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TVs use automatic content recognition to gather viewing information about us, and opting out doesn’t always stop it. | Photo: John Higgins / The Verge The fact our TVs are gathering our information isn't new, but what and how they're tracking - and if we can stop it - is hard to figure out. Researchers at Northeastern University monitored 12 TVs from 10 manufacturers to test whether opting out of automatic content recognition (ACR) actually works . While opting out was effective for most TVs - including LG, Amazon Fire TV, a Sony Bravia running Google TV, and those with Vidaa OS (which can be found on TVs from Hisense, Toshiba, and smaller brands like the Supersonic used in the study) - Samsung and Roku kept sending some data. And Walmart's Vizio TV continued on as if the opt-out hadn't eve … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/7jxfB9G

Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler. | Bloomberg via Getty Images Search queries are growing at their fastest rate in five years, Google parent Alphabet said in its earnings report last week. However, Google's Search revenue growth slowed to 12 percent year over year in the third quarter, down from roughly 17 percent in the previous quarter. Meanwhile, growth in paid clicks - clicks on ads that generate revenue for Google - slowed from 13 percent to 8 percent. That's still substantial growth, but not the direction investors were hoping for from a company planning to spend about $200 billion this year on infrastructure, largely to support AI. Alphabet shares have fallen about 14 percent since it reported e … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/clOsApi

Breath of the Wild changed everything. Two decades after The Legend of Zelda made the transformational shift to 3D, Breath of the Wild reinvigorated the franchise with an open-ended adventure that was built around player freedom and expression. Instead of following a set path, players could go wherever they wanted and tackle challenges in a variety of ways. That philosophy filtered down to subsequent games, letting players author their own creative solutions to puzzles in titles like Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom . As a result, Zelda has never been bigger , and the traditional, more linear Zelda games had become a thing of the past … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/qGOaYNZ

These edits of Jason Statham (left) and Jeff Bezos are a bit jarring, but that’s sort of the point. | Image: The Verge Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor Jason Statham have a distinctive feature in common: They're both famously bald, and that definitely hasn't changed in the last few days. However, there are some images of the two men circulating around X , Threads , and Bluesky in which they both have substantially more hair than their usual shaved look, which in Bezos' case appears to be very freshly transplanted. It's all just photo editing fakery, AI or otherwise. It's unclear how viral these posts are , but they're prevalent enough that a few members of the Verge team have encountered them in their social media feeds. Some people who shared them claimed … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/t1vb6m4

Canva is giving digital creatives a new way to design, illustrate, and edit photos on their iPads, and it doesn't have to cost them a thing. After relaunching the Affinity creative suite as an all-in-one desktop app last year, Canva has now introduced Affinity for iPad , which provides the same pro-grade tools for vector graphics, photo editing, illustration, and page layouts in a format optimized for Apple Pencil and touchscreens. Affinity for iPad has a new Sketch Studio that's designed for freehand drawing and simplifying sketch-to-vector workflows, including optimized tools for masking and automatically converting rough sketches into cle … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/wbXGQ6S

Employees at an ICA Kvantum supermarket in Sjoebo, Sweden unloading spoiled food from the freezer units. | Image: Johan Nilsson / TT News Agency / AFP via Getty Images Grocery stores across Europe have been hit by another wave of suspected cyberattacks, reporting sudden changes in the temperatures of their fridges and freezers. Major supermarket chains across Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Estonia were affected according to local reports shared by Bloomberg and Reuters . One Ica Kvantum store in Sweden said on its Facebook page that its fridges and freezers had been hacked overnight, with temperatures remotely raised to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). In a statement to Business Insider , a spokesperson at Swedish supermarket chain Coop also confirmed that "unauthorized actors were able to access and … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/2UMNrWh