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New Study Finds Smartwatches Aren’t That Good at Measuring Stress

Some health enthusiasts swear by smartwatches as a way to monitor stress levels, but a recent study calls into question that common usage. The study, published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, claims that such watches display a very limited ability to actually communicate what a person’s psychological state is. Sometimes, a watch may think the user is stressed when they’re really just excited about something, researchers say. The report looked at nearly 800 students who w

Private Companies Are Now Gathering Weather Data for NOAA

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When staffing shortages caused the National Weather Service (NWS) to suspend weather balloon launches at its Kotzebue, Alaska, station earlier this year, a startup deploying next-generation weather balloons, WindBorne Systems, stepped up to fill the void. The company began selling its western Alaskan atmospheric data to the NWS in February, plugging what could have been a critical data gap in w

RFK Jr. wants a wearable on every American — that future’s not as healthy as he thinks

is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine. I keep hearing the same sentence repeating in my head. “My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.” RFK Jr., our current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said this at a congressional hearing at the end of June. Wearables, he said, are key to the MAHA — Make America Healthy Agai

Google Maps sucks on unpaved roads, so I use this open source app instead

Andy Walker / Android Authority Google Maps was primarily designed for inner-city travel, where roads are well-marked and relatively smooth. I doubt the app’s developers envisioned users navigating gravel roads in the heartland of South Africa. So, it’s unsurprising that the app becomes far less useful once you hit the dirt. However, where Google Maps falls short, OsmAnd excels. OsmAnd is a free, open-source app on the Play Store and F-Droid. It draws data from various sources, primarily relyi

Virtual 6NF

One of the goals of this substack is to research ways of removing historical cruft from the way relational model is taught. One thing that puzzles me particularly is why Sixth Normal Form (6NF) is historically treated so... reverently? Lots of texts on the internet consider 6NF to be “exotic”, “academic”, “never used in practice”, etc., etc. As software developers, we can solve any problem by adding one level of abstraction, and database modeling is not an exception. I’m going to show that any

How to safely escape JSON inside HTML SCRIPT elements

<script> tags follow unintuitive parsing rules that can break a webpage in surprising ways. Fortunately, it’s relatively straightforward to escape JSON for script tags. Just do this Replace < with \x3C or \u003C in JSON strings. with or in JSON strings. In PHP, use json_encode($data, JSON_HEX_TAG | JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES) for safe JSON in <script> tags. for safe JSON in tags. In WordPress, use wp_json_encode with the same flags. You don’t have to take my word for it, the HTML standard recom

Why building a self-hosted SaaS is harder

In the 90s, we flew in technicians to install Oracle databases in server basements. Today, Supabase spins up a backend, in seconds, for free. Over the past 30 years, software has gotten faster, cheaper and easier in almost every way. Some engineers might miss 24-month cycles of tranquil coding, but nobody wants to do code reviews over email or contort software to run on a 10 year-old server rack your eighth-biggest customer is still using. As an open source SaaS startup, we need to be able to

OnePlus 13 gets its own version of Google’s Best Take

Joe Maring / Android Authority TL;DR An update has rolled out for the OnePlus 13. The update introduces the new AI Perfect Shot feature. AI Perfect Shot can recognize a person and replace facial expressions to provide the best shot. Earlier this year, OnePlus announced that a bevy of new AI tools would soon be available on its phones. This included two photo-centric features: AI Reframe and AI Perfect Shot. It looks like the latter is now starting to roll out to the OnePlus 13. A new softwa

How to delete your personal data from the internet (and why you should right now)

Data brokers are making serious money by selling personal information. Your phone number, email, home address, and Social Security number could be packaged and sold to spammers, scammers, and identity thieves right now. Apple’s privacy protections help block future tracking, but if you want to get proactive about removing your existing personal data from broker databases, Incogni makes it easier than ever to fight back. The data broker ecosystem Data brokers built a billion-dollar industry by

How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB

At Radar, performance is a feature. Our platform processes over 1 billion API calls per day from hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. We provide geolocation infrastructure and solutions, including APIs for: Geocoding : Forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, and IP geocoding APIs with global coverage. : Forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, and IP geocoding APIs with global coverage. Search : Address autocomplete, address validation, and places search APIs. Address autocomplete, address v

Lurk – A Turing-complete programming language for ZK-SNARKs

Lurk Overview Lurk is a statically scoped dialect of Lisp, influenced by Scheme and Common Lisp. A reference implementation focused on describing and developing the core language can be found in the lurk-lisp repo. Lurk's distinguishing feature relative to most programming languages is that the correct execution of Lurk programs can be directly proved using SNARKs. The resulting proofs are succinct: they are relatively small, can be verified quickly, and they reveal only the information expli

This Week’s ‘Foundation’ Took a Killer Spy-Fi Turn

Foundation is nearing the halfway point of season three. Episode five, “Where Tyrants Spend Eternity,” began to show us how Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) hopes to gain an advantage over the sinister Mule (Pilou Asbæk). Her plan tapped into a much-loved trope that Star Wars series Andor also made excellent use of: sci-fi spycraft. “Where Tyrants Spend Eternity” is also tense throughout and ends up involving a horrific, large-scale tragedy (another Andor similarity), building to a final scene that t

How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. With the rise of AI writing tools, Wikipedia editors have had to deal with an onslaught of AI-generated content filled with false information and phony citations. Already, the community of Wikipedia volunteers has mobilized to fight back against AI slop, somethi

It's Staggeringly Easy for Hackers to Trick ChatGPT Into Leaking Your Most Personal Data

OpenAI's ChatGPT can easily be coaxed into leaking your personal data — with just a single "poisoned" document. As Wired reports, security researchers revealed at this year's Black Hat hacker conference that highly sensitive information can be stolen from a Google Drive account with an indirect prompt injection attack. In other words, hackers feed a document with hidden, malicious prompts to an AI that controls your data instead of manipulating it directly with a prompt injection, one of the mo

This app lets Mac users take full advantage of Android’s Quick Share with new QR code support

Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority TL;DR NearDrop allows users to send files from their Android device to their Mac. A new update adds support for sending files using QR codes. This update now allows you to send files from your computer to your Android device. It would be nice if Google created a Quick Share app for macOS that allowed you to share files quickly between your Android phone and your Mac. The NearDrop app can help fill that gap, but it’s not a perfect solution. However, a new up

What Does Consulting Do?

This paper provides the first systematic and comprehensive empirical study of management and strategy consulting. We unveil the workings of this opaque industry by drawing on universal administrative business-to-business transaction data based on value-added tax links from Belgium (2002-2023). These data permit us to document the nature of consulting engagements, take-up patterns, and the effects on client firms. We document that consulting take-up is concentrated among large, high-labor-product

The Windows 10 emoji picker has been broken for a month

The Windows 10 emoji picker has been broken for a month August 8, 2025 On July 8th, Microsoft released update KB5062554 to the world. It contains no documented changes or features. This update broke the emoji panel’s search functionality for all Windows 10 users. The broken grammar isn't the bug, that's just... how it is The emoji panel (accessed with Win + .) is the official way of typing emojis on Windows. I’m sure many users don’t know it exists. It’s hardly discoverable, and most desktop

HorizonDB, a geocoding engine in Rust that replaces Elasticsearch

At Radar, performance is a feature. Our platform processes over 1 billion API calls per day from hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. We provide geolocation infrastructure and solutions, including APIs for: Geocoding : Forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, and IP geocoding APIs with global coverage. : Forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, and IP geocoding APIs with global coverage. Search : Address autocomplete, address validation, and places search APIs. Address autocomplete, address v

Columbia University data breach impacts nearly 870,000 individuals

​An unknown threat actor has stolen the sensitive personal, financial, and health information of nearly 870,000 Columbia University current and former students and employees after breaching the university's network in May. Established in 1767 as King's College, Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university with a budget of $6.6 billion in 2024, over 20,000 employees, including 4,700 academic staff, and over 35,000 enrolled students across 19 schools and special programs. The

Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole

I started using Linear a couple of months ago and using it made me go down a technical rabbit hole that changed how I think about web applications. For the uninitiated, Linear is a project management tool that feels impossibly fast. Click an issue, it opens instantly. Update a status and watch in a second browser, it updates almost as fast as the source. No loading states, no page refreshes - just instant, interactions. After building traditional web apps for years, this felt wrong. Where’s th

Achieving 10,000x training data reduction with high-fidelity labels

Classifying unsafe ad content has proven an enticing problem space for leveraging large language models (LLMs). The inherent complexity involved in identifying policy-violating content demands solutions capable of deep contextual and cultural understanding, areas of relative strength for LLMs over traditional machine learning systems. But fine-tuning LLMs for such complex tasks requires high-fidelity training data that is difficult and expensive to curate at the necessary quality and scale. Stan

Leak Reveals the Workaday Lives of North Korean IT Scammers

Job hunting is a fresh kind of hell. Hours are wasted sifting through open roles, tweaking cover letters, dealing with obtuse recruiters—and that’s all before you get started with potential interviews. Arguably, some of the world’s most prolific job applicants—or at least most persistent—are those of North Korea’s sprawling IT worker schemes. For years, Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime has successfully sent skilled coders abroad where they’re tasked with finding remote work and sending money back

The Bus Station That Didn't Exist, and Other Data Epiphanies

“Data is multidisciplinary” is my mantra—it’s 2025, and I’ve now worked 20 years in every possible flavour of data—data visualization, open data advocacy, data pipelines in healthcare, data-driven national-scale services, AI innovation, and more. Whatever the application or project, my take on data literacy is the fundamental ability to challenge your own assumptions about the data you have or don’t, the appropriateness in using it, the ethics of your application, and ask yourself: is there a di

Topics: bus data dataset map use

OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5

OpenAI just released its first ever open-source large language models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. You can talk to them here. Are they good models? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for. They’re great at some benchmarks, of course (OpenAI would never have released them otherwise) but weirdly bad at others, like SimpleQA. Some people really like them. Others on Twitter really don’t. From what I can tell, they’re technically competent but lack a lot of out-of-domain knowledge: fo

Google discovered a new scam—and also fell victim to it

In June, Google said it unearthed a campaign that was mass-compromising accounts belonging to customers of Salesforce. The means: an attacker pretending to be someone in the customer's IT department feigning some sort of problem that required immediate access to the account. Two months later, Google has disclosed that it, too, was a victim. The series of hacks are being carried out by financially motivated threat actors out to steal data in hopes of selling it back to the targets at sky-high pr

California jury rules Meta violated privacy law in case involving period-tracking app

A California jury ruled against Meta in a privacy-related lawsuit involving the alleged collection of sensitive data from Flo, a period-tracking app. The jury ruled that the plaintiffs proved that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, according to a verdict form filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for Northern District of California. The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit dating back to 2021 against the health-tech company Flo Health and other businesses like Meta, Go

A generic non-invasive neuromotor interface for human-computer interaction

Hardware sEMG-RD The sEMG devices consisted of two primary subcomponents: a digital compute capsule and an analogue wristband (Extended Data Fig. 1). The digital compute capsule comprised the battery, antenna for Bluetooth communication and a printed circuit board that contained a microcontroller, an analogue-to-digital converter and an inertial measurement unit. The analogue wristband comprised discrete links that each housed a multilayer rigid printed circuit board that contained the low-noi

Mark your calendar: The ROG Xbox Ally release date just leaked

TL;DR The release date of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X will reportedly be October 16. The date comes from a leak focused on Europe, but other regions may follow suit. Xbox is expected to show off the handhelds and begin pre-sales during its Gamescom showcase on August 20. Xbox’s upcoming handhelds have been making waves since rumors about them began, but one key detail has remained elusive until now. A new report claims the official release date of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X will be on Octo

Bouygues Telecom confirms data breach impacting 6.4 million customers

Bouygues Telecom warns it suffered a data breach after the personal information of 6.4 million customers was exposed in a cyberattack. The company is one of the largest telecommunication service providers in France, offering mobile, internet, and IPTV services. Bouygues Telecom has 14.5 million mobile subscribers, 9,000 employees, and an annual revenue of €56.8 billion ($66B). Bouygues Telecom confirmed in a FAQ and a press statement that the attack occurred last Sunday, August 4, 2025. Altho

AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

A few days ago, OpenAI released an open-source language model for the first time in a very long time. It had been promised for a while, but the deadline kept being pushed for “safety” concerns. In fact, they’ve put quite a bit of time and effort into discussing safety, because, ostensibly, safety and ethics is at the top of people’s minds. So, the public is worried about AI ethics, and OpenAI is putting efforts into making sure the AI is ethical. Sounds like a match. Not just a match, but a