Bold design sacrifices legibility.

The worlds first no-tools-necessary ebike conversion kit is a great concept but still has some bugs to work out.

Meet the man on a crusade to uncover which high-end handbags and leather goods are worth your hard-earned cashby tearing them apart.

MacworldIt looks like the long wait for a new AirTag is almost over. After sparse and tentative rumors earlier this year that Apple was working on a 2nd-gen model, a new report indicates that the project has made firm progress and is on track for a launch in mid-2025.In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman writes that Apple has been running manufacturing tests on the device (codenamed B589) and that thanks to progress in these tests, Apple is getting ready to bring it to market. The likely release timeframe remains midway through 2025, which will be roughly four years after the launch of the original AirTag.In May we were told only that the AirTag 2 would feature a better chip with improved location tracking, but Gurman is now prepared to disclose a little more about what Apple has in store. Aside from better range and a bolstered onboard wireless chip the new device will, he claims, offer improved privacy, as Apple wrestles with one of the most controversial issues with the first product.Gurman doesnt mention a design changeor the addition of a much-needed keyring holeso expect the new AirTag to be virtually indistinguishable from the old one.To a minority of unethical customers, the AirTags attraction is that it can be used for stalking, and there have been numerous high-profile incidents where people have discovered strange AirTags in their cars or personal effects. The company addressed the issue with software updates to warn people who find themselves accompanied by an unknown AirTag, but this can to an extent be neutered by removing the devices speaker. So the speaker on the AirTag 2 will be harder to remove.The AirTag is a fascinating product with bags of potential and a troubling flaw, so we look forward to hearing more about the 2nd-gen version. I remain unconvinced that its possible to thwart stalking without also thwarting the devices function as an anti-theft measure, since the two situations are functionally identical, even if they are ethically different. But perhaps Apple will change my mind next yearespecially if theyve been reading my list of ways to improve the AirTag.

MacworldFor several years back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, there were persistent rumors that Apple was making its own TV set (mostly stemming from analyst Gene Munster). It made sense after allat the time, flat-screen TVs were attainable luxury items that fit well into Apples media-focused products, including the relatively new Apple TV streaming box.Obviously, those rumors never came to pass and as the years went by without a release, we assumed the project was dead. But a new report claims that might not be the case, According to Mark Gurmans latest Power On newsletter, the project still has a glimmer of life.Gurman doesnt say much, but in a section talking about a rumored wall-mounted smart home control center, he mentions that Apple is evaluating the possibility of a TV set as part of a new smart-home push. However, Gurman says the project depends on the wall tablets success, which will reportedly arrive next year. That device is Apples first real entry into the smart home and will reportedly control appliances, handle videoconferencing and use AI to navigate apps.Rather than running tvOS, Gurman implies that the TV set will be more like a larger version of the smart home tablet, with a camera for the ability to use FaceTime as well as other non-tvOS apps, including Safari, Notes, and Calendar. Additionally, it would show home security footage as well as control music, which the current Apple TV can do. It would presumably also have a a 4K panel, built-in spatial audio speakers, and the ability to either hang on a wall or sit on a stand.Still, it sounds like such a device is still many years away and very much not a priority for Apple CEO Tim Cook. However, if Apple were to design a TV set, were pretty sure there are several Jony Ive prototypes floating around Cupertino.

OpenAI launched its new AI-powered online search engine SearchGPT with the aim of supplanting for specific search tasks Google, Microsoft Bing and start-up Perplexity.But the move is also raising concerns that it could open the door to plagiarism; AI-powered search engines have been accused of intentionally or unintentionally plagiarizing web-based content because the platforms scrape material and data from all over the web in real-time.They can also generate content that closely mimics pre-existing content, according to Alon Yamin, CEO of AI-enabled plagiarism detection platform Copyleaks. Thats because the large language model engines behind generative AI (genAI) are trained using existing content.The trouble with unintentional plagiarism is that it creates a gray area thats challenging for both content creators and search engines to navigate, Yamin said.SearchGPT is a front-facing interface built atop OpenAIs genAI-based ChatGPT chatbot; it will enable real-time web access for up-to-date sports scores, stock information and news. The search engine will also allow follow-up questions in the same search window, and its answers will consider the full context of the previous chat to offer an applicable answer.The AI-based web crawler is also being touted for its ability to allow questions in a more natural, conversational way, according to OpenAI.OpenAI announced on Oct. 31 that it had launched the SearchGPT prototype after beta testing it since July. Currently, access to SearchGPT is limited, as a list of hopeful free users waits for access.An example of a search result from SearchGPT.OpenAIThe pilot version of the search engine will be available at chatgpt.com/search as well as being offered as adesktop and mobile app. All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will have access from here on. Enterprise and education users will get access in the next few weeks, OpenAI said, with a rollout to all free users over the coming months.One standout feature is the search engines ability to allow follow-up questions that build on the context of the original query.For example, a user could ask what the best tomato plants are for your region; that could be followed up by asking about the best time to plant them.SearchGPT is also designed to offer links to publishers of information by citing and linking to them in searches. Responses have clear, in-line, named attribution and links so users know where information is coming from and can quickly engage with even more results in a sidebar with source links, OpenAI said in its announcement.Search rivals beat OpenAI to the punchLast year, Google added its own AI-based capabilities to its search tool; so did Microsoft, which integrated OpenAIs GPT-4 into Bing. Big hitters like Google are already developing AI detection tools to help identify AI-generated content. But the challenge lies in distinguishing between high-quality AI-assisted content and low-quality, plagiarized material, Yamin said. Its undoubtedly an ongoing process that will require constant refinement of algorithms and policies.For its part, Perplexity said in an updated FAQ that its web crawler, PerplexityBot, will not index the full or partial text content of any site that disallows it using robots.txt code. Robots.txt files are common simple text files stored on a web server to instruct web crawlers about which pages or sections of a website they are allowed to crawl and index.PerplexityBot only crawls content in compliance with robots.txt, the FAQ explained. Perplexity also said it does not build foundation models, (also known as large language models), so your content will not be used for AI model pre-training.The bottom line, Yamin said, is that search engines are in a tricky position as genAI evolves. They want to provide the best results to users, which increasingly involves AI-generated or AI-enhanced content. At the same time, they need to protect original creators and maintain the integrity of search results. Were seeing efforts to strike this balance, but its a complex issue that will take time to fully address.ChatGPT (i.e., SearchGPT) is probably best positioned among all competitors to upset Googles dominance in online search, according to Damian Rollison, director of market insights at marketing software company SOCi. Of all the areas where ChatGPT competes with Google, search is where the latters 26-year advantage is the strongest.The early results of Bing search integrated into ChatGPT have been shaky, and the incredibly complex requirements of maintaining a world-class search platform tap into areas of expertise where OpenAI has yet to demonstrate its capabilities, Rollison said.Andy Thurai, a vice president analyst at Constellation Research, noted that Google still owns about 90% of the search engine market, meaning it wont to be easy for anyone to encroach on that dominance.An example of a follow-on question in SearchGPT that began with asking: \What are the best tomatos for my region?\OpenAIBut Thurai said SearchGPTs ease of use and conversational interface, which provides synthesized and more prose-like answers instead of traditional search results like Google, could attract more users in the future.While Google can provide a personalized search result based on location, and previous searches, it still has limitations in terms of offering concise and conversational-style answers that remain on point, according to Thurai. The concise nature of the answers, whether accurate or not, might be appealing to some users versus combing through many page search engines like those Google returns.Ironically, when ChatGPT was asked the question: Is SearchGPT as good as Google search? ChatGPTs reply was nuanced.Google is great for quickly finding specific, current resources and ChatGPT is better for having interactive conversations, asking detailed questions, or seeking explanations on a wide range of topics, SearchGPT responded. The two can actually complement each other depending on what you need!When asked whether its as good or better than Bing, ChatGPT replied: In short, if youre looking for real-time information or need to browse the web, Bing is likely better. If you need detailed, conversational, or creative assistance, ChatGPT tends to be more helpful. Each tool excels in different areas!The murky issue of plagiarismThurai said hes unsure whether AI-based search engines or answer engines will invite plagiarism on their own.They are not all that different from Google search, in which you get many answers instead of the most relevant answer that AI thinks is relevant to your question, he said. However, AI for content creation is a big concern for plagiarism. What is more concerning is that the current plagiarism tools dont catch AI-produced content correctly. They are mostly useless.There are, however, tools that can create digital watermark/credentials such as C2PA, which can provide some content provenance and/or authenticity mechanisms, Thurai noted.He also argued that text-based content production via AI-search engines is virtually impossible to catch. And people are getting unfairly penalized for plagiarism by using AI when in reality they didnt, he said.As AI tools become more sophisticated and part of our day-to-day lives, distinguishing between AI-generated and human-created content, properly attributing original sources or authors, and empowering overall originality becomes even more critical, Copyleaks Yamin said. This is precisely where the focus needs to remain providing robust content integrity solutions that are evolving alongside the demands of the AI landscape.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.The rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of socialYou may have read that it was a big week for Bluesky. If youre not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes short-form status updates. Last Wednesday, The Verge reported it had crossed 15 million users. Its just ticked over 19 million now, and is the number one app in Apples app store.Meanwhile, Threads, Metas answer to Twitter, reportedly signed up 15 million people in November alone. Both apps are surging in usage.Many of these new users were seemingly fleeing X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, in reaction to Elon Musks support of Donald Trump, and his moves to elevate right-leaning content on the platform. But theres a deeper trend at play here. Were seeing a long-term shift away from massive centralized social networks. Read the full story.Mat HonanThis story is from The Debrief, our newly-launched newsletter written by our editor-in-chief Mat Honan. Its his weekly take on the real stories behind the biggest news in techwith some links to stories we love and the occasional recommendation thrown in for good measure. Sign up to get it every Friday!Why the term women of childbearing age is problematicJessica HamzelouEvery journalist has favorite topics. Mine include the quest to delay or reverse human aging, and new technologies for reproductive health and fertility. So when I saw trailers for The Substance, a film centered on one middle-aged womans attempt to reexperience youth, I had to watch it.I wont spoil the movie for anyone who hasnt seen it yet (although I should warn that it is not for the squeamish). But a key premise of the film involves harmful attitudes toward female aging.Hey, did you know that a womans fertility starts to decrease by the age of 25? a powerful male character asks early in the film. At 50, it just stops, he later adds. He never explains what stops, exactly, but to the viewer the message is pretty clear: If youre a woman, your worth is tied to your fertility. Once your fertile window is over, so are you.The insidious idea that womens bodies are, above all else, vessels for growing children has plenty of negative consequences for us all. But it also sets back scientific research and health policy. Read Jesss story to learn how.This story is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Reviews weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Trump plans to loosen US rules for self-driving carsNo prizes for guessing who might be behind that idea. (Bloomberg$)+Elon Musk is ramping up his legal fight against OpenAI and Microsoft.(WSJ$)+Trump has appointed the FCCs Brendan Carr to lead the agency.(NPR)+Robotaxis are here. Its time to decide what to do about them. (MIT Technology Review)2 How Bluesky is handling its explosive growthIt has just 20 employees, and theyre working round the clock to deal with bugs, outages and moderation issues. (NYT$)+Just joined Bluesky? Heres how to use it.(The Verge)+How to fix the internet.(MIT Technology Review)3 Biden agreed to some small but significant AI limits with Xi JinpingI think we can all get behind the idea that nuclear weapons should be exclusively controlled by humans. (Politico)+Biden has lifted a ban on Ukraine using long-raise missiles to strike inside Russia.(BBC)4 Big Tech is trying to sink the US online child safety billAnd, as it stands, its lobbying efforts look very likely to succeed. (WSJ$)5 Amazon has launched a rival to Temu and SheinNothing on Haul costs more than $20. (BBC)+Welcome to the slop era of online shopping. (The Atlantic$)6 The Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on Netflix was plagued by glitchesDespite that, 60 million households still tuned in. (Deadline)7 AI models can work together faster in their own languageLinking different models together could help tackle thorny problems individual ones cant solve. (New Scientist$)8 Tech companies are training their AI on movie subtitlesA database called OpenSubtitles provides a rare glimpse into what goes into these systems. (The Atlantic$)9 McDonalds is trying to bring back NFTsRemember those? (Gizmodo)10 A lot of people are confusing Starlink satellites with UFOsGuess itll take us a while for us to get used to seeing them. (Ars Technica)Quote of the dayF*** you, Elon Musk.Brazils first lady, Janja Lula da Silva, makes her views clear during a speech calling for tougher social media regulation ahead of the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro,Reutersreports.The big storyAlina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a labCOURTESY PHOTOJune 2021Alina Chan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus then spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that no one had found any infected animal. She wondered why no one was admitting another possibility, which to her seemed very obvious: the outbreak might have been due to a lab accident.Chan is a postdoc in a gene therapy lab at the Broad Institute, a prestigious research institute affiliated with both Harvard and MIT. Throughout 2020, Chan relentlessly stoked scientific argument, and wasnt afraid to pit her brain against the best virologists in the world. Her persistence even helped change some researchers minds.Read the full story.Antonio RegaladoWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ WhyQuincy Joneswas the best of the best.+ Thesehandy appsare a great way to save articles to read later on (Pocket is my own personal favorite.)+ How to resurrect aghost riverin the Bronx.+ Look after yourstainless steel pans, and your stainless steel pans will look after you.

You may have read thatit was a big week for Bluesky.If youre not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes short-form status updates. It gained more than 2 million users this week. On Wednesday,The Vergereportedit had crossed 15 million users. By Thursday, it was at 16 million. By Friday?17 million and counting. It was thenumber one appin Apples app store.Meanwhile, Threads, Metas answer to Twitter, put up even bigger numbers. The companys Adam Mosserireported that 15 million peoplehad signed up in November alone. Both apps are surging in usage.Many of these new users were seemingly fleeing X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. On the day after the election, more than115,000 people deactivated their X accounts, according to Similarweb data. Thats a step far past not logging on. It means giving up your username and social graph. Its nuking your account versus just ignoring it.Much of that migration is likely a reaction to Elon Musks support of Donald Trump, and his moves to elevate right-leaning content on the platform. Since Musk took over, X has reinstated a lot of previously banned accounts, very many of which are on the far right. It also tweaked its algorithm to make sure Musks own posts, which are often pro-Trump, get an extra level of promotion and prominence,according toKate Conger and Ryan Macs new bookCharacter Limit.There are two points I want to make here. The first is that tech and politics are just entirely enmeshed at this point. Thats due to the extreme extent to which tech has captured culture and the economy. Everything is a tech story now, including and especially politics.The second point is about what I see as a more long-term shift away from centralization. Whats more interesting to me than people fleeing a service because they dont like its politics is the emergence of unique experiences and cultures across all three of these services, as well as other, smaller competitors.Last year,we put Twitter killers on our list of 10 breakthrough technologies. But the breakthrough technology wasnt the rise of one service or the decline of another. It was decentralization. At the time, I wrote:Decentralized, or federated, social media allows for communication across independently hosted servers or platforms, using networking protocols such as ActivityPub, AT Protocol, or Nostr. It offers more granular moderation, more security against the whims of a corporate master or government censor, and the opportunity to control your social graph. Its even possible to move from one server to another and follow the same people.In the long run, massive, centralized social networks will prove to be an aberration. We are going to use different networks for different things.For example, Bluesky is great for breaking news because it does not deprioritize links and defaults to a social graph that shows updates from the people you follow in chronological order. (It also has a Discover feed and you can set up others for algorithmic discoverymore on that in a momentbut the default is the classic Twitter-esque timeline.)Threads, which has a more algorithmically defined experience, is great for surfacing interesting conversations from the past few days. I routinely find interesting comments and posts from two or three days before I logged on. At the same time, this makes it pretty lousy at any kind of real time experienceseemingly intentionallyand essentially hides that standard timeline of updates from people you follow in favor of an algorithmically-generated for you feed.Im going to go out on a limb here and say that while these are quite different, neither is inherently better. They offer distinct takes on product direction. And that ability to offer different experiences is a good thing.I think this is one area where Bluesky has a real advantage. Bluesky lets people bend the experience to their own will. You arent locked into the default following and discover experiences. You canroll your own custom feed, and follow custom feeds created by other people. (And Threads isnow testing something similar.) That customization means my experience on Bluesky may look nothing like yours.This is possible because Bluesky is a service running on top of the AT Protocol, an open protocol thats accessible to anyone and everyone. The entire idea is that social networking is too important for any one company or person to control it. So it is set up to allow anyone to run their own network using that protocol. And thats going to lead to a wide range of outcomes.Take moderation, as an example. The moderation philosophy of the AT Protocol is essentially that everyone is entitled to speech but not to reach. That means it isnt banning content at the protocol level, but that individual services can set up their own rules.Bluesky hasits own community guidelines. But those guidelines would not necessarily apply to other services running on the protocol. Furthermore, individuals can also moderate what types of posts they want to see. It lets peopleset up and choose different levels of what they want to allow. That, combined with the ability to roll your own feeds, combined with the ability of different services to run on top of the same protocol, sets up a very fragmented future.And thats just Bluesky. Theres also Nostr, which leans toward the crypto and tech crowds, at least for now. And Mastodon, which tends to have clusters of communities on various servers. All of them are growing.The era of the centralized, canonical feed is coming to an end. Whats coming next is going to be more dispersed, more fractured, more specialized. It will take place across these decentralized services, and also WhatsApp channels, Discord servers, and other smaller slices of Big Social. Thats going to be challenging. It will cause entirely new problems. But its also an incredible opportunity for individuals to take more control of their own experiences.If someone forwarded you this edition of The Debrief, you cansubscribe here. I appreciate your feedback on this newsletter. Drop me a line atmat.honan@technologyreview.comwith any and all thoughts. And of course, I love tips.Now read the rest of The DebriefThe NewsTSMC halts advanced chip shipments for Chinese clients. It comes after some of its chips were found inside a Huawei AI processor.Google DeepMind has come up with a new way to peer inside AIs thought process.An AI lab out of Chicago is building tools to help creators prevent their work from being used in training data.Lina Khan may be on the way out, but shes going out with a bang: The FTC is preparing to investigate Microsofts cloud business.The ChatEvery week Ill talk to one of MIT Technology Reviews reporters or editors to find out more about what theyve been working on. For today, I spoke with Casey Crownhart, senior climate reporter, about her coverage of the COP29 UN climate conference.Mat: COP29 is happening right now in Azerbaijan, do you have a sense of the mood?Casey: The vibes are weird in Baku this week, in part because of the US election. The US has been a strong leader in international climate talks in recent years, and an incoming Trump administration will certainly mean a big change.And the main goal of these talksreaching a climate finance agreementis a little daunting. Developing countries need something like $1 trillion dollars annually to cope with climate change. Thats a huge jump from the current target, so there are questions about how this agreement will shake out.Mat: Azerbaijan seems like a weird choice to host. I read one account from the conference saying you could smell the oil in the air. Why there?Casey: Azerbaijans economy is super reliant on fossil fuels, which definitely makes it an ironic spot for international climate negotiations.Theres a whole complicated process of picking the COP host each yearfive regions rotate hosting, and the countries in that region have to all agree on a pick when its their turn. Russia apparently vetoed most of the other choices in the Eastern European group this year, and the region settled on Azerbaijan as one of the only viable options.Mat: You write that if Trump pulls out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, it would be like riding away on a rocket. Why would that be so much worse than dropping out of Paris?Casey: Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement once already, and it was relatively easy for Biden to rejoin when he came into office. If, during his second term, Trump were to go a step further and pull out of the UNFCCC, its not just an agreement hes walking away from, its the whole negotiating framework. So the statement would be much bigger.Theres also the question of reversibility. Its not clear if Trump can actually withdraw from the UNFCCC on his own, and its also not clear what it would take to rejoin it. When the US joined in the 90s, the Senate had to agree, so getting back in might not be as simple as a future president signing something.Mat: What from COP29 are you optimistic about?Casey: Tough to find a glimmer of hope in all this, but if there is one, Id say Im optimistic that well see some countries step up, including the UK and China. The UK announced a new emissions target at the talks already, and itll be really interesting to see what role China plays at COP29 and moving forward.The RecommendationOnce upon a time I was a gadget blogger. Its fun writing about gadgets! I miss it! Especially because at some point your phone became the only device you need. But! My beloved wife bought me a Whoop fitness tracker for my birthday. Its an always-on device that you wear around your wrist. Ive been Oura-curious for some time, but frankly I am a little bit terrified of rings. I spent a number of months going to a hand rehab clinic after a bike accident, and while I was there first learned about degloving and how commonly it happens to people because a ring gets caught on something. Just thought Id put that in your head too. Anyway! The whoop is a fabric bracelet with a little monitor on it. It tracks your movement, your heart rate, your sleep, and a lot more. Theres no screen, so its very low profile and unobtrusive. It is, however, pretty spendy: The device is free but the plan costs $239 annually.

Owners of Apple's newest Mac models running M4 chips aren't able to run older versions of macOS in a virtual machine, thanks to a mystery booting issue.MacBooks running older versions of macOSRunning a virtual machine with older generations of macOS can have its uses, ranging from security and development to simply being able to run software that won't work with newer macOS versions. However, there seems to be a problem when it comes to using a virtual machine in this way on an M4 chip.Detailed by the Eclectic Light Co. and pointed out by Csaba Fitzl, issues have been found when trying to run macOS versions released before macOS 13.4 Ventura in a virtual machine on an M4 Mac. On an M1, M2, or M3-generation Mac, there is no issue, as it only happens on the M4. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple iPhone supplier Foxconn has reportedly told its various recruitment partners to cease putting conditions about marital status and other issues in job ads for the company.One of several Foxconn manufacturing facilities in India image credit: FoxconnFoxconn was first accused of discrimination in June 2024. The company's chair, Young Liu, then tried evading questions about the issue, but India's government demanded answers.Now according to Reuters, Foxconn has capitulated and has ordered its recruitment agencies to cease discrimination. Foxconn had previously admitted to discrimination around 2022, but denied it was still happening. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums