Last year, Lucasfilm announced a handful of promising new film projects set within the Star Wars universe, including one that will follow Rey (Daisy Ridley) as she attempts to rebuild the Jedi Order following the events of 2019’s Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker. Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy subsequently confirmed in an interview with IGN that the film will take place 15 years after the conclusion of Star Wars’ Sequel Trilogy and will find the Jedi “in disarray” and Rey trying to rebuild the Order “based on the books, based on what she promised Luke (Mark Hamill).”

Since then, progress on the project has been slow. Its original writers, Damon Lindelof and Justin Britt-Gibson, departed the project in March 2023, and their replacement, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, reportedly parted ways with the film recently as well. For her part, Daisy Ridley has remained fairly tight-lipped about the project and its status. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, though, she did open up about actually preparing to reprise her life-changing Star Wars role.

“I feel like the new one/new ones will be so interesting. Time has passed and a lot has changed for me, personally,” Ridley told the outlet. “It’ll be interesting to come back to someone who I know so well, but in such a different moment. For me to inhabit Rey again after all the time that we haven’t seen her, it’s actually scary, but it’s also exciting.”

Given how much time has passed since Ridley worked on The Rise of Skywalker, it’s easy to see why it might seem both daunting and a bit strange to return to her role in that film. Ridley, who became a household name because of her breakout turn as Rey in 2015’s Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, has also grown a lot as an actress in the years since she made her Star Wars debut. To watch her return to a role that she played when she was less seasoned as a big-screen performer should be an interesting experience for Star Wars fans everywhere.

It is, unfortunately, unclear when fans will actually get to see Ridley back as Rey. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is still attached to direct the film in question, but its behind-the-scenes screenwriter exits have cast doubt on when it will actually begin shooting — let alone when it will hit theaters. There is a lot of pressure on the film to get Star Wars’ post-Sequel Trilogy era off to a strong start, which may be why Lucasfilm seems to be taking so much time developing it.

In the meantime, while fans wait for an official update on the project and Ridley continues preparing to step back into her Jedi robes, Lucasfilm still has a few other film and TV titles in the pipeline right now. These projects include The Mandalorian & Grogu, which is currently set to hit theaters on May 22, 2026.

The EU has slapped a $334 million fine on LinkedIn over its targeted advertising practices. The Microsoft-owned social media platform may not challenge the fine. Instead, it would change its ad practices to comply with the GDPR.

LinkedIn fined $334 million by lead European Union privacy regulator

The EU has confirmed LinkedIn is liable to pay a 310 million euro (approx. $334 million) fine. The regulator has fined the Microsoft-owned professional networking platform for its targeted advertising practices.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has determined that LinkedIn had improperly conducted behavioral analyses of the EU members’ personal data for targeted advertising. The regulator is relying on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that’s currently in effect in the EU.

Speaking about the fine on LinkedIn, DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle stated, “The lawfulness of processing is a fundamental aspect of data protection law and the processing of personal data without an appropriate legal basis is a clear and serious violation of a data subjects’ fundamental right to data protection.”

Simply put, the EU watchdog has argued that LinkedIn violated the GDPR by not obtaining proper consent. Moreover, it has accused the networking platform of failing to demonstrate legitimate interest or showing a contractual necessity to process the data it and third parties collected.

Did Microsoft expect to pay a fine for its data collection policies?

Microsoft was reportedly aware it could face some heat from the EU over its data collection practices. According to Reuters, back in 2023, the tech giant said it expected to take a charge of about $425 million for a potential fine from the Irish regulator for its LinkedIn unit.

LinkedIn hasn’t categorically refuted the allegations. The company issued a statement that said, “While we believe we have complied with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we are working to ensure our ad practices meet this decision by the IDPC’s deadline.”

It appears LinkedIn might not contest the fine. Instead, the company has indicated it would alter its data collection practices or policies to ensure the company complies with the GDPR.

In an AMA this weekend, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared some insight into why some videos on the platform appear reduced in quality well after they’re posted, and it all boils down to performance. Responding to a question about old stories looking “blurry” in highlights, Mosseri said, “In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can. But if something isn’t watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video.” If the video later spikes in popularity again, “then we will re-render the higher quality video,” he said in the response, which was reposted by a Threads user (spotted by The Verge).

Further elaborating in a follow-up reply, though, Mosseri added, “We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views.” The comment has sparked concern from small creators in the replies who say it puts them at a disadvantage competing with others who have larger platforms. Meta has previously said it uses “different encoding configurations to process videos based on their popularity” as part of how it manages its computing resources.

The performance system “works at an aggregate level,” Mosseri said, “not an individual viewer level… It’s not a binary theshhold [sic], but rather a sliding scale.” In response to one user who questioned its fairness for smaller creators, Mosseri said the quality shift “doesn’t seem to matter much” in practice as it “isn’t huge” and viewers appear to care more about video content over quality. “Quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks poor, than to their viewers,” he said. Understandably, not everyone seems convinced.

A few months ago, my doctor showed off an AI transcription tool he used to record and summarize his patient meetings. In my case, the summary was fine, but researchers cited by ABC News have found that’s not always the case with OpenAI’s Whisper, which powers a tool many hospitals use — sometimes it just makes things up entirely.

Whisper is used by a company called Nabla for a medical transcription tool that it estimates has transcribed 7 million medical conversations, according to ABC News. More than 30,000 clinicians and 40 health systems use it, the outlet writes. Nabla is reportedly aware that Whisper can hallucinate, and is “addressing the problem.”

A group of researchers from Cornell University, the University of Washington, and others found in a study that Whisper hallucinated in about 1 percent of transcriptions, making up entire sentences with sometimes violent sentiments or nonsensical phrases during silences in recordings. The researchers, who gathered audio samples from TalkBank’s AphasiaBank as part of the study, note silence is particularly common when someone with a language disorder called aphasia is speaking.

One of the researchers, Allison Koenecke of Cornel University, posted examples like the one below in a thread about the study.

The researchers found that hallucinations also included invented medical conditions or phrases you might expect from a YouTube video, such as “Thank you for watching!” (OpenAI reportedly used to transcribe over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4.)

The study was presented in June at the Association for Computing Machinery FAccT conference in Brazil. It’s not clear if it has been peer-reviewed.

OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson emailed a statement to The Verge:

We take this issue seriously and are continually working to improve, including reducing hallucinations. For Whisper use on our API platform, our usage policies prohibit use in certain high-stakes decision-making contexts, and our model card for open-source use includes recommendations against use in high-risk domains. We thank researchers for sharing their findings.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my Wordle today, NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games.

A new study has provided “unambiguous evidence” that the Earth’s inner core began to slow down its rotation in 2010, compared to the planet’s surface.

Researchers said that the slowing down could change the length of one day on the Earth by fractions of a second.

The Earth’s inner core, a solid sphere made of iron and nickel, is suspended within the liquid outer core (made of molten metals) and anchored in its place by gravity. Together, the inner and the outer core, form one of the planet’s three layers — the other two being mantle and crust.

Being physically inaccessible, researchers usually study the core by analysing the recordings of waves sent out by earthquakes — seismograms.

“When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was stumped,” said John Vidale, a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California, US.

“But when we found two dozen more observations signalling the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades,” said Vidale, also the corresponding author of the study published in the journal Nature.

The slowing down of the inner core is hotly debated in the scientific community, with some studies even suggesting that it rotates faster than the Earth’s surface.

It is known that the spin of the inner core is influenced by the magnetic field generated in the outer core and the gravitational effects within Earth’s mantle.

However, it is considered that the inner core is reversing and backtracking relative to the surface, because of rotating slower than the mantle for the first time in about 40 years.

“Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most convincing resolution,” Vidale said.

A study published earlier this year, in the journal Nature, had found that climate change-driven melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica was affecting global timekeeping by slowing down Earth’s rotation.

The author, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the University of California San Diego, showed that the Earth’s liquid core was slowing down in its rotation. To counter the effects of this, the solid Earth was rotating faster, said Agnew.

However, this has resulted in fewer ‘leap seconds’ being needed to be added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in recent decades, according to Agnew.

Since 1972, once every few years, a ‘leap second’ has been required to be added, owing to irregularities in the UTC arising out of the fact that the Earth doesn’t always rotate at the same speed.

For the latest study, the researchers looked at seismic data recorded from 121 repeating earthquakes – multiple quakes occurring in the same location – between 1991 and 2023 in the South Sandwich Islands, a remote archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean. The islands are prone to violent earthquakes.

Data from twin Soviet nuclear tests between 1971 and 1974, along with multiple French and American nuclear tests from other studies of the inner core, were also included in the analysis.