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Samsung’s thin, big, boring AI phones

A photo of the Galaxy S25 Edge from the side, plus an illustration of the Vergecast hosts.
Image: The Verge

Samsung’s new phones will almost certainly be the most popular Android phones of 2025. They’ll probably also be among the best Android phones of 2025. And yet the Unpacked event this week felt like one of the most boring phone launches... ever. Are we entering a new phase of the smartphone industry, in which companies basically just launch the same thing over and over? Wait a second: have we been in that phase for a while now?

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what this year’s Samsung phones mean. The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins David and Nilay to talk about the vibes at Unpacked, where the thinner S25 Edge inspired raucous enthusiasm, and where Samsung tried to make the case that AI will make your phone better even if there’s not much new hardware to speak of. We also talk about the glimpse we got at the Project Moohan headset, Gemini’s increasing dominance over the future of virtual assistants, and more.

After that, we take a deep breath and wade into the first week of the new Trump administration. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner explains what’s going on with Stargate, and why a $500 billion AI data-center plan is being announced in the White House. We talk...

Read the full story at The Verge.

Allen Media Decides to Keep Some Local Meteorologists Where They Are

Allen Media station WTVA in Tupelo Mississippi said that the station owner has reversed its decision to stop producing some weather forecasts locally and lay off staff. The NBC and ABC affiliate referenced community reaction to the original news that the station group would hub its weather forecasts in Atlanta and lay off meteorologists, saying,...

Millions of Subarus could be remotely unlocked, tracked due to security flaws

About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.

It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza's Internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.

Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru's location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car’s whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.

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Sony is halting production of recordable Blu-ray, MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes

Sony is ending production of recordable Blu-ray, MiniDisc and MD Data disc media, along with MiniDV cassettes, the company announced. Last year, Sony said that it would gradually end production of recordable optical media and production at its Tagajo City plant due to poor sales. Now, production will definitively halt next month and "there will be no successor models," according to the Japanese web page. 

In the announcement, Sony referred to "Blu-ray Disc media," by which it means recordable media only, not Blu-ray discs used to distribute movies (Engadget asked Sony to confirm that it's only halting recordable optical disc production). Sony currently offers 11 products in the recordable category, ranging from 25GB to 128GB, in both R (write once) and RE (write multiple times).

While Sony is ceasing production of recordable Blu-ray discs, they're still available from Verbatim and possibly others. However, MiniDiscs may be hard to come by as Sony was one of the few remaining manufacturers — so you may want to stock up while they're still for sale. 

MiniDisc, mostly used for audio recording, has seen a bit of a resurgence among audiophiles due in part to the tactile experience compared to streaming. It was widely used by professionals as it supports live recording and still has a presence in studios because a lot of content has been archived to that format. (Fun fact: the character Neo in The Matrix stores his ill-begotten wares, whatever they are, on MiniDiscs.)

Once popular for movie collection and file archiving, recordable Blu-ray and other optical media were effectively killed by streaming services, cheap memory, and cloud storage. All of the formats Sony killed have been around for decades, with BD-RE arriving 2002, MiniDisc in 1992, MD Data in 1993 and MiniDV cassettes, primarily used for video production, first appearing in 1995.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/sony-is-halting-production-of-recordable-blu-ray-minidiscs-and-minidv-cassettes-140030225.html?src=rss

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© Sony

Sony is halting production of recordable Blu-ray, MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes

Meta AI in panic mode as free open-source DeepSeek gains traction and outperforms for far less

Late last year, we reported on a Chinese AI startup that surprised the industry with the launch of DeepSeek, an open-source AI model boasting 685 billion parameters. What made headlines wasn’t just its scale but its performance—it outpaced OpenAI and […]

The post Meta AI in panic mode as free open-source DeepSeek gains traction and outperforms for far less first appeared on Tech Startups.

Google commits to combatting fake reviews in the UK after 5-year probe

The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has reached an agreement with Google to counter the scourge of fake online reviews. The internet giant has committed to several remedies. Bogus endorsements have blighted the web since the creation of user reviews, which is why regulators around the world have been upping the ante on tech companies to put […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Allara lands $26M to expand women’s hormone telehealth

Growing up with an OB-GYN father, Rachel Blank assumed that most women received excellent gynecological care.  She regularly witnessed her dad’s patients thanking him for delivering their child when they would bump into him around town. But Blank realized that not all women’s health issues are treated equally when, at the age of 21, she […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Foyer unlocks $6.2M to help people save up to buy homes

Landy Liu knows how hard it is to save for a home.  While working at mortgage startup Better.com, he spent years dealing with first-home home buyers who felt overwhelmed when it came to shopping for homes. By the time it was his turn in 2022, mortgage rates had nearly doubled, and he found himself in […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Microsoft is closing its British flagship store in London

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Microsoft says it’s shutting down its UK “experience center” in London next month, nearly six years after it first opened as a 21,000-square-foot Microsoft store. “To better align with its focus on digital growth, Microsoft has decided to exit the lease at the Microsoft Experience Centre in London early,” says an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to Windows Central.

The store originally opened in July 2019, just months before the pandemic lockdowns began. Microsoft then quickly transitioned it to an “experience center” alongside closing its stores in the US in 2020.

I visited the London flagship store for its opening day, at a time when the company had more than 80 retail stores worldwide. The big, bold, and British store included Surface devices on every floor, HoloLens headsets, a big Xbox gaming lounge, and even a real-life McLaren Senna sports car that you could sit in and play Forza.

It was quite the venue, set in the heart of Oxford Circus and inside a historic building with windows and ceilings from the 1920s. Microsoft spent two years renovating the space, with giant 4K video walls and an opening party that included British celebrities like Peter Crouch.

After transitioning the UK Microsoft store to an experience center, the software giant regularly used the space for business meetings and partner events — turning it into a showcase for Microsoft products and services in recent years. A similar experience center still exists in New York City, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time until that meets a similar fate to the one across the pond.

As Trump Looks for a US TikTok Buyer, 5 Details Could Really Complicate the Sale

The potential sale of TikTok to an American buyer has become one of the most complex and high-stakes business deals in recent memory, with high-profile contenders like Elon Musk, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, creator star MrBeast, tech CEOs, and others linked to the potential sale. At the heart of the issue are competing geopolitical interests,...

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