President Trump has confirmed that the 25% tariff mentioned for iPhone earlier today will also apply to Samsung and βanybodyβ making smartphones outside of the United States.
moreβ¦
President Trump has confirmed that the 25% tariff mentioned for iPhone earlier today will also apply to Samsung and βanybodyβ making smartphones outside of the United States.
moreβ¦
Today, Apple TV+ dropped one of its strongest candidates yet for an original franchise. Fountain of Youth, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman, is streaming now.
moreβ¦
Eight years after it was acquired by Mozilla, the popular bookmarking tool Pocket has been sent to the apps graveyard. According to the company, Pocket is being trashed in order to let Mozilla turn its "resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs."
While Pocket might have lost its gloss in recent years, it was still useful for tracking online articles and other resources that you didn't have time for at the moment but wanted to get back to later. If you're a disappointed Pocket loyalist, or if you're just looking for some way to keep your bookmarks and saved sites in some kind of order, here are a few possibilities. Most offer free versions and sync across a number of devices, including web browsers, Android devices, and iPhones.
Like Pocket, Instapaper started out as a simple web add-on and has gone through several iterations (and owners); currently, it is part of an independent company called Instapaper Holdings. The web app has a nice and simple UI; while there is no grid view, you can turn thumbnails on and off. It works with (and syncs across) web browsers (using a Chrome extension, Safari extension, Firefox extension, or boo β¦
Apple CEO Tim Cook personally intervened in an attempt to stop a Texas age verification bill, The Wall Street Journal reports. SB 2420 β passed by the legislature but awaiting a signature by Governor Greg Abbott β would require app store operators like Apple to verify the age of users accessing their stores. The companyβs opposition puts it in conflict with social media giant Meta in an escalating fight over whether and how the internet should be age-gated.
In a statement to The Verge, Apple expressed its opposition to the bill. βWe share the goal of strengthening kidsβ online safety but are deeply concerned that SB 2420 threatens the privacy of all users. If enacted, app marketplaces will be required to collect and keep sensitive personal identifying information for every Texan who wants to download an app, even if itβs an app that simply provides weather updates or sports scores,β says spokesperson Peter Ajemian.
As the Journal notes, several states have proposed sweeping age verification measures, at least nine of which specifically place the burden for checking ages on app stores; one state, Utah, has such a law already passed. These measures are frequently accompanied by plans to ban minors from accessing social media, either without parental consent or entirely, as in a Texas law thatβs on the verge of passing. Texas, among other states, already requires age verification for adult websites; the law implementing that requirement has become the center of a Supreme Court battle over age verification thatβs expected to be resolved in the coming months.
According to the Journal report, Cook and Abbot had a βcordialβ conversation in which Cook asked for either amendments to or a veto of the bill. An Abbott spokesperson told the outlet that the governor will βthoughtfully review this legislation, as he does with any legislation sent to his desk.β
Civil liberties advocates staunchly and consistently oppose mandating digital age verification systems, which tend to either pose significant privacy problems or be ineffectual. But over the past couple of years, the fight has evolved into a game of ping-pong between web services and device makers.
Meta and some others β including the Free Speech Coalition, which filed the suit against Texasβ porn age verification law and represents the operators of adult websites β support making companies like Apple and Google build age-check systems into their products. Both phone makers already offer voluntary parental control systems, but a legal requirement would create substantial risk for them in the case of failure, on top of privacy concerns for users themselves.
Appleβs statement on SB 2420 instead pushed for the passage of the Kids Online Safety Act: a federal bill that would place liability on web platforms to prevent young users from harm. Google, meanwhile, has reportedly backed lobbying against both bills β as owner of the Android operating system and video platform YouTube, itβs stuck in the middle.
Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for todayβs software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can βinstantly generate a to-do listβ that eliminates the burden of βwading through weeks of commits.β What these companies donβt say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users.
Researchers from security firm Legit on Thursday demonstrated an attack that induced Duo into inserting malicious code into a script it had been instructed to write. The attack could also leak private code and confidential issue data, such as zero-day vulnerability details. All thatβs required is for the user to instruct the chatbot to interact with a merge request or similar content from an outside source.
The mechanism for triggering the attacks is, of course, prompt injections. Among the most common forms of chatbot exploits, prompt injections are embedded into content a chatbot is asked to work with, such as an email to be answered, a calendar to consult, or a webpage to summarize. Large language model-based assistants are so eager to follow instructions that theyβll take orders from just about anywhere, including sources that can be controlled by malicious actors.
Β© Getty Images
As Google moves the last remaining Nest devices into the Home app, it's also looking at ways to make this smart home hub easier to use. Naturally, Google is doing that by ramping up Gemini integration. The company has announced new automation capabilities with generative AI, as well as better support for third-party devices via the Home API. Google AI will also plug into a new Android widget that can keep you updated on what the smart parts of your home are up to.
The Google Home app is where you interact with all of Google's smart home gadgets, like cameras, thermostats, and smoke detectorsβsome of which have been discontinued, but that's another story. It also accommodates smart home devices from other companies, which can make managing a mixed setup feasible if not exactly intuitive. A dash of AI might actually help here.
Google began testing Gemini integrations in Home last year, and now it's opening that up to third-party devices via the Home API. Google has worked with a few partners on API integrations before general availability. The previously announced First Alert smoke/carbon monoxide detector and Yale smart lock that are replacing Google's Nest devices are among the first, along with Cync lighting, Motorola Tags, and iRobot vacuums.
Β© Google
The is in full swing as we head into the holiday weekend, alongside Best Buyβs, but for now we are rounding up the dayβs best Android game and app deals. Just be sure to scope out the deals we have on these Google Find My Device trackers for your wallet from $17.50, this $100 drop on Boseβs latest SoundLink Max Portable Speaker, upcoming OnePlus Pad 3 offers, one of the best discounts to date on GoProβs latest HERO13 Black action camera, and Google Pixel 9a. As for the apps, highlights include Iron Marines 2 β Invasion, Dune: Imperium, Tokaido, Munchkin, Raiders of the North Sea, and more. Head below for everything.Β
moreβ¦
NASA's Apollo missions brought back moon rock samples for scientists to study. We've learned a great deal over the ensuing decades, but one enduring mystery remains. Many of those lunar samples show signs of exposure to strong magnetic fields comparable to Earth's, yet the Moon doesn't have such a field today. So, how did the moon rocks get their magnetism?
There have been many attempts to explain this anomaly. The latest comes from MIT scientists, who argue in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that a large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon's early weak magnetic fieldβand that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples.
Evidence gleaned from orbiting spacecraft observations, as well as results announced earlier this year from China's Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6 missions, is largely consistent with the existence of at least a weak magnetic field on the early Moon. But where did this field come from? These usually form in planetary bodies as a result of a dynamo, in which molten metals in the core start to convect thanks to slowly dissipating heat. The problem is that the early Moon's small core had a mantle that wasn't much cooler than its core, so there would not have been significant convection to produce a sufficiently strong dynamo.
Β© OptoMechEngineer/CC BY-SA 4.0
