We were promised multimodal, natural language, AI-powered everything. We got nothing of the sort.
An anonymous Vancouver school guidance counselor told Associated Press that the Gaggle monitoring software “is good for catching suicide and self-harm” risks, but students then look for workarounds once they’re caught. An AP investigation found that many students’ Gaggle incident documents shared by the district weren’t protected and could be read by anyone with a link.
You can long press a message to open up a DM with Copilot, according to a blog post. Microsoft says the GroupMe Copilot can help with things like drafting a response and building a playlist.
[groupme.com]
0The New York Times’ Spelling Bee puzzle is celebrating its 2,500th edition today. To mark the occasion, today’s puzzle is the first with the letter S, which should open up a lot of fun possibilities for words. Try it here.
The law’s 26 words were written to address the same challenges we face today.
As terrifying as FX’s new Alien: Earth series is probably going to be, it’s going to be so much more alarming if we get to see some of how things go sideways from the perspective of the USCSS Maginot’s pet cat.
The big news in Rivian’s most recent software update was Enhanced Highway Assist for hands-free driving on compatible highways, but let’s take a moment to call out a very simple quality-of-life upgrade: you can now set the side mirrors to tilt down automatically when you go into reverse. (Lots of other cars have this feature, which makes parking a big vehicle like an R1S or R1T much easier.)
Decoder listeners know I asked CEO RJ Scaringe for this feature when he was on the show last year because it’s such a common request in the Rivian forums. He committed to adding it on the show, and now it’s here. See? Results.
[stories.rivian.com]
Palworld’s crossplay update is coming soon. We don’t know exactly when, as the announcement states it’ll happen sometime late March. But expect to pal around with your friends on any platform within the next two weeks. Also, in celebration of the update, Palworld’s 25 percent off on the PlayStation store and Steam.
One of the malicious apps masqueraded as a file manager and had more than 10 downloads, according to the cybersecurity firm Lookout. The app contained Android spyware called KoSpy, which Lookout attributes to the North Korean hacking group APT37. It’s capable of collecting a device’s SMS messages, call logs, location, files, and more.
Lookout says the apps it found have since been removed from the Google Play Store.
The iOS and iPadOS versions of Dropbox’s mobile app were updated this week with support for Live Photos which was first introduced on the iPhone 6S and iOS 9 in 2015, as spotted by 9to5Mac.
As with Apple’s Photos app, you can press and hold on a Live Photo in Dropbox to play the short video. You can also convert Live Photos to still images and back again, and convert HEIC Live Photos to JPEGs.
After filing for Chapter 11 in the US in November, Northvolt — which worked with Volkswagen, Volvo, Audi, Porsche, and BMW — has now filed for bankruptcy in Sweden. The company was founded by two ex-Tesla executives and was one of Europe’s leading efforts to rival US and Asian battery manufacturers before racking up billions in debt.
“As the bankruptcy process unfolds, the court-appointed trustee will determine the future of Northvolt’s businesses and their assets, including technology and production facilities.”
[northvolt.com]
After admitting that AI-powered upgrades to Siri are taking “longer than we thought,” Apple has added a disclaimer to its iPhone 16, 16E, and 16 Pro product pages warning that some features “will be available with a future software update.”
There was no disclaimer on the site last week, even though the features were just as unavailable then. Apple has also pulled an iPhone 16 ad focused on the unreleased upgrades.
Android Authority spotted a new beta feature to delete all your passwords, passkeys, and other data from the tool in one go, rather than removing them individually.
In October Google made it easier to use third-party password managers in Chrome on Android, and this change should help users move from Google’s option to another without leaving a load of data behind.
[androidauthority.com]
The app now lets you remove every photo uploaded to the cloud from a specific device, without deleting the images from local storage. It turns off backup too. That’s better than previous options, which only let you remove photos individually, or delete them from both the cloud and your device.
iOS and iPadOS users got the option in December 2024.
Mike Verdu had Netflix’s been VP of generative AI for games, with Alain Tascan taking over as gaming boss, but Verdu has left the company, it confirmed to Game File.
If The Weeknd wasn’t enough to convince you to pick up Apple’s $3,499 headset (or at least stop by an Apple Store to try one out), now the company will offer a 25-minute virtual trip to the Mexico City finale of Metallica’s M72 World Tour, which will also be available as an EP on Apple Music.
Filmed on 14 cameras in “ultra-high-resolution 180-degree video and Spatial Audio to give viewers unprecedented access to James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo,” it will be available as an extended preview in Apple Store demos beginning Friday.
I’m willing to bet you’ve never heard of AdHawk, but it’s a Canadian startup that specializes in advanced eye tracking technology. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Google is set to sign a $115 million deal to buy AdHawk. Why do we care? Two words: smart glasses.
Meta sniffed around AdHawk in 2022, and EssilorLuxxotica — Ray-Ban’s parent company — is a backer too. Google’s already shown that it’s ready to put Google Glass behind it with Android XR and its partnership with Samsung for Project Moohan. This is another sign.
The New York Times reported in 2023 that Keita Takahashi gets no royalties from his quirky roll-up-the-world’s-objects-into-a-blob game series — which wouldn’t terribly surprise me. Royalties aren’t common in an industry that doesn’t treat workers well in general. But I imagine he’s getting something from cute licensed products with his name on them, right? Right?
The desk mat is $28, and I just bought one for my wife. (We bonded over Katamari in our dating years; Don’t tell her, it’s a surprise!)
Donald Trump livestreamed a Tesla showcase in the White House driveway on Tuesday, apparently reading the notes of a Tesla sales pitch as he performed choosing one of its EVs to purchase from five delivered for the event.
Standing alongside Elon Musk, Trump attempted to boost the automaker, after prices of its shares dropped 15 percent over the last five days, and said he’d label violence against its locations as domestic terrorism.
That’s according to legal filings seen by The New York Times, which says Google can’t own more than 15 percent of the AI startup, and has no voting rights, board seats, or board observer rights. Google has invested a total of $3 billion into Anthropic so far, and it plans to invest $750 million more in September, the NYT reports.
[nytimes.com]
A new batch of Apple security updates today that includes iOS 18.3.2 and macOS 15.3.2 might re-enable Apple Intelligence (again), but it also supplements an issue first addressed in iOS 17.2, where “Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox,” according to an Apple update note spotted by 9to5Mac.
