Tech

Domestic robots are beginning to enter the household, but we still have our doubts about how many might require a little teleoperation. You have to feel for the poor teleoperators though.

It’s teaming up with the National Sanitation Foundation to develop a voluntary repairability scoring standard for the US, aligning with growing requirements for gadgets to show how repairable they are at the time of purchase. iFixit says the standard will be distinct from its own scores, aligning with European efforts.

LG’s Xboom Stage 501 party speaker is now available to buy for $499.99 (technically $449.99 after a $50 rebate). Like Soundcore’s Rave 3S, the new Xboom speaker has an AI feature that can remove vocals, turning “virtually any song” into a karaoke track.

I’ve uploaded the response to DocumentCloud, if you want to take a look. I’m planning to write more about this soon, but in the meantime, you should also check out my big story about this case from earlier this year.

Instead of revealing more about your iPhones and other devices by tearing them apart, this time iFixit is inside a Chinese battery factory. The video shows how the lithium polymer cells are manufactured and tested, long before they end up in your pocket.

Zac Bowden at Windows Central posted this video of Aion, a stripped-down Windows concept made for agentic AI that popped up on the BetaWiki Discord, and says sources have confirmed to him that it is a real video made in 2024.

You know what weeping gamers really want? A burned CD with their GitHub repo on it. Fun novelty if you can get it, though. “This is a limited run, so signing up doesn’t guarantee one,” writes Microsoft-owned GitHub.

According to a Pew Research poll, 56 percent of American adults support banning social media for anyone under 16. A majority support it across almost every demographic — Democrats, Republicans, parents, non-parents — except among those over 65, where 49 percent of respondents agreed, but just 19 percent opposed a ban.

Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale are doing their best to make sure “the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.” The extractive world of today’s technology — harvesting your data and attention, among other things — has created the Texan Ideology.

Starting September 15th, Cloudflare will block bots that scrape ad-supported websites for search indexing and AI training at the same time. The goal is to encourage AI companies to separate their crawlers for different purposes, giving publishers more control over which ones to allow into their websites.

The app, which allows you to track the shows and movies you’re watching, will no longer be available starting July 15th. In an update on its support page, TV Time’s developers say operating the free app “was no longer sustainable,” and that “there was not enough demand for a paid app.”

19-year-old Peter Stokes was arrested in Finland and extradited to the US to face federal conspiracy charges related to the Scattered Spider hacking group. Stokes is accused of working with co-conspirators to breach a luxury jewelry retailer and demand an $8 million ransom.

Made by Weave Robotics, Issac 1 is a fuzzy, colorful home robot that promises to collect dirty clothes, fold and put away laundry, make beds, and tidy clutter. Shipping is slated for later this year, with a $250 deposit required. While its main tasks are automated, Weave says that, like its predecessor Isaac 0, Issac 1 will be teleoperated “when needed to guarantee we complete tasks.”

Instead of turning M5Stack’s M5PaperS3 development hardware into another Kindle clone, Wenting Zhang used the Playdate’s open source CrankBoy emulator to create a Game Boy alternative with an easy-on-the-eyes E Ink screen. Having to play with touchscreen controls isn’t ideal, but we’d love to see this turned into an app optimized for the Boox Palma devices.

YouTuber Urban Circles lost power one day and clearly spiraled. He wound up creating a self-hosted backup internet, complete with photo syncing, messaging, streaming media, and offline Wikipedia. He was even kind enough to provide instructions for building your own 3D-printed doomsday briefcase.

The search giant has lost its final appeal to overturn a record-breaking €4.1 billion (about $4.68 billion) penalty imposed by the European Commission over practices that abused Android’s mobile dominance. The charges date back to 2018, so it’s taken almost a decade to close the antitrust case.

The Magic V6 is available to order now in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. It’s officially priced at £1,999.99 / €2,299.99 (about $2,600), but Honor’s early offers slash hundreds off that price and throw in freebies like earbuds or tablets too.

ICE has denied it maintains such a database, but Mother Jones lays out some shifty wording that suggests Trump administration officials are dodging the question — including a spontaneous mention of the known Terrorist Screening Dataset. Given that 15 Minnesota activists are facing federal charges, it sure sounds like DHS may be tracking protesters after all.

Tyler Murphy, the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, tells 404 Media that he notified Apple about a bug in its Hide My Email feature more than a year ago, but it’s reportedly still not fixed. The vulnerability allows someone to obtain a person’s real email through the fake one generated by Apple’s tool, 404 Media reports.

The company is weighing plans like selling access to AI models on its infrastructure or letting customers buy compute in a model similar to companies like CoreWeave, Bloomberg reports.

Apple is teasing its upcoming Neuromancer adaptation, which means we might be getting a trailer for the cyberpunk series — or maybe even a premiere date — in the near future.

In an interview with French media outlet PSI, former SIE Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden said bringing Sony exclusives to PC was always about expanding title visability beyond PlayStation consoles, and wasn’t a money-making strategy:

All signs point to Samsung launching a wide version of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 this month, and now the company has released its first teaser. There are video versions too, all along similar lines teasing a “new shape” from the company.

If you loved Microsoft sticking Copilot in everything, just wait until its marketing department gets ahold of “quantum.“

The AI search tool will start linking directly to source recipes at the top of cooking queries, with images, ratings, and ingredient numbers. Not every food writer is happy though, since there’s still a full AI-generated recipe below the links, sometimes with opaque sourcing and errors in the instructions.