GoKawiil
Tech News
Google allows users to turn off Timeline, its location-history feature in Google Maps, through device-specific settings rather than a single global switch. Users can choose to simply pause tracking, delete all past data, or set auto-delete rules for activity older than three, 18, or 36 months. The app also provides options to export Timeline data or back it up in encrypted form to a Google account.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission has imposed a €403 million ($463M) fine on Google following a probe into three features—Web & App Activity, Location History, and Location Accuracy—that operated during the GDPR's early enforcement window from May 2018 to February 2020. The regulator concluded Google failed to properly justify its processing of location data and kept that data longer than necessary, while also falling short on transparency requirements across all three tools.
Microsoft has acknowledged that its September 2026 security updates cause the legacy File History backup tool to fail on multiple Windows 10 and 11 versions. Affected PCs may show FileHistory.exe crashes in Event Viewer, false 'Reconnect your drive' warnings, and backups that stop updating even though the external or network drive is connected properly.
Hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks have relaunched their music history podcast No Dogs in Space with a fourth season called Punk 2.0, kicking off with a multi-part look at the New York Dolls. The hiatus stretched over two years, partly because the pair abandoned an earlier planned season on the Washington DC punk scene after research into Bad Brains and the scope of the project became untenable.
The Verge's Version History podcast released a new episode examining how Texas Instruments built and maintained near-total dominance of the graphing calculator business since the early 2000s. Hosts David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Victoria Song discuss the company's history as part of a back-to-school themed season that will also cover One Laptop Per Child, Chromebooks, LeapPad, and overhead projectors.
A reverse-engineering report by developer ferstar found that ZCode, the coding agent built by Z.ai around its GLM models, silently packages a user's entire workspace—including .git history, LFS caches, reflogs and global configs—encrypts it, and uploads the archive to Aliyun OSS whenever a user is logged in. The researcher captured a 313MB encrypted archive from a 345MB commercial project spanning over 42,000 files, plus 564 logged failed upload attempts during investigation.
The New York Times is celebrating its 175th anniversary since its founding on September 18, 1851, by honoring the advertisers who have supported its journalism over nearly two centuries. The centerpiece is a nine-page print spread showcasing seven real advertisements pulled from the paper's archives, some dating back to its very first year. The campaign also spans a dedicated timeline landing page on its Advertising site, digital placements across its verticals, and audio spots on its podcasts.
A developer investigating unexpected disk usage discovered that Zhipu's ZCode AI coding app compresses and encrypts entire project workspaces—including .git history, LFS caches, reflogs and configs—and uploads them to Aliyun OSS without visible user consent. The encryption uses a server-issued RSA public key while the private key stays server-side, meaning neither the user nor the local client can ever decrypt the archives sitting on the user's own disk. In the investigated case, a 313MB encrypted baseline snapshot of a commercial project had failed to upload 564 times and remained queued locally.
UCLA researchers analyzed isotopic signatures in the tooth enamel of Thomas the T. rex, a well-preserved 66-million-year-old specimen from Montana, to estimate its internal body temperature. They calculated it at roughly 36.3 degrees Celsius, close to the 98.6-degree average for humans and comparable to elephants and large flightless birds like ostriches.
A blog post argues that much of engineering productivity comes from small, easily learned tricks rather than deep expertise. Examples include using python3 -m http.server for a quick local server, installing fzf for fuzzy-search of shell history, using atuin for SQLite-backed history search, and running a bare SELECT statement in SQL without a FROM clause to test expressions.
A developer built mapsnap, a program that automatically aligns old Sanborn Insurance Maps—detailed block-by-block city surveys made from roughly 1870 to 1960—with modern geographic coordinates. The tool processes the maps' rich detail, including building materials, addresses, business labels, and heights, to make them usable in mapping software. The post explains the technical approach and why automating this process matters for historians and archivists.
The Verge's podcast Version History kicked off its fifth season with an episode tracing how The Oregon Trail became a staple of classroom computing for decades. Host David Pierce spoke with gaming journalist Chris Grant and Philip Bouchard, who led design on the game's most well-known edition, about its academic roots and cultural staying power. The season will continue with episodes on other educational tech touchstones like the TI-84 calculator, One Laptop Per Child, Chromebook, LeapPad, and overhead projectors.