Tech Talk

My “We Are Not For Sale” shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO David Zaslav seems to be trying to squash rumors that he wants to sell the company to the likes of Comcast. According to a report from Deadline , he told employees that “we are not for sale, absolutely, not for sale,” during a Zoom call on Wednesday attended by staff from all over the company. While he reportedly didn’t address any specific rumors, a recent report from The Hollywood Reporter seems to be the likely target of his comments. Earlier this month, the outlet suggested that “top industry execs” were “convinced” that Warner Bros. was on the brink of merging with Comcast, owners of NBCUniversal and the Peacock streaming service (and, disclosure , an investor in Vox Media, The Verge ’s parent company). One was even already mourning the loss of another major studio after Disney bought 21st Century Fox , accor

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge VK, the Russian technology conglomerate behind a social network with hundreds of millions of downloads called VKontakte, says that its apps have been removed from Apple’s App Store . The translated statement says “some VK applications are blocked by Apple” but that it will “continue to develop and support iOS applications.” The Russian Ministry of Digital Affairs told state-controlled media outlet RT that it was investigating “the reasons for deleting VK applications and developer accounts, underlining the social significance and scale of use of the services provided by the Russian company.” The apps are still available on Google’s Play Store. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, its government has blocked several American social media sites, including Instagram , Facebook , and Twitter . The US and other governments have sanctioned many Russian-government-affiliated individuals and businesses, including VK Group CEO and Putin ally Vladimir Kiriye

Everything about the Apple Watch Ultra is bigger. It has a bigger and brighter display than the Apple Watch 8, a bigger battery, bigger (and more) buttons, and it has a bigger capacity to handle the rough and tumble world of outdoor activities. It can also take a punch, or at least a series of whacks, from a small sledgehammer. In a recent video spotted by MacRumors, YouTuber TechRax joyfully smashes the new $799 / £849 / AU$1229 Apple Watch Ultra to bits. It's a rather unrealistic durability test of the beefy 49mm wearable, but if you watch from beginning to end, you will glean some hard (in a good way) Ultra truths. It would be unfair to call the Apple Watch Ultra a ruggedized version of the Apple Watch 8 (or really any generation). It's not simply a toughened exterior. It's a completely redesigned Apple Watch. At 49mm, it's 5mm larger than the biggest Apple Watch 8. Naturally, it's also heavier. The titanium case helps it put on an additional 23 grams ov

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing crypto company Nexo, alleging that the company misled customers by saying it was registered to sell securities and commodities and that it wasn’t approved to offer services like its “Earn Interest Product” that promised returns on deposited crypto. It’s the latest legal move in a fight between regulators and crypto companies looking to offer interest-earning accounts, often insisting that they shouldn’t be classified as securities. Seven other states — California, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Washington, and Vermont — are also filing “administrative actions” against the company, according to a press release from the New York AG. The release also quotes James as saying: “Nexo violated the law and investors’ trust by falsely claiming that it is a licensed and registered platform. Nexo must stop its unlawful operations and take necessary action to protect its investors.” I'

We've now been given multiple looks at the upcoming Google Pixel Watch , but it's likely that there are still going to be one or two new announcements when the device is finally, fully unveiled – which should be on October 6 . One of those announcements might be around a Google Photos watch face for the Pixel Watch. As spotted by 9to5Google , there's now code hidden in the Google Photos app for Android that hints at support for adding pictures to the screen of a wearable. Multiple images can be selected it seems, though there will be an as-yet-unspecified limit. Presumably, if more than one photo is picked then the watch face will cycle through them, though the details of how this will work aren't yet fully clear. Photos for all There's no indication that this Google Photos watch face will be exclusive to the Pixel Watch: though Google may introduce the feature alongside the Pixel Watch, it's probably going to make its way out to other Wear OS 3 smartwatc

Before a smartphone can make it out into the world, it has to be approved by various regulators – and the Samsung Galaxy S23 just showed up at 3C, the Chinese regulatory agency, revealing another key spec along the way. This comes from SamMobile and Ice Universe , which are both trustworthy sources when it comes to upcoming Samsung products. The fact that the phone has now shown up at 3C suggests that it's still on track for a launch in the not-too-distant future, with February 2023 the month that the handset is most likely to be launched in. The only real tidbit of information we get from this filing is that the wired charging speed is going to stick at 25W, just like the Samsung Galaxy S22 . By today's standards, that's not speedy at all, with some handsets almost five times faster (120W) at recharging the battery. Slow and steady This caution when it comes to charging speeds is something that we've noticed on Samsung's other premium phones as well. The Sa

The benefits of AI without the drawbacks of the cloud. | Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images OpenAI, the company behind image-generation and meme-spawning program DALL-E and the powerful text autocomplete engine GPT-3, has launched a new, open-source neural network meant to transcribe audio into written text ( via TechCrunch ). It’s called Whisper, and the company says it “approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition” and that it can also automatically recognize, transcribe, and translate other languages like Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. As someone who’s constantly recording and transcribing interviews, I was immediately hyped about this news — I thought I’d be able to write my own app to securely transcribe audio right from my computer. While cloud-based services like Otter.ai and Trint work for most things and are relatively secure, there are just some interviews where I, or my sources, would feel more comfortable if the audio file sta