GoKawiil
Tech News
Rivian has released a Ghostbusters-themed over-the-air update for its R1S, R1T and R2 electric vehicles, developed with Sony Pictures. The update, active through November 2, adds custom exterior lights, sounds, dashboard graphics, voice-assistant tie-ins, and a parked-car arcade game themed around the Ecto-1 car and other Ghostbusters elements like the Proton Pack and Slimer.
Google revised its privacy policy effective October 16, 2026 to clarify that Gmail, Drive and Photos content remains excluded from ad personalization by default, but connecting those services to Personal Intelligence—an opt-in feature letting Google's AI search draw on linked apps—can change that. Google says the content itself is never shown to advertisers, and sensitive topics like health remain off-limits, but ads shown through AI Mode can reflect what a user's question and the AI's answer were about.
Google's privacy policy, updated October 16, now qualifies its longstanding promise not to personalize ads based on Gmail, Drive or Photos content. The exception applies to users who opt into Personal Intelligence, letting Gemini and AI Mode pull context from those apps, and Google's support page confirms that resulting summaries and inferences can feed into ad personalization. Google says advertisers still can't access the apps directly, and sensitive categories like health or religion remain excluded from targeting.
Android Authority's Robert Triggs tested portrait photography on three flagship phones, examining how each handles skin tones, facial detail and background blur. The Pixel's portrait mode offers a simple zoom-based interface with a default 2x setting, plus finer manual controls for exposure, white balance and blur strength than its rivals provide outside their Pro modes.
Apple Watch's Theater Mode dims the display, mutes sound, disables raise-to-wake and blocks visual notifications, requiring a screen tap or button press to wake it. Unlike Do Not Disturb, it keeps haptic vibrations active so wearers still feel notifications arrive. Users enable it by tapping the side button to open Control Center and selecting the comedy-tragedy mask icon, and must manually turn it off since there's no automatic timer or event-based shutoff.
Google announced new Chrome features that warn users when they land on suspicious or dangerous websites, available through the browser's Enhanced Protection mode. The update targets fake antivirus and browser-update scams with a likelihood score, and counters 'ClickFix' attacks by clearing the clipboard and showing a warning when a site tries to trick users into pasting malicious code.
The DuckDB team released version 2.0.0, a long-term support build nicknamed 'Cinnamon Teal,' incorporating nearly 20,000 commits since version 1.5. The update adds a polished Quack protocol, asynchronous I/O, a new VARIANT data type, an agent mode, triggers, and an extensible SQL parser. DuckDB says this LTS release will be supported until at least October 2027, alongside continued support for the 1.4 and extended 1.5 lines.
A developer released Sumi.css, a minimalist, classless-first CSS framework that styles plain semantic HTML automatically. The single-file package is 6.7 KB minified and gzipped, requires no build step or JavaScript, and includes light/dark mode support, themeable CSS custom properties, and accessibility features like focus rings and ARIA-driven states.
Amazon is offering a 12% discount on Belkin's SoundForm Isolate Buds ANC, bringing the earbuds to a new low price. The earbuds include active noise cancellation, a transparency mode, and companion app controls.
A new emulator called PS5X lets Xbox Series X hardware run PlayStation 5 games, but only through Microsoft's Developer Mode, which restricts games to 5GB of memory versus the 13.5GB available to retail Xbox titles. The cap only lifts when software runs via the Visual Studio debugger, a developer-testing setup, and consoles in Developer Mode cannot load retail games until switched back. Microsoft banned emulators from retail Xbox mode in 2023 and has reportedly suspended players for 15 days for circumventing that policy.
A troubleshooting guide outlines steps for fixing frequent Amazon Alexa problems, including setting up Voice ID when the assistant misunderstands speech, enabling Brief Mode or a Brief personality style to reduce wordy replies, changing the Wake Word if it activates accidentally, and grouping multiple Alexa devices by room so audio plays from the correct speaker. Each fix is accessed through settings in the Alexa app or by giving Alexa specific voice commands.
A hands-on test compared the iPhone 18 Pro's new variable aperture lens at f/1.8 versus its widened f/1.48 setting for Night mode photography. Switching to the wider aperture cut exposure duration in one test shot from 2.1 seconds to 1.7 seconds, with similar modest reductions seen in other shots. The lens can also be manually stopped down to f/4 to deliberately lengthen exposures, such as for smoothing moving water.