Twitter plans to launch its updated Verified program next Friday with manual authentication and different colored check marks for different types of users, Elon Musk has tweeted. "Gold check for companies, grey check for government, blue for individuals (celebrity or not) and all verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates," he said. 

Musk previously stated that Twitter would "probably use [a] different color check for organizations than individuals." However, this is the first time he's revealed what those colors will likely be. It's not clear if all verified users including government and industry will have to pay Twitter Blue fee of $8 per month. 

In a subsequent tweet, Musk added that "individuals can have secondary tiny logo showing they belong to an org if verified as such by that org." However, all individual users will have the same blue check mark "as [the] boundary of what constitutes 'notable' is otherwise too subjective," he said.

Musk originally launched his new verification program with the idea that anyone who joins Twitter Blue for $8 a month would get a blue checkmark. As many predicted, though, the system quickly became a goat rodeo due to account impersonation and was shut down after just 48 hours. In one instance, an Eli Lilly impersonator tweeted that "insulin is free now," forcing the company to apologize for the tweet. Another Eli Lilly impersonator then apologized for the apology.

Musk originally said that the revised Verified program would launch on November 29th, but his latest tweet puts the date at December 2nd. 

The Russo brothers are creating a series for Amazon based on the story of how FTX, which was once one of the most well-known crypto exchanges, met such a swift and scandalous end. According to Variety, Amazon has approved a limited series adaptation with eight episodes and is looking to start production by spring next year. David Weil, who previously worked with the Russo brothers in their Prime Video series Citadel, will write and executive produce the pilot episode. Meanwhile, Anthony and Joe Russo, known for directing four Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, are reportedly in talks of directing on top of serving as the show's executive producers. 

FTX filed for bankruptcy last week after a series of events ultimately led to its collapse in a short amount of time. The exchange's FTT tokens had plummeted in value earlier this month after rival exchange Binance announced that it was going to sell its remaining FTTs due to "recent revelations." A few days before Binance decided to liquidate all its FTTs, CoinDesk had reported that Alameda Research, the trading firm that was founded by then-FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, was mostly backed by FTT tokens. "The situation adds to evidence that the ties between FTX and Alameda are unusually close," CoinDesk wrote. Alameda had reportedly been having financial issues and was allegedly using FTX customers' deposits to pay debts.

Smaller investors and ordinary customers also sought to get out upon smelling trouble in the air and submitted requests for withdrawals, which caused a liquidity issue. Binance initially agreed to bail out FTX by buying it but ultimately backed out of the deal. After that, FTX filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. There's a lot more to the story, including the mystery of where billions of dollars of missing or stolen funds had gone, that the Russo brothers could include in their show. 

It's still unclear what source material the Russos are planning to use, but Variety says the show could be based on "insider reporting" by journalists who've been investigating the FTX scandal. They're also reportedly in talks with multiple Marvel actors to play key roles in the series. Before Amazon confirmed that it was working on a show based on FTX, Deadline reported that Apple was close to signing a seven-figure deal for the rights on a book about Bankman-Fried and the crypto exchange that's being written by Michael Lewis. That's the same author behind Moneyball, The Big Short and The Blind Side. Unlike Amazon, Apple is reportedly planning to turn Lewis' book into a feature film. 

Ticketmaster's chaotic handling of Taylor Swift's tour ticket sales has brought the company under increased scrutiny, including from lawmakers. Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Mike Lee (R-UT), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, have announced a hearing to gather evidence on competition in the ticketing industry. They have yet to confirm when the hearing will take place or the witnesses that the committee will call upon.

Swift's fans overwhelmed Ticketmaster's systems in the gold rush for tickets to her first tour in five years. Ticketmaster says presale codes went out to 1.5 million people, but 14 million (including "a staggering number" of bots) tried to buy tickets. The company said it was slammed with 3.5 billion total system requests, four times its previous peak. When fans were able to make it to the seat selection screen, many effectively had tickets snatched out of their hands as tried to put them in their carts.

There was supposed to be a general sale for the remaining tickets last Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled that, citing "extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand." Even though the level of interest in Swift's stadium shows was evidently through the roof, Ticketmaster's management of the process has raised a lot of questions. Swift said Ticketmaster assured her and her team that it could handle the demand. However, she said the mayhem “pissed me off.”

After the presale mess, Klobuchar (who wrote to Ticketmaster to ask if the company is taking appropriate measures to provide the best service it can) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal said they were concerned about "the state of competition in the ticketing industry." Others, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Ticketmaster's parent, Live Nation, to be broken up.

Along with selling event tickets, the company owns and operates many venues and manages several major artists. Last week, it was reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been conducting an antitrust investigation into Live Nation for several months.

“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets. The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “That’s why we will hold a hearing on how consolidation in the live entertainment and ticketing industry harms customers and artists alike. When there is no competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences.”

Ticketmaster has said it's adhering to a 2010 consent decree it has with the DOJ that allowed its merger with Live Nation to go ahead. “Ticketmaster has a significant share of the primary ticketing services market because of the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system,” it added in a statement to Deadline.

Netflix's new in-house game teams may be particularly ambitious. The company has posted a job listing for a director in Los Angeles who would lead work on a "brand-new AAA PC game" — this is not just another mobile title. While many details remain unknown, the new hire will ideally have experience with first- and third-person shooters, constantly evolving "live service" games (think Destiny 2) and quickly prototyping in Unreal Engine. The perfect candidate would also be comfortable with both cooperative and competitive multiplayer, and create a game world "worthy" of a Netflix show.

The streaming service emphasizes that the game director won't be held back by the "design constraints" of monetization. As with Netflix's existing games, in-app purchases, ads and other rude surprises shouldn't exist in this project. A listing for a lead engineer also alludes to a "3rd person action RPG."

Expectations are already high. Netflix games VP Mike Verdu revealed last month that former Overwatch director Chacko Sonny is leading the LA studio after leaving Blizzard in 2021, and the new director may be similarly notable when they're expected to have "at least" 10 years of design experience. Netflix has also set up shop in Helsinki and has bought multiple developers, including Oxenfree creator Night School Studio.

There's a strong incentive to foster game development at Netflix. Less than one percent of the firm's subscribers are taking advantage of the mobile games that come with membership. Blockbuster games for other platforms could not only reach new audiences, but help Netflix build its reputation in the industry.

Twitter won't be firing and laying off more people, Elon Musk reportedly told the staff members who remained after asking employees to commit to an "extremely hardcore" Twitter during an all-hands meeting. According to The Verge, which heard a partial recording of the event, the company is even actively looking for people to fill roles in engineering and sales. Musk apparently made the announcement on the same day layoffs hit the company's sales and partnerships teams. Robin Wheeler, Twitter’s head of ad sales, and VP of partnerships Maggie Suniewick were reportedly fired for opposing Musk's directive to cut more employees. Of course, these all happened after the website's new owner ordered layoffs that cut the company's workforce in half.  

Musk didn't specify which roles Twitter is hiring for during the meeting, The Verge said, but he did say that "[i]n terms of critical hires, people who are great at writing software are the highest priority." Since this all-hands was also the first time Musk met with staff members following his takeover, employees asked him questions about the company's future, including whether Twitter will move its HQ to Texas like Tesla did. Musk replied that there are no plans for Twitter to move, but that being "dual-headquartered" in both states could make sense. 

He also said moving to Texas would "play into the idea that Twitter has gone from being left-wing to right-wing." Musk said that's not the case. "It is a moderate-wing takeover of Twitter... to be the digital town square, we must represent people with a wide array of views even if we disagree with those views," he added. As The Verge notes, Twitter recently fired people who called out Musk through tweets and through other avenues. 

In addition to addressing questions about the inner workings of the company, Musk announced during the meeting that Twitter might not be relaunching paid verification before this month ends, after all. If you'll recall, the website had to pause its $8-a-month Blue subscription with verification shortly after it was launched due to a steep rise in impersonation and fake accounts on the website. 

Musk previously said that Blue Verified would return on November 29th. But now he told employees and has also announced that Twitter won't be relaunching the subscription system until the website is confident that it can stop impersonation. Also, Twitter might ultimately give individuals and organizations different color checkmarks, which will make it apparent if users are interacting with a company's or org's actual account. Twitter already has a gray "Official" checkmark reserved for organizations, but it looks like it wants to make the indicator more visible and recognizable as a way to prevent people from being duped by impersonators.

Meta is taking new steps to lock down teens’ privacy settings. The company is making changes to the default privacy settings for teens’ Facebook accounts, and further limiting the ability of “suspicious” adults to message teens on Instagram and Facebook.

On Facebook, Meta says it will start automatically changing the default privacy settings on new accounts created by teens under 16. With the changes, the visibility of their friend list, tagged posts, and pages and accounts they follow will be automatically set to “more private settings.”

Notably, the new settings will only be automatically switched on for new accounts created by teens, though Meta says it will nudge existing teen accounts to adopt similar settings. The update follows a similar move from Instagram, which began making teen accounts private by default last year.

Meta is also making new changes meant to prevent “suspicious” adults from contacting teens. On Facebook, it will block these accounts from the site’s “people you may know” feature, and on Instagram it will test removing the message button from teens’ profiles. The company didn’t share exactly how it will determine who is “suspicious,” but said it would take into account factors like whether someone has been recently blocked or reported by a younger user.

Additionally, Meta said it’s working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) on a “global platform” to prevent the non-consensual sharing of intimate images of teens. According to Meta, the platform, which could launch by mid-December, will work similarly to a system designed to prevent the sharing of similar images from adults.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, the system will allow teens to generate a “private report” for images on their devices they don’t want shared. The platform, operated by NCMEC, would then create a unique hash of the image, which would go into a database so companies like Facebook can detect when matching images are shared on their platforms. The spokesperson added that the original image never leaves the teen’s device. 

Following an Xbox Series X/S and PC release this past summer, Immortality, the latest project from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, is now available on Android and iOS via Netflix. Provided you subscribe to the streaming service, you can download the game at no additional charge and experience one of the most highly acclaimed titles of 2022.

Like Barlow’s past projects, Immortality is a love letter to the full-motion video games of the ‘90s. The game tasks you with finding out the fate of fictional actress Marissa Marcel. You’ll need to piece together what happened to her by watching clips from three unreleased films and behind-the-scenes footage. Barlow recruited Allan Scott and Amelia Gray, best known for their work on Queen’s Gambit and Mr. Robot, to help write the story of Immortality. So if you’re a sucker for a good story, this one is worth checking out.

The Department of Justice has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Live Nation, the parent of Ticketmaster, to determine if the company has abused its power in the live music industry. The investigation is said to have been ongoing over the last several months. The New York Times reported on the investigation after Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen fans had an excessively difficult time trying to buy tickets for those artists' tours.

The DOJ's antitrust division has been asking music venues and stakeholders in the ticketing market about the industry and Live Nation’s practices, according to the report. The agency is said to be looking into whether Live Nation holds a monopoly in the live music space.

The company owns and/or operates many venues, including the House of Blues, and it runs festivals like Lollapalooza and Download. It sells tickets to those places and events through Ticketmaster. Live Nation also manages dozens of notable artists.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010 after gaining approval from the DOJ. The agency imposed some conditions on the deal, such as Live Nation having to sell some parts of its business. For a 10-year period, Live Nation was prohibited from threatening to keep tours away from venues that don't use Ticketmaster. In 2019, the DOJ determined that Live Nation broke that condition, and it extended the merger agreement provision period to 2025.

Bringing things up to date, Swifties (and bots) crashed Ticketmaster on Tuesday as they attempted to snag tickets for the megastar's first tour in five years during a pre-sale. Ticketmaster said a load of more than 3.5 billion system requests caused havoc.

"The site was supposed to open up for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans," Greg Maffei, the CEO of Live Nation's biggest shareholder Liberty Media, told CNBC. "We had 14 million people hit the site, including bots, which are not supposed to be there.”

Fans waited in queues for hours and when they were finally able to select a seat, many were still unable to grab tickets. In many cases, tickets were essentially snatched out of customers' hands as they tried to put them in their cart. A general sale for the remaining tickets was supposed to take place on Friday, but Ticketmaster canceled it "due to extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory to meet that demand."

The chaos led to calls to break up Live Nation, including from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar expressed concern over " the state of competition in the ticketing industry," as Reuters notes.

"I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could," Swift wrote in an Instagram Story on Friday. "It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them."

This is far from the first time people had a chaotic experience while trying to get tickets to see a major artist. Blink-182 and Paramore tours sold out almost instantly. Ticketmaster's controversial dynamic pricing system led to some fans paying thousands of dollars for Bruce Springsteen tickets — even before those sought-after tickets hit secondary markets.

Engadget has contacted Live Nation for comment. The Department of Justice doesn't comment on ongoing investigations.

Twitter may not be restoring Blue verification for a couple of weeks, but it hopes to be more careful when the feature comes back. The social network has updated its FAQ site to warn that new accounts will have to wait 90 days before they can subscribe to Blue. The company also says it reserves the right to demand waiting periods "at our discretion without notice."

The new policy comes shortly after Twitter blocked new accounts from joining Blue. Within two days of Twitter adopting its pay-to-verify system, the social media service grappled with a flood of impersonators and trolls using their new checkmarks to confuse users. The firm tried using a secondary "official" checkmark for public figures and organizations, but new Twitter owner scrapped the system mere hours after it launched.

Musk added that a "new release" would discourage fraudsters by dropping the Blue checkmark if they change their name — they wouldn't get it back until Twitter confirmed that the new handle honored the Terms of Service. There isn't yet any official policy to this effect, however.

There's plenty of pressure for revised policies like these. Senator Ed Markey has grilled Elon Musk over the ease of creating fake accounts under the new verification system, and suggested that Congress might intervene if the entrepreneur doesn't fix Twitter and his other brands. Twitter is also dealing with internal chaos as employees resign en masse in response to Musk's demands for "long hours" from "hardcore" staff.

The digitization of the music industry leveled the playing field for artists. An album can be written, recorded and released from a bedroom without an expensive recording studio or predatory record label. This DIY ethic isn’t new. Bands have been recording and releasing albums on their own or out of friendly record stores for decades.

Digitization has also created a glut of available music, which can make it difficult for new bands or artists to break through the noise. Plus, popular artists with record deals still get the lion’s share of the attention. I’m pretty sure every Beyonce release is now a national holiday. For every other artist, the resurgence of vinyl and cassette has revived the ability to give or sell something tangible to their fans – a physical keepsake that could offer a tighter emotional bond with the music. While making copies of tapes has been an at-home pastime since the 1980s, vinyl has required a third party that specializes in cutting records. At least, until recently.

Teenage Engineering’s $149 PO-08 Record Factory combines the nostalgia of a Fisher-Price turntable with the utility of a machine that can actually cut vinyl. You’ll have to assemble it yourself and master each song specifically for the device. Even after all that work, your music probably will sound like it’s being played through an AM radio. That might sound like a nightmare for some, yet is potentially wonderful for others.

Roberto Baldwin / Engadget

The PO-08 is a rebranding of magazine publisher Gakken’s "Easy Record Maker" — a record cutter/player designed by Yuri Suzuki. Teenage Engineering worked with Suzuki for its version and even includes an interview with the designer in the supplied magazine/instruction booklet.

Though the turntable looks like a toy, Teenage Engineering tells you (again and again) that it’s not recommended for kids under the age of 12. It’s really built for “children” between the ages of 17 and 64 — for the type of person that has three bands, strong opinions about direct drive turntables, a very active Discogs account and a DIY attitude. Oh, and also the patience needed to fiddle with tiny parts for hours to create a single, not-so-perfect mono copy of a song. Yes, it works, but it’s a lo-fi representation of a professionally created record; The Factory is an EZ bake oven for vinyl.

Building the Record Factory takes about 60 to 90 minutes, and it helps give you the confidence to disassemble it when you realize that, say, you didn’t attach the cable for the needle securely. I had to do exactly that when there was no audio after I first put the device together – everything seemed to be working but there was no actual sound.

Having to assemble the device also lends insight into the Record Factory’s inner workings, which are quite clever. The cutting needle vibrates via a tiny speaker to engrave your audio onto one of Teenage Engineering’s blank discs. A tiny gearing system moves the needle along and after three to four minutes (depending on the recording speed), your song is inscribed onto the vinyl.

But everything leading up to that is a series of adjustments. If you’re the type of person that requires a thing to “just work” without much tinkering, stay far away from the PO-08.

You begin with your original recording and at the end of the inscription, you get a mono representation. The single-channel audio is a technical limitation of the device. To make sure the audio going in is mono, the Record Factory comes with a minijack cable that takes the left and right channels of your stereo signal and merges them together. You also end up losing fidelity, which is another technical limitation. The top and low ends of a song can get muddy easily and too much bass actually causes the cutter needle to jump.

Roberto Baldwin / Engadget

You can try to fix this yourself, but it’s smarter to use Teenage Engineering’s online audio mastering tool. Just upload the file, wait a few minutes and the site spits out something that works better with the device. This process does result in the loss of all the intricate details of your song. The low end becomes slightly muddy or disappears altogether while the high end loses its bite. If you’re looking for crisp, exact copies, skip the PO-08 entirely.

A whole 45 minutes after mastering your audio, you get to cut a record. In that time, you’ll be adjusting the pressure of the cutting arm, listening very carefully to the audio being sent to the device to make sure it’s not distorting and if it is, turning down the volume. But you can’t go too low, or the signal wont be strong enough to engrave. That means you have to open up the equalizer and make adjustments (so many adjustments) until the audio sounds good (enough).

Now you’re ready to put it on wax (as they used to say in the olden days). Except before you create a record you can share, you need to cut audio onto a test vinyl. You record 10 seconds, wash the disc with water to get all the excess bits out of the grooves, then switch the Record Factory to play mode and listen to your masterpiece.

Roberto Baldwin / Engadget

The test record isn’t that a big deal until you realize that Teenage Engineering has sold out of the discs needed for the turntable and hasn’t shared information on when they’ll be back in stock. This makes testing all the more important.

A word of caution: the cutter slows down the turntable, so when played back at regular speed it might sound a little higher pitched. Like low-level Chipmunks high. So make sure you drop your file into the relevant tools online to adjust your song. Except it likely still needs work if you want the closest representation of your song available from the PO-80, which means you’ll have to, surprise surprise, make more adjustments. I conducted five test cuts before I was finally ready to create my first at-home vinyl record of a song.

On top of all that, the turntable itself isn’t a great player, either. It sounds like you’re listening to music from under the sea. It’s fun to create and play on the same device, but it’s best to take the disc to a proper turntable. On my Technics SL-1200 MK2, the mono audio with the high and low-end cut-off sounded a bit far away compared to the original and the fidelity is nowhere near the quality of professional vinyl in my collection. Yet, it’s exactly what I anticipated and I’m happy with the end result.

The Record Factory lives or dies by its owner’s expectations. There are two types of people in this world: those that lose their minds and patience dealing with even the tiniest inconvenience and those that live for tinkering and experimenting.

Roberto Baldwin / Engadget

The second group are people like me, and are excited about the difference in sounds between an at-home produced record, a cassette and a digital file. My band typically records on a digital eight-track but I also use a cassette four-track from the late 80s. There’s something special about sending a fan a vinyl recording that was produced at home. The PO-08 is for people that find beauty in the inherent potential for errors in DIY analog recordings.

The Record Factory will find its niche of users that happily spend hours creating the perfectly imperfect vinyl copy of their song. Unfortunately, if someone doesn’t already have a PO-08 turntable they will have to find one of these beauties on eBay or Craigslist. The power move is to search for the Gaken branded version on eBay. Those turntables are much cheaper (under $100) than the Teenage Engineering version.

Teenage Engineering told Engadget that it has no plans to produce more of the sold-out turntables which is a shame. Not every musician can afford to have hundreds of records produced by a third party. But, if they can find a Record Factory (they’re currently selling from $250 to $500) they can cut one-of-a-kind vinyl they can share with friends and fans while they wait to make it big. As long as they are happy doing that on a toy built for very patient music nerds that are happy trading fidelity for something real.