Google’s new ‘G’ logo appeared on stage during the I/O 2025 keynote, and is now live in more apps and the web.
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The winners of the $TRUMP meme coin contest did get to see President Donald Trump speak at a private dinner closed to the press - but his speech was probably the least exciting part of their night. They did get a better, more valuable, and potentially more lucrative experience: the opportunity to network with the biggest crypto traders in the game, win watches worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and attend a not-so-exclusive afterparty at the Capitol Hill Marriott afterward - all without having to complete particularly thorough background checks.
The vetting process for entering the dinner was a 'pretty light' KYC check
After being whisked behind the gates of the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, past a throng of journalists snapping photos and protesters screaming at them for being corrupt, the 220 attendees went through security and had their IDs checked. According to one attendee, many were wealthy but some were living on normal-ish paychecks. The other guests, he said, were largely foreigners from overseas, all with an extremely high risk tolerance for gambling with crypto. The attendee said the vetting process for entering the dinner was a "pretty light" …
Welcome to episode 55 of Pixelated, a podcast by 9to5Google. This week, we talk about Android 16 QPR1 Beta 1 and share our first thoughts on Google I/O 2025.
After three seasons, Amazon’s live-action take on Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time series is coming to an end.
Though The Wheel of Time‘s third season was hailed by fans as the show’s strongest chapter yet, Deadline reports that Amazon has decided not to bring it back due to its relatively high production costs and flagging viewership numbers. Similar to Amazon’s Rings of Power series, The Wheel of Time was clearly a play to produce another Game of Thrones-style hit. When the series first debuted in 2021, it managed to capture an impressively large audience and become one of Amazon’s most-watched programs. But those numbers dwindled in subsequent seasons, leading Amazon to call it quits.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter back in April right after The Wheel of Time‘s third season concluded, showrunner Rafe Judkins said that when when he and his team were first shopping the series around to studios, they ultimately chose Amazon as a production partner because it “felt like a place where they do want to invest in shows for the long term.”
“There are not a lot of places doing that anymore,” Judkins said. “For Wheel of Time, it’s really important for us to be somewhere that does want to invest in shows for the long term and not just for the splash and leave.”
In February, Chegg sued Google, blaming the search giant’s AI-generated summaries for tanking its traffic, slashing revenue, and triggering a 90% stock collapse. Founded in 2005, Chegg built its business around online tutoring and academic support, helping students with test […]
The post Prompt Killed the Startup: How AI Is Quietly Taking Over the Execution of Founders’ Best Ideas Before They Even Launch first appeared on Tech Startups.
The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a single malware operation allegedly enabled hacking operations as varied as ransomware, wartime cyberattacks in Ukraine, and spying against foreign governments.
The US Department of Justice today announced criminal charges today against 16 individuals law enforcement authorities have linked to a malware operation known as DanaBot, which according to a complaint infected at least 300,000 machines around the world. The DOJ’s announcement of the charges describes the group as “Russia-based,” and names two of the suspects, Aleksandr Stepanov and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, as living in Novosibirsk, Russia. Five other suspects are named in the indictment, while another nine are identified only by their pseudonyms. In addition to those charges, the Justice Department says the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS)—a criminal investigation arm of the Department of Defense—carried out seizures of DanaBot infrastructure around the world, including in the US.
Aside from alleging how DanaBot was used in for-profit criminal hacking, the indictment also makes a rarer claim—it describes how a second variant of the malware it says was used in espionage against military, government, and NGO targets. “Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses,” US attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a statement.
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Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board—it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation.
Given such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students. Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available. The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get its digital act together.
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The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other's heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week's I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT's advanced voice mode.
This time, OpenAI dropped its bombshell the day after.
OpenAI buying the "io" hardware division of Jony Ive's design studio, LoveFrom, is a delightfully petty bit of SEO sabotage, though I'm told the name stands for "input output" and was decided a while ago. Even still, the news of Ive and Altman teaming up quickly shifted the conversation away from what was a strong showing from Google at this year's I/O. The dueling announcements say a lot about what are arguably the world's two foremost AI companies: Google's models may be technically superior and more widely deployed, but OpenAI is kicking everyone's ass at capturing mindshare and buzz.
Speaking of buzz, it's worth looking past the headlines to what OpenAI actually announced this week: it's paying $6.5 billion in equity to hire roughly 55 people from LoveFrom, including ex-Apple design leaders E …
President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to strip Harvard of its ability to enroll international students — an effort blocked by a federal judge on Friday, just hours after the university filed a lawsuit claiming Trump was violating its First Amendment rights.
On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded Harvard’s access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a government database of international students attending universities in the United States. The students’ visas weren’t canceled, but DHS’s revocation of Harvard’s SEVIS certification could, in theory, make nearly 6,800 international students enrolled at Harvard deportable immediately.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” DHS secretary Kristi Noem said on Thursday. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”
A month earlier, DHS demanded that Harvard turn over information on its international students, including their “known illegal activity,” “known dangerous or violent activity,” “known threats to other students or university personnel,” and “known deprivation of rights of other classmates or university personnel.” The department also requested information on any disciplinary action that had been taken against international students who participated in protests. DHS threatened to rescind Harvard’s SEVIS certification if the university didn’t turn over student records by April 30th.
Since taking office, Trump has used allegations of antisemitism at universities across the country to retaliate against students involved in campus protests against the war on Gaza — and against the universities themselves, which the administration claims haven’t done enough to quell antisemitism on their campuses. In addition to pulling billions of dollars in federal funding, the administration has also had Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest several students over their pro-Palestine activism. Some of these students, like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, are green card holders whom ICE has accused of engaging in behavior that is contrary to the US’s foreign policy interests. Others are international students whose visas were revoked by the State Department, thus making them deportable.
Instead of targeting individual students at Harvard, the Trump administration is going after the university’s ability to enroll international students altogether. Unlike Columbia, which capitulated to a list of Trump’s demands, Harvard has generally refused to comply with the administration’s requests that it hand over data on its international students; “audit” its academic programs, as well as students’ and faculty’s political views; and change its governance structure and hiring practices.
Harvard sued the administration on Friday. In a complaint filed in Massachusetts federal court, the university’s lawyers called DHS’s revocation of its SEVIS certification a “blatant violation of the First Amendment.”
“It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” the complaint alleges. “With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.”
Moreover, the suit claims, revoking Harvard’s SEVIS status puts students in an impossible position. “Termination of SEVIS records presents student visa holders whose school loses its certification with two bad choices,” the complaint claims: transferring immediately, or leaving the country.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked DHS’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s SEVIS certification. The university’s international students are safe — for now.
The Google I/O keynote may have been all about AI, but there were a handful of other meaningful updates that didn’t make it to the main stage. In addition to updates coming to Google Wallet, the company’s developer sessions also revealed handy features that will roll out to smartwatches, the Google Play Store, and Google TV.
Here are some of the updates Google didn’t highlight during the keynote.
Google is preparing to bring Live Updates — a feature that lets users track the status of certain activities in delivery, rideshare, and navigation apps — to your smartwatch. We already knew about Google’s plans to bring it to smartphones with Android 16, but in a developer session spotted by Android Authority, Google’s Aaron Labiaga confirmed that it will also work on wearables “later in 2026.”
Apple already has a similar feature, called Live Activities, that displays at-a-glance status information on watchOS devices.
Google announced a bundle of upgrades for Google Wallet, including a new “Nearby Passes notification.” If you enable the feature, Google Wallet will prompt you to take out your pass when you reach a location where you might need to use it, like a coffee shop, airport, or gym. “This notification serves as a direct gateway, allowing users to seamlessly access the associated pass with a single tap,” Google says.
Additionally, Google revealed that it’s expanding digital IDs to Arkansas, Montana, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia, and is also adding support for UK passports. It will also allow airlines with loyalty cards “automatically push” boarding passes to users’ wallets upon check-in.
The Google Play Store is adding a new “Ask someone else to pay” button. The feature is exactly what it sounds like: it will let users “request purchases” from people outside their Google Family by sending them a payment link. It launched in India first, but now it’s coming to the US, Japan, Indonesia, and Mexico.
Google is also trying to streamline checkouts by letting users buy subscription add-ons with a base subscription with “one price and one transaction.”
Additionally, Google is trying to make it easier to stop the rollout of buggy apps as well. The company says it will let developers “halt fully-live releases” to prevent “the distribution of problematic versions to new users.” The Play Store is also letting developers enhance their listings with a content carousel and YouTube playlist, along with audio samples for health and wellness app developers.
There are new topic pages, too, that will let users browse through “timely, relevant, and visually engaging content” for shows, movies, and sports on the Play Store.
Android 16 is coming to Google TV, introducing some Material 3 Expressive design changes, according to 9to5Google. It also adds new features like MediaQualityManager, which will let apps automatically “take control over selecting picture profiles.” Google TV will support the Eclispa Audio codec, the spatial audio format that Google and Samsung are working on, as well.
