It’s been 16 months since a DMA ruling allowed iOS developers like Google and Mozilla to use their own browser engines in the EU, so…  where are they? According to the Open Web Advocacy (OWA) — a nonprofit group of software engineers that advocates for the open web — Apple continues to place technical and financial restrictions on WebKit-alternative iOS browser engines that effectively stifle competition.OWA says these barriers include insufficient testing tools outside of the US, hostile legal terms, and forcing browser developers to create entirely new apps to ship their own engines, causing developers to lose their existing European user base. Instead of allowing Google, for example, to simply update its existing Chrome browser with a Blink engine, Apple’s rules require a brand new app for the EU audience, resetting the user count to zero. Developers would then have to maintain two separate browser implementations.Mozilla told The Verge last year that it was disappointed by Apple’s restrictions, describing them as “a burden” on independent browser providers. “Apple’s proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari,” said Mozilla spokesperson Damiano DeMonte. “This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS.”Apple added support for non-WebKit browsers in iOS 17.4 to appease DMA rules that aim to prevent tech giants from disadvantaging third-party browser engines, but the OWA alleges that Apple’s restrictions mean it is “not in effective compliance with the DMA.”“Ensuring other browsers are not able to compete fairly is critical to Apple’s best and easiest revenue stream,” the OWA says. The group notes that Safari brings in $20 billion per year in search engine revenue from Google, accounting for 14-16 percent of Apple’s annual operating profit, and that it’s set to lose $200 million per year for every 1 percent of browser market share that Safari loses.Outside of the EU, Apple is also facing pressure from UK regulators to allow developers to use alternative browser engines in iOS, following an investigation that found both Apple and Google were “holding back” mobile browser innovation.

NFL coaches will start using Sony’s new headset during the 2025 season. | Image: Sony Sony is finally debuting the headset that it developed specifically for NFL coaches, after teasing it almost a year ago as part of a new partnership with the NFL. The headset features technology and engineering borrowed from Sony’s popular consumer-focused wireless headphones, such as the WH-1000XM6.That includes the same noise-canceling technology that Sony uses in its 1000X headphone series, although it’s been optimized for use on the sidelines. Sony tested the headset using real crowd noises at 100 decibels to fine-tune its active noise cancellation for use in NFL stadiums. The headset will be available in two configurations featuring either one or two ear cups.It features a new oversized microphone that helps keep the coach’s voice clear while concealing their lip movements so that other teams can’t easily see what play they’re calling. (They usually hide their mouths anyway.) Sony designed the new headsets to handle most of the weather teams face during the season, including extreme heat and cold conditions, as well as snow, sleet, and rain. They were drop tested to ensure they can endure the “physical demands of the sidelines”— cut to a scene of a coach tossing a headset to the ground after a bad play.All 32 teams in the NFL will use Sony’s new hardware. The headsets will be wirelessly connected through a belt pack using a Verizon private 5G network in each stadium to ensure secure communications. Sony was announced as an official technology partner of the NFL in July 2024. In addition to replacing Bose as the official headset provider for the league, the use of Sony’s Hawk-Eye tracking technology was also expanded this past season. The technology will be used to assist with important calls on plays.

A week after Elon Musk’s Grok dubbed itself “MechaHitler” and spewed antisemitic stereotypes, the US government has announced a new contract granting the chatbot’s creator, xAI, up to $200 million to modernize the Defense Department.xAI is one of several leading AI companies to receive the award, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. But the timing of the announcement is striking given Grok’s recent high-profile spiral, which drew congressional ire and public pushback. The use of technology, and especially AI, in the defense space has long been a controversial topic even within the tech industry, and Musk’s prior involvement in slashing federal government contracts through his work at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) still raises questions about potential conflicts — though his relationship with President Donald Trump has more recently soured, and Trump’s administration has claimed Musk would step back from any potential conflicts while at DOGE.The contract announcement from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) is light on details, but says the deals will help the DoD “develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.” Alongside the contract award, xAI announced “Grok for Government,” which it says will supply “frontier AI products” to the US. In addition to the DoD contract, xAI says other federal agencies will now be able to purchase its tools via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. The company plans to work on new products for government customers, like custom models focused on national security, applications for healthcare and science use cases, and models accessible in classified environments.Days after changes to Grok sent it off the rails (saying that if “calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally Hitler,’ then pass the mustache,” and referencing a “pattern-noticing meme” where “folks with surnames like ‘Steinberg’ (often Jewish) keep popping up in extreme leftist activism, especially the anti-white variety”), the company apologized for “the horrific behavior that many experienced.” It said the update responsible for Grok’s tirades was active for 16 hours but had been deprecated. Instructions given to the chatbot, like to not be “afraid to offend people who are politically correct,” had the “undesired” effect of leading it to “ignore its core values in certain circumstances in order to make the response engaging to the user” — even if that meant “producing responses containing unethical or controversial opinions.”

Sun Day will estimate how long you can safely stay in the sun based on the UV index and your skin type. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has released a new app that tracks your sun exposure and vitamin D levels. It’s his second app in a week, after last weekend’s encrypted peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat.Sun Day is available now for iOS via TestFlight, and the code for the project is available on GitHub. The app uses location-based data to display your local UV index and sunlight hours. You can detail your skin type and clothing level, then manually toggle when you’re in and out of the sun and the app will track your rough vitamin D levels for the day, along with how long you can be in direct sunlight without burning.Dorsey says he’s “learning” through his recent weekend coding projects, which he’s developing using the open-source AI coding tool Goose. It and similar vibe coding tools are one of the next key battlegrounds for tech’s AI giants — just last week a $3 billion deal for OpenAI to buy AI coding tool Windsurf fell through, as Google swooped in to hire Windsurf’s CEO and top talent onto its DeepMind team.

Some of the most beloved Star Wars games to ever be released are the Knights of the Old Republic games. These games for the original Xbox introduced fans to a new era of the Star Wars galaxy, many years before the conflict between the Empire and Rebellion that people watched in movie theaters. What made this time of Star Wars so interesting was how much it felt familiar to longtime fans, but it had more than enough new things to discover and follow that felt refreshing and interesting. Despite having a few critically acclaimed games that explored this era, including an MMO that is still played today, not many Star Wars games were set during this timeframe in a galaxy far, far away. It was always a time that felt largely ignored by most Star Wars video games that were developed across multiple platforms.

Pebblebee is turning its Clip tracker into a personal safety alarm for free. | Image: Pebblebee Pebblebee has announced a new personal safety feature for its Clip location tracker that’s compatible with both Apple’s Find My and Google’s Find Hub network. Alert is being introduced as a free update to the Pebblebee app today, and the company says it will work with current and future versions of the Clip without requiring a subscription fee. Pressing a button on the tracker will activate a loud siren and flashing light to alert anyone nearby that you’re in trouble, while also triggering the app to send a notification to an emergency contact.Activating the Alert feature requires you to rapidly press the Clip’s button several times, and it can be canceled by rapidly pressing the button again or using a single long press. When canceled manually, your Safety Circle contact will receive another message letting them know it was deliberately stopped. Unlike the sounds that the tracker emits when you’re trying to locate it, the 97-decibel siren has a more urgent tone so that it’s immediately obvious to those around you that there’s a problem, and the tracker’s siren and flashing light will continue for up to a minute.The new feature is comparable to the SOS Alert that was introduced by Pebblebee’s competitor, Tile, last September. Tile’s alert feature comes without the audio and visual alerts but will contact multiple people when activated, even if you’re not a paying subscriber, while having Life360’s team ready to dispatch emergency services to your location requires a Silver, Gold, or Platinum subscription that starts at $7.99 a monthThrough the Pebblebee app, you can set up a “Safety Circle” consisting of one trusted contact, who will receive an SMS message when the Alert feature has been activated. The emergency message includes a secure link to the location where the alert was triggered, which can be viewed in a browser so that your contacts don’t need to have the Pebblebee app installed. The company says it plans to expand the Safety Circle to multiple contacts “in the near future,” with continuous live location tracking being a feature on its “product roadmap.”To ensure you know how to use Alert ahead of time so you can reliably activate the feature during a real emergency, the Pebblebee app includes a test mode that allows you to practice rapidly pressing the button without alerting your Safety Circle contact.Update, July 14th: Clarified the details of Life360’s SOS Alert feature.

Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter. Warner Bros. Discovery’s new Harry Potter series for HBO and HBO Max will premiere in 2027, the company announced. Production has started on the show in the UK.The show is set to be a “faithful adaptation of the beloved Harry Potter books,” according to WBD, and the original Harry Potter movies will still be available on HBO Max. When the show was first announced in 2023, WBD said it would be a “decade-long series.”WBD also released an on-set picture of Dominic McLaughlin, who is playing Harry Potter, in his Hogwarts robes. Newcomers Alastair Stout and Arabella Stanton will play Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.The company announced some new cast members, too: Rory Wilmot will play Neville Longbottom, Amos Kitson will play Dudley Dursley, Louise Brealey will play Madam Rolanda Hooch, and Anton Lesser (who you might recognize as Lio Partagaz from Andor) will play Garrick Ollivander. WBD has trickled out other cast announcements over the past few months, including that John Lithgow will play Dumbledore.Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has been heavily criticized for hurtful comments toward the transgender community, is serving as an executive producer on the series.

This excerpt from Adam Aleksic's Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language has been abridged for online publication. The book is out on July 15th.The modern-­day incel is entirely an invention of the twenty-­first century. Before the internet, lonely men simply didn't have a way to gather and share ideas. That all began to change in 1997, when a Canadian student started a website called Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project to connect with others over her shared lack of sex. As the name implies, the site wasn't a place for just straight men; rather, it was used by people of any gender or sexual orientation.In subs …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm not much for productivity-focused software, but there's one utility that's redefined how I use my PC. It's called Espanso, and it's a text expander. Type in a trigger word (or series of characters), and Espanso will step in and swap it out with whatever you want. Replace ":poke" with "Pokémon," or save some time by replacing ":greeting" with a stock email template. That's the basic idea, but Espanso goes much further.

Canva users can now create, edit, and manage their designs by describing their requirements to Anthropic’s Claude AI. The connection is the latest of several integrations that allow Claude users to access third-party tools and services, including Figma, Notion, Stripe, and Prisma, without having to leave their conversation with the AI chatbot.Starting today, Claude users will be able to use natural language prompts to complete design tasks in their linked Canva account, such as creating presentations, resizing images, and automatically filling premade templates. The integration also enables users to search for keywords within Canva Docs, Presentations, and brand templates, and summarize them through the Claude AI interface. The feature requires both a paid Canva account (which starts at $15 per month) and a paid Claude account ($17 per month).Anthropic is utilizing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that Canva launched last month, which provides Claude with secure access to user Canva content. MCP, often referred to as the “USB-C port of AI” apps, is an open-source standard that enables developers to quickly connect their AI models with other apps and services. Companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, Figma, and Canva have embraced MCP to prepare their platforms for a future tech landscape that’s expected to be filled with AI agents.“Instead of uploading or manually transferring ideas, users can now generate, summarize, review, and publish Canva designs, all within a Claude chat,” Canva Ecosystem head Anwar Haneef said in a statement to The Verge. “MCP makes this possible with a simple toggle in settings, marking a powerful shift toward user-friendly, AI-first workflows that combine creativity and productivity in one.”Claude is the first AI assistant to support Canva design workflows through MCP, but the chatbot has other design platform offerings thanks to a similar partnership with Figma that was announced last month. A new Claude integrations directory is also launching on web and desktop today, which should give users an easy overview of all the tools and connected apps at their disposal.

Google’s head of Android has said that the company plans to combine its mobile operating system with ChromeOS, the software that currently runs across Google’s Chromebook laptops.Sameer Samat, president of Google’s Android ecosystem, told TechRadar that “we’re going to be combining Chrome OS and Android into a single platform.” Samat, who’s responsible for Android’s implementation across mobile, wearables, XR, TV, and auto, added that he’s “interested in how people are using their laptops these days,” suggesting he may be adding a new string to his bow.The comment is the closest thing yet to official confirmation of a change that’s been rumored for months. In November 2024 Android Authority reported that Google is “migrating ChromeOS over to Android,” with the aim of competing with the iPad. That process may have already begun, with Google itself announcing last June that ChromeOS will now be “developed on large portions of the Android stack.” Chromebooks can already run many Android apps.Meanwhile Android is getting a little closer to ChromeOS this year with new features including a desktop mode, resizable windows, and improved support for external displays. Google bringing its two operating systems under one roof makes a lot of sense on paper, allowing it to speed up feature development and work on improving functionality on tablets, where both its current OSes lag behind Apple’s iPadOS. Then again, that’s been true for a while — a merger of the two platforms was reported ten years ago in 2015, and The Verge wrote that it “makes perfect sense to bring them together” two years before that. This is a change that’s been a long time coming, but that means it might be a long time still.

I'm usually at my desk for hours a day and can't work without a dual-monitor setup as it significantly improves my efficiency. I use my 17-inch laptop as my primary display, and I pair it with either a 27-inch gaming monitor for daily use or a 15.4-inch portable monitor when I'm on the go and working in coffee shops.