Everything you need to track your movies, music, books, and more

Everything you need to track your movies, music, books, and more

Illustration: William Joel / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 10, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, hooray! I’m so happy you’re here, and also, you can catch up on all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) We made it through 10 weeks! It’s been so fun to make this every week and to talk to you all about the cool stuff you’re into. Thanks for being part of the Installerverse (we’re gonna make that a thing, it’s gonna happen), and as always, tell me everything you think we can do to make it better!

This week, I’ve been reading about Marvel’s plan to fix its TV shows and all the wild testimony from the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, making lots of deranged art in the improved Bing Chat, watching the David Beckham documentary and debating many new hairstyles, asking all the teens if they actually love LinkedIn, and blocking out my weekend to see the Eras Tour movie as many times as possible.

This week, I also have for you a new flip phone, a big Roblox release, a new messaging app, some sneaky browser hacks, and oh so many ways to keep track of all your media. And a deal on some truly rad Verge merch!

As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What do you want to know more about? What awesome tricks do you know that everyone else should? What app should everyone be using? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you want to get every edition in your inbox a day early, you can subscribe here.

This week’s a really fun one. Let’s get into it.

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The Drop

• Omnivore. One of the best (and free and open-source) read-later apps got a bunch of updates this week — better highlighting, better text-to-speech — but I’m really into the upgraded browser extension, which makes organizing much easier. I tend to save a billion things and then never find them again, so a good tags system is a game-changer.
• The Verge’s dbrand collab. Yes, this is brazen self-promotion, but I just got the skin I ordered, and honestly, it looks awesome. We worked with dbrand on phone cases, skins, chargers, and more. And just for this weekend, just for us in the Installerverse (I told you we’re making this happen), if you use the code INSTALLER, you’ll get 15 percent off everything dbrand sells.
• How Do We Fix It? “The Polarization Series.” I’m new to this podcast but have been enjoying the three-episode arc on the current broken state of American politics, how we got here, and where we go next. I took a particularly large number of notes on the episode about whether social media is to blame.
• Space OS. The idea is super compelling: a personal, private computer in the cloud that is completely yours and not subject to the whims of app providers and social platforms. The reality of “a private thing in the cloud” is way more complicated, but the team behind Space OS has some really interesting ideas about how it should all work.
• Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul. A three-episode dive into the spectacular rise and brutal fall of the biggest name in e-cigs. You can see bits of everything from Juicero to Theranos and WeWork in this story, and the doc tells it well. (Fair warning: I was interviewed for this, and I’m in it a bit, but you can just fast-forward past those bits.)
• The Motorola Razr. I think flip phones are the future of phones. I really do. And so I’m psyched to see Motorola showing up with a flip phone designed to manage your relationship with your phone, and most importantly, it’s $699.99 — a lot cheaper than other flip phones we’ve seen. (I’m even seeing it on sale for $599.99 right now.) Yeah, I wish it had a bigger outer screen, but it’s nice to have options.
• Roblox for PlayStation. A long-overdue release, if you ask me, but still a big deal, especially as Roblox tries to become a platform for all ages and all uses. Forget what Meta’s building; Roblox is the company most trying to make the metaverse happen.
• The Fall of the House of Usher. Mike Flanagan’s horror shows have been a Netflix staple in recent years, and his latest (and maybe last) sounds like a fitting finale: truly bonkers but ultimately a lot of fun. And bonus: plenty of critiques of modern tech-forward life.
• ActivityPub for WordPress. This is a huge deal: it means anyone with a site on WordPress.com, which is an awful lot of people, can now automatically syndicate their stuff to Mastodon, Pixelfed, and the rest of the fediverse. I’m all in on the open web future of social, and this is a big step in that direction.
• Lightroom Ultra HDR. This is the good kind of HDR, the kind that actually makes your photos crisper and more lifelike, and now Lightroom’s Android app can work with it natively on your phone. For now, Ultra HDR is just for Pixel phones, but in general, Lightroom is an excellent app and a great step up from your typical smartphone editing app. (Also, check out all the wild AI stuff Adobe showed off at Max this week. I know we talk too much about “what is a photo,” but seriously. Everything’s different now.)

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Group project

Last week, I thought I’d try something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: see if we, as the whole Installerverse (it’s HAPPENING), could all work together to figure out the same thing. So I asked, what do you use to track all the stuff you want to read, watch, and listen to?

Oh, boy, did you all come through. Thanks so much to everyone who emailed and texted and DMed! I got a lot of great app recommendations, a bunch of truly wild hacky systems, some seriously elaborate spreadsheeting, and much more. So here, as best as I can summarize it all in one place, is how the whole Installer community does its media tracking.

• The overall favorite. Sequel was by far the most-recommended app in my inbox this week. It is sadly only for Apple devices, but folks love its design, the fact that it can track basically all kinds of media, its notifications for new stuff, the extra info it adds, and more. Oh, and good news: Romain Lefebvre, who makes Sequel, tells me version 2.1 is coming soon with even more stuff, and you can get in the TestFlight beta right now.
• The all-in-one apps. Sofa was probably the second most popular recommendation. Everybody also seems to love the design of Trakt, Play is a nifty up-and-comer, and Cronica has some fans, too.
• The media-specific apps. For movies, lots of people recommended Reelgood and JustWatch, and there was a lot of love for Letterboxd as well. For TV shows, Hobi seems to be a favorite, and SeriesGuide and TV Club both came up a few times, too. For book consumption, Goodreads seems to be the go-to, but StoryGraph got some love as well. For tracking music, MusicHarbor and MusicBox seemed to be the choices, though there are some Last.fm diehards out there, too. For video games, GameTrack was really the only one I heard about!
• Drop them in a link bucket. I heard from a few people who use bookmarking tools like Raindrop, into which you can just drop IMDb or YouTube or Amazon links. Others used Instapaper and Pocket for saving links.
• Make them tasks. A bunch of you are repurposing to-do list apps like Things, Todoist, and Microsoft To Do as ways to track this stuff — some have it in a big “Stuff to Consume” list; others have it separated by media type. One upside of this is that it can be collaborative: share a list with a partner or roommate, and everybody can add to it easily.
• Go to the source. I heard from folks who keep their to-watch list in IMDb, their shopping list in their Amazon account, their podcast recommendations in Overcast, and their music queue in their Spotify library. The goal, it seems, is just to dump everything where it’ll end up anyway.
• Just keep a list. Notion; Apple Notes; Evernote; Anytype; Bear; Obsidian; Capacities; Google Keep; OneNote; lots and lots of others. So many of you said the best thing to do is just write everything down somewhere — ideally, somewhere you’ll find it again — and be done with it.

A few other specific apps that people really liked: Mela for tracking recipes; Copilot for tracking finances; Discogs for managing physical music; Habitica for tracking habits.

And a special shoutout to the most impressive system I heard about this week, from someone who asked to be identified only as Stealth1248, which I’m just going to quote in its entirety:

“I’ve looked into some of the collector apps, but they are expensive and seem like a lot of work. The joy of an Excel spreadsheet is that it’s super easy to modify to contain whatever kind of information I want. I can sort things, categorize them, keep track of if I already own them or not, etc.

“I also set up a couple Microsoft Forms to add things to them. The reason for that is 2-fold. 1: Excel on mobile (while possible) is really hard to work with. Forms adjust far better to a small vertical screen. You can set up free fill answers, multi select questions, fields that require dates/times/numbers, and make certain questions mandatory (so I don’t forget to fill out a certain field of data) 2: You can export the results from Forms as rows in an Excel document, so this makes it easy to add them to the main spreadsheet when I have time to sit down on a real (aka large with a horizontal screen) computer. Each question becomes a column of the spreadsheet and each complete survey response becomes a row.”

Here’s what the resulting spreadsheet looks like:

I love it. I’d never manage to keep it up to date, but I love it. Thanks again to everyone who wrote in with recommendations and ideas, we’ll do something like this again really soon!

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Screen share

Every once in a while, I like to text Casey Newton just to see which note-taking app he’s using — because he seems to change his mind almost as often as I do and is just as willing to throw his life and hopes and dreams into anything that might help him do a little more a little more easily. And honestly, same. Casey gets it.

But on the other hand, Casey is also one of the most thoughtful internet users I know. If you’ve read his excellent Platformer newsletter or heard the delightful Hard Fork podcast, you know he’s deeply knowledgeable about how and why tech influences us. So I was curious to see what apps he uses, where they live, and how he thinks about his phone’s job in his life.

Here’s Casey’s homescreen (two of them, actually!), plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 15 Pro.

The wallpaper: “The system wallpaper that shows you where on earth you are. I don’t think it has a name.”

The apps: Todoist, Barry’s (lets you book Barry’s classes on the go, or even more importantly, cancel them when you’re hungover), Clock, Cron (actually the more I look at Cron, the more I miss Fantastical. What am I doing to myself here?), Stripe, Pocket, Messenger, Google, Google Maps, App Store, Settings, Overcast, Spotify, Phone, 1Password, Threads (Threads has felt much more lively over the past week, and I basically think it’s three or four big releases away from achieving escape velocity), ChatGPT, Messages, Gmail, Bear, Safari, Chrome, Dark Sky (I will never delete this app icon because it reminds me of what we lost. Valar morghulis), Day One, Holedown (it’s 400 years old, is never updated, and can fill absolutely any amount of time between 10 seconds and 90 minutes), Grindr, Mem, Ivory, Artifact, Poe, Bluesky, Lutron, Amie, Capacities (my new favorite note-taking app, and if you’re in the market for a place to do your personal knowledge management, you should absolutely check it out), Epik, and Bonk.

I also asked Casey to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he said:

• Artifact. This little AI newsreading app from the Instagram co-founders is shipping new features faster than any product on the consumer internet. I increasingly discover news there that I put in Platformer, and I always find something interesting that I haven’t seen before. I’m not totally sure where it’s going, but I know Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have huge plans for it, and I’m enjoying being along for the ride. One cool feature is that if you’re a writer, they send you push notifications when other people link to your stories. Which is always fun to see.
• Bonk. Bonk is the best new social network. You add friends and then “bonk” them, and every time you bonk, they get a separate notification telling them. So you can quickly take over someone’s entire phone with your horrible notifications, and every time you bonk, you get haptic feedback, and the Bonk app itself is taken over by the word Bonk. The best feature (aside from every other feature) is that there is a leaderboard that tells you which of your friends has bonked the most over the past few days. The funniest feature is that the app, which is still in beta, requires iOS 17 for reasons known only to the developer and to God. It also has the best URL for an app I have personally ever seen: bonkbonkbonk.app.
• ChatGPT. A mistake I made this year as a tech reporter was not immediately subscribing to ChatGPT Plus when GPT-4 became available. It turns out that if you’re only using 3.5, you really have no idea what is about to happen to all of us. GPT-4 makes many fewer mistakes and is better in every way at helping you think through subjects or analyze text than its predecessor. I assigned the voice-operated version of it to the Action Button on my new iPhone 15 Pro, so now I can talk to ChatGPT at the press of a button. It feels like getting a glimpse of the future.

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Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. And for way more great recommendations than I could include here, check out this Threads thread.

“Dex. It’s a ‘personal rolodex’ app: it lets you take notes about people in your life, set reminders to follow up, keep track of birthdays, and sync with Gmail / LinkedIn. For a freelancer, my memory skills leave much to be desired. It helps me remember details about conversations with people the next time we talk — both professionally and socially.” – Ryan

“Two recent excellent series, both on Apple TV Plus: Silo and Foundation.” – Dennis

“I use multiple browsers for different things, then I use BrowserFairy to automatically route apps and sites to specific browsers. For my newsletters and related things to read, I have BrowserFairy open Microsoft Edge. In Edge, I sync between devices, group tabs, and all the normal built-in-browser things Edge brings, especially vertical tabs (which is like Safari reader, just so much better).” – Brent

“Making a smart lamp using a Shelly RGBW and a custom firmware mod to get it to work with Apple Home. Probably a huge home network security risk, but it works. Also, too much Stardew Valley on Apple Arcade.” – Timothy

“After years of trying to warm up to GTD apps, with little success, I finally tried Agenda, and it really works for me. I’m not using it for note-taking (I have Apple Notes, Google Keep, and Obsidian for that). But the way it handles triaging to-dos and integrates with your calendar and Apple Reminders is really slick. It is loaded with features, looks beautiful, is constantly being updated, and has a unique paid tier that you can get via subscription or a one-time payment. But the free version is so good, most people will never need to pay. Finally, I’m GTD!” – David

“Just got Patrick Stewart’s new memoir, and I’m super excited to read it! I also got to see him during his book tour, which was amazing.” – Aaron

“Oh my god, I just got a Nitro Deck from CKRD, and it is absolutely my new favorite video game gadget. It’s a deck for the Switch, with Hall-effect joysticks, programmable rear bumpers, and a nice wide grip for big-handed folks like me that find the Joy-Cons cramped. I ordered the unit in GameCube purple and can confirm it is as righteous in person as it looks on the store.” – Nick

“The coolest thing I’ve seen recently, I don’t know how to share with anyone. It’s a movie called Hello Dankness that seamlessly cuts together everything from Napoleon Dynamite and Wayne’s World to Pen15 and RoboCop to create bizarre cross-world interactions and make a satirical commentary on the absurdity of the post-Trump political landscape. But because it’s basically a pirated work, I think you can only see it at film festivals and special screenings. Oh, and it has a bonkers trailer.” – Thomas

“I used iTunes exclusively until about 2018, and though it was bad software by the end, it did offer a music nerd a lot of things that Spotify and some of the others do not. There is an iOS app called Marvis, which has a pro version that offers many of those features. The rub is that it only works with Apple Music, but I’ve found that, for old iTunes holdouts, this isn’t much of a problem.” – John

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Signing off

A few days ago, on The Vergecast, I mentioned that one of the best phone accessories I’ve ever bought is a really long — mine is 10 feet — charging cable. I have one next to my couch and another next to my bed, and y’all, the freedom that comes from not having to lean over to be closer to my outlets!

But then, I got an email from Eric telling me how wrong I was. Here’s what Eric said: “I used to work at Apple retail, and when people would come in looking for longer charging cables, they would balk at the price — longer Lightning (at the time) cables were (are?) expensive! — and I would always recommend going to Target and looking at regular extension cables. Way more options (colors, lengths, thicknesses, cord styles, etc...) and often way cheaper. Can’t tell you how many folks came back in just to say thanks for the idea, just saved them $25. All this to say: David! Don’t buy a 10-foot Apple USB cable, buy an awesome 12-foot extension cable instead.”

I’ve done some looking, and Eric’s not wrong. There are some lovely, inexpensive extension cables out there (I searched “braided extension cable” and found lots of good ones), and they’re way more multifaceted than just having one long USB charger. Apparently, I’m going to redo all my charging stations again.

See you next week!

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LG’s desk-friendly C3 OLED has dipped below $1,000 for the first time

LG’s desk-friendly C3 OLED has dipped below $1,000 for the first time

LG’s 42-inch C3 OLED TV might not be big enough for your living room, but it will look great on your desk. | Image: LG

Welcome to the weekend, dear readers! Although we’ve spent the past week pummeling you with deals from Amazon’s fall Prime Day event — some of which are still available, to be sure — our Saturday roundup is mostly concerned with the discounts that have cropped up in the time since, starting with LG’s C3 OLED. Right now, you can grab the 42-inch model at Amazon for $921.48 (about $276 off).

Like the much-lauded C2 we reviewed last year, it’s hard to go wrong with LG’s brilliant C3 panel, regardless of what type of entertainment you watch. The TV features terrific picture quality and many of the same specs that made last year’s C2 such a great pick for gamers, including a 120Hz refresh rate and comprehensive HDMI 2.1 support, only with a brighter display and faster performance. It showcases a few interface refinements as well, one of which makes it a bit easier to set up the C3’s picture mode.

Admittedly, a 42-inch panel is certainly not the biggest, though the TV’s smaller stature also makes it a perfect desk companion if you want a glorified gaming monitor with perfect black levels. If not, the 65-inch model is also currently on sale at BuyDig with a $150 Visa gift card and an extended four-year warranty for $1,696.99 ($900 off).

Lego, not to be outdone by Amazon, also kicked off a pre-holiday sale this week, slashing prices on an assortment of Verge-approved sets we’ve only seen on sale a few times before. There are about 80 discounted sets in total, including both busts and bird nests, but we want to specifically call out the Atari 2600 and the Hulkbuster.

The first is a 2,532-piece replica of the Atari’s iconic console — the 1980 revision, mind you, not the original from 1977 — while the latter is a “hulking” 4,000-piece set that pays tribute to Iron Man’s Mark XLIV armor from the Infinity Saga films. The former is currently on sale for $191.99 ($48 off) while the latter is down to $384.99 ($165 off), which are some of the best prices we’ve seen on either Lego set.

Other weekend deals and discounts

• If you could use a travel charger, Zendure’s fantastic SuperTank Pro is on sale at Amazon for $137.99 ($92 off) when you clip the on-page coupon for 40 percent off. It has a 26,800mAh capacity, up to 100W charging, and four USB-C ports, along with an info-dense OLED panel that shows the remaining battery life and charging speeds of all your devices. Read our review
• Apple’s Mac Mini is on sale at B&H Photo right now in its base configuration with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage for $499 ($100 off), matching a deal we saw in August. The latest model features a wide port selection, Wi-Fi 6E, and the same speedy M2 processor as the latest 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, which makes it a competent little desktop machine so long as you’re prepared to BYO monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Read our review.
• The newer OnePlus Buds Pro 2 are available for $129.99 ($50 off) from Amazon and OnePlus, which marks their second-best price to date. The flagship wireless earbuds check quite a few boxes — ANC, multipoint, you name it — and supposedly offer both better sound and battery life than the original model. They even feature head-tracked spatial audio when used with the OnePlus 11.
• The 128GB Google Pixel Tablet, which is one of the better Android slates you can pick up right now, is down to $419.99 ($80 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and the Google Store. It doesn’t reinvent the tablet by any means, but it comes with a nice 11-inch display, fast-enough performance, and a magnetic speaker dock that ensures it’s always ready to go when you need it. Read our review.
• We are in the very throes of spooky season, y’all. Thankfully, if you have yet to get in on the Halloween fun, Arkham Horror The Card Game is currently on sale at Amazon for $24 ($21 off). The cooperative title is a little complex at first, but once you grasp the various role-playing elements and overall flow, the Lovecraftian game takes on a life of its own.

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Apple’s new video reactions are making therapy incredibly awkward

Apple’s new video reactions are making therapy incredibly awkward

This may not be what you want to see during a video therapy session. | Image: Apple

SimplePractice, a company that offers a telehealth platform, is warning patients about Apple’s new video reactions feature that might let people unintentionally add heart emoji or virtual fireworks during a telehealth video call. Awkward.

As shown in a Mastodon post by Matt Haughey — who says he had a friend who saw the fireworks on a therapy call after giving a thumbs up in response to a question from his therapist — SimplePractice is notifying patients that Apple devices “may show emojis during video calls” and that SimplePractice doesn’t have control over the settings. SimplePractice also discusses the reactions in an FAQ and has instructions on how to turn reactions off on both iOS and macOS.

The video reactions are a big new feature for iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, which Apple officially released in September. When the reactions are enabled — and they’re enabled by default — you can use hand gestures to make certain emoji and animations appear. Making a heart shape adds the hearts, for example, while two thumbs up set off the virtual fireworks. There are eight possible reactions you can activate with your hands.

The reactions are theoretically a useful way to add something a little extra to a video call. But during certain situations (like, say, a video therapy session or an important litigation call), you probably don’t want to see those reactions at all. The reactions all use relatively common hand gestures — things like a single thumbs up, thumbs down, and two peace signs all do different reactions, too — so it’s easy to see how people might activate the reactions by accident. And since the reactions are enabled by default, people may end up triggering them without knowing that it was possible to do so.

Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

If you want to turn the gesture-based reactions off, here’s how to do it. On iOS, open up the FaceTime app, access the Control Center (on Face ID iPhones, you can get to it from a swipe down from the top-right corner, while on Touch ID iPhones, it’s a swipe up from the bottom of the screen), tap the “Video Effects” option in Control Center, and then tap “Reactions.” On macOS Sonoma, open the FaceTime app, click the FaceTime icon in the menu bar, and then click on “Reactions.”

Google tests adding a Discover Feed to its valuable desktop homepage

Google tests adding a Discover Feed to its valuable desktop homepage

Illustration: The Verge

Google is experimenting with the inclusion of a Discover Feed on its desktop homepage that shows recommended content alongside the company’s traditional search box. A screenshot from MSPowerUser, which spotted the change, shows a feed that includes news headlines, a weather forecast, sports scores, and stock information for a trio of companies. The search giant previously added the Discover Feed to its US homepage on mobile devices in 2018,

A Google spokesperson confirmed the change in a statement given to The Verge, noting that it’s an experiment that’s currently being run in India. Any change to google.com is significant as it continues to be the world’s most visited website.

Image: MSPowerUser

A screenshot of the feature published by MSPowerUser.

The search giant has experimented with its desktop homepage before. Last year 9to5Google spotted it testing a row of widget-like cards on its desktop homepage showing a similar mix of news stories, weather forecasts, and stock information. However, it’s unclear how widely the feature was rolled out, and it’s not appearing for me in the UK as of this writing.

As MSPowerUser points out, Google’s experimental interface looks similar to what Microsoft offers on its search engine Bing, which already contains a long list of news stories and other information. I’ll always have a fondness for the simplicity of Google’s traditional interface, but I have to admit I now barely visit the search engine’s homepage after over a decade of being able to search directly from my browser’s address bar.

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Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators

Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge

Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard has been approved by UK regulators. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has concluded that the deal can proceed after Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft. The decision clears the way for the deal to close now that the UK regulator has given the green light.

“The CMA has decided to give Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) consent to acquire Activision Blizzard, Inc. (Activision) (the Parties) excluding Activision’s cloud streaming rights outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) (the Merger) subject to the condition that the sale of Activision’s cloud streaming rights completes prior to completion of the Merger,” reads a statement from the CMA.

We’ve cleared the new deal for Microsoft to buy Activision without cloud gaming rights.

In August, Microsoft made a concession that would see Ubisoft, instead of Microsoft, buy Activision’s cloud gaming rights.

Read more: https://t.co/Z4scLEJFy0

1/2 pic.twitter.com/gmqwZsOOFi

— Competition & Markets Authority (@CMAgovUK) October 13, 2023

The CMA describes Microsoft’s concession as a “gamechanger that will promote competition” in the growing cloud gaming market. “With the sale of Activision’s cloud streaming rights to Ubisoft, we’ve made sure Microsoft can’t have a stranglehold over this important and rapidly developing market,” says Sarah Cardell, CEO of the CMA. “As cloud gaming grows, this intervention will ensure people get more competitive prices, better services and more choice. We are the only competition agency globally to have delivered this outcome.”

Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith says the company welcomes the CMA’s decision. “We have now crossed the final regulatory hurdle to close this acquisition, which we believe will benefit players and the gaming industry worldwide,” says Smith in a message on X (formerly Twitter).

We’re now awaiting news from Microsoft about the finalization of the acquisition. The Verge reported last week that Microsoft was getting ready to close its Activision Blizzard deal today, Friday October 13th.

We’re grateful for the CMA’s thorough review and decision today. We have now crossed the final regulatory hurdle to close this acquisition, which we believe will benefit players and the gaming industry worldwide.

— Brad Smith (@BradSmi) October 13, 2023

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick emailed all employees today announcing the news. “We now have all regulatory approvals necessary to close and we look forward to bringing joy and connection to even more players around the world,” said Kotick. “We’re excited for our next chapter together with Microsoft and the endless possibilities it creates for you and for our players.”

The CMA’s decision comes months after the regulator initially moved to block Microsoft’s deal in April over cloud gaming concerns. Microsoft appealed that decision with the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), but both parties put that process on hold in July to make way for Microsoft’s restructured deal that was designed to address the concerns. After successful discussions with the CMA, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard agreed to extend their merger agreement deadline to October 18th.

The Xbox maker originally announced the deal in January 2022, and has faced close scrutiny from regulators ever since — including an FTC v. Microsoft case that revealed plenty of Xbox secrets. The Federal Trade Commission is still appealing its failure to secure a preliminary injunction to block Microsoft’s deal, with a decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals due in December.

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

Cloud gaming is a growing market for Microsoft and others.

As the FTC doesn’t have a preliminary injunction in place, Microsoft is now clear to close its proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition ahead of the deal deadline. The closure will bring to an end a 20-month process of regulatory approvals and battles, and comes months after EU regulators approved the deal thanks to additional concessions from Microsoft.

Microsoft’s obligations to the European Commission will allow consumers in EU countries to stream via “any cloud game streaming services of their choice” all current and future Activision Blizzard PC and console games that they have a license for.

Microsoft has made several cloud gaming deals to license Activision Blizzard content, and the company’s restructured deal means it won’t control the cloud gaming rights to Activision Blizzard outside of EU markets. Ubisoft will acquire these rights for a period of 15 years, allowing the publisher to license titles back to Microsoft to be included in Xbox Cloud Gaming.

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EU is formally investigating X over content about the Israel-Hamas war

EU is formally investigating X over content about the Israel-Hamas war

Illustration by Laura Normand / The Verge

The European Union (EU) has formally opened an investigation into X, the platform previously known as Twitter, to ensure it’s complying with the Digital Services Act (DSA) following Hamas’ attack on Israel in early October and subsequent Israeli air assault on Gaza. According to the request, this comes after “indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech.”

Earlier this week, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton sent a letter to X owner Elon Musk alleging that the platform is “being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU.”

The EU is requesting that X provide information related to its investigation by October 18th. Investigators are reportedly asking X on what the company’s protocols are during crisis situations, according to the Financial Times. In his letter from earlier this week, Brenton noted the media has widely reported misleading imagery on X that includes previous armed conflicts as well as doctored ones.

The probe at X is the first under the new DSA, the Financial Times says. Under the law, tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, which operate “very large online platforms” with millions of users, can be held liable for content that’s illegal in the EU. The commission could, in serious cases, impose fines of up to six percent of global revenue.

Brenton also sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, similarly urging his company to remove illegal content and “to be very vigilant to ensure strict compliance with the DSA rules.”

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

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

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.

In Cohen’s disorganized cross-examination, he mostly bored the jury

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.

Apparently, Alameda had a problem with retaining accountants

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.)

At one point, Ellison appeared to even be toying with Cohen

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.

In the recording, Ellison did indeed confess to stealing customer funds with Bankman-Fried’s approval

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

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.

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

The Fitbit app has been having some issues for hours

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.”

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

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

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

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

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.

Crunchyroll is a service best used on your phone

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

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.

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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.”

“What I am pretty clear about is ... less of a focus on the specific platform that is podcasting.”

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.

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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.

Death, Sex & Money’s potential cancellation reflects the uncertainty of the podcast industry itself

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.

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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.

NYPR says this isn’t the end of standalone podcasts

“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

T-Mobile is pushing some unlimited customers onto pricier plans

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

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.

Image: MSPowerUser

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.

The Verge Guide to Amazon’s October Prime Day event

The Verge Guide to Amazon’s October Prime Day event

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

Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend

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.

“We ultimately took about $14 billion, some of which we were not able to pay back.”

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.

Bankman-Fried called this being “risk-neutral,” which seems like a fancy way of saying he was a gambling addict

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.

Using the effectively unlimited funds “allowed us to make profitable trades we couldn’t have made otherwise.”

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.

FTT was one of several “Sam coins”

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.

Echoing Bankman-Fried and Ellison’s romantic relationship, FTX was keeping cozy private ties with Alameda yet publicly holding it at arm’s length

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

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.

GIF: Google

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.

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

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.

Image: X

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

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.

Image: OnLeaks / Smartprix

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?