TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with “Made in Vietnam” claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State’s Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of deceptively marketing its networking devices and alleging that its security practices and China-based affiliations allowed Chinese state-sponsored actors to access devices in the homes of American consumers.

It is understood that this is just the first of several lawsuits that the Office of the Attorney General intends to file this week against “China-aligned companies,” as part of a coordinated effort to hold China accountable under Texas law. The lawsuit claims that TP-Link is the dominant player in the US networking and smart home market, controlling 65 percent of the American market for network devices.

It also alleges that TP-Link represents to American consumers that the devices it markets and sells within the US are manufactured in Vietnam, and that consistent with this, the devices it sells in the American market carry a “Made in Vietnam” sticker.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to a New York Times report, Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The feature, called “Name Tag” within Meta, would allow users to identify people and get information about them through Meta’s AI. The feature could be rolling out as early as this year.

Adding the feature is not a done deal, however. According to an internal document cited by The Times, the company is weighing the “safety and privacy risks” of introducing facial recognition as well as discussing how to navigate the response to a no-doubt controversial feature.

A document quoted by The Times suggests Meta is deliberately timing a potential rollout to minimize scrutiny. “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the document from Meta’s Reality Labs reads.

Meta’s long history with facial recognition

This would not be the first time Meta dabbled in facial recognition. Meta debated adding facial recognition to the first generation of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2021, but decided against it due to privacy concerns. And Facebook, Meta’s social media platform, identified and tagged people as early as 2010, but the company pulled the feature in 2021, citing “many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society.”

Concerns also include the risk of doxxing. The ACLU characterized facial recognition used by law enforcement as a “systematic invasion of privacy,” though personal use of the technology raises different issues. Facial recognition glasses could enable instant doxxing, linking anyone’s face to publicly available information, including social media profiles, addresses, and phone numbers.

Meta says it isn’t planning to release a universal facial recognition tool. The company is considering glasses that identify only people a user knows based on their connection on a Meta platform, or only identify people who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram. “While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature—and some products already exist in the market—we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out,” Meta said in a statement.

The upside of smart glasses with facial recognition technology

Privacy concerns aside, the technology has genuinely beneficial applications, particularly to people with vision problems. According to The Times’ report, Meta originally planned to introduce Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind before releasing it to the public, highlighting a group that could potentially benefit from facial recognition technology, though that plan was scrapped for unknown reasons.

Mike Buckley, CEO of Be My Eyes, an accessibility technology company that works closely with Meta, said he has been in discussions with Meta about facial recognition glasses for more than a year. “It is so important and powerful for this group of humans,” Buckley told The Times.

Following our report last week that Verizon is forcing people to wait 35 days for phone unlocks after paying off device installment plans, Verizon is apparently trying to eliminate the inconvenient delay. But Verizon hasn’t confirmed the plan to Ars, and a statement to another news outlet did not provide any timeline for implementing the change.

As a refresher, the latest version of Verizon’s device unlocking policy for postpaid customers imposes a 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off the remaining balance of a device installment plan online, in the Verizon app, or with a Verizon gift card. There’s also a 35-day waiting period after paying off an installment plan over the phone or at a Verizon Authorized Retailer.

Saying restrictions are needed to counter fraud, Verizon will only unlock a phone immediately when someone pays off their device-plan balance at a Verizon corporate store or when someone pays off an installment plan on schedule via automatic payments. If you’re partway into one of Verizon’s 36-month device installment plans and pay off the remaining balance early, but without making a trip to a Verizon corporate store, you’d have to wait 35 days for an unlock that would allow you to switch the phone to a different carrier’s network.

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Google has announced that using its newly incorporated Lyria 3 model, Gemini users will be able to generate 30-second music tracks based on a prompt, or remix an existing track to their liking. The new model builds on Gemini’s pre-existing ability to generate text, images and video, and will also be available in YouTube’s “Dream Track” feature, where it can be used to generate detailed backing tracks for Shorts.

Like some other music generation tools, prompting Gemini doesn’t require a lot of detail to produce serviceable results. Google’s example prompt is “a comical R&B slow jam about a sock finding their match,” but after playing with Lyria 3, you can definitely get more granular about individual elements of a track — changing the tempo or the style of drumming, for example — if you want to. Outside of text, Gemini can also generate music based on a photo or video, and tracks can be paired with album art created by Google’s Nano Banana image model.

Google says that Lyria 3 improves on its previous audio generation models in its ability to create more “realistic and musically complex” tracks, give prompters more control over individual components of a song and automatically generate lyrics. Gemini’s outputs are limited to 30-second clips for now, but given how Google’s promotional video shows off the feature, it’s not hard to imagine those clips getting longer or the model getting incorporated into other apps, like Google Messages.

Like Gemini’s other AI-generated outputs, songs made with Lyria 3 are also watermarked with Google’s SynthID, so a Gemini clip can’t as easily be passed off as a human one. Google started rolling out its SynthID Detector for identifying AI-generated content at Google I/O 2025. The sample tracks Google included alongside its announcement are convincing, but you might not need the company’s tool to notice their machine-made qualities. The instrumental parts of Gemini’s clips often sound great, but the composition of the lyrics Lyria 3 produces sounds alternately corny and strange.

If you’re curious to try Lyria 3 for yourself, Google says you can prompt tracks in Gemini starting today, provided you’re 18 years or older and speak English, Spanish, German, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean or Portuguese.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/gemini-can-now-generate-a-30-second-approximation-of-what-real-music-sounds-like-204445903.html?src=rss

A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.

Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms to comparable US firms by sector, size, investment intensity and other characteristics, then used the AI adoption rates of those US counterparts as a proxy for exogenous AI exposure among European firms.

The productivity gains, however, skewed heavily toward medium and large companies. Among large firms, 45% had deployed AI, compared to just 24% of small firms. The study also found that complementary investments mattered enormously: an extra percentage point of spending on workforce training amplified AI’s productivity effect by 5.9%, and an extra point on software and data infrastructure added 2.4%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2026 is looking like a pretty good year for affordable electric vehicles. There’s a new Nissan Leaf that starts at a hair under $30,000 (as long as you ignore the destination charge). We’ll soon drive the reborn Chevrolet Bolt—with a new lithium iron phosphate battery, it also has a price tag starting with a two (again, ignoring the destination charge). And the closer you get to $40,000, the more your options expand: the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Chevy Equinox EV, Toyota bZ, Tesla Model 3, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Subaru Solterra all fall within that price bracket, and some of those are pretty good cars.

But what if you only want to spend a fraction of that? Well, you won’t be buying anything new, but then neither do three-quarters of American car buyers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A few weeks ago, we looked at what passes for the used EV bargain basement—ones that cost $5,000 or less. As long as you’re OK with limited range and slow charging, going electric on a shoestring is possible. But if you’re prepared to spend twice that, it turns out you’ve got plenty of options.

As before, we stress that you should have a reliable place to charge an EV if you’re going to buy one, which means at home at night or at work during the day. At this price range, you’re unlikely to find something that DC fast charges quickly, and relying on public AC charging sounds stressful. You’ll probably find a car with some battery degradation, but for the vast majority of models that use active battery cooling, this should be minimal; about 2 percent a year appears to be the average.

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Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio’s Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an “AI rewrite specialist” who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.

The reporters on these beats — covering Lorain, Lake, Geauga, and most recently Medina County — are assigned entirely to reporting, spending their time on in-person interviews and meeting sources for coffee. Editors review the AI-produced drafts and reporters get the final say before publication.

Quinn says the arrangement has effectively freed up an extra workday per week for each reporter. The newsroom adopted this model last year to expand local coverage into counties it could no longer staff with full teams, and Quinn described the setup in a February 14 letter after a college journalism student withdrew from a reporting role over the newsroom’s use of AI. Quinn blamed journalism schools for the student’s reaction, saying professors have repeatedly told students that AI is bad.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency was accused of abandoning its mission to protect public health after repealing an “endangerment finding” that has served as the basis for federal climate change regulations for 17 years.

The lawsuit came from more than a dozen environmental and health groups, including the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Clean Air Council, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The groups have asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the EPA decision, which also eliminated requirements controlling greenhouse gas emissions in new cars and trucks. Urging a return to the status quo, the groups argued that the Trump administration is anti-science and illegally moving to benefit the fossil fuel industry, despite a mountain of evidence demonstrating the deadly consequences of unchecked pollution and climate change-induced floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes.

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