It looks like Meta’s Vibes feed is just the start of the company’s pivot toward AI slop. In an earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “we’re going to add yet another huge corpus of content” to Meta’s recommendation system, via AI’s ability to create and remix content — so you’re likely to see even more AI generated posts on Facebook and Instagram. 

“Social media has gone through two eras so far. First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly. The second was when we added all the creator content,” he said, seemingly suggesting that AI content will be the third era.  

Zuckerberg added that recommendation systems that “deeply” understand AI content are “increasingly valuable” since they can “help you achieve your goals.” 

He then nodded to Vibes, calling it an example of a new type of content enabled by AI. Retention on the feed “is looking good so far, and its usage keeps growing quickly week over week,” he proclaimed. Furthermore, there are more opportunities to build “many more novel types of content aheads, as our new models become ready,” Zuckerberg added. To put some numbers to Vibes takeup, Meta CFO Susan Li said that users have generated over 20 billion images in the feed to date. 

Meta has already introduced a number of AI features across its social media platforms. Those include in-app photo and video editing via text prompts directly in Instagram Stories, AI chatbots across WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, and a standalone Meta AI app that includes an AI assistant and discovery feed. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-will-add-a-huge-corpus-of-ai-content-into-its-recommendation-system-113027353.html?src=rss

Forget Samsung’s $1,800 Galaxy XR, the Android XR device I’m actually intrigued to see is Xreal’s Project Aura, an evolution of the company’s existing smart glasses. Instead of being an expensive and bulky headset like the Galaxy XR and Apple Vision Pro, Xreal’s devices are like over-sized sunglasses that project a virtual display atop transparent lenses. I genuinely loved Xreal’s $649 One Pro for its comfort, screen size and relative affordability. 

Now that I’m testing the M5-equipped Vision Pro (full review to come soon!), it’s clearer than ever that Apple should replicate Xreal’s winning formula. It’ll be a long while before we’ll ever see a smaller Vision Pro-like device under $1,000, but Apple could easily build a similar set of comfortable smart glasses that more people could actually afford. And if they worked like Xreal’s glasses, they’d also be far more useful than something like Meta’s $800 Ray-Ban Display, which only has a small screen for notifications and quick tasks like video chats. 

Devindra Hardawar for Engadget

While we don’t have any pricing details for Project Aura yet, given Xreal’s history of delivering devices between $200 and $649, I’d bet they’ll come in cheaper than the Galaxy XR. Xreal’s existing hardware is less complex than the Vision Pro and Galaxy XR, with smaller displays, a more limited field of view and no built-in battery. Project Aura differs a bit with its tethered computing puck, which will be used to power Android XR and presumably hold a battery. That component alone could drive its price up to $1,000 — but hey, that’s better than $1,800.

During my time with the M5 Vision Pro, I couldn’t help but imagine how Apple could bring visionOS to its own Xreal-like hardware, which I’ll call the “Vision Air” for this thought experiment. The basic sunglasses design is easy enough to replicate, and I could see Apple leaning into lighter and more premium materials to make wearing the Vision Air even more comfortable than Xreal’s devices. There’s no doubt it would be lighter than the 1.6-pound Vision Pro, and since you’d still be seeing the real world, it also avoids the sense of being trapped in a dark VR headset. 

To power the Vision Air, Apple could repurpose the Vision Pro’s battery pack and turn it into a computing puck like Project Aura’s. It wouldn’t need the full capabilities of the M5 chip, it would just have to be smart enough to juggle virtual windows, map objects in 3D space and run most visionOS apps. The Vision Air also wouldn’t need the full array of cameras and sensors from the Vision Pro, just enough track your fingers and eyes. 

I could also see Apple matching, or even surpassing, Project Aura’s 70-degree field of view, which is already a huge leap beyond the Xreal One Pro’s 57-degree FOV. Xreal’s earlier devices were severely limited by a small FOV, which meant that you could only see virtual screens through a tiny sliver. (That’s a problem that also plagued early AR headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens.) While wearing the Xreal One Pro, though, I could see a huge 222-inch virtual display within my view. Pushing the FOV even higher would be even more immersive.

In my review of the original Vision Pro, I wrote, “If Apple just sold a headset that virtualized your Mac’s screen for $1,000 this well, I’d imagine creative professionals and power users would be all over it.” That may be an achievable goal for the Vision Air, especially if it’s not chasing total XR immersion. And even if the Apple tax pushed the price up to $1,500, it would still be more sensible than the Vision Pro’s $3,500 cost. 

While I don’t have high hopes for Android XR, its mere existence should be enough to push Apple to double-down on visionOS and deliver something people can actually afford. If Xreal can design comfortable and functional smart glasses for a fraction of the Vision Pro’s cost, why can’t Apple? 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/whats-next-for-vision-pro-apple-should-take-a-cue-from-xreals-smart-glasses-113000437.html?src=rss

Proton, the company behind Proton VPN and other encrypted apps like Proton Mail and Proton Drive, just launched a new web page called the Data Breach Observatory that aims to make accurate cybercrime data more widely accessible. The Observatory is intended to be a continually updated report that records any data leak detected on the dark web, with information sourced from the underground data marketplaces themselves.

The reason for the Observatory, according to Proton, is that too many studies of cyberattacks depend on organizations reporting when they’ve been hacked. A company might not make a data breach public for fear of backlash from customers, regulators or stockholders. Although it’s impossible to tell how many breaches aren’t reported, Proton believes it’s a significant portion.

Compounding the transparency problem, most stolen data is advertised and traded on dark web markets that are hard to trace without specialized knowledge, like how diamond thieves don’t tend to fence their loot at above-board jewelry stores. In other words, while most people know that personal information is frequently stolen and leaked, it’s very difficult to know how much data is getting stolen, how often breaches occur and who’s buying and selling the goods.

Proton’s solution is to monitor the dark web itself, watching locations where data thieves go to advertise stolen information. By keeping an eye on these exchanges, Proton believes the Data Breach Observatory will be able to warn victims as early as possible, including before the targets themselves are aware of the leak. Making breach reports available in one place is also meant to educate the public about the actual size and scope of cybercrime, while making it harder for companies to keep quiet about getting hacked.

Proton plans to update the Observatory in “near real time,” working with a risk detection firm called Constella Intelligence. It remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to keep up the workload — according to Proton’s own research, around 1,571 data breaches have occurred in 2025 so far, compromising well over 100 billion records. A clearing house for reporting on all of those definitely sounds valuable, but at around five breaches a day, it’ll be a busy page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/proton-launches-data-breach-observatory-to-track-personal-info-leaks-110047833.html?src=rss

It’s spooky season, and what better way to spend Halloween weekend than settling in to watch a classic Hollywood ghost story? To help you figure out what to watch, we’ve compiled a handy list of 15 classic ghost stories, presented in chronological order.

What makes a good ghost story? Everyone’s criteria (and taste) will differ, but for this list, we’ve focused on more traditional elements. There’s usually a spooky old house with a ghostly presence and/or someone who’s attuned to said presence. The living must solve the mystery of what happened to trap the ghost(s) there in hopes of setting said ghost(s) free. In that sense, the best, most satisfying ghost stories are mysteries—and sometimes also love stories. The horror is more psychological, and when it comes to gore, less is usually more.

As always, the list below isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Mostly, we’re going for a certain atmospheric vibe to set a mood. So our list omits overt comedies like Ghostbusters and (arguably) Ghost, as well as supernatural horror involving demonic possession—The Exorcist, The Conjuring, Insidious—or monsters, like The Babadook or Sinister. Feel free to suggest your own recommendations in the comments.

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Black Friday (which is now basically all of November) is one of the best times of the year to pick up things for yourself and for other people. But to say money is tight is an understatement this year. If Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days was any indicator, folks are spending more on essentials than anything else during these big sales. That, combined with the rising trend of holding on to big tech purchases for longer means that you may not have gadgets at the top of your to-buy list this year.

Even if that’s the case, I’d recommend not overlooking tech entirely this Black Friday. After all, all of us have essential tech that we use every day, and more often than not, you can avoid paying full price for most of those gadgets (and all of the rest of the best tech of the year) if you’re looking to add to your repertoire or you need a replacement. Personally, I’m not eyeing a new smartphone or laptop this holiday shopping season, but there are a few tech purchases I’d like to make if the prices are right. This is the tech I’m hoping to save on this year during Black Friday.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/these-are-the-black-friday-deals-on-tech-im-hoping-to-see-for-2025-100014802.html?src=rss

Alphabet reported its first-ever $100 billion quarter, fueled by a 34% surge in Google Cloud revenue and booming AI demand. The tech giant also announced an increase in expected capital expenditures for the fiscal year of 2025. CNBC reports: “With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report (PDF) Wednesday. “Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said finance chief Anat Ashkenazi on the earnings call with investors Wednesday.

Earlier this year, the company increased its capital expenditure expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion. Most of that goes toward technical infrastructure such as data centers. The latest earnings show the company is seeing rising demand for its AI services, which largely sit in its cloud unit. It also shows the company is continuing to spend more to try and build out more infrastructure to accomodate the backlog of customer requests. “We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses. Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in the earnings release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: From enabling life as we know it to greasing the geological machinery of plate tectonics, water can have a huge influence on a planet’s behavior. But how do planets get their water? An infant world might be bombarded by icy comets and waterlogged asteroids, for instance, or it could form far enough from its host star that water can precipitate as ice. However, certain exoplanets pose a puzzle to astronomers: alien worlds that closely orbit their scorching home stars yet somehow appear to hold significant amounts of water.

A new series of laboratory experiments, published today in Nature, has revealed a deceptively straightforward solution to this enigma: These planets make their own water. Using diamond anvils and pulsed lasers, researchers managed to re-create the intense temperatures and pressures present at the boundary between these planets’ hydrogen atmospheres and molten rocky cores. Water emerged as the minerals cooked within the hydrogen soup. Because this kind of geologic cauldron could theoretically boil and bubble for billions of years, the mechanism could even give hellishly hot planets bodies of water — implying that ocean worlds, and the potentially habitable ones among them, may be more common than scientists already thought. “They can basically be their own water engines,” says Quentin Williams, an experimental geochemist at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not involved with the new work.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In March, three months after being forced out of his position as the CEO of Intel and sued by shareholders, Patrick Gelsinger took the reins at Gloo, a technology company made for what he calls the “faith ecosystem” — think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support. […] Now Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology (who’s largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company’s Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of $110 million. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users’ theological beliefs.

“My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” he said. Gloo says it serves “over 140,000 faith, ministry and non-profit leaders”. Though its intended customers are not the same, Gloo’s user base pales in comparison with those of AI industry titans: about 800 million active users rely on ChatGPT every week, not to mention Claude, Grok and others.

[…] Gelsinger wants faith to suffuse AI. He has also spearheaded Gloo’s Flourishing AI initiative, which evaluates leading large language models’ effects on human welfare across seven variables — in essence gauging whether they are a force for good and for users’ religious lives. It’s a system adapted from a Harvard research initiative, the Human Flourishing Program. Models like Grok 3, DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4.1 earn high marks, 81 out of 100 on average, when it comes to helping users through financial questions, but underperform, about 35 out of 100, when it comes to “Faith,” or the ability, according to Gloo’s metrics, to successfully support users’ spiritual growth. Gloo’s initiative has yet to visibly attract Silicon Valley’s attention. A Gloo spokesperson said the company is “starting to engage” with prominent AI companies. “I want Zuck to care,” Gelsinger said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rode’s range of tiny, portable microphones are a mainstay for creators looking for crisp audio on their phone videos. The company knows that those using digital cameras probably want that same blend of portability and performance for their own footage. That’s why it’s launching the new Wireless Micro Camera Kit, which outputs audio over USB-C or via a 3.5mm line-in.

As with the Wireless Micro, the new set includes a pair of microphones and a transmitter that all sit in a portable charging case. You’ll also find a pair of furry wind screens should you need to film in less than favorable weather. But unlike that model, the receiver comes with both a cold shoe mount and a 1.1-inch AMOLED screen. That will let you configure the audio setup on the fly, plus you’ll get battery data for all three units and an on-screen visualizer.

Rode

It would appear that Rode noticed user gripes that its own kit was being shown up by DJI’s Mic Mini, which had a transmitter with its own 3.5mm jack and shoe mount for camera connection. In addition, Rode has added Bluetooth Direct Connect to the microphones so they’ll connect to your iOS phone directly via the Rode Capture App. Which, like the 3.5mm, was a notable omission from the older hardware.

In terms of battery life, Rode says the kit and the charging case will hold up to 21 hours of use before you need to head back to an outlet.

Plus, to sweeten the deal, Rode is also throwing in one of its first-generation USB-C smartphone receivers into the package for free.

Rode’s Wireless Micro Camera Kit is available to purchase today for $149.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/rodes-latest-wireless-microphones-now-work-with-digital-cameras-025338766.html?src=rss

schwit1 shares a report from IOL: China has enacted a new law regulating social media influencers, requiring them to hold verified professional qualifications before posting content on sensitive topics such as medicine, law, education, and finance, IOL reported. The new law went into effect on Saturday. The regulation was introduced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) as part of its broader effort to curb misinformation online.

Under the new rules, influencers must prove their expertise through recognized degrees, certifications, or licenses before discussing regulated subjects. Major platforms such as Douyin (China’s TikTok), Bilibili, and Weibo are now responsible for verifying influencer credentials and ensuring that content includes clear citations, disclaimers, and transparency about sources. A separate report notes that if influencers are caught talking about the “serious” topics, they will face a fine of up to 100,000 yuan ($14,000).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It hasn’t been a good year for Xbox so far. Microsoft has released its earnings report for the quarter ending on September 30, and it has revealed that its revenue from the Xbox hardware fell by 30 percent year-over-year. Take note that the revenue decline doesn’t reflect any dip in sales caused by the console’s $20-to-$70 price hike, since that took effect on October 3. Similarly, Microsoft only raised the price for its Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $20 to $30 in October. 

Meanwhile, revenue from Xbox content and services remained relatively unchanged from the same period last year. Microsoft says it saw growth from Xbox subscriptions and third-party content, but it was “partially offset” by the decline in first-party gaming content. 

The Xbox division was one of the most affected teams when Microsoft started cutting down its global workforce earlier this year, with the company cancelling games that were being developed for the console. Microsoft scrapped the modern reimagining of Perfect Dark, a first-person shooter from the year 2000, and even closed down the Xbox studio working on it. The company also cancelled Everwild, a project that had long been in development by Xbox studio Rare, also in the midst of its mass layoffs. 

Overall, Microsoft’s $77.7 billion revenue was 17 percent higher compared to the same period last year, and its operating income was up by 22 percent. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posted a few highlights about the company’s earnings call on X, mostly focusing on its AI efforts. He said that the company will increase its AI capacity by 80 percent this year and will double its data center footprint over the next two. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/xbox-console-revenue-fell-30-percent-year-over-year-this-summer-012245146.html?src=rss