On Monday, Valsorda finally channeled years’ worth of frustration, fueled by the widely held misunderstanding, into a blog post titled “Quantum Computers Are Not a Threat to 128-bit Symmetric Keys.”

“There’s a common misconception that quantum computers will ‘halve’ the security of symmetric keys, requiring 256-bit keys for 128 bits of security,” he wrote. “That is not an accurate interpretation of the speedup offered by quantum algorithms, it’s not reflected in any compliance mandate, and risks diverting energy and attention from actually necessary post-quantum transition work.”

That’s the easy part of the argument. The much harder part is the math and physics that explain it. At its highest level, it comes down to a fundamental difference in the way a brute-force search works on classical computers versus the way it works using Grover’s algorithm. Classical computers can perform multiple searches simultaneously, a capability that allows large tasks to be broken into smaller pieces to complete the overall job faster. Grover’s algorithm, by contrast, requires a long-running serial computation, where each search is done one at a time.

“What makes Grover special is that as you parallelize it, its advantage over non-quantum algorithms gets smaller,” Valsorda said in an interview. He continued:

Imagine it with small numbers, let’s say there are 256 possible combinations to a lock, A normal attack would take 256 tries. You decide it’s too long, so you get three friends and you each do 64 tries. “That’s the classical parallelization. With Grover you could in theory do √256)=16 tries in a row, but if that’s still too long and you again look for help from three friends. Each has to do √256/4)=8 tries.

So in total you do 8*4=32 tries, which is more than the 16 you would have done alone! Asking for help to parallelize the attack made the attack slower overall. Which is not the case for classical attacks.

Of course the numbers are way larger, but if we apply any reasonable constraint on the attacker (like having to finish a run in 10 years), the total work becomes so much more than 2⁶⁴.

Also, 2⁶⁴ was never the right number, because that pretends you can do AES as a single operation on a single qubit. This is somewhat orthogonal. The combination of these two observations turn the actual cost into 2¹⁰⁴ give or take, which is well beyond the threshold for security.

Sophie Schmieg, a senior cryptography engineer at Google, explained it this way:

Looking at enterprise AI adoption, VentureBeat has anecdotally observed a fairly wide divergence when it comes to specific roles: For those who build—engineers and developers—the arrival of AI has been transformative, moving through the workflow with the speed of tools like Claude Code and Cursor to automate the heavy lifting of syntax and architecture.

Yet, for those who sell, the “revenue stack” has remained a fragmented collection of data silos, manual CRM entries, and anecdotal reporting.

Von, a new AI platform emerging from the team behind process automation startup Rattle, aims to bridge this gap. By positioning itself not as another “point solution” but as a foundational “intelligence layer,” Von seeks to do for Go-To-Market (GTM) teams what the modern IDE has done for the developer: provide a single, reasoning interface that understands the entire business context.

“AI has revolutionized the workflow for people who build things, but there is nothing that has revolutionized the workflow for people who sell those things,” Von CEO Sahil Aggarwal said in a recent video call interview with VentureBeat. “That is what we are trying to build with Von”.

Technology: The context graph and multi-model engine

At the core of Von’s capability is a departure from the traditional “search bar” approach to enterprise AI. While standard LLMs often struggle with the sprawling, unstructured nature of sales data, Von begins its deployment by building a “context graph” of a company’s entire business.

This process involves ingesting structured data from CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot, alongside unstructured data from call recorders (Gong, Zoom, Chorus), email threads, and internal documentation.

“Once Von builds this context graph, it will understand your business better than anyone else in the company,” Aggarwal said.

This understanding is rooted in a company’s specific “ontology”—the unique language of its deal stages, territory definitions, and institutional knowledge.

“We train these foundational models on a company’s own business and ontology to make the model work for them,” the CEO addded.

Instead of relying on a single large language model, Von utilizes a “mixture of models” strategy to optimize performance and cost. In this architecture, Anthropic’s Claude is deployed for high-level reasoning and “thinking,” ChatGPT handles bulk data processing, and Google’s Gemini is utilized for generating creative assets such as decks and reports.

This technical approach allows Von to resolve a common frustration in Sales Operations: the gap between what is logged in a CRM and what actually happened in a meeting. By cross-referencing call transcripts with Salesforce records, the system can identify discrepancies in “lost reasons” or verify deal health based on sentiment rather than just a rep’s manual update.

From reporting queues to AI headcount

Von is designed to function as an “AI Data Scientist” or a “VP of RevOps” that lives on top of the enterprise’s existing revenue tracking tools.

During an initial product demonstration, Aggarwal showed how the platform could analyze 101 SMB accounts to identify churn risk in just over three minutes—a task he estimates would take a human analyst one to two weeks.

The platform’s primary interface resembles a chat environment, but the outputs are designed to be actionable revenue assets. Key functionalities include:

• Deal Health Monitoring: Cross-referencing calls and emails to surface “risky” commits that might otherwise go unnoticed until the end of a quarter.

• Automated Briefing: Generating pre-call context docs that draw from the entire history of an account, ensuring reps are briefed on every previous touchpoint.

• Win/Loss Analysis: Clustered analysis of transcripts to find the “true” reasons for lost deals, often finding that the recorded reason in the CRM does not match the customer’s actual feedback.

• Revenue Operations Automation: Handling “low-level” Salesforce admin tasks, such as creating flows, validation rules, or cleaning up account territories.

The goal is to shift Revenue Operations (RevOps) from a “reporting queue” that handles ad-hoc data requests into an infrastructure layer.

As Kieran Snaith, SVP of Revenue Operations at Qualified, noted in a Von testimonial blog post, the goal is to allow leaders to “run the business in chat,” asking complex questions about forecast confidence or pipeline risk and receiving data-backed answers instantly.

Pivoting into ‘the next Salesforce’

Von is operated by Rattle Software Inc., a company that previously found success with “Rattle,” a mid-seven-figure revenue business focused on Salesforce-Slack integrations. Aggarwal describes Von as a significant pivot toward a larger opportunity, aiming to build “the next Salesforce”.

The business has seen rapid early traction, reportedly crossing $500,000 in revenue within its first eight weeks of launch, with projections to reach $10 million in its first year.

The product is governed by a commercial, proprietary license typical of enterprise SaaS. Unlike open-source tools, Von’s “restricted” license means the underlying source code and the “context graph” technology are proprietary to Rattle Software Inc.. Users are granted a non-transferable, non-exclusive right to use the software for internal business purposes, with the company maintaining all rights, title, and interest in the service.

This philosophy of deep integration extends to the broader SaaS ecosystem, where Aggarwal observes, “Point solutions in SaaS are essentially dead. They will have a very hard time surviving in this world, because point solutions can now be white-coded within a company.”

Pricing follows a hybrid model of per-seat subscriptions and consumption-based credits. This structure is designed to scale with the persona using the tool; for instance, a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) seat may cost $1,000 per month for deep strategic analysis, while individual seller seats may be as low as $20 per month for basic research and follow-up tasks.

The company is currently backed by several tier-one venture capital firms, including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Insight Partners, and GV (Google Ventures).

Early adopter reaction

The reaction from early adopters highlights a shift in how AI is being integrated into the sales org.

Taylor Kelly, Head of Revenue Operations at Tapcart, remarked that “Von handles the analysis and insights that would normally require hiring another full-time analyst,” specifically citing its ability to handle complex Salesforce configurations and deal risk assessments.

Similarly, Evan Briere, VP of Partnerships at DemandScience, noted that Von’s direct connection to data sources makes it “actually applicable” compared to more “theoretical” horizontal AI tools like ChatGPT.

Other community feedback from the platform’s early users includes:

• CJ Oordt, Sales Director at Coalesce: Described it as a “research assistant who knows every conversation and note”.

• Rob Janke, Director of Revenue Operations at QuickNode: Stated that Von “solved this gap before we could even start building it ourselves”.

• Sydney, Head of Renewals at 15Five: Highlighted its impact on renewal intelligence, allowing her to analyze actual conversation signals across an entire book of business in minutes.

The prevailing sentiment among these users is that Von serves as “additional headcount” rather than just a tool. This mirrors the company’s internal metrics, which report that Von is already completing over 10,000 revenue tasks per week for its customer base.

An autonomous revenue org

The introduction of Von signals a maturing of AI in the enterprise. We are moving past the era of “AI as a feature”—where a chatbot is simply bolted onto an existing CRM—toward “AI as a persona”.

By training foundational models on a company’s specific business logic, Von is attempting to create a system that doesn’t just return data but offers “judgment calls”.As organizations look toward the rest of 2026, the challenge for RevOps leaders will be one of trust and infrastructure.

If Von can maintain its claimed 95% accuracy in predicting deal outcomes, the role of the human salesperson will inevitably shift toward higher-value relationship management, leaving the “data science” of sales to the agents.

For now, Von remains a high-growth experiment in whether the “intelligence layer” can finally bring the same level of revolutionary workflow to the people who sell as it has to the people who build.

Privacy tools are usually locked behind a monthly subscription, but Mozilla is changing that by baking protection directly into the browsing experience. With the latest update, Firefox has added an integrated VPN that allows you to hide your digital tracks without needing a separate app or a credit card. It’s a major shift for the browser, moving a feature that used to be a paid extra into the hands of every user by default.

Keep in mind that free VPNs can be dangerous. If they’re not from a trusted provider, they can put your data at risk or include vulnerabilities you wouldn’t find in some of the more popular paid VPN services. 

In its post about the Firefox 149 updates, Mozilla notes, “Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world’s most trusted browser.” 

In CNET’s tests, among VPN services that offer a free tier, the best free plan on the market is Proton VPN’s free service. (It’s the only free VPN CNET currently recommends.) But the free Proton VPN service is missing some features found in the company’s premium plan, such as the ability to choose a server manually or connect multiple devices at the same time. 

For limited or casual use

Mozilla’s overall VPN technology has undergone independent audits from Cure53, has resolved security issues over its history and uses WireGuard, which gives it a good security foundation. 

The browser-based free version may give the impression that it offers the same level of overall protection as a stand-alone VPN. However, it only protects web traffic viewed through the Firefox browser.

“The fundamental limitation is scope,” said Jacob Kalvo, a cybersecurity expert and CEO of Live Proxies, which provides technical services to businesses and individuals. “[The free Firefox VPN] only protects browser traffic, not apps, system processes or other network activity. That creates a false sense of ‘full protection’ for less technical users.”

That could make it a useful feature for casual use while browsing the web for those who don’t already have a VPN service. And Kalvo says the 50GB data limit is generous for a browser-based VPN.

But, he said, for anything involving “sensitive data, competitive intelligence, or large-scale operations,” he doesn’t recommend it.

“This is a controlled, limited-use product rather than a full privacy solution,” Kalvo said.

On Tuesday, the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America filed a lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the way the social networking giant handles scammers on its platforms violates Washington, DC’s consumer protection laws.

While many online scams involve direct outreach to victims by scammers (who are often themselves human trafficking victims trapped in scam compounds), CFA’s lawsuit focuses on fraudulent advertising that CFA alleges Meta profited from and allowed to “proliferate on its platforms,” despite publicly promising that it takes cracking down on fraud and scams seriously.

In its complaint, CFA points to ads found in Meta’s ads library that CFA claims are types of well-known scams, including several that appear to target people by their birth year and tout $1,400 checks, as well as others that advertise free government iPhones.

Speaking with WIRED, Ben Winters, CFA’s director of AI and data privacy, says others can find more dubious ads just by searching Meta’s ad library using key words like “free phone” and “stimulus check.” WIRED’s quick perusal of the ads library on Monday shows more live ads for “secret tax checks” that lead to a website that promises to reveal “Wall Street’s recession-proof investing strategy.”

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CFA is seeking to recover damages and what it says are illegal profits from Meta, in addition to business reforms. Winters says that there’s more to be done to take down repeat violators and scrutinize ads that promise things like free government programs that don’t exist before they’re put in front of consumers.

Meta has faced particular scrutiny because Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—which are all owned by Meta—are among the most widely used online platforms by Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. In late 2025, Reuters reported on a set of internal Meta documents that detailed how the company dealt with fraudulent and prohibited user activity, including a May 2025 presentation that estimated that its platforms were involved with a third of all successful scams in the US. Another presentation cited by Reuters alleged that an internal Meta review found it “is easier to advertise scams on Meta platforms than Google.”

One Meta document from 2024 that Reuters cited estimated that the company would earn 10.1 percent of its revenue that year—around $16 billion—from ads that were actually scams or other types of prohibited content. To put that figure in perspective, the FBI estimated that in 2024, Americans lost $16 billion from all internet crimes. At the time, a Meta spokesperson called the estimate “rough and overly inclusive” and said that the set of documents Reuters reported on “distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams” and that the actual revenue was lower, but declined to tell Reuters by how much.

In June 2025, a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general urged Meta to crack down on Facebook ads that led consumers to WhatsApp groups that were used for carrying out investment scams. The letter, which was signed by New York AG Letiticia James, said that Meta’s solutions were not working and that investigators in New York kept seeing scam advertisements months after submitting reports to Meta.

Since then, the US Virgin Islands attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit against Meta that, among other things, alleged that the company not only failed to crack down on scam advertising but charged advertisers higher rates to run ads flagged as likely to be fraudulent. That lawsuit is ongoing.

Though the federal government and many states have similar consumer protection laws as the DC law that CFA alleges Meta violated, Winters says he’s not holding his breath for the federal government to take action, and while he appreciates the work of state attorneys general, he believes consumers need relief now.

“We appreciate their work and think it’s absolutely critical, but we can’t wait for them to act when we haven’t seen them able to act as quickly as we need to,” Winters says. “This is why nonprofits and civil society exist in the idealized world, right? To fill in gaps where there are gaps.”

After its recent launch, Honor of Kings is now doubling down on the market with a two-pronged strategy. First, build a creator ecosystem, then strengthen its esports pathway. For this, the game has announced the rollout of HOK Studio, alongside the King’s Arise India: KWC at EWC26 Qualifier. Here’s everything you need to know.

HOK Studio to Boost Creator Ecosystem

At the center of this push is HOK Studio, the game’s official creator platform designed to support content creators across formats. This includes short videos, livestreams, tutorials, esports coverage, and more. As part of its initial phase in India, HOK Studio will introduce a Content Creator Incentive Program with rewards exceeding ₹1 crore (₹10 million). Creators can also get access to in-game tokens, exclusive rewards, official promotional support, and even early access to new content.

Dean Huang, the game’s producer, said:

India is a key market for Honor of Kings, and our focus is on building a strong, localised ecosystem that goes beyond gameplay. With HOK Studio, we are committed to developing a program worth an initial ₹10 million, to empower creators who play a critical role in shaping how the game is experienced and shared. At the same time, through initiatives like the KWC at EWC26 Qualifier, we are creating opportunities for Indian players to compete at the highest global level. Together, these efforts reflect our long-term commitment to growing both the creator and competitive ecosystems in India.

EWC Qualifier

Alongside creators, the game is also focusing heavily on competitive play. The King’s Arise India: KWC at EWC26 Qualifier will act as a structured pathway for Indian teams to reach the global stage. Registration for the tournament will run from April 19 to April 26, followed by open qualifiers, playoffs, and offline finals on May 17. The tournament features a prize pool of ₹5 lakh and will eventually select two teams to represent India at the global KWC event, where the total prize pool stands at $3 million.

The competition will follow global formats like Global Ban & Pick, which prevents teams from reusing heroes across matches, and a Bo7 Grand Final with an “Ultimate Battle” tiebreaker. These formats are designed to test strategy, adaptability, and team coordination at the highest level.

Google announced today that it is upgrading the Gemini for Home service with a “continued conversations” feature. Continued conversation allows a user to have a natural discussion with the Gemini platform without prefacing every follow-up request with the “Hey Google” prompt. The microphone will remain active on a smart device for a few seconds after the Gemini AI assistant provides its reply. During that window, the lights on the hardware will pulse or glow, indicating that you can keep chatting normally with the chatbot without needing a wake word. Gemini should retain the context as the conversation progresses, which should allow it to provide the desired information faster without the need for a user to repeat key details.

The feature is rolling out today for all Gemini for Home voice assistant languages and in all supported regions. Continued conversations have to be manually enabled in the Google Home app through the settings menu under “Gemini for Home voice assistant.” Google said that Gemini should be able to distinguish between follow-up questions addressed to the chatbot and other conversations happening in a room, but it should be interesting to track how successful that is given the past history of voice assistants unintentionally eavesdropping.

Continued conversation was an option under the Google Assistant platform, but it had more limited availability. Google has been preparing Gemini for Home as a replacement for Google Assistant platform since the fall.

In short: Samsung SmartThings and IKEA announced that 25 new IKEA Matter-over-Thread devices can now connect directly to a SmartThings hub without requiring IKEA’s own DIRIGERA hub, with smart bulbs starting at $5.99 that undercut competitors by half. The integration leverages Thread border routers already embedded in Samsung TVs, soundbars, and appliances since 2022, meaning millions of Samsung hardware owners have the infrastructure for Matter devices without knowing it, as the smart home market heads toward 800 million Matter-compatible devices by year end and a projected $537 billion market by 2030.

Samsung SmartThings and IKEA announced on Monday that 25 of IKEA’s new smart home devices can now connect directly to a SmartThings hub using Matter over Thread, eliminating the need for IKEA’s own DIRIGERA hub as an intermediary. The change sounds incremental. It is not. It means a $6 IKEA smart bulb can now join the same system that controls a Samsung television, refrigerator, and washing machine, all communicating locally without cloud dependency, through a protocol that also works with Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. The smart home has spent a decade promising interoperability. This is what it looks like when the promise starts to work at a price point that does not require justification.

The 25 devices span IKEA’s new Matter-over-Thread lineup: KAJPLATS smart bulbs in 11 variants starting at $5.99, GRILLPLATS smart plugs, scroll wheel remotes, smart buttons, a MYGGSPRAY motion sensor at $9.99, a MYGGBETT door and window sensor at $7.99, a KLIPPBOK water leak detector at $9.99, and an ALPSTUGA air quality sensor at $29.99 that measures CO2 and PM2.5 at roughly a quarter of the price competitors charge. The bulbs, plugs, and remotes connect directly to a SmartThings hub through Matter. The sensors require a hub, either IKEA’s DIRIGERA or a third-party alternative. Blind and shade control will be added later this year.

Why this matters technically

The previous integration required both an IKEA DIRIGERA hub and a SmartThings hub, with DIRIGERA acting as a Matter bridge between IKEA’s Zigbee devices and the SmartThings ecosystem. The new devices use Matter natively over Thread, a low-power IPv6 mesh networking protocol that allows devices to communicate directly with any Matter-compatible controller. Samsung and IKEA conducted multiple rounds of validation to ensure connectivity stability and built a dedicated user experience within the SmartThings app for IKEA device management.

The technical significance is in the protocol stack. Matter is the application layer, defining how devices describe themselves, receive commands, and report state. Thread is the networking layer, creating a self-healing mesh where devices act as routers for each other. SmartThings was the first platform to adopt Thread 1.4, which enables cross-brand network unification: a SmartThings hub can join an existing Thread network from another ecosystem, or allow a third-party border router to join its own. The result is that all Thread border routers in a home, regardless of manufacturer, operate as a single unified mesh.

Samsung has been quietly building Thread border routers into an expanding range of hardware. Every Samsung smart TV from 2022 onward, including QLED, Neo QLED, OLED, and Lifestyle models, contains one. So do Samsung soundbars, refrigerators, and washing machines. Millions of Samsung TV owners already have the infrastructure for Matter-over-Thread devices in their homes without having purchased anything specifically for smart home use. IKEA’s $6 bulbs give those TV owners something cheap enough to try.

IKEA’s pricing as strategy

IKEA’s pricing is the most consequential element of the announcement. A KAJPLATS smart bulb at $5.99 undercuts Philips Hue Essential at $15, Nanoleaf Essentials at $12, and Aqara T2 at $15 by half or more. The ALPSTUGA air quality sensor at $29.99 competes with devices from Awair and IQAir that cost more than $100. IKEA has stated that its goal is to make smart home technology “easy to use, easy to understand, and within reach for the many,” and the pricing reflects that ambition with unusual directness.

The strategy is a full-range revamp. IKEA announced 21 new Matter-compatible products in November 2025 and has committed to making Matter and Thread its default smart home protocols going forward. The DIRIGERA hub has evolved from a Zigbee controller to a Matter bridge in September 2024 to a full Matter controller in mid-2025, capable of onboarding devices from other manufacturers. IKEA is not just adding Matter support. It is rebuilding its entire smart home lineup around it.

Jaeyeon Jung, executive vice president of SmartThings at Samsung, framed the partnership explicitly in terms of accessibility: “By connecting IKEA devices to SmartThings, even first-time smart home users can enjoy a familiar and easy connectivity experience without financial burden.”

The state of Matter

Matter launched in October 2022 to considerable enthusiasm and a slow initial rollout. Early devices had reliability and setup issues that undermined the standard’s promise of seamless interoperability. Three and a half years later, the standard has matured. More than 1,000 devices have been certified across Matter 1.0 through 1.2. Matter 1.5, ratified in November 2025, added support for cameras, soil moisture sensors, and energy management. The Connectivity Standards Alliance projects 800 million Matter-compatible devices in use by the end of this year, which it calls the fastest adoption of any home technology standard in history.

The practical effect is that a Matter-certified device now works across Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung ecosystems simultaneously without additional configuration. The competition among platforms has shifted from device compatibility, which Matter has made universal, to software quality, AI integration, and user experience. SmartThings, with 430 million users as of January and on track to cross 500 million by year end, 4,700 connected device types, and 390 partners, is positioned as the platform with the broadest hardware integration, given that Samsung embeds SmartThings into televisions, appliances, and wearables.

Apple is expected to make its own significant push into the smart home this year with a touchscreen hub, a HomeKit camera, and smart glasses that function as ambient input devices. Google Home and Amazon Alexa continue to expand their own Matter support. The convergence means users are increasingly choosing platforms for their software and AI capabilities rather than for which devices they can control, because Matter ensures all platforms can control the same hardware.

What it means for the market

The smart home market was valued at $127.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $537 billion by 2030, growing at 27% annually. The primary barrier to adoption has been fragmentation: incompatible protocols, multiple hubs, and the constant risk that a device purchased today will not work with a system purchased tomorrow. Matter addresses the protocol problem. IKEA addresses the price problem. Samsung addresses the infrastructure problem by embedding Thread border routers into products that people buy for reasons that have nothing to do with smart home automation.

The combination of a $6 smart bulb, a universal protocol, and a television that already contains the networking hardware to support it is closer to mass-market smart home adoption than anything the industry has produced in the decade it has spent talking about it. The technology is no longer the constraint. The constraint has been making it cheap enough and simple enough that the average household does not need to understand what Matter, Thread, or a border router is in order to benefit from them. IKEA and Samsung, between them, appear to have solved both problems at once.

from the lying-liars-and-the-lies-they-tell dept

Talk about pathetic.

CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed “The Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

Truly banana republic type shit.

Oliver Darcy got a hold of the original invite for the dinner, and it’s everything you might expect:

Trump is, as regular Techdirt readers may recall, arguably the worst president in a century when it comes to trampling press freedom, free speech, and the First Amendment. When the administration isn’t trying to destroy comedians for telling jokes about the president, it’s busy crushing whatever was left of public media in the U.S., or threatening the broadcast licenses of networks that do basic journalism.

CBS management doesn’t care about any of that, of course, because it’s owned by billionaire right wing Trump ally, Larry Ellison. And Larry and David Ellison are desperate to have the government sign off on their job-destroying merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. The Warner Brothers board is voting to approve the deal on the same day as the dinner.

Despite some pretense that the Trump DOJ is doing its due diligence to review the deal, there’s little real doubt that the feds will rubber stamp the transaction. The real question mark rests with a likely antitrust lawsuit from a coalition of state attorneys general to block the transaction.

It’s worth noting that Larry Ellison’s son David couldn’t attend a hearing last week on the massive problems with the Paramount Warner merger due to a purported death in the family (nobody seems able to determine who died), but he was able to make an appearance at Cinemacon a day earlier to make all sorts of empty promises about how wonderful the merger will be:

“David Ellison…made a unexpected appearance at CinemaCon, the annual gathering of theater owners. He took the stage to reassure exhibitors they have nothing to fear, whether it be the new regime at Paramount, or his pending acquisition of Warner Bros.”

They of course have everything to fear. The massive $108 billion in debt from the Warner Brothers deal will inevitably result in mass layoffs, price hikes, and sagging product quality due to the need to cut corners to service the debt. This is before we even talk about the layoffs already happening at CBS.

It’s simply not up for debate: this happens absolutely every single time folks like the Ellisons delude themselves into thinking mass consolidation does anything useful outside of generate tax breaks, drive short-lived stock boosts, and let guys like David Ellison pretend they’re “savvy dealmakers.”

Pre-merger promises about release windows (or anything else) are absolutely meaningless. But with just a handful of people at the top financially disincentivized from learning anything from history (including the three previous disastrous Warner Brothers mergers), the dysfunction just repeats itself indefinitely. We’ve seen merger dysfunction and chaos before, but this one has the potential to outdo them all.

Filed Under: consolidation, corruption, david ellison, dinner, donald trump, first amendment, free speech, journalism, larry ellision, media, mergers, regulators

Companies: cbs, paramount, warner bros. discovery

Motorola has a busy week ahead. The Edge 70 Pro is set to launch in India on April 22, but it looks like that’s not the only device worth watching. Prolific leaker Evan Blass has shared high-resolution render images of the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+, giving you an early look at the more premium sibling, the Edge 70 Pro+ in the lineup.

What colors and finishes is the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+ coming in?

The renders reveal five color options for the Edge 70 Pro+. You’re looking at white, dark blue, light blue (turquoise), brown, and maroon color, along with a curved display and slim bezel. While these aren’t the official names, what makes this more interesting than a standard color drop is the variety of finishes on offer.

The blue and turquoise versions feature a fabric back, the white version gets a marble surface, and the brown variant sports a wood-inspired look. Motorola is clearly focusing more on materials and finishes than on a total redesign in 2026.

The overall design won’t surprise you if you’ve seen other recent Motorola devices, as it closely follows the same aesthetic as the Edge 70 Fusion+ and Moto X70 Air Pro.

What to expect from the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+

The complete specs, price, or launch date for the Motorola Edge 70 Pro+ are still under wraps. Going by the naming, it’s likely positioned as a more powerful version of the Edge 70 Pro. The difference will probably come down to a faster processor and possibly better cameras.

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The Edge 70 Pro gives you a solid baseline in the meantime as the phone packs a 6.8-inch 1.5K AMOLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate, a 6,500mAh silicon-carbon battery with 90W charging, and a MediaTek Dimensity 8500 Extreme chip. It also carries IP68 and IP69 certifications.

Both the Edge 70 Pro and Pro+ have appeared on the HDR10+ certification website, confirming richer contrast and better detail in bright and dark scenes. The Pro+ is expected to step things up with a faster processor and improved cameras.