Technology

jeudi 12 octobre 2023

How is it still getting worse for Sam Bankman-Fried?

Photo Illustration of Caroline Ellison in front of a graphic background of pixels and soapy money. — Caroline Ellison didn’t crack under pressure. Granted, she wasn’t under that much pressure. | Photo Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Bloomberg, Agustina Torres, Getty Images

The defense botched the cross examination of Caroline Ellison.

In the break after Caroline Ellison stepped down from the stand, Barbara Fried engaged defense lawyer Christian Everdell in an animated conversation. Fried, the defendant’s mother, was gesticulating, and clearly had a strong opinion about something. Everdell walked off, and Mark Cohen talked to her for a bit after that.

Fried seemed frustrated, and I couldn’t blame her. The defense absolutely biffed the cross-examination of Ellison and, to make matters worse, was unable to keep a recording of an all-hands meeting where Ellison confessed to taking customer funds from being played for the jury. Is this really the best the defense can do?

Before this case, I had been told that Everdell and Cohen were “workman-like,” which I took to mean that they were unshowy but competent. I now believe that comment was an insult. I have been waiting for a juicy cross-examination, as I live for chaos and drama. I am beginning to think I am not going to get one.

Ellison had given, in her direct testimony, fairly damning evidence tying FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to the conspiracy to take FTX customer funds. There were fake balance sheets, one of which was sent to crypto lender Genesis. After a Genesis representative received the balance sheet, he texted Ellison to tell her he’d spoken to Bankman-Fried — strongly suggesting that Bankman-Fried was aware of the contents of the fake balance sheet. Not great!

But a lot of testimony relied on Ellison recounting conversations she’d had in person, or on auto-deleting text messaging platforms. This gave the defense an opportunity to try to make her sound unreliable. After all, she had an incentive to flip on Bankman-Fried: the possibility of leniency in her sentencing. Given her fun tweets about speed, the fact that she was Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, and that she’d apparently written a bunch of stuff down, I was expecting fireworks. For the first time in this trial, maybe the defense had an opening.

Instead, I got a sad trombone. In Cohen’s disorganized cross-examination, he mostly bored the jury. At one point, two different jurors appeared to be asleep.

Midway through the morning I began wondering if there was a mercy rule for cross-examinations. Prosecutor Danielle Sassoon had run an effective direct examination, creating an easy-to-follow narrative. By contrast, Cohen appeared to be bumbling around, taking up one topic only to abruptly pivot. Sure, we’re still in the prosecution’s case, but Cohen had all night to prepare his lines of questioning.

We established that Bankman-Fried had a much larger appetite for risk than Ellison. I thought perhaps it might be building to something, but this line of questioning was quickly dropped. We established that Bankman-Fried and Ellison reacted differently to stress, and that they also had different approaches to media: namely, that Ellison avoided it while Bankman-Fried sought it out. Okay?

We discovered that there was one accountant at Alameda in 2021, and two more junior accountants were hired in 2022. Apparently, Alameda had a problem with retaining accountants, which didn’t surprise me much; CEOs generally don’t do the balance sheets for their companies. I was ready to hear this pursued further — but then it, too, was dropped.

I think the defense was also trying to suggest that the government had coerced Ellison’s testimony, by suggesting that she had pleaded guilty to a charge of defrauding investors that she couldn’t have been involved in. After all, she didn’t prepare materials for them. Unfortunately, she did say that she had conversations with investors as part of their due diligence — and, of course, Alameda was taking on losses from FTX to keep FTX’s balance sheet pristine. This line of questioning felt like a waste of time.

There were rather a lot of sidebars during the cross-examination, to the point that when one occurred, several jurors looked entertained. There were a few yesterday, too, including one in which the prosecution complained that Bankman-Fried was visibly scoffing at Ellison’s answers, according to the court transcript. (I did observe him occasionally shaking his head, and sometimes quivering at points during her testimony, but didn’t have a view of his face.)

As we were approaching lunch, several jurors looked annoyed, and Cohen looked clueless. He asked Ellison to define what “buy on the way down” meant, as though it were a term of art. (It means what you think it means, to purchase an asset that’s losing value.) This seemed to puzzle her. At other times, Cohen seemed to forget what she had testified to, bringing up things she hadn’t said. I don’t know if this was an attempt to trap her in a lie or just poor preparation, but much like FTX employee Adam Yedidia before her, Ellison was fastidious about making sure a question was clear and her answer was precise.

At one point, Ellison appeared to even be toying with Cohen. She’d testified on direct about Luna, a cryptocurrency token. It had a sister token, Terra, that was a paired algorithmic stablecoin. (If you don’t understand what that means, it doesn’t matter, because they were both nonsense.) Cohen asked her about Terra/Luna and she pointed out she’d only spoken about Luna, leaving him to fumble about how to explain the relationship between the two tokens. She kept a straight face on the stand while I chuckled from the press seats.

During the opening statement, Cohen had blamed Ellison for not taking out a hedge on some of the risks Alameda was trading. We heard more about this hedge in cross-examination, and friends, it was stupid. Forget evaluating the trade itself (hedging being long crypto by selling Nasdaq futures). Was she supposed to have taken more customer funds to put on the hedge? Was that the defense, that she didn’t take enough of them? Was it that she should have taken them sooner? What the fuck?

When Sassoon got up for a quick redirect, she demolished any points Cohen had attempted to make. But I didn’t really appreciate her cleverness until after Ellison left the stand, and the jurors left the room. She’d managed to set a neat little trap for Cohen.

On the direct examination, near the end, Sassoon asked about an Alameda all-hands meeting, without bringing up many specifics. During the cross, Cohen asked Ellison what topics were covered in the meeting, while avoiding details. That opened the door for Sasson on redirect to work in that Ellison had confessed to stealing billions of FTX customers’ money, at Bankman-Fried’s direction.

There had been an open question of whether jurors would hear the tapes of Ellison’s remarks. The testimony set up an argument for the prosecution to bring in those tapes. The judge ruled in favor of the jury hearing the recordings and we briefly recessed.

That was when Bankman-Fried’s mother approached the defense lawyers.

The late afternoon was short and snappy. Christian Drappi, a former Alameda software engineer who looked like a handsome funeral director in a black suit and tie, testified briefly to set up the tape. When Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, announced on Twitter that he intended to acquire FTX, Ellison confessed the theft of customer funds to him and a few other employees, Drappi said. The all-hands took place the following day, and was secretly recorded by an employee who’d joined Alameda three days before.

In the recording, Ellison did indeed confess to stealing customer funds with Bankman-Fried’s approval. Drappi said he resigned less than 24 hours after the meeting. The recording was later sent to Drappi, who sent it to the government. Joseph Bankman, the defendant’s father and a senior advisor to FTX’s philanthropic arm, wasn’t in the room for the recording. Barbara Fried looked unhappy, rubbing her left temple as though she had a tremendous headache.

And in a small miracle of pacing, the government got Zac Prince, the founder and former CEO of crypto lender BlockFi, on the stand just long enough to blame FTX’s bankruptcy for BlockFi’s subsequent bankruptcy before we broke for the day.

I’ve been asked by some people why the reporting coming out of the trial seems so skewed toward the prosecution. There’s an answer for this: the prosecution has put together a strong, comprehensive indictment of Bankman-Fried’s behavior at FTX and Alameda. The defense, so far, has managed to do almost nothing in response. I don’t know if Cohen and Everdell have bad facts, a bad client, or are simply untalented themselves (or some combination of all three?). But I do know that I haven’t yet seen any good reason to doubt the very convincing story I’m hearing from the prosecution.

We’re still in the prosecution’s case. We’ll hear from the defense soon. But nothing they’ve said so far gives me confidence that Bankman-Fried is getting out of this.

Google promises to take the legal heat in users’ AI copyright lawsuits

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge

Google will protect customers who use some of its generative AI products if they get sued for copyright infringement, the company says.

In a blog post, Google said customers using products that are now embedded with generative AI features will be protected, attempting to assuage growing fears that generative AI could run afoul of copyright rules. It specifically mentioned seven products it would legally cover: Duet AI in Workspace (including text generated in Google Docs and Gmail and images in Google Slides and Google Meet), Duet AI in Google Cloud, Vertex AI Search, Vertex AI Conversation, Vertex AI Text Embedding API, Visual Captioning on Vertex AI, and Codey APIs. Google’s Bard search tool was not mentioned.

“If you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved,” the company said.

Google said it will follow a “two-pronged, industry-first approach” for intellectual property indemnification, which will cover its training data and results created from its foundation models. This means if someone gets sued because Google’s training data used copyrighted material, Google will take that legal heat.

The company said indemnity around training data “is actually not a new protection.” But Google admitted customers wanted explicit clarification that its protection covers the possibility that the training data took in copyrighted information.

Google will also protect users if they are sued for the results they get after using its foundation models. For example, if they generate a sentence similar to a published work. The company noted this protection “only applies if you didn’t try to intentionally create or use generated output to infringe the rights of others.”

Other companies have made similar proclamations. Microsoft announced it will take legal responsibility for enterprise users of its Copilot products. Adobe said it would protect enterprise customers using Firefly over copyright, privacy, and publicity rights claims.

Copyright issues have haunted generative AI platforms, and more lawsuits have now been filed against different companies for allegedly infringing on copyright. One of the latest lawsuits was filed by famous authors like George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult.

Google already faced a proposed class action lawsuit for allegedly taking personal information and copyrighted data to train AI models, Reuters reported.

‘A.I. Obama’ and Fake Newscasters: How A.I. Audio Is Swarming TikTok

‘A.I. Obama’ and Fake Newscasters: How A.I. Audio Is Swarming TikTok TikTok accounts are spreading falsehoods with the help from A.I.-generated voices.

mercredi 11 octobre 2023

Energy Firms, Green Groups and Others Reach Deal on Solar Farms

Energy Firms, Green Groups and Others Reach Deal on Solar Farms The agreement could help speed up the development of large solar projects that are often bogged down by fights over land use and environmental concerns.

The Fitbit app has been having some issues for hours

Person looking at a Fitbit Charge 6 on their wrist. — Image: Google / Fitbit

The Fitbit app has been dealing with some issues for hours, and the Google-owned company acknowledged Wednesday night that there are some problems right now.

“We’re aware that some customers are experiencing issues with the Fitbit app and we are currently investigating,” Fitbit wrote in a message on X (formerly Twitter) at 8:01PM ET. “We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, thank you for your patience!” In a reply to a frustrated user asking for an ETA, Fitbit said that “we can’t provide any time frame as of now.”

Fitbit’s community page also has a big banner that reads: “We’re continuing to investigate the issue affecting Fitbit devices. Thank you for your patience.”

A screenshot of a Fitbit community page.

There are a bunch of reports in other outlets and on X discussing the outages. Android Authority reports that, in the app, data isn’t loading and the Coach tab shows a “content not available” message. 9to5Google also isn’t seeing stats in the app. A Verge reader emailed us to say they haven’t been able to activate a Charge 6, which is something that you have to do inside the app.

On Downdetector, more than 3,000 people have reported problems of some kind. The reports began to spike at about 5PM ET.

Wednesday’s issues follow two major outages in February.

Microsoft owes $29 billion in back taxes, says IRS

Illustration: The Verge

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has informed Microsoft that the company owes back taxes of $28.9 billion “plus penalties and interest” for the tax years 2004 through 2013, according to an SEC filing.

Microsoft’s corporate VP for worldwide tax and customs Daniel Goff responded to the audit in a blog post, and says the company has changed its corporate structure and practices since the years covered by the audit. “The issues raised by the IRS are relevant to the past but not to our current practices,” Goff states.

The IRS’s proposed adjustments don’t reflect the amounts the company paid under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, according to Goff, who claims that could decrease the final tax owed by up to $10 billion. Additionally, Microsoft claims the IRS disagrees with the way Microsoft allocated profits internationally through an arrangement of transfer prices called cost-sharing.

Microsoft says it disagrees with the IRS’s “proposed adjustments” and will “vigorously contest” them. In the same blog, Microsoft says it doesn’t expect the dispute to be resolved in the next 12 months. Separately, the company recently reigned victorious over the FTC, which failed to secure a preliminary injunction against Microsoft’s plan to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion — a deal expected to close on October 13th.

Crunchyroll is in the news today, but not for the reason it needs to be

An image of a orange and white banner on a booth saying Crunchyroll. — Photo by Stefan Etienne / The Verge

Crunchyroll is in the news today, and I’m gonna get to all of that. But first, a moment of silence. When I saw Crunchyroll in a headline flying across my RSS feed, I thought for sure it was the streaming service announcing it has fixed its app for smart TV. Instead, it launched a new FAST channel and settled a class action lawsuit.

Crunchyroll, which is owned by Sony, who purchased it from AT&T and WarnerMedia, is one of the primary ways to get anime legally and inexpensively in the United States. It frequently airs shows at the exact same time they air in Japan, it carries both dubbed and subtitled versions of those shows, and it has an enormous library featuring what feels like every major anime of the last 20 years.

But Crunchyroll is a service best used on your phone or web browser and only watched on a TV via AirPlay or Chromecast. The app you will find on Apple TV, Roku, PS4, and PS5 is a painful alternative prone to crashes and bugs that make it borderline unusable. (The app is available on nearly every other smart TV and set top box available, and while I haven’t tried those versions, I’ve also never heard anyone say something complimentary about them.) I get logged out of the Apple TV app on a daily basis. When I do manage to log in, it rarely lets me pick up a show where I left off. Instead, I usually have to search for the show and then scroll down to find the most recent episode.

The exception is Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story. I watched a single episode of the show, and for some reason, the app refuses to let me forget that I did. I swear I will return to it one day, but the fact that the app can remember I that watched it but can’t show me the next episode of Spy X Family without me searching for it on my own has kind of put me off.

Things have gotten so bad that I’ve effectively stopped using the app on any of the devices attached to my TV. Instead, I open the app on my phone and AirPlay it to my TV. This usually works great — except when I compulsively open TikTok on my phone and it breaks the AirPlay connection.

This experience, which is excruciating at 10AM on a Saturday when you just want to watch a little show while having a late breakfast, is why I was so excited to see Crunchyroll appearing in my RSS feed today. But sadly, there’s no word on a new, improved, functional app for Crunchyroll.

Instead, the company (which, again, is owned by Sony) announced that it’s joining with GSN to launch anime streaming channels for FAST TV services. Those services include Amazon Freevee, the Roku Channel, LG Channels and Vizio’s WatchFree Plus. Shows streaming at launch include PSYCHO-PASS and CLAMP’s Code Geass. The shows will air dubbed initially because the goal of the channel is to bring new viewers into the world of anime, according Crunchyroll President Rahul Purini in a quote to Deadline.

Crunchyroll’s other big piece of news this week is that parent company Sony has settled a class action lawsuit. The complaint, as seen by Engadget, claims Sony may have shared Crunchyroll users’ individual viewing information with third-party sites without permission. If you were a subscriber between September 8th, 2020 and September 20th, 2023, you could be eligible for up to $30. You’ll need to submit your claim online here by December 12 to receive payment.

If you happen to have access to my viewing history, no, I will not be explaining the presence of RWBY on it.

Death, Sex, and the future of WNYC podcasts

Image: WNYC

This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.

On Wednesday afternoon, staffers at WNYC’s podcast division sat down for an all-hands meeting looking for answers. Last week, 6 percent of New York Public Radio’s workforce was let go — with most of the cuts targeting its podcast vertical, WNYC Studios.

LaFontaine Oliver, CEO of New York Public Radio, said the nonprofit would be shifting its current strategy of producing both national radio shows and on-demand podcasts to a new model known as “broadcast to podcast.” The podcast studio would focus on shows that can work for both broadcast audiences in New York and online audiences globally, he said. For the most part, WNYC will no longer continue with short-run and seasonal podcasts — unless a third party is footing most of the bill for production costs. Many employees wondered: was such an abrupt change to WNYC’s mission really necessary?

The strategy shift came down to the numbers, Oliver said. According to remarks from today’s meeting that were shared with Hot Pod, the CEO pointed to stats from Edison Research showing that while podcasting is growing, AM/FM radio’s reach is still three times greater.

“Part of what the strategy is about is saying that we are still having material success in reaching people from traditional media broadcasting,” Oliver said. “Quite honestly, most of the folks in the podcasting and on-demand world wish they had broadcast sticks in order to sort of queue audiences and induce sampling for on-demand audio, and we have that.”

Oliver acknowledged that WNYC’s plan for diversifying its shows and creating audio for “multiple platforms” was still not set in stone. “I’m not sitting here today claiming to have all the answers,” Oliver said. But he was sure about one thing: “What I am pretty clear about is it means a greater focus on the audience and less of a focus on the specific platform that is podcasting.”

WNYC employees expressed concerns at today’s meeting over the lack of details in the public radio giant’s new pivot. Although a new goal like increasing audience reach with social media and increasing local news coverage sounded good, it would have to be accomplished with fewer staffers. Outreach on social platforms in particular will likely be an even heavier lift for shows like Radiolab and Notes from America, which both lost their social media producers in last week’s layoffs.

Some staffers feel like it’s a strategy shift without a strategy, lacking hard details on how to execute. “Seems like they have goals but not a real concrete strategy for getting there beyond saying ‘broad to pod’ over and over,” one WNYC staffer, who asked to remain anonymous to freely discuss the change, wrote in an email to Hot Pod.

WNYC’s vice president of communications, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, told Hot Pod that the shows remaining were picked because they were already successful at serving multiple audiences and providing multiple revenue streams.

“The shows that are continuing each have a different revenue mix, but serving broadcast and on-demand audiences is a continuation of what they are already doing. Putting a focus on these multiplatform shows is where we see a competitive advantage in a very crowded, competitive, and disruptive podcast environment,” Roussel wrote.

To current and former staffers who spoke with Hot Pod, the cancellations feel like a step back from the studio’s original purpose — to incubate and produce both radio shows and podcasts for a national audience. “Broad to pod” has left podcasts like More Perfect and La Brega on the cutting room floor. Meanwhile, industry-favorite Death, Sex & Money, once seen by staffers as a safe bet, is in limbo.

Last Thursday, the team behind Death, Sex & Money was pulled into a meeting with Kenya Young, the senior vice president of WNYC Studios, and two members of the organization’s human resources team. During a day when 20 other staffers at WNYC were given the pink slip, Death, Sex & Money effectively received an expiration date: the show would be sunset at the very end of 2023. This development wasn’t mentioned in an internal memo that WNYC later shared with reporters.

“They let the team know that the show would be sunset by December 31. Unless WNYC could find a strategic partner or buyer for the show,” said one employee with knowledge of the meeting.

Host Anna Sale tells Hot Pod that she wasn’t blindsided by the news and is working with WNYC to find a new home for the podcast. “We’ve been given this wonderful opportunity to come up with a whole new way to make the show,” she said.

Still, Death, Sex & Money’s departure from WNYC and WNYC Studios is no small thing. The nearly 10-year-old podcast was launched during a time when podcasts appeared to be the clear future for public radio — and traditional radio stations were scrambling to evolve with the times. Death, Sex & Money was having a very strong year so far, according to employees. The podcast was one of the few WNYC shows with host-read ads, which commanded a higher CPM. Its potential cancellation reflects the uncertainty of the podcast industry itself.

Although WNYC leadership said they had “put out some feelers” to see if any buyers were interested in Death, Sex & Money, they didn’t name which entities they contacted during last week’s meeting. They did maintain that there was enough interest in the show that it would be allowed to remain in production at WNYC until the end of the year, in the off chance it could secure a partnership or new home by then.

Sale is adamant about the interview-style podcast simply not being a good fit for radio production, in the same way that other WNYC podcasts in the “broad to pod” strategy are. Death, Sex & Money was always designed to be a podcast. Sale referred to it as a “podcast for podcast listeners” in a phone interview with Hot Pod.

During Wednesday’s episode of the podcast, Sale included a special message for listeners.

“There is a big change coming for our show. Since we launched in 2014, we’ve made it with WNYC, the public radio station in New York, which, like a lot of podcast and digital media companies, is facing a really difficult budget situation. Because of that, they have to make cuts, and we’ve learned that our show is affected by those cuts. But what exactly that will mean…we’re not sure yet,” said Sale.

For now, the plan is to continue making the podcast at WNYC until it sunsets at the end of the year.

When WNYC Studios first launched in 2015, it was billed as a way for the public radio giant to specifically develop programs for the then-red-hot podcast market. But it was also a way for WNYC to distribute its own shows to public radio stations across the country instead of using NPR to syndicate those programs. While many of its current podcasts are standalone, other WNYC Studio shows like The New Yorker Radio Hour and Radiolab can be heard across hundreds of public radio stations across the country.

WNYC Studios was always a separate entity from WNYC’s newsroom, which enabled it to focus first and foremost on creating podcasts. This allowed the outfit to experiment, which it did, launching dozens of original podcasts over the past several years — a cadence that, largely, seems to be on the way out.

“The buried lede is that they destroyed WNYC Studios,” said the employee of a major WNYC podcast, who asked to remain anonymous to candidly discuss the changes. “I don’t know why they can’t come out and say it. But there are no podcast-only shows left after this. There’s just none.”

That’s a loss the studio’s employees are feeling acutely. “We’re not going to do anything original. So it’s dismaying that they can’t be clear about that. They couldn’t have been less transparent about what’s actually going on and everything seemed like it was minimizing what was actually happening,” said the employee.

NYPR says this isn’t the end of standalone podcasts — not exactly. The organization is cutting “most short-run, seasonal, podcast-only titles,” Roussel said in an email. But there will be “rare exceptions,” such as when there’s a production partner or another organization “contributing significantly” to funding the show. “For instance, we are moving forward with another season of Blindspot with the History Channel,” Roussel said.

But as it stands, WNYC’s podcast studio is currently tied to a radio giant that now sees podcasts as another mode of distribution. And the future of radio, at least for WNYC, doesn’t appear to be podcasts — just good shows that, hopefully, work as podcasts, too.

T-Mobile is pushing some unlimited customers onto pricier plans

Signage for T-Mobile hangs on a storefront — Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Starting next week, T-Mobile will move subscribers of some of its older unlimited plans to new (and, in some cases, more expensive) options, the carrier has confirmed to CNET.

The plan will apply to users on the One, Simple Choice, Magenta, and Magenta 55 Plus plans, according to documentation posted on Reddit. Impacted users will be informed by “an SMS and email,” and the new plans will take impact beginning with the November billing cycle. The price increases customers see will vary depending on their plan, but most can expect a bump of $5 or $10 per line.

T-Mobile clarified to CNET that those impacted can opt out of the move and stay on their old plans. In order to do so, you’ll need to call T-Mobile’s Customer Care support line.

Forced plan migrations coming soon!
by u/Appropriate_Draft_77 in tmobile

It’s clear from T-Mobile’s communication that this isn’t just a mass migration of customers from old plans to new ones; people are just being bumped up across the board. For example, some customers on the Simple Choice / Select Choice plans are being moved up to Magenta, per the leaked documentation, but those on Magenta are also being moved up to Go5G.

Back in 2020, T-Mobile had to agree to a number of conditions in order to proceed with its purchase of Sprint. One was that it would offer “the same or better rate plans” for three years. And technically, I suppose, the company is continuing to offer the same plans for the same prices here that it was before. Still, T-Mobile customers could be forgiven for feeling a bit, well, slighted here. Don’t worry: I’m sure the hold music you’ll have to listen to when you call T-Mobile to opt out will be a delight.

Firefox tests a built-in checker for fake reviews

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Mozilla is testing a new built-in “Review Checker” feature for its Firefox browser that rates how reliable a product’s customer reviews are. The experimental feature was initially spotted by MSPowerUser, and Firefox’s senior director of product management Byron Jourdan confirmed that the company is testing the functionality “with a limited audience in the United States,” in a statement given to The Verge.

Fake reviews are a big problem for online retailers, which have had to take increasingly aggressive measures to stop malicious actors from using them to boost the ratings of their products. Amazon has previously taken down tens of thousands of reviews deemed to be fraudulent, and has even taken legal action against individuals who coordinated fake reviews via Facebook groups. Two years ago, the UK’s antitrust regulator even opened an official investigation into the problem.

A screenshot of an amazon listing for AirPods, with the Review Checker feature sidebar visible. — *A screenshot of the Firefox feature published by MSPowerUser.*

Firefox’s Review Checker is now preparing to give users the tools to weed out unreliable reviews. Screenshots posted by MSPowerUser show how the tool is accessible via a price tag icon in the browser’s URL bar, which brings up a sidebar with details on the current open product page. The tool assigns the product’s reviews a grade based on how reliable it believes them to be, offers an “adjusted rating” out of five stars with “unreliable reviews removed,” and pulls out some highlights of the existing reviews.

The Review Checker feature is powered by technology from Fakespot, a company Mozilla acquired earlier this year. The company “uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) system to detect patterns and similarities between reviews in order to flag those that are most likely to be deceptive,” Mozilla said when it announced the acquisition, noting that it planned to integrate the technology into its browser to “make Firefox customers the best equipped to cut through deceptive reviews.”

Fakespot already offers its review checking services via its website, extensions for browsers like Chrome and Safari, and iOS and Android apps. When it announced the acquisition, Mozilla said Fakespot would continue to work “across all major web browsers and mobile devices.” But being offered as a built-in Firefox feature could be a huge promotional boon for Fakespot, and bring it to the attention of many more users.

Although it’s currently testing the feature, Mozilla’s Jourdan says the company is yet to announce an official release date for the feature. “We will continue to test and see if this is one of the ways where we can help improve people’s online experience,” he said in a statement.

mardi 10 octobre 2023

The Verge Guide to Amazon’s October Prime Day event

Colorful animation of Amazon packages stacked. — Illustration by Lucia Pham / The Verge

For the second year in a row, Amazon is holding a second Prime Day event in the fall. This year’s two-day deal blitz — aka Prime Big Deal Days — is running from today, October 10th, through tomorrow, October 11th, presenting Amazon Prime members with yet another opportunity to get a head start on their holiday shopping before Black Friday and Cyber Monday arrive.

As you might expect, the best deals are on Amazon’s own devices, including Echo smart speakers and displays, Kindles, Fire tablets, and Amazon’s smart TV lineup. However, we’re also seeing steep discounts on other electronics as well, such as noise-canceling earbuds, gaming accessories, smartwatches, laptops, and various smart home accessories (including video doorbells).

Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend

Photo illustration of Caroline Ellison on a graphic orange and green background of pixels and money. — She didn’t even get equity! | Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Bloomberg, Getty Images

Bankman-Fried thought Alameda’s brand wasn’t as good as FTX’s — so he put his sometime-lover in charge of it.

I’ve got some shitty ex-boyfriends, but none of them made me the CEO of their sin-eater hedge fund while refusing to give me equity and bragging about how there was a 5 percent chance they’d become the President of the United States, you know? Absolutely counting my blessings after Caroline Ellison’s first day on the stand. I wonder how many of the nine women on the jury are doing the same.

Ellison was the head of Alameda Research, the aforementioned hedge fund, during the implosion of it and FTX. She’s already pleaded guilty to criminal charges stemming from one of the worst romantic relationships I’ve ever heard of, and her testimony was widely anticipated before the trial. Today, that took the form of discussing a damning spreadsheet — one she prepared for her ex and boss Sam Bankman-Fried, now the defendant in a criminal fraud trial.

The day started off promisingly for the defense as it cross-examined Gary Wang, the chief technology officer of FTX and co-owner of both FTX and Alameda. Christian Everdell, one of Bankman-Fried’s defense attorneys, couldn’t undo the damage of last week’s code review. But he managed to shake the rust off long enough to make Wang sound less reliable, drowning the jury in confusing technicalities.

Last week Wang testified that Alameda got access to a special credit line and an option to take its balance into the negative without triggering liquidation — something he alleged other accounts at FTX didn’t get. Everdell tried to undermine this claim by talking about the spot margin program, which let users lend each other assets for margin trading. In those cases, it was possible to have a negative balance in a specific coin. It was not, however, possible for those accounts to avoid liquidation, as Wang testified Alameda could do — or to have an overall negative balance. But I’m betting the defense is hoping the jurors will throw up their hands in confusion thinking about this.

Wang didn’t exactly help himself out, either. Apparently, what Wang said in court contradicted something he’d said in earlier interviews with the government about market making. I say “apparently” because Everdell was probably giving him his previous testimony to refresh his recollection, but Wang was insisting he didn’t remember. In any event whatever Wang was shown wasn’t submitted as evidence or shown to the court. I got the gist, though, and I bet the jury did too — probably the strongest work the defense has done so far.

But by the end of the day, that all seemed like a sideshow. Bankman-Fried had been vibrating slightly during Wang’s testimony. During Ellison’s testimony, his bouncing became more noticeable.

Ellison was hunched in on herself as she walked into the courtroom, wearing a dusty rose dress with a gray blazer over it, looking less like an executive than like a girl who’s borrowed her boyfriend’s coat because she’s cold. When the prosecution asked her to identify Bankman-Fried, she had trouble finding him and gazed around the courtroom for more than 20 seconds — apparently he was incognito with his new haircut. After she did spot him, she was asked to identify him, which she did by identifying him as wearing a suit. This got chuckles from the rest of the defense table, also all in suits.

She listed off the crimes she’d already pleaded guilty to, and added that Bankman-Fried “directed me to commit these crimes,” Ellison said. (Fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and money laundering, in case you were wondering.) “We ultimately took about $14 billion, some of which we were not able to pay back.” She tilted her head down to answer the questions, then lifted her head when she’d finished her answer.

In Ellison’s telling, Alameda was troubled from her earliest time there in 2018. “Shortly after I started, I learned the company was in worse shape than I realized,” Ellison said. Alameda had initially been funded with loans “from acquaintances,” she said, and those loans were recalled a few weeks after she arrived. (There was a staff revolt within Alameda Research, over lost millions and general financial chaos, according to Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite.) Ellison asked Bankman-Fried why he hadn’t shared the company’s shaky circumstances in the job offer. “He hadn’t known how to tell me,” she said.

Ellison was also, of course, in a more personal relationship with Bankman-Fried. (A juror who’d been asleep for a discussion of the FTT token woke up when she started discussing it.) The two started sleeping together in the fall of 2018, on and off. At the time, she was a trader and Bankman-Fried was the CEO. They didn’t date until later — twice. Their first relationship stretched from the summer of 2020 through the summer of 2021; they agreed to keep it secret. (Some people found out, as they usually do.) The second time, from the fall of 2021 until the spring of 2022, they lived together.

That gave Ellison an unusual view of his character. “He was very ambitious,” she said. Besides telling her about his presidential chances, he also told her that if there was a coin flip where tails destroyed the world and heads made the world twice as good, he’d flip the coin. He called this being “risk-neutral,” which seems like a fancy way of saying he was a gambling addict.

She was named co-CEO of Alameda with Sam Trabucco in 2021, while she and Bankman-Fried were broken up, and CEO in 2022. The goal, Bankman-Fried told her, was to “optically” separate Alameda Research and FTX. “The whole time we were dating, he was my boss at work,” she said. They broke up because she wanted more from the relationship; Bankman-Fried was distant and not paying enough attention to her.

Bankman-Fried didn’t grant Ellison equity, even though she asked; he told her it would be too complicated. Instead, she got a $200,000 salary, even as CEO, and bonuses twice a year, which ranged from $100,000 to $20 million.

Initially, Alameda and FTX were “very integrated,” Ellison said. They were run by the same team, from the same office. And when Alameda was scrounging for funds, Bankman-Fried told Ellison that FTX would be a good source of capital. The $65 billion line of credit Alameda Research had meant that it did not have to post collateral. There was no contract, and no written terms, she testified. It also wasn’t visible to FTX’s auditors — she’d raised the question with Bankman-Fried and he told her not to worry about it.

Alameda’s credit line — which was taken in increments of $100,000 to $10 million at a time — was used for trading. Using the effectively unlimited funds “allowed us to make profitable trades we couldn’t have made otherwise,” Ellison testified.

Customer funds were also used when Bankman-Fried bought back FTX shares from Binance, an early investor, in the summer of 2021. Bankman-Fried told Ellison it was “really important,” otherwise “Binance would do things to mess with FTX.” Ellison says she told him Alameda didn’t have the money. So Bankman-Fried took $1 billion of FTX customer funds to buy out Binance, the first time Ellison recalled an amount that large. It was Bankman-Fried’s decision, she said, as he was the CEO of FTX.

There was also the FTT token, which was created by Bankman-Fried and Wang. Alameda got its war chest — 60 percent to 70 percent of the initial supply — for free, while seed investors got FTT at 10 cents a coin, and FTT first listed at $1 a coin. Bankman-Fried felt that $1 per coin was psychologically important, Ellison said, and that he directed her to buy up FTT using Alameda if its price fell below a dollar.

FTT was one of several “Sam coins,” a nickname for tokens which Bankman-Fried was heavily involved in and owned a lot of, either personally or through Alameda. Those coins were almost certainly worth less than the value displayed on the balance sheet, because trying to sell them all at once would crater the prices. Bankman-Fried directed her to put those coins on the balance sheets Alameda showed to lenders, even though she felt it was “somewhat misleading.”

Alameda was also getting loans from outside lenders, such as Genesis, because when FTX started, there weren’t a lot of customer funds to borrow, Ellison testified. That was the basis of the worst of her testimony — and the spreadsheet from hell.

Ellison said she’d prepared the spreadsheet at Bankman-Fried’s request in the fall of 2021 and shared it with him. The point was risk analysis around paying back Alameda’s loans if they were abruptly recalled by Genesis, their lender. Bankman-Fried wanted to use $3 billion for venture investments, so Ellison was ballparking what that would do to Alameda’s risk. In the as-is scenario, if things went south, she figured there was a 30 percent chance they wouldn’t be able to meet the loan recalls. If Bankman-Fried used $3 billion to make investments, there was a 100 percent chance they couldn’t meet the recalls, even with FTX customer funds.

The problem here wasn’t really the math, which seemed pretty arbitrary. It was that Ellison’s calculations assumed Alameda could borrow $1.8 billion in normal dollars and $1.5 billion in crypto from FTX. The spreadsheet makes this clear with a row labeled “FTX borrows,” which Ellison said were customer funds.

Meanwhile, echoing Bankman-Fried and Ellison’s romantic relationship, FTX was keeping cozy private ties with Alameda yet publicly holding it at arm’s length. On January 14, 2022, Bankman-Fried tweeted, “We’re launching a $2b venture fund: FTX Ventures!” Those funds came from Alameda, Ellison testified. But Bankman-Fried didn’t want to go public with the source of the funds. He said he thought Alameda’s brand was less good, and he didn’t want his name associated with it. Alameda also bought Robinhood shares for Bankman-Fried, who moved them to a vehicle called “Emergent Fidelity Technologies” to avoid association with Alameda.

The day ended with a document that had been shared between Ellison and Bankman-Fried — with his comments appearing in bubbles along the main text. Ellison wrote she was worried about “both actual leverage and presenting on our balance sheet.” Bankman-Fried responded with a note: “Yup, and could also get worse.”

Things did, indeed, get worse.

Google Meet adds support for 1080p in group video calls

Illustration: The Verge

Google is enabling the ability to stream 1080p-quality webcam feeds during group calls for Workspace subscribers. The company first enabled the high-quality video feature back in April; however, it only worked during one-on-one sessions at the time. Now, the feature is extending to group calls on the web that include three or more participants.

To opt in to the new feature, participants who have Full HD (or better) webcams will need to turn it on by accepting a prompt that’ll automatically appear on the join screen. Once enabled, a 1080p icon will appear on the upper right of the video box to confirm it’s on. People in the meeting can view the higher-quality video if the enabled user is pinned or if the viewer has a large enough screen to see the higher-resolution video.

Settings for sending and receiving high-quality video can be set under Settings > Video on the web, and Google Meet will auto-adjust the quality if network bandwidth tightens.

*The prompt will appear before joining a meeting.*

The new update is available now for Workspace customers, including Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Starter, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, and Workspace Individual subscribers, according to Google. This time around, it appears that paying Google One users aren’t included, so they will have to settle for only one-on-one 1080p calls.

lundi 9 octobre 2023

Now X posts can lock replies to only allow comment from verified accounts

Image: The Verge

The latest turn in the Elon Musk-directed platform X, previously known as Twitter, is that users can now block unverified accounts from replying to their posts.

This change arrives about 11 months after Musk launched paid verification for Twitter Blue, apportioning blue checkmark labels to people willing to part with $7.99 per month. It also means it could be harder for those who don’t pay for the service (with the exception of accounts forced into verified status) to refute misinformation, which researchers report has continued to increase.

Screenshot of X on a mobile device showing a screen with options for who can reply to a new post, listing the choices of either everyone, verified accounts, accounts you follow, or only accounts mentioned. — The new menu for locking replies.

There’s an argument that limiting replies to accounts verified by payment, phone number, or perhaps even government ID could reduce harassment, trolling, and misinformation.

However, that argument is quickly undone, whether by the continued presence of bots with verified labels or a quick look at the current state of the platform. Since X already prioritizes replies from verified accounts, it’s easy to evaluate the quality of threads populated by paid checkmark posters. One response to X’s post announcing the feature’s availability, from “Dave the reply guy,” gleefully called it “pay to win mode.”

Unity Chief Resigns After Pricing Backlash

Unity Chief Resigns After Pricing Backlash John Riccitiello angered video game developers who use Unity’s software when he announced a new fee structure that could have significantly increased their costs.

The Pixel 8A is curvy and colorful in these first-look leaks

An unofficial render of the Pixel 8A. | Image: OnLeaks / Smartprix

Google just started selling its new $699 Pixel 8 and $999 Pixel 8 Pro, but a less expensive version is apparently already on the way: OnLeaks and Smartprix have teamed up again to offer unofficial renders of a roughly 6.1-inch Pixel 8A.

Like the Pixel 8, it’s a design with two rear cameras and a hole-punch selfie cam, and it’s curvy like the other new Pixel phones, too.

And you may not have to satisfy your curiosity with renders alone — because in September, Abhishek Yadav shared photos of this handset too:

Google Pixel 8a pic.twitter.com/nQMrucz5qv
— Abhishek Yadav (@yabhishekhd) September 21, 2023

Many journalists were a little skeptical about the images and the new rounded design last month — but the photos look almost identical to the leaked renders, and obviously Google did indeed go curvier with its new 8 and 8 Pro handsets.

It’s nice to see that Google is continuing to make its less expensive phone look premium; the company told Der Standard (via Android Central) that it’s not currently interested in producing a budget phone.

Both Yadav and Smartprix suggest the 8A will house the same Tensor G3 chip as its siblings, though it’s not clear if they have any inside info there. Given that Google’s gating Pixel 8 software features behind the Pro pricetag, I wonder what Google might hold back from the Pixel 8A?

The best Sonos speakers to buy right now

An image of the Sonos Roam and Sonos Move side by side. — *Sonos has a speaker for practically every price point.* | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Sonos has an ever-growing lineup, and after you’ve bought your first speaker, you’ll likely want to put one in every room.

Editor’s note: Amazon’s fall Prime Day event is less than a week away. If you were hoping to nab some deals before the event, however, we’ve put together a guide to the best early Prime Day deals you can already get.

Sonos has built out a large collection of smart speakers, soundbars, subwoofers, portable devices, and more. And we can’t forget about the many Symfonisk speakers that the company has released in partnership with Ikea. 2023 has seen the company introduce major new products including the Era 100 and Era 300, and more are on the way.

With such a broad portfolio of hardware at prices ranging anywhere from $120 to $899, picking the best Sonos speaker for your needs isn’t always as straightforward as it might seem. You probably have some idea of the category of speaker you want — soundbar, desk speaker, or something portable — but even then, it takes some narrowing down to land on the right product.

I’m The Verge’s audio reviewer and have closely followed Sonos over the last several years. I’ve also spent many, many hours listening to each of these devices, so I’ve got you covered when it comes to the right recommendations.

Best speaker for getting started with Sonos

Sonos landed on a successful formula for a smart speaker with the Sonos One. And with the Era 100, the company has improved upon the One in numerous ways. It’s very similar in size — still perfect for any desk, bedside table, or countertop — but the newer speaker is capable of stereo playback, while the One could only do mono (unless you had two of them in a stereo pair). The enhanced bass response is also instantly noticeable. Despite its relatively compact size, the Era 100 produces a full, nicely balanced sound signature.

Aside from better sound, the Era adds support for Bluetooth playback and line-in audio. The former makes it easier for friends to play music from their own devices when visiting, and the latter allows you to run a turntable through your Sonos system. That was previously a much pricier proposition and required either the Sonos Five or something like the Amp. It’s great to see it come to the entry-level tier.

A photo of the Sonos Era 100 speaker on a home office desk. — *The Era 100 is small enough to make for a great desk or countertop speaker.*

The Era 100 retains the One’s hands-free voice controls and smart assistant capabilities, but unfortunately, Google Assistant isn’t available on this speaker. Instead you’re left with Amazon Alexa and Sonos Voice Control. Sonos revamped the topside controls, so you get dedicated track controls and an indented bar for volume adjustments. The new entry-level Sonos speaker is slightly more expensive than the Sonos One was, but it adds enough new functionality to easily justify a price increase.

If you move around the house a lot throughout the day or find yourself outside, it might be worth considering the Sonos Move portable speaker as your starting point. It doesn’t sound quite as rich as the Era 100, but it packs plenty of volume and good overall audio quality into a speaker that you can carry wherever you need it.

Read my full review of the Sonos Era 100.

Best budget Sonos speaker

The Symfonisk lineup of speakers is jointly developed by Sonos and Ikea, and they can be a great entry point to the world of Sonos. There’s perhaps no better deal in the entire portfolio than the versatile bookshelf speaker, which sells for under $150. This stylish unit is great for so many different use cases: it’s a great option for anyone getting started with Sonos, delivering sound quality that’s basically on par with a Sonos One in a different form factor that some people might prefer. Remember that you can pair two bookshelf speakers together for stereo audio (or to use as surround speakers). Ikea sells plenty of accessories for it, including a floor stand and wall bracket.

A photo of the Ikea Symfonisk Bookshelf Speaker with bottles behind it. — *Ikea’s Symfonisk Bookshelf Speaker is a perfect choice for anyone new to Sonos.*

Best sounding Sonos speaker

What the Sonos Five lacks in smarts (there are no integrated mics on this product), it makes up for with pristine sound. Excluding soundbars, the Sonos Five is Sonos’ largest, most powerful speaker. Play some of your favorite tracks through the Five, and you’ll quickly come to understand why it ranks above the rest of the lineup in audio fidelity, detail, and overall performance. It’s among the very best standalone speakers on the market at its price point and will outclass any HomePod, Echo, or Nest Audio speaker you test alongside it. Pair two of them together in stereo, and your music will sound sublime; a pair of Fives can also be used as rear surrounds, though there are more affordable options for that scenario.

It also outperforms the Era 300 — at least when it comes to stereo playback. The newer speaker has a unique advantage with spatial audio music; the Five isn’t capable of playing Atmos mixes since it’s a traditional, stereo unit. But it still sounds better overall and especially when you crank the volume. If you care about lossless audio and getting the highest level of fidelity from your Sonos system, this is the company’s very best option.

A photo of a Sonos Five next to a record player on a wooden table. — *The Sonos Five offers the best sound quality of the company’s entire speaker lineup.*

Aside from its powerful, enveloping sound, the Five has one relatively unique hardware feature among the Sonos lineup: there’s a 3.5mm aux input that can be used for plugging in a record player or another audio device of your choosing. The only other Sonos devices with line-in functionality are the Amp and Port.

Best portable Sonos speaker

Sonos’ Move 2 isn’t “portable” in the same sense as the much smaller Roam, but it’s easy enough to lug around different rooms of your home or haul out to the backyard for a party. It’s a hefty little thing at over 6 pounds, but at least there’s a handle molded into the back of the speaker for easier carrying.

The second-generation Move offers substantial improvements compared to the original. Battery life has doubled to around 24 hours on a single charge. And the speaker now outputs proper stereo audio thanks to its dual tweeters. (The original Move was limited to mono.) The Move 2 includes support for line-in via USB-C, and you can now broadcast anything you’re playing over Bluetooth to the rest of your Sonos system — both features that the original lacked.

A photo of Sonos’ Move 2 portable speaker.

Sound-wise, the Move 2 might very well be Sonos’ best speaker dollar for dollar. It’s like an Era 100 that you can take anywhere, and this speaker is more than powerful enough to fill an outdoor patio area with sound. The revamped internals produce greater clarity and a fuller soundstage than the first-gen Move.

Sonos’ portable speakers have what’s called automatic Trueplay, meaning they use their own built-in mics to produce the best possible audio for whatever environment you’re using them in. Whenever the Move (or Roam) is picked up and put somewhere new, this process automatically happens in the background while you listen. Like the original Move, Sonos has made efforts to help the Move 2 last long into the future by offering a battery replacement kit that can be purchased when the included battery no longer holds a satisfactory charge.

Read my full review of the Sonos Move 2.

Best Sonos speaker for travel

The Sonos Roam is a small, lightweight Bluetooth speaker that’s easy to toss into your bag and bring anywhere or travel with. It also makes for a great bathroom speaker and can be placed throughout the home in areas that might be lacking audio coverage from your other Sonos devices. When used around the house, the Roam will play music over Wi-Fi just like your other Sonos speakers — and it has built-in mics for voice controls. Take it on the road, and it works like any Bluetooth speaker. And if you happen to own a turntable that supports Bluetooth, you can play your vinyl collection across your entire Sonos system by pairing the turntable with the Roam.

A photo of the Sonos Roam speaker on a kitchen counter. — *The Sonos Roam is far more portable than the Move and is easy to take anywhere.*

You can only expect so much from the tiny Roam in terms of sound quality. It outputs clean, detailed audio and can fill small rooms, but the bass and overall presence are no match for something like the Sonos Move or the Era 100. You can always link two Roams together for a more immersive stereo listening experience.

Read my full review of the Sonos Roam.

Best Sonos speaker for spatial audio

The Sonos Era 300 is a promising glimpse into the future of music. With six drivers inside (including an upward-firing speaker), it’s built to showcase spatial audio. Find the right Dolby Atmos track from Apple Music or Amazon Music and it can be a mind-blowing experience: you’ll really feel like music is coming from beyond the speaker’s relatively small footprint. The Era 300 bounces sound off your walls and ceiling to heighten immersion and give songs more dimensionality.

A photo of the Sonos Era 300 speaker on a home office desk. — *It’s a safe bet that the Era 300 doesn’t look like any other speaker you own.*

The Era 300 is also the only Sonos speaker that can deliver full Dolby Atmos audio — including height effects — when you use a stereo pair as rear surrounds for an Arc or Beam (Gen 2) soundbar. If you’re a home theater enthusiast, that perk alone could be enough to choose this speaker over the Sonos One SL, which would otherwise be my recommendation for rear surrounds.

But we’re still in the early days of spatial audio from streaming music services, and the quality of Atmos mixes can vary wildly from album to album. If you want to experience the best of what’s out there, the Era 300 is a worthwhile investment. But if you’re still mostly listening to stereo in 2023, the Five remains the way to go.

Read my full review of the Sonos Era 300.

Best Sonos soundbar

At $899, the Sonos Arc soundbar doesn’t come cheap. But this Dolby Atmos soundbar is a true powerhouse that will bring out the most from the latest Hollywood blockbusters or your Netflix streams. With 11 drivers in all (including two up-firing height speakers), the Arc delivers truly immersive home theater audio. The company has continued to improve its flagship soundbar with firmware updates that have focused on clearer dialogue and other enhancements.

An image of the front of the Sonos Arc soundbar with a TV in the background. — *The Sonos Arc is among the very best, most immersive soundbars on the market today.*

The Arc includes mics for voice assistants and smart speaker functionality, but you can optionally purchase the Arc SL from Costco if you’d prefer to go without them. If you’re serious about your home theater system and want the best, most powerful soundbar that Sonos offers, the Arc is the move. You’ll quickly get over the steep price once you hear it.

Read my full review of the Sonos Arc.

Best budget Sonos soundbar with Dolby Atmos

Stepping down to the mid-level Sonos Beam doesn’t mean you’ll be settling for lackluster sound. While it lacks proper up-firing height speakers for Dolby Atmos content, the second-gen Beam does an impressive job of virtualizing those channels in a way that’s convincing to your ears — especially in small- to mid-size rooms. The inclusion of eARC means you don’t have to worry about any lip sync issues when watching movies or audio delay while gaming.

An image of the Sonos Beam soundbar with a TV screen in the background. — *The Sonos Beam soundbar is a great option for getting Dolby Atmos without breaking the bank.*

While the second-gen Beam is similar in size and weight to the first, it features a perforated plastic grille instead of the hard-to-clean fabric of the original model. And priced at $449, it’s certainly easier on your wallet than the flagship Arc.

Read my full review of the Sonos Beam (Gen 2).

Best Sonos soundbar for a bedroom

With its optical-only design and no HDMI connection, the entry-level Sonos Ray is best suited for smaller rooms or secondary TVs. You don’t get any Dolby Atmos support with this $279 soundbar, and it doesn’t have a dedicated center channel for dialogue. Still, the Ray provides balanced, crisp audio and surprisingly big sound for its relatively small size.

A photo of the Sonos Ray soundbar next to a TCL TV. — *If you want a soundbar for the bedroom or a smaller apartment, the entry-level Sonos Ray makes a lot of sense.*

Bass output is limited compared to Sonos’ pricier soundbars, but if you’re looking for a simple solution that sounds good for both movies and music, the Ray isn’t a bad purchase. I’d recommend saving a bit more for the Beam if you have any plans to build out your home theater system with additional Sonos speakers, however.

Read my full review of the Sonos Ray.

Best Sonos subwoofer

If you want to unleash the full potential of any Sonos home theater setup, the Sub is an essential piece of kit. It’s got plenty of boom and floor-shaking power (if you want it) for those blockbuster action sequences, and the Sub also adds another layer of depth when you’re playing music through your system.

The Sub can either be positioned upright or laid flat on the floor; you can conveniently hide it under a couch, which can’t be said of the cylindrical Sub Mini. But there’s no denying that the best low-end rumble that Sonos offers comes at a stiff premium: the Sub costs $799, and sales on the subwoofer are rare to come by.

Best budget Sonos subwoofer

The Sub Mini can’t fully match the loudness of the full-size Sub, but it gets you surprisingly close — and for substantially less money. It’s also arguably more stylish, trading the dust-magnet glossy finish for a matte design. The Sub Mini’s reduced size makes it easy to place discreetly somewhere near your TV without calling much attention to the hardware itself.

Read my full review of the Sonos Sub Mini.

Most stylish Sonos speaker

The Symfonisk bookshelf speaker is a great deal, but it still looks like a speaker. If you’re looking to camouflage tech in your home so that it blends in with other decor, that’s where the Symfonisk picture frame speaker shines. When mounted on your wall, it looks like a piece of artwork — albeit with a power cord coming out of the bottom. If you don’t love the default pattern, Ikea sells a rotating variety of replacement art panels, including these colorful limited-edition ones.

A photo of the Ikea Symfonisk Picture Frame Speaker on a wall next to a guitar and concert poster. — *Not everyone likes gadgets clashing with their home decor, and the Symfonisk Picture Frame Speaker is a great option for them.*

Behind the front piece of art are Sonos drivers and waveguides that help distribute sound from the picture frame speaker throughout a room. There are many possibilities and potential use cases for this thing: you can mount two picture frame speakers together on the same wall for surround sound with any Sonos soundbar. And when the TV’s off, they fit into the room better than any traditional speaker can.

Read my full review of the Symfonisk Picture Frame speaker.

The best time to buy Sonos products

One unfortunate thing about Sonos gear is that it rarely goes on sale. Occasionally the company will discount some products, but if you want to save money, your best bet is to shop the Sonos certified refurbished store. I also recommend checking your closest Best Buy(s) for open box speakers; you can land some excellent deals this way, and the products often look brand new.

Is it worth buying older Sonos speakers?

In general, I advise people to stick to the current lineup of Sonos hardware. But there are exceptions. For example, the second-generation Play:5 and Sonos Five sound identical and offer the exact same features. The newer model has more processing power, but that’s not going to matter to your ears, is it? If you can find the older speaker for the right price, go for it. You might also want to hunt down past products if you’re trying to form a stereo pair. But when it comes to other devices like the Beam soundbar, the second-gen model offers substantially better sound. There’s ample reason to pick the latest revision.

What about the Amp and Port?

If you want to retrofit your existing passive speakers and bring them into your whole-home Sonos system, that’s where the $699 Amp comes in. Sonos also sells the cheaper $449 Port that you can link to a receiver or other audio equipment for the same end result. The big difference between them is power: the Amp offers 125 watts per channel, so it’s able to power floor-standing or bookshelf speakers that lack their own amplification.

Sonos and privacy

While Sonos offers a selection of voice-enabled smart speakers, the company is very privacy conscious. The new Era 300 and 100 both include two ways of turning off the built-in microphones: there’s a button on top that temporarily mutes them, and if you want to fully disable the mics, there’s a physical switch on the back of each speaker for doing so. Sonos also sells “SL” models of its Arc soundbar (a Costco exclusive), Sonos One, and Roam that do not include microphones. When using Sonos Voice Control, all requests are processed locally on-device and not sent to the cloud.

Update October 9th, 2:00PM ET: The buying guide has been updated to replace the original Sonos Move with the newer Move 2.

California governor signs ban on social media ‘aiding or abetting’ child abuse

California Gov. Gavin Newsom talks to reporters after Republican primary debate — Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1394, a law that would punish web services for “knowingly facilitating, aiding, or abetting commercial sexual exploitation” of children. It’s one of several online regulations that California has passed in recent years, some of which have been challenged as unconstitutional.

Newsom’s office indicated in a press release yesterday that he had signed AB 1394, which passed California’s legislature in late September. The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2025. It adds new rules and liabilities aimed at making social media services crack down on child sexual abuse material, adding punishments for sites that “knowingly” leave reported material online. More broadly, it defines “aiding or abetting” to include “deploy[ing] a system, design, feature, or affordance that is a substantial factor in causing minor users to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation.” Services can limit their risks by conducting regular audits of their systems.

As motivation, the bill text cites whistleblower complaints that Facebook responded inadequately to child abuse on the platform and a 2022 Forbes article alleging that TikTok Live had become a haven for adults to prey on teenage users. Prominent supporters include the child-focused nonprofit Common Sense Media. But like many other online regulations, it raises questions about unintended side effects, including encouraging sites to under-enforce rules to avoid “knowingly” encountering illegal material or over-enforce them and remove innocuous content. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick likened the bill to “a kind of mini-California FOSTA,” referring to the widely criticized federal law that punished web platforms for content advertising sex services.

Tech industry trade associations TechNet and NetChoice raised concerns about the bill, with NetChoice urging Newsom in September to veto it. “Unfortunately, in the legislature’s desire to decrease CSAM online it passed a bill that imposes liability in a manner inconsistent with the First Amendment,” said NetChoice vice president and general counsel Carl Szabo.

Even so, AB 1394 has gotten less attention than a number of other California internet laws. Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) sued in September over AB 587, which requires sites to formulate and post plans for addressing hate speech. And NetChoice, which issued successful challenges to Texas and Florida social media moderation bans, convinced a judge to block the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act as unconstitutional last month. The organization did not immediately confirm to The Verge whether it’s planning a similar challenge to AB 1394.

Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries

Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.