An anonymous reader shares a report: Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to pause some of the exorbitant tariffs that he put in place earlier today, he spoke to the press at the White House and provided some commentary that could be a positive for Apple. When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. “As time goes by, we’re going to take a look at it,” he said. “There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we’ll take a look at that,” he added, claiming that he will “show a little flexibility.”

[…] When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple “building” in China is unsustainable. “If you look at Apple, Apple is going to spend $500 billion building a plant. They wouldn’t be doing that if I didn’t do this. They’d just keep building them in China. And that’s unsustainable,” he said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta’s latest whistleblower, Sarah Wynn-Williams, got a warm reception on Capitol Hill Wednesday, as the Careless People author who the company has fought to silence described the company’s chief executive as someone willing to shapeshift into whatever gets him closest to power. The message was one that lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism were very open to. Their responses underscore that amid CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s latest pivot in cozying up to the right, his perception in Washington has not yet totally changed, even as he reportedly lobbies President Donald Trump to drop the government’s antitrust case against the company.

“He’s recently tried a reinvention in which he is now a great advocate of free speech, after being an advocate of censorship in China and in this country for years,” subcommittee Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) said, pointing to longtime conservative allegations that Meta has suppressed things like vaccine skepticism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. “Now that’s all wiped away. Now he’s on Joe Rogan and says that he is Mr. Free Speech, he is Mr. MAGA, he’s a whole new man, and his company, they’re a whole new company. Do you buy this latest reinvention of Mark Zuckerberg?”

“If he is such a fan of freedom of speech, why is he trying to silence me?” Wynn-Williams asked in response. Meta convinced an arbitrator to order her to stop making disparaging statements and halt further publishing and promotion of the book, which details Meta’s alleged dealings with the Chinese government and claims of sexual harassment from a top executive.

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Google made waves with the release of Gemini 2.5 last month, rocketing to the top of the AI leaderboard after previously struggling to keep up with the likes of OpenAI. That first experimental model was just the beginning. Google is deploying its improved AI in more places across its ecosystem, from the developer-centric Vertex AI to the consumer Gemini app.

Gemini models have been dropping so quickly, it can be hard to grasp Google’s intended lineup. Things are becoming clearer now that the company is beginning to move its products to the new branch. At the Google Cloud Next conference, it has announced initial availability of Gemini 2.5 Flash. This model is based on the same code as Gemini 2.5 Pro, but it’s faster and cheaper to run.

You won’t see Gemini 2.5 Flash in the Gemini app just yet—it’s starting out in the Vertex AI development platform. The experimental wide release of Pro helped Google gather data and see how people interacted with the new model, and that has helped inform the development of 2.5 Flash.

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WASHINGTON, DC—Over the course of a nearly three-hour committee hearing Wednesday, the nominee to lead NASA for the Trump administration faced difficult questions from US senators who sought commitments to specific projects.

However, maneuvering like a pilot with more than 7,000 hours in jets and ex-military aircraft, entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman dodged most of their questions and would not be pinned down. His basic message to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was that NASA is an exceptional agency that does the impossible, but that it also faces some challenges. NASA, he said, receives an “extraordinary” budget, and he vowed to put taxpayer dollars to efficient use in exploring the universe and retaining the nation’s lead on geopolitical competitors in space.

“I have lived the American dream, and I owe this nation a great debt,” said Isaacman, who founded his first business at 16 in his parents’ basement and would go on to found an online payments company, Shift4, that would make him a billionaire. Isaacman is also an avid pilot who self-funded and led two private missions to orbit on Crew Dragon. Leading NASA would be “the privilege of a lifetime,” he said.

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An anti-deepfake bill is on the verge of becoming US law despite concerns from civil liberties groups that it could be used by President Trump and others to censor speech that has nothing to do with the intent of the bill.

The bill is called the Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes On Websites and Networks Act, or Take It Down Act. The Senate version co-sponsored by Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was approved in the Senate by unanimous consent in February and is nearing passage in the House. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved the bill in a 49-1 vote yesterday, sending it to the House floor.

The bill pertains to “nonconsensual intimate visual depictions,” including both authentic photos shared without consent and forgeries produced by artificial intelligence or other technological means. Publishing intimate images of adults without consent could be punished by a fine and up to two years of prison. Publishing intimate images of minors under 18 could be punished with a fine or up to three years in prison.

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump, once again, took to Truth Social to abruptly shift US trade policy, announcing a 90-day pause “substantially” lowering reciprocal tariffs against all countries except China to 10 percent.

Because China retaliated—raising tariffs on US imports to 84 percent on Wednesday—Trump increased tariffs on China imports to 125 percent “effective immediately.” That likely will not be received well by China, which advised the Trump administration to cancel all China tariffs Wednesday, NPR reported.

“The US’s practice of escalating tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake,” the Chinese finance ministry said, calling for Trump to “properly resolve differences with China through equal dialogue on the basis of mutual respect.”

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The U.S. Army told the government it had a lot of success using AI to “process targets” during a recent deployment. It said that it had used AI systems to identify targets at a rate of 55 per day but could get that number up to 5,000 a day with “advanced artificial intelligence tools in the future.” 404 Media: The line comes from a new report from the Government Accountability Office — a nonpartisan watchdog group that investigates the federal government. The report is titled “Defense Command and Control” and is, in part, about the Pentagon’s recent push to integrate AI systems into its workflow.

Across the government, and especially in the military, there has been a push to add or incorporate AI into various systems. The pitch here is that AI systems would help the Pentagon ID targets on the battlefield and allow those systems to help determine who lives and who dies. The Ukrainian and Israeli military are already using similar systems but the practice is fraught and controversial.

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You’ve probably heard a thing or two about the ongoing tariff situation. You might know the Trump administration has been imposing tariffs on countries around the world since February. What started as a 10% tariff on China, for example, has multiplied more than tenfold. Other countries have had tariffs threatened, imposed, then paused, all seemingly at random. It’s chaotic, and it’s having real-world implications on the stock market, businesses, and consumers.

It’s tough to keep track of each development, but you’ve probably heard talk about increased prices—especially when it comes to consumer goods. Perhaps you’ve heard products like the iPhone are going to jump in price, and if you want to avoid it, you should buy a new iPhone today. You might feel the pressure when you read a headline about Apple flying plane-loads of iPhones in before tariffs take effect. Again: chaos.

Are devices going to get more expensive?

Here’s the thing: No one knows exactly what’s going to happen here. No one even know which tariffs are here to stay, and which are up for discussion: As I was writing this piece, Trump announced a 90-day pause on nearly all the reciprocal tariffs he imposed across the globe—save for China, which he raised from 104% to 125%. That said, the blanket 10% tariffs are still in effect here.

That might mean the situation isn’t quite so dire for products and goods that are manufactured or originate from countries where the pause is in effect. If your goods are coming from India, for example, you don’t have to worry about the 27% tariffs that started Wednesday at midnight—just the original 10%. The same goes for Vietnam, which was slapped with a 46% tariff.

While the drastic tariffs are off the table for most countries for now, most of the U.S.’s trading partners are still dealing with tariffs of some kind—including, of course, China. That means that companies may pass on the costs of these tariffs to consumers, whether it’s because of a 10% tariff, or 125%.

If an iPhone 16e you’re eyeing is coming from India, for example, that $599 price tag could rise 10% to roughly $660. If it’s coming from China, however, that 125% tariff could add about $749 to the total, or raise the price somewhere around $1,348. Suddenly, Apple’s “budget” iPhone is anything but.

Of course, that assumes a company like Apple passes along every cent of the tariff to consumers. This is where things continue to get messy: There’s no predicting how companies will respond to these tariffs until they act. In fact, instead of raising prices, some companies are pausing sales in the U.S. altogether.

However, experts do expect companies to raise prices as tariffs make importing goods and products more expensive. Some companies have already confirmed as much. Acer announced it would be raising prices by 10% back in February: How do new tariffs affect that price hike? I can’t guarantee if that iPhone 16e is going to more than double in price, but it probably won’t be $599 in the near future.

You probably don’t need to buy something new

Reading the above, it might seem like now’s the time to buy something brand new. It’s always temping to buy the latest and greatest tech on the market—especially when that tech could skyrocket in price at any given moment. But in all likelihood, you don’t actually have to buy a new device right now.

I mean this in a couple of important ways. First, if the tech you already own is working for you, don’t feel the pressure to buy something just because the upgrade is going to cost more in the near future. If your smartphone, computer, tablet, TV, what have you is running fine and serving your needs as-is, there’s really no need to upgrade at all. You probably spent a considerable amount of money on the device you’re reading this on right now: If you weren’t going to buy a replacement before tariff fears, better to hold onto it for a while longer.

Even if your tech is on the older side, there are things you can do to boost its longevity. For example, if you’ve had your smartphone for a while, and it’s slowing down while lasting fewer hours on a single charge, replace the battery. A fresh battery can obviously boost overall battery life, but it can also improve performance, since some smartphones slow down their processors to compensate for aging batteries. Win-win. Another quick tip? Mind your storage: Maxing out the internal storage of any device can cause issues, so make sure you’re giving your device’s internal drive some room to work with.

For a complex piece of tech like a laptop, there are plenty of steps you can take to boost performance. You can wipe your system and start fresh, in case any bloat was weighing your computer down; you can take advantage of features in power-hungry apps like Chrome to manage performance; and, if you’re technically inclined, you can even crack it open, cleaning out the fans and reapplying thermal paste. You might be surprised how some simple maintenance can improve the performance of an older laptop.

Shopping for a new device

However, the other side of the coin here is when you really do need to buy something new. Maybe you smashed your smartphone, or your laptop kicked the bucket, and a new device is the best solution. Or, maybe you just want a new device, and you’re trying to figure out the best way to buy it with the threat of price increases on the horizon. Before you go to the store and buy the newest device, however, I strongly encourage you to consider a new device that isn’t so new.

There has arguably never been a better time to buy last year’s tech, or a device secondhand. Tech across the board has gotten so good, not only will it likely last longer than devices used to, but year over year updates just aren’t that massive. The iPhone 15 Pro isn’t that much slower than the iPhone 16 Pro, and the 14 Pro isn’t that much slower than the 15 Pro, let alone the 16 Pro. Side by side, sure, you may notice some performance gains. But unless you really care about the Camera Control button, Apple Intelligence support, or the latest and greatest hardware, the iPhone from last year (or the year before) might be the move.

Smartphones really are a good example of this new age of technology longevity. Companies like Samsung and Google used to support their smartphones for only a few years at a time. Now, both guarantee software updates for seven years. While Apple never offers any official guarantees for how long it will support any given iPhone, the company tends to support its devices for many years as well. The iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max, for example, are over six years old, but still run the latest versions of iOS. That’s not to say you should pick up an iPhone XR and expect the same experience as an iPhone 16; rather, these devices last a lot longer than they used to.

While buying last year’s model is a great move, the secondhand market is also an excellent place to look. There are stores that sell certified refurbished devices—like Amazon, Best Buy, even Apple—that come with limited warranties. You may find even steeper deals on used markets like Reebelo or Back Market. As long as the device you’re eyeing can handle the tasks you need it to, this can be a great way to save money on a new purchase.

These devices are going to be cheaper than the new devices are now, but tariffs could affect their prices, too. If the latest tech skyrockets in price, the older or used models may become more valuable, and their prices could inflate. Still, a laptop from last year sitting in an Amazon warehouse has already passed through customs, and will not be directly affected by increased tariffs on any country.

Sometimes, new is best

That’s not to say you should never buy the newest device. There are plenty of times when it makes the most sense: I wouldn’t be so frugal with smart tech, for example, considering the track record companies have for ditching their older devices entirely. You also wouldn’t want to buy the older version of a device that’s incompatible with newer devices you do own. Don’t spend money on an outdated router that can’t offer you the internet speeds you’re paying your ISP for.

New tech is also, well, new: You don’t have to do the mental math to think about how long it might be supported based on its original release date, nor do you need to worry about compatibility issues. If you were considering buying secondhand, there are zero concerns about whether the previous owner wrecked something the reseller overlooked (or neglected to mention). It’s the latest thing the company offers—bells, whistles, and all.

It also helps when it makes financial sense to buy the latest piece of tech on the market. If your carrier offers you a deal that offers no financial difference between the latest smartphone or one from a previous year, of course you should go for the new one. Who knows what they’ll offer you once smartphone manufacturers raise prices.

In fact, as great as Apple’s M-series line is, I do recommend the latest M4 MacBook Air for most people. The $999 price tag for the latest hardware (and 16GB of RAM) makes it a fantastic value, enough so that I’d usually suggest it over an M2 or M3 Air. That said, Apple could easily raise the price of the MacBook Air due to tariffs. If so, poof! There’s goes that great value.

Should you rush to buy something new? Probably not

Let’s use the above as an example here: If you need a new MacBook right now, I’d say buy the M4 MacBook Air while it’s still $999. If you’re thinking about buying a new Mac, but your current laptop is working just fine, hold off. Even if Apple ends up raising the prices, there’s an excellent M2 or M3 MacBook Air that will be worth the money you pay for it.

That’s how I think you should approach this current tariff situation. These devices may get more expensive—but you shouldn’t spend money on things you don’t need for the sake of beating that inflation. Buy it if you need it, wait if you don’t. If the price jumps, consider an older model instead. You’ll get a great deal, and you can upgrade your tech when you actually need to.

The National Recording Registry announced its 2025 inductees, and there are some geeky sounds that will be immortalized in the Library of Congress. The Microsoft Windows 95 reboot chime was selected to be a part of the registry, as was the Minecraft soundtrack.

“These are the sounds of America – our wide-ranging history and culture. The National Recording Registry is our evolving nation’s playlist,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said. “The Library of Congress is proud and honored to select these audio treasures worthy of preservation, including iconic music across a variety of genres, field recordings, sports history and even the sounds of our daily lives with technology.”

The Windows 95 start-up audio was composed by ambient music pioneer Brian Eno. According to the blurb from the Library of Congress, the final sound clip was twice as long as Microsoft’s engineers had requested of the composer. But they went ahead with the chime because they felt it “conveyed the sense of welcome, hopefulness and progress that they envisioned” for this era of personal computing.

The Volume Alpha soundtrack to Minecraft is only the second piece of gaming music to be added to the registry. It joins the iconic theme for Super Mario Bros, which was inducted in 2023. The launch audio for the popular sandbox game (which just got its own movie) was composed and performed by Daniel Rosenfeld under stage name C418.

The 2025 inductees include music from across the genre spectrum. Some of the other selections include the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton, Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, and Celine Dion’s single “My Heart Will Go On.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/the-windows-95-start-up-chime-has-been-added-to-the-library-of-congress-203909673.html?src=rss

Spammers used OpenAI to generate messages that were unique to each recipient, allowing them to bypass spam-detection filters and blast unwanted messages to more than 80,000 websites in four months, researchers said Wednesday.

The finding, documented in a post published by security firm SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs, underscores the double-edged sword wielded by large language models. The same thing that makes them useful for benign tasks—the breadth of data available to them and their ability to use it to generate content at scale—can often be used in malicious activities just as easily. OpenAI revoked the spammers’ account after receiving SentinelLabs’ disclosure, but the four months the activity went unnoticed shows how enforcement is often reactive rather than proactive.

“You are a helpful assistant”

The spam blast is the work of AkiraBot—a framework that automates the sending of messages in large quantities to promote shady search optimization services to small- and medium-size websites. AkiraBot used python-based scripts to rotate the domain names advertised in the messages. It also used OpenAI’s chat API tied to the model gpt-4o-mini to generate unique messages customized to each site it spammed, a technique that likely helped it bypass filters that look for and block identical content sent to large numbers of sites. The messages are delivered through contact forms and live chat widgets embedded into the targeted websites.

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On Wednesday, Anthropic introduced a new $100- to $200-per-month subscription tier called Claude Max that offers expanded usage limits for its Claude AI assistant. The new plan arrives after many existing Claude subscribers complained of hitting rate limits frequently.

“The top request from our most active users has been expanded Claude access,” wrote Anthropic in a news release. A brief stroll through user feedback on Reddit seems to confirm that sentiment, showing that many Claude users have been unhappy with Anthropic’s usage limits over the past year—even on the Claude Pro plan, which costs $20 a month.

One of the downsides of a relatively large context window with Claude (the amount of text it can process at once) has been that long conversations or inclusions of many reference documents (such as code files) fill up usage limits quickly. That’s because each time the user adds to the conversation, the entire text of the conversation (including any attached documents) is fed back into the AI model again and re-evaluated. But on the other hand, a large context window allows Claude to process more complex projects within each session.

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Anthropic has unveiled a new premium tier for its AI chatbot Claude, targeting power users willing to pay up to $200 monthly for broader usage. The “Max” subscription comes in two variants: a $100/month tier with 5x higher rate limits than Claude Pro, and a $200/month option boasting 20x higher limits — directly competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro tier.

Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic still lacks an unlimited usage plan. Product lead Scott White didn’t rule out even pricier subscriptions in the future, telling TechCrunch, “We’ll always keep a number of exploratory options available to us.” The launch coincides with growing demand for Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the company’s first reasoning model, which employs additional computing power to handle complex queries more reliably.

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President Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on the sweeping tariff plan that went into effect on Wednesday, April 9, and an increase to 125 percent on the tariff on imports from China. Even with the 90-day pause, there’s still also a 10 percent tariff on all other imports to the US.

“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125 percent, effective immediately, ” Trump posted on Truth Social. For not retaliating, and attempting to “negotiate a solution,” the president says he also “authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10 percent” on trade with countries other than China.

China originally announced its own 50 percent tariff on US imports on April 8, The New York Times reports, before raising the tariff to 84 percent when Trump’s plan went into effect. The European Union recently approved its own set of tariffs to go into effect on April 15.

Besides negatively impacting global trade, Trump’s tariffs have already had an immediate effect on companies offering consumer products partially or completely manufactured outside of the US. Many companies can no longer afford to pay the tariff to get their products to US customers, or are considering raising prices to account for their losses.

For example, Nintendo attributed the pause on Switch 2 pre-orders in the US and Canada to the tariffs. The new import restrictions have also temporarily limited the sales of some products: Both Razer and Framework are no longer selling certain laptops in the US. Framework also delayed pre-orders on its new 2-in-1 convertible laptop and announced that it would be raising prices by 10 percent on the devices that remain for sale.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/trump-announces-90-day-pause-on-tariffs-excluding-china-195630212.html?src=rss

Google has used AI to revamp one of the most beloved films of all time for a 360-degree Sin City screen with the highest resolution in the world. The rerolled version of The Wizard of Oz will debut this August at The Sphere, the Las Vegas entertainment venue with a famously globular LED screen. Whether a technical marvel, dystopian nightmare fuel or some combination, the project will surely continue The Sphere’s penchant for extravagant spectacles that persuade tourists to plunk down hundreds of dollars to sit for a few hours in one of its 17,600 seats.

Sphere Entertainment, the company behind the venue, worked on the project with Google, Magnopus and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns The Wizard of Oz rights. Google describes it as an “epic undertaking of creativity and technology,” humbly likening it to the cinematic boundaries broken by the acclaimed Technicolor original. “We’re taking a beloved movie, but we are re-creating it,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told The Wall Street Journal. “The only other way you could do it is to go back [in time] and film it with the cameras that the Sphere uses.”

Warner Bros. Discovery

Google used generative AI models from its Gemini family on the project, most notably Veo 2 and Imagen 3. The company not only had to magnify the original 35mm film for a 160,000-square-foot screen composed of 16,000 LEDs but also had to account for camera cuts that removed characters from the frame. For example, in a Kansas scene between Dorothy, Auntie Em and Miss Gulch, Uncle Henry (who was also in the room but off-camera) will be visible on the much wider screen.

It did so primarily through an AI super-resolution tool (generating new pixels to fit the much higher-res screen), AI outpainting (generating new parts of a scene stretching beyond the original celluloid) and performance generation (incorporating composites of the actors into these expanded environments).

To help fine-tune the AI models, Google didn’t limit the models’ training to the original footage. It also fed them supplementary material like the shooting script, production illustrations, photographs, set plans and scores — teaching them about characters’ and environmental details and production elements like camera focal lengths. The company also consulted with professional filmmakers for character actions, expressions and performance.

“Now, Dorothy’s freckles snap into focus, and Toto can scamper more seamlessly through more scenes,” Google claimed.

The companies behind the project (perhaps contradictorily) claim that, despite AI touching “over 90 percent of the movie,” it “respects the original in every way.” Google says no new dialogue lines were added, and there isn’t a note of new music sung.

If the glimpse shown in the preview below (via tabGeeks) is any indication, Dorothy has all the overly smoothed-out hallmarks we’ve come to expect from AI-upscaled faces. But we’ll leave final judgment for the sun-drenched Sin City tourists who spend their hard-earned (or hard-won) cash on following the Gemini-infused road beginning on August 28.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/google-used-ai-to-reconceptualize-the-wizard-of-oz-for-the-las-vegas-sphere-194504769.html?src=rss