With rare exceptions, phones are pretty boring these days. The good news is, a boatload of those rare exceptions are about to show up at once, courtesy of Mobile World Congress. The tech industry’s biggest mobile show may not quite have the clout it once did, when the likes of Samsung, Sony, LG, and HTC […]
Aliro has officially arrived. The smart lock standard, first announced in 2023, finally has a 1.0 spec, meaning companies can now get hardware certified and roll out support. Aliro is an open standard designed to let any smart lock be unlocked by any smartphone, regardless of manufacturer. It stores a digital key in your phone’s […]
For more than six decades, the Peace Corps has represented itself as an agency focused on helping underserved communities around the globe. But a new initiative, called the “Tech Corps,” threatens to unravel the agency’s original mission by recruiting de facto Silicon Valley salespeople to promote the biggest names in AI – many of which […]
It took me a while to recover from the first big scare in Resident Evil Requiem. There I was, hunched over with a screen inches from my face and headphones in my ears, when a gigantic woman began chasing me through a dimly lit hallway intent on, well, eating me. It was a heart-racing sequence, […]
Over the past several weeks, as more and more Anthropic executives do interviews on a publicity blitz for Claude, one thing has gotten increasingly clear: Anthropic sure seems to think Claude is alive in some way, shape, or form. “Alive” is obviously a loaded term; the more frequently used word is “conscious.” If you ask […]
When Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson began uploading a series of short clips created with Seedance 2.0 – TikTok developer ByteDance’s newest video generation model – it was hard to deny that the footage was much more impressive than what we’ve seen from other gen AI outfits. The clips’ star (a digital duplicate of Tom Cruise) […]
In mid-February, the Department of Justice lost its head antitrust enforcer – just weeks before it was scheduled to argue one of the year’s biggest anti-monopoly cases in court. Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater announced her departure suddenly, via a post on her personal X account. But to those who follow the agency closely, it […]
The last few years of Xbox have been expensive. Under Phil Spencer’s leadership, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars in an attempt to build an ambitious future for gaming that looks a lot like Netflix. And while its subscription service Game Pass started out as a good deal for gamers (although now not so much), […]
As 2025 drew to a close, Instagram head Adam Mosseri ended the year by doom-posting about AI. “Authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” Mosseri lamented. “Everything that made creators matter – the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn’t be faked – is now accessible to anyone with the right tools.” […]
Last November, the House Oversight Committee had just released 20,000 pages of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, and Luke Igel and some friends were clicking around, trying to follow the threads of conversation through garbled email threads and a PDF viewer that was, frankly, “gross.” In the coming months, the Department of Justice […]