Elon – “I think they’re getting clean rooms wrong in these modern (chip) fabs. I’m going
Bose recently announced the pending end of cloud support for its SoundTouch line of home speakers. This will, in effect, turn the smart speakers into dumb speakers as they will no longer have access to many features and any related software updates. Well, there’s a spot of good news for SoundTouch owners. The company is turning to an open source model for the software, allowing third parties to keep the music playing.
The company has already begun mailing out the API documentation to customers so “independent developers can create their own SoundTouch-compatible tools and features.” This will take some time, so Bose is also extending the end-of-life (EoL) date for the SoundTouch speakers. They were set to stop receiving cloud updates in February, but that has been moved to May 6.
It made a couple of other changes to make life a bit easier for SoundTouch owners. The speakers will still be able to use AirPlay and Spotify Connect after EoL, which was something that had been in doubt. The app will also continue to work in a stripped-down format. That app was originally set to stop working altogether, so all of those angry customer comments on Reddit must have done the job.
The SoundTouch speakers were introduced in 2013 and were on the expensive side, starting at $600. Nobody likes spending hundreds of dollars on something only to have it become a useless brick several years later. Good on Bose for listening to their customers on this.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/speakers/bose-made-the-consumer-friendly-move-to-open-source-its-soundtouch-speakers-163459024.html?src=rss
China has hacked the emails used by congressional staff on powerful committees in the US House of Representatives, as part of a massive cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon. An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese intelligence accessed email systems used by some staffers [non-paywalled source] on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee and armed services committee, according to people familiar with the attack. The intrusions were detected in December.
The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers’ emails. The MSS has been operating Salt Typhoon for several years. It allows China to access the unencrypted phone calls, texts and voicemails of almost every American, and in some cases enables access to email accounts. Salt Typhoon has also intercepted the calls of senior US officials over the past couple of years, said people familiar with the campaign.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Affectionately called the “Whippet” (officially AT2024wpp), this Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) occurred on a scale that defied traditional expectations.
Xbox will kick off the fourth installment of its Developer Direct event on January 22 at 1PM ET. As usual, we’ll get a glimpse at what the upcoming year has in store along with news, new gameplay footage and more directly from the teams behind this year’s slate of games.
It’s officially Developer_Direct season!
Join us on January 22 at 10am PT for an exclusive look at Fable, Forza Horizon 6, and Beast of Reincarnation: https://t.co/FvFUT7RzVZ | #DeveloperDirect pic.twitter.com/GMRpVDxucs
— Xbox (@Xbox) January 8, 2026
In a blog post announcing the event, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief Jon Skrebels said Xbox’s 25-year anniversary will be marked by the return of some beloved franchises. Gamers will also get their first extended look at Fable, a reboot of the iconic series. The event will also be unveiling gameplay footage for Forza Horizon 6, the upcoming open-world racing game set in Japan. UK studio Playground Games is behind both titles.
The showcase will also include new details and gameplay from Beast of Reincarnation, the “one-person, one-dog” role-playing game. The game is being developed by Game Freak, the studio best known for its series of Pokémon games, and follows protagonist Emma and her canine companion in post-apocalyptic Japan.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/the-next-xbox-developer-direct-showcase-is-on-january-22-154444166.html?src=rss
A 50-inch TV that would have set you back $1,100 at Best Buy during Black Friday 2001 now costs less than $200, and the price per area-pixel — a metric accounting for both screen size and resolution — has dropped by more than 90% over the past 25 years. The story behind this decline is largely one of liquid crystal display technology maturing from a niche product to a mass-manufactured commodity.
LCDs represented just 5% of the TV market in 2004; by 2018, they commanded more than 95%. The largest driver of cost reduction has been the scaling up of “mother glass” sheets — the large panels of extremely clear glass onto which semiconductor materials are deposited before being cut into individual displays. The first generation sheets measured roughly 12 by 16 inches. Today’s Generation 10.5 sheets span 116 by 133 inches, nearly 100 times the original area. This scaling delivers substantial savings because equipment costs rise more slowly than glass area increases.
Moving from Gen 4 to Gen 5 mother glass cut the cost per diagonal inch by 50%. Equipment costs per unit of panel area fell 80% between Gen 4 and Gen 8. Process improvements have compounded these gains: masking steps required for thin-film transistors dropped from eight to four, yields climbed from 50% to above 90%, and a “one drop fill” technique reduced liquid crystal filling time from days to minutes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
According
Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the US from the world’s most important climate treaty, as well as from dozens of other international organizations, as the president intensifies efforts to upend decades of global cooperation tackling rising temperatures.
In a presidential memorandum issued on Wednesday evening, Trump said the US would withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and 65 additional UN and other multilateral groups, mostly linked to the environment, renewable energy, development, education, and the promotion of democracy and human rights.
They include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global body of climate scientists, the International Trade Centre, the UN Population Fund, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Disney+, which is looking to catch up with some streaming and digital rivals in terms of daily engagement, is adding vertical videos to the service. From a report: The arrival of the new format later this year was one of several advertising-oriented announcements the company made Wednesday at its Tech + Data Showcase at CES in Las Vegas. Other new offerings include a new “brand impact” metric and a new video generation tool that helps advertisers create high-quality connected-TV-ready commercials using existing assets and guidelines.
[…] In an interview prior to the Wednesday showcase, Erin Teague, EVP of Product Management for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, said “everything’s on the table” in terms of how vertical video is delivered on Disney+. It could be original short-form programming, repurposed social clips, refashioned scenes from longer-form episodic or feature titles or a combination. “We’re obviously thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors,” Teague said. “So, it won’t be a kind of a disjointed, random experience.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Garmin displays a real-time stress level from 0 to 100. Oura calculates “daytime stress” and resilience metrics. For Whoop, it’s the stress monitor; for Fitbit, a “stress management score.” However it’s branded, some version of a “stress score” has become ubiquitous across smartwatches and wearables. This number is marketed as a window into our internal emotional state, turned into quantified proof of how our day is really going. The only issue: these numbers aren’t all that accurate.
The scores lighting up our wrists aren’t measuring what most of us think they’re measuring. When you check your smartwatch and see that your stress level spiked, you might assume the device somehow detected your anxiety about some direct stimulus, like a difficult conversation or frustrating traffic. But that’s not totally accurate.
Sure, your watch might have detected physiological arousal—changes in your heart rate variability, skin conductance, or movement patterns. And while those signals do tell us something real about the nervous system, they don’t really tell us about stress in the psychological sense you actually care about.
“Part of the discrepancy can be explained by different definitions of how stress is conceptualized,” says Eiko Fried, who co-authored a 2025 study that found smartwatch stress measures did not align with self-reported stress scores for most individuals. The way most people understand the term “stressed”—as in “I was really stressed today!“—isn’t the way Garmin defines its stress score, which measures physiological stress. So, your watch is not necessarily telling you how stressed you feel, just how your nervous system is behaving. “Such elevated activity can come from various sources,” says Fried, “including many we would not typically consider a stressful experience.”
Physiological arousal shows up in response to all kinds of experiences that have nothing to do with distress. “What most smartwatches call a ‘stress score’ isn’t stress itself,” says Erwin van den Burg, a physiologist who specializes in the biology of stress. “It’s usually based on indirect physiological signals like heart rate variability, skin conductance, or movement patterns. Those signals tell us something about arousal in the nervous system, but arousal can come from many sources—physical activity, excitement, caffeine, poor sleep, illness, or emotional engagement—not just psychological stress.”
The oversimplification becomes even more problematic when we consider that most stress algorithms fail to account for sex-specific physiology, particularly the menstrual cycle. Because hormonal fluctuations can meaningfully alter heart rate, heart rate variability, and temperature, “a perfectly healthy physiological shift can be interpreted by a wearable as ‘high stress,'” says Emile Radyte, CEO at Samphire Neuroscience. This means women are more likely to receive misleading stress alerts for standard human biology, which can be confusing at best and anxiety-provoking at worst.
Even setting aside the definition problem and the sex-bias issue, there’s a basic question of measurement accuracy.
“When you have problems with your heart, your cardiologist may ask you to wear a chest-worn device for a few days to monitor your heart rate and heart rate variability. This is a highly accurate medical-grade device,” Fried says. “Your doctor will not ask you to wear a smartwatch, because there are many issues that make wrist-worn measurement less reliable. This affects in particular heart rate variability, for which we need highly accurate measurements.”
Heart rate variability is the cornerstone of most smartwatch stress scores, yet wrist-worn devices struggle to measure it with the precision required for medical-grade insights. The data isn’t worthless, but it’s noisy, and building definitive claims about internal states on top of noisy data is, well…scientifically dubious.
So is your wearable useless? Of course not. My critique here isn’t that wearables have no value—it’s just that the value they provide is being misrepresented. Your smartwatch’s “stress score” claims to tell you far more than the science really supports. And in some cases, a less-than-ideal score may even increase stress, rather than help people understand what their body is responding to. The great irony of the wellness industry persists.
The way you think about “stress” doesn’t translate to a single biological state, let alone one that can be captured by number or “score.” Your watch simply detects signs of arousal in your nervous system, which could mean almost anything.
This distinction doesn’t make the data useless, but it should make you a more informed consumer. It’d be nice if companies could stop using the word “stress” for what they’re actually measuring—perhaps “physiological arousal” or “autonomic nervous system activity,” which would be more accurate, but less marketable, so I’m not holding my breath. (Although, if I did, I’m sure my stress score would skyrocket.)
A device marketed to help you manage stress may actually create more of it by generating anxiety-inducing alerts about normal physiological variation that it misinterprets as distress. The sooner we’re honest about that gap, the sooner these devices can actually help us, rather than selling us a quantified illusion of self-knowledge they don’t really have.
Nintendo has unveiled the first color variants for the Switch 2 Joy-Cons in light purple and light green, set to arrive on February 12 alongside Mario Tennis Fever. The new controllers are now on pre-order for $100 and include matching wrist-straps.
Other than the colorway, these are standard Joy-Con 2 controllers with motion controls and HD rumble, along with the C Button for GameChat and the mouse controls for compatible games. However, you may have noticed something weird about them — the colors are on the inner rails, so you’ll barely be able to see them when the Joy-Con 2s are connected to a Switch 2 console, except around the thumbsticks. By contrast, previous Joy-Con color variants covered the entire shell. The new Switch 2 Joy-Con colors also clash with the light blue and orange strips on the inner left and right of the console.
Along with the new Joy-Con 2 controllers, Nintendo released a lengthy game-play video for Mario Tennis Fever, also set to arrive on February 12th. It details some of the key gameplay features, like “fever shots,” the ice racket and moves like slides and dives.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-reveals-its-first-switch-2-joy-con-color-variant-142725414.html?src=rss
The AirPods Pro 3 are on sale and back at their record low price of $200. This is marked down from $250, a hefty 20 percent discount. This model was just released in September of last year, so consider this a substantial discount for such a recent product.
We gave these AirPods a score of 90 out of 100 in our review and we consider them the best wireless earbuds for iPhone users. The third generation model is a substantial update to an already impressive product, bringing new features like live translation to the table.
The AirPods Pro 3 also offer heart-rate tracking, allowing them to stream live data to Apple Fitness and other third-party workout apps. This lets you track your fitness and close activity rings similarly to when using an Apple Watch.
Apple also improved the sound quality of this generation thanks in large part to a redesigned acoustic architecture that improves how air is delivered into the ear canal. Additionally, the company changed the angle of the drivers to help more sound get where it needs to go instead of bouncing off the sides of your ear. We felt the jump in audio quality from the last generation to this one was substantial.
The ANC on the AirPods Pro 3 has also been improved. Apple claims this model filters out twice as much noise as the AirPods Pro 2 and four times as much as the original AirPods Pro. We found the noise cancellation to be top-notch.
Live Translation is as neat as it sounds, leveraging the AirPods’ noise cancellation tech, Apple’s AI and beamforming mics to help you understand a speaker in a different language. Right now, this is limited to a handful of languages with more being added over time.
It’s not often you see one of Apple’s best and most recent products on sale for 20 percent off, so if you’re in the market for an upgrade or your first set of AirPods, consider taking advantage of this deal.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apple-airpods-pro-3-are-back-on-sale-at-a-record-low-price-140752004.html?src=rss
Prior to World War II the vast majority of telescopes built around the world were funded by wealthy people with an interest in the heavens above.
However, after the war, two significant developments in the mid-20th century caused the burden of funding large astronomical instruments to largely shift to the government and academic institutions. First, as mirrors became larger and larger to see deeper into the universe, their costs grew exponentially. And then, with the advent of spaceflight, the expense of space-based telescopes expanded even further.
But now the tide may be turning again.
LEGO has responded to concerns that its newly announced Smart Brick technology represents a departure from the company’s foundation in physical, non-digital play, a day after the official reveal at CES drew criticism from child development advocates. Federico Begher, SVP of Product, New Business, told IGN the sensor-packed bricks are “an addition, a complementary evolution” and emphasized that the company would “still very much nurture and innovate and keep doing our core experience.”
A BBC News report on the CES announcement noted “unease” among “play experts” at the unveiling. Josh Golin, executive director of children’s wellbeing group Fairplay, said he believed Smart Bricks could “undermine what was once great about Lego” and curtail imagination during play. Begher compared the rollout to the Minifigure’s gradual introduction decades ago. The Smart Brick launches in March in Star Wars sets including an X-Wing that produces engine sounds based on movement. The technology is screen-free and physical, Begher said, drawing on learnings from previous projects like Super Mario figures where “some of the levels were very prescriptive.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There’s a well-worn pattern in the development of AI chatbots. Researchers discover a vulnerability and exploit it to do something bad. The platform introduces a guardrail that stops the attack from working. Then, researchers devise a simple tweak that once again imperils chatbot users.
The reason more often than not is that AI is so inherently designed to comply with user requests that the guardrails are reactive and ad hoc, meaning they are built to foreclose a specific attack technique rather than the broader class of vulnerabilities that make it possible. It’s tantamount to putting a new highway guardrail in place in response to a recent crash of a compact car but failing to safeguard larger types of vehicles.
One of the latest examples is a vulnerability recently discovered in ChatGPT. It allowed researchers at Radware to surreptitiously exfiltrate a user’s private information. Their attack also allowed for the data to be sent directly from ChatGPT servers, a capability that gave it additional stealth, since there were no signs of breach on user machines, many of which are inside protected enterprises. Further, the exploit planted entries in the long-term memory that the AI assistant stores for the targeted user, giving it persistence.
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The Meta Quest Pro launched as Meta’s vision of what high-end virtual and mixed reality could look like without dragging a gaming PC into the equation. At $679.99 on Woot, it’s now $320 off its original $999 price and still more than $100 cheaper than Amazon at the time of writing. This deal runs for six days or until it sells out, with free standard shipping for Prime members and a $6 fee for everyone else. This headset won PCMag’s Best VR Headset award in 2022, and while it’s no longer the newest thing Meta sells, it’s still positioned well above entry-level VR in both build and capability.
What you’re really paying for here is comfort and hardware that doesn’t feel compromised. The Quest Pro uses a balanced halo-style strap with the battery placed at the back, which spreads the weight more evenly than front-heavy headsets. That makes longer sessions more tolerable, though “long” is relative—the battery lasts around two hours, which can feel limiting if you’re deep into work or creative apps. Inside, you get a Snapdragon XR2+ chip, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage, which is generous for a standalone headset. The displays push 1,920 by 1,800 pixels per eye, with better contrast and richer colors thanks to local dimming. In practice, this means sharper text, deeper blacks, and fewer washed-out scenes compared to older Quest models, especially in mixed-reality apps where clarity matters.
The controllers are another quiet upgrade. Meta removed the tracking rings and gave each controller its own cameras, so tracking doesn’t depend on where your headset is pointing. That pays off in tasks like 3D sculpting, painting, or precision-heavy productivity apps, where hand movement feels steadier and more predictable. Eye and face tracking also come built in, which lets avatars mirror your expressions in supported apps. It’s impressive, but not essential for everyone. One downside, according to this PCMag review, is immersion: The default open-style face interface lets in light from the sides, and full isolation requires an optional light blocker that costs extra. Still, if you’re after a premium standalone headset with solid future-proofing, this is the lowest price the Quest Pro has seen, and a compelling offer while it lasts.
