If you’re a Nest Aware subscriber, your Google displays and speakers can be used to detect smoke alarms and glass breaking. The Google Home Max is now set to loose sound detection from May 8.
Fresh off of its “Alpha Plan” unveiling at MWC 2025, new rumors suggest Honor is working on a new “Mini” phone release and an ultra-slim device as well, following industry trends.
Google is once again in the crosshairs of Republicans in Congress because of alleged censorship, Bloomberg writes. The House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed Google's parent company Alphabet and CEO Sundar Pichai for evidence of communication between the tech company and the Biden administration.
The subpoena specifically asks for documents covering communications between Alphabet and the executive branch, along with discussions Alphabet might have had internally or with third-parties about those communications. The Committee hopes to snowball the discovery that the Biden administration made requests to Meta to remove COVID-19 misinformation into a case for "new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users," the subpoena says.
None of these concerns are particularly new. Pichai and other tech CEOs have been brought in front of Congress to explain things like content moderation, censorship and bias before. In the past, it's mostly seemed like a way for members of Congress to get sound bites, but the aggressive, retaliatory nature of the Trump administration might give these new demands more teeth. Helping to pay for Trump's inauguration and showing up for photos didn't get Google protection in the end, assuming it doesn't manage to wriggle out of the ongoing antitrust case against it.
Tech companies might be getting attention from Congress, but the idea that the current administration might want to make censorship demands doesn't appear to be a concern. President Trump has expressed interest in using the Take It Down Act, a bill designed to hold websites liable for hosting and not removing Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (NCII), to eliminate any kind of speech he dislikes. The disastrous potential misuses of the law have been outlined by activists before, but the bill passed in the Senate and is now waiting to be taken up by the House.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/house-republicans-subpoena-google-over-alleged-censorship-212115140.html?src=rss
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) speaks at a House Republicans press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., June 12, 2024. REUTERS/Craig Hudson/File Photo
Plans to redevelop a Northern Virginia warehouse site have long been complicated by the area’s worst-kept secret—the presence of a CIA facility. The GSA put the site up for sale anyway.
Europe's Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight.
The 184-foot-tall (56-meter) rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 11:24 am EST (16:24 UTC). Twin solid-fueled boosters and a hydrogen-fueled core stage engine powered the Ariane 6 through thick clouds on an arcing trajectory north from the spaceport on South America's northeastern coast.
The rocket shed its strap-on boosters a little more than two minutes into the flight, then jettisoned its core stage nearly eight minutes after liftoff. The spent rocket parts fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The upper stage's Vinci engine ignited two times to reach a nearly circular polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above the Earth. A little more than an hour after launch, the Ariane 6 upper stage deployed CSO-3, a sharp-eyed French military spy satellite, to begin a mission providing optical surveillance imagery to French intelligence agencies and military forces.
On Uncanny Valley this week, our hosts talk about the pronatalism movement, and how the push to increase birth rates is trending among some of Silicon Valley's biggest and wealthiest names.
OpenAI’s flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT, returned to solid growth in the latter half of 2024, according to a new report published on Thursday by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). While it took ChatGPT nine months to grow from 100 million weekly active users in November 2023 to 200 million in August 2024, it’s now taken […]
AI company founders have a reputation for making bold claims about the technology’s potential to reshape fields, particularly the sciences. But Thomas Wolf, Hugging Face’s co-founder and chief science officer, has a more measured take. In an essay published to X on Thursday, Wolf said that he feared AI becoming “yes-men on servers” absent a […]
ChatGPT on macOS is about to become more useful for coding. With the latest update for the app (version 1.2025.057), ChatGPT can now edit code directly within an integrated development environment — no need to copy and paste. You can find the full list of supported IDEs on OpenAI's website, but some of the more notable inclusions are Apple's own Xcode, Visual Code Studio and offshoots of Jetbrains like Android Studio and PyCharm.
According to OpenAI, IDE integration has been one of the most-requested features from macOS users since the company released its "works with app" framework back in November. If you're a Plus, Pro or Team subscriber, you can start using the integration today. As for Enterprise, Edu and Free users, look for the updated app to arrive next week.
ChatGPT for macOS can now edit code directly in IDEs. Available to Plus, Pro, and Team users. pic.twitter.com/WPB2RMP0tj
Perhaps unsurprisingly this feature arrives just as "vibecoding" enters the popular lexicon. For the uninitiated, vibecoding is a form of coding that involves using AI tools like ChatGPT (and the power of vibes, of course) to program apps and games. While it might seem like a meme, vibecoding is very much a real thing. In a video titled "Vibe Coding is the Future," Jared Friedman, a managing partner at Y Combinator, said a quarter of the startup accelerator's W25 cohort have a code base that was 95 percent generated by AI.
"This isn't a fad. This isn't going away. This is the dominant way to code. And if you are not doing it, you might just be left behind," Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, added in the same video.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpt-for-macos-can-now-directly-edit-xcode-projects-201904659.html?src=rss
Most Android phones ship with Google's Gboard as the default input option. It's a reliable, feature-rich on-screen keyboard, so most folks just keep using it instead of installing a third-party option. Depending on how you feel about circles, it might be time to check out some of those alternatives. Google has quietly released an update that changes the shape and position of the keys, and users are not pleased.
In the latest build of Gboard (v15.1.05.726012951-beta-arm64-v8a), Google has changed the key shape from the long-running squares to circle shapes. If you're using the four-row layout, the keys are like little pills. In five-row mode with the exposed number row, the keys are collapsed further into circles. The reactions seem split between those annoyed by this change and those annoyed that everyone else is so annoyed.
Change can be hard sometimes, so certainly some of the discontent is just a function of having the phone interface changed without warning. If you find it particularly distasteful, you can head into the Gboard settings and open the Themes menu. From there, you can tap on a theme and then turn off the key borders. Thus, you won't be distracted by the horror of rounded edges. That's not the only problem with the silent update, though.
