The fight continues

Google is fighting tooth and nail to keep the Play Store locked down, which it claims is beneficial to Android users who expect an orderly and safe app ecosystem. The company pleaded with the US Supreme Court several weeks ago to consider the supposed negative impact of the order, asking to freeze the lower court’s order while it prepared its final appeal.

Ultimately, SCOTUS allowed the order to stand, but Google has now petitioned the high court to hear its appeal in full. The company will attempt to overturn the original ruling, which could return everything to its original state. With Google’s insistence that it is only allowing this modicum of extra freedom while the District Court’s order is in effect, devs could experience some whiplash if the company is successful.

It’s uncertain if the high court will take up the case and whether that would save Google from implementing the next phase of Judge Donato’s order. That includes providing a mirror of Play Store content to third-party app stores and distributing those stores within the Play Store. Because these are more complex technical requirements, Google has 10 months from the final ruling to comply. That puts the deadline in July 2026.

If the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, arguments likely won’t happen for at least a year. Google may try to get the summer 2026 deadline pushed back while it pursues the case. Even if it loses, the impact may be somewhat blunted. Google’s planned developer verification system will force all developers, even those distributing outside the Play Store, to confirm their identities with Google and pay a processing fee. Apps from unverified developers will not be installable on Google-certified Android devices in the coming years, regardless of where you get them. This system, which is allegedly about ensuring user security, would also hand Google more control over the Android app ecosystem as the Play Store loses its special status.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/google-begins-loosening-developer-restrictions-in-play-store-against-its-will/

After kicking off an unpopular pilot test last month, Samsung made the practice of having its expensive smart fridges display ads official this week.

The ads will be shown on Samsung’s 2024 Family Hub smart fridges. As of this writing, Samsung’s Family Hub fridges have MSRPs ranging from $1,899 to $3,499. The ads will arrive through a software update that Samsung will start issuing this month and display on the fridge’s integrated 21.5- or 32-inch (depending on the model) screen. The ads will show when the fridges are idle and display what Samsung calls Cover Screens.

As part of the Family Hub software update, we are piloting a new widget for select Cover Screens themes of Family Hub refrigerators. The widget will display useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements.

Samsung also said that its fridges will only show contextualized ads, instead of personalized ads, which rely on collecting data on users.

The Verge reported that the widget will appear as a rectangular box at the bottom of the screens. The box will change what it displays “every 10 seconds,” the publication said.

The software update will also introduce “a Daily Board theme that offers a new way to see useful information at a glance,” Samsung said. The Verge reported that this feature will also include ads, something that Samsung’s announcement neglected to state. The Daily Board theme will show five tiles with information such as appointments and the weather, and one with ads.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/samsung-makes-ads-on-3499-smart-fridges-official-with-upcoming-software-update/

That leaves AMD with four distinct branding tiers for laptop processors: the Ryzen AI 300 series, which uses all of the company’s latest silicon and supports Windows 11’s Copilot+ features; the Ryzen 200 series for processors originally launched in mid to late 2023 as Ryzen 7040 and Ryzen 8040; Ryzen 100 for Rembrandt-R chips first launched in 2022; and then a smattering of two-digit Ryzen and Athlon brand names for Mendocino chips.

These chips are still capable of providing a decent Windows (or Linux) experience for budget PC buyers—we were big fans of the Ryzen 6000 in particular back in the fall of 2022. But the practice of giving old chips updated labels continues to feel somewhat disingenuous, and it means that users who do want AMD’s latest CPU and GPU architectures (or neural processing units, for Copilot+ PC features) will continue to pay a premium for them.

If you want to squint hard and see an upside to this for PC buyers, it’s that if you can get a good deal on a refurbished or clearance PC using Ryzen 6000, Ryzen 7035, or Ryzen 7020 chips, you’re still technically getting the latest and greatest processors that AMD is willing to sell you. The issue, as always, is that stacking more brand names on top of old processors makes it that much more difficult to make an informed buying decision.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/amd-shores-up-its-budget-laptop-cpus-by-renaming-more-years-old-silicon/

In turn, the delay in network state propagations spilled over to a network load balancer that AWS services rely on for stability. As a result, AWS customers experienced connection errors from the US-East-1 region. AWS network functions affected included the creating and modifying Redshift clusters, Lambda invocations, and Fargate task launches such as Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow, Outposts lifecycle operations, and the AWS Support Center.

For the time being, Amazon has disabled the DynamoDB DNS Planner and the DNS Enactor automation worldwide while it works to fix the race condition and add protections to prevent the application of incorrect DNS plans. Engineers are also making changes to EC2 and its network load balancer.

A cautionary tale

Ookla outlined a contributing factor not mentioned by Amazon: a concentration of customers who route their connectivity through the US-East-1 endpoint and an inability to route around the region. Ookla explained:

The affected US‑EAST‑1 is AWS’s oldest and most heavily used hub. Regional concentration means even global apps often anchor identity, state or metadata flows there. When a regional dependency fails as was the case in this event, impacts propagate worldwide because many “global” stacks route through Virginia at some point.

Modern apps chain together managed services like storage, queues, and serverless functions. If DNS cannot reliably resolve a critical endpoint (for example, the DynamoDB API involved here), errors cascade through upstream APIs and cause visible failures in apps users do not associate with AWS. That is precisely what Downdetector recorded across Snapchat, Roblox, Signal, Ring, HMRC, and others.

The event serves as a cautionary tale for all cloud services: More important than preventing race conditions and similar bugs is eliminating single points of failure in network design.

“The way forward,” Ookla said, “is not zero failure but contained failure, achieved through multi-region designs, dependency diversity, and disciplined incident readiness, with regulatory oversight that moves toward treating the cloud as systemic components of national and economic resilience.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/a-single-point-of-failure-triggered-the-amazon-outage-affecting-millions/

For years, color E Ink was seen as a desirable feature, which would make it easier to read magazines and comics on low-power devices—Boox even has an E Ink monitor. However, the quality of the displays has been lacking. These screens do show colors, but they’re not as vibrant as what you get on an LCD or OLED. In the case of the Palma 2 Pro, the screen is also less sharp in color mode. The touchscreen display is 824 × 1648 in monochrome, but turning on color cuts that in half to 412 × 824.

In addition to the new screen, the second-gen Palma adds a SIM card slot. It’s not for phone calls, though. The SIM slot allows the device to get 5G mobile data in addition to Wi-Fi.

The Palma 2 Pro runs Android 15 out of the box. That’s a solid showing for Boox, which often uses much older builds of Google’s mobile OS. Upgrades aren’t guaranteed, and there’s no official support for Google services. However, Boox has a workaround for its devices so the Play Store can be installed.

The new Boox pocket reader is available for pre-order now at $400. It’s expected to ship around November 14.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/the-android-powered-boox-palma-2-pro-fits-in-your-pocket-but-its-not-a-phone/

Microsoft said earlier this month that it wanted to add better voice controls to Copilot, Windows 11’s built-in chatbot-slash-virtual assistant. As described, this new version of Copilot sounds an awful lot like another stab at Cortana, the voice assistant that Microsoft tried (and failed) to get people to use in Windows 10 in the mid-to-late 2010s.

Turns out that the company isn’t done trying to reformulate and revive ideas it has already tried before. As part of a push toward what it calls “human-centered AI,” Microsoft is now putting a face on Copilot. Literally, a face: “Mico” is an “expressive, customizable, and warm” blob with a face that dynamically “listens, reacts, and even changes colors to reflect your interactions” as you interact with Copilot. (Another important adjective for Mico: “optional.”)

Mico (rhymes with “pico”) recalls old digital assistants like Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Rover, ideas that Microsoft tried in the ’90s and early 2000s before mostly abandoning them.

Microsoft clearly thinks that backing these ideas with language and/or reasoning models will help Copilot succeed where both Cortana and Clippy failed. Part of the reason these assistants were viewed as annoying rather than helpful is that they could respond to a finite number of possible inputs or situations, and they didn’t even help in those situations most of the time because they could only respond to a small number of context clues. I don’t have hard evidence for this, but I’d bet that the experience of dismissing Clippy’s “It looks like you’re writing a letter!” prompts is near-universal among PC users of a certain age.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/microsoft-makes-copilot-human-centered-with-a-90s-style-animated-assistant/

Apple’s iPhone Air was the company’s most interesting new iPhone this year, at least insofar as it was the one most different from previous iPhones. We came away impressed by its size and weight in our review. But early reports suggest that its novelty might not be translating into sales success.

A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, whose supply chain sources are often accurate about Apple’s future plans, said yesterday that demand for the iPhone Air “has fallen short of expectations” and that “both shipments and production capacity” were being scaled back to account for the lower-than-expected demand.

Kuo’s note is backed up by reports from other analysts at Mizuho Securities (via MacRumors) and Nikkei Asia. Both of these reports say that demand for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models remains strong, indicating that this is just a problem for the iPhone Air and not a wider slowdown caused by tariffs or other external factors.

The standard iPhone, the regular-sized iPhone Pro, and the big iPhone Pro have all been mainstays in Apple’s lineup, but the company has had a harder time coming up with a fourth phone that sells well enough to stick around. The small-screened iPhone mini and the large-screened iPhone Plus were each discontinued after two generations.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/early-indicators-analyst-reports-suggest-apples-iphone-air-isnt-taking-off/

A few weeks ago, Google told US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that it would allow creators banned for COVID and election misinformation to rejoin the platform. It didn’t offer many details in the letter, but now YouTube has explained the restoration process. YouTube’s “second chances” are actually more expansive than the letter made it seem. Going forward, almost anyone banned from YouTube will have an opportunity to request a new channel. The company doesn’t guarantee approval, but you can expect to see plenty of banned creators back on Google’s video platform in the coming months.

YouTube will now allow banned creator to request reinstatement, but this is separate from appealing a ban. If a channel is banned, creators continue to have the option of appealing the ban. If successful, their channel comes back as if nothing happened. After one year, creators will now have the “second chance” option.

“We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance,” the blog post reads, noting that YouTube itself doesn’t always get things right the first time. The option for getting a new channel will appear in YouTube Studio on the desktop, and Google expects to begin sending out these notices in the coming months. However, anyone terminated for copyright violations is out of luck—Google does not forgive such infringement as easily as it does claiming that COVID is a hoax.

The readmission process will still come with a review by YouTube staff, and the company says it will take multiple factors into consideration, including whether or not the behavior that got the channel banned is still against the rules. This is clearly a reference to COVID and election misinformation, which Google did not allow on YouTube for several years but has since stopped policing. The site will also consider factors like how severe or persistent the violations were and whether the creator’s actions “harmed or may continue to harm the YouTube community.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/youtube-explains-how-banned-creators-can-get-a-second-chance/

Of the many minor to medium-size annoyances that come with a modern Windows 11 installation, the requirement that you sign in with a Microsoft account is one of the most irritating. Sure, all operating systems (including Apple’s and Google’s) encourage account sign-in as part of their setup process and prevent you from using multiple operating system features until and unless you sign in.

Various sanctioned and unsanctioned tools and workarounds existed to allow users to set their PCs up with old-fashioned local accounts, and those workarounds haven’t changed much in the last three years. But Microsoft is working on tightening the screws in preview builds of Windows, foreshadowing some future version of Windows where getting around the account requirement is even harder than it already is.

In a new update released to the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Preview program yesterday (build number 26220.6772), Microsoft announced it was “removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE).” Microsoft says that these workarounds “inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.”

The removed commands include the “OOBE\BYPASSNRO” workaround that Microsoft announced it was removing earlier this year, plus a “start ms-cxh:localonly” workaround that had been documented more recently. In current Windows releases, users can open a command prompt window during setup with Shift+F10 and input either of those commands to remove both the Microsoft account requirement and Internet connection requirement.

Windows 11 Pro currently includes another workaround, where you can indicate that you plan to join your computer to a corporate domain and use that to create a local account. We don’t know whether this mechanism has also been removed from the new Windows build.

It’s unclear what “critical setup screens” Microsoft is referring to; when using the workarounds to create a local account, the Windows setup assistant still shows you all the screens you need for creating an account and a password, plus toggling a few basic privacy settings. Signing in with a Microsoft account does add multiple screens to this process though—these screens will attempt to sell you Microsoft 365 and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, and to opt you into features like the data-scraping Windows Recall on PCs that support it. I would not describe any of these as “critical” from a user’s perspective, but my priorities are not Microsoft’s priorities.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/microsoft-removes-even-more-microsoft-account-workarounds-from-windows-11-build/

Smartphone processor and modem maker Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino, the Italian company known mainly for its open source ecosystem of microcontrollers and the software that makes them function. In its announcement, Qualcomm said that Arduino would “[retain] its brand and mission,” including its “open source ethos” and “support for multiple silicon vendors.”

“Arduino will retain its independent brand, tools, and mission, while continuing to support a wide range of microcontrollers and microprocessors from multiple semiconductor providers as it enters this next chapter within the Qualcomm family,” Qualcomm said in its press release. “Following this acquisition, the 33M+ active users in the Arduino community will gain access to Qualcomm Technologies’ powerful technology stack and global reach. Entrepreneurs, businesses, tech professionals, students, educators, and hobbyists will be empowered to rapidly prototype and test new solutions, with a clear path to commercialization supported by Qualcomm Technologies’ advanced technologies and extensive partner ecosystem.”

Qualcomm didn’t disclose what it would pay to acquire Arduino. The acquisition also needs to be approved by regulators “and other customary closing conditions.”

The first fruit of this pending acquisition will be the Arduino Uno Q, a Qualcomm-based single-board computer with a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor installed. The QRB2210 includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU and a Qualcomm Adreno 702 GPU, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and combines that with a real-time microcontroller “to bridge high-performance computing with real-time control.”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/arduino-retains-its-brand-and-mission-following-acquisition-by-qualcomm/