Veronika Slowikowska is the social media star turned comedian joining the latest cast of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Learn more about her here.
Veronika Slowikowska is the social media star turned comedian joining the latest cast of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Learn more about her here.
Europe’s second-highest court has dismissed a challenge against a data transfer pact between the European Union and the US. “On the date of adoption of the contested decision, the United States of America ensured an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the European Union to organisations in that country,” the EU’s General Court ruled (PDF).
The two sides brokered the Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework in 2023 to continue allowing US companies to store European users’ personal data on Stateside servers. The pact included a proviso that allows for Europeans to file complaints over what US companies do with their data.
French politician Philippe Latombe sued the European Commission (EC), the EU’s executive arm and the body that struck the deal with the US, claiming that “there were inadequate guarantees of respect for private and family life in the agreement because of the widespread and bulk collection of personal data,” according to Reuters. He also said that the Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), the body that was set up to handle complaints from Europeans, wasn’t an independent tribunal and didn’t necessarily offer the level of protection required under European law.
The General Court determined that the DPRC’s functioning and appointment of judges “are accompanied by several safeguards and conditions to ensure the independence of its members.” It stated that the judges can only be removed by the Attorney General and for cause, while the AG and intelligence agencies “may not hinder or improperly influence their work.”
The political landscape has shifted dramatically since the agreement was reached in 2023. The Trump administration has asserted control over independent government agencies and it’s been at loggerheads with the EU over issues such as regulating major US-based tech companies and international trade. Still, the General Court points out that the EC is required to keep an eye on the application of the legal framework.
“If the legal framework in force in the United States at the time of the adoption of the contested decision changes, the Commission may decide, if necessary, to suspend, amend or repeal the contested decision or to limit its scope,” the court said. The judges also dismissed Latombe’s claims regarding the bulk collection of personal data.
Latombe can still take the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union. Europe’s top court previously scrapped two previous data transfer deals between the EU and US — the Safe Harbor agreement and the Privacy Shield — following challenges by pro-privacy activist Max Schrems, who raised concerns about American intelligence agencies accessing the private data of European citizens.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/european-court-rules-in-favor-of-the-latest-us-and-eu-data-transfer-framework-150049576.html?src=rss
It’s shaping up to be a good week for people who like enormous party speakers. Hot on the heels of JBL’s PartyBox 720 comes Samsung’s latest Sound Tower. The two new models are the ST50F and the ST40F, both of which are designed to provide music for large gatherings, indoors or outdoors.
A redesigned acoustic structure houses dual dome tweeters equipped with Samsung’s Waveguide tech, which it says delivers a wider and more even soundstage. These are joined by a pair of woofers, the output of which you can adjust by choosing between Deep, Punchy and Gentle bass modes. You can even customize further by selecting one of four sound modes — Standard, Wide, Stadium and Outdoor — to get the best sonic balance for your environment. Presumably you opt for Stadium at your own risk.
The Sound Tower isn’t just about big sound. This is very much an audiovisual device, with the visual element provided by Samsung’s Party Lights+ system, which is exactly what it sounds like. It offers five mood presets and six “dynamic lighting patterns,” with the LEDs arranged in five different areas of the speaker’s exterior illuminating in sync with the rhythm of whatever music you’re playing. You can switch lighting modes using the updated Samsung Sound Tower app, and the speaker has built-in DJ Booth and Karaoke modes. You can even plug a guitar into it.
The Sound Tower ST50F has wheels and a telescopic handle for easy transportation, with a battery life of up to 18 hours. Its loudspeakers are slightly larger than those in the ST40F (6.5-inch vs 5.25-inch on the respective woofers), which has a handle but no wheels, and only lasts for 12 hours on a single charge. Both speakers are IPX4-rated for water resistance, which means they’ll be fine with a little splash, but don’t send them for a swim.
The new Samsung Tower is available to buy from this month, retailing at $700 for the ST50F and $500 for the ST40F.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/speakers/samsung-announces-a-pair-of-flashy-new-party-speakers-153027692.html?src=rss
Tommy Brennan is joining ‘Saturday Night Live’ for season 51 as a new cast member. Learn more about the rising star making his debut on the legendary sketch series.
Tommy Brennan is joining ‘Saturday Night Live’ for season 51 as a new cast member. Learn more about the rising star making his debut on the legendary sketch series.
Ben is now a cast member on ‘Saturday Night Live’ for its 51st season. Get to know the comedian and member of Please Don’t Destroy here.
Ben is now a cast member on ‘Saturday Night Live’ for its 51st season. Get to know the comedian and member of Please Don’t Destroy here.
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter can resume her work as a commissioner for the FTC, a federal appeals court has ruled. Slaughter, who was one of the two Democratic commissioners for the FTC that President Trump fired back in March, filed a lawsuit for her reinstatement. “Your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities,” a letter to the commissioners said. In July, US District Judge Loren AliKhan ruled that her removal from the agency was “unlawful and without legal effect,” and Slaughter was able to go back to work. A few days later, however, an appeals court paused the order for her reinstatement.
Now, the appeals court judges voted 2-to-1 in favor of restoring AliKhan’s order. Obama appointees Patricia Millett and Cornelia Pillard voted to reinstate Slaughter, while Trump appointee Neomi Rao dissented. Millett and Pillard wrote in their decision that the government “has no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent.” They explained that a Supreme Court precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor prevents presidents from removing FTC commissioners at will and without cause. Based on federal law, commissioners can only be removed due to “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
Rao, however, has dissented. By “ordering the remaining FTC commissioners and the subordinates to treat Slaughter as though she is still in office, the district court expressly orders them to disregard the President’s directive,” she said in a statement. It “directly interferes with the President’s supervision of the Executive Branch and therefore goes beyond the power of the federal courts.” The FTC typically has five commissioners: Three from the same party as the president and two from the opposition. After Trump fired the FTC’s Democratic commissioners, only the three Republican commissioners remained.
Slaughter is now listed again on FTC’s website as a commissioner. According to The New York Times, she’s planning to report back to work today, September 3. “Amid the efforts by the Trump administration to illegally abolish independent agencies, including the Federal Reserve, I’m heartened the court has recognized that he is not above the law,” Slaughter said in an interview. Her fellow Democratic commissioner who was fired back in March, Alvaro Bedoya, resigned from the agency completely and took on a private-sector job.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/appeals-court-reinstates-fired-democratic-ftc-commissioner-124549494.html?src=rss
Autumn is Apple season, and the tech company will once again host its annual unveiling of the season’s new smartphone generation. The fall event has been dubbed “Awe dropping,” and so we’re hoping for some surprising announcements that will earn the name. “Awe dropping” all begins on September 9 at 1PM ET/ 10 AM PT.
If you want to tune in to hear what Tim Cook and crew have to say about the iPhone 17, you can stream the whole show on Apple’s website or on its YouTube channel. We’ve also got the livestream embedded below so you can follow along with our liveblog while you watch.
With just a week to go until the “Awe dropping” event, it seems like we’ve already gotten a lot of advanced insights about what the new iPhone 17 lineup has in store. Apple introduced the software side of the equation with the iOS 26 unveil at WWDC this summer, and since then we’ve gotten some pretty reliable insights on the hardware.
The big reveal is expected to be an ultralight smartphone, potentially called the iPhone 17 Air. This would be Apple’s first application of its Air nomenclature for mobile, and when we had Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on the Engadget Podcast at the end of August, he suggested that the first iteration of the smartphone might come with some growing pains. We also anticipate seeing a base iPhone 17, an iPhone 17 Pro, and an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Beyond the smartphones, “Awe dropping” will likely showcase some refreshes for the Apple Watch and possibly for some new smart home tech. Tune in on September 9 to hear all the new product launches.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/how-to-watch-apples-awe-dropping-event-on-september-9-130040484.html?src=rss
Google is set to reveal more information about its “Gemini for Home” plans, including new Nest devices designed for the AI assistant, the company announced on X. “Gemini is coming to Google Home,” the teaser states, while showing what could be a new Nest camera. That follows the company’s Made By Google announcement last month revealing Gemini for Home and its capabilities.
Gemini for Home will replace Google Assistant and enable natural language commands plus easier-to use controls. For instance, you could ask it to come up with recipes based on ingredients in your fridge, provide information on general topics like buying a car and help you troubleshoot home appliance issues. It will be available both in free and subscription versions — much like Amazon is doing with Alexa and Alexa+.
Is that you, Gemini? Come in and make yourself at Home 🏠
Sign up for updates: https://t.co/V85WgPJvQN pic.twitter.com/JJaVRW385A
— Made by Google (@madebygoogle) September 2, 2025
Back at CES, Google said that Nest Aware subscribers who pay $10 per month would get early access to Gemini in Google Home, but it hasn’t confirmed that recently. In any case, the teaser implies we will likely see a new Nest camera (the image strongly resembles the company’s wired Nest security camera) and hopefully the unknown Nest speaker that caught everyone’s eye during Google’s recent live stream. If you’re interested, you can sign up for updates.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/google-will-reveal-more-gemini-smart-home-plans-and-devices-on-october-1-133601777.html?src=rss
John shifted his focus from ‘SNL’ to acting after leaving Please Don’t Destroy in September 2025. Learn more about the comedian here.
John shifted his focus from ‘SNL’ to acting after leaving Please Don’t Destroy in September 2025. Learn more about the comedian here.
reMarkable knows you’d like to use its e-paper tablet on the go, but the size of its current products don’t make that easy. To address this, it’s launching a smaller, pocket-sized version of its flagship slate for folks who can’t luxuriate at a desk or armchair to do their thinking. The reMarkable Paper Pro Move is a slate with a 7.3-inch display that’s the same size as a reporter’s notepad. It’s a device that Chief Product Officer Mats Herding Solberg says is perfect for getting “real work done while standing up and holding it in one hand.” Now, I’m on record saying that I love reMarkable’s products, and its ethos, but the bit about being able to do good work while standing up? That’s a harder sell.
reMarkable makes devices for serious, intentional work shorn of the myriad distractions inherent in modern computing. You can read, annotate and edit documents on its e-paper display, as well as write with either a stylus or a compatible keyboard. Its first device launched in 2016 and its second in 2020 with the third, the Paper Pro, arriving last year. The Paper Pro heralded a number of changes, including a bigger display (11.8-inch, up from 10.3-inch), a backlight, faster internals and, for the first time, the ability to reproduce color.
Nico Cormier, the company’s CTO, said the previous three models were really designed “for people who have a desk, people in a controlled environment.” The focus here was to build a reMarkable slate that could easily fit in a pocket or purse for work on the go. After a lot of prototyping, product manager Jon Dalvang said the team used the reporter’s notepad as the template for how the hardware should feel.
At first blush, the Paper Pro Move just looks like a slimmed down version of the Paper Pro from last year. If the company said it just threw some of its bigger tablets into a boil wash and they came out looking like this, you’d be tempted to believe them (I’m joking). But while they look and feel very similar, reMarkable made it clear that a lot of work had to go into reengineering the hardware and software to reach this smaller size.
The reMarkable Paper Pro Move measures 7.6 inches tall and 4.3 inches wide, with a 7.3-inch version of the same Canvas Color display found in its larger sibling. Inside, you’ll find a 1.7GHz dual-core Cortex A55 processor (compared to the Paper Pro’s 1.8GHz, quad-core Cortex A53 one). It has the same 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage as found on the bigger model, and while the battery has shrunk from 5,030mAh to 2,344mAh, the promise of two weeks of battery life remains the same. Similarly, you’ll find the same ridged edge banding (to evoke the feeling of a sheaf of paper) as on the Paper Pro. And the power button and USB-C ports are in the same place (bottom edge and top left corner, respectively), too.
Dalvang explained that the changes are far more subtle, and designed to improve the user experience. For instance, the back cover has the same “high-friction surface” as found on the company’s styluses to improve friction. reMarkable believes users should always use their device with a folio for protection. After all, no matter how hardy a device like this is, it might not do too well if it’s dropped onto a curb from chest height. Such are the perils of using any device on the go.
The smaller chassis and smaller display pushed the company to make a lot of changes to the software. The Paper Pro’s 11.8-inch screen is positively luxurious compared to what’s here and, in usual reMarkable fashion, the details have been sweated. For instance, you can now drag and drop the toolbar, letting you pick a position in both portrait and landscape modes. The company also focused on ensuring gesture navigation is more efficient since you’ll need to use it a lot more frequently here.
I’ve maintained that reMarkable’s products work fine with a stylus, but only really become truly useful when paired with a keyboard. After all, it’s at that point that you have a pure, distraction free writing machine that enables you to get focused work done. But with the Move, the only way to write and edit text is with the on-screen keyboard, and the company has already ruled out making a smaller version of the Type Folio. On one hand, it’s logical since a keyboard for a 7.3-inch tablet would be fairly small, and using the equivalent of a Nokia 9210 to get work done would be a pain. But I’d have preferred the ability to pair up any old Bluetooth keyboard if I needed to write something out and this was my device of choice. For the bigger models, I grudgingly accept the company omitting Bluetooth to help encourage sales of the type folio, but here, its absence is churlish.
Now, I often use old-school reporters notebooks, especially when I’m on the go at a big tech trade show. I like their small size, the big volume of paper at hand and the fact that they fit in the back pocket of my pants. The spiral binding makes it easy to flip pages and is a neat place to hold my pen, making it practical and effective, if not particularly good-looking. Since the Paper Pro has the same footprint as one, I could easily see this as a useful tool when I’m on the go.
The notebooks I use measure five by eight inches, giving me plenty of space to write. It’s here, however, that I started to see the issue with the Move, given its usable writing area is closer to 3.6 by 6.4 inches. That puts your writing area in the same territory as the not-quite-A6 you’d find if you used Field Notes or one of its many imitators. reMarkable knows this, and believes users will more likely hold the slate in landscape orientation. So you get a longer writing line, at the expense of having to scroll up more frequently — and you can move the toolbar around to ensure you’re as comfortable as you can be.
reMarkable believes landscape orientation is easier to write with, but it’s not as easy to hold with your non-dominant hand. It now has to carry the weight of both the slate and the pressure of your writing from the palm to the tips of your fingers.
It’s here, I think, that the whole pitch for the Paper Pro Move is slightly undermined by its goals. After all, you can use the full-size reMarkables when sitting down in pretty much any location you can imagine. I’ve read, written and annotated documents on train journeys and long haul flights on a fairly regular basis. But in trying to capture the feeling of writing while standing up or moving around, I’ve found that the experience is compromised. My handwriting is quick and efficient, but it’s barely legible to anyone else but me, and that’s a problem for OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
Take this snippet that I scribbled on the Paper Pro Move:
Naturally, reMarkable thinks its ability to convert written text to type will be more useful with the smaller slate. This is true, since its algorithms are quite effective at discerning what’s being written. But you will always be cursed with more than a few “Eat up Martha” moments.
“Naturally, ReMarble thinks its ability to count untten text type will be more betel with the small Slate. This is the, since its algorithms are Quite effete at discerning that’s being within. But, you will always be cased with me than a few “EAT Up MARTHA” Moment.”
As the above shows, your mileage is likely to vary depending on how many stickers you got from your teacher complimenting your handwriting.
But for people with more legible handwriting, the company is offering a new feature: Search. Behind the scenes, the system is indexing your scrawl, and so if you need to find a reference across all of your notebooks, you can type the word in search. So long as your text is clear enough to be indexed, you’ll be able to jump straight to where you need to go.
The arrival of the Move allows reMarkable to talk up its plans for reducing friction when using its devices. As much as you want a deliberate experience while using it, getting content to and from the Paper tablets can be arduous. Text documents need to be sent to the slate and when edited, may only be returned as an emailable PDF. It’s a fussy process, and one reMarkable knows needs to be improved.
Over the year, it’s been looking at building one-click methods to send files to platforms like Slack. But the company has also developed Quick Share, which will let you push a file online to share and collaborate with others. Press the button, and you’ll be given a QR code that will take you there in the browser and allow others to view at the same time.
In my limited time with the Paper Pro Move, I’ve found it to be a little more compelling to use than its bigger siblings. The smaller size means I’ve had it alongside my Bullet Journal for the whole of the week, helping me keep track of things. But I’ve discovered that I’d much rather sit down to use it rather than embracing its new-found portability. I suspect the biggest cause of this is my unique handwriting, and that better graphologists than I won’t have that issue.
The reMarkable Paper Pro Move is available to order today, priced at $449 with the standard Marker. As before, you’ll be able to upgrade to the Marker Plus, which has a built-in eraser tip on its other end, for an additional fee. The company has said users should be buying a folio to help protect their Move on the go, and there are six options to choose from, ranging from gray polymer weave to black leather. The former will set you back $69, while the latter is $139, although if bought at the same time as the slate, you’ll get a small discount. As usual, the Paper Pro and reMarkable 2 will remain available at their existing prices.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/tablets/remarkables-paper-pro-move-is-a-pocketable-version-of-its-e-paper-tablet-120011894.html?src=rss
