Enlarge / Apple’s M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro. New Pro laptops and some desktops could be on tap for later this fall. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple’s newest iPhones and Apple Watches don’t come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn’t get a mention at the iPhone event. Apple…

Enlarge / Illustration of a person who refuses to check their iPhone’s messages until RCS is enabled on their MVNO carrier, out of respect for their Android-toting friends and family. (credit: Getty Images) The future of inter-OS mobile messaging is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. With iOS 18, Apple has made it possible for non-Apple phones to message with iPhones through Rich Communication Services (RCS). This grants upgrades from standard…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries. Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the Android-based boxes by putting malicious components in their system storage area, where they can be updated with additional malware at any time by command-and-control…

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google) On Thursday, Google made Gemini Live, its voice-based AI chatbot feature, available for free to all Android users. The feature allows users to interact with Gemini through voice commands on their Android devices. That’s notable because competitor OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode feature of ChatGPT, which is similar to Gemini Live, has not yet fully shipped. Google unveiled Gemini Live during its Pixel…

Enlarge / Sorry about all the black space in the lower-right corner. Nerdfetch does not make good use of the space it’s given—unlike the Asahi install on this MacBook. (credit: Kevin Purdy) Almost nobody truly needed Neofetch, but the people who did use it? They really liked it. Neofetch, run from a terminal, displayed key system information alongside an ASCII-art image of the operating system or distribution running on that…

Enlarge (credit: Vlatko Gasparic via Getty Images) OpenAI finally unveiled its rumored “Strawberry” AI language model on Thursday, claiming significant improvements in what it calls “reasoning” and problem-solving capabilities over previous large language models (LLMs). Formally named “OpenAI o1,” the model family will initially launch in two forms, o1-preview and o1-mini, available today for ChatGPT Plus and certain API users. OpenAI claims that o1-preview outperforms its predecessor, GPT-4o, on multiple…

Enlarge / Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji. (credit: Emojipedia) The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998. Of those 5,185 characters, the…

Enlarge / Hard drives, unfortunately, tend to die not with a spectacular and sparkly bang, but with a head-is-stuck whimper. (credit: Getty Images) One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Microsoft has updated a key cryptographic library with two new encryption algorithms designed to withstand attacks from quantum computers. The updates were made last week to SymCrypt, a core cryptographic code library for handing cryptographic functions in Windows and Linux. The library, started in 2006, provides operations and algorithms developers can use to safely implement secure encryption, decryption, signing, verification, hashing, and key exchange in the…

Enlarge / It’s never explained what this collection of app icons quite represents. A disorganized app you tossed together by sideloading? A face that’s frowning because it’s rolling down a bar held up by app icons? It’s weird, but not quite evocative. (credit: linuxct/hydra) You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you’re using a custom version of Android that doesn’t include Google’s Play Store….