Monday’s top tech news: an Apple headset this year? Finally?

As silly as Jonathan Majors’ Loki villain was, it’s been kind of hard to imagine how the actor might bring Kang the Conqueror to life in director Peyton Reed’s upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But the movie’s latest trailer makes it crystal clear that while the Avenger Kang’s fighting might be something of a goofball, Kang himself is going to be all business as he tries to tear reality itself apart.

Quantumania’s new trailer re-introduces Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang, Evangeline Lilly’s Hope Van Dyne, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Janet Van Dyne as they and Scott’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) are accidentally sucked into the Quantum Realm that Janet first escaped in the second Ant-Man film.

YouTube has announced that creators can start making ad revenue on Shorts starting February 1st, following a promise from September that the monetization option was on its way. The change is coming as part of a broader update to YouTube’s Partner Program, which will require everyone who’s currently part of it to sign new agreement terms, whether or not they’re looking to make money from Shorts.

Creators have been able to make some money from the format that rolled out in 2021 for a while via things like Super Chats and shopping integrations, as well as a creator fund that the company had set up, but that model wasn’t all that much better that TikTok’s monetization scheme. What TikTok doesn’t do, though, is directly share ad revenue with creators — something that YouTube has been doing for years for traditional videos and that it’s now bringing to Shorts.

Meta is planning to stop supporting the original Quest VR headset with new software updates, and soon anyone using the older hardware will be locked out of some social features.

Several users on Reddit and Twitter, along with journalist Janko Roettgers, have posted screenshots of an email saying the company will stop shipping new features to the Quest 1 and that some features are going away. The headset will, however, be getting “critical bug fixes and security patches until 2024.”

Apple is working on a new in-house chip that would power cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth functionality on its devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company is also developing its own chip that would replace the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip it currently uses from Broadcom, Bloomberg says, which it wants to begin using in devices in 2025.

Bloomberg also shared some new information about Apple’s efforts to develop its own cellular modems to replace Qualcomm’s. While Qualcomm recently said during its Q4 2022 earnings that it expects to have the “vast majority” of 5G modems for 2023 iPhones, Bloomberg says Apple will use its own modems “by the end of 2024 or early 2025.” Apple will apparently start by using its custom modem in one product and fully transition them over the course of approximately three years.

Our time at CES 2023 might be over, but it’s still worth highlighting some standouts at the show. One of those that’s gotten quite a bit of attention is from an upstart company called Displace. LG’s brand-new Signature OLED M eliminates every wire except for the power cord, but Displace is trying to nix that one, too. In Las Vegas, the company demonstrated a completely wireless 55-inch 4K OLED TV that runs off four hot-swappable batteries. This is a dream that has existed since the earliest days of The Verge.

Are we seeing an imperfect sneak peek of the future, or is this a solution in search of a problem? Is the Displace another classic example of CES vaporware? Will it actually ever ship? All I know for now is that it seems to make good on the everything-wireless concept — with one potentially pricey gamble.

Meta is adding some new moderation features to Horizon Worlds, the company’s VR social platform, as part of version 91, according to a blog post published Friday. While the features are welcome upgrades, they also feel like relatively basic additions that should have been in place sooner.

For example, users who violate the platform’s policies will now get a notification spelling out what they did. (You can see an example at the top of this post.) And with the Account Status menu, which is accessible from the Safety tab in settings, you can see a list of your violations. “With this added level of transparency, we hope to increase awareness of our policies, prevent repeated violations, and promote positive behavior to keep our community safe,” Meta wrote in the blog post.

Instagram users will soon have a revamped navigation bar on their home feed.

Beginning next month, Instagram will remove the shopping tab from the main bar at the bottom of the screen, and the button to create a new post will move down. The Reels tab, which is currently front and center on the navigation bar, will take the place of the Shop tab.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has reached out to Tesla with questions about a tweet by Elon Musk suggesting he would remove an important safeguard from the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system. The news was first reported by the Associated Press.

An NHTSA spokesperson confirmed that the agency has reached out to Tesla to gather information about the Musk tweet, in which the controversial billionaire suggested he would eliminate a driver monitoring function that warns users to keep their hands on the steering wheel while using FSD.

Google is taking another shot at bringing new features to phones that haven’t gotten OS updates in years. It’s releasing something called the “Extension Software Developer Kit,” which should let developers use features like Android 13’s new photo picker in apps running on some versions of Android 11 and 12. In a blog post announcing the change, the company says the feature lets it “extend the support of certain platform functionality to existing Android versions.”

While more access to the photo picker previously exclusive to Android 13 is definitely nice, Google seems to have much bigger plans for the Extension SDK. “This update also sets the stage for expanding Privacy Sandbox testing on Android,” says Scott Westover, a Google spokesperson. Privacy Sandbox is Google’s in-progress replacement for its current ad-tracking system, and the company is planning to roll out the beta for the system on Android 13.

As Twitter slashes staff and pares back moderation under Elon Musk, it may soon run into a problem it can’t ignore: its potential liability for copyright infringement. TorrentFreak reported last week that the company faces a lawsuit by celebrity photo agency Backgrid. Backgrid says that Twitter systematically failed to take down unauthorized copies of its pictures, arguing it shouldn’t be protected by American safe harbor laws for copyright. The allegations leave plenty of questions unanswered, but claims like them could pose a problem for Musk’s increasingly bare-bones operation.

Backgrid’s claims predate Musk’s ownership of Twitter, dating to at least September 2021. The complaint, filed in a California court in late December, alleges Backgrid sent thousands of takedown notices for photos. “Not a single work was taken down and not a single repeat infringer was suspended,” it says. It includes links to some images that remain online as of today, although others appear to have been deleted. It also says it tried to resolve the issue with Twitter before filing the suit, “but Twitter did not respond.” It’s not clear whether this attempt came before or after Musk’s acquisition; an attorney at the firm representing Backgrid did not reply to a request for comment, and Twitter no longer has a public relations department.

My years-long battle to get gigabit internet installed may soon be over, thanks to new rules introduced by the UK government that make it easier to install faster broadband into apartments and flats across the UK. Additionally, a new law has been introduced that requires new properties in England to be built with gigabit broadband connections, sparing tenants from footing the bill for later upgrades.

Amendments to Building Regulations 2010 were announced by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) on January 6th that mandate new homes constructed in England to be fitted with infrastructure and connections required to achieve gigabit internet connectivity.

John Deere has finally committed to giving farmers the tools they need to fix their own equipment. The company signed a memorandum of understanding with the agricultural lobbying group, American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), on Sunday, an agreement that’s also supposed to ensure that farmers can take their machines to third-party repair shops, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

For years, John Deere has been at the center of the right-to-repair debate, and not in a good way. The company put software locks on equipment that only authorized dealers can disable, preventing farmers or an independent repair shop from diagnosing and fixing a machine. It can also remotely shut down machines at any time (like it demonstrated when Russians stole Ukrainian farm equipment last year). These limitations have led some fed-up farmers to hack their tractors, something this new agreement is supposed to remedy.

Microsoft has been reportedly experimenting with building OpenAI’s language AI technology into its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook apps. The Information reports that Microsoft has already incorporated an unknown version of OpenAI’s text-generating GPT model into Word in its autocomplete feature, and has been working on integrating it further into Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Microsoft has reportedly been using OpenAI’s GPT technology to improve Outlook search results so users can find what they’re looking for without having to search using keywords in emails. Microsoft is also said to have looked at how these AI models could suggest replies to emails or recommend document changes to improve Word users’ writing. It’s not clear if Microsoft plans to launch these features, or if it’s just experimentation for now.