Apple is forcing Patreon to move all remaining creators onto Apple’s in-app purchase subscription system by November 2026 “or else Patreon would risk removal from the App Store,” reports TechCrunch. “Apple made this decision because Patreon was managing the billing for some percentage of creators’ subscriptions, and the tech giant saw that as skirting its App Store commission structure.” The tech giant initially told Patreon that it must do so by November 2025, but the deadline was pushed back. From the report: “We strongly disagree with this decision,” its blog post states. “Creators need consistency and clarity in order to build healthy, long-term businesses. Instead, creators using legacy billing will now have to endure the whiplash of another policy reversal — the third such change from Apple in the past 18 months. Over the years, we have proposed multiple tools and features to Apple that we could’ve built to allow creators using legacy billing to transition on their own timelines, with more support added in. Unfortunately, Apple has continually declined them,” it says.

Creators can read more about the transition plan on Patreon’s website. It has also built several tools to support these changes, including a benefit eligibility tool to see who has paid or is scheduled to pay, tier repricing tools, and gifting and discount tools to offer payment flexibility. An option for annual-only memberships will be introduced before November 2026 as well. The commission on in-app purchases and subscriptions is 30% on Apple’s system, but “drops to 15% for a subscription that has been ongoing for more than a year,” notes MacRumors. Patreon lets creators either raise prices only in its iOS app to cover Apple’s fee or keep prices the same by absorbing the cost, while iPhone and iPad users can avoid the App Store commission entirely by paying through Patreon’s website instead.

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Google is rolling out an “auto browse” AI agent in Chrome that can navigate websites, fill out forms, compare prices, and handle tedious online tasks on a user’s behalf. Bloomberg reports: The feature, called auto browse, will allow users to ask an assistant powered by Gemini to complete tasks such as shopping for them without leaving Chrome, said Charmaine D’Silva, a director of product. Chrome users will be able to plan a family trip by asking Gemini to open different airline and hotel websites to compare prices, for instance, D’Silva explained.
“Our testers have used it for all sorts of things: scheduling appointments, filling out tedious online forms, collecting their tax documents, getting quotes for plumbers and electricians, checking if their bills are paid, filing expense reports, managing their subscriptions, and speeding up renewing their driving licenses — a ton of time saved,” said Parisa Tabriz, vice president of Chrome, in a blog post.

[…] Chrome’s auto browse will be available to US AI pro and AI Ultra subscribers and will use Google Password Manager to sign into websites on a user’s behalf. As part of the launch, Google is also bringing its image generation tool, Nano Banana, directly into Chrome.
The company said that safeguards have been placed to ensure the agentic AI will not be able to make final calls, such as placing an order, without the user’s permission. “We’re using AI as well as on-device models to protect people from what’s really an ever-evolving landscape, whether it’s AI-generated scams or just increasingly sophisticated attackers,” Tabiz said during the call.

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Mark Zuckerberg says there’s an end in sight to Reality Labs’ years of multibillion-dollar losses following the company’s layoffs to the metaverse division earlier this year. The CEO said he expects to “gradually reduce” how much money the company is losing as it doubles down on AI glasses and shifts away from virtual reality.

Speaking during Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg was clear that the changes won’t happen soon, but sounded optimistic about the division that lost more than $19 billion in 2025 alone. “For Reality Labs, we are directing most of our investment towards glasses and wearables going forward, while focusing on making Horizon a massive success on mobile and making VR a profitable ecosystem over the coming years,” he said. “I expect Reality Labs losses this year to be similar to last year, and this will likely be the peak, as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward.”

The company cut more than 1,000 employees from Reality Labs earlier this month, shut down three VR studios and announced plans to retire its app for VR meetings. Meta has also paused plans for third-party Horizon OS headsets. Instead, Meta is doubling down on its smart glasses and and wearables business, which tie in more neatly to Zuckerberg’s vision for creating AI “superintelligence.” 

During the call, Zuckerberg noted that sales of Meta’s smart glasses “more than tripled” in 2025, and hinted at bigger plans for AR glasses. “They’re [AI glasses] going to be able to see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you and help you as you go about your day and even show you information or generate custom UI right there in your vision,” he said. 

Developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-says-reality-labs-will-eventually-stop-losing-so-much-money-222900157.html?src=rss

Tesla published its financial results for 2025 this afternoon. If 2024 was a bad year for the electric automaker, 2025 was far worse: For the first time in Tesla’s history, revenues fell year over year.

A bad quarter

Earlier this month, Tesla revealed its sales and production numbers for the fourth quarter of 2025, with a 16 percent decline compared to Q4 2024. Now we know the cost of those lost sales: Automotive revenues fell by 11 percent to $17.7 billion.

Happily for Tesla, double-digit growth in its energy storage business ($3.8 billion, an increase of 25 percent) and services ($3.4 billion, an increase of 18 percent) made up some of the shortfall.

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RAMP—the predominantly Russian-language online bazaar that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed”—had its dark web and clear web sites seized by the FBI as the agency tries to combat the growing scourge threatening critical infrastructure and organizations around the world.

Visits to both sites on Wednesday returned pages that said the FBI had taken control of the RAMP domains, which mirrored each other. RAMP has been among the dwindling number of online crime forums to operate with impunity, following the takedown of other forums such as XSS, which saw its leader arrested last year by Europol. The vacuum left RAMP as one of the leading places for people pushing ransomware and other online threats to buy, sell, or trade products and services.

I regret to inform you

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized RAMP,” a banner carrying the seals of the FBI and the Justice Department said. “This action has been taken in coordination with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice.” The banner included a graphic that appeared on the RAMP site, before it was seized, that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The interim head of the country’s cyber defense agency uploaded sensitive contracting documents into a public version of ChatGPT last summer, triggering multiple automated security warnings that are meant to stop the theft or unintentional disclosure of government material from federal networks, according to four Department of Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the incident. The apparent misstep from Madhu Gottumukkala was especially noteworthy because the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had requested special permission from CISA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer to use the popular AI tool soon after arriving at the agency this May, three of the officials said. The app was blocked for other DHS employees at the time.

None of the files Gottumukkala plugged into ChatGPT were classified, according to the four officials, each of whom was granted anonymity for fear of retribution. But the material included CISA contracting documents (PDF) marked “for official use only,” a government designation for information that is considered sensitive and not for public release. Cybersecurity sensors at CISA flagged the uploads this past August, said the four officials. One official specified there were multiple such warnings in the first week of August alone. Senior officials at DHS subsequently led an internal review to assess if there had been any harm to government security from the exposures, according to two of the four officials. It is not clear what the review concluded.

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The Mac menu bar is a bit of a mess. Way too many applications want to put icons in the top-right corner of the screen, and most users only want to see a fraction of those. This is a particular problem on recent MacBooks, where the camera notch blacks out a chunk of space right in the middle of the menu bar. This is why applications for cleaning up the Mac menu bar are so popular—the clutter can feel overwhelming.

Here’s the thing, though: You probably don’t need to leave applications like that running constantly. You can hide icons in macOS’ Settings, then use a free tool once to move all the icons closer together. Here’s how.

How to hide icons in Mac System Settings

Tahoe, also known as macOS 26, gave users a lot to talk about, which meant a few features were broadly overlooked. One of them: the ability to hide any menu bar icon, no third party software required. To use this feature open System Settings and head to the Menu Bar section. You will see the ability to toggle system icons, like Siri and Spotlight, on and off. Keep scrolling, though, and you’ll find the ability to hide icons for any of your installed applications. Just toggle off any application you’d rather not see in the menu bar and it will disappear.

I’ve been using this to disable unwanted icons for months, and it’s working well for me. Having said that, though, it isn’t a perfect replacement. Applications like Bartender and Ice don’t just hide icons—they give you access to a secondary tray where you can still occasionally access icons you hid. There’s no quick way to do that using the macOS settings. Still: It’s a free way to hide unwanted icons, and there’s no need to keep third party software running.

Reduce the spacing between icons in the menu bar

Credit: Justin Pot

If your menu bar still feels crowded, you can free up a bit more space by squeezing all of your icons together. A free application called Menu Bar Spacing lets you change the spacing in your menu bar. Just download the application, move the slider, and your icons will move closer together.

The great thing about Menu Bar Spacing, as an application, is that it doesn’t need to run constantly. You can launch it once, make the changes you like, and then delete it—your setting will still apply. This is because the application changes a few hidden macOS settings. You can make the changes yourself using the Terminal if you prefer not to use an app, but I think the app makes things a little bit easier.

There’s a bit of a caveat for macOS 26 users. Because of a bug, only Apple’s own icons will move closer together at first. Your other applications will need to be restarted before they bunch closer together. That means you’ll need to manually close and re-launch each application, or simply restart your Mac. It’s annoying, but only relevant right after you change the settings. And you’ll have a lot more space on your menu bar once you’re done.

Apple’s new Creator Studio subscription bundle officially launches today, offering access to a wide range of updated professional apps for an all-or-nothing price of $13 a month or $130 a year. Teachers and students can get the same apps for $3 a month, or $30 a year.

The bundle includes either access to or enhanced features for a total of 10 Apple apps, though the base versions of several of these are available for free to all Mac and iPad owners:

• Final Cut Pro
• Logic Pro
• Pixelmator Pro
• Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
• Freeform
• Motion, Compressor, and MainStage (Mac only)

When companies introduce a subscription-based model for long-standing apps with an established user base, they often shift exclusively to a subscription model, offering continuous updates in return for a more consistent revenue stream. But these aren’t always popular with subscription-fatigued users, who have seen virtually all major paid software shift to a subscription model in the last 10 or 15 years, and who in recent years have had to deal with prices that are continuously being ratcheted upward.

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BBC One has adapted William Golding’s classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies into a new miniseries and just dropped the first trailer. The book has been adapted for film three times since its publication and also inspired the Emmy-nominated TV series Yellowjackets (renewed for its fourth and final season this year). This BBC miniseries apparently has the support of the Golding family and is expected to hew quite closely to the novel.

(Spoilers for the 1954 novel below.)

Golding was inspired to write Lord of the Flies by a popular, pro-colonialism children’s novel called The Coral Island, whose central theme was the civilizing influence of British colonial efforts and Christianity on a “savage” people. Golding wanted to write a book about children on an island who “behave the way children really would behave.”

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Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found a galaxy that is offering new data about the early stages of the universe’s existence. The latest discovery shared by astronomers is about a bright galaxy dubbed MoM-z14. According to the team, this galaxy existed 280 million years after the Big Bang. 

The sounds like a long time, but in the context of the universe’s estimated 13.8 billion years of existence, that’s actually one of the closest examples astronomers have found to the Big Bang’s occurrence. As a result, MoM-z14 can offer some insights and some surprises about what the early stages of the universe entailed.

“With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” lead author Rohan Naidu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology said. The findings about this galaxy were published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

The scientists were able to date MoM-z14 with Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument, analyzing how light from the galaxy changed wavelengths as it traveled to reach the telescope. One of the initial questions sparked by this bright galaxy centers on the presence of nitrogen. Some early galaxies, including MoM-z14, have revealed higher nitrogen concentrations than scientists had projected was possible. Another topic of interest is about reionization, or the process of stars producing enough light or energy to permeate the dense hydrogen fog that existed in the early universe. 

“It’s an incredibly exciting time, with Webb revealing the early Universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover” said Pennsylvania State University graduate student and team member Yijia Li.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/astronomers-share-new-insights-about-the-early-universe-via-the-webb-space-telescope-213311848.html?src=rss

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Surround sound systems are not cheap, especially if you want to go for flagship options like Bose, Sonos, or JBL. However, one brand offers a complete surround sound system that is still on-par with the rest as far as quality, but offers a much better bang for your buck—that’s Samsung’s HW-Q990F/ZC, and right now it’s 58% off on Woot for a new system. You can get it for $847.99 (originally $1,997.99), the lowest price I’ve seen it on sale.

Samsung HW-Q990F/ZC Soundbar

$847.99
at Woot

$1,997.99
Save $1,150.00

$847.99
at Woot

$1,997.99
Save $1,150.00

The Q990F is a 2025 upgrade on the Q990D, which Samsung released in 2023. It’s not much different except for a few tweaks that were the biggest cons on reviews. The Q990F added HDMI 2.1 with support for 4K at 120 Hz passthrough and VRR, which is ideal for serious gamers who want the lowest input lag possible. Samsung also added Wireless Dolby Atmos with compatible Samsung TVs, meaning you can have uncompressed Atmos audio without needing to hook up the HDMI cable to the eARC, sending it over wifi instead. The subwoofer was also improved with a tighter, more controlled sound. And of course, the overall tuning and audio technology are also better overall.

The Q990F comes with a soundbar, subwoofer, and two rear speakers, and it’s honestly the best surround sound system at this price that you can get. As you can read in PCMag’s “outstanding” review, the system is powerful, elegant, and has impressive surround-sound audio. There is also a useful companion app that brings all of the settings and any tweaks that you can think of needing right on your phone.

Amazon is discontinuing its Amazon One palm recognition ID system for stores later this year, the company informed users. From a report: The company will discontinue Amazon One services at retail businesses on June 3, 2026, according to a support page for the service and email messages to customers. “In response to limited customer adoption, we’re discontinuing Amazon One, our authentication service for facility access and payment,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “All customer data associated with Amazon One will be securely deleted after the service ends.”

The move coincides with a sweeping pullback from Amazon’s physical retail experiments. Amazon announced Tuesday that it’s closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh locations, a total of 72 stores nationwide, concentrating its efforts instead on its Whole Foods Market locations and grocery delivery from Amazon.com. Amazon One launched in 2020 as a way to help speed up in-store entry and payments, identifying customers who opted-in and eliminating the need for them to present a credit card to pay. It often worked in conjunction with the company’s Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras and sensors to let customers avoid using a checkout line.

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SpaceX has made a new set of demands on state governments that would ensure Starlink receives federal grant money even when residents don’t purchase Starlink broadband service.

SpaceX said it will provide “all necessary equipment” to receive broadband “at no cost to subscribers requesting service,” which will apparently eliminate the up-front hardware fee for Starlink equipment. But SpaceX isn’t promising lower-than-usual monthly prices to consumers in those subsidized areas. SpaceX pledged to make broadband available for $80 or less a month, plus taxes and fees, to people with low incomes in the subsidized areas. For comparison, the normal Starlink residential prices advertised on its website range from $50 to $120 a month.

SpaceX’s demands would also guarantee that it gets paid by the government even if it doesn’t reserve “large portions” of Starlink network capacity for homes in the areas that are supposed to receive government-subsidized Internet service. Moreover, SpaceX would not be responsible for ensuring that Starlink equipment is installed correctly at each customer location.

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