ChatGPT maker OpenAI releases ‘not fully reliable’ tool to detect AI generated content
OpenAI is calling on educators to give their feedback on how the tool is used, amid rising concerns around AI-assisted cheating at universities
OpenAI, the research laboratory behind AI program ChatGPT, has released a tool designed to detect whether text has been written by artificial intelligence, but warns it’s not completely reliable – yet.
In a blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI linked to a new classifier tool that has been trained to distinguish between text written by a human and that written by a variety of AI, not just ChatGPT.
Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Private Parts and Echo Chamber As he fights for free speech online and promotes his companies, the new owner of Twitter spends a lot of time replying to his fans.
Frontier’s bringing its 5-gig fiber network across the country
Frontier joins AT&T as another 5-gig capable ISP available in the United States | Graphic by William Joel / The Verge
Compared to the cable-bound internet that most of us are familiar with, Frontier’s 5 Gig internet is reported to have upload speeds that are up to 125 times faster and up to five times faster downloads, all delivered with less latency.
The new 5 Gig network is one of the fastest internet options currently available in the US, with other fiber-enabled ISPs like Verizon Fios and Google Fiber still capped at around 2Gbps. Right now, other 5 Gig networks currently available in the US include AT&T, which offers 2 Gig and 5 Gig plans, and Optimum. Altice communications senior vice president Janet Meahan notes Optimum has started rolling out 5 Gig service across its fiber footprint in Connecticut and Long Island, as well as parts of its fiber networks in the Bronx, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Westchester.
The 5 Gig plan offered by Frontier starts at $154.99 per month, with the fee including a router and installation. This is roughly $55 more than the 2 Gig plans offered by Frontier and other ISPs; however, costs, availability, and promotions can vary from state to state. Even with a monthly price exceeding $150, 5-gig internet connectivity can be invaluable for networks responsible for a large number of devices and is still less expensive than AT&T’s 5Gbps plan, which starts at $179.99.
5-gig connection speeds are good, but only as long as you have the hardware to support it. Most Wi-Fi 6E devices, like the Google Nest Wifi Pro, are capable of handling 5Gbps throughput, but anyone planning to subscribe to Frontier’s new plan will want to check their specific hardware beforehand to get the most out of their investment.
Correction January 31st, 7:30PM ET:An earlier version of this story said AT&T had the only other 5-Gig service, but in fact, Optimum is also offering 5-Gig fiber service in several areas. We regret the error.
Su predicts that the total addressable market for PCs will shrink 10 percent this year, down to around 260 million units. (IDC reported this month that 292.3 million PCs shipped in 2022, and both IDC and Gartner suggested it might take until 2024 to recover.) Su says AMD is expecting “a softer first half and a stronger second half.”
While AMD is predicting that both its client processor and gaming revenue will continue to drop next quarter — even as its new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, 7000 laptop CPUs and RDNA 3 mobile chips make their way to shelves — Su says it actually has 25 percent more notebook design wins this year, with 250 different AMD-powered laptops set to go on sale.
The company’s profits sunk to just $21 million this quarter, a decline of 98 percent, but it says most of that was due to the Xilinx acquisition. Its revenue from client processors and gaming GPUs dropped 51 percent and 7 percent in Q4, respectively.
While AMD waits for demand to recover, Su says the company’s been “undershipping” its processors and GPUs into the market. While you can find some discounts due to the “marketing programs and pricing incentives in place,” Su says the company’s been focused on matching supply to demand as soon as possible. “We’ll undership to a lesser extent in Q1,” she says.
Research firm Gartner says the current PC slump “marks the largest quarterly shipment decline since Gartner began tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s.” It wrote that the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, “the anticipation of a global recession,” and the fact that many people already bought a new PC during the pandemic have all tanked demand for new computers.
Overwatch 2 is making it easier and cheaper for you to get older skins
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
To coincide with the release of season 3, Overwatch 2 is reintroducing Overwatch credits, giving players ways to earn those credits via battle pass progression, and adding Overwatch’s epic and legendary skins to its shop at reduced prices. Altogether, this currency overhaul is meant to address the long-standing complaint that the new cash shop placed one of Overwatch’s most unique and desirable features — itswell-designedskins — behind a paywall that was just too expensive.
As Overwatch season 2 nears its end, the developers published a blog highlighting their takeaways from the season. They addressed new hero Ramattra, including the tweaks they’ve made to his abilities, competitive ladder updates, and changes coming to rewards for seasonal events. But perhaps one thing that stood out the most was the changes the team is making to its skin shop known in-game as the Hero Shop.
“In Season 3, we’re bringing back Overwatch Credits, which had been previously shown as Legacy Credits and been unearnable in Overwatch 2,” the post read. “Now, all players can earn up to 1500 credits as free rewards and another 500 credits as premium rewards spread throughout Season 3 Battle Pass. We are also adding more uses for your Credits so you can choose from many potential rewards.”
Credits were phased out in the jump from Overwatch to Overwatch 2. You got them in loot boxes as a random reward and could use them to purchase cosmetics like skins, voice lines, and sprays. When Overwatch 2 subsumed Overwatch, you kept your credits and could still use them, but only on Overwatch prime cosmetics you didn’t yet have. Anything new required the purchase of the shiny new premium currency Overwatch coins. Ever since Overwatch 2 launched, players have complained that shop prices are a bit expensive. Players can earn Overwatch coins without buying them, but they’re awarded at such low rates it would take several months of grinding to earn enough to buy one of the new skins.
The developers were aware of the complaints and are making changes by reintroducing credits, adding “nearly all” epic and legendary Overwatch skins to the shop and making them always available, and lowering their price.
According to the blog, “these changes mean all players can earn a legendary skin of their choice each season from the Hero Gallery skins just for playing normally and without needing to make any purchases.”
This does at least partly address the concern that it just wasn’t possible for casual players to earn anything in the game without ponying up a bunch of cash. But while this may satisfy players who haven’t completed their Overwatch collection, unless Overwatch 2 skin prices come down or the team ups the number of coins you can earn, that Star Sheep Orisa will still be out of me and my wallet’s reach.
‘Everything is fake’: how global crime gangs are using UK shell companies in multi-million pound crypto scams
Investigation reveals more than 150 fake firms, many with ties to China, are targeting people online, breaking their hearts – and emptying their bank accounts
A woman meets a man online. They flirt. Then, after a few weeks, they begin imagining a future together. Fast forward a few months and one of them has had their heart broken and been defrauded of their life savings.
It sounds like a classic romance scam, but it isn’t. This is “pig butchering”: a brutal, elaborate and rapidly expanding form of organised crime, often involving criminal syndicates, modern-day slaves and victims around the world.
The Last Boeing 747 Leaves the Factory The plane known as “Queen of the Skies” helped make air travel more affordable, but it has been supplanted by smaller, more efficient aircraft.
‘They filmed me without my consent’: the ugly side of #kindness videos
Some social media users are building a following through ‘feelgood’ videos, in which, for instance, they give flowers to a stranger. The stranger then becomes their clickbait. Is there anything we can do to stop this?
Maree only wanted to buy some shoes. A pair that she liked the look of had gone on sale, so she made a trip into the city to try them on. It was late in the day in June, mid-winter in Melbourne, and the shopping centre was quiet. After making her purchase, Maree stopped for a coffee. “And that’s when it happened,” she says.
A young man approached her holding a posy of flowers. He asked Maree to hold them for him as he put on his jacket. “I wish I’d trusted my instincts and said no,” she says. “It was all so quick.” Maree took the flowers – then the man walked away, wishing her “a lovely day”. She held them out after him, bemused.
GM has started producing the Hummer EV SUV
Image: GM
General Motors has started production on the Hummer EV SUV at its Factory Zero in Michigan, according to Nicole Schmitz, a spokesperson for the company. The Detroit Press reported Monday that customers could start receiving their orders by the end of Q1. That lines up with GM’s FAQ stating that the SUV will be available in “early 2023.”
I won’t blame anyone who’s thinking, “wait, haven’t they been making these for a while,” because GM started delivering the truck version of the Hummer EV, which sports a five-foot-long bed, in December 2021. In October 2022, the company announced that it had made 782 of the vehicles during 2022, and said it had around 90,000 reservations for both the truck and SUV versions. Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that GM was only making around 12 Hummer EVs a day.
The Hummers are massive vehicles; the truck’s release revealed that its battery alone weighed 2,923 pounds or almost as much as an entire Honda Civic. That fact was actually recently highlighted by Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, during a speech about how vehicles are getting bigger and heavier.
“I‘m concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights and increasing size, power, and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles,” she said before specifically calling out the Hummer’s 10,000-plus pound gross vehicle weight rating. (She also mentioned how electrified vehicles from Ford, Volvo, and Toyota were significantly heavier than their gas counterparts.)
That does make it slightly ironic, then, that GM issued a press release about how it’s donating proceeds from selling the first production Hummer SUV at auction to a charity called “Tread Lightly!” which aims to “balance the needs of the people who enjoy outdoor recreation with the need to maintain healthy ecosystems and thriving populations of wildlife across the nation.” While I’m definitely happy to hear that the non-profit will be getting $500,000, I don’t think anybody will be able to tread lightly in a Hummer EV SUV.
Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are reportedly all skipping E3 2023
Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are all skipping the revitalized E3 convention in June, according to a new report from IGN. E3 will be back as an in-person conference in Los Angeles after not happening at all in 2022, and I personally was hopeful that the big three console makers would be at the show when it takes place from June 13th through 16th to help make it feel like the big event of years past. But according to IGN’s reporting, that’s not the case.
That said, it’s not entirely unexpected. Sony first skipped E3 in 2019 and hasn’t been part of the convention since. Microsoft said last week that it would be doing a showcase in LA this summer but didn’t outright say the words E3. Nintendo has proven time and time again that it can drive huge news cycles with its can’t-miss Direct video presentations, so it may not feel the need to share the E3 spotlight. And since the show will be taking place about a month after the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo may want to keep the attention of its fans on what could be one of the biggest games of the year.
As E3 has grown smaller, other digital stages have sprung up for game publishers to make their big announcements — most prominently, The Game Awards and the Summer Game Fest, both hosted by Geoff Keighley. He spoke to us in 2022 about where E3 does — or maybe doesn’t — fit into the gaming landscape. Incidentally, the Summer Game Fest account just tweeted that it will also be returning on June 8th, just a few days before E3.
Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition plays great on console
Image: Microsoft / World’s Edge
Age of Empires II is extremely special to me. The game came to me by accident at 16, and it has remained a great gaming love of mine ever since. I played Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition on Xbox to see if, after all these years, I could rekindle my fondness for this PC game on console, and it feels like love at first wololo all over again.
It is a daunting prospect to play a complex real-time strategy game like Age of Empires without the finely tuned control of a keyboard. There are maps and submenus to click through and units to select and move and control. Yet, the developers at World’s Edge have designed a thoughtful controller interface that, after a couple of hiccups, worked as seamlessly as I remember with a mouse and keyboard.
You can double-tap the A button to select units of the same time. You hold the button down and move the left thumbstick to select units within a certain area. There are also a handful of shortcuts that make ordering your little minions around a lot easier. The game will tell you if you have idle villagers and let you select those lazy slobs by pressing up on the D-pad. If there’s an enemy that needs a wololo-ing, right on the D-pad selects your monks. My favorite shortcut was hitting left on the D-pad, which selects all of your military units and brings them under your control simultaneously. If you’re one of those “numbers go up” sickos like I am, there is no greater joy than seeing your UI light up with the number of units you’re about to send to ruin a Carthaginian’s day.
Image: Microsoft / World’s Edge
My cities were never so thoughtfully constructed. I just plopped buildings down wherever there was room and encircled them with walls.
There are also some neat automation features built into AOE II that make management a bit easier. With a click of the right stick, you can automate how villagers gather resources depending on your goals. You can have a balanced approach or set it to a function that prioritizes food and gold if you’re going for a big military. Then, the next time you generate a villager, it automatically does your bidding without the need to manually direct them. I, however, am too precise for such settings. Part of the fun is the micromanagement, so I left that setting off.
I’m also not sure if this is new to AOE II: DE or something that’s been implemented before, but I really like how the game is smart enough to direct my villagers to automatically start digging for nearby gold or stone if I have them build a mining camp. I like when minions intuitively know what their goddess demands. (I also have way too much fun capriciously killing villagers if I need to free up my population for other units. I should probably talk to somebody about that.)
That said, Age of Empires II: Definitive EditionElectric Console Boogalo isn’t 100 percent elegant in its control scheme. If there’s a way to click directly on the map, I haven’t found it, forcing me to hold the thumbstick until I get to the area I want to survey. That makes it really hard to get a quick glance at what’s happening if you’re under attack. I hear the telltale horn blow, letting me know there’s a fight happening, and by the time my eyes are on the action, it’s over, and units I could have maybe withdrawn had I been quicker are dead.
One of the bigger issues I had, which resulted in a couple of frustrating game overs, was the fact that the game’s UI has so much going on because it’s been distilled from a PC experience to a console one, making it easy to miss crucial information. I needed to build a siege workshop. I clicked on my builder and hit the left trigger. I was immediately shown a wheel of the buildings it can construct, but none of them were siege workshops. I went mad, looking up tutorials and wikis, convinced that I hadn’t done enough upgrading to give my civilization access to the siege workshop yet. Turns out, buildings are segregated by function, with commerce buildings (mills, markets, and monasteries, oh my!) on one wheel and military buildings on another. A quick press of the Y button pulled up the military wheel and there was the siege workshop I was desperate for. On an embarrassing note, the game actually tells you to hit Y to bring up the military buildings, but I missed it as it got lost in the noise of the informationally stuffed UI.
Image: Microsoft / World’s Edge
Controlling a lot of little units over a big space can get difficult.
Once I got over those initial hangups, AOE II: DE played exactly as I remembered. All the nostalgia of spending hours with this game came flooding back, and the experience is no less diminished playing on console.
I didn’t have access to computer games growing up. My family got our first home computer when I was 16, and it was an educational / work tool, and therefore, purchasing games for it was verboten. That didn’t stop me from playing Pinball while listening to the one song that came pre-installed on Windows XP machines — David Byrne’s “Like Humans Do” — on repeat every day after school.
All that changed when somehow, someway, and for some unknown reason, my mother’s boyfriend gave me a spindle of CD-Rs. Most of them were blank, one of them was a copy of Tomb Raider II, and another one was a bootleg copy of Age of Empires II: Rise of Rome.
Nobody told me what this game was. It wasn’t a gift or anything, just something that got put on a spindle of CDs and forgotten about. But I devoured that game. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. I had no idea games like Starcraft or Myst or any of the other foundational PC games existed.
Age of Empires, quite literally, changed my gaming life. Instead of spending hours trying to run up my Pinball multiplier, I’d spend hours as Augustus trying to defeat Antony and Cleopatra. My enduring love of Roman history — complete with several college courses taken and several listens to the phenomenal podcast The History of Rome — came about because of this game.
I’m actually a bit sad those campaigns aren't available in this version of AOE: II, but I do know it’s coming soon. I can’t wait.
Sony promises ‘increased supply of PS5 consoles’ ahead of PSVR2 launch
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Sony says it should now be a lot easier to find PS5 stock at retailers. After two years of supply challenges, Sony has thanked fans for their patience as it delt with “unprecedented demand” since the PS5 launch in November 2020.
“If you’re looking to purchase a PS5 console, you should now have a much easier time finding one at retailers globally,” says Isabelle Tomatis, VP of brand, hardware, and peripherals at Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Sony recommends its own PlayStation direct store for those looking for a PS5 in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. There are a variety of bundles available, alongside the base digital and disc PS5 consoles.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Sony’s PlayStation VR2 headset.
As Sony is confident its supply issues are over, it’s now launching a new PS5 commercial that’s filmed in the style of a live news channel with plenty of game references. Sony is also working with creators on social media to market the PS5 more.
This fresh marketing push also comes just after the launch of the new DualSense Edge controller, and weeks before Sony’s PlayStation VR2 launches on February 22nd for $549.99. The PSVR2 headset is a major upgrade over the original, with an OLED screen, a 110-degree field of view, and 4K HDR support. It also supports up to 120Hz for smoother frame rates and gameplay.
The VR2 will have more than 30 games in its launch window, including Gran Turismo 7, Resident Evil Village, and Horizon Call of the Mountain.
JD Sports hit by cyber-attack that leaked 10m customers’ data
Retail group says incident affected shoppers at JD, Size?, Millets, Blacks, Scotts and Millets Sport brands
The fashion retailer JD Sports said the personal and financial information of 10 million customers was potentially accessed by hackers in a cyber-attack.
The company said incident, which affected some online orders made by customers between November 2018 and October 2020, targeted purchases of products of its JD, Size?, Millets, Blacks, Scotts and Millets Sport brands.
Foldable iPad could arrive as early as next year, claims noted Apple analyst
Apple’s 10th-gen iPad, released last year. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge
Apple could be on track to release a foldable iPad as early as next year, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. “I’m positive about the foldable iPad in 2024 and expect this new model will boost shipments and improve the product mix,” he tweeted early Monday. Kuo expects it to be joined by a revamped iPad Mini, due to enter mass production in early 2024.
Kuo didn’t offer many new details on the rumored iPad foldable, but said that it will feature a “carbon fiber” kickstand produced by Chinese component manufacturer Anjie Technology.
(4/4)
Thus, I'm taking a cautious approach to iPad shipments for 2023, predicting a YoY decline of 10-15%. Nevertheless, I'm positive about the foldable iPad in 2024 and expect this new model will boost shipments and improve the product mix.
A 2024 release date is significantly earlier than the last significant foldable iPad prediction, which came from Display Supply Chain Consultant analyst Ross Young last February. He reported that Apple is developing a foldable iPad/MacBook hybrid with a roughly 20-inch folding screen, but anticipated that it won’t be ready for release until 2026. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman later reported that Apple has been exploring a dual-screen foldable, and added that the bottom half of the display would serve as a virtual keyboard when the device is used as a MacBook-style clamshell.
Gurman didn’t offer an exact release date prediction, but noted in October that Apple’s foldable iPad could release “later in the decade.”
This isn’t the first time Kuo has put a date on an Apple foldable prediction after he said a foldable iPhone might release in 2023, two years ago. But it sounds like this might be a much smaller device with a screen size in the region of 7.5 to 8 inches. Gurman has even reported that Apple has discussed releasing a foldable device with a similar screen size to the 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Pro Max. Given the lack of rumors about a foldable iPhone more recently it’s hard to imagine it releasing in 2023, as Kuo previously predicted.
In the more immediate future, Kuo is predicting a drop in iPad shipments of between 10 and 15 percent year-over-year in 2023. Given the bump in sales enjoyed by most consumer tech companies during the covid lockdowns, and the drops many have experienced more recently, a decline in tablet shipments this year wouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
Finally, Kuo expects the next iPad that Apple releases to be the iPad Mini. He thinks a new model will enter production in the first quarter of 2024, succeeding its last refresh in 2021.
The latest Super Mario Bros. Movie teaser showcases Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong
Image: Nintendo
The latest Super Mario Bros. Movie teaser lets us hear Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong for the first time. During the clip, Mario faces off against Donkey Kong in an arena of sorts — just like we’ve seen in the previous trailer — but this trailer expands on the scene.
While it seems like Mario’s on the losing side of the battle, this appears to change when the titular plumber hits a question mark block, and (presumably) gets the Super Bell, transforming him into Cat Mario. Seeing Mario in his adorably fuzzy catsuit sends Donkey Kong into a laughing fit, which gives us a chance to hear Rogen’s signature laugh.
Image: Nintendo
Don’t laugh at Cat Mario.
It’s nice to finally hear Rogen as Donkey Kong, and I have to admit, I’m pleasantly surprised at how well his voice (and laugh) suits the character. The film also features Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Charlie Day as Luigi, and Jack Black as Bowser. From what I’ve heard so far, it seems like Nintendo and Illumination — the animation studio working on the film — did a great job with casting.
With every new trailer that Nintendo drops, I’m getting more and more hyped for the film’s release. Luckily, we’ll just have to hold out for a few more months, as the Super Mario Bros. Movie hits theaters on April 7th.
Are bands dead? How solo stars took over the charts
Pop was once all about four guys and their instruments. Now that gang mentality has been blown away by tech-savvy individuals
When David Crosby helped found the Byrds, the idea of being in a band like the Beatles was intoxicating. The musician, who died last week, and his bandmates were so obsessed with the Beatles that they watched A Hard Day’s Night and went straight out to buy the same instruments.
A modern-day Crosby would be well advised not to bother – bands are almost entirely absent from the music charts. Only four new songs by groups made it into the official Top 100 singles of last year, which was dominated by solo acts and a smattering of classics by the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Arctic Monkeys.
Bezos and Washington Post show honeymoon is over for tech mogul media owners
Jeff Bezos has denied rumours he wants to sell the Washington Post but hopes that Silicon Valley savvy could transform heritage media have waned
Amid intense speculation to the contrary, the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos last week sought to reassure a nervous newsroom at the Washington Post that he was not seeking to sell the august newspaper.
The rumors, stoked by layoff anxiety at the newspaper and – again, speculation – that another multibillionaire, Mike Bloomberg, is in the market for the title, had been the subject of feverish debate in US media circles.
Tears, blunders and chaos: inside Elon Musk’s Twitter
In the three months since Musk bought Twitter for £44bn, thousands have been sacked and the company has nosedived. Here, staff tell of a firm in disarray and an owner whose reputation is also plummeting
In April 2022, Elon Musk acquired a 9.2% stake in Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder, and was offered a seat on the board. Luke Simon, a senior engineering director at Twitter, was ecstatic. “Elon Musk is a brilliant engineer and scientist, and he has a track record of having a Midas touch when it comes to growing the companies he’s helped lead,” he wrote on the workplace messaging platform Slack.
Twitter had been defined by the leadership of Jack Dorsey – a co-founder who was known for going on long meditation retreats, fasting 22 hours a day, and walking five miles to the office – who was seen by some as an absentee landlord, leaving Twitter’s strategy and daily operations to a handful of trusted deputies. To Simon and those like him, it was hard to see Twitter as anything other than wasted potential.
Why the UK is gangs' base for multi-million ‘pig-butchering’ scams
Investigation reveals more than 150 fake firms, many with ties to China, are targeting people online, breaking their hearts – and emptying their bank accounts.
A woman meets a man online. They flirt. Then, after a few weeks, they begin imagining a future together. Fast forward a few months and one of them has had their heart broken and been defrauded of their life savings.
It sounds like a classic romance scam, but it isn’t. This is “pig butchering”: a brutal, elaborate and rapidly expanding form of organised crime, often involving criminal syndicates, modern-day slaves and victims around the world.
Tesla trial: did Musk’s tweet affect the firm’s stock price? Experts weigh in
Legal and finance experts say the car company’s attorneys face an ‘uphill battle’ to prove the billionaire’s tweets had no impact on shares
After Elon Musk tapped the tweet button at 12.48 pm on 7 August 2018, a bunch of Tesla investors were about to be taken on a wild ride.
“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Financing secured,” read the tweet that has since stirred up more than four years of securities fraud litigation focused on the rampant tweeting habits of the electric automaker’s billionaire CEO.
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI claim the lawsuit doesn’t hold up. | Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB (Photo by Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want the court to dismiss a proposed class action complaint that accuses the companies of scraping licensed code to build GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a pair offilings submitted to a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, the Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI say the claims outlined in the suit don’t hold up.
Things came to a head when programmer and lawyer, Matthew Butterick, teamed up with the legal team at Joseph Saveri Law Firm to file a proposed class action lawsuit last November, alleging the tool relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” Butterick and his legal team later filed a second proposed class action lawsuit on the behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which is the suit Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want dismissed.
As noted in the filing, Microsoft and GitHub say the complaint “fails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim,” while OpenAI similarly says the plaintiffs “allege a grab bag of claims that fail to plead violations of cognizable legal rights.” The companies argue that the plaintiffs rely on “hypothetical events” to make their claim, and say they don’t describe how they were personally harmed by the tool.
“Copilot withdraws nothing from the body of open source code available to the public,” Microsoft and GitHub claim in the filing. “Rather, Copilot helps developers write code by generating suggestions based on what it has learned from the entire body of knowledge gleaned from public code.”
Additionally, Microsoft and GitHub go on to claim that the plaintiffs are the ones who “undermine open source principles” by asking for “an injunction and a multi-billion dollar windfall” in relation to the “software that they willingly share as open source.”
The court hearing to dismiss the suit will take place in May, and Joseph Saveri Law Firm didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
With other companies looking into AI as well, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI aren’t the only ones facing legal issues. Earlier this month, Butterick and Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed another lawsuit alleging the AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt violate copyright laws by illegally scraping artists’ work from the internet. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI over claims the company’s Stable Diffusion tool “unlawfully” scraped images from the site.
Google’s new AI turns text into music
Song of the bots. | Illustration: The Verge
Google researchers have made an AI that can generate minutes-long musical pieces from text prompts, and can even transform a whistled or hummed melody into other instruments, similar to how systems like DALL-E generate images from written prompts (via TechCrunch). The model is called MusicLM, and while you can’t play around with it for yourself, the company has uploaded a bunch of samples that it produced using the model.
The examples are impressive. There are 30-second snippets of what sound like actual songs created from paragraph-long descriptions that prescribe a genre, vibe, and even specific instruments, as well as five-minute-long pieces generated from one or two words like “melodic techno.” Perhaps my favorite is a demo of “story mode,” where the model is basically given a script to morph between prompts. For example, this prompt:
electronic song played in a videogame (0:00-0:15)
meditation song played next to a river (0:15-0:30)
fire (0:30-0:45)
fireworks (0:45-0:60)
Resulted in this audio:
It may not be for everyone, but I could totally see this being composed by a human (I also listened to it on loop dozens of times while writing this article). Also featured on the demo site are examples of what the model produces when asked to generate 10-second clips of instruments like the cello or maracas (the later example is one where the system does a relatively poor job), eight-second clips of a certain genre, music that would fit a prison escape, and even what a beginner piano player would sound like versus an advanced one. It also includes interpretations of phrases like “futuristic club” and “accordion death metal.”
MusicLM can even simulate human vocals, and while it seems to get the tone and overall sound of voices right, there’s a quality to them that’s definitely off. The best way I can describe it is that they sound grainy or staticky. That quality isn’t as clear in the example above, but I think this one illustrates it pretty well:
That, by the way, is the result of asking it to make music that would play at a gym. You may also have noticed that the lyrics are nonsense, but in a way that you may not necessarily catch if you’re not paying attention — kind of like if you were listening to someone singing in Simlish or that one song that’s meant to sound like English but isn’t.
I won’t pretend to know how Google achieved these results, but it’s released a research paper explaining it in detail if you’re the type of person who would understand this figure:
Chart: Google
A figure explaining the “hierarchical sequence- to-sequence modeling task” that the researchers use along withAudioLM, another Google project.
AI-generated music has a long history dating back decades; there are systems that have been credited with composing pop songs, copying Bach better than a human could in the 90s, and accompanying live performances. One recent version uses AI image generation engine StableDiffusion to turn text prompts into spectrograms that are then turned into music. The paper says that MusicLM can outperform other systems in terms of its “quality and adherence to the caption,” as well as the fact that it can take in audio and copy the melody.
That last part is perhaps one of the coolest demos the researchers put out. The site lets you play the input audio, where someone hums or whistles a tune, then lets you hear how the model reproduces it as an electronic synth lead, string quartet, guitar solo, etc. From the examples I listened to, it manages the task very well.
Like with other forays into this type of AI, Google is being significantly more cautious with MusicLM than some of its peers may be with similar tech. “We have no plans to release models at this point,” concludes the paper, citing risks of “potential misappropriation of creative content” (read: plagiarism) and potential cultural appropriation or misrepresentation.
It’s always possible the tech could show up in one of Google’s fun musical experiments at some point, but for now, the only people who will be able to make use of the research are other people building musical AI systems. Google says it’s publicly releasing a dataset with around 5,500 music-text pairs, which could help when training and evaluating other musical AIs.
The Amazon Halo Rise would be a neat sleep tracker, if it weren’t for my cat
Amazon’s smart sunrise lamp knows when you’re sleeping but struggles to figure out when you’re awake, especially if you have a needy feline that gets in the way.
I am stuck in a vicious cycle. My cat is an asshole who likes waking me up at 3AM. In pursuit of a more peaceful slumber (and a new life as an early riser), I turn to all sorts of gadgets and sleep tech. It works for a while, until my cat adopts a new strategy.
I drowned out his late-night yowls with the Bose SleepBuds II, until he started batting my face with his paws. I bought him a cat fountain so he’d stop knocking over the cup on my nightstand; he was pleased until he decided it was more fun to drink condensation in the bathtub and then scream. Inevitably, I wake up late and exhausted. Rinse and repeat.
I had hoped to break the cycle with the Amazon Halo Rise, a $139.99 smart alarm clock, sunrise lamp, and contactless sleep tracker rolled into one. And I think it might’ve worked if it weren’t for my pugnacious purry boy Pablo.
I decided to review the Halo Rise because I’m struggling to transform from a night owl to an early bird. Outside a bout of insomnia, my talents include sleeping through three iPhone alarms, multiple vibrating smartwatch alarms, and most of my spouse’s nightly pilgrimages to the kitchen. (They seem unaware that potato chip bags crinkle 1,000 times louder at night.) I read somewhere that sunrise lamps can be an effective yet gentle way to wake up and was literally in the middle of researching which one to buy when my editor mentioned the Halo Rise.
On paper, the Halo Rise is an efficient option. It helps you wake up gently by mimicking natural morning light during your lightest sleep stage and has sensors to monitor ambient temperature, light disturbances, and humidity. You can link it with an Echo device, effectively turning it into another voice-controlled smart light. It’s small enough to fit on a crowded nightstand, and its minimal design is versatile enough to go with a variety of bedroom decor.
I was most wary of the Halo Rise’s contactless sleep tracking. Wearable or mattress-based sleep trackers tend to use a combination of motion sensors and heart rate data to determine which stage of sleep you’re in. There is no accelerometer or optical heart rate sensor in the Halo Rise. Instead, like the Nest Hub, it tracks sleep via a low-energy radar that analyzes your movement and breathing. Unlike the Nest Hub (and some smartphone sleep tracking apps), there’s no microphone, so it doesn’t record your snores or voices. There’s no camera, either. That’s great for privacy, but it also eliminates another data source. This ultimately means the Halo Rise’s radars and algorithms have to be on point for the sleep tracking to be accurate — and in my experience, radars in sleep gadgets can be hit or miss.
You view your sleep metrics in the Amazon Halo app, which is fairly basic.
Bundling all of these features into one device is convenient, but as the saying goes, a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none. Nightstand real estate is precious; there’s no room for something that falls just shy of nailing everything it’s supposed to do. That’s where my head was at going into testing. Now that I’ve used it for a little over a month, I can say that my instincts were spot-on — but not because of the Rise.
Operation: sleep no meow
Setting up the Rise is easy peasy, but positioning it is tricky. Because it’s a contactless tracker, you need to aim it in the right direction. The app walks you through it, but the gist is that you have to:
Place it on a nightstand such that the Rise’s metal stand is either the same height or up to eight inches above your mattress.
Point it at your upper body.
Ensure there’s about one arm’s length of distance between you and the Rise.
Remove any objects between you and the Rise (though bedding is okay).
The hard thing is making sure that it stays this way. For me, that meant checking that my books, water bottle, and phone weren’t obstructing any part of the Rise before bed. You can set nightly reminders in the Halo app to check that everything’s positioned correctly, but that’s just one more notification for you to ignore on your phone. But even though I did everything right, there was one factor I couldn’t control: Pablo.
The Halo Rise is small enough to fit on most nightstands, but you’ll need to make sure nothing is blocking its radars.
I first suspected something was off when I started comparing my historical Halo Rise sleep scores to what I got on the Oura Ring, Apple Watch Ultra, Garmin Fenix 7S Sapphire Solar edition, Polar Ignite 3, and several other wearables and sleep tracking apps I’ve been testing. I also keep a sleep and fitness journal, so I was able to cross-reference when I got a crappy night of sleep. Impressively, the Halo Rise was very accurate on a couple of nights when a persistent cough or insomnia woke me up. For those nights, my data and sleep stage graphs across all my test devices corresponded. On several days where I got really good sleep, the Halo Rise was able to recognize that, too. Again, my data corresponded across several platforms.
But there were also several nights when the data did not match at all. My wearable devices would say I’d slept soundly with few disturbances. Only the Halo Rise would say I’d been up for hours when I hadn’t. For instance, the Oura Ring would say I’d had about an hour’s worth of awake time. The Halo Rise would say I’d been sleepless for three to four hours. Sometimes those wakeful periods matched on sleep stage graphs. Other times, they absolutely didn’t.
I asked Dr. Michael Miyamoto, medical director for Amazon Halo, why that might be. Could my spouse’s midnight snacking confuse the Rise? According to Miyamoto, while it can’t be ruled out, it’s highly unlikely, as the Rise is programmed to focus on the body closest to it. Miyamoto also told me that people generally wake up several times during the night but only for a few seconds. The Rise only records it as a disturbance if it’s an instance lasting longer than five minutes. That’s about when I put two and two together. I asked if it were possible that a cat could wreck my results.
Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
Caught making his way to the Halo Rise. Glasses were knocked off the nightstand two seconds later. Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
Caught once again contemplating nightstand mischief while blocking the Halo Rise. This disturbance was logged the next morning as me being awake for one hour.
Here’s what you need to know about Night Pablo. Night Pablo loves chaos, nightstands, and creating chaos on my nightstand. A few times a week, I wake up to the sound of my glasses, books, phone, Nintendo Switch, or water bottle clattering across the floor. Why? It took us a long time to figure it out. It’s not that he’s hungry or thirsty; he has an automatic feeder and a fancy cat fountain. It turns out this crepuscular demon wants someone to witness him eating kibble. It’s beneath him to dine alone.
Pablo doesn’t always knock stuff off of my nightstand. He parks his fluffy butt there for myriad reasons. He loves playing with my charging cables. He loves sniffing my stuff. He likes having a launching pad for catapulting himself onto my spouse’s chest. Sometimes, he’ll sit right next to my head and demand scritches. (And if I don’t, he’ll bite.) It’s not every night, and I don’t remember every instance because I usually sleep like the dead. That said, I’ve sleepily witnessed it enough times over five years to know it happens.
In short, because the Halo Rise zeroes in on the closest body, it likely confused Pablo’s mischief-making as me being awake. I now have an inadvertent record of all the nights Pablo entered chaos mode. That, in itself, was startling. I knew Pablo sometimes made it difficult to get decent shut-eye — I just wasn’t aware of how much that added up to over time. I’ve since caught him in the act and corroborated it with the data the next morning.
Needless to say, if you want to use it as a sleep tracker, the Halo Rise is better suited to people who don’t have rambunctious kitties (or bed partners).
Good alarm clock, better smart light
Sleep tracking is just one of the things the Halo Rise can do. Pet-induced inaccuracies aside, it’s not a bad sleep tracking option if you feel uncomfortable wearing watches or rings to sleep. But I was more excited to try the smart alarm and sunrise lamp combo.
As mentioned earlier, I’m trying to become a morning person. So far, I’ve had mixed results. I set the Halo Rise’s smart alarm for 6:45AM. After a month, my success rate is about 45 percent. On the one hand, the Halo Rise’s default alarm sound is adorably cheery. It reminds me of my rice cooker — a tiny robot singing in a MIDI-esque voice so you know it’s time to do the thing. Even my spouse said it was the “least annoying alarm tone” and “kinda cute.” I’d attribute the 45 percent of the time I did get up to the audible alarm. If you don’t like cute bleeps and boops, you’re wrong, but you can also connect it to an Echo device to play music instead.
On the flip side, the simulated sunrise didn’t help me much. I sleep on my side, so when I’m turned away from the Rise, I don’t get any benefit. My back does. I also found it a little dim, but that’s a me problem. Most sunrise lamps are between 100 and 300 lux, and the Halo Rise is right in that range with a maximum of 300 lux. I simply didn’t find it bright enough because I apparently need a floodlight shining down on me to wake up. If you’re more sensitive to light (or sleep on your back), you might have greater success than I did.
You get a maximum of 300 lux, which is paradoxically bright and not bright enough at the same time.
The irony is that, when you’re awake, the Halo Rise is a good lamp — especially if you’re trying to nix blue light from your surroundings before bed. It was bright enough for me to read my books and Kindle Paperwhite in bed without feeling harsh or overpowering. While you can adjust brightness, you can’t tweak the color temperature; it’s just automatic variations on warm lighting.
But here, too, Pablo’s interference occasionally mucked things up. Because he liked to get between me and the Rise anywhere between 3AM and 6AM, it’d sometimes trip up the smart alarm. That’s because the smart alarm will go off within a 30-minute window of your alarm if it detects you’re in a lighter stage of sleep. Unless, of course, it confuses a moving cat for you. The alarm went off between 6:15 and 6:30AM a couple of times, and I’d smash the snooze / off button like I was trying to win a round of Hungry Hungry Hippos. Once I figured out it was Pablo’s fault, I turned off the smart part and settled for a “regular” alarm.
There were a few things Pablo couldn’t ruin for me. His existence had zero impact on the Rise tracking the temperature, humidity, or light disturbances in my bedroom. I already have a decent sleep setup — the temperature is always a pleasant 65–70 degrees Fahrenheit, and we recently got blackout curtains. However, it’s a dry winter, and I often wake up hacking up my lungs. The Rise confirmed that our bedroom is way too dry most nights, so we got a humidifier. When I remember to use it, it actually helps.
There are only two buttons to remember: the snooze button (top) and the on / off button. The snooze button also contains the light sensor. I had a hard time remembering which was which when sleepy and ended up hitting both until it shut up.
Amazon also sent me an Echo Show to try using alongside the Rise. You can, for instance, ask Alexa to show your sleep data on the Show. It worked when I tested it, but I didn’t find it useful. I preferred using the Rise as a smart light with my other Echo devices. The fact that you can use it in Alexa Routines and control it with voice commands is neat, especially if you’ve already invested in the Amazon smart home ecosystem. (It’s only compatible with Alexa.)
Let’s talk subscriptions
For $140, you get the Rise and a six-month trial of Amazon’s Halo service. After that, Halo costs $3.99 monthly. That’s relatively affordable as far as subscriptions go, but here’s why I’m not sold. For starters, the Halo app is fairly basic, and it’s not the easiest to view historical data if you’re a self-quantifying nerd. It’s really only worth paying if you use the Rise alongside the Halo Band or Halo View — and I recommend neither due to their bizarre body mapping and tone policing features. (Side note: if you use either tracker, Miyamoto says the app will prioritize the Rise for sleep data.) If you don’t give a flip about the Halo Band or Halo View, you still get nearly all of the sleep features and some workouts, recipes, and programs without membership.
Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
Pablo, smug and napping after a hard night of making sure the Halo Rise can’t track my sleep accurately.
Otherwise, $140 is on the pricier side but not egregious given the extra smarts and sleep tracking. For context, sunrise lamps can cost anywhere from $50 to $200 for one of Philips’ fancier lamps. When you put all of that together, I’m not sure why you would pay for the subscription if you plan on using the Rise by itself.
Ultimately, the Rise is the best Amazon Halo product thus far and the first new Amazon product I’ve liked in a long while. It’s the least invasive in the Halo lineup, and while it wasn’t perfect for me, that’s not the device’s fault. It’s Pablo’s.
And before you say anything, we’ve tried closing the bedroom door. It only leads to the cat destroying any breakable item he can find in retaliation. Since I love the hairy bugger and don’t plan on evicting him, I don’t think the Rise suits my needs. But if you don’t have a rascally pet, maybe you can have what I can only dream of: an uninterrupted night of sleep.
Small, convenient mosquito repellent device passes test to protect military personnel A device developed at the University of Florida for the U.S. military provides protection from mosquitos for an extended period and requires no heat, electricity or skin contact.
Twitter vows to take ‘less severe actions’ against rule-breaking accounts
Suppression, not suspension. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter is promising that it’ll take “less severe actions” when disciplining accounts that break its rules; it’ll only suspend Twitter accounts that engage in “severe or ongoing, repeat violations” of its rules. The company also says it’ll be letting anyone appeal suspensions starting February 1st, and that those doing so will be judged using updated standards.
What will Twitter do instead of suspending your account? The “less severe actions” are things that Twitter has been doing for years, such as limiting visibility of a tweet, or telling a user to remove a tweet before they can get back onto the site. Today’s change is that Twitter is promising to reach for those tools more often, instead of going straight for the ban button.
The company also says it’s planning to be more transparent with its enforcement actions, and will be rolling out some unspecified new features to help with that next month. One possible example: CEO Elon Musk promised last year that Twitter would let you know when you’ve been “shadowbanned,” and why.
Severe violations include but are not limited to: engaging in illegal content or activity, inciting or threatening violence or harm, privacy violations, platform manipulation or spam, and engaging in targeted harassment of our users.
Today, Twitter also seems to be justifying its decisions to bring those people back to Twitter, saying it “did not reinstate accounts that engaged in illegal activity, threats of harm or violence, large-scale spam and platform manipulation, or when there was no recent appeal to have the account reinstated.” That does make it rather odd that Trump’s been let back on, given that Twitter said in 2021 that it permanently suspended the former president “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” However, it’s possible that’s because — like the genesis of the amnesty policy itself — Trump was let back on because Elon wanted him back and decided to poll his own audience.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Prosecutors Ask Judge to Tighten Bail Conditions The move followed the disgraced cryptocurrency executive’s attempt to contact a potential witness in his criminal case, prosecutors said.
FBI says it ‘hacked the hackers’ of a ransomware service, saving victims $130 million
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Department of Justice announced this week that FBI agents successfully disrupted Hive, a notorious ransomware group, and prevented $130 million worth of ransom campaigns that targets no longer need to consider paying. While claiming the Hive group has been responsible for targeting over 1,500 victims in over 80 countries worldwide, the department now reveals it had infiltrated the group’s network for months before working with German and Netherlands officials to shut down Hive servers and websites this week.
The FBI claims that by covertly hacking into Hive servers, it was able to quietly snatch up over 300 decryption keys and pass them back to victims whose data was locked up by the group. US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in his statement that in the last few months, the FBI used those decryption keys to unlock a Texas school district facing a $5 million ransom, a Louisiana hospital that had been asked for $3 million, and an unnamed food services company that faced a $10 million ransom.
“We turned the tables on Hive and busted their business model,” Monaco said. Hive had been considered a top-five ransomware threat by the FBI. According to the Justice Department, Hive has received over $100 million in ransom payments from its victims since June 2021.
Hive’s “ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS)” model is to make and sell ransomware, then recruit “affiliates” to go out and deploy it, with Hive administrators taking a 20 percent cut of any proceeds and publishing stolen data on a “HiveLeaks” site if someone refused to pay. The affiliates, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), use methods like email phishing, exploiting FortiToken authentication vulnerabilities, and gaining access to company VPNs and remote desktops (using RDP) that are only protected with single-factor logins.
A CISA alert from November explains how the attacks target businesses and organizations running their own Microsoft Exchange servers. The code provided to their affiliates takes advantage of known exploits like CVE-2021-31207, which, despite being patched since 2021, often remain vulnerable if the appropriate mitigations haven’t been applied.
Once they’re in, their pattern is to use the organization’s own network management protocols to shut down any security software, delete logs, encrypt the data, and, of course, leave behind a HOW_TO_DECRYPT.txt ransom note in encrypted directories that connects victims to a live chat panel to negotiate over ransom demands.
The FBI, during its stakeout of Hive, found more than 1,000 encryption keys tied to previous victims of the group, and FBI Director Christopher Wray noted that only 20 percent of detected victims reached out to the FBI for help. Many victims of ransomware attacks refrain from contacting the FBI for fear of repercussions from the hackers and scrutiny in their industries for failing to secure themselves.
Since hackers are getting their paydays, however, it’s giving the ransomware industry fuel to keep going at it. The FBI hopes it can convince more victims to come forward and work with them instead of buckling to the demands. “When a victim steps forward, it can make all the difference in recovering stolen funds or obtaining decryptor keys,” Monaco said.
Now Google Search results for cars include what’s on the lot at nearby dealerships
Illustration: The Verge
Google isn’t just useful for helping research your next car; it can also help you shop for one while you search. SearchLab initially reported that the search giant has opened up access to a vehicle listings feature that lets dealerships advertise inventory right beside search results (via 9to5Google and Search Engine Land).
The listings have been appearing as part of a beta, but SearchLab notes that now all dealerships in the US with a Google Business Profile can add any motor vehicle to their inventory as long as it has a Vehicle Identification Number (VIN). That includes cars, trucks, motorcycles, RVs, and more. A support page for dealers shows activity from last year, as well as more recent updates earlier this month.
Google’s Vehicles for sale listings looks like any car buying app out there.
If you search for certain vehicles on Google, and there’s any inventory of that vehicle listed in your area, it will appear under a new “for sale” section within the Google-generated widget of the car’s specs. For instance, if you search for “Ford Fusion Energi” in Google on a computer, you’ll see a “Ford Fusion Energi for sale” section on the right sidebar.
On mobile, Google seemed to get a bit more aggressive with it. Searching for “Ford Fusion Energi” on an iPhone pushed a sponsored section and displayed local inventory on top before showing any information about the car itself. Then, after scrolling down past vehicle specs, we were hit with more listings.
Once you tap on “more cars,” you’ll go to the vehicles for sale page that looks like what you’d expect from Cars.com or Autotrader. Google gives you search filters and drop-down selections to find different car makes and models, lists out features, and even lets you adjust how far of a distance the dealership is that you're willing to go to. It’s almost like Google’s giving you a reason to not download another car buying app.
GoldenEye 007 is now available on Nintendo Switch and Xbox
Image: Rare
GoldenEye 007 has finally landed on Xbox and Nintendo Switch in a simultaneous dual-release of two titles with some important differences.
On Xbox, GoldenEye 007 is a remastered version of the legendary Nintendo 64 title that first launched in 1997. The remaster includes 4K resolution, smoother frame rates, and split-screen local multiplayer, similar to a 2008-era bound-for-Xbox 360 version that was canceled amid licensing and rights issues but leaked out in 2021.
GoldenEye 007 is also available to play now on Nintendo Switch for #NintendoSwitchOnline + Expansion Pack members, with all the benefits the platform offers! Good to have you back, 007. https://t.co/SwCemJNtCL
Online multiplayer modes are exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version of the game, as opposed to Microsoft’s “faithful recreation” that’s available for Xbox One and Xbox Series S / X consoles and included in the Xbox Game Pass subscription.
The classic campaign mode will also be available on Xbox, alongside cheat modes, support for dual analog sticks, and a native 16:9 aspect ratio up to 4K. If you already own a digital copy of Rare Replay on Xbox, then GoldenEye 007 is included and free of charge.
Update January 26th, 8:47PM ET:Updated to note both games are available now on Nintendo and Xbox.
YouTube says it’s fixing the bug that let someone fake a new oldest video
“Me at the Zoo” is still the oldest video. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube is setting the record straight: “Me at the zoo” is still the oldest YouTube video.
“Me at the zoo,” uploaded on April 23rd, 2005 and featuring YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo, is an important piece of internet history, as it marks the oldest video on one of the most influential video services on the planet. But earlier on Thursday, a video started circulating that, somehow, had an even earlier upload date: April 5th, 2005.
Titled “Welcome to YouTube!!!”, the 48-second video definitely looks like something that could have been used to test out a mid-aughts video website. The video has just one image: a low-res graphic with a YouTube logo with the text “Welcome to YouTube!!!!” that’s attributed to Chad, Steve, and Jawed, a likely reference to co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The video is backed by Van Halen’s iconic song “Jump.”
But if you watch the (now unlisted) video on YouTube’s website, you’ll probably spot some suspicious red flags. You might notice, for example, the “Live chat is disabled for this Premiere” notice under the video. Premieres let people pre-schedule videos to play at a certain time with features like live chat, and they definitely were not a thing on 2005 YouTube. You might also spot that the video was uploaded by a mysterious account named enn who joined YouTube in September 2005, which is months after this supposed earliest video was posted to the site. The account claims that the join date was “reset during a database update.”
While I was writing this article, the description said that the video “premiered” on April 5th; for a video this old, there typically wouldn’t be a “premiered” descriptor ahead of the date. (The description also points to a Discord server that’s filled with sketchy-seeming links and posts with derogatory slurs, and I strongly recommend against visiting it.) But shortly before publishing, the video reverted to premiering 23 hours ago.
In a statement to The Verge, YouTube spokesperson Kimberly Taylor said that “we’re aware of an issue that allowed the upload date of this video to be changed, and are working on a fix. Rest assured, the oldest video on YouTube will always be ‘Me at the zoo’ which was uploaded on April 23, 2005 by one of our co-founders and helped kickstart more than 17 years of creativity on YouTube.”
We tried contacting the uploader on Discord for comment, but they aren’t accepting friend requests or DMs from people who aren’t already their friend.
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