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Enlarge / Active geology could have helped purify key chemicals needed for life. (credit: Christof B. Mast)

In some ways, the origin of life is looking much less mystifying than it was a few decades ago. Researchers have figured out how some of the fundamental molecules needed for life can form via reactions that start with extremely simple chemicals that were likely to have been present on the early Earth. (We've covered at least one of many examples of this sort of work.)

But that research has led to somewhat subtler but no less challenging questions. While these reactions will form key components of DNA and protein, those are often just one part of a complicated mix of reaction products. And often, to get something truly biologically relevant, they'll have to react with some other molecules, each of which is part of its own complicated mix of reaction products. By the time these are all brought together, the key molecules may only represent a tiny fraction of the total list of chemicals present.

So, forming a more life-like chemistry still seems like a challenge. But a group of German chemists is now suggesting that the Earth itself provides a solution. Warm fluids moving through tiny fissures in rocks can potentially separate out mixes of chemicals, enriching some individual chemicals by three orders of magnitude.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Matt Anderson Photography)

California can keep enforcing its state net neutrality law after the Federal Communications Commission implements its own rules. The FCC could preempt future state laws if they go far beyond the national standard but said that states can "experiment" with different regulations for interconnection payments and zero-rating.

The FCC scheduled an April 25 vote on Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposal to restore net neutrality rules similar to the ones introduced during the Obama era and repealed under former President Trump. The FCC yesterday released the text of the pending order, which could still be changed but isn't likely to get any major overhaul.

State-level enforcement of net neutrality rules can benefit consumers, the FCC said. The order said that "state enforcement generally supports our regulatory efforts by dedicating additional resources to monitoring and enforcement, especially at the local level, and thereby ensuring greater compliance with our requirements."

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As another week winds to a close, it's time for Engadget's roundup of the best deals we spotted this week. There's no giant sale happening right now, but we still found a few decent discounts on some of our recommended tech, including 40 percent off a year's subscription to Max's streaming service, $130 off our favorite Android tablet and a new low price on our top mouse for gaming. If you've been considering a foldable phone but have been (understandably) turned off by the high prices, a both Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Google's Pixel Fold are currently on sale and going for $400 and $500 off, respectively. Here are the best tech deals from this week that you can still get today. 

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/annual-max-subscriptions-are-still-40-percent-off-plus-the-rest-of-this-weeks-best-tech-deals-172622166.html?src=rss

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Ivanti, the remote-access company whose remote-access products have been battered by severe exploits in recent months, has pledged a "new era," one that "fundamentally transforms the Ivanti security operating model" backed by "a significant investment" and full board support.

CEO Jeff Abbott's open letter promises to revamp "core engineering, security, and vulnerability management," make all products "secure by design," formalize cyber-defense agency partnerships, and "sharing information and learning with our customers." Among the details is the company's promise to improve search abilities in Ivanti's security resources and documentation portal, "powered by AI," and an "Interactive Voice Response system" for routing calls and alerting customers about security issues, also "AI-powered."

Ivanti CEO Jeff Abbott addresses the company's "broad shift" in its security model.

Ivanti and Abbott seem to have been working on this presentation for a while, so it's unlikely they could have known it would arrive just days after four new vulnerabilities were disclosed for its Connect Secure and Policy Secure gateway products, two of them rated for high severity. Those vulnerabilities came two weeks after two other vulnerabilities, rated critical, with remote code execution. And those followed "a three-week spree of non-stop exploitation" in early February, one that left security directors scrambling to patch and restore services or, as federal civilian agencies did, rebuild their servers from scratch.

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Enlarge (credit: Francesco Carta fotografo | Moment)

On Friday, Meta announced policy updates to stop censoring harmless AI-generated content and instead begin "labeling a wider range of video, audio, and image content as 'Made with AI.'"

Meta's policy updates came after deciding not to remove a controversial post edited to show President Joe Biden seemingly inappropriately touching his granddaughter's chest, with a caption calling Biden a "pedophile." The Oversight Board had agreed with Meta's decision to leave the post online while noting that Meta's current manipulated media policy was too "narrow," "incoherent," and "confusing to users."

Previously, Meta would only remove "videos that are created or altered by AI to make a person appear to say something they didn’t say." The Oversight Board warned that this policy failed to address other manipulated media, including "cheap fakes," manipulated audio, or content showing people doing things they'd never done.

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Enlarge (credit: Design Cells)

When we catch a whiff of perfume or indulge in a scented candle, we are smelling much more than Floral Fantasy or Lavender Vanilla. We are actually detecting odor molecules that enter our nose and interact with cells that send signals to be processed by our brain. While certain smells feel like they’re unchanging, the complexity of this system means that large odorant molecules are perceived as the sum of their parts—and we are capable of perceiving the exact same molecule as a different smell.

Smell is more complex than we might think. It doesn’t consist of simply detecting specific molecules. Researcher Wen Zhou and his team from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have now found that parts of our brains analyze smaller parts of the odor molecules that make things smell.

Smells like…

So how do we smell? Odor molecules that enter our noses stimulate olfactory sensory neurons. They do this by binding to odorant receptors on these neurons (each of which makes only one of approximately 500 different odor receptors). Smelling something activates different neurons depending on what the molecules in that smell are and which receptors they interact with. The sensory neurons in the piriform cortex of the brain then use the information from the sensory neurons and interpret it as a message that makes us smell vanilla. Or a bouquet of flowers. Or whatever else.

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Enlarge / Electric F-150 sales are up 80 percent year over year. (credit: Ford)

Ford has caught a case of electric vehicle pessimism and is scaling back or delaying some of its plans for new EV models. A new electric pickup, scheduled to go into production next year, has been pushed back to 2026. And a three-row electric SUV has been given a two-year delay and will now not be available until 2027 at the earliest. The kicker? The automaker has published its sales for the first quarter of the year, and its EV sales are up a whopping 86 percent year over year.

Instead, the Blue Oval wants to focus on making more hybrids instead and says it will have hybrid options for all its internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2030. Ford's current range of hybrids is not extensive, but it grew 42 percent in Q1 compared to the first three months of 2023.

Many of those—19,660 to be exact—were the Maverick Hybrid, despite the fact that for model year 2024, Ford removed the hybrid powertrain as the base model and effectively gave the electrified pickup a $1,500 price hike. In total, Ford sold 38,421 hybrids in Q1 2024, which it says makes this the best-ever quarter for hybrid sales. But they represent a rather small slice of its overall pie—just 7.6 percent of the 508,083 vehicles that Ford sold for the first three months of the year.

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It looks like President Biden’s CHIPS Act is starting to pay off. Samsung is planning on doubling its investment in Texas, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. This will bring the total investment in the state’s chip-manufacturing sector to $44 billion, as Samsung already spent nearly $20 billion to build a factory back in 2021.

The ambitious expansion will reportedly take the form of a new chip manufacturing facility, a packaging site and a research and development space. It’ll all be located in or near Taylor, Texas, as that’s where the pre-existing semiconductor facility was built. The current manufacturing hub isn’t operational yet, but will begin building “crucial logic chips” later this year. For the geographically challenged, Taylor is around a 40 minute drive from Austin.

If this actually happens, it’ll be a huge win for the Biden administration. One of the main goals of the CHIPS Act, after all, is to lure global chipmakers to build on US soil. To that end, Washington plans on awarding more than $6 billion to Samsung as further incentive to keep things running in the good ole USA.

The CHIPS Act has allowed the federal government to award funding and offer loans to many tech companies to encourage domestic spending. Back in February, the multinational semiconductor company GlobalFoundries received a grant of $1.5 billion to help pay for a major US expansion, in addition to a $1.6 billion loan. It plans on building a new fabrication facility in Malta, New York, which will handle the manufacture of chips for the automotive, aerospace, defense and AI industries.

More recently, Intel received the largest CHIPS grant to date, snagging up to $8.5 billion to continue various US-based operations. The current plan is for Intel to use that money to manufacture plants that make leading-edge semiconductor chips meant for use in AI and other advanced applications. The company’s building two new fabrication facilities in Arizona and two in Ohio. Additionally, it’s going to use the money to modernize two pre-existing fabs in New Mexico and expand one location in Oregon. All told, Intel is going to invest $100 billion in US-based chip manufacturing. The various projects are expected to create 20,000 construction and 10,000 manufacturing jobs.

The Biden administration signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law back in 2022 to foster domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing and to lessen America’s reliance on Chinese suppliers. It sets aside $52 billion in tax credits and funding for firms to expand stateside production.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsung-is-doubling-its-semiconductor-investment-in-texas-to-44-billion-154322399.html?src=rss

Meta says that its current approach to labeling AI-generated content is too narrow and that it will soon apply a "Made with AI" badge to a broader range of videos, audio and images. Starting in May, it will append the label to media when it detects industry-standard AI image indicators or when users acknowledge that they’re uploading AI-generated content. The company may also apply the label to posts that fact-checkers flag, though it's likely to downrank content that's been identified as false or altered.

The company announced the measure in the wake of an Oversight Board decision regarding a video that was maliciously edited to depict President Joe Biden touching his granddaughter inappropriately. The Oversight Board agreed with Meta's decision not to take down the video from Facebook as it didn't violate the company's rules regarding manipulated media. However, the board suggested that Meta should “reconsider this policy quickly, given the number of elections in 2024.”

Meta says it agrees with the board's "recommendation that providing transparency and additional context is now the better way to address manipulated media and avoid the risk of unnecessarily restricting freedom of speech, so we’ll keep this content on our platforms so we can add labels and context." The company added that, in July, it will stop taking down content purely based on violations of its manipulated video policy. "This timeline gives people time to understand the self-disclosure process before we stop removing the smaller subset of manipulated media," Meta's vice president of content policy Monika Bickert wrote in a blog post.

Meta had been applying an “Imagined with AI” label to photorealistic images that users whip up using the Meta AI tool. The updated policy goes beyond the Oversight Board's labeling recommendations, Meta says. "If we determine that digitally-created or altered images, video or audio create a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance, we may add a more prominent label so people have more information and context," Bickert wrote.

While the company generally believes that transparency and allowing appropriately labeled AI-generated photos, images and audio to remain on its platforms is the best way forward, it will still delete material that breaks the rules. "We will remove content, regardless of whether it is created by AI or a person, if it violates our policies against voter interference, bullying and harassment, violence and incitement, or any other policy in our Community Standards," Bickert noted.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-plans-to-more-broadly-label-ai-generated-content-152945787.html?src=rss

We highlight Samsung's Galaxy Tab A9+ in our Android tablet buying guide for those who just want a competent slate for as little money as possible. If that describes you, take note: The 11-inch device is now on sale for $170 at several retailers, including Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy. This deal has technically been available for a couple of weeks, but it still represents the lowest price we've tracked. For reference, Samsung typically sells the tablet for $220. Both the Graphite and Silver finishes are discounted.

Do note, though, that this price applies the base model, which includes 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The latter is expandable with a microSD card, but the limited memory can cause some stutters if you want to push the the tablet for anything beyond casual streaming and web browsing. Samsung sells a higher-spec model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage: That one will be a better buy for gaming and more involved use, and it's also $50 off at $220, another all-time low.

As my colleague Sam Rutherford notes in our buying guide, the Galaxy Tab A9+ isn't likely to wow you in any one area, but it covers the basics well. Its 11-inch LCD display is well-sized and has a faster-than-usual 90Hz refresh rate, which helps the UI feel smooth to scroll through. The screen has a wide 16:10 aspect ratio, so it's better suited to landscape mode than the 4:3 display on an iPad. The metal and plastic frame is slick for the price, while the 7,040mAh battery should hold up for a day or two of casual use. And though no Android tablet really nails the software experience, most people should find Samsung's One UI to be cleaner than something like Amazon's Fire OS. The company says it'll provide OS updates through the eventual Android 16 and security updates through October 2027.

That said, this is still a cheap tablet. The Galaxy Tab A9+'s Snapdragon 695 chip is speedy enough but no powerhouse, and its charging speed tops out at a relatively meager 15W. There's no fingerprint reader, included stylus or formal water-resistance rating, either. If you're not beholden to Android, one of Apple's iPads will still be more well-rounded (though we expect to see new models arrive in the coming weeks). Still, at these prices, the Galaxy Tab A9+ is a solid buy if you're on a tighter budget.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/our-favorite-cheap-android-tablet-is-on-sale-for-170-151624727.html?src=rss

The Apple Vision Pro is an impressive piece of hardware, and the eye-tracking/hand gesture input combo is fantastic for navigating menus and the like. It’s not so great for gaming. There haven't been many easy ways to connect a third-party controller for playing iPad or cloud games. This is changing, however, as accessory manufacturer 8BitDo just announced Vision Pro compatibility for a number of its controllers.

These accessories are officially supported by Apple, so they should work as soon as you make a Bluetooth connection. No muss and no fuss. All told, eight devices got the Apple seal of approval here. One such gadget is the company’s Ultimate Bluetooth Controller, which we basically called the perfect gamepad for PC.

8BitDo

Other compatible devices include various iterations of the SN30 Pro controller, the Lite 2 and the NES-inspired N30 Pro 2. The integration isn’t just for game controllers, as 8BitDo also announced AVP compatibility for its Retro Mechanical Keyboard. Of course, the Vision Pro works out of the box with most Bluetooth keyboards.

This is pretty big news, however, as media consumption is one of the best parts of the Vision Pro experience. Video games fall squarely in that category. Just about every iPad title works on the device. If playing Cut the Rope on a giant virtual screen doesn’t do it for you, the headset also integrates with Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now for access to AAA titles. 

8BitDo announced official controller support for Apple devices last year, though this was primarily for smartphones, tablets and Mac computers. The integration was thanks to new controller firmware and Apple's recent iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, tvOS 16.3 and macOS 13.2 updates. It looks like all of the accessories that work with iPhones and iPads also work with the Vision Pro. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-vision-pro-owners-now-have-more-decent-controller-options-150055872.html?src=rss

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto)

For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI’s GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorker–style illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants offer shortcuts for crafting code and prose. There’s also a color analysis bot, a spider identifier, and a dating coach called RizzGPT. Yet Blichfeldt Andersen is hunting only for one very specific type of bot: Those built on his employer’s copyright-protected textbooks without permission.

Blichfeldt Andersen is publishing director at Praxis, a Danish textbook purveyor. The company has been embracing AI and created its own custom chatbots. But it is currently engaged in a game of whack-a-mole in the GPT Store, and Blichfeldt Andersen is the man holding the mallet.

“I’ve been personally searching for infringements and reporting them,” Blichfeldt Andersen says. “They just keep coming up.” He suspects the culprits are primarily young people uploading material from textbooks to create custom bots to share with classmates—and that he has uncovered only a tiny fraction of the infringing bots in the GPT Store. “Tip of the iceberg,” Blichfeldt Andersen says.

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Having a fancy webcam is all well and good, but another thing you might need to seriously upgrade the quality of your video calls and livestreams is a decent key light. It will illuminate your face to help you stand out from the background and help the camera discern your features more clearly. You don’t need to break the bank to get a decent key light either. Logitech’s Litra Beam is currently $10 off at $90. That’s only $5 more than the lowest price we’ve seen for it.

The Litra Beam looks a bit like an LED reading lamp and it would be a fairly stylish addition to many setups. It has a three-way adjustable stand, allowing you to tweak the height, tilt and rotation as needed, while its ability to run on either USB or AC power gives you more placement options.

The device uses TrueSoft tech, which, according to Logitech, provides "balanced, full-spectrum LED light with cinematic color accuracy for a natural, radiant look across all skin tones." A frameless diffuser helps mitigate harsh shadows, according to the company. 

You'll be able to adjust the Litra Beam's brightness, color temperature, presets and other settings through the Logitech G Hub desktop app, which also allows you to manage multiple lights at once. In addition, the key light has five physical buttons on the rear for quick switching between brightness and color temperature settings.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/logitechs-litra-beam-key-light-is-10-percent-off-right-now-141839351.html?src=rss

Enlarge / Cloud cover forecast for 2 pm ET on Monday, April 8. (credit: Tomer Burg)

The best opportunity to view a total Solar eclipse in the United States for the next two decades is nearly at hand. Aside from making sure you're in the path of totality, the biggest question for most eclipse viewers has been, will it be cloudy?

This has posed a challenge to the meteorological community. That's because clouds are notoriously difficult to forecast for a number of reasons. The first is that they are localized features, sometimes on the order of a few miles or km across, which is smaller than the resolution of global models that provide forecasts five, seven, or more days out.

Weather models also struggle with predicting clouds because they can form anywhere from a few thousand feet (2,000 meters) above the ground to 50,000 feet (15,000 meters), and therefore they require good information about conditions in the atmosphere near the surface all the way into the stratosphere. The problem is that the combination of ground-based observations, weather balloons, data from aircraft, and satellites do not provide the kind of comprehensive atmospheric profile needed at locations around the world for completely accurate cloud forecasting.

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On Monday, April 8, a total solar eclipse will be visible across a swath of North America, from Mexico’s Pacific coast to the easternmost reaches of Canada. And in those few minutes of daytime darkness, all sorts of interesting phenomena are known to occur — phenomena NASA would like our help measuring.

During a total solar eclipse, temperatures may drop and winds may slow down or change their course. Animals have been observed to behave unusually — you might hear crickets start their evening chatter a few hours early. Even radio communications can be disrupted due to changes in the ionosphere while the sun’s light is blocked. And, the sun’s corona — its outermost atmosphere — will come into view, presenting scientists (and those of us helping them) with a rare opportunity to study this layer that’s normally invisible to the naked eye.

NASA has lots of research efforts planned for the eclipse, and has sponsored a handful of citizen science campaigns that anyone can take part in if they’re in or near the path of totality, or the areas where people on the ground can watch the sun become completely obscured by the moon. The path of totality crosses 13 US states, including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It’s an event of some significance; the next time a total solar eclipse passes over that much of the contiguous US won’t be until 2045.

All you’ll need to join in is equipment you already own, like a smartphone, and a few minutes set aside before the eclipse to go through the training materials.

NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio Help measure the shape of the sun

One such citizen science project is SunSketcher, a concerted effort to measure the true shape of the sun. While the sun is closer to being a perfect sphere than other celestial bodies that have been observed, it’s still technically an oblate spheroid, being a smidge wider along its equator. The SunSketcher team plans to get a more precise measurement by crowd-sourcing observations of Baily's Beads, or the little spots of sunlight that peek out from behind the moon at certain points in the eclipse.

The Baily’s Bead effect is “the last piece of the sun seen before totality and the first to appear after totality,” NASA explained in a blog post. “For a few seconds, these glimmers of light look like beads along the moon’s edge.” They’re visible thanks to the uneven topographical features on the lunar surface.

You’ll need to download the free SunSketcher app, which is available for iOS and Android on the App Store and Google Play Store. Then, a few minutes before totality (the exact time is location-dependent), put your phone on Do Not Disturb, hit “Start” in the app and prop up the phone in a place where it has a good view of the sun. After that, leave it be until the eclipse is over — the app will automatically take pictures of Baily’s Beads as they show up.

There’s a tutorial on the SunSketcher website if you want to familiarize yourself with the process beforehand. When it’s all said and done, the pictures will be uploaded to SunSketcher’s server. They’ll eventually be combined with observations from all over to “create an evolving pattern of beads” that may be able to shed better light on the size and shape of the sun.

The SunSketcher images probably won’t blow you away, so if you’re hoping to get some great pictures of the eclipse, you’ll want to have another camera on hand for that (with the appropriate filters to protect your eyes and the device’s sensors).

NASA / Aubrey Gemignani Record changes in your surroundings

Eclipse-watchers can also use their smartphones to record the environmental changes that take place when the sun dips behind the moon as part of a challenge run by Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (Globe). You’ll need an air temperature thermometer as well for this task, and can start logging observations in the days before the eclipse if you feel like being extra thorough.

Temperatures at the surface can, in some cases, drop as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit during a total solar eclipse, according to NASA. And certain types of clouds have been observed to dissipate during these brief cooldowns, resulting in unexpectedly clear skies in the moments before totality. Data collected with the help of citizen scientists during the 2017 total solar eclipse showed that areas with heavier cloud cover experienced a less extreme drop in surface temperatures.

To participate this time around, download the Globe Observer app from the App Store or Google Play Store, and then open the Globe Eclipse tool from the in-app menu. There, you’ll be able to jot down your temperature measurements and take photos of the sky to record any changes in cloud cover, and make notes about the wind conditions. Plan to dedicate a few hours to this one — NASA asks that you include observations from 1-2 hours before and after the eclipse in addition to what you’ll record during. “You will measure temperature every 5-10 minutes and clouds every 15-30 minutes or whenever you see change,” NASA says.

You can keep using the Globe Observer app for citizen science beyond eclipse day, too. There are programs running all year round for recording observations of things like clouds, land use, mosquito habitats and tree heights. The eclipse tool, though, is only available when there’s an eclipse happening.

Listen to the sounds of wildlife

Observations going back nearly 100 years have added support to the idea that total solar eclipses temporarily throw some animals out of whack. Inspired by a 1935 study that gathered observations on animal behavior during an eclipse three years prior, the Eclipse Soundscapes Project is inviting members of the public to take note of what they hear before, during and after totality, and share their findings.

To be an Observer for the project, it’s recommended that you first sign up on the website and go through the brief training materials so you can get a sense of what type of information the project is looking for. The website also has printable field notes pages you can use to record your observations on eclipse day. You should start taking notes down at least 10 minutes before totality. Only after the eclipse is over will you need to fill out the webform to submit your observations along with your latitude and longitude.

If you happen to have an AudioMoth acoustic monitoring device and a spare microSD card lying around, you can go a step further and record the actual sounds of the environment during the eclipse as a Data Collector. You’ll need to set everything up early — the project says to do it on Saturday, April 6 before noon — and let it record until at least 5PM local time on April 10. At that point, you can turn it off, submit your notes online and mail in the SD card. All of the details for submission can be found on the project’s website.

NASA Take photos of the solar corona

The Eclipse Megamovie 2024 is an initiative designed to study the sun’s corona and plasma plumes from locations in the path of totality, building off of a previous campaign from the 2017 total solar eclipse. It’s already selected a team of 100 Science Team Alpha Recruits (STARs) who underwent training and were given 3D-printed tracking mounts for their cameras to shoot the best possible images. But, the project will still be accepting photo submissions from any enthusiasts who have a DSLR (and a solar filter) and want to participate.

The Photography Guide is pretty exhaustive, so don’t wait until eclipse day to start figuring out your setup. You’ll be able to submit your photos after the eclipse through a form on the website.

However you choose to spend the eclipse, whether you’re collecting data for a citizen science mission or just planning to kick back and observe, make sure you have everything in place well ahead of the time. While the partial eclipse phases will last over an hour, totality will be over and done in about 3.5-4.5 minutes depending on where you’re watching from. You wouldn’t want to miss out on some of that time because you were fumbling with your camera.

Totality will start shortly after 11AM local time (2PM ET) for western Mexico, moving northeastward over the subsequent two-or-so hours before exiting land near Newfoundland, Canada around 5:30PM local time. There will still be something to see for people outside the path of totality, too. Most of the US will be treated to a partial eclipse that day. You can find out exactly when the eclipse will be visible from your location with this tool on NASA’s website, along with the percentage of sun coverage you can expect to witness.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-will-be-studying-the-total-solar-eclipse-heres-how-you-can-help-140011076.html?src=rss

Google has gone from being the go-to search engine to something people are paying to avoid entirely. This week, Cherlynn and Devindra chat with 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler about his experience moving away from Google and towards Kagi, a $10 a month search engine without ads or data tracking. Funny enough, Kagi is still relying on Google’s index, so it’s a lot like using that site before the onslaught of ads, sponsored posts and AI results. Also, we discuss the company’s lies around Chrome’s incognito mode, as well as the news that it would be deleting user data collected in that mode. (Be sure to check out the 404 Media podcast too!)

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

• Why Jason Koebler moved from Google to Kagi's paid search engine – 0:45

• Google says it will destroy data collected from users using Incognito mode – 15:01

• Gurman report: Apple is working on personal home robots – 24:55

• Amazon just walked out on its self check-out tech – 30:43

• FCC set to vote to restore Net Neutrality – 43:00

• Apple adds Spatial Personas to make the Vision Pro experience less lonely – 45:09

• Proposed California state law would give tech workers the “right to disconnect” – 47:17

• Tekken director responds to fighting game fans’ request for a Waffle House stage – 49:57

• Around Engadget – 51:22

• Working on – 54:31

• Pop culture picks – 59:13

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Credits 

Hosts: Cherlynn Low and Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Jason Koebler
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-google-search-kagi-incognito-123049753.html?src=rss

AI models using individual's work without permission (or compensation) is nothing new, with entities like The New York Times and Getty Images initiating lawsuits against AI creators alongside artists and writers. In March, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati contributed to the ongoing uncertainty, telling The Wall Street Journal she wasn't sure if Sora, the company's new text-to-video AI tool, takes data from YouTube, Instagram or Facebook posts. Now, YouTube's CEO Neal Mohan has responded with a clear warning to OpenAI that using its videos to teach Sora would be a "clear violation" of the platform's terms of use.

In an interview with Bloomberg Originals host Emily Chang, Mohan stated, "From a creator's perspective, when a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations. One of those expectations is that the terms of service is going to be abided by. It does not allow for things like transcripts or video bits to be downloaded, and that is a clear violation of our terms of service. Those are the rules of the road in terms of content on our platform."

A lot of uncertainty and controversy still surrounds how OpenAI trains Sora, along with ChatGPT and DALL-E, with The Wall Street Journal recently reporting the company plans to use YouTube video transcriptions to train GPT-5. On the other hand, OpenAI competitor Google is apparently respecting the rules — at least when it comes to YouTube (which it owns). Google's AI model Gemini requires similar data to learn but Mohan claims it only uses certain videos, depending on permissions are given in each creator's licensing contract.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/youtube-ceo-warns-openai-that-training-models-on-its-videos-is-against-the-rules-121547513.html?src=rss

Roku already serves ads through its platform, but it's also apparently exploring the idea of showing you ads while you're using third-party devices connected to its TVs. Based on a recent patent filing unearthed by Lowpass, the company is looking to develop a system or a method "for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device via a high-definition media interface (HDMI) connection." That means if you've connected another streaming device or console — say, an Apple TV, a Chromecast or a PlayStation — to a Roku TV via HDMI, the company would still be able to serve you advertisements. 

In particular, Roku is hoping to show you commercials while whatever you're watching or playing on the third-party device attached to it is on pause. In its patent, it described several methods on how it can detect whether the show or game on screen is paused, such as receiving a pause signal from the remote control, detecting a pause icon, looking at several video frames and determining that the image on screen hasn't changed for some time and getting a silent audio signal from the HDMI connection. 

If it works as intended, those ads wouldn't impact your viewing or playing experience (much), assuming you're truly stepping away or doing something else in the meantime. While you'd probably prefer those experiences to be free of ads altogether, Roku is at least looking to make sure that it's serving you relevant ads. It could analyze frozen video or audio frames and use automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to identify what's on screen. Or it could analyze metadata to show ads connected to what you're playing or watching. It could also serve commercials based on what third-party device is attached to your TV. 

As Lowpass notes, the company could have conjured the idea because manufacturers typically don't make a lot of money from hardware sales. For the fiscal year of 2023, Roku lost $44 million on smart TVs. Similarly, Samsung's visual display and digital appliances division posted $37.5 million in operating losses for last year's fourth quarter. Meanwhile, ads and services generated $1.6 billion in profit for Roku. This idea could potentially make it more money... if the prospect of watching commercials while your show or game is paused doesn't turn you off buying Roku TV, of course. This is just a patent at this point in time, though, and Roku may very well end up scrapping it and not implementing it at all. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/roku-looks-into-serving-you-ads-on-whatever-you-plug-into-its-tvs-120016754.html?src=rss

Enlarge / The Maven. (credit: B. Mole)

The first thing I should say in this bike review is that I am not a bike enthusiast.

My preferred form of exercise is running, where no mechanical components are necessary. But I'm acting as reviewer here because what I lack in longstanding opinions on brand-name bike gearing and motor hubs, I make up for by being the exact target audience for the bike under review: the Maven Cargo E-bike by Integral Electrics. This is a cargo bike designed not for hardcore cyclists but for smaller riders, women specifically, who would happily swap out their family's second car for a simpler e-bike—as long as it can handle the needs of family life: toting children, running errands, and making short commutes.

This is exactly what Integral CEO and co-founder Laura Belmar and her family were looking for amid the pandemic, she told me in an interview. But while her husband picked out e-bikes that were comfortably designed for him, who is taller than her, she consistently found herself top-heavy and struggling as soon as her two kids were loaded onto the bikes. "They were scared to ride with me," she said of her kids. "One time, we were literally going down in the park and a jogger came by and grabbed the rack and pulled us back up."

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A new Carbon Majors Database report, which examines carbon dioxide emissions, found that just 57 companies were responsible for 80 percent of the global carbon dioxide emissions between 2016 and 2022. ExxonMobil, which topped the list of United States companies, contributed 1.4 percent of all global carbon dioxide emissions. It has net zero emissions targets.

Nearly 200 parties adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, 58 of the 100 state- and investor-owned companies in the Carbon Majors Database have since increased their production.

The International Energy Agency found coal consumption increased by eight percent over the seven years to 8.3 billion tons — a record high. State-owned Coal India is one of the top three carbon dioxide producers. Russia’s state-owned energy company Gazprom and state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco rounded out the group.

— Mat Smith

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The chaos of YouTube’s multicam Coachella stream When you apply sports logic to a music festival. YouTube

YouTube is hyping its exclusive Coachella streaming coverage, which starts next week. The headlining feature is the platform’s multiview experience (already familiar to sports fans) — but who wants to watch up to four stages simultaneously, with audio for one of them. It’s… a music festival. Coachella runs from April 12 to 14 and April 19 to 21.

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The latest Razer Blade 18 is now available to order If you want 4K 200Hz display, you’ll need an extra $1,700 and a bit of time. Razer

Finally, after a reveal at CES, the 2024 edition of the Razor Blade 18 arrives for $3,099. The base system has an i9-14900HX processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, Wi-Fi 7, a triple-fan cooling system and a six-speaker array with THX spatial audio support. You can equip the laptop with up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (the base model has a 4070 graphics card). In what Razer claims is a first for a laptop, there’s Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, but only if you opt for a 4080 or 4090 GPU.

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Apple cuts over 700 jobs as it closes car and display projects Eight offices in Santa Clara, California were affected by the layoffs.

Over 700 people at Apple have recently lost their jobs, mostly from offices in Santa Clara. The location that dealt with the company’s electric vehicle projects has lost 371 people. There may not be enough space at that new home robot project.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-80-percent-of-global-carbon-dioxide-emissions-comes-from-just-57-companies-111514748.html?src=rss