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After multiple delays and false starts, Apple now has a solid start date for its hybrid work arrangement. According to Bloomberg and The Verge, the tech giant will start requiring employees who work in its Santa Clara Valley offices to report to office three times a week starting in the week of September 5th. They're expected to come in every Tuesdays and Thursdays, with the third day set by their individual teams. In a letter sent to staff members, Apple's SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi encouraged employees to share their input about that third team-specific day with their managers to help them decide. 

Apple has been planning to enforce a hybrid arrangement wherein employees are required to work from its offices since June 2021. At the time, though, it wanted personnel to come in every Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. The company, which puts great value in what Tim Cook calls the "irreplaceable benefits of in-person collaboration," has made several attempts to enforce a hybrid work week arrangement since then but has had to keep pushing its plans back due to rising COVID-19 cases and other factors.

Earlier this year, it again attempted to start enforcing its hybrid work policy in the week stating on May 23rd. However, employees had criticized the policy for being "driven by fear" — "[f]ear of the future of work, fear of worker autonomy, fear of losing control," they said in an open letter. Apple even reportedly lost Ian Goodfellow, its director of machine learning and most cited expert in the field, over the policy. In the end, the company backtracked and softened its stance, launching a pilot that required some employees to report to its offices two days a week instead.

Now, it looks like there's no stopping Apple from requiring employees to report to its offices. "September 5th marks the true start of our hybrid work pilot in the Santa Clary Valley," Federighi wrote in his memo. As he mentioned, though, it is still a pilot, and the company expects to learn from its implementation in the coming months as it prepares for employees' return to office in other locations. 

Apple may be planning to bring ads to more of its first-party apps. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company has conducted internal tests of a version of Maps that features search ads. Apple already employs similar advertisements within the App Store.

Developers can pay the company to get their software to show up at the top of the search results page when you input specific terms. Gurman suggests search ads in Maps would work in much the same way. For instance, a Japanese restaurant could pay Apple for their business to show up higher in local listings when people use search terms like “sushi.” Gurman believes Apple could implement similar ads in its Podcasts and Books apps. He says the company could begin offering an ad-supported tier through Apple TV+.

Gurman attributes the potential push to Todd Teresi, the vice president in charge of the company’s advertising division. Teresi recently began reporting directly to services chief Eddy Cue and has reportedly talked of greatly expanding his team’s impact. The division generates about $4 billion in annual revenue. Teresi’s ambition is to increase that number to the double digits. That would require a significant expansion of Apple’s current advertising efforts.

A wider advertising push would be an about-face for a company that has, at least externally, positioned itself as a champion of user privacy. With the release of iOS 14.5, Apple introduced a feature called App Tracking Transparency. The prompt allows you to prevent apps from logging your activity across other apps and websites. In 2022, it’s estimated the policy will cost Facebook parent company Meta approximately $13 billion in lost revenue. When Apple announced ATT at WWDC 2020, the company publicly said it designed the feature to protect user privacy. A recent report from The Wall Street Journal, which said the company pursued a revenue-sharing agreement with Facebook, suggests its motivations with ATT may have not been so altruistic.

Signal's reputation for secure messaging doesn't make it completely invulnerable to hacking incidents. The company has confirmed that a data breach at verification partner Twillio exposed the phone numbers and SMS codes of roughly 1,900 users. As TechCrunchobserved, the intruder could have either used the information to either identify Signal users or re-register their numbers to other devices.

The data has already been misused. The culprit searched for three phone numbers, and re-registered the account of one user. Signal doesn't store chat histories or contacts online, so the breach shouldn't have revealed other sensitive details.

Signal is taking steps to limit the damage. It will unregister the app on all devices linked to affected accounts, forcing users to re-register. The team also recommended enabling a registration lock that bars anyone from re-registering on other devices without providing a PIN code.

Twilio revealed the breach on August 8th. The currently unidentified perpetrators used phishing scams to obtain login details and access the accounts of 125 customers. Although it's not clear which other customers were affected, Twilio typically serves large companies and organizations.

The attack increases pressure on Signal to join other encrypted messaging providers in moving away from phone numbers, which can be vulnerable to SIM swaps and other digit-based schemes. This is also a reminder that systems are only as secure as their technology partners — a slip at a third-party is sometimes as dangerous as a direct assault.

Zoom users with Macs can rest a little easier. Ars Technicareports Zoom has updated its Mac software to patch a vulnerability that let would-be intruders take control of systems. The video calling software's auto-updater software not only had root-level access, but had a signature verification system that you could fool simply by giving your package a familiar file name. A hacker could force your app to downgrade or otherwise enable exploits.

Objective-See Foundation (OSF) creator and researcher Patrick Wardle first discovered the security hole, and disclosed it to Zoom in December last year. Zoom fixed that problem, but introduced another bug in the process. Zoom addressed that, too, but Wardle found still another flaw. The OSF founder discussed his findings at Def-Con last week. Zoom acknowledged the issue that day, and patched it afterward.

This isn't the first time Zoom has grappled with security headaches, including for the Mac. In 2019, the company raced to fix a webcam hijack exploit that relied on a locally-created web server. Increased scrutiny of Zoom at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 also prompted a full-scale review of the company's practices. While that did lead to changes, it's clear Zoom isn't immune to missteps.

Peloton may soon allow users of competing fitness equipment to stream its workouts to their bikes and treadmills. In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Barry McCarthy said the company is “rethinking” its digital strategy. As a first step, Peloton could adopt a freemium model that would see the company begin offering some features and workouts found in its mobile and TV app for free. Currently, the software costs $13 per month after a 30-day trial.

In the future, people with stationary bikes or treadmills from companies like Bowflex, Echelon and NordicTrack could also stream Peloton's content to their equipment’s display. McCarthy didn’t say how deeply the company's software would integrate with competing models. For instance, it’s not clear if you would see in-workout metrics like you do on a Peloton bike or treadmill.

McCarthy also told Bloomberg Peloton plans to redesign its bikes to make it possible for customers to assemble them at home. At the moment, the company has a professional come to your house or apartment to help with setup. “We’ve been working on it for a while, and it’s a real thing,” he said. “We’ll continue to cost-reduce the hardware and we will engineer it so that you can assemble it, so that we can ship it via FedEx.”

The moves come as Peloton struggles to regain profitability. Following a $757 million net loss in the first three months of 2022, the company raised prices and laid off 784 employees (after it previously cut 2,800 jobs). The idea that Peloton would let you access its software on competing hardware would have seemed unthinkable only a year ago, but with its very survival now on the line, it’s doing what it has to do to stay afloat.

Russia has already provided a look at the space station it will make after it leaves the ISS — if only a brief one. Reutersreports the country's Roscosmos space agency has shared a model of the future station (pictured above), nicknamed ROSS by state-controlled media. The orbital facility would launch in two phases, starting with four modules and expanding to six with a service platform. The design would accommodate four people in rotating tours and reportedly offer better monitoring of Earth than Russia gets from the ISS today.

You'll be disappointed if you want more concrete details, however. Roscosmos hasn't provided dates, and state media claim the first phase will launch sometime between 2025 and 2030. The second would arrive between 2030 and 2035. There could be a long interval between Russia's touted ISS exit in 2024 and a functional replacement.

Roscosmos announced its departure from the ISS in July in response to the West's sanctions and other measures following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February. If the move goes ahead, it will end two decades of a shared, permanent US-Russia presence aboard the station. Russia will still fulfill its obligations until the 2024 cutoff and even has a deal to swap flight seats with the US.

The country has incentives to get its own platform running as quickly as possible. The absence of a station limits Russia's ability to conduct both the previously mentioned Earth observations as well as low-gravity research. There's also the matter of national pride. Russia decommissioned its last self-run station, Mir, in 2001. ROSS would not only help Russia pick up where it left off, but eclipse the country's previous efforts.

The major cost-cutting drive at Warner Bros. Discovery is continuing, as the company is reportedly laying off around 70 workers across HBO and HBO Max. Most of the cuts are on the side of the streaming service, according to Deadline.

The layoffs account for around 14 percent of staffers across the two divisions. HBO Max's nonfiction team is being downsized, which isn't surprising given the influx of reality and documentary programming from the Discovery side of the business. Leadership may believe it's redundant for HBO Max to have its own reality division. As Variety notes, kids' programming will be less of a priority for HBO Max too, as there have been cuts to the live-action family originals department.

Although there had been rumors that the ax would fall on many HBO Max originals as part of budget cuts and a changing strategies, that's not exactly that case, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The publication notes that leadership at the streaming service is expanding its lineup of originals, albeit with fewer non-fiction and live-action family projects. No projects were canceled as part of today's layoffs.

Warner Bros. Discovery recently cannedBatgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunt, movies that were lined up as HBO Max exclusives. According to reports, the company shelved the films in favor of tax breaks.

In addition, HBO Max's casting and international teams have been downsized. The team that handles acquisitions of third-party content has been affected too. Meanwhile, layoffs are said to be expected in other Warner Bros. Discovery divisions. Engadget has contacted HBO Max for comment.

WarnerMedia and Discovery merged in April to form Warner Bros. Discovery. An effort to slash costs got underway quickly, with the company announcing it would shut down CNN+ only a few weeks after that streaming service launched. Next year, the company will merge HBO Max and Discovery+ into a single platform. It's not yet clear what the unified streaming service will be called, though it may retain the HBO Max name or, according to one report, it could simply be named "Max."

For the first time since Amazon released the Fire 7 earlier this year, the company has discounted the base model — the one with 16GB of storage and lock screen ads — to $45. You can also get the 32GB variant on sale. After a 19 percent discount, it’s $65 – or just $5 more than what you would pay for the 16GB version normally. Amazon offers the Fire 7 in three colors (Black, Denim and Rose), all of which are included in the company’s current promotion.

The new 2022 model features a handful of small enhancements over its predecessor. The most notable one is the addition of USB-C charging. It also comes with 2GB of RAM (up from 1GB on the previous generation model) and the same 2GHz processor found on the Fire HD 8. Amazon also claims you can get up to 10 hours of battery life from the new model. That said, don’t expect a fast experience from the Fire 7. When she reviewed the tablet earlier this summer, Engadget’s Nicole Lee found it would often hiccup when she would navigate the interface or try to do any multitasking. The 1,024 by 600 screen is also a disappointment. It produces images that look dull and muddy.

For those reasons, the Fire 7 isn’t a great tablet for most people. However, if you can get past its flaws and know what to expect from a tablet that normally costs $65, it’s a decent enough device for reading and surfing the web.

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Disney's D23 Expo takes place in just a few weeks and one panel that will be worth paying attention to is all about games. It takes place at 4PM ET on September 9th and it will feature several Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century projects.

The first Disney and Marvel Games Showcase will include new game announcements. It will also offer a look at something new for Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, as well as updates on upcoming titles Disney Dreamlight Valley and Marvel’s Midnight Suns. On top of all that, we'll get an early peek at a Marvel action-adventure title that's in the works at Amy Hennig’s studio, Skydance New Media.

The showcase will stream live on the D23, Disney and Marvel YouTube, Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as on Marvel's Twitch channel. After the showcase, D23 attendees will be able to view a presentation that features developer interviews and special guests.

Android 13 is coming out of beta and will start rolling out to Pixels today, with devices from Samsung, ASUS, Nokia (HMD), Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Sony, Xiaomi and more expected to get the update later this year. The latest version of Google's mobile operating system brings more granular privacy controls, a new photo picker, Bluetooth LE audio and more. Those who want even more personalization from the company's Material You theme generator may appreciate the additional customized app icons.

One of the more intriguing updates is messaging app streaming, which will let you cast your messaging apps to your Chromebook so you can chat with your friends on your laptop. Google said this works with Messages "and many of your other favorite messaging apps." Inter-device copy and paste will be getting easier too, with the company saying you'll "soon be able to copy content — like a URL, picture, text or video — from your Android phone and paste it on your tablet" or the other way around.

There are plenty of small touches that make Android 13 feel refreshed, like an animated progress bar in the updated media playback box on the lock screen, as well as a QR code scanner shortcut. Many other improvements are coming to the L version of Android, which is designed to make navigating larger screened devices more intuitive.

You'll also find HDR video capability on third-party camera apps, support for braille displays for Google's screen reader Talkback and an update media output switcher. The company lists more details on what's changed on its website so you can check them out there.