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This week we’re diving into the new 12-inch Surface Pro, which, alongside the 13-inch Surface Laptop, is a foray into smaller Surface hardware. You can thank Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus chips for that. In this episode, Devindra and Engadget’s Igor Bonifacic explore the compromises Microsoft had to make for these devices, and they dive into the rumors around Half Life 3 and the leaked photos of Microsoft and ASUS’s potential Xbox handheld. Also, Devindra chats with the head of Google’s X division, Astro Teller, about the past and future of the “moonshot factory.”

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Topics

Surface Pro 12-inch review: less weight, less power? – 2:04

ASUS’ Xbox handheld photos leak in FCC filing – 21:39

OpenAI restructures business, announces plan for hostile takeover-proof public benefit corp – 26:14

The EPA announces plans to shut down the Energy Star Program – 31:16

Telemessage, a Signal clone favored by Trump administration officials has been hacked – 34:44

Samsung subsidiary buys Masimo and now it owns all the fancy speakers – 36:35

Half-Life 3 is fully formed and playable?! – 40:59

Around Engadget – 49:53

Pop culture picks – 51:42

Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Igor Bonifacic
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/engadget-podcast-surface-pro-12-inch-and-a-chat-with-google-xs-astro-teller-113048410.html?src=rss 

The World Video Game Hall of Fame welcomed its 2025 inductees today. The Strong National Museum of Play announced that the newest entries are GoldenEye 007 from Rare, Quake by id Software, Defender from Williams Electronics and Tamagotchi by Bandai. The four games chosen “have significantly influenced popular culture and the video game industry,” the museum said in its press release. The other impactful games nominated for inclusion this year are Age of Empires, Angry Birds, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, Frogger, Golden Tee, Harvest Moon, Mattel Football and NBA 2K.

The selections may spark some serious nostalgia for those of us who grew up in the 90s. I remember being deeply envious of my classmates who had little Tamagotchi pets to care for, and I have fond memories of smack-talking my friends during late-night GoldenEye matches. Last year’s inductees also highlighted favorites from that era like Myst, Resident Evil and SimCity.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/goldeneye-007-and-quake-join-the-world-video-game-hall-of-fame-224818476.html?src=rss 

ChatGPT is bringing its Deep Research service directly into GitHub’s developer ecosystem. This integration is beginning a beta test this week, with ChatGPT Plus, Pro and Team users the first to receive access over the coming days. Members of the Enterprise and Edu plans will get a chance to try it out “soon.” Users can grant the AI assistant access to select code repositories and ask questions about their contents that ChatGPT will answer with cited reports.

Programmers have been a notable audience for AI assistants. A tool like ChatGPT can quickly review code and see where you’ve left a bracket unclosed or explain why a function isn’t working, so looping the chatbot directly into GitHub could streamline the process. Plus, Microsoft owns GitHub and the company has made extensive investments into OpenAI.

When OpenAI initially announced Deep Research, the analysis-focused application of the AI chatbot required a Pro plan to use. In February, the company opened it up to all paying users of ChatGPT.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpt-deep-research-can-now-connect-to-github-215909296.html?src=rss 

Threads will finally start giving users more visibility into when their accounts are penalized for breaking its rules. Meta is bringing its “Account Status” feature to Threads, which will enable people to see when the company has removed or demoted posts or handed out other penalties.

The change adds a layer of much-needed transparency to Threads, which already has a recommendation algorithm that can be hard for creators to understand. Earlier this year, Meta reversed course on whether it would recommend political content to Threads users after it tried to limit posts about elections and other “social” topics last year.

As on Instagram (and Facebook), Account Status allows Threads users to view “actions” Meta has taken against their account. It will indicate if a post has been removed, made less visible in other users’ feeds or deemed un-recommendable by Meta. It will also show if a user has been blocked from using certain features for breaking the platform’s rules.

If Meta has “actioned” your account for some reason, Account Status is also where you can request an appeal. The company says it will alert users once their report has been reviewed.

Account Status is starting to roll out now and is accessible from the “account” section in Threads’ settings menu.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/threads-will-start-telling-users-when-their-posts-are-demoted-204628224.html?src=rss 

CEO and founder of Celsius Network Alex Mashinsky has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by a US District Court. Celsius Network held about $25 billion in assets at its height, but was one of the many cryptocurrency operations to fail during 2022. Prosecutors were seeking two decades for Mashinsky, claiming he defrauded and misled customers about the status of his company’s CEL token.

“His crimes were not the product of negligence, naivete, or bad luck,” the attorneys said. “They were the result of deliberate, calculated decisions to lie, deceive, and steal in pursuit of personal fortune.”

After an initial not-guilty plea to seven criminal counts, the former cryptocurrency leader pled guilty to two of the fraud charges in December. As part of his plea deal, Mashinsky agreed not to appeal any sentence of 30 years or less.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/celsius-ceo-alex-mashinsky-sentenced-to-12-years-for-crypto-fraud-210415388.html?src=rss 

If you purchased an Apple device in the last 10 years, you might be able to receive some of the money from the company’s recently settled spying lawsuit. The original lawsuit claimed Apple was capturing sensitive information with its Siri voice assistant without users’ consent, and sending it to third-party contractors. The company agreed to settle the case for $95 million in January 2025, and thanks to the new landing page for the settlement, there’s now a way to file a claim on your own.

To file a claim, you you need to have bought an “iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, HomePod, iPod touch or Apple TV” between September 17, 2014 and December 31, 2024, and believe Siri accidentally activated on your device during a private conversation. From the $95 million Apple is paying out, you can receive up to $20 per device you believe called up Siri, provided you swear under oath it happened.

You have until July 2, 2025 to file your claim. If you qualify for the settlement, you may have already been notified with information on your Claim Identification Number and Claim Confirmation Code. If you haven’t received either but believe the settlement applies, you’re free to submit a claim on your own.

Apple claims that Siri was designed with protecting users’ privacy in mind, and agreeing to share data to improve the voice assistant — through your device’s Privacy & Security settings — never uses audio recordings or transcripts for anything other than training. In the case of newer devices, voice data is processed locally anyway, so agreeing to share your data is supposed to be the only way Apple could ever access it.

Given the growing focus on AI, and the large amounts of data needed to train it, there’s good reason to be skeptical about where companies are getting their training material. Apple prefers to get its customers consent, but the company has turned to new sources to help its AI research along. For example, Apple recently disclosed that it will start using the images captured for its Street View-esque feature in Apple Maps to train its models.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/you-can-now-claim-your-piece-of-apples-95-million-siri-privacy-settlement-213020351.html?src=rss 

Instagram’s Threads app began testing advertisements for its users at the start of this year, and the social platform is already ramping up its monetization efforts. Meta announced at IAB NewFronts that it will start testing video ads on Threads. The company didn’t get specific about the size or scale of this preliminary test, but said that a “small number” of advertisers will trial 19:9 or 1:1 video ad creatives placed between typical posts in users’ feeds.

At the NewFronts event, where social media companies can pitch themselves to advertisers, Meta also said that it is trying out a new ad option centered around Instagram Reels. It is developing Reels trending ads that will be shown next to some of the service’s most popular videos.

Basically, Meta is following the same trajectory with its Instagram networks that it did with Facebook: making it less and less enjoyable to actually socialize with your connections.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-will-test-video-ads-on-threads-192213050.html?src=rss 

The Wikimedia Foundation, hosts of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, is challenging an aspect of the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (OSA). The law aims to protect users from harmful online content by imposing restrictions and fines on large internet platforms such as social media companies. While the law was originally passed in 2023, enforcement and categorization of companies subject to the law are only taking shape now.

The law sorts online platforms into categories that are then met with varying levels of restrictions and enforcement. Wikimedia is specifically challenging the “categorisation regulations” under the law, arguing that Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, is using a flawed and vague system of metrics to judge what category a platform falls into.

Under the current definition, metrics like number of UK users and the ability to forward or share content make it more likely that Wikipedia would be considered a higher-risk “Category 1” platform. This would put Wikipedia in the same bucket as Facebook, X, YouTube and other enormous social platforms. 

The Wikimedia Foundation’s lead counsel Phil Bradley-Schmieg shared in a blog post that the foundation had been working with UK regulators for years in an attempt to clarify the rules in a manner the foundation felt would be more fair.

Platforms that are recognized as Category 1 are held to more stringent requirements governing how quickly they remove harmful content, ensuring proper age verification, preventing cyberbullying and more. The Wikimedia Foundation is arguing that Wikipedia should not be lumped into Category 1, as it is a nonprofit, ad-free and mostly volunteer-operated service.

In another blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation lays out its concerns, saying that these restrictions “would be a substantial challenge to our resources to meet the strict reporting and compliance obligations,” and that the fines threatened by Category 1 classification could lead to “disempowering users who wish to keep their identity private.”

The foundation made clear that they ultimately support regulations that could improve online safety. “Given that the OSA intends to make the UK a safer place to be online,”Bradley-Schmieg wrote “it is particularly unfortunate that we must now defend the privacy and safety of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors from flawed legislation.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/wikipedias-owner-challenges-categorization-rules-under-uks-online-safety-act-175128560.html?src=rss