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.

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.

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.

The DJI Flip is expected to fly nearly twice as long as the DJI Neo, pictured here. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge New images of the rumored DJI Flip folding drone hit late last week, showing the compact, light-colored drone both folded and unfolded, and even in a carrying case. The images appeared in posts by Igor Bogdanov, who has shared other credible DJI leaks in the past.Bogdanov added in a post yesterday that DJI is preparing a new Cellular Dongle 2 module for the compact drone. The new leaks join earlier images of ND filters for the Flip, its propeller set, and charging hub, which Bogdanov wrote can charge two batteries in a minimum of 45 minutes, and can use “a 65W parallel charger.” Oh, how. Flip gonna have a Cellular Dongle 2. #dji #djiflip pic.twitter.com/CbpZpnSHj0— Igor Bogdanov (@Quadro_News) December 28, 2024Below are some of the other pictures Bogdanov posted, including of its front screen, which drone leaker Jasper Ellens notes shows “all the handsfree Quickshots we know from the Neo.” Ellens posted a short video of the drone yesterday, writing that the Flip’s registration numbers put it in DJI’s FPV drone category, meaning that it could allow for first-person streaming during flight. In early December, he also leaked details like the drone’s compact folding approach and that it should get about 30 minutes of flight thanks to a battery that’s bigger than the one in DJI’s Neo selfie drone.Fun fact. The #DJIFLIP product numbers are registered under the #FPV product line of DJI. This drone will be a #hybrid in many ways. I wish you all happy holidays and see you in the new year. Thank you for reading. Fly safe, stay safe. Cheers! Jasper pic.twitter.com/csGagm0U2M— Jasper Ellens | X27 (@JasperEllens) December 28, 2024

While Excel is an ideal software for creating and managing databases, it may not be easy to navigate when dealing with thousands of rows and columns. Here is where Power Pivot comes in, since it can be a game-changer for anyone dealing with massive datasets. It offers a powerful engine for analyzing big databases without the need for expensive, specialized software.

Karaoke is my jam, and I know a few friends who feel the same way. But here’s the catch: we don’t always want to leave the house to sing our hearts out. Imagine having a karaoke machine right at home! It would be an absolute blast, bringing endless fun and entertainment to everyone, from solo singers to families and friends. With a karaoke machine, you can sing your heart out without worrying about scheduling or location. It’s like having your own personal karaoke party anytime, anywhere!

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.

There are lots of great M.2 SSDs to choose from if you're looking to upgrade your Steam Deck or other PC gaming handheld. Luckily, with this Western Digital SN770M, you don't need to sacrifice, as it delivers excellent speeds at a fantastic price. Right now, you can grab the 1TB model for just $83, which is 10% below its original retail price.

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.

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.

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge YouTube is testing a new floating “Play something” button that will pick a video for you, 9to5Google spotted in the YouTube app for Android. The button floats just above the bottom bar of the app, and when tapped, it picks a YouTube video to play for you.Just as in earlier versions of this feature YouTube’s been testing, the new button reportedly uses the portrait-oriented YouTube Shorts player to show videos, regardless of whether they’re vertically formatted Shorts or standard YouTube videos. Hopefully that changes by the time the feature gets a wide release.Other incarnations the company has been testing for over a year include a “Play Something” banner and a simple button that looks like a black-and-white YouTube logo. If the feature’s name sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because Netflix retired a similar random video picker last year called “Surprise Me,” which originally launched in 2021 as “Play Something.”

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.