Tech
FTC Admits Age Verification Violates Children’s Privacy Law, Decides To Just Ignore That
from the the-law-breaking-admin dept
We’ve been pointing out the fundamental contradiction at the heart of mandatory age verification laws for years now. To verify someone’s age online, you have to collect personal data from them. If that someone turns out to be a child, congratulations: you’ve just collected personal data from a child without parental consent. Which is a direct violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)—the very law that’s supposed to be protecting kids.
So what happens when the agency charged with enforcing COPPA finally notices this obvious problem? If you guessed “they admit the conflict and then just promise not to enforce the law,” you’d be exactly right.
The FTC put out a policy statement last week that is remarkable in what it tacitly concedes:
The Federal Trade Commission issued a policy statement today announcing that the Commission will not bring an enforcement action under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule) against certain website and online service operators that collect, use, and disclose personal information for the sole purpose of determining a user’s age via age verification technologies.
The FTC appears to be explicitly acknowledging that age verification technologies involve collecting personal information from users—including children—in a way that would otherwise trigger COPPA liability. If the technology didn’t create a COPPA problem, there would be no need for a policy statement promising non-enforcement. You don’t issue a formal announcement saying “we won’t sue you for this” unless “this” is something you could, in fact, sue people for.
The statement itself tries to dress this up by noting that age verification tech “may require the collection of personal information from children, prompting questions about whether such activities could violate the COPPA Rule.” But “prompting questions” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. The answer to those questions is pretty obviously “yes, collecting personal information from children without parental consent violates the rule that says you can’t collect personal information from children without parental consent.” The FTC just doesn’t want to say that part out loud, because then the follow-up question becomes: “so why are you encouraging companies to do it?”
Instead, they’ve decided to create an enforcement carve-out. Do the thing that violates the law, but pinky-promise you’ll only use the data to check the kid’s age, delete it afterward, and keep it secure. Then we won’t come after you. This is the FTC solving a legal contradiction not by asking Congress to fix the underlying law or admitting the technology is fundamentally flawed, but by deciding to selectively not enforce the law it’s supposed to be enforcing.
The honest approach would have been to tell Congress that age verification, as currently conceived, cannot be squared with existing privacy law—and that if lawmakers want it anyway, they need to resolve that conflict themselves rather than asking the FTC to pretend it doesn’t exist.
No such luck.
And boy, do they seem proud of themselves. Here’s Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection:
“Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades…. Our statement incentivizes operators to use these innovative tools, empowering parents to protect their children online.”
“The most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades.”
Excuse me, what?
This is the kind of statement that sounds authoritative right up until you spend thirty seconds thinking about it. Anyone with any knowledge of security and privacy knows that age verification is anything but “child protective.” It involves a huge invasion of privacy, for extremely faulty technology, that has all sorts of downstream effects that put kids at risk.
Oh, and the FTC seems proud that the vote for this was unanimous—though it’s worth noting that Donald Trump fired the two Democratic members of the FTC and has made no apparent efforts to replace them, despite Congress designating that the FTC is supposed to have five full members, with two from the opposing party. A unanimous vote among the remaining two Republicans is a strange thing to brag about.
The FTC even posted about this on X, and the response was… well, let me just show you:
If you can’t see that, the main part to pay attention to is not the tweet from the FTC itself, but the Community Note that (under the way Community Notes works, notes need widespread consensus among users to be appended to the public tweet):
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Contrary to their claim, using age verification has numerous issues, including but not limited to:
1. Easily bypassed
2. Risks of security data breach
3. Inaccuracies (Placing adults into underage groups, vice versa)
And many more… (sigh, I need a break).
Yeah, we all need a break.
That Community Note does a better job explaining the state of age verification technology than the FTC’s entire Bureau of Consumer Protection. It methodically lists out the problems: kids easily bypass these systems, the collected data creates massive security breach risks, and the technology produces wildly inaccurate results that lock adults out while letting kids through (and vice versa). When the consensus-driven crowdsourced fact-check on your own announcement is more informative than the announcement itself, maybe it’s time to reconsider the announcement.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the technology worked perfectly. Would mandatory age verification still be a good idea?
That still wouldn’t solve the issues with this technology and the harm it does to kids. Even UNICEF (UNICEF!) has been warning that age restriction approaches can actively harm the children they’re supposed to protect. After Australia’s social media ban for under-16s went into effect, UNICEF put out a statement that could not have been more clear about the risks:
“While UNICEF welcomes the growing commitment to children’s online safety, social media bans come with their own risks, and they may even backfire,” the agency said in a statement.
For many children, particularly those who are isolated or marginalised, social media is a lifeline for learning, connection, play and self-expression, UNICEF explained.
Moreover, many will still access social media – for example, through workarounds, shared devices, or use of less regulated platforms – which will only make it harder to protect them.
So the actual child welfare experts are saying that age verification can backfire, push kids into less safe spaces, and should never be treated as a substitute for real safety measures. Meanwhile, the FTC is calling the same technology “the most child-protective” thing to come along in a generation and is waiving its own enforcement authority to encourage more of it.
What we have here is a federal agency that has identified a direct conflict between the law it enforces and the policy outcome it wants. Rather than grappling with what that conflict means—maybe age verification as currently conceived just doesn’t work within the existing legal framework, and for good reason—the FTC has chosen to simply look the other way. The message to companies is clear: go ahead and collect data from kids to figure out if they’re kids. We know that violates COPPA. We don’t care. We like age verification more than we like enforcing our own rules.
That’s a hell of a policy position for the agency that’s supposed to be the last line of defense for children’s privacy online.
Filed Under: age verification, coppa, ftc, think of the children
Tech
Trump Officials Attended a Summit Of Election Deniers Who Want The President To Take Over The Midterms
from the found-that-election-fraud dept
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.
According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting.
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”
The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.
“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”
Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.
In the past, Trump has expressed an openness to a federal takeover as a way to stem projected Republican losses in November. This month, he said in an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans need “to take over” elections and “to nationalize the voting.”
Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”
The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.
Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.
“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”
Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”
In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.
One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”
Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.
The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.
A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.
Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.
Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”
“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.
At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.
Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.
Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.
“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”
McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”
Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.
Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.
“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.
Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.
The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”
Filed Under: cleta mitchell, donald trump, election deniers, elections, free and fair elections, heather honey, kurt olsen, michael flynn, midterms
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has just hit the market, and the perceptions are divided. Irrespective of the debate around it, I had already made up my mind to make the upgrade. But over the course of the past few days, since its launch, the fine print and a few unexpected cuts got exposed. And ultimately, they convinced me to sit this one out.
Having spent days going through all its upgrades and downgrades – yes, there are many – I decided to skip this update with a heavy heart after all the early enthusiasm. If you, too, are planning to get the new Galaxy S26 Ultra, you might want to reconsider your decision and read this first.
Privacy Display comes at a high cost
Samsung’s Privacy Display is the centerpiece of the S26 Ultra, and it’s genuinely cool. It blocks nosy people from peeking at your screen in public. Great idea, except there’s an uncomfortable trade-off: the S26 Ultra’s screen is not as bright as the S25 Ultra, even with Privacy Display turned off.
Samsung rates the screen for up to 2,600 nits, but lab testing shows a peak brightness of 1,806 nits, compared to the 1,860 nits recorded on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. That’s a small gap on paper, but it is quite noticeable in real life.
To make matters worse, several reviewers have reported that text on the display appears blurry compared to the S25 Ultra, even with the privacy display switched off.
One user on Twitter even reported experiencing eye strain after prolonged use. For me, that’s a potential dealbreaker, since most of what I do on my phone involves texting or reading articles for long periods of time.
Samsung promised 10-bit color and then took it back
This one is almost hard to digest. During the Galaxy S26 press briefing, Samsung told journalists that one of the upgrades over the S25 Ultra was a 10-bit color depth display.
However, users noticed that the product specifications page only mentioned that the display offers 16.7 million colors, which corresponds with 8-bit color specs. Once this controversy got highlighted, a Samsung spokesperson reached out to confirm that the S26 Ultra’s display is an 8-bit display that simulates 10-bit color depth.
And this isn’t just a theoretical difference on a spec sheet. In hands-on testing with the S26 Ultra alongside phones with true 10-bit panels, including the OnePlus 15, the gap was noticeable in HDR content. Skies don’t fade as smoothly, and darker transitions feel a bit harsher.
Even if you can’t actually tell the difference in daily use, the mismatch between what was promised and what customers received is difficult to accept.
The 3x camera quietly got worse
The cameras on the S26 Ultra may appear the same at first glance, but a closer look at the specs tells a different story. Although both telephoto cameras feature a 10MP telephoto sensor with an f/2.4 aperture, a 67mm focal length, PDAF, OIS, and 3x optical zoom, the key difference lies in the sensor and pixel size.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra uses a larger 1/3.52″ sensor with 1.12µm pixels, compared to the smaller 1/3.94″ sensor with 1.0µm pixels on the S26 Ultra. In bright daylight, the difference may not be noticeable, with both cameras delivering fairly similar results.
But push either camera into a dimly lit restaurant or a late evening shoot, and the gap will start to show. The smaller 1/3.94″ sensor on the S26 Ultra captures less light, which means you will see more noise and less detail. It will perform worse in low ambient light situations.
The design choices I don’t quite understand
This is more of a subjective opinion, but I don’t like the new design of the S26 Ultra. The new camera island design doesn’t appeal to me, and I honestly prefer what we had with the S25 Ultra.
Then there’s the decision to move back to aluminum from titanium, which almost feels like blindly following the iPhone.The device is slimmer, sure, but it’s also taller and wider, and offers a worse screen-to-body ratio. On a positive note, the more rounded design should make it comfortable to hold.
None of these things on their own is a deal breaker, but taken together, they make the device feel like a slight downgrade, at least in my opinion.
The charge cycle confusion
The EU’s EPREL database lists the S26 Ultra rated for 1,200 charge cycles before dropping to 80% capacity, compared to the S25 Ultra’s 2,000 cycles. That sounds alarming, but it’s not the whole story.
The S25 Ultra launched before June 2025, when EU testing standards were less strict, and charge cycles weren’t precisely defined. The S26 Ultra was likely tested under the newer, stricter rules, which explains the discrepancy.
In real-world use, the S26 Ultra’s battery should degrade at the same rate as its predecessor. And if anything, the more efficient Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip means the S26 Ultra lasts longer on a single charge.
As far as I can tell, the battery cycle story is essentially a non-issue, and you can remove it from your list of concerns.
While Samsung cuts corners, rivals are stepping up
Here’s the thing: at $1,299, the S26 Ultra isn’t competing in a vacuum. The OnePlus 15 comes in at a significantly lower price while offering comparable performance and a battery that easily outclasses Samsung’s flagship.
Then there’s the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, which boasts a 12-bit display with 3,500 nits of peak brightness and a 6,000 mAh battery with 90W fast charging. The reality is that Samsung’s flagship is no longer the undisputed winner it once was.
If you’re upgrading from an S23 Ultra or an older device, the S26 Ultra is still worth considering, but if you’re already using an S25 Ultra, there isn’t enough new here to justify making the jump.
Taara started as a Google X moonshot spin-off aimed at connecting rural villages in sub-Saharan Africa with beams of light. Its newest product, debuting this week at Mobile World Congress (MWC), in Barcelona, aims at a different kind of connectivity problem: getting internet access into buildings in cities that already have plenty of fiber—just not where it’s needed.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.–based company transmits data via infrared lasers, the kind typically used in fiber-optic lines. However, Taara’s systems beam gigabits across kilometers over open air. “Every one of our Taara terminals is like a digital camera with a laser pointer,” says Mahesh Krishnaswamy, Taara’s CEO. “The laser pointer is the one that’s shining the light on and off, and the digital camera is on the [receiving] side.”
Taara’s new system—Taara Beam, being demoed at MWC’s “Game Changers” platform—prioritizes efficiency and a compact size. Each Beam unit is the size of a shoebox and weighs just 8 kilograms, and can be mounted on a utility pole or the side of a building. According to the company, Beam will deliver fiber-competitive speeds of up to 25 gigabits per second with low, 50-microsecond latency.
Taara’s former parent company, Krishnaswamy says, is also these days a prominent client. Google’s main campus in Mountain View, Calif., is near a landing point for a major submarine fiber-optic cable.
“One of the Google buildings was literally a few hundred meters away from the landing spot in California,” he says. “Yet they couldn’t connect the two points because of land rights and right-of-way issues.… Without digging and trenching into federal land, we are able to connect the two points at tens of gigabits per second. And so many Googlers are actually using our technology today.”
A Fingernail-Size Chip Shrinks Taara’s Tech
Krishnaswamy says his laser pointer and digital camera analogy doesn’t quite do justice to the engineering problems the company had to tackle to fit all the gigabit-per-second photonics into a weather-hardened, shoebox-size device.
The Taara Beam must steer its laser link across kilometers of open air so that the Beam device can receive it on the other end of the line. Effectively, that means the device’s laser can’t be off target by more than a few degrees.
Beam approaches the steering problem by physically shaping the laser pulse itself. Taara’s photonics chip splits the laser beam carrying the data into more than a thousand separate streams, delaying each one by a closely controlled amount. The result is a laser wavefront that can be pointed anywhere the system directs.
Krishnaswamy likens this to the effects of pebbles tossed into a pond. Dropping pebbles in a careful sequence, he says, can create interference patterns in the waves that ripple outward. “These thousand emitters are equivalent to a thousand stones,” he says. “And I’m able to delay the phase of each of them. That allows me to steer [the wavefront] whichever direction I want it to go.”
The idea behind this technology—called a phased array—is not new. But turning it into a commercial optical communications device, at Taara Beam’s scale and range, is where others have so far fallen short.
“Radio-frequency phased arrays like Starlink antennas are well known,” Krishaswamy says. “But to do this with optics, and in a commercial way, not just an experimental way, is hard.”
This isn’t how the company started out, however.
In 2019, when the company was still a Google X subsidiary, Krishaswamy says, Taara launched its first commercial product, the traffic-light-size Lightbridge. Like Beam, Lightbridge boasts fiberlike connection speeds, and it has to date been deployed in more than 20 countries around the world—including the Google campus.
Taara’s upgraded model, Lightbridge Pro, launched last month and is also on display this week at MWC. Lightbridge Pro adds one crucial capability Lightbridge lacked: an automatic backup. When fog or rain disrupts Lightbridge’s optical link, the system switches traffic to a paired radio connection. When conditions clear, Lightbridge Pro switches traffic back to the faster laser-data connection. The company says that combination keeps the link up 99.999 percent of the time—less than 5 minutes of downtime in a year.
Both Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro mechanically position their mirrors, achieving three degrees of pointing accuracy. An onboard tracking system inside the unit also relocks the beams automatically whenever the unit gets shifted or jostled.
The Future of Taara Beam Deployment
Krishaswamy says that while Taara continues to install and support Lightbridge and Lightbridge Pro, he hopes the company can also begin installing Taara Beam units for select early customers as soon as later this year.
Mohamed-Slim Alouini, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, says the bandwidth of free-space optical (FSO) technologies like Taara Beam and Lightbridge still leaves plenty of room to grow.
“Like any physical medium, free-space optics has a capacity limit,” Alouini says. “But laboratory experiments have already demonstrated fiberlike performance with terabits-per-second data rates over FSO links. The real gap is not in raw capacity but in practical deployment.”
Atul Bhatnagar, formerly of Nortel and Cambium Networks, and currently serving as advisor to Taara, sees room for optimism even when it comes to practical deployment.
“Current Taara architecture is capable of delivering hundreds of gigabits per second over the next several years,” he says.
Krishnaswamy adds that Beam’s compact form factor makes it suitable for more than just terrestrial applications.
“We’ll continue to do the work that we’re doing on the ground. But to the extent that space solutions are taking off, we would love to be part of that,” he says. “Data center-to-data center in space is something we are really looking at using for this technology.
“Because when you have multiple servers up in space, you can’t run fiber from one to the other,” he adds. “But these photonics modules will be able to point and track and transmit gigabits and gigabits of data to each other.”
For now, Taara’s ambitions are closer to Earth—specifically to the buildings, utility poles, and city blocks where fiber still hasn’t arrived. Which is, after all, where the company’s story began.
UPDATE 4 March 2026: The weight of the Taara Beam (8 kg) and the launch year of the Taara Lightbridge (2019) were both corrected.
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Struggling to find an effective fan heater that works well in both winter and summer? Look no further than this Dyson AM09 deal.
When it comes to fans and heaters, it’s easy to assume that you’ll be stuck just investing in a winter’s worth of hot air, with summer being a completely separate purchase, but that’s not the case with Dyson’s AM09.
And you’re in luck today, as it’s now 47% cheaper thanks to the voucher code SPRING30 on Argos, bringing the Dyson AM09 down to £209.99 from £400.99.
Now available with savings of more than £190, the Dyson AM09 Hot + Cool feels like the kind of upgrade you make once and appreciate daily.
Dyson’s AM09 Hot + Cool fan heater is nearly half price, as a refined essential for year‑round comfort
This particular device, which just so happens to be Dyson’s most affordable heater at full price, can push out both cold and hot air as you need it, and it’s even flagged as the best hot and cold fan in our best electric heater buying guide.
Like all of Dyson’s products, the Dyson AM09 boasts a modern aesthetic that really helps it to stand out in your home.
Whichever room it ends up being situated in, the AM09 can become a talking point among friends, largely for its unique bladeless design that not only keeps it safe around children and pets but it also contributes to a smoother flow of air.
The AM09 also boasts a dedicated sleep timer as well as oscillation for ensuring that air flow is delivered exactly where you need it to be (and not right into your face).
Get Updates Straight to Your WhatsApp
Speaking of air flow, there are several modes of adjustment for the AM09, allowing you to be as specific with the strength of the air flow as you need. Take it from us, there’s nothing worse than trying to read a book with a fan heater blasting away, so it’s great to have the option here.
When it comes to its performance, Dyson fans are known for power, and that fact holds true here. The AM09 can heat up your room quickly in the colder months, but never to the point where it ends up getting too hot, ensuring that Dyson can help you to be more energy efficient with your habits.
The same principle also applies in reverse when you switch things up to the cooling side of the Dyson fan.
The Dyson AM09 might sit at the higher end of the market as far as price is concerned, but Dyson’s experience in innovative technology, coupled with an elegantly built product, really does cost a pretty penny.
Although cheaper than the other Dyson fan heaters, which double up as purifiers and can be controlled via a smart app, the Dyson Hot+Cool Jet Focus AM09 is still considerably more expensive than the competition. It is very good, though: it warms quickly and efficiently, with Jet Focus helping to direct heat where you want it to go. And, it’s a brilliant standalone fan for when you need cooling in Summer. If you want something you can use all-year-round and don’t mind spending this much, this is a great heater and fan.
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Useful all year round -
Magnetic remote-control -
Intuitive and easy to use
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Expensive -
Noisy in heat mode
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Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies they have for mitigating the negative impacts of data center construction.
The main provisions of the federal pledge have tech companies agreeing to “build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands, paying the full cost of those resources.” It also claims they will pay for any needed power infrastructure upgrades and operate under separate rate structures for power that will see payments made whether or not the business uses that electricity.
The pledge doesn’t appear to be any form of binding agreement and there’s no discussion of enforcement or a penalty for companies that don’t honor the stipulated provisions. It also doesn’t address any of the other impacts data centers and AI development might be having, either on local communities, on other utilities and resources, or on access to critical computing elements like RAM.
At first glance, the Aria EV doesn’t look much different from any other student-built electric prototype—no different from the battery-powered cars built by engineering students from dozens of universities every year. Beneath its panels, however, is a challenge to the modern auto industry: What if electric vehicles were designed to be repaired by their owners?
The Aria project began in 2024, when roughly 20 students assembled at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands under the university’s Ecomotive team structure, which operates like a small startup. Students apply, are selected, and spend a year developing a vehicle in a setting meant to mirror industry practice.
The goal, says team spokesperson Sarp Gurel, “was to make the car as accessible and repairable as possible.” Gurel, who graduated last July with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and is currently working toward a master’s degree at Eindhoven, says the Aria EV is not yet road legal. Its purpose is to demonstrate that repairability can be embedded into EV architecture from the outset. With that objective in mind, the team focused first on the most challenging and expensive component in almost any EV: the battery.
Modular Battery Design in EVs
Aria’s total battery capacity is 13 kilowatt-hours, which is far below the 50- to 80-kWh packs common in mass-market electric sedans and SUVs. The scale is closer to that of a lightweight urban vehicle or neighborhood EV, which is more appropriate for a student-built prototype focused on concept validation rather than long-range highway travel.
What distinguishes Aria is not the battery’s size, but its structure. Rather than housing the 13 kWh in a single sealed pack, the team divided the total capacity into six smaller modules. Each module weighs about 12 kilograms—much easier to handle than the 400 kg or more that’s typical of a conventional EV’s monolithic battery pack. This makes it feasible for a single person to remove, swap, and replace modules.
The modules sit in reinforced compartments beneath the vehicle floor and are secured using a bottom-latch system. When the vehicle is fully powered down, a latch can be made to mechanically release a module. Integrated interlocks isolate the high-voltage connection before a module can be lowered. This combination of hardware and software ensures that component-level replacement is straightforward and relatively safe, bringing the idea of “repairability by design” into a tangible, hands-on form. Even with this careful design, modular batteries introduce technical considerations that must be managed, particularly when integrating different modules over the vehicle’s lifespan.
Joe Borgerson, a laboratory research operations coordinator at Ohio State University’s Center for Automotive Research, in Columbus, notes one complication: Mixing new and aged battery modules can create challenges. Borgerson has spent the past three years designing and building a battery pack from scratch as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Battery Workforce Challenge. “Our team is integrating a student-designed pack into a Stellantis vehicle platform,” he says, “which has given me deep exposure to both automaker design philosophy and high-voltage EV architecture,.”
To complement their car’s hardware, the Aria team developed a diagnostic app that can be accessed via a dedicated USB-C port. When the user connects their smartphone, the app presents a 3D visualization on the phone screen that points out faults, locates problems, identifies the necessary tools to fix them, and provides step-by-step repair instructions. The tools themselves are stored in the vehicle. The system aims to reduce as many barriers as possible for users to maintain and extend a vehicle’s service life.
Students at Eindhoven University of Technology unveiled their Aria EV prototype in November.Sarp Gürel
Challenges of EV Modularity
While Aria prioritizes modularity, the broader EV industry trend is toward integrated, interdependent systems that simplify manufacturing processes and cut costs. This trend is true for the structural battery packs for EVs as well.
Unlike mainstream EVs, Aria treats energy storage as a replaceable subsystem. Whether it scales economically and structurally to larger, highway-capable EVs remains an open question. But designing a vehicle for repairability involves trade-offs that ripple across every system in the car.
Borgerson says that dividing systems into removable units adds interfaces—mechanical fasteners, electrical connectors, seals, and safety interlocks. Each interface must survive vibration, temperature swings, and crash forces. More interfaces can mean added mass and complexity compared with tightly integrated battery structures. And these components take up space that would otherwise be used for energy storage.
Matilde D’Arpino, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State whose research focuses on electrified power trains and advanced vehicle architectures, notes that EV batteries are already modular internally—cells form modules, and modules form packs—but making modules externally replaceable changes validation requirements. High-voltage isolation, thermal performance, and crash integrity must remain robust even when energy storage is divided into removable segments. In other words, what seems like a simple way to make batteries user-friendly actually cascades into system-level design decisions influencing safety, thermal management, and vehicle structure.
Right-to-repair legislation in Europe and the United States could push automakers to reconsider sealed architectures for batteries and other components. Economic incentives could also emerge from fleet operators or long-term owners who benefit from replacing a fraction of a battery system rather than an entire pack. But adopting this approach would require changes across supply chains, certification processes, and service models.
The Aria prototype isn’t ready to go toe-to-toe with production EVs, but it demonstrates some proof-of-concept ideas about repairability.Sarp Gürel
Consumer expectations are also shaping the boundaries of what designs like Aria’s can become. In the mainstream market, buyers consistently prioritize longer driving range and lower sticker prices—two factors that have defined competition among models such as the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, and the the Tesla Model 3. Range anxiety remains a powerful psychological factor, even as charging infrastructure expands, and price sensitivity has intensified as government incentives fluctuate. Designing for modularity and repairability, as Aria does, must ultimately contend with these consumer priorities. Any added cost, weight, or complexity must be weighed against a market that still rewards vehicles that go farther for less money.
Ultimately, however, Aria inserts a different priority into the equation: repair as a core design requirement. Whether that priority becomes mainstream will depend less on whether it can be engineered—and more on whether regulators, manufacturers, and consumers decide it should be.
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Amazon is laying off an undisclosed number of employees from its robotics division. Business Insider first reported the news, and the company confirmed the cuts in a statement to GeekWire.
“We regularly review our organizations to make sure teams are best set up to innovate and deliver for our customers,” a company spokesperson said. “Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a relatively small number of robotics roles. We don’t make these decisions lightly, and we’re committed to supporting employees whose roles are affected with severance pay, health insurance benefits, and job placement support.”
The layoffs are separate from Amazon’s broader cuts announced in January that impacted more than 16,000 corporate workers — the second phase in a restructuring that totals 30,000 positions, the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history.
In a memo to employees in January, Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said the company did not plan to make regular rounds of massive cuts. “Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months,” she wrote. “That’s not our plan.”
However, Galetti added that teams will continue to evaluate their operations and “make adjustments as appropriate,” saying that’s “never been more important than it is today in a world that’s changing faster than ever.”
Amazon’s robotics unit supports the company’s growing robot fleet that helps move products around its fulfillment centers. The company deployed its 1 millionth robot last year. In January, Amazon shut down its new Blue Jay warehouse robotic system, according to Business Insider.
Amazon also announced in January that it will close all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh grocery store locations. The “Just Walk Out” technology originally developed for Amazon Go convenience stores, which uses overhead cameras and sensors to avoid traditional checkout, will live on as a licensing business.
Amazon previously slashed 27,000 positions in 2023 across multiple rounds of layoffs.
The company’s corporate roles numbered around 350,000 people in early 2023, the last time Amazon provided a public figure. Its overall workforce stands at 1.58 million, which includes warehouse employees.
Even before the introduction of the MacBook Neo, Apple had a great student laptop. The MacBook Air is our current pick as the best laptop for college students. So in addition to competing against Chromebooks and budget Windows laptops, the new MacBook Neo is also going up against the MacBook Air for school laptop buyers.
Given the large price difference between the Neo and Air, I think we’ll see tons of colorful MacBook Neos in schools by next fall. It looks like a hit for student budgets, but should you consider buying a MacBook Neo if you’re already out of school?
Let’s take a closer look at the new Neo to see what features it offers and those that are missing.
MacBook Neo vs. MacBook Air
For $599, or just $499 with Apple’s educational discount, the MacBook Neo significantly lowers the entry price for MacBook shoppers. The Neo arrives on the heels of the new M5 MacBook Air, which raises the Air’s price by $100 to $1,099. That likely puts the Air beyond many student budgets.
There’s also last year’s M4 MacBook Air to consider. It can usually be found for less than $1,000 at Amazon. Right now, it’s selling for $899.
With M4 MacBook Air models still readily available, budget laptop shoppers have three MacBook options.
MacBook Neo and MacBook Air compared
MacBook Neo
M4 MacBook Air
M5 MacBook Air
Price
$599
$899
$1,099
CPU
A18 Pro
M4
M5
No. of CPU cores
6
10
10
No. of GPU cores
5
8
8
RAM
8GB
16GB
16GB
Storage
256GB
256GB
512GB
Screen size
13 in
13.6 in
13.6 in
Screen resolution
2,408×1,506 pixels
2,560×1,664 pixels
2,560×1,664 pixels
Weight
2.7 lbs
2.7 lbs
2.7 lbs
Dimensions (HWD)
0.5 x 11.71 x 8.12 in
0.44 x 11.97 x 8.46 in
0.44 x 11.97 x 8.46 in
Connections
USB-C x2, headphone
Thunderbolt 4 x2, headphone, MagSafe 3
Thunderbolt 4 x2, headphone, MagSafe 3
Battery
36.5-watt‑hour
52.6-watt‑hour
53.8-watt‑hour
The fact that the price gap between the MacBook Neo and the discounted M4 MacBook Air is greater than that of the M4 Air and M5 Air makes a compelling case for the Neo. The Neo costs $300 less than the discounted M4 Air and $500 less than the $1,099 M5 Air. Only $200 separates the older M4 Air and the new M5 Air.
We don’t yet know how the MacBook Neo with its A18 Pro processor and 8GB of unified memory will measure up to a MacBook Air with an M4 or M5 chip and 16GB of RAM.
I can tell you right now, however, that if you’re a creator who uses photo- or video-editing apps or plan to use Apple Intelligence or run other AI workloads, a MacBook Air is the better choice for the additional GPU cores and greater memory allotment. You’re stuck with the Neo’s 8GB of RAM; the only upgrade offered for it is doubling the storage to a 512GB SSD for $100.
The Neo makes more sense as a MacBook for casual use around the house. Think of it as an oversized, nontouch iPad with an attached keyboard. It will let you browse the web, watch shows and movies, edit photos and videos you took with your iPhone, and respond to texts using a keyboard. It’s also compact and portable, with a lightweight aluminum body, and will no doubt make an easy travel companion.
The Neo looks like a MacBook Air, just a bit smaller (and $500 less).
What’s missing on the Neo
The MacBook Neo’s most pleasant surprise was the size of the display. Rumors had swirled that Apple would keep costs in check in part by outfitting the Neo with a 12-inch display, so I was happy to see the Neo get a 13-inch display that’s only slightly smaller than the Air’s 13.6-inch display. Plus, it’s a Liquid Retina display with a relatively high resolution of 2,408×1,506 pixels.
Still, a number of items that you get with the Air are missing on the Neo.
Let’s start with the input devices. The keyboard doesn’t have backlighting, which is a bummer since that shows up on even the most budget of Windows laptops and Chromebooks at this price. The basic keyboard also lacks Touch ID. You have to spend $100 on the 512GB SSD to get Touch ID, a feature I couldn’t live without on my MacBook. Also, the touchpad is mechanical and not the lovely Force Touch haptic touchpad found on the Air.
You can upgrade to a 512GB SSD that also includes a Touch ID keyboard, but the MacBook Neo does not offer keyboard backlighting.
Ports are also a downgrade. Instead of a pair of speedy Thunderbolt 4 ports, the two USB-C ports are of the slower USB 3 and USB 2 variety. And you’ll need to use one of them to charge the Neo because it doesn’t have a MagSafe connector. I really enjoy the satisfying snap when I connect my MagSafe cable and the peace of mind that comes knowing that the cable will disconnect with ease and not pull my MacBook to its doom if I trip over the cord.
The webcam can do 1080p video, as you get with the Air, but it lacks Center Stage, which pans and zooms to keep you in the middle of the frame. (It is nice that there’s no webcam notch, though.) And while you get a Liquid Retina display on the Neo, it doesn’t have Apple’s True Tone technology that uses ambient light sensors to adjust the white balance so text and images look more natural and accurate. Most people won’t miss either of these last two items.
Don’t forget the memory
For most people deciding between a MacBook Air and Neo, the biggest drawback will be the 8GB of RAM. I suspect the six-core A18 Pro will do a reasonably good job of running MacOS. It’s the RAM that makes me nervous.
In this era of RAM shortages driving up pricing, it should come as no surprise that Apple went with only 8GB of RAM on the Neo. And it makes sense why you can’t upgrade the Neo’s memory to 16GB.
Apple charges $200 to go from 16GB to 24GB of RAM on the MacBook Air. Adding $200 to the cost of the Neo on top of the $100 charge for the 512GB (because most people wouldn’t do one without the other), and you’re suddenly looking at a price of $899 for the Neo. At that price, you’re entering MacBook Air territory.
Unless you absolutely insist on keyboard backing, a haptic touchpad, Thunderbolt 4 or MagSafe, the decision between MacBook Neo or Air will come down to the memory. If you keep things casual, then the Neo’s 8GB of RAM will suffice. After all, up until the M3 Air, the base models had just 8GB of memory and didn’t struggle to run MacOS. Still, for heavier lifting where you’re doing some graphics or AI work — or you’re just a serious multitasker and find yourself juggling many, many apps every day — then it makes sense to spend the extra money on a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM.
Google is eliminating its traditional 30% Play Store fee and introducing lower commissions, while at the same time allowing alternative billing systems and making it easier for third-party app stores to operate on Android. The changes stem largely from Google’s settlement with Epic Games. Engadget reports: The biggest change is to how Google will collect fees from developers publishing apps on Android. Rather than take its standard 30 percent cut of in-app purchases through the Play Store, Google is lowering its cut to 20 percent, and in some cases 15 percent for new installs of apps from developers participating in its new App Experience program or updated Google Play Games Level Up program. Those changes extend to subscriptions, too, where the company’s cut is lowering to 10 percent. For Google’s billing system, the company says developers in the UK, US, or European Economic Area (EEA) will now be charged a five percent fee and “a market-specific rate” in other regions. Of course, for anyone trying to avoid those fees, using alternatives to Google’s billing system is getting easier.
Google says that developers will be able to offer alternative billing systems alongside its own or “guide users outside of their app to their own websites for purchases.” […] Epic is ultimately interested in getting people to use the mobile version of its Epic Games Store, and Google’s announcement also includes details on how third-party app stores can come to Android. Third-party app stores will be able to apply to the company’s new “Registered App Stores” program to see if they meet “certain quality and safety benchmarks.” If they do, they’ll be able to take advantage of a streamlined installation interface in Android. Participating in the program is optional, and users will still be able to sideload alternative app stores that aren’t part of the program, but Google clearly has a preference. […]
Google says that its updated fee structure will come to the EEA, the UK and the US by June 30, Australia by September 30, Korea and Japan by December 31 and the entire world by September 30, 2027. Meanwhile, the company’s updated Google Play Games Level Up program and new App Experience program will launch in the EEA, the UK, the US and Australia on September 30, before hitting the remaining regions alongside the updated fee structure. For any developers interested in offering their own app store, Google says it’ll launch its Registered App Stores program “with a version of a major Android release” before the end of the year. According to the company, the program will be available in other regions first before it comes to the US.
from the let’s-move-your-contempt-from-civil-to-criminal dept
Of course, we’ll see what comes of this, but it’s starting to look like this administration won’t outlast this level of judicial scrutiny. It may have bullied its way past courts during Trump’s first year back in office, but now lines are being drawn. Whether or not those lines matter is an open question. But the important thing is that they’re being drawn. All the government has to do is cross them. And there’s no reason to believe it won’t.
This is not the only court drawing these lines. The administration has already been hit with hundreds of adverse rulings. Multiple courts have threatened contempt sanctions. Some courts have even begun making those threats a reality.
Trump may flood the zone, but now it’s clear the zone is willing to flood right back. Stare into the abyss, etc. Judges are done with dealing with this shady AF administration. They’re putting in the (legal) papers that Trump got mad.
This is from a recent order [PDF] handed down by a New Jersey federal court:
The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.
“Roundly rejected.” Just like prior restraint. This is active and ongoing restraint. And while it doesn’t do much to the First Amendment, it certainly does plenty of damage to other amendments dealing with the deprivation of personal liberty.
The court goes on to point out that the US Attorney for New Jersey has conceded to “violating 72 orders” issued in immigration cases handled in this jurisdiction alone. And yet, nothing changes. The US Attorney claimed the violations were “unintentional.” The court disagrees.
Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.
And:
It ends today.
This is how it goes from here. The judge says any further arrests or detentions in violation of this order will result in mandatory testimony under oath, if not actual sanctions. It’s not the best threat I’ve ever heard, but it’s still more than most courts are willing to do, even as the administration continues to pretend courts are mere nuisances, rather than an integral part of the American republic that constitutionally has as much power as the Executive Branch.
Let the judges cook.
Filed Under: dhs, doj, ice, mass deportation, new jersey, trump administration, zahid quraishi
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