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Google Search recorded the highest traffic in its 25-year history during the FIFA World Cup yesterday, CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted. Google effectively became an information hub for the final, a strong contender for the best in FIFA men’s history. With records already smashed for group stage and Round of 16 matches, it’s also likely to be the most watched final in history once figures are released. 

With updated Search features released ahead of the World Cup, Google made it easier for users to keep up with the action. Searching “World Cup” showed a dedicated section at the top with a list of upcoming matches, for instance, including dates and local times. You could also set up notifications on mobile for specific teams by tapping the bell icon and choosing the squad you wanted to follow.

It was also aided by the nail-biting action and strong storylines. Those include Lionel Messi finally getting his World Cup, Kylian Mbappe’s legendary performance, France’s late second-half comeback, an incredible extra time with two goals scored and a nerve-wracking shootout. All of that was capped by the celebrations and outpouring of emotions by players and fans alike. 

 

Yesterday Elon Musk launched another one of his famous Twitter policy polls, this time putting his own leadership on the line. “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” he tweeted. The poll just ended and 57.5 percent of users voted “Yes,” compared to 42.5 percent who voted no (with 17,502,391 votes) — a decisive 15-point margin.

It remains to be seen if (and how, and when) Musk will abide by his poll, as he has yet to issue any comment about the results. Shortly after publishing the vote (and when it was already tilting toward “Yes”), he tweeted “as the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.” In a reply to another user on the same thread, he added that “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.” During the poll, Musk was seen at the World Cup in Qatar with former White House adviser Jared Kushner, live-tweeting the final between France and Argentina.

The vote follows a flurry of activity on Twitter. Yesterday, the social media site announced a rule change prohibiting users from linking to competing platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter rival Mastodon. That resulted in the ban of multiple users including Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, an early supporter of Musk’s Twitter acquisition.  

A massive backlash ensued, prompting an apology from Musk, who also tweeted that “going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes.” Then, in yet another poll yesterday, @TwitterSafety asked users whether it should “have a policy preventing the creation of or use of existing accounts for the main purpose of advertising other social media platforms.” The “No” votes currently command a 87 percent share from 224,365 users with 14 hours remaining.

 

Could the state of Twitter get any worse? Of course it can. While a lot of us were glued to the World Cup final, the social network made major policy changes, deciding to halt any kind of “free promotion” of competing social media sites. Or, at least, it did for a moment.

Twitter announced yesterday it would remove links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Post and, er, Truth Social, from accounts whose “main purpose” is to promote content on those platforms. This includes links in Twitter bios and even, it seems, links to YouTube channels and profiles. The company would even restrict the use of third-party aggregators, like Linktree and Link.bio. Funnily enough, if you were willing to pay, you’d be fine. Twitter said it would continue to allow paid promotion for any of the platforms on its new prohibited list.

Twitter began enforcing the policy almost immediately. Yesterday, at 2:17 PM ET, Paul Graham, the founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator – and Silicon Valley royalty – said he was done with Twitter, following the rule change, and told his more than 1.5 million followers to find him on Mastodon. A few hours later, Twitter suspended Graham’s account.

But then late last night, the official tweets announcing the link ban were deleted, as was the policy itself from Twitter’s website. So, well, we’re not entirely sure now. Musk also tweeted a poll asking if he should stick around as Twitter boss. At the moment, the answer is no.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Riot Games wants a court to end its ‘League of Legends’ sponsorship deal with FTX

It is owed at least $6.25 million.

Riot Games has filed a motion with the court overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy case to end the seven-year sponsorship agreement the two companies signed last August. In a brief spotted by crypto critic Molly White, Riot says the exchange still owes half of the 12.5 million it agreed to pay in 2022 for the studio to display FTX branding at LCS events. Riot adds the disgraced firm will owe it another nearly $13 million in 2023.

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Apple has reportedly dropped out of NFL Sunday Ticket negotiations

The new frontrunners are Amazon and Google.

In 2021, Apple was the frontrunner to secure streaming rights to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket game coverage. Now, a year later, the company has reportedly dropped out of negotiations. With Disney bowing out of the negotiations as well, the talks have become a two-horse race between Amazon and Google. Amazon’s Prime Video is already the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football for the next decade. Last year, The Athletic reported the NFL was asking for more than $2 billion per year for Sunday Ticket rights, at least $500 million more than DirecTV had been paying to air Sunday games.

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A Horizon multiplayer game is on the way

Guerrilla is working on more ‘epic solo adventures for Aloy,’ too.

A VR spinoff and Horizon Forbidden West expansion won’t be the last we see of Guerrilla Games’ Horizon universe. The studio has at least two more games in the works for the PlayStation franchise, including a multiplayer title. Guerrilla made the announcement in a recruitment tweet. Along with working on more “epic solo adventures for Aloy,” the star of the first two games, the studio has a separate team to create an “online project set in Horizon’s universe.” It added that the latter will feature new characters and a “unique stylized look.”

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Fujifilm X-H2 camera review

A perfect blend of speed, resolution and video power.

Fujifilm’s 40-megapixel X-H2 is the highest-resolution APS-C camera yet and the first with 8K video. It has a good balance between resolution and speed, with autofocus that’s good but not quite up to par with Canon and Sony. It has plenty of features for video, and the only drawback is rolling shutter, but even that’s not as bad as other rival APS-C cameras. Read on for our full review.

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YouTube has removed PornHub’s official channel over what it called “multiple violations” of its community guidelines, Variety has reported. Pornhub’s YouTube channel first launched in 2014 and had 900,000 subscribers, but it no longer appears in YouTube search and its URL now shows a 404 error. 

YouTube said that Pornhub violated its policy against linking to sites that host content not allowed on YouTube. “Upon review, we terminated the channel Pornhub Official following multiple violations of our community guidelines,” a spokesperson said. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and channels that repeatedly violate or are dedicated to violative content are terminated.”

Pornhub’s parent MindGeek said that it “vehemently denied” YouTubes claims that it linked out to porn sites. “Pornhub maintains the absolute best trust and safety measures on the internet and takes special care to ensure it does not violate any of YouTube’s Community Guidelines,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this is just the latest example of discrimination against those in the adult industry.”

On Friday, the anti-pornography group National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) wrote on its blog that it had flagged content that it believed violated YouTube policies. “After review, YouTube alerted NCOSE that they had terminated the channel for violations of their Community Guidelines.” MindGeek, meanwhile, said that performers and sex workers are marginalized groups and called YouTube’s “haphazard and arbitrary enforcement… dangerous and harmful.” 

Mastercard and Visa cut off payments to Pornhub in 2020, with Mastercard saying at the time that it found illegal content on the site. A federal judge refused to remove Visa from a lawsuit alleging that it aided MindGeek in monetizing child pornography. In September, Instagram banned Pornhub permanently, also citing violations of community guidelines. 

 

Sonos has never used WiFi 6 in its products, but a speaker with that feature has just passed through the FCC, Zatz Not Funny! has reported. Dubbed S39, it also offers full Bluetooth that could be used for audio streaming on top of Bluetooth LE normally used for WiFi pairing. Another product, the S41, reportedly appeared on a regulatory filing in Canada. 

The S39 model could be a successor to the Sonos One second-generation speaker released back in 2019. Both may also be the first products in a rumored “Optimo” lineup of high-end speakers reported by The Verge earlier this year. The Optimo 2 speaker (possibly a replacement for the Sonos Five) is supposed to support both WiFi and Bluetooth streaming, so that report lines up with the FCC filing. It could also have a USB-C wired line-in port, making it one of the few Sonos speakers with that feature. 

WiFi 6 and 6E could allow for more dependable streaming, particularly when using multiple speakers. Bluetooth, meanwhile, let you play music directly from a smartphone or other device. So far, Bluetooth streaming has only been present on Sonos’ portable speakers. It’s all still speculation until the products arrive, but given the FCC approvals, they should be coming soon. 

 

The Kia EV6 is an outstanding EV based on the Hyundai Motor Group’s E-GMP architecture. One of the more impressive elements of the crossover is that it charges at 240kW at compatible DC fast charging stations. That’s quicker than offerings from Mercedes, Volkswagen, BMW and Ford, and it means less time at a station and more time on the road.

Now, Kia could have allowed quick charging to continue to be the electric crossover’s speediest feature. Instead, it decided to build something rather bonkers; an EV6 with a zero-to-60 time of 3.4 seconds, 576 horsepower, and 545 pound-feet of torque. It’s a quick electric crossover that in tests, outran a Lamborghini and Ferrari.

To get the full experience of the 2023 EV6 GT, Kia invited us to Las Vegas, Nevada where we drove the vehicle on twisty roads, a track, and a drag strip. Oh, and we also got a chance to try out the EV’s new Drift mode. Again, this is all in a Kia.

Check out the video below to see how well the vehicle performed both in the real world and on the track.

 

The head of Profeco, Mexico’s consumer protection watchdog, has promised to sue Ticketmaster following a ticketing snafu in the country’s capital, reports The New York Times. On the weekend of December 9th, Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny was scheduled to play two soldout shows in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, the largest stadium in Latin America. The Friday night date saw thousands of fans denied entry to the venue after they were told by Estadio Azteca staff the tickets they bought directly from Ticketmaster were fake.

Profeco accused the company of overselling tickets. According to the agency, more than 1,600 ticket holders were denied entry on the first night, and another 110 on the following evening. “Ticketmaster claimed they were counterfeit, but they were all issued by them,” Profeco head Ricardo Sheffield told local news outlets. Ticketmaster has agreed to refund all affected fans the full price of their ticket, plus a 20 percent compensation fee. Profeco is preparing to file a class-action lawsuit against the company. Ticketmaster Mexico could also be fined up to 10 percent of its total sales in 2021. “As we are a fiscal authority, if they don’t want to pay of their own will, we will seize their accounts then, and they will pay because they have to,” Sheffield said.

In a statement Ticketmaster posted to Twitter this week, the company denied the claim it oversold tickets. It blamed the event on demand for Bad Bunny tickets – saying more than 4.5 million people tried to purchase just 120,000 stubs – and scalpers who sold fake tickets. “On Friday, an unprecedented number of false tickets, not bought through our official channels, were presented at the gates,” the company said, according to an Associated Press translation. “The situation, in addition to confusion among access control personnel, caused temporary interruptions in the ticket reading system, which unfortunately momentarily impeded recognition of legitimate tickets.”

In November, Democratic lawmakers, including House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, began calling for the break up of Ticketmaster after the company botched sales of Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Ocasio-Cortez said last month. The US Department of Justice reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster parent company LiveNation before the Swift fiasco. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumers recently announced it would hold a hearing on the company’s recent failures. 

 

After implementing an unprecedented policy change earlier in the day, Elon Musk took to Twitter on Sunday to ask his followers whether he should step down as the company’s chief executive officer. “Should I step down as head of Twitter?” he asked, adding he would “abide by the results of this poll.” As of the writing of this article, the “Yes” option is leading with more than 2 million votes cast. The poll is set to conclude around 6AM ET. In an earlier tweet, Musk claimed there would be a public vote when Twitter considers future policy changes. “My apologies. Won’t happen again,” he said.

The vote comes after Twitter earlier in the day announced a major rule change effectively prohibiting users from linking to competing platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and Donald Trump’s Truth Social. With its new “Promotion of alternative social platforms” policy, Twitter said it would delete posts that include links to those websites. It also warned users against attempting to bypass the ban and said repeat offenders could be subject to permanent suspensions. In the span of a few hours, the company briefly suspended the account of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and an early supporter of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, after he expressed frustration with the policy and told his followers to find him on Mastodon.   

It’s worth noting Musk has already said he plans to hand over the day-to-day operations of Twitter to someone else. In fact, he made that commitment under oath. “I frankly don’t want to be the CEO of any company,” he told a court last month. A public vote won’t change that, but it might bruise his ego. What’s more, unsaid in Musk’s tweet is the fact he faces intense pressure from Tesla investors to return his focus to the automaker. Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter at the end of October, the value of Tesla’s stock has fallen precipitously. In December alone, it fell 22 percent. All of that has led to some of Musk’s most ardent supporters turning against the billionaire. 

 

Riot Games is trying to extricate itself from its League of Legends Championship Series partnership with FTX. On Friday, the studio filed a motion with the court overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy case to end the seven-year sponsorship agreement the two companies signed last August.

In a brief spotted by crypto critic and Web3 is Going Just Great creator Molly White (via PC Gamer), Riot says the exchange still owes half of the 12.5 million it agreed to pay in 2022 for the studio to display FTX branding at LCS events. Riot adds the disgraced firm will owe it another nearly $13 million in 2023, with the first quarterly payment of the year due on January 2nd. FTX’s yearly payments to Riot are scheduled to increase through the end of their agreement in 2028.

Riot also has a personal stake in the case. More than a year before he was arrested on fraud charges, FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried admitted he was “(in)famous for playing League of Legends while on phone calls.” SBF’s gaming habit became something of a joke when it came out that he wasn’t very good at the game.

“Images of Mr. Bankman-Fried playing League of Legends were displayed alongside text describing his cavalier attitude towards investor meetings and irresponsibility with corporate funds. These images created a public narrative that Mr. Bankman Fried’s interest in League of Legends, once relatable and human, was now reckless and juvenile,” Riot states. “Even Mr. Bankman-Fried’s ranking in League of Legends has been the subject of online commentary with public figures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elon Musk weighing in.”

If you think Riot is ready to swear off crypto because of one high-profile implosion, think again. The reason the studio wants a court to void its agreement with FTX is so that it can move forward with a new sponsorship. “The longer Riot is prevented from commercializing the crypto exchange sponsorship category and the broadcast assets currently owned by FTX, the more damages Riot incurs.” Here’s hoping the studio doesn’t find itself in a similar situation sometime in the future.

 

Apple fans disappointed by the Studio Display could soon have a few more options from the company. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is developing “multiple new external monitors,” including a refresh of its 32-inch Pro Display XDR from 2019. Details on the upcoming screens are sparse, but Gurman suggests they’ll incorporate built-in Apple Silicon chipsets like the Studio Display, which features a dedicated A13 Bionic processor. He adds that the updated Pro Display XDR could ship after the M2 Mac Pro arrives (more on the computer in a moment).

It’s unclear if Apple’s slate of new monitors could include a Studio Display refresh. As MacRumors points out, display analyst Ross Young tweeted in October that the company was preparing to release a monitor with a 27-inch mini-LED panel in the first quarter of 2023. Based on the specs Young shared, it looked like Apple was planning to update the Studio Display with its ProMotion technology.

Gurman also provides an update on the long-rumored M2 refresh of the Mac Pro. In October, he reported the computer would ship with an optional “Extreme” variant of the company’s M2 chipset that was reportedly slated to feature a processor with up to 48 cores and 256GB of memory. Since then, Gurman says Apple has abandoned those plans.

“Based on Apple’s current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades — making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn’t worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require,” Gurman writes.

As things stand, the remaining model will reportedly feature an M2 Ultra chipset with up to 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores and at least 192GB of RAM. Additionally, Gurman says the new Mac Pro retains the current model’s expandability, including the option to add more memory. It will be interesting to see how Apple offers that kind of upgradability since the company’s current chips feature soldered RAM.

Apple was supposed to finish transitioning its computer lineup to Apple Silicon two years after the release of its first M1 chip. According to Gurman, feature tweaks and a change in Apple’s manufacturing plans are among the reasons why it’s taken the company so long to announce a new Mac Pro. Barring any additional delays, the new model will likely arrive sometime next year, though Gurman did not speak to a specific timeline.