The US government still isn’t sure about Elon Musk’s Twitter
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images
Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter hasn’t escaped government scrutiny just yet. According to a report from Bloomberg, the US government is looking into whether Musk’s foreign investment partners have access to users’ private data on the platform.
Sources close to the situation told Bloomberg that the government’s asking for more details about Musk’s private agreements with the international investors who hold stakes in the company, which include Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud and the Qatar Investment Authority. Musk’s business dealings in both Ukraine and China have also drawn concern.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is also the head of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), said that she sees “no basis” to investigate Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. However, President Joe Biden expressed that Musk’s “relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) also called for CFIUS to look into Saudi Arabia’s stake in Twitter. “I don’t understand this decision,” Murphy said in response to Yellen’s statement. “CFIUS is designed to review transactions like this.”
Separately, a number of lawmakers, including Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), and Cory Booker (D-NJ), are also pushing for the Federal Trade Commission to take action against Twitter.
Twitter is also on the hook to comply with the conditions of the settlement it reached with the FTC earlier this year over claims it used personal information to sell targeted ads. As reported by The Verge’s Alex Heath, Twitter’s lawyer has already warned the company could face billions in fines if it doesn’t follow the agency’s consent order.
NASA Blazes a Path Back to the Moon With Artemis I Rocket Launch The uncrewed flight of the giant Space Launch System on Wednesday began a new era of spaceflight amid a debate over how to finance rocket development.
Judge Edward Davila, who has overseen the case, declared that the charges she had been found guilty of made her responsible for defrauding 10 victims out of $121 million, according to The New York Times’ Erin Griffith. Davila said that Holmes’ refusal to accept responsibility for the fraud counted against her in his sentencing decision, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A jury found Holmes guilty of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud earlier this year. In the weeks leading up to the former Theranos CEO’s sentencing, prosecutors asked the judge to give her 15 years of prison time and to pay victims more than $800 million. On the day of the trial, the government argued Holmes’ actions put patients in harm’s way, according to the WSJ.
Elizabeth Holmes just got sentenced to 135 months in prison (11.25 years)
Meanwhile, Holmes’ lawyers filed an 82-page document arguing why she should get a much lighter punishment — 18 months of house arrest and community service, at most — and provided well over 100 letters written in support of the founder.
Holmes led a company that promised to revolutionize the medical industry by running over 240 tests on a single drop of blood, where traditional panels required much larger samples.
But it turned out that the company’s tech didn’t work and gave patients inaccurate results. (Holmes was found not guilty on two counts of defrauding patients and one count of conspiracy to defraud patients.) The trial mainly hinged on whether Holmes knew she was giving out false information. In announcing his decision, Davila cited texts between Holmes and Sunny Balwani, former chief operating officer and president of Theranos, as proof that Holmes conspired to defraud investors, according to NBC News’ Scott Budman.
Judge: “What is the pathology of fraud? Is it the inability to accept responsibility? Perhaps that the cautionary tale to come from this case.”
Balwani was also found guilty in a separate trial: 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Unlike Holmes, Balwani was found to have misled both investors and patients. He is set to be sentenced on December 7th.
What Employees Does Twitter Need, Anyway? The many departures have set off a wave of hand-wringing about whether the site can continue to operate well.
FTX’s Unraveling and Elon Musk’s Ultimatum to Twitter Employees Sam Bankman-Fried’s DMs go public, and Congress announces an investigation. Tech’s nightmare November continues.
What does $5,000 a month get you? The viral star barging into New York apartments
Caleb Simpson’s man-on-the-street TikTok videos capture the insides of stranger’s homes for millions of followers
Come inside a shoebox studio apartment with a stripper pole in downtown Manhattan that rents for $2,095 (£1,764) a month. Or an $800 (£674) housing project unit with hand-painted kitchen walls. What about a luxury $5,000-a-month rental with marble countertops? Curious voyeurs can see them all on Caleb Simpson’s TikTok, and they won’t be alone. Nearly 6 million people follow his short-form house tours, romps that he bills as “this generation’s MTV Cribs”.
“Seeing the inside of someone’s home is one of the most intimate things you can ever do,” Simpson, 30, tells the Guardian. “And then there are the price points, what you pay for your space – people will be curious about that.”
Users urged to archive tweets amid rumors of Twitter implosion
People are wondering what parts of their online selves, loved ones and favorite celebrities to save in case the bird goes belly-up
Amid ongoing fallout from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, speculation of the platform’s imminent collapse is swirling – leaving users wondering what parts of their online selves they’ll get to keep.
After Musk laid off thousands of workers, many users have reported signs the platform is falling apart in real time – from glitching home pages to log-in failures – and researchers are desperately urging users to download their tweets in case Twitter implodes completely.
Hundreds of employees say no to being part of Elon Musk’s ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter
Illustration: Jovana Mugosa / The Verge
Musk gave Twitter staff a deadline to say if they are staying for his cultural reset of the company. And right on deadline, the farewell emojis started pouring into Twitter’s Slack.
The fresh purge of Twitter’s ranks comes after Musk recently fired dozens of employees who criticized or mocked him in tweets and internal messages. Musk then set a deadline of 5PM ET on Thursday for all employees to respond “yes” on in Google form if they want to stay for what he is calling “Twitter 2.0;” otherwise, today would be their final day of work and they would receive a severance package. After the deadline hit, hundreds of employees quickly started posting farewell messages and salute emojis in Twitter’s Slack, announcing that they had said no to Musk’s ultimatum.
Twitter had roughly 2,900 remaining employees before the deadline Thursday, thanks to Musk unceremoniously laying off about half of the 7,500-person workforce when he took over and the resignations that followed. Remaining and departing Twitter employees told The Verge that, given the scale of the resignations this week, they expect the platform to start breaking soon. One said that they’ve watched “legendary engineers” and others they look up to leave one by one.
“It feels like all the people who made this place incredible are leaving,” the Twitter staffer said. “It will be extremely hard for Twitter to recover from here, no matter how hardcore the people who remain try to be.”
“I have worked here at Twitter for over 11 years,” wrote another in Twitter’s Slack. “Back in July, I was the 27th most tenured employee at the company. Now I’m the 15th.”
“I’m not pressing the button,” another posted in Slack. “My watch ends with Twitter 1.0. I do not wish to be part of Twitter 2.0”
“Where did all these chopped onions come from,” another message read.
And just like that, after 12 years, I have left Twitter. I have nothing but love for all my fellow tweeps, past and present. A thousand faces and a thousand scenes are flashing through my mind right now - I love you Twitter and I’ll forever bleed blue
Children’s Groups Want F.T.C. to Ban ‘Unfair’ Online Manipulation of Kids Children’s privacy and health experts pressed regulators to prohibit video games and social networks from using attention-hacking techniques on youngsters.
Amazon’s CEO says more layoffs will happen in 2023
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Amazon will be cutting jobs again at some point in early 2023, CEO Andy Jassy informed employees in a memo on Thursday. The company publicly confirmed some layoffs on Wednesday, and Jassy says that as Amazon’s annual planning process extends into the new year, “there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments.”
Jassy says the company hasn’t determined exactly how many additional roles will be cut but did state that there will be “reductions in our Stores and [People, Experience, and Technology] organizations.” Amazon will inform who will be impacted by the future cuts early next year.
In the Wednesday notice, devices and services SVP Dave Limp said that some staffers in the organization were being laid off, and Jassy said Thursday that the company has extended voluntary buyouts to some of its HR organization, confirming reporting from Vox. Vox’s article highlighted how layoffs have been communicated internally before top executives shared information publicly, and based on Jassy’s note, it seems that approach will continue.
“As has been the case this week, we will prioritize communicating directly with impacted employees before making broad public or internal announcements,” Jassy wrote. The company will try to find roles for impacted people internally, and if it can’t, workers will be offered severance packages, according to Jassy.
The New York Timesreported Monday that Amazon planned to lay off approximately 10,000 employees. Jassy’s memo did not specify how many people will be affected or how many have been already. Amazon didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Pokémon Scarlet/Violet review – poor performance holds an exciting game back
Nintendo Switch; Game Freak/Nintendo Technical problems and an evident lack of development time take the shine off this ambitious new outing for the world-conquering critters
Modern video games can be so perceptibly realistic – grass rippling in a gentle breeze, non-player characters going about their daily routines, faces and gestures that look so close to those of real humans – that they’ve started to call to mind Plato’s old chin-stroker about the cave (reimagined in 1999’s trench coat-flapping classic The Matrix.) What if we are all trapped inside a shockingly realistic illusion? Would we really know if we were inside a video game? If you’re looking for reassurance that we haven’t yet reached the singularity, boot up the ropey Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.
In this second Pokémon outing of the year, developer Game Freak abandons February’s Legends: Arceus’s intriguing feudal-era setting, but otherwise picks up where it left off. It aims to take the series’ expansive-yet-enclosed-environments to the next logical level: a seamless open world, where you can go where you want, catching and battling creatures as you travel. But Scarlet and Violet buckles violently under the weight of that ambition.
Unexpected nudity and vomit-covered cats: how Dwarf Fortress tells some of gaming’s most bizarre stories
For around 20 years, brothers Zach and Tarn Adams have been working on their idiosyncratic fantasy game – and it’s only just got graphics
In 2015, players of the video game Dwarf Fortress – a wildly influential cult hit that has appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and been cited as the inspiration for Minecraft – started finding vomit-covered dead cats in taverns. When the game’s creator, 44-year-old Tarn Adams, attempted to determine the cause, he discovered that cats were walking through puddles of spilled alcohol, licking themselves clean, and promptly dying of heart failure due to a minor error in the game’s code, which overestimated the amount of alcohol ingested.
Most games don’t simulate anything nearly as complex as alcohol poisoning and feline grooming, but Dwarf Fortress does, and the way that its code generates these bizarre situations is symbolic of what people love about it. Dwarf Fortress has a unique, incredibly complicated approach to storytelling and play, but it looks like pure Matrix code, composed entirely of coloured text. Any casual observer would find it indecipherable.
Blizzard will suspend World of Warcraft in China because of licensing dispute
Blizzard
Blizzard will suspend games in China because it can’t reach an agreement with its licensing and publishing partner NetEase, it said in a press release. World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Diablo III, and Warcraft III: Reforged won’t be available in China after January 23, 2023.
Blizzard will suspend the sale of games and offer guidance to Chinese players “in the coming days,” according to the press release, which did not offer a specific timeline. Development of Diablo Immortal is in a separate agreement and will continue, NetEase said in a statement. Upcoming releases including the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Dragonflight, and the second season of Overwatch 2, “will proceed later this year,” according to Blizzard.
NetEase, the second-largest gaming company in China, has published games for Blizzard since 2008. The partnership ensures that Blizzard’s games meet China’s strict content policies. NetEase also is a franchisee in Blizzard’s Overwatch League, and owns the Shanghai Dragons team. In August, the two companies couldn’t agree on terms of a deal, and canceled a World of Warcraft mobile game, Bloomberg reported.
The problems weren’t just the financial terms of the deal — who owned the intellectual property and player data were also in dispute, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources.
“We’re immensely grateful for the passion our Chinese community has shown throughout the nearly 20 years we’ve been bringing our games to China,” said Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra in the press release. “We are looking for alternatives to bring our games back to players in the future.”
The revenue from these games “represented low single digits as a percentage” of NetEase’s total revenue, the company said.
Steve Aoki dropped the beat at Amazon during layoffs
This is a photo of Aoki performing in Las Vegas, not at the Amazon event. | Photo by David Becker/Getty Images
Amazon may have just confirmed that it would be laying off employees, but it seems to still have room for a Steve Aoki concert. On Wednesday evening, the superstar DJ performed a live concert for what appeared to be a group of Amazon warehouse employees, and the whole thing was streamed on the AmazonVestLife Twitch channel.
We learned this was happening at all thanks to the New York Times’ Karen Weise, who tweeted about the performance shortly before it wrapped up. But it seems the concert wasn’t exactly a secret, as the “amazonvestlife” Instagram (which, like the Twitch channel, describes itself as the “official account for Amazon associates”) posted a story featuring Aoki to promote the show earlier on Wednesday. The DJ gave a shoutout to “Amazonians” and said the show would be streaming on Twitch.
Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
Aoki took a photo onstage at the end of the show.
If this “hold a concert right after laying people off” thing rings familiar to you, you’re not alone; WeWork reportedly hosted an in-office concert featuring Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC a few weeks after CEO Adam Neumann fired 7 percent of the staff.
Amazon didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
The cuts announced Wednesday by Amazon SVP Dave Limp affected the company’s devices and services organization, and spokesperson Kristy Schmidt characterized the layoffs to me earlier as a very small percentage of the team. But that division isn’t the only one affected, as Vox reported that some employees in the company’s HR division have received a buyout offer. The New York Timesreported Monday that Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 corporate and technology employees in total.
Australian companies don’t value keeping our data safe because they have little to lose. Our laws need to change that | George Newhouse and Duncan Fine
Our nation’s data security practices have been so sloppy that recent major data breaches could have been avoided with simple protections
Few would disagree with the view that the world has changed more in the last 20 years than it did in the 2,000 years before that.
In today’s connected world, breaking news is streamed live into the palm of our hands in seconds. The dark side to that connectivity is that the minute details of our personal lives are increasingly collected and stored by governments and corporations.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2022: deals, news, and more
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
We’re rounding up all of the best deals from across the internet to help you cross some names off your holiday shopping list.
With Amazon’s recent Prime Day event behind us, it’s time for us to turn our attention two the two biggest shopping events of the year: Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And while the former used to fall the day after Thanksgiving in the US, retailers continue to lean into the chaos by dishing out deals and discounts well ahead of November 25th and what has become the official kickoff to Cyber Week.
While it’s unlikely that we’ll see discounts on hot-ticket items like the PlayStation 5 and Nvidia’s 40-Series GPUs, we’re here to help you find deals on what is on sale, including noise-canceling headphones, 4K TVs, smartphones, streaming devices, laptops, and a range of other notable tech. As always, we’ll provide you with regular updates on all the best deals and arm you with all the right information you need to navigate — and stay sane — during the busy holiday season. After all, juggling the myriad of deals, offers, terms, and conditions associated with each retailer never seems to get any easier.
Whether you intend to get your holiday shopping done online or in-store this year, a number of retailers — including Best Buy, Walmart, and Target — are already offering deals, online exclusives, and price-matching items in the run-up to the main event. We’re expecting other retailers to enter the deal fray in the coming week as well, with many offering a new selection of discounts on a daily, rolling basis.
We’ll be providing a steady drip of news, tips, and deals throughout November here, so bookmark this page and check back regularly if you want to stay up to date on all the latest deals from across the internet. Also, if you want savings delivered directly to you, be sure to subscribe to the Verge Deals newsletter and follow @VergeDeals on Twitter.
‘Could this be Twitter without the toxic slurry?’ My week on Mastodon
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has left many users wondering if they should join its rival, which promises a ‘different kind of social media experience’. But how different is it? I decided to find out
How did I choose this as the day I would leave Twitter, already semi-destroyed by an “eccentric” billionaire, and migrate to Mastodon? Easy, stupid: it was the day after I had sworn never to move to Mastodon. About 230,000 people had flocked to the site in the first week of November. Eugen Rochko, who devised and first published the software that underpins the platform in 2016, promised a “different kind of social media experience,” chiefly one that had “stringent anti-abuse and anti-discrimination policies”.
How to Prepare for Life After Twitter Don’t delete your account just yet. Elon Musk’s takeover can teach us valuable lessons about our relationship with social networks.
‘I f****d up’: the rise and fall of US crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried
The 30-year-old wunderkind last week saw his giant FTX digital currency exchange collapse and his $17bn fortune disappear
He drives a Toyota Corolla to work, lives in a house with 10 roommates and a goldendoodle dog named Gofer, sometimes sleeps under his desk on a beanbag and was, until this week, worth tens of billions of dollars.
But on Friday, Sam Bankman-Fried, a curly-haired crypto king and Democratic mega-donor who claimed to be reinventing digital finance, gave up a week-long fight to save FTX, which in three short years since being launched had become the world’s second largest digital currency exchange. He resigned as chief executive and the company and 130 affiliates were placed under US bankruptcy protection.
Apple is reportedly looking to buy chips from US and European fabs
Arizona is getting a few new fabs within the next two years. | Nick Barclay / The Verge
Apple is reportedly planning to start buying chips made in the US and Europe, according to a report from Bloomberg that cites comments made by Tim Cook at an internal meeting. Apple has “already made a decision to be buying out of a plant in Arizona” that’s due to begin production in 2024, meaning that the company could start using those chips in around two years, according to the reported comments from Cook. He also said that Apple hopes to “source from Europe as those plans become more apparent.”
Apple’s custom-designed chips, such as the M2 chip that powers its newest MacBooks and the iPhone’s A-series processors, are mainly produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC. As the company’s name implies, most of its fabs are located in Taiwan, though it currently has an advanced facility being constructed in Arizona, which will likely start producing chips in 2024.
It seems likely that’s the fab that Apple plans to buy chips from, given that it already does a lot of work with TSMC. It is, however, not the only company building a facility there; Intel also has plans to build an additional Arizona factory that’s set to open in 2024, spurred on by the US government passing legislation to invest over $50 billion in domestic semiconductor production. Intel has said it plans on producing chips for other companies, rather than just making its own processors, but it seems unlikely that Apple plans on making it an important part of its chip strategy going forward. The company’s cutting-edge tech is widely considered to be not as advanced as TSMC’s, which was almost certainly a factor in Apple’s silicon transition for its Mac lineup.
Regardless of which company or companies end up making Apple’s chips in the US and Europe, it’s not necessarily surprising that the company is looking into purchasing production capacity outside of Asia. The company has been looking to geographically diversify other parts of its supply chain too, and has been ramping up its iPhone production in India over the past few years. As of 2020, it had started producing some AirPods in Vietnam, and there are reports that it’s doing the same for MacBooks, Apple Watches, and iPads.
Elon Musk says the new Twitter Blue will relaunch on November 29th
Mark your calendars? | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Elon Musk says the new Twitter Blue, which lets you pay $7.99 per month for a blue verification check mark next to your name, will relaunch on November 29th. In a tweet, he said he would be “punting” the relaunch to the new date “to make sure that it is rock solid.”
The mayhem resulted in a fake Nintendo account that posted an image of Mario flipping the bird and another account impersonating the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which posted a tweet saying that insulin is now free.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 gives us a glimpse of 2023’s Android flagships
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 builds on its predecessor’s AI capabilities. | Image: Qualcomm
Qualcomm has announced all the details of its next flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, with a focus on better and more efficient performance for AI-related tasks. That extends from its updated AI-centric Hexagon processor to smarter image processing and a new modem designed to wring the best performance out of 5G networks. It also supports Wi-Fi 7 because the numbers just keep going up.
Compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the Gen 2’s Kryo CPU includes one prime core based on Arm Cortex-X3 at 3.2GHz. There are also four performance cores (one more than last year) at 2.8GHz and three efficiency cores at 2.0GHz — all between 200 and 300MHz faster than last year’s hardware. Qualcomm says the CPU is 35 percent faster than the previous generation, with 40 percent power savings. Likewise, the Adreno GPU is up to 25 percent faster with 45 percent better power efficiency. The whole chip is built on a 4nm process, like the Gen 1.
Qualcomm says it has made improvements all throughout the Hexagon processor for up to 4.35x faster AI performance. Qualcomm also claims it’s able to handle more complex tasks, like translating a language into multiple languages in real time.
Just when we were starting to get on board with Wi-Fi 6, Qualcomm has leapfrogged ahead and added Wi-Fi 7 — the 8 Gen 2 is the first system on a chip to support it. The Snapdragon X70 modem announced at Mobile World Congress earlier this year is on board, too, with its own AI processor to help boost 5G coverage and speed. The X70 also enables dual active 5G SIMs, meaning you can use two different 5G networks simultaneously. More bars in more places indeed.
On the audio side, there’s now support for dynamic spatial audio, so sound moves with you as you move your head with compatible earbuds. It’s a new addition to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound platform but something already offered by the likes of LG, Samsung, and Apple. You’ll likely need compatible headphones to do the head-tracking part. For gaming, the chipset now supports hardware-based real-time ray tracing for more realistic light and reflections; companies including Oppo and Asus will support it in upcoming devices.
The company’s Spectra Image Signal Processor now has a “Cognitive ISP” label, with the ability to use real-time semantic segmentation for photos and videos. This helps the imaging system identify different kinds of subjects in an image and apply appropriate image tuning. In theory, it helps the camera distinguish between things like faces, hair, and skies and make color adjustments to each individually as the image is captured. This could make it easier to predict what a final image will look like in the viewfinder as you’re taking it — before software image processing does its thing. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is also tuned to support new image sensors from Sony and Samsung, the two companies that make basically every smartphone camera sensor.
Curiously, the 8 Gen 2 supports 8K video capture and playback, but on-device and external display support tops out at 4K, so... good luck watching your 8K footage.
The “always-on” camera feature introduced with the Gen 1 has been renamed to a less creepy “always sensing,” and it supports things like automatically hiding notifications when it detects someone else looking at your phone screen.
Qualcomm’s list of partners for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 includes the usual suspects like Motorola, Oppo, and Asus’ Republic of Gamers brand, though Samsung is conspicuously missing from the list. It’s not clear whether upcoming S23 flagships will include the 8 Gen 2 globally as early rumors indicate or whether Samsung will keep using its own Exynos chipset in models sold outside of the US. In any case, we won’t have to wait until the S23 arrives to check out Qualcomm’s latest — the company says its new chipset will start appearing in devices before the end of 2022.
Elizabeth Holmes prosecutors seek 15-year sentence and $800m in restitution
Theranos founder faces maximum of 20 years in prison after she was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy
Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to sentence Elizabeth Holmes to 15 years in prison and require the Theranos founder to pay $800m in restitution, according to court documents filed on Friday.
A jury found Holmes guilty in January of four counts of investor fraud and conspiracy. Her sentencing is scheduled for 18 November, and she faces a maximum 20 years in prison.
One of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, has collapsed, with what is reported to be an $8bn (£6.8bn) black hole on its balance sheet. Of its 1 million users, many are now unable withdraw their funds. On Friday, the FTX group, run from offices in America but headquartered in the Bahamas, filed for bankruptcy protection in the US.
FTX’s rival, Binance, has played a key role in the saga. Here is a step by step account of how the disaster unfolded.
Construction workers at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory to sue for labor violations
Whistleblowers allege constant hazards, onsite accidents and wage theft while working on the manufacturing facility in Austin
Construction workers who toiled on one of Tesla’s sprawling so-called Gigafactories will file a complaint and a case referral with the federal Department of Labor on Tuesday detailing exploitative work conditions they say they experienced while building the plant.
Whistleblowers came forward to allege serious labor and employment violations during construction of the electric car manufacturer’s massive new facility in Austin, Texas, that left them vulnerable to injuries and wage theft.
Buying ads on Twitter is ‘high-risk’ according to the world’s biggest ad agency
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Twitter may be in big trouble when it comes to generating advertising revenue: GroupM, part of WPP, the world’s biggest ad company — and Twitter’s biggest spender — is reportedly telling its clients that buying ads on the platform is “high-risk,” according to Platformer and Digiday. That makes it the third advertising juggernaut telling massive corporations that they might want to take their money elsewhere, after IPG and Omnicom Media Group both recommended pausing advertisements on the platform.
GroupM works with companies like Google, L’Oréal, Bayer, Nestle, Unilever, Coke, and Mars. If you’ve ever seen that graphic about how a few brands make pretty much everything you buy at the grocery store, you’ll notice a lot of Venn diagram overlap with GroupM’s list of clients.
GroupM is reportedly concerned about several specific things following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter; in a document, it cites the large numbers of Twitter executives leaving or being fired (especially those in charge of safety, security, and compliance), the wave of high-profile impersonations by “verified” users, and also raises concerns about Twitter’s abilities to follow the Federal Trade Commission's orders. If Twitter wants to lose its high-risk label, there’s several things GroupM reportedly wants to see, according to a document viewed by Digiday and a Slack message from Twitter’s agency partnerships lead seen by Platformer. The list includes:
A “return to baseline NSFW levels”
New IT Security, Privacy, Trust and Safety executives
GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. The internal message seen by Platformer says that Twitter is “working through” GroupM’s requirements with leadership.
While Musk has said that he wants to wean Twitter off its reliance on advertising for revenue, he’s not there yet. For one, a lot of people can’t even buy the company’s premium Blue subscription service right now, because the company temporarily suspended that program. Musk has said that Twitter is burning through around $4 million a day, and he’s also saddled it with hefty interest payments on the debt he used to purchase it in the first place. Twitter needs money if it wants to keep going — but it seems that advertisers are increasingly hesitant to provide it.
Elon Musk ignored Twitter’s internal warnings about his paid verification scheme
Laura Normand / The Verge
Employees and advertisers keep telling him about the risks of the changes he’s making to Twitter — but he’s not listening
On Thursday evening, after a full day of chaos on the timeline, Elon Musk’s Twitter halted new enrollment into its $8-a-month Blue subscription offering. Offering anyone the chance to slap a “verified” badge on their account had led to widespread impersonation of government officials, corporations, and celebrities. The resulting mayhem, which led to memorable hoaxes from accounts misrepresenting themselves as Eli Lilly, Tesla, Lockheed Martin and others, had triggered an advertiser pullout and a general sense that the platform had descended into chaos.
As the significance of all this began to register with Musk, he tweeted that satirical accounts must now include “parody” in both their name and bio. But if any of the fallout had come as a shock to Musk and his team, they can’t say they weren’t warned.
Days before the November 9th launch, the company’s trust and safety team had prepared a seven-page list of recommendations intended to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of his plans for Blue. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.
“Motivated scammers/bad actors could be willing to pay … to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends where their upside exceeds the cost,” reads the document’s first recommendation, which the team labeled “P0” to denote a concern in the highest risk category.
“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”
On November 1st, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.
The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”
The team identified several other risks for which Twitter has yet to identify any solutions. For starters, the company lacks any automated way to remove verified badges from user accounts. “Given that we will have a large amount of legacy verified users on the platform (400K Twitter customers), and that we anticipate we’ll need to debadge a large number of legacy verified accounts if they decide not to pay for Blue, this will require high operational lift without investment.”
(And this was before the company laid off 80 percent of its contractors, but we’ll get to that.)
The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”
For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.
It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. And while Crawford appeared sympathetic to many of the concerns in the document, sources said, she declined to implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. (Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.)
Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.
The contractor wipeout
On Saturday afternoon, a week after an initial round of layoffs had cut Twitter in half, Platformer was the first to report that a second massive wave of cuts had hit the company. This time, the cuts were aimed at Twitter’s contract workers. And on a percentage basis, these losses were even more severe: by the next day, we reported, about 4,400 of 5,500 or so contractors — 80 percent of the team — had lost their jobs.
Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. At the moment, it’s unclear how the loss of what may have been thousands of moderators will affect the service. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.
Unlike Twitter’s full-time employees, who at least got the courtesy of an email informing them that layoffs were coming a night before, contractors received nothing. Neither did their managers, who discovered one by one over the weekend that people they had been counting on to perform critical tasks had suddenly disappeared from the company’s systems.
“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.
Over the course of the day, similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app for coworkers to anonymously discuss their workplaces, and on external Slacks that employees have established to have more candid discussions.
Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.
“Found out through your tweet and just happened to check,” one person who worked on content moderation told us. “What a lovely Saturday night.”
Said another, who worked in recruiting: “If I didn’t see your tweet just now, I wouldn’t have even known.”
Some employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts ever since the layoffs earlier this month. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as Platformer was first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.
Meanwhile, the company’s Slack channels over the weekend told a story of already-low morale finding a new basement.
“I’m wondering when people will realize the value of Twitter was the people that worked here,” one employee said, according to screenshots obtained by Platformer.
Replied another: “In 2 weeks Twitter has gone from being the most welcoming and healthy workplace I’ve ever known to the most openly hostile and degrading I’ve ever known.”
Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. But not to the coterie of volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers from Tesla and the Boring Company that have been carrying out Musk’s orders: those they refer to universally, including on Slack, as “the goons.”
Code freeze
On Monday morning, at around 1:45 AM, Twitter engineers were called into an emergency meeting. A new order had just come down from Musk: freeze all production changes on Twitter systems, effective immediately.
This was more than just a run-of-the-mill code freeze, during which engineers can commit code but not deploy it. Those are fairly common, and Twitter has been under one for most of the time since Musk took over. Such freezes are generally intended to reduce the chances that a bug disrupts Twitter’s systems.
This time, however, engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”
On Slack, even engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”
In the meantime, we’re told engineers are writing code locally, on their laptops, and waiting for the freeze to end.
Meanwhile over the last day, Musk has made several public statements about the quality of Twitter’s code and service that have drawn rebukes from current engineers.
“I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk tweeted on Sunday morning, referring to remote procedure calls. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down.
Engineer Eric Frohnhoefer pushed back on Musk’s criticism, and offered a detailed thread about why Twitter loads more slowly in some places than others. Musk fired him by the end of the day, Bloomberg reported, along with a second engineer who commented on the affair: “As the former tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter, I can confidently say that this man has no idea wtf he’s talking about.”
Another current engineer explained it to us this way:
The fact that he’s focusing on performance being worse in certain countries kind of shows that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
If it was an issue with the microservices talking to each other inside of a data center, everyone in the world would have the same crappy experience.
Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.
Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.
So why the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.
Fallout
On Friday, after the disaster of the Blue rollout, Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Twitter. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.)
The pharmaceutical giant is one of many large companies pulling ad dollars from Twitter in recent days. Companies including Volkswagen and Pfizer have paused their campaigns, and large advertising firms like IPG’s Mediabrands and Omnicom Media Group are advising clients to do the same.
The news has left Twitter’s ad teams — particularly those responsible for managing ad agency relationships — in a lurch, according to internal screenshots and conversations with current employees.
“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”
One employee responded that T-Mobile had requested to “pause the campaigns due to brand safety concerns.” (Three days later, former T-Mobile CEO John Legere asked Musk to let him run Twitter, to which Musk responded simply “no.”)
Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. “The initial reason they gave is elections, but it looks like an open-ended pause, because the team requested to meet next week to help them make a case to global on why they shouldn’t.” Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. The reason now is brand safety.”
GroupM, the largest media-buying agency in the world, with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy, according to Digiday and an email obtained by Platformer. Twitter’s agency partnerships lead explained the situation in Slack: “Given the recent senior departures in key operational areas (specifically Security, Trust & Safety, Compliance), GroupM have updated Twitter’s brand safety guidance to high risk. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they feel that Twitter’s ability to scale and manage infractions at speed is uncertain at this time.”
The employee went on:
GroupM will consider lowering the risk grade when the below requirements have been met, which we are working through with leadership:
–Return to baseline levels of NSFW / toxic conversation on the platform
–Re-population of IT Security, Privacy, Trust & Safety senior staff
–Establishment of internal checks & balances
–Full transparency on future development plans of community guidelines / content moderation / anything affecting user security or brand safety
–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)
As with the list of product recommendations prepared by trust and safety for the Blue rollout, advertisers appear to have a better understanding of what Twitter needs than Musk does. Massive cuts to the content moderation team, a paralyzing code freeze, and open hostility between the “goons” and the pre-Musk Tweeps have created a company that continues to court a larger crisis.
There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.
Google is bringing Material You-style color themes to desktop Chrome
Picking a yellow colored wallpaper adjusts Chrome’s interface to match. | Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge
The latest Canary build of Google Chrome includes a neat feature that automatically picks a color scheme for the browser based on the wallpaper shown when you open a new tab. The feature was first spotted by u/Leopeva64-2 over on Reddit, who shows how changing the new tab wallpaper automatically adjusts the color scheme of the browser’s address bar and interface. It’s previously been possible to manually change Chrome’s color scheme to one of your choosing, but this simplifies the process.
According to Google’s software, the feature “enables setting theme color based on background image color when background image is changed in New Tab Page,” and is available on Mac, Windows, and Linux, as well as Google’s own ChromeOS and Fuchsia operating systems.
We were able to turn on the “Customize Chrome Color Extraction” feature in version 110 of Chrome’s Canary build (specifically 110.0.5418.0) to test it ourselves. It seemed to work best with more colorful wallpapers, whereas darker backgrounds tended to make Chrome’s interface a muddy black, brown, or gray — not much of an improvement over its default color scheme. We were able to get it working with Google’s own wallpapers, although the automatic color theming option didn’t work when we uploaded our own image. It’s unclear if this is a bug or by design.
Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge
Chrome in a pink theme.
Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge
Chrome in a desert orange theme.
The feature isn’t enabled by default. Instead, if you want to try it out, you’ll need to enable the Chrome flag “chrome://flags/#customize-chrome-color-extraction.” Once it’s turned on, open a new Chrome tab, click the pen icon on the bottom right of the new tab window, and select a new wallpaper to see its color scheme reflected in Chrome’s interface. Once you’ve selected a wallpaper, the color scheme persists across different tabs as you browse the web.
There’s no word on if or when the feature will get a wider rollout, but given it’s currently an opt-in feature on Google Chrome’s Canary build (which is the earliest beta version of its software), we wouldn’t expect it to get a widespread release for at least a few months.
The Case of the Golden Idol review – delicious Sherlockian murder mystery
Playstack; Color Gray Games; Windows
A treasure inspires murder, and your job as detective is to piece together the crime in this addictive 18th-century whodunnit
What is the source of the murderous curse? The golden idol, found by a pair of explorers who followed a treasure map to its long-forgotten island hiding place? Or the misfortune that accompanies the arrival of sudden wealth into any complex family dynamic? Or perhaps it’s the shortcomings of character often found in the sort of people drawn to such gilded mysteries: not only thieves and thugs, but also members of clandestine societies who roam Whitehall in search of power.
Whatever the reasons, murder is seemingly the price commanded by this artefact, as evidenced by the string of cases relating to the treasure that you are tasked to investigate in Color Gray Games’ delicious, moreish and utterly singular 18th-century detective spree.
Airline Travel Hacks To Avoid Holiday Excursion Headaches
This week, I'll share some tips on how to survive traveling over the holidays. We'll close with my product of the week: my favorite suitcase from Solgaard, which is like a rolling dresser. The post Airline Travel Hacks To Avoid Holiday Excursion Headaches appeared first on TechNewsWorld.
Elizabeth Holmes to be sentenced this week as Theranos saga nears conclusion
The blood testing company’s founder could serve up to 20 years in prison after she was convicted in January for four counts of fraud
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, will be sentenced this week to up to 20 years in prison for her role in the blood testing company that tumbled from the heights of Silicon Valley after its fraudulent claims were exposed.
The sentencing is set to take place in a California courtroom on Friday, after a federal judge denied Holmes’s request for a new trial last week. Holmes had requested a new trial after she said a key witness for the prosecution apologized for the role he played in her conviction.
‘I lie in the bath, imagining that I am wandering the Rialto in Venice’: my obsession with Duolingo
First it was Italian, then I added French, Portuguese and even Latin. But does the language learning app, which has almost 15 million people using it, really work?
This morning, before checking in on my young son or making a coffee, I opened the Duolingo app on my phone and translated “They love smelling meat” into Italian. I’ve been starting my days like this for a few months now: wake up, wash face, grapple with the gerund. I usually spend between 10 and 20 minutes on it while the kettle boils or I load CBeebies or write some emails. It used to be eBay. Then Wordle. Now it’s this.
Duolingo is a language learning app and pretty simple to use. After you’ve chosen which language you want to learn, you are presented with about 100 skill-sets divided by scenario or grammar (grocery shopping, the future tense and so on). Each level is structured like branches of a tree, and when you complete one, you move down the tree earning gems to “spend” on the app or hearts that you need to perform the exercises. Make a mistake, and you must correct it before moving on. It’s all fun and games until you make too many mistakes, run out of hearts and lose your progress. This is when you’ll engage with Duolingo’s mascot, an officious green owl called Duo who, if you’re anything like me, will eventually define your self-esteem. Duo’s face is the first thing I see each day and increasingly, the last thing, too.
Is Time Running Out for the Leap Second? To the world’s timekeepers, the leap second is a kludge, a bane, a pain in the little hand. Now they’re proposing to ditch it. Will our days ever be the same?
TikTok Builds Itself Into an Ads Juggernaut The Chinese-owned video app’s ad business is thriving, even as a digital advertising slump hurts Meta, Snap and other rivals.
‘Fix your companies. Or Congress will,’ Senator Ed Markey warns Elon Musk
Illustration by Lille Allen / The Verge
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) told Elon Musk, “Fix your companies. Or Congress will,” after Musk snarkily replied to the senator’s concerns about fake verified accounts on Twitter, and suggested Markey’s real account “sounds like a parody.”
On Friday, Markey sent out a tweet containing a link to a letter he wrote to Musk, criticizing the new $7.99 per month Blue with verification subscription. The letter cites a report from the Washington Post that details how a reporter was able to easily create a fake verified account impersonating Markey and calls on Musk to address the issue. “Twitter must explain how this happened and how to prevent it from happening again,” Markey writes.
One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online. Fix your companies. Or Congress will. https://t.co/lE178gPRoM
Musk’s response? “Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody.” The billionaire followed up with another tweet about an hour later, saying “And why does your pp have a mask?” in reference to the Senator’s profile picture on Twitter that shows him wearing a face covering.
Markey didn’t take too kindly to Musk’s reply and warned that Congress could take action against Musk and his many companies if he doesn’t straighten things out. “One of your companies is under an FTC consent decree. Auto safety watchdog NHTSA is investigating another for killing people. And you’re spending your time picking fights online,” Markey writes. “Fix your companies. Or Congress will.”
The senator’s concerns about impersonation on Twitter aren’t unfounded. After Twitter rolled out the ability to pay your way to verification on iOS last week, a wave of fake verified accounts impersonating high-profile users flooded the platform. One account impersonating Nintendo posted an image of Mario flipping the bird, while another pretending to be LeBron James falsely claimed he planned on leaving the Los Angeles Lakers.
While Markey obviously doesn’t represent all of Congress, the Democrats will keep their control of the Senate following the midterm elections. Markey is also on a number of commissions that could affect the Musk-owned Tesla — including the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee — and has raisedconcerns over the electric vehicle maker’s full-self driving software several times in the past.
Crypto.com sent $400 million to the wrong recipient, but got it back this time
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Crypto.com just admitted to making another very large and concerning clerical error: it mistakenly sent 320,000 in Ethereum (~$416 million USD) to another cryptocurrency exchange, called Gate.io, about three weeks ago (via Web3 Is Going Just Great). In a post on Twitter, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek says the company was supposed to send the crypto to one of its cold, or offline, wallets, but accidentally sent it to a “whitelisted” address belonging to its corporate account at Gate.io.
This all unfolded after Marszalek publicly posted the company’s cold wallet addresses to provide transparency about what the exchange does with its funds. After digging into Crypto.com’s transactions, one user, Conor Grogan, points out that the exchange sent 320,000 in Ethereum to Gate.io on October 21st, an amount that makes up about 80 percent of the company’s Ethereum holdings.
https://t.co/pFc4Pz9nFR proceeded to withdraw the funds back to its cold wallets over the following days. The entirety of ETH was successfully withdrawn by https://t.co/pFc4Pz9nFR and returned to our cold storage.
Marszalek later added that it was able to recover “the entirety” of the transferred assets. Users on Twitter confirmed that Crypto.com received its funds back about a week later, transferring 285,000 Ethereum (~350 million USD) into one wallet and putting the remaining 35,000 Ethereum (~43 million USD) into another. Gate.io also issued a response, noting that it started returning the funds once it realized the transfer was “an operation error.” But hey, at least Crypto.com’s funds were actually returned this time. In August, a pretty unfortunate typo resulted in Crypto.com giving a customer $7.2 million instead of a $68 refund, which it’s currently suing to get back.
While Gate.io published its asset audit snapshot on October 19th and, clarified that “Crypto.com’s deposit was not included,” Crypto.com provided partial proof of reserves on November 11th. Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao appeared to allude to the situation in a tweet on Sunday morning, stating: “If an exchange have to move large amounts of crypto before or after they demonstrate their wallet addresses, it is a clear sign of problems. Stay away.”
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Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge
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Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge
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Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge
