An image from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where in 1874, the newest thing was not software or genetic compositions, but shutter fastenings from H.L. Norton. , would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not." That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets.

A day after exploding pagers targeting Hezbollah members killed 12 people, including two children, and injured nearly 3,000 people in Lebanon and Syria, the attacks started again. The New York Times reports 14 people have died, along with hundreds injured in the second wave of explosions. Lebanese state media agency NNA reports they resulted from wireless devices like walkie-talkies and fingerprint analysis devices that also damaged cars and motorcycles and started fires, including one at a lithium battery store. At least one of the exploding devices on Wednesday went off in the middle of a funeral procession for several of the people killed in the previous attack, causing additional panic as people ran for safety and were asked to...

Rich Johnston, a father of two school-aged children in Atlanta, thought AOL Instant Messenger was bad enough. Johnston recently told me that “away messages screwed with people’s brains,” stressed them out. The self-identified elder millennial also loves the fire hose of information that is X, formerly Twitter, and yes, he knows that’s weird. “Now we’ve got Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram, and that’s got to be worse in 10 years,” he said. “That’s the terrifying part of bringing a kid up in this environment.” He’s not the only one who feels this way. There’s now a nationwide and rather panicked push to keep smartphones out of kids’ hands and teens off of social media, pointing to a correlation between young people spending more time online and an increase in mental health problems. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy even called for warning labels on social media platforms earlier this year.  This week that panic reached a tipping point.  Congress on Wednesday came one step closer to passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA), as tech companies scramble to get ahead of what would be the most significant internet regulation in decades.  And just a day before that bill was set to be marked up in the House, Meta announced it was revamping Instagram with a new effort called Teen Accounts, which makes accounts of users under 18 private by default, restricts notifications at night, and gives parents options to supervise their kids. It’s not exactly taking Instagram away from teens, but it could dramatically change how they use it. This is the latest move by social media companies to make their platforms a bit less, well, terrifying for parents. YouTube and Snapchat made similar announcements this month.  Whether these developments will actually be good for kids remains an open question. This is all happening against a backdrop where seven states have passed bans in schools, and another 14 are considering bans. There’s also a wave of cultural pressure, intensified by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, The Anxious Generation, rallies parents to work together to “swim against the tide of ever-increasing screen time.” One of his collaborators, psychologist Jean Twenge, was one of the first to sound the alarm about the link between youth mental health and time online back in 2017 when she asked in an Atlantic essay, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” To be clear, researchers like Haidt and Twenge aren’t suggesting we simply ban kids from ever touching a smartphone or scrolling through a social media feed. We don’t actually know how such bans or even changes in policy would affect youth mental health. Meanwhile, the school phone bans that have been sweeping the nation don’t govern what parents do at home. We are, however, starting to use the phrase “phone ban” a lot more than we used to. “I hear that talk of a ban as a kind of howl of despair, really, that we’ve lost control,” said Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, who has been studying kids and tech for decades. “We’ve lost control of the feed from the companies, and we’ve lost control of our education and our health and our family life by accepting — as part of whatever kind of Faustian contract — the infrastructure of commerce.”  In other words, we’re letting the tech companies win.  Companies like Meta make money by getting their users to engage more with their products, so they can collect data about them and sell targeted ads accordingly. Instagram’s new Teen Accounts might make parents feel like they have a bit more control over how their kids factor into these transactions, but their kids’ attention is still the product.  KOSPA, however, targets the business models of social media platforms. The legislation, which combines the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), would ban targeted advertising to minors, allow users to turn off algorithmic sorting in their feeds, and bumps the minimum age requirement for online accounts from 13 to 17. It would also create a so-called “duty of care” for social media companies that would make them liable for harmful content on their platforms. The definition of what constitutes harmful content is still being hammered out in the bill’s language. We don’t yet know the fate of KOSPA. Its predecessor, KOSA, passed the Senate in July with a vote of 93 in favor, 3 opposed. Tech companies and their lobbyists have been arguing against it, as have free speech advocates who believe it will open the door to censorship. Combined with whatever self-regulation social media platforms decide to do, such sweeping legislation could make it a little less terrifying to raise kids in our increasingly digital world. But it hardly guarantees an end to the youth mental health crisis. The internet, like parenting, does not come with an instruction manual. There are, however, resources available to help parents and children develop healthy media habits.  The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has an entire portal dedicated to kids and tech. A good starting point is the 5 Cs of Media Use — Child, Content, Calm, Crowding Out, and Communication — that help you evaluate the specific needs of your child. The AAP points out that although we’re accustomed to safety standards for childrens’ products, such regulations don’t currently exist for tech. “This means that kids are using platforms and apps that might have been designed for adults — not kids at their different stages of development,” according to the AAP. Parents should also follow basic guidelines for healthy digital media use, like turning off notifications, avoiding screens before bed, limiting social media use, and just putting your phone away sometimes. You can live without looking at it for longer than you think. To do that, Livingstone told me, we should study the causes of youth mental health problems, rather than focus on the consequences of screen time. Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Lab at Wellesley College, pointed to the surgeon general’s call for warnings on social media platforms as a sign of “a little bit of a hysterical panic.” She also said that solving the mental health problem will require more than a crackdown on smartphone use. “People want something to stop that rise of mental illness as if this was going to be the magic bullet,” Charmaraman said. “I think it could actually cause people to not look at the other root causes of mental illness.” It’s not just the kids, after all, who are having a hard time navigating life online. Surgeon General Murthy in August issued an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents, and with it, the hand-wringing over kids and tech starts to resemble an ouroboros of anxiety. In a New York Times essay about the advisory, Murthy even points to “the impact of social media on youth mental health” as a source of mental health challenges for parents. “Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being,” Murthy wrote. “And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.” No wonder everyone’s feeling panicky. As Congress bands together to take aim at kids’ safety online and give parents more control over what their children see and do online, parents are stuck in a feedback loop. They’re stressed out by the child care crisis that Congress still won’t solve. They’re suffering through a loneliness epidemic with no end in sight. A 2022 Harvard study found that 20 percent of mothers and 15 percent of fathers reported anxiety, compared to 18 percent of teens. And almost 40 percent of teens said they were “somewhat worried” about their parents’ mental health. We don’t yet know how changing the way social media works for kids will affect their mental health. There’s a chance that turning off algorithmic feeds will reduce the risk that they’re exposed to harmful content. It’s certainly possible that getting rid of targeted ads will have a positive effect. Better privacy is bound to keep kids safer from strangers online. If nothing else, we’ve at least started talking more about how these platforms work and could work better. And how we could feel better online and off. “You can’t protect them from it forever,” Johnston, the dad from Atlanta, said. “So you’ve got to train them how to use it in a smart, safe, non-panic-inducing fashion as best you can.” A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Rich Johnston, a father of two school-aged children in Atlanta, thought AOL Instant Messenger was bad enough. Johnston recently told me that “away messages screwed with people’s brains,” stressed them out. The self-identified elder millennial also loves the fire hose of information that is X, formerly Twitter, and yes, he knows that’s weird. “Now we’ve got Snapchat and TikTok and Instagram, and that’s got to be worse in 10 years,” he said. “That’s the terrifying part of bringing a kid up in this environment.” He’s not the only one who feels this way. There’s now a nationwide and rather panicked push to keep smartphones out of kids’ hands and teens off of social media, pointing to a correlation between young people spending more time online and an increase in mental health problems. US Surgeon General Vivek Murtha even called for warning labels on social media platforms earlier this year.  This week that panic reached a tipping point.  Congress on Wednesday came one step closer to passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOSPA), as tech companies scramble to get ahead of what would be the most significant internet regulation in decades.  And just a day before that bill was set to be marked up in the House, Meta announced it was revamping Instagram with a new effort called Teen Accounts, which makes accounts of users under 18 private by default, restricts notifications at night, and gives parents options to supervise their kids. It’s not exactly taking Instagram away from teens, but it could dramatically change how they use it. This is the latest move by social media companies to make their platforms a bit less, well, terrifying for parents. YouTube and Snapchat made similar announcements this month.  Whether these developments will actually be good for kids remains an open question. This is all happening against a backdrop where seven states have passed bans in schools, and another 14 are considering bans. There’s also a wave of cultural pressure, intensified by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt, whose latest book, The Anxious Generation, rallies parents to work together to “swim against the tide of ever-increasing screen time.” One of his collaborators, psychologist Jean Twenge, was one of the first to sound the alarm about the link between youth mental health and time online back in 2017 when she asked in an Atlantic essay, “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” To be clear, researchers like Haidt and Twenge aren’t suggesting we simply ban kids from ever touching a smartphone or scrolling through a social media feed. We don’t actually know how such bans or even changes in policy would affect youth mental health. Meanwhile, the school phone bans that have been sweeping the nation don’t govern what parents do at home. We are, however, starting to use the phrase “phone ban” a lot more than we used to. “I hear that talk of a ban as a kind of howl of despair, really, that we’ve lost control,” said Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, who has been studying kids and tech for decades. “We’ve lost control of the feed from the companies, and we’ve lost control of our education and our health and our family life by accepting — as part of whatever kind of Faustian contract — the infrastructure of commerce.”  In other words, we’re letting the tech companies win.  Companies like Meta make money by getting their users to engage more with their products, so they can collect data about them and sell targeted ads accordingly. Instagram’s new Teen Accounts might make parents feel like they have a bit more control over how their kids factor into these transactions, but their kids’ attention is still the product.  KOSPA, however, targets the business models of social media platforms. The legislation, which combines the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children and Teen’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), would ban targeted advertising to minors, allow users to turn off algorithmic sorting in their feeds, and bumps the minimum age requirement for online accounts from 13 to 17. It would also create a so-called “duty of care” for social media companies that would make them liable for harmful content on their platforms. The definition of what constitutes harmful content is still being hammered out in the bill’s language. We don’t yet know the fate of KOSPA. Its predecessor, KOSA, passed the Senate in July with a vote of 93 in favor, 3 opposed. Tech companies and their lobbyists have been arguing against it, as have free speech advocates who believe it will open the door to censorship. Combined with whatever self-regulation social media platforms decide to do, such sweeping legislation could make it a little less terrifying to raise kids in our increasingly digital world. But it hardly guarantees an end to the youth mental health crisis. The internet, like parenting, does not come with an instruction manual. There are, however, resources available to help parents and children develop healthy media habits.  The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has an entire portal dedicated to kids and tech. A good starting point is the 5 Cs of Media Use — Child, Content, Calm, Crowding Out, and Communication — that help you evaluate the specific needs of your child. The AAP points out that although we’re accustomed to safety standards for childrens’ products, such regulations don’t currently exist for tech. “This means that kids are using platforms and apps that might have been designed for adults — not kids at their different stages of development,” according to the AAP. Parents should also follow basic guidelines for healthy digital media use, like turning off notifications, avoiding screens before bed, limiting social media use, and just putting your phone away sometimes. You can live without looking at it for longer than you think. To do that, Livingstone told me, we should study the causes of youth mental health problems, rather than focus on the consequences of screen time. Linda Charmaraman, founder and director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Lab at Wellesley College, pointed to the surgeon general’s call for warnings on social media platforms as a sign of “a little bit of a hysterical panic.” She also said that solving the mental health problem will require more than a crackdown on smartphone use. “People want something to stop that rise of mental illness as if this was going to be the magic bullet,” Charmaraman said. “I think it could actually cause people to not look at the other root causes of mental illness.” It’s not just the kids, after all, who are having a hard time navigating life online. Surgeon General Murtha in August issued an advisory on the mental health and well-being of parents, and with it, the hand-wringing over kids and tech starts to resemble an ouroboros of anxiety. In a New York Times essay about the advisory, Murtha even points to “the impact of social media on youth mental health” as a source of mental health challenges for parents. “Stress, loneliness and exhaustion can easily affect people’s mental health and well-being,” Murtha wrote. “And we know that the mental health of parents has a direct impact on the mental health of children.” No wonder everyone’s feeling panicky. As Congress bands together to take aim at kids’ safety online and give parents more control over what their children see and do online, parents are stuck in a feedback loop. They’re stressed out by the child care crisis that Congress still won’t solve. They’re suffering through a loneliness epidemic with no end in sight. A 2022 Harvard study found that 20 percent of mothers and 15 percent of fathers reported anxiety, compared to 18 percent of teens. And almost 40 percent of teens said they were “somewhat worried” about their parents’ mental health. We don’t yet know how changing the way social media works for kids will affect their mental health. There’s a chance that turning off algorithmic feeds will reduce the risk that they’re exposed to harmful content. It’s certainly possible that getting rid of targeted ads will have a positive effect. Better privacy is bound to keep kids safer from strangers online. If nothing else, we’ve at least started talking more about how these platforms work and could work better. And how we could feel better online and off. “You can’t protect them from it forever,” Johnston, the dad from Atlanta, said. “So you’ve got to train them how to use it in a smart, safe, non-panic-inducing fashion as best you can.” A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Soundcore has launched another ultralight wireless speaker called the Select 4 Go. It’s priced at $24.99, making it the most affordable option in Soundcore’s current lineup of Bluetooth speakers and much cheaper than similarly sized options such as Ultimate Ears’ recently launched $79.99 Miniroll. The Select 4 Go pairs a 1.75-inch 5W full-range speaker driver with a passive radiator to help bolster the intensity of lower frequencies. That’s only a slightly smaller speaker than you’ll find inside the pricier Miniroll, which has a claimed 12 hours of battery life. Soundcore says the Select 4...

It’s been nearly six years since we warned you that ads were coming for your pause button and 18 months since Google revealed that YouTube would serve them up, too. Now, YouTube confirms advertisers can broadly target your paused screentime: “As we’ve seen both strong advertiser and strong viewer response, we’ve since widely rolled out Pause ads to all advertisers,” YouTube comms manager Oluwa Falodun confirms to The Verge. Technically, YouTube started piloting pause ads in 2023 with a limited selection of advertisers, but Google chief business officer Philipp Schindler revealed this April that they were unsurprisingly a big hit with ad firms and lucrative for Google. Last week, Redditors started posting that the pause ads seemed to be...

Enlarge On Wednesday, AI video synthesis firm Runway and entertainment company Lionsgate announced a partnership to create a new AI model trained on Lionsgate's vast film and TV library. The deal will feed Runway legally clear training data and will also reportedly provide Lionsgate with tools to enhance content creation while potentially reducing production costs. Lionsgate, known for franchises like John Wick and The Hunger Games, sees AI as a way to boost efficiency in content production. Michael Burns, Lionsgate's vice chair, stated in a press release that AI could help develop "cutting edge, capital efficient content creation opportunities." He added that some filmmakers have shown enthusiasm about potential applications in pre- and post-production processes. Runway plans to develop a custom AI model using Lionsgate's proprietary content portfolio. The model will be exclusive to Lionsgate Studios, allowing filmmakers, directors, and creative staff to augment their work. While specifics remain unclear, the partnership marks the first major collaboration between Runway and a Hollywood studio.

The globally popular YouTube star's upcoming reality show is facing serious (but also vague) allegations.

Netflix's Emmy-winning tale of dystopian game-show terror starring Lee Jung-jae (Star Wars: The Acolyte) is back December 26.

Enlarge The FBI has dismantled a massive network of compromised devices that Chinese state-sponsored hackers have used for four years to mount attacks on government agencies, telecoms, defense contractors, and other targets in the US and Taiwan. The botnet was made up primarily of small office and home office routers, surveillance cameras, network-attached storage, and other Internet-connected devices located all over the world. Over the past four years, US officials said, 260,000 such devices have cycled through the sophisticated network, which is organized in three tiers that allow the botnet to operate with efficiency and precision. At its peak in June 2023, Raptor Train, as the botnet is named, consisted of more than 60,000 commandeered devices, according to researchers from Black Lotus Labs, making it the largest China state botnet discovered to date. Raptor Train is the second China state-operated botnet US authorities have taken down this year. In January, law enforcement officials covertly issued commands to disinfect Internet of Things devices that hackers backed by the Chinese government had taken over without the device owners’ knowledge. The Chinese hackers, part of a group tracked as Volt Typhoon, used the botnet for more than a year as a platform to deliver exploits that burrowed deep into the networks of targets of interest. Because the attacks appear to originate from IP addresses with good reputations, they are subjected to less scrutiny from network security defenses, making the bots an ideal delivery proxy. Russia-state hackers have also been caught assembling large IoT botnets for the same purposes.

Google is rolling out an update that’ll let you adjust the brightness levels of its newest Nest Learning Thermostat, fixing a key issue that made it difficult to read, according to Android Authority. The Nest Learning Thermostat (4th gen) is Google’s biggest redesign of the smart thermostat since it launched in 2011. Released in August, one of the thermostat’s major new features was the 2.7-inch display, which was double the size of its predecessor and more customizable. For example, you can have the main display be a clock or show the weather or indoor temperature. As you get closer, it can then transition to display the humidity, outdoor temperature, or even the outdoor air quality index score. There was one huge drawback, though: o...

Nothing is more frustrating than buying a new pair of headphones, an OLED TV, or a laptop just to find out that you could have gotten it for a lot cheaper somewhere else. That’s why, in order to keep customers happy and prevent them from going elsewhere, many retailers offer price-matching policies in which they promise to match a lower price found elsewhere. That kind of information comes in handy no matter the time of year, but it’s especially helpful during shopping events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Amazon’s upcoming Prime Day event — aka Prime Big Deal Days — which kicks off on October 8th. What follows are the price-matching policies for a variety of major retailers. There are a few things to make note of here. First, all...

Roughly 25 years after it launched payment processing, PayPal is “ushering in a new era for customers” with some generic black text. The company has a new logo, designed by Pentagram, that looks incredibly plain — especially compared to previous iterations of the logo that featured a rakish slant, two shades of blue, and prominent PayPal P’s. The company justifies the change by saying that the new black standalone wordmark won’t be confused with the rest of the payments processing world — especially “the blue that has become synonymous with fintech.” And yet:

A rich knight likely paid a handsome sum to import the ornately carved monument, despite brutal conditions in the Jamestown colony.

The future of drone warfare could hinge on the unique structures found in your laziest pet's peepers.

The studio recently distanced itself from a Megalopolis trailer full of chatbot-generated quotes, but its new deal with Runway suggests it'll be embracing AI more openly in the future.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, announced Tuesday that it would begin rolling out measures that restrict what kind of content young people can access, who they can talk to, and how much time they spend on special media. The new measures will begin with an Instagram rollout that began September 17 in the US, but will eventually be implemented on Facebook and WhatsApp, too. The new policies include automatically making Instagram accounts of users 16 and under private, limiting who can contact teen accounts or tag them in posts, muting certain words associated with online bullying, and defaulting to the most restrictive content access, as well as encouraging young people to spend less time on the app. The new protocols come after years of discourse regarding the effect of social media use on young people, with pundits and politicians arguing that social media and smartphones are to blame for a decline in teenagers’ well-being.  Legislation and lawsuits have blamed social media for issues ranging from bullying and suicidal ideation to eating disorders, attention problems, and predatory behavior. Meta’s new policies gesture toward those concerns, and some may have positive effects, particularly those geared toward privacy. But they also address the rhetoric of politicians rather than teenagers’ well-being and come even as some experts caution that there’s no causal relationship between youth social media use and those poor outcomes.  Meta and other social media companies have been subject to intense scrutiny for their perceived ill effects on the mental health and well-being of young people. Cyberbullying, eating disorders, anxiety, suicidal ideation, poor academic outcomes, sexual exploitation, and addiction to social media and technology are all concerns that Meta’s new Instagram protocols were designed to address.  In recent years, reporting — like the Wall Street Journal’s 2021 series Facebook Files — has explored how Meta’s leadership knew that Instagram could be toxic for teen girls’ body image, yet did not try to mitigate the risks to vulnerable users. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has also placed the blame for increasing rates of depression and anxiety on social media use; his office released a report last year warning that social media use was a leading contributor to a decline in young people’s mental well-being.  The report says that up to 95 percent of American children ages 13 to 17 use social media, and nearly 40 percent of children ages 8 to 12 do, too. “At this time, we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” the report’s introduction states, and cites excessive use, harmful content, bullying, and exploitation as the main areas for concern.  Murthy also called for a surgeon general’s warning label on social media — similar to the one on cigarette packs and alcohol bottles warning about those products’ risk to health — in a New York Times op-ed in June. The op-ed also called for federal legislation to protect children using social media. Such legislation is already making its way through Congress — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). KOSA passed the Senate in July and is headed to the House for markup Wednesday; it’s not clear whether any version of the bill will end up passing both chambers, but President Joe Biden has indicated that he would sign such a bill if it did.  The version of KOSA that passed earlier this summer would require companies to allow children or teen accounts to turn off targeted algorithmic features and limit features that reward or enable sustained use of the platform or game in question. It would also require companies to limit who could communicate with minors, as Meta’s new policies do; “prevent other users […] from viewing the minor’s personal data”; and mitigate and prevent harms to teen mental health. The Senate-approved version of KOSA goes further than Meta’s new teen account policies do, particularly when it comes to young people’s data privacy, and it’s unclear what effect the Instagram Teen accounts will have, if any, on legislation surrounding young people’s social media use.  The language in Meta’s press release is geared toward parents’ concerns about their children’s social media use, rather than young people’s online privacy, mental health, or well-being. The reality is that Meta’s teen accounts, as well as the KOSA legislation, can only do so much to address cultural and political fears about what social media does to children’s well-being because we simply don’t know that much about it. The available data does not show that social media use has more than a negligible outcome on teens’ mental health.  “A lot of things that are proposed to fix social media are not really questions of scientific rigor, they’re not really questions about health or anxiety or depression,” Andrew Przybylski, a professor of human behavior and technology at Oxford University, told Vox. “They’re basically matters of taste.” Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson, who studies the psychological effect of media on young people, said that in his view the uproar over social media’s effect on kids’ well-being has all the makings of  “a moral panic,” echoing earlier generations’ concerns that radio, television, the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and other new media would ruin the minds and morals of children. It’s unclear exactly what metrics Meta plans to use to decide whether the new rules are helping children and parents; when asked about those metrics, Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw only told Vox that the company would “iterate to ensure Teen Accounts work” for Instagram users. Crenshaw didn’t respond to follow-up questions by publication time. “These all look like good-faith efforts,” Przybylski said. “But we don’t know if it’s going to work.”