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Actors, studios, agents, and the actors union SAG-AFTRA have all expressed their concerns about appearing in Sora 2’s AI-generated videos ever since the deepfake machine was released last month. Now a joint statement from actor Bryan Cranston, OpenAI, the union, and others says that after videos of him appeared on Sora — one even showed him taking a selfie with Michael Jackson — the company has “strengthened guardrails” around its opt-in policy for likeness and voice. The joint statement said that OpenAI “expressed regret for these unintentional generations.” It also carried cosigns from talent agencies United Talent Agency, the Association…

When the first 3D Ninja Gaiden came out on Xbox in 2004, I really wanted to play it; though the game looks a little antiquated now, at the time, teenage me thought that ninja protagonist Ryu Hayabusa was cool as hell. But alas, I didn't have an Xbox, and I don't think I could have convinced my parents to let me get such a (for the time) violent game. Even as an adult that could buy whatever game I wanted, I never got around to playing the franchise. Twenty-one years later, I've finally scratched that itch. Ninja Gaiden 4 stars…

Our picks include carrying cases and ones you can leave on during handheld and docked play. | Image: The Verge, Getty Images You might find it kind of sad to put your hard-earned Switch 2 into a protective case. To me, it’s freeing. Using a case relieves me of the worry that it will accumulate tons of little scratches, or worse. I’ve tested several types of cases on the Nintendo Switch 2 since its June 2025 debut, including flimsy shells that snap or slide onto the Switch 2 to provide a simple, aesthetically pleasing barrier from scratches to the console…

Apple’s latest iOS 26.1 beta has a new option that lets you tint Liquid Glass elements of iOS 26 so that they are more opaque. Since announcing Liquid Glass at WWDC this year, Apple has tweaked exactly how glassy Liquid Glass is — early on, there were some legibility issues — but this new setting gives you the choice of making things more transparent or more frosted. The option is available now in the iOS 26.1 developer beta that Apple launched on Monday. You can access it from Settings > Display & Brightness > Liquid Glass, where you can choose…

X is testing a change to the way it handles links on iOS so that the buttons to like, reply, and repost will always be visible. Normally, when you click a link on X the page opens up and completely covers the original post. Apparently, this leads to fewer people clicking like or otherwise engaging with the content.  A good chunk of people probably just don’t return to Twitter at all after following an external link. So the company is collapsing the original post to the bottom, instead of letting the web browser take over the whole screen, and pushing…

Premium Plus and Premium Business users will soon be able to browse and request inactive usernames on the X Handle Marketplace. Handles are going to be broken up into two broad categories. Priority handles will be free and “often include full names, multi-word phrases, or alphanumeric combinations.” Rare handles, on the other hand, will be a paid option, and “may be priced anywhere from $2,500 to over seven figures, depending on demand and uniqueness.” X is treating this not as a one-time perk, but as an ongoing service to lure in more paid subscribers. If you secure a new handle,…

I've read a lot of horror books over the last two years. But my absolute favorite is easily Mariana Enriquez' Our Share of Night. The book was originally published in 2019 in Argentina, but it only got an English translation in 2023. While it doesn't quite reach Stephen King lengths, at nearly 600 pages, I'd say it still counts as an epic. There are certainly scary and gruesome moments in the story involving ancient gods, a powerful cult, and brutal ritual violence. But as is usually the case with the best horror, the supernatural here is a stand-in for real-world…

By the time I arrived, the waterfront park in downtown Portland, Oregon was already awash with people as far as the eye could see. The No Kings protest in June had turned out around 10,000 people across the city; this one saw several times that number just downtown, with thousands more choosing to join localized protests in their neighborhoods or in the suburbs. Unable to get a precise crowd estimate, I tried instead to count inflatable frog costumes. I gave up on this about twenty minutes later: there were simply too many frogs. Last month, President Donald Trump signed an…

No Kings protest in Chicago. Saturday marked the biggest day of protest since the start of Donald Trumps’ second term. Organizers of the No Kings protests estimated that over seven million people took to the streets to declare their opposition to the president, his policies, and his tactics. Indivisible, the group behind the protests, claims that there were over 2,700 events in all 50 states. That’s a sizable increase from the roughly five million protesters at 2,000 events it claimed for its June No Kings day, signalling that opposition to the president may be growing. Several individual events topped 100,000…

TiVo could have been a contender. In the 2000s, TiVo reached heights few companies ever achieve. Like Google and Xerox, its name became a verb. People had to "TiVo" the new episode of Battlestar Galactica or game 4 of the Red Sox vs. Cardinals, not "record" it. While it didn't invent the DVR, TiVo popularized it and many of the features we would eventually take for granted, like the ability to pause or rewind live TV, and watch one program while recording another. Those features were covered in the now infamous US Patent 6,233,389 - better known as the Time…