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Pocket, One of the Only Apps I Ever Liked, Is Shutting Down

Pocket, One of the Only Apps I Ever Liked, Is Shutting Down

Pocket, an app for saving and reading articles later, is shutting down on July 8, Mozilla announced today. 

The company sent an email with the subject line “Important Update: Pocket is Saying Goodbye,” around 2 p.m. EST and I immediately started wailing when I saw it. 

“You’ll be able to keep using the app and browser extensions until then. However, starting May 22, 2025, you won’t be able to download the apps or purchase a new Pocket Premium subscription,” the announcement says. Users can export saved articles until October 8, 2025, after which point all Pocket accounts and data will be permanently deleted. 

The Mozilla-owned Pocket, formerly known as "Read It Later," launched in August 2007 as a Firefox browser extension that let users save articles to... well, read later. Mozilla acquired Pocket in 2017. 

“Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today,” Mozilla said in an announcement on Distilled, the company’s blog. “Discovery also continues to evolve; Pocket helped shape the curated content recommendations you already see in Firefox, and that experience will keep getting better. Meanwhile, new features like Tab Groups and enhanced bookmarks now provide built-in ways to manage reading lists easily.” 

In that announcement, it also said it’s sunsetting Fakespot, Mozilla’s failed attempt at consumer-level AI detection tools. The Distilled announcement post says the company made the choice to shut down these products because “it’s imperative we focus our efforts on Firefox and building new solutions that give you real choice, control and peace of mind online.” It also says the choice will allow Mozilla to “shape the next era of the internet – with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way.” Which is what everyone wants: more AI bloat in their browsers. 

The “Pocket Hits” newsletter will continue, the company says, under a new name starting June 17. “We’re proud of what Pocket has made possible over the years — helping millions of people save and enjoy the web’s best content. Thank you for being part of that journey,” the company said.

As I said, I’m upset! I use the Pocket Chrome extension almost daily, and it’s become a habitual click for articles I want to save to read later even though I fully know I never will. Before the subway had Wi-Fi, back when I commuted to work 45 minutes each way every day, I used Pocket to save articles offline and read outside of internet access. Anecdotally speaking, Pocket was a big traffic driver for bloggers: At all of the websites I’ve worked at, getting an article on Pocket’s curated homepage was a reliable boost in viewers. 

404 Media contributing writer Matthew Gault suggests copy-pasting links to articles into a giant document to read later. Now that Pocket is no longer with us, I might have to start doing that. 

Pocket and Mozilla did not immediately reply to a request for comment. 

Destructive malware available in NPM repo went unnoticed for 2 years

Researchers have found malicious software that received more than 6,000 downloads from the NPM repository over a two-year span, in yet another discovery showing the hidden threats users of such open source archives face.

Eight packages using names that closely mimicked those of widely used legitimate packages contained destructive payloads designed to corrupt or delete important data and crash systems, Kush Pandya, a researcher at security firm Socket, reported Thursday. The packages have been available for download for more than two years and accrued roughly 6,200 downloads over that time.

A diversity of attack vectors

“What makes this campaign particularly concerning is the diversity of attack vectors—from subtle data corruption to aggressive system shutdowns and file deletion,” Pandya wrote. “The packages were designed to target different parts of the JavaScript ecosystem with varied tactics.”

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© Getty Images

Mozilla is killing its Pocket and Fakespot services to focus on Firefox

When web services shut down and have time to put up a blog post about it, there's typically some real understatement in their explanation of "why." Bookmarking service Pocket's goodbye post truly delivers on this front, noting almost off-handedly that "the way people use the web has evolved." Yes, you might just say that.

Both Pocket and another browser add-on, Fakespot, are being shut down by Firefox maker Mozilla in early July. In a post about the closures, Mozilla cites the need to "invest our time and resources so we can make the biggest impact." Pocket's saving and curation powers will be implemented into Firefox, while Fakespot's analysis of online shopping reviews "didn't fit a model we could sustain."

Pocket started in 2007 as Read It Later, a way to bookmark web articles for later reading. It's not just the focus on published text articles that now seems quaint but also the idea that there was a finite amount of web material you would get back to and would have the time to do so. Those who do want that nice-sounding media experience can cobble it together in most modern browsers, which have built-in tools for managing bookmarks, distinct "reading lists," and even creating stripped-down "readable" versions of articles.

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© Mozilla/Pocket

FAA: Airplanes should stay far away from SpaceX’s next Starship launch

The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year.

The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program.

In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements."

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© SpaceX

Founders of Amazon’s PillPack launch General Medicine, a new startup tackling the frustrations of U.S. healthcare

Seven years after selling their online pharmacy startup PillPack to Amazon for around $1 billion, TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen are back with a new idea—this time, they’re going after the broader healthcare experience. The two just launched General Medicine, […]

The post Founders of Amazon’s PillPack launch General Medicine, a new startup tackling the frustrations of U.S. healthcare first appeared on Tech Startups.

Today’s Android app deals and freebies: Agent A, Fury of Dracula, Aporkalypse, more

Thursday afternoon’s best deals from the Google Play store are now ready to go down below. On your way down be sure to go score $525 off unlocked Pixel 9 Pro Fold, this $300 discount on Lenovo’s touchscreen Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition Copilot+ PC, and dive into the Samsung OLED smart TV Memorial Day sale that’s now live at up $2,400 off. As for the apps, highlights include titles like Agent A, Fury of Dracula, Aporkalypse, Homo Machina, and more. Everything awaits below. 

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New data confirms: There really is a planet squeezed in between two stars

While our Sun prefers to go solo, many other stars are parts of binary systems, with a pair of stars gravitationally bound to each other. In some cases, the stars are far enough apart that planets can form around each of them. But there are also plenty of tight binary systems, where the stars orbit each other at a radius that would place them both comfortably inside our Solar System. In these systems, exoplanets tend to be found at greater distances, in orbits that have them circling both stars.

On Wednesday, scientists described a system that seems to be neither of the above. It is a tight binary system, with a heavy central star that's orbited by a white dwarf at a distance two to three times larger than Earth's orbit. The lone planet confirmed to be in the system is squeezed in between the two, orbiting at a distance similar to Earth's distance from the Sun. And, as an added bonus, the planet is orbiting backward relative to the white dwarf.

Orbiting ν Octantis

The exosolar system is termed ν Octantis (or Nu Octantis), and its primary star is just a bit heavier than our Sun (1.6 solar masses). It's orbited by a far dimmer companion that's roughly half of our Sun's mass, but which hasn't been characterized in detail until now. The companion's orbit relative to the central star is a bit lopsided, ranging from about two astronomical units (AU, the typical Earth-Sun distance) at its closest approach to roughly three AU at its farthest. And, until yesterday, the exact nature of the companion star was not clear.

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© NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, the handy bookmarking tool used to save articles and webpages for later. The organization announced that Pocket will stop working on July 8th, 2025, as Mozilla begins concentrating its “resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

Following the shutdown, you’ll only be able to export saves until October 8th, 2025, which is when Mozilla will permanently delete user data. Mozilla says it will start automatically canceling subscriptions as well, and will issue prorated refunds to users subscribed to its annual plan on July 8th.

It has also taken down the Pocket web extension and app as of May 22nd, 2025, but users who have already installed the app will be able to re-download it until October 8th.

Pocket — originally called Read It Later — launched in 2007 and grew in popularity as people used it to keep track of the articles, recipes, videos, and more that they planned to revisit. In 2015, Mozilla added Pocket to Firefox as the browser’s default read-it-later app, and then acquired it two years later

Mozilla says it’s shuttering Pocket because “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved.” Pocket’s email newsletter, called Pocket Hits, will continue under a new name, “Ten Tabs,” but it will no longer have a weekend edition.

In addition to shutting down Pocket, Mozilla is also sunsetting its fake reviews detector, Fakespot. “We acquired Fakespot in 2023 to help people navigate unreliable product reviews using AI and privacy-first tech,” Mozilla says. “While the idea resonated, it didn’t fit a model we could sustain.” Review Checker, the Fakespot-powered tool built into Firefox, is shutting down on June 10th, 2025, too.

“This shift allows us to shape the next era of the internet — with tools like vertical tabs, smart search and more AI-powered features on the way,” Mozilla says. “We’ll continue to build a browser that works harder for you: more personal, more powerful and still proudly independent.”

A safety institute advised against releasing an early version of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 AI model

A third-party research institute that Anthropic partnered with to test one of its new flagship AI models, Claude Opus 4, recommended against deploying an early version of the model due to its tendency to “scheme” and deceive. According to a safety report Anthropic published Thursday, the institute, Apollo Research, conducted tests to see in which […]
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