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The problem with distraction-blocking apps is how easy they are to turn off. But what if you needed to access a physical object to unblock distractions? That way, you could leave the object at home, or give it to someone who can keep you accountable. That’s the basic idea behind Foqos, an iPhone app by developer Ali Waseem, that’s open source, completely free, and works really well.

At first, Foqos may seem similar to other focus apps for blocking distractions. You can select a set of applications and websites you’d like to block, then turn on the blocker. The difference comes when it’s time to turn that distraction blocking off. To do so, you have to scan a “key,” either an NFC chip or a QR code.

Credit: Justin Pot

If you’re looking for the simplest option, go with the QR code: You can print out the code on a piece of paper and place it somewhere in your house. I, personally, set up a QR code and taped it to the back of a desk drawer. The NFC chip, on the other hand, is a little more nerdy. You’ll need to buy a blank one and set it up yourself. Such chips are extremely affordable and have all kinds of other users, from automating routines to sharing your wifi passwords.

The setup process is straight forward. First, you need to give the application permission to access your Screen Time settings—this is used to enable the blocking. Next you can create profiles. I made one for blocking social media applications as a category, then added the web versions of Reddit so I didn’t have a workaround. After doing this, you can choose which key you want to use. You can use your key of choice—the NFC chip or the QR code—to both trigger blocking and end it. Alternatively, you can start the blocking manually and require the key to stop it.

However you set this up, there are all kinds of ways you can use it. You could leave the key at home before a night out, making it easier to focus on the people around you. Or, during the workday, you could give the key to a friend and instruct them not to give it back until you’re done with the current project. I’ve been trying this for a couple days, leaving my phone without the ability to access Reddit or Bluesky. My hope was that I’d spend time reading instead of scrolling, and it seems to be working. Even if the key is only across the room, there’s enough friction to keep me from scrolling.

The app, as mentioned, is completely free, though the developer asks that you chip in a few bucks if you find it helpful.

It was a quiet Labor Day weekend for tech, but the Engadget team has kept busy testing out new gear from the likes of DJI, Sony and Bose. I want to kick things off with the new flagship DJI Mic 3.

The wireless mics have a wholesale design change from the Mic 2, plus many improvements in sound quality, noise reduction and the number of subjects you can record at once — though there is one downgrade compared to the last model. I’ve had one for over a week, so I’ll share some impressions as well.

The most noticeable change with the Mic 3 is the smaller transmitter size and lighter weight. It’s just 16 grams (.58 ounces) compared to 28 grams (.99 ounces) for the Mic 2. The smaller size and rotating clip make the Mic 3 more discreet and easier to attach to any shirt or hat. However, there’s still a large DJI logo on both sides of the transmitter, so dig out your black tape.

The Mic 3 now supports up to four transmitters and eight receivers at once. That means you can record four subjects at a time to as many as eight receivers simultaneously for multi-camera shoots (if you buy the extra kits). DJI’s Mic 3 is now on sale in most territories, priced at $329 in a kit with a charging case plus two transmitters and a receiver, or $219 with a single transmitter and receiver.

— Mat Smith

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The news you might have missed

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• Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd gen) review: Still a noise-canceling powerhouse

• How to perform a reverse phone number lookup

The best mobile microphones for 2025

Our top picks for phone mics to record anything and everything.

That makes it a great time to test the DJI Mic 3’s rivals. The world of mobile-specific (or phone-friendly) microphones has expanded significantly, with many great options arriving in the last few years. We’ve tested a wide range of popular microphones with a mobile focus, so you don’t have to. Some microphones — such as the wireless lavalier kind — will be more versatile and convenient, making them useful for a variety of uses. We also have musician or field-recording picks, where we explore more exotic form factors, such as shotgun mics and mobile-friendly desktop options. Naturally, our top focus is sound quality and performance.

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YouTube TV subscribers won’t lose access to Fox content after all

The two companies reached an agreement.

YouTube TV warned subscribers they could lose access to Fox content, including the start of the NFL season and a key college football game between the top-ranked Texas Longhorns and the Utah Utes. The standoff was over money, of course, with YouTube TV saying Fox demanded more than rival stations with comparable offerings.

That has now been resolved with a “renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Weather, Fox Sports, FS1, FS2, Fox Deportes, Big Ten Network, the Fox network and all Fox Local Stations,” Fox said in its own press release.

In the past, YouTube TV has lost access to local Fox stations that carry regional sports, though usually disputes are extended and resolved before they get that far.

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Sony RX1R III camera review

Waiting 10 years to be underwhelmed.

Engadget

First things first: The RX1R III can capture stunning photos. However, for something Sony waited nearly a decade to update and is charging $5,100 for, it also feels like a missed opportunity. First, the RX1R III is nearly $2,000 more expensive than its predecessor. Plus, it’s missing a handful of features the company really should have included for it to hold its own against other high-end compact cameras from rivals, like Fujifilm. Come for Igor Bonifacic’s full review, stay for the pet pics.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-engadget-newsletter-111920529.html?src=rss

The Federal Communications Commission’s Republican chairman is eliminating regulations at breakneck speed by using a process that cuts dozens of rules at a time while giving the public only 10 or 20 days to review each proposal and submit objections.

Chairman Brendan Carr started his “Delete, Delete, Delete” rule-cutting initiative in March and later announced he’d be using the Direct Final Rule (DFR) mechanism to eliminate regulations without a full public-comment period. Direct Final Rule is just one of several mechanisms the FCC is using in the Delete, Delete, Delete initiative. But despite the seeming obscurity of regulations deleted under Direct Final Rule so far, many observers are concerned that the process could easily be abused to eliminate more significant rules that protect consumers.

On July 24, the FCC removed what it called “11 outdated and useless rule provisions” related to telegraphs, rabbit-ear broadcast receivers, and phone booths. The FCC said the 11 provisions consist of “39 regulatory burdens, 7,194 words, and 16 pages.”

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College students have integrated generative AI into their academic routines at an unprecedented scale as 85% report usage for coursework in the past year, according to new Inside Higher Ed survey data. The majority employ AI tools for brainstorming ideas, seeking tutoring assistance, and exam preparation rather than wholesale academic outsourcing. Only 25% admitted using AI to complete assignments entirely, while 19% generated full essays.

Students overwhelmingly reject institutional policing approaches, with 53% favoring education on ethical AI use over detection software deployment. Despite widespread adoption, 35% of respondents report no change in their perception of college value, while 23% view their degrees as more valuable in the AI era.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

International tourism to the United States faces an unprecedented 8.2% decline in 2025, with the World Travel and Tourism Council projecting a $12.5 billion loss in visitor spending — the only decline among 184 economies analyzed. Canadian visitors, traditionally comprising 28% of international arrivals, have dropped by approximately 25% through July.

Seattle tour operators report 30-50% fewer Canadian customers with many explicitly citing recent tariff policies and political rhetoric as deterrents. The newly implemented $250 “visa integrity fee” for certain countries compounds existing concerns about immigration policies and National Guard deployments in major cities. Tourism Economics now projects full recovery to pre-pandemic levels won’t occur until 2029, three years later than initially forecast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking to The Logan Bartlett Show on Friday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the use of AI agents had enabled him to “rebalance” his headcount in the customer support division by trimming 4,000 jobs. “I’ve reduced it from 9,000 head to about 5,000 because I need less heads,” Benioff said. Benioff called the first eight months of 2025, during which an estimated 10,000 jobs have been lost to AI, “eight of the most exciting months of my career.”

“There were more than 100 million leads that we have not called back at Salesforce in the last 26 years because we have not had enough people,” Benioff said. “We just couldn’t call them back. But we now have an agentic sales that is calling back every person that contacts us.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is officially debunking a series of reports that claimed Gmail has been hit with a “major” security issue in recent days. “We want to reassure our users that Gmail’s protections are strong and effective,” the company said in a somewhat unusual statement. “Several inaccurate claims surfaced recently that incorrectly stated that we issued a broad warning to all Gmail users about a major Gmail security issue. This is entirely false.”

Google doesn’t detail the erroneous claims in its post. But, as Forbes points out, it seems to be referring to several recent reports that stated the company issued an “emergency warning” to all of its 2.5 billion users in response to a phishing attack that targeted a Salesforce instance used by the company. That incident, however, was first reported by Google in early June, and the company said in an August 8 update that it had finished notifying everyone affected.

It’s not clear why that report resurfaced now or how it was misconstrued into a supposed warning impacting all Gmail users, but Google is now trying to set the record straight. “While it’s always the case that phishers are looking for ways to infiltrate inboxes, our protections continue to block more than 99.9% of phishing and malware attempts from reaching users,” the company said. “It’s crucial that conversation in this space is accurate and factual.”

Google also notes that it encourages all users to set up “a secure password alternative,” such as a passkey for maximum protection.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/google-says-reports-of-a-major-gmail-security-issue-are-entirely-false-224812292.html?src=rss

Major social media platforms in China have started rolling out labels for AI-generated content to comply with a law that took effect on Monday. Users of the likes of WeChat, Douyin, Weibo and RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu) are now seeing such labels on posts. These denote the use of generative AI in text, images, audio, video and other types of material, according to the South China Morning Post. Identifiers such as watermarks have to be included in metadata too.

WeChat has told users they must proactively apply labels to their AI-generated content. They’re also prohibited from removing, tampering with or hiding any AI labels that WeChat applies itself, or to use “AI to produce or spread false information, infringing content or any illegal activities.” 

ByteDance’s Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — similarly urged users to apply a label to every post of theirs that includes AI-generated material while noting it’s able to use metadata to detect where a piece of content content came from. Weibo, meanwhile, has added the option for users to report “unlabelled AI content” option when they see something that should have such a label.

Four agencies drafted the law — which was issued earlier this year — including the main internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Public Security and the National Radio and Television Administration also helped put together the legislation, which is being enforced to help oversee the tidal wave of genAI content. In April, the CAC started a three-month campaign to regulate AI apps and services.

Mandatory labels for AI content could help folks better understand when they’re seeing AI slop and/or misinformation instead of something authentic. Some US companies that provide genAI tools offer similar labels and are starting to bake such identifiers into hardware. Google’s Pixel 10 devices are the first phones that implement C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) content credentials right inside the camera app.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chinese-social-media-platforms-roll-out-labels-for-ai-generated-material-194803979.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Union will deploy additional satellites in low Earth orbit to strengthen resilience against GPS interferences and will improve capabilities to detect it, EU Defence Commissioner Andrius Kubilius said on Monday. His remarks followed an incident on Sunday in which the GPS system aboard European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s aircraft was jammed en route to Bulgaria. Bulgarian authorities suspect the jamming was due to due to interference by Russia, an EU spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The century-old duty-free import exemption that transformed American online shopping has ended, The Atlantic argues, closing a loophole that allowed packages valued under $800 to enter the United States without tariffs. The de minimis threshold, raised from $200 in 2016, processed millions of daily shipments directly from overseas sellers to American consumers.

China lost access earlier this year; the exemption now terminates for all countries. Platforms including Shein, Temu, and marketplace sellers on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay built business models around direct shipping from manufacturing hubs in Asia and elsewhere. Import duties will apply to all international packages regardless of value, with tariffs reaching 50% for some countries. The policy shift affects everything from $30 specialty faucet parts shipped from Britain to handmade crafts from India, fundamentally altering the economics of cross-border e-commerce that emerged over the past decade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts.

An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure’s automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft’s support forums indicates their issue was not isolated.

The problem was that costs had suddenly ramped up. One user, with a budget threshold of $85, received an automated alert indicating that their spend was forecast to reach $1,027. Another said: “We’re actively seeing the same issue, costs have blown up by a crazy amount. No official notice or announcement from Microsoft either, it’s appalling.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The end of any sports season is usually the most exciting part, and MLS fans can watch the climax of the 2025 campaign for a discount. As it has done each year around this time since it locked up the rights to the top North American soccer league, Apple is offering the MLS Season Pass at a discount for the remainder of the season. Apple TV+ subscribers can get access for $25, while everyone else can snag the season pass for $29.

This is just the latest MLS Season Pass price cut of 2025, as Apple slashed it in half to $49 in July. However, it’s not quite as great a deal as latecomers got on the pass last year. Apple’s end-of-season discount for 2024 saw the season pass drop to just $10 in early September.

We’re now well over halfway through the 2025 season. Teams have between five and nine games of the regular season left to play. Inter Miami have the most games remaining due to the team’s participation in the Club World Cup, so Lionel Messi fans might get to see quite a bit more of him — especially if his squad makes the MLS Cup playoffs. You’ll also have the chance to check out a few new high-profile imports to MLS, including Son Heung-min at Los Angeles FC and Thomas Müller at Vancouver Whitecaps. The season will end with the MLS Cup final, which will take place on December 6.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/apples-mls-season-pass-drops-to-as-low-as-25-for-the-rest-of-2025-170855008.html?src=rss

Americans are having a record low amount of sex — even less than they did during the Covid-19 pandemic — according to a new study led by researchers at the Institute for Family Studies. WSJ: This continues the downward shift in sexual activity that has been worrying sociologists and psychologists for decades. For the report, called “The Sex Recession,” researchers at the IFS analyzed the data on sex and intimacy in the latest General Social Survey produced by NORC at the University of Chicago, which was collected in 2024 and released in May. They found that just 37% of people age 18-64 reported having sex at least once a week, down from 55% in 1990. The decline is even more striking for young adults: Almost a quarter of people age 18-29, or 24%, said they had not had sex in the past year; this is twice as many as in 2010.

Much has been written in recent years about the trend of young people having less sex, attributed to everything from stunted social skills to a rise in internet pornography. Yet the IFS study shows that the same trend holds true for people up to the age of 64, of all sexual orientations, both married and single. (After age 64, there was no significant change in the amount of sex people have, largely because this group reports having sex less frequently to begin with, the researchers said.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has lined up its next PlayStation State of Play showcase, and this one is all about a single game. It will focus on 007 First Light, the long-awaited James Bond adventure from Hitman studio IO Interactive. It starts at 2PM ET on September 3 and you can watch it on the PlayStation YouTube and Twitch channels (there’ll also be a version of the video with English subtitles on YouTube). You can also just hit the play button on the YouTube video above when the time is right.

The showcase will run for over 30 minutes and it will feature a deep dive into gameplay, including a full playthrough of a young Bond’s first mission. Over on the PlayStation Blog, IOI said to expect “everything from high-speed car chases to on-foot stealth sequences and shootouts.” Following that, IOI will offer up more details on 007 First Light gameplay. Perhaps we’ll also get a release date or narrower window for the action-adventure game, which is slated to hit Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2026.

In the meantime, you can get a taste of just why IOI was able to land this gig by checking out Hitman World of Assassination, a bundle of all three of the main Hitman games from the last decade. Hitman WOA just hit iOS last week, and you can play through the first location for free. It’s also available on PC and consoles.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/sony-is-hosting-a-state-of-play-showcase-for-007-first-light-on-september-3-151958435.html?src=rss

Waymo robotaxis are repeatedly selecting identical parking spots in front of specific Los Angeles and Arizona homes between rides, puzzling residents who document the same vehicles returning to precise locations daily. The company states its vehicles choose parking based on local regulations, existing vehicle distribution, and proximity to high-demand areas but cannot explain the algorithmic specificity.

Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle expert Phil Koopman attributes the behavior to machine learning systems optimizing for specific spots without variation. Waymo said it had received neighbor complaints and has designated certain locations as no-parking zones for its fleet. The vehicles comply with three-hour parking limits, according to Los Angeles Department of Transportation regulations, governing commercial passenger vehicles under 22 feet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.