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Motorola teases Moto G60 and Moto G40 Fusion key features

Motorola has been teasing the Moto G60 and Moto G40 Fusion on its Instagram profile, and today it has finally revealed some of the key specs of the duo.

The two new smartphones share a Snapdragon 732G chipset and a massive 6.8” screen with HDR10 support and 120Hz refresh rate.

The main difference between the Moto G60 and Moto G40 is the sensor behind the main camera – the G60 has a 108MP imager, while its sibling is downgraded to 64MP.

The other two members of the triple-cam setups on the back are identical and so is the selfie camera inside a punch hole at the front.

The screens are likely of the LCD variety because we can see a fingerprint scanner on the back. The volume rocker, Google Assistant and power key are all lined on the right side, while the left hosts the SIM tray.

The full launch of the Moto G60 and Moto G40 Fusion will take place on April 20, and the phones will be sold through Flipkart.

Source

Six months later, there still isn’t a MagSafe car charger

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As Vergecast listeners know, I am a sucker for car phone mounts and chargers. They are a perfect gadget for the modern age — a design problem with no perfect solution, price points that usually land at the higher end of the impulse-buy zone, and completely well-suited for targeted Instagram ads. “People who have bought a Qi-based car mount in the last year,” the marketing director of a tiny accessory company sternly instructs the Facebook ad-targeting system. “Find them and relentlessly pressure them into buying our product which is at best marginally better than the one they have.”

Reader, it works.

All of this means I was very excited when Apple added MagSafe charging to the new iPhone 12 line. A series of magnets aligns a wireless charger to the back of the phone, and has enough attachment strength to — yes — hold the phone on a car mount. A dream: you get in the car, seamlessly dink! your phone onto the mount, and drive away, laughing at the suckers fumbling with their cradles and motorized friction arms and other unwieldy ideas. Magnets, baby. How do they work.

The MagSafe attachment plate can pivot independently from the mount

Nilay Patel

Note the lack of a USB cable plugged in here, because there isn’t a charger in there.

Nilay Patel

Unfortunately it has been six months since the iPhone 12 was announced, and there is a pitiful shortage of MagSafe car chargers. In fact, there are no officially-sanctioned MagSafe car chargers. Instead, there is this Belkin Car Vent Mount PRO with MagSafe, which, as the name suggests, allows you to mount a phone to your vents with MagSafe, in, um, a professional way. However, it does not charge your phone.

I have been using a review unit of the Belkin Car Vent Mount PRO with MagSafe, or BCVMPwM, for a couple months now. It is at once supremely satisfying — dink! — and also tremendously frustrating. Like all vent mounts, the weight of the phone is enough to pull the vent louvers down over time, especially if you have a large phone like my iPhone 12 Pro Max. The magnets are indeed strong enough to hold even that phone in place, but if you go over any particularly huge bumps, something will fall down — the phone off the mount, or the mount off the vent.

“Dammit, BCVMPwM,” you will yell, using the full name of this $40 promise to yourself. “Why aren’t you everything I hoped and dreamed of when I looked at the marketing photos on social media?” Then you will put everything back into place at the next stop light, sheepishly glance at your partner, and slowly realize they have completely stopped paying attention to these sorts of antics anymore. You need new antics. You need to add Linux to your smart home.

It’s a clean look, but note that this phone is not charging. Because it’s not a charger.

Nilay Patel

Stop it. Have I mentioned that the BCVMPwM does not have C? No, this is not a charger. For that, you still have to plug in a Lightning cable, which sort-of-maybe makes sense if your car does not have wireless CarPlay and you need to plug it in anyway — but there you are, plugging a cable into your phone, which is the complete opposite of the dink! Magnet Experience. Your old car mount, with the horrible friction arms, had a built-in Qi charger. There are hacky wireless CarPlay adapters! People say they are kinda slow and have audio latency issues, but c’mon — a single dink! to mount your phone, charge it, and instantly connect to CarPlay? Now that’s the good shit.

Why isn’t there an approved MagSafe car mount with built-in wireless charging after six months? Why do Apple accessory ecosystems always seem so petrified, in every sense of the word? This is the easiest win of all time, but instead, there is the BCVMPwM. It offers you a glimpse of a dream. Then it falls down. There are better unlicensed ones that might burn your car to the ground that you can buy on Amazon. It is the paradigmatic Apple accessory.

How to turn off autoplay videos on Facebook, Twitter, Firefox, and more

You’ve probably been caught off guard by videos that play automatically on Facebook, Twitter, or just across the internet in general. They begin playing as soon as you load a page or (if they’re more deviously implemented) when you start scrolling through a page.

Automatic video play is a feature that, while nice to have when it’s surfacing content that’s related to your interests, can be pretty annoying. Autoplay videos can be harmful, too, exposing you to violent, offensive, or otherwise unwanted content that you shouldn’t have to see by default.

Whether you just want to put an end to autoplay videos on social media platforms or are looking for a more comprehensive fix, we’ve got some tips. Keep in mind that you’ll need to adjust these settings for every device that you use, since your preferences on, say, your phone do not automatically push to your PC.

Illustration by James Bareham / The Verge

Facebook

If you’re using Facebook on your browser, you can turn off autoplay videos this way:

Go to the drop-down menu at the top right of the page.
Select “Settings & Privacy” > “Settings.”
Look for the “Videos” listing on the left-hand menu. Inside of that option is a toggle where you can turn off autoplaying videos.

Facebook has similar options available for its iOS and Android apps:

Using the iOS app

Click the menu button on the bottom of your screen.
Once you’re there, tap “Settings & Privacy,” then “Settings.”
Scroll down until you find “Media and Contacts,” then tap “Videos and Photos.”
Finally, once you find “Autoplay,” you can turn off the feature.

Using the Android app

Click the menu button at the top right of your screen.
Once you’re there, scroll down and tap “Settings & Privacy,” then “Settings.”
Scroll down until you find “Media and Contacts” and tap on it.
Tap on “Autoplay” and set it to “Never Autoplay Videos.”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter

Click on “More” in the left-hand menu, and then on “Settings and privacy.”
Select “Accessibility, display, and languages” > “Data usage”
Click on the “Autoplay” setting. You can then switch off the autoplaying of videos on your feed.

Using the iOS and Android apps

Click the profile picture at the top of your phone screen.
Select “Settings and privacy” in the menu.
Navigate to “Data usage,” tap on “Video autoplay” and set it to “Never.”

Instagram doesn’t allow for autoplay videos to be turned off, so you’ll have to tread carefully here. Videos won’t autoplay with sound if you use Instagram on your browser. Stopping autoplay on mobile devices is possible, but a little roundabout.

Using a mobile app

Go to your profile page and tap on the three lines in the upper right corner
Go to “Settings” > “Account” > “Cellular Data Use”
For Android: toggle the “Data Saver” on and tap on “High Resolution Media.” If you then select “Never,” then media such as videos won’t load in advance.
For iOS: toggle on “Use Less Data”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit, like most sites that host video, autoplays videos by default. However, it’s pretty easy to turn it off.

Using the newest design

Click your username in the upper-right corner and select “User settings” in the menu.
Select the “Feed settings” tab at the top of the page, and toggle off the “Autoplay media” switch.

Using the legacy version

Click “Preferences” next to your username in the top right of the window.
Under “Media,” look for and uncheck “Autoplay Reddit videos on the desktop comments page.”
You’ll need to hit “save options” at the bottom of the screen to put the changes through.

Using the mobile app

Tap the icon next to the search bar, then hit “Settings.”
You’ll see “Autoplay” near the top of the page, and you can easily choose to turn it off.

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Desktop browsers

There are a variety of desktop browsers out there — some of which let you turn off video autoplay and some of which don’t.

Using Google Chrome

If you use Google Chrome and want to turn off video autoplay — you can’t. There used to be an experimental command-line flag that allowed you to turn them off (you can find the flags by typing chrome://flags/ into Chrome’s address field), but it’s disappeared.

You can turn the sound off (which might help a bit):

Tap on the three dots in the upper right corner
Select “Settings” > “Site settings” > “Sound”
Toggle sound off. You can add exceptions for specific sites here.

Using Microsoft Edge

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Edge browser, which is also based on the Chromium open-source design, does let you turn off — well, at least, limit — video autoplay:

Click on the three dots in the upper right corner and select “Settings.”
In the left-hand column, click on “Site Permissions,” and then scroll down to and select “Media autoplay.”

You can either allow audio and video to play automatically or limit it. According to the instructions, whether autoplay will work or not will depend on “how you’ve visited the page and whether you interacted with media in the past.”

Using Firefox

Firefox has a similar feature that lets you turn off autoplay, for the most part.

Click on the three lines in the upper right corner of the browser and select “Preferences.”
In the left-hand column, click on “Privacy & Security.”
Scroll down to the section headed “Permissions” and look for “Autoplay.” Click on the button marked “Settings.”

A drop-down menu will let you allow audio and video, block audio, or block audio and video. You can also specify sites that you want to differ from your defaults — for example, if you block audio and video as a default, but you want to allow it for, say, The Verge.

Using Safari

Safari makes it simple to disable autoplay. In fact, it assumes that you want the feature disabled to begin with. However, if it hasn’t been disabled — or if you want to make some exceptions to the rule — here’s what you do:

While in the app, go to Safari > Preferences in the top menu.
Click on “Websites” in the top menu.
Look for and select “Auto-Play” in the side menu.
Look for the drop-down menu at the bottom right of the window and select “Never Auto-Play.”

As with Firefox, you can whitelist any sites that you want to be an exception to the rule.

Update September 4th, 2020 5:11PM ET: This article was originally published on March 15th, 2019. Most of the entries have been updated.

Update April 15, 2021 5:30PM ET: Additional entries have been updated.

Arcade Fire released an epic 45-minute single — in Headspace’s meditation app

Arcade Fire has a new single out — sort of. The Canadian indie rock band has released a new 45-minute instrumental composition called “Memories In The Age Of Anxiety,” but the new song is actually a collaboration with meditation app Headspace, and you can only listen to it there.

The new track was created in collaboration with John Legend and, as Stereogum notes, is one of the first new pieces of music from the group since its cover of “Baby Mine” in the 2019 live-action version of Dumbo. (It’s the band’s first original song since its 2017 studio album Everything Now.)

Unfortunately for frugal Arcade Fire fans, it’s also locked behind a paywall in Headspace as part of the app’s Headspace Plus subscription, which costs $12.99 per month or $69.99 per year. You can listen to a snippet in the group’s Instagram post announcing the collaboration, which gives a mere glimpse of the soaring synthesizers and pulsing beats that Arcade Fire is known for. But if you want to hear the whole thing, you’ll have to pay up.

Disclosure: John Legend is on the board of directors for Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.

Personal info for 1.3 million Clubhouse users reportedly leaked online

Personal data for some 1.3 million users of the social audio app Clubhouse has been leaked online, Cyber News reported. a SQL database with users’ IDs, names, usernames, Twitter and Instagram handles and follower counts were posted to an online hacker forum. According to Cyber News, it did not appear that sensitive user information such as credit card numbers were among the leaked info. But the information could be used in phishing attempts to get users to hand over that more sensitive info.

Last week, Cyber News reported on another data breach from a social platform: it found that personal data for 500 million LinkedIn users had been scraped and posted online. The Microsoft-owned company said that no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in the leak.

That news came just a couple of days after it was discovered that personal data for some 533 million Facebook users also was leaked online for free. The Facebook leak reportedly included users’ phone numbers, birthdates, locations, email addresses, and full names.

Clubhouse had a monster first year—despite being invite-only and available only on iOS devices— seeing more than 10 million downloads. Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify, and Slack have all launched or are working on competing social audio platforms, and Facebook reportedly has one in the works as well.

Clubhouse did not immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on Sunday.

How tech companies are ignoring the pandemic’s mental health crisis

There is plenty that scientists don’t understand about the long-term effects of COVID-19 on society. But a year in, at least one thing seems clear: the pandemic has been terrible for our collective mental health — and a surprising number of tech platforms seem to have given the issue very little thought.

First, the numbers. Nature reported that the number of adults in the United Kingdom showing symptoms of depression had nearly doubled from March to June of last year, to 19 percent. In the United States, 11 percent of adults reported feeling depressed between January and June 2019; by December 2020, that number had nearly quadrupled, to 42 percent.

Prolonged isolation created by lockdowns has been linked to disruptions in sleep, increased drug and alcohol use, and weight gain, among other symptoms. Preliminary data about suicides in 2020 is mixed, but the number of drug overdoses soared, and experts believe many were likely intentional. Even before the pandemic, Glenn Kessler reports at The Washington Post, “suicide rates had increased in the United States every year since 1999, for a gain of 35 percent over two decades.”

Issues related to suicide and self-harm touch nearly every digital platform in some way. The internet is increasingly where people search, discuss, and seek support for mental health issues. But according to new research from the Stanford Internet Observatory, in many cases, platforms have no policies related to discussion of self-harm or suicide at all.

In “Self-Harm Policies and Internet Platforms,” the authors surveyed 39 online platforms to understand their approach to these issues. They analyzed search engines, social networks, performance-oriented platforms like TikTok, gaming platforms, dating apps, and messaging apps. Some platforms have developed robust policies to cover the nuances of these issues. Many, though, have ignored them altogether.

“There is vast unevenness in the comprehensiveness of public-facing policies,” write Shelby Perkins, Elena Cryst, and Shelby Grossman. “For example, Facebook policies address not only suicide but also euthanasia, suicide notes, and livestreaming suicide attempts. In contrast, Instagram and Reddit have no policies related to suicide in their primary policy documents.”

Among the platforms surveyed, Facebook was found to have the most comprehensive policies. But researchers faulted the company for unclear policies at its Instagram subsidiary; technically, the parent company’s policies all apply to both platforms, but Instagram maintains a separate set of policies that do not explicitly mention posting about suicide, creating some confusion.

Still, Facebook is miles ahead of some of its peers. Reddit, Parler, and Gab were found to have no public policies related to posts about self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies have no policies whatsoever. But if they aren’t posted publicly, we may never know for sure.

In contrast, researchers said that what they call “creator platforms” — YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch — have developed smart policies that go beyond simple promises to remove disturbing content. The platforms offer meaningful support in their policies both for people who are recovering from mental health issues and those who may be considering self-harm, the authors said.

“Both YouTube and TikTok are explicit in allowing creators to share their stories about self-harm to raise awareness and find community support,” they wrote. “We were impressed that YouTube’s community guidelines on suicide and self-injury provide resources, including hotlines and websites, for those having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, for 27 countries.”

Outside the biggest platforms, though, it’s all a toss-up. Researchers could not find public policies for suicide or self-harm for NextDoor or Clubhouse. Dating apps? Grindr and Tinder have policies about self-harm; Scruff and Hinge don’t. Messaging apps tend not to have any such public policies, either — iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp don’t. (The fact that all of them use some form of encryption likely has a lot to do with that.)

Why does all of this matter? In an interview, the researchers told me there are at least three big reasons. One is essentially a question of justice: if people are going to be punished for the ways in which they discuss self-harm online, they ought to know that in advance. Two is that policies offer platforms a chance to intervene when their users are considering hurting themselves. (Many do offer users links to resources that can help them in a time of crisis.) And three is that we can’t develop more effective policies for addressing mental health issues online if we don’t know what the policies are.

And moderating these kinds of posts can be quite tricky, researchers said. There’s often a fine line between posts that are discussing self-harm and those that appear to be encouraging it.

“The same content that could show someone recovering from an eating disorder is something that can also be triggering for other people,” Grossman told me. “That same content could just affect users in two different ways.”

But you can’t moderate if you don’t even have a policy, and I was surprised, reading this research, at just how many companies don’t.

This has turned out to be a kind of policy week here at Platformer. We talked about how Clarence Thomas wants to blow up platform policy as it exists today; how YouTube is shifting the way it measures harm on the platform (and discloses it); and how Twitch developed a policy for policing creators’ behavior on other platforms.

What strikes me about all of this is just how fresh it all feels. We’re more than a decade into the platform era, but there are still so many big questions to figure out. And even on the most serious of subjects — how to address content related to self-harm — some platforms haven’t even entered the discussion.

The Stanford researchers told me they believe they are the first people to even attempt to catalog self-harm policies among the major platforms and make them public. There are doubtless many other areas where a similar inventory would serve the public good. Private companies still hide too much, even and especially when they are directly implicated in questions of public interest.

In the future, I hope these companies collaborate more — learning from one another and adopting policies that make sense for their own platforms. And thanks to the Stanford researchers, at least on one subject, they can now find all of the existing policies in a single place.

This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

Facebook and Instagram are down

Facebook and Instagram were down on Thursday afternoon. The outage appeared to start around 5:30PM ET, with several thousand people reporting outages on DownDetector. The outage is the second one in less than a month from the social media giant; an outage on March 19th took its sites offline for several hours. Facebook returned a “sorry something went wrong” error message:

The company didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment from The Verge on the cause of the outage; it’s unclear at this time when service will be fully restored. In addition to WhatsApp and Messenger, the outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, first noted in a tweet from developer Jane Wong. Even Facebook’s outage dashboard appeared to be having problems.

Developing…

Facebook isn’t planning to tell you if you’re one of the 533 million people whose data leaked

Facebook is responding to the recent news that data from 533 million accounts leaked online for free, but perhaps not in the way users might have hoped: the company doesn’t plan to notify the users whose data was exposed online, a Facebook spokesperson told Reuters.

In the dataset, there’s apparently a lot of information that you might not want floating around the internet — including birthdays, locations, full names, and phone numbers — so it’s disappointing to hear that Facebook doesn’t plan to notify users that might be affected. The company cited two reasons to Reuters as to why it’s not telling users proactively: it says it’s not confident it would know which users would need to be notified, and that users wouldn’t be able to do anything about the data being online.

On Tuesday Facebook wrote on its blog that it “believes” the data was scraped via its contact importer sometime before September 2019, a method that’s in violation of the company’s policies. But as BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Mac points out, this doesn’t quite mesh with the fact that the company hasn’t spoken out or filed lawsuits against controversial surveillance company Clearview AI for scraping photos from Instagram and Facebook.

Over the last year, I have asked Facebook more than a dozen times if it will take legal action against Clearview AI for scraping what is likely millions of photos from Instagram and Facebook. No lawsuits have been filed and FB has said nothing on record.https://t.co/htkKCD5bT0

— Ryan Mac (@RMac18) April 7, 2021

Facebook says it has “made changes to the contact importer” to stop the scraping.

If you’re concerned about whether or not your data was included in the data dump, and don’t want to wait to see if Facebook will change its mind about notifying users, you can take a look at our guide on how to see if you were affected. And for more about the data set and Facebook‘s lack of transparency around it, you should read Wired’s piece about the company’s inconsistent messaging.

Facebook has not responded to a request for comment.

Ikea is working with Sonos on a hidden speaker built into art you hang on the wall

Ikea and Sonos are starting to tease the next products that the two companies have collaborated on. The furniture giant today posted an Instagram story that directly mentions the “Symfonisk” line and flashes the Sonos logo at the end, so there’s little doubt that new hardware is coming soon. Two fresh filings have also just appeared at the Federal Communications Commission.

The Verge can exclusively share details on what’s coming. The first new product, covered in this filing, is a revamped version of the Symfonisk table lamp. It’s expected to be sold for around the same price ($179) as the original product, which basically stuffed the sound quality of a Sonos Play:1 into the body of a lamp.

But from what The Verge understands, the $99 Symfonisk bookshelf speaker — the most affordable gateway into the Sonos platform — is not due for any major updates. Instead, the second product that Ikea and Sonos will announce in 2021 is completely new: a piece of wall art with an integrated speaker.

Ikea and Sonos are also preparing an updated table lamp speaker.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Companies like Soundwall have produced artwork speakers before, but it’s safe to assume that Ikea and Sonos are targeting a price point that’s dramatically lower than those expensive products.

The Verge has seen an early image of this product, codenamed “Titan,” but details about how it functions couldn’t yet be learned. Specifically, it’s unclear whether the entire artwork print is the product or if the speaker unit can be transferred between different exterior art housings. One of the two new FCC filings from Ikea and Sonos is for a “wireless module.” At a distance, it could look like any of Ikea’s wall prints, only with much more tech on the other side (and a power cord running down from the bottom).

All of the Symfonisk products so far have been designed with a dual purpose in mind. The lamp combines a speaker and light source; the bookshelf speaker can literally be used as a shelf when mounted to a wall. And they’re also meant to blend into home decor. From that angle, combining artwork and a music speaker seems like a natural progression for the Symfonisk series.

I’ve heard from a fair number of Sonos customers who use the Symfonisk bookshelf speakers as rear surrounds for Sonos’ Arc and Beam soundbars. They work very well for that purpose, but a stereo pair of wall art speakers could make for an even sleeker home theater setup.

Ikea and Sonos have not yet revealed exactly when they plan to announce their latest collaborative efforts. The Verge has reached out to Sonos for comment. In the immediate future, Sonos is gearing up for the launch of its new Sonos Roam, a product first leaked by The Verge, which starts shipping on April 20th. You can read my full review of that excellent portable speaker.

Go read this powerful story about how the internet never lets you forget

The technology and social media we use every day constantly bombard us with things we’ve shared in the past or advertise to us based on who they think we are. Those past posts can be fun to relive, and every once in a while, those targeted ads do actually work. But Wired senior writer (and former Verge staffer) Lauren Goode published a powerful and personal story about how these technologies can also haunt us with memories of times we may want to forget.

In the essay, Goode describes how she called off her wedding in May 2019, and ever since, she has grappled with technology reminding her of her former relationship and the wedding that didn’t happen. Here is just one devastating passage:

Social media and photo apps were by now full-on services, infused with artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and an overwhelming amount of presumption. For months, photos of my ex appeared on the Google Home Hub next to my bed, the widgets on my iPad, and the tiny screen of my Apple Watch. So yeah: My ex’s face sometimes shows up on my wrist. As I write this, Facebook reminds me that nine years ago I visited him in Massachusetts and met his family’s dog.

Goode also writes about how difficult it is to escape these reminders because of the near-impossibility of removing your data from the internet:

I managed to do half the work. But that’s exactly it: It’s work. It’s designed that way. It requires a thankless amount of mental and emotional energy, just like some relationships. And even if you find the time or energy to navigate settings and submenus and customer support forms, you still won’t have ultimate control over the experience. In Apple Photos, you can go to Memories, go through the collage the app has assembled for you, delete a collage, untag a person or group of people, or tell the app you want to see fewer Memories like it. The one thing you can’t do? Opt out of the Memories feature entirely.

But she also shares how this technology and the data we keep can still give us meaning, even if it is from a time that may no longer represent what it once did:

Never mind that I’m wearing a white silk dress in the photo, that there’s a ring on my finger and a hazy row of bridal gowns on racks behind us. I still won’t delete it. I won’t archive photos from the half-marathon I ran with my ex, the one finish line we crossed, because I ran 13.1 miles and I’d prefer to remember how that felt on days when I have nothing left in the tank. I won’t delete the albums I have from half a dozen Christmases, because I need to believe holiday gatherings will happen again. I won’t unfollow our wedding photographer on Instagram, because—even though she never shot our photos—I appreciate her work as a keeper of other people’s memories.

No matter what I write here, I can’t do Goode’s incredible story justice. Just go read it.

TikTok adds automatic captions to videos in accessibility push

TikTok creators will soon be able to add automatically generated captions to their videos as the app attempts to make itself more accessible. The option to add auto captions will appear in the editing page after a video has been uploaded or recorded. TikTok says the feature will be available in American English and Japanese at first, but it plans to add support for more languages “in the coming months.”

The platform is adding the feature to make TikTok videos easier to watch for deaf and hard of hearing viewers. However, a TikTok dialogue box also says the feature is useful for anyone watching videos “when it’s difficult or inconvenient for them to listen to audio.” Creators can edit their captions after they’ve been automatically generated to fix any mistakes, and viewers can turn captions off via the captions button on the share panel.

As automatic transcription has gotten better over the years, services have increasingly been adding it to their software to make content more accessible. Last month, Google built the feature into Chrome, allowing it to generate captions for audio played through the browser. The company’s Live Caption system is also available as a system-wide feature for select Android devices. Video chat services like Zoom and Google Meet can auto-generate captions during calls, and Instagram also seems to be testing a similar feature for its videos.

TikTok’s auto captions are only its latest accessibility feature. The app also warns creators about videos that might trigger photosensitive epilepsy and provides filters for viewers to avoid these videos. A text-to-speech feature was also added late last year.

Vergecast: WWDC rumors, Clubhouse competition, and the cookiepocalypse

Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.

This week, Nilay and Dieter talk with Verge deputy editor Dan Seifert about this week’s rumors about the next big Apple product announcements after invites were sent out for the company’s annual WWDC event, which will again be virtual-only. After more AR headset leaks, the crew also discusses whether Apple has the bandwidth to support all of its product categories, especially with the Apple TV left alone for some time.

Later in the show, senior reporter Ashley Carman joins to discuss her coverage of social audio platform Clubhouse. Recently, we’ve seen a rise in potential competition in the social audio space from already-established platforms like LinkedIn, Slack, and Spotify. Ashley analyzes whether there is a winner-takes-all scenario or a more segmented space dedicated to genres of content.

There’s a whole lot more in the show — like Dieter’s explanation of the “cookiepocalypse” brought by Google Chrome’s changes to ad tracking on the browser — so listen to the full discussion here or on your preferred podcast player to hear it all.

The Verge’s Kara Verlaney on copy editing and its tools

You may come across the occasional writer who will claim (wrongly) that they don’t need an editor, but you will seldom, if ever, meet a writer or editor who will say they don’t need a copy editor.

The role of a copy editor is often misunderstood or underestimated by those not in the business. Kara Verlaney, senior copy editor for The Verge, when asked to explain the role of a copy editor, put it this way: “Copy editing is about maintaining consistency and accuracy, which is what gives sites like The Verge the authority to tell our audience about a subject. Beyond checking for grammatical errors and extolling the Oxford comma, copy editors also monitor things like sensitivity and tone, style, source diversity, and clarity. The Verge’s process has copy editors checking pieces right before publish, so we’re often the last line of defense before something goes up on the site.”

We talked to Kara to find out how she does her job and what tools she uses.

What is your job at The Verge?

I’m a senior copy editor, and I’ve worked here for five years. My day-to-day responsibilities vary, but a large portion of my time is dedicated to editing… everything we publish. That includes news stories, longform features, Instagram captions, video assets — there are a lot of words!

What hardware tools do you use?

My sound preferences vary depending on the length and / or topic of the piece I’m editing. Sometimes I blast music; sometimes I enjoy silence while I read. While working remotely, I mostly rely on my AirPods Pro, which allow me to control the level of noise transparency. I also tend to move around my space a lot while I work, so I’m essentially glued to my 2019 MacBook Pro during the workday.

What software tools do you and your colleagues use for your work?

Various publications have created stylebooks to guide writers and editors — examples include The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook. Each stylebook’s rules and formats differ slightly based on the content and audience, but consistency is universal.

Like many news organizations, our style largely follows The Associated Press Stylebook (otherwise known as the AP). Its online topical style guides and Ask the Editor sections can be great language resources (although sometimes the answers are confounding). The Verge’s default dictionary is Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged. It produces weekly vocabulary quizzes that are super fun, if that’s your thing. I have AP and M-W open at all times.

I do a majority of my editing in Google Docs or Vox Media’s CMS (content management system) Chorus, so I can leave comments and track changes.

What other tools do you use?

One facet of managing the copy desk is updating and maintaining The Verge’s style guide and communicating those rules to writers. Some of our house style is unique to our publication, so we differ somewhat from AP style. Language is constantly evolving and changing, so I need to stay on top of what other publications and style guides are doing to ensure our language stays relevant and inclusive.

I love using physical style manuals — any time I can avoid staring at a screen, I do! — but most of my hard copies are still gathering dust at the office. I did bring one home with me, though: Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which is essentially the lifeblood of any editor. The illustrated edition pictured at the top of this article was given to me as a gift, particularly due to its cover. (As my co-workers will tell you, I solicit pictures of dogs and other pets as a form of emotional currency.)

What advice do you have for people who are considering copy editing as a profession?

Being a copy editor is a very involved job. You have to communicate well with the writers, editors, and creators you work with; operate efficiently under some tight deadlines; and try to understand the essence of every story you read, cataloging some of that information to reference later. It’s fairly nuanced work for being so prescriptive.

I’d recommend reading as much as you can and refreshing your grammar skills. (The New York Times creates copy edit quizzes; I’ve gotten a perfect score on very few.) There are also tools like Grammarly that will highlight and explain various parts of speech and language rules, which some people find really helpful.

Mostly, you need a willingness to relearn (and unlearn) a bunch of rules you were probably taught in fourth grade English class. Language is learning!

Clubhouse defined a format — now it has to defend it

Clubhouse had an incredible year in one most of us would rather forget. The live audio app launched during a pandemic; gained more than 10 million downloads for an invite-only, iOS-only app; and succeeded to the point that most every social platform wants to copy it. Congrats to Clubhouse.

The company now faces its biggest challenges yet, however. For one, the pandemic is waning, and people might be more interested in real-life socializing instead of conversations facilitated through their phone. Anyone advertising their backyard as the next great Clubhouse competitor has a point. But for the people who do end up wanting to talk to each other online, they’ll soon have a lot more places to do so. In case you haven’t kept up: Twitter, Facebook (reportedly), LinkedIn, Discord, Spotify, Mark Cuban, and Slack have all launched or are working on their own attempts at social audio — the space is about to get busy.

The great concern for Clubhouse is that, as I postulated in February, social audio could follow the same trajectory as Snapchat’s Stories function: a brilliant social media-altering idea that goes on to live in every app to the detriment of the upstart that pioneered the format. And social audio is shaping up to go that way. With the threat growing, it’s worth looking at where Clubhouse is most likely to run into problems.

But first: what does Clubhouse have going for it? It was the first to social audio, and that’s something. Already, it counts millions of users who come to Clubhouse solely for social audio content, and that includes headline-grabbing names like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other celebrities. Tech CEOs are even making announcements in Clubhouse, including Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, who announced his company’s own copycat product in the app. The app generates news and discussions — that’s something much trickier for other companies to clone.

People have also built habits around Clubhouse, which is a positive sign for user retention. The team also plans to launch a creators program in the near future that’ll reward its most dedicated users with revenue and resources to beef up their shows.

And critically, the app has staffed up in just the past month. The company recently poached Fadia Kader from Instagram to lead its media partnerships and creators. At Instagram, she worked with musicians to help them optimize their work on the platform. Presumably, she’ll be doing something similar at Clubhouse. Already, I’ve seen her in a room with Justin Bieber talking about his most recent album. Clubhouse also hired Maya Watson from Netflix to become its head of global marketing, meaning it’ll soon dedicate resources to promoting Clubhouse rather than relying primarily on word of mouth. These are all important steps to keeping Clubhouse interesting and thriving.

But the app now faces competition from some of the world’s biggest platforms, which already have years of moderation experience, are available on iOS and Android, and have massive, loyal user bases to whom they can push social audio. Some companies, like Twitter and Discord, already pushed social audio features live to their millions of users with effectively the same interface as Clubhouse. Anyone who didn’t have an invite to Clubhouse, or an iPhone, now can access the magic of social audio with no association to Clubhouse whatsoever.

Maybe the most dangerous possibility for Clubhouse, however, is how easily it could lose the big names on its platform to challengers. Spotify, which announced this week that it acquired Betty Labs, the maker of the sports-centric social audio app Locker Room, plans to bring the app to Android, change its name, and broaden its coverage to music, culture, and sports. It could directly compete with Clubhouse for talent. Joe Rogan, for example, recently joined a Clubhouse chat, and although Spotify’s head of R&D tells me the company won’t restrict its podcasters from using other social audio apps, it’s easy to imagine the company encouraging the use of its own. Musicians, like Bieber, who maybe came to Clubhouse to debut music, might turn to Spotify’s app instead to maintain relationships with the streaming giant. As a point of reference, when Kylie Jenner tweeted that she barely opened Snapchat anymore, the company’s stock lost $1.3 billion. If stars like Tiffany Haddish decide to spend their time elsewhere, Clubhouse will falter, too.

At the same time, a few of these competitors are specifically interested in building native recording into their app, possibly to fuel the podcasting ecosystem and on-demand listening. Clubhouse has yet to do this. Fireside, which was co-founded by Mark Cuban, allows people to input sound effects, like music, and record their shows for distribution across podcasting platforms, as well as later playback on the app itself. Spotify will likely do the same with its app and rely on its Anchor software to handle hosting and distribution. Twitter’s head of consumer product told The Verge that it, too, would let people natively record their Spaces. Clubhouse hasn’t built that functionality, limiting its users to only live conversations, which can be hard to follow if they join them midway through. Context collapse will challenge every platform that focuses on live, but some of Clubhouse’s competitors are already working to solve that.

Stories made Snapchat a success. It pioneered the idea of ephemeral content and brought some semblance of authenticity back to social media. But it didn’t take long for the functionality to come to the same competitors Clubhouse now faces. To make its business work, Snapchat doubled down on its Android app, made the app more approachable to new users through a redesign, and aggressively pursued content partnerships with media and entertainment companies. It now pays users to make content for its TikTok competitor Spotlight and supports a growing ad business, but Instagram ultimately came away with the crown for Stories. Clubhouse hasn’t yet pursued ads or subscriptions, but that’ll be the next step to make it a self-supported platform. (Notably, though, its competitors, like Facebook, already rule ad targeting, possibly making Clubhouse’s job of selling ads or access to the platform itself tougher.)

None of this is to say Clubhouse won’t survive or build a strong business in the coming months and years. It just needs to stay in the conversation.

9 brilliant albums recorded in self-isolation

(Image credit: The Streets)

Novelty of working from home wearing a little thin? Children climbing the walls? Missing those carefree double-kisses and bear hugs from relatives and acquaintances?

Or are you feeling something else? Whisper it lest she disappear, but might that something actually be the muse descending?

“An artist is always alone – if he’s an artist,” said author Henry Miller. “No, what the artist needs is loneliness.” As if in agreement, the very second lockdown measures kicked in, social media feeds filled up with news that Shakespeare managed to pen King Lear, Macbeth, and most of Antony and Cleopatra in quarantine during a plague outbreak. (No all-new Netflix Originals or Amazon Prime Video documentaries to distract him, eh?)

In 1665, Isaac Newton found himself working from home following the closure of Cambridge University during the Bubonic plague. After sticking blunt needles into his eye (seriously) and watching apples fall from trees for a bit, he managed not only to explain gravity, but also to develop theories on optics and calculus that irrevocably changed our understanding of the universe. Not bad considering all we’ve managed to do today is upload an Instagram story and watch three episodes of Unforgotten on ITV Hub.

So, what of the socially distant musician during this and other periods of solitude? Turns out they too have been busy. What follows is our curated list of bands and solo artists who, owing to a series of unfortunate events, managed to write, record and release superb albums in complete isolation.

And ultimately it means we have no excuse. Do not pass go, do not collect £200 and do not visit Twitter. Read these examples for inspiration, then pick up your instrument. Get to work.

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Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson (1936)

(Image credit: Robert Johnson)

Robert Johnson died in 1938, aged 27, having recorded only 29 songs of which we know. Of these, 16 were taped alone in room 414 at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, on a single-reel Grundig recorder, less than two years before his death.

Nobody knows for sure how Johnson died – theories include poisoning, a gunshot wound, pneumonia, syphilis and stabbing – but his rumoured Faustian pact with the devil at a crossroads (his soul in return for otherworldly guitar powers) is the stuff of music legend.

Johnson’s work was not widely played until at least 25 years after his death. Indeed, Johnson never received any royalties for his songs and was paid in cash by his record label. Yet, according to Eric Clapton and almost any other iconic guitar player you can think of, Robert Johnson is “the most important blues musician who ever lived”.

Clapton released not one but two collections of songs by Johnson: Me and Mr. Johnson and the EP Sessions for Robert J, alongside a TV documentary of the same name aired in 2004 by the BBC.

Johnson simultaneously used elements of Delta blues – fingerpicking, sliding, strumming – while layering his own unique techniques and forms found in flamenco guitar. And then he sang on top. Only Robert Johnson (and the devil himself, if you believe the legend) will ever know exactly how he performed some of the tracks recorded in that hotel room.

Only two photos of Johnson are known to exist, despite musicologists and historians scouring the globe for more. What we do have is his music – and most of it was recorded in glorious solitude, in a hotel now owned by Sheraton.

“Who is the other guy playing with him?” Keith Richards asked fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones on first hearing a Robert Johnson song, “I was hearing two guitars – it took a long time to actually realise he was doing it all by himself.”

Richards later said, “His playing was like Bach.”

Listen to Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings on Tidal

Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen (1982)

(Image credit: Bruce Springsteen)

What does Bruce Springsteen do after his fifth studio album – a double LP featuring stone cold bangers Hungry Heart and Cadillac Ranch alongside the full force of the raucous E-Street Band?

He buys a Teac four-track cassette recorder and lays down 15 songs alone, in his house, through the night on 3rd January 1982. He sings, plays guitar, and uses the other two tracks to add a harmony vocal or an alternative guitar.

He thinks he’s going to teach the songs to the rest of the band when they get into the recording studio. He carries that demo cassette around in his pocket, without a case, for “a couple of weeks”. Then, after a bit more thought, The Boss decides to release the demo as is, without the band – the songs are a little too personal to be altered.

Owing to the recording process, it was apparently hard to release the thing as a record (the needle wouldn’t track in the wax properly because of the distortion it picked up) to the point that the label nearly released it as a cassette-only affair.

Springsteen named the album after one of the songs, Nebraska (the birthplace of Kool-Aid, but hardly America’s most exciting State) and never toured to promote it.

And still, Nebraska is one of the most highly-regarded albums in Springsteen’s substantial back catalogue.

Even one of the tracks that Springsteen recorded for the album, then shelved, (eventually giving it the E-Street Band treatment and releasing it in 1984) isn’t bad – it’s called Born in the USA.

Listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska on Tidal

Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones (1972)

(Image credit: The Rolling Stones)

Rolling stones gather no moss, but they do rack up ridiculously high tax bills. And so it was that, after becoming quite successful in the late 1960s, The Rolling Stones found themselves at a villa called Nellcôte in the south of France in 1972.

Keith Richards rented the house, where the band lived as tax exiles and sheltered their earnings in a Netherlands holding company.

Exile on Main Street was the band’s tenth album. The Stones were already well versed on recording nowhere near a proper studio – much of the recording of their prior album, Sticky Fingers, had been done at Mick Jagger’s country-pile Hampshire home using a mobile recording studio. The same mobile studio was simply transferred to Nellcôte and set up in the basement of the villa.

Keith Richards lived upstairs and the band had frequent house guests – so not self-isolation as we’ve become accustomed to, recently, but still.

Often, other musician friends would amble down to the studio to jam with Keith, or stay to record tracks with the whole band. Such daily recording sessions went on through the night. Without formal studio rules, there’s a delightfully bohemian, laissez-faire feel to the whole album.

Listen to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street on Tidal

Original Pirate Material by The Streets (2001)

(Image credit: The Streets)

Recorded mostly within the confines of his Brixton home over the course of about a year, Skinner’s debut album as The Streets is an inventive collage of beats and lazily delivered lines about life among Britain’s working class that proves there is worth in music recording now being at every person’s fingertips.

In his autobiography, The Story Of The Streets, Skinner discusses how he cleared out a wardrobe to create a vocal booth, deadening its sound with duvets, pillows and mattresses.

The album got to number 12 in the UK Album Charts in 2002, but got another lease of life and peaked at number 10 in 2004 – after the release of The Streets’ chart-topping second album A Grand Don’t Come For Free.

The sobering cover artwork (main photo) is a night-time shot of the south face of the Kestrel House tower block on City Road, London, taken in 1995 by German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg.

Listen to Original Pirate Material on Tidal

Greystone Chapel by Glen Sherley/Johnny Cash (1968)

(Image credit: Johnny Cash)

Although Greystone Chapel was the song that made Glen Sherley the most famous prison inmate and country-music singer/songwriter alive, Sherley wrote many songs in lock-up and even recorded an entire album in his cell.

Sherley was in and out of several prisons throughout the 1950s and ’60s. When Johnny Cash discovered him in 1968, Sherley was doing a bit for armed robbery in Folsom.

In a 1994 interview with Life Magazine, Johnny Cash said: “The night before I was going to record at Folsom Prison, I got to the motel and a preacher friend of mine brought me a tape of a song called Greystone Chapel. He said a convict had written it about the chapel at Folsom.

“I listened to it one time and I said: ‘I’ve got to do this in the show tomorrow.’ So I stayed up and learned it, and the next day the preacher had him in the front row. I announced: ‘This song was written by Glen Sherley.’ It was a terrible, terrible thing to point him out among all those cons, but I didn’t think about that then. Everybody just had a fit, screaming and carrying on.”

Greystone Chapel was recorded live, along with the rest of Cash’s At Folsom Prison album, on 13th January 1968 and released in May of that year.

After Greystone Chapel, country singer Eddy Arnold sniffed out Sherley’s music and recorded another Sherley song in 1971, Portrait Of My Woman. It became the title track of Arnold’s next album.

Sherley was given the permission by prison officials to record a live album, Glen Sherley, while still in jail. The album was released by Mega Records and was a big success.

When Sherley was released from Prison in 1971, Cash met him at the gates. Sadly though, the story doesn’t end well. In May 1978, two days after shooting someone, Sherley put a gun to his own head. He was 42. The funeral was paid for by Cash.

Listen to Glen Sherley on Tidal or Spotify

how i’m feeling now by Charli XCX (2020)

(Image credit: Charli XCX)

Charli XCX’s fourth album really is a product of the pandemic: conceived during the initial COVID-19 lockdown, made in collaboration with her fans over the following 39 days and released on 15th May 2020, thus elegantly encapsulating the confusion, loneliness and boredom of our first long stint at home.

On 6th April 2020, Charli XCX announced in a public Zoom call with fans that she would be working on a new album in self-isolation, stating, “The nature of this album is going to be very indicative of the times just because I’m only going to be able to use the tools I have at my fingertips to create all music, artwork, videos everything.”

Although the result will undoubtedly (and rightly) be used as a kind of sonic photograph in the years to come – owing both to its subject matter and how Charlotte Aitchison used social media to workshop the tracks – how i’m feeling now is a timeless triumph.

The Cambridge-born songwriter’s knack of finding an absorbing melody or phrase can’t be ignored. The first track, Pink Diamond, came to Aitchison during an At Home With Apple Music interview between herself, Dua Lipa and and Jennifer Lopez, after J. Lo recounted talking to Barbara Streisand about Ben Affleck’s gift of that iconic rock. The compelling DIY electronics should also be celebrated, whether or not we’re able to dance, mingle and talk freely again soon.

Listen to Charlie XCX’s how i’m feeling now on Tidal

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OK Computer by Radiohead (1997)

(Image credit: Radiohead)

Radiohead recorded and self-produced OK Computer in a 16th-century, Grade I listed Tudor Mansion called St. Catherine’s Court in Bath, owned by actress Jane Seymour. She rented the house to the band on the condition that they feed her cat in her absence.

Almost every song on this third Radiohead album (the studio-recorded 1995 Lucky is the exception) was laid down in that house.

If ever a song perfectly captured dystopian, apocalyptic self-isolation, it’s Climbing Up the Walls. There’s nothing quite like that guttural scream at the end for the cabin feverish.

As if to emphasise its socially distanced rhetoric, Thom Yorke has compared the acoustic guitar-heavy opening of the song Exit Music (For a Film), to Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison (listed, above).

Listen to Radiohead’s OK Computer on Tidal

For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver (2008)

(Image credit: Bon Iver)

Justin Vernon wrote, recorded and self-released his debut breakthrough Bon Iver

album, For Emma, Forever Ago, in his dad’s hunting cabin in the woods of Wisconsin.

Vernon, frustrated with trying to write songs and somehow pay the bills while working in a sandwich shop, left his place in Raleigh, North Carolina, and drove for 18 hours to the remote hunting cabin – set in 80 acres of land an hour northwest of his hometown, Eau Claire in Wisonsin – hoping for some time alone.

He recorded the entire album in the cabin, on an old Mac with ProTools, throughout the winter of 2006 into early 2007 – when he wasn’t hunting for food. He apparently killed two deer during his three month residence in the cabin and had one scary encounter with a bear, which was enticed by the smell of his cooking.

The album is focused on a break-up he’d struggled to get over.

“I had nothing but the sound of my own thoughts, and they were really loud when that’s all that was going on,” Vernon later said on his near-complete isolation. We’ve all been there.

Though he hadn’t intended to make an album, encouragement from friends did the trick and he self-released For Emma, Forever Ago – after a little help with mastering – in July 2007. He was signed to the independent label Jagjaguwar later that year and the rest, as they say, is history.

Listen to Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago on Tidal

461 Ocean Boulevard by Eric Clapton (1974)

(Image credit: Eric Clapton)

This was the album that gave Eric Clapton his first US number one LP and single – his cover of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ I Shot the Sheriff. It also marked Clapton’s return to recording after recovering from a three-year addiction to heroin. The album topped various international charts and sold more than two million copies.

The title of the record refers to a house in the small town of Golden Beach, Miami – the house that Clapton’s manager at the time, Robert Stigwood, paid for him to live in so that he might, perhaps, write and record new music. After overcoming his substance addiction, Clapton confessed that he’d wasted three years of his life, barely managing to do anything except watch TV and get out of shape.

Clapton worked on a farm for a little while, listening to music from artists such as Robert Johnson (featured above), and even lending his guitar skills to the rock opera Tommy – which you can read about in our 10 best musical theatre soundtracks to test your speakers feature.

He was given a demo tape by former Derek and the Dominos bassist, Carl Radle, which contained collaborations between Radle, keyboardist Dick Sims and drummer Jamie Oldaker. Clapton felt inspired and ready to write new material.

The whole album was recorded from April to May 1974. Although Clapton did venture into the Criteria studios in Miami to record, he wrote, practiced, recuperated and sang alone with Blackie, his Fender, in the Floridian rented house pictured on the album sleeve.

Listen to Eric Clapton’s 461 Ocean Boulevard on Tidal

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