The acting head of the General Services Administration says it has no DOGE team. It merely lists at least a half-dozen DOGE affiliates on payroll and has a section of its building for DOGE use only.

Macworld For years, the Apple was infamous for offering users little control over their iPhone experience, especially compared to Android phones. Through recent OS updates, Apple addressed common user concerns by unleashing the system, letting you customize its functionality and appearance. Many of these new options, however, are buried deep behind endless menus, and many users aren’t even aware they exist. If you’re running the latest iOS 18 version on your iPhone, you may want to look into these seven settings right away. 1. Turn off Apple Intelligence Apple Intelligence is one of the most contentious iOS 18 additions, partially because of all the negative press it attracted. The first-party AI suite has been rolling out gradually throughout the past months, and some of its core features, like the new more capable Siri, have been delayed indefinitely. If you’re not actively relying on Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, notification summaries, or its other perks, you may want to turn off Apple’s AI system altogether. This lets you reclaim around 6GB of local storage on your iPhone. Go to Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri. Turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle on this page and confirm your choice. Keep in mind that future OS updates may re-enable it automatically, so you may have to repeat this process whenever you update your iPhone. Bonus tip: In the Action Button settings, you can program said button to launch your favorite third-party AI chatbot app, such as ChatGPT, as a decent alternative. Foundry 2. Set up Camera Control With the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro models, Apple introduced an all-new Camera Control button. The hardware change aims to make the latest iPhones more appealing to mobile photographers. Thanks to its touch- and pressure-sensitive surface, the button lets users launch their preferred camera app, lock the exposure, control the zoom, pick a Photographic Style, shoot, etc. Though to make the button more efficient, there are some settings you may want to tweak. Launch Settings > Camera > Camera Control. On this page, you may want to pick the Single Click option and turn off the Require Screen On toggle. These changes make capturing fleeting moments easier, as they reduce the number of clicks needed to launch the assigned camera app. You can also choose which camera app the button launches by visiting the Camera section on the same page. Bonus tip: If you have a favorite Photographic Style, you can set it as the default that applies to all of your future shots in the Camera settings. 3. Adjust the Lock Screen Another relatively new iOS feature lets you change the included Lock Screen controls. If you’re unhappy with the Camera and Flashlight buttons, you can pick something else—or nothing at all. Tap and hold on the Lock Screen then tap Customize > Lock Screen. You can then tap on the default toggles to replace or remove them. Bonus tip: iOS 18 also enables you to fully customize the Control Center, so you can similarly add and delete toggles based on your personal needs. To find that, open the Control Center by swiping down down from the top right, then tap the plus (+) symbol in the top left. Foundry 4. Limit spammy Phone interruptions Don’t you just hate it when your iPhone rings, only to realize it’s a spam call from a random number? Fortunately, iOS can silence unknown callers to minimize distractions. Calls still come through and are sent to voicemail; your iPhone will simply not vibrate or make noise. Go to Settings > Apps > Phone > Silence Unknown Callers. Enable the individual Silence Unknown Callers toggle on this page. An “unknown caller” is a number that isn’t in your contacts, your outgoing call list, or your Siri Suggestions (from important Messages or emails for example). So if you are expecting a call from a number you haven’t contacted before (like a plumber or electrician), you may not hear it ring. Bonus tip: You can similarly filter texts from unknown senders by toggling the Filter Unknown Senders option in the Messages app’s settings. Foundry 5. Add a magic touch One of my favorite lesser-known iOS features is the back tap gesture. When enabled, you can tap twice or thrice on your iPhone’s back to execute a task of your choice, such as screenshotting, going to the Home Screen, etc. It also supports custom actions you create in the Shortcuts app, offering endless remapping possibilities. Head to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap. On this page, you get to pick the separate actions for the Double Tap and Triple Tap gestures using their respective menus. Bonus tip: You can get rid of the intrusive popup that appears every time you double- or triple-tap the iPhone’s back by turning off the Show Banner toggle in Back Tap settings. 6. Minimize motion sickness Many of us get motion sickness when using our smartphones in moving vehicles. Fortunately, you can reduce its effect by relying on a newly added iPhone feature. The tool works by displaying tiny dots on your screen that mimic the vehicle’s movements, tricking your brain into thinking the environment is fixed. Launch Settings > Accessibility > Motion > Show Vehicle Motion Cues. In this section, you can choose between On, Automatic, and Off. If you set the feature to work automatically, it’ll show the circles whenever your iPhone detects it’s in a moving vehicle. Bonus tip: You can add a dedicated Vehicle Motion Cues toggle to the Control Center to quickly jump between its different options without repeating the process above. 7. Mute the keyboard Sound pollution is very real, and as a responsible adult, you’d want to reduce the unnecessary noise you produce, particularly when in public. A prominent annoyance with the iPhone’s built-in keyboard is the sound it makes with every keystroke. Fortunately, you can effortlessly mute it once and for all. Go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback. Turn off the Sound toggle on this page. Bonus tip: In the same section, you can enable the Haptic toggle, which provides sensory feedback with every key click. This could elevate the digital typing experience—sans disturbing people around you. Foundry Make your iPhone truly yours The iPhone has long catered to tech newbies with its uncomplicated approach and by thinking on users’ behalf. While recent updates have enriched the system with deeper customizations and more advanced preferences, the default settings continue to get the job done reliably. By taking this route, Apple maintains the iPhone’s user-friendly reputation, while also offering tech enthusiasts the space to get creative with how their devices function and look. So, go ahead and make the needed tweaks to shape the iOS experience in a way that serves your unique everyday workflows.

Apple invests quite a bit of time, money, and effort into its environmental initiatives, but it's hard to see whether or not its efforts are making an impact.Eucalyptus trees | Image credit: ekaterinvor on PixabayThe saying goes, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." It's very possible to do a lot of harm while attempting to do a lot of good.In 2020, Apple announced "Apple 2030;" a highly ambitious goal of becoming 100% carbon neutral by 2030. While Apple has already been carbon neutral on the global corporate level, the company wants to become carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

LA Mayor Karen Bass has signed a pair of new executive orders clearing leftover hurdles in the way of an effective post-fire recovery for the Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles.  According to the language of a press announcement, the orders a) establish the plan check Self-Certification program for qualified architects; and b) allow city planning staff to augment their reviews using AI technology. In Bass's own words, "these initiatives will help reduce timelines and further streamline the rebuilding process to keep our recovery effort on track to be the fastest in modern California history." They follow an earlier order from January that touched on a number of rebuilding solutions while defining "Eligible Projects." Currently, just 23 rebuilding permits have been issued in the Palisades. 

Street Fighter 6 is set to add the fourth and final DLC character of its Year 2 pass in the form of Elena a little over a month from now, ahead of which Capcom is continuing to show off new gameplay footage for the character.  The capoeira expert, who was first introduced to the franchise with Street Fighter 3: New Generation, will bring “a herd of fluid moves,” as Capcom puts it. That is on full display in the newly released gameplay trailer, which showcases Elena in action against multiple other characters. Check out the gameplay trailer below.  Street Fighter 6 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PC, and launches for the Nintendo Switch 2 as a launch title on June 5. Elena will join the game’s roster on the same day, though depending on your time zone, she could become available late on June 4. 

The Ancient ‘Terror Crocodiles’ of North America Weren’t Alligators After All, DNA and Fossils Suggest A new study indicates the giant reptile Deinosuchus is not a close relative of modern alligators, as scientists previously thought, and it might have thrived by tolerating saltwater An artist's impression of the Late Cretaceous crocodilian Deinosuchus riograndensis and a much smaller, early alligator relative. Márton Szabó More than 75 million years ago, a giant reptile known as the “terror crocodile” roamed the waters of North America. Scientists long thought the monstrous Deinosuchus was a relative of modern alligators, despite its nickname. But now, a new study suggests the reptile sits far away from alligators on their family tree. The research team analyzed DNA and fossils from 128 living and extinct crocodilians—the group that includes crocodiles, alligators and caimans—to paint a picture of how these animals evolved. Their findings, which indicate Deinosuchus was saltwater-tolerant like the crocs of today, were published in the journal Communications Biology on Wednesday. The study also suggests super-sized species like Deinosuchus evolved more commonly than previously thought. The giant caiman Purussaurus of South America grew twice as long as a pickup truck, and the massive Sarcosuchus once prowled what’s now South America and Africa. “It almost looks like it’s the norm to have giant crocs at a given time,” says Márton Rabi, a paleontologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany and the study’s senior author, to Jake Buehler at Science. “Giant crocs are not something special.” But in Cretaceous North America, at least, Deinosuchus really stands out.even dinosaurs. They feasted on prey with their banana-sized teeth. “No one was safe in these wetlands when Deinosuchus was around,” says Rabi to Mindy Weisberger at CNN. “We are talking about an absolutely monstrous animal. Definitely around eight meters (26 feet) or more total body length.” A figure from the paper demonstrates a hypothesized dispersal route of a prehistoric Deinosuchus species across the Western Interior Seaway. Walter, Jules D. et al., Communications Biology, 2025 According to the study, the key to Deinosuchus’ status as apex predator could have been a tolerance to saltwater. During the Cretaceous, a shallow inland sea called the Western Interior Seaway split North America into two landmasses—and the giant reptile’s fossils have been found on both sides of it. This had long confounded reptile researchers. Modern alligators tend to tolerate only freshwater, so how did a supposed alligator ancestor cross the salty sea? The answer, as the paper argues, is that Deinosuchus isn’t an alligator at all. The reptile likely had salt glands that would have allowed it to travel across the waterway—something its alligator relatives couldn’t do—and evolve into the threat it became. The authors suggest this tolerance let Deinosuchus thrive in coastal habitats that hosted large prey, in turn growing to enormous proportions. “This ecological trait would have allowed lineages of crocodiles in the past to be more opportunistic in times when drastic environmental changes, such as sea-level rise, were causing extinctions in less tolerant species,” explains Evon Hekkala, a biologist at Fordham University who was not involved in the study, to CNN. The team reconstructed the crocodilian family tree and placed Deinosuchus on a lineage that split off before the last common ancestor of modern alligators and crocodiles. As a result, the “terror crocodile” shares traits with both groups. Its salt tolerance, the authors suggest, was lost in later alligators but maintained in crocodiles. “Given this new placement within the family tree, we now assume that their ancestors’ tolerance of saltwater has been preserved in the genus,” says lead author Jules D. Walter, a paleontologist at the University of Tübingen, in a statement. “Although Deinosuchus crocodiles did not live permanently in the sea, they could have crossed the Western Interior Seaway and spread out.” Study co-authors Tobias Massonne and Márton Rabi sit with two skulls of living crocodilians currently housed at the University of Tübingen. Friedhelm Albrecht / University of Tübingen Some researchers, however, aren’t fully on board with the team’s conclusions. “I disagree with species of Deinosuchus being saltwater tolerant,” Adam Cossette, a vertebrate paleobiologist at the New York Institute of Technology, tells National Geographic’s Riley Black. For instance, they might have preferred living in freshwater and ventured into salty seas only when necessary. Cossette adds to Science that he’s skeptical of the paper’s claim that Deinosuchus swam across the Western Interior Seaway, because each side of the water had its own species of the reptile. If they could easily cross the gap, he notes, the animals would have interbred. “Just because you cross [the sea] once, it doesn’t mean that you are a marine animal able to cross it indefinitely,” Rabi argues to Science, standing behind his findings. “It might have been just a single event.” Hekkala, on the other hand, tells CNN that this study “fits much better with our current understanding of ecological flexibility among the extinct and living crocodiles. … This new paper really reaches into both the evolutionary and ecological role of this amazing animal.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

MagicBlock, a real-time engine for decentralized games and applications on Solana, has raised a $7.5 million seed round. Lightspeed Faction led the round, with participation from Maven11, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Equilibrium, Pivot Global, and notable angels including Anatoly Yakovenko, Mert Mumtaz, and Tristan Yver. This investment fuels MagicBlock’s mission to power real-time, fully onchain games and applications built natively on Solana, ensuring that developers can build decentralized experiences with ultra-low latency and full composability – without the tradeoffs of an L2. Following a $3 million investment led by a16z CSX in September 2024, this latest raise further accelerates MagicBlock’s momentum as it blurs the boundaries between blockchain and traditional servers. While traditional appchains force developers to choose between fragmented liquidity and app-specific customizations, MagicBlock delivers ultra-low latency and elastic throughput while maintaining full access to Solana’s liquidity and composable ecosystem. With MagicBlock’s Ephemeral Rollups, developers can build natively on Solana and access app-specific extensions, or plugins, like real-time pricing feeds, custom sequencing, or institutional-grade permissioned environment. MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollup technology, pioneered by cofounders Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco, is a breakthrough in real-time blockchain execution, the company said. Unlike traditional L2s and rollups that require bridging, this innovation enhances Solana’s performance without sacrificing native composability. MagicBlock ensures that developers can harness high-speed infrastructure with seamless interoperability across DeFi, gaming, and high-performance dApps. As part of this growth phase, MagicBlock has partnered with Flash Trade, Supersize, Pyth, Jito, and dTelecom, leading projects in the Solana ecosystem that share its vision for fully onchain, high-performance applications. Flash Trade, a decentralized derivative exchange, leverages MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollups to execute real-time, gas-efficient trades with minimal latency. Supersize, a real-time multiplayer game built fully onchain for maximum composability and verifiability dTelecom, a decentralized real-time communication network running ephemeral rollup technology to deliver a low latency experience with ultra-cheap fees.Partners include Pyth Lazer, for a 1ms price stream running in Ephemeral Rollups; and Jito, a leader in Solana’s validator ecosystem, collaborates with MagicBlock to enhance security with restaking and reducing execution time. These partnerships reinforce MagicBlock’s commitment to providing the fastest, most scalable infrastructure for developers building high-frequency trading platforms, real-time gaming, and next-generation onchain applications. “Every application developer wants to build on the fastest chain with the deepest liquidity — that’s Solana. But they also want the customizability and real-time performance of a Web2 server. With MagicBlock, they don’t have to choose,” said MagicBlock cofounder Andrea Fortugno. With this funding, MagicBlock will expand its engineering team, scale its developer ecosystem, and continue optimizing its ephemeral rollup technology. As demand for real-time onchain applications grows, MagicBlock is positioning itself as the go-to execution layer for Web3 builders looking to harness Solana’s speed and composability.

A group of tabletop game makers and other American small businesses are filed a lawsuit on Thursday against President Donald Trump and his administration to attempt to stop his tariffs. The lawsuit alleges the tariffs are “unlawful and unconstitutional” and details how they are creating challenges for the plaintiffs’ businesses.The tabletop companies that are among the plaintiffs in the case include Stonemaier Games (which announced its involvement in the lawsuit earlier this week, as reported by Polygon), Spielcraft Games, Rookie Mage Games, XYZ Game Labs, and Tinkerhouse. The 145 percent tariffs imposed on goods imported from China are a significant part of the burden, as spelled out in examples in the lawsuit:Stonemaier Games, which has its products printed at a factory in China, has imports that are “ready to ship on which it estimates it will pay millions in tariffs pursuant to the actions challenged herein.”Spielcraft Games has paid $4,335.40 in tariffs for “a board game set” that it imported from China this month.Rookie Mage Games has paid $3,120.80 in tariffs for “products imported from China” this month and will have to pay tariffs on “all future imports.”XYZ Game Labs estimates that it will have to pay “substantial tariffs” on goods manufactured in China that it plans to import later this year and on “all future imports.”Tinkerhouse is producing a “tabletop roleplaying game accessory” in China that the company has made a down payment on. The company estimates it will have to pay “substantial tariffs” on when it imports the accessory later this year. It also expects that it has to pay tariffs on “all future imports.”Other plaintiffs in the case include Princess Awesome, a clothing company, Mischief Toy Store, a toy store based in Saint Paul, MN, and others. The lawsuit was filed on Thursday with the US Court of International Trade.The lawsuit from the small companies joins a growing list of parties fighting the tariffs in court. On Wednesday, 12 states sued the administration, with New York Attorney General Letitia James calling the tariffs “unlawful” in a statement. The CEO of Learning Resources, a toy company that also filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over tariffs, told CBS MoneyWatch that “this path is catastrophic.”However, the future of the tariffs is also murky right now, with The Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that the Trump administration is thinking about reducing the tariffs on China See More: