Wednesday’s top tech news: 2022 in review – The Verge

Sam Bankman-Fried’s former friends pleaded guilty and are cooperating in the FTX fraud case

2022-12-21T22:57:00-05:00

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 …

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NASA’s InSight lander loses power, enters retirement on Mars

2022-12-21T16:41:02-05:00

The last image sent back from Mars by the InSight lander. | Image: NASA

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 …

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Meta is making the Quest 2’s GPU more powerful

2022-12-21T16:31:20-05:00

It will be a little clunky to activate at first, but a boost is a boost. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

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.

The change is possible thanks to the Quest using a new 525MHz GPU frequency, which is up from the previous 490MHz, and Meta's …

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Netflix will start streaming Nike Training Club classes next week

2022-12-21T15:09:17-05:00

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-br …

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FCC proposes $300 million fine for massive auto warranty robocaller scam

2022-12-21T14:48:33-05:00

The fine would be the FCC’s largest ever. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

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 dom …

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Channel your inner Ash with Samsung’s new poké ball Galaxy Buds case

2022-12-21T14:33:51-05:00

Samsung used nostalgia trip. It’s super effective. | Image: Samsung

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.

The poké ball case also comes with a small lanyard | Image: Samsung" data-portal-copyright="Image: Samsung">

The case is perfectly round, save for a small flat edge on the bottom t …

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Netflix unveils a terrifying AI in the first teaser for Jung_E

2022-12-21T12:46:44-05:00

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:

In a post-apocalyptic 22nd century, a researcher at an AI lab leads the effort to end a civil war by cloning the brain of a heroic soldier - her mother.

Jung_E is the latest project from Yeon Sang- …

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Where to find Verge staff on Mastodon

2022-12-21T11:44:35-05:00

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. …

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The Verge’s 2022 in review

2022-12-21T10:13:38-05:00

Nobody can say that 2022 was an uneventful year. But if you wanted to escape reality occasionally by playing a really great game, enjoying a fantastic movie, or marathoning an exciting series, there were plenty of options to be found.

Now that the end of the year is approaching, we thought we’d share our recommendations and thoughts from 2022. We’ve got roundups of our favorite movies and series from Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, and a variety of other streaming services, along with our best-loved games for the Switch, Xbox, PC, and other devices. We also offer our thoughts on some of the best and worst tech that the year brought — including that strange phenomenon known as crypto — and an account of some of the most exciting space launches seen this year.

So welcome to our look back at some of our most (and least) favorite entertainment and events of 2022. We hope you enjoy some of the games and shows we liked so much over the last 12 months.

The year in review

Great entertainment

Fails of 2022: the Intel P-series was a step back

2022-12-21T10:00:00-05:00

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.

For many of …

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