Google rolled out a bunch of new features with Android 16 on Tuesday, but the company appears to be saving its big Material 3 Expressive redesign for a future update. The update doesn’t feature the design language’s revamped elements, and a source tells Android Authority’s Mishaal Rahman that Google is planning to launch the new look on September 3rd, 2025, instead.

With Android 16, Google is starting to roll out support for Live Updates with progress-centric notifications and enhanced settings for users with hearing aids. The updates are coming to Pixel devices first, but according to Google, Android users will have to wait for another update to see Live Updates “fully realized.”

Google officially took the wraps off Material 3 Expressive following a leak last month, which features updates to icon shapes, type styles, and color palettes with “more natural, springy animations” across the Android interface. You can still check out some Material 3 Expressive updates in the Android 16 QPR1 beta that’s available now, but Rahman notes that Google plans on launching more design updates in the next Android 16 QPR1 Beta 2.

Google is expected to include Android’s desktop mode in a September launch as well. The new mode, which builds on Samsung’s DeX platform, optimizes apps and content for large-screen devices. It will allow you to resize multiple app windows across your screens, as well as connect phones and tablets to external displays for a desktop-like experience. Users with a Pixel 8 and up can try out these features in the Android 16 beta, but the rest of us will likely have to wait a few more months.

Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune are coming to streaming for the first time. The two game shows will arrive on Hulu and Peacock in September, according to a report from The New York Times.

Under the multi-year deal, new episodes of Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune will appear on both streaming services one day after they air on linear TV. The agreement will include older episodes of each show, too.

For decades, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune have been staples on linear TV, and their expansion to Peacock and Hulu is part of a broader pattern that’s bringing key series, like WWE’s Monday Night Raw, to streaming.

As pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter, this streaming deal isn’t directly connected to the legal battle involving Sony — the producer of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! — and its distributor, CBS. 

Last year, Sony sued CBS over claims it breached their agreement by not doing enough to boost revenue from licensing the shows. A judge granted Sony the rights to distribute Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! in April, but an appellate court ruled last week that CBS can keep distributing the shows during the legal battle.

Google’s AI-powered notetaking app, NotebookLM, now lets you share your notebooks with classmates, coworkers, or students using a public link. Though viewers can’t edit what’s in your notebook, they can still use it to ask questions and interact with AI-generated content like audio overviews, briefings, and FAQs.

First launched as an experiment in 2023, NotebookLM has become a breakout hit for Google. The app is designed to help you understand material from a variety of sources, such as notes, documents, presentation slides, and even YouTube videos. It can provide AI-generated summaries of the content, generate AI podcast-style discussions, “chat” with you about the material, and more. Google launched a mobile NotebookLM app last month.

The steps to making your notebook available publicly are pretty similar to the way you share something in Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. You just select the Share button in the top-right corner of the notebook, and then change the access to “Anyone with a link.” From there, hit the “Copy link” button and then paste the notebook link into a text, email, or even on social media if you want more people to interact with the information.

Google also lets you share your notebooks with others by entering their email address. Unlike with public link-sharing, you can give individual users the ability to edit your notebook. You can share audio overviews from within the Gemini app as well.

T-Mobile is bringing its fiber internet service to more than 500,000 households throughout the US. In an update on Tuesday, T-Mobile revealed three new plans that offer customers symmetrical speeds of up to 2 Gigs.

In addition to a five-year price lock, the new plans come with a $5 autopay discount, but only if you pay with a debit card or bank account. Here’s a list of the plans, which will be available starting June 5th:

• Fiber 500 (500 Mbps): $80 / month ($75 with autopay)
• Fiber 1 Gig (1 Gbps): $95 / month ($90 with autopay)
• Fiber 2 Gig (2 Gbps): $110 / month ($105 with autopay)

T-Mobile’s big fiber expansion comes just months after it closed its joint venture deal with the fiber internet provider Lumos — a move the Federal Communications Commission only approved after the carrier made changes to its stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

T-Mobile’s fiber internet service was previously only available in a limited number of locations. But now it’s building out its network through its deal with Lumos and its pending acquisition of the fiber provider Metronet. T-Mobile says it expects to reach 12 to 15 million households or more by the end of 2030, allowing it to compete with rivals like AT&T and Verizon that have invested billions into fiber. Last month, the FCC approved Verizon’s $20 billion acquisition of Frontier after it “committed to ending DEI.”

T-Mobile will also provide discounts for customers who have phone lines with the service. It’s offering a $75 / month ($70 with autopay) Fiber Founders Club plan as well, which comes with a 10-year price lock but is only “available in select locations for a limited time.”

I spent my morning with Gemini in Chrome, the new integration that puts the AI-powered assistant right in your browser. Instead of going to the chatbot's web app, you can click the new Gemini button in Chrome's top-right corner to start a conversation - but the key difference is that the browser's built-in assistant can "see" what's on your screen while you navigate the web.

To me, Gemini's integration in Chrome seems like just the start of Google's mission to make its AI more "agentic," as I found myself wanting it to do more than it actually could. For now, you can only try out the early access version of Gemini in Chrome if you're an AI Pro or AI Ultra subscriber, and use either the Beta, Dev, or Canary version of Chrome.

I started out by using Gemini to summarize some of the articles on The Verge, as well as even find some gaming-related news on the homepage, where it pointed out the new Game Boy games Nintendo added to its Switch Online service, the upcoming Elden Ring film adaptation, and Valve's massive Steam Deck update.

But Gemini can only "see" what's on your screen, so I found that if you want it to summarize certain elements, like The Verge's comments section, you'l …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The trade association backing some of the biggest news publishers in the US slammed Google’s newly expanded AI Mode, which trades traditional search results for an AI chatbot-like interface. In a statement on Wednesday, the News/Media Alliance said the new feature is “depriving” publishers of both traffic and revenue.

During Google I/O on Tuesday, the company announced that it’s expanding AI Mode to all users in the US, which appears in a new tab directly within Search. When users enter a query, AI Mode serves up an AI-generated response alongside a list of relevant links. 

“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” Danielle Coffey, the CEO and president of News/Media Alliance, said in the statement. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”

This week, an internal document disclosed as part of Google’s antitrust trial over its search dominance showed that the company decided against asking publishers for permission to have their work included in its AI search features, as reported by Bloomberg. Instead, publishers must opt out of search results completely if they don’t want their work included in AI features. 

Google Search head Liz Reid said during her testimony that allowing publishers to opt out of individual features would add “enormous complexity,” according to Bloomberg. “By saying a publisher could be like, ‘I want to be in this feature but not that feature,’ it doesn’t work,” Reid said. “Because then we would essentially have to say, every single feature on the page needs a different model.”

It’s a great time to catch up on some big games you might’ve missed out on recently. Epic Games is holding a Mega Sale that includes big discounts on a ton of PC games, including Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced, which is on sale for $14.99 instead of $29.99, and The Last of Us Part 1, which costs $29.99 instead of $59.99.

Here are some other highlights from the sale:

• Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered: $29.99 (down from $59.99)
• Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut: $40.19 (down from $59.99)
• God of War Ragnarök: $47.99 (down from $59.99)
• Cyberpunk 2077: $23.99 (down from $59.99, and also on sale on other platforms)
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard: $29.99 (down from $59.99)
• Alan Wake 2 Deluxe Edition: $27.99 (down from $69.99)
• Red Dead Redemption: $34.99 (down from $49.99)

If you don’t know which games you want to get yet, you have some time to decide. The Mega Sale runs from May 15th to June 12th at 11AM ET. Dead Island 2 and Happy Game are also available for free until May 22nd.

Verizon’s $20 billion deal to acquire the fiber internet provider Frontier is officially happening. On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission signed off on the merger, which will allow Verizon to “upgrade and expand” Frontier’s existing fiber networks.

Verizon expects to bring fiber to 1 million homes each year following the acquisition. The deal went through after Verizon “committed to ending DEI-related practices,” according to a statement by FCC Chair Brendan Carr.

The Intercept reports that in a May 15th letter to Carr, Verizon’s chief legal officer, Vandana Venkatesh, outlined what it’s walking away from. Because “Verizon recognizes that some DEI policies and practices could be associated with discrimination,” it will no longer have any HR roles or teams focused on DEI, remove references to the term from employee training materials, as well as goals for diversity in its supplies, representation of women and minorities in its workforce. In the letter, Venkatesh says that now Verizon’s public messaging is going to “remove references to ‘DEI’ or ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’”

When Verizon’s consumer chief, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, appeared on Decoder last month, we asked him about whether it would fight the FCC imposing regulatory requirements against its diversity initiatives with a decade’s worth of lawsuits, the same way it fought net neutrality. It didn’t.

Earlier this year, Carr criticized Verizon’s “lack of progress” on getting rid of policies related to DEI — or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — and suggested that the agency won’t approve deals if companies keep these policies in place. T-Mobile similarly closed its acquisition of the fiber provider Lumos after tweaking mentions of DEI on its website.

Through the merger, Verizon will also be able to claw back some of its fiber business after it sold parts of its wireline operations, including Fios fiber internet connections, to Frontier in 2015. Carr said the merger will allow fiber to come to more communities, including rural ones. BEAD, a Biden-era initiative, was supposed to pay fiber providers to bring high-speed internet to rural areas, but a report from The Washington Post suggests that the “money isn’t flowing.”

Update, May 16th: Added additional details from Verizon’s letter to the FCC and Decoder.

After slamming everything from clothing to avocados with tariffs, now President Donald Trump has taken aim at films. "The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death," Trump proclaimed on Truth Social last week, while floating a 100 percent tariff on movies "produced in Foreign Lands."

The news stirred up confusion across Hollywood, as it would seemingly apply to a broad range of films, maybe even US films with scenes shot abroad. Though Trump has already begun to reel his original statement back in, as he told CNBC that he's "not looking to hurt the industry," it doesn't seem like he's given up on the idea completely. But like many of Trump's plans, he's relying on presidential powers that are stretched to a breaking point.

"A car has a value when it arrives at a US port that they can slap a tariff on," says Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University. "But because of the way the film industry works, it'd be much tougher to determine what proportion of the film you would actually apply a tariff to."

Trump's tariff plan appears to have spun out of a meeting with actor Jon Voight, a fervent Trump supporter who has been appointed a "special ambassado …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Alex Mashinsky, the founder and former CEO of the collapsed cryptocurrency lending firm Celsius, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud that led to “billions in losses,” the Department of Justice announced on Thursday.

Celsius, which held $25 billion in assets at its peak, abruptly halted withdrawals and transfers during a broader crypto crash in 2022, locking up billions in customer funds. The firm filed for bankruptcy just weeks later.

The DOJ charged Mashinsky with securities fraud in 2023, accusing him of misrepresenting Celsius’s business and finances. It also claimed Mashinsky artificially inflated the price of the platform’s token, CEL, by “spending hundreds of millions purchasing it on the open market.” Mashinsky pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud and one count of commodities fraud last December.

Mashinsky’s arrest comes as the Trump administration takes a softer stance on crypto regulation. Last month, a memo obtained by The Washington Post revealed the disbandment of a DOJ division dedicated to investigating crypto firms. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped several cases against companies in crypto, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood.

“Alexander Mashinsky targeted retail investors with promises that he would keep their ‘digital assets’ safer than a bank, when in fact he used those assets to place risky bets and to line his own pockets,” US Attorney Jay Clayton said in the press release. “In the end, Mashinsky made tens of millions of dollars while his customers lost billions.”

The US government is bringing up Starlink adoption in the midst of tariff trade talks with other countries, according to a report from The Washington Post. In recent weeks, several countries have moved forward with licensing the Elon Musk-owned satellite internet company, including India, Somalia, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

Internal messages seen by The Post suggest that US embassies and the State Department are encouraging countries to make way for US satellite internet services like Starlink. The messages don’t promise lower tariffs in exchange for adopting Starlink, but “they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm,” The Post reports.

Sources tell The Post that government officials in India rushed to secure regulatory approval for Starlink “with the understanding that doing so could help them cement trade deals with the administration.” This week, India cleared Starlink’s proposal, bringing it another step closer to establishing its service in the country.

In a statement to The Post, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said “the only consideration in the Trump administration’s trade negotiations with other countries is what’s best for the American people — which includes American companies succeeding at home and abroad” and that President Donald Trump “will not tolerate any conflicts of interest.” The State Department told the outlet that “any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. 

In response to an earlier Washington Post article on the rapid global expansion of Starlink, several Senate Democrats called on President Donald Trump to investigate reports that Musk “used his government role to improperly advance his personal businesses abroad.”

If you’ve been harboring complaints about Ticketmaster, now’s the time to let it all out. The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are inviting the public to submit comments about harmful practices in live ticketing as part of efforts to “identify unfair and anticompetitive” behavior in the industry.

In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to address unfair practices in the ticketing industry, such as scalpers using bots to buy up massive amounts of tickets. He directed the FTC and DOJ to enforce competition laws, as well as file a report about their progress within six months. The agencies plan to use the public comments to inform their recommendations.

Ticketmaster has been under closer regulatory scrutiny after its site crashed when Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets went on sale in November 2022, sparking outrage among fans and even Swift herself. The DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its parent company, LiveNation, last year, claiming their illegal monopoly results in higher ticket prices for consumers.

You can submit your comments about the live ticketing industry on the Regulations.gov website from now until July 7th.

“We will continue to closely examine this market and look for opportunities where vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws can lead to increased competition that makes tickets more affordable for fans while offering fairer compensation for artists,” Abigail Slater, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s antitrust division, said in the press release.

The PC gaming platform GOG is adding a bunch of classic Star Wars games to its preservation program, which aims to keep older games playable on modern systems. The games joining the program include: 

• Star Wars: Dark Forces (Classic, 1995)
• Star Wars: X-Wing Special Edition (1993)
• Star Wars: TIE Fighter Special Edition (1994)
• Star Wars: Battlefront (Classic, 2004) 
• Star Wars: Rebel Assault 1 + 2 (1993 and 1995)

First announced last November, GOG’s game preservation program includes 162 DRM-free games, such as Breath of Fire IV, Diablo, System Shock 2, and Resident Evil 1-3. GOG maintains these games so that they work on “current and future” Windows systems, and also offers tech support.

As another added benefit, preserved titles will remain accessible even if GOG removes them from its store. GOG says it hopes to have “hundreds” of games in the program by the end of this year.

You can check out the newly added Star Wars games on GOG’s game preservation webpage, and they’re all currently 75 percent off until May 6th.

Kickstarter is launching a new “Tariff Manager” tool that will allow creators to apply a surcharge to projects after their campaign has ended, as spotted earlier by 404 Media. The tool is supposed to help creators deal with “rising costs” and import fees as a result of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

If a creator’s project is affected by tariffs, they can submit a request through Kickstarter and then apply per-item surcharges to backers with US shipping addresses. Kickstarter will include the extra fee in a separate line on a backer’s payment page. The platform says the tool is “weeks away” from rolling out.

“We understand that asking backers to pay an additional fee — especially after a campaign has ended — can be sensitive,” Kickstarter writes. Backers who decide not to pay the fee will have to reach out to creators directly to come up with a solution, such as adjusting their pledge or getting a refund, according to Kickstarter.

Larger campaigns have addressed the tariffs head-on, like the one for Peak Design’s Roller Pro Carry-On, which says it has “made the decision to not add any additional tariff charges to your pledges.” But this campaign has received more than $13 million in pledges, and smaller projects might not be able to cover import fees with pledges alone. Several Kickstarter board game projects, such as ones led by Curt Covert and Gap Closer Games, have already warned backers that tariffs could result in delays or higher prices, as reported by Fast Company.

Interim DC attorney Ed Martin has written a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation — the organization behind Wikipedia — that calls into question its status as a nonprofit entity. In the letter, which was obtained by The Free Press, Martin claims he found that Wikipedia “is engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations” under US law about tax-exempt organizations.

Under the law (Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26), tax-exempt organizations must operate “exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes.” Martin alleges that Wikipedia is “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda,” including by “rewriting” historical events and through “other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States.”

Martin is known for thinly justified legal threats against media organizations. In recent days, Martin has sent letters to the New England Journal of Medicine, the CHEST Journal, and Obstetrics and Gynecology, accusing them of being “partisan in various scientific debates.”

Martin asks the Wikimedia Foundation to respond to several questions, such as what it’s doing to “safeguard” the public from propaganda, as well as efforts to exclude “foreign influence operatives from making targeted edits” on topics that would “reshape or rewrite history.” He’s giving the Foundation until May 15th to respond.

“Wikipedia’s content is governed by three core content policies: neutral point of view, verifiability, and no original research, which exist to ensure information is presented as accurately, fairly, and neutrally as possible,” Jacob Rogers, the Wikimedia Foundation’s associate general counsel, said in an emailed statement to The Verge. “The entire process of content moderation is overseen by nearly 260,000 volunteers and is open and transparent for all to see, which is why we welcome opportunities to explain how Wikipedia works and will do so in the appropriate forum.”

Martin’s letter reflects a broader trend of the right targeting Wikipedia. Last year, Elon Musk told supporters to “stop donating to Wokepedia” before later calling the site “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” In January, a report from Forward.com found that The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, created a presentation with a series of slides geared toward “targeting” Wikipedia editors.

The Wikimedia Foundation has since created tools to protect the identities of editors, with CEO Maryana Iskander telling the community that it’s “seeing an increase in threats, both regulation and litigation across the world,” as reported by 404 Media.

WhatsApp is launching a new “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature that aims to prevent people from taking conversations outside the app. When the setting is turned on, you can block others from exporting your chat history and automatically downloading photos and videos sent in the app.

The feature will prevent people from using messages for Meta AI as well, which you can currently use to ask questions within a chat and generate images.

By default, WhatsApp saves photos and videos in a chat to your phone’s local storage. It also lets you and your recipients export chats (with or without media) to your messages, email, or notes app. The Advanced Chat Privacy setting will prevent this in group and individual chats.

This feature still doesn’t stop people from taking screenshots of your messages or manually downloading media from chats, WhatsApp spokesperson Zade Alsawah confirmed to The Verge. However, WhatsApp says this is its “first version” of the feature, and that it plans to add more protections down the line.

“We think this feature is best used when talking with groups where you may not know everyone closely but are nevertheless sensitive in nature,” WhatsApp says in its announcement. WABetaInfo first spotted this feature earlier this month, and now it’s rolling out to the latest version of the app. You can turn on the setting by tapping the name of your chat and selecting Advanced Chat Privacy.

Update, April 23rd: Added information from WhatsApp.

General Timothy Haugh, the director of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, was fired on Thursday, according to a report from The Washington Post. His removal reportedly occurred just one day after right-wing activist Laura Loomer pushed for his firing during a meeting with President Donald Trump.

Wendy Noble, the Deputy Director and senior civilian leader of the U.S. National Security Agency, has also been fired and may have been moved to another role at the Pentagon, according to The New York Times.

“NSA Director Tim Haugh and his deputy Wendy Noble have been disloyal to President Trump,” Loomer wrote in a post on X. “That is why they have been fired.” Loomer said Haugh was “hand picked” by General Mark Milley, who butted heads with Trump during his first term. “Why would we want an NSA Director who was referred to Biden after being hand selected by Milley,” Loomer wrote.

Former President Joe Biden nominated Haugh in 2023. He spent more than 30 years in the military and led the Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force.

Democrats on the Intelligence Committee criticized Haugh’s ousting. “It is astonishing that President Trump would fire the nonpartisan leader of the NSA while still failing to hold any member of his team accountable for leaking classified information on Signal – even as he apparently takes staffing direction from a discredited conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said in a post on Bluesky. Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said in a statement to The Post he was “deeply disturbed” by Haugh’s removal.

Lieutenant General William J. Hartman, who served as the Cyber Command Deputy, has been named the acting director of the NSA, while NSA executive director Sheila Thomas was appointed acting deputy, according to The Post.

The card grading service PSA will no longer take direct submissions from outside the US in response to the Trump administration’s new far-reaching tariffs. In an update on Wednesday, PSA says it’s “reluctantly taking these measures to protect our international customers from significant tariff expenses.”

As noted by PSA, the tariffs are “against the value of the items in the order rather than on the PSA service fee.” That means sending high-value Pokémon or sports cards to PSA would result in hefty fees. Under a 10 percent tariff, for example, a card valued at $5,000 would incur a $500 fee.

Though PSA is pausing international submissions now, that doesn’t mean cards currently at — or in transit — to its facilities will escape additional charges. PSA notes that orders entering the US after 12:01AM on April 5th may be affected by tariffs, and may also face “not-yet-announced” retaliatory tariffs upon return. “PSA will leverage available means to limit tariff exposure for customers outside of the US,” the company says.

PSA has already stopped accepting direct submissions from Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Mexico due to the first round of tariffs imposed earlier this year. However, PSA notes that customers in Canada and Japan can still get their cards graded by sending or bringing them to its physical locations in both countries.

TikTok is shutting down Notes, its photos-sharing app that rivaled Instagram. In a notification to users, the TikTok Notes team says the app will stop working starting May 8th, and “all related features will no longer be available.”

TikTok first rolled out Notes in April of last year, which lets users share photos alongside a caption, as well as scroll through a “For You” feed with recommended content. The app was initially rolled out in limited testing to Australia and Canada.

The decision to close the app “was not made lightly,” according to TikTok’s message. It also suggests that users try out Lemon8, another social platform owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance.

Lemon8 lets users share both photos and videos, and has a focus on lifestyle topics, like beauty, food, fashion, travel, and pets. Though TikTok started nudging users toward the app in the days leading up to its brief shutdown in the US, Lemon8 was also taken offline by the ban.

“We’re excited to bring the feedback from TikTok Notes to Lemon8 as we continue building a dedicated space for our community to share and experience photo content, designed to complement and enhance the TikTok experience,” a TikTok spokesperson said to TechCrunch.