Following an unsuccessful first attempt at paid account verification, Twitter will start rolling out its revamped Blue subscription on December 12th, the company announced on Saturday. Twitter originally launched Blue verification for iOS devices in early November for $8 per month, but the company paused the rollout after the platform was overrun by verified trolls. On Saturday, the company also confirmed the service will cost $11 per month when users subscribe directly through its iOS app. On the web, the subscription will cost $8 per month. 

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US federal prosecutors could be building a fraud case against FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Bloomberg reports Justice Department officials met with the crypto exchange’s bankruptcy team this week to discuss documents investigators aim to obtain from the company.

The meeting included prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, Assistant US Attorney Roos, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and lawyers from FTX. Roos, notably, was involved in the prosecution of Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was convicted of misleading investors earlier this year. According to Bloomberg, potential charges were not discussed at the meeting that occurred this week.

The Justice Department is “closely” examining whether FTX improperly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars around the time the company declared bankruptcy on November 11th. It’s also probing whether the exchange broke the law when it moved funds to sister company Alameda Research.

In his recent New York Times interview, Bankman-Fried denied knowingly misusing customer funds. “Clearly, I made a lot of mistakes. There are things I would give anything to be able to do over again,” he said. “I did not ever try to commit fraud on anyone.” He will testify before the House Committee on Financial Services next week, a panel that will also include testimony from FTX’s current CEO, John J. Ray III. Ray has accused Bankman-Fried of making “erratic and misleading public statements” about FTX.

Jeep parent company Stellantis on Friday said it would indefinitely shut down a manufacturing plant in Illinois and lay off approximately 1,350 employees early next year. The facility – located in Belvidere, a city 75 miles northwest of downtown Chicago – is responsible for producing the internal combustion engine Jeep Cherokee crossover. In a statement the automaker shared with Reuters, Stellantis blamed the cost of electrifying its cars for the move.

“[The automotive industry] has been adversely affected by a multitude of factors like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the global microchip shortage, but the most impactful challenge is the increasing cost related to the electrification of the automotive market," the company said, adding that it may shutter the facility permanently as it considers what to do next.

United Auto Workers Local 1268 shop chairman Tim Ferguson told Reuters that company documents show Stellantis plans to move Cherokee production to a facility in Toluca, Mexico. "To me, there is no question about it," he said. "Their plan is to close this plant." Stellantis declined to comment on Ferguson’s allegations. “We are not commenting on the future of the Cherokee,” the company said.

As The Verge points out, Stellantis isn’t the first automaker to blame EVs for a recent set of layoffs. In August, Ford cut about 3,000 employees. “We have an opportunity to lead this exciting new era of connected and electric vehicles,” the automaker said at the time. “Building this future requires changing and reshaping virtually all aspects of the way we have operated for more than a century.”

It’s also worth noting Friday’s announcement came on the same day that workers at a General Motors-LG battery cell facility in Ohio voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionization. Unions in France, Italy, Canada and other parts of the world recently asked Stellantis to raise worker wages by as much as 8.5 percent following a year of record global inflation. In the third quarter of the year, Stellantis said revenue grew to €42.1 billion (approximately $44 billion), a 29 percent from the same period last year.

The Biden administration is reportedly drafting an executive order designed to modernize federal space regulations. According to Reuters, White House officials have hosted multiple “listening sessions” since November 14th. The goal of those meetings has been to hear from private space companies and the rules they would like to see introduced.

Reuters reports the White House wants to simplify licensing and approval procedures for more routine space activities, including things like rocket launches and satellite deployments. Among the measures the Biden administration is considering is an order that would task the Department of Commerce with creating an online tool that would guide companies through the licensing requirements from each federal agency. The team drafting the order is also looking for ways to push Congress to give certain federal agencies oversight of space activities that aren’t covered by current laws, including things like asteroid mining and space junk removal. The order could be ready for President Biden to sign by early next year.

The administration’s push to streamline space regulations comes as companies like Blue Origin prepare to spend billions on projects like Orbital Reef, a space station the firm hopes to start assembling in low Earth orbit by the end of the decade. The next decade is also likely to see a new space race between the US and China play out as the rival superpowers look to put humans back on the Moon. Private space firms are likely to be critical in the outcome of that conflict.

When Dyson announced its Zone noise-canceling and air-purifying headphones earlier this year, the company kept some details close to its chest. Specifically, Dyson didn’t announce pricing or availability, nor did it say much about battery life. On Wednesday, it shared that information. Let’s begin with the detail everyone wants to know. When the wearable arrives in the US next March, it will start at an eye-watering $949, making it almost twice as expensive as the AirPods Max.

At first, Dyson will begin accepting preorders by appointment only before the headphones become available through its website and Demo stores across the country. In the US, the company will offer the wearable in two colorways: Ultra Blue/Prussian Blue and Prussian Blue/Bright Copper. The latter will only be available directly from the company, but it comes with a few extras, including a second electrostatic carbon filter, a soft pouch and an inflight adaptor kit.

Both the standard and Dyson Direct models come with the Zone’s signature vizor, as well as a dedicated sleeve and cleaning brush. According to Dyson, the electrostatic filters are rated to provide up to 12 months of use before they should be replaced. The filters feature a dual-layer design that incorporates potassium-enriched carbon to capture acidic gasses like nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and ozone. All told, the company claims the filters will block 99 percent of particles, including ones that are as small as 0.1 microns.

On the audio front, the Zone headphones are capable of up to 38 decibels of noise cancellation and feature 40-millimeter neodymium drivers. You can use the MyDyson companion app to choose between three audio equalization modes dubbed Dyson EQ, Bass Boost and Neutral. At launch, the headphones will support SBC, AAC and LHDC audio codecs, as well as Bluetooth 5.0.

Battery life will depend on how extensively you use the Zone’s air filtration feature. If it’s not powering the Visor, the Zone’s 2,600mAh battery can provide up to 50 hours of listening time on a single charge. Using the visor at its slowest setting reduces battery life to a modest four hours. Increasing purification speed to the “Mid” and “High” flow settings further reduces battery life to two-and-a-half hours and one-and-a-half hours, respectively. Using USB-C charging, Dyson says it will take about three hours to take the battery from dead to 100 percent. All of that means you will need to be selective about when you decide to use the visor.

Twitter is effectively sunsetting Moments, the company announced on Wednesday. First launched in 2015, the feature allowed users to create curated collections of tweets in a bid to make it easier to follow current events on the platform. “Not all moments last. As of today we’re removing the option to create Moments for users as we focus on improving other experiences,” the Twitter Support account posted, adding previously made Moments would still have a home on the website.

The end of Twitter Moments is unsurprising for a few reasons. Even before Elon Musk bought the company, Twitter had begun to move away from the feature. In 2018, the company removed the ability to create Moments within its Android and iOS apps. “When features aren’t used as often, we’ll remove them, so we can focus on building other products you’ll love,” Twitter noted at the time.

Following Musk’s takeover, it’s likely Moments was identified as a feature that didn’t mesh with his vision for the platform. The billionaire has repeatedly said he aims to simplify Twitter while simultaneously transforming it into a “super app.” The website’s “tweeted from” labels were an early victim of the former inclination. The fact Twitter lost most of its moderation team during its recent layoffs probably made it even easier for the company to decide to stop supporting Moments.

In the aftermath of the Itaewon Halloween crowd crush that killed at least 158 people, North Korea’s APT37 state-sponsored hacking group took advantage of a previously unknown Internet Explorer vulnerability to install malware on the devices of South Koreans who were trying to find out about the tragedy, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group. The team became aware of the recent attack on October 31st after multiple South Koreans uploaded a malicious Microsoft Office document to the company’s VirusTotal tool.

APT37 took advantage of national interest in the Itaewon tragedy by referencing the event in an official-looking document. Once someone opened the doc on their device, it would download a rich text file remote template that would, in turn, render remote HTML using Internet Explorer. According to Google, this is a technique that has been widely used to distribute exploits since 2017, as it allows hackers to take advantage of vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer even if someone isn’t using IE as their default web browser.

The JavaScript vulnerability APT37 took advantage of allowed the group to execute arbitrary code. Google informed Microsoft of the zero-day on the same day it became aware of it. On November 8th, Microsoft released a software update to address the exploit. “We’d be remiss if we did not acknowledge the quick response and patching of this vulnerability by the Microsoft team,” Google said.

While the TAG team didn’t get a chance to analyze the final malware APT37 hackers attempted to deploy against their targets, it notes the group is known for using a wide variety of malicious software, including ROKRAT, BLUELIGHT and DOLPHIN. “TAG also identified other documents likely exploiting the same vulnerability and with similar targeting, which may be part of the same campaign,” the team added.

This isn’t the first time Google’s Threat Analysis Group has thwarted an attack by North Korean hackers. At the start of 2021, the team detailed a campaign that targeted security researchers. More recently, the team worked with the Chrome team to address a vulnerability that was used by two North Korean hacking cadres to execute remote code.

At its core, Mario Kart is a game about trolling your friends. So what better way to ratchet up the hijinks than by allowing players to decide what power-ups spawn during races? Nintendo has released a free update for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that adds custom item selection for offline VS races and select online modes. Want to be a monster and force blue shells on all your friends? Go right ahead. It’s even possible to set specific items for each team in team races and battles.

The free update is the latest show of support for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, a five-year-old rerelease of a nearly nine-year-old game. At the start of the year, Nintendo announced it would continue to support Mario Kart 8 Deluxe until the end of 2023 with paid DLC. The company plans to release a total of 48 remastered tracks, all of which can be obtained through the $25 Booster Course Pass.

About three hours into my preview of Diablo IV, I stumble upon the body of a dead priest. The discovery adds a quest to my journal to visit nearby Margrave. A short while later, I find a small village worn down by constant snowfall and all the monsters and bandits that lurk outside its palisade walls. Despite the town’s desperate state, there are signs of warmth and humanity everywhere.

By the south entrance, I find a woman praying for her deceased husband. She tells his gravestone how she can’t sleep now that no one is snoring at night. Nearby, a man tells his adopted son not to venture outside the town’s walls. I love these details. They remind me of some of my favorite moments playing Diablo II.

Whenever I went back over the years to revisit the action RPG on my own, I would listen to everything the non-playable characters had to say. The game doesn’t have much dialogue by modern standards, but if you pay attention, it says a lot with very little. Looking back at my time with Diablo III and, more recently, Diablo Immortal, what stands out is that those games rarely, if ever, slow down to take a breath.

Blizzard

Diablo IV feels different. It feels like a game that was designed by people who love the history of this franchise as much as I do. That might not seem like much, but it’s refreshing when you consider Diablo III’s original lead designer called his Diablo II predecessor a “loser.”

“Certainly, there are a lot of things about Diablo II that we think are really cool and need to be in Diablo IV, particularly when you look at the depth of systems and itemization… and, as you noted, there are things about Diablo III like the smooth and seamless combat that we wanted to bring forward to Diablo IV,” game director Joe Shely tells me during a roundtable interview. Shely took over leadership of the Diablo IV team in the fall of 2021 after the game’s previous director, Luis Barriga, left Blizzard when California’s fair employment agency accused the studio of systemic gender discrimination and sexual harassment. “We think Diablo IV can be a place that welcomes players from any previous Diablo game and people who have never played a Diablo game.”

Blizzard

Diablo IV existing as a project that takes all the best aspects of past entries in the series and iterates on them in meaningful ways is a theme Shely and his boss, Diablo franchise head Rod Fergusson, repeat early and often. At first, I dismissed it as marketing, but after playing the game for about a dozen hours, I started to believe them.

Take combat, for instance. Carrying over a change Blizzard made for the console release of Diablo III, each class comes with a dodge ability built into their kit. At first, you can only use your dodge once before it goes on cooldown, but as you level your character, you’ll find magical and rare boots that give you additional charges.

The potion system, meanwhile, represents a hybrid of the systems that existed in Diablo II and III. When you first start playing, your character can carry a maximum of five potions on them. There’s no cooldown after you use one, and you gain refills by slaying enemies or bringing a boss down to certain thresholds of their health. Walking over a potion when your character is at max health won’t automatically heal you as it did in Diablo III, so there’s more strategy involved. As you might have guessed, you can upgrade the potency of your potions and find ways to carry more as you progress through the game.

Blizzard

On the surface, these are minor changes, but they add some much-needed tactical depth to Diablo’s combat, so you’re not just mindlessly clicking and spamming your skill rotation. Most larger enemies have a windup attack in their arsenal to stagger your character. Combine that with elite and champion variants of enemies that can use abilities like frost to trap you in place, and combat encounters feel more involved in Diablo IV than in past games. Playing on the game’s veteran world tier difficulty, I had the most success when I used my barbarian’s leap ability to close the distance quickly on ranged enemies and monsters like fallen shamans that could bring their comrades back from the dead.

All of that made for a fun and satisfying combat loop enhanced by how much the game encouraged me to experiment with my character’s build. Diablo IV sees the return of Diablo II’s skill trees, but this time around, you’re not limited to respecing your character once per difficulty. Instead, you can at any time refund a single skill point or all of them simultaneously to tweak your build. At first, doing so only costs a few gold coins, but the price increases as you level your character. The beauty of this system is that you’re free to experiment early before settling on the build that will take you through Diablo IV’s endgame activities.

Unfortunately, I only had enough time to play through the demo with the barbarian. The preview also came with access to the rogue and sorcerer classes. At launch, the final game will feature five classes, adding the druid and necromancer to the mix.

I wish I could write about the story, but Blizzard asked those of us taking part in the preview not to spoil anything. What I can say is that once you complete Diablo IV’s prologue, you can tackle its primary acts in any order you want. The preview build only came with access to act one and the Fractured Peaks zone where that part of the story takes place. When Blizzard revealed Diablo IV in 2019 by sharing the game’s gruesome “By Three They Come” intro cinematic, I was worried the story would end up being edgy instead of mature and dark.

The little I’ve seen of the plot has done a lot to address those concerns. Part of that has been thanks to the smart, restrained writing I saw and Diablo IV’s willingness to give its narrative time to breathe, but the thing I think that’s going to surprise a lot of people is how atmospheric Diablo IV can be in its best moments. All of the trailers Blizzard has released so far don’t do nearly enough justice to all the great work the art team has done with the environmental, lighting and particle effects in the game. When my barbarian first began his adventure on a mountain beset by a blizzard, I reached for a blanket.

One thing the demo didn’t include was a preview of Diablo IV’s monetization system. Blizzard provided an overview of those this past summer. The short version is that the game won’t include pay-to-win microtransactions. Instead, an in-game cosmetic shop will allow you to buy items you can use to customize the look of your characters further. Seasonal battle passes will allow you to earn additional cosmetics. From the moment you create your character, the customization systems are robust, offering you plenty of options to alter their physical appearance, including things like skin tone, head and facial hair, as well as jewelry.

Blizzard

Additionally, the way you can modify the appearance of items is as fleshed out. For instance, if you use the transmog system to make a piece of armor look different, and then an item with better stats drops for you, you can match it with your previous set directly from the character sheet. By level 10, my barbarian had already started to look menacing.

If there’s one worry I have about Diablo IV, it’s the same one I’ve had with every Blizzard game in the past decade or so: Can the studio stick the landing? To say Blizzard’s recent output has been all over the place would be an understatement. I’m still disappointed with how it handled remastering my favorite RTS of all time. The studio will have the chance to reassure fans in early 2023 when Diablo IV’s open beta begins ahead of the game’s official launch later in the year.

When Dead Island 2 remerged earlier this year after a lengthy absence, publisher Deep Silver announced it would be the first title to support Amazon’s Alexa Game Control, a feature that allows you to use your voice to play a game. On Tuesday, the company shared a trailer showcasing the functionality, albeit one that offers a staged view of things.

The trailer opens with a group of zombie apocalypse survivors finding a playable build of Dead Island 2. “What a weird coincidence,” says one of the characters, commenting on the meta-narrative. “What’s Alexa Game Control?” asks the leader of the group. As one of their friends goes outside for a smoke, the video shows how certain voice commands will trigger actions within the game. “Hey zombie,” for example, draws the attention of the nearest undead. You can also say, “get me my ax” to cause your character to, well, switch to their ax.

Not every voice command that’s in the game is shown off in the trailer. An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge you’ll be able to use your voice to do things like set waypoints and greet other characters. Alexa Voice Control doesn’t require an Echo device. All you need is a headset with a microphone. We’ll get a chance to see how well the voice commands work when Dead Island 2, after nearly a decade of development, finally arrives on April 28th.