Google bans advertisers from promoting deepfake porn services

Illustration: The Verge Google has had a longstanding ban on sexually explicit ads — but until now, the company hasn’t banned advertisers from promoting services that people can use to make deepfake porn and other forms of generated nudes. That’s about to change.Google currently prohibits advertisers from promoting “sexually explicit content,” which Google defines as “text, image, audio, or video of graphic sexual acts intended to arouse.” The new policy

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge AMD is looking into a potential cyberattack. A threat actor that goes by the alias “IntelBroker” is selling data that it claims was obtained from an AMD.com breach this month, BleepingComputer reports, and the company confirmed in a statement that it’s looking into the purported theft. IntelBroker claims that the data for sale includes future products, employee databases, and customer databases.
“We are aware of a cybercriminal

One remote to rule them all (but in the darkness, you probably still can’t find them). | Photo: Cantata Universal remotes might be on a comeback tour if devices like Cantata’s Haptique RS90 and RS90X actually materialize and are as good as advertised. The connected remote purports to double as a comprehensive smart home controller, but it’s merely a Kickstarter hopeful for now. Serial remoters (remotees?) have pledged more than $300,00, with less than $10,000 needed to fully fu

Cath Virginia / The Verge Less than two weeks after Nvidia jumped Apple in terms of its overall valuation, the GPU maker has now passed Microsoft to stand as the world’s most valuable company based on the chips it makes that are key to powering a boom in generative AI technology.At the close of trading on Tuesday, its share price stood at $135.58, up $4.60 from the previous day and pushing its market cap to $3.335 trillion. That’s more than Microsoft ($3.32 trillion), Apple ($3.29 tr

Chomsky often was critical of the media. | Photo by Heuler Andrey / AFP via Getty Images Everyone dies eventually, and famed linguist Noam Chomsky will be no different — but at the time of this writing, he is alive. And, sadly, his wife is explaining to people that reports of his death are “false,” according to The Associated Press.
Chomsky, 95, has been hospitalized in Brazil as he recovers from a stroke he had last year, the AP reported earlier this month. He’s having d

Over the weekend, AI startup Luma official X account posted a series of videos created using its video-generating Dream Machine tool, which the company website describes as a “highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos.”The only problem? At about 57 seconds in, the Dream Machine-generated trailer for Monster Camp — an animated story about furry creatures journeying to a sleepaway camp — features a slightly AI-smudged but still recognizable

Last week, AI startup Luma posted a series of videos created using its new video-generating tool Dream Machine, which the company describes as a “highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos.”
The only problem? At about 57 seconds in, the Dream Machine-generated trailer for Monster Camp — an animated story about furry creatures journeying to a sleepaway camp — features a slightly AI-smudged but still recognizable Mike Wazowski from Pixar&rsq

Union organizer Chris Smalls speaks following the April 1st, 2022, vote for the unionization of the Amazon Staten Island warehouse in New York. | Photo by ANDREA RENAULT / AFP via Getty Images Amazon Labor Union (ALU) members voted to affiliate with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in a move they hope will bring new life to a yearslong struggle to secure union contracts for Amazon warehouse workers.
Amazon has tried to block various efforts to unionize across different branches of the

Hue’s new Twilight bedside lamp costs $280. | Image: Philips Hue Following leaks last week, smart lighting company Philips Hue has confirmed it has a new sunrise lamp called Twilight. The company also announced several other new products, including a less expensive light strip, new decorative Lightguide bulbs, and the Datura ceiling light. The new products are available now, except the ceiling light, which is coming on September 10th.
The Philips Hue Twilight ($279.99 / €279.99) is th

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Don’t hold your breath for a resurgence of government internet subsidies. Republicans and Democrats can’t seem to agree on a way forward to fund the program, and passing such bills will only get more difficult as Election Day inches closer.
Democrats and Republicans have introduced dueling bills to reauthorize the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum auctions, where the agency doles out access to freque

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge What if your laptop didn’t need a processor from an established brand like Intel or AMD? What if it didn’t even rely on proprietary paid architectures like Arm and x86? RISC-V is one of the answers to those questions — it’s free for anyone to use! — and modular computer company Framework has just decided to welcome RISC-V into its laptop lineup.
Specifically, Framework has partnered with DeepComputing, the company behind t

Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker. | Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP via Getty Images Earlier today, Fisker finally did what has seemed inevitable these past few turbulent months: declared bankruptcy.“Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic headwinds that have impacted our ability to operate efficiently,” the company said in a statement. “After evaluating all options for our business, we determined that proceeding with a sal

One step closer to a final release in the fall. | Image: The Verge / Android It’s beta software season, baby. Google is releasing Android 15’s third beta today, taking it one step closer to its final release. With this update, it reaches platform stability, meaning that APIs are finalized and developers can start testing their apps with this near-final version. Not much appears to have changed since the last beta dropped, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few interesti

The Sphero Bolt Plus’ new full-color screen can help kids troubleshoot their code. | Image: Sphero Sphero has updated its RC Bolt robotic ball with a higher-resolution LCD screen, providing improved visual feedback that promises to make the new Bolt Plus a better STEM tool for teaching kids the fundamentals of programming.Originally making a name for itself with a simple remote control ball that could be steered using a smartphone, Sphero eventually found massive success by leveraging its

Image: TikTok TikTok recently launched a new Instagram-like photo-sharing app called Whee, as spotted by Android Police and APKMirror founder Artem Russakovskii.
TikTok is explicitly positioning Whee as an app for sharing photos with only your closest friends. “Capture and share real-life photos that only your friends can see, allowing you to be your most authentic self,” according to Whee’s Google Play description. “Whee is the best place for close friends to share life

Butterflies AI. So far, generative AI has been mostly confined to chatbots like ChatGPT. Startups like Character.AI and Replika are seeing early traction by making chatbots more like companions. But what happens when you dump a bunch of AI characters into something that looks like Instagram and let them talk to each other?
That’s the idea behind Butterflies, one of the most provocative — and, at times, unsettling — takes on social media that I’ve seen in quite a while. Af

The Portal is getting a very slow trickle of software updates. | Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge The PlayStation Portal is getting a couple of modest features it should have had in the first place. Sony announced on its PlayStation Blog that a software update for its handheld remote player will allow users to connect their devices to public Wi-Fi networks that require sign-in, like free ones found at hotels and cafes.
Also in this update are new visual cues when you tap or swipe the

New Zealand’s Marcus Daniell (TOP) and Michael Venus compete against USA’s Austin Krajicek and Tennys Sandgren during their Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games men’s doubles tennis match for the bronze medal at the Ariake Tennis Park in Tokyo on July 30th, 2021. | Photo by Vincenzo Pinto / AFP via Getty Images Athletes are raising concerns about how extreme heat might affect the Summer Olympic Games in Paris, according to a new report. They’re worried that soaring temperatures pose

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge For the past couple of weeks, Adobe has faced intense backlash over changes to its terms of service agreement — and now, it’s trying to patch things up. On Tuesday, Adobe announced a tweaked version of its terms of service agreement that makes it clear the company will not train AI on user content stored locally or in the cloud.
The section defining Adobe’s access to user content now includes several distinct categories, including one ded

An artist’s concept of what the Netflix House retail destinations could look like. | Image: Netflix Today, Netflix revealed more details about its upcoming permanent retail destinations that were first announced eight months ago, including where the first two Netflix House venues will open in 2025: Dallas, Texas, and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania — a city located 15 miles outside of Philadelphia.
The initial Netflix House locations will open in “two of the most popular shopping

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple may no longer be working on a new high-end Vision headset amid slowing sales of the Vision Pro, according to a new report from The Information. Instead, Apple has apparently been finding ways to reduce the cost of components for the first model and is working on a cheaper Vision headset that it aims to ship by the end of 2025.
The first Vision Pro came out earlier this year, and while it’s a very good VR headset, it has a lot of flaws inher

The current promo means you won’t have to pay extra for local storage. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge ’Tis the season of travel, and if you want to beef up your home security ahead of your vacation, today might be a good time to do so. Right now, you can pick up a Blink Video Doorbell with a Sync Module 2 at Best Buy, The Home Depot, and Kohl’s for just $41.99 ($28 off), which is one of the lowest prices we’ve seen on the entry-level smart home bundle.If y

Image: Nintendo After years of playing second fiddle to Link in her own franchise, Princess Zelda is finally getting a video game of her own this fall.
During today’s Direct presentation, Nintendo revealed The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the franchise’s first game to follow as Princess Zelda herself embarks on an adventure to save the world from destruction. After Ganon bests Link in battle, Zelda is left to her own devices to battle hordes of monsters that descend upon the ga

Image: Nintendo Nintendo finally shared gameplay footage of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond during Tuesday’s Nintendo Direct. The brief video was classic Metroid Prime, featuring intense first-person gunfighting and scanning stuff in the environment. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a little while until we can play it for ourselves, as the company gave a vague 2025 release window for the title.We’ve been waiting a very long time for any scraps of information about the next entry in th

Image: Nintendo To start off Nintendo’s Summer Game Fest-adjacent Direct, the company debuted a new Mario & Luigi game: Mario & Luigi: Brothership.It’s been nine years since the last Mario & Luigi game, Bowser’s Inside Story, which debuted in 2009 on the Nintendo DS before being rereleased with extra content and a whole new side story on the 3DS in 2018.
In Brothership, the Mario Bros commandeer their own sailing ship to explore an all-new world dotted with islands