Meta has agreed to a proposed settlement worth up to roughly $18 billion with 52 state attorneys general over claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to hook young users and mislead the public about the risks. The deal, still awaiting court approval, stems from a 2023 lawsuit accusing Meta of fostering compulsive teen use and unlawfully collecting data from children under 13 in violation of COPPA and California consumer protection laws.
Dick's Sporting Goods is closing more Foot Locker stores in 2026 as part of an ongoing effort to shrink that chain's retail footprint. The company's stock dropped sharply after it issued a revised financial outlook, signaling that its turnaround plan for Foot Locker is behind expectations.
Apple has started rolling out advertisements within its Maps app in the US and Canada, appearing both in suggested places before a search and within relevant search results. The company says the ads are privacy-preserving, with no user location data tied to Apple accounts or shared with advertisers, and the rollout will reach all users in both countries within weeks.
A back-to-school buying guide highlights a selection of portable speakers suited to dorm life, ranking options by priorities like portability, sound quality, multi-functional features, and volume for parties. The recommendations span a range of prices and speaker types to fit different student needs.
X has issued legal takedown notices to the open-source Nitter project and its offshoot XCancel, accusing them of data scraping and rules violations. Both services, which let users read X posts without an account, JavaScript or tracking, have gone offline, with Nitter's maintainer citing legal advice and XCancel posting a notice about the cease-and-desist letter. Nitter's GitHub repository is now archived and read-only.
The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 26.8, bringing a set of Writer-focused enhancements. Key additions include automatic RTL text direction detection, a new baseline grid display option, fixed page line-spacing inside frames, and a new Paragraph Composer that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of using a simple greedy algorithm.
Devine and the author, working on Uxn tooling, have been reworking POP-2—a 1970s programming language from the Lisp era—into a new dialect called Pop-2000 meant to serve as a common language across minimal, bootstrap-friendly systems. The project stems from Devine's search for a high-level language to write a new Uxn assembler, paired with the author's long-standing interest in designing 'tiny compilers' that are easy to implement with little tooling.
Canada confirmed a new round of tariffs matching Washington's 50% duties, covering more than 700 American products worth roughly $20 billion, set to take effect September 8. The move follows the collapse of trade talks last week, with both governments blaming each other for last-minute demands. Ottawa specifically doubled its tariff on U.S. steel and aluminum to 50% in direct response to similar U.S. levies.
A security researcher's report describes Omarchy 4.0, the Linux distribution promoted by DHH, as riddled with basic vulnerabilities, including bash injection triggered by video titles and notifications capable of executing arbitrary commands. The report argues these are not obscure edge cases but well-known classes of input-handling flaws that mature software practices routinely prevent, and suggests some scripts may have been AI-generated without proper review.
A website posing as the 'Hanover Institute for Public Policy' published over half a million words in nine days, presenting pro-Israel talking points on Gaza and Palestinian prisoners as neutral research. The New York firm Piro Inc registered the site with the US government as material distributed on behalf of Israel, though the institute itself has no verifiable legal existence, address, or staff. It forms part of a larger, multimillion-dollar Israeli government campaign, involving Havas Media and other firms, to shape how AI chatbots frame conversations about Israel.
MIT Technology Review has published its annual Kids issue, exploring how children are experiencing and adapting to a world saturated with AI and technology, including topics like AI companionship, monitoring apps, and schools' use of AI. Separately, in an interview featured in the same roundup, Bill Gates told MIT Technology Review's Mat Honan that he believes society has already crossed certain safety thresholds with artificial intelligence, expressing concern about risks ranging from economic disruption to loss of control over AI systems.
ClamUI is a free, Flatpak-installable graphical interface for the open-source ClamAV antivirus engine on Linux, designed as a more modern and intuitive alternative to the default ClamTK GUI. It offers scan profiles for home folders, quick scans, or full system scans, plus easy database updates, scan logs, and one-click EICAR test files to verify the antivirus is working correctly.
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