It has become a common refrain during Google’s antitrust saga: What happened to “don’t be evil?” Google’s unofficial motto has haunted it as it has grown ever larger, but a shareholder lawsuit sought to rein in some of the company’s excesses. And it might be working. The plaintiffs in the case have reached a settlement with Google parent company Alphabet, which will spend a boatload of cash on “comprehensive” reforms. The goal is to steer Google away from the kind of anticompetitive practices that got it in hot water.

Under the terms of the settlement, obtained by Bloomberg Law, Alphabet will spend $500 million over the next 10 years on systematic reforms. The company will have to form a board-level committee devoted to overseeing the company’s regulatory compliance and antitrust risk, a rarity for US firms. This group will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. There will also be reforms at other levels of the company that allow employees to identify potential legal pitfalls before they affect the company. Google has also agreed to preserve communications. Google’s propensity to use auto-deleting chats drew condemnation from several judges overseeing its antitrust cases.

The agreement still needs approval from US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco, but that’s mainly a formality at this point. Naturally, Alphabet does not admit to any wrongdoing under the terms of the settlement, but it may have to pay tens of millions in legal fees on top of the promised $500 million investment.

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On May 23, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” And, in news that may surprise our readers, it sounds remarkably good, focusing on issues like reproducibility and conflicts of interest. While there were a few things that could be phrased better, when it comes to basic scientific practices, the language was remarkably reasonable.

So, why didn’t we report on what appeared to be a rare bit of good news? I’d considered doing so, but the situation is complicated by the fact that the order is structured in a way that makes it very sensitive to who’s responsible for implementing it, a situation that’s subtle enough that I couldn’t figure out how to handle it well. Fortunately, I only had to wait a week for a member of the Trump administration to show just how dangerous it could be and highlight its biggest problem.

On Sunday, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary appeared on one of the weekend news programs, where he was asked about the decision to limit pregnant people’s access to the COVID-19 vaccines. The host mentioned that aggregation of studies involving a total of over 1.8 million women had shown the vaccine was safe and effective.

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Game developer and publisher IO Interactive is participating in Summer Games Fest 2025 with its own showcase. The presentation will take place on Friday, June 6 at 9PM ET/6PM PT. You can watch the IOI Showcase live on multiple platforms: Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. We’ve also got the YouYube stream embedded above, so that you can watch here while keeping up with our coverage of all the other developments happening during this year’s packed Summer Games Fest lineup.

IO Interactive parlayed its work on the excellent Hitman trilogy into a gig making a new James Bond game. Today, the company teased the title, 007 First Light, and it seems like there will be a game reveal during the showcase on Friday. The presentation will also introduce new content for the studio’s Hitman World of Assassination and as well as a game called MindsEye from its publishing branch. “We’ve prepared some truly exciting surprises” for the event, IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak said, so there will probably be additional announcements beyond those three titles. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/how-to-watch-the-ioi-showcase-at-summer-games-fest-2025-200751318.html?src=rss

X has never been a go-to app for messaging, even back when it was known as Twitter. Direct messages are useful, sure, and I have no doubt that someone out there uses it as their main chat app. But the platform’s chat function have never been most users’ reason for logging on, especially compared to dedicated platforms like WhatsApp.

But Elon Musk isn’t content with that status quo. As TechCrunch reports, Musk has made it clear over the years since he acquired and renamed Twitter that he wants DMs to compete with (and beat out) competitors like Signal and iMessage. Now, he’s finally making a move, as DMs on X are transforming into something new: XChat.

On Sunday, Musk posted on X announcing that XChat’s rollout. It does appear that the new chat feature is currently in beta, but between Musk’s post, and some first-hand reporting, it looks like XChat is bringing four key new features to chatting on X.

Encryption

Encryption is the first new feature Musk mentions in his XChat post, and it’s no mystery why. End-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging is a key feature for modern chat apps. It ensures that only the users involved in the conversation are able to read the messages sent and received—if bad actors were to intercept the thread and attempt to read the messages without logging into the approved user’s account, they’d see a jumble of meaningless code. Importantly, it means the company that makes the chat app can’t access your messages either.

Most chat apps offer E2EE to at least some degree. Signal made the standard famous, but iMessage, WhatsApp, and Messenger all use it. X’s DMs have traditionally not been encrypted, which meant it is possible for someone at X to read your chats, or to release your chats to the authorities should they request them.

Musk isn’t wrong that E2EE is necessary if you’re trying to make a chat app to compete with the likes of Signal, but he also isn’t clear if he understands how encryption works. Musk says XChat’s encryption is “build on Rust with (Bitcoin style) encryption.” Rust is a programming language, which makes his wording here a bit odd. (One Redditor points out Musk is treating Rust like a platform, not the programming language that it is.) But more importantly, Bitcoin isn’t encrypted, which makes “Bitcoin-style encryption” a confusing statement. There’s speculation that Musk means “cryptography,” which Bitcoin does use, but that’s not the same as encryption. For the sake of XChat’s users, I hope chats are actually E2EE, but it’s tough to say at this point.

Vanishing messages

Snapchat may have made vanishing messages popular, but it’s far from the only app to offer them. For years, you’ve been able to send self-destructing texts in apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Soon, you’ll be able to do the same in XChat.

It’s not clear how XChat will handle vanishing messages, but I’m guessing the app will offer a self-destruct feature that will let you select a time limit before a sent message expires, like Telegram.

File sharing

With XChat, Musk says you’ll have the ability to send “any kind of file.” He’s sparse any other details, but file sharing is a useful element to any chat app. Currently, you can send photos, videos, and GIFs in X DMs, but not other file types.

Make messages as unread

Musk did not announce this feature in his initial post, but a user testing out the beta noticed it. XChat supports “unreading” a message, or, essentially, marking it as unread. It’s a small but helpful change for messages you can’t get to right away, but don’t want to forget about the next time you scroll through your chats.

Delete messages for everyone in the chat

This is another new feature Musk did not announce himself. That same beta tester post notes that XChat supports the ability to deleting a message for all participants. Like many chat apps, if you send a message you regret, you can “undo” it, and it will be removed from the recipients’ chats as well.

Many apps place a time limit on this feature, however. iMessage, for example, only lets you undo a message within two minutes of sending it. After that, you’ll only see the option to delete it for yourself. It’s not yet clear how long XChat will let you delete a message for everyone after you send it.

Audio and video calls (which aren’t actually new)

As part of the announcement, Musk said that audio and video calls would also be rolling out to XChat—but X has already had audio and video calling for a while, so I’m not sure why he chose to highlight them.

Will XChat actually catch on as a messaging alternative?

Maybe I’m skeptical, but I strongly doubt these new features—while genuinely useful—will make XChat the chat app to beat, and for a simple reason: Have you ever tried getting your friends and family to switch chat apps? It’s like pulling teeth. People are set in their ways when it comes to communication—whether they’re committed to their iPhones with iMessage, or they’re dedicated to WhatsApp like most of the world. There are a lot of apps out there for communication, and while people switch between them for various reasons, you’re unlikely to move them en masse to one specific platform.

Add to that the fact that this new option is tied to a controversial platform owned by a controversial person, and it’s hard to imagine anyone signing up for X just to use XChat. I could be wrong, but something tells me I won’t be XChatting with my friends and family in the near future.

Google is still waiting to hear how it will have to address its monopoly in the search engine business — it plans to appeal the judgement — but in the meantime, it also has to answer to its shareholders. According to a report from The Financial Times, Google’s parent company Alphabet has reached a preliminary settlement with shareholders who were also suing the company for allowing Google’s anticompetitive behavior, which they believe exposed the company to “reputational damage” and “substantial costs.”

The new settlement will reportedly force Alphabet to rebuild its “global compliance structure” and will cost the company a minimum of $500 million over the next 10 years to make it happen. At its most basic, this means establishing some kind of committee within the Alphabet board to oversee regulatory issues, of which Google has accrued many in the last few years.

“A new body made up of senior executives would meanwhile report directly to chief executive Sundar Pichai,” FT writes, while another group “consisting of product managers and internal compliance experts,” would consult. The goal is to prevent Alphabet and its subsidiaries from making the kind of business decision that led to Google being deemed a monopoly on multiple counts. A judge will need to approve the settlement before the company can move forward, though.

The case against Alphabet officials like Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin was originally brought by a Michigan pension fund on behalf of shareholders back in 2021. In comparison to the structural changes the US Department of Justice is requesting, paying some money and forming some committees is a small ask. In the grand scheme of things, changing how Alphabet deals with regulation will likely be one of the more minor ways the company’s business is forced to change in the next few years.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/alphabet-settles-with-shareholders-over-google-antitrust-lawsuit-195636653.html?src=rss

Every smartphone maker is racing to find a way to put AI in your pocket, but no one has cracked the code yet. Samsung was an early supporter of Google’s Gemini AI, which has largely supplanted its little-used Bixby assistant. However, a new report claims Samsung is planning a big AI shakeup by partnering with Perplexity on the Galaxy S26.

Perplexity pitches itself as an AI-powered search service, running on the same generative AI technology behind ChatGPT, Gemini, and all the others. However, it cites its sources around the web more prominently than a pure chatbot. Perplexity made waves during the Google search antitrust trial when executive Dmitry Shevelenko testified that Google blocked Motorola from using Perplexity on its 2024 phones. The company got its wish this year, though, with Perplexity finding a place on 2025 Razr phones.

A report from Bloomberg says Samsung will be the next to leverage Perplexity’s AI. The companies are apparently close to signing a deal that will make this AI model a core part of the Galaxy S26 lineup. Motorola uses Perplexity for search functionality inside its Moto AI system, but the Samsung deal would be more comprehensive.

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Snowflake’s growth among large enterprise customers faces a significant bottleneck tied to the sluggish replacement cycles of existing on-premises data warehouse systems, according to finance vice president Jimmy Sexton. Speaking at a Jefferies conference, Sexton explained that while the cloud data company secured two deals worth more than $100 million each in the financial services sector during its latest quarter, such migrations unfold over multiple years as “cumbersome projects.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We’ve seen a few Xbox-styled kitchen items over the last few years, from the Series X fridge to the Series S toaster. The latest one is probably not one for those of you in the US. Over the weekend, Xbox Canada revealed a Xbox Series X bagged milk pitcher styled after the Xbox Series X. 

Milk in a bag is a long-standing tradition in Canada, India, South America and several other parts of the world. The idea is that you plop a bag into a pitcher, cut off the corner and pour away, all the while taking great care not to spill any. 

There are practical benefits, such as bags taking up less space in garbage or recycling. But containers for bagged milk are typically boring white jugs. At least until now.

The Xbox Series X Milk Pitcher comes in white or black and it can hold up to 1.3 liters (fine, if you insist, 2.75 pints) of bagged milk. That should give you enough fuel for your next Halo Infinite deathmatch battle or adventure in the Oblivion remaster. Sadly, there’s no word as yet if Xbox Canada is going to sell this thing or if it’s just a fun marketing gimmick.

I get it, bagged milk confused me too before my first visit to Canada as a teen. But milk in a bag is as Canadian as poutine, Letterkenny, hockey games on frozen ponds and The Beaches. As one of Engadget’s Canadian contingent, it’s my civic duty to test this out. My email’s in my bio, Xbox.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-latest-xbox-kitchen-kitsch-is-a-series-x-milk-jug-for-canadians-184154694.html?src=rss

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Before you toss your broken smartwatch and buy a replacement, get this: Coros has introduced a new repair service. The process is a beautifully straightforward exchange model: You need a battery or screen replacement, you send them your watch and a payment, and they send you a working, refurbished watch. The program offers battery, screen, button, and digital dial replacements. If you could use an upgrade or repair on your Coros watch, here’s what you need to know.

How the Coros repair program works

If you need repairs, like a battery replacement or screen fix, all you need to do is visit coros.com/repairs to initiate the process. The repair process can take up to 30 days. Instead of waiting without a device for a month, you can get a replacement immediately to keep training uninterrupted. This means you aren’t getting your physical watch back, but also, it means minimal disruption to training schedules and recovery tracking. The company’s goal is keeping products in active use for as long as possible.

Eligible devices

The following Coros products are eligible for repairs:

• Pace 3

• Pace Pro

• Apex 2

• Apex 2 Pro

• Vertix 2S

• DURA Solar GPS Bike Computer

Pricing

The repair program covers several common issues athletes face with their devices, with the cost of your repairs dependent on the device and service needed. Fees range from $59 to $89 for battery replacement, and $79 to $119 for cracks, scratches, and backlight malfunctions. Here’s the full breakdown.

• Pace 3: $59 for battery replacement, $79 for screen/dial/button repair

• Pace Pro: $59 for battery replacement, $89 for screen/dial/button repair

• Apex 2: $69 for battery replacement, $99 for screen/dial/button repair

• Apex 2 Pro: $69 for battery replacement, $99 for screen/dial/button repair

• Vertix 2S: $89 for battery replacement, $119 for screen/dial/button repair

• DURA: $69 for battery replacement, $99 for screen/dial/button repair

COROS PACE 3

$229.00
at Amazon

$229.00
at Amazon

The bottom line

Coros’ repair program is pretty good, and definitely more accessible and affordable compared to Apple or Garmin repair options. Coros’ approach stands out with the fact that once they receive your return, you get a refurbished device immediately. This really does solve a key pain point for serious athletes who rely on consistent data tracking. While other manufacturers may offer repairs, few prioritize maintaining the user’s training continuity. The program also suits anyone who prefers their favorite, reliable devices over frequently upgrading to the latest models.

Again, full details are available at coros.com/repairs.