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Tech News
In this week's Installer newsletter, The Verge's David Pierce highlights Apple's new iPad Mini, noting it lacks a ProMotion display but is thinner, lighter and more water- and dust-resistant than before. He also mentions Amazon's $500 Echo Show 16 smart display and a cheaper $200 Alexa-powered photo frame, alongside other gear picks like a Pebble Index 01 and CMF Speaker S.
DuckDuckGo publicly criticized Samsung for embedding a non-removable Google search bar on One UI 9 home screens, even for users who prefer other search engines. The bar, unlike a typical widget, cannot be long-pressed or dragged away, though Samsung does allow users to turn it off entirely through Home screen settings. The change builds on Android 17's revamped search widget system, which Motorola has also adopted.
Canada is weighing legislation that critics say would effectively mandate backdoors and expanded data retention in encrypted services. Psiphon VPN and Signal have said they would leave the Canadian market rather than comply, while Apple, Meta, DuckDuckGo and NordVPN have also criticized or said they'd reconsider their presence in the country.
A technical article explains how to block advertisements across an entire Android device rather than within individual apps, noting that Android has become increasingly locked down and harder to customize. It describes four DNS-based techniques that intercept ad-serving hostnames and redirect them to invalid IP addresses, which can be applied either on the device itself or via an external DNS server. The piece notes DuckDuckGo's browser blocks trackers but not ads outright, so additional measures are needed.
A researcher who previously exposed a similar Chrome bug in 2019 has found that Chrome version 152.0.7977.83 again exempts google.com from the 'delete site data on close' setting, letting Google cookies, local storage, and session storage persist after all windows are closed and even after relaunching the browser. The behavior was reproduced on two Macs, with sign-in and default search engine ruled out as causes, and appears specific to www.google.com.
A DuckDuckGo survey found that a third of AI users have confided secrets to chatbots they wouldn't tell trusted people in their lives. Washington Post reporting shows these conversations aren't as private as users assume, having surfaced in at least a dozen court cases over the past two years and potentially being accessible to employers, law enforcement, or exposed through company data breaches like Anthropic's Claude leak in July.
A DuckDuckGo Research survey found that about one-third of people disclose sensitive personal details to AI chatbots that they withhold from friends, family, and doctors, with the figure rising to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. Nearly half of parents surveyed admitted to telling chatbots things they've never shared with their own children or closest confidants.
DuckDuckGo's new survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. adults found that almost a third of respondents have confided something to an AI chatbot they wouldn't tell friends, family or doctors, with the figure jumping to 56% among self-identified AI enthusiasts. The survey also found that most respondents didn't know chatbot conversations are typically used for training by default, and only a quarter knew such chats could be subpoenaed by law enforcement.