Tech
Trump Administration Makes The Conscious Choice To Make America Less Prepared For The Next Pandemic
from the hot-stove dept
Way back in the ancient days of the year 2020, the world went through this pandemic thing called COVID-19. For those of you not old enough to remember such ancient history, it was a fairly significant health issue that caused a few disruptions throughout the world, including in these here United States. Trump was president at the time of the wild spread of the pandemic. There were shutdowns. There was a supply chain shitstorm. People argued over masks and school closures while staring at shelves where toilet paper used to be available so we could wipe ourselves. The government displayed such an impressive failure of leadership that I myself questioned why we should have a government at all if this is how it was going to behave.
But, to be fair, there were also some impressive things from government to come out of the pandemic. Trump’s administration initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop and distribute COVID vaccines so we could all get back to our lives. While the first Trump administration didn’t do so great at the distribution part of the plan, and managed to coat the world in incredible amounts of misinformation around the pandemic and these vaccines, it was still an impressive feat to bring these vaccines to market in record time. One of the government agencies that powered Operation Warp Speed was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), which was responsible for collating research on previous pathogens similar to COVID-19 and for building out the trials for the vaccines that would eventually come to market. If it weren’t for NIAID, it’s unlikely the government’s response to the pandemic would have been as rapid, or successful.
And if you think I’m wrong about that, there’s a chance that the next pandemic will provide us with an answer. That’s because this second Trump administration is actively choosing to remove exactly this sort of pandemic work from NIAID’s proactive efforts.
NIH director Jay Bhattacharya explained the restructure at an event with other top agency officials on 30 January. “It’s a complete transformation of [the NIAID] away from this old model” that has historically prioritized research on HIV, biodefence and pandemic preparedness, he said. The institute will focus more on basic immunology and other infectious diseases currently affecting people in the United States, he added, rather than on predicting future diseases.
Nahid Bhadelia, director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Massachusetts, says the decision to deprioritize these areas will leave people in the United States more vulnerable to pathogens that are constantly evolving in wildlife around the world and spilling into human populations, sometimes sparking outbreaks. “Just because we say we’re going to stop caring about these issues doesn’t make the issues go away — it just makes us less prepared,” she says.
This is one of the things I’ve found about Trump’s second term most perplexing. His reelection efforts were arguably chiefly torpedoed by the pandemic. There’s an old saying in parenting that even a child can learn a lesson from pain. If a child touches a hot stove, they will get burned and will not touch it again. By installing the likes of RFK Jr. and his cadre of conspiracy theorists to manage the health of Americans, and by keeping the very agency that allowed for his rapid response to COVID from doing likewise in the future, it appears Trump wants to keep touching the hot stove. I don’t get it.
And it’s not like we don’t have outbreaks of infectious disease happening right now. We absolutely do. The measles infection count that has gone on for 14 months in this country is insane. There’s no reason COVID can’t mutate and come right back into our lives as a major health issue. Or there could be another novel pathogen that grinds all of our lives back to a halt once more. For a man so concerned with building walls, he’s tearing down the virtual protection that is proactive research and knowledge.
“NIAID’s work clearly neither prevented the pandemic nor prevented Americans from experiencing among the highest levels of all-cause excess mortality in the developed world during that time,” [Bhattacharya and subordinates] wrote. “Given the increasing prevalence of allergic and autoimmune disorders and the burden of common infections in the population over the past few decades, the NIAID must focus research on these conditions with a greater sense of urgency.”
This is a wild fictionalization of what occurred at NIAID. The agency doesn’t make healthcare policy. It advises the Executive Branch on what is needed to prepare for new and existing diseases, performs research into detecting those diseases before they become pandemics, and provides research and planning into how to respond to them. When Anthony Fauci led NIAID in 2017, he warned the administration of all of this and asked for funding to prepare for it. Not only did he not get his funding, but the administration also made staff and budget cuts impacting our pandemic preparations.
“We do need a public-health emergency fund. It’s tough to get it … but we need it,” Fauci said. “Because what we had to go through for Zika — it was very, very painful when the president asked for the $1.9 billion in February and we didn’t get it until September.”
But the Trump administration did not create such a fund, and instead cut spending for federal agencies responsible for detecting and preparing for outbreaks. In May 2018, Trump’s national security advisor disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team, while in October 2019, the administration declined to renew funding for a pandemic early warning system.
This administration is doing it again, except worse. This time, it’s not removing some funding and some staff that were used to prepare us for the next pandemic. Instead, he’s just removing the mission of pandemic preparedness from NIAID entirely. And there are future plans to remove funding for research on novel pathogens, as well.
The instructions to agency staff members to rebrand the institute’s language are only the first step towards implementing this new vision, according to the NIAID employees. NIH principal deputy director Matthew Memoli has ordered more changes, including the review of the portfolio of grants funding biodefence and pandemic preparedness, in the coming weeks and months, they say.
This is crazy. It’s as though we’re all in the back seat of the family minivan, while mom and dad drive us somewhere… except we have no GPS, no maps, the steering wheel moves on its own, and the windshield is made of lead.
The stove is still hot. And, unfortunately, as Trump makes another attempt to touch it, it won’t be his fingers that are singed, but our own.
Filed Under: covid, donald trump, health, jay bhattacharya, niaid, operation warp speed, pandemics, vaccines
Tech
Photonics research firm Invrs.io & its single employee acquired by Apple
A new filing has revealed that Apple purchased Invrs.io, acquiring its assets along with the sole equityholder, founder, and employee.

Apple has acquired another AI startup — Invrs.io
Following Apple’s acquisition of the audio-focused startup Q.ai in January 2026, it has been revealed that another, much smaller company has moved under the Apple umbrella.
A notice on the European Commission website, spotted by MacRumors, says that the iPhone maker acquired the photonics research company Invrs.io, LLC back in October 2025. Photonics is the science and technology of generating, controlling, and detecting photons, or light particles.
Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Tech
Turning a BMX Bike Into an Electric-Powered Dragster is More Interesting Than You Think

A unique BMX frame tests the limits of an electric bike’s capabilities. Sam Barker and Tom Stanton, two friends who enjoy tackling weekend projects, transformed a standard BMX frame into a speed machine. What they created is a beast that feels more like a dragster than a pedal assist bike, a tiny BMX frame with enough power to raise the front wheel and outperform more standard e-bikes.
The project began by simply plugging a 20-inch BMX wheel equipped with a 3kW hub motor into an existing bike in the garage, powered by a 72 volt, 20 amp-hour battery. Initially, some quick spins around the block revealed some potential acceleration, but pushing the throttle wide was all it took to send the back wheel spinning into the air and the front end flying off completely due to the narrow wheelbase.
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They knew they needed to solve the handling issues, so they brought out the welder and cut the frame, adding a meter of 12mm mild steel tubing to give it some significant stability. They added some reinforced brackets to make the whole thing feel sturdy, almost like scaffolding. The longer frame kept the front wheel on the ground during those violent launches, and it also allowed them to finally tuck the battery inside the bike. They also changed the handlebars to a unique design to give them better control, and they adjusted the pedals to make them exactly perfect.

Stopping was accomplished with a borrowed rim brake caliper from a penny-farthing cycle. To be honest, it sort of works, but don’t expect to be able to stop on a dime soon. The machine overheats a lot under severe braking, and it won’t slow you down enough to be safe at the speeds it can reach. They did identify a workaround by shunting the motor wires to enable regenerative braking, but the main brakes remain marginal.

When they eventually took it out for a ride, they discovered the bike’s personality: it creates so much acceleration that the back wheel starts spinning before the rubber really has a chance to grip, and then you’re past 50 or 60 kph, feeling the speed wobble from the sharp steering angle. It’s not particularly stable, but it’s far superior to the original short version. While there is no fairing to protect you, and the low seat causes you to bounce around on the pegs, you must agree it’s a lot of fun.
[Source]
Tech
Vantrue E1 4K Pro Review (2026): Tiny and High-Definition
One way is to buy an optional $25 hardwire kit from Vantrue, which will connect the device directly to your fuse box. Note, however, that the camera draws about 25 to 35 milliamps while in parking mode (about 3 to 4 watts on a home outlet), and this will drain your car’s battery if hardwired. This isn’t a troublesome power draw, and should be fine for days or maybe weeks if your battery’s healthy.
But in general, I’d rather not drain my car battery while it’s parked. I’d instead nix the hardwire kit and invest in a good power bank. Even a $48 portable bank from Anker should be enough for about a week’s continuous operation while parked, without ever worrying about battery drain on your car.
Limitations and Faults
Vantrue app via Matthew Korfhage
For such a dinky device, the Vantrue does nonetheless offer a real-time screen. It’s doubtful you’ll use it to scroll through video, however. It’s most useful for verifying the framing on the cam when you stick it to your windshield. The screen is a bit busy with information, and lower resolution than the actual video.
If you’re reviewing footage, you’ll be doing so on your phone using the app. But the screen is still useful for adjusting settings manually, should you desperately need to—though controlling the phone via the on-camera interface will be a little fiddly and irritating. Again, you’re better off just connecting the camera to your phone to toggle settings.
There are, in fact, settings aplenty. Through the app, you’re able to track mileage, toggle GPS tracking, set the frame rate and resolution of the camera, and set whether you want the camera to use high-dynamic range settings or PlatePix. The former will be most useful when light is dim.
It’s also a simple, single-camera device. Vantrue has more elaborate (and more expensive, and larger) multi-camera options with similar camera specs that I’m in the process of testing, including a Nexus 4 Pro with a lower-resolution front-cabin and rear cam. A 4-channel N5 adds an extra rear-cabin channel for a wild amount of camera coverage, but at the expense of some image resolution.
PlatePix does indeed help in capturing license plates, but it will do so at the expense of contrast on the rest of the image. This is a compromise that’ll matter most at night. Which is to say, you’re choosing between marginal license plate capture on a dark image, or worse, license plate capture on crisper night footage.
Tech
SheBuilds on Lovable’s 2026 call to create
On March 8, 2026, in honour of International Women’s Day, a new edition of SheBuilds on Lovable invited builders from around the world to a 24-hour global, powered by Anthropic. On top of that, participants in the SheBuilds campaign receive $100 in Anthropic API credits and $250 in Stripe fee credits to kickstart their builds and remove early-stage barriers to creation.
This isn’t just another hackathon; it’s a campaign that blends community, technology, and real output. It asks a simple question of the tech industry and its marketers: do we want participation, or just talk about it?
If I’m honest, I have mixed feelings. We need a stronger community and louder voices for women in tech not just on a specific international day, but every day. I’d like to believe we are beyond the stereotype of what jobs women can or cannot do, and what is left for men. Beyond any single campaign, we should advocate for women as builders in the tech world every day.
Still, every time I see a campaign like this, it sparks some hope inside me. It reminds me that we are not reduced to specific skills on a specific day, and that progress is possible.
Returning to SheBuilds, which is rooted in a longer tradition: the 48-hour virtual buildathons Lovable has run for women founders and builders, where ideas become real applications over an intense weekend of collaboration.
In October 2025, 60 women joined a remote, AI-enabled sprint to design, prototype, and launch working products in 48 hours, and the resonant element wasn’t speed, it was agency.
In 2026, the campaign took this idea further. Instead of being constrained to a single track, it anchored itself to a global cultural moment where women’s participation in tech isn’t just acknowledged but activated, with free build credits, peer connection, live sessions, and an open invitation to anyone who wants to make rather than debate what innovation should look like.
We have been talking in tech about inclusion and diversity for years. Many initiatives generate reports, webinars, and packs of aspirational slides. SheBuilds does something different: it creates the conditions for output. In the world of software, execution matters. A founder funded or a product launched is a literal piece of industry change, unlike any promise that never materialises.
SheBuilds lowers barriers in two ways. First, it reshapes access to execution. Participants don’t need traditional engineering skills; they need a laptop, an idea, and the willingness to build it. Second, by connecting creation to a broader cultural moment, International Women’s Day, it reframes participation as both a personal achievement and a public conversation about who gets to shape tech.
There’s good evidence that this model matters. Across the Lovable community, builders report that the ritual of building, not discussing, changes how they see themselves in technology. For many, shipping a live prototype in 48 hours meant moving from being stuck in ideas to being recognized as a doer; more than that, it positioned them within a network that values rapid iteration and real product agency.
From the industry’s perspective, this matters because it accelerates user engagement in a genuinely participatory way. Rather than positioning a platform as something to use someday, the SheBuilds campaign positions it as something you use now. When marketers tie campaigns to output, not just signup counts, they create moments of meaningful interaction. That’s both a brand story and a user experience strategy.
Lovable’s move to embrace International Women’s Day isn’t a gesture; it’s a strategic campaign. By hosting SheBuilds events tied to a global calendar, the company amplifies its mission, and invites participation on a broader scale. It embodies a shift in how tech platforms engage builders: merging community activation with cultural moments, and showing that building isn’t reserved for a subset with coding degrees.
If the tech industry wants to look past fancy words like diversity and equity, it needs campaigns that exchange words for workshops, panels for platforms, and theories for tools. That’s the real invitation SheBuilds extends to its participants, and the lesson it offers marketers who want to tell meaningful stories about making things.
The tech world still doesn’t reflect the people it serves. Women make up far less than half of technical roles and leadership positions, and the gap shows up in boardrooms, engineering teams, and the very products we use every day. Representation isn’t a nice-to-have statistic; it shapes what technology looks like and who gets to steer it.
From where I stand, SheBuilds on Lovable isn’t just another event. It is a call to action that meets a long-standing need, a space where women are not only welcomed but empowered to create, ship, and be seen. It turns invisible potential into visible impact, inviting women to bring their solutions into the world rather than waiting for permission to do so.
When women build, the whole industry becomes richer in ideas, perspective, and purpose. Moments like this, tied to real creative work, are not symbolic gestures. They are steps toward a tech ecosystem where women aren’t exceptions but equals.
Let the world know the builder you are! Celebrate your voice here! Isn’t this lovable?
Tech
ColorOS 16 February Update Brings PopOut Feature to More OPPO Devices
OPPO has started rolling out its February 2026 update for ColorOS 16, bringing the PopOut feature to more devices beyond the recently launched Reno 15 series. The update focuses on creative tools and productivity improvements, as well as refinements to AI-powered image editing.
PopOut Feature Expands to More OPPO Devices
Originally introduced with the OPPO Reno15 series, the PopOut feature is now available on a wider range of OPPO smartphones, including:
The PopOut feature creates a 3D-like depth effect by lifting the main subject forward from the background. The result is a more dynamic and eye-catching image that appears to extend beyond the frame. With this update, OPPO is making the creative tool accessible to more users across its premium and upper mid-range lineup.
Productivity and AI Enhancements
Alongside PopOut, the February update also introduces several system-level improvements.
PowerPoint Translation now allows users to translate presentations into multiple languages while preserving the original formatting. It also supports side-by-side comparison and easy export.
OPPO has further refined its AI Eraser tool, aiming for cleaner edits with fewer visible traces after object removal. The Reflection Removal feature has also been upgraded to reduce glare in document photos and portraits, including images where subjects are wearing glasses.
The Private Safe feature has also received performance improvements, with faster file transfers and a new option to add files directly under the “Other files” category.
Rollout Timeline
The ColorOS 16 February update is being rolled out in phases between February 6 and February 28, 2026. Users on eligible devices can check for the update via Settings once it becomes available in their region.
Tech
IBM’s $40B stock wipeout is built on a misconception: Translating COBOL isn’t the same as modernizing it
On Tuesday, Anthropic published tools that let Claude read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. By the end of the trading day, investors had wiped roughly $40 billion from IBM’s market cap — the company’s biggest single-day drop in 25 years — pricing the announcement as an existential threat to IBM’s mainframe business.
The reaction was swift. It was also built on a fundamental misreading of why enterprises run mainframes in the first place.
IBM’s COBOL is 66 years old. It was designed in 1959, runs on IBM mainframes, and continues to power transaction processing systems with an estimated 250 billion lines of COBOL in active production, according to the Open Mainframe Project.
The engineers who wrote it are retiring; the ones replacing them largely cannot read it. For decades, that skills gap has been one of enterprise IT’s most expensive unsolved problems — and one IBM has been working to fix with AI since at least 2023, when it launched watsonx Code Assistant for Z to help migrate COBOL to modern Java.
Claude Code, Anthropic says, can now analyze entire codebases, map hidden dependencies, and generate working translations of code that most engineers today cannot read. For enterprises running COBOL on distributed platforms — Windows, Linux and other non-mainframe environments — that capability is genuinely useful and increasingly practical.
The actual barrier was never technical
“Modernizing COBOL has been a technically solved problem for a while,” Matt Brasier, analyst at Gartner, told VentureBeat. “The real problem is that the costs of modernization are high and the ROI is low.”
Amazon and Google have been offering AI-powered COBOL migration tools for years. AWS Transform and a comparable Google Cloud Platform service both targeted the same problem: reducing friction for customers looking to move mainframe workloads to the cloud.
“This is basically one more source of competition,” Raj Joshi, senior vice president at Moody’s Ratings, told VentureBeat. “IBM has always lived in a very competitive domain. On the margin, this thing is basically negative, no question about that. There’s one more powerful competitor. But IBM has coexisted with these threats.”
Steve McDowell, chief analyst at NAND Research, cuts to the structural argument: “Applications don’t run on mainframes because they’re written in COBOL,” he said. “They run on mainframes because mainframes deliver a class of determinism, scalable compute and reliability that general purpose servers can’t match.”
The issue runs deeper than market positioning. “GenAI tools are helpful, but their non-deterministic nature means the resulting code is not consistent — the same operation will be implemented in different ways in different parts of the code,” Brasier said. “Leading tools combine deterministic and non-deterministic approaches. None of this solves the ROI problem, though.”
What COBOL translation leaves unsolved
“Translating COBOL is the easy part,” IBM communications director Steven Tomasco told VentureBeat. “The real work is data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware-accelerated performance built over decades of tight software and hardware coupling. That is the problem IBM has spent decades learning to solve, and AI is the most powerful tool we have ever had to do it.”
According to IBM, Royal Bank of Canada, the National Organization for Social Insurance and ANZ Bank have all used watsonx Code Assistant for Z to accelerate modernization of COBOL code without moving off IBM Z.
That does not mean Anthropic has no competitive foothold. For enterprises running COBOL outside the mainframe — on distributed systems, Windows and Linux environments — Claude Code enters a space where IBM’s vertical integration is less of an advantage. “IBM understands mainframe technology at a level that others can’t match. If I’m only looking at COBOL, I’m using IBM’s watsonx,” McDowell said. “Anthropic, however, has a broader footprint within a lot of development teams, where a single vendor makes it worthwhile.”
What enterprise buyers should actually do
Senior data and infrastructure engineers will spend the next few weeks fielding questions from executives who saw the headlines and assumed the hard problem just got solved. It did not.
“It’s COBOL, but there are numerous applications tied to it,” Joshi said. “It’s not like you transform millions of lines and somehow you are ready to go to cloud. It’s a massive risk assessment, dependencies and all those things.”
The more useful question for buyers is whether this week’s noise creates an opening. Braiser thinks it does.
“They should use the resulting board-level and shareholder discussions to review postponed modernization initiatives and see if any of them now have ROI,” Brasier said.
McDowell was blunt on the competitive question. “Will Anthropic take business from IBM’s tool? Yes, of course,” he said. “But I’d be surprised if that tool was making significant revenue for IBM.”
Chirag Mehta, analyst at Constellation Research, cautioned that IT leaders should not react emotionally or rewrite strategy overnight.
“Treat this as a reason to run a small, bounded pilot to measure outcomes, not as a reason to rip and replace vendors,” Mehta told VentureBeat.
Mehta suggests that enterprises pick one well-scoped application slice or workflow with clear inputs and outputs, and evaluate approaches apples-to-apples: quality of dependency mapping, quality of recovered business logic documentation, test coverage and equivalence checks, performance and reliability regressions.
In Mehta’s view, the bigger reminder is that modernization is more than converting code. The hard parts are extracting institutional knowledge, reworking processes and controls, change management, and containing operational risk in systems that cannot break. AI can compress the “analysis and translation” work, but it does not eliminate the governance and accountability burden.
“The teams that win will treat AI as an accelerator inside a disciplined modernization program, with measurable checkpoints and risk guardrails, not as a magic conversion button,” Mehta said.
Tech
How Mexico’s ‘CJNG’ Drug Cartel Embraced AI, Drones, and Social Media
“El Mencho” is dead.
This weekend, Mexican Army Special Forces killed Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, the head of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) in Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico. Following confirmation of El Mencho’s death by federal authorities, experts anticipate a profound reconfiguration of the global drug trafficking landscape, a scenario that could lead to a new and dangerous wave of violence.
The focus will turn to the CJNG’s mechanisms of control, intimidation, financing, and recruitment that granted the cartel unprecedented operational capacity. Much of its strength stemmed from the weakening of long-standing rivals through the sophisticated use of social media and artificial intelligence, state-of-the-art specialized weaponry, and a flexible internal structure.
The US State Department says that CJNG maintains a presence and contacts in “almost all of Mexico,” the American continent, and countries such as Australia, China, and various Southeast Asian nations. The agency underscores the cartel’s criminal versatility: In addition to fentanyl trafficking, it is involved in extortion, migrant smuggling, oil and mineral theft, and illicit arms trade.
How Was the CJNG Born?
The CJNG traces its roots to the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, also known as “El Chapo.” Around 2007, this group formed an armed wing in Jalisco under the command of Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel Villarreal. This was the Milenio Cartel, also known as Los Valencia. During this period, Guzmán’s operatives were vying for control of Jalisco territories against Los Zetas, a splinter group of the Gulf Cartel.
In its early years, the CJNG presented itself as “Los Mata Zetas” (The Zeta Killers). According to the BBC, its first documented appearance occurred in September 2011, when it claimed responsibility, through a video circulated on social media, for the discovery of 35 bodies in Boca del Río, a municipality in the state of Veracruz.
By then, the alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel had already fractured after a confrontation with federal forces that culminated in 2010 with the death of Ignacio Coronel. Leadership fell to Oseguera Cervantes, who spearheaded a rapid expansion in methamphetamine production and trafficking.
Cartels Embracing Tech
In less than five years, the CJNG displaced the Knights Templar from southern Michoacán and expelled Los Zetas from northern Jalisco and parts of Zacatecas. After Guzmán Loera’s capture and extradition, the group strengthened its strategy by recruiting financial and chemical specialists to boost the manufacture of synthetic drugs and diversify its income through money-laundering schemes in sectors such as livestock, mining, agriculture, and construction, as well as expanding extortion of small- and medium-size businesses.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) notes that the CJNG operates in more than 40 countries and has a financial structure known as Los Cuinis, headed by Abigael González Valencia, Oseguera’s brother-in-law. This network coordinates money-laundering operations through international trade, cryptocurrencies, and links with Asian networks.
Several investigations have documented the use of digital tools for recruitment and fraud. In 2024, Interpol warned that groups like the CJNG were involved in large-scale financial scams supported by AI, natural language models, and cryptocurrencies. It also detected the expansion of human trafficking for forced criminal activity in scam compounds.
A study by El Colegio de México, in collaboration with the Civic AI Lab at Northeastern University in Boston, revealed that TikTok has become a recruitment tool for Mexican cartels, including CJNG. The research identified 100 active accounts linked to illicit organizations and categorized their content as recruitment, border crossings, illegal businesses, prostitution, propaganda, and arms sales. Forty-seven percent of the accounts promoted the recruitment of new members, and 31 percent disseminated propaganda messages. The report highlighted that the CJNG accounted for 54.3 percent of the detected accounts, followed by the Sinaloa Cartel and the Northeast Cartel.
Tech
Apple introduces age verification for apps in Utah, Louisiana and Australia
Now that Apple has started blocking users under 18 in certain regions from downloading apps, the company has introduced new age verification tools. Those will help developers “meet their age assurance obligations under upcoming US and regional laws, including in Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah and Louisiana,” the company said in a news release on its Developer site.
As of February 24, 2026, users in Australia, Brazil and Singapore won’t be able to download apps rated 18+ unless their age is confirmed through “reasonable methods.” Apple noted that any apps distributed in Brazil that are declared to contain loot boxes will be updated to 18+. While the App Store can perform those checks automatically, “developers may have separate obligations to independently confirm that their users are adults,” Apple wrote. For that, developers can employ the company’s Declared Age Range API (on iOS, iPadOS and macOS) to get “helpful signals” about a user’s age.
In Utah as of May 6, 2026 and Louisiana on July 1, 2026, “age categories will be shared with the developer’s app when requested through the Declared Age Range API.” That API will also provide “new signals,” like whether age-related regulatory requirements apply to the user and if the user must share their age range. “The API will also let you know if you need to get a parent or guardian’s permission for significant app updates for a child,” Apple says.
Under Utah’s new law, users must be over 18 to make a new account with an app store, while underage uses will need to link their account to a parent’s in order to get permission to use certain apps. Louisiana and Texas also passed similar laws and California plans to enact age-based rules for app stores in 2027.
Those rules are designed to protect children from predators, financial harm and other problems. However, critics have described the laws as blunt tools that harm privacy and internet anonymity. “A poorly designed system might store this personal data, and even correlate it to the online content that we look at,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes. “In the hands of an adversary, and cross-referenced to other readily available information, this information can expose intimate details about us.”
Tech
On Running Is Finally Ramping Up Production of Its ‘Hyper-Foam’ Spray-On Shoes
Swiss shoe company On—one of the fastest-growing footwear brands—has done very well for itself, growing into a $3 billion company on the giant puffy soles of its very garish shoes. Today, the company announced three new kicks and the opening of a new production plant in South Korea that will make many, many more—at least, that’s the goal.
Specifically, the company is focusing on the production of its newest, weirdest shoe—a giant soled laceless running shoe with a single-piece toe box made of “hyper-foam” plastics sprayed on by robot arms. The plastics are 40 percent biofoam, and the shoe is made of just eight pieces; On says its minimalist approach saves on the shoe’s carbon footprint.
The LightSpray Cloudmonster 3 Hyper is a switch-up from On’s first shoe that uses its sprayed-on toe box technique, the Cloudboom Strike LS. Along with adding the LightSpray branding to the thing, the primary difference is the switch to the Cloudmonster model, which, in On shoe lore, tends to provide more cushy soles. This new version has 20 percent more foam, for all those runners who like a squishy bounce. They’ll have a limited release on the company’s website and retail stores in North America starting March 5, with a global expansion on April 16.
The new LightSpray shoes weigh 205 grams apiece (less than half a pound), which puts them a little heavier than the 170-gram Cloudboom Strikes. They’re also cheaper at $280 versus the Cloudboom’s heftier $330 price.
While WIRED liked the first iteration of the LightSpray shoe, nobody else, except for a few hand-picked marathon runners, had a chance to use it. Production runs were very limited, and the shoes were prohibitively expensive. Now, On has beefed up production in South Korea, enabling it to expand its overall production of LightSpray shoes 30-fold in 2026.
“On’s strategy to expand the LightSpray technology from racing to running shoes is to make it available to a broader audience beyond elite athletes,” an On representative tells WIRED via email.
Whether laceless, slip-on shoes are going to find their gait in the shoe market isn’t a winning idea yet. While brands like Nike offer slip-ons, the laceless fixation tends to be reserved for one-off shoes like the Back to the Future II-inspired Adapt BB self-lacing shoes. Some serious runners prefer the pursuit of a more natural run offered by slim-soled shoes like barefoot shoes, but On is still doubling down on its doubly big cushions. People seem to like them, as On is also announcing two other Cloudmonster shoes. One is the laced-up Cloudmonster 3, and the other is a regular ol’ Cloudmonster 3 Hyper with laces and a non-LightSprayed toe box. (Ugh, laces. How passé.)
On says it has the further strategic goal of scaling up its global production of the LightSpray shoes, “within the next few years.”
Tech
Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control
Claude Code has become increasingly popular in the first year since its launch, and especially in recent months, as developers and non-technical users alike flock to AI unicorn Anthropic’s hit coding agent to create full applications and websites in days, on their own, that would’ve taken months and technical teams without. It’s not a stretch to say it helped spur the “vibe coding” boom — using plain English instead of programming languages to write software.
But it’s all been restricted to the desktop Claude Code apps and Terminal command-line interfaces and integrated development environments (IDEs) — until today. Now, Anthropic has added a new mode, Remote Control, that lets users issue commands to Claude Code from their iPhone and Android smartphones — starting with subscribers to Anthropic’s Claude Max ($100-$200 USD monthly) subscription tier.
Anthropic posted on X saying Remote Control will also make its way to Claude Pro ($20 USD monthly) subscribers in the future.
The mobile command center
Announced earlier today by Claude Code Product Manager Noah Zweben, Remote Control is a synchronization layer that bridges local CLI environments with the Claude mobile app and web interface.
The feature allows developers to initiate a complex task in their terminal and maintain full control of it from a phone or tablet, effectively decoupling the AI agent from the physical workstation.
Currently, Remote Control is available as a Research Preview for subscribers on the Claude Max tier. While access for Claude Pro ($20/month) users is expected shortly, the feature remains a high-end tool for power users and is notably absent from Team or Enterprise plans during this initial phase.
To access the feature, users must follow this guide and update to Claude version 2.1.52 and execute the command claude remote-control or use the in-session slash command /rc. Once active, the terminal displays a QR code that, when scanned, opens a responsive, synchronized session in the Claude mobile app.
Less screen time, more IRL time: philosophy of flow
The messaging behind the release centers on the preservation of a developer’s “flow state.”
In his announcement, Zweben framed the update as a lifestyle upgrade rather than just a technical one, encouraging users to “take a walk, see the sun, walk your dog without losing your flow.”
This “Remote Control” is not a cloud-based replacement for local development, but a portal into it. According to official documentation, the core value is that “Claude keeps running on your machine, and you can control the session from the Claude app.”
This ensures that local context—filesystem access, environment variables, and Model Context Protocol (MCP)servers—remains active and reachable even if the user is miles away from their desk.
Architecture, security, and setup
Claude Code Remote Control functions as a secure bridge between your local terminal and Anthropic’s cloud interface, which provides the Anthropic AI models, Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, that power Claude Code.
When you run the command, your desktop machine initiates an outbound connection to Anthropic’s API for serving the models — meaning you aren’t opening any “inbound” ports or exposing your computer to the open web. Instead, your local machine polls the API for instructions.
When you visit the session URL or use the Claude app, you are essentially using those devices as a “remote window” to view and command the process still running on your computer. Your files and MCP servers never leave your machine; only the chat messages and tool results flow through the encrypted bridge.
To get started, ensure you are on a Pro or Max plan and have authenticated your CLI using the /login command. Simply navigate to your project directory and run claude remote-control to initialize the session. The terminal will then generate a unique session URL and a QR code (toggleable via the spacebar) for your mobile device.
Once you open that link on your phone, tablet, or another browser, the two surfaces stay in perfect sync—allowing you to start a task at your desk and continue it from the couch while maintaining full access to your local filesystem and project configuration.
From brittle community hacks to official solution
Prior to this official release, the developer community went to great lengths to “hack” mobile access into their terminal-based workflows.
Power users frequently relied on a patchwork of third-party tools like Tailscale for secure tunneling, Termius or Termux for mobile SSH access, and Tmux for session persistence.
Some developers even built complex custom WebSocket bridges just to get a responsive mobile UI for their local Claude sessions.
These unofficial solutions, while functional, were often brittle and prone to timeout issues. Remote Control replaces these workarounds with a native streaming connection that requires no port forwarding or complex VPN configurations.
It also includes automatic reconnection logic: if a user’s laptop sleeps or the network drops, the session remains alive in the background and reconnects as soon as the host machine is back online.
The $2.5 billion-dollar agent
The launch of Remote Control serves as an “escalation of force” in what has become a dominant business for Anthropic. As of February 2026, Claude Code has hit a $2.5 billion annualized run rate — a figure that has more than doubled since the start of the year alone.
Claude Code is currently experiencing its “ChatGPT moment,” surging to 29 million daily installs within Visual Studio Code. Its efficiency is no longer theoretical; recent analysis suggests that 4% of all public GitHub commits worldwide are now authored by Claude Code.
By extending this power to mobile, Anthropic is further entrenching its lead in the “agentic” coding space, moving beyond simple autocomplete to a world where the AI acts as an autonomous collaborator.
Future outlook: vibe coding everywhere
The move toward mobile terminal control signals a broader shift in the software market. We are entering an era where AI tools are writing roughly 41% of all code. For developers, this translates to a migration from “line-by-line” typing to “strategic oversight.”
This trend is likely to accelerate as mobile-tethered agents become the norm. The barrier between “idea” and “production” is collapsing, enabling a single developer to manage complex systems that previously required entire DevOps teams. This shift has already rattled the broader tech market; shares of major cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike and Datadog fell as much as 11% following the launch of Claude Code’s automated security scanning features.
As Claude Code moves from the desk to the pocket, the definition of a “software engineer” is being rewritten. In the coming year, the industry may see a surge in “one-person unicorns”—startups built and maintained almost entirely via mobile agentic commands—marking the end of the manual coding era as we knew it.
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