An anonymous reader shares a report: European Union countries have shelved plans to approve a new climate change target next week, after pushback from governments including France and Germany over plans to quickly land a deal, three EU diplomats told Reuters on Friday. Countries are discussing a legally-binding target to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040, from 1990 levels – with a share of this covered by buying foreign carbon credits.

The European Commission has said this would offer investors certainty and keep Europe on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Climate change has made Europe the world’s fastest-warming continent, unleashing deadly heatwaves and record-breaking wildfires. But EU governments are divided over how ambitious to be in tackling global warming, as governments also try to increase defence spending and support struggling industries.

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With hackers looking for any way they can to gain access to your personal information via every form of phishing scheme, it’s critical to take every precaution to protect your data. Multi-factor (MFA) authentication is one way to boost account security, but it has to be employed correctly, and even then, you should be on the lookout for malicious prompts that give bad actors the codes they need to log in easily.

Two-factor authentication can be compromised

First, a reminder that two-factor and multi-factor authentication are not necessarily made equal. 2FA uses exactly two factors to verify a user’s login, and both can be something the user knows, such as their password plus a PIN or SMS code. MFA, meanwhile, requires at least two independent factors, like a password (a knowledge factor) plus a biometric ID (an identity factor) or a time-based, one-time password (a possession factor) from an authenticator app.

Knowledge factors (and some possession factors) can be phished relatively easily, which is why 2FA codes sent via SMS are the worst option for authentication, especially if you have alternatives. Bad actors may also try to trick you into engaging with fake 2FA prompts.

How to identify malicious 2FA prompts

One way hackers get past 2FA is by wearing you down with repeated authentication requests, a tactic known as prompt bombing. You may get dozens, even hundreds of push notifications to your phone in a short amount of time or late at night when you’re less likely to be thinking clearly. Threat actors are counting on the fact that if you get annoyed enough, you’ll eventually approve one of them. Don’t. If you get a 2FA prompt when you’re not trying to log into one of your accounts, that’s an instant red flag.

Another sign of a malicious prompt is that the attempted login is coming from an unfamiliar device or region—for example, a Google notification for a Windows machine when you’re a Mac user or a location in an entirely different country. You should also be wary of prompts with pop-ups that request permissions unrelated to the app or service itself, like the ability to access all of the contacts on your device.

Hackers may also contact you by phone, text, or email to request your 2FA SMS codes. It is easy to spoof phone numbers and email addresses, so you shouldn’t trust caller ID or a sender even if it looks legitimate. Companies won’t call unsolicited to demand your password or authentication code, so hang up or ignore these messages.

Bottom line: If you receive suspicious 2FA requests via push notification, text, or other method, ignore them, and change the password on the related account by going directly to the website or app, never via the prompt itself, as this may lead you to a phishing site that could further compromise your information. If you do accidentally interact with malicious prompts, look for signs of a scam, such as sneaky or lookalike characters in web addresses and poor spelling or grammar.

US colleges face a prolonged enrollment decline beginning this fall as high school graduating classes shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The incoming freshman class marks the start of a 13% drop in high school graduates through 2041, falling from 3.9 million to 3.4 million students. The decline stems from reduced birth rates during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent years.

Regional four-year institutions in the Northeast and Midwest states face potential applicant pool contractions of 15% or more. Small liberal arts colleges, comprising 40% of the higher education market, are particularly vulnerable. 40% of private colleges posted financial losses in 2023. Top-ranked schools in the US News top 50 are expected to experience minimal impact due to sustained national demand for limited seats.

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US retail coffee prices surged 21% year-over-year in August, the largest annual increase since October 1997, according to Thursday’s Consumer Price Index. The monthly 4% jump marks the steepest rise in 14 years. Trump administration tariffs on major coffee exporters — 50% on Brazil, 20% on Vietnam, and 10% on Colombia — are driving costs higher as 99% of US coffee consumption relies on imports.

J.M. Smucker plans its third price increase this winter for Folgers and Cafe Bustelo brands after raising prices in May and August. New Orleans chain French Truck Coffee has implemented a 4% tariff surcharge. Starbucks expects peak cost impacts in 2026 due to its advance purchasing practices. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk predicts prices will exceed historical records as Brazilian tariff effects reach retail shelves.

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Here’s some good news for a Friday afternoon: For 2025 through August, global electric vehicle sales have grown by 25 percent compared to the same eight months in 2024, according to the analysts at Rho Motion. That amounts to 12.5 million EVs, although the data combines both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs for the total.

However, that’s for global sales. In fact, EV adoption is moving even faster in Europe, which has grown by 31 percent so far this year (Rho says that BEV sales grew by 31 percent but PHEV sales by just 30 percent)—a total of 2.6 million plug-in vehicles. In some European countries, the increase has been even more impressive: up by 45 percent in Germany, 41 percent in Italy, and by 100 percent in Spain.

But despite a number of interesting new EVs from Renault and the various Stellantis-owned French automakers, EV sales in France are down by 6 percent so far, year on year.

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Instagram fixed a bug that caused the reach of some users’ Stories to shrink when they posted more than one Story a day, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared on Friday. The fix addresses a common complaint shared by creators in the last year that they were disincentivized to use Stories because of how regularly using the feature impacted the number of people who actually saw their posts.

“People were complaining about getting less reach with their Stories if they posted lots of Stories in the same day,” Mosseri said in a video announcing the change. “That is not at all the intended behavior of Instagram.” Fixing the bug doesn’t mean every Story you add will be watched, but Mosseri says posting multiple Stories a day won’t negatively impact the reach of your Stories overall, especially your first Story.

For anyone who primarily uses Instagram to keep up with their friends, the change might not matter all that much. But much like YouTube, Instagram is an increasingly professionalized platform where people post in the hopes of expanding their reach and earning a living off their content. That creates an interesting dynamic between Mosseri’s regular announcements and users trying to suss out the nuances of the platform’s algorithm. For every new feature, like adding of comments to Stories, there’s subtler tweaks that can totally change creators’ content strategy.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-fixed-an-issue-that-caused-posting-multiple-stories-to-tank-your-reach-184714482.html?src=rss

Fans will have to wait a little bit longer for the hotly-anticipated Balatro 1.1 update. Developer LocalThunk just announced it will not be coming out in 2025, despite previously promising a release this year. Instead, it’ll come out “when it’s done.”

It’s worth remembering that Balatro was created by a single person, and the same goes for this update. The lone developer also made the original balance patch and the well-regarded mobile port. He says he’s “well and truly burned out.”

LocalThunk apologizes for the delay and says “it has become clear now that it won’t happen by the end of the year.” It’s actually nice to let us know now instead of forcing us to wonder where the update is for the next several months.

“I still consider this my hobby,” he wrote. “The prospect of rushing the work and going back into crunch mode to get it out this year just felt terrible.”

Now for some good news. The update is definitely coming, just not right now. It’ll be free for all players on all platforms. The developer also hinted that this update would not be the final DLC drop for the game.

For the uninitiated, Balatro is a deckbuilding roguelike that’s loosely based on poker. Consider it the highly addictive sequel to poker we never knew we needed. It has proven to be a bona-fide phenomenon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/balatros-big-2025-update-wont-be-coming-out-this-year-after-all-183511401.html?src=rss

California’s legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider.

The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must “allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy.” If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant “may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent,” and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating.

The bill passed the state Senate in a 30–7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75–0 vote in April.

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Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.

Apple didn’t necessarily make it easy to pick a new iPhone this year. The $799 iPhone 17 comes with features previously exclusive to the Pros, without raising the price; the iPhone 17 Pros, once again, have the best and most varied camera system of the bunch; and the iPhone Air is just cool.

There are a lot of reasons to consider any one of these new iPhones over the others, but things get a little clearer if you zero in on one metric in particular: battery life. Whether you care about taking the best possible photos, or having the thinnest iPhone ever made, you’re impacted by the size and longevity of the battery inside your iPhone of choice. As such, many of us are absolutely obsessed with battery life and battery health.

Comparing the battery life of all four new iPhones

Apple doesn’t share technical battery stats for its iPhones, so we’ll need to wait until certain reviews teardown these new devices to see how large these batteries really are. But what we can pull from is Apple’s odd battery claims for each device. For iPhones, Apple focusing on video playback time as a measure of overall battery life. When using this comparison tool, we can see the following timelines for each new iPhone:

• iPhone 17: Up to 30 hours (27 hours streamed)

• iPhone Air: Up to 27 hours (22 hours streamed)

• iPhone 17 Pro: Up to 33 hours (30 hours streamed)

• iPhone 17 Pro Max: Up to 39 hours (up to 35 hours streamed)

Solely based on these numbers, if you need the device with the longest possible battery life, you need to go with the 17 Pro Max. It crushes all other iPhone 17 models, especially the iPhone Air. As cool as it is, my guess is this is not the iPhone for people who hate worrying about battery life. While 27 hours isn’t bad by any means, that’s just for video playback. If you’re running more demanding tasks, including taking photos or videos, video calling, streaming, or gaming, that’s going to eat into the battery much faster. According to Apple, the Air has roughly the same battery life as the iPhone 15 Plus or iPhone 13 Pro Max, so if you’re coming from one of those iPhones, you can expect similar battery performance here.

I picked up on the Air’s smaller battery during Apple’s announcement, when the company said the Air still had “all-day battery life,” but didn’t actually share any numbers. You can see why. The company did share numbers when discussing the Air’s new MagSafe Battery accessory, which, when used with the Air, nets 40 hours of video playback, or 35 hours when streaming. Technically, an Air with the MagSafe Battery pack has the best battery life out of all four iPhones, but add a battery pack to any of the other three above, and that advantage is instantly erased. As such, I’m not counting that.

Zooming out, however, these iPhones do have pretty great battery life across the board—at least compared to last-generation’s iPhones. Here’s how the iPhone 16 series compares:

• iPhone 16: 22 hours (18 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16 Plus: 27 hours (24 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16 Pro: 27 hours (22 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16 Pro Max: 33 hours (29 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16e: 26 hours (21 hours streamed)

Apple managed to squeeze an extra eight hours of video playback on the base model this year compared to last year’s iPhone 16, while the iPhone Air matches the iPhone 16 Plus’ battery life. The iPhone 17 Pro has the same battery life as the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and the whole comparison clearly shows how large the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s battery is.

Things to consider before buying an iPhone for battery life

If you’re only buying your new iPhone based on battery life, you have no other choice than the 17 Pro Max. However, if you have other qualifications to consider, or if the 17 Pro Max is a bit too large for your taste, my recommendation is to use Apple’s comparison tool to see what the battery life of your current iPhone is. Then, consider that against the new iPhones to see how it fares. If you’re coming from an iPhone 14, for example, your phone is rated for just 20 hours of video playback when it was new. Unless you replaced the battery recently, it’s likely not reaching those highs, so any of the new iPhones will likely last longer. But if you’re coming from a 15 Pro Max, with 29 hours of video playback potential, the Air is going to die a bit sooner than you might be used to.

I’ve been an Apple Music user since the day the service launched a decade ago. However, I still like to try Spotify from time to time to see if it’s worth switching. Now that Spotify has lossless audio as well, I gave it another shot and discovered some fun new features that are worth trying out. Note that some of these are Spotify Premium exclusive features, so you won’t be able to use them without a paid subscription. I’m not sure if they’re enough to sway me yet, but you might be different—try these newer Spotify features to make the most of the service.

Hide songs you don’t want to hear

Credit: Pranay Parab

Sometimes, Spotify likes to play songs I’ve heard way too many times already, or a song that I’m just not in the mood for. Luckily, when this happens, I can now quickly hide the song from the playlist. This is easy enough. In the Now Playing view, tap the three-dots button up top, and select the Hide in this playlist button. This will stop the song from playing when you listen to that playlist again, and you’ll see a red minus icon next to its name. You can tap the three-dots button again and hit Show in this playlist to undo this, if you no longer want to hide the song.

Snooze a song for 30 days

Credit: Pranay Parab

While it is a bit of a shame that Spotify doesn’t allow you to block certain songs entirely, you do get the chance to snooze them for a month at a time. I found this feature when Spotify played Iris by The Goo Goo Dolls way too many times over the same weekend for me. I like that song, but not so much that I can listen to it on repeat. Fortunately, I was able to hide it quickly. 

When you’re playing a song, expand the mini player and tap the X button next to the song’s name. On the pop-up that shows up, tap Don’t suggest this song anywhere for 30 days. It’ll still take Spotify some time to fully purge it from your algorithmic playlists and feed, but once that’s done, you won’t see the song for the rest of the month.

Premium users get better player controls

Credit: Pranay Parab

If you use Spotify Premium, you have access to better playback controls. The song queue now show buttons to quickly shuffle, repeat, or add a sleep timer to your listening. I love having big buttons for these features, as it makes it easy to access them.

Separately, if you’re on Spotify’s free plan, there’s a good chance that the service automatically enables Smart Shuffle and Autoplay for you. Smart Shuffle looks at the songs in your queue and adds recommended songs to your list, which I’m not a big fan of because it makes the queue twice as long by adding random music. Autoplay is the feature that adds recommended songs to the end of the queue, so that music keeps playing even after the queue ends.

On the free plan, you can’t get rid of Smart Shuffle, but you can disable Autoplay if you dislike it. Premium users can disable Smart Shuffle, too. Tap the profile icon in the top-left in Spotify and go to Settings and privacy > Playback, and scroll to the bottom. You can disable both Autoplay and Smart Shuffle here.

Tweak playlists to your liking

Credit: Pranay Parab

On Apple Music, I have lots of long playlists that I’ve painstakingly curated. Spotify has made managing its playlists a little easier now. You can use the Add, Edit, and Sort buttons to quickly build your own playlists. I enjoy the Add feature because it shows suggested songs, and as you add them, it updates the list to suggest similar music. This has made creating initial drafts of my playlists a lot faster.

In some regions, Spotify also now supports creating new playlists from your Liked Songs playlist. It lets you filter these new playlists by genre or mood, so you can match the mood of a specific track in your Liked Songs, and generate a whole new playlist for it. It goes without saying that you can also rename your playlists easily and add custom cover art, too. For cover art, you can try Spotify’s free playlist art maker, but I like using the excellent Denim app to get the job done.

Try smart filters for your song library

Credit: Spotify

Spotify Premium users also get to use smart filters to listen to certain types of music. I haven’t tried this feature yet because it’s still rolling out, but it sounds quite interesting. If you’re using Spotify Premium on mobile or tablet in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, or the US, you’ll get this feature soon.

Spotify says you can try it by tapping the filter icon in the top-left corner of the Your Library tab. Here, you’ll see a Smart Filters menu. Select a filter, and the Your Library tab will update to show only those types of music. You can filter music by a specific mood, genre, or activity. The good news is that Smart Filters includes options for music, podcasts, and audiobooks, so you can try it with all types of content.

Talk to your Spotify DJ

Credit: Spotify

Spotify has a built-in “AI DJ” that can find and play songs for you. This year, Spotify has begun rolling out the ability to talk to your DJ to request specific songs. I’m still waiting for this to be rolled to my region, but it’s available in 60 countries at time of writing, so you should try it out. In Spotify’s search tab, look for “DJ,” press play, and the AI DJ will play a mix of music and commentary. You can then press and hold the DJ button on the right, and talk to the DJ to send in your music requests. 

Fix your Discover Weekly playlist

Credit: Pranay Parab

If you are unhappy with what Spotify’s been serving up in your Discover Weekly playlist, you can easily refresh it. At the top of Discover Weekly, Premium users will see genre buttons, and tapping any button will create a new 30-song playlist of music from that genre. 

Keith Rabois, co-founder and newly minted board chair of Opendoor, said remote work and a “bloated” workforce have been a drag on the online real estate platform’s culture, as he vowed to slash headcount. CNBC: “There’s 1,400 employees at Opendoor. I don’t know what most of them do. We don’t need more than 200 of them,” Rabois told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Friday.

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When Apple announced the Apple Watch Series 11 earlier this week, one of its headlining new features was “hypertension notifications.” Since then, it’s been revealed that these will actually be coming to some older Apple watches as well, but regardless, everyone was set to wait a bit. That’s because Apple was still waiting on FDA approval for the new feature, even as it announced the new watch. Now, though, it seems that’s been taken care of.

While Apple initially only promised the feature sometime “this month,” in a statement sent to press just last night, Apple said that its hypertension notifications have now been approved by the FDA and will be releasing alongside watchOS 26 when it launches to the public on Monday. That means no delay for the update—it’ll be ready for the Apple Watch Series 11 at launch, and owners of the Series 9 and Series 10 will get a chance to play with it before then. If your tastes skew a bit fancier, then yes, the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is also set to get the notifications at launch, and the Ultra 2 will be among the older watches getting them on Monday.

This is all great news for my family, which does have a history of heart problems. While these notifications aren’t set to replace a full-on blood pressure cuff, the idea is that they’ll help tip you off to potential issues early, so you can know to bring them up to your doctor or pay more attention to them. According to Apple, the way it works is that the watch will use its existing optical heart rate sensor to passively check “how your blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart” over a 30-day period, and then will send you a warning if it detects signs of high blood pressure. After that, it’ll encourage you to log your blood pressure for a week using a third-party cuff, and set up an appointment with your doctor.

In other words, it won’t give you exact numbers, but might let you know if you’re at risk. Given that high blood pressure often goes undiagnosed until it’s too late, Apple is hoping these notifications will help change that.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe it. Earlier this year, my husband actually had surgery to treat a separate heart condition called AFib, and his Apple Watch Series 10 played a big part in detecting and tracking it before it became a problem. As part of his treatment, he’s had to regularly check his blood pressure with a cuff, but we’re both looking forward to the extra data his watch will now give him.

Apple says its hypertension notifications were developed using data from over 100,000 testing participants, and then validated using data from 2,000 additional patients. While I can’t guarantee that they’ll work perfectly for you out of the box, that’s a good sign, even if Apple warns that the new feature “will not detect all instances of hypertension.” Interestingly, this follows the FDA’s rejection of a similar feature from Whoop, although that feature purports to provide more data than Apple’s.

If you want to try Apple’s hypertension notifications for yourself, there’s nothing you need to do for now. Simply ensure you have a compatible Apple Watch, then allow it to update to watchOS 26 on Monday and try to wear it as often as you can over the next 30 days to give it ample opportunities to collect data.

A anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making “significant investments” in the compute capacity required to Microsoft’s own future frontier models.

“We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to,” said Suleyman during Microsoft’s employee-only town hall on Thursday. “We’re also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster, so today MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things.”

Suleyman hinted that Microsoft has ambitions to train models that are comparable to Meta, Google, and xAI’s efforts on clusters that are “six to ten times larger in size” than what Microsoft used for its MAI-1-preview. “Much more to do, but it’s good to take the first steps,” said Suleyman.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.