Wednesday’s top tech news: 2022 in review

Caroline Ellison and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, two executives in Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen crypto empire, have pleaded guilty to federal charges and are cooperating with prosecutors. The news was announced late Wednesday by Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Williams didn’t specify the charges the two pled to but said the guilty pleas were related to their roles as insiders at FTX and its sister company Alameda Research. Wang was a co-founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and owned 10 percent of Alameda Research. (Bankman-Fried owned the other 90 percent.) Ellison served as CEO of Bankman-Fried’s trading company Alameda Research.

On Mars, another machine just bit the dust. The marsquake-detecting, photo-snapping InSight lander has now officially completed its mission and will now spend its retirement in the same place it spent its career — sitting on a flat plain on the Martian surface, as dust slowly accumulates on its solar panels and other instruments.

We’ve known this was coming for a while. InSight’s solar panels, which generate electricity for the lander, have been getting covered with dust ever since they unfurled. The mission, officially known as the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight), was expected to run out of power this summer, but a spate of good weather bought it a few additional months of work on Mars.

Meta is giving Quest 2 developers 7 percent more GPU compute power to work with, meaning apps and games on the headset you already own might look a little bit better sometime soon.

For developers, the increased power should “improve your ability to leverage higher pixel density without substantially reducing the resolution in order to hit the target frame rate,” Meta wrote in a blog post. Phrased a different way, “this means your apps’ visuals will look even better—without sacrificing resolution quality,” Meta says.

Netflix is taking a page from Peloton’s playbook. Starting December 30th, you’ll be able to stream classes from Nike Training Club on the platform. In total, Netflix subscribers will have access to 30 hours of content in multiple languages and exercises.

For the uninitiated, Nike Training Club is a popular fitness app where users can take strength, yoga, and high-intensity interval training led by Nike trainers. It’s geared toward improving your strength, endurance, and mobility across all fitness levels. While some classes require equipment, many don’t. It’s very much in the vein of Apple Fitness Plus or Peloton, albeit without any Nike-branded hardware.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing a $299,997,000 fine against a massive auto warranty scam robocall campaign, the agency announced on Wednesday. The fine, which would be the FCC’s largest ever, targets a huge operation; in just three months in 2021, it made more than 5 billion calls to more than a half-billion phone numbers using just over 1 million caller ID numbers. As the FCC put it, that’s “enough calls to have called each person in the United States 15 times during just those three months.”

According to the FCC, the operation is run by Roy Cox Jr. and Michael Aaron Jones via “their Sumco Panama company, other domestic and foreign entities, and a host of international cohorts located in Panama and Hungary (Cox/Jones Enterprise).” If those names sound somewhat familiar, that’s because the FCC already had the operation on its radar and asked carriers not to carry calls from it in July of this year. Spam blocker app Robokiller reported in November that car warranty robocalls have plummeted since June 2022, indicating that the FCC’s July action seemingly had a big effect.

Samsung is launching a new line of Pokémon-themed accessories on December 26th for its Galaxy Buds, Z Flip 4, as well as the Galaxy Watch 4 & 5. The collection is mostly what you would expect, with a new strap for the Galaxy Watch and a themed case for the Z Flip 4, but the real star of the show, however, is the case for the Galaxy Buds, which just looks like a poké ball.

This case was initially made available in limited quantities for South Korean markets and was priced around $105 USD. This new lineup, though, will be available globally and won’t cost nearly as much.

Current AI concerns revolve mostly around art and chatbots, but in the future of Jung_E, things are a little more intense. The first teaser for the sci-fi film features a company called Kronoid Lab introducing what it describes as the “most advanced AI combat warrior.” We don’t actually get to see it in action — it’s just a brief teaser, after all — but it seems pretty clear that things aren’t going to go as planned. I mean, this is the premise:

Jung_E is the latest project from Yeon Sang-ho, best known for the zombie film Train to Busan, as well as the Netflix series Hellbound. The cast includes Kim Hyun-joo and Ryu Kyung-soo, both of whom appeared in Hellbound, and will also mark the final appearance of actress Kang Soo-yeon, who passed away earlier this year. It starts streaming on January 20th.

Twitter has gotten just a little chaotic lately, and several of us here at The Verge are exploring the alternatives. One of the more popular options so far is Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging (yes, I will call the Twitter format “microblogging” till my dying day) network that’s exploded since November. It’s a service with lots of rough edges, but it’s gotten more useful as some of my favorite Twitter accounts have jumped ship.

The Verge has an official presence on the Mastodon.Social instance, which you can find here. We also manage a Mastodon.Social bot tracking the biggest US tech law cases in partnership with the Free Law Project. But we’ve gotten requests for a list of individual members to follow on the platform. So here’s a collection of Verge staff active to varying degrees on Mastodon; we’ll update it periodically as people join.

It has been difficult to find great laptops this year. That’s partially because 2022 has been a bit of a building year for some companies, especially on the consumer side. It’s also because of the Intel P-series.

I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year — that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home — because, with Apple’s MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side.

We may be only a few days out from Christmas, but you still have time to save on popular presents without paying extra for expedited shipping. Right now, for example, you can buy LG’s 42-inch C2 OLED at Amazon, Best Buy, B&H Photo, and Target for around $797 ($500 off), which eclipses the TV’s previous low.

The C2 is a terrific 4K TV that touts many of its predecessor’s impressive specs, like a speedy 120Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision support, and variable refresh rate with AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync. At the same time, it boasts better performance and a brighter display than the prior C1 model, not to mention great contrast and the kind of black levels for which OLED is known. It even touts a few new features, including the ability to log in to different user profiles and a new sports setting. Read our review.

Even though much of 2022 was a hellscape for the crypto industry, somehow, this year managed to mark a turning point for one of its most notorious issues: pollution.

Lawmakers are cracking down on crypto miners burning through huge amounts of energy. And even without regulation, crashing crypto prices limited mining and its pollution. Most importantly, Ethereum showed that it’s possible for a cryptocurrency to drastically shrink its carbon footprint during “The Merge.”

Happy holidays! Here is our gift for you: over an hour of audio content dedicated to Bluetooth.

If you’re lucky this holiday season, you may be given a brand-new phone, tablet, or gadget equipped with the short-range wireless standard we’ve dealt with for decades. Though it has improved significantly since its introduction in 1998, it still has a lot of room to grow. Will Bluetooth get better next year? That’s the impetus for today’s Vergecast.

I had the privilege of using lots of incredible new phones in 2022, packed with the latest hardware and capable of impressive performance. But there’s one app I turned to again and again when I was using each of those devices, and it’s far from new or cutting-edge: Google Maps.

As in-person events (both professional and personal) resumed over the course of the year, I found myself with a lot more opportunities to get out of the house. From navigating unfamiliar transit systems to finding toddler-friendly playgrounds, Google Maps was the app I opened up when it was time to go somewhere. But even beyond that, Google Maps has become more than a “get me from point A to point B” service. It’s become a kind of everything app for me, and I’ve taken full advantage of its conventional — and less conventional — features over the past year.

Only nine percent of new Netflix subscribers in the US opted for the streaming service’s new ad-supported streaming tier last month, according to data from analytics firm Antenna. That’s compared to the 15 percent of new signups that reportedly opted for competitor HBO Max’s ad-supported subscription during its launch month in 2021. Netflix’s “Basic with Ads” plan launched on November 3rd at $6.99 a month, compared to between $9.99 and $19.99 per month for an ad-free subscription.

The figures aren’t surprising after Digiday reported that Netflix has returned money to advertisers after failing to meet viewership guarantees by as much as 20 percent. But the new data is more evidence that Netflix’s transition from a solely subscription funded streaming service to a hybrid model is off to a slow start.

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov has announced that over 10,000 additional Starlink terminals will be sent to Ukraine in the coming months, confirming that issues regarding how to fund the country’s critical satellite internet service have been resolved.

The governments of several European Union countries are ready to share payment said Fedorov (who is also Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation) in an interview with Bloomberg, affirming that “As of now all financial issues have been resolved.” Fedorov did not publicly identify which governments are contributing towards the payments but confirmed that there’s currently no contract in place and that Ukraine will need to find additional funding by spring 2023.

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he’ll still be in charge of Twitter’s software and server teams after he resigns his CEO seat to “someone foolish enough to take” it. He broke the news in a response to a poll he ran earlier this week, where around 58 percent of respondents said that he should step down as CEO.

Given that the social networking site is mainly made up of software and servers (especially after the massive layoffs), it’s clear Musk will still have direct control over the company, even if he doesn’t have the explicit CEO title. That’s not necessarily a surprise; Musk has de-facto control over product at most of his companies, and he’s still Twitter’s owner at the end of the day. But the announcement likely means disappointment for anyone hoping that him stepping down as CEO would bring an end to Twitter’s wild rollercoaster ride.