Image: The Verge X CEO Linda Yaccarino says the social media platform formerly known as Twitter has identified and removed “hundreds” of Hamas-affiliated accounts, and has “taken action to remove or label tens of thousands of pieces of content” in the wake of terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel. Yaccarino’s letter comes in response to concerns raised by EU commissioner Thierry Breton that X is being used to “disseminate illegal content and disinformation,” in possible violation of the EU’s tough new Digital Services Act (DSA). The back-and-forth between X and the European Union comes as the EU implements the DSA, which imposes obligations on large online platforms to remove illegal content and mitigate risks to public security more... 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…

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for photos in a user’s OneDrive account starting on October 16th, Gizmodo reports.Starting in October, under the now-rescinded policy, photos in a user’s saved photo albums and OneDrive Gallery would count against its cloud-based quota of five gigabytes.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: AVerMedia It’s nearly three years since HDMI 2.1 consoles like the Xbox Series X and PS5 launched and we’re finally seeing HDMI 2.1 capture cards appear on the market. AVerMedia is launching its $299.99 Live Gamer ULTRA 2.1 (what a name) HDMI 2.1 USB capture card today, offering streamers and gamers the ability to play the latest consoles with 120Hz options turned on and still capture at 4K/60fps.Streamers have been eagerly awaiting 4K/60fps capture over USB, as right now there are limited options for capturing this resolution and frame rate over USB, especially as Elgato’s 4K 60 S+ was discontinued late last year. Most have had to opt for PCIe capture cards instead.AVerMedia’s latest capture card supports up to 4K/144Hz pass-through, complete... 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…

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…

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…

OnePlus’ first folding phone arrives soon with the alert slider intact. | Image: OnePlus The OnePlus Fold is set to arrive on October 19th, and this is our first official look at the folding-style phone. In an official teaser image provided to The Verge, it looks to be a relatively thin design with at least one fan-favorite feature: a three-stage alert slider. OnePlus president and COO Kinder Liu isn’t being shy about the phone’s potential. In a conversation conducted via translator with The Verge late last month, he told us it would “bring the foldable experience to new heights.” That’s a big claim to make about your first entry into a market where Samsung has dominated for years, but according to Liu, this device — which parent company Oppo will release under another name — has been a long time coming. His statements... Continue reading…

If you have an M1 or M2 MacBook Pro, then you probably love it as much as I do. The performance is excellent, the battery life is phenomenal, and I even use my M1 Pro MacBook over my PC most of the time. However, there are some things that it's not quite as good at, and one of those things is running virtual machines. Turns out there's a pretty neat way to run an Ubuntu virtual machine for free on an Apple Silicon Mac, though.

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…

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…

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…