Major artists like Swift have been removed from TikTok. | Photo by Buda Mendes/TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Universal Music Group (UMG) has started removing the music catalogs of performers the label represents — including Taylor Swift, Drake, and Olivia Rodrigo — from TikTok after negotiations to renew licensing agreements broke down this week. The previous licensing agreement between UMG and TikTok expired on January 31st. On Tuesday, UMG accused the video platform of attempting to bully it into accepting a “bad deal” that didn’t soothe the record labels' concerns regarding adequate compensation for artists and songwriters, protections against AI-generated music, and online safety on the platform to protect artists from “hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment.” TikTok responded saying that it was “disappointing” that UMG had “chosen... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge During the roughly 40-minute presentation, expect to hear new info on Rise of the Ronin, Death Stranding, Sonic Generations, Judas, and more. Continue reading…

Image: Konami Silent Hill, the town in desperate need of a city council or something, showed up during PlayStation’s State of Play in a big way with two new trailers and a stealth drop of a new, free-to-play game.The first game was the debut of Silent Hill: The Short Message, an all-new entry in the Silent Hill franchise. According to PlayStation’s blog, The Short Message is a short, experimental, free-to-play game meant to introduce newcomers to the joys of that idyllic foggy city. Though the name was only just revealed, details on The Short Message including screenshots and the names of the main characters — Anita and Maya — were leaked in 2022. Based on the trailer below, the leaks were accurate.After The Short Message, Konami showed off a new... Continue reading…

The Apple Watch Series 7 remains one of the most popular smartwatches yet. Despite it not currently being the latest Apple Watch, it still supports watchOS 10 and its advanced features. As a result, you can expect this wearable to last you for years to come. That, of course, assuming you take good care of it. To maximize its life expectancy, you should consider buying a screen protector for your Apple Watch Series 7. After all, our wrists are often exposed, and an accidental bump against a rough object may scratch or break its display. To help you find a suitable screen protector, we've highlighted some of the best options below.

Image: Kojima Productions The sequel to Death Stranding is shaping up to be just as strange as the original. At its State of Play showcase today, Sony showed off a new trailer for the game that... starts out with a particularly disturbing bit of surgery. The lengthy clip features a whole bunch of new locations outside of the US, as well as the return of a villain who has been given a Joker-esque makeover. And yes, the baby makes an appearance — along with a new, talking doll.The sequel also has an official title now: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. It’s due to launch in 2025. Here’s the premise:Embark on an inspiring mission of human connection beyond the UCA. Sam — with companions by his side — sets out on a new journey to save humanity from extinction. Join... Continue reading…

Image: Disney Hulu has just laid the groundwork to kick friends, family, and freeloaders off its streaming service unless they pay for their own accounts. This week, the company revised its Terms of Service to explicitly ban password sharing outside of “your primary personal residence,” and it’s begun to tell subscribers they’ll need to comply by March 14th, 2024. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise: the writing’s been on the wall ever since Netflix reported that its password sharing crackdown was successful in driving more signups, after Disney CEO Bob Iger revealed he’d like to follow suit, and certainly after Disney Plus began its own password sharing crackdown in earnest. (Disney should soon own all of Hulu and the two apps are even beginning... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge During the January Microsoft Research Forum, Dipendra Misra, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Lab NYC and AI Frontiers, explained how Layer-Selective Rank Reduction (or LASER) can make large language models more accurate. With LASER, researchers can “intervene” and replace one weight matrix with an approximate smaller one. Weights are the contextual connections models make. The heavier the weight, the more the model relies on it. So, does replacing something with more correlations and contexts make the model less accurate? Based on their test results, the answer, surprisingly, is no. “We are doing intervention using LASER on the LLM, so one would expect that the model loss should go up as we are doing more approximation,... Continue reading…

Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images Today’s hearing on child safety was — mostly — an unusually focused affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee called up the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord and grilled them for four hours on the potential dangers their services posed for children. Many of the lawmakers emphasized emotional impact, playing to an audience filled with families who’d had kids targeted by predators or otherwise harmed online.But midway through the hearing, it was dragged off course by a predictable tangent: the fact that TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. And a meeting ostensibly about keeping kids safe dipped into a now-familiar attempt to make TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew answer questions utterly unrelated to the rest of the day.Although... Continue reading…

Microsoft has announced that Microsoft 365 apps will be available on the App Store for Apple Vision Pro from February 2, the day when the mixed reality headset will go on sale in the U.S. In addition to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps, the company's Copilot AI tool will be available for Vision Pro mixed reality headsets to help users with drafts, edits, summaries, and a lot more.

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images This is Hot Pod, The Verge’s newsletter about podcasting and the audio industry. Sign up here for more.I just got back from Puerto Rico and wow, there is a lot of podcast news! Let’s get into it.Call Her Daddy is getting wide distributionIt’s very nearly the end of the exclusivity era for Spotify. The audio streamer announced today that Call Her Daddy, Spotify’s second-most-popular original podcast, is getting wide distribution across podcast platforms. Call Her Daddy was one of only two remaining Spotify exclusives, along with Rogan. The arrangement could be an indication of what is to come for Rogan as his contract is up for renewal.There is a slight twist to the deal: Spotify is still hanging on to the video version of Call Her... Continue reading…

The Vision Pro’s not-a-Lightning-connector connector. | Image: Nilay Patel / The Verge Ray Wong of Inverse discovered a hidden joy today: The Apple Vision Pro power cable connects to the battery with what may well be Lightning’s final form. Using a SIM removal tool, he pushed into a small hole in the silver external battery pack of the Vision Pro next to the cable, and...Out it popped, revealing what looks like a bigger, 12-pin version of the connector Apple’s iPhone moved away from last year. l used a SIM card push pin to "unlock" the cable connected to the Apple Vision Pro battery pack. It popped right out. pic.twitter.com/tShScpMlvr— Ray Wong (@raywongy) January 31, 2024Nilay Patel, Verge editor-in-chief and Vision Pro reviewer, gave it a shot, and what do you know? The rumors are true. Like a Palpatinian... Continue reading…

Google’s data center in Eemshaven, Netherlands. | Image: Google Google announced its biggest deal yet to purchase offshore wind energy for its data centers in Europe, signing power purchase agreements to support two new wind farms off the coast of the Netherlands. It’s part of Google’s plan to match all of its data center electricity consumption with clean energy generation on a 24/7 basis by 2030. To do that, the company will need to help get more renewable energy, including offshore wind, pulsing through power grids where it operates. It shared “the next step” of that plan for Europe today, where it says it’s adding more than 700 megawatts of clean energy capacity to the grid.Much of that new capacity will come from the pair of new offshore wind farms in the Netherlands, where Google operates two... Continue reading…