Tech Industry

A “click to cancel” law was last month passed in California, and now the FTC has ratified a federal rule designed to achieve the same goal. The idea of both is to force companies to make it as easy to cancel an online or app subscription as it is to sign up in the first place.

Update: The FTC has announced that enforcement has been pushed back from May 14 to July 14 to give companies more time to respond – and that it may even be weakened – see end of the piece …

Update: CNBC reports that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has dismissed its lawsuit against the three lead banks, as the White House downsizes the consumer rights agency.

A high rate of Zelle scams originating from social media contacts has led JPMorgan Chase Bank to block payments made through social media networks and messaging apps. Chase said that Zelle was intended as a method of transferring money to family, friends, and other trusted contacts, and should never be used to make online purchases …

Digg – once known as “the homepage of the internet” – is making a come-back, after being bought by its co-founder Kevin Rose in partnership with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

It’s an interesting move given that Reddit was a competitor who pretty much inherited that “homepage of the web” accolade. Also ‘interesting’ is the pair’s belief that most moderation can be done by AI …

Consumer electronics from China are getting more expensive for both consumers and businesses, as Trump’s 10% import tariffs take effect. Additionally, removal of a small-value exemption on existing tariffs means some products are now subject to import taxes as high as 45%.

Courier companies are also applying their own collection fees on top of the tariffs, further increasing costs – and some companies are pausing imports while they figure out what to do …

After I commented on the ASUS Zenbook A14 not only emulating the look of the MacBook Air, but exceeding its specs in several respects, I got the chance to spend some time using the machine.

While I’m certainly not going to be making the switch from macOS to Windows, there are a few things I’d love to see Apple replicate in future MacBooks …

Satellite video calls will be coming to Europe from later this year, following a successful demo of the tech by Vodafone in partnership with AST SpaceMobile. Rollout in the US through AT&T will follow some time later.

As with existing satellite text and voice calls, the service will operate in remote areas where no cellular coverage is available …

The greatest attraction for me about Vision Pro is being able to have huge virtual monitors for both work and entertainment, but the downside is the discomfort of wearing one for an extended time. The Brelyon Ultra Reality Extend is a funky new monitor tech that aims to solve this problem.

You don’t have to wear anything – just sit in front of a monitor, which can project a virtual display as wide as 122 inches from a much smaller physical display …

Throughout the ongoing wildfires, California officials have relied on emergency alerts to communicate with citizens. This system is an important way for officials to communicate with citizens instantly across iPhone and Android devices.

On Thursday evening, however, a wildfire evacuation alert went out to everyone in Los Angeles – even though it was only meant for a subset of residents.

I’m a great fan of robot cleaners, and they’ve grown more capable over the years. They started with vacuuming, then added mopping, then auto-emptying.

But this year’s CES announcements go further, and I can’t help feeling like companies are now just adding capabilities purely to have something to talk about …

It says a lot about Apple’s design that the MacBook Air is seen as the ultimate standard targeted by PC laptop brands. Just matching the aesthetics and performance of the machine is seen as a tough goal, but ASUS may have gone one better with its new Zenbook A14.

The new machine not only succeeds in emulating the look of the MacBook Air, but exceeds its specs in no fewer than five different ways – including being even lighter …

You have to feel sorry for Intel at this point. Not only has Apple left its CPUs in the dust, but AMD’s new Ryzan AI Max chips claim to do the same to Intel’s flagship Core Ultra 9 288V.

The new chips take the same approach as Apple Silicon in combining CPU, GPU, and unified memory. AMD doesn’t credit Apple with the idea, but does admit the chip wouldn’t exist without the Cupertino company …

Oura remains the king of the smart ring business – at least until Apple enters the arena – but two competitors are trying very different approaches in launching their own models.

French branch Circular hasn’t made much progress to date, thanks to a plastic construction and an absence of wireless charging, but it has fixed both issues in its latest model …

Apple’s long-term goal for Vision Pro is believed to be an Apple Glasses product, in which an ordinary-looking pair of glasses will be able to display both text and AR content.

We’ve seen some competitors take early steps in that direction, and the RayNeo X3 Pro AR glasses look like the closest thing we’ve yet seen in a real-world product …

While some parents treat their kids to an Apple Watch, the Pinwheel Watch aims to offer an interesting alternative. The $160 cellular smartwatch combines strong parental controls with a kid-friendly AI chatbot.

Unlike the real thing, the Pinwheel includes a camera, with the company promising that video calling will be coming later this year …

Phishing attacks are about to get a whole lot more convincing. A new report warns that scammers are now using AI to scrape information about you from your online profiles in order to send hyper-personalized emails which target your login credentials.

By finding out everything from your employer to your interests, scammers can send emails which have a far greater chance of appearing to be genuine …