Instead of wallowing in misery about potentially losing access to their favorite short-form video app, many TikTokers are flocking to RedNote, a Chinese social media platform also called Xiaohongshu. I’ve decided to spend some time on the platform myself, and it looks like so-called “TikTok refugees” are excited about interacting with a community mainly comprised of Chinese-speaking users — and vice versa.

Launched in 2013 as a shopping platform, RedNote has grown into one of China’s most popular social apps featuring photos, videos, and written content. Now it’s seeing another spike in users from another part of the globe, with more than 700,000 users joining RedNote in just two days, according to a report from Reuters. The number is still small, at just a fraction of the 150 million Americans TikTok reported were already using the app in early 2023.

As noted by CNN, the name Xiaohongshu translates to “little red book,” which “could be seen as a tongue-in-cheek reference to a red-covered book of quotations from the founding father of Communist China, Mao Zedong.” Many US users seem to be using the Chinese platform out of spite of the US government’s plan to ban TikTok — but in a deeply unserious way.

Screenshot: The Verge

Amongst all the Chinese-language posts depicting sleek fit checks, mouthwatering food videos, and memes I don’t quite understand yet, is content from TikTok expats. Many joke about their sudden appearance on the app, with one user wondering what Chinese users might think after seeing an influx of US-based users and another showing their gradual transformation from a gun-wielding, Buc-ee’s merch-wearing American into a Chinese-speaking RedNote user. Others are simply saying “hello” to their new community — some of whom have written captions in what I’d assume is machine-translated Chinese.

Even more interesting though, are all the RedNote users welcoming TikTokers with open arms. Several RedNote users are eager to introduce the app while also sharing some tips and tricks on how to navigate it. One creator says, “now’s the perfect time to dive into Chinese culture” through RedNote with the Chinese New Year coming up, adding that users on the platform are “obsessed with Luigi, Trump, and Squid Game.” Some even offer to teach their new community members Chinese.

But many TikTokers are equally curious about RedNote users in China, too. “Chinese friends, post pictures of your meal or snacks for today! Curious to see what you typically eat,” one user writes. Another asks, “I’m American. Do y’all like us? We know y’all not the enemy. Can we all be friends?”

The trend is actually kind of wholesome, and I’m here for it, but I’m not confident it will actually last. If these apps grow in popularity, they could potentially face a ban, too. But the migration to RedNote is likely just a trend — and trends only last as long as it takes for another to replace it.

A major copyright lawsuit against Meta has revealed a trove of internal communications about the company’s plans to develop its open-source AI models, Llama, which include discussions about avoiding “media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated.”

The messages, which were part of a series of exhibits unsealed by a California court, suggest Meta used copyrighted data when training its AI systems and worked to conceal it — as it raced to beat rivals like OpenAI and Mistral. Portions of the messages were first revealed last week.

In an October 2023 email to Meta AI researcher Hugo Touvron, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta’s vice president of generative AI, wrote that the company’s goal “needs to be GPT4,” referring to the large language model OpenAI announced in March of 2023. Meta had “to learn how to build frontier and win this race,” Al-Dahle added. Those plans apparently involved the book piracy site Library Genesis (LibGen) to train its AI systems.

An undated email from Meta director of product Sony Theakanath, sent to VP of AI research Joelle Pineau, weighed whether to use LibGen internally only, for benchmarks included in a blog post, or to create a model trained on the site. In the email, Theakanath writes that “GenAI has been approved to use LibGen for Llama3... with a number of agreed upon mitigations” after escalating it to “MZ” — presumably Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As noted in the email, Theakanath believed “Libgen is essential to meet SOTA [state-of-the-art] numbers,” adding “it is known that OpenAI and Mistral are using the library for their models (through word of mouth).” Mistral and OpenAI haven’t stated whether or not they use LibGen. (The Verge reached out to both for more information).

Screenshot: The Verge

The court documents stem from a class action lawsuit that author Richard Kadrey, comedian Sarah Silverman, and others filed against Meta, accusing it of using illegally obtained copyrighted content to train its AI models in violation of intellectual property laws. Meta, like other AI companies, has argued that using copyrighted material in training data should constitute legal fair use. The Verge reached out to Meta with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

Some of the “mitigations” for using LibGen included stipulations that Meta must “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen,” while avoiding externally citing “the use of any training data” from the site. Theakanath’s email also said the company would need to “red team” the company’s models “for bioweapons and CBRNE [Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives]” risks.

The email also went over some of the “policy risks” posed by the use of LibGen as well, including how regulators might respond to media coverage suggesting Meta’s use of pirated content. “This may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues,” the email said. An April 2023 conversation between Meta researcher Nikolay Bashlykov and AI team member David Esiobu also showed Bashlykov admitting he’s “not sure we can use meta’s IPs to load through torrents [of] pirate content.”

Other internal documents show the measures Meta took to obscure the copyright information in LibGen’s training data. A document titled “observations on LibGen-SciMag” shows comments left by employees about how to improve the dataset. One suggestion is to “remove more copyright headers and document identifiers,” which includes any lines containing “ISBN,” “Copyright,” “All rights reserved,” or the copyright symbol. Other notes mention taking out more metadata “to avoid potential legal complications,” as well as considering whether to remove a paper’s list of authors “to reduce liability.”

Screenshot: The Verge

Last June, The New York Times reported on the frantic race inside Meta after ChatGPT’s debut, revealing the company had hit a wall: it had used up almost every available English book, article, and poem it could find online. Desperate for more data, executives reportedly discussed buying Simon & Schuster outright and considered hiring contractors in Africa to summarize books without permission.

In the report, some executives justified their approach by pointing to OpenAI’s “market precedent” of using copyrighted works, while others argued Google’s 2015 court victory establishing its right to scan books could provide legal cover. “The only thing holding us back from being as good as ChatGPT is literally just data volume,” one executive said in a meeting, per The New York Times.

It’s been reported that frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have hit a data wall, which means they don’t have sufficient new data to train their large language models. Many leaders have denied this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said plainly: “There is no wall.” OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who left the company last May to start a new frontier lab, has been more straightforward about the potential of a data wall. At a premier AI conference last month, Sutskever said: “We’ve achieved peak data and there’ll be no more. We have to deal with the data that we have. There’s only one internet.”

This data scarcity has led to a whole lot of weird, new ways to get unique data. Bloomberg reported that frontier labs like OpenAI and Google have been paying digital content creators between $1 and $4 per minute for their unused video footage through a third-party in order to train LLMs (both of those companies have competing AI video-generation products).

With companies like Meta and OpenAI hoping to grow their AI systems as fast as possible, things are bound to get a bit messy. Though a judge partially dismissed Kadrey and Silverman’s class action lawsuit last year, the evidence outlined here could strengthen parts of their case as it moves forward in court.

The FBI hacked about 4,200 computers across the US as part of an operation to find and delete PlugX, a malware used by state-backed hackers in China to steal information from victims, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday.

In an unsealed affidavit, the FBI says the China-based hacking group known by the monikers “Mustang Panda” and “Twill Typhoon” used PlugX to infect thousands of Windows computers in the US, Asia, and Europe since at least 2012. The malware, which infects computers through their USB ports, operates in the background while allowing hackers to “remotely access and execute commands” on victims’ computers.

To do this, infected computers contact a command-and-control server run by the hackers, which has its IP address hard-coded into the malware. From there, hackers can remotely access users’ files and obtain information about infected computers, such as their IP addresses. At least 45,000 IP addresses in the US have contacted the command-and-control server since September 2023, according to the FBI.

The FBI used this very exploit to remove PlugX from infected computers. In collaboration with French law enforcement, which launched a PlugX deletion operation of its own, the FBI gained access to the command-and-control server and requested the IP addresses of infected computers. It then sent a native command to make PlugX delete the files it created on victims’ computers, stop the PlugX application from running, and delete the malware after it’s stopped.

Last year, the FBI similarly dismantled a network of infected Quakbot computers by instructing devices to download software to uninstall the malware. The agency also remotely hacked hundreds of computers to protect them from the Hafnium hack in 2021.

DirecTV is launching MySports, a sports-focused streaming package offering access to live NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL games across more than 40 channels, including ESPN, Fox Sports, TNT Sports, and USA Network, along with local ABC, Fox, and NBC stations. The service will cost $69.99 per month and is available to stream from DirecTV’s app on mobile and smart TV platforms — no satellite TV subscription required.

The announcement comes just days after the Disney-owned ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery called off their live sports streaming venture, Venu, after facing an antitrust lawsuit from Fubo. Though Fubo dropped its lawsuit after Disney agreed to merge Hulu + Live TV with the service, DirecTV and EchoStar weren’t happy about the decision.

DirecTV bills MySports as a cheaper alternative to competitors like YouTube TV, which starts at $82.99 per month, and Fubo, which costs $79.99 / month and up.

Despite offering access to dozens of channels, MySports is still working to add local CBS content. Vince Torres, DirecTV’s chief marketing officer, told Bloomberg the company is in “early discussions” with the network about a potential deal. MySports should help fix the fractured sports streaming landscape, which currently scatters live NFL, NBA, and MLB games across different services like Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, Apple TV Plus, and Paramount Plus.

To start, a beta version of MySports will only be available in 24 metro areas, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, and others. The MySports app is supported by several smart TV platforms like Roku, Amazon Fire, and Apple TV, and also offers unlimited DVR. DirecTV says it will add additional networks, local stations, and ESPN Plus to MySports at a later date for “no extra cost.”

Along with this sports streaming package, DirecTV plans to launch similar streamlined bundles soon. “This is the first of several genre-based options we plan to launch over the coming months on our path towards a brighter TV future for consumers.” DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow said in the press release.

TikTokers are coping with the app’s potential ban with an unusual trend: by bidding farewell to their “personal Chinese spy.” The trend, which pokes fun at security concerns surrounding the app, has users thanking their “spy” for surveilling them and filling their For You page with entertaining content, while others proclaim that they’d rather share their data directly with the Chinese government than switch to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.

One post, which garnered more than 1.5 million likes, depicts an emotional scene from Squid Game with the caption, “Me saying goodbye to my Chinese spy on the 19th (He perfected my algorithm).” Other TikTokers are speaking — and singing — in Chinese, while some pretend to be the “spies” powering individual algorithms.

“It is a great honor to spy on you for the last few years,” TikToker yanxiao1003 says in a video. “I wish you all have a great life in the future... Laura from California, you shouldn’t drink that much Coca-Cola, it’s bad for your health.”

For years, TikTok has faced scrutiny over the ties of its parent company, ByteDance, to China, with lawmakers calling it a “national security threat” and accusing the app of sending US user data to China. But now the platform’s ban is imminent, with the Supreme Court set to hand down a decision on whether to uphold the law that would either ban TikTok or force ByteDance to divest it by January 19th.

RedNote, the Chinese social media app also known as Xiaohongshu, rose to the number one spot on the Apple App Store as a US ban closes in on TikTok. The app offers a mix of pictures, short-form videos, and text posts across “follow,” “explore,” and “nearby” feeds.

A cursory scroll through RedNote’s Explore page shows English-language posts scattered among those written in Chinese. Many American users call themselves “TikTok refugees” in videos, while others write in text posts that they’re in search of a new community because of the potential TikTok ban. Some are even asking questions to Chinese users, such as “What are some popular memes in China?”

RedNote, which launched in 2013 as a shopping-focused app, now has more than 300 million monthly active users and surpassed $1 billion in profit last year, according to Bloomberg.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over whether to uphold the law that will ban TikTok or force its China-based owner, ByteDance, to sell it to an American company. The Supreme Court has until January 19th to issue a decision.

TikTok users may be flocking to RedNote now, but the ban also implicates other Chinese-owned apps, including RedNote, WeChat, and the other apps run by ByteDance like Lemon8 and CapCut.

Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.

The raised funds will go toward launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”

After starting as a research project under former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky became an independent company in 2021 and went on to create the AT Protocol, an open-source infrastructure that aims to create a social ecosystem with interoperable apps. Bluesky built its own social network atop the framework, raising millions in funds and attracting a growing number of users.

Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes “social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company” forever.

“Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, could offer a new pathway for the social web. Yet as it stands, it is still venture-capital backed,” Sherif Elsayed-Ali, the executive director at the Future of Technology Institute, said in a statement. “This important initiative aims to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent pathway, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”

Free Our Feeds will be led by nine custodians — including the Mozilla Foundation’s Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman — who will oversee the project’s “major governance decisions.”

Mastodon is also moving away from the single ownership model used by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced that he will transfer the ownership of the decentralized social network to a nonprofit organization because “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”

With Meta making drastic changes to its content moderation policy, and X’s transformation under Musk’s ownership, the Free Our Feeds project couldn’t come at a better time — even if it might take some time for its efforts to come to fruition.

Correction, January 13th: A previous version of the article misattributed a quote to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales due to an error from Free Our Feeds. The quote is from Sherif Elsayed-Ali.

Blue Origin is preparing for its biggest launch yet, but on Monday morning the attempt was scrubbed for technical reasons after several delays were made throughout the three-hour launch window. The window originally opened at 1AM ET.

It’s unclear when the Jeff Bezos-owned commercial space company will next attempt to send its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket into space for the first time.

The launch of New Glenn comes after almost a decade of development, and its outcome could threaten the dominance of Elon Musk’s SpaceX — not only in the commercial space industry but also in the satellite internet business. Here’s an overview of what you need to know about the New Glenn flight and how to watch it live.

What is New Glenn, and why is it important?

First announced in 2016, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is meant to shuttle cargo, satellites, and, in the future, people into space. The New Glenn is named after John Glenn, the first NASA astronaut to enter the Earth’s orbit.

Its first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin’s powerful BE-4 engines, which run on liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen. Blue Origin aims to reuse New Glenn’s first stage for at least 25 missions, as it’s designed to touch down vertically on a sea-based platform following launch, allowing the company to retrieve it.

The rocket’s upper stage is disposable and carries Blue Origin’s payload. It’s capable of sending 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit and 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit. Blue Origin says New Glenn is also “engineered with the safety and redundance required to fly humans.” Though Blue Origin initially aimed to launch New Glenn in 2020, its inaugural flight kept getting pushed back due to issues with the development of its BE-4 engine and other technical mishaps.

As pointed out by NPR, New Glenn has a similar carrying capacity to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, but it stands out with a larger, 23-foot-wide cargo bay. If New Glenn’s launch is successful, it could heat up its rivalry with SpaceX as both companies vie to secure lucrative government contracts.

New Glenn is also key to Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite internet initiative. Though the company’s first set of satellites is scheduled to launch aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket this year, Blue Origin will eventually launch Project Kuiper satellites aboard New Glenn, rivaling SpaceX’s Starlink. Amazon plans to send 3,236 Project Kuiper satellites into space, which is still far fewer than Starlink’s growing constellation of more than 6,000 satellites.

What to expect from New Glenn’s first launch

New Glenn is set to take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a three-hour launch window opening on January 13th at 1AM ET (10PM PT). The launch was originally scheduled for January 10th, but it was pushed back due to “a high sea state in the Atlantic,” first to January 12th and then to January 13th as the “still unfavorable” conditions continued.

Image: Blue Origin

During this uncrewed launch, New Glenn will have the Blue Ring Pathfinder on board, a payload consisting of a communications array, a power system, and a flight computer. It will test the company’s Blue Ring spacecraft, which will help support missions with refueling, hosting, data relay, and cloud computing capabilities. The goal is for New Glenn to reach orbit, while “anything beyond that,” like landing its reusable booster, is a “bonus,” according to Blue Origin CEO David Limp.

“This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president of New Glenn, said in a statement. “But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations are a replacement for flying this rocket. It’s time to fly. No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch.”

How to watch New Glenn’s launch live

Blue Origin will livestream the launch from its website, its X account, and its YouTube channel. The YouTube stream is embedded at the top of this article.

Update January 13th: Noted that the launch has been scrubbed.

Like Meta, Amazon is ending some of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In a memo sent last month, Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company has been “winding down outdated programs and materials” related to its efforts around representation and inclusion, as reported earlier by CNBC and Bloomberg.

In the memo, a copy of which Amazon provided to The Verge, Castleberry wrote that over the past few years, Amazon has been evaluating its programs across the company, each of which “addresses a specific disparity, and is designed to end when that disparity is eliminated.” At the same time, Castleberry noted that the company worked to “build programs that are open to all” instead of having “individual groups build programs.” Castleberry said Amazon aimed to complete the discontinuation of some of these “outdated” programs by the end of 2024.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser declined to identify which programs had been ended.

“This approach — where we move away from programs that were separate from our existing processes, and instead integrating our work into existing processes so they become durable — is the evolution to...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is eliminating its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs because of the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts” in the US, according to a memo to employees seen by Axios. Meta will also roll back representation goals and end its “diverse slate approach” to hiring.

The memo, which was written by Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, said the company would replace DEI programs with ones “that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” as reported by Axios. The company will also “end efforts to source business suppliers from diverse-owned businesses.”

“The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI,” Gale wrote. “The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.”

Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton confirmed to The Verge that Axios’ reporting is accurate.

The news follows Meta’s appointment of the Trump-friendly policy chief Joel Kaplan. Meta also recently announced its plans to replace third-party fact-checking with a Community Notes system similar to Elon Musk’s X.

Meta also overhauled its Hateful Conduct Policy, making changes that now “allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation,” among other horrible things, and announced plans to move its moderation teams from California to Texas due to concerns about “bias.”

Update, January 10th: Added confirmation from Meta.

Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com, is scaling back its contributions to the WordPress open-source project, according to an announcement on Thursday. The company says it’s decreasing contributions to “match” the amount of time companies like WP Engine spend on the ecosystem, further escalating the tension between Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and the community.

Now, instead of spending 3,988 hours per week developing the WordPress project, Automattic says it will now contribute around 45 hours as part of Five for the Future — a program that encourages companies to give back five percent of their resources to WordPress.org. “These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates,” Automattic says.

Mullenweg, who also co-founded WordPress, criticized the third-party host WP Engine for contributing 40 hours a week to the ecosystem and called it a “cancer” to the community. On the Five for the Future page that tracks contributions, the number of hours contributed by Automattic is already dwindling.

Automattic blames the cutback on the “significant time and money” related to the ongoing legal battle with WP Engine. It also points to the “intense criticism” it has faced “from members of the ‘community’ who want Matt and others to step away” from the WordPress project:

We’ve made the decision to reallocate resources due to the lawsuits from WP Engine. This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.

WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg last year after the co-founder waged a public campaign against the company and took over its ACF plugin. A judge later granted a preliminary injunction in favor of WP Engine, saying Mullenweg’s “conduct is designed to induce breach or disruption.”

A number of employees also left Automattic last year after the company offered to buy out staff who didn’t agree with its fight against WP Engine. Mullenweg also shuttered the WordPress project’s sustainability team this week, with a screenshotted Slack message from Mullenweg saying, “it’s probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely,” adding that “it doesn’t seem like creating a team around this was able to further any of its goals.” The move has sparked criticism from the community, including journalist Kara Swisher.

Correction, January 10th: A previous version of the article stated that Automattic shut down its sustainability team. The sustainability team shut down by Mullenweg was in the WordPress.org open source project, not Automattic.

As wildfires continue to devastate parts of Los Angeles County, hundreds of thousands of residents are without power as utility crews work to restore connectivity. Mobile carriers are also taking action to keep their services online and provide relief to affected residents.

Here’s how major carriers are responding.

Verizon

In an update on Thursday, Verizon said it will waive call, text, and data usage incurred by prepaid and postpaid customers in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties from January 9th to the 18th. Verizon will automatically credit customers if they were billed for overages during this time.

Additionally, the company is extending service end dates for customers using prepaid services, including Straight Talk, Tracfone, Total Wireless, Simple Mobile, Walmart Family Mobile, Net10, GoSmart, and Page Plus, until January 18th, 2025. It’s also working with LA County officials to “aggressively deploy portable generators and mitigate impacts for those customers affected across the area.”

T-Mobile

T-Mobile is similarly offering unlimited talk, text, and data for T-Mobile and Assurance Wireless customers across Altadena, La Cañada Flintridge, Los Angeles, Palisades, Pasadena, and Sierra Madre from January 8th to January 15th.

Meanwhile, the T-Mobile-owned Mint Mobile will increase the available data for users on 5GB, 15GB, and 20GB plans to 50GB through their current billing cycle, while Mint Unlimited customers in the area can use up to 2TB of high-speed data with no hotspot restrictions.

T-Mobile is also teaming up with SpaceX’s Starlink to temporarily deploy an “early test version” of its direct-to-cell satellite service, allowing people in affected areas to receive wireless emergency alerts and send SMS texts. At the same time, T-Mobile is working to deploy and refuel portable generators to keep its network online.

AT&T

AT&T will waive overage charges for prepaid and postpaid customers affected by the wildfires through February 6th. The company notes that customers in parts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties may experience home phone and internet disruptions due to power outages in the area.

Along with continuously deploying and refueling generators, AT&T has dispatched its disaster response team to help keep its wireless and wireline communications up and running. Its FirstNet Response Operations Group — a team led by former first responders who help during emergencies — “have been deployed to support firefighters and other first responders on the front lines where they need connectivity the most,” according to AT&T.

Starlink

Image: Starlink

Though Starlink isn’t a mobile carrier, it’s still working to provide LA County residents with satellite internet connectivity. Residents impacted by the wildfires can access Starlink for free through February 10th by placing an order through starlink.com/residential and choosing the “Disaster Relief” service plan. However, users still need to purchase a Starlink kit to access the free service.

Customers who already use Starlink will receive a one-month service credit.

Venu, the live sports streaming service from ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, isn’t happening. In a joint statement on Friday, the three companies announced the decision “not to move forward with the contemplated joint venture:”

After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service. In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels. We are proud of the work that has been done on Venu to date and grateful to the Venu staff, whom we will support through this transition period.

ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery first announced Venu last year, and it was supposed to launch in the fall of 2024. The service would’ve given viewers access to a swath of live games from the NFL, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and more from several linear channels, including ESPN, ABC, Fox, Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, TNT, and others.

But then Venu hit a legal roadblock: an antitrust lawsuit from the live TV streaming service Fubo, accusing the trio of engaging in “a years-long campaign to block Fubo’s innovative sports-first streaming business” due to restrictive sports licensing agreements. Lawmakers also asked regulators to investigate Venu and its potential to become a monopoly in televised sports.

Last August, a federal judge sided with Fubo and temporarily blocked Venu’s launch. Things seemed to settle when Disney agreed to merge Hulu + Live TV with Fubo, leading Fubo to drop its lawsuit. However, DirecTV and EchoStar, both of which raised concerns about the launch of Venu, weren’t happy about Fubo’s decision to settle. When asked about what will become of the Fubo and Hulu + Live TV deal, Fubo spokesperson Jennifer Press said the companies have a “definitive agreement” to merge.

Google is partnering with The Linux Foundation to launch an initiative meant to “fund open development and enhance projects” in the Chromium ecosystem, according to an announcement on Thursday. The fund, called Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers, is billed as a “neutral” space to support Chromium projects.

Google launched Chromium alongside its Chrome web browser in 2008. It’s the open-source infrastructure that powers Chrome and many other browsers built on it, including Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Brave.

In addition to Google, there are already several notable companies on board with the initiative, including Meta, Microsoft, and Opera. Microsoft said joining will help “provide clear and open governance that directs funds towards community-driven needs.”

Image: Google

Google also highlighted the more than 100,000 commits it made to Chromium last year, as well as its efforts to “invest heavily” into the open-source project:

Google also continues to invest heavily in the shared infrastructure of the Open Source project to ‘keep the lights on’, including having thousands of servers endlessly running millions of tests, responding to hundreds of incoming bugs per day, ensuring the important ones get fixed, and constantly investing in code health to keep the whole project maintainable.

The creation of the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers initiative comes months after the US Department of Justice demanded that Google sell Chrome as part of its proposed remedies following the ruling that Google is a monopolist. In response, Google proposed eliminating exclusive deals that make Google the default search engine on web browsers like Safari and Mozilla for three years.

Even if Google is attempting to show the DOJ how much it contributes to Chromium, the creation of the Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers suggests the open-source project would still have backing without the company’s involvement.

xAI has released an iOS app in the US for its Grok chatbot, as spotted earlier by TechCrunch. The standalone app version of the chatbot, which xAI calls a beta, can perform the same functions as the one built into X, as it can field real-time information, answer questions, and generate images.

xAI started testing Grok’s standalone iOS app in December in a handful of countries. There’s no word on when it may come to Android.

Though Grok was initially only available to X Premium subscribers, the platform started letting all users access the chatbot last month, bringing it in line with other free-to-use chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.

As pointed out by TechCrunch, it seems xAI is also working on a dedicated Grok.com website that currently has a “coming soon” message on it. After raising $6 billion in June, xAI reported another $6 billion funding round, including from “strategic investors” like Nvidia and AMD.

The Last of Us Part 2 remaster is joining the PlayStation Network club. That means you’ll need to link a PSN account if you want to play the game after buying it on Steam, Epic Games, and other PC platforms when it launches in April, as spotted earlier by Video Games Chronicle.

The requirement has proven very unpopular with other Sony titles released on PC, including Ghost of Tsushima, God of War Ragnarök, and the Horizon Zero Dawn remaster. Last year, Helldiver players review-bombed the game after it suddenly introduced PSN account linking, leading Sony to walk back on the requirement completely.

Screenshot: Steam

It’s still not clear why Sony requires a PSN account to play The Last of Us Part 2, as it doesn’t have any multiplayer features, and the requirement may also prevent people across dozens of countries where PSN isn’t supported from playing the game.

The Last of Us Part 2 remaster launches on PC on April 3rd for $49.99.

Amazon’s massive advertising business, which is only surpassed in the US by Google and Meta, is about to get bigger. In addition to selling ads on its sprawling marketplace, it will now let other retailers use the technology powering its $50 billion business on their own websites, as reported earlier by Adweek.

The company’s new Retail Ad Service beta will let other online stores “Deliver contextually relevant ads by leveraging Amazon’s two decades of ad tech expertise, driven by machine learning models trained on trillions of shopping signals” across their product, search, and browsing pages.

It also plugs the retailers into Amazon’s existing advertising customers, as brands already using Amazon’s ad system can choose to place their ads on third-party sites. The setup also allows Amazon to pull more profit from “retail media” (ads you see in stores or while shopping online) even when the shopping isn’t happening on its site, and could give it access to more data — which is something the FTC may have questions about.

The path of this business is similar to the launch of Amazon Web Services, which the company built to keep its online marketplace running and loading quickly 24/7 before selling access to the servers as a backbone for other companies’ operations, as noted by CNBC.

The AI search engine Perplexity is launching an integration with Tripadvisor that will add more information about hotels. Now, when you search for places to stay, Perplexity will present you with a neatly organized list of hotels, alongside summaries of why it chose them using information sourced from Tripadvisor.

In an example shared by Perplexity, a search for “hotels in Madrid for a business trip” yields a result for Hotel Regina, which the search engine says you should choose “if you want a centrally located hotel in Madrid with exceptional service and a rich breakfast offering.” It also displays its ratings and images from Tripadvisor as well as a list of perks, like “location,” “service,” and “cleanliness.”

Previously, Perplexity only displayed a numbered list of hotels with their address, user rating, and features, while showing images gathered from each hotel’s website in its sidebar.

“From the Tripadvisor side, they provide an up-to-date trustworthy source of information that we sync regularly,” Perplexity cofounder Johnny Ho said during an interview with The Verge. “On the fly, we’ll index and retrieve the right results depending on the user intent of the query.”

Perplexity, which bills itself as an “answer engine” rather than a search engine, plans to expand the Tripadvisor integration to include information about restaurants and experiences in the future. The AI search engine also added data from Yelp last year as part of its goal to include accurate information you can use.

The change comes just weeks after ChatGPT widely rolled out its AI search engine, which now displays results from the web for certain queries. Perplexity’s Tripadvisor integration is rolling out now to Perplexity on the web, but it will be available on its mobile app “soon.”

Meta is testing eBay listings on Facebook Marketplace in the US, Germany, and France. The company said in a post on Wednesday that it’s making the change to comply with last year’s antitrust order by the European Union, though it continues to appeal the decision.

With the test, Facebook Marketplace users can browse eBay listings on Facebook Marketplace and then check out on eBay. Meta said it could “benefit” both platforms, as it exposes eBay sellers to Facebook’s audience, while giving Marketplace users access to “a broader array of listings from the eBay community.” The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg.

Image: Meta

“It’s a small test for now, so not all people will see it, but we hope to expand soon,” Meta spokesperson Jocelyn Jones said in an emailed statement to The Verge. Facebook Marketplace users will see both local eBay listings and items that can be shipped, according to eBay’s FAQ.

Last year, the EU fined Meta $840 million over claims it forcibly exposed Facebook users to Marketplace by linking its selling and social platforms. It also accused Meta of imposing “unfair trading conditions” on rival classified ads services to benefit Marketplace, and ordered Meta to stop engaging in this allegedly illegal behavior. At the time, Meta said it would work on a solution while appealing the fine, saying that the EU’s decision relies “on a hypothetical potential to harm competition.”

Update, January 8th: Added a statement and more information from Meta.

CES is home to some of the coolest, cutting-edge, and most innovative technology around. But within this sea of tech are always some pretty strange gadgets. This year’s conference was no different, packed with a whole bunch of wacky devices, some of which might have a chance of taking off, and others... maybe not so much.

Here’s a roundup of all the weird tech we spotted on the CES show floor and beyond.

1. Mirumi, the shy sloth-like robot

Image: Yukai Engineering

Mirumi is a furry little robot that latches onto your purse or backpack strap. It turns its head to look curiously around the room using built-in sensors. But much like an infant, Mirumi is designed to be a bit shy, so it might bury its face if it’s touched or approached by strangers. The company behind Mirumi, Yukai Engineering, plans to launch the bot through a crowdfunding campaign this year with an expected price of $70.

2. A phone battery charger that resembles a toaster

Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge

No, my colleague Allison Johnson isn’t sticking her phone in a toaster — that white box is actually a charging hub made by Swippitt. It’s designed to power up a series of external batteries that go into Swippitt’s Link phone case, giving your device a little extra charge. When your battery is on the verge of dying, insert your phone into the hub, and it will automatically swap out the external battery for one that’s fully charged, no cords or wireless charging stations needed.

3. This retractable keyboard

I never even thought I needed a keyboard that retracts to reveal a trackpad and number pad, and after seeing my colleague Sean Hollister use it... I still don’t think I need it. The AutoKeybo uses a built-in camera to detect the position of your hands and will automatically switch between setups when you raise them slightly. It’s supposed to help you “boost productivity” by saving you from moving your hands between your mouse and keyboard, and it comes with a pretty hefty $700 price tag.

4. An even more portable LG StanbyME display

LG is back with a second version of its portable StanbyME monitor. But this time, you can add a shoulder strap to the 27-inch monitor, letting you haul it around while on the go (or hang it up in a room). There’s even a new folio case that makes it look like an absurdly large tablet. Aside from the new accessories, the StanbyME comes with other upgrades over its predecessor, including a higher 1440p resolution, a longer four-hour battery life, and two USB-C ports.

5. SwitchBot’s modular, multitasking robot

SwitchBot made a modular robot capable of completing many different types of chores. Built on a version of SwitchBot’s mini robot vacuum, the Multitasking Household Robot K20 Plus Pro comes with a wheeled “FusionPlatform” that you can equip with various devices, like the company’s air purifier, fan, security camera, and more, allowing it to roll around your house while completing all kinds of tasks. It will be able to do even more in the future with the in-development robotic arms you can see in the video above.

6. An 18-karat gold smart ring

Image: Ultrahuman

Forget your traditional engagement ring. What about presenting your partner with an 18-karat gold smart ring? Well, Ultrahuman made just that, with its “artisanal” Rare ring, costing $1,900 in gold (or $2,200 in platinum). Aside from full access to all of Ultrahuman’s features and lifetime membership to its warranty program, this device has the same specs as the far cheaper $349 Ultrahuman Ring Air — just in a far more expensive package.

7. LG’s air purifier your cat can sit on

The LG AeroCatTower is exactly what it sounds like: an air purifier that doubles as a cat tree. In addition to providing a heated spot for your feline friend, it filters out pet dander and even weighs your cat, too. The AeroCatTower connects to the LG ThinQ app, where you can see information about your cat’s weight and track how long your cat was asleep.

8. The “world’s first wearable solar panel”

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

This jacket from Anker is still just a concept for now, but it gives off real Cyberpunk 2077 vibes with its LED light strips and perovskite solar cells wrapped around the outside of the cloak. It offers a 30W maximum input, along with a USB-C output you can use to charge your phone.

9. LG’s indoor gardening side table

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Like LG’s AeroCatTower, the company’s latest take on indoor gardening combines multiple functions in a single package. The device looks similar to your typical side table, but it features a lamp you can grow plants beneath. It also automatically waters your plants using its built-in tank and has a built-in speaker. LG made a taller, lamp-style garden as well.

10. Encapsulated anime girls that talk to you

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

This is exactly what it looks like: a pod containing 3D models of dancing anime girls. But it doesn’t have to house anime girls; you can upload any character to Character Livehouse’s 1200p display, and it will use AI to interact with you. The capsule comes equipped with cameras and microphones with sound recognition, allowing the character to detect your presence. Code 27, the company behind Character Livehouse, says the model can cheer you on in games and even “gently” wake you up. It’s headed to Kickstarter soon with a price range of $400 to $500.