Canada will set its own tariffs against US goods in retaliation to broad 25 percent tariffs President Donald Trump announced Saturday on Canadian imports. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a 25 percent tariff on a total of $155 billion worth of American goods — $30 billion of that on Tuesday when Trump’s tariffs go into effect, then an additional $125 billion after 21 days. Trudeau also warned that the US tariffs will harm both countries’ economies, particularly the auto industry. “This is a choice that, yes, will harm Canadians, but beyond that, it will have real consequences for you, the American people,” he said in a press conference Saturday.

Trudeau offered a “far-reaching” list of products that would be subject to import taxes, including American alcohol, orange juice, clothing, appliances, lumber, and plastics, along with “much, much more.” Non-tariff moves like reexamining public procurement policies are also on the table. However, he said that actions like limiting energy exports would require more careful consideration because “no one part of the country should be carrying a heavier burden than any other.”

The sweeping US tariffs, which include a lower 10 percent tariff on energy products from Canada, are a major shift in trade policy between the two countries. Trump claims the tariffs — which he also imposed on Mexico, and increased on goods from China — are meant to incentivize these countries to stem the flow of illegal fentanyl into the US.

The US tariffs include a clause seeking to prevent retaliation, outlets including The Wall Street Journal report, which would increase the penalties should the countries impacted impose their own tariffs. Despite this, Trudeau says that Canada’s new tariffs “are strong but appropriate in this case, and we will continue to defend Canada, Canadians, and our future.”

The National Transportation Safety Board will only update the press about the plane crashes in Washington, DC and Philadelphia on X — not over email, as reported earlier by The Desk. The agency announced on Saturday that it will use its @NTSB_Newsroom account to share ”news conferences or other investigative information.“

The NTSB later said, “Reporters should email [email protected] for all other inquiries,” claiming that it was meant to “better manage the volume of” emails about the two incidents n. “The NTSB media relations team has always used Twitter/X to inform the media and public on the time and location of media briefings. We cannot respond to every email asking for the details of media briefings,” the NTSB said, without explaining the process behind the decision or why an agency would rely solely on one privately owned social media platform.

At the same time, the US Department of Defense is also removing major outlets, like NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, and Politico, from their dedicated workstations in the Pentagon, according to a report from NBC. Instead, the DoD will impose an “annual media rotation program” that will replace the outlets with conservative-leaning ones, like One America News Network, the New York Post, and Breitbart. It also includes HuffPost even though it doesn’t have a Pentagon correspondent, NBC notes.

The Trump administration is targeting media networks in other ways, too, as the Federal Communications Commission ordered investigations into NPR and PBS over their financial sponsors.

President Donald Trump has announced that he’s imposing a tariff on goods from some of the US’s biggest trade partners: Canada, Mexico, and China. Under the executive orders signed on February 1st, Canada and Mexico will face a 25 percent tariff, while goods from China will be subject to a 10 percent tax. Energy resources from Canada will also have a lower 10 percent tariff.

Trump positioned the tariffs as a way to “halt the flood of poisonous drugs into the United States,” referring to fentanyl. The change will have a big impact on the cost of a wide variety of goods imported from each country, including electronics, produce, clothing, and much more.

Though Trump previously said the tariffs will “enrich” citizens, consumers are expected to bear the brunt of the fees as they typically lead to higher prices. Here’s all the latest news on Trump’s tariffs.

• Canada will retaliate against Trump with tariffs on US goods
• Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China
• Canadian officials have reportedly been notified of tariffs.
• Trump says he’ll put tariffs on imported chips ‘in the near future’

The US is officially imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. President Donald Trump announced that goods imported from Mexico and Canada will face a 25 percent tariff, while goods from China will face a 10 percent tariff. There will also be a lower 10 percent tariff on energy resources from Canada. In a series of posts on X announcing the tariffs, the administration claimed they were happening to “hold China, Mexico, and Canada accountable for their promises to halt the flood of poisonous drugs into the United States” while repeatedly referencing fentanyl.

The tariffs are set to go into effect on Tuesday, February 4th, according to The New York Times. They’re expected to have an impact on a huge swath of goods, ranging from the electronics we use every day to necessities like clothing, pharmaceuticals, and lithium batteries.

With tariffs in place, the company importing the goods is the one that pays the additional fee — not the exporting country, as Trump has often claimed. These additional fees are typically passed to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

“This was done through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) because of the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “We need to protect Americans, and it is my duty as President to ensure the safety of all.”

Tariffs were one of Trump’s major campaign promises, and he’s floated additional ones, like a tax on semiconductors from Taiwan. (He’s also made threats against Denmark and Colombia.) During Trump’s inauguration speech, the president said he will “immediately begin the overhaul” of the US trade system. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”

Update, February 1st: Added information about timing.

Google just debuted a series of Super Bowl ads showing how small businesses use Gemini AI across all 50 states, but the cheese lovers out there might notice something a little off about its Wisconsin one. As spotted by @natejhake on X, the ad shows Gemini AI generating text that says Gouda accounts for “50 to 60 percent of the world’s cheese consumption” — a stat that isn’t quite accurate.

The cheese is undoubtedly popular in Europe, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the world. “While Gouda is likely the most common single variety in world trade, it is almost assuredly not the most widely consumed,” Andrew Novakovic, E.V. Baker Professor of Agricultural Economics Emeritus at Cornell University, tells The Verge.

Gemini doesn’t say where it fetched this information, but it doesn’t appear to be completely made up. A site called Cheese.com has the same stat (the legitimacy of which Redditors were debating about more than a decade ago).

“I don’t think there is hard data to substantiate consumption of particular varieties of cheeses on a global scale,” Novakovic adds. “My guess is that Indian Paneer or the ubiquitous ‘fresh’ cheeses of South America, Africa, and western and southern Asia have far larger volumes than Gouda.”

As shown in the commercial, the fine print beneath Gemini’s response reads, “This is a creative writing aid, and is not intended to be factual.” But you’d think it would at least have a source to back it up, especially when the ad depicts a business owner using Gemini to fill out descriptions for their website.

When reached for comment, Google pointed The Verge to a reply from Google Cloud apps president Jerry Dischler on X. “Not a hallucination. Gemini is grounded in the Web — and users can always check the results and references. In this case, multiple sites across the web include the 50-60% stat,” Dischler said.

Last month, Google started building all its AI features into Workspace and also raised the price of its subscription.

Update, February 1st: Added a response from Google.

President Donald Trump has fired Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In a letter posted to X, Chopra confirmed his “term as CFPB Director has concluded.” Chopra was notified of his removal via an email from the White House, according to a report from the Associated Press.

During Chopra’s tenure, which began in 2021, the CFPB took an aggressive approach to regulating tech companies and financial institutions. The CFPB most recently proposed limiting data brokers’ ability to sell personal data in the US. It sued major US banks for “widespread fraud” on Zelle and also issued a rule that would put digital payment services like Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and PayPal under bank-like supervision — something it’s now facing a lawsuit over.

Trump was widely expected to fire Chopra before the director’s term came to an end in October 2026. “With so much power concentrated in the hands of a few, agencies like the CFPB have never been more critical,” Chopra wrote in his letter. “We’ve led efforts across the government to stop the scourge of junk fees in banking and across sectors of the economy, to tame the harmful impacts of medical bills riddled with errors, and to limit the creep of surveillance by data brokers that puts our sensitive data in the hands of foreign adversaries.”

Since taking office last month, Trump has pushed out many of the officials appointed by the Biden administration, replacing them with his own allies. Elon Musk, who is leading the government’s efforts to cut spending, said the US should “delete” the CFPB last year.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) responded to Chopra’s departure by saying Trump will need a “strong CFPB and a strong CFPB” director to achieve goals of capping credit card interest rates and lowering costs. “If President Trump and Republicans decide to cower to Wall Street billionaires and destroy the agency, they will have a fight on their hands,” Warren said.

In 2008, Mortis Ghost made a game with his friend, composer Alias Conrad Coldwood. It was a surreal roleplaying game about a baseball player fighting ghosts called Off. He shared it for free on a French-speaking forum, where it garnered a small audience. One player was a French artist who was inspired to make a piece of fan art, which she shared with her then-girlfriend. “I was very intrigued,” says Quinn K, now a writer and game developer. At the time, she was a 15-year-old living in Austria who had no idea how influential Off would be for her, nor she for Off.

After beating the game, K lay awake at night thinking about the ending. “Something had gotten its hooks in me,” she says. Wanting to show it to more friends, she resolved to translate the game from French to English — neither of which were her first language. “I wasn’t the right person for the job,” she says. “I was just the person that did it.”

Fan translation for games is often a tricky process, not just because of linguistics but also technical limitations and potential copyright claims by the original developers. But K knew it was possible to make her version work because there was already a parti …

Read the full story at The Verge.

While your Windows computer should be pretty well locked down with a password or maybe even some kind of biometric protection, it’s impossible to guarantee that no one else is ever going to get access to it, whether it’s a thief swiping your unlocked laptop from a coffee shop or one of your kids wanting to play a few games while you’re doing something else. 

Whatever the reason, knowing how to hide files and folders from view can be really useful. These files won’t pop up during normal file browsing, and they’ll be difficult to find even if someone is specifically looking for them.

And you’ve got a choice of ways to go about it, ranging from features built into File Explorer to third-party options.

Using Windows File Explorer

By default, Windows File Explorer hides certain files and folders from view. Typically, these are important system files, which shouldn’t be accessed or edited. You can see these files and folders if you want to:

• From any File Explorer window, click the three dots in the top toolbar.
• Click Options on the menu that pops up.
• On the View tab, enable Show hidden files, folders and drives.
• Click OK to confirm.

To hide any of your own files o …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When you yell “Can you just Google it?” at your AI assistant, it’s fair to say that the AI assistant is not doing its job.

I was browning some beef on the stove and trying to determine when my husband’s flight was landing. I didn’t have the flight number, but there are only so many direct flights between Detroit and Seattle in a day. So I long-pressed the power button on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and asked Google’s Gemini assistant to find the information for me. It said it couldn’t. So I insisted — loudly — to just Google it, plus or minus an expletive. It couldn’t even do that, so I went to Google myself and had the answer in seconds. AI, everybody.

This wouldn’t matter except AI smarts are supposed to be the big deal with this phone. The Galaxy S25 Ultra is a barely warmed-over version of last year’s device, with some lightly bumped specs and ever-so-slight design changes. That’s fine! The S24 Ultra was a great piece of hardware, and the S23 Ultra was, too. Samsung didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. But it means the company is relying on these “Galaxy AI” features — plus some help from Gemini — to give the S25 Ultra that new-phone zhuzh. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

On January 9th, 56-year-old Peter Akemann flew his DJI Mini 3 Pro drone far beyond the legal limit of his ability to see — and into a Super Scooper water dumping plane fighting the Los Angeles Palisades wildfires, grounding it for repairs after punching a hole in its left wing. Now that authorities have traced the drone back to him, he agreed Friday to plead guilty — possibly escaping a year in prison in exchange for 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief and the roughly $65,000 it cost to repair the plane.

According to the plea agreement (PDF via Courthouse News), his drone flew quite a distance and the impact punched quite a hole:

While the Firefighting Aircraft was conducting its firefighting missions, defendant drove to the area near the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California, and parked his vehicle on the top floor of a parking structure. Defendant launched the Drone and flew it toward the Pacific Palisades to observe damage caused by the Palisades Fire. At the time, the Federal Aviation Administration had issued Temporary Flight Restrictions that prohibited drone operations near the Southern California wildfires, including the Palisades Fire.

Defendant flew the Drone at least 2500 meters away from its launch point and lost visual sight of the Drone while flying it. Thereafter, the Drone collided with the Firefighting Aircraft, causing an approximately 3-inch-by-6-inch hole in the left wing of Firefighting Aircraft.

The Hollywood Reporter writes that Akemann isn’t just any old drone pilot, but rather the former president and chief technologist of video game developer Skydance Interactive and the co-founder of Treyarch, a studio known for its Call of Duty and Spider-Man games. THR writes that he “recently left his role” at Skydance, which would be news in and of itself. Both the Akemann pleading guilty and the game developer are Peter T. Akemann. A LinkedIn page for Akemann no longer exists, and an X social media page for a Peter T. Akemann has been scrubbed.

It is possible that the US District Court will not accept Akemann’s plea agreement, which his lawyers are making jointly with the US Attorney’s Office, in which case he faces a year of prison time, a year of supervised release, and either up to a $100,000 fine or “twice the gross loss resulting from the offense,” whichever is greater.

Akemann’s attorneys told ABC News he’s now “deeply sorry for the mistake he made by flying a drone near the boundary of the Palisades fire area on January 9, 2025, and for the resulting accident” and “accepts responsibility for his grave error in judgment.”

They also added that there are “mitigating factors that will come to light during the court proceedings, including Mr. Akemann’s reliance on the DJI Drone’s geo fencing safeguard feature and the failure of that feature.”

DJI recently eliminated its most restrictive forms of geofencing, potentially letting drone pilots fly over active wildfires and government buildings like the White House when it might have previously stopped them automatically. That said, DJI recently explained to us that even the earlier versions of its software would not have stopped someone from flying over a temporary no-fly-zone, like a wildfire, unless that person let their drone download the updated temporary flight restriction lists first.

Correction Feb 1st: Akemann pleaded guilty to avoid prison, not jail.

YouTube is expanding the availability of its dedicated community space feature to more creators on the site, giving them more opportunities to connect with their fans without needing to lean on another platform like Discord.

Only available for access via mobile devices, Communities first launched during the Made for YouTube event last fall, letting the creators write posts with images and text while also enabling fans to start discussions. “We’ve been testing Communities with a small group of creators and have heard positive feedback, which is why we’re excited to keep expanding access, says today’s post from YouTube. Creators can monitor and moderate via a Community Hub in the YouTube Studio app that combines the activity from their channel, and can also offer suggestions for replies to fans.

YouTube is also renaming its previously existing Community tab to Posts to try to keep things clear between the two things:

The tab will work just as it does today, just with a new name. Creators can still share updates and announcements via posts and viewers can engage by commenting on those posts like they always have!

Creators will still need an invitation to access Communities, which will come in an email and as a banner on their channel pages on the YouTube app. Once received, creators will be invited to “Go to Community” to learn more and then allow them to enable the features.

Windows Insiders will soon see a Copilot icon in one more place: Paint. Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels will see the new button thanks to an update rolling out now, putting AI tools in one location. Clicking the Copilot button in the task bar will reveal a dropdown menu with generative features like Cocreator, Image Creator, and Generative Erase. Microsoft has been on a mission to put a Copilot icon everywhere it can — from your keyboard to the taskbar — and Paint is just the latest place for it to pop up.

Microsoft has been adding AI image generation tools to Paint throughout the past year and change, bringing in the DALL-E-based Cocreator in late 2023 and generative fill options last fall. They’re all going in one place now, so if you’re looking to create some AI-generated clip art, you’ll just look for the Copilot logo. Honestly, a Copilot shortcut probably makes more sense in Paint than it does in Bing, anyway.

With today’s update, Windows 11 Insiders are also getting an update to the AI search opened up in preview earlier this month. Now, the “improved search” will allow you to find photos in the cloud with natural language; previously, AI search was limited to local files. When you perform a search, you’ll see the cloud files show up alongside the local images. This update is rolling out to Windows 11 Insiders in the Dev and Beta channels.

Though Netflix is planning to bring back a number of its ongoing series in the coming months, the streamer has decided to cancel its adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

Netflix announced today that The Sandman will conclude with its upcoming second season. In a statement about the show coming to an end, Sandman showrunner Allan Heinberg said that the series “has always been focused exclusively on Dream’s story, and back in 2022, when we looked at the remaining Dream material from the comics, we knew we only had enough story for one more season.”

As Variety notes, Netflix took its time before renewing The Sandman after its first season and did not announce a specific number of episodes it ordered. Netflix also made a point of referring to the renewal as “a continuation of The Sandman world,” which at the time included the Dead Boy Detectives adaptation that was canceled last August after a single season. That all makes Heinberg’s statement sound plausible, but the timing of Netflix’s move to cancel The Sandman links it to the multiple allegations of sexual assault that Gaiman is currently facing. In response to the allegations, Gaiman wrote in a blog post earlier this month, “I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever.”

Amazon made a similar decision last year when it first halted production on the third season of its Good Omens (a Guiman novel co-written with Terry Pratchett) adaptation following earlier reporting about Gaiman’s actions, and ultimately decided to rework it into one 90-minute-long finale episode. Disney also decided to axe its plans to adapt Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. More recently, Dark Horse Comics announced that it was dropping its series based on Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. Amazon’s adaptation of Anansi Boys has been in development for ages and was intended to debut later this year, but it wouldn’t be surprising if those plans changed as well.

BioWare now has fewer than 100 employees after laying off “around two dozen” staffers and shifting others to different projects at EA, Bloomberg reports.

The changes follow BioWare’s own “Studio Update” published this week where GM Gary McKay said the studio had “worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles.” According to Bloomberg, “dozens” of staffers that had been “loaned out” to other teams at EA after the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard apparently learned this week that those shifts would be permanent.

McKay said that as a “core team” at the studio is developing the next Mass Effect game – which got a teaser trailer more than four years ago – and that the changes will help BioWare “become a more agile, focused studio.”

McKay’s post didn’t mention layoffs. Bloomberg reports that BioWare had “more than 200 people two years ago.”

Last week, EA said that The Veilguard significantly missed expectations. EA Sports FC hasn’t done as well as expected during EA’s 2025 fiscal year, either.

EA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IGN also reported this week on layoffs at BioWare.

Key resources for environmental data and public health have already been taken down from federal websites, and more could soon vanish as the Trump administration works to scrap anything that has to do with climate change, racial equity, or gender identity.

Warnings floated on social media Friday about an impending purge at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spurring calls to save as much data as soon as possible. The CDC shares data on a wide range of topics, from chronic diseases to traffic injuries, tobacco use, vaccinations, and pregnancies in the US — and it’s just one of the agencies in the crosshairs. 

The CDC’s main data portal, which housed much of those datasets, was offline by Friday night. “Data.CDC.gov is temporarily offline in order to comply with Executive Order 14168 Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” a notice on the webpage says, adding that it will become available again once it’s “in compliance” with the executive order.

Fortunately, researchers have been archiving government websites for months. This is typical with every change in administration, but there was even more imperative with the return of Donald Trump to office. Access to as much as 20 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency’s website was removed during the first round of Trump’s deregulatory spree. And now, it seems, similar moves are happening fast.

The CDC’s social vulnerability index and environmental justice index — tools that could show whether particular populations might face disproportionate health risks — have both been taken offline within the past week. In 2007, during the Bush administration, social scientists, geographers, and statisticians started developing the social vulnerability index (SVI), which incorporated demographic and socioeconomic factors including poverty, race, and ethnicity over the years. 

The Biden administration launched the environmental justice index (EJI)  in 2022. “Too many communities across our nation, particularly low-income communities and communities of color, continue to bear the brunt of pollution. Meeting the needs of these communities requires our focused attention and we will use the Environmental Justice Index to do just that,” then Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release at the time.

Since stepping into office, Trump has tried to undo previous administrations’ work to address health disparities when it comes to race and gender. In an executive order Trump signed to undo Biden-era policies, the president wrote that  “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) has “corrupted” government institutions. 

He also claimed that “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” During his first term in office, there was a near 40 percent decline in the term “climate change” across websites for federal environmental agencies. It’s too soon to know what the damage might be this time around, but some webpages have already vanished. The US Department of Transportation’s “priorities” website has removed pages on both “climate and sustainability” and “equity.” It follows an internal memo sent this week instructing USDOT operating administrations to identify and ultimately “terminate” Biden-era activities relating to climate change and DEI.

Donald Trump’s efforts to limit foreign aid seem to have also led to information being taken down on HIV and AIDS. The data webpage for the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR) was taken down this week. PEPFAR has been around since 2003 and helped more than 20.6 million people get access to antiretroviral therapy in 2024 alone, according to a snapshot of the website taken by the Wayback Machine on January 26th, before it was taken down.

The End of Term Web Archive project has saved content on federal government websites during every presidential transition since 2008. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) that formed after Trump was first elected also documents changes to government websites and works to make archived datasets available elsewhere. It has backed up data from the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and Environmental Justice Index and shared it on a webpage for The Public Environmental Data Project.

Yet even if these datasets have been archived, they aren’t as helpful when they aren’t updated. “Any dataset has a lifespan of utility,” says Dan Pisut, senior principal engineer at GIS software company Esri.  

Aging datasets might not fully represent what’s actually happening on the ground, so people have to be careful about how they use them, Pisut points out. It could be risky, he says, but “better than nothing.”

Update, February 1st: This post has been updated with information about data.cdc.gov going offline.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is the latest in the long-running 4X strategy franchise that first debuted in 1991 on MS-DOS. The new turn-based game from Firaxis Games and the titular, legendary designer is set to release on PC and modern consoles in on February 11th, 2025 — over eight years after the last installment.

Civ VII promises to expand the scope of how players can write their own historical fantasy, offering the freedom to mix and match civilizations with different historical figures, such as Hatshepsut reigning over the Roman empire in the Age of Exploration. It’s the kind of game that easily consumes hundreds of hours of playtime, constantly offering new and unexpected ways to engage with its deep city-building systems. Our own Ash Parrish details in her hands-on impressions how she only managed to scratch the surface in a lengthy three-hour demo.

Here’s all our coverage of the next major title in the Civilization series.

• Here are the PC requirements for Civilization 7.
• Civilization 7 launches in February
• Baba yetu, yetu uliye!
• Civilization 7 is launching in 2025
• A new mainline Civilization game is in development at Firaxis

In 2016, Apple started including an auto power-on feature for its new MacBook models that activated when you opened the notebook lid or plugged in USB-C power when the lid was open. This is a cool little convenience if you don’t want the added step of pressing the power button — plus it could get the computer running if, for some reason, that button stops working.

But what if you open the lid just to clean the screen or are troubleshooting the computer for some other issue? Or perhaps you are building a slabtop and don’t want it to power on just because you plugged it into power? Or what if you don’t want to automate everything? In these cases, auto power-on is either a minor inconvenience or a straight-up annoyance.

The first MacBooks to get this feature had Intel processors, and it continued over to every new model, including when Apple switched to its own Apple Silicon M-series processors. There’s a Terminal command for the Intel MacBooks that can be used to disable open lid power-on, but when Apple launched the M1 MacBook Air in 2020, that command no longer worked. However, in January 2025, Apple finally added an official way to disable autoboot upon opening the li …

Read the full story at The Verge.

While Mark Zuckerberg and Meta press forward with augmented glasses projects buoyed by its million-selling set of smart Ray-Bans, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says that Apple just pulled the plug on an AR glasses project. Codenamed N107, they’re described as something that would’ve looked similar to regular glasses but with added displays in the lenses that could connect to a Mac.

With features that sound similar to devices like the Xreal One AR glasses, the glasses could’ve delivered on the Vision Pro feature that’s closest to being any kind of a killer app (popping up a huge virtual monitor anywhere) without the $3,499 price and heavy design that required a head strap. The glasses also would’ve had tint-changing lenses that, like the Vision Pro’s Eye Sight, could signal to onlookers whether the wearer was busy or not. While other details are fuzzy, it doesn’t appear as if the N107 glasses would’ve had a camera or any of the mixed-reality features of the Vision Pro.

A big problem, according to Gurman, was developing something that worked well while being cost-effective proved to be a challenge. Apple initially wanted the N107 to connect to an iPhone, but it proved to be a battery-guzzler, and the iPhone itself didn’t have enough juice to power the glasses — hence the shift to a Mac. Unfortunately, that switch purportedly didn’t seem to go over well with executives in testing.

This most recent cancellation puts a big question mark over Apple’s future AR and XR plans. Apple purportedly canceled a separate AR glasses project in 2023, and rumor has it that work on a Vision Pro 2 has been put on hold in favor of trying to create a cheaper Vision Pro. Meanwhile, the Vision Pro itself has struggled to find a foothold.

The cancellation also means Apple is falling further behind the competition. CES 2025 was a playground for all sorts of smart glasses, and Google recently entered the fray with Android XR. Samsung has also thrown its hat in the ring with its Project Moohan headset. Last year, Meta showcased its Orion glasses, an AR glasses prototype with advanced Micro LED displays and a neural wristband for controls. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also been bullish on smart glasses as an ultimate vehicle for AI assistants, and the company is expected to release both Oakley-branded smart glasses for athletes and a higher-end version of its current Ray-Ban glasses with a display this year.

In Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects from Joe Bennett (Scavengers Reign) and Steve Hely (American Dad!), the discovery of a strange mushroom that can heal any sickness or injury is either a miracle or a doomsday scenario, depending on who you ask. The plant is a godsend to people suffering from debilitating illnesses, but its curative properties make it an existential threat to powerful pharmaceutical companies. And while all Marshall Cuso (Dave King), the show’s hero, wants to do with his fungus is help people in need, that’s enough to make the American Drug Enforcement Administration label him as a menace to society.

Imminent danger is always right around the corner as Marshall goes on the run in hopes of finding a way to spread his mushrooms far and wide. Often, he feels like the show’s only character who has a conscience and wants to do good in the world. But when I recently spoke with Bennett and Hely, they explained that even though the people around Marshall might seem terrible, the show’s true villain is the (American) healthcare system they have all been forced to live within.

Marshall knows that he can’t really relax or trust anyone (aside from his pet torto …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A popular Bloodborne framerate mod is no longer available thanks to a DMCA takedown request from Sony. Australia-based Twitch streamer Lance McDonald first developed the mod back in 2020 before making it available to download in 2021. Lance announced today in a post on X that Sony Interactive Entertainment asked them to remove download links for the patch.

The hack’s sole purpose was to get Bloodborne running at a smoother 60 fps with improved frame pacing. FromSoftware originally released Bloodborne back in 2015 for the PlayStation 4, and the game has always been locked at 30 fps with occasional stuttering from inconsistent pacing (the 30 frames within each second were not always on-screen for equal amounts of time). The beloved game’s graphical limitations have persisted even on the PS4 Pro and while playing it via backwards compatibility on the PlayStation 5.

Lance’s mod has received its share of testing and praise from the “Soulsbourne” community that covet FromSoftware games but wish their technical and graphical chops were more cutting-edge. This includes being spotlighted by creators like Digital Foundry, who interviewed McDonald about his hack back in 2020, used his mod to make a 4K / 60 fps representation on PS5 using AI upscaling, and recently published a Bloodborne PS4 emulation video that really juices up the performance and has an extra-spicy video thumbnail aimed squarely at Sony.

For years, the most rabid of Bloodborne fans have been quick to jump at any Bloodborne-related news as a potential clue to an upcoming, long-awaited remake. And in this case, it only takes a short scroll of McDonald’s replies on his post to see people speculating that this takedown means Sony must be nearing some kind of announcement in time for the 10-year anniversary of Bloodborne’s release. Or, perhaps, Sony is just taking a page from Nintendo’s playbook.