After repeatedly denying for weeks that his force used AI tools, the chief constable of the West Midlands police has finally admitted that a hugely controversial decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans from the UK did involve hallucinated information from Microsoft Copilot.

In October 2025, Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) met to decide whether an upcoming football match between Aston Villa (based in Birmingham) and Maccabi Tel Aviv could be held safely.

Tensions were heightened in part due to an October 2 terror attack against a synagogue in Manchester where several people were killed by an Islamic attacker.

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For a number of very obvious reasons, we don’t want to roll back the clock to early 2020. No thank you. But if there was a feel-good lockdown story, it was the perfectly timed arrival of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which allowed friends who could no longer meet up IRL to do so virtually on their carefully pruned islands.

The game will almost certainly never be as popular as it was back then again, but Nintendo is hoping a good chunk of lapsed islanders will return for its latest DLC drop, which has arrived a day earlier than planned. As spotted by Eurogamer, the free Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update is available to download now and, as previously announced, brings a host of new features to the cozy life sim, including a brand new resort hotel on the pier that you can help decorate.

There are new items and quality-of-life additions too, as well as the ability to build fresh islands with your friends and family in the “Slumber Island” dream world. All you need to do is go to the New Horizons game icon on your Switch’s home screen and download the software update.

Nintendo also announced last year that New Horizons would be coming to Switch 2 on January 15, improving the visuals, unlocking mouse controls and GameChat functionality, and expanding the online multiplayer capacity from eight players to 12. As of now, the Switch 2 edition of the game remains locked, so you’ll be stuck with the standard Switch version until tomorrow. Upgrading costs $5, while first-time players can purchase the Switch 2 version of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for $65.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/the-latest-animal-crossing-new-horizons-expansion-has-arrived-earlier-than-expected-160739040.html?src=rss

Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized AI fakes: trademarking himself. From a report: Over the past several months, the “Interstellar” and “Magic Mike” star has had eight trademark applications approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office featuring him staring, smiling and talking. His attorneys said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from simulating McConaughey’s voice or likeness without permission — an increasingly common concern of performers.

The trademarks include a seven-second clip of the Oscar-winner standing on a porch, a three-second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree, and audio of him saying “Alright, alright, alright,” his famous line from the 1993 movie “Dazed and Confused,” according to the approved applications. “My team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it’s because I approved and signed off on it,” the actor said in an email. “We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gemini is adding a feature that’s designed to feel more tailored to individual users. Once enabled, “Personal Intelligence” can pull context from across your Google ecosystem, including Gmail, Google Photos, Search and YouTube History, to gain specific insight that will shape its answers and recommendations. Personal Intelligence is available starting today in the US for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. The feature is opt-in only and is off by default.

Google

Google says users will have the ability to control what apps Gemini pulls from and, in the future, which chats it uses Personal Intelligence for. The company says this new feature might still make some mistakes, such as “over-personalization” where it draws connections between unrelated things.

According to Google, Gemini will not train directly on the data it pulls for personalization like your photos and emails, but will instead train on your prompts and its responses. Users can also prompt Gemini to “try again” without personalization and will have the option to delete chat histories.

For now, Personal Intelligence works in the Gemini app across web, Android and iOS for personal Google accounts. Google says it’s coming to Search’s AI Mode soon, with plans to expand to more countries and the free tier down the line.

Google has been on a tear integrating Gemini into everything, including Gmail, TVs and Chrome on mobile. This week, Apple announced that Siri AI will be powered by Gemini as part of a multi-year collaboration. AI remains an imperfect tool, and Google’s AI has a long history of malfunctions like explaining made-up idioms, calling itself a “failure” in a depressing doom loop and generating images of the Founding Fathers as people of color.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/gemini-can-now-pull-context-the-rest-of-your-google-apps-if-you-let-it-160039468.html?src=rss

Since the days when Google Gemini was still called Bard, it’s been able to connect with the company’s other productivity apps to help pull context from them to answer your questions—but you still had to connect those apps to the AI manually using extensions. And even after bringing your apps together, you usually had to tell Gemini where to look for your data to get much use out of its abilities. For Instance, if you wanted it to pull information from your emails, you might have started a prompt with “Search my email.”

Now, Google is making it easier to connect Gemini to its various services, and adding “reasoning” when pulling context from across your Google Workspace. It’s calling the feature “Personal Intelligence.”

Rolling out in beta for paid subscribers in the U.S. today (and coming to other countries and free users “soon”), Personal Intelligence is an opt-in feature that currently works with Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search, all of which you can connect in one tap while setting up the feature.

That alone makes it more convenient than a collection of extensions, but there are supposedly a few upgrades to general usability as well. The biggest is that Gemini will apparently be able to “learn” about you from a grab bag of sources all at once, without you having to specify where to look, and use that information to answer your questions.

Credit: Google

In an example, Google has a user say “I need to replace the tires for my car. Which ones would you suggest for me?” The bot then runs through multiple reasoning steps, pulling from all the data available to it, to find out what car the prompter drives and which tires would be best for it. This can take a while, which is why there’s an “Answer now” button next to the reasoning progress bar to stop the bot from getting stuck. In the example, it took about 10 seconds for the AI to generate a response.

Google is promising its typical Workspace privacy guarantees with Personal Intelligence, saying “because this data already lives at Google securely, you don’t have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience.” In other words, it’s not going to move the needle on how much data about you Google can access, but at least it’ll prevent you from having to connect your Workspace to third parties.

Google also says, “Gemini will try to reference or explain the information it used from your connected sources so you can verify it,” although we don’t have any examples of that in action yet. It’s worth keeping an eye out, though, if you’re worried about hallucinations. To that end, the company does suggest asking Gemini for more information about what it used to come to its answers if you’re unsatisfied, and to correct it “if a response feels off,” perhaps by saying something like “Remember, I prefer window seats.” Theoretically, Gemini will then remember this for next time, using its existing chat history feature. If you’re continually unsatisfied, you can hit the thumbs down button on responses to provide feedback.

How to turn on Personal Intelligence in Google Gemini

Google says that eligible users should see an invitation to try Personal Intelligence on the Gemini home screen as soon as it’s rolled out to them, but if you don’t, you can turn it on manually by following these steps:

1. Open Gemini and click or tap Settings.

2. Click or Tap Personal Intelligence.

3. Under Connected Apps, select which apps you would like Personal Intelligence to take information from.

And that’s it! Remember, Personal Intelligence is off by default and is only available for paid subscribers for now, so it may be some time until you can actually use it. Google also stresses the Gemini might not personalize every response, as that will save time on more simple requests. The company also said Personal Intelligence for AI Mode in Google Search is currently planned, but does not have a set release date.

The chief constable of one of Britain’s largest police forces has admitted that Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant made a mistake in a football (soccer) intelligence report. From a report: The report, which led to Israeli football fans being banned from a match last year, included a nonexistent match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv.

Copilot hallucinated the game and West Midlands Police included the error in its intelligence report without fact checking it. “On Friday afternoon I became aware that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot [sic],” says Craig Guildford, chief constable of West Midlands Police, in a letter to the Home Affairs Committee earlier this week. Guildford previously denied in December that the West Midlands Police had used AI to prepare the report, blaming “social media scraping” for the error.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube is rolling out some additional parental controls, including a way to set time limits for viewing Shorts on teen accounts. In the near future, parents and guardians will be able to set the Shorts timer to zero on supervised accounts. “This is an industry-first feature that puts parents firmly in control of the amount of short-form content their kids watch,” Jennifer Flannery O’Connor, YouTube’s vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post. Along with that, take-a-break and bedtime reminders are now enabled by default for users aged 13-17. 

The platform is also bringing in new principles, under which it will recommend more age-appropriate and “enriching” videos to teens. For instance, YouTube will suggest videos from the likes of Khan Academy, CrashCourse and TED-Ed to them more often. It said it developed these principles (and a guide for creators to make teen-friendly videos) with help from its youth advisory committee, the Center for Scholars and Storytellers at UCLA, the American Psychological Association, the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and other organizations.

Moreover, an updated sign-up process for kid accounts will be available in the coming weeks. Kid accounts are tied to parental ones, and don’t have their own associated email address or a password. YouTube says users will be able to switch between accounts in the mobile app with just a few taps. “This makes it easier to ensure that everyone in the family is in the right viewing experience with the content settings and recommendations of age-appropriate content they actually want to watch,” O’Connor wrote.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/youtube/youtube-adds-more-parental-controls-including-a-way-to-block-teens-from-watching-shorts-151329673.html?src=rss

As someone who regularly switches between the Mac and PC, I really can’t live without the PowerToys app on Windows. It adds little missing features that I really like on the Mac, like a Spotlight Search alternative, auto dark mode, screen awake, on-screen OCR (which lets you pull text from images), and more.

But the reverse is also true. When I’m on MacOS, I start to miss the little features and commands that I’ve been used to Windows having for decades now (I started using Windows in school, but was only exposed to macOS when I was in college).

It’s the little things, like not being able to cut and paste files in Finder. And why must I accidentally open the Music app every time I press the play button? This is just the beginning.

Enter Supercharge, a utility from prolific indie developer Sindre Sorhus. Think of it not as a single app, but as a Swiss army knife for your menu bar—a collection of micro-utilities designed to patch the specific usability holes that Apple has left open, many of which Microsoft has already plugged. The app offers an unlimited free trial (with a prompt to upgrade every 12 hours), or you can buy it outright for $18. It’s also available as part of a Setapp subscription.

Credit: Supercharge

The best Supercharge tweaks that you should enable

The Supercharge app works in two ways. The first is by giving you a set-and-forget settings menu. Secondly, it adds a menu bar app where you can quickly access small features on the fly.

The tweaks part, to me, is a lot more interesting. Once the app is installed, open the menu bar app and go to Settings. Go to the Tweaks tab and take some time to customize your Mac’s behavior.

Make Finder work more like Windows File Explorer

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

The Finder is where Supercharge shines, fixing legacy behaviors that have frustrated Windows switchers for years. The first thing I enabled was the “Cut and Paste” functionality. Finally, you can use Cmd+X to cut a file and Cmd+V to move it, eliminating the awkward Cmd+C followed by Cmd+Option+V dance required by default.

Beyond moving files, the app allows you to enable the Option+N shortcut to instantly create a new text file in your current folder—another Windows muscle memory I’ve had for decades. Additional tweaks include toggling the Enter key to open a file instead of renaming it, and an option to show hidden files by default.

Mission Control features

Apple’s Mission Control provides a bird’s-eye view of all your windows, but it’s hardly interactive. Supercharge changes that by adding window management buttons directly to the overlay. You can now add dedicated Close, Minimize, and Quit buttons for every window inside Mission Control, helping you clear cluttered app windows in seconds, and in a fairly visual way.

Dock enhancements

Supercharge also brings much-needed flexibility to the Dock, making it more like the taskbar on Windows or Linux. Enable the Click-to-Hide feature, and you can minimize or hide an app simply by clicking on the app icon. My favorite, though, is the option to open folders directly in the Finder from the Dock. You can also set Supercharge to add spacers to the Dock, and quit apps using the middle-click mouse button.

The Apple Music app fix

Perhaps the most useful fix in the entire suite is the ability to stop Apple Music from launching automatically. This feature stops the app from popping up when you press Play on your keyboard or Bluetooth headphones. If you are a dedicated Spotify user or simply dislike it when your headphones accidentally wake up Apple Music, this feature alone makes a Supercharge installation worth it.

Other useful features

The Supercharge app includes several other quality-of-life improvements. The Notification Nuke feature allows you to set a global hotkey to instantly clear all notifications from Notification Center, acting as a panic button for focus. To prevent accidents, you can also enable Accidental Quit Prevention, which requires a double-press or a Shift + Cmd + Q combo to actually quit an application.

Add these features to the Supercharge menu bar app

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

The second part of the equation here is the menu bar app. Here, you can add small missing features that usually require downloading separate apps. There are more than two dozen options. Go to Settings > General > Show Menu Items to see the whole list.

Here, you can add options to quickly capture and copy any text from an image (or translate it). There are one-click options for hiding all windows, showing the desktop, quitting all apps except the current one, clearing all notifications, and more. There’s also a simple Keep Awake feature that will keep your Mac active even when the screen is off.

And there’s also a simple default browser switcher built-in, though I prefer using Sindre’s dedicated Default Browser app.