Next week is a big one. Assassin’s Creed Shadows launches on the heels of new reporting that Ubisoft is looking to spin off the franchise into a standalone company backed by Chinese conglomerate NetEase. The 2025 Game Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco with talks from people behind some of the biggest…
Season two has been illuminating so far—but there are still plenty of Lumon mysteries waiting to be solved on the Apple TV+ hit.
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If you’re tired of websites bombarding you with intrusive banners, pop-ups, trackers, and ads, this AdGuard family plan is worth a look: It’s a lifetime subscription that is currently $39.99 on StackSocial (down from $169.99), but it gets even better—applying the coupon FAMPLAN drops the price further to $15.97. That’s a lifetime of ad-blocking for less than what some services charge per month. That said, this plan is only for new users, and you’ll need to redeem your code within 30 days of purchase.
You can access and utilize this plan across nine devices, making it a solid pick for families or anyone juggling multiple gadgets. It works on Windows (7 and newer), macOS (10.15 and newer), iOS (12 and newer), and Android (7 and newer), covering most modern setups. AdGuard goes beyond standard ad-blocking by filtering out annoying pop-ups, stopping autoplay videos, and blocking phishing attempts. It also cuts down on trackers that follow you around the internet, which means less targeted advertising and a little more privacy. Unlike browser-based ad blockers, AdGuard works at the network level, meaning it can block ads in apps and games, too. Setup is straightforward—you’ll get your redemption code via email immediately after buying, so you can start using it right away.
If you’re already an AdGuard user, this deal won’t apply to you, but for new users looking for a one-time payment solution to dodge ads and boost privacy across multiple devices, this might be one of the best deals out there right now.
way2trivial shares a report: Microsoft is testing AI-powered summaries in Notepad. In an update rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels, you’ll be able to summarize information in Notepad by highlighting a chunk of text, right-clicking it, and selecting Summarize.
Notepad will then generate a summary of the text, as well as provide an option to change its length. You can also generate summaries by selecting text and using the Ctrl + M shortcut or choosing Summarize from the Copilot menu.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view at the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.
In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.
Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said:
New feature on Google Pixel phones hints at a ChromeOS-like VM. The March “feature drop” for Android 15 on Google Pixel devices includes an optional Linux session.
Additional AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver updates were sent out today for collecting ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window. As we are late in the cycle, most of the new AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver changes are fixes, but there are some minor feature changes particularly for the new RDNA4 GPUs…
Don’t miss the start of the 2025 season and learn how to watch the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix via a free live stream.
Tens of thousands of JPMorgan Chase software engineers increased their productivity 10% to 20% by using a coding assistant tool developed by the bank, its global chief information officer Lori Beer said. From a report: The gains present “a great opportunity” for the lender to assign its engineers to other projects, Beer told Reuters ahead of DevUp, an internal conference hosted by JPMorgan, bringing together its top engineers in India this year. The largest lender in the U.S. had a technology budget of $17 billion for 2024. Its tech workforce of 63,000 employees, with a third of them based in India, represents about 21% of its global headcount. The efficiency gains from the coding assistant will also allow JPMorgan’s engineers to devote more time to high-value projects focusing on artificial intelligence and data, Beer said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In a new paper published Thursday titled “Auditing language models for hidden objectives,” Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or “personas.” The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden motives, although the methods are still under research.
While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal motives from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where powerful AI systems might intentionally deceive or manipulate human users.
While training a language model using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reward models are typically tuned to score AI responses according to how well they align with human preferences. However, if reward models are not tuned properly, they can inadvertently reinforce strange biases or unintended behaviors in AI models.
Don’t get me wrong, a Batman Ninja sequel could be great, but there’s a brilliant idea in this faux anime opening waiting to be pounced on.
This is just going to break stuff, isn’t it?
The city found a nice little way to indirectly tax the big tech company.
You can argue if bash is a good programming language or not, but you can’t argue that it is a programming language. However, there are a few oddities about it that make it different from most other languages you probably know.
Luigi content is on the run from the (moderation) law.
Prepare to be wowed by the mysterious cosmic wonders that are black holes.
The sci-fi film starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig opens today.
Pour one out for Google Assistant, the sometimes helpful but often frustrating digital assistant Google launched in 2016. In its place, users will encounter Gemini, the generative AI Google has been integrating into every product in its portfolio. Later this year, Google will make Gemini its only supported assistant, forcing most of its users to abandon Assistant once and for all.
The Gemini brand is barely a year old, but Google has moved aggressively to increase usage. When it released the Gemini app on Android, Google forced anyone who installed it to disable Assistant and switch to Gemini. It did this despite a plethora of missing features and the omnipresent issues of AI hallucinations. The company has forged ahead with Gemini’s expansion in the intervening months, making Assistant’s demise rather unsurprising.
Since Gemini’s debut, users have had the option of sticking with the legacy assistant, but that’s not going to be an option soon. On mobile devices, the upgrade path (if you want to call it that) is clear. Most newly released phones already ship with Gemini as the default, and Google will prompt any remaining Assistant users to get the Gemini app. When Assistant is put out to pasture later in 2025, Google will remove the app from app stores and direct users to Gemini instead.
It’s been about six months now since Apple’s big iOS 18 update introduced RCS support to the iPhone. In many ways, it’s been a game changer: Ditching SMS for RCS has meant group chats function better, and videos are sent in higher quality. But there’s still one big drawback to RCS on iPhone that has yet to be fixed: Your messages aren’t encrypted.
To fully understand the issue, it’s important to know what RCS actually is. RCS stands for Rich Communication Services, and is basically a souped up version of SMS: The platform supports modern messaging features, like typing bubbles, high-quality image and video sharing, functioning group chats, and end-to-end encryption. SMS doesn’t support these features, so using it—especially in group settings—can be a pain.
RCS isn’t available on all Android messaging services, but if your partner’s Android setup supports it and you have it enabled on your iPhone, your conversations should feel very similar to iMessaging between other iPhones (minus the green bubbles, of course). Now, most of these features are currently working: You should be able to see when they’re typing; you should be able to send photos and videos in high resolution; and group chats should function much as they do between iPhones. There’s just one big issue.
At this time, messages sent and received via RCS between iPhones and Androids are not end-to-end encrypted. That means any conversations you have with Android friends are vulnerable, since these messages are sent without modern security protections.
That’s not a deviation from the norm for those of us on iOS: If you’re used to texting over SMS with Android users, those chats weren’t encrypted either. But the promise of RCS on iOS includes encrypted messaging. When you see that RCS tag in your green bubble chat, you should be safe in the knowledge that no one other than the parties involved in the chat can read these messages.
That said, RCS isn’t end-to-end encrypted everywhere, either. Google Messages is the biggest platform that supports default end-to-end encryption through RCS, but unless the other user is also using Google Messages and also has RCS enabled, your messages may not be encrypted after all. Other popular platforms, like Samsung Messages or Textra, do not support end-to-end encryption at all.
But things are changing for the better. The GSMA, the association that works with mobile operators to set unified standards, announced new specifications for RCS that enable end-to-end encryption based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol. In simplified terms, these new specifications mean that, no matter which platforms you’re using, all RCS messages will be end-to-end encrypted.
This isn’t necessarily a surprise: The GSMA publicly said it was working on end-to-end encryption for RCS on iPhone. There’s no timeline for this new standard, but Apple and Google both support adopting it as fast as possible. That’s good news, and the standard can’t get here soon enough.
However, it doesn’t change the fact that some may be using RCS with misunderstood assumptions about their security: Until this future update hits, RCS messages on iPhone are never end-to-end encrypted. If you want all of your conversations with non-iPhone friends to be protected, you’ll need to stick to encrypted messaging platforms, like Signal or WhatsApp. Again, iMessage is end-to-end encrypted by default, so no worries there.
If you’re an Android user who is used to how things work on Google Messages, listen up: Group chat names are not private when messaging with iPhones.
On Google Messages, you can rename a group whatever you want, and only you will see it. That’s helpful for keeping tabs on specific groups, without worrying that other people in the group will know how you’ve designated the chat. That’s not how things work when iOS is involved, however. iPhones users will know that group chat names are controllable by everyone in the group, and are very much public: When one person changes the group name, it changes for everyone.
If you’re new to messaging iPhones on RCS and you happen to have one in your group chat, don’t change the name to anything you wouldn’t be happy with everyone in the group seeing as well.
