Google continues to turn the screws on free YouTube users, expanding a test that restricts access to song lyrics on YouTube Music. Users without a premium subscription have found that Google’s streaming music service only shows song lyrics a few times before demanding money.

For as long as YouTube Music has existed, lyrics have been accessible to all users in the mobile app. That started to change over recent months as Google tested a paywall. The lyrics section still appears in the app when playing a song with a free account, but opening it eats into a limited allotment of lyric views. A substantial uptick in user reports, spotted by 9to5Google, suggests this restriction is now rolling out widely.

“You have [x] views remaining,” the app now warns free users who access lyrics. It looks like users get five free lyric views before they have to pay up. Google has still neglected to officially announce the addition of this feature to its Premium subscription—there’s no mention of lyrics being part of the paid tier on Google’s support page.

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The Federal Communications Commission is reportedly investigating ABC’s The View in what FCC Democrat Anna Gomez called an attempt to intimidate critics of the Trump administration.

“Let’s be clear on what this is. This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation,” Gomez said in a statement Friday night. “Like many other so-called ‘investigations’ before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful action. The real purpose is to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this administration and chill protected speech.”

The FCC hasn’t announced the investigation but previously gave several indications that it would occur sooner or later. After pressuring ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in September that it would be “worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs” are violating the agency’s equal-time rule. The Carr FCC followed that up in January by issuing a warning to late-night and daytime talk shows that they may no longer qualify for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule.

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Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.

The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost about $20,000 in API fees. Each instance operated inside its own Docker container, independently claiming tasks via lock files and pushing completed code to a shared Git repository. No orchestration agent directed traffic. The compiler achieved a 99% pass rate on the GCC torture test suite and can compile major open source projects including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg and Doom. But it lacks a 16-bit x86 backend and calls out to GCC for that step, its assembler and linker remain buggy, and it produces less efficient code than GCC running with all optimizations disabled.

Carlini also invested significant effort building test harnesses and feedback systems to keep the agents productive, and the model hit a practical ceiling at around 100,000 lines as bug fixes and new features frequently broke existing functionality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Traditional TV works best for live events, and for many people, that means sports. Most of the online services providing access to traditional TV, however, don’t allow you to only subscribe to sports. That’s going to change.

Today YouTube TV announced new plans that are a little bit cheaper than the current cost of $82.99 per month. Among them is a $64.99-per-month Sports plan, which includes access to the big national sports channels including FS1, NBC Sports Network, and all of the ESPN channels, along with access to network television. Basically, if a game is broadcast nationally, this package should give you access. And it will eventually give you access to many out-of-market—the post mentions that ESPN Unlimited will be part of the bundle starting in the fall.

The new plan is only an $18 discount over the “main” YouTube TV plan, but if you’re already paying for YouTube TV and are only ever watching sports, this could be a nice discount, particularly if you get access to ESPN Unlimited.

There are a few other discounted plans included in the announcement: The Sports + News package adds CNBC, Fox News, MSNow (formerly MSNBC), CNN, and more to the sports bundle, and costs $71.99. That’s only $11 cheaper than the full plan, but is still a nice discount if you were only watching sports and news.

But maybe the biggest savings are for people who don’t want to watch sports at all. The Entertainment plan costs $54.99, which is $28 cheaper than the main plan ($336 cheaper per year). If you only watch entertainment channels, with no news or sports, this is the package to look into.

There will be more than 10 plans like this rolling out in the next few weeks, according to YouTube TV. I’ve long dreamed of a world where I could pay only for the cable channels I care about at an affordable rate. This isn’t perfect, but it’s a bit closer than what YouTube TV offered before.

Discord is facing backlash after announcing that all users will soon be required to verify ages to access adult content by sharing video selfies or uploading government IDs.

According to Discord, it’s relying on AI technology that verifies age on the user’s device, either by evaluating a user’s facial structure or by comparing a selfie to a government ID. Although government IDs will be checked off-device, the selfie data will never leave the user’s device, Discord emphasized. Both forms of data will be promptly deleted after the user’s age is estimated.

In a blog, Discord confirmed that “a phased global rollout” would begin in “early March,” at which point all users globally would be defaulted to “teen-appropriate” experiences.

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Users on ChatGPT’s free and Go plans in the US may now start to see ads as OpenAI has started testing them in the chatbot. The company announced plans to bring ads to ChatGPT. At the time, the company said it would display sponsored products and services that are relevant to the current conversations of logged-in users, though they can disable personalization and “clear the data used for ads” whenever they wish.

“Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We’re starting with a test to learn, listen and make sure we get the experience right.”

These ads will appear below at the bottom of chats. They’re labeled and separated from ChatGPT’s answers. Ads won’t have an impact on ChatGPT’s responses.

Ads won’t appear when users are conversing with ChatGPT about regulated or sensitive topics such as health, mental wellbeing or politics. Users aged under 18 won’t see ads in ChatGPT during the tests either. Moreover, OpenAI says it won’t share or sell users’ conversations or data to advertisers. 

A source close to the company told CNBC that OpenAI expects ads to account for less than half of its revenue in the long run. Currently the company also takes a cut of items bought through its chatbot via the shopping integration feature. Also according to CNBC, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told staff on Friday that the company will deploy “an updated Chat model” this week.

The tests come on the heels of Anthropic running Super Bowl ads that poked fun at OpenAI for introducing advertising. Anthropic’s spot asserted that while “ads are coming to AI,” they won’t appear in its own chatbot, Claude.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-starts-testing-ads-in-chatgpt-191756493.html?src=rss

The romance genre — long the publishing industry’s earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases — has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic’s Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said.

A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre’s reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My subscription fatigue is real, but at the end of the day, I do recognize that companies need to make money. If one of them manages to put together a compelling package of features for a reasonable price, I can decide whether or not I find that value worth the money. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is offering a feature for free for years, and then suddenly deciding to lock it behind a paywall.

It seems YouTube didn’t get that memo. Starting on Saturday, outlets like 9to5Google began reporting that YouTube Music had started to remove the ability to vie lyrics for free users. If you want a full lyrics experience, you’ll need to subscribe to either YouTube Music Premium, or YouTube Premium (the latter includes Music Premium). The service hasn’t cut these users off cold turkey. According to anecdotal user experiences, YouTube Music is opening lyrics access to free users for five songs per month. Once they play song number six, they’ll only have access to the first two lines of each song, as the rest of the lyrics will be blurred out. These users will have to wait until the following month to view another five songs.

There appears to be no confusion about why the lyrics are blurred out, either. When you switch to the “Lyrics” tab on YouTube Music as a free account, a new banner appears, telling you how many views you have remaining. Beneath this, you’ll see the option to “Unlock lyrics with Premium,” a clear message that, unless you pay up, you only get a limited number of lyrics views. This, apparently, follows a months-long period where YouTube Music tested lyrics as a Premium-only feature.

For what it’s worth, when I tried to see what the current lyrics situation looks like on my free YouTube Music app, the service gave me two weeks of Premium for free, with no option to skip it. That’s, um, nice of YouTube, but since I already have an Apple Music subscription, the only real consequence here is that I can’t test these new lyrics limitations out.

Free music services that offer lyrics

I don’t see the strategy here. Lyrics aren’t something I feel people would feel compelled to pay for specifically—but they might be annoyed enough at losing them to look elsewhere. Spotify, for example, offers a full lyrics experience for free users. It was only last week the company added offline lyric downloads for Premium users only, but, even then, that’s adding a feature for the subscription tier—not taking away an existing feature from free users.

It’s not just Spotify, either. Other free music streaming services offers lyrics, as well, including Pandora, Amazon Music Free, and Freefy. These are largely radio services, so you may not have as much flexibility as you would have with YouTube Music free—but, hey, you at least have lyrics.

Losing lyrics isn’t the end of the world for free YouTube Music users, either. Just about any song’s lyrics can be found on the internet. Sometimes, the lyrics show up in a Google search window without you needing to even click a link. Otherwise, sites like Genius and AZLyrics do exist. It’s just a bummer YouTube feels the need to gatekeep the in-app experience.

Ring aired a Super Bowl ad touting its Search Party feature that didn’t quite get the intended buzz. Instead, the commercial scared the pants off of anyone concerned about a mass surveillance state.

The feature is advertised as a way to reunite missing dogs with their owners, a noble cause indeed, but Search Party does this by turning individual Ring devices into a surveillance network. Each camera uses AI to identify pets running across its field of vision and all feeds are pooled together to potentially identify lost animals. I’ve never seen a slope quite so slippery, as the technology could easily be rejiggered to track people.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t a new feature. Search Party was first announced last year. In that time it has been used to find 99 lost dogs in 90 days of use, according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Approximately ten million pets go missing in America each year. Many people aren’t keen on helping to create a surveillance state for a tool with what looks to be around a 0.005 percent success rate. That percentage is sure to rise with mass adoption, but you get the jist.

With that said, many Ring users are looking for a way to disable the feature, as it’s enabled by default. Engadget has got you covered.

How to Disable Search Party

Thankfully, this is fairly easy to do. Just open the Ring app and tap the menu in the top-left corner. Next, select Control Center. Then, tap Search Party and toggle the settings to Disable for both Search for Lost Pets and Natural Hazards. Repeat this process for each camera.

There has also been some confusion as to what Ring will share with law enforcement agencies. If you want to go a step further, delete all of your saved videos by tapping the History icon and then “Delete All.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/heres-how-to-disable-rings-creepy-search-party-feature-185420455.html?src=rss

At the end of January, Washington, DC, saw an extremely unusual event. The MAHA Institute, which was set up to advocate for some of the most profoundly unscientific ideas of our time, hosted leaders of the best-funded scientific organization on the planet, the National Institutes of Health. Instead of a hostile reception, however, Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, was greeted as a hero by the audience, receiving a partial standing ovation when he rose to speak.

Over the ensuing five hours, the NIH leadership and MAHA Institute moderators found many areas of common ground: anger over pandemic-era decisions, a focus on the failures of the health care system, the idea that we might eat our way out of some health issues, the sense that science had lost people’s trust, and so on. And Bhattacharya and others clearly shaped their messages to resonate with their audience.

The reason? MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) is likely to be one of the only political constituencies supporting Bhattacharya’s main project, which he called a “second scientific revolution.”

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Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its “Flow” trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.

Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name — then filed a trademark application in Tonga, where filings are not publicly accessible, before seeking U.S. protection.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When I asked real people why they post their workouts online, I received well over a hundred replies, many of them filled with venting about body image issues and unattainable beauty standards. That’s didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that the majority of these responses came from men. 

Carefully measured chicken and rice, obsessive tracking of macros, the guilt when a workout is missed: On social media, these behaviors are framed in the language of performance and strength. The same rituals that would be clear indications of disordered behavior for women are redefined as “discipline” and “optimization” for men. How many men suffer in silence because eating disorders are coded as a women’s issue? How many cases go unrecognized when they’re framed as “clean eating” or “serious training”? When eating disorders and body dysmorphia get rebranded as “fitness goals,” a lot of men are left struggling in plain sight. 

Men can have eating disorders, too

Boys and men now make up about a third of those diagnosed with eating disorders, and that figure likely understates the crisis. In particular, muscle dysmorphia—sometimes called “bigorexia“—is characterized by excessive and compulsive exercise, a persistent belief that one is insufficiently muscular, and an obsession with muscle mass, size, and leanness. 

Unfortunately, much of fitness culture allows men to engage in disordered behaviors by wrapping them in performance language. “Bulking” and “shredding” cycles can mask seriously problematic eating patterns. Without giving certain men in my life an armchair diagnosis, I can confidently say I’ve seen the mental fallout when someone’s extreme caloric restriction becomes “cutting” or compulsive exercise becomes “staying on track.”

Unsurprisingly, social media amplifies these harmful messages. Mason Boudrye, who describes himself as “someone known to post gratuitous thirst traps,” shared with me the mental fallout of always trying to look a certain way. “Even if people don’t admit that the obsessive tracking and strict adherence to diet qualifies as disordered eating, I know it’s true for me,” he says. The social media of it all makes these feelings even more public and persistent. 

We all scroll through feeds of chemically enhanced physiques presented as natural and achievable. This naturally breeds more self-scrutiny, more comparison, more perceived inadequacy. Matthew Singer, a yoga teacher, says most “fitspo” (fitness inspiration) “is as helpful for fitness as previous winning lottery numbers are for winning millions. Fitspo cannot take into account genetics, job and family circumstances, health history, or any of the other countless factors that influence health outcomes.” Our bodies are treated like projects always in need of correction, devoid of much-needed context.

What’s most troubling to me is the way men don’t get to call out disordered behaviors by name. There is both a misconception around who eating disorders affect, and a deep reluctance among affected men to seek help for a problem they’ve been socialized to handle alone. Society has constructed a masculine ideal that equates vulnerability with weakness, making it nearly impossible for some men to admit they’re struggling with their relationship to food and their bodies.

Unattainable beauty standards stay unattainable

Botox injections in men may get called “Brotox,” but a cheeky nickname shouldn’t shroud the fact that unattainable beauty standards are leading men to take more extreme measures. Dr. Claudia Kim of New Look New Life Cosmetic Surgery says she’s seen a rise in men turning to beauty treatments: jawline contouring, under-eye correction, hair restoration, skin rejuvenation. “These approaches offer noticeable yet discreet results with little downtime,” says Kim, fitting neatly into lives that were never supposed to include these concerns.

What’s telling, Kim adds, is that her male patients are usually entering the aesthetic realm for the first time. In this sense, men are catching up to beauty regimens women have been undertaking for generations, and slowly learning what women have long understood: Namely, that appearance affects professional success, social capital, and romantic prospects—and the goalposts are always moving. At the same time, the masculine ideal demands stoic self-sufficiency, even as it requires costly and constant aesthetic labor. 

What does all this mean for the average person with an average budget? The treatments Kim describes—jawline contouring, hair restoration, aesthetic procedures—aren’t cheap. Nor are supplements, meal prep services, personal trainers, specialized equipment, and so on. Beauty standards increasingly require you to spend more money, meaning your appearance is yet another health arena where class determines outcomes. And if they can’t afford to look the way they feel pressured to look, men are uniquely left behind to suffer in silence.

As a woman, I’ve spent most of my life jealous of how men were allowed to age, or gain weight, or simply be in their bodies without constant intervention. Now I have a more sympathetic gaze, especially after hearing so many men admit they were never given the language to articulate aesthetic concerns without shame.

The bottom line

There’s a big difference between healthy self-care and the sense that your body is never good enough. Meticulously tracking every calorie, every rep, every perceived flaw—why should one woman’s obvious eating disorder be another man’s enviable achievement? 

Women have been battling body image issues and unattainable beauty standards since birth, but a lot of men were never taught how to fight this particular war. To me, the takeaway is that we all need to be on the same side. To fight this war, we need a more honest conversation about what we’re doing to men’s relationships with their bodies. Until we acknowledge that, all this talk of “cutting” and “discipline” will allow dangerous behaviors to keep hiding in plain sight.

Steven Spielberg directed two of the best alien films of all time: E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now he’s going back to those roots, as it were, with his latest blockbuster film, Disclosure Day. A full-length trailer aired during the Super Bowl LX broadcast last night.

Per the (deliberately vague) official premise: “If you found out we weren’t alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you, would that frighten you? This summer, the truth belongs to seven billion people. We are coming close to… Disclosure Day.”

The trailer doesn’t tell us much more than the logline. It opens with a newscast announcing the pending public release of “government material long shrouded in secrecy.” We see a shot of a man standing in the middle of a crop circle that definitely wasn’t made by humans. A little girl encounters a seemingly sentient deer in her bedroom as a voiceover wonders whether there could be “others.” And what’s with putting electrodes on people’s temples so that their eyes change color? We’ll find out in June.

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On Monday, Discord announced its plan to begin rolling out mandatory age verification globally. Starting in March, new and existing accounts will start moving over to a “teen-by-default” setting, which will lock certain chats and features away until the account’s owner proves they’re an adult. Here’s what you’ll lose, how to get it back, and for good measure, what your other options are.

Discord will require age verification starting in March

In its announcement, Discord said the new age verification settings will start with a “phased global rollout” in March, so it may be some time until it hits you. However, once the changes make their way to your region, you’ll lose access to the following features until you verify your age:

• Age-restricted channels and servers: This is the most obvious one. Any channels that are set to adults only will now be off-limits to your account until you verify your age. In some cases, this could include whole servers, or depending on the server, certain app commands.

• Spicy content: Until you verify your age, Discord’s content filters will be active for you, and the app will blur any images it thinks are too sensitive or graphic.

• Message requests: Direct messages from people you don’t know will now go to a separate inbox.

• Speaking in Stages: Accounts that aren’t age-verified won’t be able to speak in Stage channels, which are livestreams where a few server members can broadcast to everyone on the server at once.

• Warnings on friend requests: This one adds something rather than taking it away. Until you verify your age, you’ll now see a warning prompt when getting a friend request from someone you don’t know.

How to verify your age in Discord

Discord has two ways to verify your age, though it will tell you if you need to go through the process. To the platform’s credit, it won’t suddenly strip away a bunch of features from you without explanation.

To start verifying your age on Discord, either click Get Started on a prompt the platform should send you once age verification hits your region, or navigate to User Settings > My Account > Age Group to see your age group and verify from there.

Now, you can either take a video selfie or scan a valid government ID. For video selfies, just select Take a selfie from the verification page, follow the on-screen instructions, and click Done to submit. For verifying through a government ID, select Use your ID, scan the provided QR code with your mobile device, take a clear photo of your ID on said device, and tap Done to submit.

Discord says that video selfies used for age verification are processed purely on-device, and that while photos of government IDs do go to “vendor partners” for verification, they are “deleted quickly—in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”

Once you’ve submitted your video selfie or ID, the app will then begin the process of assigning you an “age group,” which you’ll be able to see under User Settings > My Account > Age Group. Discord says most users only need to verify once, but that you might need to provide a government ID in addition to a video selfie if the app can’t confidently determine your age from just a face scan. You’re also able to attempt re-verification at any time, but if the app determines that you’re under the 13-year-old minimum for using Discord, your account will be banned. (You can appeal this and attempt to re-instate your Discord account via an ID.)

According to Discord, the age verification process “typically takes just a few minutes,” and you’ll get a notification and DM once it’s completed.

Best Discord alternatives that don’t use age verification

As countries around the world add new laws for age verification online (Discord mentions the UK and Australia in particular), it seems like Discord is just throwing its hands up and deciding to play it as safe as possible by taking the feature global. The move mimics similar decisions from Google, ChatGPT, and Roblox, but even adult users might be uncomfortable with it, since they’ll need to show the company—and the company’s third-party processors—personal identifying information to comply with it.

If that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, there are a few Discord alternatives you can try that don’t yet require age verification, although they might not completely match the app’s feature set:

• Slack: Discord basically stole Slack’s entire flow, and that’s great news for anyone looking for a Discord alternative. About the only Discord feature missing here is persistent voice channels, although you can still talk to others over voice using huddles. Slack can be a strong Discord replacement or supplement to another Discord replacement, but if you’re a teen looking for a new home, be careful. Technically, users under 16 are banned from Slack, according to the app’s terms of service.

• TeamSpeak: TeamSpeak has been updated since the 2000s to match many of Discord’s features, including adding persistent chat channels. However, it’s still lagging behind on some features, like video chat. Additionally, only 32 users can be in a free TeamSpeak server at a time. This is what I used as a teen before moving onto other platforms.

• Mumble and Ventrilo: These are no-frills, voice-first clients that primarily focus on privacy and low latency connections, with Mumble even being open source. They aren’t as robust as Discord, but they could serve as a strong voice channel supplement to another Discord alternative, like Slack.

YouTube is launching YouTube TV Plans this week, after revealing the program back in December. These are genre-specific subscription packages that let users opt into a curated version of the service and save a few bucks in the process. Yeah. It’s pretty much cable, proving you can’t cut a cord if it’s made out of invisible radio waves.

There more than ten plans available and they are all cheaper than the typical asking price of $83 per month. There’s a Sports Plan that costs $65 per month and includes channels like FS1, NBC Sports Network and all of the ESPN networks. Subscribers will pay $72 per month to add some news channels like CNN and CSPAN to the sports package.

The Entertainment Plan costs $55 per month and includes networks like Bravo, Comedy Central, FX and the Food Network, among many others. There’s a beefier version of this that costs $70 per month and adds in family channels like the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, along with news channels.

Signing up for one of these plans still provides various perks of a standard YouTube TV subscription. These include unlimited DVR, multiview and the ability to add up to six members on one account. Of course, those with deep pockets can spring for some premium add-ons like HBO Max, 4K Plus and the NFL Sunday Ticket.

YouTube

Some plans are rolling out later in the week, but YouTube says it could take “several weeks” for every plan to become available. New customers receive a discount for the first three months, which is worth looking into.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/youtube-tv-launches-curated-subscription-packages-this-week-170710000.html?src=rss

Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said.

Century bonds — long-term borrowing at its most extreme — are highly unusual, although a flurry were sold during the period of very low interest rates that followed the financial crisis, including by governments such as Austria and Argentina. The University of Oxford, EDF and the Wellcome Trust — the most recent in 2018 — are the only issuers to have previously tapped the sterling century market.

Such sales are even rarer in the tech sector, with most of the industry’s biggest groups issuing up to 40 years, although IBM sold a 100-year bond back in 1996. Big Tech companies and their suppliers are expected to invest almost $700bn in AI infrastructure this year and are increasingly turning to the debt markets to finance the giant data centre build-out. Michael Burry, writing on Substack: Alphabet looking to issue a 100-year bond. Last time this happened in tech was Motorola in 1997, which was the last year Motorola was considered a big deal.

At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top 25 market cap and top 25 revenue corporation in America. Never again. The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the US, ahead of Microsoft. In 1998, Nokia overtook Motorola in cell phones, and after the iPhone it fell out of the consumer eye. Today Motorola is the 232nd largest market cap with only $11 billion in sales.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you tuned into Super Bowl LX on Sunday, you may have caught Ring’s big ad of the night: The company tried to tap into us dog owners’ collective fear of losing our pets, demonstrating how its new “Search Party” feature could reunite missing dogs with its owners. Ring probably thought audiences would love the feature, with existing users happy to know Search Party exists, and new customers looking to buy one of their doorbells to help find lost dogs in the neighborhood.

Of course, that’s not what happened at all. Rather than evoke heartwarming feelings, the ad scared the shit out of many of us who caught it. That’s due to how the feature itself works: Search Party uses AI to identify pets that run in its field of vision. But it’s not just your camera doing this: The feature pools together all of the Ring cameras that have Search Party enabled to look for your lost dog. In effect, it turns all these individual devices into a Ring network, or, perhaps in harsher terms, a surveillance state. It does so in pursuit of a noble goal, sure, but at what cost?

The reactions I saw online ranged from shock to anger. Some were surprised to learn that Ring cameras could even do this, seeing as you might assume your Ring doorbell is, well, yours. Others were furious, lashing out at anyone who thinks Search Party is a good idea, or that the feature isn’t the beginning of a very slippery slope. My favorite take was one comparing Search Party to Batman’s cellphone network surveillance system from The Dark Knight, which famously compromised morals and ethics in the name of catching the bad guy.

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According to Ring, Search Party is a perfectly safe and wholesome way to look for lost dogs in the area. The company’s FAQs explain that users can opt-out of the feature at any time, and only Ring doorbells in the area around the home that started the current Search Party will look for the dog. In addition, Ring says the feature works based on saved videos, so Ring doorbells without a subscription and a saved video history won’t be able to participate. (Though I’m not sure the fact that the feature works with saved videos assuages any fears on my end.)

I am not pro-missing dogs. But I am pro-privacy. At the risk of sounding alarmist, Search Party really does seem like a slippery slope. Today, the neighborhood is banding together to find Mrs. Smith’s missing goldendoodle; tomorrow, they’re looking for a “suspicious person.” Innocent until proven guilty, unless caught on your neighbor’s Ring camera.

Can law enforcement request Search Party data?

Here’s the big question regarding Search Party and its slippery slope: Can law enforcement—including local police, FBI, or ICE—request saved videos from Ring cameras participating in Search Party in order to track down people, not pets?

You won’t be surprised to learn that that wasn’t answered by Ring’s Super Bowl ad, nor is it part of the official Search Party FAQs. However, we do know that, as of October 2025, Ring partnered with both Flock Safety as well as Axon. Axon makes and sells equipment for law enforcement, like tasers and body cameras, while Flock Safety is a security company that offers services like license plate recognition and video surveillance. These partnerships allow law enforcement to post requests for Ring footage directly to the Ring app. Ring users in the vicinity of the request have the choice to either share that footage or ignore the petition. Flock Safety says that users who do choose to share footage remain private.

Of course, law enforcement isn’t always going to ask for volunteers. According to Ring’s law enforcement guidelines, the company will comply with “valid and binding search warrants.” That’s not surprising, of course. But the company does note an important distinction in what it will share: Ring will share “non-content” data in response to both subpoenas and warrants, including a user’s name, home address, email address, billing info, date they made the account, purchase history, and service usage data. The company says it will not share “content,” meaning the data you store in your account, like videos and recordings of service calls, for subpoenas, only warrants.

Ring also says it will tell you if it shares your data with law enforcement, unless it is barred from doing so, or it’s clear your Ring data breaks the law. This applies for both standard data requests, as well as “emergency” requests.

Based on its current language, it seems that Ring would give up the footage used in Search Party to law enforcement, assuming they present a valid warrant. The thing is, it’s not clear whether Search Party has any actual impact on that data: For example, imagine a dog runs in front of your Ring doorbell, and the footage is saved to your history. Now, a valid warrant comes through requesting your footage. Whether you have Search Party enabled or disabled, Ring may share that footage with law enforcement—the feature itself had no impact on whether your doorbell saved the footage. The difference would be whether law enforcement has access to the identification data within the footage: Can they see that Ring thinks that dog is, in fact, Mrs. Smith’s goldendoodle, or do they simply see a video of a fluffy pup running past your house? If so, that would be your slippery slope indeed: If law enforcement could obtain your footage with facial recognition data of the suspect they’re looking for, we’d be in particularly dangerous territory.

I’ve reached out to Ring for comment on this side of Search Party, and I hope to hear back to provide a fuller answer to this question.

How to opt-out of Search Party on your Ring cameras

If you’d rather not bother with the feature at all, Ring says it’s easy enough to turn off. To start, open the Ring app, tap the hamburger menu, then choose “Control Center.” Here, choose “Search Party,” then choose the “blue Pet icon” next to each of your cameras for “Search for Lost Pets.”

To be honest, if I had a Ring camera, I’d go one step further and delete my saved videos. Law enforcement can’t obtain what I don’t save. If you want to delete these clips from your Ring account, head to the hamburger menu in the app, tap “History,” choose the “pencil icon,” then tap “Delete All” to wipe your entire history.