Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge A Reddit user posted a screenshot overnight of a Spotify search that brought a surprise: a pornographic video tucked into suggested results for the rapper M.I.A. Here’s a NSFW link to the thread. The video shown in their screenshot didn’t appear for us, but we found others after scrolling through dozens of results in the “Video” tab.One of the accounts that posted videos we saw has published erotic audio for years but has sprinkled in sexually graphic videos more recently. Another account, which was named with a long string of alphanumeric characters, has been publishing equally nonsensically-titled explicit videos as a podcast account since mid-November. Spotify representative Laura Batey told The Verge in an email that the examples we provided “have been removed due to violation of our policies.” Those policies include forbidding sexually explicit material. We asked Spotify for more information on how the videos made it past its moderation and will update here if it responds. The videos we found appear to be unmoderated podcast uploads, and reporting them isn’t very convenient. The Spotify app lacks a button for doing so — instead, users have to copy the content’s URL and head to a webpage for reporting possible violations.Porn on Spotify isn’t a new thing. Other recent Reddit posts contain examples of unexpected explicit video in search results and even erotic audio tracks being suggested in one user’s Discovery Weekly algorithmic playlist. A 2022 Vice story also detailed sexually explicit audio on the platform, as well as other content like graphic nudity in user-made playlist cover art.

Windows 11 is awful in many ways. There is no denying it, and one of the main reasons is all the ads. Microsoft seems completely focused on stuffing Windows 11 with features designed to steal your attention or trick you into using their products instead of what you actually want. From the moment you boot up a new Windows laptop and open Edge to download Chrome, you are met with ads urging you to choose Microsoft’s offerings.

Obsidian has become a haven for note-takers and knowledge workers seeking a powerful, flexible, and interconnected system. However, when you have hundreds of notes stored in other services like OneNote or Evernote, transferring them manually to Obsidian can be a daunting task. Here is where Obsidian’s Importer plugin comes into play.

If you're a developer, you should be intimately familiar with Git. It's the essential tool for software engineers, but is also hugely useful for just about anyone. Git is a version-controlling system for software and other text-based documents and files, which allows you to modify and make changes with a full history and branching system, among plenty of other great features (which are all explained elsewhere, far better than I ever could). If you're a homelabber, Git can be great for managing your configurations.

iOS 18 introduced an “Enhanced Visual Search” toggle for the Photos app. | Screenshot: iOS 18 Settings app Apple occasionally makes choices that tarnish its strong privacy-forward reputation, like when it was secretly collecting users’ Siri interactions. Yesterday, a blog post from developer Jeff Johnson highlighted what feels like such a choice: an “Enhanced Visual Search” toggle for the Apple Photos app that is seemingly on by default, giving your device permission to share data from your photos with Apple.Sure enough, when I checked my iPhone 15 Pro this morning, the toggle was switched to on. You can find it for yourself by going into the Photos settings on your phone (through the iOS Settings app) or a Mac (in the Photos app’s settings menu). Enhanced Visual Search lets you look up landmarks you’ve taken pictures of or search for those images using the names of those landmarks.To see what it enables in the Photos app, swipe up on a picture you’ve taken of a building and select “Look Up Landmark,” and a card will appear that ideally identifies it. Here are a couple of examples from my phone: Screenshots: Apple Photos That’s definitely Austin’s Cathedral of Saint Mary, but the image on the right is not a Trappist monastery, but the Dubuque, Iowa city hall building. On its face, it’s a convenient expansion of Photos’ Visual Look Up feature that Apple introduced in iOS 15 that lets you identify plants or, say, find out what those symbols on a laundry tag mean. But Visual Look Up doesn’t need special permission to share data with Apple, and this does.A description under the toggle says you’re giving Apple permission to “privately match places in your photos with a global index maintained by Apple.” As for how, there are details in an Apple machine-learning research blog about Enhanced Visual Search that Johnson links to:The process starts with an on-device ML model that analyzes a given photo to determine if there is a “region of interest” (ROI) that may contain a landmark. If the model detects an ROI in the “landmark” domain, a vector embedding is calculated for that region of the image. According to the blog, that vector embedding is then encrypted and sent to Apple to compare with its database. The company offers a very technical explanation of vector embeddings in a research paper, but IBM put it more simply, writing that embeddings transform “a data point, such as a word, sentence or image, into an n-dimensional array of numbers representing that data point’s characteristics.” Like Johnson, I don’t fully understand Apple’s research blogs and Apple didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment about Johnson’s concerns. It seems as though the company went to great lengths to keep the data private, in part by condensing image data into a format that’s legible to an ML model. Even so, making the toggle opt-in, like those for sharing analytics data or recordings or Siri interactions, rather than something users have to discover seems like it would have been a better option. Correction December 29th: An earlier version of this story misstated the location of the Enhanced Visual Search toggle. It is in iOS Settings under Apps > Phone and in Photos > Settings in the macOS Photos app. The headline was also made clearer.

Adrien Brody in The Brutalist | A24 Brady Corbet’s 3.5-hour saga is a tale of one man’s journey through architecture and assimilation — and one of the year’s best films. The director tells The Verge how he got away with it. Read the full story at The Verge.

Building your own custom Windows ISO is a great project for anyone who wants a clean, easily repeatable Windows PC setup. You can tweak your ISO for everything from minimal telemetry and improving privacy settings, to preinstalling your favorite apps, setting up network connections, making user profiles, and more. It's a truly personal experience, and you can put as much or as little of your normal Windows setup process into your ISO image as you'd like. Having your own image is also a good thing to store on your emergency USB with multiple ISO images, allowing you to set up your own personal flavor of Windows anywhere (or when helping family and friends set up their machines).

While PowerPoint is the de facto choice for creating presentations, it goes far beyond endless bullet points and dull meetings. It’s a secret weapon for unleashing your creativity. In this post, I will show you the creative side of PowerPoint, where slides transform into canvases for visual storytelling and design.

Thanks to their affordable price tags, low energy consumption, and compact size, Single Board Computers are great for projects where you don’t need the latest and greatest pixel-pushing hardware. Building a NAS is one such project, and with enough external drives, you can have a reliable file-sharing and backup server running on top of your tiny SBC. So, here’s a guide to help you put together a budget-friendly NAS server using an SBC, some USB drives, and the lightweight OpenMediaVault package.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images With rumors of Nvidia entering the CPU market, 2025 might be an even bigger year for Microsoft’s Arm efforts. Read the full story at The Verge.

Waiting for Nvidia to release the price of the GeForce RTX 5090 is kind of like getting an injection. You know it's going to sting, but all you can do is wait with your teeth clenched and your eyes closed. While Nvidia won't dare reveal the price point until CES 2025 at the very earliest, there have been hints of how much it may cost. Now, a Chinese retailer has leaked a price point, and even though I know it would be quite costly, I'm still grimacing at the sound of it.

It's always a great idea to recycle your plastic bottles, but how about using them for your own needs? If you go through PET bottles like crazy and your recycling heap is a mountain of plastic, you may be interested in this cool project that can turn them into 3D printer filament. And while it's still at the crowdfunding stage, it's already shaping up to be something amazing.