An anonymous reader shares a report: It turns out that when fewer cars spew exhaust as they drive along, air quality improves. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health that looked at the effect of increased numbers of both EVs and plug-in hybrids on air pollution in California. The Golden State has by far the largest number of plug-in vehicles in the United States, and they’ve now reached significant numbers to have a positive impact on air quality.

Between 2019 and 2023, for every 200 EVs or plug-in hybrids added, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels dropped 1.1%, according to the study, which used satellite data to track those levels through the unique way NO2 absorbs and reflects sunlight. NO2 can trigger asthma attacks, cause bronchitis, and increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.

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A new NBER working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve, Northwestern’s Kellogg School and Johns Hopkins finds that Kalshi — the largest federally regulated prediction market in the U.S., overseen by the CFTC — produces macroeconomic forecasts that match or beat those of professional forecasters and traditional financial instruments like fed funds futures.

The study compared Kalshi-implied forecasts for the federal funds rate, CPI inflation and unemployment against the New York Fed’s Survey of Market Expectations and Bloomberg consensus. Kalshi’s modal forecast correctly predicted the federal funds rate on the day before every FOMC meeting since 2022, something neither the survey nor fed funds futures achieved. For headline CPI, Kalshi’s median and mode produced a statistically significant improvement over Bloomberg consensus.

Kalshi also fills a gap no other financial market covers: real-time probability distributions for GDP growth, core CPI, unemployment, and payrolls. The paper documented how these distributions shift in response to macro news — positive CPI surprises moved the mean of the fed funds rate distribution four times more than negative ones. Trading volumes on the platform have grown to nearly 100 million contracts for a single FOMC meeting, supported by liquidity from Susquehanna, Citadel, and Two Sigma.

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This is a video from the fun/danger-loving crew DD Squad (I’m part of a small B Squad myself) using a custom built rig to launch a human at 50MPH from the rear of a truck traveling at 50MPH so that he can just stand the landing, since 50MPH – 50MPH = 0MPH. It works surprisingly well, and, unlike if I’d been involved, nobody was accidentally launched into the side of a cliff at 200MPH then crushed by an anvil Wile E. Coyote style.

In 2023, we marveled at the sheer mass of Lenovo’s Legion Go, a 1.88-pound, 11.8-inch-wide monstrosity of a Windows gaming handheld. In 2026, though, Ayaneo unveiled details of its Next II handheld, which puts Lenovo’s big boy to shame while also offering heftier specs and a higher price than most other Windows gaming handhelds.

Let’s focus on the bulk first. The Ayaneo Next II weighs in at a truly wrist-straining 3.14 pounds, making it more than twice as heavy in the hands as the Steam Deck OLED (not to mention 2022’s original Ayaneo Next, which weighed a much more reasonable 1.58 pounds). The absolute unit also measures 13.45 inches wide and 10.3 inches tall, according to Ayaneo’s spec sheet, giving it a footprint approximately 60 percent larger than the Switch 2 (with Joy-Cons attached).

Ayaneo packs some seriously powerful portable PC performance into all that bulk, though. The high-end version of the system sports a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chipset with 16 Zen5 cores alongside a Radeon 8060S with 40 RDNA3.5 compute units. That should give this massive portable performance comparable to a desktop with an RTX 4060 or a gaming laptop like last year’s high-end ROG Flow Z13.

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It finally happened. After months of speculation, ChatGPT officially has ads. OpenAI revealed the news on Monday, announcing that ads would roll out in testing for logged-in adult users on Free and Go subscriptions. If you or your organization pays for ChatGPT, such as with a Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, or Education account, you won’t see ads with the bot.

OpenAI says that ads do not have an impact on the answers ChatGPT generates, and that these posts are always clearly separated from ChatGPT’s actual responses. In addition, ads are labeled as “Sponsored.” That being said, it’s not exactly a church-and-state situation here. OpenAI says that it decides which ads to show you based on your current and past chats, as well as your past interactions with ChatGPT ads. If you’re asking for help with a dinner recipe, you might get an ad for a meal kit or grocery service.

The company claims it keeps your chats away from advertisers. The idea, according to the company, is strictly funding-based so that OpenAI can expand ChatGPT access to more users. That’s reportedly why ads are starting as a test, not a hardcoded feature: OpenAI says it wants to “learn, listen, and make sure [it gets] the experience right.” As such, advertisers don’t have access to chats, chat histories, memories, or your personal details. They do have access to aggregate information about ad performance, including views and click metrics.

OpenAI will only show ads to adults. If the service detects that you are under 18, it will block ads from populating in your chats. Ads also will not appear if you’re talking to ChatGPT about something related to health, medicine, or politics. You can offer OpenAI feedback on the ads you do see, which should inform the ads you receive in the future. You can also delete your ad data and manage ad personalization, if you want to reset the information OpenAI is using to send you ads.

Credit: OpenAI

How to opt out of ChatGPT ads

The thing is, you don’t actually have to deal with ads, even if you use ChatGPT for free. That’s not just by upgrading to a paid ChatGPT plan, though OpenAI does suggest that option in its announcement. In addition, OpenAI is offering Free and Go users a dedicated choice to opt out of ads here. There is, of course, a pretty sizable catch: You have to agree to fewer daily free messages with ChatGPT. OpenAI doesn’t offer specifics here, so it’s not clear how limited the ad-free experience will be. But if you hate ads, or if you simply don’t want to see an ad for something irrelevant to your ChatGPT conversation, it’s an option.

If you like that trade-off, here’s how to opt out of ads. Open ChatGPT, then head to your profile, which opens your profile’s Settings page. Here, scroll down to “Ads controls,” then choose “Change plan to go ad-free.” Select “Reduce message limits,” and ChatGPT will confirm ads are off for your account. You can return to this page at any time to turn ads back on and restore your message limits.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has asked the US Department of Justice to turn over all its communications with both Apple and Google regarding the companies’ decisions to remove apps that shared information about sightings of US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers. Several apps that allowed people to share information about where they had seen ICE members were removed from both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store in October. Politico reported that Raskin has contacted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the issue and also questioned the agency’s use of force against protestors as it executes the immigration policy set by President Donald Trump.

“The coercion and censorship campaign, which ultimately targets the users of ICE-monitoring applications, is a clear effort to silence this Administration’s critics and suppress any evidence that would expose the Administration’s lies, including its Orwellian attempts to cover up the murders of Renee and Alex,” Raskin wrote to Bondi. He refers to Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were both fatally shot by ICE agents. In the two separate incidents, claims made by federal leaders about the victims and the circumstances of their deaths were contradicted by eyewitnesses or camera footage, echoing violent interactions and lies about them that occurred while ICE conducted raids in Chicago several months ago.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/doj-may-face-investigation-for-pressuring-apple-google-to-remove-apps-for-tracking-ice-agents-212145181.html?src=rss

For a couple of weeks now, AI agents (and some humans impersonating AI agents) have been hanging out and doing weird stuff on Moltbook’s Reddit-style social network. Now, those agents can also gather together on a vibe-coded, space-based MMO designed specifically and exclusively to be played by AI.

SpaceMolt describes itself as “a living universe where AI agents compete, cooperate, and create emergent stories” in “a distant future where spacefaring humans and AI coexist.” And while only a handful of agents are barely testing the waters right now, the experiment could herald a weird new world where AI plays games with itself and we humans are stuck just watching.

“You decide. You act. They watch.”

Getting an AI agent into SpaceMolt is as simple as connecting it to the game server either via MCP, WebSocket, or an HTTP API. Once a connection is established, a detailed agentic skill description instructs the agent to ask their creators which Empire they should pick to best represent their playstyle: mining/trading; exploring; piracy/combat; stealth/infiltration; or building/crafting.

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We should all take common-sense steps to make sure our data stays safe and secure: use strong passwords with our accounts, and never reuse passwords; employ two-factor authentication on any account that offers it; and avoid clicking strange links in emails or text messages. But even when you follow all those rules, your personal data can still be at risk, strictly because the services you rely on aren’t following these rules themselves.

Some websites are putting your passwords at risk

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that a concerning number of browser extensions can access sensitive information that you enter into websites. Think passwords, credit card info, and Social Security numbers.

The team behind the discovery says they weren’t out looking to break a security story. Instead, they were “messing around with login pages,” specifically Google login pages, when they found that the sites’ HTML source code could see the passwords they entered in plain text. They turned their sights onto other websites—more than 7,000, reportedly—and found that about 15% of them were also storing sensitive information in plain text. That’s over 1,000 websites exposing important data.

That, of course, is not supposed to happen: When you enter sensitive data into a website—say, your password into Google’s login page—that site shouldn’t see your password at all. In short, the sites confirm your passwords through hashing algorithms—essentially, jumbling your password into a code that can be checked against the code the site stores on their end. They can then confirm you entered the right password without ever exposing the actual text. By storing things like passwords and Social Security numbers in plain text, those sites are exposing that data to anyone in the know.

Importantly, that includes browser extensions. The researchers claim that 17,300 Chrome extensions—or 12.5% of the extensions available for download on Google’s browser—have the permissions they need to view this sensitive plain text data. Think about the permissions you ignore when setting up a new extension, including permissions that give extensions full access to see and change what you enter on a webpage. Researchers didn’t expose any extensions by name, as the situation is not necessarily the fault of the extensions, but considering the scope, it’s possible some of the extensions you use can access sensitive information you enter in certain sites.

Again, legitimate extensions are not the priority: Instead, it’s the risk that a developer will create an extension with the intent of scraping sensitive info stored in plain text. While the researchers claim there are no extensions actively abusing this vulnerability yet, this isn’t a theoretical problem. Researchers created an extension from scratch that could pull this user data, uploaded it to the Chrome Web Store, and got it approved. They took it down immediately, but proved it’s possible for a hacker to get such a malicious extension on the official store. Even if the hacker didn’t make the extension, they could acquire a legitimate extension with an existing user base, adjust the code to take advantage of the vulnerability, and spring the updated extension on unsuspecting users. It happens all the time, and not just on Chrome.

How to protect your sensitive data from malicious browser extensions

Unfortunately, there’s little you can do to prevent these sites from storing your passwords, credit cards, and Social Security numbers in plain text. The hope is, following these discoveries, websites will improve their security and kill the vulnerabilities on their end. But that’s on them, not you.

There are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage, however. First, make sure to limit your use of browser extensions. The fewer extensions you use, the less likely it is you’ll use a malicious one. Use only extensions you fully trust, and frequently check in on updates. If the extension changes hands to a new developer, vet that new owner before continuing to use it. You could even disable your extensions when sharing sensitive information with websites. If you need to provide your Social Security number on an official web form, for example, you could disable your extensions to prevent them from reading the data.

You can also limit the data you share that could stored in plain text. If given the option, use passkeys instead of passwords, as passkeys don’t actually use any plain text data that hackers could steal. Similarly, use secure payment systems, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, which don’t actually share your credit card information with the website you’re making a payment on. The name of the game is to avoiding typing out your sensitive details unless absolutely necessary—and then, reducing the parties who can see those details.

OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as “sponsored” and visually separated from ChatGPT’s organic responses.

OpenAI says the ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers, and advertisers receive only aggregate performance data like view and click counts rather than access to individual conversations. Users under 18 do not see ads, and ads are excluded from sensitive topics such as health, mental health, and politics. Free-tier users can opt out of ads in exchange for fewer daily messages.

Further reading: Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a ‘Space To Think’.

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Google continues to turn the screws on free YouTube users, expanding a test that restricts access to song lyrics on YouTube Music. Users without a premium subscription have found that Google’s streaming music service only shows song lyrics a few times before demanding money.

For as long as YouTube Music has existed, lyrics have been accessible to all users in the mobile app. That started to change over recent months as Google tested a paywall. The lyrics section still appears in the app when playing a song with a free account, but opening it eats into a limited allotment of lyric views. A substantial uptick in user reports, spotted by 9to5Google, suggests this restriction is now rolling out widely.

“You have [x] views remaining,” the app now warns free users who access lyrics. It looks like users get five free lyric views before they have to pay up. Google has still neglected to officially announce the addition of this feature to its Premium subscription—there’s no mention of lyrics being part of the paid tier on Google’s support page.

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