I’m a devout Pixel user. I love stock Android, and I’m always running the latest Android beta, making Pixel basically my only choice. But there are times when I get jealous looking at all the extra tools that Samsung provides on its Galaxy phones, Edge Panel being the big one. With Edge Panel, you can swipe in from the edge of your phone and a hidden drawer reveals itself, filled with apps, system actions, and shortcuts. Given how barebones Pixel Launcher is, I’ve always wanted something like this. Then I found the Panels app by Fossor Coding (not to be confused with the ill-fated wallpaper app by MKBHD).

In some ways, Panels is even better than Edge Panels on Samsung. It lets you use custom icon packs, there’s a quick search shortcut, and you can even open floating widgets. Plus, because it’s customizable, you can move the trigger point to the bottom edge of your phone instead of the side (incredibly handy for large phones), and you can add multiple columns (up to a ridiculous seven column layout). And while you can pay for Panels, all of that basic functionality is included for free.

How to customize the Panels app for Android

First, install the app and give it permission to display over other apps; this makes sure that the Panels launcher can work when you’re using any app.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Next, tap on the View button and customize the panel. The free version limits you to 3 columns and 9 rows, which seems like plenty to me. You can upgrade to the full version to remove this limit (which is quite cheap, at just $1.50). From the Trigger section, you can customize the trigger area. If you have a larger phone, I highly recommend bringing down the trigger area towards the bottom of the screen.

Now, let’s customize the Panels launcher itself. Swipe in from your trigger area and hold for a second to bring up the sidebar panel. By default, you’ll see some apps here already. Tap and hold on an empty area to start adding more apps.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

You can choose to add any of the following items:

• Applications: Choose any installed app. Add your most frequently used apps here.

• Shortcuts: Launch actions from inside any supported apps. For example, you can create a shortcut for adding a new task in TickTick, or messaging someone on WhatsApp.

• App pair: Create shortcuts for launching two apps side-by-side, made even more useful after Android 16’s latest 90:10 split screen update.

• Accessibility: Add shortcuts for system-level options like Home, Back, Notifications, Screenshot, and more.

• System preferences: Quick access to frequently used settings like media volume, cellular data, airplane mode, Wi-Fi, and a lot more.

• Website: You can add any website as a quick shortcut here.

• Floating widget: This is a hidden gem. You can add widgets that open in a floating window above everything else. You can trigger widgets for news, weather, or sports updates. They can hover over everything else for a few seconds, before you dismiss them out of the way.

• Folder: If you have too many quick app options, organize them in folders instead.

• Contact: Add any contact here as an icon. Press and hold to quickly call, message, or email them.

• Quick Search: Another useful hack. The Quick Search panel brings up a fast search for all installed apps.

Go over each option and choose what you’d like to add to your sidebar launcher. Me, I’m a simple man, so my focus is mostly on my most frequently used apps, shortcuts for common actions, and quick access to some system level functionality.

One swipe gesture: Lastly, here’s a pro tip. While you can open apps in Panels by swiping, lifting your thumb, and selecting, you can also do it without taking your thumb off the screen.

Once you swipe in from the edge and the Panels sidebar opens up, don’t let go. You can keep moving your thumb to highlight any app or shortcut (the icon that’s in focus will get bigger). Then simply let go over your selection to launch it.

Overall, Panels is a pretty robust app. Once you have your personalized setup, you can launch apps, shortcuts, or widgets, with just a swipe, no matter which app you’re using.

Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology’s promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that “GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated” to the cost of energy in using AI.

He pointed to a new global commodity in “tokens” — basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing them to run tasks. “The job of every economy and every firm in the economy is to translate these tokens into economic growth, then if you have a cheaper commodity, it’s better.”

“I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens, if these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors,” Nadella said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As Ars reported last week, NASA’s plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch.

The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies.

Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in “phase two” of NASA’s commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space. At some point later this year, the space agency is expected to select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.

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Meta has a lot of work to do when it comes to limiting hate speech on its platforms. Now, its Oversight Board is looking into the company’s decision to ban an account for, among other things, posting visual violent threats and harassment against a journalist — and it wants the public’s advice. 

In the year prior to the ban, Meta referred five posts due to violations of its hateful conduct, bullying and harassment, violence and incitement and adult nudity and sexual activity community standards. In addition to the posts harassing the woman journalist, the user also shared “anti-gay slurs against prominent politicians and content depicting a sex act, alleging misconduct against minorities.” 

Meta’s internal review experts decided to permanently disable the account due to the consistent violations and calls for violence. This action was taken despite the number of strikes not reaching the ban threshold — Meta’s guidance states that even seven strikes only get users a one-day ban. However, its account integrity page lays out examples of when it will disable accounts, including violating its community standards through “risk of imminent harm” to an individual. 

The Board is now looking for insight from the public until 11:59PM PT on Tuesday, February 3. The Board is specifically seeking comments from individuals who can “contribute valuable perspectives” on the following topics: 

• How best to ensure due process and fairness to people whose accounts are penalized or permanently disabled.

• The effectiveness of measures used by social media platforms to protect public figures and journalists from accounts engaged in repeated abuse and threats of violence, in particular against women in the public eye.

• Challenges in identifying and considering off-platform context when assessing threats against public figures and journalists.

• Research into the efficacy of punitive measures to shape online behaviors, and the efficacy of alternative or complementary interventions.

• Good industry practices in transparency reporting on account enforcement decisions and related appeals.

This instance marks the first time the Board has looked into Meta permanently disabling an account. It stated that this “represents a significant opportunity to provide users with greater transparency on Meta’s account enforcement policies and practices, make recommendations for improvement, and expand the types of cases the Board can review.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/metas-oversight-board-is-looking-into-transparency-around-disabling-accounts-145757717.html?src=rss

I’ve been in a particularly “back everything up for the sake of it” mood lately, and the latest target of my fixation is messages. It’s been several generations of Android flagships since I archived anything, though, so now I’m scrambling to back up everything from 2019 and beyond.

Android was supposed to fix the way it backs up data and messages as far back as Android 8.0 Oreo in 2017. Google recently refined the mechanism when it switched to Google One, its all-in-one subscription and cloud data offering. While data backup has improved, it’s also a veritable “black box.” It’s hard to verify what’s been saved and even harder to view the data.

I’m taking backups back into my own hands, like in the Android days of yore. Actually, one of the throwback apps, SMS Backup and Restore, is still one of the best for backing up text messages, and it’s included in this guide on backing up messages in Android. I’ll also walk you through how to back up archives for secondary messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Signal, two oft-used third-party messengers.

Start with Google One

Credit: Florence Ion / Lifehacker

By default, your phone uses Google One to handle backups as long as Google Messages is your default messaging app. (Samsung users can choose to use Samsung Messages instead, which backs up to the Samsung Cloud.) It’s generally a “set it and forget it” system that saves SMS, RCS, and MMS messages, call history, contacts, and device settings to your Google Drive storage. (Pictures and videos are backed up through Google Photos.)

You can check the status of this to see when it was last backed up. Open your phone’s Settings panel, then look for the backup option. If it’s your first time, you’ll get on-screen instructions to turn on backup. If not, you should be able to see what’s been backed up so far. If you’re on the Pixel launcher, scroll down to find a list of Backup details to browse. Tap to see what’s in the vault.

Credit: Florence Ion / Lifehacker

At most, backup data doesn’t exceed 25 MB and doesn’t count against your Google Drive quota. (Google Photos does, but that’s effectively another product.) Only the most recent data backup is stored at a time. Anything before that is fully deleted.

Google One’s backup methodology is merely a “sync,” not a true data archive. If you accidentally delete a thread from messages, its backup would also be removed from the cloud, and you couldn’t restore it. Google makes it clear, even in its developer documentation, that backup data can’t be accessed by a user or other apps on the device. So what’s a user to do? Call upon an old faithful: SMS Backup & Restore.

Set up SMS Backup & Restore

Credit: Florence Ion / Lifehacker

I’m using original Android apps like SMS Backup & Restore to facilitate full backups because it’s still the only way to easily thumb through the messages and call logs you’ve saved. The app treats your text messages as a database and stores them in XML format for parsing if needed. SMS Backup & Restore was once an indie darling, though SyncTech acquired it in late 2017, which has partly helped it endure this long.

It’s easy to set up. Download and install the app from the Google Play Store. The app is free with ads, or you can pay a one-time fee of $6 to remove them and unlock extra abilities, like more cloud storage. Then grant it access to your contacts and messages. Tap the option to set up a backup, and choose Messages. (You can also include call logs if you want.) Then, pick your destination. I back up to Google Drive into its own archive folder. Dropbox, OneDrive, and WebDAV are also options.

SMS Backup & Restore offers several backup options. For one, you don’t have to back up everything in your Messages app. You can choose to back up only select conversations. It doesn’t have to be a constant backup either. If you need to save a one-off thread, SMS Backup & Restore lets you select it and back it up to a location of your choice in XML format.

SMS Backup & Restore also lets you peruse through all that data after it’s synced. The easiest way is through the mobile app, which lets you search conversations, and through SyncTech’s web viewer, where you can upload the XML file it generates and thumb through it as if it were a messaging app on your phone. SyncTech says all processing is done on the browser and nothing is uploaded to any servers. If you’d rather not upload your conversations through the Web Viewer, you can try opening it with Excel instead. And if you’re particularly adept, there are plenty of third-party XML readers available, though they’re not all fully compatible with how SMS Backup & Restore saves logs.

WhatsApp and Signal

These days, half of my digital life is scattered among several messaging apps, most notably WhatsApp and Signal. WhatsApp is where I chat with friends who are on wifi or live halfway across the world, while Signal is where my local parents group and I keep our chats private.

WhatsApp can create a local backup on your phone’s internal storage every day at a set time. This is the most direct way to handle your own WhatsApp chat data. You’ll find your data in the WhatsApp app database on your device’s internal storage. WhatsApp can also automatically back up to Google Drive on Android devices. Unfortunately, Google started counting WhatsApp backups toward your Google Drive storage quota. But the app shows you how much room you have in your Drive account if you are backing up that way.

Credit: Florence Ion / Lifehacker

If you haven’t set it up yet, WhatsApp’s backup capabilities are available under the Chats backup option in the app’s settings panel. You can select the backup frequency and whether it includes videos. You can also select whether the backups are end-to-end encrypted. (Note that this option is not on by default.) If you need to export a particular conversation, you can do so from the Chat history menu. You can then read those WhatsApp backups by exporting individual chats as text files directly from the app.

Signal is a little trickier at backup. Since it’s built on the premise of extreme privacy, it prioritizes local backup and doesn’t back up to the cloud. Only recently, in the latest beta for Android devices, has Signal added push-button backup. And it’s technically still getting its kinks sussed out.

Credit: Florence Ion / Lifehacker

But you can use it if you want to. In Signal on Android, go to Settings, then scroll down to Backups. You’ll see a big Beta sign right next to it. Tap it, and from here, Signal will set you up with an end-to-end encrypted backup of your conversations. The recovery key is a 64-character code that will help you restore the backup. If you lose it, you won’t be able to recover your messages.

Signal eschews the ability to back up to a third-party service. Instead, it will back up the last 45 days of media and text messages for free. Any more than that, and you’ll have to pay $2/month for a full backup of your messages. It also grants you 100GB of photo storage.

Because these are encrypted files, they’re not particularly easy to parse through without first decrypting them and converting them into a readable XML file. You’ll also need to save the archive locally if you want to dig in. Small apps like the Signal Message Exporter and Signal Back can help with this if you are especially keen on having a readable log.

Backing up isn’t a one-and-done task. It’s something you have to get into the habit of doing. The best way to ensure you don’t lose those “receipts” is to make it a habit to check on your backups. Keep Google One, WhatsApp, and Signal’s cloud backups turned on, then set SMS Backup & Restore to run once a week, or, if you’re lighter on that app than on others, once a month.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are starting to be reflected in the price of some items, as sellers weigh how to absorb the shock of the added costs. From a report: Amazon and many of its third-party merchants pre-purchased inventory to try to get ahead of the tariffs and keep prices low for customers, but most of that supply ran out last fall, Jassy said in a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“So you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items, and you see some sellers are deciding that they’re passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding that they’ll absorb it to drive demand and some are doing something in between,” Jassy said. “I think you’re starting to see more of that impact.” The comments are a notable shift from last year, when Jassy said Amazon hadn’t seen “prices appreciably go up” a few months after Trump announced wide-ranging tariffs. Further reading: Americans Are the Ones Paying for Tariffs, Study Finds: Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the entire cost of U.S. tariffs, according to new research that contradicts a key claim by President Trump and suggests he might have a weaker hand in a reemerging trade war with Europe.

[…] The new research, published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a well-regarded German think tank, suggests that the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices. […] By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony plans to spin off its TV hardware business to a new joint venture controlled by Chinese electronics giant TCL, the two said Tuesday, a significant retreat for the Japanese giant whose Bravia line has long occupied the premium end of the television market. TCL would hold a 51% stake in the venture and Sony would retain 49% under a nonbinding agreement the two companies signed. They aim to finalize binding terms by the end of March and begin operations in April 2027, pending regulatory approvals.

The new company would retain the Sony and Bravia branding for televisions and home audio equipment but use TCL’s display technology. Japanese TV manufacturers have steadily lost ground to Chinese and Korean rivals over the years. Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric and Pioneer exited the business entirely. Panasonic and Sharp de-emphasized televisions in their growth strategies. Sony’s Bravia line survived by positioning itself at the premium tier where consumers pay more for high-end picture and sound quality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.