Attorneys general in 14 states and Washington, D.C., accuse TikTok of designing its app to keep users hooked. Court-released edited video shows some company staff discussing the toll it can take on children and teens.
#TikTok #faces #lawsuits #mental #health #risks
The Made by Google account on Twitter announced that the Pixel 10 devices will support voice and video calls on WhatsApp over satellite. The message includes a video, which is short on details, and got a cheeky reply from WhatsApp’s official account.
#Pixel10 has you covered on and off the grid Pixel devices will be the first to offer voice and video calls on @WhatsApp over a satellite network starting 8/28¹ pic.twitter.com/6yDSDMskkK
— Made by Google (@madebygoogle) August 22, 2025
With the August 28 official launch of the Pixel 10 series, WhatsApp will support Google’s satellite connectivity feature, allowing voice and video calls off the grid. The video Google used for its announcement showed a Pixel device accepting a WhatsApp call while in satellite mode.
The few available details about the new feature are deduced from the video’s fine print. Google makes the usual disclaimer that there are “restrictions, terms, and conditions” applying, and adds that the service will only work with participating carriers. Moreover, using it may lead to additional charges.
Just like other satellite services, you will need to be in an outdoor area with a visible sky to use this one. Google also warns that the service may be delayed, limited, or unavailable, another common limitation for such connections.
Whatever its limitations may be, this feature is a big win for Google. Apple has supported satellite connectivity since the iPhone 14, but even the latest iPhone 16 series doesn’t allow satellite calls. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra also has satellite connectivity, but it has even more limited availability.
There is wider support for carrier-provided satellite connectivity, which allows internet connectivity. However, those services are quite different and act more like the usual cellular connections, requiring a plan to work.
I like that Google is partnering with the most popular messaging app in the world for such a feature, but I am worried about its availability. It will be a bummer if this is just a way for WhatsApp to win more US users and not something available in more countries. However, we’ll need to wait for a detailed announcement to learn about the specifics.
“Iconic Phones” is coming this Fall!
Good news everyone! Over the past year we’ve been working on an exciting passion project of ours and we’re thrilled to announce it will be ready to release in just a few short months.
#satellite #calls #WhatsApp #phone #offer
Verizon is at it again, but this time, no one should be surprised. Earlier this month, the My Verizon app notified users that certain perks would be taken away. The carrier is now providing more details to customers.
Verizon‘s old 5G Get More and 5G Play More plans gave customers access to either Apple Arcade ($6.99 per month) or Google Play Pass ($4.99 per month) for free. In August, the company used its app to tell users that the free game subscription service would be removed from accounts on September 25.
Many users received emails about the fate of Google Play Pass today. Verizon says that it’s updating the subscription options in some of its plans and, as a result, the Google Play Pass perk will be removed for 5G Get More and 5G Play More customers.
Customers on Verizon’s old 5G Get More and 5G Play More plans will soon have to part with their free Google Play Pass subscription. | Image Credit – Reddit user pntless
The company notes that all other benefits, including Premium Data, are still intact.
Perhaps to cushion the blow, Verizon has given many users a reprieve. Despite the discontinuation of the perk, many users will be able to continue using Google Play Pass for an additional six months.
Launched in 2021, the 5G Get More and 5G Play More plans are no longer available to new customers. Carriers often try to get customers to abandon plans they have discontinued, which is probably why Verizon is making 5G Get More and 5G Play More less attractive. It was only in March that the company raised prices on these plans by $4.
The six-month grace period is likely an attempt to make customers realize that 5G Get More and 5G Play More plans offer less than before for the same price, and that they should perhaps switch to a more recent plan.
“Iconic Phones” is coming this Fall!
Good news everyone! Over the past year we’ve been working on an exciting passion project of ours and we’re thrilled to announce it will be ready to release in just a few short months.
#Verizon #spoils #day #clawing #customers
#Scanning #heavens #Vatican #Observatory
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of religion at Wesleyan University, presents a thorough diagnosis of this exact pathology in her 2022 book Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, which came out in paperback last year. It all begins, appropriately enough, with the book of Genesis, where God creates Earth for the dominion of man. Over the years, this biblical brain worm has offered divine justification for the brutal colonization and environmental exploitation of our planet. Now it serves as the religious rocket fuel propelling humans into the next frontier, Rubenstein argues.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2022 (PAPERBACK RELEASE 2024)
“The intensifying ‘NewSpace race’ is as much a mythological project as it is a political, economic, or scientific one,” she writes. “It’s a mythology, in fact, that holds all these other efforts together, giving them an aura of duty, grandeur, and benevolence.”
Rubenstein makes a forceful case that malignant outgrowths of Christian ideas scaffold the dreams of space settlements championed by Musk, Bezos, and like-minded enthusiasts—even if these same people might never describe themselves as religious. If Earth is man’s dominion, space is the next logical step. Earth is just a temporary staging ground for a greater destiny; we will find our deliverance in the heavens.
“Fuck Earth,” Elon Musk said in 2014. “Who cares about Earth? If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonize the whole solar system.”
Jeff Bezos, for one, claims to care about Earth; that’s among his best arguments for why humans should move beyond it. If heavy industries and large civilian populations cast off into the orbital expanse, our home world can be, in his words, “zoned residential and light industry,” allowing it to recover from anthropogenic pressures.
Bezos also believes that space settlements are essential for the betterment of humanity, in part on the grounds that they will uncork our population growth. He envisions an orbital archipelago of stations, sprawled across the solar system, that could support a collective population of a trillion people. “That’s a thousand Mozarts. A thousand Einsteins,” Bezos has mused. “What a cool civilization that would be.”
It does sound cool. But it’s an easy layup for Rubenstein: This “numbers game” approach would also produce a thousand Hitlers and Stalins, she writes.
And that is the real crux of the argument against pushing hard torapidly expand human civilization into space: We will still be humans when we get there. We won’t escape our vices and frailties by leaving Earth—in fact, we may exacerbate them.
#case #humans #space
Back to my Galaxy S26 Ultra mini-rant. It all started with this intriguing piece I stumbled upon the other day:
The feature discussed here is called Flex Magic Pixel, developed by Samsung Display. It almost sounds like another foldable trickery, but it’s not.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra doesn’t have such a feature. | Image by PhoneArena
According to reports, Samsung is bringing its Flex Magic Pixel technology to mass production. That’s a new OLED display innovation that uses AI to limit viewing angles when sensitive apps are open. Unlike traditional privacy screen protectors that dim or wash out displays, this approach promises to maintain full brightness and quality while still shielding your content from prying eyes.
Maybe you’ve seen phones with such screen protectors, maybe you haven’t: but it’s getting more popular by the day.
Video credit – UBI Research on YouTube
If the leaks are accurate, the S26 Ultra will be the first Samsung phone to ship with this display tech, potentially giving it a practical advantage over rivals.
And it does sound like a practical feature: no more turning around when opening your bank account in public. Or when looking at those funny pictures of you on the beach last year. In fact, even if you don’t have sensitive stuff on your phone, it’s good to keep pictures and videos to yourself.
Unless you actually want to show something to somebody. Or a group of friends.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra doesn’t have such a feature. | Image by PhoneArena
If this tech is installed on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, I guess it won’t be active 100% of the time: maybe there’ll be an on/off switch button somewhere in the settings menu. I hope so.In fact, I hope there’ll be at least three options to choose from:
There it is: there should be a sub-menu in the Flex Magic Pixel setting that lets us pick the apps that trigger this otherwise clever privacy feature.
Keeping Flex Magic Pixel on for all apps would be great for the more paranoid among us, but that’s going to be a major pain in the rear for lots of people. See, I want to use Flex Magic Pixel only for my banking and sensitive stuff. I don’t want to have to dig through menus and settings to turn Flex Magic Pixel off every time I want to show a cool photo to a group of friends because they can’t see jack when standing next to me.
That’s how Flex Magic Pixel and physical screen protectors work – they affect viewing angles. By design, they narrow the angle at which the screen is clearly visible, which helps prevent people sitting next to you from peeking. The drawback is that it also limits your own experience. You may need to hold the phone more directly in front of your eyes, since tilting it even slightly can make the screen look dimmer or harder to read.
All in all, the Flex Magic Pixel feature sounds fun: I guess there’ll be many breakups, or at least quarrels: try to convince your significant other that you’ve been checking your bank account for the last 20 minutes, chatting with the AI bot about balance and new offers.
Joking aside, I hope the Flex Magic Pixel arrives on the Galaxy S26 Ultra – with options to customize! – because that’ll certainly be a leap in display technology. Rivals should take notes!
#Galaxy #S26 #Ultra #destined #flop #Samsung #full #control #rumored #feature
Google has just released a report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption (five drops per query) and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.
It’s the most transparent estimate yet from a Big Tech company with a popular AI product, and the report includes detailed information about how the company calculated its final estimate.
Earlier this year, MIT Technology Review published a comprehensive series on AI and energy, at which time none of the major AI companies would reveal their per-prompt energy usage. Google’s new publication, at last, allows for a peek behind the curtain that researchers and analysts have long hoped for. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
I gave the police access to my DNA—and maybe some of yours
Last year, I added my DNA profile to a private genealogical database, FamilyTreeDNA, and clicked “Yes” to allow the police to search my genes.
In 2018, police in California announced they’d caught the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded capture for decades. Once the police had “matches” to a few relatives of the killer, they built a large family tree from which they plucked the likely suspect.
This process, called forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG, has since helped solve hundreds of murders and sexual assaults.
But I wasn’t really driven by some urge to capture distantly related serial killers. Rather, my spit had a less gallant and more quarrelsome motive: to troll privacy advocates whose fears around DNA I think are overblown and unhelpful. By giving up my saliva for inspection, I was going against the view that a person’s DNA is the individualized, sacred text that privacy advocates sometimes claim. Read the full story.
#Download #Googles #energy #expenditure #handing #DNA #data #police
iPhone 16 Pro Max. | Image Credit – PhoneArena
According to Instant Digital, Apple’s new approach may be similar to that on devices like the Oppo Find X8 Ultra, where pressure sensors can recognize light taps, firm presses, and sliding gestures.
Apparently, as the tipster claims, it’s the costs that are driving the change (well, almost everything in this life is cost-driven, but hey). The current solution is said to be “very expensive” for Apple, and is also causing expensive after-sales repairs. And, according to the tipster, this is creating cost pressure for the company. We also have Visual Intelligence, which is yet to be fully released, as one of the perceived values of this button to begin with.
“Iconic Phones” is coming this Fall!
Good news everyone! Over the past year we’ve been working on an exciting passion project of ours and we’re thrilled to announce it will be ready to release in just a few short months.
Instant Digital has generally had a good track record for leaks. And personally, I think it makes more sense for Apple to simplify the button than remove it just two generations after it’s been introduced (it arrived with the iPhone 16 series).
#iPhone #18s #Camera #Control #Apple #change #wont #expect
Pak would help set the topic, but both he and Zou wanted to see what approaches the Virtual Lab could come up with on its own. As a first project, they decided to focus on designing therapies for new covid-19 strains. With this goal in mind, Zou set off training five AI scientists (including ones trained to act like an immunologist, a computational biologist, and a principal investigator) with different objectives and programs at their disposal.
Building these models took a few months, but Pak says they were very quick at designing candidates for therapies once the setup was complete: “I think it was a day or half a day, something like that.”
Zou says the agents decided to study anti-covid nanobodies, a cousin of antibodies that are much smaller in size and less common in the wild. Zou was shocked, though, at the reason. He claims the models landed on nanobodies after making the connection that these smaller molecules would be well-suited to the limited computational resources the models were given. “It actually turned out to be a good decision, because the agents were able to design these nanobodies efficiently,” he says.
The nanobodies the models designed were genuinely new advances in science, and most were able to bind to the original covid-19 variant, according to the study. But Pak and Zou both admit that the main contribution of their article is really the Virtual Lab as a tool. Yi Shi, a pharmacologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the work but made some of the underlying nanobodies the Virtual Lab modified, agrees. He says he loves the Virtual Lab demonstration and that “the major novelty is the automation.”
Nature accepted the article and fast-tracked it for publication preview—Zou knew leveraging AI agents for science was a hot area, and he wanted to be one of the first to test it.
When he was submitting his paper, Zou was dismayed to see that he couldn’t properly credit AI for its role in the research. Most conferences and journals don’t allow AI to be listed as coauthors on papers, and many explicitly prohibit researchers from using AI to write papers or reviews. Nature, for instance, cites uncertainties over accountability, copyright, and inaccuracies among its reasons for banning the practice. “I think that’s limiting,” says Zou. “These kinds of policies are essentially incentivizing researchers to either hide or minimize their usage of AI.”
Zou wanted to flip the script by creating the Agents4Science conference, which requires the primary author on all submissions to be an AI. Other bots then will attempt to evaluate the work and determine its scientific merits. But people won’t be left out of the loop entirely: A team of human experts, including a Nobel laureate in economics, will review the top papers.
#Meet #researcher #hosting #scientific #conference
Powered by Qualcomm’s flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and 12GB of RAM, it delivers insanely fast performance. This makes it a top choice for power users who need to juggle multiple apps simultaneously, or for shoppers who want a phone that will remain relevant for years to come.
Meanwhile, its 200MP main camera and 50MP ultra-wide snapper allow it to capture stunning photos with vibrant colors, ranking it among the best camera phones of 2025. To top it all off, it rocks a gorgeous 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a sharp 3120 x 1440 resolution and HDR support, delivering an incredible viewing experience on the go, while its peak brightness of 2,600 nits ensures you’ll see what’s on the screen without any issues even on the sunniest days.
In fact, we could say that the only box it doesn’t check—but we really wish it did—is an affordable price tag. Of course, for a phone like this, it’s understandable that it leans toward the expensive side, but it would be great if you could snag it at a hefty discount, wouldn’t it?
Actually, you can indeed get one for much less than usual, but you’d have to act fast. A third-party seller on Amazon is offering a $236 discount on the 512GB model in Gray, dropping it below the $1,184 mark. Sure, the phone is still far from affordable, but this price is way more tempting than its usual cost of about $1,420. There’s no telling how long this sweet deal will last, though, so be sure to capitalize on it now while you still can!
“Iconic Phones” is coming this Fall!
Good news everyone! Over the past year we’ve been working on an exciting passion project of ours and we’re thrilled to announce it will be ready to release in just a few short months.
#512GB #Galaxy #S25 #Ultra #plunges #bargain #price #discount