The UK leaked the next Nintendo console

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is preparing to launch a verification subscription similar to Twitter Blue. Meta Verified would work for both Facebook and Instagram accounts. In order to be verified, you have to be 18 years or older and submit a government issued id. After you are verified, you can’t change your username, profile picture, or date of birth without going through the verification process again. Accounts that were already verified will keep their verification. I hope people are just as outraged as the Twitter Blue announcement and not pay for this service.

This move makes little sense. SMS is the least secure version of 2 factor verification. Twitter even announced in a blog post that “While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately, we have seen phone-number-based 2FA be used—and abused—by bad actors, So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers.” The reason that they did this was because SMS is the most popular version of 2FA on Twitter. So making it a subscription locked feature would make some people pay for Twitter Blue. I suggest not paying for Twitter Blue and never use SMS 2FA.

When TikTok first launched, the maximum video length was 15 seconds. Over time the limit has increased to up to 3 minutes in 2021. This report from TikTok confirmed The Information report from last week. This change will be implemented in the coming months.

Buried in a 43 page document reports that “Nintendo Switch Online is only available on the Nintendo Switch device and [redacted].” The redacted piece of information could be seen as the next console that Nintendo is developing. Nintendo also hinted at this in a 2020 investor presentation where they showed this image. Thankfully, we now know that the next console is coming sometime this century.

Microsoft is still trying to acquire Activision-Blizzard for $69 billion. In order to gain some friends in this deal, Microsoft has agreed to bring Activision-Blizzard titles like Call of Duty to Switch and Nvidia’s Geforce cloud gaming service. A major video game union, CWA, also supports the acquisition. Representatives sent a letter to the executive vice president of the European Commission. The letter argued that the merge would benefit the workers

Activision has confirmed that a security breach had occurred in December 2022 where hackers gained access through a phishing SMS message. Activison claims that no data was stolen from them. They somehow forgot to inform their own employees about the breach until months later.

Large law firms are now using generative Ai tools such as Harvey for research and to write legal documents.

While this feature is currently only available in Korean, it would allow users to type what they want to say. Then Bixby would clone the user’s voice from only a few samples to talk to the other person on the phone. This feature is similar to a Pixel exclusive feature of call screening, where Google assistant would ask who is calling.

Tumbler is still alive and has increased their revenue after their release of the ‘important blue internet checkmarks’. These checkmarks are exactly like Twitter verification check marks except that each checkmark could be bought for $8 and you can buy as many as you want. This was poking fun at Twitter when they released their paid verification subscription.

After a trailing period with some large Youtubers, like MrBeast, you can now have audio tracks in different languages. This allows creators to only have one channel and have different language options instead of having multiple channels for all of the languages of the world. Secondly, Youtube adds support for podcasts in Youtube Music and Youtube Studio, where creators could opt out of Youtube Music. Lastly, Youtube is testing an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p. This  is only available to Premium subscribers and Youtube has been rumored to have decreased the quality of the normal 1080p for non-Premium users.