Turning on Personal Intelligence gives the company more data for ad targeting. Using Google’s products and services has always been fundamentally precarious—doing so gives the world’s largest advertising company a lot of juicy personal data. Google has long said it won’t use the sensitive data from products like Gmail,…
Space Force considering options: public-private, federal installation, state land. Leaders in the US Space Force would like to have a new spaceport up and running in four years, adding a third heavy-lift launch site to relieve pressure from bases in Florida and California that have shot rockets into orbit…
If you share Spotify sub with family, you may need to scan QR code to prove it. As reported by Music Business Worldwide, Spotify appears to be stepping up enforcement of existing policies regarding Family and Duo subscription plans by requiring users to scan a QR code in person…
Birds’ compact nervous system seems to help them handle tasks very quickly. Much of what we know about how a brain makes decisions comes from studying monkeys watching dots. In a task known as a random-dot-motion task, a cloud of flickering specks drifts weakly in one direction while the…
Company says foreign-made robotic vehicles are crucial to US chip production. US chip champion Intel was so confused by the US government ban on foreign-made robots that it requested and received a waiver “out of an abundance of caution.” The tech company wanted to make sure that it could…
Sound designer lets Half Life-related codename slip at a conference. Gamers still hoping against hope for a true follow-up to Half-Life 2 (after so, so many years) may remember last year’s flurry of speculation that Half-Life 3 was finally nearing completion. Amid all those rumors, though, we never got…
Ukraine has changed drone and war-fighting tech to reduce reliance on Starlink. Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraine’s successful resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Musk’s political inclinations and the latest surprise…
“Userland” exploit relies on integer overflow found in “SmileBasic” interpreter. A security researcher has demonstrated a software-only partial jailbreak of the Switch 2, gaining “userland” access that he says “lets us run homebrew, reverse engineer and mod Switch 2 games, back up save files off the Switch, and access…
Flubbed key signing “ceremony” allowed minting of web credentials for any site. eMudhra, the certificate authority that issued eight intermediate TLS credentials so weak that anyone could mint certificates for any website or mail server—one had a private encryption key of just 4—said it’s getting out of the business.…
We can’t have nice things, but at least we can get trailers for them. Those mourning yesterday’s shuttering of highly praised and influential developer BioWare also had to deal with the cancellation of the next Mass Effect game, which was first teased back in 2020. Today, we got our…
