Meta has rolled out Vibes, an endless feed of AI-generated videos within its Meta AI app and meta.ai website. Users can create short-form synthetic videos from scratch or remix existing AI content from the feed, adding music and adjusting styles before redistributing the artificial output to Instagram, Facebook Stories and Reels. The feed promises to become "more personalized over time" as it learns user preferences for machine-generated content. Meta positioned the feature as part of its broader AI video strategy, adding another stream of synthetic media to platforms already saturated with algorithmic content. The company says additional AI creation tools are coming.

OpenAI introduced Pulse, a new ChatGPT feature that generates five to ten personalized daily reports overnight for Pro users on its $200/month plan. The goal is to eventually expand beyond summaries to agent-like tasks. TechCrunch reports: Pulse offers users five to 10 briefs that can get them up to speed on their day and is aimed at encouraging users to check ChatGPT first thing in the morning -- much like they would check social media or a news app. "We're building AI that lets us take the level of support that only the wealthiest have been able to afford and make it available to everyone over time," said OpenAI's new CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, in a blog post. "And ChatGPT Pulse is the first step in that direction -- starting with Pro users today, but with the goal of rolling out this intelligence to all."

Starting Thursday, OpenAI will roll out Pulse for subscribers to its $200-a-month Pro plan, for whom it will appear as a new tab in the ChatGPT app. The company says it would like to launch Pulse to all ChatGPT users in the future, with Plus subscribers to get access soon, but it first needs to make the product more efficient. Pulse's reports can be roundups of news articles on a specific topic -- like updates on a specific sports team -- as well as more personalized briefs based on a user's context.

Microsoft is working on bringing support for setting a video as your desktop wallpaper on Windows 11. From a report: Hidden in the latest Windows 11 preview builds, the feature lets you set an MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, M4V, or MKV file as your wallpaper, which will play the video whenever you view the desktop.

For many years, users have wanted the ability to set a video as a desktop background. It's a feature that many Linux distributions support, and macOS also supports the ability to set a moving background as your lock screen. Windows Vista did support setting videos as your wallpaper, but only as part of the Ultimate SKU via a feature called DreamScene.

Many Apple Watches will soon be able to alert users about possible high blood pressure, reports Reuters — culminating six years of research and development: Apple used AI to sort through the data from 100,000 people enrolled in a heart and movement study it originally launched in 2019 to see whether it could find features in the signal data from the watch's main heart-related sensor that it could then match up with traditional blood pressure measurements, said Sumbul Ahmad Desai [Apple's vice president of health]. After multiple layers of machine learning, Apple came up with an algorithm that it then validated with a specific study of 2,000 participants.

Apple's privacy measures mean that "one of the ironies here is we don't get a lot of data" outside of the context of large-scale studies, Desai said. But data from those studies "gives us a sense of, scientifically, what are some other signals that are worth pulling the thread on ... those studies are incredibly powerful."

The feature, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, does not measure blood pressure directly, but notifies users that they may have high blood pressure and encourages them to use a cuff to measure it and talk to a doctor. Apple plans to roll out the feature to more than 150 countries, which Ami Bhatt, chief innovation officer of the American College of Cardiology, said could help people discover high blood pressure early and reduce related conditions such as heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease. Bhatt, who said her views are her own and do not represent those of the college, said Apple appears to have been careful to avoid false positives that might alarm users. But she said the iPhone maker should emphasize that the new feature is no substitute for traditional measurements and professional diagnosis.
The article notes that the feature will be available in Apple Watch Series 11 models that go on sale on Friday, as well as models back to the Apple Watch Series 9.

Google has added Gemini features to Chrome for all desktop users in the US browsing in English following a limited release to paying subscribers in May. The update introduces a Gemini button in the browser that launches a chatbot capable of answering questions about page content and synthesizing information from multiple tabs. Users can remove the Gemini sparkle icon from Chrome's interface.

Google will add its AI Mode search feature to Chrome's address bar before September ends. The feature will suggest prompts based on webpage content but won't replace standard search functionality. Chrome on Android already includes Gemini features. The company plans to add agentic capabilities in coming months that would allow Gemini to perform tasks like adding items to online shopping carts by controlling the browser cursor.

Microsoft is now prioritizing Anthropic's Claude 4 over OpenAI's GPT-5 in Visual Studio Code's auto model feature, signaling a quiet but clear shift in preference. The Verge reports: "Based on internal benchmarks, Claude Sonnet 4 is our recommended model for GitHub Copilot," said Julia Liuson, head of Microsoft's developer division, in an internal email in June. While that guidance was issued ahead of the GPT-5 release, I understand Microsoft's model guidance hasn't changed.

Microsoft is also making "significant investments" in training its own AI models. "We're also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster. So today, MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things," said Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in an employee-only town hall last week.

Microsoft is also reportedly planning to use Anthropic's AI models for some features in its Microsoft 365 apps soon. The Information reports that the Microsoft 365 Copilot will be "partly powered by Anthropic models," after Microsoft found that some of these models outperformed OpenAI in Excel and PowerPoint.

An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of dismissing the idea of putting a touchscreen on a MacBook, it seems Apple may have finally caved. Its MacBook Pro overhaul in 2026 is now expected to be the first-ever MacBook to feature a touchscreen display, according to a report from supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on X.

The change will reportedly affect Apple's next-generation MacBook Pro, which could feature an OLED display and "incorporate a touch panel using on-cell touch technology." The OLED MacBook Pro isn't expected to enter production until late 2026, and before then, Apple is expected to launch the M5 MacBook Pro in early 2026.

"There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone," notes Apple's security blog, pointing out that "The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware... historically associated with state actors and [using] exploit chains that cost millions of dollars..."

But they're doing something about it — this week announcing a new always-on memory-safety protection in the iPhone 17 lineup and iPhone Air (including the kernel and over 70 userland processes)... Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities, which are interchangeable, powerful, and exist throughout the industry... For Apple, improving memory safety is a broad effort that includes developing with safe languages and deploying mitigations at scale...

Our analysis found that, when employed as a real-time defensive measure, the original Arm Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) release exhibited weaknesses that were unacceptable to us, and we worked with Arm to address these shortcomings in the new Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) specification, released in 2022. More importantly, our analysis showed that while EMTE had great potential as specified, a rigorous implementation with deep hardware and operating system support could be a breakthrough that produces an extraordinary new security mechanism.... Ultimately, we determined that to deliver truly best-in-class memory safety, we would carry out a massive engineering effort spanning all of Apple — including updates to Apple silicon, our operating systems, and our software frameworks. This effort, together with our highly successful secure memory allocator work, would transform MTE from a helpful debugging tool into a groundbreaking new security feature.

Today we're introducing the culmination of this effort: Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), our comprehensive memory safety defense for Apple platforms. Memory Integrity Enforcement is built on the robust foundation provided by our secure memory allocators, coupled with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE) in synchronous mode, and supported by extensive Tag Confidentiality Enforcement policies. MIE is built right into Apple hardware and software in all models of iPhone 17 and iPhone Air and offers unparalleled, always-on memory safety protection for our key attack surfaces including the kernel, while maintaining the power and performance that users expect. In addition, we're making EMTE available to all Apple developers in Xcode as part of the new Enhanced Security feature that we released earlier this year during WWDC...

Based on our evaluations pitting Memory Integrity Enforcement against exceptionally sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks from the last three years, we believe MIE will make exploit chains significantly more expensive and difficult to develop and maintain, disrupt many of the most effective exploitation techniques from the last 25 years, and completely redefine the landscape of memory safety for Apple products. Because of how dramatically it reduces an attacker's ability to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities on our devices, we believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

They stole a woman's phone in Barcelona. Unfortunately, her husband was security consultant/penetration tester Martin Vigo, reports Spain's newspaper El Pais.

"His weeks-long investigation coincided with a massive two-year police operation between 2022 and 2024 in six countries where 17 people were arrested: Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru...." In Vigo's case, the phone was locked and the "Find my iPhone" feature was activated... Once stolen, the phones are likely wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent the GPS from tracking their movements. "Then they go to a safe house where they are gathered together and shipped on pallets outside of Spain, to Morocco or China." This international step is vital to prevent the phone from being blocked if the thieves try to use it again. Carriers in several European countries share lists of the IMEIs (unique numbers for each device) of stolen devices so they can't be used. But Morocco, for example, doesn't share these lists. There, the phone can be reconnected...

With hundreds or thousands of stored phones, another path begins: "They try to get the PIN," says Vigo. Why the PIN? Because with the PIN, you can change the Apple password and access the device's content. The gang had created a system to send thousands of text messages like the one Vigo received. To know who to target with the bait message, the police say, "the organization performed social profiling of the victims, since, in many cases, in addition to the phone, they also had the victim's personal belongings, such as their ID." This is how they obtained the phone numbers to send the malicious SMS...

Each victim received a unique link, and the server knew which victim clicked it... With the first click, the attackers would redirect the user to a website they believed was credible, such as Apple's real iCloud site... [T]he next day you receive another text message, and you click on it, more confidently. However, that link no longer redirects you to the real Apple website, but to a flawless copy created by the criminals: that's where they ask for your PIN, and without thinking, full of hope, you enter it... "The PIN is more powerful than your fingerprint or face. With it, you can delete the victim's biometric information and add your own to access banking apps that are validated this way," says Vigo. Apple Wallet asks you to re-authenticate, and then everything is accessible...

In the press release on the case, the police explained that the gang allegedly used a total of 5,300 fake websites and illegally unlocked around 1.3 million high-end devices, about 30,000 of them in Spain.
Vigo tells El Pais that if the PIN doesn't unlock the device, the criminal gang then sends it to China to be "dismantled and then sent back to Europe for resale. The devices are increasingly valuable because they have more advanced chips, better cameras, and more expensive materials."

To render the phone untraceable in China, "they change certain components and the IMEI. It requires a certain level of sophistication: opening the phone, changing the chip..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For millions of Spotify users, the "Wrapped" feature -- which crunches the numbers on their annual listening habits -- is a highlight of every year's end, ever since it debuted in 2015. NPR once broke down exactly why our brains find the feature so "irresistible," while Cosmopolitan last year declared that sharing Wrapped screenshots of top artists and songs had by now become "the ultimate status symbol" for tens of millions of music fans. It's no surprise then that, after a decade, some Spotify users who are especially eager to see Wrapped evolve are no longer willing to wait to see if Spotify will ever deliver the more creative streaming insights they crave.

With the help of AI, these users expect that their data can be more quickly analyzed to potentially uncover overlooked or never-considered patterns that could offer even more insights into what their listening habits say about them. Imagine, for example, accessing a music recap that encapsulates a user's full listening history -- not just their top songs and artists. With that unlocked, users could track emotional patterns, analyzing how their music tastes reflected their moods over time and perhaps helping them adjust their listening habits to better cope with stress or major life events. And for users particularly intrigued by their own data, there's even the potential to use AI to cross data streams from different platforms and perhaps understand even more about how their music choices impact their lives and tastes more broadly.

Likely just as appealing as gleaning deeper personal insights, though, users could also potentially build AI tools to compare listening habits with their friends. That could lead to nearly endless fun for the most invested music fans, where AI could be tapped to assess all kinds of random data points, like whose breakup playlists are more intense or who really spends the most time listening to a shared favorite artist. In pursuit of supporting developers offering novel insights like these, more than 18,000 Spotify users have joined "Unwrapped," a collective launched in February that allows them to pool and monetize their data.

Voting as a group through the decentralized data platform Vana -- which Wired profiled earlier this year -- these users can elect to sell their dataset to developers who are building AI tools offering fresh ways for users to analyze streaming data in ways that Spotify likely couldn't or wouldn't. In June, the group made its first sale, with 99.5 percent of members voting yes. Vana co-founder Anna Kazlauskas told Ars that the collective -- at the time about 10,000 members strong -- sold a "small portion" of its data (users' artist preferences) for $55,000 to Solo AI. While each Spotify user only earned about $5 in cryptocurrency tokens -- which Kazlauskas suggested was not "ideal," wishing the users had earned about "a hundred times" more -- she said the deal was "meaningful" in showing Spotify users that their data "is actually worth something." Spotify responded to the collective by citing both trademark and policy violations. The company sent a letter to Unwrapped developers, warning that the project's name may infringe on Spotify's Wrapped branding, and that Unwrapped breaches developer terms. Specifically, Spotify objects to Unwrapped's use of platform data for AI/ML training and facilitating user data sales.

"Spotify honors our users' privacy rights, including the right of portability," Spotify's spokesperson said. "All of our users can receive a copy of their personal data to use as they see fit. That said, UnwrappedData.org is in violation of our Developer Terms which prohibit the collection, aggregation, and sale of Spotify user data to third parties."

Unwrapped says it plans to defend users' right to "access, control, and benefit from their own data," while providing reassurances that it will "respect Spotify's position as a global music leader."

"President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act may have quietly changed the economics of the creator economy," reports the Hollywood Reporter. The Treasury Department has ruled this past week that digital creators, including podcasters, influencers, and streamers, qualify for the U.S. "no tax on tips" policy, allowing them to deduct tipped income up to $25,000. From the report: The change could cause digital creators to rethink how they seek income. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Twitch and Snapchat all offer a variety of ways for creators to generate income, be it a share of advertising revenue or creator funding programs, or options to launch subscription tiers for their channels or profiles. But they also give creators the option to turn on tips or gifts. If revenue from user tips or gifts is eligible, while recurring subscription revenue is not, it could shift how streamers, podcasters or influencers ask their followers to support them.

To be sure, there are limitations: The tax deduction is capped at $25,000 per year, and it begins to phase out at $150,000 in income for single filers and $300,000 for married joint filers. The act also provides that tips do not qualify for the deduction if they are received "in the course of certain specified trades or businesses -- including the fields of health, performing arts, and athletics," Treasury says, further limiting the deduction opportunity for some in entertainment-adjacent lines of work.

But by making influencers, Twitch streamers and podcasters eligible, the administration has nonetheless changed the incentive structure for digital creators, and the ramifications could be felt across the creator economy in the name of tax efficiency (Don't be surprised if users are asked to like, subscribe, and tip). Platforms may also develop more ways to more prominently feature tips and gifts, pushing creators to add more opportunities for that income. But the inclusion of digital creators is also a recognition of how the power dynamics have shifted in media.

Apple's Live Translation feature for AirPods won't reach European Union users when it launches next week. The restriction applies to users physically located in the EU who also have EU-registered Apple Accounts. Apple hasn't specified reasons for the limitation, though the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act and GDPR impose requirements on speech processing and translation services.

The feature enables real-time translation between English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish on AirPods Pro 2, AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation, and the newly announced AirPods Pro 3. Translation requires iOS 26 on iPhone 15 Pro or newer models.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Within the nightly builds of the Firefox web browser is finally the ability to support playback of Matroska "MKV" content. Enabled just within the Firefox Nightly builds for now or opting in within the media.mkv.enabled preference is the ability to support MKV playback.

Initially just AVC/H.264 and AAC within MKV containers are supported but other codec support will be expanded over time. For the past eight years there has been this feature request for supporting Matroska/MKV playback support.

Apple's new Watch lineup introduces blood pressure monitoring, sleep scoring, and upgraded hardware across the Series 11 ($399), Ultra 3 ($799), and SE 3 ($249). Ars Technica reports: The Apple Watch 11 is supposed to be able to alert users about "possible hypertension" by using data from an optical heart rate sensor "to analyze how a user's blood vessels respond to the beats of the heart," per its announcement. According to Apple's presentation, the smartwatch will look for chronic hypertension over 30-day periods. Apple's presentation noted that the Watch Series 11 won't be able to identify all hypertension, but the company said that it expects to notify over 1 million people with undiagnosed hypertension during the feature's first year of availability. The feature is based on machine-learning and training data built from multiple studies examining over 100,000 people combined, Apple noted. Apple said it expects the blood pressure monitoring feature to receive Food and Drug Administration clearance soon and to get approval in 150 regions this month.

The new watch will use a 5G modem and also introduce a feature that provides wearers with a "sleep score" that's based on the duration of their sleep, the consistency of their bedtime, how often they awaken from their sleep, and how much time they spend in each sleep stage. The Watch will analyze those factors every night and then provide a breakdown of how each score is calculated. The feature is based on an algorithm tested with 5 million nights of sleep data, Apple said. Other updates include the use of INX glass with ceramic coating that's supposed to make the Watch Series 11 two times more scratch-resistant than its predecessor. The Apple Watch Ultra 3 also debuted with hypertension notifications and sleep scoring, but comes equipped with a brighter edge-viewable OLED display, stronger radios with 5G and satellite support, and a larger 42-hour battery. It starts at $799.

Meanwhile, the budget-friendly SE 3 adds the new S10 chip with always-on display, faster charging, and expanded health tracking -- including sleep scores, apnea alerts, and temperature monitoring. It starts at $249.

Apple has unveiled the AirPods Pro 3 with heart-rate sensing, improved noise cancellation, a more compact case, and upcoming live translation features powered by Apple Intelligence. They'll be available for preorder today at a price of $249. TechCrunch reports: One of the standout features of the AirPods Pro 3 is its heart-rate sensing capability, a first for the AirPods line. This addition will operate similarly to the Powerbeats Pro 2, using LED sensors to provide precise measurements. The collected data will sync with Apple's Fitness app. The active noise cancellation, which reduces external noise, has been significantly improved. Apple says it removes twice the noise compared to Pro 2.

A noteworthy upcoming feature is a live translation capability, thanks to Apple's iOS 26 software update. This lets you have conversations in different languages, using your iPhone to translate while the phone plays one language and the AirPods handle the other. Other notable updates include smaller, more comfortable earbuds. Apple now offers foam ear tips in five different sizes, and the company claims it's "the best-fitting AirPods."

Apple has unveiled its iPhone 17 lineup, introducing three distinct models targeting different market segments. The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max feature an aluminum unibody design incorporating a vapor chamber for thermal management, enabling the A19 Pro chip to deliver 40% better sustained performance than its predecessor. Both Pro models include three 48MP cameras offering 8x optical zoom -- the longest in an iPhone -- and an 18MP Center Stage front camera.

The standard iPhone 17 gains ProMotion display technology previously exclusive to Pro models, along with dual 48MP rear cameras and the Center Stage system. Apple introduced iPhone Air as the thinnest iPhone at 5.6mm, built on a titanium frame housing the A19 Pro, N1 wireless, and C1X cellular chips. All models feature Ceramic Shield 2 protection offering three times better scratch resistance than previous generations. The iPhone 17 starts at $799 with 256GB storage, iPhone Air at $999, iPhone 17 Pro at $1,099, and Pro Max at $1,199.

Signal has begun rolling out end-to-end encrypted cloud backups in its latest Android beta release. The opt-in feature allows users to restore message history if their phone is lost or damaged. Free backups include all text messages and 45 days of media attachments. A $1.99 monthly subscription extends media storage to 100GB.

Users generate a 64-character recovery key on their device that Signal's servers never access. Backups refresh daily, excluding view-once messages and those set to disappear within 24 hours. The nonprofit cited storage costs as the reason for its first paid tier. iOS and Desktop support will follow the Android rollout. Signal said it stores backup archives without linking them to specific user accounts or payment information.

The blog OMG Ubuntu notes that Microsoft Copilot chatbot support has been added in the latest Firefox Nightly builds. "Firefox's sidebar already offers access to popular chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Le Chat's Mistral and Google's Gemini. It previously offered HuggingChat too." As the testing bed for features Mozilla wants to add to stable builds (though not all make it — eh, rounded bottom window corners?), this is something you can expect to find in a future stable update... Copilot in Firefox offers the same features as other chatbots: text prompts, upload files or images, generate images, support for entering voice prompts (for those who fancy their voice patterns being analysed and trained on). And like those other chatbots, there are usage limits, privacy policies, and (for some) account creation needed. In testing, Copilot would only generate half a summary for a webpage, telling me it was too long to produce without me signing in/up for an account.

On a related note, Mozilla has updated stable builds to let third-party chatbots summarise web pages when browsing (in-app callout alerts users to the 'new' feature). Users yet to enable chatbots are subtly nudged to do so each time they right-click on web page. [Between "Take Screenshot" and "View Page Source" there's a menu option for "Ask an AI Chatbot."] Despite making noise about its own (sluggish, but getting faster) on-device AI features that are privacy-orientated, Mozilla is bullish on the need for external chatbots.
The article suggests Firefox wants to keep up with Edge and Chrome (which can "infuse first-party AI features directly.") But it adds that Firefox's nightly build is also testing some non-AI features, like new task and timer widgets on Firefox's New Tab page. And "In Firefox Labs, there are is an option to enable JPEG XL support, a super-optimised version of JPEG that is gaining traction (despite Google's intransigence).

Other Firefox news:

• There's good news "for users still clinging to Windows 7," writes the Register. Support for Firefox Extended Support Release 115 "is being extended until March 2026."

• Google "can keep paying companies like Mozilla to make Google the default search engine, as long as these deals aren't exclusive anymore," reports the blog It's FOSS News. (The judge wrote that "Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial — in some cases, crippling — downstream harms to distribution partners..." according to CNBC — especially since the non-profit Mozilla Foundation gets most of its annual revenue from its Google's search deal.)

• Don't forget you can now search your tabs, bookmarks and browsing history right from the address bar with keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, and @history. (And @actions pulls up a list of actions like "Open private window" or "Restart Firefox").

"A raft of articles have been retracted from publications including Business Insider and Wired in recent month," reports the Washington Post, "with links between them suggesting a possible broader scheme to pass off fake stories that these outlets now suspect were written using artificial intelligence." A Washington Post probe into the retractions found a connection between Onyeka Nwelue, the purported author of one of 38 essays removed this week by Business Insider, and someone using the name Margaux Blanchard, two of whose stories were previously removed by the same outlet. In recent months SFGate, Index on Censorship and Wired also retracted articles under the Blanchard byline, after it was identified as bogus by the British publication Press Gazette...

Business Insider Editor in Chief Jamie Heller explained to staff Tuesday in an email, obtained by The Post, that the report of a phony writer spurred a fuller investigation that turned up dozens of suspicious articles under various bylines. "We recently learned that a freelance contributor misrepresented their identity in two first-person essays written for Business Insider. As soon as this came to light, we took down the essays and began an investigation," Heller said. "As part of this process, we've removed additional first-person essays from the site due to concerns about the authors' identity or veracity. No news articles or videos were found to have this issue." On Tuesday Business Insider removed 38 pieces that had been published under bylines other than Blanchard. Business Insider deleted the author pages of 19 individuals, including Blanchard and Nwelue, and replaced their essays with editor's notes.

The website's investigation involved reviewing "tens of thousands of records," Business Insider spokesperson Ari Isaacman D'Angelo said in a statement to The Post. But it hadn't determined whether artificial intelligence was used to produce the yanked essays, she said, noting that AI-detection tools are often unreliable... Essays under [Nate] Giovanni's byline feature contradictory information. One piece, published in December 2024, refers to the author having two teenage daughters and a two-and-a-half-year-old son. Another, published three months later mentions two sons, aged eight and nine. Pieces that ran in May and July — about house-sitting around the world and applying to PhD programs — make no mention of a family at all...

On Aug. 21, Wired wrote a longer mea culpa about the article it published under Blanchard's name, with the headline "How WIRED Got Rolled by an AI Freelancer." "If anyone should be able to catch an AI scammer, it's WIRED," the publication wrote. ["In fact we do, all the time. Our editors receive transparently AI-generated pitches on a regular basis, and we reject them accordingly..."] "Unfortunately, one got through," referring to a story that ran under Blanchard's byline in May about two people who were married in the video game Minecraft.
The site Index on Censorship also published an article under the Blanchard byline about threats to journalists in Guatemala. "In the age of very intelligent AI it's clear we will have to look at things differently," the site's editor told the Washington Post.

The Post's article notes that one sign the pitches were AI-generated "is that while they sounded interesting, they featured details that were erroneous — including fictitious locales." Reached for a comment, one of the authors told the Post "Don't mention my name in your stupid article," claiming their acocunt was recently "compromised" (though their X.com account had also recently tweeted one of their articles.) But another author emailed the Post from their actual academic email address, saying they had no connection to the Gmail account The Post had been corresponding with. And here's how the person at that Gmail account responded to a follow-up query from the Post.

"What is one to do? With a few savvy prompts, AI could probably generate a 'long-lost' novel by Proust."

Philips Hue is rolling out MotionAware, a new feature that turns its smart bulbs into motion sensors using radio-frequency (RF) Zigbee signals. The upgrade works with most Hue bulbs made since 2014, but requires the new $99 Bridge Pro hub to enable. The Verge reports: To create a MotionAware motion-sensing zone, you need Hue's new Bridge Pro and at least three Hue devices in a room. It works with all new and most existing mains-powered Hue products via a firmware update. That includes smart bulbs, light strips, and fixtures. Portable devices, such as the Hue Go or Table Lamp, and battery-powered accessories, such as Hue switches, aren't compatible. Neither is Hue's current smart plug. [...] "All of the functionality you get with our physical motion sensors -- including turning on when motion is detected or off when there's been no movement for a certain amount of time -- can be configured on motion-aware motion events," says George Yianni, Hue CTO and founder, in an interview with The Verge. "We've done something that's quite a lot better than what else is out there."

MotionAware is occupancy sensing, not presence sensing; it requires movement. Yianni says it's comparable to the passive infrared sensing (PIR) Hue's physical sensors use. This means it can be triggered by pets or other motion. A sensitivity slider in the app helps fine-tune detection. According to Yianni, a key benefit over PIR is that a MotionAware zone can cover a larger area than a single PIR sensor, and it's also not limited to line of sight. MotionAware can't sense light levels, which Hue Motion Sensors can, but you can pair a light sensor to a motion zone to feed it that data. The positioning of the lights will also play a role in determining the effectiveness of the motion sensing. "We recommend that the lights surround an area which will roughly define the detection area in which motion will be detected," says Yianni. "It will sense around the lights and in the broader room thanks to reflections, but detection reliability will depend on lots of factors."

Beyond lighting automation, MotionAware can also integrate with Hue Secure, Hue's DIY security platform that includes cameras, contact sensors, and a new video doorbell. Motion detection can trigger lights to flash red, activate Hue's new plug-in chime/siren, and send an alert to your phone with a button to call emergency services. [...] MotionAware is built on RF sensing -- a technology that uses wireless signals to "see" a space and detect disruptions within it. The data is then sent to the Bridge Pro, where AI algorithms are applied to figure out what is causing those disruptions, so the system can act accordingly. This is why it's limited to the Bridge Pro, the V2 bridge isn't powerful enough to run those algorithms, says Yianni.