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No, Your iPhone Isn't Listening to You. Here's What's Really Happening

The bartender's first hoot is so clean and high-pitched it sounds piped in from the ceiling speakers — a single whooo that slices through the post-punk and clinking glassware. My friend Michael jolts on his barstool, beer sloshing dangerously close to the rim. "Did you hear that owl?" he whispers. "Not an owl," I say, matter-of-factly, wiping condensation from my glass before it drips onto the bar. The bartender, in his mid-30s with slicked-back hair and an immaculate black apron, lets out ano

Strava’s refreshed Apple Watch app adds Live Segments

is a deputy editor and Verge co-founder with a passion for human-centric cities, e-bikes, and life as a digital nomad. He’s been a tech journalist for 20 years. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Strava is bringing what it calls a “cleaner and more intuitive” experience to the Apple Watch along with Live Segments. The changes are meant to address growing demand from athletes turning to Apple’s wearable, according to Strava: In 2024, Strava

Volkswagen to make EVs more affordable, starting with the ID.Polo and a new SUV

It’s official. Volkswagen is shaking up its EV naming strategy. After confirming the ID.2 will launch as the ID.Polo, Volkswagen promises its new family of entry-level EVs “will make electric driving more affordable than ever.” The ID.Polo is just the start with an electric T-Cross and much more coming soon. Meet the Volkswagen ID.Polo Volkswagen is reviving some of its most popular nameplates for its next-generation electric vehicles. Starting with the ID.Polo next year, Volkswagen will begin

Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself

Brioches and Knife, Eliot Hodgkin, 08/1961 1. When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. Attention is something we “have to protect.” And we have to “pay” attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be. Slowing down makes reality vivid, strange, and hot. Let me start with the most obvious example. As anyone who has had good sex knows, susta

Paramount Plus Coupon Codes and Deals: Up to 50% Off

The most talked-about TV show in the country right now, South Park, is on Paramount+. Don’t you want to know what got Trump in such a tizzy? Stream the much buzzed-about South Park, fan-favorite Yellowstone, original series MobLand, and rebooted crime drama Dexter & Dexter on Paramount+. The streaming network has a bingeable TV series for almost everyone. And whether you want to remember Lindsay Lohan’s old face in the classic Mean Girls flick, or wonder just how many more sequels Tom Cruise ha

Synthesia’s AI clones are more expressive than ever. Soon they’ll be able to talk back.

When Synthesia launched in 2017, its primary purpose was to match AI versions of real human faces—for example, the former footballer David Beckham—with dubbed voices speaking in different languages. A few years later, in 2020, it started giving the companies that signed up for its services the opportunity to make professional-level presentation videos starring either AI versions of staff members or consenting actors. But the technology wasn’t perfect. The avatars’ body movements could be jerky a

Galaxy Tab S11 revives 11-inch size as S Pen ditches Bluetooth, copies iPad placement

Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab S11 has arrived with updated specs, the return of an 11-inch size, and some big S Pen changes. The Galaxy Tab S11 series will feel pretty similar to anyone who has seen the past few generations. This year, we’re getting the usual 14.6-inch monster, the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra, alongside the return of a smaller 11-inch Galaxy Tab S11 that was missing from last year’s lineup. There’s no 12.4-inch “Plus” model this time around, though. Under the hood, these tablets are power

Eufy's MarsWalker allows its robot vacuums to climb stairs

Eufy just introduced a couple of new devices at the IFA conference in Germany, including something called the MarsWalker. This little doodad picks up robot vacuums and carries them up and down stairs. That's pretty neat, considering stairs are the bane of any robovac's existence. The company says the MarsWalker automatically recognizes common stair types, including straight, L-shaped and U-shaped. It transports the vacuum between floors and drops it off at the base station when needed. Eufy boa

Save $50 on the OnePlus Pad 3 and get a free stylus pen - here's the deal

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Samsung just launched new flagship Galaxy tablets - and quietly removed this model

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Visa's AI-enhanced payment options will be coming to more apps soon, thanks to new MCP support

Getty Images / Anna Barclay / Contributor Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Visa Intelligent Commerce opens Visa's payment network to developers and engineers. These individuals can then build agentic AI shopping experiences using Visa's network. Now, Visa Intelligent Commerce offers Model Context Protocol (MCP) support. AI agents can optimize how people do everyday tasks in the digital world, including shopping. In May, Visa unveiled Visa Intell

Say Bye with JavaScript Beacon

Sometimes we want to send a piece of data to our servers when user leaves our website or webapp. Maybe it’s for for analytics or even auto-logout when they leave the website. But do you know what is a reliable way of doing it? Most of you might say use XMLHTTPRequest (or fetch) in beforeunload or unload events. Like, window . addEventListener ( "beforeunload" , () => { fetch ( '/analytics' , { method : "POST" , headers : { "Content-Type" : "application/json" , }, body : JSON . stringify ({ eve

I Should Have Loved Electrical Engineering

Author’s note: Drafted in 2022, lightly edited and finished on Sep 1, 2025 for clarity. Substance unchanged. I tried to not glamorize my undergraduate experience but I could be hallucinating. “Hardware invention enabled the information revolution. The internet and all the fancy applications are nothing but some byproduct of the advancement in computer chips and fiber optic cables”, 18-year-old me thought wishfully, concluding that the next natural sequence in the major global transformation mus

Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available

After working hard since our Polars Cloud announcement last February, we are pleased to officially launch Polars Cloud. Polars Cloud is now Generally Available on AWS. Beyond that, we also launched our novel Distributed Engine in Open Beta on Polars Cloud. You can immediately get started at https://cloud.pola.rs/. After that you can fire a remote distributed query: import polars_cloud as pc import polars as pl from datetime import date with pc . ComputeContext ( workspace = "<my-workspace>" ,

After a Complicated Legal Past, AI Set Her Free

At the turn of the millennium, during her teens and early twenties, Heather Chase was addicted to methamphetamine. To fund her addiction, she broke into cars and homes and forged checks, leading to several arrests and a year in jail. But she got sober in 2004 after attending a court-ordered recovery program in Salt Lake City. She moved on, ultimately graduating college in 2014 and earning a master’s degree in 2015. Today, she runs the same nonprofit recovery center she attended, called the Hav

Porsche Is Set to Be the First Electric Car Maker to Deliver Wireless Charging Later This Year

Table of Contents Porsche Is Set to Be the First Electric Car Maker to Deliver Wireless Charging Later This Year Those who closely follow electric cars will have heard whispers of wireless charging for a while now. And if you're not an EV aficionado, you've probably wondered why it hasn't happened. Well, that's all about to change. Porsche announced on Thursday that it’s rolling out wireless charging on the upcoming all-electric Cayenne later this year. The goal is to put an end to wrangling t

Is Congestion Pricing Working? The MTA’s Revamped Data Team Is Figuring It Out

For the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data and analytics team, January 5, 2025, felt a lot like kismet. Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had passed a law requiring the MTA to release “easily accessible, understandable, and usable” data to the public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the new team’s formation. Meanwhile, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls cars entering Manhatta

Topics: agency data mta new team

Here’s how you can watch Samsung’s September ‘Galaxy Event’ later today

Samsung TL;DR Samsung is hosting a Galaxy Event today, unveiling new devices including the Galaxy S25 FE and Galaxy Tab S11 series. The Galaxy S25 FE is expected to bring flagship-adjacent features to a mid-range price point. The Galaxy Tab S11 series will introduce two new high-end tablets with S Pen support and premium specs. In case you didn’t already know, Samsung is hosting a “Galaxy Event” today. While it’s not officially branded as an “Unpacked” event, the company will still reveal a

This guy made his own slider phone out of a broken Z Flip 5 and BlackBerry keyboard

TL;DR A YouTuber attached a BlackBerry Q10 keyboard to a folded Galaxy Z Flip 5 with a broken folding screen. The YouTuber also added a magnetic slider mechanism akin to phones like the Nokia N97. A video shows that the keyboard works in apps like YouTube and in games. What happens if your Galaxy Z Flip‘s folding screen breaks? Well, you could get it repaired, or you could do what one enterprising person did and attach a BlackBerry keyboard to it. YouTuber and inventor Marcin Plaza decided t

AR Fluid Simulation Demo

Fluid Simulation (Demo) 2025 I wanted to see what happens when a fluid simulation collides with real objects. To test this idea I created this demo. To capture the shapes of objects, I mounted a webcam above the screen. A polarization filter blocks the image displayed on the screen, preventing a feedback loop, while still allowing the camera to see anything placed in front of it. The video feed is then aligned with the computer-generated simulation, so the fluid can react to those cutout obj

Inside Philips Hue’s plans to make all your lights motion sensors

is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Philips Hue has announced that its smart light bulbs — both new and existing models — are being upgraded to feature built-in motion sensing. The new feature, called Hue MotionAware, uses radio-frequency (RF) sensing to detect changes

Trump to host tech CEOs over dinner for inaugural event in renovated Rose Garden

U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump walk to the Rose Garden of the White House to hold a signing ceremony for the Take it Down Act, in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 19, 2025. U.S. President Trump will host two dozen high-profile tech and business leaders for an inaugural event in the White House's renovated Rose Garden on Thursday. Invitees include Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, according to a lis

Evaluating Agents

“Models constantly change and improve but evals persist” Look at the data No amount of evals will replace the need to look at the data, once you have a evals good coverage you’ll be able to decrease the time but it’ll be always a must to just look at the agent traces to identify possible issues or things to improve. Starting, end to end evals You must create evals for your agents, stop relying solely on manual testing. Not sure where to start? Add e2e evals, define a success criteria (

Topics: agent data e2e end evals

Evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people

In a moment with many important economic questions and fears, I continue to find this among the more interesting mysteries about the US economy in the long run: Is artificial intelligence already taking jobs from young people? If you’ve been casually following the debate over AI and its effect on young graduates’ employment, you could be excused for thinking that the answer to that question is “possibly,” or “definitely yes,” or “almost certainly no.” Confusing! Let’s review: Possibly! In Apri

The best VPN deals: Get up to 77 percent off ExpressVPN, ProtonVPN, Surfshark and others

A virtual private network (VPN) can save you a lot of money if you use it right. By changing your virtual location, you can use one streaming service to see shows that might be scattered between three or four in your home country. You can also trawl the world for discounts that only show up in a few select regions. And of course, you can't put a price on the joy of taking back your online business from intrusive ads and trackers. VPN providers are all competing to boost their subscriber counts,

The Evidence That AI Is Destroying Jobs for Young People Just Got Stronger

In a moment with many important economic questions and fears, I continue to find this among the more interesting mysteries about the US economy in the long run: Is artificial intelligence already taking jobs from young people? If you’ve been casually following the debate over AI and its effect on young graduates’ employment, you could be excused for thinking that the answer to that question is “possibly,” or “definitely yes,” or “almost certainly no.” Confusing! Let’s review: Possibly! In Apri

Want Paramount Plus? You Can Get Half Off Annual Plans Right Now

Between hikes at Netflix, Apple TV Plus and Peacock, streaming services haven't held back on increasing prices in 2025. It's as good a time as any for a deal, and Paramount Plus is offering one for new and returning subscribers. Now through Sept. 18, you can get half off Paramount Plus' annual plans, which require you to pay up-front for the 12 months. You can choose between $30 for a year of Paramount Plus Essential, which is ad-based, and $60 for Paramount Plus Premium, which has no commercia

What is it like to be a bat?

1974 philosophy paper by Thomas Nagel Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat". "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consci

A Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI

Paranoia is as natural to Silicon Valley as lip fillers are to Los Angeles. In the Bay Area, you can't throw a rock without hitting a startup founder convinced everyone is out to steal his ideas or poach his staff — a state of mind reaffirmed by the fact that sometimes, people very much are trying to rip off their competitors. Until the last few years, OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, seemed above that fracas. Altman's sanguine predictions about artificial general intelligence (AGI), a benchmark