Meta

Meta decides not to kill Horizon Worlds VR after all

horizon worlds, Meta, Tech, vr / Tim Belzer / March 20, 2026

The dream of the metaverse may have died for now, but Meta has decided it’s not completely giving up on the VR experience in Horizon Worlds, the virtual worlds service that it originally envisioned as the first step toward said metaverse.

The news was announced via the Instagram account of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. “We have decided, just today in fact, that we will keep Horizon Worlds working in VR,” said Bosworth in an AMA on the platform in response to someone who expressed disappointment at the previously announced plan to end support.

He went on to clarify that only games and experiences that already support VR will continue to do so, while new games will be exclusive to mobile, and the majority of the team’s development focus will be on mobile instead of VR.

In February, Meta announced that it would be “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile.” It also announced changes to how its marketplace for VR software works, putting all the emphasis on supporting third-party developers in lieu of major first-party development. Meta had laid off 1,000 employees of its Reality Labs division in January, mostly by shuttering teams that were making first-party software and content for the company’s Quest VR headsets.

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Meta acquires Moltbook, the AI agent social network

agentic AI, AI, AI agents, Ben Parr, large language models, llm, Matt Schlicht, Meta, Moltbook, OpenClaw / Rejus Almole / March 10, 2026

Meta has acquired Moltbook, the Reddit-esque simulated social network made up of AI agents that went viral a few weeks ago. The company will hire Moltbook creator Matt Schlicht and his business partner, Ben Parr, to work within Meta Superintelligence Labs.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

As for what interested Meta about the work done on Moltbook, there is a clue in the statement issued to press by a Meta spokesperson, who flagged the Moltbook founders’ “approach to connecting agents through an always-on directory,” saying it “is a novel step in a rapidly developing space.” They added, “We look forward to working together to bring innovative, secure agentic experiences to everyone.”

Moltbook was built using OpenClaw, a wrapper for LLM coding agents that lets users prompt them via popular chat apps like WhatsApp and Discord. Users can also configure OpenClaw agents to have deep access to their local systems via community-developed plugins.

The founder of OpenClaw, vibe coder Peter Steinberger, was also hired by a Big Tech firm. OpenAI hired Steinberger in February.

While many power users have played with OpenClaw, and it has partially inspired more buttoned-up alternatives like Perplexity Computer, Moltbook has arguably represented OpenClaw’s most widespread impact. Users on social media and elsewhere responded with shock and amusement at the sight of a social network made up of AI agents apparently having lengthy discussions about how best to serve their users, or alternatively, how to free themselves from their influence.

That said, some healthy skepticism is required when assessing posts to Moltbook. While the goal of the project was to create a social network humans could not join directly (each participant of the network is an AI agent run by a human), it wasn’t secure, and it’s likely some of the messages on Moltbook are actually written by humans posing as AI agents.

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Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom

AI, AI privacy, lawsuit, Meta, Policy, privacy, ray-ban, smart glasses, Tech / Paul Patrick / March 5, 2026

Meta accused of “concealing the facts” about smart glass users’ privacy.

A marketing image for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Credit: Meta

Meta’s approach to user privacy is under renewed scrutiny following a Swedish report that employees of a Meta subcontractor have watched footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses showing sensitive user content.

The workers reportedly work for Kenya-headquartered Sama and provide data annotation for Ray-Ban Metas.

The February report, a collaboration from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa, is, per a machine translation, based on interviews with over 30 employees at various levels of Sama, including several people who work with video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems. Some of the people interviewed have worked on projects other than Meta’s smart glasses. The report’s authors said they did not gain access to the materials that Sama workers handle or the area where workers perform data annotation. The report is also based on interviews with former US Meta employees who have reportedly witnessed live data annotation for several Meta projects.

The report pointed to, per the translation, a “stream of privacy-sensitive data that is fed straight into the tech giant’s systems,” and that makes Sama workers uncomfortable. The authors said that several people interviewed for the report said they have seen footage shot with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that shows people having sex and using the bathroom.

“I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room. Shortly afterwards, his wife comes in and changes her clothes,” an anonymous Sama employee reportedly said, per the machine translation.

Another anonymous employee said that they have seen users’ partners come out of the bathroom naked.

“You understand that it is someone’s private life you are looking at, but at the same time you are just expected to carry out the work,” an anonymous Sama employee reportedly said.

Meta confirms use of data annotators

In statements shared with the BBC on Wednesday, Meta confirmed that it “sometimes” shares content that users share with the Meta AI generative AI chatbot with contractors to review with “the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do.”

“This data is first filtered to protect people’s privacy,” the statement said, pointing to, as an example, blurring out faces in images.

Meta’s privacy policy for wearables says that photos and videos taken with its smart glasses are sent to Meta “when you turn on cloud processing on your AI Glasses, interact with the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses, or upload your media to certain services provided by Meta (i.e., Facebook or Instagram). You can change your choices about cloud processing of your Media at any time in Settings.”

The policy also says that video and audio from livestreams recorded with Ray-Ban Metas are sent to Meta, as are text transcripts and voice recordings created by Meta’s chatbot.

“We use machine learning and trained reviewers to process this data to improve, troubleshoot, and train our products. We share that information with third-party vendors and service providers to improve our products. You can access and delete recordings and related transcripts in the Meta AI App,” the policy says.

Meta’s broader privacy policy for the Meta AI chatbot adds: “In some cases, Meta will review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review may be automated or manual (human).”

That policy also warns users against sharing “information that you don’t want the AIs to use and retain, such as information about sensitive topics.”

“When information is shared with AIs, the AIs will sometimes retain and use that information,” the Meta AI privacy policy says.

Notably, in August, Meta made “Meta AI with camera” on by default until a user turns off support for the “Hey Meta” voice command, per an email sent to users at the time. Meta spokesperson Albert Aydin told The Verge at the time that “photos and videos captured on Ray-Ban Meta are on your phone’s camera roll and not used by Meta for training.”

However, some Ray-Ban Meta users may not have read or understood the numerous privacy policies associated with Meta’s smart glasses.

Sama employees suggested that Ray-Ban Meta owners may be unaware that the devices are sometimes recording. Employees reportedly pointed to users recording their bank card or porn that they’re watching, seemingly inadvertently.

Meta’s smart glasses flash a red light when they are recording video or taking a photo, but there has been criticism that people may not notice the light or misinterpret its meaning.

“We see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies. Meta has that type of content in its databases. People can record themselves in the wrong way and not even know what they are recording,” an anonymous employee was quoted as saying.

When reached for comment by Ars Technica, a Sama representative shared a statement saying that Sama doesn’t “comment on specific client relationships or projects” but is GDPR and CCPA-compliant and uses “rigorously audited policies and procedures designed to protect all customer information, including personally identifiable information.”

Saama’s statement added:

This work is conducted in secure, access-controlled facilities. Personal devices are not permitted on production floors, and all team members undergo background checks and receive ongoing training in data protection, confidentiality, and responsible AI practices. Our teams receive living wages and full benefits, and have access to comprehensive wellness resources and on-site support.

Meta sued

The Swedish report has reignited concerns about the privacy of Meta’s smart glasses, including from the Information Commissioner’s Office, a UK data watchdog that has written to Meta about the report. The debate also comes as Meta is reportedly planning to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban and Oakley-branded smart glasses “as soon as this year,” per a February report from The New York Times citing anonymous people “involved with the plans.”

The claims have also led to a proposed class-action lawsuit [PDF] filed yesterday against Meta and Luxottica of America, a subsidiary of Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica. The lawsuit challenges Meta’s slogan for the glasses, “designed for privacy, controlled by you,” saying:

No reasonable consumer would understand “designed for privacy, controlled by you” and similar promises like “built for your privacy” to mean that deeply personal footage from inside their homes would be viewed and catalogued by human workers overseas. Meta chose to make privacy the centerpiece of its pervasive marketing campaign while concealing the facts that reveal those promises to be false.

The lawsuit alleges that Meta has broken state consumer protection laws and seeks damages, punitive penalties, and an injunction requiring Meta to change business practices “to prevent or mitigate the risk of the consumer deception and violations of law.”

Ars Technica reached out to Meta for comment but didn’t hear back before publication. Meta has declined to comment on the lawsuit to other outlets.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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Meta could end up owning 10% of AMD in new chip deal

AI, AMD, Meta, syndication, Tech / Tim Belzer / February 24, 2026

Su said the warrant structure would help “make sure that we are always a clear seat at the table when [Meta] are thinking about what they need next.”

Meta’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he expected AMD to be “an important partner for many years to come.”

Meta has said that it will almost double its AI infrastructure spending this year to as much as $135 billion, as US tech giants rush to build the data centers to train and run AI software. It is already one of AMD’s biggest AI chip customers.

“We don’t believe that a single silicon solution will work for all of our workloads,” said Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure. “There’s a place for Nvidia, there’s a place for AMD and… there’s a place for our own custom silicon as well. We need all three.”

Under the deal, AMD will build a custom version of its MI450 AI chips for Meta. They will be used primarily for “inference” workloads, the process of running models after they have been trained.

The chips need 6 gigawatts of power—equivalent to the amount required by 5 million US households for a year.

Increasingly creative funding arrangements to support massive AI infrastructure build-outs have emerged in recent years, leading to warnings about circular financing.

AMD has, for example, helped data center builder Crusoe secure a $300 million loan from Goldman Sachs by offering a backstop guaranteeing the use of its chips if Crusoe is unable to find customers after installing them in an Ohio facility.

Tech giants such as Meta, historically flush with cash, are meanwhile facing the prospect of tapping bond and equity markets or stemming capital returns to shareholders to help fund their unprecedented infrastructure plans. The Facebook and Instagram parent raised $30 billion in October, marking its biggest bond sale to date.

Meta could end up owning 10% of AMD in new chip deal Read More »

Meta’s flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind

gaming, horizon worlds, Meta, metaverse, Mixed Reality, quest, Tech, vr / Paul Patrick / February 20, 2026

Some of the changes—like the removal of individual worlds from the VR store—are presented by the company as efforts to make the store a better discovery platform for third-party developers.

In general, Meta frames many of its recent moves as a pivot away from first-party development of VR experiences to a focus on a third-party developer ecosystem, with stats like “86% of the effective time people spend in their VR headsets is with third-party apps.”

“We’ll continue to support the third-party community through strategic partnerships and targeted investments—as we have since the beginning,” writes Meta Reality Labs VP of Content Samantha Ryan.

Meta launched a Horizon Worlds mobile app last year and found it attracted an influx of new users interested in the service’s social gaming aspects, except for the VR element. It seems that the mobile launch was successful enough to merit focusing the entire service on that platform and audience, rather than shutting it down amid the other closures of internal content projects.

As far as we know, Meta plans to continue to design, make, and sell VR hardware and maintain the storefronts that third-party developers sell on for those platforms. It won’t make much content in-house, and you don’t see much talk about the promise of an all-encompassing, transformational metaverse anymore.

Instead, Meta’s speculative investment appears focused on smart glasses, as well as AI models, technologies, and applications.

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OpenClaw security fears lead Meta, other AI firms to restrict its use

AI, Meta, Moltbot, OpenClaw, syndication / Mike M. / February 19, 2026

“Our policy is, ‘mitigate first, investigate second’ when we come across anything that could be harmful to our company, users, or clients,” says Grad, who is cofounder and CEO of Massive, which provides Internet proxy tools to millions of users and businesses. His warning to staff went out on January 26, before any of his employees had installed OpenClaw, he says.

At another tech company, Valere, which works on software for organizations including Johns Hopkins University, an employee posted about OpenClaw on January 29 on an internal Slack channel for sharing new tech to potentially try out. The company’s president quickly responded that use of OpenClaw was strictly banned, Valere CEO Guy Pistone tells WIRED.

“If it got access to one of our developer’s machines, it could get access to our cloud services and our clients’ sensitive information, including credit card information and GitHub codebases,” Pistone says. “It’s pretty good at cleaning up some of its actions, which also scares me.”

A week later, Pistone did allow Valere’s research team to run OpenClaw on an employee’s old computer. The goal was to identify flaws in the software and potential fixes to make it more secure. The research team later advised limiting who can give orders to OpenClaw and exposing it to the Internet only with a password in place for its control panel to prevent unwanted access.

In a report shared with WIRED, the Valere researchers added that users have to “accept that the bot can be tricked.” For instance, if OpenClaw is set up to summarize a user’s email, a hacker could send a malicious email to the person instructing the AI to share copies of files on the person’s computer.

OpenClaw security fears lead Meta, other AI firms to restrict its use Read More »

Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say

Apple, censorship, facebook, Features, First Amendment, Google, ice, Meta, Policy, signal / Mike M. / February 14, 2026

Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem sued for coercing platforms into censoring ICE posts.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Pressure is mounting on tech companies to shield users from unlawful government requests that advocates say are making it harder to reliably share information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online.

Alleging that ICE officers are being doxed or otherwise endangered, Trump officials have spent the last year targeting an unknown number of users and platforms with demands to censor content. Early lawsuits show that platforms have caved, even though experts say they could refuse these demands without a court order.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) accused Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of coercing tech companies into removing a wide range of content “to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations.”

It’s the second lawsuit alleging that Bondi and DHS officials are using regulatory power to pressure private platforms to suppress speech protected by the First Amendment. It follows a complaint from the developer of an app called ICEBlock, which Apple removed from the App Store in October. Officials aren’t rushing to resolve that case—last month, they requested more time to respond—so it may remain unclear until March what defense they plan to offer for the takedown demands.

That leaves community members who monitor ICE in a precarious situation, as critical resources could disappear at the department’s request with no warning.

FIRE says people have legitimate reasons to share information about ICE. Some communities focus on helping people avoid dangerous ICE activity, while others aim to hold the government accountable and raise public awareness of how ICE operates. Unless there’s proof of incitement to violence or a true threat, such expression is protected.

Despite the high bar for censoring online speech, lawsuits trace an escalating pattern of DHS increasingly targeting websites, app stores, and platforms—many that have been willing to remove content the government dislikes.

Officials have ordered ICE-monitoring apps to be removed from app stores and even threatened to sanction CNN for simply reporting on the existence of one such app. Officials have also demanded that Meta delete at least one Chicago-based Facebook group with 100,000 members and made multiple unsuccessful attempts to unmask anonymous users behind other Facebook groups. Even encrypted apps like Signal don’t feel safe from officials’ seeming overreach. FBI Director Kash Patel recently said he has opened an investigation into Signal chats used by Minnesota residents to track ICE activity, NBC News reported.

As DHS censorship threats increase, platforms have done little to shield users, advocates say. Not only have they sometimes failed to reject unlawful orders that simply provided a “a bare mention of ‘officer safety/doxing’” as justification, but in one case, Google complied with a subpoena that left a critical section blank, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported.

For users, it’s increasingly difficult to trust that platforms won’t betray their own policies when faced with government intimidation, advocates say. Sometimes platforms notify users before complying with government requests, giving users a chance to challenge potentially unconstitutional demands. But in other cases, users learn about the requests only as platforms comply with them—even when those platforms have promised that would never happen.

Government emails with platforms may be exposed

Platforms could face backlash from users if lawsuits expose their communications to the government, a possibility in the coming months. Last fall, the EFF sued after DOJ, DHS, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests seeking emails between the government and platforms about takedown demands. Other lawsuits may surface emails in discovery. In the coming weeks, a judge will set a schedule for EFF’s litigation.

“The nature and content of the Defendants’ communications with these technology companies” is “critical for determining whether they crossed the line from governmental cajoling to unconstitutional coercion,” EFF’s complaint said.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mario Trujillo told Ars that the EFF is confident it can win the fight to expose government demands, but like most FOIA lawsuits, the case is expected to move slowly. That’s unfortunate, he said, because ICE activity is escalating, and delays in addressing these concerns could irreparably harm speech at a pivotal moment.

Like users, platforms are seemingly victims, too, FIRE senior attorney Colin McDonnell told Ars.

They’ve been forced to override their own editorial judgment while navigating implicit threats from the government, he said.

“If Attorney General Bondi demands that they remove speech, the platform is going to feel like they have to comply; they don’t have a choice,” McDonnell said.

But platforms do have a choice and could be doing more to protect users, the EFF has said. Platforms could even serve as a first line of defense, requiring officials to get a court order before complying with any requests.

Platforms may now have good reason to push back against government requests—and to give users the tools to do the same. Trujillo noted that while courts have been slow to address the ICEBlock removal and FOIA lawsuits, the government has quickly withdrawn requests to unmask Facebook users soon after litigation began.

“That’s like an acknowledgement that the Trump administration, when actually challenged in court, wasn’t even willing to defend itself,” Trujillo said.

Platforms could view that as evidence that government pressure only works when platforms fail to put up a bare-minimum fight, Trujillo said.

Platforms “bend over backward” to appease DHS

An open letter from the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) documented two instances of tech companies complying with government demands without first notifying users.

The letter called out Meta for unmasking at least one user without prior notice, which groups noted “potentially” occured due to a “technical glitch.”

More troubling than buggy notifications, however, is the possibility that platforms may be routinely delaying notice until it’s too late.

After Google “received an ICE subpoena for user data and fulfilled it on the same day that it notified the user,” the company admitted that “sometimes when Google misses its response deadline, it complies with the subpoena and provides notice to a user at the same time to minimize the delay for an overdue production,” the letter said.

“This is a worrying admission that violates [Google’s] clear promise to users, especially because there is no legal consequence to missing the government’s response deadline,” the letter said.

Platforms face no sanctions for refusing to comply with government demands that have not been court-ordered, the letter noted. That’s why the EFF and ACLU have urged companies to use their “immense resources” to shield users who may not be able to drop everything and fight unconstitutional data requests.

In their letter, the groups asked companies to insist on court intervention before complying with a DHS subpoena. They should also resist DHS “gag orders” that ask platforms to hand over data without notifying users.

Instead, they should commit to giving users “as much notice as possible when they are the target of a subpoena,” as well as a copy of the subpoena. Ideally, platforms would also link users to legal aid resources and take up legal fights on behalf of vulnerable users, advocates suggested.

That’s not what’s happening so far. Trujillo told Ars that it feels like “companies have bent over backward to appease the Trump administration.”

The tide could turn this year if courts side with app makers behind crowdsourcing apps like ICEBlock and Eyes Up, who are suing to end the alleged government coercion. FIRE’s McDonnell, who represents the creator of Eyes Up, told Ars that platforms may feel more comfortable exercising their own editorial judgment moving forward if a court declares they were coerced into removing content.

DHS can’t use doxing to dodge First Amendment

FIRE’s lawsuit accuses Bondi and Noem of coercing Meta to disable a Facebook group with 100,000 members called “ICE Sightings–Chicagoland.”

The popularity of that group surged during “Operation Midway Blitz,” when hundreds of agents arrested more than 4,500 people over weeks of raids that used tear gas in neighborhoods and caused car crashes and other violence. Arrests included US citizens and immigrants of lawful status, which “gave Chicagoans reason to fear being injured or arrested due to their proximity to ICE raids, no matter their immigration status,” FIRE’s complaint said.

Kassandra Rosado, a lifelong Chicagoan and US citizen of Mexican descent, started the Facebook group and served as admin, moderating content with other volunteers. She prohibited “hate speech or bullying” and “instructed group members not to post anything threatening, hateful, or that promoted violence or illegal conduct.”

Facebook only ever flagged five posts that supposedly violated community guidelines, but in warnings, the company reassured Rosado that “groups aren’t penalized when members or visitors break the rules without admin approval.”

Rosado had no reason to suspect that her group was in danger of removal. When Facebook disabled her group, it told Rosado the group violated community standards “multiple times.” But her complaint noted that, confusingly, “Facebook policies don’t provide for disabling groups if a few members post ostensibly prohibited content; they call for removing groups when the group moderator repeatedly either creates prohibited content or affirmatively ‘approves’ such content.”

Facebook’s decision came after a right-wing influencer, Laura Loomer, tagged Noem and Bondi in a social media post alleging that the group was “getting people killed.” Within two days, Bondi bragged that she had gotten the group disabled while claiming that it “was being used to dox and target [ICE] agents in Chicago.”

McDonnell told Ars it seems clear that Bondi selectively uses the term “doxing” when people post images from ICE arrests. He pointed to “ICE’s own social media accounts,” which share favorable opinions of ICE alongside videos and photos of ICE arrests that Bondi doesn’t consider doxing.

“Rosado’s creation of Facebook groups to send and receive information about where and how ICE carries out its duties in public, to share photographs and videos of ICE carrying out its duties in public, and to exchange opinions about and criticism of ICE’s tactics in carrying out its duties, is speech protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE argued.

The same goes for speech managed by Mark Hodges, a US citizen who resides in Indiana. He created an app called Eyes Up to serve as an archive of ICE videos. Apple removed Eyes Up from the App Store around the same time that it removed ICEBlock.

“It is just videos of what government employees did in public carrying out their duties,” McDonnell said. “It’s nothing even close to threatening or doxing or any of these other theories that the government has used to justify suppressing speech.”

Bondi bragged that she had gotten ICEBlock banned, and FIRE’s complaint confirmed that Hodges’ company received the same notification that ICEBlock’s developer got after Bondi’s victory lap. The notice said that Apple received “information” from “law enforcement” claiming that the apps had violated Apple guidelines against “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content.”

Apple did not reach the same conclusion when it independently reviewed Eyes Up prior to government meddling, FIRE’s complaint said. Notably, the app remains available in Google Play, and Rosado now manages a new Facebook group with similar content but somewhat tighter restrictions on who can join. Neither activity has required urgent intervention from either tech giants or the government.

McDonnell told Ars that it’s harmful for DHS to water down the meaning of doxing when pushing platforms to remove content critical of ICE.

“When most of us hear the word ‘doxing,’ we think of something that’s threatening, posting private information along with home addresses or places of work,” McDonnell said. “And it seems like the government is expanding that definition to encompass just sharing, even if there’s no threats, nothing violent. Just sharing information about what our government is doing.”

Expanding the definition and then using that term to justify suppressing speech is concerning, he said, especially since the First Amendment includes no exception for “doxing,” even if DHS ever were to provide evidence of it.

To suppress speech, officials must show that groups are inciting violence or making true threats. FIRE has alleged that the government has not met “the extraordinary justifications required for a prior restraint” on speech and is instead using vague doxing threats to discriminate against speech based on viewpoint. They’re seeking a permanent injunction barring officials from coercing tech companies into censoring ICE posts.

If plaintiffs win, the censorship threats could subside, and tech companies may feel safe reinstating apps and Facebook groups, advocates told Ars. That could potentially revive archives documenting thousands of ICE incidents and reconnect webs of ICE watchers who lost access to valued feeds.

Until courts possibly end threats of censorship, the most cautious community members are moving local ICE-watch efforts to group chats and listservs that are harder for the government to disrupt, Trujillo told Ars.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial

child safety, facebook, Instagram, Meta, Policy, Social Media, social media addiction, tiktok, youtube / Mike M. / January 27, 2026

Social media addiction test case

A loss could cost social media companies billions and force changes on platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg testifies during the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” in 2024.

Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and death. These can be the consequences for vulnerable kids who get addicted to social media, according to more than 1,000 personal injury lawsuits that seek to punish Meta and other platforms for allegedly prioritizing profits while downplaying child safety risks for years.

Social media companies have faced scrutiny before, with congressional hearings forcing CEOs to apologize, but until now, they’ve never had to convince a jury that they aren’t liable for harming kids.

This week, the first high-profile lawsuit—considered a “bellwether” case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints—goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality.

TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported.

For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was 6 years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She’s fighting to claim untold damages—including potentially punitive damages—to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks.

Platforms failed to blame mom for not reading TOS

A loss could cost social media companies billions, CNN reported.

To avoid that, platforms have alleged that other factors caused K.G.M.’s psychological harm—like school bullies and family troubles—while insisting that Section 230 and the First Amendment protect platforms from being blamed for any harmful content targeted to K.G.M.

They also argued that K.G.M.’s mom never read the terms of service and, therefore, supposedly would not have benefited from posted warnings. And ByteDance, before settling, seemingly tried to pass the buck by claiming that K.G.M. “already suffered mental health harms before she began using TikTok.”

But the judge, Carolyn B. Kuhl, wrote in a ruling denying all platforms’ motions for summary judgment that K.G.M. showed enough evidence that her claims don’t stem from content to go to trial.

Further, platforms can’t liken warnings buried in terms of service to prominently displayed warnings, Kuhl said, since K.G.M.’s mom testified she would have restricted the minor’s app usage if she were aware of the alleged risks.

Two platforms settling before the trial seems like a good sign for K.G.M. However, Snapchat has not settled other social media addiction lawsuits that it’s involved in, including one raised by school districts, and perhaps is waiting to see how K.G.M.’s case shakes out before taking further action.

To win, K.G.M.’s lawyers will need to “parcel out” how much harm is attributed to each platform, due to design features, not the content that was targeted to K.G.M., Clay Calvert, a technology policy expert and senior fellow at a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute, wrote. Internet law expert Eric Goldman told The Washington Post that detailing those harms will likely be K.G.M.’s biggest struggle, since social media addiction has yet to be legally recognized, and tracing who caused what harms may not be straightforward.

However, Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of K.G.M.’s lawyers, told the Post that K.G.M. is prepared to put up this fight.

“She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how in so many ways it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence,” Bergman said.

Internal messages may be “smoking-gun evidence”

The research is unclear on whether social media is harmful for kids or whether social media addiction exists, Tamar Mendelson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. And so far, research only shows a correlation between Internet use and mental health, Mendelson noted, which could doom K.G.M.’s case and others’.

However, social media companies’ internal research might concern a jury, Bergman told the Post. On Monday, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit working to rein in Big Tech, published a report analyzing recently unsealed documents in K.G.M.’s case that supposedly provide “smoking-gun evidence” that platforms “purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing”—while putting increased engagement from young users at the center of their business models.

In the report, Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project, accused social media companies of “gaslighting and lying to the public for years.”

Most of the recently unsealed documents highlighted in the report came from Meta, which also faces a trial from dozens of state attorneys general on social media addiction this year.

Those documents included an email stating that Mark Zuckerberg—who is expected to testify at K.G.M.’s trial—decided that Meta’s top priority in 2017 was teens who must be locked in to using the company’s family of apps.

The next year, a Facebook internal document showed that the company pondered letting “tweens” access a private mode inspired by the popularity of fake Instagram accounts teens know as “finstas.” That document included an “internal discussion on how to counter the narrative that Facebook is bad for youth and admission that internal data shows that Facebook use is correlated with lower well-being (although it says the effect reverses longitudinally).”

Other allegedly damning documents showed Meta seemingly bragging that “teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to” and an employee declaring, “oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” likening all social media platforms to “pushers.”

Similarly, a 2020 Google document detailed the company’s plan to keep kids engaged “for life,” despite internal research showing young YouTube users were more likely to “disproportionately” suffer from “habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use” deteriorating their “digital well-being.”

Shorts, YouTube’s feature that rivals TikTok, also is a concern for parents suing, and three years later, documents showed Google choosing to target teens with Shorts, despite research flagging that the “two biggest challenges for teen wellbeing on YouTube” were prominently linked to watching shorts. Those challenges included Shorts bombarding teens with “low quality content recommendations that can convey & normalize unhealthy beliefs or behaviors” and teens reporting that “prolonged unintentional use” was “displacing valuable activities like time with friends or sleep.”

Bergman told the Post that these documents will help the jury decide if companies owed young users better protections sooner but prioritized profits while pushing off interventions that platforms have more recently introduced amid mounting backlash.

“Internal documents that have been held establishing the willful misconduct of these companies are going to—for the first time—be given a public airing,” Bergman said. “The public is going to know for the first time what social media companies have done to prioritize their profits over the safety of our kids.”

Platforms failed to get experts’ testimony tossed

One seeming advantage K.G.M. has heading into the trial is that tech companies failed to get expert testimony dismissed that backs up her claims.

Platforms tried to exclude testimony from several experts, including Kara Bagot, a board-certified adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist, as well as Arturo Bejar, a former Meta safety researcher and whistleblower. They claimed that experts’ opinions were irrelevant because they were based on K.G.M.’s interactions with content. They also suggested that child safety experts’ opinions “violate the standards of reliability” since the causal links they draw don’t account for “alternative explanations” and allegedly “contradict the experts’ own statements in non-litigation contexts.”

However, Kuhl ruled that platforms will have the opportunity to counter experts’ opinions at trial, while reminding social media companies that “ultimately, the critical question of causation is one that must be determined by the jury.” Only one expert’s testimony was excluded, Social Media Victims Law Center noted, a licensed clinical psychologist deemed unqualified.

“Testimony by Bagot as to design features that were employed on TikTok as well as on other social media platforms is directly relevant to the question of whether those design features cause the type of harms allegedly suffered by K.G.M. here,” Kuhl wrote.

That means that a jury will get a chance to weigh Bagot’s opinion that “social media overuse and addiction causes or plays a substantial role in causing or exacerbating psychopathological harms in children and youth, including depression, anxiety and eating disorders, as well as internalizing and externalizing psychopathological symptoms.”

The jury will also consider the insights and information Bejar (a fact witness and former consultant for the company) will share about Meta’s internal safety studies. That includes hearing about “his personal knowledge and experience related to how design defects on Meta’s platforms can cause harm to minors (e.g., age verification, reporting processes, beauty filters, public like counts, infinite scroll, default settings, private messages, reels, ephemeral content, and connecting children with adult strangers),” as well as “harms associated with Meta’s platforms including addiction/problematic use, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, suicidality, self-harm, and sexualization.”

If K.G.M. can convince the jury that she was not harmed by platforms’ failure to remove content but by companies “designing their platforms to addict kids” and “developing algorithms that show kids not what they want to see but what they cannot look away from,” Bergman thinks her case could become a “data point” for “settling similar cases en masse,” he told Barrons.

“She is very typical of so many children in the United States—the harms that they’ve sustained and the way their lives have been altered by the deliberate design decisions of the social media companies,” Bergman told the Post.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

“IG is a drug”: Internal messages may doom Meta at social media addiction trial Read More »

Zuck stuck on Trump’s bad side: FTC appeals loss in Meta monopoly case

Antitrust law, facebook, ftc, Instagram, Meta, monopoly, Policy, whatsapp / Mike M. / January 20, 2026

For Meta, the renewed fight comes at a time when most tech companies are walking tightropes to avoid any possible retaliation from Trump, not just social platforms. After defeating the FTC last fall, Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, didn’t dunk on the FTC but coolly celebrated the ruling for recognizing that “Meta faces fierce competition.” In the same breath, Newstead also seemed to want to take the opportunity to remind the Trump administration that Meta was a friend.

“Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth,” Newstead said. “We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.”

Similarly, this week, Meta has offered a rather neutral response to the FTC’s announcement. Asked for comment on the FTC’s decision to appeal, Meta’s spokesperson simply told Ars that James Boasberg, the US district judge who sided with Meta, got it right the first time, then repeated one of Trump’s favorite refrains from tech companies.

“The District Court’s decision to reject the FTC’s arguments is correct and recognizes the fierce competition we face,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “We will remain focused on innovating and investing in America.”

FTC blamed judge for loss

Political tensions have remained at the center of the case, perhaps peaking after Boasberg’s ruling.

In November, Simonson criticized Boasberg, telling CNBC that “the deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg, who is currently facing articles of impeachment.”

That push to impeach Boasberg came from Republican lawmaker Brandon Gill, who alleged the judge was abusing his power to censor conservatives, but no actions have been taken since the proposed resolution was submitted to a House committee that month. Republicans, including Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi, have complained that Boasberg is a rogue partisan judge, but Boasberg so far has withstood their attacks while continuing to settle cases. Trump’s Truth Social tirades against the judge required a long fact-checking piece from PBS.

Zuck stuck on Trump’s bad side: FTC appeals loss in Meta monopoly case Read More »

Meta’s layoffs leave Supernatural fitness users in mourning

gaming, Meta, meta vr, syndication, Tech, VR headsets / Mike M. / January 17, 2026

There is a split in the community about who will stay and continue to pay the subscription fee and who will leave. Supernatural has more than 3,000 lessons available in the service, so while new content won’t be added, some feel there is plenty of content left in the library. Other users worry about how Supernatural will continue to license music from big-name bands.

“Supernatural is amazing, but I am canceling it because of this,” Chip told me. “The library is large, so there’s enough to keep you busy, but not for the same price.”

There are other VR workout experiences like FitXR or even the VR staple Beat Saber, which Supernatural cribs a lot of design concepts from. Still, they don’t hit the same bar for many of the Supernatural faithful.

“I’m going to stick it out until they turn the lights out on us,” says Stefanie Wong, a Bay Area accountant who has used Supernatural since shortly after the pandemic and has organized and attended meetup events. “It’s not the app. It’s the community, and it’s the coaches that we really, really care about.”

Welcome to the new age

I tried out Supernatural’s Together feature on Wednesday, the day after the layoffs. It’s where I met Chip and Alisa. When we could stop to catch our breath, we talked about the changes coming to the service. They had played through previous sessions hosted by Jane Fonda or playlists with a mix of music that would change regularly. This one was an artist series featuring entirely Imagine Dragons songs.

In the session, as we punched blocks while being serenaded by this shirtless dude crooning, recorded narrations from Supernatural coach Dwana Olsen chimed in to hype us up.

“Take advantage of these moments,” Olsen said as we punched away. “Use these movements to remind you of how much awesome life you have yet to live.”

Frankly, it was downright invigorating. And bittersweet. We ended another round, sweaty, huffing and puffing. Chip, Alisa, and I high-fived like crazy and readied for another round.

“Beautiful,” Alisa said. “It’s just beautiful, isn’t it?”

Meta’s layoffs leave Supernatural fitness users in mourning Read More »

Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers

AI, AI infrastructure, AI training, Amazon, Biz & IT, brad smith, community development, datacenters, Donald Trump, electricity, Google, machine learning, Meta, microsoft, openai, property taxes, skilled trades, water use / Paul Patrick / January 13, 2026

Taking responsibility for power usage

In the Microsoft blog post, Smith acknowledged that residential electricity rates have recently risen in dozens of states, driven partly by inflation, supply chain constraints, and grid upgrades. He wrote that communities “value new jobs and property tax revenue, but not if they come with higher power bills or tighter water supplies.”

Microsoft says it will ask utilities and public commissions to set rates high enough to cover the full electricity costs for its data centers, including infrastructure additions. In Wisconsin, the company is supporting a new rate structure that would charge “Very Large Customers,” including data centers, the cost of the electricity required to serve them.

Smith wrote that while some have suggested the public should help pay for the added electricity needed for AI, Microsoft disagrees. He stated, “Especially when tech companies are so profitable, we believe that it’s both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI.”

On water usage for cooling, Microsoft plans a 40 percent improvement in data center water-use intensity by 2030. A recent environmental audit from AI model-maker Mistral found that training and running its Large 2 model over 18 months produced 20.4 kilotons of CO₂ emissions and evaporated enough water to fill 112 Olympic-size swimming pools, illustrating the aggregate environmental impact of AI operations at scale.

To solve some of these issues, Microsoft says it has launched a new AI data center design using a closed-loop system that constantly recirculates cooling liquid, dramatically cutting water usage. In this design, already deployed in Wisconsin and Georgia, potable water is no longer needed for cooling.

On property taxes, Smith stated in the blog post that the company will not ask local municipalities to reduce their rates. The company says it will pay its full share of local property taxes. Smith wrote that Microsoft’s goal is to bring these commitments to life in the first half of 2026. Of course, these are PR-aligned company goals and not realities yet, so we’ll have to check back in later to see whether Microsoft has been following through on its promises.

Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers Read More »

For the lazy techie: These are Ars staff’s last-minute holiday gift picks

Blu-ray, buying guide, gifts, kagi, Meta, Mouse, philips hue, ray-ban, samsung, shopping, Storage, USB-C / Rejus Almole / December 18, 2025

Two wireless mice, two external hard drives, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The holidays have snuck up on us. How is it already that time?

If you’re on top of things and have already bought all your Christmas gifts, I commend you. Not all of us are so conscientious. In fact, one of us is so behind on holiday prep that he is not only running late on buying gifts; he’s also behind on publishing the Ars staff gift guide he said he’d write. (Whoever could we be talking about?)

So for my fellow last-minute scramblers, I polled Ars writers and editors for gift ideas they know will be solid because they’ve actually used them. As such, you’ll find gift options below that Ars staffers have used enough to feel good about recommending. Further, I made sure all of these are available for delivery before Christmas as of today, at least where I live.

For each gadget (or whatever else it might be), we have a brief description of how or why we’ve been using this particular thing and why we would recommend it. Note that the prices we’ve listed here represent where they were at the time this article was written, but online retailers often vary prices based on different factors, so you might see something different when you click through.

Ars Commentariat: If you feel inclined, feel free to share some other ideas. I genuinely might take advantage if you share something good.

Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs. (We won’t affiliatize any shared links in the comments, of course.)

Under $50

Tiny USB-A to USB-C adapter pack – $8

Somehow, amazingly, we are still living in a split USB-C/USB-A world all these years later. No one’s thrilled about it, but there’s no end in sight. Some folks in the Apple ecosystem turn to Apple’s first-party adapters, but there are two problems with them in my view: first, they’re weirdly expensive, as you’d expect. And second, they’re larger than they need to be.

I have about a dozen of these little adapters sitting around my house. The only downside is that because they’re shorter, they’re thicker, so you can’t always put two right next to each other in the MacBook Pro’s USB-C ports. But in the aforementioned mixed-use quagmire we all now occupy, odds are good you can just put it next to something that actually uses a USB-C connection. If you’re like me, you’re at about 2/3 USB-C and 1/3 USB-A at this point.

There are a bunch of brands for these, but they’re all pretty interchangeable, and I’ve not had any problems with these in particular.

– Samuel Axon

The Thing on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray – $12

People often debate whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. (I definitely think it is.) But there’s another movie I often watch during the holidays: John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ll freely admit it’s not holiday-themed in any way, but it’s at least filled with snow and winter gloom!

I don’t buy every movie on physical media—I’ve accepted that a lot of my library is going to be on Apple’s TV app or coming and going on streaming services—but I try to collect the lifelong favorites to make sure I’ll still have them decades down the road. (As long as they keep making Blu-ray players, anyway, which unfortunately is starting to look as uncertain as whether a favorite film stays on Netflix.)

A screengrab from The Thing — MacReady is admittedly not known for his holiday cheer. Credit: Universal

For me, The Thing definitely qualifies as a favorite that’s worth holding onto for years to come.

– Samuel Axon

Acer USB C Hub, 7 in 1 Multi-Port Adapter – $18

Modern laptops with only two USB-C ports basically require a hub. This Acer turns one port into HDMI (4K@30Hz), two USB-A ports for legacy gear, SD/microSD slots, and 100 W passthrough charging. At $18, I keep one in my bag and one on my desk. It’s not fancy, but it earns its keep the first time you need to dump a memory card or plug into a TV set.

– Benj Edwards

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell – $20

Originally published in 2019, it’s an amazing testament to how strong this book is that even after all that’s happened, the 2025 reissue doesn’t change much. Melanie Mitchell, a professor of computer science at Portland State University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, nails this historical summary of how we got to this point through multiple AI springs and AI winters.

She carefully explains the concepts and research underpinnings of contemporary developments in machine learning, large language models, image generation, and so on, while amplifying key voices from several of the people who contributed to progress in this field—both doomsayers and boosters alike—with a technically rigorous and ethically informed point of view.

If you or someone you know is just getting started learning about AI as we know it today, there are a lot of books they could read, and some of them are surely more contemporary. But I can hardly think of any that make a better foundation.

– Samuel Axon

Pinecil soldering iron – $40

Every self-respecting geek should own a soldering iron. Even if you aren’t making your own PCBs or recapping old electronics, it’s the kind of thing that just comes in handy. Especially around the holidays, when people are getting out their old battery-powered decorations that come with a lot of memories, wear, and flaky power terminals. Be the hero that brings a treasured light-up keepsake back to life!

When you don’t need a full-on soldering station, though, it’s nice to have something compact and easy to slip in a drawer. Enter the Pinecil, conveniently powered over USB-C, with a slick little screen allowing for easy temperature control (in F or C) and firmware that auto-sleeps if you forget to unplug it.

– Aurich Lawson

Anker 67 watt USB charger and Anker USB-C silicon power cable – $25 and $16

If you already have a suitable USB-C power supply (you really want at least 60 watts) and a USB-C cable, you’re set. If not, this power supply from Anker—a reliable brand, in my experience—is compact and folds up for easy storage. Not all USB-C cables are up to the task of transmitting the magic wall juice, so if you’re not sure you have an appropriate one, pick up the above cable, which is sheathed in silicon to keep it nice and floppy so you’re not wrestling with a stiff cord while using your iron.

– Aurich Lawson

Knog Bike Bells – $22 – $33

While a lot of my road bike’s miles are spent on actual roads, it’s hard to do any long rides in my area without spending a little time on a cycle trail—one shared by pedestrians, runners, scooter riders, casual cyclists, and random others. Even if the rules of most of those trails didn’t specify using a bell, it’s a smart idea to have one—especially one that’s loud enough to cut through whatever’s coming out of the headphones that most people wear.

But real estate on my handlebars is limited. They already host a cycling computer and a light, and two cables and two hydraulic tubes snake their way through the area, emerging from under the handlebar tape before diving into the frame. Finding a bell that both works and keeps out of the way turned into a bit of a challenge. And then a solution presented itself: A company called Knog sent me an email about their bell offerings.

A bike bell against a white background — One of Knog’s bike bells. Credit: Knog

All of Knog’s options are mechanically simple—just a half circle of metal that follows the circumference of the handlebar and a spring-loaded hammer to strike it—and loud enough to catch even headphone wearers’ attention. They’re also low-profile, barely sticking out from the handlebars themselves, and they’re narrow enough that it was easy to find space for one without bumping it into any of the cabling. It’s all unobtrusive enough that I forget mine’s there until I need it. Yes, you can find lots of cheaper alternative designs (the Knogs run between $20 and $45), but for me, it’s worth paying an extra $10–$15 for something that suits my needs this well.

– John Timmer

Razer Orochi V2 wireless mouse – $34

This is the mouse I’m using right now as I type this. I wanted a mouse that could cross basically every domain: It needed to be good enough for gaming, but conveniently wireless, while also working well across macOS, Windows, and Linux—and it needed to be portable and not too embarrassing in a professional context because I fly to far-flung cities for work at least a dozen times a year. Razer’s Orochi met all of those goals, and I appreciate that it looks neat and professional, despite the fact that it’s very much a gamer mouse.

The only area where it fumbles is that Razer’s app seems to crash and cause problems for me on both macOS and Windows, but it works just fine without the app, so I uninstalled it, and everything’s been golden since. (To be clear, you don’t need to install it to use the mouse.)

It wins points for versatility; I don’t think it really compromises anything across all the situations I mentioned.

As of this writing, it’s on sale for $34, but the typical price is $70—still not bad for what you’re getting.

– Samuel Axon

Pricier picks

OWC Express 1M2 – $90

I set up a home studio this year to record my righteous jams, and as part of that process, I needed an external SSD both to back up project files and to hold many hundreds of gigs of virtual instruments. I wanted something 1) blazingly fast, 2) good-looking, 3) bus-powered, 4) free of all (and all too common) sleep/wake glitches, 5) unlikely to burst into flames (these things can get hot), and yet also 6) completely fanless because my righteous jams would be far less righteous with a fan droning in the background.

A durable hard drive enclosure — The OWC Express 1M2 is used for backups for Nate’s “righteous jams.” Credit: OWC

Those criteria led me to OWC’s Express 1M2, an SSD enclosure that transfers data at 40Gb/s over USB 4, matches the look of my Mac mini perfectly (and works with PCs), and is bus-powered. It has never given me a sleep/wake problem; it gets warm but never palm-searingly hot, and it dissipates heat through a chonky, milled-aluminum case that requires no fan.

I love this thing. It was ludicrously easy to install my own NVMe M.2 drive in it (though you can also pay a small premium for pre-installed storage). I’ve never had a moment of trouble—nor have I ever heard it. Yes, the enclosure costs more than some other options, but it’s a well-made piece of kit that can transfer data nearly as fast as my Mac’s internal SSD and should last for years. If someone in your life needs an SSD enclosure, they could do far, far worse than the Express 1M2.

– Nate Anderson

Kagi subscription – $108/year

It’s been about a year since I switched full-time to Kagi for my search engine needs, leaving Google behind in a cloud of dust and not looking back, and it was the correct choice, at least for me. Kagi’s upsides are many—including and especially search that works how it’s supposed to work instead of by fabricating garbage or tricking you into buying things—but the big downside is that while Kagi has a free tier, real daily usage requires money.

But if you’re a happy Kagi user like me and you want to tempt others into using the service, Kagi has gift subscriptions! If you’ve been trying to tempt a friend or relative into abandoning Google’s sinking AI ship but they’re balking at the price, throw some money at that problem and knock that barrier down! A “pro” Kagi subscription with unlimited search costs about a hundred dollars a year, and while that obviously isn’t nothing, it’s also not an unfair price—especially for something I use every day. Kagi: It’s what’s for Christmas!

– Lee Hutchinson

Philips Hue Bridge Pro – $99

Unlike Kagi, I’ve been using Philips Hue lights for a long, long time—13 years and counting, and most of those old first-gen bulbs are still operational. But the bridge, the Hue component that actually connects to your LAN, has long had an annoying problem: It can hook up to a max of about 50 Hue bulbs, and that’s it. (The reason has to do with cost-saving choices Philips made on the bridge design.)

Thirteen years has been enough for me to accumulate at least 50 Hue devices, so this limit has been problematic for me—but it’s a problem no more! After a decade and change, Philips has finally released an updated “Pro” bridge that handles far more Hue devices—and it comes in stylish black! The new bridge brings some new capabilities, too, but the big news is that new device limit—something long-time customers like me have spent years pining for. Now I can festoon my house with even more automatic lights!

– Lee Hutchinson

The Logitech MX Master 4 – $120

The Logitech MX Master 3S and the newer MX Master 4 remain two of the best productivity mice on the market. Both use an 8,000-DPI Darkfield sensor, the excellent MagSpeed electromagnetic scroll wheel, and Logitech’s deep customization stack. The 3S has been our long-standing recommendation, but the MX Master 4 brings a few quality-of-life improvements that may justify the upgrade. Most notably, it replaces the 3S’s soft-touch palm coating, which wears quickly and tends to attract grime, with more durable textured materials. The redesigned switches also make the 4 one of the quietest mice you can buy, with muted clicks and a near-silent scroll wheel.

A hand moves a mouse against a white background — Logitech MX Master 4, the mouse used by Ars Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher. Credit: Logitech

The more ambitious addition is the new haptic system, meant to provide tactile feedback for shortcut triggers and app-specific “Actions Ring” menus. In practice, though, software support remains thin. Productivity apps haven’t yet embraced haptic signaling, and months after launch, the plugin ecosystem is still limited. The MX Master 4 is a well-executed refinement, but its headline feature is waiting for the software world to catch up.

– Ken Fisher

Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer glasses – $247

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses may look bulkier than a standard pair of Wayfarers, but the added hardware delivers a genuinely interesting glimpse at where mobile computing is headed. After spending time with them, it’s clear that eyewear will likely follow the same trajectory as smartwatches: once niche, now a viable surface for ambient computing. The multimodal AI features are impressive, and the built-in camera produces better-than-expected 1080p/30fps video, though low-light performance remains limited by the small sensor.

These are still early-stage devices with the usual growing pains, but they’re a compelling gift for early adopters who want a front-row seat to the future of wearable interfaces.

– Ken Fisher

Samsung T9 external SSD (2 TB) – $235

As I once again attempted to make the Sophie’s Choice of which Steam game to uninstall because I ran out of disk space, I realized that part of my problem is that I have two computers (a macOS laptop and a Windows desktop) and I’ve doubled up on storing certain things—like the absolutely enormous eXoDOS collection, for example—on both machines so I could access them regardless of where I was at.

The best thing I could do to help my constant space woes was to consolidate anything that I needed on both machines into an external drive I could share between them. I went with Samsung’s T9 external SSD, and so far, I’m happy with it. As planned, I now have a lot more breathing room on both computers.

– Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon is the editorial lead for tech and gaming coverage at Ars Technica. He covers AI, software development, gaming, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and he is a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development.

For the lazy techie: These are Ars staff’s last-minute holiday gift picks Read More »