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Spotify has found itself the target of artists' ire for many reasons over the years: poor audio quality, terrible payouts, giving Joe Rogan millions of dollars… the list goes on. But recently it's been CEO and founder Daniel Ek's extracurricular activities that have been cause for consternation. Over the past few months his funding of German defense company Helsing through his investment firm Prima Materia has been the final straw for many acts, including Hotline TNT, Massive Attack, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Deerhoof, and more. Then, on Tuesday, Ek announced that he would be stepping down as CEO. Neither Ek…

The robovac comes with a dock that can refill itself using its built-in water tank. Robot vacuums that mop well rarely come cheap, but thankfully, some of our favorite models are receiving a significant discount ahead of Amazon’s next Prime Day event next week. Right now, the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni and the newer Deebot X9 Pro Omni are on sale at Amazon for Prime members for $799.99 ($300 off) and $899.99 ($400 off), respectively, which is the lowest price we’ve seen on either model. The Deebot X8 Pro Omni is an excellent robot vacuum and mop hybrid, with an extendable…

Why just post a photo when you can encourage all your friends and followers to engage with it? Have you tried simply uploading a photo to Instagram lately? It's a minefield. Is that a Story, a Post, or a Reel? Do you want to add music? A caption? A prompt, which is… different than a caption, somehow? How about a poll? A fundraiser? More text, but this time on top of the image? Share it to Facebook? On and on and on. I have a simple request to anyone at Meta who is listening: please, just give us our photo…

Last week at the Zurich Film Festival, Eline Van der Velden - founder and CEO of AI production house Particle6 and its subsidiary talent studio Xicoia - said that a number of talent agents had expressed interest in working with Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated "actress" created by the companies. Van der Velden has not gone into detail about which agencies might be contemplating whether they should bring Norwood (and by extension, Xicoia) on as clients. But simply saying that agents have come knocking was enough to get the entertainment industry trades buzzing and posting stories about how Norwood came to…

After getting off the phone with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek on Saturday, the president mused over something that had baffled him about the call. Kotek had been "very nice," said Trump in an interview the next day. But she was trying hard to convince him not to send in the National Guard, and that just didn't make any sense to him. "But I said, 'Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening?'" Hours later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum federalizing 200 members of Oregon's National Guard to deploy to Portland,…

One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers was compromised by an “unauthorized party,” the company says. The unauthorized party gained access to “information from a limited number of users who had contacted Discord through our Customer Support and/or Trust & Safety teams” and aimed to “extort a financial ransom from Discord.” The unauthorized party “did not gain access to Discord directly.” Data potentially accessed by the hack includes things like names, usernames, emails, and the last four digits of credit card numbers. The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed…

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. The billboard didn't say "Listen Labs." It didn't say anything about hiring. It consisted of just a plain white background with "https://" and a single line of grouped numbers hanging over Nob Hill, San Francisco. Last month, Alfred Wahlforss, the startup's CEO, posted on X that whoever cracked the code and completed a subsequent challenge would win a trip to Berlin and get on the guest list for the ultra-exclusive nightclub Berghain. One of…

Unity is urging developers to take “immediate action” after it disclosed a major security vulnerability affecting games built using versions of its popular development tool dating back to 2017. While there is “no evidence of any exploitation of the vulnerability, nor has there been any impact on users or customers,” Unity already has fixes available to developers, according to a post from Larry Hryb, aka “Major Nelson.”  Specifically, developers need to take action if “you have developed and released a game or application using Unity 2017.1 or later for Windows, Android, or macOS,” Hryb says. Unity’s “platform partners” have also…

Just one day after Apple took down the iOS App Store listing for ICEBlock, Google has confirmed to 404 Media that it has removed a similar app, Red Dot, from the Google Play Store. The company also reportedly said it “removed apps that share the location of what it describes as a vulnerable group after a recent violent act against them connected to this sort of app.”  On Thursday, Apple removed ICEBlock and similar apps, including Red Dot, after facing pressure from the Department of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi said to Fox News on Thursday that “ICEBlock is designed…

Apple has removed the “Waze but for ICE sightings” app ICEBlock from its App Store, as reported previously by Business Insider. A post from its developer relayed Apple’s App Review message about the ban, saying, “We just received a message from Apple’s App Review that #ICEBlock has been removed from the App Store due to ‘objectionable content.’ The only thing we can imagine is this is due to pressure from the Trump Admin. We have responded and we’ll fight this!” The ICEBlock app rose to the top of the App Store’s charts this summer after being targeted by Trump administration…