Say More Look Up Mashable Selects Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Can a vehicle wrap hide your car from Flock cameras? Flashy patterns fight back against AI detection. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Is anti-AI car customization the future? Could a solution to the ever-growing surveillance network across the U.S. be as simple as some garish attire?

You shouldn't have to spend a fortune on a great robotic pool cleaner--but apparently, you do. More difficult to clean than it should be. The market is stuffed to the gills with pool-scrubbing robots that cost thousands of dollars, and consumers are well justified in worrying whether that level of expense will ultimately be worthwhile. But there's also a subset of pool robots that go the other way--much simpler devices that cost well under $500, sometimes much less. It's here where we find the Poolease X1, a pint-sized robot that can be yours for barely over 100 bucks.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. 'We're Proving It Works': Inside the DSA's Push to Remake the Democratic Party Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens.

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series And college students can get Google AI Pro for free. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Google expands Gemini offerings and Search functions as students head back to school. As districts across the country debate the efficacy of tech-enabled classrooms, Google wants to upgrade the average students' school supplies with new AI features. And they don't even need to leave the Google homepage to find them.

The universe may never tell you if your choices mattered. A main theme of the nine-book sci-fi series is that sometimes you may never know the consequences of a choice you made. The universe, utterly indifferent black box that it is, "never tells us if we did right or wrong," as the character Naomi Nagata puts it in TV show. That's the line the developer of the upcoming Expanse video game has adopted as its own slogan. It's being developed by Owlcat Games, the Cyprus-based developer known for dense role-playing games like and .

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia - but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn't have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It's as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can't put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can't stop, or look back, or think straight. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. Things could have turned out differently.

Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Plaintiffs are seeking a class action case against SpaceXAI. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. More stories of Grok generating sexually explicit images add heft to federal court case. Elon Musk-owned SpaceXAI is set to defend its artificial intelligence bot Grok in federal court, following a scandal that alleges the AI assistant was used to produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM) . In March, three Tennessee teenagers filed a federal lawsuit against the company for its alleged role in producing millions of sexually explicit images of minors, claiming malicious actors used the AI tool to generate inappropriate images of them when they were children.

Safety Net Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Hub Versus Say More Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Flock just announced new default privacy settings. Chase joined Mashable's Social Good team in 2020, covering online stories about digital activism, climate justice, accessibility, and media representation. Civil rights groups question the new policy shift. Controversial surveillance technology company Flock Safety has unveiled sweeping new privacy guardrails, seemingly intended to quell growing unrest over its devices' presence across the country. Days prior, CEO Garrett Langley went on a media run to convince the public that the company was not the latest cog in a dystopian surveillance state, but rather a purveyor of public safety.

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?