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. Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge A bipartisan bill seeks to create a federal law to protect actors, musicians, and other performers from unauthorized digital replicas of their faces or voices. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2023 — or the No Fakes Act — standardizes rules around using a person’s faces, names, and voices. Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) sponsored the bill. It prevents the “production of a digital replica without consent of the applicable individual or rights holder” unless part of a news, public affairs, sports broadcast, documentary, or biographical work. The rights would apply throughout a person’s lifetime and, for their estate, 70 years after their... Continue reading…

Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama has shifted to providing general narrative guidance and character designs for many of the franchise’s projects in recent years. But for Dragon Ball Daima — a new animated series from Toei — the legendary mangaka will be hands-on in a big way.Today at this year’s New York Comic Con, Toei Animation announced that it is well into production on Dragon Ball Daima, a new series that will see a number of classic Dragon Ball Z characters like Goku, Vegeta, and Bulma transformed into children similar to the way Goku became a child in Dragon Ball GT.During a panel about the new show, executive producer Akio Iyoku described Toriyama as being “deeply involved beyond his usual capacity” in its production process... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge After receiving backlash from customers, Microsoft announced it has canceled plans to impose storage limits for photos in a user’s OneDrive account starting on October 16th, Gizmodo reports.Starting in October, under the now-rescinded policy, photos in a user’s saved photo albums and OneDrive Gallery would count against its cloud-based quota of five gigabytes. Once the new policy went into effect, users with photos surpassing the limit would no longer be able to save new OneDrive files or even receive emails in Microsoft’s free Outlook email service.When it announced the changes in August, Microsoft said it would grant users a free one-year storage bonus to compensate for the inconvenience, but that didn't satisfy users.It’s possible... Continue reading…

Image: James Bareham / The Verge Popular online adult film sites in Texas have published “Texas Health and Human Services” disclaimers warning visitors about the unproven health risks of watching porn, reports 404 Media. The move comes after a US appeals court temporarily overturned an order blocking a Texas law that required porn sites to verify users’ ages and display government health warnings.Though they don’t require age verification, every Vixen Media Group site — which includes Deeper, Blacked, and Vixen — now displays factually debatable disclaimers warning that porn is “potentially biologically addictive” and “proven to harm human brain development.” The warnings appear to users within the state of Texas.These pop-ups also claim porn “increases the demand for... Continue reading…

The homepage promoting the new feature. | Screenshot by Jon Porter / The Verge SpaceX has published a new webpage to promote its upcoming “Starlink Direct to Cell” service that plans to offer cellular connectivity to “existing LTE phones” via satellite. The website, which PCMag reports went live earlier this week, notes that the service will initially be limited to texting services in 2024, with voice and data functionality following in 2025, alongside support for IoT devices.“Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data,” SpaceX’s website reads. The Elon Musk-owned space company announced plans for the service last year alongside US partner T-Mobile. The... Continue reading…

Image: Google / Fitbit Fitbit’s services were dealing with some issues for hours on Wednesday, but the company mitigated the problems by early Thursday morning, according to an explanation on Fitbit’s status website.While the issues were going on, people who use Fitbit on its own and Fitbit via a Google account were seeing errors at different rates. But the company hasn’t totally nailed what was going on.“The root causes of this incident remain under investigation,” Fitbit wrote. “One underlying cause was an unexpected kind of resource exhaustion which caused requests between backend servers to fail and which was mitigated by expanding capacity. Our teams are now working to ensure that the issue will not recur.” (Perhaps an influx of people trying to set up... Continue reading…

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... Continue reading…

Despite the best Chromebooks being cloud-based machines for web browsing, you can unlock an entirely new level of productivity and entertainment with Android apps. Most Chromebooks are compatible with the feature right out of the box. Launch the Google Play Store, browse for your favorite Android app, and get going.

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge Somebody sent a strange tip about Spotify to The Verge on Wednesday.The email, with the subject line “Spotify Hackers,” claimed that “Every English account in America has two new followers, ! lucasrpx and ! vitornovaes.” The tipster followed up two minutes later to share a screenshot showing the profile pictures from the accounts, which featured characters from the Studio Ghibli movie Ponyo. Weird stuff.This seemed pretty innocuous — we doubted they were hackers — but we had to investigate. It was easy to disprove that the accounts followed “every English account in America”; the accounts were not following me. (Though full disclosure that I’ve been an Apple Music user for years.) But the accounts did follow two other Verge staffers,... Continue reading…

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... Continue reading…

Morty and Rick on a mission. | Image: Adult Swim The Rick and Morty season 7 premiere makes quick work of dealing with the elephant in the room and getting back to business. Continue reading…