On July 1, it will be illegal for streaming platforms to play ads louder than the content being watched in California. As The Hollywood Reporter highlighted this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill (SB 576) in October 2025 that prohibits any video streaming service from transmitting the “audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany” in the state. The law brings some parity between…

According to Apple’s 2025 App Store Transparency Report, Russia is the runaway world leader in one category: Demanding that Apple remove apps from its App Store. In 2025, Russia asked that Apple remove 1,213 apps—many of these VPN apps designed to thwart the country’s draconian Internet censorship. (Vietnam was number two, requesting that 335 apps be blocked.) Russia is essentially trying to build a closed, spy-friendly, domestic version of the…

Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10 in 2025, but the company may have a harder time than expected putting the operating system out to pasture. After promising a year of optional extended update support, Microsoft has changed its policy, tacking on another year to its Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. If you are still clinging to Windows 10, you don’t have to do anything but enjoy that extra year….

In February 2024, Notion bought Skiff, an encrypted email and productivity software startup. Within a year, Notion shut down Skiff’s email service (taking @skiff.com email addresses with it). And in April 2025, the San Francisco-based company released Notion Mail, a Gmail client primarily built by people who joined Notion through the Skiff acquisition. Today, Notion announced that it’s shutting down Notion Mail, effectively killing what little remained of Skiff email….

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Codex and the models those tools utilize, and Broadcom, an established silicon supplier, have announced a new chip called Jalapeño, designed specifically for large language model inference in data centers. The chip is intended to be deployed at large data centers, both companies claim this is just the first generation in a long-term project that will see chips refined over time. Read full article…

International authorities and a raft of private technology companies say they have disrupted a cybercrime “assembly line” that allowed crooks to collect millions of login credentials and steal more than $47 million in ransom payments and by other fraudulent means. The crux of the operation was the simultaneous targeting of two unrelated tools that are widely used in various online scams. The first is Amadey, a malware-as-a-service platform for compromising…

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $50 million to subscribers of YouTube TV and DirecTV’s live TV streaming services to settle a lawsuit that claimed that Disney forced these services to raise their prices. In November 2022, four YouTube TV subscribers filed a class action complaint (PDF) against Disney in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. They accused Disney of entering “anticompetitive agreements with…

The White House is drastically shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that will withstand attacks that use quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth. The executive order, titled Securing the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, requires computing systems for “high-value assets” and “high-impact systems” to transition…

In a supposed “nationwide first” use of drones to disarm a person, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office in California promoted a video showing how a small quadcopter drone used a dangling magnet to remove a knife from the hand of a motionless suspect. The promotional video shared to Facebook and Instagram on June 22, 2026, uses the Mission: Impossible film franchise theme to dramatize video footage of the incident that…

The growing use of AI contributed to Oracle laying off 21,000 workers in a year, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Monday. In its annual regulatory filing for the fiscal year ending May 31, Oracle said it has 141,000 full-time employees. In its 2025 filing, Oracle said it had 162,000 employees. The reported 12.9 percent reduction followed March reports of mass layoffs at the database management software…