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 streaming services and broadcast, cable, and satellite TV providers, which, under The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, can only play commercials at “the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” the FCC says.

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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 Internet. While the Russian government loves demanding app bans from Apple, it only wants bad, degenerate apps banned. It does not want good, strong Russian apps banned, such as VKontakte (a Russian version of Facebook) or the Max messaging app (state-mandated communications software so creepy that one exile publication described it with the insanely long headline, "You already know Russia’s Max messenger spies on users. You probably don’t know just how many surveillance tools it hides, including even a neural network for eavesdropping.")

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Recently, my father called me in a panic.

There were just a few minutes until Netflix would start streaming a live MMA event, and he couldn’t get into my account. For a while, he had accessed Netflix as an add-on member with his own profile through my household’s account. That day, however, he was logged out and couldn’t use my login credentials to watch Netflix. Instead, he saw a prompt asking him to “add an email address to your profile” to continue.

A Reddit user shared this image of the notification that affected profile owners are seeing. Credit: Scotti_Dev/Reddit/Netflix

After some frantic phone troubleshooting and a couple of password resets, we realized that my father had to create his own login to continue using the extra profile I paid for. Although I was able to get him set up in time (for some disappointing bouts), the situation was confusing and inconvenient.

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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.

The last regular updates rolled out to Windows 10 in October of last year, but the Internet can be a dangerous place for unpatched Windows machines. That was a problem for Microsoft, as Windows 11 usage had only barely surpassed Windows 10 when support ended. Microsoft's solution was to give everyone on the old OS a free year of extended updates.

That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change.

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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.

In an X post (first spotted by 9to5Mac) today, Notion said that it will shutter the Notion Mail “inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22.”

The post claimed that most Notion users don’t use email clients anyway and instead rely on AI agents to handle their electronic correspondence. It reads:

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A new chip architecture from IBM can integrate nearly 100 billion transistors on a chip the size of a human fingernail—nearly twice the transistor density of the company’s previous generation of chip technology. The resulting improvement in chip compute performance and energy efficiency comes from what IBM describes as the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology” for AI data centers.

“It's not just an incremental step, it's a meaningful leap forward,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, in an advance media briefing. He described the new chip technology as “pointing to a future where computing becomes significantly more powerful without a corresponding increase in energy.”

It’s worth unpacking what the “world’s first sub-1 nanometer chip technology” means, because it is impractical to build reliably functional chips with transistors and other features smaller than 1 nanometer due to various physical limitations. Instead, IBM is basically claiming that its new “nanostack” architecture can deliver the computing performance improvements that would be expected if a theoretical chip could be built with physical features smaller than 1 nanometer.

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Codex and the models those tools use, and Broadcom, an established silicon supplier, have announced a new chip, called Jalapeño, designed specifically for large language model inference in data centers.

The companies intend to deploy the chip at large data centers and claim this is just the first generation in a long-term project that will see chips refined over time.

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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 YouTube TV” and other companies that provide access to broadcast channels via the Internet.

The complaint argued that Disney forced over-the-top (OTT) live TV services to cost more by requiring distributors to include ESPN, which Disney owns, with their base packages.

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Well, the big Prime Day deals bonanza has finally arrived, and we aren't going with it. Well, we are - as James has noted in his big master guide, there is some mutual benefit for talking about deals and all for both you and us, but that's besides the point. None of the deals you're going to find here are Amazon deals - I've gone through the deluge of other retailers you could choose to spend your hard-earned cash at over the next couple of days, and rounded up what I think are some of the best reductions across our fair United Kingdom and the United States of Freedomland.

"Why should you trust me?", I hear you cry. Well, I've written thousands of deals articles for plenty of websites over the years, including this fair site and Eurogamer for many years, and have covered these ridiculous 'deals holidays' in all their glory for quite some time, so like to think I can pick the wheat from the chaff when it comes to what's good and what's not. Too many 'deals' these days are barely worth talking about, and folks have gotten wise to it with all of the price tracking and history tools we've got these days.

So, before I waffle on any further, here are the seven (because ten would have turned this into every other roundup) best anti Prime Day deals I've spotted across both the UK and USA, including a little bit of a writeup on why I think each product is worth your time and money.

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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 took place earlier in the month, which involved what the video describes as a “felony suspect armed with a knife and a firearm” who “was not responding to negotiators.” The sheriff’s office is just one among hundreds of US police departments and sheriff’s offices that have deployed camera-equipped drones to assist first responders.

In a Facebook post, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office described having surrounded the suspect’s residence with a SWAT team after the “known felon and parolee-at-large was seen earlier with a firearm.” A first drone deployed to the scene located the suspect hiding in a corner of the garage, but also spotted the motionless suspect holding a knife in one outstretched arm.

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Last year, we featured a lengthy interview with tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow about his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. The prolific Doctorow is back with a provocative new book that serves as a follow-up of sorts, focusing on AI and related issues: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.

Doctorow doesn't actually enjoy talking about AI, but he's constantly being asked to comment on it. "I made the tactical error of being sick of talking about AI," Doctorow told Ars. "So I wrote a book about why I think it's a dumb thing to keep asking people to talk about, and now I have to talk about it." Reverse Centaur is Doctorow's attempt to "sort out the bullshit from the material reality."

In automation theory, per Doctorow, a "centaur" describes a human augmented with a technology, like machine learning, or even just driving a car or using autocomplete. A reverse centaur "is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine," Doctorow said in a speech last December. He gave the example of an Amazon delivery driver, surrounded by AI cameras monitoring their driving, who essentially serves as a peripheral to the delivery van.

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Almost 20 years ago, Google pitched Android as the more open alternative to Apple's walled garden. Last year, Google announced it would begin erecting its own walls through developer verification. The company has issued an update on its plans, affirming that the verification system will begin rolling out in select countries later this year. We're also learning which app stores are participating in verification and the timeline for key features like the recently revealed "advanced flow" for bypassing verification.

Google has claimed that developer verification is a necessary change to smartphone software distribution, pointing to the increased prevalence of scams that trick Android users into installing malware apps. Google's solution requires verifying the identities of developers outside the Play Store just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. This has proven to be a contentious change for myriad reasons.

In the new blog post, Google's Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

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Good things take time, but not all things that take time are good. The jury is still out on the Google Home Speaker, but it certainly took a while to arrive. After announcing its new speaker last August, Google finally has a release date. The company's first new smart home speaker in years will launch on June 25, and you can preorder it today for $100.

The generically named Google Home Speaker is Google's first home audio device in almost six years. The last one was the Nest Audio, which debuted back in September 2020. The new device is small and round—an oblate spheroid, technically. It's covered in a partially recycled fabric available in four colors: hazel, porcelain, jade, and berry (jade and berry are limited to the US). Google says the device produces "360-degree sound" for a uniform listening experience anywhere in a room.

Google is into lighting effects again. Credit: Google

Previous Google speakers included Assistant-style illuminated lights, but the Google Home Speaker features a light ring around the bottom that glows when the device is listening, "thinking," or responding. This is becoming a trend with Google. The company will require a similar glowing lightbar embellishment on the upcoming Googlebook laptops. There are three far-field microphones distributed around the speaker that will pick up your speech, and there's a mute switch when you don't want it listening for the "OK Google" trigger.

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Android 17 has been in testing since early this year, with the final beta hitting devices just a couple of weeks ago. Insofar as a mature operating system like Android still has big days, this is one of them. The official Android 17 build is starting its rollout on Pixel phones, adding a small set of new features and laying the groundwork for the future. This release also coincides with a Pixel Drop and a new version of Wear OS (based on Android 17) on Pixel Watches.

Google no longer uses an unmodified version of Android on its phones—the Pixel build includes numerous features that are distinct from Android 17 itself. Other device makers will include versions of some of these features when they eventually update their phones, but for now, Google's Pixel phones are the only way to experience Android 17.

The multitasking Bubbles system in Android 17 expands on a similar (but underutilized) messaging feature. In Android 17 on Pixels, you can long-press on any app icon to open that app as a floating window. When minimized, these bubbles stay on top of other apps. On foldable phones, the bubbles dock into a "bubble bar" for easy multitasking.

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The next gadget to bear the storied Commodore branding will be a flip phone.

The name behind the bestselling desktop PC in history came back about a year ago. Christian “Peri Fractic” Simpson, best known for running the Retro Recipes (now known as Retro Recipes x Commodore) YouTube channel, acquired the Commodore Corporation and "100 percent of the original and official trademarks that defined the Commodore name since 1983,” per a July 2025 press release. Simpson said the price was “in the low seven figures.” Since the acquisition, the brand released the Commodore 64 Ultimate and the Commodore 64X PC, a mini PC housed in a chassis that resembles the Commodore 64.

Today, the new Commodore announced a new device in a dated design: a flip phone.

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Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22 billion, the firms announced today.

The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.

The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn't its hardware, which lost $19.1 million in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1 million, with the advertising business pulling in $371 million in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.

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The release of macOS 27 later this fall won't quite close the book on the Intel Mac. The last handful of models that could run macOS 26 Tahoe will be eligible for security and Safari updates for two more years, and elements of the Rosetta compatibility layer for running Intel code on Apple Silicon Macs will be with us in some form for some indeterminate amount of time after that.

But macOS 26 is definitely the last chapter of the Intel Mac story. Anything that happens after this is a coda or an epilogue.

Most of our WWDC coverage has been forward-looking, so indulge us if you will in a look backward at the full history of the Intel Mac, a partnership between two companies that made Macs dramatically better, until it started making them worse.

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At the 2026 World Cup, the refs on the field and the officials on the sidelines will be able to use an abundance of tech to help call penalties, spot offside violations, and make other consequential decisions.

The video assistant referee system, known as VAR, and the semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) have been used in soccer for years. But the setup at this summer's World Cup represents some of the most advanced uses of adjudication tech to date—not just in soccer, but across all high-level sports.

During each match, the pitch will be awash in sensors, cameras, and new computer vision software. One especially notable advancement this year is the use of digital twins. Every player in the World Cup has had their body scanned by a computer. The digital twin of any athlete—which precisely matches their height, limb length, and shoe size—can be dropped into a virtual simulation of the game to determine their exact position relative to the ball, boundary lines, and other players. Officials can use all of this data to help spot infractions, determine penalties, and smooth out the edges of the beautiful game.

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Smart weather-monitoring device vendor AcuRite has delayed plans to force users onto a new companion app. The transition from My AcuRite to AcuRite NOW, which AcuRite previously set for May 30, “has raised serious questions and concerns among many long-time users,” AcuRite’s VP of product development, Jeff Bovee, told Ars Technica.

AcuRite, whose devices include weather stations, rain gauges, and indoor thermometers, told customers that it would shut down My AcuRite at the end of May. Devices owners would have to use AcuRite NOW, an iOS and Android app launched in June 2025, to control their gadgets instead.

Some long-time users lamented being forced to new software when the current software worked fine, if not better, than the new app. When Ars first reported on AcuRite in May, AcuRite NOW lacked some features of My AcuRite, including the ability to rename multiple temperature sensors, report temperatures in non-integers, as well as an online dashboard option. Users have also highlighted problems uploading data to weather sites and a poor layout with wasted space.

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