Friday’s top tech news: job cuts come for Google – The Verge

Twitter will stop forcing you onto its ‘For You’ timeline

2023-01-20T20:03:36-05:00

Soon you may be able to more-or-less set one of the tabs as default.

Twitter's next update should make it less insistent that you use the "For You" algorithmic timeline, according to a tweet from Elon Musk. He says the app will "stop switching you back to recommended tweets," and remember if you left it on the reverse-chronological "Following" timeline or a pinned list.

Musk's promises should be taken with a grain of salt, but I hope the company delivers on this one. Until last month, Twitter had a button that let you set a preference on which version of the timeline you wanted to use. That option went away when the company rolled out a UI that let you swipe between the two timelines, with the app defaulting …

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Elon Musk admits at trial that he ignored pleas to stop tweeting

2023-01-20T18:10:03-05:00

Elon Musk will never stop posting, no matter who tells him to stop.

That was one of the takeaways from his brief testimony during his securities fraud trial, which took place in a San Francisco courthouse Friday. Lawyers for the plaintiffs peppered Musk with questions about his tweets as they work up to his infamous "funding secured" tweet from 2018 at the center of this case. Musk is being sued by a class of Tesla investors who claim his bumbling attempts to take Tesla private that year cost them millions of dollars.

Musk wasn't asked about that tweet yet, though. He took the stand for a little over 30 minutes before the trial recessed un …

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TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral

2023-01-20T17:35:01-05:00

TikTok has confirmed to Forbes that some of its US employees have the ability to boost videos in order to "introduce celebrities and emerging creators to the TikTok community." The statement comes as part of a report about TikTok's "Heating" button, which Forbes says can be used to put selected videos onto users' For You pages, helping boost views by sidestepping the algorithm that supposedly drives the TikTok experience.

Jamie Favazza, a spokesperson for TikTok, told Forbes that increasing views to particular videos isn't the only reason for heating. TikTok will also "promote some videos to help diversify the content experience" (read: mak …

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Humble Bundle’s Winter Sale kicks off today

2023-01-20T16:15:48-05:00

Humble Bundle’s Winter sale goes live today | Image: Humble Bundle

Here’s your PSA to remind you that the Humble Bundle Winter Sale has started, knocking up to 90 percent off a variety of titles until February 7th. The sale features discounts on a plethora of AAA and eccentric indie games, but we’ve put together a short list of highlights that we can personally vouch for. Buying a game off the Humble Bundle store allows you to donate a portion of your purchase to the charity of your choice once you’ve set up an account.

The majority of the games on sale are unlocked via your Steam account, but a handful may require an Epic Games Store or Ubisoft Connect account.

Cyberpunk 2077 $29.99 (normally $59.99)
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga $29.99 (normally $59.99)
Cult of the Lamb $18.74 (normally $24.99)
Hardspace: Shipbreaker $23.44 (normally $34.99)
Return to Monkey Island $19.99 (normally $24.99)
Neon White $19.99 (normally $24.99)
Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate Daemonhunters $32.99 (normally $54.99)
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction $19.99 (normally $49.99)
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy $20.99 (normally $69.99)
Persona 5 Royal $41.99 (normally $59.99)
Graveyard Keeper $7.99 (normally $19.99)

In addition to the aforementioned titles, you can find a number of Square Enix games on sale as well.

Tactics Ogre Reborn $42.49 (normally $49.99)

Nier Replicant $29.99 (normally $59.99)

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade $39.89 (normally $69.99)

If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the Humble Bundle store, you might want to check out Steam’s Lunar New Year sale, which is marking down games from studios like Sega, Rockstar, and Electronic Arts, to name a few.

Nintendo reportedly projects Switch sales are going up in 2023

2023-01-20T14:36:44-05:00

Nintendo is planning to increase production of the Switch for the upcoming fiscal year beginning in March, according to a Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources. The news arrives on the same weekend as the company's first big release in 2023, Fire Emblem Engage, and ahead of the long-anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which will go on sale in May.

Nintendo reportedly has pinged its suppliers and assembly partners about increasing production without putting a firm number on its expectations. In November, the company had decreased its Switch sales forecast for the current year to 19 million units (down from its initial …

Read the full story at The Verge.

CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy

2023-01-20T14:25:57-05:00

CNET will pause publication of stories generated using artificial intelligence "for now," the site's leadership told employees on a staff call Friday.

The call, which lasted under an hour, was held a week after CNET came under fire for its use of AI tools on stories and one day after The Verge reported that AI tools had been in use for months, with little transparency to readers or staff. CNET hadn't formally announced the use of AI until readers noticed a small disclosure.

"We didn't do it in secret," CNET editor-in-chief Connie Guglielmo told the group. "We did it quietly."

's pop-up disclosure before it was rewritten last week." data-portal-copyright="">

CNET, owned by private equity firm Red Ventures, is among sever …

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How to easily share your Wi-Fi password on Android and iOS

2023-01-20T12:12:43-05:00

If you have a guest over to your house for any amount of time, there's a fair chance they'll ask you for the Wi-Fi password, which may begin a dreaded dance of you trying to remember what it is or read out a complicated string of numbers, letters, and symbols.

Of course, you could always buy a Wi-Fi password sign or write it on a sticky note that you can quickly point guests to, but that's not always the most convenient solution; if your password is long or contains hard-to-read symbols (is that an O or a 0?), it can be a pain to get your friends and family connected.

It's worth noting that if you frequently have people you don't know very …

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T-Mobile announces another data breach, impacting 37 million accounts

2023-01-20T10:07:02-05:00

The breach went undetected for over a month before T-Mobile detected the malicious activity. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile has revealed the company's second major breach in less than two years, admitting that a hacker was able to obtain customer data, including names, birth dates, and phone numbers, from 37 million accounts. The telecom giant said in a regulatory filing on Thursday that it currently believes the attacker first retrieved data around November 25th, 2022, through one of its APIs.

T-Mobile says it detected malicious activity on January 5th and that the attacker had access to the exploited API for over a month. The company says it traced the source of the malicious activity and fixed the API exploit within a day of the detection. T-Mobile s …

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Polar Ignite 3 review: style over substance

2023-01-20T10:00:00-05:00

The Polar Ignite 3 is the company’s best-looking smartwatch yet.

I really wanted to like the Polar Ignite 3.

The $329.95 Ignite 3 was one of Polar's more memorable launch announcements in recent years. With a shiny new OLED display, it looked like a Pixel Watch doppelgänger in photos. It also got new features like multiband GPS and Sleepwise, which helps you visualize when you'll be at your best during the day - an "alertness forecast," if you will. I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I had a good experience with the original Ignite watch back in 2019. Sleeker design, better components, new features - on paper, it sounded like a formula for a successful update.

What I got was a watch that loo …

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Google is freaking out about ChatGPT

2023-01-20T09:57:11-05:00

The recent launch of OpenAI's AI chatbot ChatGPT has raised alarms within Google, according to reports from The New York Times. Now, the Times says Google has plans to "demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year" and unveil more than 20 projects powered by artificial intelligence.

As recently as December, we'd heard Google execs were worried that despite investing heavily in AI technology, moving too fast to roll it out could harm the company's reputation. But things are changing quickly. Earlier this morning, Google announced it's laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI as a domain of prima …

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