Elon Musk's X delays access to New York Times, Instagram, Facebook, others

When Elon Musk left the Tesla Engineering HQ in Palo Alto on Friday clutching his smartphone and a livestream, he would not have anticipated the controversy it might cause. For 45 minutes, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO drove around the city and demonstrated the capabilities of Tesla's newest Full Self-Driving (FSD) update, FSD v12, thereby breaking several laws of the land in the process. Here's everything that happened during the eventful Musk live stream.

The gamers behind the Gray Lady have a new game to add into our morning rotations: Connections, which invites the player to categorize 16 words or phrases into four distinct groups of four.

By Andrew Webster, an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

Just days ago, reports highlighted that billionaire Elon Musk intended to remove headlines from link previews on X (formerly Twitter) to make the height of the preview box smaller. But that does not mean that he wants these users and organizations to stop using the platform. In fact, Musk has been openly asking journalists and news organizations to become a part of the platform and participate in news sharing to begin earning money from X's revenue-sharing program. But with no option to share headlines in links, it might be that the billionaire is setting things up for original, or direct, reporting on the social media site - scribes are being encouraged to post directly on X.

It appears that the ‘block' is not the only Twitter (now X) feature whose future is in jeopardy. After expressing his views on how blocking users is pointless and suggesting he may take away this feature, company owner Elon Musk is targetting the headlines on link previews, as per reports. At present, a large number of news organizations share their articles on X. While sharing the articles, the platform generates a link preview that contains the image, URL, headline, and a short summary. But soon, the headline might be gone to reduce the height of the preview window.

Last week, reports emerged that the New York Times may take legal action against the ChatGPT maker OpenAI as its AI models allegedly use content published on the website, which is NYT's intellectual property, to train its AI models. While that may not have happened so far, the major news publisher has now decided to ban OpenAI's web crawler from viewing content on its website. The move means that the website's content cannot be used to train any of OpenAI's AI foundational models.

Right after X (formerly known as Twitter) owner Elon Musk tweeted that the block feature will be deleted from the platform yesterday, it sparked outrage. Many came forward expressing their displeasure with the decision and urged Musk to reconsider his stance. Something else happened right about this time as well. X rival Bluesky suffered an outage and many users reported that the server load time was excessively high. Some reports are now suggesting that there might be a correlation between the two.

Elon Musk made a shocking comment on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Friday when he said that ‘block' as a feature will be deleted on the platform. That means users will not be able to block any other user on the platform, no matter if they spam or troll. The billionaire is known for his dislike of general social networking features, and he has repeatedly expressed his feelings about it. However, getting rid of the blocking feature might not be that easy, even for the owner of one of the largest social media platforms.

Jack Dorsey is done with Instagram.

The battle between artificial intelligence (AI) and people in creative fields has been ongoing for some time. In the US, actors and writers working in Hollywood have been on strike to limit the usage of AI as they may lose their jobs. Even authors have joined the cause by submitting an open letter to corporations involved in developing these AI tools requesting them to pay fair compensation for using their work as “food” for AI. And now, reports have emerged that a major news publisher New York Times may take legal action against OpenAI, the developer of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

In 1995, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates sent a memo calling the internet a “tidal wave” that would be crucial to every part of the company's business. Nearly two decades later, Microsoft's current leader, Satya Nadella, said he believes the impact of artificial intelligence will be just as profound.

We review Get On Board, a flip and write board game published by IELLO. In Get On Board, players are trying to make bus line routes to get people where they need to go.