Even with burnout, overwhelm, budget cuts, hiring freezes, waves of redundancies and everything else in 2024, there’s still little regulation in the US to stop employers tapping workers to respond to requests either at their desk or through their smartphones and laptops at home.

(Of course, France is showing us all up, having introduced a right-to-disconnect policy back in 2017. Those pesky, utterly correct French…)

This week, California State Assemblyman Matt Haney introduced AB 2751, a “right to disconnect” proposition. If passed, it would make every California employer lay out exactly what a person’s hours are and ensure they aren’t required to respond to work-related communications while off the clock. Time periods in which a salaried employee might have to work longer hours would need to be laid out in their contract.

“I do think it’s fitting that California, which has created many of these technologies, is also the state that introduces how we make it sustainable and update our protections for the times we live in and the world we’ve created,” Haney told The San Francisco Standard.

He’s not wrong: California is the birthplace of Gmail, the iPhone, although not Slack — watch out Vancouver, Canada.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

HP Spectre x360 14 review

Tesla sees EV deliveries drop year-over-year for the first time since 2020

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X names its third head of safety in less than two years

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Form’s next-gen goggles make for a more comfortable swim

Smart Swim 2 is smaller, lighter and more useful.

Engadget

Form launched its Smart Swim goggles in 2019. They featured a built-in display showing real-time data when you swim, and its successor, the Smart Swim 2, is a refinement in every way. Form has nipped and tucked the existing model, with the tech pack 15 percent smaller than its predecessor. It also worked on comfort and fit, giving the goggles longer, more adjustable straps and a broader range of swappable nose bridges.

Continue reading.

Amazon just walked out on its self-checkout technology

The company is removing Just Walk Out from Fresh grocery stores in the US.

Amazon

Amazon is removing its much-trumpeted Just Walk Out tech from all of its US Fresh grocery stores. The self-checkout system used cameras, sensors and good old-fashioned human eyeballs to track what people leave the store with, charging the customers accordingly with no human needing to scan a thing.

One issue was the system didn’t use AI object detection and advanced smarts as much as Amazon would like you to believe. There are reportedly over 1,000 people in India scanning the camera feeds to ensure accurate checkouts.

Amazon tried to sell the technology to other retail chains, but its only major deal was with Starbucks in a few locations. These systems require high ceilings to accommodate the cameras and sensors. Reuters suggested many retailers consider Amazon a competitor and didn’t want its hooks in their systems. For now, the systems will continue in select UK stores.

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With the launch of the iPhone 12 Apple doubled wireless charging power to 15 watts, but there was a catch: only Apple-branded MagSafe chargers operated at full power. Now, users are getting a surprise update. The latest iOS 17.4 release now allows third-party Qi2 chargers to charge at the maximum rated 15 watts of power as well, MacWorld reported. 

Apple introduced Qi2 15 watt wireless charging support for the iPhone 13 and 14 with iOS 17.2, and the iPhone 15 supported the standard from the get-go. In fact, it's based on Apple's MagSafe technology, with Apple being a "steering member" and chair of the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) board of directors. 

When the iPhone 12 came along in October 2020, however, Qi2 didn't exist and the WPC's original Qi standard was limited to 7.5 watts. Since the iPhone 12 used MagSafe, it was apparently able to support Qi2 and its higher max charging capability. 

Apple has yet to officially comment on this change. However, Macworld tested the iPhone 12 with Qi2 devices and found that they match the charging speeds of official MagSafe chargers. 

Charger manufacturer Belkin also stated that its Qi2 chargers "are fully certified to deliver up to 15 watts of fast wireless charging to Qi2-enalbed devices," while referring any other questions to Apple. With the change, all MagSafe iPhones now support Qi2 charging.

Apple's move to support Qi2 with its iPhone lineup was a bit of a surprise, considering it tends to favor in-house proprietary solutions. It may have been done to fend off regulators, as the EU had already forced it to switch to USB-C charging to avoid wasteful multiple standards. 

Amazon is removing Just Walk Out tech from all of its Fresh grocery stores in the US, as reported by The Information. The self-checkout system relies on a host of cameras, sensors and good old-fashioned human eyeballs to track what people leave the store with, charging the customers accordingly.

The technology has been plagued by issues from the onset. Most notably, Just Walk Out merely presents the illusion of automation, with Amazon crowing about generative AI and the like. Here’s where the smoke and mirrors come in. While the stores have no actual cashiers, there are reportedly over 1,000 real people in India scanning the camera feeds to ensure accurate checkouts. 

It’s also incredibly expensive to install and maintain the necessary equipment, which is likely why Just Walk Out technology was only adopted at around half of Fresh stores in the US. There have been plenty of frustrating issues for consumers when using this system, from receipts being sent out hours after purchase to completely mismanaged orders. In other words, it took a vast array of sensitive equipment and 1,000 people staring at video feeds to do the job of one or two people sitting behind cash registers at each store. Ain’t modern innovation grand?

There’s also some major privacy concerns here. Remember those cameras and sensors? They are constantly collecting biometric information as people shop. This goes beyond Amazon’s palm-scanning technology, as the cameras and sensors measure the shape and size of each customer’s body for identification and tracking purposes. This led to a class action suit in New York that accused the company of collecting biometric identifier information without properly disclosing the practices to consumers.

The suit says that Amazon ran afoul of the state’s Biometric Identifier Information Law, which requires businesses to tell customers if they are collecting data used for identification purposes. Peter Romer-Friedman, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, told The Seattle Times that “Amazon owes its customers an explanation about how it’s operating these systems before people enter — so that people can decide for themselves whether they want to provide measurements of the size and shape of their body as a condition of getting a sandwich.”

Amazon tried to sell the technology to other retail chains, but didn’t get too many bites. It teamed up with Starbucks in a few locations and there was a small launch in hospitals for medical staff, but that’s about it. One sticking point? These systems require high ceilings to accommodate the cameras and sensors. Reuters also suggested that many retailers consider Amazon a competitor and disruptor, souring them on a technology partnership. Those 1,000 off-shore cashiers probably didn’t help with the sales pitch either.

Just Walk Out technology will continue to be offered in select stores in the UK. As for the US, Amazon says the removal of these systems is part of a larger effort to revamp its retail grocery arm. The company plans on bringing its Dash smart carts to retail locations, after a test at several Whole Foods and Fresh stores. These smart carts are equipped with scales and sensors to track spending in real time and, of course, allow consumers to skip the checkout.

Apple is making the Vision Pro a bit more social with the introduction of Spatial Personas, which breaks those avatars out of their restricted windows and plops them right next to you in virtual space. The goal is to make collaborating and hanging out feel more natural in the Vision Pro — you can work on presentations together, watch movies over SharePlay, or play games as if your friends are right beside you. The feature works with up to five participants, and it'll be available today for everyone with a Vision Pro running visionOS 1.1 or later.

Meta has tackled virtual collaboration similarly with Horizon Workrooms, but Apple's implementation reminds me more of Microsoft Mesh, which let me interact with virtual companions in AR using the HoloLens 2. Like the Vision Pro itself, Spatial Personas seem a bit more refined than Microsoft's 2021-era technology. You can enable or disable them at will from a FaceTime call, and Apple says everyone will be able to adjust content how they like, without affecting how their virtual companions will see it.

While I found Apple's Personas to be a bit creepy and robotic during my Vision Pro review, the company has steadily improved them to better capture different facial expressions and hairstyles. When they're stuck in a FaceTime window, Personas are a sub-par replacement for actually seeing your friends faces. But they may be more useful if they can make it seem like your remote friends are actually sitting beside you. 

Long before Gmail became smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was buttering up the public for a fate that defined the internet age: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

When Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and the timing of its release reportedly had people assuming it was a joke. It wasn’t the first web-based email provider — Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had already been around for years — but Gmail was offering faster service, automatic conversation grouping for messages, integrated search functions and 1GB of storage, which was at the time a huge leap forward in personal cloud storage. Google in its press release boasted that a gigabyte was “more than 100 times” what its competitors offered. All of that, for free.

Except, as Gmail and countless tech companies in its wake have taught us, there’s no such thing as free. Using Gmail came with a tradeoff that’s now commonplace: You get access to its service, and in exchange, Google gets your data. Specifically, its software could scan the contents of account holders’ emails and use that information to serve them personalized ads on the site’s sidebar. For better or worse, it was a groundbreaking approach.

“Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it’s the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” tech journalist Paul Boutin wrote for Slate when Gmail launched. (Boutin, one of its early media testers, wrote favorably about Google’s email scanning but suggested the company implement a way for users to opt out lest they reject it entirely.)

There was immediate backlash from those who considered Gmail to be a privacy nightmare, yet it grew — and generated a lot of hype, thanks to its invite-only status in the first few years, which spurred a reselling market for Gmail invitations at upwards of $150 a pop, according to TIME. Google continued its ad-related email scanning practices for over a decade, despite the heat, carrying on through Gmail’s public rollout in 2007 and well into the 2010s, when it really started gaining traction.

And why not? If Gmail proved anything, it was that people would, for the most part, accept such terms. Or at least not care enough to read the fine-print closely. In 2012, Gmail became the world’s largest email service, with 425 million active users.

Other sites followed Google’s lead, baking similar deals into their terms of service, so people’s use of the product would automatically mean consent to data collection and specified forms of sharing. Facebook started integrating targeted ads based on its users’ online activities in 2007, and the practice has since become a pillar of social media’s success.

Things have changed a lot in recent years, though, with the rise of a more tech-savvy public and increased scrutiny from regulators. Gmail users on multiple occasions attempted to bring about class-action lawsuits over the scanning issue, and in 2017, Google finally caved. That year, the company announced that regular Gmail users’ emails would no longer be scanned for ad personalization (paid enterprise Gmail accounts already had this treatment).

Google, of course, still collects users’ data in other ways and uses the information to serve hyper-relevant ads. It still scans emails too, both for security purposes and to power some of its smart features. And the company came under fire again in 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed it was allowing third-party developers to trawl users’ Gmail inboxes, to which Google responded by reminding users it was within their power to grant and revoke those permissions. As CNET reporters Laura Hautala and Richard Nieva wrote then, Google’s response more or less boiled down to: “This is what you signed up for.”

Really, what users signed up for was a cutting-edge email platform that ran laps around the other services at the time, and in many ways still does. It made the privacy concerns, for some, easier to swallow. From its inception, Gmail set the bar pretty high with its suite of free features. Users could suddenly send files of up to 25MB and check their email from anywhere as long as they had access to an internet connection and a browser, since it wasn’t locked to a desktop app.

It popularized the cloud as well as the Javascript technique AJAX, Wired noted in a piece for Gmail’s 10-year anniversary. This made Gmail dynamic, allowing the inbox to automatically refresh and surface new messages without the user clicking buttons. And it more or less did away with spam, filtering out junk messages.

Still, when Gmail first launched, it was considered by many to be a huge gamble for Google — which had already established itself with its search engine. “A lot of people thought it was a very bad idea, from both a product and a strategic standpoint,” Gmail creator Paul Buchheit told TIME in 2014. “The concern was this didn’t have anything to do with web search.”

Things obviously worked out alright, and Gmail’s dominion has only strengthened. Gmail crossed the one billion user mark in 2016, and its numbers have since doubled. It’s still leading the way in email innovation, 20 years after it first went online, integrating increasingly advanced features to make the process of receiving and responding to emails (which, let’s be honest, is a dreaded daily chore for a lot of us) much easier. Gmail may eventually have changed its approach to data collection, but the precedent it set is now deeply enmeshed in the exchange of services on the internet; companies take what data they can from consumers while they can and ask for forgiveness later.

Elon Musk's answer to ChatGPT is getting an update to make it better at math, coding and more. Musk's xAI has launched Grok-1.5 to early testers with "improved capabilities and reasoning" and the ability to process longer contexts. The company claims it now stacks up against GPT-4, Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Opus in several areas. 

Going by xAI's numbers, Grok-1.5 appears to be a large improvement over Grok-1. It shot up to 50.6 percent in the MATH benchmark, over double the previous score. It also climbed to 90 percent and 74.1 percent in GSM8K (math word problems) and HumanEval (coding), respectively, compared to 62.9 percent and 63.2 percent before. Those numbers are within shouting distance of Gemini Pro 1.5, GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus — in fact, the HumanEval coding score beats all rivals except Claude 3 Opus.

xAI

It can also process long contexts of up to 128K tokens within its context window, meaning it can amalgamate data from more sources to understand a situation. "This allows Grok to have an increased memory capacity of up to 16 times the previous context length, enabling it to utilize information from substantially longer documents," the company said.

xAI didn't detail Grok's progress in other areas, though, where it still may be lagging (academic scores, multimodal and others). And Grok-1.5 may not keep its position for long. ChatGPT 5 is set to arrive sometime this summer, promising a feature set that "makes it feel like you are communicating with a person rather than a machine," according to OpenAI. 

Currently, Grok is only available for users of the Premium+ tier on X (formerly Twitter), though Elon Musk recently promised to open it up to X's regular Premium users. The company also recently open sourced its Grok chatbot, after Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning its non-profit mission. 

Activision is reportedly in the midst of investigating a hacking campaign that's stealing login credentials from people playing its games. According to TechCrunch, bad actors have been successfully installing malware onto victims' computers and using their access to steal logins for their gaming accounts and even their crypto wallets. The video game publisher has apparently been helping victims remove the malware and regain control of their accounts, but it doesn't have enough information at the moment to say how the malware is spreading. 

TechCrunch's source said the malware "could be only affecting folks who have third-party tools installed," insinuating that people are getting it from non-Activision-developed software typically used with its games. Delaney Simmons, Activision's spokesperson, told the publication that the company is aware of "claims that some player credentials across the broader industry could be compromised from malware from downloading or using unauthorized software." He added that the company's servers "remain secure and uncompromised."

That's certainly a plausible theory, seeing as the hacking scheme appears to have been uncovered by someone known as Zeebler, who develops cheating software for Call of Duty. Zeebler told TechCrunch that he discovered the campaign when one of his customers had their account stolen for his software. Upon looking into it, he reportedly discovered a database containing stolen credentials. He also said that the malware is disguised to look like real software, but they were actually designed to steal the usernames and passwords victims type in. Zeebler is presumably talking about third-party tools like cheating software getting cloned to harvest people's logins, but phishing schemes that use Activision's official login design exist, as well. Bottom line is, people should be careful what they download and always double check if the login page they're typing in is the real deal. 

A $3 iOS app now records higher-resolution spatial videos than Apple’s native camera app. Spatialify, available on the App Store, lets iPhone 15 Pro owners record 3D videos for Apple’s Vision Pro in either 1080p at 60fps or 4K at 30fps — with HDR. Apple’s native recording only supports 1080p / 30fps without HDR, so your immersive clips will be noticeably sharper using Spatialify than the camera app on the same phone. UploadVR first reported on the app update.

Spatialify launched earlier this year as a tool for converting Apple’s spatial videos (HEVC format) for playback on non-Apple VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3. But with Meta later adding native HEVC conversion to its headsets (the best-selling on the market), Spatialify’s superior recording could give the third-party app a new lease on life.

Engadget senior editor Devindra Hardawar confirmed that Spatialify produces files in 4K / 30fps when set accordingly. He also verified that Spatialify’s videos look much sharper on the Vision Pro than those shot in Apple’s camera app. HDR also makes the videos’ lighting look more realistic. Not bad for three bucks.

It’s somewhat surprising Apple is holding back its native camera app from exploiting the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max’s full hardware capabilities, but it isn’t unheard of. Halide, a popular iOS camera app, beat Apple to the punch with iOS photography features like shooting in RAW, manual controls and portrait photos for pets. Based on that history, I wouldn’t be shocked if Apple soon added similar advanced spatial recording to its camera, especially now that we know its current hardware has no problem with it.

Spatialify is available on the App Store for $3. It requires an iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro Max to capture spatial videos.

Microsoft's Copilot AI service is set to run locally on PCs, Intel told Tom's Hardware. The company also said that next-gen AI PCs would require built-in neural processing units (NPUs) with over 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of power — beyond the capabilities of any consumer processor on the market. 

Intel said that the AI PCs would be able to run "more elements of Copilot" locally. Currently, Copilot runs nearly everything in the cloud, even small requests. That creates a fair amount of lag that's fine for larger jobs, but not ideal for smaller jobs. Adding local compute capability would decrease that lag, while potentially improving performance and privacy as well. 

Microsoft was previously rumored to require 40 TOPS on next-gen AI PCs (along with a modest 16GB of RAM). Right now, Windows doesn't make much use of NPUs, apart from running video effects like background blurring for Surface Studio webcams. ChromeOS and macOS both use NPU power for more video and audio processing features, though, along with OCR, translation, live transcription and more, Ars Technica noted.

So far, the processor with the fastest NPU speed is Apple M3, which offers 18 TOPS across the lineup (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Ultra). AMD's Ryzen 8040 and 7040 laptop chips are next with 16 and 10 TOPS respectively, while Intel's Meteor Lake laptop hits 10 TOPS as well. Qualcomm may offer the first processor with enough power for Copilot via the Snapdragon X Elite, which will offer 45 TOPS of AI compute speed. 

Intel's Lunar Lake chips, set to arrive in 2025, will ship with triple its current NPU speeds. Yesterday, the company introduced 300 new AI features optimized specifically for its own OpenVino platform. The chip giant also announced an AI PC development kit based on the the ASUS NUC Pro that uses its current Meteor Lake silicon. 

"From a desktop standpoint, we have plans on the desktop side, what we would say [is an] AI PC. And then there's also the next-gen AI PC, the 40 TOPS requirements; we have all of our different steps in our roadmap on how we cover all the different segments," the company told Tom's Hardware.

YouTube’s TikTok competitor, Shorts, is becoming a more significant part of the company’s monetization program. The company announced that more than a quarter of channels in its Partner Program are now earning money from the short-form videos.

The milestone comes a little more than a year after YouTube began sharing ad revenue with creators making Shorts. YouTube says it currently has more than 3 million creators around the world in the Partner Program, which would imply the number of Shorts creators making money from the platform is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.

Because ads on Shorts appear between clips in a feed, revenue sharing for Shorts is structured differently than for longer-form content on YouTube. Ad revenue is pooled and divided among eligible creators based on factors like views and music licensing. The company has said this arrangement is far more lucrative for individuals than traditional creator funds.

So far though, it’s unclear just how much creators are making from Shorts compared with the platform’s other monetization programs. YouTube declined to share details but said the company has paid out $70 billion to creators over the last three years.

Shorts’ momentum could grow even more in the coming months. TikTok, which itself has been trying to compete more directly with YouTube by encouraging longer videos, is facing a nonzero chance that its app could be banned in the United States. Though that outcome is far from certain, YouTube would almost certainly attract former TikTok users and creators.