Verge Archives

The ITC’s opinion on the Apple Watch ban has been unsealed. You can read it at the link below, but there are no big surprises. The gist is the ITC didn’t think Apple proved it would suffer irreparable harm if the ban went through.

You can now follow certain test Threads accounts on Mastodon as Meta begins enabling ActivityPub interoperability. It barely works right now — all you can do is follow so far, and posts don’t even show up yet - but Threads head Adam Mosseri’s account is storming up the charts and is now the third most followed account in the fediverse. The people want open and interoperable networks!

It’s still very early days, but the California Privacy Protection Agency just released a set of draft rules that would greatly restrict how companies use consumer data in AI. If adopted, businesses will be required to tell customers how their personal data is being in AI — as well as give them the ability to opt out.

We have big ideas for the future of The Verge — and lot of them involve expanding our business into more subscription offerings like Command Line and Hot Pod. We’re going to take it slow, and we want to make sure we hear from our audience as clearly as possible, so if you’ve got a moment, please take our little survey! We are not going to paywall the entire site, I promise — but there are lots of other ideas floating around, and we’d like to narrow them down.

And Google didn’t grant it. OnePlus would have had to give up substantial Google revenue share just to ship phones with the Epic Games Store / Fortnite launcher app needed to install the game.

Tuesday’s edition of WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show focused on the past, present, and future of the TV remote control and various other buttons that control our lives.

We got a brief glimpse at the latest collab between Netflix and Dreamworks with Orion and the Dark, about a young kid with anxiety who is forced to confront one of his greatest fears.

Fair to say Danny does not love Amanda Chicago Lewis’ excellent piece about the web SEO built — and the people who’ve made millions running SEO schemes. (Also important to note that Danny says he is not responding in his professional capacity as a Google employee here!)

The open source intelligence site has been fact-checking information about the Israel-Hamas war during a seismic shift in social media practices, and it outlines some of the most common tells of a false report, alongside a useful reminder for watching disturbing videos:

It’s called the Dragonfly rotorcraft lander, designed to one day zip across Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. To prepare it for the icy moon’s dense atmosphere, NASA and Johns Hopkins APL engineers have already tested a smaller model in a subsonic wind tunnel. The lander is supposed to reach Titan in the mid 2030s, where it’ll be used to study the origins of life.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Goosebumps author R.L. Stine mentions how smartphones have changed the way he writes his horror novels. Everyone has a phone to call for help!

The United Auto Workers have scored a major win in negotiations with General Motors. The automaker has agreed to place its EV battery factory under the union’s “master agreement,” which came after the UAW made it clear that it planned on expanding its strike to include some of GM’s most profitable facilities.

Per Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press, a witness in the ongoing Sam Bankman-Fried trial had to spell out “D-O-G-E” in response to a question from a prosecutor. It doesn’t look like there were any follow-up questions about a cryptocurrency based on a meme. It’s probably for the best.

Yep, there’s a new feature called Zoom Enhance on the Pixel 8 Pro. It uses on-device processing to let you zoom in on parts of your photos and recreates fine detail. Like in the movies! It’s available in December via Feature Drop.

The phone can run up to 150x more computations than the largest model on Pixel 7. Magic Eraser looks like it gets a big improvement from this on-device processing, too. It’s available right away, says Rick.

It’s coming to select testers first, then they’ll be expanding availability in the next few months. Also, it wrote a social caption for a cute puppy photo.

Google is shouting out its AI chatbot while we’re talking about Google Assistant. Sissie Hsiao is introducing Assistant with Bard, which will offer more generative capabilities. It can find your important emails and pull together information from different apps.

Video Boost will offload some complex video AI processing to the cloud so it can edit every frame. That’s a whole lot of data to handle from a 4K video clip. It enables more robust HDR for video as well as Night Sight Video. It’s coming via a feature drop in December.

A few Verge staffers have be been playing around with a new app called Orion, which turns the iPad into a HDMI monitor. Dan got Dex running to his iPad, Parker sent his Switch’s video output to the device, and I used the tablet as a monitor for my retro Windows PC.

is X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s description of the state of her company.

Linda Yaccarino didn’t quite answer that question while onstage at Code, but she did pose a question that, frankly, feels easier to answer: “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?”

Hear CEO Praveen Penmetsa talk about it in this clip from Code 2023. (It’s more interesting than it seems!) And read more from the event in our storystream.

With the new $499 SM7dB (kinda punny), Shure adds an integrated preamp to the classic radio microphone to bring its audio signal up to proper recording levels right out of the gate. This will help out podcasters and traveling audio engineers who typically have to use a Cloudlifter box whenever they want the SM7b sound.

Julia Boorstin asked her to confirm that X would start charging users to post, as Musk floated a week ago. Yaccarino was not so sure:

We’ll have a few more videos to share as we wrap things up, so check back in for some of the key moments. And if you want all the details, read back through our StoryStream below.

There was a recurring theme to Yaccarino’s answers: she keeps defending X from statements and choices by Elon Musk.

She didn’t dispute that some members of the team had been fired, but she said X is expanding its work to combat platform manipulation and disinformation overall.

Boorstin is trying to squeeze in a last couple of questions before they wrap up.

Yaccarino says in response to the dispute between Musk and the Anti-Defamation League.

When Boorstin asked about how the plan would impact X usage, Yaccarino asked her to clarify.

“Something like that,” Yaccarino said on stage. She pulled out her phone like she was going to double check the number, then got sidetracked by a long answer.

Roth said his advice to her was to think about the risks of working with Musk and “what she might face.”

The house is packed right now for Yaccarino’s interview, particularly after the surprise of Roth’s appearance. She opens the conversation with a response to Roth, saying that his Twitter was “operating on a different sets of rules ... ideologies that were creeping down the road of censorship.”

She’s speaking with CNBC senior media and tech correspondent Julia Boorstin.