Senior News Editor
Richard Lawler joined The Verge as Senior News Editor in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. He's been a tech blogger since before the word was invented, and will never log off.
Netflix is about to look back at the history of WWE co-founder Vince McMahon with a six-episode series premiering September 25th. Just after Netflix signed a 10-year $5 billion dollar deal with WWE in January, McMahon was accused of sex trafficking and abuse and resigned as executive chairman of its parent company, TKO.
The series covers McMahon’s transformation of WWE from a small, regional business into a global entertainment powerhouse, and the explosive sexual misconduct allegations that led to his eventual resignation.
A reader asked the Denver Post why it hadn’t covered a grisly and salacious 2014 murder in Littleton, CO. It hadn’t, because the crime never happened.
But there it is on YouTube and Spotify, accumulating millions of views with seemingly AI-generated voiceovers and faces. True crime fans say they reported the videos months ago after YouTube recommended them, but they aren’t being removed.
The Windows and Surface team split last year when Panos Panay left, with Parakhin’s team building AI-powered web services like Bing Chat / Copilot. Then, this spring, in a shake up as Mustafa Suleyman became CEO of Microsoft AI, Parakhin was out.
He’s since joined the board of an AI startup and with Shopify:
Mikhail will oversee our engineering and data organizations and push Shopify to the cutting edge, not just in ML and AI, but in everything we’re building to make commerce better for everyone.
The Post cites internal documents saying the voice assistant’s upgrades could include daily “Smart Briefing” AI-generated news summaries to drive more “recurrent engagement.” Other features like asking users about their preferences, and tracking sales of Amazon products could also help Amazon turn around losses in its devices business.
The documents also said Project Metis, Amazon’s rumored web-based ChatGPT competitor, could launch alongside it.
[The Washington Post]
The three-year compliance plan (PDF) and civil penalty aren’t for this April outage or a nationwide AT&T wireless outage in February that blocked more than 25,000 attempts to reach 911.
This outage on August 22nd, 2023, caused over 400 failed 911 calls across Illinois, Kansas, Texas, and Wisconsin in just over an hour.
The names have changed, but the failures continue.
While Durov hasn’t been charged, a statement from the French government says his recent arrest is tied to an investigation into a “person unnamed” on charges of being complicit in distributing CSAM, drugs, and hacking tools, along with refusing to cooperate with law enforcement and other crimes.
Telegram has said its CEO and founder has “nothing to hide.”
George Clooney and Brad Pitt “...gave money back to make sure that we had a theatrical release” in thousands of theaters, but just ahead of a big Olympics marketing push, the Wolfs plan changed to a limited one-week run before its Apple TV Plus debut.
NYT:
Apple executives in Cupertino were already questioning the entertainment units over the amount of money being spent on movies, and the people said there was a thought within the company to not risk a public disappointment should the movie not succeed at the box office.
[The New York Times]
Boeing’s first crewed Starliner launch got Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to the International Space Station in June, but with issues including helium leaks, will the same vehicle still bring them home?
We expect to find out during NASA’s press conference that was scheduled to start at 1PM ET following an Agency Test Flight Readiness Review.
