Fed up with modern MTBs? Canyon’s new Spectral AL is for you

In a time of ultra-adjustable frames with increasingly intricate tech, Canyon’s latest Spectral AL strips back the complexity and complications from your riding.

Its aluminium construction, lack of flip chips and internal frame storage, industrial bearings and reasonable retail prices for the three-model range should appeal to those sick of puzzling over whether their bike setup is performing perfectly.

Starting at £2,249 / €2,299 for the Spectral AL 5 and rising to £3,749 / €3,999 for the Fabio Wibmer signature bike, this 150mm front, 140mm rear-travel bike represents the excellent value for money we’ve come to expect from the German direct-sales brand.

Canyon Spectral AL 2025 trail mountain bike
It’s designed to climb 40 per cent of its time and descend 60 per cent. A true trail bike, then. Canyon Bikes

The geometry figures are bang-on for a bike of this ilk. The five-size range (XS to XL) runs a 64-degree head tube angle, 76.5-degree seat tube angle and 437mm chianstays.

But just because the bike lacks complexity, that doesn’t mean Canyon hasn’t paid plenty of attention to the details.

Canyon’s Spectral AL frame is packed with details

Canyon Spectral AL 2025 trail mountain bike
No fancy features, but there’s plenty of attention to detail. Canyon Bikes

Simplicity doesn’t have to mean basic – and the Spectral AL proves that.

Along with the usual things – think SRAM’s Universal Derailleur Hanger and plenty of chain-slap protection – the Spectral AL’s also got some neat features.

The internal cable routing channels have foam linings to reduce rattling. There’s protective tape to reduce heel rub on the chainstays.

The bike has anti-rock-impact protection on the down tube, too. A straight, steep seat tube means long-travel dropper posts – up to 200mm on the M and L sizes and 230mm on the XL – should quench the appetite of the riders with the longest legs.

Each of the pivot points runs on industrial bearings and they’re filled with Canyon’s special grease to help them run smoother for longer.

Canyon Spectral AL 2025 trail mountain bike
The clean alloy tubes and lack of flip chips give the Spectral AL a simple aesthetic. Canyon Bikes

The pivot hardware – the bolts – screw intro steel helicoil inserts, rather than directly into the frame’s alloy. In theory, this should reduce the chances of stripped threads and make fixing them if they do strip much easier.

Forgoing internal frame storage might be a deal-breaker for some and, if it is, Canyon has thought about you. Accessory mounts on the underside of the top tube can holster either Canyon’s own accessory bag or storage solutions from other brands.

Honing things in further, the bike’s front and rear ends have been tuned with stiffness and compliance in mind respectively.

Add in the one-piece rocker link, which is designed to isolate lateral loads from the rear end impacting shock performance, and there’s plenty of tech behind this simple frame.

Trail bike geometry with no adjustments

Canyon Spectral AL 2025 trail mountain bike
Fed up of complexity? The Spectral AL could be the bike for you. Canyon Bikes

Despite forgoing the CF model’s flip chip, the Spectral AL can be run in either a mixed-wheel (29in front, 27.5in rear) or full-29in configuration.

However, the consumer needs to decide which wheel size they want when they buy the bike because the entire chainstay is different.

Canyon alluded to the fact it’s more efficient (cost, time, manufacturing, design) to have two different rear ends than build in flip chips.

Canyon Spectral AL mixed wheel size geometry chart

Canyon Spectral AL mixed wheel size geometry chart
Spectral AL Mullet XS S M L XL
BB drop rear (mm) 19 19 19 19 19
Chainstay length (mm) 437 437 437 437 437
Head tube angle (degrees) 64 64 64 64 64
Head tube length (mm) 100 110 120 130 140
Reach (mm) 425 450 475 500 525
Eff. seat tube angle (degrees) 76.5 76.5 76.5 76.5 76.5
Seat tube length (mm) 375 400 415 445 455
Standover height (mm) 744 749 757 761 762
Max seatpost insertion (mm) 259 279 309 309 339


Edit Table

Bar a few differences dictated by the smaller rear end, the 29in and mixed-wheel (mullet) bikes share their figures.

There’s a 64-degree head tube angle, 76.5-degree seat tube angle and 437mm chainstays.

The 29in bike is only available in small to extra-large, while the mullet bike has an additional XS size.

Canyon Spectral AL 29 wheel size geometry chart

Canyon Spectral AL 29in wheel geometry chart
Spectral AL 29 S M L XL
BB drop rear (mm) 36 36 36 36
Chainstay length (mm) 437 437 437 437
Head tube angle (degrees) 64 64 64 64
Head tube length (mm) 110 120 130 140
Reach (mm) 450 475 500 525
Eff. seat tube angle (degrees) 76.5 76.5 76.5 76.5
Seat tube length (mm) 400 415 445 455
Standover height (mm) 749 757 761 762
Max seatpost insertion (mm) 279 309 309 339


Edit Table

Reach figures start at 425mm and lift to 525mm. The medium size is closer to other brands’ large bikes, at 475mm.

The Spectral AL is a trail bike through and through.

Canyon Spectral AL models, specfications and pricing

Canyon Spectral AL 2025 trail mountain bike
Plain, simple lines make the Spectral AL an attractive bike. Canyon Bikes

The three models in the new Spectral AL range share their aluminium frames, but each has increasingly luxurious specs.

Prices start at £2,249 / €2,299 for the AL 5 and rise to a very reasonable £3,749 / €3,999 for the Spectral AL CLLCTV FW.

Canyon Spectral AL 5

Canyon Spectral AL 5 2025 trail mountain bike
The Spectral AL 5 is the most affordable bike in the range. Canyon Bikes
  • Frame: Spectral AL
  • Shock: RockShox Deluxe Select+
  • Fork: RockShox Lyrik
  • Drivetrain: Shimano Deore
  • Brakes: Shimano Deore
  • Wheels / tyres: Race Face AR30 / Maxxis Minion DHRII Maxx Terra 2.4in (front and rear)
  • Price: £2,249 / €2,299

Canyon Spectral AL 6

Canyon Spectral AL 6 2025 trail mountain bike
The mid-spec AL 6 should please a host of different riders. Canyon Bikes
  • Frame: Spectral AL
  • Shock: Fox Float X Performance
  • Fork: Fox 36 Performance Elite
  • Drivetrain: Shimano SLX
  • Brakes: Shimano SLX
  • Wheels / tyres: DT Swiss M 1900 / Maxxis Minion DHRII Maxx Terra 2.4in (front and rear)
  • Price: £2,799 / €2,999

Canyon Spectral AL CLLCTV FW

Canyon Spectral AL CLLCTV FW 2025 trail mountain bike
The Fabio Wibmer signature model gets a fancy paintjob and luxurious parts. Canyon Bikes
  • Frame: Spectral AL
  • Shock: RockShox Super Deluxe Ultimate
  • Fork: RockShox Lyrik Ultimate
  • Drivetrain: SRAM S1000 AXS Transmission
  • Brakes: SRAM Maven Silver
  • Wheels / tyres: DT Swiss XM 1700 / Pirelli Scorpion Race Enduro M (front) T (rear)
  • Price: £3,749 / €3,999

Wanderer: The Fragments Of Fate Roadmap Reveals Combat Changes, Quest 3 Upgrades And More

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate developers Mighty Eyes announced a 2025 roadmap, revealing performance improvements and tweaks to NPC behavior among other changes.

Recently released on PlayStation VR2 and Quest, Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate hasn’t had the breeziest of launches, a reality developers Mighty Eyes acknowledged in their 2025 roadmap announcement yesterday, saying:

Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate has had a bit of a rocky start. If you’ve had a less-than-great experience, we’re genuinely sorry. Combat isn’t quite hitting like it should, there are too many bugs disrupting an epic VR adventure.

The roadmap includes bug fixes, more detailed avatar customization, improvements to physics actions in combat, and more. You can check out the full 2025 roadmap below:

In our 3/5 star review, we felt that the game had ‘immense potential’ and offered a ‘uniquely engaging narrative and an outstanding array of creative and satisfying puzzles.’ However, the Quest version was plagued with technical issues and poor combat implementation.

It is clear that beneath these problems is a truly exceptional game that, with proper patches and improvements, could easily become one of the best VR experiences available to date.

A recent hotfix for Quest and PlayStation VR2 addressed some of the teething issues, including problems with collisions and missing assets in some levels. While the roadmap details future support for PS5 Pro and updates to the Quest 3 and PlayStation VR2 editions, there is still no word on a specific SteamVR release date at this time.

Wanderer: The Fragments Of Fate is available on Quest and PlayStation VR2, and it’s “coming soon” to SteamVR.

The Quest To Build Islands With Ocean Currents In the Maldives

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place.
Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives’ capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations — to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En’boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you’ll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. “There’s just a ton of sand in there. It’s really looking good,” says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena.

The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or “self-assemble” in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation.

In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is “omnidirectional,” capturing sand year-round. “It’s basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area,” Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country’s 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.


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AI Hallucinations Lead To a New Cyber Threat: Slopsquatting

Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user’s mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model’s mistake. A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models — like DeepSeek and WizardCoder — hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4. Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer.

These package hallucinations are particularly dangerous as they were found to be persistent, repetitive, and believable. When researchers reran 500 prompts that had previously produced hallucinated packages, 43% of hallucinations reappeared every time in 10 successive re-runs, with 58% of them appearing in more than one run. The study concluded that this persistence indicates “that the majority of hallucinations are not just random noise, but repeatable artifacts of how the models respond to certain prompts.” This increases their value to attackers, it added. Additionally, these hallucinated package names were observed to be “semantically convincing.” Thirty-eight percent of them had moderate string similarity to real packages, suggesting a similar naming structure. “Only 13% of hallucinations were simple off-by-one typos,” Socket added. The research can found be in a paper on arXiv.org (PDF).


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Airbnb Now Shows the Full Price of Your Stay By Default

Airbnb is rolling out a global update that displays the total cost of a stay upfront in search results. The only fee that won’t be included are taxes. The Verge reports: The company first started showing the full price of its listings in some locations in 2019 after facing scrutiny from the European Union over how it displays its fees. It later launched a toggle in the US and hundreds of other countries that shows the total cost of a stay across Airbnb’s search results, individual listings pages, and other areas of the platform.

Airbnb says nearly 17 million people have used the toggle since its launch in 2022, and now, you won’t have to worry about turning the option on when making a search. Instead, you’ll now see a banner at the very top of your search results that says, “Prices include all fees.”


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Microsoft Implements Stricter Performance Management System With Two-Year Rehire Ban

Microsoft is intensifying performance scrutiny through new policies that target underperforming employees, according to an internal email from Chief People Officer Amy Coleman. The company has introduced a formalized Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) system that gives struggling employees two options: accept improvement targets or exit the company with a Global Voluntary Separation Agreement.

The policy establishes a two-year rehire blackout period for employees who leave with low performance ratings (zero to 60% in Microsoft’s 0-200 scale) or during a PIP process. These employees are also barred from internal transfers while still at the company.

Coming months after Microsoft terminated 2,000 underperformers without severance, the company is also developing AI-supported tools to help managers “prepare for constructive or challenging conversations” through interactive practice environments. “Our focus remains on enabling high performance to achieve our priorities spanning security, quality, and leading AI,” Coleman wrote, emphasizing that these changes aim to create “a globally consistent and transparent experience” while fostering “accountability and growth.”


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China’s CATL Says It Has Overtaken BYD On 5-Minute EV Charging Time

CATL has unveiled a second-generation Shenxing battery capable of delivering a 520km range in just five minutes of charging, surpassing BYD’s recent breakthrough and positioning both Chinese firms ahead of Western rivals in EV battery tech. The battery manufacturer also introduced a sodium-ion battery called Naxtra, offering up to 500km range for EVs and potential to diversify global energy resources. The Financial Times reports: The claims by the Chinese battery groups would put them ahead of major western rivals. At present, Tesla vehicles can be charged up to 200 miles (321km) in added range in 15 minutes, while Germany’s Mercedes-Benz recently launched its all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station. […] The second generation of the Shenxing battery, which boasts a range of 800km on one charge, can achieve a peak charging speed of 2.5km per second, the company said at a media event ahead of this week’s Shanghai auto show.

“We look forward to collaborating with more industry leaders to push the limits of supercharging through true innovation,” said CATL’s chief technology officer Gao Huan, adding that he wanted the new batteries to become “the standard for electric vehicles.” Analysts at Bernstein said the latest progress meant that charging speeds had more than doubled in the past year and “increased tenfold over the past 3-4 years.” Huan said the new Shenxing battery would be installed in more than 67 EV models this year. He later told reporters that energy density would not be sacrificed as a trade-off for fast charging.

During its tech day, CATL also unveiled its new sodium-ion battery, which it said would go into mass production in December. The battery brand called Naxtra is able to give a range of about 200km for a hybrid vehicle and 500km for an electric vehicle, according to Huan. […] At the event, Huan claimed the new sodium-ion battery would enable the industry’s shift from “single resource dependence” to “energy freedom” and reshape the global energy landscape. He added that he was in discussions with several companies about using sodium-ion batteries in their vehicles.


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Controversial doc gets measles while treating unvaccinated kids—keeps working

A controversial doctor providing unproven measles treatments to unvaccinated children in West Texas recently contracted the highly infectious virus himself amid the mushrooming outbreak—and he continued treating patients while visibly ill with the virus.

The doctor’s infection was revealed in a video posted online by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the rabid anti-vaccine advocacy organization founded and previously run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time anti-vaccine advocate who is now the US secretary of health. Kennedy headed CHD until January, when he stepped down in anticipation of his Senate confirmation.

In the video, the doctor, Ben Edwards, can be seen with mild spots on his face. Someone asks him if he caught measles himself, and he responds, “Yeah,” saying he was “pretty achy yesterday.” He went on to say that he had developed the rash the day before but woke up that day feeling “pretty good.” The video was posted by CHD on March 31, and the Associated Press was the first to report it.

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Trump can’t keep China from getting AI chips, TSMC suggests

As the global artificial intelligence (AI) race presses on amid a US-China trade war, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—a $514 billion titan that manufactures most of the world’s AI chips—is warning that it may not be possible to keep its customers’ most advanced technology out of China’s hands.

US export controls require chipmakers to monitor shipments and know their customers to restrict China’s access to AI chips. But in a recently published 2024 report, TSMC confirmed that its “role in the semiconductor supply chain inherently limits its visibility and information available to it regarding the downstream use or user of final products that incorporate semiconductors manufactured by it.”

Essentially, TSMC expects that it plays too big a role in the semiconductor industry to stop all the possible unintended end-uses of the semiconductors it manufactures. Similarly, it appears impossible to track all the third parties determined to skirt sanctions. And if TSMC’s hands are truly tied, that ultimately means that the US can’t effectively stop the latest AI tech from trickling into China.

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In depth with Windows 11 Recall—and what Microsoft has (and hasn’t) fixed

Microsoft is preparing to reintroduce Recall to Windows 11. A feature limited to Copilot+ PCs—a label that just a fraction of a fraction of Windows 11 systems even qualify for—Recall has been controversial in part because it builds an extensive database of text and screenshots that records almost everything you do on your PC.

But the main problem with the initial version of Recall—the one that was delayed at the last minute after a large-scale outcry from security researchers, reporters, and users—was not just that it recorded everything you did on your PC but that it was a rushed, enabled-by-default feature with gaping security holes that made it trivial for anyone with any kind of access to your PC to see your entire Recall database.

It made no efforts to automatically exclude sensitive data like bank information or credit card numbers, offering just a few mechanisms to users to manually exclude specific apps or websites. It had been built quickly, outside of the normal extensive Windows Insider preview and testing process. And all of this was happening at the same time that the company was pledging to prioritize security over all other considerations, following several serious and highly public breaches.

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Chrome on the chopping block as Google’s search antitrust trial moves forward

The remedy phase of Google’s search antitrust trial is getting underway, and the government is seeking to force major changes. The next few weeks could reshape Google as a company and significantly alter the balance of power on the Internet, and both sides have a plan to get their way.

With opening arguments beginning today, the US Justice Department will seek to convince the court that Google should be forced to divest Chrome, unbundle Android, and make other foundational changes. But Google will attempt to paint the government’s position as too extreme and rooted in past grievances. No matter what happens at this trial, Google hasn’t given up hope it can turn back time.

Advantage for Justice Dept.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has a major advantage here: Google is guilty. It lost the liability phase of this trial resoundingly, with the court finding Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power.” As far as the court is concerned, Google has an illegal monopoly in search services and general search advertising. The purpose of this trial is to determine what to do about it, and the DOJ has some ideas.

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Valorant Mobile pre-registration is open in China

Nearly four years after it was originally announced, Riot Games has finally shared a look at Valorant Mobile. The mobile version of the competitive shooter was developed by LightSpeed Studios and will launch in China first before coming to other countries and regions.

Valorant Mobile looks like it relies on a lot of onscreen buttons, but based on a brief gameplay video, the game otherwise seems pretty similar to its PC counterpart in terms of speed and intensity. LightSpeed Studios successfully adapted PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds into PUBG Mobile, and Riot Games clearly believes the developer has managed to do the same with the originally mouse-based Valorant.

Coming to mobile has been in the works for Valorant for years, and makes a ton of sense given the current popularity of mobile first-person shooters like PUBG Mobile and Call of Duty: Warzone. This isn’t the first time the game’s precise gunplay has had to be adapted to a slightly more cumbersome control scheme, either. Valorant successfully made the jump to controllers when it launched on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 in 2024. Mobile controls aren’t that much bigger of a hurdle in comparison.

Players in China can pre-register now to be ready for the next playtest, ahead of a more formal launch at some point in the future.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/valorant-mobile-pre-registration-is-open-in-china-180132021.html?src=rss

Instagram Is Using AI to Automatically Enroll Minors Into ‘Teen Accounts’

Meta is getting serious about the teens who use its services. Last year, the company rolled out “Teen Accounts” for Instagram, which add a number of restrictions, limitations, and features for users under the age of 18. Earlier this month, Meta rolled out Teen Accounts to Facebook and Messenger as well, and expanded some of those restrictions on Instagram specifically.

If your teen had a standard Instagram account when Meta started rolling this out, their account was automatically changed into a Teen Account. Of course, that only worked if they had their real age attached to the account: If a teen said their birthday made them 18 or older, no Teen Account for them.

Meta’s AI is snitching on Instagram teens

In response to this loophole, Meta is tasking its AI with rooting out teens purporting to be adults on Instagram. The company announced the experiment on Monday, revealing that tests will begin in the United States that same day. Meta is brief on the details here, but they do say that if the AI finds a standard account it suspects to be a teen, it will automatically switch them to a Teen Account—even if that account has an adult birthday.

This also isn’t Meta AI’s first rodeo. The company has used an AI model trained to identify whether a user is underage since 2022. The AI model looks for behaviors associated with teen users, as, according to Meta, people in the same age group react similarly to specific types of content. (Think about all those memes you don’t understand.)

One interesting “tell” comes with birthday posts: The AI looks at how users interact with an account on their birthday, and can make a determination from there. If the AI is seeing a lot of “happy 17th birthday” posts and DMs, that’s going to be quite obvious, but even if the messages track with how users under 18 tend to wish each other a happy birthday, the AI will get suspicious fast.

What happens if the AI gets it wrong?

There are probably many parents out there that have no issue with Instagram automatically changing their kids’ profiles to Teen Accounts. But this tech is driven by AI, and AI doesn’t always get it right: As such, there’s a good chance that the AI accidentally flags adult accounts as teens by mistake, locking users 18 and older into restrictions meant for minors.

That means your account will automatically take on some pretty drastic restrictions: You’ll go private if you aren’t already, and adult users won’t be able to see your posts or DM you without following first. You won’t see “violent” content, or posts promoting cosmetic procedures. (Perhaps no loss there.) Instagram will also warn you whenever you use the app for 60 minutes in one day, advising you to stop. And while you don’t need to, your account will enter “sleep mode” between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., muting alerts and sending auto-replies to DMs. (To be fair, perhaps many of us adults would benefit from these restrictions.)

If Instagram thinks you’re 16 or 17, you’ll be able to manually disable some of these limitations, but that’s not really the point. If you’re an adult, you shouldn’t expect Instagram to change the parameters of your account because its AI bot got it wrong. Meta knows it, too. As the company says it its blog post: “We’re taking steps to ensure our technology is accurate and that we are correctly placing teens we identify into protective, age-appropriate settings, but in case we make a mistake, we’re giving people the option to change their settings.”

The company hasn’t said exactly what those mitigation steps are yet, so I’ll update this piece once we know for sure. My guess, however, is there will be an option in settings to verify your age and transfer your account back to an adult account.

Car With LED Grill Sings Along To Songs

These are a couple videos from Instagram user justinthelightguy of his Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat that’s been modded with a grill of LEDs that can be programmed to sing along to songs. Finally, we’re one step closer to making the movie Cars a reality! Next stop, conversational AI and windshield eyeballs.

Google Faces Off With US Government in Attempt To Break Up Company in Search Monopoly Case

Google is confronting an existential threat as the U.S. government tries to break up the company as punishment for turning its revolutionary search engine into an illegal monopoly. From a report: The drama began to unfold Monday in a Washington courtroom as three weeks of hearings kicked off to determine how the company should be penalized for operating a monopoly in search. In its opening arguments, federal antitrust enforcers also urged the court to impose forward-looking remedies to prevent Google from using artificial intelligence to further its dominance. “This is a moment in time, we’re at an inflection point, will we abandon the search market and surrender them to control of the monopolists or will we let competition prevail and give choice to future generations,” said Justice Department attorney David Dahlquist.

The proceedings, known in legal parlance as a “remedy hearing,” are set to feature a parade of witnesses that includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to order a radical shake-up that would ban Google from striking the multibillion dollar deals with Apple and other tech companies that shield its search engine from competition, share its repository of valuable user data with rivals and force a sale of its popular Chrome browser. Google’s attorney, John Schmidtlein, said in his opening statement that the court should take a much lighter touch. He said the government’s heavy-handed proposed remedies wouldn’t boost competition but instead unfairly reward lesser rivals with inferior technology. “Google won its place in the market fair and square,” Schmidtlein said.


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Bluesky is getting blue checkmarks and an official verification system

Bluesky is adopting an official verification system after all. In an update, the company said it plans to grant blue checkmarks to “authentic and notable” accounts. It will also allow some “trusted organizations” to verify users as well.

The change is a notable shift for the upstart platform, which previously resisted the idea of centralized verification. Up to now, the company has relied on a domain-based verification system, which allows users to change their handles to match domains that they are associated with. But that approach was often criticized for being overly complicated and offering insufficient protection from impersonation. 

These critiques have only amplified as Bluesky has grown in popularity and attracted more prominent users. For example, when former President Barack Obama joined Bluesky in recent weeks, his handle did not use a custom domain, which understandably led many users to question whether the account was authentic. Instead, individual Bluesky employees ended up publicly vouching that the account was legitimate

Under Bluesky’s new system, the company will proactively verify certain accounts and add a prominent blue checkmark to their profile. It’s not clear what criteria Bluesky will use for these badges or how it plans to verify users’ identities. Additionally, there will be a slightly different blue badge — one with “scalloped edges” — that certain “trusted organizations” can grant through a new “trusted verifiers” feature. 

Trusted verification.
Bluesky

The New York Times is one such organization, and the newspaper will now be able to hand out blue checks to its journalists. Bluesky didn’t say what other organizations will be able to participate in the program, but added that it will review verification from third-parties in order to “ensure authenticity.”

Notably, Bluesky said that people and organizations are still “highly encourage(d)” to verify themselves via a custom domain. And it sounds like the new blue ticks may be in short supply, at least to start. “During this initial phase, Bluesky is not accepting direct applications for verification,” the company wrote in its announcement. “As this feature stabilizes, we’ll launch a request form for notable and authentic accounts interested in becoming verified or becoming trusted verifiers.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/bluesky-is-getting-blue-checkmarks-and-an-official-verification-system-173204662.html?src=rss

Nintendo is going after the person behind last year’s massive Pokémon leak

Nintendo is going after the leaker behind last year’s massive Pokémon data breach, according to a report by Polygon. The company has asked a California court to force Discord to give up the identity of the person behind the leak, who goes by the name “GameFreakOUT” on the platform.

Nintendo wants Discord to release the name, address, phone number and email address of the leaker. It said in a subpoena that the person uploaded “confidential materials not released to the public” to a Discord server called FreakLeak. After that, the leaked materials reached every nook-and-cranny of the Internet.

These materials included source codes, early character designs, references to an upcoming MMO and transcripts of design meetings. There was even information about an unreleased Detective Pikachu sequel and other planned Pokémon movies. The data breach included so much data that it’s become known as the “Teraleak” on the internet, referring to the sheer breadth and scope of the leaked materials.

Babe wake up, a new Pokémon beta video from the Teraleak just dropped!

▶️ A Deep Dive Into Pokemon Sword & Shield’s Scrapped Content

[ Full video link in the first reply ] pic.twitter.com/G8pEzWDCHQ

— Centro LEAKS (@CentroLeaks) April 17, 2025

As of this writing, Discord hasn’t publicly addressed the request. We’ve reached out to the company and will update this post when we hear back. If the platform complies with Nintendo’s request, it’s likely that “GameFreakOUT” will face a lawsuit.

In the past, Nintendo has taken people to court over Pokémon leaks. This happened when photos of a Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield strategy guide were distributed online before the games were released. The defendants in that case were required to pay $150,000 each in damages and attorneys’ fees.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-is-going-after-the-person-behind-last-years-massive-pokemon-leak-171336637.html?src=rss