the momentum just... stopped. The bill is in limbo and TikTok is still here, for now, while the debate rages over what should happen to the massively popular platform.

In the meantime, the government filed a landmark antitrust case against Apple, accusing it of illegal monopolistic behavior in everything from digital wallets to messaging to... super apps. It’s a broad, complex...

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DJI’s new Ronin stabilizers arrive for both solo creators and studios

The DJI RS 4 (pictured) starts at $549. | Image: DJI

It’s been 10 years since DJI introduced its Ronin series of cameras and stabilization accessories, and the company is marking the occasion with two new camera gimbals, targeting both independent video creators and professional studios.

The DJI RS 4 is the smaller of the two gimbals. It weighs 3.1 pounds (1.4kg) and is capable of supporting camera systems up to 6.6 pounds (3kg), just like its predecessor, the RS 3. Some improvements over the previous model include upgraded axis locks that provide improved stability when shooting vertically, a new joystick mode switch for jumping between joystick controls for zoom or gimbal, and an additional 8.5mm on the tilt axis that gives it more space to accommodate camera accessories.

The OLED...

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With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work

In Vids, you can either make a video or ask the AI to make one for you. | Image: Google

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever.

Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies… or even not-that-beautiful movies. It’s meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google’s VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. “The ethos that we have is, if you can make a...

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Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro can now hear

Illustration: The Verge

Google’s update to Gemini 1.5 Pro gives the model ears. The model can now listen to uploaded audio files and churn out information from things like earnings calls or audio from videos without the need to refer to a written transcript.

During its Google Next event, Google also announced it’ll make Gemini 1.5 Pro available to the public for the first time, through its platform to build AI applications, Vertex AI. Gemini 1.5 Pro was first announced in February.

This new version of Gemini Pro, which is supposed to be the middle-weight model of the Gemini family, already surpasses the biggest and most powerful model, Gemini Ultra, in performance. Gemini 1.5 Pro can understand complicated instructions and eliminates the need to fine-tune...

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Intel investigating games crashing on 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 processors

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Owners of Intel’s latest 13th and 14th Gen Core i9 desktop processors have been noticing an increase in game crashes in recent months. It’s happening in games like The Finals, Fortnite, and Tekken 8, and has even led Epic Games to issue a support notice to encourage Intel Core i9 13900K and 14900K owners to adjust BIOS settings.

Now, Intel says it’s investigating the reports. “Intel is aware of problems that occur when executing certain tasks on 13th and 14th generation core processors for desktop PCs, and is analyzing them with major affiliates,” says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to ZDNet Korea.

The crashes vary in severity depending on the game, with some titles producing an “out of memory” error, others simply exiting out to...

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Logitech’s new wireless keyboard targets pro gamers needing portability

The Logitech G Pro X 60 Lightspeed offers plentiful features in a compact form factor. | Image: Logitech

Logitech has announced the Pro X 60 Lightspeed, the first wireless gaming keyboard from the company to come in a compact 60 percent format. Available through the gaming-focused Logitech G sub-brand, the keyboard is available now for $179 in a choice of two GX optical switch types (tactile or linear) and three colors (black, white, or pink).

Positioned as a compact follow-up to Logitech’s G Pro X TKL Lightspeed, the Pro X 60 includes many of the same features. Users get three connectivity options: wired, using the included six-foot USB-C to USB-C charging cable, or wireless via Bluetooth or Logitch’s Lightspeed dongle, with the latter providing a polling rate of 1000Hz.

One key difference is that, unlike the Pro X TKL, the Pro X 60 isn’t...

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Elon Musk says his posts did more to ‘financially impair’ X than help it

Image: Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Elon Musk admitted that his posts on the platform formerly known as Twitter may have financially harmed the company in the long run, in a March 27th deposition made public on Monday by The Huffington Post. The billionaire also admitted to have a “limited understanding” of the lawsuit for which he was being deposed.

The 22-year old Ben Brody sued Musk for defamation last fall, alleging that Musk pushed a conspiracy theory that falsely identified Brody as being involved in a fight between two far-right groups in Oregon. Musk’s attorney filed multiple requests to keep the transcript of his nearly two-hour testimony confidential, but they were denied by the judge.

At one point, Musk is asked by Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, about his...

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