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Spotify’s iPhone app could soon sell audiobooks with links, too - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T15:10:39.000Z

Spotify is working on an update that could allow iPhone users in the US to purchase audiobooks through external links. In a post on Friday, Spotify says it has submitted the update to Apple, and if approved, it would also let Premium users buy “top-ups” for additional audiobook listening time.

The change comes in response to last week’s order issued by Epic Games v. Apple Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who found Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction. The judge ordered Apple to stop taking an up to 27 percent commission on purchases made through external links, and also blocked the company from restricting how developers direct users toward purchases outside the App Store.

In response to the order, Spotify started allowing users to purchase subscriptions through external links.

Adding links and pricing info for audiobooks would be a major change to the app. Spotify previously attempted to get around Apple’s restrictions by not displaying the price of audiobooks in the app, and instead emailing users a link to purchase the audiobook they want on the web. Spotify eventually pulled audiobook purchases from iOS altogether.

“It helps level the playing field by allowing developers to offer basic pricing information and easy-to-access links to purchase digital goods through iPhones with no unnecessary steps or additional taxes levied by Apple,” Spotify says in the post. “In short, this freedom is a win for authors, audiences, and developers everywhere — if Apple approves and if the legal ruling stands despite Apple’s continued attempts to stop it.”

Though Apple has asked the court to halt the order while it appeals the decision, other apps, including the ones for Kindle, Patreon, and Delta’s emulator, are taking advantage of the newly relaxed policies as well.

Germany takes down eXch cryptocurrency exchange, seizes servers - BleepingComputer

2025-05-09T15:07:24.000Z

The Federal police in Germany (BKA) seized the server infrastructure and shut down the 'eXch' cryptocurrency exchange platform for alleged money laundering cybercrime proceeds. [...]

Leaked document reveals more about Eufy’s first smart display - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T14:57:32.000Z

A leaked brochure shared to Reddit reveals more details about Eufy’s first smart display. | Image: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/eufy/comments/1k5dfbj/embrace_our_brandnew_allinone_smart_display_e10/">Reddit</a>

A brochure shared on Reddit provides new details on Eufy’s first smart display.

The Eufy Smart Display E10 hasn’t been officially announced by Anker yet, but it’s already received FCC certification and was recently demonstrated at a private event in New York. The smart display’s manual has also leaked.

According to the brochure, the Smart Display E10 features an eight-inch touchscreen with an HD resolution. It includes a charging station dock that draws power over USB-C, but the smart display also has a 5,000mAh battery that Eufy says will last up to 24 hours. You can carry it from room to room to keep an eye on what’s happening around your house or mount it to a wall in your home.

The E10 can simultaneously display up to four live camera feeds and prioritizes feeds where motion has been detected. A live feed from one of Eufy’s smart doorbells or door locks will also automatically pop up when someone presses the doorbell, with their presence and name being announced if their face is recognized.

The E10 will also provide daily summaries of all the activities it detected, including who may have stopped by and whether or not they dropped off packages. You can use a timeline view to navigate all the videos saved throughout the day.

You don’t need to pay for a cloud storage subscription. The E10 comes with 8GB of built-in storage, which can be expanded using a microSD slot, for saving video clips locally.

Other features include a microphone and speaker allowing you to communicate with people at your door through Eufy’s smart locks and doorbells, and a time of flight sensor for potentially detecting when a person approaches the display. There’s also a dedicated SOS button and, while the brochure doesn’t detail its exact function, a video captured during the recent Eufy event shows that holding the button for three seconds triggers cameras to sound an alarm, if they support that feature.

It’s unclear how much the Eufy Smart Display E10 will cost or when it will be released. We also don’t yet know if it will support cameras, doorbells, or camera-equipped smart home devices from other companies.

Whoop angers users over reneged free upgrade promises - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T14:53:21.000Z

Upgrading from the Whoop 4.0 to the 5.0 hardware is no longer free for most existing customers.

Whoop just announced its new Whoop 5.0 fitness tracker yesterday, but some existing users are already calling foul. Previously, Whoop said people who had been members for at least six months would get free upgrades to next-generation hardware. Now, the company says that members hoping to upgrade from a Whoop 4.0 to 5.0 will have to pay up.

Whoop is a bit different from other fitness trackers in that it runs entirely on a subscription membership model. Most wearable makers that have subscriptions will charge you for the hardware, and then customers have the option of subscribing to get extra data or features. A good example is the Oura Ring, where you buy the ring and then have the option of paying a monthly $6 subscription. Whoop, however, has until now said that you get the hardware for “free” while paying a heftier annual subscription.

Previously, Whoop promised users that whenever new hardware was released, existing members would be able to upgrade free of charge so long as they’d been a member for at least six months. However, that has since been scrubbed from Whoop’s site — though it was there as recently as March 28th this year, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

On Whoop’s current official “How to upgrade” site, the company states that existing members have one of two options. They can either extend their membership by another 12 months and receive new Whoop 5.0 hardware “at no extra cost,” or if they’d rather not extend, they can pay a one-time upgrade fee of either $49 for the regular Whoop 5.0 or $79 for the Whoop 5.0 MG, which includes EKG sensors. An official Reddit thread also notes that people who either joined or extended their membership in the past 30 days are eligible for a free upgrade.

Understandably, Whoop fans are none too pleased. The r/Whoop subreddit is full of angry users who are accusing the company of misleading them.

“One of the main reasons I chose a Whoop over an Apple Watch was due to the free hardware upgrades,” writes one Redditor. “Conveniently my 12 month subscription is up around the same time the Apple Watch is released. The cost isn’t the issue, it’s them changing what was promised.”

“I’m definitely cancelling mine now, over the Whoop hype. Was excited to see they had a nice update and deflated after I saw they went back on their word about not charging for future hardware,” writes another.

The Verge reached out to Whoop for comment about why its changed its hardware upgrade policy, but didn’t immediately receive a response. We’ll update when we hear back.

It’s another example of how changes to subscriptions often results in customer backlash. Garmin recently angered its customer base by introducing a paid tier to the Garmin Connect app after years of touting its lack of a paywall. Oura also received hefty backlash when it introduced a subscription with its third-gen smart ring.

Brilliant launches new smart home control panels - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T14:38:52.000Z

Smart home controller maker Brilliant NextGen has launched its second generation of touchscreen panels that replace traditional light switches.

The new hardware, which looks like the previous model, has a 4x higher resolution screen and dual-band WiFi (2.4GHz and 5GHz) to help curb interference.

It also has a more powerful processor that Brilliant says is ready “for the next phase of AI-powered smart home evolution,” although the company has not said when it plans to launch such features or what it could do. (As-is, there are currently no new software features from the previous gen.)

In an email to The Verge, Brilliant’s head of marketing Erin Wright says the new version also reduces latency with integrations, which sounds promising since the previous model was sluggish with some devices in our testing. Brilliant’s smart panels control smart bulbs like Philips Hue lights and Sonos speakers, among other smart home devices.

The company nearly went out of business in 2024 before it was purchased by two private investment firms, Almeida Strategic Investments and Cullinan Holdings, for an undisclosed sum.

Most of the new Brilliant panels are available to order and ship today. There are bundles that include three screenless switches (usually $69.99 each), saving you up to $96. The company is also selling a plug-in version of the panel for $329, which comes with two smart plug outlets, for anyone who’d rather not do any electrical work.

Tall Tales is a critique of AI — so why do people think it was made with AI? - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T14:30:00.000Z

For the past three decades, multidisciplinary artist Jonathan Zawada has produced art across various mediums: sculptures, paintings, videos, installations, and more. He's also been making visualizations with his friend Mark Pritchard, a record producer and experimental musician. They became close friends, talking nearly every day. But the relationship changed when Pritchard brought him a new, daunting project: a collaborative album with Thom Yorke, the frontman of Radiohead.

"I'm a massive fan, and I've found he's kind of a terrifying person," Zawada says. But despite being intimidated, he found Yorke to be a great collaborator. "He's so switched on, and he's so clear and concise… Yeah, I was very nervous a lot of the time."

Before the record, Tall Tales, was even a complete album, Zawada was working on a visual accompaniment to it. Songs would arrive in his inbox - oftentimes just sketches or demos - and Zawada would send back pictures or start a collaborative whiteboard. It's just whatever popped into his mind after listening to the music: Dutch painters Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch came up a lot. Five years later, the album is now available and Zawada's accompanying "v …

Read the full story at The Verge.

X notifications are broken - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T14:19:49.000Z

Some parts of X’s notification system have been down since Thursday afternoon, making it hard for users to see when accounts they follow have posted something. User reports can be seen across Reddit and X, and my colleagues at The Verge have noticed zero new notifications even with alerts enabled on accounts that have posted multiple times since yesterday.

Outside of hindering updates from your favorite X users, the busted notifications may also disrupt essential alerts from accounts run by public transportation companies, emergency weather services, and other key service providers.

While we confirmed some pings for user tags are working, users have also reported they haven’t received notifications for new likes and followers for almost a day. In some instances, users said notifications appeared several hours after they should have been received.

It’s unclear what is causing the issues or how badly the X notifications system is affected. At 6:04AM ET on Friday, X owner Elon Musk posted that users “should be noticing some improvements to the quality of recommendations in your timeline.” The company hasn’t yet acknowledged the notification issues or given any indication of when they might be resolved.

We have reached out to X and will update if we hear back.

Trump cuts tariff on UK cars; American carmakers not happy about it - Ars Technica - All content

2025-05-09T14:12:06.000Z

The British car industry got a big break from US President Donald Trump yesterday afternoon. Trump and UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer have agreed to a bilateral trade agreement that cuts tariffs on a range of imports from the UK, including pharmaceuticals, aluminum and steel, and cars.

Now, the first 100,000 cars that come to the US from the UK will only be subject to a 10 percent tariff rather than the 27.5 percent they have been under since the start of this trade war in April.

"The car industry is vital to the UK’s economic prosperity, sustaining 250,000 jobs," said Jaguar Land Rover CEO Adrian Mardell. "We warmly welcome this deal which secures greater certainty for our sector and the communities it supports. We would like to thank the UK and US Governments for agreeing this deal at pace and look forward to continued engagement over the coming months," Mardell said.

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Jony Ive’s next product is driven by the ‘unintended consequences’ of the iPhone - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T14:02:28.000Z

Former Apple designer Jony Ive says the work on his next product is driven by owning the “unintended consequences” associated with the iPhone. During an interview with Stripe, Ive said there’s “not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered by” than the potentially adverse effects smartphones have on their users.

“I think when you’re innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences,” Ive said. “You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that I’ve been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.”

Ive spent more than two decades at Apple, where he led the design of many products, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and iPod. He left the company in 2019 to co-found the design firm LoveFrom. Ive confirmed last year that he’s working on a new device with OpenAI, which he seemed to allude to during this interview.

“I think even if you’re innocent in your intention, I think if you’re involved in something that has poor consequences, you need to own it,” Ive said. “That ownership, personally, has driven a lot of what I’ve been working on that I can’t talk about the moment, but look forward to being able to talk about at some point in the future.”

When talking about AI, Ive mentioned that he finds it encouraging that “it’s very rare for there to be a discussion about AI, and there not to be the appropriate concerns about safety.” He adds that he was “extremely concerned about social media, and there was no discussion whatsoever.”

Details about what Ive is working on with OpenAI are still slim, but The New York Times reported that LoveFrom is leading the device’s design with Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, who helped design the iPhone. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have reportedly discussed how AI has allowed them to create a new device “because the technology could do more for users than traditional software.”

Why Apple is trying to save Google - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T12:58:44.000Z

Google is in antitrust court, fighting to preserve the search engine business that has made it so historically successful. At a few different moments through the various stages of the trial, high-powered executives from Apple have taken the stand - and largely taken Google's side. Just this week, Apple's Eddy Cue made the case that Google is actually in a hugely competitive market, is no longer the unstoppable force it once was, and should be largely left alone.

If it seems odd that Apple and Google would be aligned, here's a number to keep in mind: 20,000,000,000. That's how many dollars Google pays Apple every year, as part of a revenue-sharing deal that makes Google the default search engine in Safari. Even as Cue talks about Google searches going down in Safari, and how AI might cannibalize search and the iPhone and everything, it's important to keep that $20 billion paycheck in mind.

Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Overcast | Pocket Casts | More

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay, David, and The Verge's Richard Lawler discuss Cue's testimony, what it means that Google searches are going down in Safari, and whether the whole "AI chat will replace search" thin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Trump Using Pointless, Shitty Tariffs To Bully Countries Into Coddling Elon Musk’s Starlink - Techdirt

2025-05-09T12:21:06.000Z

By now most sentient people realize Trump’s tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that’s going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There’s bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump administration to go fuck itself.

But amusingly (?), the Trump administration still seems to think it can leverage the threat of tariffs to try and force companies into using Elon Musk’s Starlink service, according to the Washington Post:

“A series of internal government messages obtained by The Post reveal how U.S. embassies and the State Department have pushed nations to clear hurdles for U.S. satellite companies, often mentioning Starlink by name. The documents do not show that the Trump team has explicitly demanded favors for Starlink in exchange for lower tariffs. But they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm at a moment when the White House is calling for wide-ranging talks on trade.”

When asked by WAPO, the State Department just insisted they were being patriotic:

“Starlink is an American-made product that has been game-changing in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity. Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.”

A growing number of countries are trying to move away from Starlink because of Musk’s unhinged support of racism and conspiratorial fascism, and the fact they’re not sure they can trust Musk to be objective or reliable when it comes to military and political communications.

Germany and Ukraine, for example, are starting to more heavily use France’s Eutelsat fledgling low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite services after Musk restricted Ukraine’s access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine’s military aims (defending itself from unprovoked invasion by a fascist).

The U.S. certainly has a long history of promoting U.S. corporate interests globally. But even this level of naked cronyism is an extreme outlier. Everywhere you look, the Trump administration is looking to coddle Trump’s rich benefactor, who donated $277 million to ensure Trump’s election victory.

They’ve duct-taped Starlink terminals to the White House roof, creating all sorts of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities by bypassing government security protocols. They’ve installed Starlink at the FAA, in a bid to oust Verizon out of a $2 billion agency telecom contract. They’re rewriting the infrastructure bill grant program to drive as much taxpayer money as possible to Elon Musk.

The head of the Trump FCC, Brendan Carr, has been going around acting like a used car salesmen, telling countries that refuse to sign up for Starlink service that they’re effectively aiding communism. Carr’s been falsely claiming that countries either have the choice of Starlink or compromised Chinese satellite service, ignoring a growing array of looming French, European, Canadian, and Jeff Bezos’ alternatives.

This is, of course, just transparently corrupt effort to reward the authoritarian administration’s top donor. And while Starlink certainly has its uses (disasters, war, or the middle of nowhere rural America–assuming you can afford it), it’s ill-suited for this sort of “use everywhere, for everything” approach.

The technology has been criticized for harming astronomy research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics, launch logistics, and capacity constraints means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable and will get worse, and making it scale to meet real-world demand is many years away. There are real questions about whether the network is even permanently sustainable.

It’s not an improved solution for White House broadband access (unless you’re trying to hide administration communications from transparency requirements). It’s not a good upgrade over Verizon fiber or 5G at the FAA. And it’s a very problematic a downgrade from the kind of high-capacity, future-proof fiber deployments the infrastructure bill was funding.

This is all before you get to the fact that Starlink is being run by an overt white supremacist openly embracing authoritarianism, who is actively decimating the country’s science, arts, consumer protection, and public safety infrastructure for his own amusement. Musk may be enjoying the fruits of his investments into Trump now, but the longer-term stain and stink on his brands may prove difficult to wash off as the full scope of the administration’s damage begins to penetrate thicker electorate skulls.

Amazon now sells prescription pet pills - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T11:19:21.000Z

Amazon is expanding its prescription medication business to include your pooches and pussycats. Through its Vetsource partnership announced on Thursday, Amazon says that “hundreds of prescription pet medications” will now be available for US customers to purchase via Amazon’s storefront, including treatments for fleas, ticks, and chronic conditions.

Prescription pet drugs can be found by searching for the required medication in Amazon’s search bar and inputting your prescribing veterinarian’s information during checkout. The Vetsource online pet pharmacy service will then dispense and deliver medications purchased through Amazon, with shipping expected to take between two to six days.

Vetsource will contact your veterinarian for approval for first-time orders, but Amazon says that refills can then “usually be processed without additional veterinarian contact” if your account has an active prescription on file. All of the pet medications provided on Amazon are FDA approved, and the company says that the selection of drugs available will be expanded over time.

The selling point here, much like when Amazon first launched its human-focused online pharmacy service in 2020, is convenience. Being able to order flea, worming, and other essential pet care prescriptions alongside everyday shopping items is convenient for everyone, but especially people who have mobility issues or live in rural areas and would otherwise have to make their way to a vet’s office or pharmacy location. It also puts Amazon more in line with competing online pharmacy services like Walmart, which launched its own service for pet medications in 2019.

Threads adds dashboard to better explain post and account restrictions - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T09:27:03.000Z

Threads is getting a new transparency feature that allows users to see how their accounts are being reprimanded for breaking the platform’s rules. Video ads are also making their debut on the platform.

The new account status dashboard is similar to existing account features on Instagram and Facebook, showing when posted content has been removed or lowered in feeds. It also shows posts that can’t be recommended to other users because they violate the Threads community guidelines, and tells users if they’ve been blocked from using certain features on the platform. If Threads users believe they have been penalized erroneously, the account status dashboard can facilitate an appeal.

The feature aims to give users more clarity when action is taken against their account, make it easier to avoid being penalized in the future, and restore content or features they believe have been mistakenly restricted. The account dashboard is rolling out to Threads users now and can be accessed from the “account” section in the settings menu.

Threads is also ramping up its monetization efforts, with Meta announcing on Thursday that it will soon begin testing video ads on the platform. Meta said at IAB NewFronts that a “small number” of 19:9 or 1:1 videos will be trialed by advertisers to appear in Threads users’ feeds between organic content. This follows advertising being first introduced to the platform in January and then globally expanded last month.

Meta’s ad expansion will also be felt on Facebook and Instagram. A new “short-form video solution” trial will show ads next to popular Reels videos to piggyback on engagement, while new branded partnership ad formats will be rolling out to both Facebook and Instagram, including Facebook Live.

Why am I internet-stalking the pope? - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T03:10:37.000Z

The moment the white smoke appeared above the Sistine Chapel, I immediately turned on my television, because I wanted to see who the new pope would be, and then hopped on social media, because I knew that the internet could tell me more about the new pope faster than television could. That, and the memes would be good.

The memes came first, naturally, flying in harder and faster than they ever did with Pope Francis, because the new pope was American. Not just that - Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, was from Chicago, with a bio full of cultural touchstones that the American meme economy grasped immediately: Did the pope ever drink Malort? Was the pope a Cubs or a Sox fan? Was God going to intercede on behalf of the Knicks in the NBA playoffs because the pope graduated from Villanova? The next wave of information was, I'd suspected, going to be news and articles about his upbringing, pastoral history and religious stances - things that would tell the world what sort of leader this new pope would be.

And then someone I followed posted a screenshot from an X account with the handle @drprevost: three retweets, over the past three months, that linked to articles harshly cri …

Read the full story at The Verge.

RFK Jr.’s Measles Policy: Deaths Are Expected And It’s The Victim’s Fault - Techdirt

2025-05-09T02:58:14.000Z

I’ve ranted and raved enough about how RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department are completely fucking up the response to the current measles outbreak enough that I’m confident you all don’t need me to rehash the entire thing in this opening. We can leave it at this: we’re probably going to lose our measles elimination status under Kennedy’s watch, Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer no matter how much he attempts to state otherwise, his advice for alternative therapies and/or that everyone should just get measles are bullshit, and he has a habit of victim-blaming those who get measles to boot.

It’s that last bit that’s most important here. The post I linked to is one in which Kennedy claims that malnutrition is to blame for serious outcomes from measles infections. But he’s said so much more on the topic, including in a March interview on Fox News.

“It’s very, very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person,” Kennedy falsely said during a March Fox Nation interview. “We see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regime.” Coupled with his disturbing statements on autism and long-standing belief that vaccinations cause the condition, Kennedy is circling a dark idea: that the value of one’s life can be tabulated in accordance with diagnoses and preexisting conditions. Since his appointment as secretary of health and human services (HHS), he has pursued a brutal vision of American health that several experts liken to a sort of eugenics. Kennedy has made it clear that certain deaths are acceptable or even preferable to a world where every child is vaccinated.

“There’s a sort of Darwin-esque notion that only the fittest survive,” says Paul Offit, a vaccine scientist, virologist, and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “But these viruses can kill anybody, so that’s just wrong.” In the recent deaths, the first from measles in a decade, no underlying medication conditions have been reported. Both of the Texas children were reportedly healthy before they contracted measles. They could have stayed that way.

Now, here’s where I have to be very careful about stating that this is an opinion piece in which I will draw conclusions based on Kennedy’s words and actions, along with the analysis in that post from The Verge. Why? Because of this following statement.

Alluding to survival of the fittest on its own is already a problematic stance to take when we’re talking about a disease that has already resulted in two tiny little coffins made to fit for children. It’s already problematic because it’s also just fucking wrong; otherwise fit people have gotten severely sick and died from this outbreak. But if you couple the “survival of the fittest” stance with the “everyone should just get infected to gain immunity stance,” what you have is a combined policy that is tolerant of many unnecessary deaths and major illness in people whom Kennedy says are deficient in some way, and that is damned close to a policy of eugenics.

The underlying message of Kennedy’s campaign is that measles deaths are expected and admissible, because the people who don’t survive the disease were flawed anyway, says Laura Appleman, a professor of law at Willamette University in Oregon. Kennedy has talked up the “measles parties” of past decades — discounting that sometimes those parties proved deadly. “I think there’s a real subtext here saying that, ‘no, that’s ok, because in the old days the ones who survived were the strong ones,’” she adds.

Appleman has studied and written about the history of eugenics in the U.S., in the context of the criminal justice system, as well as that of public health and the covid-19 pandemic. The current rhetoric coming from Kennedy is an amplification of what’s long persisted in American culture and politics, she says. “I talk a lot about the long tail of eugenics [in the US]. And I think certainly, lately, the tail is not so hidden anymore.”

“He’s pretty much coming out and saying these things,” Appleman says. “Who deserves to live and who is it okay to not mourn? And this is from someone who runs the HHS. This is profoundly disturbing.”

And if you think that is a bridge too far, couple it further with Kennedy’s absolutely ignorant comments on autism, which he has falsely linked historically to vaccinations, particularly the MMR vaccine.

During the press conference, Kennedy asserted that autism “destroys” families and children. He said that children with autism, “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

“It doesn’t get much closer, that I can imagine, to ‘useless eaters’ than that,” says David Gorski, a surgeon and oncologist at Wayne State University and prolific health blogger, who cofounded the website Science-Based Medicine. “Useless eaters” was a phrase coined by German eugenicists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in a 1920 book that advocated for culling people with disabilities — which the Nazi regime would later use to justify mass murder.

This isn’t to suggest that Kennedy himself is a Nazi or is sympathetic to Nazi ideology, to be clear. But he’s adopting a position that is at least similar to the one the Nazis used to eliminate all kinds of people they claimed were poisoning the gene pool. And when you package all of this in with the current administration’s work to defund or otherwise deprioritize all kinds of research, help, and government programs for certain classes of people, well, the comparison begins to get unavoidable.

Additionally proposed and already enacted cuts within HHS include eliminating the national suicide hotline’s program for LGBTQ youth, ending programs focused on preventing childhood lead poisoning, eliminating domestic HIV prevention efforts and research, and scrapping multiple measures for treating drug addiction and opioid overdoses, including grants for supplying emergency responders with Narcan.

Altogether, the changes fit cleanly with the idea that certain lives aren’t worth investing in or protecting, Fox says. “All of these things could be explained through that lens,” she notes — the lens of acceptable death. Refracted through the looking glass, “a lot of things come into focus,” and the road to an America made “healthy again” looks treacherous.

A healthcare policy in which death is an acceptable outcome. Might as well make that HHS’s motto.

Netflix is removing Black Mirror: Bandersnatch - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-09T00:14:51.000Z

Netflix is removing the last two shows listed on its Interactive Specials page: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend, reports What’s on Netflix. The two specials will be pulled on May 12th, 2025, according to the publication, so if you want to watch them, you’ll want to catch them soon.

Bandersnatch wasn’t Netflix’s first interactive special, but it was arguably the platform’s most famous. It was a dark, choose-your-own-adventure-style movie, and after it launched, Reddit detectives immediately went to work to decode the many choices throughout the film. (Though it didn’t work on every device that could play Netflix.)

As of late, however, Netflix has been moving in a different direction with its interactive experiences, focusing more on its mobile games library (which has a Black Mirror-themed game) and testing cloud-streamed games over TVs. The new design for Netflix on TVs was even created in part to help people better find games they might like.

The removals perhaps shouldn’t be surprising following Netflix’s decision late last year to pull all but four of its interactive specials from its catalog. “The technology served its purpose, but is now limiting as we focus on technological efforts in other areas,” spokesperson Chrissy Kelleher told me ahead of those removals.

The other two interactive shows that stuck around were Ranveer vs. Wild with Bear Grylls and You vs. Wild. What’s on Netflix says they were removed in January of this year, but I’m seeing non-interactive versions of the show available to watch.

Netflix spokesperson Jessica Braslow declined to comment.

Google requires Android applications on Google Play to support 16 KB page sizes - OSnews

2025-05-08T23:05:30.000Z

About a year ago, we talked about the fact that Android 15 became page size-agnostic, supporting both 4 KB and 16 KB page sizes. Google was already pushing developers to get their applications ready for 16 KB page sizes, which means recompiling for 16 KB alignment and testing on a 16 KB version of an Android device or simulator. Google is taking the next step now, requiring that every application targeting Android 15 or higher submitted to Google Play after 1 November 2025 must support a page size of 16 KB.

This is a key technical requirement to ensure your users can benefit from the performance enhancements on newer devices and prepares your apps for the platform’s future direction of improved performance on newer hardware. Without recompiling to support 16 KB pages, your app might not function correctly on these devices when they become more widely available in future Android releases.
↫ Dan Brown on the Android Developers Blog

This is mostly only relevant for developers instead of users, but in the extremely unlikely scenario that one of your favourite applications cannot be made to work with 16 KB page sizes for some weird reason, or the developer refuses to support it or some even weirder reason, you might have to say goodbye to that applications if you use Android 15 or higher. This is absurdly unlikely, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens to at least one application.

If that happens, I want to know which application that is, and ask the developer for their story.

DOGE Aide Who Helped Gut CFPB Was Warned About Potential Conflicts Of Interest - Techdirt

2025-05-08T22:33:30.000Z

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

Last month, a Department of Government Efficiency aide at the nation’s consumer watchdog agency was told by ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that employees are forbidden from owning — and was advised not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally, according to a person familiar with the warning.

But days later, court records show, Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old software engineer who has been detailed to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau since early March, went ahead and participated in mass layoffs at the agency anyway, including the firings of the ethics lawyers who had warned him.

Experts said that Kliger’s actions, which ProPublica first reported on last week, constitute a conflict of interest that could violate federal criminal ethics laws. Such measures are designed to ensure that federal employees serve the public interest and don’t use their government power to enrich themselves. At the CFPB, which regulates companies that provide financial services, there are strict prohibitions on the investments that employees can maintain.

As ProPublica previously reported, Kliger owns as much as $365,000 worth of shares in Apple Inc., Tesla Inc. and two cryptocurrencies, according to his public financial report. Investments in those businesses are off limits to employees since the bureau can regulate them. A further review now shows that he’s invested in even more companies that are on the agency’s “Prohibited Holdings” list. Kliger also disclosed owning as much as $350,000 worth of stock in Google parent Alphabet Inc., Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.

That means, at a maximum, Kliger could own as much as $715,000 of investments in seven barred companies, the records show.

Experts said a defanged and downsized consumer watchdog is unlikely to aggressively regulate those and other companies, freeing them of compliance costs and the risk associated with examinations and enforcement actions. That in turn could boost their stock prices and benefit investors like Kliger.

Don Fox, a former general counsel of the independent federal agency that advises executive branch workers on their ethical obligations, said that “this looks like a pretty clear-cut violation” of the federal criminal conflict-of-interest statute.

Richard Briffault, a government ethics expert at Columbia Law School, said the fact that Kliger was warned not to take any actions that could benefit him personally showed that “he’s on notice that this is a problem, as opposed to doing this by accident, or unintentionally.”

But Briffault said there would likely be no recourse for Kliger’s actions given that the Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has “greatly deprioritized public integrity, ethics and public corruption as issues for them.” The New York Times reported last week that the section handling such cases is down to just a handful of lawyers.

From the outset, the Trump administration has been dogged by ethics controversies, from the president’s own foray into the cryptocurrency industry to Elon Musk’s dual roles as both the head of DOGE and a major federal contractor. Kliger’s case is “a nice illustration of how even on this micro level, they are violating the law, acting in ways that positively should cause people to not trust what they’re doing because there is no question that these corporations will benefit,” said Kathleen Clark, an expert on government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Kliger hasn’t returned a phone call or email seeking comment. The CFPB didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The White House didn’t answer questions about the warning, whether Kliger had sought ethics waivers or if he was in the process of divesting. Instead, a spokesperson provided ProPublica the same statement it previously had, writing that Kliger “did not even manage” the layoffs, “making this entire narrative an outright lie.” A spokesperson said that Kliger had until May 8 to divest.

The April 10 ethics warning came amid a heated legal battle over the future of the CFPB.

The following day, an appeals court in Washington, D.C., allowed the agency’s acting director, Russell Vought, to implement mass firings after a lower court judge had stayed them. The court instructed Vought to conduct a “particularized assessment” of the bureau and to lay off only those employees who were deemed to be “unnecessary” to perform the agency’s statutorily required duties. In court filings, the government has said that review was done by the bureau’s chief legal officer, Mark Paoletta, and two other attorneys. In court papers, Paoletta has said the cuts are designed to achieve a “streamlined and right-sized Bureau.”

On April 13, Kliger was among a small team of DOGE and agency officials who received an email from Vought about the coming layoffs with the subject line “CFPB RIF Work” — government parlance for reduction in force, according to emails produced in court records. Vought’s email is redacted in the filing, but hours after he sent it, records show the bureau’s chief information officer wrote to Kliger and another DOGE aide regarding a “follow-up on Russ’s note below” and advised Kliger that he’d been granted access to agency computer systems that “should allow you to do what you need to do,” according to the email.

Layoff notices to more than 1,400 bureau employees went out on April 17.

In the preceding 36 hours, “Gavin was screaming at people he did not believe were working fast enough” to get the notices out and “calling them incompetent,” a federal employee on the layoff team using the pseudonym Alex Doe wrote in sworn declaration filed by lawyers for unionized employees trying to stop the administration from dismantling the bureau.

Among those laid off were the agency’s ethics officer and their “entire team” of lawyers, according to court records.

Those are the very employees who’d twice notified Kliger that he was required to identify any investments in companies on the bureau’s Prohibited Holdings list. The warning last month explicitly instructed him not to participate in any bureau activity that could benefit the businesses whose stocks he owned, said the person familiar with the notice, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity.

Last week, the appeals court reversed course and temporarily stopped the firings at the CFPB amid a flurry of legal challenges. Agency officials then notified the more than 1,400 fired employees who’d been told they were being let go that the pink slips were being rescinded.

The court battle over the CFPB’s future is ongoing, though, with oral arguments before appellate judges in Washington, D.C., scheduled for later this month.

FBI: End-of-life routers hacked for cybercrime proxy networks - BleepingComputer

2025-05-08T22:15:39.000Z

The FBI warns that threat actors are deploying malware on end-of-life (EoL) routers to convert them into proxies sold on the 5Socks and Anyproxy networks. [...]

Instagram CEO testifies about competing with TikTok: ‘You’re either growing, or you’re slowly dying’ - The Verge - All Posts

2025-05-08T22:00:30.000Z

When Adam Mosseri took over Meta-owned Instagram as CEO in 2018, the app was experiencing what he'd later call "concerning" drops and plateaus in user engagement, thanks partly to fierce competition from a new app: TikTok. Instagram estimated in 2019 that 23 percent of the decline in time spent on Instagram in the US was due to TikTok. Bytedance's video app kept expanding through the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. "We can't explain it all, but what's clear at this point is that we need to adapt, and do so quickly," Mosseri wrote to his team in March 2020. Instagram needed to recover, he testified Thursday in a DC courtroom, because "you're either growing, or you're slowly dying."

Mosseri described the dire situation while testifying in the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust trial against Meta, where the government alleges the company illegally monopolized the market for personal social networking services, a category that it says includes Snapchat but not more entertainment-focused apps like YouTube or TikTok. Mosseri's testimony highlighted how much Instagram sees itself as in competition with TikTok, but it also showed that even as entertainment content becomes a larger port …

Read the full story at The Verge.