GoKawiil
Tech News
Indie publisher Panic is returning the tariff fees it had charged Playdate buyers, after a court ruling deemed the Trump administration's import taxes illegal and ordered refunds to affected companies. Panic said it has now received its own tariff refunds and passed that money back to customers who had paid the added charge as a line item on their orders.
Harvard researchers surveyed over 100 blind and low-vision people and identified turn-by-turn directions, continuous path guidance, and obstacle detection as top needs. They responded by creating Mobilio, a standalone smartphone app that combines the camera, GPS, motion sensors, and LiDAR (when available) to steer users safely along sidewalks and paths.
A startup called Operation Bluebird, founded partly by former Twitter trademark counsel Stephen Coates, has launched a new social network named Twitter.now. The move follows a lawsuit from X last year, which tried to block the company from using the Twitter name, though Operation Bluebird argued X had abandoned trademarks like 'Twitter' and 'Tweet.' The platform is currently in paid testing at $20 for early access and features an AI trust-scoring system called VERA.
Meta is rolling out new safety measures for Instagram and Facebook users under 18, including two-hour daily time limits, nighttime blocks, and algorithm-free feed options, as part of a settlement with dozens of US states over child safety and addiction claims. However, these protections currently apply only in the US, with Meta saying it will keep talking to other governments about expanding them.
Nvidia announced hardware optimizations for popular Chinese open-source AI models, including DeepSeek's V4 Flash and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, as part of a broader push to support open-weight systems. Alongside the announcement, an SEC filing tied to its quarterly earnings warned that potential White House restrictions on Chinese-origin AI could hurt its business by limiting its ability to support apps built on those models.
Google published a memo detailing enforcement of new per-app memory limits introduced with Android 17, first rolling out on Pixel devices. Apps that exceed the thresholds will be slowed down or terminated, and starting in February 2027, non-compliant apps could face reduced visibility and publishing restrictions on the Play Store.
A developer is building a simulator for CII's Mitra-15, a French 16-bit minicomputer from the early 1970s, by adapting an existing SDS 940 simulator within the SIMH framework. The project is still in an early, incomplete stage, with core instruction sets, memory management, and numerous peripheral devices like disks, tape readers, and various I/O channels still to be implemented. The developer relied heavily on documentation compiled by Pascal Chour due to the scarcity of surviving Mitra-15 materials.
Australian authorities have arrested two men in Perth accused of belonging to TeamPCP, a hacking group linked to widespread supply-chain attacks on open-source software. The pair face over a dozen charges including hacking, money laundering, and cybercrime offenses, with a court appearance scheduled for Thursday. The FBI says the group compromised more than a thousand organizations and stole over half a million credentials.
A new analysis revisits the 2006-2007 subprime mortgage crisis, showing how millions of borrowers held two-year adjustable-rate mortgages with teaser rates that were contractually set to reset 30-50% higher. Credit Suisse and the IMF had already charted this trillion-dollar 'reset wall' months before the crisis hit, yet markets kept buying because everyone assumed they could exit in time. The piece uses this history as a lens to question whether today's AI investment boom is similarly built on temporary, favorable conditions that are due to expire.
Google announced two new Android app quality requirements in response to memory chip shortages fueled by AI data center demand. One mandates stricter thresholds on dynamic memory and bitmap usage along with code optimization to prevent crashes and slowdowns, while the other requires apps to automatically restore sign-in status when users switch devices, via the Zero Tap Sign-In standard. Developers have until February 2027 for the memory rules and April 2027 for sign-in compliance.
Apple Arcade has released a limited-time crossover between Sneaky Sasquatch and Subway Surfers+, running through October 7, giving players four character skins, two hoverboards, and a reimagined level themed around Sasquatch Valley. Apple also released a set of Sneaky Sasquatch stickers for iMessage, and confirmed a separate birdwatching-themed update for Sneaky Sasquatch arriving September 17.
A software engineering commentary distinguishes between writing code—translating ideas into executable instructions, a task AI handles well—and building software, which involves deciding what instructions should exist, how systems interact, and which tradeoffs and constraints matter. The piece uses an example of processing incoming events to show that architectural decisions like consistency, retries, and ordering have little to do with syntax or programming language choice.