Author: Geek Planet

A new collaborative study by UC Riverside computer and social scientists has found that as people increasingly rely on AI for answers, the internet risks losing the very thing that made it interesting in the first place: human emotion, lived experience, and messy, opinionated thinking. The study compared how AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini respond to subjective questions versus traditional web searches. The researchers asked both AI and web search engines opinion-heavy questions, such as whether governments should ban fossil-fuel cars or whether the US healthcare system needs reform, and analyzed the reasoning behind each response. Is AI actually…

If you use your Android phone as a car key, Google just improved the whole experience. The May 2026 Google system services update is rolling out now, with a big upgrade to how digital car keys work in Google Wallet. You can now share your car key with different people and assign them different levels of access, almost exactly like you would with a physical key fob. What are the new car key sharing roles in Google Wallet? Previously, sharing your digital car key in Google Wallet was pretty basic. The new update introduces three distinct roles: co-owner, guest, and…

An essay in Culture indicates the evident decline in longform nonfiction books and causes one to wonder how this digital new media ecosystem is reshaping how we get our news, sources of information, and even how we think. What happens when we as a society stop reading informationally dense material? It is no secret that reading books is starting to be seen as something of an antiquated pastime. We can read infinitely on our screens (as you’re doing now with this article!), and yet these quick changes in media consumption don’t go without their side effects. Paul Elie writes for…

Today, Apple seeded the first beta of iOS 26.6 to developers, and so far, it contains exactly one known feature. It’s an alert that tells you when you’ve run out of space on your blocked contacts list. That’s right, and that’s it.   The fact that Apple had to ship this new alert at all says something uncomfortable about how the company has handled the spam call problem, along with carriers and regulators.  What is the blocked contacts limit and why does it matter? Apple never told us, but iOS has always had a cap on how many numbers you can…

If you have ever scrolled through a YouTube Music playlist wishing you could just sort it alphabetically, we have some good news! YouTube Music is rolling out new sorting options for playlists, and yes, it has only taken about a decade. As first spotted by PiunikaWeb, users are now seeing three new sorting options: Title, Artist, and Album, in addition to the four existing options: Manual, Top Voted, Newest First, and Oldest First. New sorting options for YouTube Music are still rolling out The new options were first spotted by a Reddit user running YouTube Music version 9.20.52 on Android.…

This republished article first appeared in the National Review. A new medical study out of Finland has found that gender-dysphoric adolescents and young adults who were subjected to gender reassignment interventions had worse mental health outcomes than a control group that did not receive such bodily alterations. The study tracked 2,083 people who had sought medical services for gender confusion between 1996 and 2019. The findings are quite specific. From, “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019,” just published in Acta Paediatrica (my emphases, citations omitted): Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls…

Oppo has launched a new phone accessory in China called the Oppo Bubble, and it’s surprisingly versatile. It functions like a selfie tool, while also being a tiny rear display, a playful phone add-on, and a fun accessory in general. All of this would have it dominate tech TikTok a few years ago. Announced alongside the Reno 16 series, the Bubble is a compact magnetic circular display that attaches to the back of supported Oppo smartphones. The tiny gadget basically acts like a secondary screen that helps in taking better selfies, which is honestly handy. It is small, light, and…

Voter fraud has been with us for a long time. Modern technology is only one of many tools that can be used to cheat. Sans high-tech, there is informed speculation that the death of the great American short-story craftsman and poet Edgar Allan Poe, in 1849, was due to voter fraud. More recently, President Donald Trump has repeatedly and forcefully claimed that the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was altered by voter fraud. After the 2020 U.S. presidential election, “America’s mayor”, Rudy Giuliani, claimed that electronic voting machines were used to commit widespread fraud. Dominion Voting Systems sued…

Your location data can reveal a lot more than you might think. It goes beyond just pinpointing where you are right now. Over time, it can map out your daily routines, the places you visit regularly, and even when your home is likely empty. To help you see exactly what you’re giving away, NordVPN has launched My Location, a free browser-based tool that instantly shows your physical location and the virtual location visible to every website you visit. What’s the difference between your real and virtual location? Your real location is determined through device-based methods like GPS or your browser’s…

Google’s Quick Share is the kind of feature you don’t think about until the day you need it and your phone simply doesn’t have it. Huawei device owners live in that reality permanently, given that they don’t have access to Google Play services, and so does anyone running the Chinese regional build of Android.  However, a developer with the handle Kyujin-cho just published an open-source Android app called Bada on GitHub that seems to solve exactly this problem. It does so by implementing Google’s own Quick Share protocol from scratch, circumventing the lack of Google Play Services. What does Bada…