Over millions of years of evolution, nature has worked out solutions to many problems. Humans have arrived late in the day and pinched them. For example, Velcro was invented after a Swiss engineer marvelled at the burdock burrs that got stuck to his dog’s fur; the idea for robotic arms came from the motion and gripping ability of elephant trunks, and the front of Japan’s bullet trains were redesigned to mimic a kingfisher’s streamlined beak, reducing the sonic boom they made exiting tunnels.
There are different types of mimicry, the most straightforward is the simple idea of copying something that exists in nature. Buildings are an obvious example, as outlined by research published in Nature. The Beijing national stadium is inspired by a bird’s nest, the Lotus Temple in India is shaped, unsurprisingly, like a lotus and the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai is shaped like a palm tree.
Tracking Amazon: the New Yorkers monitoring pollution from delivery hubs
Brooklyn residents are using air quality and traffic sensors to see how new warehouses affect their community
For the past year, a pair of plain-looking buildings has been at the center of a simmering conflict in a close-knit waterfront community in New York City. They look like warehouses, with tall concrete walls, loading bays and few windows. They sound like warehouses, emitting the rev of diesel engines and the chirps of reversing trucks. But by all accounts, they’re something very different.
The two newcomers to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood are hubs for Amazon’s growing last-mile delivery network. Unlike traditional warehouses, they’re bustling with around-the-clock activity, attracting convoys of cars, delivery vans, and semi-trucks to a neighborhood of narrow two-lane streets. Every day, shipments jostle through Red Hook’s crowded truck routes and make their way across New York, fulfilling Amazon’s promise of blistering-fast delivery.
The FTC could challenge Microsoft’s Activision purchase by December
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The Federal Trade Commission is preparing a potential legal challenge to Microsoft’s plan to buy Activision for $68.7 billion, and it could file the lawsuit by next month, according to Politico. The outlet’s sources say both CEOs — Satya Nadella and Bobby Kotick — have already been deposed, and yet the FTC remains skeptical.
The report notes that there are still a few steps to go before the regulator is ready to act, including a vote from its commissioners. If it does end up happening, it’d mean the deal would face antitrust challenges in the US, UK and the EU. This is despite Microsoft’s repeated attempts to assure regulators that its purchase of Activision — the company in charge of Candy Crush, Call of Duty, and all of Blizzard — wouldn’t hurt competition in the gaming space.
The company has basically been in an all-out PR battle with its competitor, Sony (which may be getting nervous now that major game makers like Obsidian, Mojang, and Bethesda are all now Xbox Game Studios). A major sticking point for the PlayStation company has been that the deal would give Microsoft power over Call of Duty, though Xbox head Phil Spencer has now told The Verge that Microsoft will keep making the games for Sony’s consoles as long as the company is selling them. However, it’s possible the decision was the result of pressure from the public and Sony, after PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said that Microsoft only offered to extend Sony’s existing contract by three years, which could have resulted in 2028’s installment being an Xbox-exclusive.
The fight between the two companies has gotten ugly at times. Microsoft accused Sony of paying developers to keep their content off of its Game Pass service, and just this week Sony argued that Microsoft’s master plan was getting everybody to move over to Xbox before jacking up prices. Both companies will likely reiterate these arguments — and more — to whichever regulators come knocking. And at the moment, it feels like that list is only getting bigger.
San Francisco police consider letting robots use ‘deadly force’
A remote-controlled robot used to disarm bombs. | ARNO BURGI/DPA/AFP via Getty Images
The San Francisco Police Department is proposing a new policy that would give robots the license to kill, as reported earlier by Mission Local (via Engadget). The draft policy, which outlines how the SFPD can use military-style weapons, states robots can be “used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option.”
As reported by Mission Local, members of the city’s Board of Supervisors Rules Committee have been reviewing the new equipment policy for several weeks. The original version of the draft didn’t include any language surrounding robots’ use of deadly force until Aaron Peskin, the Dean of the city’s Board of Supervisors, initially added that “robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.”
However, the SFPD returned the draft with a red line crossing out Peskin’s addition, replacing it with the line that gives robots the authority to kill suspects. According to Mission Local, Peskin eventually decided to accept the change because “there could be scenarios where deployment of lethal force was the only option.” San Francisco’s rules committee unanimously approved a version of the draft last week, which will face the Board of Supervisors on November 29th.
As outlined in the equipment policy, the SFPD currently has 17 remotely piloted robots, but only 12 are functioning. In addition to granting robots the ability to use deadly force, the proposal also authorizes them for use in “training and simulations, criminal apprehensions, critical incidents, exigent circumstances, executing a warrant or during suspicious device assessments.”
While most of the robots listed in the SFPD’s inventory are primarily used for defusing bombs or dealing with hazardous materials, newer Remotec models have an optional weapons system, and the department’s existing F5A has a tool called the PAN disruptor that can load 12-gauge shotgun shells. It’s typically used to detonate bombs from a distance. The department’s QinetiQ Talon can also be modified to hold various weapons — a weaponized version of the robot is currently used by the US Army and can equip grenade launchers, machine guns, or even a .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle.
“SFPD has always had the ability to use lethal force when the risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available,” says SFPD Officer Eve Laokwansathitaya, in a statement to The Verge. “SFPD does not have any sort of specific plan in place as the unusually dangerous or spontaneous operations where SFPD’s need to deliver deadly force via robot would be a rare and exceptional circumstance.”
The Dallas Police Department used a robot to carry out deadly force for the first time in 2016. It used a bomb-disposal robot — the same Remotec F5A model owned by the SFPD — armed with an explosive device to kill a suspect who shot and killed five police officers and wounded several others. At the time, Dallas police chief David Brown said the department “saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.”
Last month, a report from The Intercept revealed that California’s Oakland Police Department was also considering letting shotgun-equipped Remotec F5A robots use deadly force. Shortly after the report came out, the Oakland PD announced on Facebook it decided against adding “armed remote vehicles to the department.” Meanwhile, a group of robot makers, including Boston Dynamics, signed a pledge not to weaponize their robots earlier this year.
Google Messages has started letting some users react with any emoji
And just like that, Messages are now way more fun.
Google has started letting some users of its Messages app react to text messages with any emoji, instead of limiting them to the standard set of seven that have been available in the app for a while now (via 9to5Google). The feature’s similar to what other messaging platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, and paid versions of Telegram have — pressing and holding on a message gives you the standard emoji reactions, but you can then access the picker to react with whatever you want.
The expanded emoji reactions appear to be a limited test at this point — 9to5Google says it’s heard two reports of it being rolled out, and while one person on The Verge’s staff has access to it, two other people who checked do not. Google didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on the feature.
As with any features that are added to messaging services, the extra reactions can be a bit messy depending on who you’re texting, and what communications standards their phone supports. They seem to work fine if both parties are using RCS, the SMS replacement that Google’s been pushing for. My phone doesn’t have access to the extended picker yet, but my colleague’s reactions showed up correctly when I was using Google’s Messages app.
I can’t react with this emoji, but I was able to see when someone reacted to my message with it.
Other configurations can get messy, though. On the same phone, which obviously supports RCS, Samsung’s Messages app shows the reaction as a separate text message, saying “ to ‘Can you react to this message?’” The same’s true when my colleague reacts to a text from an iPhone user, as those are SMS only (much to Google’s chagrin).
So we’re back to this...
That the reactions don’t translate to iPhones isn’t a surprise. For one, Apple’s Tapback system only lets you use a specific set of symbols, so it’s unlikely the company’s Messages app has the ability to add an arbitrary emoji to a message. Even if it did, who knows if it would; after years of Apple users’ reactions showing up as separate text messages for Android users, it appeared as if the two companies had worked out a solution, with iMessage’s and Google Message’s reactions translating between the two platforms. And yet, when I tested it today with the standard reactions, I was back to the same old system of getting separate “[emoji] to [message]” texts instead of beautifully-displayed reactions when messaging between an Android phone and iPhone.
Regardless of whatever Apple and Google have going on, I am happy to see Google bringing this feature to its texting platform, even if it’s really only elegant when you’re doing RCS chats. It’s a feature I’ve always wanted everywhere, and it seems like Google’s working on making that the case, at least for the people using its app.
Power-hungry robots, space colonization, cyborgs: inside the bizarre world of ‘longtermism’
Sam Bankman-Fried said his billions would save the world – but his philanthropic ideas ranged from the worthy to the severely outlandish
Most of us don’t think of power-hungry killer robots as an imminent threat to humanity, especially when poverty and the climate crisis are already ravaging the Earth.
This wasn’t the case for Sam Bankman-Fried and his followers, powerful actors who have embraced a school of thought within the effective altruism movement called “longtermism”.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., Computer Design Innovator, Dies at 91 He was a lead designer of the computers that cemented IBM’s dominance for decades. He later wrote a book on software engineering that became a quirky classic.
Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is another typical tale of financial mismanagement. That’s how its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, terms it: a liquidity crisis that tipped over into a solvency one.
FTX had deposits and loans and when depositors tried to get their money back, FTX didn’t have it to hand. Sure, the loans were in fancy digital money, rather than stale dollars, but at first glance, it appears like just another big company failure.
Three weeks after shutting down the studio that produced it (which had incidentally just finished going through an expensive rebrand), Embracer has decided not only to remove their games from mobile app stores, it’s apparently taking the extra step of making them inaccessible even if you’ve already downloaded them — or in the case of Deus Ex, even if you’ve paid $5 or $6 to do so.
“Current players will not be able to access the games past January 4th,” reads part of a tweet from the defunct Studio Onoma, which is also seeing three free-to-play games (Arena Battle Champions, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes) shut down. “We encourage prior in-game purchases to be used before January 4th, as they will not be refunded.”
Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
No refunds.
Usually when a downloadable game is removed from a digital marketplace, you can at least download a copy first — in many cases, you can even re-download purchased games indefinitely. (I can still get my Steam copies of Mass Effect 2 and Indigo Prophecy even though they were yanked from the Steam store many years ago.)
But apparently that won’t be the case here. Like Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett says, it’s a games preservation tragedy. It’s also ready-made ammunition for critics of digital purchases, and of Embracer Group itself, which is already under scrutiny from gamers both for buying up franchises and for taking a billion dollars from Saudi Arabia.
And it’s not clear why this is happening with Deus Ex in particular. There shouldn’t be a rights issue, right? Embracer explicitly purchased the rights to Deus Ex alongside the mobile games studio that developed the title. All we know, via games journalist Jason Schreier, is that Embracer apparently decided it wasn’t interested in mobile games anymore.
Onoma was part of the acquisition that saw Embracer take control of Eidos and the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain franchises. The company informed staff at a 2pm ET meeting today that Onoma is shutting down as the company pivots to focus only on PC and console
UK’s digital services tax reaps almost £360m from US tech giants in first year
Figure raised exceeds what most of the digital businesses have been paying in UK corporation tax
The digital services tax has reaped almost £360m from US tech giants including Amazon, Google and Apple in its first year, raising more from most of the digital businesses than they have been paying in UK corporation tax.
A National Audit Office (NAO) report has found the UK’s digital services tax, which was introduced in April 2020 and imposes a 2% charge on the gross revenues made by digital titans running search engines, social media services and online marketplaces, hauled in 30% more than the government had forecast in 2021.
The best Black Friday Google deals you can get
The Pixel 7 (left) and Pixel 7 Pro (right) are some of the many big Google deals going on. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
It’s a good time to be in the market for some new Google hardware. Google recently kicked off its Black Friday sales promotions on its store, and that set off a chain reaction of the same or better deals being offered all over. While some products on sale are mainstays that see frequent discounts (like the Nest Mini smart speaker for $19.99), there are also excellent deals on the latest flagship phones and accessories. For example, the Pixel 7 Pro is on sale for $749, and the new Pixel Watch is $50 off.
This may just be the tip of the iceberg of this season’s Black Friday sales, as there are all kinds of other early deals worth your attention. So we’ll forgive you if you need a moment to digest it all, but the good thing about these Google deals is they’re set to stick around for Black Friday and even through the weekend, ending on November 28th.
We’ve combed through all the Pixel, Nest, and Chromecast sales to pool together the best and most worthwhile deals you should know about.
Pixel phone deals
The latest crop of Pixel phones is just over a month old, but they’re already nicely discounted. The Pixel 7 and 7 Pro are an excellent follow-up to last year’s Pixel 6 generation, honing the quality of the hardware and software for an overall better experience. They both have a new, second-gen Google Tensor CPU and refined camera performance.
The jumbo-sized flagship Pixel 7 Pro is normally a little more affordable than its direct competition from Apple and Samsung, but it’s even more appealing at a lower $749 ($150 off) from Best Buy, Target, Amazon, and Google.
Not one to be outdone when it comes to value proposition, the midrange Google Pixel 6A is still an excellent option if you prefer your Pixel a little smaller (though 6.1 inches isn’t exactly tiny). It’s on sale for $299 ($150 off) at Google, Amazon, Target, and Best Buy.
Pixel accessories deals
The new Google Pixel Watch is on sale for $299.99 at Target, Best Buy, Amazon, and Google. The battery life leaves a bit to be desired, but it’s a very functional smartwatch for notifications on your wrist and tracking your fitness; it also looks pretty sharp and unique with that domed glass case. Be sure to check out our excellent Versus video comparing it to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5.
The Pixel Buds Pro are on sale for $149.99 ($50 off) from Google, Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Google’s flagship wireless earbuds have active noise cancellation, some great sound, and a quality microphone for calls.
If you need some budget-friendly earbuds, the Pixel Buds A-Series are great for just $64 ($35 off) at Google, Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy. They’re not noise-canceling, but they’re very affordable and offer hands-free Google Assistant controls.
Nest smart home deals
Several quality Google Nest products are on some sizable sales for Black Friday. Each one can be worth considering unless you’ve already staked a claim over your home with a rival ecosystem.
The tiny and colorful second-gen Nest Mini smart speaker is just $18 ($31 off) at Walmart. It’s priced slightly higher at $19.99 from Best Buy, Target, and Google. It doesn’t have room-filling sound for listening to music, but it does sound better when mounted to a wall, and it’s the cheapest way to get Google Assistant voice controls into your home.
Speaking of tiny Google smart home devices, the latest Nest Hub smart display is $49.99 ($50 off) at Walmart, Google, Target, and Best Buy. This little seven-inch display is handy for news and weather or listening to music, and it doubles as a digital photo frame for Google Photos shared albums.
Google’s larger 10-inch Nest Hub Max smart display is $164 ($65 off) at Google, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. It’s a similar formula to the smaller version but with a bigger screen and front-facing camera for video calls.
The Nest Audio smart speaker is $49.99 ($50 off) at Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Google or $89 ($110.98 off) when you buy two from Google. You can pair these Google Assistant-powered speakers in stereo mode, so buying the two-pack may make some sense if you’re looking to pump lots of music in your home.
The entry-level Nest Thermostat is on sale for $89.99 ($40 off) at Best Buy, Target, Amazon, and Google. It’s not the most advanced smart thermostat on the market, but it’s simple to operate remotely and has a clean, modern aesthetic.
Google’s latest Nest Learning Thermostat is $179 ($70 off) at Best Buy, Target, Google, and Amazon. This is Google’s smart thermostat with a whole lot more smarts in it; it can learn your habits and preferences over time to make automatic adjustments for comfort and saving energy.
Chromecast deals
The best deal around on the 4K Chromecast with Google TV is Walmart’s bundle of it with a Stranger Things Funko Pop! vinyl figure for $29 (about $20 off the Chromecast alone) if it’s available for store pickup in your area. It’s somehow cheaper than the sale price of the 4K Chromecast itself, which is widely available to ship for $39.99 ($10 off) at Best Buy, Target, and Amazon. This may be the weirdest deal of all for Black Friday — it’s certainly the strangest... thing. Alright, we’re done here.
Actually, the newer but lower-res HD Chromecast with Google TV is also on sale. It’s discounted to $18 (about $12 off) at Walmart and $19.99 ($10 off) at Best Buy, Target, and Google. But unless you need to save every dollar, you might as well get higher quality video with the deal on the 4K version above, plus you get that free figure of Eleven for... $11 more (seriously???).
Musk antagonist George Hotz hired to fix Twitter search — he’s got 12 weeks
Hotz demonstrating his former company’s advanced driver assistance technology. | Photo by Michael Zelenko / The Verge
The internship came about after Hotz expressed support for Musk’s “extremely hardcore” ultimatum to Twitter’s employees, which demanded that they work “long hours at high intensity” or else depart the company. Hotz said that “this is the attitude that builds incredible things” and that he’d be willing to do an internship at the company. “Sure, let’s talk,” was Musk’s response.
Hotz appears to be in-between major projects right now, having recently departed his advanced driver assistance company Comma.ai late last month (although he was quick to announce a new company developing software for AI chips). In a note announcing his departure, Hotz suggested that Comma.ai requires a new style of leader as it attempts to scale up from a startup into a sustainable consumer-focused business.
Comma.ai aims to build driver assistance technology that can be retrofitted into existing cars, as opposed to Tesla vehicles which ship with the technology built-in. But early claims about the Hotz’s driver assistance technology in a feature in Bloomberg prompted a stern rebuke from Tesla, which said that it was “extremely unlikely that a single person or even a small company that lacks extensive engineering validation capability will be able to produce an autonomous driving system that can be deployed to production vehicles.” Comma.ai currently sells a $1,999 driver assistance developer kit that it claims is compatible with over 200 vehicles, and is working on turning this into a consumer product, TechCrunch notes.
In the same 2015 Bloomberg feature Hotz said that he’d been discussing working at Tesla, but that the plans fell through when Musk kept changing the terms of their deal. “I appreciate the offer,” Hotz told Musk, “but like I’ve said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.” At the time, Mobileye was the company supplying some of the technology Tesla used in its Autopilot system, before the two parted ways in 2016.
George Hotz is wasting no time working out fixes for Twitter’s search feature. In a tweet, Hotz said these include making it easier to find the search function’s advanced modifiers, and making the feature less reliant on typing the exact text you want to find.
Okay, summarizing:
‣ Searching within "liked" and "seen" tweets with a modifier should be table stakes.
‣ The modifiers and advanced search should be surfaced a lot better. Discord does this well.
‣ Move away from exact text search and toward embeddings.
Crypto exchange FTX owes nearly $3.1bn to 50 biggest creditors
Company says cryptocurrency allegedly stolen in collapse being transferred to other exchanges
The collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1bn (£2.6bn), according to a filing in a US bankruptcy court.
The exchange owes about $1.45bn to its top 10 creditors, it said in a court filing over the weekend, without naming them. The largest creditor is owed $226m.
‘Verified’ anti-vax accounts proliferate as Twitter struggles to police content
Platform’s paid verification system is being used to give sense of validity to accounts pushing health misinformation
As the troubled social media platform Twitter rolled out a paid verification system and laid off thousands of content moderators, health misinformation accounts on the social network began pushing their messages to a wider audience than ever.
Under Elon Musk’s new direction for Twitter, several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers are now verified by paying $7.99 a month for Twitter Blue.
Monday’s top tech news: Don’t call it a comeback
Nick Barclay / The Verge
Bob Iger’s back at Disney, and Ye, Trump, and others are back on Twitter.
Iger is back, Trump is back, Ye is back, and Elon Musk, well, he never leaves the news cycle.
Ex-Disney CEO Bob Iger is back at the helm of the Mouse House in an announcement that surprised everyone, including executives and employees who thought Iger’s email announcing the change came from a hacked account, according to the Wall Street Journal. The outgoing Bob — Bob Chapek — wasn’t even quoted in Disney’s official announcement.
Elon Musk brought Trump, Ye, and others back to Twitter, despite previously saying that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen” before a new content moderation council “with widely diverse viewpoints” had a chance to convene. Trump has yet to tweet, but Ye returned with an is-thing-on mic test followed by a smiley face and the Jewish greeting for peace.
The metaverse will be a digital graveyard if we let new technologies distract us from today’s problems | Jordan Guiao
The collapse of digital ventures like FTX shows that no amount of hype and starry-eyed proselytising can escape reality
The tiny island nation of Tuvalu recently announced that it would be the first country to fully replicate itself as a virtual reproduction in the metaverse.
Tuvalu, comprising of nine small islands in the Pacific situated between Australia and Hawaii, fears that its demise is inevitable due to human-induced climate change, and wanted to preserve “the most precious assets of its people … and move them to the cloud”.
Inside Gary Gensler’s SEC Campaign to Rein In the Crypto Industry Gary Gensler, the chair of the S.E.C., is at the center of a reckoning over the future of cryptocurrency after the implosion of FTX.
Bob Iger steps back in as Disney CEO, replacing Bob Chapek
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
In a sudden turn of events, Disney has reversed the CEO swap that surprised us in early 2020, with Bob Iger returning to his post, replacing his own successor, Bob Chapek. Iger, who is also the company’s largest shareholder, is now set to serve a new two-year term as CEO. Part of Iger’s job in those two years will be to pick and groom his long-term successor.
During an episode of the Decoder podcast in April, former Verge writer and now Parrot Analytics senior strategy analyst Julia Alexander described the issues facing Chapek:
...Bob Chapek is in a difficult position of trying to take Disney, a legacy company of yesterday, and make it into a legacy company of tomorrow. That means becoming more like a tech company rather than a traditional media and entertainment company. He arguably runs it the way that some tech companies might, where he breaks up the content production and the distribution. He goes in and says, “This is how it is going to work; we are focusing on streaming, on the Metaverse, and on how to get into these different positions.”
All of these issues happen at the same time. So it seems like Bob Chapek is losing control of the kingdom, versus Bob Iger had control over it. But what I think gets lost in that is that Bob Chapek is just over two years into his tenure as CEO, and his first job was pulling the company out of the pandemic and focusing on how to just survive it. Now he’s being tasked with carrying the company very publicly in a way that generates support from the shareholders, from the consumers, and from his employees. That’s easier said than done, especially for someone who’s so new to the role.
While Iger initially pushed Disney into the streaming wars, Chapek’s reorganization of the company ruffled feathers by placing Kareem Daniel, a non-streaming executive, in charge of everything streaming and studio budgets and increasing the emphasis on streaming.
Disney’s board chair Susan Arnold said in a statement that, “We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period.”
Beware self-made ‘genius’ entrepreneurs promising the earth. Just look at Elon Musk | Kenan Malik Silicon Valley ‘saviours’ are the heroes of the hour. Too often they have feet of clay
Trussonomics trashed within eight weeks. Donald Trump’s anointed candidates cut down in the US midterms. Sam Bankman-Fried, the poster boy of the crypto world, collapsing into bankruptcy. Elon Musk throwing Twitter into turmoil. The bursting of myths and the shredding of reputations seem to be the themes of the day.
Each of these cases is, of course, distinct and the root causes of each disaster different. There is a danger, too, in discussing these developments, of seeming to revel in failure. Too much of the debate about Musk and Twitter, especially, has mixed despair with schadenfreude. Yet, viewed collectively, these cases also tell us something deeper about our age and in particular about the ways in which we think about innovation and change.
Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for her Theranos fraud
Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for Fortune
The former billionaire has been convicted and sentenced after it was revealed that her blood-testing company hadn’t achieved the breakthroughs it claimed.
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder, and CEO of disgraced blood-testing company Theranos, has been found guilty on three counts of wire fraud, as well as a count of conspiracy to commit fraud along with her co-founder Sunny Balwani. On November 18th, she was sentenced to 135 months, or about 11 and a half years, in prison for defrauding 10 victims out of $121 million.
Theranos was valued as high as $9 billion, and Holmes was a darling of Silicon Valley, sporting black turtlenecks that prompted comparisons to Steve Jobs.
Until John Carreyrou’s exposé was published in The Wall Street Journal. In that article, Carreyrou wrote that Theranos was using its own device for only a handful of tests and that other employees were concerned that the device wasn’t accurate.
Crypto collapse: it’s looking like a long, cold, contagious winter
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
FTX is just the latest company facing an uncertain future as cryptocurrency values drop, revealing flaws in risky financial strategies that fueled the recent crypto and NFT boom.
On January 1st of 2022, one Bitcoin would cost you about $46,000. By November 8th, that same coin went for about $18,500. And that’s when the year’s most dramatic crypto story was just starting: the ongoing collapse of the FTX exchange, which brought yet another round of existential threats to the crypto industry as a whole.
This year has looked like death by a thousand scandals for crypto. There was the Luna / Terra crash, which wiped out billions in value practically overnight. There was Axie Infinity, the once-hot NFT game that lost $625 million in a hack and has struggled to recover. Celsius collapsed. Three Arrows Capital collapsed. Remember when NFTs were cool and people thought their JPGs were worth millions?
All this happened, of course, as the overall economy began to crash back down to earth after a pandemic-created spike in stock prices — which also dampened society’s overall tolerance for chaotic, nonsensical gambling on internet money. As the economy began to even out and our collective risk tolerance went down, crypto went for many investors from a fun plaything to a dangerous bet.
Crypto has crashed before, and as ever, the HODLers are saying there’s upside left to come. But right now, the future for cryptocurrencies of all kinds looks pretty bleak.
Here’s all our coverage from the ongoing crypto winter:
Elon Musk says he’s letting Donald Trump back on Twitter
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Donald Trump is allowed to rejoin Twitter, Elon Musk has announced. Musk justified that decision based on the results of his own personal Twitter poll. The @realDonaldTrump account and its tweets are fully visible again.
Shortly after taking control of the social network, Musk said he wouldn’t be reinstating any banned accounts until the company had set up and convened a content moderation council with “widely diverse viewpoints.”
Instead, on Friday evening, as people drifted off for the pre-Thanksgiving weekend, he decided to poll his own followers on Twitter. “Reinstate former President Trump,” he tweeted, alongside a poll with buttons to pick “Yes” or “No.”
“Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he added in a follow-up tweet, Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
The “Yes” responses won by a slim 52–48 margin. It is not clear how many of them may have been bots; Musk himself suggested that the poll was being attacked by bots. Musk also famously attempted to get out of the Twitter deal by claiming that as many as 20 percent of Twitter’s accounts were fake, and he once suggested that bots were responsible for the results of his controversial poll about Russia and Ukraine.
Over 134 million people saw the poll, according to Musk, though it wound up with just over 15 million responses. That would suggest only around 11 percent of those who saw it clicked on one of the buttons.
We will likely never know whether Musk actually made the decision based on the poll or whether he already made up his mind. In November 2021, he sold 10 percent of his Tesla shares after he polled his followers, and the majority responded that he should. At the time, he wrote, “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.” But The Wall Street Journal revealed he’d already made the decision to sell those shares by September, two months earlier, as part of a preset trading plan meant to keep executives from insider trading.
Former President Trump was banned from Twitter on January 8th, 2021, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” after Trump’s role in inciting the January 6th Capitol attacks. Twitter said at the time that Trump’s messages broke its rules against the glorification of violence. From that time until this evening, visitors to his Twitter profile were greeted with an “account suspended” message, instead of seeing his tweets.
Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
51.8 percent of respondents responded yes, according to Musk’s Twitter. 48.2 percent responded no.
During the long and rocky process of purchasing Twitter, Musk said he would restore Trump’s account. “I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” said Musk in May. “I think that was a mistake, because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice ... So I guess the answer is I would reverse the permaban.”
It’s not clear whether Trump will come back to Twitter, invited or not. After being booted off Twitter, Trump joined Truth Social, a right-wing social media company developed by a firm founded by the former president. Following Musk’s comments on allowing him to rejoin Twitter, Trump said he would stay on Truth Social regardless of whether he was invited back. “Twitter’s become very boring. They’ve gotten rid of a lot of good voices on Twitter, a lot of their conservative voices,” said Trump at the time.
On Saturday, after being asked about Musk’s poll during a Q&A, Trump suggested he might not rejoin, saying, “I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it.” But Trump also reportedly told his followers on Truth Social to vote for the Twitter poll, roughly three hours before it ended.
Musk also announced that Jordan Peterson, Kathy Griffin, and The Babylon Bee would all be reinstated, without making any mention of the aforementioned content moderation council having been set up. Musk made no mention of a content moderation council alongside this evening’s decision to reinstate Trump, either. It is not clear what happened to his promise that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”
Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
“No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before [the content moderation council] convenes,” wrote Musk in late October.
If Trump decides to return to Twitter, it could have a significant effect on the 2024 US election, with the former president once more in possession of his favorite megaphone: a Twitter account watched by the world’s media that he can use to direct both support and abuse, and the implicit support of that platform’s owner in doing so.
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.
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Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
