If you want to subscribe to Disney Plus or Hulu on your iPhone, you can’t do that anymore. Support documents for Disney Plus and Hulu now say that new and returning subscribers to those streaming services can’t sign up through Apple, as reported by MacRumors. I’m not currently paying for Disney Plus, so out of curiosity, I tried logging into my account through the iOS app to see what would happen. After entering my email and password, I was greeted by a message that says: “Unfortunately, this app doesn’t support in-app sign up. Finish setting up your account on the website. Create and manage your account at disneyplus.com/next.” Hulu’s iOS app also pushes you to the Hulu website if you try to log in without an active subscription.

In a new copyright lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity, Dow Jones and the New York Post argue that hallucinating fake news and attributing it to real papers is illegal.

Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur and campaign surrogate for former President Donald Trump, recently announced a plan to give away $1 million each day until November 5 to a randomly chosen person who’s signed a petition from his political action committee. To win the money, the signee must be a registered swing state voter — and that criterion has raised concerns that Musk may be in violation of a federal law that makes it illegal to pay people (or offer them an incentive) to either register to vote or cast a ballot.  “I think there’s a strong argument that there’s potential criminal liability here, so at the very least [the Department of Justice] should be investigating and should be warning people not to be doing this,” Richard Hasen, director of the safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law School, told Vox. The program works like this: Registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, or Wisconsin — all swing states that could go for either Vice President Kamala Harris or Trump come election day — can sign the petition, which claims to be a “Petition in Favor of Free Speech and the Right to Bear Arms” until Monday, October 21, which happens to be the voter registration deadline in Pennsylvania.  The petition is being circulated by Musk’s America PAC, which has taken over much of Trump’s ground operation in key swing states. Musk has made Pennsylvania a particular focus of his personal outreach, hosting events there, including one on Sunday where he handed a woman in a Trump-Vance shirt a giant $1 million check. Though the petition does not require signers to be registered Republicans, the focus on the First and Second Amendments appeals to potential Trump voters who fear Democrats will take away their gun rights and who subscribe to Musk’s idea of “free speech.” The net effect, then, is that Musk is promising $1 million a day to a program aimed at getting pro-Trump voters registered in swing states. Because his contest is only open to registered voters, there may be a case for it to be understood as an illegal financial incentive to get people to register to vote. One issue Musk faces, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, is that what constitutes payment for voting-related activity has been broadly interpreted in the past.  “This could involve anything of value,” Becker said. The law “has been applied to things like Ben & Jerry’s offering everyone who has an ‘I Voted’ sticker an ice cream cone on Election Day. They received a cease-and-desist letter and changed [the promotion to give] everyone a free ice cream cone on Election Day.” There is some ambiguity in Musk’s promotion, compared to what Ben & Jerry’s offered, however. The uncertainty arises from the fact that Musk’s PAC is asking people to sign a petition for the chance to win $1 million, not explicitly rewarding them for registering to vote. Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government Program, told Vox that the issue at hand really comes down to whether entering a specific group of people in a lottery if they sign a petition counts as paying people to register to vote.  “There’s certainly an argument that it is, [but] I think it’s hard to know for sure how to predict how this would play out in court,” Weiner said. Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro called the contest “concerning,” and said it was “something that law enforcement could take a look at” in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. Thus far, the federal government hasn’t announced any investigation into the contest.  If indeed the Justice Department decided to pursue Musk, it would first send a cease-and-desist letter — just like the one Ben & Jerry’s received back in 2008. From there, he would have to decide how to respond; the penalty for breaking the law is $10,000 or a maximum of five years in prison. But even if the DOJ decides to go after Musk for this — and there is no guarantee that it will — the issue likely won’t be resolved before November 5, in part to avoid any perception on the part of the federal government that the DOJ is meddling in the election.  “There are important norms around initiating investigations and legal proceedings in the run-up to an election. Otherwise, they can potentially launch an investigation after the election, and whether they will is something that’s difficult to predict,” Weiner said. “I think that this is something whose legality will not be resolved before the election.”

From simple fitness bands and rugged sports watches to rings, these are the best trackers you can get.

For years, Google has included an extra search box within some search results, encouraging you to dig further and look only within a specific website. But now that sitelinks search box is going away because “usage has dropped.” Google: It’s been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks search box in Google Search, and over time, we’ve noticed that usage has dropped. With that, and to help simplify the search results, we’ll be removing this visual element starting on November 21, 2024. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, it will probably make more sense if you see it: See that little search box beneath the link for The New York Times? That’s what Google’s taking away. You...

The Spider-Man actor joins Matt Damon in the latest mystery film from the Oppenheimer director.

Though it remains very unclear whether any of the self-driving vehicles demoed at Tesla’s We, Robot presentation will ever actually make it to market, one of the production companies behind Blade Runner 2049 thinks Elon Musk ripped off their copyright for the event, and are taking him to court. Today, Alcon Entertainment — an LA-based production company behind Blade Runner 2049 — filed a lawsuit against Tesla, Elon Musk, and Warner Bros. Discovery alleging that an AI image generator was used to create promotional art for the We, Robot event that was meant to resemble stills from the 2017 sci-fi film. According to Alcon, which also owns the copyright to Blade Runner 2049, WBD and Tesla sent a request to use imagery from the film on the...

We found the best cameras for your budget and needs.

America PAC purchased ads yielding tens of millions of impressions on X between July 8 and October 1, according to the platform’s ad disclosure data.

The vibes about who will win the 2024 presidential election may have shifted — but with barely more than two weeks until Election Day, the polls are as inconclusive as they’ve ever been. Polling averages show a contest in which Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are almost tied in most key swing states. And while Trump’s polling has improved slightly in the past few weeks, it hasn’t been enough to give him a clear edge. At least not yet. On average, Trump holds a small edge, generally between 1 and 2 points, in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. To win the presidency, though, he will need to breach the “blue wall” by winning one of Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. As of midday Monday, those states are still, on average, about tied. There hasn’t been a ton of high-quality swing-state polling in recent weeks, and the best-regarded pollsters will likely all release new numbers closer to the end of the campaign. Once they do, we could get a better sense of where the race stands. If polling averages continue to show an extremely close race after a final infusion of high-quality polls, it will only heighten the uncertainty about what will happen. Polling errors — where one candidate or party is systematically underestimated — of the magnitude of a few points are common.  The polls could be underestimating Trump again, as they did in swing states in 2016 and 2020. Alternatively, perhaps pollsters have corrected for their previous bias — or even overcorrected, risking an error that underestimates Harris. We simply won’t know until the votes are counted. To recap: There are seven swing states that will very likely determine the outcome of the election (with every other state expected to go solidly for either Trump or Harris). Listed in order of electoral votes, they are: If Harris can pick up 44 electoral votes in these swing states, she’ll win the presidency. Trump would need 51 electoral votes from these same states to win. The polls say these swing states are — brace yourself — very close! Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina all are almost exactly tied in the New York Times’s polling averages, which show Trump up in Georgia by 1 and Arizona by 2. Nate Silver’s polling averages have similar results. There’s a slightly more rosy story for Harris in the Washington Post’s averages, which show her up by 2 in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. On the other hand, the RealClearPolitics averages show Trump leading by 2 points or less in all the swing states. But these differences are hair-splitting. None of these results are lopsided enough to instill any real confidence about which way the outcome will go.  The vibes, on the other hand, point more clearly in one direction: Among Democrats, there’s been increasing trepidation about Harris’s chances, while Republicans sound quite confident in Trump’s.  But the pre-election vibes would have told you that the GOP was headed for a landslide victory in 2022, that Biden was going to win overwhelmingly (rather than very narrowly) in 2020, and that Trump had no chance of winning in 2016. These sorts of intangible hunches and guesses just aren’t worth much. Some point to purported clues about the outcome in non-polling metrics, like early voting numbers or prediction markets. But early voting numbers are a notoriously bad indicator of what will happen on Election Day. Prediction markets generally reflect conventional wisdom — and this year in particular, they may be skewed by a few big-betting Trump fans. Once we know the result, hindsight will be 20/20. We can all look back for the clues that were purportedly hidden in plain sight, as we tell ourselves stories about how the outcome was fated all along. For now, though, the race is simply too close to call.

The pouches have become a cause célèbre among anti-regulation conservatives, and a growing number of middle and high school students are using them.

Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti star in the DC Batman spinoff series, streaming on Max.

The new Roomba Combo 2 Essential and Roomba Vac 2 Essential include a dock for self-emptying their dirt bins — a feature missing from the budget-friendly Essential robovacs that iRobot introduced six months ago. The 2-in-1 Combo 2 features both vacuuming and mopping capabilities for $424.99 and is slightly more expensive than the Vac 2, which only sucks up dust and dirt for $399.99. The Combo 2 is now the most expensive option in iRobot’s Essential line and slightly pricier than the $400 DreameBot D10 Plus, our current choice for the best budget robot vacuum and mop. The Vac 2 is available via “select retailers” in North America (including Target and Best Buy, so far) and has the same features as the Combo except for the mopping...

The streaming platform is looking to make fewer movies that are higher quality, a radical strategy borne from disruption.

Knock 34% off the price of the best TP-Link AX3000 WiFi 6 OneMesh-ready router when you order it at Amazon.