The Federal Trade Commission announced on Friday it finalized an order (pdf) requiring Marriott International and subsidiary Starwood Hotels to improve their digital security, reports BleepingComputer. The FTC charged the companies with lax security practices that resulted in three big breaches detected in 2015, 2018, and 2020, “affecting more than 344 million customers worldwide,” leaking passport details, payment cards, and other info.

The shortest breach lasted 14 months before it was detected, while the longest one saw attackers maintain access for four years, starting in 2018. The beefed-up security programs they've agreed to establish include creating policies to only keep information for as long as it’s needed and publishing a link allowing US customers to request the deletion of information tied to their email address or loyalty account.

Hotels have been one of many key targets for hackers, with one breach last year catching FTC Chair Lina Khan among the many people left waiting to check in when a ransomware attack forced MGM Resorts to fall back on using pen and paper.

The FTC announced its charges in October, accusing the companies of having “deceived consumers” with false claims of “reasonable and appropriate data security.” Their alleged failures included having bad password and firewall practices and not patching outdated software and systems. The same day the FTC revealed the charges, the Connecticut Attorney General’s office announced Marriott had agreed to a $52 million settlement.

Beyond improving their security, the companies are now forbidden “from misrepresenting how they collect, maintain, use, delete or disclose consumers’ personal information; and the extent to which the companies protect the privacy, security, availability, confidentiality, or integrity of personal information.” Other requirements include that they keep compliance records and submit to FTC inspections. The order will stay in effect for 20 years.

The PayPal Honey browser extension is, in theory, a handy way to find better deals on products while you’re shopping online. But in a video published this weekend, YouTuber MegaLag claims the extension is a “scam” and that Honey has been “stealing money from influencers, including the very ones they paid to promote their product.”

Honey works by popping up an offer to find coupon codes for you while you’re checking out in an online shop. But as MegaLag notes, it frequently fails to find a code, or offers a Honey-branded one, even if a simple internet search will cover something better. The Honey website’s pitch is that it will “find every working promo code on the internet.” But according to MegaLag’s video, ignoring better deals is a feature of Honey’s partnerships with its retail clients.

MegaLag also says Honey will hijack affiliate revenue from influencers. According to MegaLag, if you click on an affiliate link from an influencer, Honey will then swap in its own tracking link when you interact with its deal pop-up at check-out. That’s regardless of whether Honey found you a coupon or not, and it results in Honey getting the credit for the sale, rather than the YouTuber or website whose link led you there.

Paypal VP of corporate communications Josh Criscoe said in an email to The Verge that “Honey follows industry rules and practices, including last-click attribution.”

MegaLag isn’t the first to make such claims. A 2021 Twitter post advises using Honey’s discount codes in a different browser to avoid it taking the affiliate credit. A Linus Media Group employee also explained in a 2022 forum reply that Linus Tech Tips dropped Honey as a sponsor over its affiliate link practices.

Honey’s convenience has resulted in the extension being recommended widely, including in almost 5,000 Honey-sponsored videos across about 1,000 YouTube channels, according to MegaLag. We’ve even recommended it here at The Verge; now we do not.

Here is Criscoe’s full statement:

Honey is free to use and provides millions of shoppers with additional savings on their purchases whenever possible. Honey helps merchants reduce cart abandonment and comparison shopping while increasing sales conversion.

In a pair of Truth Social posts on Sunday, Donald Trump announced a set of picks for his administration’s tech policy team that will report to David Sacks, Trump’s “AI and crypto czar.” The picks include Michael Kratsios, who will lead the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) if confirmed by the Senate.

Kratsios, who served in Trump’s first term as the White House chief technology officer, also briefly held an acting undersecretary role at the Department of Defense near the end of the term. He later became a managing director at Scale AI and has been helping lead Trump’s tech policy transition team.

The President-elect also picked his former deputy CTO, Dr. Lynne Parker, as Executive Director of the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. Directing the Presidential Council of Advisers for Digital Assets (AKA the “Crypto Council”) will be former college football player and unsuccessful Republican congressional candidate Bo Hines. Advising Trump on AI policy as part of the OSTP will be Sriram Krishnan, who has extensive Silicon Valley experience, with roles at Andreessen Horowitz, X, Meta, and Snap.

Sacks is close with Elon Musk, who Trump has charged with gutting the US government as part of the not-yet-established Department of Government Efficiency — and who recently helped send Congress into chaos by posting relentlessly to stop a US spending bill.

Days after furloughing dozens of its employees without pay, EV startup Canoo told the remainder of its staff they will be on a “mandatory unpaid break” through at least the end of the year, TechCrunch reported Friday. A company email seen by the outlet said employees would be locked out of Canoo’s systems by the end of Friday, with their benefits continuing through the end of this month.

The report follows Canoo’s announcement last week that it was idling its Oklahoma factories and furloughing employees while it worked “to finalize securing the capital necessary to move forward with its operations.” As TechCrunch notes, the company reported that it had only about $700,000 left in the bank last month.

Also on Friday, the company announced a 1-for-20 reverse stock split, effective December 24th. Canoo says the consolidation aims to keep its stock listed on the Nasdaq exchange and attract “a broader group of institutional and retail investors.”

Canoo was founded in 2017 to sell electric vans and trucks to adventure-seeking customers but has mostly only ever made vehicles for the US government. As The Verge’s Andrew Hawkins wrote last year, analysts have warned of its risk of insolvency as it’s teetered on the edge of running out of cash since 2022. Canoo has lost a steady stream of executives since then, including all of its founders and, more recently, its CFO and general counsel.

Apple is working on a new smart doorbell camera that uses Face ID to unlock your door, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. The camera could be released by the end of 2025 “at the soonest,” Gurman writes.

The lock would work just like your iPhone, automatically unlocking your door when you or another resident looks at it. Like biometric login info on other Apple devices, the camera would be equipped with the company’s Secure Enclave chip that stores and processes Face ID information separately from the rest of the system’s hardware.

Gurman writes that this device will “likely” work with existing third-party HomeKit smart locks and that the company may also partner with a smart lock company “to offer a complete system on day one.” He expects the camera will make use of Apple’s in-house “Proxima” combination Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chip that’s rumored for new HomePod Mini and Apple TV devices next year.

This doorbell camera joins a broader collection of rumors surrounding a renewed Apple push into the smart home that’s centered around Apple Intelligence. Those include another new smart home camera, a possible Apple-branded TV, and new smart home displays — one a simple iPad-like device that magnetically attaches to wall mounts or speaker bases, while another display sits on the end of a robotic arm attached to a larger base.

In the latest version of the Files by Google app, summoning Gemini while looking at a PDF gives you the option to ask about the file, writes Android Police. You’ll need to be a Gemini Advanced subscriber to use the feature though, according to Mishaal Rahman, who reported on Friday that it had started rolling out.

If you have the feature, when you summon Gemini while looking at a PDF in the Files app, you’ll see an “Ask about this PDF” button appear. Tapping that lets you ask questions about the file, the same way you might ask ChatGPT about a PDF. Google first announced this screen-aware feature during its I/O developer conference in May.

Rahman posted a screenshot of what it looks like in action:

Other context-aware Gemini features include the ability to ask about web pages and YouTube videos. For apps or file types without Gemini’s context-aware support, the assistant instead offers to answer questions about your screen, using a screenshot it takes when you tap “Ask about this screen.”

The US Commerce Department has awarded Samsung and Texas Instruments with a combined over $6 billion in “direct funding under the CHIPS Incentives Program’s Funding Opportunity for Commercial Fabrication,” according to a pair of announcements published on Friday.

Samsung will get the larger of the two awards at $4.745 billion. The Commerce Department says the company will use this as part of its planned $37 billion investment in Texas chip facilities that include two new “leading-edge logic fabs and an R&D fab” in Taylor, Texas, and the expansion of its plant in Austin.

The company was originally slated to receive $6.4 billion. In a statement reported by Bloomberg, the company said that its “mid-to-long-term investment plan has been partially revised to optimize overall investment efficiency,” which suggests the company has dialed back its plans, according to the outlet.

Texas Instruments will receive $1.61 billion to bolster the $18 billion it plans to spend on projects like constructing two wafer fabs in Texas and a third in Utah. The Commerce Department announced smaller awards this week too, including $407 million in funding for Amkor Technology, a US-based company that...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Asus has announced the Asus NUC 14 Pro AI, the first Copilot Plus-capable AI mini PC that crams an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor into a form factor resembling a black M4 Mac Mini. First introduced at IFA in September, Asus is providing a little more detail about the mini PC’s specs than it did before, but still isn’t saying it will become available or how much it will cost.

The NUC 14 Pro AI will come in five CPU configurations, from the Core Ultra 5 226V processor with 16GB of integrated RAM to a Core Ultra 9 288V processor with 32GB of RAM. The company says it has up to 67 TOPS of GPU performance and 48 NPU TOPS, and that its M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 x 4 slot supports 256GB to 2TB NVMe SSDs.

All of that is packed into a PC that measures 130mm deep and wide and just 34mm tall; comparatively, the Mac Mini is 127mm deep and wide and 50mm tall. Here are some pictures from Asus’ website:

The Asus NUC 14 Pro AI features a fingerprint sensor on top and a Copilot button on the front for speaking voice commands to Microsoft’s AI assistant. Also on the front are two USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a headphone jack, and a power button. Around the back, you’ll find a 2.5Gbps ethernet jack, another Thunderbolt 4 port, two more USB-A ports, and an HDMI port. For connectivity, it features Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Asus still hasn’t said when the NUC 14 Pro AI will be available, nor how much it will cost.

I opened the App Store today to find an emulator I’d read about, and a new prompt appeared under the search bar inviting me to “search the way you talk.” I hadn’t seen the prompt before on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, and quite frankly, I had missed the iOS 18.1 update note about it.

As it describes, Apple's update in October added, “App Store search lets you use natural language to find what you’re looking for more easily.” It’s also not the only place Apple is adding natural language search with iOS 18, in addition to Photos, Music, and Apple TV.

While some others had seen a splash screen in October, I’d only spotted the same simple search prompts as before. When I asked around at The Verge, several others hadn’t seen it before, although closing the app and relaunching it caused the message to appear in at least one case, and a few social media posts have popped up from other people noticing it for the first time.

The prompt in the hint bubble suggested trying something like “Apps that help me work out,” so of course, I gave it a try.

Screenshot: iOS App Store

How well does it work? When I searched “emulators that feature multiple consoles,” the top result was the multi-console Delta app. Cool. “Apps that only emulate single consoles” gave me the PS Remote Play, PlayStation, and Xbox apps — less good, but it did follow those with Gamma, a PS1 emulator app. And when I asked for “Video games that can help me work out,” well...

Screenshot: iOS App Store

Overall, it seems like an improvement to me. Twerk Race 3D is not an app that would help me work out, but it does seem like the search engine worked in spirit. I never felt like the App Store’s search was helpful for anything besides finding an app I already knew the name of. Plus, searching with the usual one-or-two-word terms might not give me the same variety as switching up how I phrase a natural language prompt.

Nvidia announced the latest in its Jetson Orin Nano AI computer line, the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. Sort of like a Raspberry Pi but for powerful AI processing, the tiny $249 computer packs more of an AI processing punch than the kit did before — for half the price. It’s available to buy now.

The Jetson Nano line has been a low-cost way for hobbyists and makers to power AI and robotics projects since its introduction in 2019. Nvidia says the Nano Super’s neural processing is 70 percent higher, at 67 TOPS, than the 40 TOPS Nano. It also has 50 percent more memory bandwidth, at 102GB/s, which should speed up those operations.

The Jetson Orin Nano Super kit uses essentially the same hardware as the original Orin Nano kit, and the company says it will get the same performance gains with a new JetPack update. Nvidia says the boost comes from “a new power mode which increases the GPU, memory, and CPU clocks.”

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang showed off the Nano Super in a video:

The developer kit includes a reference carrier board and a Jetson Orin Nano 8GB system-on-module, comprised of an Nvidia Ampere GPU with tensor cores and 6-core Arm CPU. Nvidia calls the Nano Super Developer Kit “an ideal solution” for building chatbots or visual AI agents, as well as AI-based robots.

Blackmagic has announced that its URSA Cine Immersive commercial camera for shooting high-quality 3D immersive video is now available to preorder “direct from Blackmagic Design Offices,” with the first deliveries going out in early 2025. The camera, which could enable more immersive content for the Vision Pro, costs $29,995 — or a mere 8.6 Vision Pros.

First revealed in June, the Cine Immersive will let cinematographers shoot 90fps video in stereoscopic 3D at 8160 x 7200 resolution per eye — or more than twice the estimated per-eye resolution of the Vision Pro’s screens. They’ll be able to edit the footage using the proprietary Apple Immersive Video format in DaVinci Resolve Studio, which Blackmagic plans to add support for early next year.

Blackmagic Design CEO Grant Petty said the DaVinci update will enable “a true end-to-end workflow for Apple Immersive Video.” He added that the company is “looking forward to working closely with filmmakers” on immersive videos ahead of the camera’s wider release later in 2025.

Blackmagic included images of the camera in its email to The Verge. It looks cool, so I’ve included them for your perusal:

The Vision Pro has some immersive content outside of Apple’s videos — in apps like Amplium or Explore POV — but none of them quite have the quality of Apple’s videos. Until now, Apple has been the only company producing content with its format, and only a handful of such videos are available at this point. That could change, eventually, if studios take advantage of Blackmagic’s new camera and DaVinci update.

The next time you comment on a YouTube video, you could hear its creator’s voice respond to you. YouTube says it’s testing out a feature with a “small number” of creators that lets them record an audio reply to comments on their videos.

YouTube says it hopes this experiment “enables more meaningful relationships between creators and their audiences.” YouTubers in the test group can use it by tapping the sound wave icon when replying to a comment, tapping “record a voice reply,” and then posting it as normal. However, anyone else can interact with these replies just like ordinary text comments.

For now, creators in the test group can only create voice replies in the iOS app, and only on their own videos. Where you can hear the replies seems to be limited, too; I didn’t have the option to listen to the above voice reply from YouTuber ThioJoe in a web browser on my Mac, but I could play it in the YouTube app on my iPhone 15 Pro and Pixel 6 phones.

Workers at a Staten Island, New York Amazon warehouse voted on Friday to authorize a strike if the company doesn’t agree to set dates for contract negotiations. The workers are asking Amazon to recognize the union and bargain for safer working conditions and better wages, threatening the possibility of a strike during one of Amazon’s busiest times of the year.

Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien says in a press release that Amazon must agree to bargaining dates by December 15th, which passed yesterday. If Amazon hasn’t agreed, it risks facing a strike by the more than 5,500 workers at its Staten Island (JFK8) fulfillment center. Delivery drivers at a Queens (DBK4) last-mile delivery station also voted to authorize a strike.

“This is my third holiday I’m giving to Amazon,” a worker named James said in a video published Friday by labor nonprofit More Perfect Union. “I haven’t been around for Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s constant speed-up for the holidays. It’s like twice as dangerous, I would say.”

A newly published US Senate Committee report says that, based on an investigation of Amazon’s records, the company’s warehouse injury rates were “more than 1.8 times that of other companies in each of the past seven years,” according to The New York Times. Senator Bernie Sanders, who chairs the committee, said “Amazon’s executives repeatedly chose to put profits ahead of the health and safety of its workers by ignoring recommendations that would substantially reduce injuries.”

In a statement emailed to The Verge, Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards accused the Teamsters union of “intentionally” misleading claims that it represents thousands of Amazon employees and drivers.

They don’t, and this is another attempt to push a false narrative. The truth is that the Teamsters have actively threatened, intimidated, and attempted to coerce Amazon employees and third-party drivers to join them, which is illegal and is the subject of multiple pending unfair labor practice charges against the union.

Hards didn’t immediately respond when we asked which charges she was referring to. Conversely, in 2022, the National Labor Relations Board alleged that Amazon itself “repeatedly broke the law by threatening, surveilling, and interrogating” Staten Island workers who were attempting to unionize.

Workers at the Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize in 2022 and joined Teamsters, one of the largest US labor unions, in June, followed by drivers working out of the Queens facility in September. Amazon hasn’t recognized those unions. As of this writing, the Teamsters hasn’t announced an active strike on its X account, its Facebook page, or its site.

In a series of Threads posts this afternoon, Instagram head Adam Mosseri says users shouldn’t trust images they see online because AI is “clearly producing” content that’s easily mistaken for reality. Because of that, he says users should consider the source, and social platforms should help with that.

“Our role as internet platforms is to label content generated as AI as best we can,” Mosseri writes, but he admits “some content” will be missed by those labels. Because of that, platforms “must also provide context about who is sharing” so users can decide how much to trust their content.

Just as it’s good to remember that chatbots will confidently lie to you before you trust an AI-powered search engine, checking whether posted claims or images come from a reputable account can help you consider their veracity. At the moment, Meta’s platforms don’t offer much of the sort of context Mosseri posted about today, although the company recently hinted at big coming changes to its content rules.

What Mosseri describes sounds closer to user-led moderation like Community Notes on X and YouTube or Bluesky’s custom moderation filters. Whether Meta plans to introduce anything like those isn’t known, but then again, it has been known to take pages from Bluesky’s book.

What if you could turn a PSP with a broken screen into a miniature PS2, connect a Bluetooth controller to it, and play PSP games on your TV? That’s the idea behind Retro Mod Works’ PS Placeable, a mod that “consolizes” the PSP and was featured yesterday in a video from the YouTube channel Macho Nacho Productions.

Retro Mod Works charges $274.99 for a prebuilt PS Placeable. Those are waitlisted at the moment, though — a message on the site says the project is a “one man show” and that the demand for the Placeable was higher than anticipated.

Retro also offers to mod customer-provided PSPs for $100 less, and there’s an option preorder DIY parts and do the conversion work yourself. The mod requires either a PSP-2000 or PSP-3000 revision, as the first PSP didn’t have a video output. It’s not clear when the DIY parts will ship — we’ve asked Retro Mod Works and will update if we get a reply.

Image: Retro Mod Works

The primary person behind the project, named Dan, told Macho Nacho host Tito Perez that he “hated the idea of buying digital games” for which he has physical copies, and wanted a way to add Bluetooth controller support while preserving the UMD drive. He’s also mentioned in replies on Reddit that his goal is to help people revive broken PSPs with the mod, which doesn’t need the console’s screen.

But buying one of these mod kits can be pricey or require skills most people don’t have. If you just want to play PSP games on your TV and don’t care about having a UMD drive, the PSP Go — which lacked Sony’s oddball optical drive but supported Bluetooth controllers and also had a way to output video — is still pretty easy to come by.

Apple hopes to release a foldable 18.8-inch creaseless iPad by about 2028, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in today’s Power On newsletter. The company’s industrial design group has reportedly managed to create prototypes of this device that “have a nearly invisible crease” and would essentially be like “two iPad Pros side-by-side.”

Rumors of a folding iPad have been floating in the ether for years, now. Recent ones include a smaller model that Apple would release in 2026 or 2027. Gurman’s write-up today has strong echoes of the gargantuan 20-inch folding “iPad / MacBook hybrid” he detailed in 2022. That doesn’t seem to mean that it will run macOS, but Gurman claims that it “will have elements of both” Macs and iPads and that iPadOS “should be advanced enough to run macOS apps” by 2028.

Considering that Macs run iPhone and iPad apps now, it’s not outrageous to think the street could go both ways in time. It might help the value proposition, too; the 13-inch iPad Pro starts at $1,299, and whatever financial damage an iPad twice that size could incur would be a little easier to take coupled with the salve of being able to run macOS apps on it.

Gurman says a foldable iPhone is still in the works, though he doesn’t expect that “before 2026 at the earliest,” as other rumors have said. He also says information from his sources lines up with an alleged Apple internal display roadmap that made the rounds recently, tipping the 18.8-inch foldable iPad and Apple’s plans to release OLED MacBook Pros in 2026, followed by a MacBook Air OLED update in 2027.

Apple is working on a redesigned successor to the Magic Mouse, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter. This new mouse would address complaints some users have had, including that pesky charging port.

Gurman writes that Apple’s design team has created prototypes of the mouse in recent months with an eye toward creating “something that better fits the modern era.” He doesn’t get into any specifics — the group still hasn’t settled on a design — except to say that the mouse will address the charging port location and other “longstanding complaints.” It’s at least 12 to 18 months away from release, according to Gurman.

How can Apple fix a mouse that’s objectively perfect? I’m kidding; after 15 years of largely the same design, the Magic Mouse has plenty of room for improvement, even with its recent USB-C revision for the M4 iMac release. Everyone is different, but my wishlist includes adding some mechanical controls, addressing ergonomics (my hand always cramps after a while), and not having to spear the mouse’s underbelly to charge it.

But even if Apple moves the port, I’m still a little grumpy when I have to dig out a cable to plug in the MX Master 3 that serves as my daily driver. There are better ways, like the Logitech mouse that charges wirelessly via a mousepad that my colleague, Sean Hollister, hasn’t had to intentionally charge for two years. I added MagSafe-style wireless charging by dropping my Magic Mouse into the wireless-charging equivalent of an ergonomic service industry sneaker — it ain’t pretty, and I still can’t use it while it’s charging, but it gets the job done. I’d bet Apple can do something better.

This week, Google announced it’s rolling out ChromeOS M131 to non-beta users, bringing with it a handy “Safety reset” feature that lets Chromebook users reset their laptops without totally wiping them. The update also introduced a new “Flash notifications” accessibility option to help those who might not otherwise easily hear or see them.

Like Powerwash in ChromeOS, Safety reset will wipe the slate clean if you’re experiencing computer virus-like behavior such as unusual pop-ups. But where Powerwash is a full factory reset, Safety reset preserves local data and apps, as well as things like bookmarks and saved passwords, according to a help document about the feature.

Google also writes that users can call up the Safety reset dialog box directly by pressing CTRL + Shift + Search + R. Otherwise, you can find it in the “Safety and privacy” settings menu or by searching Settings or Launcher for keywords like “Pop-up,” “Spam,” or “Virus.”

Image: Google

As for the new Flash notifications setting, it’s available in accessibility settings under “Audio and captions,” giving an additional visual notification indicator to those who might otherwise miss them because they’re hard of hearing or use screen magnification to read content. Users can pick the flash’s color from several options, and a preview button lets them see what it looks like.

Microsoft’s Phone Link app is warning that Android smartphones using the latest version of Android 15 won’t display certain “sensitive” notifications, according to a post from Mishaal Rahman spotted by Windows Central.

The warning is the result of an Android 15 privacy feature that automatically categorizes notifications like those containing 2FA codes as “sensitive” and prevents third-party apps from seeing them. That extra bit of privacy could come in handy if you’ve unwittingly given a malicious app permission to access your notifications. But it could be inconvenient if you frequently rely on seeing 2FA codes appear on your computer via Phone Link.

Screenshot: Windows Phone Link warning

According to Rahman, Windows should still show sensitive notifications for Android devices where Phone Link came preinstalled and has requested a “Companion Device Role.” That includes Samsung phones running One UI 6.1.1, but not other Android phones like Google Pixel or Nothing Phones, writes Windows Central.

Rahman wrote in October that users could get around the notification-hiding feature by turning off “Enhanced Notifications” in Android 15’s notifications settings. However, doing so also turns off things like reply suggestions and could make it easier again for malicious apps to gather details from all of your notifications.

YouTube announced a hefty subscription price increase this week that will shoot the monthly cost up by $10 to $82.99 on January 13th for existing members (or now, if you sign up today). Some subscribers are staving off the hike using the time-honored tradition of threatening to cancel, as one Verge reader indicated in a comment on our original story about the price hike.

That’s backed up by users in a Reddit thread that 9to5Google spotted, several of whom reported getting the offer to keep paying $72.99 for six more months when they tried to cancel their subscriptions, although some report that didn’t work for them. Some who did get to keep the old price say it happened only when they logged in using a web browser on their computer and pushed through offers to pause their subscription instead.

One Verge staffer, Jennifer Tuohy, did get the offer to extend her current price. She canceled by logging into YouTube TV in a browser on her computer and navigating to Settings > Membership > Manage. As of this morning, Reddit users continue to report receiving the extension offer.