Image: The Verge X says it will hire 100 full-time employees for a new trust and safety office in Austin, Texas, according to a Saturday report by Bloomberg. The plan comes, as the article notes, just a few days before CEO Linda Yaccarino’s scheduled January 31st hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding X’s handling of child sexual exploitation moderation.The team would reportedly focus mainly on CSE and would be the first proper trust and safety team since Elon Musk gutted it shortly after purchasing the platform formerly known as Twitter. X updated a blog post about its CSE moderation approach to mention the new office yesterday, as well, though it doesn’t reveal what the new team will be doing, nor when the office will open. The... Continue reading…

When you start counting all the different Windows 11 editions, the list keeps getting longer. For starters, there are typical consumer-focused SKUs such as Home and Pro, while Pro for Workstations and Enterprise variants are tailor-made for business environments. The Education and Enterprise editions, on the other hand, are aimed at businesses. Hence, the probability of stumbling upon one of those on your friend's gaming PC is next to none.

Samsung’s newest flagship, the S24 Ultra, comes with a massive 6.8 inch display. Although it is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 3, you still need to apply a screen protector in order to retain the screen’s current mint condition, as well as protect it from drops. That said, not every protector out there is the right one. Based on our research, we’ve picked up some of the finest screen protectors for S24 Ultra available as of now. Give them a read to find the right one for your device!

Image: The Verge Many of us are hyperaware of the multitude of ways we can be tracked with modern technology, so you may feel like you don’t need to add another to the mix. But knowing the whereabouts of trusted friends and family can be useful a lot of the time, and it’s something you can do from your Android phone.It’s worth saying at the start that you stay in control of who can see you and when — and you can stop location sharing at any time if someone in your life goes from being trusted to distrusted. I’ve used this many times to figure out where to meet someone or to check when guests are going to arrive so I know exactly how much time I’ve got left to tidy up. It can be helpful for parents, too, to know their kids are safe and where they’re... Continue reading…

When it comes to AI tools, there are few as well-known as Microsoft Copilot. It's a branding that initially started under Github Copilot back in 2021 as an AI coding tool, though it later entered the mainstream when Bing Chat was rebranded. Now, Copilot is in lots of places and coming to more, but honestly, it feels like Microsoft doesn't know exactly what to do with it.

Nomad’s minimalist Base One Max 3-in-1 is on sale for $95. | Image: Nomad Fancy phone chargers are nice, but they’re often too expensive to justify the cost. Nomad’s Base One Max 3-in-1 is one of those rare unicorns that delivers a lot of value for your money, however, thus making it worth the splurge. After all, the device can simultaneously charge a MagSafe-compatible phone, your Apple Watch, and a pair of AirPods (or another Qi-compatible device) — that’s something not even Nomad’s forthcoming Qi2 charger can do. What’s even better is that Nomad is currently selling the hefty, MagSafe-certified charger in both black and silver for its Black Friday price of $95 ($55 off).Designed with metal and glass, Nomad’s minimalist slab will look slick on any desk or bedside table. It’s also powerful, delivering up to... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft released a new Canary test build for Windows yesterday that brings the company’s Voice Clarity feature, which previously only worked on Surface devices, to all Windows machines, including those using ARM CPUs. The company says in a blog post that the feature uses “low complexity AI models” to filter out background noise, echo, and reverberation in real-time. If Voice Clarity works well enough, its obvious best use case is to make Zoom or Teams meetings less insufferable — after all, how many times have you found yourself lost because someone is giving a presentation while standing 10 feet away from a laptop, their voice awash in a sea of reverb or echo? Or been unable to concentrate on what you’re saying because your every... Continue reading…

It's an exciting time in the smartphone world, especially with AI becoming the new big thing. Last year, Google first announced the AI features in Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. This year, Samsung has done a fine job with the Galaxy AI in the latest S24 series. But, there are more contenders in the game now, including OnePlus. The latest OnePlus 12 is a top-tier machine packed with several AI features, the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and an outstanding design too. The competition is just starting to get real over here. But, the real question stands: Did Google just lose this competition with the announcement of OnePlus 12? Explore more on this question with our detailed comparative guide below, which would also help you pick the right device.

The Jamstik Classic. For many years now, my Stratocaster has been a memento hanging on my wall representing the time before I got a MacBook. I swapped my electric guitar out for a 25-key keyboard controller and a library of virtual instruments once my career headed to podcasting. In Logic Pro or Ableton, the Stratocaster could only sound like a Stratocaster, but the MIDI keyboard could be anything I needed it to be for my music or sound design work.But recently, I bought a new guitar that offers those very same strengths: Jamstik’s Classic MIDI Guitar, which has brought my unused fretboard skills back into the digital audio workstation (DAW), with almost as much flexibility as the musical keyboard.The Jamstik Classic is a fully traditional electric guitar... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge X appears to have blocked searches for Taylor Swift as a reaction to a recent trend of graphic AI fakes of the world-famous recording artist being posted to the site. Right now, if you search “Taylor Swift” or “Taylor Swift AI” on X, formerly Twitter, you may see a “Something went wrong” message. After Platformer’s Casey Newton posted about the apparent block, we tried some other searches. If X is intentionally blocking searches for illicit AI-generated images of Swift, it doesn’t seem to have gotten very far.That’s because if you run into a blocked search term and decide to put the barest amount of effort into trying something else, you’ll get around it. “Taylor AI Swift” or simply putting quotation marks around her name both returned... Continue reading…

If you have a Windows 11 machine that you've been unable to use Microsoft Copilot on, this may be because you live in the European Union (EU). I recently sat down to figure out why I didn't have Copilot (to be honest, I wasn't too bothered about it up until now), and it turned out that it wasn't a problem with my PC, but rather, with my region. There are ways to use a run command to get around this restriction, but I wanted to make it as seamless as possible, as the feature had already rolled out to me.

Still frame from a teaser reel of Lumiere clips | Image: Google Google’s new video generation AI model Lumiere uses a new diffusion model called Space-Time-U-Net, or STUNet, that figures out where things are in a video (space) and how they simultaneously move and change (time). Ars Technica reports this method lets Lumiere create the video in one process instead of putting smaller still frames together. Lumiere starts with creating a base frame from the prompt. Then, it uses the STUNet framework to begin approximating where objects within that frame will move to create more frames that flow into each other, creating the appearance of seamless motion. Lumiere also generates 80 frames compared to 25 frames from Stable Video Diffusion.Admittedly, I am more of a text reporter than a video person, but... Continue reading…