There are some complex pros and cons to Google’s new “advanced flow” for sideloading unverified Android apps, which may well protect some users from scammers. But it would sure be nice if I could just install the apps I want on the computer I own.
orion_resident:
Remember when you didn’t need special permission to install software on your own computer? Those were the days.
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Just open a conversation, tap Attachment, and then Real-time location. You can let friends and family know where you are for specific durations or until you disable the feature. It comes almost a decade after WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook Messenger introduced live location sharing, but better late than never, right?
As energy prices soar, Trump’s systemic pivot away from solar and wind in favor of big-beautiful fossil fuels is looking dumber than Brendan Carr. Spain invested heavily in renewables and France went nuclear to reduce its dependence on dinojuice. Both are expected to weather the latest energy crisis better than more oil-dependent neighbors, with Europe as a whole fairing better overall thanks to continued investment in solar panels and wind turbines.
Blue Origin is seeking permission from the FCC to deploy nearly 52,000 solar-powered satellites into space that will handle artificial-intelligence computing, following similar applications from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and start-up Starcloud. The aim is to bolster terrestrial data centers, but experts are skeptical.
A VideoCardz leak has the Arc Pro B70, with 32 Xe2 graphics cores, 32GB of RAM and a 230W TDP, launching next week alongside a B65 with 20 Xe2 cores. It’s not clear if we’ll ever get the B770 gaming variant; Intel deleted a tweet about it in December.
Last year, content moderators who’ve risked consequences like PTSD working for Big Tech companies have started to organize for better treatment in the last several years. Now, Meta has announced a wide rollout of its AI support assistant for Facebook and Instagram, and that it will “reduce our reliance on third-party vendors” employing humans for content enforcement.
While we’ll still have people who review content, these systems will be able to take on work that’s better-suited to technology, like repetitive reviews of graphic content or areas where adversarial actors are constantly changing their tactics, such as with illicit drugs sales or scams.
This time, the French newspaper found the location of an aircraft carrier because a sailor jogging on deck was recording their run on Strava. This isn’t even the first time. In 2024, Le Monde also found President Emmanuel Macron’s bodyguards also leaked his location by tracking workouts on the platform.
In a post on the website for his encrypted AI chatbot, Confer, Moxie Marlinspike says he’s working to “integrate Confer’s privacy technology so that it underpins Meta AI.”
[Confer Blog]
A second row seat to the reality TV White House’s propaganda push.
According to Microsoft, MAI-Image-2 offers improvements like “enhanced photorealism” and more reliable text generation in images. It’s rolling out now in Copilot and the Bing Image Creator.
A modest proposal from law professor Kate Klonick: acknowledge the failure of the ubiquitous “accept cookies” screen and abolish it posthaste:
Government can point to the highly visible cookie banner and declare its promise met in addressing data privacy issues. Industry, now that a compliance solution has been agreed on and normalized, prefers a known system with which they can easily comply and are unmotivated to push for a reform. While users, faced with endless click-throughs, learn not to assert their rights but to surrender them reflexively.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has the scoop. Should Google release the app publicly, it will compete with other macOS AI chatbot apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
A few of us at The Verge had been seeing issues with Reddit starting a little bit after 3PM ET, including posts not loading on the homepage and a “server error” message, but now the site is loading normally for me.
Update: Reddit appears to be working again.
First announced at CES 2026, the Ikea Varmblixt donut lamp is now available from the company’s online store and retail locations across the US. It’s still priced at $99.99 and comes with one of Ikea’s Bilresa remotes for cycling through 12 preset colors. To connect it to your smart home and unlock new colors you’ll need a Matter hub.
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Vampire Crawlers will cost $9.99 on PC and consoles, and it’s coming to mobile later this year. There’s a demo on Steam you can try right now, it’s good!
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Until now, Mister Rogers Neighborhood has only been available on YouTube in a limited capacity via the PBS Kids account and sketchy uploads. But now it will have an official home on YouTube thanks to a partnership between Fred Rogers Productions and Little Dot Studios, which has, let’s say, diverse interests.
Now that Stranger Things is over — the main series, anyways — you can finally own the whole thing on disc. Arrow Video is releasing a box set of the complete series on Blu-Ray and 4K UHD, which will be available in July. I hope the collection spans exactly 11 discs.
Their partnership, reportedly worth up to $300 million over three years, includes giving Polymarket “access to Official League Data from Sportradar, MLB’s exclusive global distributor of data for prediction markets.”
This is after Emmanuel Clase de la Cruz and Luis Leandro Ortiz Ribera were indicted in November over allegedly rigging bets on pitches.
I enjoyed this write-up of the Afroman defamation trial, which, by the way, he won. Mike Masnick cuts to the core: the police think they should be able to do whatever they want, including screwing up, without fear of embarrassment.
“The whole point is to make the cost of accountability so high that people stop trying. But Afroman showed up in an American flag suit and explained, calmly and clearly, that he makes funny songs, that these officers raided his house for no good reason, that they broke his stuff, and that he has every right to talk about it.” I think I’ll watch his videos again to celebrate.
To take on Netflix and YouTube, Paramount has to break the Warner Bros. curse.
Once we knew how easy it was to disassemble and repair Apple’s cheapest laptop, it seemed obvious that modding it would be a thing. Thankfully, it’s a lot less likely to wreck your Neo than this storage upgrade. Though it’s not clear how it will affect the CPU’s longevity.
Project Hail Mary premieres tomorrow, and it’s the kind of big, exciting sci-fi movie I’d highly recommend seeing on a big screen. For more on the movie, check out my review as well as my interview with author Andy Weir and screenwriter Drew Goddard about adapting the story for film.
