I use Google Maps for almost everything, from restaurants I want to revisit to cafés, hotels, hospitals, and useful stops around my city. Since these places appeared under my personal Google account, I naturally assumed nobody else could see them.

A person holds signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion outside Peace Hall in New Port Richey, Florida. | AFP via Getty Images On a gray, humid Saturday morning in central Florida, a little under a dozen people gathered outside the Spring Hill Branch Library to protest the construction of a hyperscale data center in their community. There was no immediate threat - the Hernando County commission had unanimously approved a one-year moratorium on such developments in June - but the organizers weren't satisfied. A temporary pause wouldn't be enough. They wanted a ban."We are going to fight, fight, fight," said a 71-year-old woman named Carol, who was manning a table with flyers and a petition the group, No Data Centers Hernando County, planned on presenting to the loc …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT Health to everyone in the US on Thursday, allowing more people to connect their medical records and health-tracking information to the chatbot. During a briefing, Ashley Alexander, OpenAI's vice president of health product, says the company's models "are now capable of reasoning at levels that are better than clinician level."When asked for more information about how the performance of OpenAI's models stacks up against human clinicians, OpenAI health lead Karan Singhal says that he would "temper" the claim that they are reasoning at better levels, but that "there have been individual studies that have been poi …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most Android smartphone OEMs use a custom skin to add a personal touch along with some exclusive features. I've used MIUI (now HyperOS) for a long time before switching to Samsung One UI. I've briefly used OnePlus OxygenOS as well, and each of them tries to do something unique with the Android experience. Samsung One UI has several interesting features that have been refined with time. I might not have liked them in the beginning, but they grew on me and are now indispensable in my daily smartphone usage habits.

Primate Labs is releasing Geekbench 7, the latest generation of its popular benchmarking tool. Geekbench 7 features new video and audio encoding / decoding tests, a redesigned multi-core test, and larger, more demanding datasets for CPUs and GPUs to crunch through. It otherwise looks and acts just like Geekbench 6, and a Pro license will cost the same $99 (discounted to $79 until August 6th). A Geekbench 7 Pro license allows for offline benchmarking that doesn't get uploaded to the Geekbench Browser, and it still covers all compatible desktop platforms of Windows, macOS, and Linux.Geekbench is one of the mainstay synthetic benchmarks we …Read the full story at The Verge.

Home Assistant is excellent at making smart devices react to things. However, these automations only work well when the trigger, conditions, and actions remain simple. For example, turning off the light when you step out of the room, switching on the washing machine at a certain time, or turning on the lights when you are near your house. Home Assistant almost always gets these automations right. But it's 2026. We are increasingly seeing agentic ways of doing things. People are making their agents order food, file taxes for them, and whatnot, so why do your automations remain simple? I wanted to take things up a notch in my home, so I paired Home Assistant with n8n. Now I am running a lot more complex automations that are essentially running my house.

The European Union has fined Google's parent company Alphabet €890 million (about $1 billion) for two separate violations of the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA). One penalty is for giving its own products preferential treatment in search results, while the other is for blocking Android developers from sending users to alternate payment options.A €460 million fine has been issued to Google for giving preferential treatment to its own Shopping, Hotels, and Flights services in Google Search results. The second €430 million penalty is for Play Store rules preventing developers from freely steering consumers to alternative payment systems that …Read the full story at The Verge.

The new strategy that Amazon gaming exec Jeff Gattis talked to The Verge about last month is getting clearer now that Prime Video has added a new Games tab on Fire TV devices. With Prime Gaming, Amazon Game Studios, and Luna now combined into one organization, it's aiming at the more casual audience of people already using Prime Video to stream movies, TV shows, and sports, instead of trying to compete directly with "core" gamers playing MMOs and shooters.Luna was already included in Prime, but now users in the US and UK can access it directly within Prime Video to play titles like Dispatch, Fallout 4, Hogwarts Legacy, EA Sports FC 26, and …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Framework Laptop 13 Pro configuration you wanted may not be available for a while. | Image: Framework RAMageddon has claimed yet another victim, with Framework now announcing a "major and unfortunate" pricing update for its upcoming premium laptop - which also impacts folks who preordered it. Memory configurations for the Laptop 13 Pro have been adjusted after Framework says it received cost updates from its memory supplier that "are more than double that of the prior inventory."While Framework says it has enough LPCAMM2 memory modules on hand to cover all existing preorders, they're not the right mix of 64GB, 32GB, and 16GB modules to match all preorder configurations. The company is now notifying some customers that the memory configurat …Read the full story at The Verge.

It has been an excellent few weeks for fans of both airplanes and DIY projects. We've seen several ESP32-based airplane trackers over the past few weeks, but not all of them are as easy to install as this one. All you need is a $35 ESP32 touchscreen and a web browser, and you're good to go.

For years, buying an OLED gaming monitor was a luxury too expensive for most gamers. Even when OLED displays dropped from $1,000 to around $600–$800, affordability wasn't where it needed to be for widespread adoption. Gamers always wanted true blacks and near-zero response times, but they were content with their IPS displays.

Google announced yet another way to gain access to your account if you get locked out, forget your password, or don't have access to the phone, computer, or two-factor authentication apps you typically use. As the name implies, selfie video lets you capture a short video of your face on a mobile device or PC, which is then compared to an earlier video that Google keeps on file to confirm you're the account owner.Setting up the selfie video feature simply requires you to look at your device's camera and follow a series of onscreen prompts that guide you through simple head movements to ensure multiple angles of your face are captured. It's …Read the full story at The Verge.