A firmware update has killed key functionality for Echelon smart home gym equipment that isn't connected to the Internet.

As explained in a Tuesday blog post by Roberto Viola, who develops the "QZ (qdomyos-zwift)" app that connects Echelon machines to third-party fitness platforms, like Peloton, Strava, and Apple HealthKit, the firmware update forces Echelon machines to connect to Echelon’s servers in order to work properly. A user online reported that as a result of updating his machine, it is no longer syncing with apps like QZ, and he is unable to view his machine's exercise metrics in the Echelon app without an Internet connection.

Affected Echelon machines reportedly only have full functionality, including the ability to share real-time metrics, if a user has the Echelon app active and if the machine is able to reach Echelon’s servers. Viola wrote:

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DJI barely sells drones in the United States anymore. The shelves are bare; resellers are jacking up prices. It appears an unofficial ban at US customs is to blame. But on Amazon, you can now buy a drone that's a a dead ringer for the DJI Mini 4 Pro - the SkyRover X1 - for a reasonable $758. And that's probably because DJI made it happen.

There's evidence suggesting so, and DJI was not able to deny the SkyRover X1 was a DJI product one day after we reached out.

As reported by DroneXL, security researchers have discovered the SkyRover X1 not only has the same specs, features, and an incredibly similar app to the one DJI provides for its dro …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This week, I take a look at the surprisingly strong state of Google, Meta gets a new chief AI researcher, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to check out this week's Decoder episode about deepfakes and where they are headed.

Also, do you use an AI coding tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot? I'd love to know what works and what doesn't…

"I think we are doing very well through this moment"

After spending time with Google executives during the company's I/O conference in May, it was clear that they were feeling confident. Now, I'm beginning to see why.

ChatGPT is not making Google Search obsolete. If anything, AI is making Google st …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Streaming has become a tangled web of subscriptions, and now Comcast says it can help by putting all your services into one hub. Comcast is launching a new hub on its set-top boxes, called the StreamStore, where you can buy and manage subscriptions for more than 450 streaming apps and channels.

The StreamStore lives within Xfinity’s Xumo Stream Box and on X1 devices. It’s also available on the web, and features a collection of more than 200,000 movies and TV shows to rent or purchase. Xfinity will let you add or drop channels through the store, while tacking on new subscriptions to your monthly internet or TV bill, further positioning the company as a sort of streaming broker. 

Other cable / telecom companies like Verizon have tried to step in as a digital subscription service middleman, though Comcast is taking things a step further by putting this hub on your TV. But is streaming really messy enough that you need Comcast to manage it?

Some services included in the StreamStore include Netflix, Peacock, Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, Hulu, Apple TV Plus, HBO Max, and over 100 “niche” streaming subscriptions, according to LightReading. Xfinity already offers its own StreamSaver bundle, which includes a subscription to Apple TV Plus, Netflix with ads, and Peacock’s ad-supported plan for $15 per month.

The bundle is, of course, available through the StreamStore, and Xfinity says it plans on bringing new streaming bundles, apps, and “enhanced subscription management and activation capabilities” to the hub in the future.

(Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.)

Activists around the world are calling attention to harassment they’ve faced on Meta’s platforms. More than 90 percent of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit organization that also tracks the murders of environmental advocates, reported experiencing some kind of online abuse or harassment connected to their work. Facebook was the most-cited platform, followed by X, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

Global Witness and many of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its peers to do more to address harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks to activists. Around 75 percent of people surveyed said they believed that online abuse they experienced corresponded to offline harm.

“Those stats really stayed with me. They were so much higher than we expected them to be,” Ava Lee, campaign strategy lead on digital threats at Global Witness, tells The Verge. That’s despite expecting a gloomy outcome based on prior anecdotal accounts. “It has kind of long been known that the experience of climate activists and environmental defenders online is pretty awful,” Lee says.

Global Witness surveyed more than 200 people between November 2024 and March of this year that it was able to reach through the same networks it taps when documenting the killings of land and environmental defenders. It found Meta-owned platforms to be “the most toxic.” Around 62 percent of participants said they encountered abuse on Facebook, 36 percent on WhatsApp, and 26 percent on Instagram. 

That probably reflects how popular Meta’s platforms are around the world. Facebook has more than 3 billion active monthly users, more than a third of the global population. But Meta also abandoned its third-party fact-checking program in January, which critics warned could lead to more hate speech and disinformation. Meta moved to a crowdsourced approach to content moderation similar to X, where 37 percent of survey participants reported experiencing abuse. 

In May, Meta reported a “small increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content” on Facebook as well as “a small increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content” during the first quarter of 2025.

“That’s sort of the irony as well, of them moving towards this kind of free speech model, which actually we’re seeing that it’s silencing certain voices,” says Hannah Sharpe, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.

Fatrisia Ain leads a local collective of women in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she says palm oil companies have seized farmers’ lands and contaminated a river local villagers used to be able to rely on for drinking water. Posts on Facebook have accused her of being a communist, a dangerous allegation in her country, she tells The Verge.

The practice of “red-tagging” — labeling any dissident voices as communists — has been used to target and criminalize activists in Southeast Asia. In one high-profile case, a prominent environmental activist in Indonesia was jailed under “anti-communism” laws after opposing a new gold mine.

Ain says she’s asked Facebook to take down several posts attacking her, without success. “They said it’s not dangerous, so they can’t take it down. It is dangerous. I hope that Meta would understand, in Indonesia, it’s dangerous,” Ain says. 

Other posts have accused Ain of trying to defraud farmers and of having an affair with a married man, which she sees as attempts to discredit her that could wind up exposing her to more threats in the real world — which has already been hostile to her activism. “Women who are being the defenders for my own community are more vulnerable than men … more people harass you with so many things,” she says. 

Nearly two-thirds of people who responded to the Global Witness survey said that they have feared for their safety, including Ain. She’s been physically targeted at protests against palm oil companies accused of failing to pay farmers, she tells The Verge. During a protest outside of a government office, men grabbed her butt and chest, she says. Now, when she leads protests, older women activists surround her to protect her as a security measure. 

In the Global Witness survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said they’d been attacked on the basis of their sex. “There’s evidence of the way that women and women of color in particular in politics experience just vast amounts more hate than any other group,” Lee says. “Again, we’re seeing that play out when it comes to defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impact that that is having on the mental health of lots of these defenders and their ability to feel safe.” 

“We encourage people to use tools available on our platforms to help protect against bullying and harassment,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in an email to The Verge, adding that the company is reviewing Facebook posts that targeted Ain. Meta also pointed to its “Hidden Words” feature that allows you to filter offensive direct messages and comments on your posts and its “Limits” feature that hides comments on your posts from users that don’t follow you. 

Other companies mentioned in the report, including Google, TikTok, and X, did not provide on-the-record responses to inquiries from The Verge. Nor did a palm oil company Ain says has been operating on local farmers’ land without paying them, as they’re supposed to do under a mandated profit-sharing scheme. 

Global Witness says there are concrete steps social media companies can take to address harassment on their platforms. That includes dedicating more resources to their content moderation systems, regularly reviewing these systems, and inviting public input on the process. Activists surveyed also reported that they think algorithms that boost polarizing content and the proliferation of bots on platforms make the problem worse. 

“There are a number of choices that platforms could make,” Lee says. “Resourcing is a choice, and they could be putting more money into really good content moderation and really good trust and safety [initiatives] to improve things.” 

Global Witness plans to put out its next report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. Its last such report found that at least 196 people were killed in 2023.

In March, charging giant Anker announced it would spin out its 3D printer business into an "independent sub-brand," stating that the new EufyMake would "continue to provide comprehensive customer service and support" for its original 3D printers the AnkerMake M5 and M5C.

Now, the 3D printing community is wondering whether that was all a euphemism for exiting the 3D printer business. eufyMake is no longer selling any 3D printers and has stopped selling some of the parts it would need to provide anything close to "comprehensive support."

Anker confirms to The Verge that it has stopped selling the M5 and M5C 3D printers indefinitely. Spokes …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Perhaps we've been thinking the same thing, you and I. That there won't be a long-standing drought of Nintendo Switch 2 availability after all. The console has been easy to buy online from several retailers this week, including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Amazon, which didn't sell the Switch 2 at launch, is currently selling it by invitation only.

The console's messy preorder process and spotty launch availability made it feel a little like late 2020 all over again, when the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Nvidia RTX 30-series GPUs launched in extremely limited quantities due to component shortages. However, Nintendo appears to have ad …

Read the full story at The Verge.

• Meta hires Shengjia Zhao, ChatGPT co-creator, as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Labs.
• Mark Zuckerberg is on a multibillion-dollar AI spending spree, which includes poaching talent.
• Other tech CEO have mixed opinions about Zuckerberg's recruitment approach.

Meta just escalated the AI talent war with OpenAI.

Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, is joining Meta as chief scientist of its Superintelligence Labs.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Zhao's appointment on Friday in a social media post, and called him a "pioneer" in the field who has already driven several major AI breakthroughs.

Zhao previously helped build GPT-4 and led synthetic data efforts at OpenAI. According to the post, Zhao will now work directly with Zuckerberg and Meta's newly appointed chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI.

The new hire comes during Zuckerberg's multibillion-dollar AI spending spree, including a $15 billion investment in Scale AI and the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new division focused on foundational models and next-gen research.

In addition to Zhao, the company has lured away the three researchers who built OpenAI's Zurich office — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — all of whom previously also worked at Google's DeepMind. The Superintelligence Labs team is now comprised of a lineup of names previously seen with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

But the war for AI talent is far from over.

Databricks VP Naveen Rao likened the competition to "looking for LeBron James," estimating that fewer than 1,000 people worldwide can build frontier AI models.

Companies without the cash for massive pay packages are turning to hackathons and computing power as incentives. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said a Meta researcher he tried to poach told him to ask again when the company has "10,000 H100s."

AI tech workers have previously told Business Insider that Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has been emailing prospects directly and even hosting AI researchers at his home, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made personal calls to potential hires.

Tech company executives have mixed feelings about Meta's poaching efforts.

"Meta right now are not at the frontier, maybe they'll they'll manage to get back on there," said Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, on an episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast," which aired on Friday.

"It's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something," Hassabis added.

During a July 18 episode of the podcast "Uncapped with Jack Altman," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticised some of Meta's "giant offers" to his company's employees, and called the strategy "crazy."

"The degree to which they're focusing on money and not the work and not the mission," said Sam Altman. "I don't think that's going to set up a great culture."

Meta and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

• Astronomer released a humorous promo video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow after leadership changes.
• Two former executives were involved in a now-infamous kiss-cam incident at a Coldplay concert.
• Paltrow promoted Astronomer's data and AI products and an upcoming conference.

Astronomer is taking the Coldplay incident and running with it.

After former CEO Andy Byron and head of HR Kristin Cabot resigned following the now-infamous "kiss-cam" style Coldplay concert footage, the company responded with a humorous video of its own, featuring Coldplay frontman Chris Martin's ex-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow.

In the brand-new video, Paltrow said she had been hired on a "very temporary basis" to represent the "more than 300 employees" at Astronomer, and to answer some very common questions.

Then, instead of addressing what Astronomer likely got the most attention for, Paltrow proceeded by promoting its latest data and AI products — all with a straight face.

After another video header that seems to ask how Astronomer's social media team is holding up, Paltrow went on to say there is still room available in the company's Beyond Analytics data conference in September.

"Thank you for your interest in Astronomer," the award-winning actor said as the video ended.

Astronomer became an internet sensation mid-July when Byron and Cabot, who were both company executives at the time, were embracing in a "kiss-cam" crowd footage at a Coldplay concert just outside of Boston.

The pair appeared horrified and immediately hid from he camera after being spotlighted on the big screen, prompting Coldplay lead singer Martin to say that they are either "having an affair or just very shy."

The video has since gone viral and generated countless internet memes. The company's board promptly launched an investigation into the incident, and Byron and Cabot both resigned from Astronomer within the week. Chief Product Officer Pete DeJoy has since stepped up as interim CEO while the company searches for a more permanent replacement.

As for Paltrow and Martin, the pair famously dubbed their split "conscious uncoupling" in March 2014 and finalized their divorce in 2016 after 13 years of marriage.

Astronomer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Do you work at Astronomer and want to talk about the impact of all the attention on the company? Email the author at [email protected].

• The Tea app was hit with a data breach that exposed 72,000 images, including selfies and IDs.
• The app said the breach involved a legacy data system with information from over two years ago.
• Tea, which lets women share anonymous dating advice and reviews, hit the top spot in the App Store.

Tea, the anonymous dating advice app for women that has the internet buzzing, is in hot water after a data breach.

Thousands of images of women, including selfies and photos of IDs that were used to verify their identity to join the app, were exposed because of the breach.

"We can confirm that at 6:44 AM PST on Friday, July 25th, Tea identified unauthorized access to one of our systems and immediately launched a full investigation to assess the scope and impact," a spokesperson for Tea told Business Insider in a statement.

"Preliminary findings indicate that the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago," the spokesperson said.

The Tea app allows women to post a "man" (including his name, estimated age, location, and photos) with the option to add commentary. Users can also react to posts with green or red flags. Some users post photos of men asking for "tea" — gossip — about them. Others share posts seeking advice. The app does not allow screenshots.

The breach included about 72,000 images — about 13,000 of which were either selfies or photo identification "submitted during account verification," the company said. Another 59,000 images from within the app, as well as comments and direct messages, "were accessed without authorization."

404 Media, which found that the data had been posted to 4chan, first reported the breach on Friday morning,

Tea said it is working with "third-party cybersecurity experts" after the breach and does not believe "current or additional user data was affected."

Meanwhile, in the Tea app, an administrative account "TaraTeaAdmin" informed users about the breach in a post, which now has hundreds of comments on it.

The Tea app has seen an influx of new users and hit No. 1 on the US Apple App Store this week. On Friday, the company posted an Instagram story stating that more than 2 million new users have requested to join the app.

Privacy concerns had already been a topic of discussion amid Tea's virality — but mostly concerning the privacy of the men posted to the app. Now, those concerns are going both ways.

• Some staff questioned Satya Nadella's memo on job cuts amid huge earnings.
• Microsoft has shed thousands of employees this year, as it spends $80 billion on AI.
• Employees speculated about the memo's intent, and whether it presages more cuts.

Microsoft employees are reacting to a memo from CEO Satya Nadella that attempted to explain why the company has cut jobs while generating huge profits and spending billions on AI.

Microsoft has shed thousands of employees this year. The company has earned $75 billion in profit over the past three fiscal quarters, and plans to spend $80 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025. The stock also hit a record earlier this month.

Nadella sent a memo to employees on Thursday describing this "seeming incongruence" as the "enigma of success." The company expects total headcount to remain roughly flat.

Inside Microsoft, some staff speculated about what may have driven Nadella to write the memo: Are more job cuts coming? Is he feeling guilty about earnings, which the company is due to report next week? Was this just a message to Wall Street?

Nadella knows employees are stressed out

Nadella wrote the letter because he knows employees are stressed about increased performance pressure, AI competition, and job cuts, a person familiar with the matter said. Microsoft's last big employee "Signals" survey came out before the recent job cuts, but the company still gauges employee sentiment through daily and weekly "pulse" surveys.

Microsoft has about 220,000 employees, so it's hard to externally gauge the sentiment across the workforce broadly.

"With a company our size, you can imagine we have a variety of reactions internally that range from positive to constructive," Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said. "Satya heard directly back from a number of employees who appreciated his leadership as well as the content and tone of his message."

Criticism from some workers

Reactions from some employees, shared directly with Business Insider and on an employee message board, provide a partial window into how Nadella's memo was received internally.

One employee told BI that they couldn't tell if the CEO was trying to mend feelings or prepare people for more pain.

Another said Microsoft was prioritizing KPIs over people. (KPIs, or key performance indicators, is a common way for businesses to measure how they're doing.)

Handling jobs cuts is never easy, as ousted workers often feel aggrieved and remaining staff can be demoralized.

Another Microsoft staffer told BI that Nadella's memo was tone deaf. This person compared the company to a coal mine and said the CEO is focused on getting more coal and doesn't care how he gets it.

Blind suspicion

Some users in a Blind message board, which requires a Microsoft.com email address to sign up, blasted Nadella's message.

One user posted a parody of Nadella's letter, titled "A quick memo on your continued utility."

Pretending to speak as Nadella, this person said constant chaos, shifting teams, and cancelled projects are not a bug, but a feature designed to keep workers anxious, compliant, and too scared to question leadership decisions. The person also advised colleagues to stay useful, or they risk being replaced.

Another post was an apparent critique of Nadella's email, attributed to Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant. It argued that the rationale behind the layoffs was not fully explained, and didn't directly acknowledge the emotional toll of ongoing change or support mechanisms.

Another user on the Microsoft Blind message board speculated that Nadella was sending a signal to Wall Street. (This is a common technique for most public companies, which exist to serve shareholders, along with customers and employees.)

Microsoft likely understood that the CEO memo would be leaked to BI, suggesting it was crafted as a reminder to investors that layoffs have been happening, there are more to come, business is strong, this person wrote.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at +1-425-344-8242. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

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Tara Viswanathan, cofounder of AI-powered construction startup Unlimited Industries, recently put OpenAI's agentic capabilities to the test and was impressed by the results.

In a post on X, Viswanathan described how she used ChatGPT (Pro version) to find an Airbnb for an October event. This was her prompt:

"I want to find an Airbnb for [event] in [city / neighborhood] in October this year. I want it for at least that Wednesday through ideally the next Monday. And I want a super nice modern spot that is ideally walkable to the event. Tell me about the area nearby. And ideally it's walkable to coffee shops and things like that too. And I want it to have at least four bedrooms."

She also helped ChatGPT do preparatory work by getting the chatbot to absorb information about her preferences upfront.

"What are some core things that you need to know about me so that you can execute on more complicated tasks accurately?," she wrote to ChatGPT. "Different types of preferences or styles, things like that. Give me a list of questions that I can answer so you can remember. And give me multiple choice answers to make it easy for me."

That resulted in Viswanathan sharing likes and dislikes on topics such as food/meals, hotels, travel, and communication, helping the ChatGPT agent conduct more bespoke research on her behalf.

The AI delivered a spot-on recommendation within about 10 minutes, versus more than an hour if she'd done this online research herself.

"I'm very picky about where I stay," she wrote. "The benefit is less about the time savings and more about the peace of mind knowing it's going to handle it. Insane."

Some travelers love organizing trips more than actually going on them. For everyone else, Viswanathan's experiment offers a compelling glimpse of the future: A proactive AI concierge that knows you well enough to get travel recommendations right the first time.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at [email protected].

• This post originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
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There's a fear in investing when a sector swells rapidly. Booming stock prices and aggressive spending feel great, until things inevitably cool off. Then comes the reckoning: Who overdid it in irreversible ways?

Big Tech is in an AI arms race, each company trying to outspend the others on data centers, GPUs, networking gear, and talent. Engineers can be let go. But the infrastructure? That's permanent. If the AGI dream fades, you're stuck with massive, costly assets.

So when Google announced it would hike capex by $10 billion to $85 billion in 2025 eyebrows went up. Most of it is for things you can't walk back: chips, data centers, and networking.

Google is "jumping aboard the AI crazy train," Bernstein Research analyst Mark Shmulik wrote, referencing a song by the late bat biter Ozzy Osbourne.

Meta's Mark Zuckerberg brags about Manhattan-sized data centers. And Elon Musk keeps hoarding GPUs. While Sam Altman is building mega-data centers with partners. JPMorgan dubbed this "vibe spending," warning OpenAI might burn $46 billion in four years.

It's no shock when Elon, Zuck, and Sam flex on capex. But Google? That's surprising. "Google doesn't do this," Shmulik said. The company has been viewed as measured in recent years, prioritizing investment intensity with care. Not anymore.

Now investors want to know: Will these swelling bets pay off?

There are promising signs. Since May, Google's monthly token processing (the currency of generative AI) has doubled from 480 trillion to nearly a quadrillion. Search grew 12% in Q2, beating forecasts. Cloud sales surged 32%. CEO Sundar Pichai said Google is ramping up capex to support all this growth.

But it's still a huge gamble. "Does the current return on invested capital seen in both Search and Cloud hold up at higher [capex] intensity levels," Shmulik asked, "or is the spend a very expensive piece of gum trying to plug an AI-sized hole?" He leans optimistic.

Still, Google shares rose just 1% after these results. Not exactly a resounding endorsement.

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at [email protected].