It’s almost time to enjoy the final Marvel TV show of 2026.

VisionQuest, starring Paul Bettany as the titular android, will make its Disney+ debut in mid-October — and to celebrate its impending release, I’ve put together a tricky quiz that covers the superhero’s story so far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Marvel Television’s VisionQuest | Official Trailer – YouTube

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After winding its way through reviews and preliminary approvals, Apple’s legal settlement over its allegedly misleading AI claims during the initial Apple Intelligence launch has finally reached the point where you can sign up to be paid from the $250 million pool via a live website.

Apple settled a false advertising lawsuit brought by Clarkson Law Firm in May, agreeing to pay $250 million to customers who bought some iPhone models during a specified period. The lawsuit alleged that Apple misled customers by promising AI features that didn’t ship with the new devices. If you purchased an iPhone 16 or iPhone 15 at launch, you may be entitled to receive a portion of the quarter-billion-dollar settlement. Payouts between $25 and $95 per eligible device are expected.

“Apple has reached a settlement to resolve claims related to the availability of two additional features. We resolved this matter to stay focused on doing what we do best, delivering the most innovative products and services to our users,” an Apple spokesperson said in an earlier statement to CNET Managing Editor David Lumb.

The court granted preliminary approval of the settlement on July 17. Then an Aug. 13 order moved up the final approval date by seven months.

How to claim your portion of the settlement

As of Sept. 21, you can go to SmartphoneAISettlement.com and enter your information to confirm your eligibility for monetary relief. People whom Apple and the settlement administrator determined would be eligible will also receive email or postal notices from the company Verita directing them to the website.

The claims window closes on Dec. 21, 2026, so you have three months to act.

Who is eligible for the $250 million settlement?

If you bought one of the following devices between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025, you could be eligible to receive a settlement payment:

• iPhone 16
• iPhone 16E
• iPhone 16 Plus
• iPhone 16 Pro
• iPhone 16 Pro Max
• iPhone 15 Pro
• iPhone 15 Pro Max

The iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are included because they have the processor and memory to run Apple Intelligence features.

It’s estimated that approximately 36 million customers are eligible for this settlement.

Why is there a lawsuit over Apple Intelligence?

When Apple advertised its new iPhone 16 lineup in 2024, it emphasized how the models were optimized for AI features such as an enhanced Siri that could act as an intelligent agent. When the phones did arrive, Apple Intelligence wasn’t yet ready; its first features didn’t arrive until iOS 18.1, five weeks later.

According to the proposed settlement, “Apple allegedly saturated the market with deceptive ads, inducing consumers to purchase iPhones based on the promise of certain enhanced Siri features.”

Some features of Apple Intelligence did ship soon after the introduction of the iPhone 16 and iOS 18, including Visual Intelligence, Live Translation, Writing Tools, Genmoji and Clean Up. But those weren’t the advanced features Apple highlighted. In fact, the type of intelligent interactions Apple advertised is only starting to show up in Siri AI, which is part of iOS 27, which was released in early September.

When can you expect to receive a settlement payment?

According to the settlement, Apple needed to provide the information about affected customers within five days of the settlement approval. As of late July, preliminary approval has been granted by the court.

After the data is provided and verified, a 45-day notice period begins to inform potential consumers that they’re eligible for a payment.

On Aug. 13, US District Court Judge Noël Wise granted approval to push forward the date from Sept. 29, 2027, to Feb. 24, 2027.

Provided approval is granted, the first checks or deposits will arrive sometime within a 60-day window after February next year, depending on court dates and possible extensions.

Jeff Carlson

Senior Writer

Jeff Carlson writes about mobile technology at CNET, from cellular phone plans to devices and emerging technology.

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Photo credit: TU Delft
Forest monitoring usually means a small quadcopter hanging in place while its motors chew through a battery in a few dozen minutes. Noise follows the same schedule. A machine that can grab a branch and cut power would last far longer and bother far fewer animals, yet the last few inches of that landing have wrecked plenty of earlier designs.

Cameras work fine until the gripper enters the frame and the drone is left scrambling to grasp the exact branch it need. Leaves and trees, as well as an overgrown mass of branches, obstruct the view. Salua Hamaza is quite forthright about the issue. Vision brings you close, but when it really counts, your own grip gets in the way. Birds have already figured this out, for example, taking that final stretch with their feet, physically feeling their way along the wood as they gain traction. Hamaza believes that a flying robot would benefit greatly from the same closed loop of feedback.

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Hamaza, Anton Bredenbeck, and Anish Jadoenathmisier designed a lightweight hand for their quadrotor with three fingers in about human proportions. Each finger is made up of three parts: a 3D printed PLA spine and a soft silicone pad that can rub against a variety of surfaces, including bark, a wooden beam, a T junction of wood, and even an arm. The fingers spring shut on their own, so holding wood requires almost no extra effort once everything is in order. When the drone has to search, a single tendon opens each finger, and then there are the sensors, which are 9 copper electrodes down under each pad that provide a simple yes-or-no response if they make touch. The foil on the tips of the fingers even gives you a bump on both sides. An MPR121 controller converts the capacitance change into a yes/no signal that the flight computer may use right away.

Even so, the drone starts by guessing with its cameras. But after that, it begins flying in a figure eight pattern, opening and shutting its hand at each end of the loop. The initial touch is all it requires. That’s because the machine already knows the geometry of its own fingers, so a single sensor reading corresponds to a point in space and a direction to move in. Bredenbeck explained it a little more simply: each sensor merely indicates that something is present, but if you know the form of the hand, you can determine where the branch is and how it is pitched. The drone continues to rotate and slide until all three fingers come into contact, at which point it turns off the motors completely. If everything goes wrong and it can’t get a grip, it just returns to a safe hover and tries again.

Simulation runs performed much better than expected, clearing more than 99% of landings even when the starting guess was significantly off, by 60 cm and 50 degrees. Despite the same shaky projections, hardware flights spanning 26 testing were also a success. Then they attempted a version without the tactile feedback loop, which you’d expect to be a disaster, but it actually kept getting closer even when the estimate was off by up to 10 cm. The diameter of the branch it could pick up increased from approximately 10 cm to a lot more respectable 15 cm, all because it could use its fingers to feel its way in. However, it is not perfect, as very thin sticks under 2 cm just glide through without making enough contact to be picked up. One of the cases they observed recognized the first bump at 15 seconds in and locked onto the branch about 35 seconds later. There is a catch if your fingertip becomes stuck on a branch toward the end.
[Source]

STP analysis is a marketing framework that helps firms select which client segments to target, which to prioritize and how the brand should be viewed by those customers. STP is an abbreviation of Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. Working through these steps in order helps to transform a large market into a targeted marketing approach.

This guide explains how to conduct an STP analysis and apply each stage in practice. For a simple analysis, a document or spreadsheet may be enough. When several customer groups need to be compared, a visual tool such as Wondershare EdrawMind can help organize the research and connect the three stages in one place.

What Is STP Analysis?

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) is a marketing framework that helps you to take a large market and transform it into a targeted plan. Segmentation is the process of dividing consumers into groups with comparable traits, requirements or habits.

Targeting reviews these categories and decides which the company should concentrate on, based on criteria such as customer wants, market potential and business fit. Positioning is thus a description of how the brand is to be presented to the target audience in relation to competing options.

These three steps work together to help firms develop more relevant marketing strategies rather than sending the same message to every consumer. Wondershare EdrawMind may help you organize and illustrate the links between customer segments, target audiences and positioning decisions in a single, clear mind map.

How to Conduct an STP Analysis with EdrawMind

EdrawMind allows you to do a STP analysis in six phases, beginning with defining the market and identifying customer groups and progressing to choosing a target audience and building a clear positioning plan.

1. Define the Market

Begin by deciding whatever product, service or market you wish to study. In EdrawMind, make it the major theme of a new mind map, then branch off into categories like consumers, rivals, goods and market circumstances. AI Mind Map Generation can also assist you in developing a basic structure from a prompt, which you can then enhance as you conduct further study.

2. Identify Customer Segments

Then, segment your market into relevant consumer groups based on demographics, geography, interests, requirements, purchase habits, etc. In EdrawMind, branches and sub-branches provide you the ability to arrange each section and add appropriate properties below it. You might also begin with an existing template and personalize it to your study.

3. Evaluate Each Segment

Once you have mapped your categories, assess them against factors such as market size, growth potential, competition, customer demands, profitability and business fit. EdrawMind’s Relationship, Boundary, Callout and Summary tools assist to arrange the supporting content and demonstrate relationships between distinct findings, making the comparison easier to understand.

4. Select the Target Audience

Once you have compared the segments, determine which audience offers the strongest opportunity for the business. Use icons, marks, boundaries, or formatting options in EdrawMind to highlight the selected segment and distinguish it from the others. Keeping the supporting research within the same map also makes the target selection easier to explain.

5. Develop the Positioning

Determine the target audience’s core demands and examine how the brand might solve them differently than rivals. Create branches in EdrawMind for customer wants, product benefits, rivals and areas of differentiation, then link similar ideas using Relationship Lines. Customizable themes and layouts might help to effectively communicate the positioning plan.

6. Review the STP Strategy

Finally, go over the entire map to ensure that the segmentation, target audience and placement are all related logically. EdrawMind’s real-time collaboration allows team members to examine and amend the analysis together and its presentation and export options make it simple to share the finished plan with stakeholders.

Examples of STP in Practice

Customers might be segmented by firm size and technological skill, according to a project management software provider. It could target mid-sized teams that still rely heavily on spreadsheets and position its product around simple setup and easier collaboration.

A skincare business could segment clients by skin issues, age and purchase habits. It might attract younger consumers searching for solutions for specific issues and could differentiate itself with science-backed formulae and ingredient transparency.

In both examples, the positioning is based on the needs of the selected audience. This connection between the three stages is what makes STP useful as a marketing strategy.

FAQ

Key Takeaways

STP analysis consists of three interrelated steps: understanding the market through segmentation, selecting the most appropriate audience through targeting and developing a clear position for that audience.

A successful plan relies on keeping these stages connected. When targeting and positioning are founded on genuine consumer demands and market research, marketing choices become more focused and easier for a team to discuss and implement.

from the dysfunction-junction dept

I’ve written a lot this year about how Republicans hijacked the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program (created by the 2021 infrastructure bill) and immediately set about weakening oversight standards, eliminating enforcement of stuff like broadband affordability, speed, and equitable deployment, and making it a priority to heavily subsidize Elon Musk for LEO satellite broadband networks he had already planned to deploy anyway.

All of the chaos and changes have resulted in endless delays, and a lot of promising providers backing out of the BEAD program entirely. That includes electric cooperatives, many of which have been pushing affordable fiber optics into their existing, very rural electrical footprints.

The Trump NTIA process has been so filled with cronyism, delays, changes, new pointless regulations and chaos, a third or more of U.S. cooperatives say they’ll no longer participate:

“63 electric cooperatives across 27 states received provisional BEAD awards to offer reliable high-speed broadband to some of the most challenging eligible locations in the country. But delayed implementation and shifting guidance have created a program defined by uncertainty and confusion. Instead of accelerating deployment, continual revisions to the program have discouraged participation,” said Matheson.

“To date, 20 of the 63 electric cooperatives originally slated to participate in BEAD have withdrawn from the program. Many others are considering withdrawal, citing concerns over the application of extra-statutory pole attachment requirements as a condition of participation,” he added.”

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Cooperatives are annoyed, in part, about new pole-attachment regulations the NTIA applied that make installations much more time-consuming and complex. The Communications Act explicitly exempted electric cooperatives and municipal utilities from federal pole regulation because such providers serve the public interest and are often the only ones willing to connect rural Americans.

Many incumbent telecoms control local poles, and make pole fiber attachment extra annoying to forestall competition. I’d suspect the new restrictions — from an administration that generally demonizes corporate oversight and regulation — are at the direct request of companies like AT&T, worried that popular cooperatives might gobble up market share in markets they theoretically could serve in the future.

It’s worth reminding you: Republicans spent the entirety of the last few years insisting that BEAD was a giant government boondoggle, and that once in office they’d fix it. This claim was routinely propped up by the likes of Ezra Klein at the New York Times, who hasn’t had a single solitary thing to say about U.S. broadband access policy in the two-years since Trumpism retook control of the program.

Congress originally set aside $42.5 billion to improve U.S. broadband. The Trump administration effectively tried to cut the program in half, insisting that Elon Musk’s expensive, congested satellite service would be “good enough” for a lot of these locations. The Trump administration then very clearly tried to wander off with the remaining money, and continues to be very murky about when states will receive it.

Fixing U.S. broadband requires a coordinated array of solutions. Some communities are helped by municipally-owned broadband. Some are helped by the local electrical cooperative getting into fiber and expanding cheap fiber access to rural communities. Others are best served by public-private partnerships between local governments and private providers.

The Trump administration’s BEAD changes have worked tirelessly to redirect a lot of money away from these popular, highly localized solutions, and funnel as much money as possible into the back pocket of incumbent monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, or billionaires like Elon Musk.

Other smaller and mid-sized providers are increasingly backing away from participating in the program entirely, either because of new restrictions and delays, or because the cost of deployment is skyrocketing due to wars, tariffs, and other Trump bumbling. As more BEAD bidders back away from participation or existing awards, more and more money will be funneled to Musk for substandard service so Trump Republicans can pretend the problem of U.S. broadband access has been “fixed.”

In states like California, Trump officials are insisting that California won’t receive any of its already-scheduled $1.86 billion BEAD grant award if they do literally anything telecom monopolies don’t like, whether that’s holding big telecom affordable for high prices, or enforcing the state’s net neutrality law.

It’s a cronyistic mess that’s starting to see growing bipartisan anger even in states like Texas, and it’s poised to get much, much louder as the long-delayed money to states truly begins to flow next year. Right now, a lot of people in state broadband policy are hesitant to publicly comment because they’re worried the Trump administration will sever their grant awards entirely.

Filed Under: bead, broadband, cronyism, delays, elon musk, fiber, high speed internet, ntia, telecom

Sony’s new ULT range of speakers stretches from the relatively manageable $450 ULT Tower 5 to the frankly ridiculous $1,200 ULT Tower Max. Sitting between them is the ULT Tower 7, with excellent sound, an ample selection of inputs, a combined 420 watts of output, and a 30-hour battery. Be warned, though, while it’s smaller than the Tower Max, it is still absolutely enormous and weighs 50.3 pounds.

Most party speakers will accept music from a DJ controller, but Sony goes further with RCA and balanced XLR inputs, plus an XLR output for expanding a wired setup. Auracast-based Party Chain can also connect up to 100 compatible speakers, so you can go head-to-head with Madison Square Garden on volume.

Inside is an 11-inch woofer, two 4.7-inch midrange drivers, and four tweeters, including a rear-facing pair that spread audio around the room. Bass is deep and effective, and at close quarters with the volume cranked, I could really feel it. It’s not quite bone-shaking at the club levels, but it’s still impressive.

The 360-degree driver configuration helps sound spread out and avoid sounding too boxed in, and while the bass is still quite directional, I really enjoyed the scale and ease with which this speaker filled the room.

If you have the budget and space, and you want to play loud all night, the Sony delivers, but I do wish it had a retractable handle. The built-in corner handles are OK-, but you need to angle it sharply at an odd angle to engage the wheels, and trust me, you don’t want to carry this speaker by hand very far.

Best Compact Party Speaker

Nscale, a British neocloud, has secured $3.36 billion in financing ahead of its IPO later this year, the company announced on Friday. Structured as a convertible note, the massive funding round underscores the staggering capital required to build out AI data centers.

Led by hedge fund Third Point, the new investment includes $2.36 billion available to the company immediately and an additional $1 billion coming from existing investor Nvidia, which Nscale will receive in mid-November. The notes will convert into equity shares once the IPO is completed.

Nscale, which filed its IPO paperwork last week, is expected to be valued at $35 billion on the NYSE, Financial Times reported, and is seeking to raise $3 billion in the offering, according to Bloomberg.

Since it was spun out of Australian cryptocurrency mining company Arkon Energy two years ago, Nscale has amassed over $103 billion worth of contracts, according to its IPO filing.

The company is currently developing several large data center campuses, including in Norway and West Virginia.   

from the petty-censorial-tyrants dept

On Monday we wrote about Donald Trump’s direct attack on the First Amendment and the free press by banning reporters from the White House. As we expected, a judge on Thursday morning issued a Temporary Restraining Order, blocking the White House from continuing this unconstitutional action, though (as happened the last time Trump tried this) the court relied on Fifth Amendment due process rather than reaching the First Amendment question.

Plaintiffs are also likely to succeed in showing that their hard passes were revoked without constitutionally adequate due process. The “general rule” is that “individuals must receive notice and an opportunity to be heard before the Government deprives them” of a constitutionally protected interest…. Indeed, the Supreme Court has “described the root requirement of the Due Process Clause as being that an individual be given an opportunity for a hearing before he is deprived of any significant property interest.” Cleveland Bd. of Educ. v. Loudermill, 470 U.S. 532, 542 (1985) (citation omitted). Karem also holds that, because of the substantial interests at stake, before the Government can revoke the White House-issued hard pass of a reporter it must promulgate rules or standards governing the conduct that would lead to such revocation. See 960 F.3d at 665. And the reporter must “receive fair notice not only of the conduct that would subject him to punishment, but also of the magnitude of the sanction that the White House might impose.”

Trump’s favorite trick of declaring “national security” as an excuse to do whatever the hell he wants doesn’t work here either:

Still, on this record, Defendants offer little to back up their asserted national security interest to justify revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes. So this interest does not tilt these factors in their favor, especially given that Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits.

For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was “banning” Plaintiffs from the White House—instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.3 And even the justifications provided to Plaintiffs after this case was filed are ambiguous about the true purpose of the revocations: while Defendants’ letters to Plaintiffs mention national security concerns, they purport to identify reporting that “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods,” leaving open the possibility that all the stories fall into the later bucket, rather than the former.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the Trump presidency if his White House didn’t start out by ignoring the TRO. According to Politico (one of the banned outlets):

A POLITICO reporter was denied access to the White House Thursday and his press credentials confiscated after a judge ordered the Trump administration overnight to immediately restore access for news organizations that President Donald Trump banned from the complex last week.

MS NOW and CNN said their reporters were also denied entry. The three outlets have been barred from the White House since Saturday, following an order from Trump to do so “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”

And so, the news orgs rushed back to court to point out that the White House was violating the TRO, which judges generally don’t take kindly to:

Early this morning the Court issued a Temporary Restraining Order directing “that Defendants (except for President Trump) and their agents, representatives, and all persons or entities acting in concert with them shall immediately return, reinstate, and restore the White House ‘hard pass’ press credentials held by employees of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO that were revoked on or about September 18, 2026.” Dkt. 24 (the “Order”). This morning journalists from each of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO attempted to enter the White House and were turned away. A Secret Service agent confiscated the hard pass of journalists from all three organizations. And when Plaintiff Betsy Klein, whose hard pass was confiscated on Saturday, September 19, requested to have her hard pass returned, her request was denied and she was refused access to the White House complex.

The judge ordered the White House to respond to the non-compliance notice by 12:30pm, and quickly received a declaration from Micah Stopperich, the Director of White House Press Operations, that the passes had been restored as of 9:07am, and that previously confiscated badges had been dropped at the entry gate to return to the journalists they had been taken from. Yet reporters say they were still being turned away until around noon, well after that supposed 9:07am restoration. They eventually regained some access to the White House.

But hours later, journalists from two of the same outlets were turned away from the arrival ceremony for Trump’s state dinner with Xi Jinping. As MS NOW itself reported:

Hours after regaining access, MS NOW White House reporter Laura Barrón-López was denied entry Thursday evening to the arrival ceremony on the portico ahead of the White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. MS NOW had requested credentials for the event but never received a response. A CNN producer and correspondent were also denied access. When Barrón-López asked why she was being turned away, a White House staffer told her to “talk to Steven,” seemingly referring to White House communications director Steven Cheung.

According to CNN, the White House told them that CNN could not send a reporter to cover Xi’s arrival, only a photojournalist and an audio technician. The White House will surely argue that credentials for a specific event aren’t the same as the hard passes covered by the TRO. But blocking the reporters while allowing only CNN’s camera crew (a restriction not imposed on any other network) is exactly the kind of petty gamesmanship that the pending preliminary injunction briefing will have to deal with.

It’s unclear how the White House thinks any of this helps. It’s unconstitutional, and it makes the administration look petty: An administration that insists it’s the champion of free speech can’t even manage to let reporters in the door after a judge orders it to.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, donald trump, free press, free press ban, free speech, journalism, steven cheung, white house, white house ban

Companies: cnn, msnow, politico