X is suing music publishers and their trade group, the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), accusing them of attempted coercion in their ongoing battle over licensing, as reported earlier by The Hollywood Reporter. The Elon Musk-owned platform accuses music publishers of colluding with the NMPA to "coerce X into taking licenses to musical works from the industry as a whole, denying X the benefit of competition between music publishers." In the antitrust lawsuit filed on Friday, X claims that the NMPA and music publishers "weaponized" the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) with requests to take down allegedly infringing conte …Read the full story at The Verge.

Regardless of what you buy, it's become increasingly difficult to watch high-quality content on a big screen without navigating a laggy, ad-infested nightmare these days. In the past two decades alone, we have witnessed the rise of smart TVs and their fall from greatness.

I've often thought about buying a mobile game controller to play emulated retro games on the go on my iPhone 17 Pro, but I've never actually picked one up because they're often bulky and cumbersome. For this type of gamepad to make sense, I need to be able to comfortably slide it in my pocket or the small bag that I often have on me.

The splitR Auracast transceiver can attach to an iPhone’s MagSafe spot. One of the issues holding Auracast back from wider mainstream use is some companies' lack of support for the Bluetooth technology - Apple being a prime example. With iOS having 58 percent of the market share in North America and nearly 28 percent worldwide, a decision by Apple to enable native Auracast support would potentially put millions of Auracast devices into the world with a firmware update. As of yet, Apple has made no comment on Auracast, and I'm not hopeful that we'll get one anytime soon.But the audio technology company Atitan thinks it has the solution. It's developing a small disc-shaped transceiver - the splitR - that can att …Read the full story at The Verge.

Things have been looking good for fans of the Arm architecture. Sure, the developments may not be coming in thick and fast, but they are making tangible progress, and we're finally seeing Arm devices get the love and respect they deserve. We've seen operating system developers making Arm versions of their software, and third-party companies either making an Arm-native version of their apps or using a compatibility layer to get things working.

DisplayPort is often considered to be the superior display interface. After all, it offers display daisy-chaining, more bandwidth than HDMI, and doesn't have nearly the same cable confusion. PC users have readily adopted the newer display standard in the last 5–10 years, but if you really want to be pedantic about it, HDMI is technically superior to DP in one key area — Ethernet support. Yes, in case you didn't know, your HDMI cable can carry Ethernet along with video and audio signals. The feature has existed for years, but it never gained widespread adoption. DisplayPort, on the other hand, is focused on PCs rather than TVs, hence it doesn't have an equivalent feature.

Media streaming tools like Plex and Jellyfin are quite useful when you want a neat interface to manage and play the movies and TV shows you’ve collected over the years. With containers being universally compatible with all permutations and combinations of hardware, you can turn any ol’ system into a solid media-serving hub. That said, you wouldn’t want to go for certain devices if you’ve got a massive army of archived media.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve slowly removed cloud-based services from my application stack and started using local FOSS tools wherever I can. That’s because I’ve grown tired of the paid subscriptions and privacy-intrusive nature of online platforms. In particular, I’ve started avoiding Google’s app collection as much as I can, with tools like Nextcloud, Grist, and Immich being my favorite replacements for the online utilities offered by the tech giant.

Amazon could be taking another, even bigger swing at physical stores, this time with a Walmart-like supercenter. On Tuesday, the Orland Park Plan Commission in the Chicago suburb Orland Park, Illinois voted 6-1 to approve Amazon's proposal to develop 35 acres of land for a 229,000-square foot retail center, as reported by The Information. The development would include a brick-and-mortar supercenter selling groceries, general merchandise, and prepared foods. It would also double as an Amazon fulfillment center, like a department store with an Amazon warehouse in back. Customers would be able to pick up Amazon orders there, as well. The pr …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've always been an early adopter of new wireless standards, and Wi-Fi 7 was no exception. I've been using it since it came on the market, with standalone access points hardwired to a central router, and while it's improved my home network overall, it's not the revolution I was promised.

Buddyo is a smart base designed to add AI to figurines like Funko Pops using NFC tags. AI toys, companions, and robots have been everywhere at CES this year, but among the horde of waddling plushies and light-up emoji eyes, two stood out to me. HeyMates and Buddyo are each betting that the collectible figurine boom is going to come back with an AI-powered vengeance, letting us chat to sports stars and superheroes from our desks.The core concept to both is this: Take a cutesy figurine and stick it onto a smart base with a speaker, microphone, and maybe a flashing ring of light or two. Then use an accompanying app to power a basic LLM chatbot based on the figurine, so you can talk to Albert Einstein about relativity, or Darth …Read the full story at The Verge.

Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to "triple your crypto," according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an "unauthorized message" that was sent via a "third-party system."Here's the notification that some people got, per a screenshot in the Reddit thread (some reported getting a similar notification over email, too):We'll triple your crypto! (Limited Time)Bryan: Betterment is giving back!We're celebrating our best-performing year yet by tripling Bitcoin and Ethere …Read the full story at The Verge.