It’s a good time to be a VPN provider.
This might be a one-off after Apple reportedly shipped 600 tons of iPhones from India in April to avoid tariff threats, but a new report from Canalys tracks with Apple’s intention to move the totality of its US iPhone production to the country by the end of 2026. China doesn’t like it and Trump’s gonna be real pretend mad.
Today’s example is a Men’s Health article on Luka Doncic and his offseason workout routine. Pretty standard stuff, until the claim about a 42-inch vertical leap at the NBA Combine -- big if true, but it’s not, and he didn’t participate.
Nick Angstadt pointed out the error and its likely source, Google’s AI Overview. It carries the above warning, but as we know, many people never click through to the source anyway. The article has since been corrected, but now the AI summary incorrectly cites the original text.
You’ll start to see it as a tab in Search or in Google’s iOS and Android apps. Google initially launched the AI-powered search experience in May in the US.
[blog.google]
We’ve collected 30-odd items designed to make student life that much easier (and far more enjoyable).
In Dallas, Waymo’s fleet will be managed through “a new strategic, multi-year partnership with Avis Budget Group,” Waymo says.
[waymo.com]
A University of Washington experiment with “a machine to create clouds” was shut down by the city of Alameda — because the scientists didn’t bother to tell the locals what they were up to, Politico writes. They were 20 minutes into the test when city officials ended the experiment.
Donors to the Marine Cloud Brightening Program include “cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen, the philanthropist Rachel Pritzker and Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist.” Can’t wait to find out what new conspiracy theories this spawns!
Now that Google has coughed up a look at the next Pixel, it’s apparently time for more iPhone rumors. The account @Skyfops on X tweeted two pictures of a cap and sunglasses-wearing man with two phones, claiming he’s holding a test development iPhone, complete with another man seemingly running interference to keep them hidden.
The device in the pictures certainly resembles other supposed leaks, but with AI, Photoshop, and bored students in the summer, are you ready to believe this is Apple’s next iPhone? Bloomberg Apple reporter Mark Gurman reshared the tweet, saying, “This looks legit.”
System update 3.0, which Panic says is coming later this year, will let you make folders for your games, adds a Game Library app, and brings support for “storing hundreds of games on your Playdate.” Seems like a great update, especially if you have a lot of titles from the Catalog or need to organize after finishing the second season of games.
YouTube acoustic explorer Benn Jordan appears to have gotten a starling — a bird arguably better at mimicry than a parrot — to do that! He turns a drawing into sound, the bird repeats the sound, and a similar drawing shows up on the computer. “I saved a PNG image to a bird,” his video claims. The result isn’t surprising because of course these birds can repeat sounds — but how often do we think of sound as encoded visual data?
Specifically, Google says it now works with the Hydrow and Hydrow Wave rowers, the latest models of Echelon machines, and the confusingly named Spinning bikes and the accompanying mobile app. The Strava app is also confirmed to work. Sadly, the official list of compatible devices and apps says the device will definitely not work with Garmin, Life Fitness and TechnoGym. Oh, and there’s a handful of new clock faces too.
[community.fitbit.com]
Now all Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can stream games they own (including some console-only titles) from the cloud through the Xbox PC app, just like they can on other devices, which is a feature that has been in testing with Insiders program members.
Also, now Microsoft’s new blog post confirms that Insiders with Game Pass Ultimate can preview play history that follows them across devices, letting them pick up right where they left off -- which could come in handy with a new Xbox handheld device.
It’s launching the new payment method for US-based merchants “in the coming weeks,” allowing them to accept than 100 types of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether.
PayPal will automatically convert the crypto payments into fiat currency or its PYUSD stablecoin. The company says the option will help merchants avoid the transaction fees that they’d typically face when accepting international payments.
[bloomberg.com]
Not to be outdone by GPD, which teased a handheld so powerful it’s begging to be plugged into the wall, Ayaneo is teasing its own Strix Halo handheld — alongside a mountain of other product. There’s so much you’ll need to scrub through not one, but two “strategy sharing session” videos to see it all. The Strix Halo device will be the Ayaneo Next 2, and it’s promising its battery will be internal unlike the GPD one.
The crosswords are “human-edited” and themed on “stories from current news,” according to a popup in the Particle app.
There’s a leaderboard, too, and it includes completion times from LLMs like Claude 4 Opus and Gemini 2.5 Pro. They trounced me today.
They say Columbia is just one of five universities they’ve penetrated.
The vulnerability (CVE-2025-31199), which Apple patched in a March 31st update, could give bad actors access to files inside a device’s Downloads folder and data cached by Apple Intelligence. That includes geolocation data, media metadata, and facial recognition info, according to a report from Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
Security researchers discovered the flaw after using Spotlight plugins to bypass a security feature made to prevent third-party services from gaining access to user data.
Click the icon to the left of a URL and you can see a star rating and an AI-generated summary of details about the store.
“The description will cover topics like customer service, product quality, shipping, pricing and returns, helping you understand what to expect from your shopping experience at a glance,” Google says in a blog post.
Similar to Zens’ Wireless Charging Adapter, the $49.99 PowerBug delivers true wireless charging by plugging directly into an outlet without a USB cable. It’s compatible with MagSafe and Qi2-compatible devices and is designed to give you an elevated place to mount your phone in the kitchen or bathroom.
It includes an extra USB-C port for charging an additional device but the PowerBug’s size, and an attached smartphone, could end up blocking an adjacent outlet.
DJI is unusually weak right now, and Insta360 is seizing the opportunity for its first drone: “immersive, creator-ready, and easy for anyone to fly,” with spherical filming so you can fly first then frame shots after. (The company tried 360-degree drone attachments before, but never a full aircraft.)
Will Antigravity even exist in the US, though? The announce doesn’t say. Insta360 is Chinese, and Trump has made it clear that US drones should “dominate.”
Android Earthquake Alerts uses the network of smartphones to detect tremors, sending alerts to other phones in the affected area. But in a paper published in Science, the company admitted it had found “several limitations” in the algorithm’s performance during two 2023 quakes that killed over 55,000 people.
It underestimated the 7.8 and 7.7 magnitude quakes, and instead of sending 10 million “TakeAction” alerts, which override Do Not Disturb, it sent just 469.
Reuters tracked a sampling of Shein prices from April to July and — surprise! — items are now more expensive. Prices spiked in April following Shein’s pre-announced price increase and then dipped slightly, Reuters found. Now they’re creeping back up: a $31 order in April would have cost $69 last week.
[reuters.com]
Yes, we tested Samsung’s latest premium foldable, but we didn’t try to destroy every surface and angle of the phone.
For that, there’s JerryRigEverything on YouTube, with the usual scratching and bending, with the results you’d probably expect, although the new hinge design is surprisingly resilient for something so skinny (and with the protruding camera lenses that make it a bit wobbly).
Plans are in place to revive a shuttered plant in Kentucky. The Trump administration and Big Tech are trying to revitalize the nuclear energy industry to meet growing electricity demand from AI data centers.
Foundation and Strange New Worlds return, while Alien: Earth and Eyes of Wakanda will make their debuts.
Disney Plus’ Eyes of Wakanda animated miniseries was slated to debut on August 6th, but the streamer has just bumped the show’s premiere up to August 1st and decided drop all four episodes at once.
Robin AI CEO Richard Robinson on hallucinations, facts versus truth, and how lawyers can use generative AI today.
The HBO Max series is the last hangover from DC’s old universe, but it has to line up with the new world started by Superman. This trailer for season two hints at how that’ll happen, and if you guessed “multiverse” then you don’t get any prize because it was both obvious and inevitable.
Peacemaker returns with eight episodes from August 21st and, most importantly, will have an all-new dance number for the opening credits.
We knew the Looney Tunes flick was launching in 2026, but it won’t be until August 28th. The date was announced at San Diego Comic-Con, where a trailer was shown too, but it’s not online yet.
Distributor Ketchup Entertainment will bring Coyote vs. Acme to theaters, having bought the rights after Warner Bros. canned the film in 2023 for a tax write-off. John Cena and Will Forte star alongside Wile E. Coyote.
