Eve’s Android app has finally arrived, but it only supports the Eve Thermo at launch. | Image: Eve Systems Eve Systems has finally launched its first Android app — over two years after announcing it was working on one. This week, the once Apple-only smart home device maker launched the Eve for Matter app on the Google Play Store. The app will allow Android users to access the custom features of Eve’s devices that Matter doesn't support, something previously only accessible to iOS users.However, at launch, the new app will only work with Google Home and only with one Eve device, the new Eve Thermo (79.99 Euros) — a Matter-over-Thread smart radiator valve designed for European homes. While the earlier version of the Eve Thermo can be upgraded to support Matter and Thread, the new version has them pre-installed. Image: Eve Systems The newest version of Eve’s smart radiator valve — the Eve Thermo — comes with Matter-over-Thread on board. “The plan is to continuously expand support for other Eve devices and platforms and turn the app into a comprehensive tool,” Lars Felber, director of PR at Eve Systems, told The Verge. “Nevertheless, we wanted to make the app available to our Eve Thermo customers with Android and Google Home as early as possible in the heating season, hence the initial exclusive release for this hardware,” he said.There hasn’t been an Android app for Eve products before because the company’s commitment to privacy, along with eschewing cloud-to-cloud connections or requiring users to sign up for an account, meant it focused all its development efforts on Apple Home. However, the advent of the Matter smart home standard and its option for local control has allowed the company to branch out and work with the other platforms while maintaining its core values.The new Eve app lets you add the Eve Thermo to Google Home through Matter and control it on that platform, as well as share it with any other Matter-compatible platform. But it also simultaneously adds it to the Eve app, where you can access additional features, such as creating and managing autonomous on-device schedules. Without the Eve app, you only get basic controls.Currently, Android users can add any of Eve’s other Matter devices — such as the Eve Energy smart plug and Eve Motion blinds — to compatible platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings.But, until Eve adds support for more devices, Android users will be limited to those devices' capabilities in Matter. In contrast, Apple Home users can access all of Eve’s innovative features, including in-depth energy data for smart plugs and adaptive shading for smart shades, through the Eve for Matter & HomeKit iOS app.The Android app only works with Google Home as it was built on the Google Home APIs released earlier this year. Eve CEO Jerome Gackel said that these enabled the company to “turbo-charge the development of Eve for Android.” Felber said support for additional platforms, including Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings, is coming in future versions.

If your router had a severe security vulnerability, and it was a router that was still being updated within the last decade, you'd probably expect it to still receive an update to fix whatever the security vulnerability was. After all, Microsoft has even done that a couple of times with Windows XP when critical exploits like WannaCry are discovered in the wild. However, that isn't the case with D-Link, and if you're an owner of an older router, then not only are you vulnerable to a remote code execution attack, you'll need to purchase a whole new router to make yourself safe.

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images The Department of Energy preliminarily approved another loan to help fund the construction of electric vehicle battery factories in the US. This time, a joint venture between Stellantis and Samsung SDI will receive $7.54 billion to build two EV battery plants in Kokomo, Indiana. The project is expected to create 3,200 jobs, as well as 2,800 operations jobs at the plants and hundreds more at a nearby supplier park. The conditional loan commitment will provide $7.54 billion — $6.85 billion in principal and $688 million in capitalized interest — to StarPlus Energy LLC, which is jointly owned by Stellantis and Samsung SDI. The loan will come from the DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) program, which was resurrected by President Joe Biden in 2022 to help fund the developing EV manufacturing industry in the US.The project is expected to create 3,200 jobs, as well as 2,800 operations jobsMuch like the $6.6 billion loan conditionally approved for Rivian last month, the new loan to StarPlus Energy will need to beat the clock if it's going to finalize its approval before Donald Trump takes over the White House. Trump has promised to reverse or cancel much of the spending by Biden on EVs once he assumes office. He has said he will kill the $7,500 tax credit for new EV purchases, as well as wipe out the rest of the spending from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Assumedly, that will include the ATVM loan program as well — even though it predates the IRA.The loan program attained almost mythical status in the EV startup world thanks to its timely $465 million loan to Tesla in 2009, which is credited with helping save the company from an early death. But the program went fallow during the first Trump administration with a number of cash-strapped EV startups getting no response to requests for funding.Biden brought the program back in 2022 with a $2.5 billion loan to a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution to help fund the construction of a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility. Since then, the program has made other commitments, including $9.2 billion to a joint venture between Ford and SK Innovation and $2 billion to Redwood Materials.The Stellantis-Samsung plants are the latest beneficiaries of the program. According to DOE, the StarPlus project will produce about 67 GWh of batteries, enough to supply approximately 670,000 vehicles annually when it's operating at full capacity. Stellantis, which owns brands like Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and Ram, and international brands like Peugeot and Fiat, is going through some corporate upheaval that could determine its ability to meet the program's demands. The company’s CEO, Carlos Tavares, recently announced that he would step down amid a sharp decline in sales in the US and abroad. And Stellantis is struggling to keep pace with its competitors in the shift to electric- and software-defined vehicles.

Expanding the capacity of even the best NAS is simple. Fill the enclosure with as many drives as it supports and add an external enclosure once the primary system is fully populated. Larger drives can replace smaller capacities as they reach their end of life, but there's also the possibility of using USB drives to expand capacity. Whether or not you should do this is a different matter altogether.

Illustration: The Verge Microsoft is asking the inspector general at the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether agency management improperly leaked news of its antitrust investigation into the company, and make their findings public.Bloomberg first reported that the probe was underway last week, which The Verge later confirmed. The investigation covers Microsoft’s cloud and software licensing businesses, AI, and cybersecurity offerings.Now, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel Rima Alaily is accusing FTC management of leaking details of the probe, in violation of the agency’s own ethics guidelines. The agency instructs new employees that “the existence of an FTC investigation is nonpublic information,” though it may be disclosed after the Office of Public Affairs determines the target of a probe already made it public in a press release or government filing. Still, the guidelines add that the Commission has authority to make “appropriate disclosures” when “it determines that doing so would be in the public interest.”Alaily writes that the information and sourcing in the Bloomberg story “strongly suggests” the details came from “within the FTC.” She says that the story “appears to be consistent with an unfortunate trend over the last two years of the FTC strategically leaking nonpublic information,” citing a September report from the FTC IG that found a “steadily increasing” volume of “unauthorized disclosures” of nonpublic information to the press. The FTC declined to comment on the Microsoft letter.Microsoft claims it learned about the FTC’s information demand “like the rest of the world, through the Bloomberg story.” Even when it inquired with FTC staff about the validity of the story, Alaily says, they wouldn’t confirm the information demand existed, and she adds that Microsoft still hasn’t seen the information demand reported by the press.The letter is the latest example of a more aggressive approach Microsoft has taken in recent months when it comes to antitrust scrutiny of its business. In October, Alaily accused Google in a blog post of launching an astroturf group “to discredit Microsoft with competition authorities, and policymakers and mislead the public.”Microsoft has mostly flown under the radar in past years as a target of antitrust lawsuits while its Big Tech peers were hit with complaints from US regulators. But it’s increasingly faced scrutiny in both the US and in Europe amid major cybersecurity issues, its acquisition of game studio Activision Blizzard, and its partnership with OpenAI. Still, the fate of any existing investigation will ultimately depend on how officials in the incoming Trump administration view the matter.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holds up an early Intel 18A wafer in late 2023. | Image: Intel On Monday, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger abruptly decided to retire after less than four years on the job. That was the official story, anyhow. Within hours, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The New York Times had a different one: the board of directors pushed him out. Three and a half years ago, Gelsinger announced an ambitious plan to turn around the troubled chipmaker within four years — now, he’s reportedly been kicked out of the company before he could see it through. It happened so abruptly that Intel doesn’t have a planned successor in mind, and so completely that Gelsinger won’t even stick around as an adviser. He’s gone.Intel has been in a tailspin for years. It missed the smartphone revolution, has been plagued by quality control issues with its chips, lost customers like Apple to alternative processors, and now is at risk of missing out on AI, too.This isn’t just about stock price and golden parachutesIf Intel is falling apart, this isn’t just a business story. The United States government has called it a national security story, too. Intel isn’t just the world’s former leading maker of computer chips; it’s one of the last companies to both design and manufacture them itself... Read the full story at The Verge.

Notifications are an important tool that allows us to stay on top of the things that matter most in our life. But many times, they can also feel like a hindrance, interfering with our focus or adding to our stress levels when we really don't need it.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Amazon has announced a series of new AI foundation models under a new “Nova” branding that will be available as part of the Amazon Bedrock model library in AWS.There are three “understanding” models available now, Amazon says in a blog post:Amazon Nova Micro, a text model that’s “optimized for speed and cost.”Amazon Nova Lite, a “very low-cost” multimodal model that can take in images, video, and text to generate text.Amazon Nova Pro, a “highly capable” multimodal model.The company is also training a model called Amazon Nova Premier, which it says will be “our most capable multimodal model for complex reasoning tasks.” Amazon aims to make Nova Premier available in “early 2025.”Amazon is releasing content generation models, too: Amazon Nova Canvas, an image generation model, and Amazon Nova Reel, a video generation model. The company says that these models have “watermarking capabilities” to “promote responsible AI use.” As an example of what’s possible with Nova Reel, Amazon has shared this mock ad for a fake pasta brand.Later in 2025, Amazon plans to release a speech-to-speech model and “a native multimodal-to-multimodal” model, according to a blog post.Amazon announced these new models at its AWS re:Invent conference, which is happening now in Las Vegas. At the show, the company also said that it’s building a huge AI compute cluster that relies on its Trainium 2 chips in partnership with Anthropic (which it has invested $8 billion in). “When completed, it is expected to be the world’s largest AI compute cluster reported to date available for Anthropic to build and deploy its future models on,” according to Amazon.The company, like many other big tech players, is racing to release new AI products and features to stay ahead of newer companies like OpenAI. Where Amazon could have an advantage is how much internet infrastructure is already powered by AWS — large enterprises may be more willing to use Amazon’s AI offerings because the company has already a trusted reputation. An Apple exec even appeared onstage today at re:Invent to talk about how the company relies on Amazon’s custom AI chips.Amazon is also working on a revamped, AI-powered Alexa, but while voice assistant was reportedly set to launch this fall, the launch has apparently slipped into next year.

Illustration: The Verge Based on testing done by Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism researchers, OpenAI’s ChatGPT search tool has some issues when it comes to responding with the truth.OpenAI launched the tool for subscribers in October, saying it could give “fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources.” Instead, Futurism points out that the researchers said ChatGPT search struggled to correctly identify quotes from articles, even when they came from publishers with arrangements to share data with OpenAI.The authors asked ChatGPT to identify the source of “two hundred quotes from twenty publications.” Forty of those quotes were taken from publishers who’d disallowed OpenAI’s search crawler from accessing their site. Yet, the chatbot confidently replied with false information anyway, rarely admitting it was unsure about the details it gave:In total, ChatGPT returned partially or entirely incorrect responses on a hundred and fifty-three occasions, though it only acknowledged an inability to accurately respond to a query seven times. Only in those seven outputs did the chatbot use qualifying words and phrases like “appears,” “it’s possible,” or “might,” or statements like “I couldn’t locate the exact article.” Image: Columbia Journalism Review ChatGPT was fully or partially wrong more than right, but almost always confidently so. The Tow Center test’s authors documented ChatGPT search results that misattributed a letter-to-the-editor quote from the Orlando Sentinel to a story published in Time. In another example, when asked to identify the source of a quote from a New York Times article about endangered whales, it returned a link to a different website that had wholly plagiarized the story.“Misattribution is hard to address without the data and methodology that the Tow Center withheld,” OpenAI told the Columbia Journalism Review, “and the study represents an atypical test of our product.” The company went on to promise to “keep enhancing search results.”

Image: Nintendo Though it started out pretty chill, over the years, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp steadily became bloated with monetization. There were all kinds of things to spend real money on, including loot boxes for unlocking rare items. When I logged in to the game last week after months away, my screen was dominated by notifications vying for my attention, most of them involving spending some kind of cash.That’s what makes the new paid version of the app so intriguing. The original Pocket Camp has technically shut down, replaced by Pocket Camp Complete, which gets rid of all the in-app purchases in exchange for a one-time fee. (It’s $9.99 at launch on both iOS and Android, which will jump to $19.99 in January.) And without the looming specter of having to spend real money, this version of Pocket Camp is a whole lot more relaxing.Fundamentally, the game is the same. You’re tasked with running a campground for a bunch of friendly animals, which involves designing various spots for them to hang out, while also doing traditional Animal Crossing activities like fishing and catching bugs. The game allows existing Pocket Camp players to transfer their saves — all you need to do is link a... Read the full story at The Verge.

Consumers have had their hands on Copilot+ computers for almost six months at this point, and during that time, Microsoft has found itself in a firestorm of criticism regarding the announcement of its controversial Recall feature. Originally announced in May of this year, Recall is an AI tool available for Copilot+ capable PCs that saves snapshots of all your activity and allows you to trace back to that snapshot just as you left it.

When Google Chrome debuted, it was a lean, lightweight, and fast browsing machine. I remember critics back then describing it as “extremely fast” and “snappy.” But over time, Chrome has gained a reputation for lagging, even on some of the best laptops. And it’s not just Chrome. Browsers like Edge, Firefox, and Vivaldi can also feel sluggish at times. A slow browser can seriously affect your online experience, especially since so much of what you do on a PC happens inside a browser. The good news is you don’t have to let your browser slow you down. Here are a few ways to speed it up.