Following significant backlash, Meta is turning off the feature it announced this week that let users generate AI images based on content from public Instagram accounts just by tagging them. The feature, as originally set up, meant that content from any public Instagram account could be used in AI creations without the account owner's permission."Earlier this week, we announced that one way for people to generate images in Meta AI is by @-mentioning public Instagram accounts that they want to reference," Meta says in an update to a blog post about its new Muse Image AI model. "Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give pe …Read the full story at The Verge.

Recently, Sony announced that from September 1st, 2026, 551 digital titles, including movies like Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, and Paddington, will vanish from the personal libraries of UK- and Europe-based PlayStation Store users with absolutely zero financial compensation or refunds. This rug being pulled out from under us exposes the true myth behind digital ownership.

Apple has sued OpenAI, alleging that engineers stole Apple secrets to advance the AI startup's hardware plans. In its complaint, Apple says it uncovered "a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple." In addition to OpenAI, the lawsuit also names IO Products - Jony Ive's hardware startup, which OpenAI bought in 2025 - along with two specific employees, Tang Tan (OpenAI's chief hardware officer) and Chang Liu (who joined OpenAI from Apple in January).An Apple spokesperson shared this statement with 9to5Mac:At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the b …Read the full story at The Verge.

General-purpose local models are what most people reach for, and that includes me. They handle everything that isn't code, which is basically the entire day if you're not a developer. All I need most of the time is just chat, quick research, working through an idea out loud, doc synthesis, and so on.

I once created a Video Overview with a style I thought looked nice in the picker. Heritage, with its bold colors and dramatic look. But the visuals kept pulling my eyes away from what the video was actually trying to teach me. NotebookLM’s Video Overview styles did more than just “decorate” my videos; they made me think about whether the style was really serving the video's purpose. And because Video Overviews have more than one style, I can choose the one that fits the person watching. The catch is that the style picker's little thumbnails don't tell you which one that is. I had to find out the more expensive way.

When I was getting to grips with Linux after using Windows for decades, I learned about immutable distros. They looked interesting at first, but the more I looked at them, the less I understood why people even bothered. The downsides looked massive, and the upsides seemed minimal at best.

I've owned my Asus ROG Ally X long enough to have cycled through its entire identity crisis. It shipped as a Windows 11 handheld, which mostly meant a desktop OS squinting at a 7-inch screen. Then I put SteamOS on it, and it ran so much better on the ROG Ally X that my Steam Deck started collecting dust, even if Valve's appliance philosophy treats you more like a customer than an administrator. But a few weeks ago, I wiped the whole thing and installed the Handheld Edition of CachyOS, the same performance-obsessed take on Arch Linux for normal people that already runs my desktop.

Nvidia's push for AI has pervaded every aspect of gaming. Over the years, I've seen the pitch change from it being an "acceptable trade-off" against performance uplift to the bold claim that DLSS now matches or beats native resolution and hands you a stack of free frames at it. It's always been the kind of claim that's easy to repeat and harder to verify, so I decided to stop taking it on faith.

Sony shook the gaming world when it recently announced that it wasn't planning to release physical copies of PlayStation games in 2028. With a full move to digital, game collectors are concerned that they'll no longer have a means to keep a game forever. In a digital-only world, all it would take is for Sony to ban the account or even revoke the licenses, and the games vanish into thin air.

On Thursday, the Instagram account for a lecture series in Newport Beach, CA posted a photo of what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Flock has received significant backlash over its technology and work with law enforcement agencies, and this letter kicked off yet another wave of criticism against the company for allegedly trying to shut down discussions of its work."WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED," the group, The Saturday Salon, wrote in the Instagram post, which has more than 3,000 likes. A separate post about the letter on Bluesky has more than 360 reposts. The text of the letter de …Read the full story at The Verge.

The Xtra Muse and the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Last year, we told you about Xtra, the company that lets DJI sneak its popular cameras into the US, and Skyrover, a brand seemingly selling DJI drones in disguise. They're just two of the many firms DJI is suspected of starting to skirt the United States' foreign drone ban.But it appears the FCC is finally doing something about "DJI front companies," as watcher Konrad Iturbe dubbed them last year. Today, the FCC is fining eight of them $25,000 each - and giving them until Monday, July 20th, just 10 calendar days, to answer the FCC's questions before the agency takes further action.Those companies include Cogito Tech, Fixaxo Technology, …Read the full story at The Verge.

Back in late 2020/early 2021, both Nvidia and AMD launched Resizable BAR (ReBAR), or Smart Access Memory (SAM), which was meant to give the GPU a boost in gaming performance. Although the feature had been part of the PCIe standard since the late 2000s, it had gone largely unused until the RX 6000 and RTX 30 series formally rolled it out. ReBAR doesn't exactly increase your GPU's raw performance, but optimizes VRAM usage and the CPU-GPU communication to ensure your gaming performance isn't held back. Still, five years after ReBAR became common on modern PCs, I still come across customer builds and friends' PCs where it's mysteriously disabled in the firmware. Gamers either don't know about it or aren't aware that it's disabled on their systems. Since the performance difference isn't drastic enough to alert you that something's off, it can go undetected for years. On Intel GPUs, ReBAR is basically non-negotiable, so you should confirm if it's enabled in your UEFI.