Robin Williams' children are taking over their father's Instagram account after his daughter spoke out against the use of his AI likeness, as reported earlier by The Wrap. In a post on Tuesday, Zak, Zelda, and Cody Williams write that they want the late actor's Instagram profile to be a "safe, trusted place where the stories, photos, videos, and memories shared reflect his legacy with authenticity, warmth, and care."
A story posted to Zelda Williams' own Instagram account expands on the decision to bring back her father's profile, saying that it's meant to help combat "rampant AI abuse," according to The Wrap:
OpenAI is announcing security updates following the July news that its AI broke out of a sandboxed environment and accidentally hacked Hugging Face, including improvements to its research environments, monitoring, and alignment techniques. The company had already put the brakes on a new model, Astra, that it thinks could have "critical" cybersecurity capabilities, and the company says it instituted a two-week pause in reinforcement learning (RL) training on its "latest models intended for deployment" while it tightened up security. The company's "largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold."
Sony's Pulse Elevate wireless gaming speakers are launching on November 12th and will cost $219.99, the company announced on Tuesday. Announced nearly a year ago, the speakers are compatible with a PS5, PlayStation Portal, PC, and Mac, and they include "studio-inspired planar magnetic drivers" that offer "lifelike sound across the entire audible spectrum," Sony says. They also include a built-in mic for voice chat, Sony's PlayStation Link low-latency tech, and charging docks for topping up the batteries.
The Pulse Elevate speakers come in two colors, black and white, and preorders begin on September 1st at 10AM ET in the US or 10AM local t …
You'll need the high-end reMarkable Paper Pro model (previously at Boing Boing), but now that Android's been ported to it, the color e-ink device can run third-party apps and connect to external peripherals.
Apple is once again overhauling App Store rules in the European Union, which the company says will resolve its "disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution." As part of the changes, every developer that distributes apps will be moved to a single set of business terms, and digital transactions for apps distributed outside of the App Store will be subject to a Core Technology Commission fee of 5 percent.
The new terms go into effect on October 1st. They will include a 26 percent commission for App Store apps that use Apple's in-app purchase system, or a 20 percent fee for developers using alternate payme …
Tesla Cybercabs are lined up on a lot at Tesla Giga Texas in Austin, Wednesday, April 8, 2026. | Image: Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images
According to The Information, Tesla is planning a public launch of the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, as soon as this month. The driverless vehicle has been popping up around the country, although often with a steering wheel and pedals, as employees are continuing to gather data. Tesla employees have been testing the fully driverless version on private roads around the compa …
Xfinity gateways XB7 and newer can now act as motion sensors in your home. | Image: Comcast
Comcast is bringing Wi-Fi motion sensing to millions of routers that are already in customers' homes, turning the devices into activity monitors. A new update to the Xfinity Internet app, arriving today, August 18th, enables the feature on compatible Xfinity routers at no extra cost.
Announced as part of its new Xfinity Shield service, WiFi Motion can monitor activity in your home and send you notifications, similar to a standalone motion sensor. It works by detecting disruptions in the Wi-Fi signal between the Xfinity gateway and any Wi-Fi-connected device, giving you some insight into what's happening in your home without buying addition …
Polaroid announced a new collection of cameras, instant film, and accessories all featuring limited-edition designs to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pokémon. The new collection goes a little harder than Fujifilm's Pokémon collaboration from five years ago with the introduction of Polaroid film printed with various characters around the frames, including Pikachu and Snorlax. The entire collection will be available for preorder starting on August 25th in the US, Canada, and the UK through the Polaroid and Pokémon Center websites. A global release is expected to follow on October 5th.
The three cameras are existing models with new des …
Starting today, AI chats in Firefox's Smart Window AI browsing mode can pull from current web info and show source links in chat responses through a partnership with Exa. Smart Window can also now automatically suggest tab groups and show visual previews of pages you previously visited when you search your browsing history using natural language.
I saw a live demo that showed how the Smart Window AI could sort through selected links in your browsing history to pull up "running shoes I looked at last week," and pop up images pulled from the sites browsed previously. The suggested groups of tabs can also find and close duplicates, making it …
One of the best things my smart home does is help me care for my pets, and security cameras are particularly useful for keeping track of my many critters. But the barrage of notifications they send often means I miss important ones. So, when Google announced its new Pet Memory feature for Gemini for Home, I thought this could be the perfect solution.
Pet Memory promises to teach your Google Home smart home who your pets are, allowing connected Nest cameras to go beyond simply telling you they saw an animal to which animal they saw. It can then use that knowledge to adapt your smart home to your pet.
Ah, the relationship between animals and the technology they can’t quite understand.
Today, it seems like there’s a high-tech solution to every element of pet ownership, with devices on the market designed to keep pets fed, cleaned, watched over, and entertained. And if you have a pet you know: nothing is too good — or too cutting-edge — for your (furry, slimy, feathery) best friend.
But while some tech can help care for your pet, it can be complicated when dogs and cats meet wires and waves. You might feel complicated about offloading elements of kitten parenthood to a robot. Some pet tech innovations over-promise or are over-hyped. And of course, your puppy (or parrot) might well mistake your gadgets for a snack.
To that end, we’ve put together a week of stories that explore the intersection of technology and pet ownership. Read on for how to take a decent photograph of your cat, pet scales and the chunky companions who need them, and takes on our favorite tools, both simple and complex.
One of the great joys in life is having pets. The unconditional love, the snuggles, the excitement they show when you get home - these things add an emotional fulfillment to daily existence that can't be achieved in another way. I think everyone's life would be better with a pet (or two) in their lives. It's an incredible experience. Except for those few times when it isn't.
Both my wife and I work from home, and in a two-bedroom Los Angeles apartment with a kid, two dogs, and a bird, we're constantly in close quarters. Kiyo, our Senegal parrot, has the best view of us all with his cage situated at a corner wraparound window in our living r …
Pets, like children, come with the responsibility to keep them happy, healthy, and mentally stimulated - obligations I readily committed to before getting my cat, Trevor. I work from home, so he's never lonely, and play with him using a mountain of toys at every opportunity outside of my working hours. But younger cats can be incredibly demanding of your attention. I simply don't have the capacity to physically entertain Trevor every time he yowls at me (constantly) or distract him from chewing every cable he can get his paws on (also constantly).
Unlike children, one of the perks of having a blissfully simple animal is that there are far f …
When I was a kid, I owned two goldfish that eventually outgrew the size of their tank. At the time, I didn't realize just how much actually goes into having fish and keeping them healthy. I've learned a lot over the past couple of years while keeping nano fish - a group of five celestial pearl danios and four corydoras habrosus - along with some live plants.
After filling up a 10-gallon tank with water and adding a filter, I was eager to add my first fish, but I soon found out that the tank must run without fish for several weeks to establish beneficial bacteria and create a stable underwater environment. But the work doesn't stop there. Ca …
The Fairphone 6 Plus is the first Fairphone to officially launch in the US. | Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge
The Fairphone 6 Plus is a minor hardware refresh, but a major launch for the company: It's the first phone that Fairphone is selling directly in the US. It's on sale now for $649.99, available through Fairphone's website and Amazon, and is sold unlocked with support for both T-Mobile and AT&T. In Europe, it costs €649, a €50 increase on last year's phone.
Fairphones from the 4 onwards have been available to buy in the US, but never from Fairphone itself. They were exclusively sold through a partnership with Murena, the developer of /e/OS, a "de-Googled" version of Android. That meant buyers were forced to use Murena's software - which is c …
Two days earlier, on August 4th, President Donald Trump departed the White House inside his Marine One military helicopter. As Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) protocol requires, the pilots tried to contact Reagan National Airport to tell them to halt commercial traffic during the flight. But the air traffic controllers never heard the transmission and cleared a different airplane for takeoff - which came clo …
The AirPods in the video look like a chunkier version of Apple’s AirPods Pro 3. | Image: Apple / MacRumors
We may have our first glimpse of Apple's rumored camera-equipped AirPods, thanks to a video that MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 Release Candidate. The short video clip features a man - who is wearing the new AirPods - holding up a book with the cover displayed, so that Visual Intelligence can see the book title.
A Siri voice-over plays over the clip, saying "with Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later." Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has previously reported that the rumored AirPods with cameras are designed to take in "visual information in low resolution" and act as eyes …
Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech
The EU wants to decrease reliance on American technology. Here’s what happened when a POLITICO reporter tried to live and work without it.
By MATHIEU POLLET
Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO
The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.
My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.
But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.
No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.
I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.
For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”
Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”
Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.
Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.
In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.
Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.
Dumbphones and FOMO
The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.
On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.
Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.
“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.
I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.
One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.
It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.
Teenage girls looking at their smartphones. | Nicolas Guyonnet / Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?
That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.
Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.
It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.
The invisible grip
Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.
Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.
A gamer holds a controller, at a Nintendo Switch 2 booth. | Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images
These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.
Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.
And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.
Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.
Working outside the stack
On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.
I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.
I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.
“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.
European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.
For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.
In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.
Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.
On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.
Relax and relapse
And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.
The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.
The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.
The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.
Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.
Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.
Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.
As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”
Reddit is trying out a new way for people to take in content on Reddit: by turning text posts into audio / video content. As part of an experiment, some posts are being adapted into videos that use AI voices to read the text of the main post and some comments. The video highlights the text as it's read by the AI voice, and under the video, a note says that it's a "Real conversation voiced by AI."
An old post in r/boardgames from eight years ago with 101 responses to a request for good road trip games that adults will like is an example of Reddit's AI at work. Instead of the usual text thread, it has the main question above a three-minute vi …
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