Bluesky is making it easier to know when an NBA game is happening with a new test that adds a red border to the NBA’s profile picture, along with a “live” callout below it. When you click the profile picture, you’ll be taken out of Bluesky and to whatever live event the organization is promoting, Bluesky COO Rose Wang announced yesterday.

“We aren’t trapping you in Bluesky,” Wang writes in her post. “We want you to use Bluesky to discover what’s happening.” 

In the announcement, Wang quote-posted an NBA promotional post about two games that were set to take place last night, indicating that the badge would have shown up during them. Bluesky didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s email asking for a screenshot of the new indicator and whether it plans to extend the test to other sports or non-sports organizations. As TechCrunch points out, Wang confirmed that the feature will appear for WNBA games as well.

Though Wang doesn’t say it, her post feels like a dig at the various deals Twitter made with sports organizations like the NFL, MLB and NHL, and the NBA to stream their content on its platform, rather than linking out to their streams elsewhere. In an interview with SportsPro last month, Wang said Bluesky doesn’t have the means or desire to take on partnerships like those, but the new live badge testing shows it’s certainly not above doing what it can to nurture its burgeoning “Sports Bluesky.”

Web developers will be able to start leveraging on-device AI in Microsoft’s Edge browser soon, using new APIs that can give their web apps access to Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini model, the company announced at its Build conference today. And Microsoft says the API will be cross-platform, so it sounds like these APIs will work with the Edge browser in macOS, as well. 

The 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-4-mini is Microsoft’s latest small, on-device model, rolled out in February alongside the company’s larger Phi-4. With the new APIs, web developers will be able to add prompt boxes and offer writing assistance tools for text generation, summarizing, and editing. And within the next couple of months, Microsoft says it will also release a text translation API. 

Microsoft is putting these “experimental” APIs forth as potential web standards, and in addition to being cross-platform, it says they’ll also work with other AI models. Developers can start trialing them in the Edge Canary and Dev channels now, the company says. 

Google offers similar APIs for its Chrome browser. With them, developers can use Chrome’s built-in models to offer things like text translation, prompt boxes for text and image generation, and calendar event creation based on webpage content.

Apple Intelligence has been a wreck since its first features rolled out last year, and a big new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman details why — and how Apple is trying to piece things back together. And much of its effort hinges on rebuilding Siri from the ground up.

Gurman has reported in the past that Apple is working on what it’s internally calling “LLM Siri” — a reworked, generative AI version of the company’s digital assistant. Apple’s previous approach of merging the assistant with the existing Siri hasn’t been working. Gurman describes in great detail a number of reasons why, but here’s a quick summary:

• Apple software chief Craig Federighi was “reluctant to make large investments in AI.” The company doesn’t like to invest in a goal without a clear endpoint, Gurman writes, but where AI is concerned, one unnamed Apple executive told him “…you really don’t know what the product is until you’ve done the investment.” That would have meant expensive GPUs, which the company didn’t rush to buy and later didn’t have enough of to keep up with competitors.
• Apple started late. Another executive told Gurman that Apple Intelligence “wasn’t even an idea” before ChatGPT launched in late 2022.
• Apple AI chief John Giannandrea thought people didn’t want AI chatbots. He told employees that customers commonly want to be able to disable tools like ChatGPT.
• Old Siri didn’t work with new Siri. Apple apparently saw bolting generative AI features onto the old Siri as the fastest way to catch Apple up in AI, but it wasn’t working. “It’s whack-a-mole. You fix one issue, and three more crop up,” an employee told Gurman.
• Giannandrea didn’t “fit in” with Apple’s inner circle. Giannandrea was a rare outside executive hire when he came on in 2018, and he didn’t have the same “forceful” personality as others in company leadership. He didn’t fight hard enough to get big funding amounts, the report says. Apple employees told Gurman that Giannandrea didn’t push his workers hard enough, and that he doesn’t see big AI companies like OpenAI or Google as an urgent threat to Apple.
• Marketing got out over its skis. The company’s AI marketing focused heavily on promised features like an improved Siri or Apple Intelligence being able to take context from apps across your system before they were ready — features that it has since been forced to delay.

Now the company is trying to rejigger its approach. Part of that is a total overhaul of Siri, rather than just trying to make generative AI work in concert with the old Siri. According to Gurman, Apple has its AI team in Zurich working on a new architecture that will “entirely build on an LLM-based engine.” Gurman reported in November last year that the company was working on this, and the idea is that it will make the assistant “more believably conversational and better at synthesizing information.”

Another part of the solution is leveraging iPhones and differential privacy to improve Apple’s synthesized data — comparing fake training data with language from iPhone users’ emails, but doing so on-device and sending only the synthesized data back to Apple for AI training. And one way the company is discussing improving Siri is letting the LLM version loose on the web to “grab and synthesize data from multiple sources.” Basically, Siri as an AI web search tool not unlike Perplexity, which is one of the companies Apple has approached about partnering for AI search in Safari.

Whatever the outcome, apparently Giannandrea won’t be a direct part of it, having been taken off of product development, Siri, and robotics projects in the spring. According to Gurman, Apple execs have talked about putting him “on a path to retirement,” but are concerned that some of the research and engineering folks he brought with him would leave with him, too. Whatever the case, Gurman says Giannandrea plans to stick around, “relieved Siri is now someone else’s problem.”

China has launched the first 12 satellites of a planned 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer satellite network, reports Space News. The satellites, created by the company ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang High-Tech Zone, will be able to process the data they collect themselves, rather than relying on terrestrial stations to do it for them, according to ADA Space’s announcement (machine-translated).

The satellites are part of ADA Space’s “Star Compute” program and the first of what it calls the “Three-Body Computing Constellation,” the company writes. Each of the 12 satellites has an onboard eight-billion parameter AI model and is capable of 744 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a measure of their AI processing grunt — and, collectively, ADA Space says they can manage five peta operations per second, or POPS. That’s quite a bit more than, say, the 40 TOPS required for a Microsoft Copilot PC. The eventual goal is to have a network of thousands of satellites that achieve 1,000 POPs, according to the Chinese government.

The satellites communicate with each other at up-to-100Gbps using lasers, and share 30 terabytes of storage between them, according to Space News. The 12 launched last week carry scientific payloads, including an X-ray polarization detector for picking up brief cosmic phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts. The satellites also have the capability to create 3D digital twin data that can be used for purposes like emergency response, gaming, and tourism, ADA Space says in its announcement.

The benefits of having a space-based supercomputer go beyond saving communications time, according to South China Morning Post. The outlet notes that traditional satellite transmissions are slow, and that “less than 10 per cent” of satellite data makes it to Earth, due to things like limited bandwidth and ground station availability. And Jonathan McDowell, a space historian and astronomer at Harvard University, told the outlet, “Orbital data centres can use solar power and radiate their heat to space, reducing the energy needs and carbon footprint.” He said both the US and Europe could carry out similar projects in the future, writes SCMP.

Yesterday, Reuters ran a story with the headline “Weeks after Amazon’s Alexa+ AI launch, a mystery: where are the users?,” in which it detailed its difficulty locating first-hand accounts of the AI-upgraded assistants’ use online. The Verge asked Amazon about the story, and the company has responded to say that the idea that Alexa Plus isn’t available is “simply wrong.”

Here’s the company’s full — and rather strongly-worded! — statement on the matter, provided by Amazon spokesperson Eric Sveum via email to The Verge:

It’s simply wrong to say that Alexa+ isn’t available to customers—that assertion is false. Hundreds of thousands of customers have access to Alexa+ and we’re constantly inviting more customers that have requested Early Access.

Sveum also shared the below screenshot of what the email invite should look like.

Alexa Plus is Amazon’s generative AI-updated version of Alexa, which it announced in February is free to Amazon Prime subscribers or $19.99 a month otherwise.

While Reuters doesn’t say Alexa Plus isn’t available to customers yet, it does quote an analyst who said, “There seems to be no one who actually has it.”

The outlet also reported that its efforts to find any real-world Alexa Plus users came up empty, writing that it had “searched dozens of news sites, YouTube, TikTok, X, BlueSky and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, as well as Amazon’s Twitch and reviews of Echo voice-assistant devices on Amazon.com.” It added that it spoke with two people who’d posted on Reddit claiming to have used Alexa Plus, but that they “did not provide Reuters with hard evidence and their identities could not be corroborated.”

Still, Engadget reported today that a wave of emails had gone out on Friday, inviting Amazon Alexa users to try out Alexa Plus. The outlet also reported that an Amazon spokesperson had told it “hundreds of thousands” of customers have tried the assistant.

Amazon started rolling out its early access program to a few customers at the end of March. At the time, it was missing features like the ability to order takeout from Grubhub using conversational context, or identify family members and remind them about chores. A page on Amazon’s website notes that some features are still “coming soon,” like being able to access Alexa Plus in a web browser or on a Fire TV or Amazon tablet. The company has said it’s prioritizing those who own certain Echo Show devices above others.

A former DoorDash delivery driver pleaded guilty this week to a wire fraud conspiracy that scammed the company out of over $2.5 million, the US Attorney’s Office in California’s Northern District announced on Tuesday. He and others made it happen over a period of months using fake customer accounts, deliveries that never happened, driver accounts, and access to DoorDash employee credentials.

Here’s how the Attorney’s office describes the scheme. The driver, Sayee Chaitainya Reddy Devagiri, placed expensive orders from a fraudulent customer account in the DoorDash app. Then, using DoorDash employee credentials, he manually assigned the orders to driver accounts he and the others involved had created. Devagiri would then mark the undelivered orders as complete and prompt DoorDash’s system to pay the driver accounts. Then he’d switch those same orders back to “in process” and do it all over again. Doing this “took less than five minutes, and was repeated hundreds of times for many of the orders,” writes the US Attorney’s Office.

Devagiri faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, and is scheduled for a status hearing in September. He and four others were charged in August for their roles in the scheme, which prosecutors say was carried out between November 2020 and February 2021. The DoorDash employee whose insider credentials they used, Tyler Thomas Bottenhorn, was charged separately in 2022 and pleaded guilty the following year, the Attorney’s Office wrote in October.

Epic is asking District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to order Apple to review — and approve if compliant with Apple’s guidelines — Epic’s submission of Fortnite to the US App Store in a new court filing. The company argues in the document that Apple is once again in contempt of the judge’s April order restricting it from rejecting apps over their use of outside payment links.

In a letter from Apple that Epic shared late Friday, Apple writes that it won’t “take action on the Fortnite app submission until after the Ninth Circuit rules on our pending request for a partial stay of the new injunction.” Epic claims the delay is retaliation for its legal fight with the company, and notes in its filing that Apple “expressly and repeatedly” told it and the court that it would approve Fortnite if the app complied with Apple’s guidelines, which it insists its current submission does.

Following Gonzalez Rogers’ decision in April, Epic said Fortnite would return to the US App Store. The company has since submitted the game twice, most recently to include content from an update to the EU version of the game. But instead of Apple approving Fortnite in the US, the game disappeared from the EU App Store.

Epic claimed that was because it can’t release in the EU because of Apple’s decision to block its US submission. Apple said it had merely asked that it resubmit the app without including the US storefront, “so as not to impact Fortnite in other geographies.” But in a post announcing its new filing, Epic claims that would mean it has to submit multiple versions of the app, which it says is against Apple’s guidelines.

Epic is asking that the court enforce its injunction, find Apple in contempt again, and require the company to “accept any compliant Epic app, including Fortnite, for distribution on the U.S. storefront of the App Store.”

The hitch here is that throughout this case, Judge Gonzalez Rogers hasn’t gone so far as to require Fortnite’s return to the store, finding in her 2021 ruling that Epic had still knowingly broken its developer agreement with apple. 9to5Mac writes that the judge would likely need to agree that Apple is once again in contempt of court, as she did in her April 30th ruling. The difference between now and then — and what could work in Epic’s favor — is just how annoyed she seemed with Apple in the text of that ruling.

Apple did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

Music-sharing platform SoundCloud is saying it “has never used artist content to train AI models,” and that it’s “making a formal commitment that any use of AI on SoundCloud will be based on consent, transparency, and artist control.” The update comes several days after artists reported that changes made last year to its terms of use could mean it reserved the right to use their music and other content to train generative AI tools.

“The language in the Terms of Use was too broad and wasn’t clear enough. It created confusion, and that’s on us,” writes SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton.

The terms that SoundCloud is currently using were updated in February last year with text including this passage:

In the absence of a separate agreement that states otherwise, You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the services.”

But Seton says that “in the coming weeks,” that line will be replaced with this:

We will not use Your Content to train generative AI models that aim to replicate or synthesize your voice, music, or likeness without your explicit consent, which must be affirmatively provided through an opt-in mechanism.

Seton reiterates that SoundCloud has never used member content to train AI, including large language models, for music creation or to mimic or replace members’ work. And, echoing what a SoundCloud spokesperson told The Verge in an email over the weekend, Seton says if the company does use generative AI, it “may make this opportunity available to our human artists with their explicit consent, via an opt-in mechanism.”

Ed Newton-Rex, the tech ethicist who first discovered the change, isn’t satisfied with the changes. In an X post, he says the tweaked language could still allow for “models trained on your work that might not directly replicate your style but that still compete with you in the market.” According to Rex, “If they actually want to address concerns, the change required is simple. It should just read “We will not use Your Content to train generative AI models without your explicit consent.” 

SoundCloud did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

Apple is testing a feature that will let users scroll through Vision Pro apps using the headset’s eye-tracking capability, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

Eye-based scrolling will apparently work across all of Apple’s built-in apps, and Gurman says the company is working on letting third-party developers use the feature, too. How it would actually function is a mystery, but I could see a system where you have to look at the edge of a page long enough to start scrolling, or focusing on a UI element, then looking above or below it to move a page.

You can do a version of eye-based scrolling with the Dwell Control accessibility feature, which lets you open menus or carry out actions by briefly resting your eyes on items in your view. To scroll, you can gaze at an icon until the page scrolls a set amount — it’s clunky, and I’d be surprised if what Apple is testing works the same way. 

Apart from accessibility alternatives, other ways to scroll include the default — pinching with your finger and thumb and raising or lowering your hand — connecting a Bluetooth mouse, or using the analog stick on a wireless game controller.

Over the weekend, Gurman wrote in the subscriber edition of his Power On newsletter for Bloomberg that Apple is planning a “pretty feature-packed release” for visionOS 3, so we may hear more about this new eye-tracked scrolling feature during its June WWDC show.

Max, formerly HBO Max, is now HBO Max again. Warner Bros. Discovery announced the change today, rolling back one of the clumsiest rebrands in history from a streaming service that's had more than its share of clumsy ideas.

Right from the start, it seemed like everyone outside of Warner Bros. Discovery knew the change was a bad one. The first takes were brutal, like this take from Design Matters host Debbie Millman in a Fast Company story:

"I am completely bewildered by the HBO Max rebrand," says Debbie Millman, a designer, brand consultant, and host of the Design Matters podcast. "HBO took four decades of prestige and casually tossed it all into a dumpster, lit a match, and cheered as it burned."

Or this from Inc, a month after the rebrand in with a story about the Max app's bad redesign:

According to the company, the problem with HBO Max was the HBO part. There is an important lesson here, which is that your brand is not what you call your streaming service. Your brand is the way your customers feel about whatever you make. In this case, the feelings are pretty clear-this is a bad idea.

Digs at the rebrand are littered all over the place. Like an Engadget story headline …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is preparing to add a new section to restaurant and bar search profiles. The new section will let owners include timely deals or events in search results in a way that they can control, either manually or by linking to a social media profile, the company says in a post spotted by Search Engine Land.

The promos will show up under the label “This week” in the block of information that you’ll get for most local businesses in a Google search. Google suggests that companies will use it for things like daily specials or to promote upcoming live music events. It’ll launch first in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand for “single Food and Drink businesses,” the company says, though it’s not clear when.

Called “What’s Happening” on the business-facing side, bars and restaurants can update this through Posts on Google, which Google launched nearly a decade ago for brands and celebrities before expanding it to local businesses, letting them post content directly to a carousel in their Search profiles. Alternatively, companies can link their Instagram, Facebook, or X accounts for automatic cross-posting.

Last week, Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Ian McKellen, Elton John, and hundreds of others in the UK creative industry signed an open letter backing an effort to force AI firms to reveal the copyrighted works used to train their models.  They support an amendment to the UK’s Data (Use and Access) Bill proposed by letter organizer Beeban Kidron, adding the requirement, which the UK government has opposed.

The British House of Lords passed the amendment yesterday, 272 to 125, reports The Guardian, and now it’s going back to the House of Commons, where the amendment could be removed again. The British government says the fight over the amendment “is holding back both the creative and tech sectors and needs to be resolved by new legislation,” writes The Guardian. 

From the letter:

We will lose an immense growth opportunity if we give our work away at the behest of a handful of powerful overseas tech companies, and with it our future income, the UK’s position as a creative powerhouse, and any hope that the technology of daily life will embody the values and laws of the United Kingdom.

Also signed by many media companies, music publishers, and arts organizations, the letter insists that the amendments “will spur a dynamic licensing market that will enhance the role of human creativity in the UK, positioning us as a key player in the global AI supply chain.”

Companies like OpenAI and Meta have been accused in court of using copyrighted material without permission to train their models. Baroness Beeban Kidron, who tabled the amendment, writes that although the UK’s creative industries welcome creative advancements enabled by AI, “…how AI is developed and who it benefits are two of the most important questions of our time.” 

“My lords,” The Guardian quotes Kidron as saying yesterday, “it is an assault on the British economy and it is happening at scale to a sector worth £120bn to the UK, an industry that is central to the industrial strategy and of enormous cultural import.”

Airbnb has announced a major redesign of its app, expanding its offerings well beyond private home rentals to include new Airbnb Services alongside the company’s Airbnb Experiences. And you don’t have to book a stay to use the new offerings.

At the moment, these new services cover ten categories, including personal chefs, catering, massages, personal trainers, and spa treatments. The company says its providers “are vetted for quality through an evaluation of expertise and reputation,” and that they “have an average of 10 years of experience, have completed Airbnb’s identity verification process, and are required to submit relevant licenses and certifications.” Services range in cost, with some entry-level offerings priced under $50, according to the company, and they can be used without actually booking an Airbnb stay.

The app redesign will also include “reimagined” Airbnb Experiences you can participate in that can be as simple as a host-led city tour or as wild as learning Mexican wrestling techniques in the ring with a luchador. The company is taking applications from those interested in offering either services or experiences.

As for the app’s redesign, Airbnb says it’s added a new Explore tab homepage that offers recommendations for homes, experiences, and services in specific destinations, a trips tab for setting up your itinerary, and a redesigned messages platform with photo and video sharing. The Airbnb host is revamped, as well, the company says — that includes a new reservations management tab with details about upcoming reservations, an updated calendar with a daily view and hourly schedule, and new listing management tools.

German iPhone users are starting to report that they’re now able to use PayPal’s tap-to-pay feature at in-store payment terminals, according to German tech site iPhone Ticker. The new capability, which PayPal announced earlier this month, is a result of the EU forcing Apple to open iPhone NFC chips up for third-party contactless payments under the Digital Markets Act. 

PayPal’s contactless wallet works with terminals that support Mastercard payments and is iPhone-only for now, so it won’t work on an Apple Watch, iPhone Ticker reports (via a machine translation). In December, a Norwegian payment app called Vipps became the first to take advantage of Apple’s changing ecosystem, nearly a year after Apple first announced it was opening up its NFC hardware to third-party wallet apps for EU users last year. 

Apple hasn’t only opened iPhone tap-to-pay to the EU. It announced in August that it would let developers offer in-app NFC-based payments in the US and other regions, too. The company also allows businesses to use iPhone NFC readers to accept contactless payments in third-party apps, which is a capability PayPal started offering in Venmo and PayPal Zettle in March last year.

Google has announced that it’s now added a “Quick Edits” feature that lets you edit an image as you’re sharing it without necessarily saving those changes to your library. 

We’re not talking deep edits here: you’ll be able to crop or auto-enhance the image, then compare it to the unedited version before you let the photo fly. Whatever changes you make will be saved when sharing in Google Photos itself, creating a shared link, or adding the image to a shared Google Photos album. However, they won’t be saved if you’re sharing through another app like Google Messages or WhatsApp. 

The option to create these edits will appear automatically when you go to share an image. If having that extra step shoved into your sharing workflow isn’t your cup of tea, there’s an option to turn it off when you tap the Settings icon on that screen.

The feature only works for images that you haven’t already edited, and “typically doesn’t appear for photos that have been edited and sorted into document albums such as receipts or screenshots.” And it’s only available in Google Photos for Android 14 and up.

Apple previewed new Vision Pro accessibility features today that could turn the headset into a proxy for eyesight when they launch in visionOS later this year. The update uses the headset’s main camera to magnify what a user sees or to enable live, machine-learning-powered descriptions of surroundings.

The new magnification feature works on virtual objects as well as real-world ones. An example from Apple’s announcement shows a first-person view as a Vision Pro wearer goes from reading a zoomed-in view of a real-world recipe book to the Reminders app, also blown up to be easier to read. It’s a compelling use for the Vision Pro, freeing up a hand for anyone who might’ve done the same thing with comparable smartphone features.

Also as part of the update, Apple’s VoiceOver accessibility feature will “describe surroundings, find objects, read documents, and more” in visionOS.

The company will release an API to give approved developers access to the Vision Pro’s camera for accessibility apps. That could be used for things like “live, person-to-person assistance for visual interpretation in apps like Be My Eyes, giving users more ways to understand their surroundings hands-free.” It may not seem like much now, given the Vision Pro’s reportedly meager sales, but the features could be useful in rumored future Apple wearables, like camera-equipped AirPods or even new Apple-branded, Meta Ray-Ban-like smart glasses.

Finally, Apple says it’s adding a new protocol in visionOS, iOS, and iPadOS that supports brain-computer interfaces (BCI) using its Switch Control accessibility feature, which provides for alternate input methods such as controlling aspects of your phone using things like head movements captured by your iPhone’s camera. 

A Wall Street Journal report today explains that Apple worked on this new BCI standard with Synchron, a brain implant company that lets users select icons on a screen by thinking about them. The report notes that Synchron’s tech doesn’t enable things like mouse movement, which Elon Musk’s Neuralink has accomplished.

Nintendo will give Switch 2 owners the option to sacrifice a little per-session playtime in the interest of battery health longevity. The company announced, via its Nintendo Today news app, that the console will have a setting to slow the console’s charge as it approaches 90 percent capacity, then maintain it around that amount.

Such a feature has made it to smartphones in the past, and is even something Valve is testing for the Steam Deck. The reason for such a feature is that rechargeable lithium batteries like those found in so many gadgets can have their lives shortened if they’re kept in a charge state outside of a sweet spot — either too much charge or too little — for extended periods of time. 

When you get your Switch 2 — assuming you were lucky enough to snag a preorder — after it launches on June 5th, it looks like you can access the new charging option by navigating to System Settings > System and scrolling to “Stop Charging Around 90%.” Tap the toggle to turn it on, and you’re set!

Nintendo included a simple video of the feature, which it doesn’t appear to have posted to the wider internet. Not to worry; I grabbed a screen recording, presented here as a GIF, to show you what the feature will look like. Interestingly, the video reveals a little tidbit: The Switch 2 will let you set a PIN to unlock the screen. It looks like a much nicer way to handle a PIN than the original Switch’s implementation, which requires you to set up parental controls and use a separate smartphone app.

If you’ve been wary after getting an email with the subject line “Lopez Voice Assistant Class Action Settlement,” that’s understandable — but it’s likely a notification that you’re owed part of a $95 million payout over allegations of Siri-enabled spying on private conversations.

The settlement is related to Lopez v. Apple Inc, a 2019 class action lawsuit that alleged that Apple violated user privacy by recording their conversations and forwarding them to third-party contractors. Apple agreed to the settlement earlier this year but denied the allegations. Several of us at The Verge received emails about the settlement in recent days, sent from [email protected]. Mine included my name, claimant identification code, confirmation code, and a description of the settlement.

You’re eligible for part of the settlement if you owned a Siri-enabled device, like an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, HomePod, or Mac, in the US between September 17th, 2014 and December 31st, 2024, and experienced Siri activating, seemingly on its own, while you were engaged in a private conversation. You have until July 2nd, 2025 to go to the settlement website and claim up to $100 — or $20 per device for as many as five eligible devices. 

Below, you’ll find the text from the email as I received it (minus some personal details, of course).

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Friday that her government is suing Google for relabeling the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America” for US users, CBS News reports. The company had done so in Google Maps after President Trump ordered the name change at the beginning of his Presidential term.

The lawsuit makes good on Sheinbaum’s February threat that Mexico would “proceed to court” if the company didn’t change the name, which it kept as Gulf of Mexico for users in Mexico, but switched to “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in regions outside of the two countries. According to a machine-translated transcript of Sheinbaum’s Friday press briefing, she says “the only thing we want is compliance with the decree issued by the United States government,” which, she adds, “wouldn’t have the authority to name the entire Gulf, because that is an international attribution.”

President Sheinbaum continues:

We couldn’t say anything about changing the name of a state, a mountain, or a lake. So, the part of their territory that corresponds to them can be called whatever they decide. The part that corresponds to Mexico can’t be renamed. The part that corresponds to Cuba can’t be renamed, either. So, what we’re saying is, “Google, stick to what the United States government approved.”

Prior to her briefing, Mexico sent letters to Google asking it not to label its territorial waters as Gulf of America, and Sheinbaum shared a reply from Google VP of government affairs and public policy Cris Turner stating the company had no plans to change its policy. CBS News notes that the US House passed a bill on Thursday that would codify the name change.

The Trump administration has been insistent that nongovernment entities honor the Gulf of America moniker, even barring The Associated Press from Oval Office press briefings when the outlet refused to use the new name in initial reporting — a ban that a federal judge ordered last month be dropped. Among tech companies, Google was one of the first tech to comply with Trump’s wishes, altering the Gulf of Mexico’s name to Gulf of America in app and browser versions of Google Maps by February 10th. Apple soon followed suit. MapQuest, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have given in, and has a site specifically making light of the name change.

Google did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

This morning, while summarizing an Apple “product blitz” he expects for 2027, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman writes in his Power On newsletter that Apple is planning a “mostly glass, curved iPhone” with no display cutouts for that year, which happens to be the iPhone’s 20th anniversary.

That follows a report last weekend from The Information, which said that “at least one 2027 iPhone model that will place the front-facing camera underneath the screen to enable a truly edge-to-edge display.” Late last year, a report from The Elec said Apple is working with its display partners to create a bezel-less iPhone, but not one that curves the display down the side of the phone — a trick companies like Samsung and Vivo have employed in the past.

But the “mostly glass, curved” part of Gurman’s prediction is more interesting to me, because what the heck does that mean? After all, I’d describe the iPhone 15 Pro sitting on my desk right now as “mostly glass,” with the only exterior metal being around the camera lenses and in its titanium edge, which the front and back curve down to. Assuming he’s not describing a banana-shaped iPhone, the closest hints are probably in Apple patents revealed over the years, like one from 2019 that describes a phone encased in glass that “forms a continuous loop” around the device.

Apart from a changing iPhone, Gurman describes what sounds like a big year for Apple. He reiterates past reports that the first foldable iPhone should be out by 2027, and that the company’s first smart glasses competitor to Meta Ray-Bans will be along that year. So will those rumored camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, he says.

Gurman also suggests that Apple’s home robot — a tabletop robot that features “an AI assistant with its own personality” — will come in 2027. On that “personality” mention, it’s hard not to think about the adorable robotic lamp Apple’s internal researchers have been tinkering with.

Finally, Gurman writes that by 2027 Apple could finally ship an LLM-powered Siri and may have created new chips for its server-side AI processing. A December report from The Information covered such a development and suggested that the team handling Apple’s new AI chips is the same Israel-based silicon design group that was “instrumental in designing” the Apple silicon chips that let the company ditch Intel chips for its Macs in 2020.