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Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn't want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations.

"We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”)," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. "Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core."

The announcement comes exactly 10 years to the day after a crowdfunding campaign saw 10,000 people give more than $500,000 to launch Proton Mail. To make it happen, Yen, along with co-founder Jason Stockman and first employee Dingchao Lu, endowed the Proton Foundation with some of their shares. The Proton Foundation is now the primary shareholder of the business Proton, which Yen states will "make irrevocable our wish that Proton remains in perpetuity an organization that places people ahead of profits." Among other members of the Foundation's board is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, HTTP, and almost everything else about the web.

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We're heading into summer, a time when some people get a few half or whole days off from work. These can't all be vacations, and there's only so much shopping, golfing, or streaming one can do. A few of these times off are even unexpected, such that people with kids might even have some rare time to themselves.

I have a suggestion for some part of one of these days: Declare a Tech Guilt Absolution Day. Sit down, gather up the little computer and phone stuff you love that more people should know about, or free things totally worth a few bucks, and blitz through ratings, reviews, and donations.

Note that I am using the term "guilt," not "shame." I do not believe any modern human should feel bad about themselves for all the things they have failed to like, rate, and subscribe to. The modern ecosystems of useful little applications, games, podcasts, YouTube videos, newsletters, and the like demand far more secondary engagement than anyone can manage. Even if you purchase something or subscribe, the creators you appreciate, swimming upstream in the torrential rapids of the attention economy, can always use some attention. So I suggest we triage as best we can.

Enlarge / Remember, folks inside those polygons: If your housing feels too expensive, spend less money on resource consumption. It's just math. (credit: Paradox Interactive)

City building simulations are not real life. They can be helpful teaching tools, but they abstract away many of the real issues in changing communities.

And yet, sometimes a game like Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2) will present an issue that's just too timely and relevant to ignore. Such is the case with "Economy 2.0," a big update to the beleaguered yet continually in-development game, due to arrive within the next week or so. The first and most important thing it tackles is the persistent issue of "High Rent," something that's bothering the in-game citizens ("cims" among fans), C:S2 players, and nearly every human living in the United States and many other places.

C:S2 has solutions to high rent, at least for their virtual citizens. They removed the "virtual landlord" that takes in rent, so now a building's upkeep is evenly split among renters. There's a new formula for calculating rent, one that evokes a kind of elegant mathematical certainty none of us will ever see:

Enlarge / Motion smoothing was making images uncanny and weird long before AI got here. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Roku)

Roku TV owners have been introduced to a number of annoyances recently through the software update pipeline. There was an arbitration-demanding terms of service that locked your TV until you agreed (or mailed a letter). There is the upcoming introduction of ads to the home screen. But the latest irritation hits some Roku owners right in the eyes.

Reports on Roku's community forums and on Reddit find owners of TCL HDTVs, on which Roku is a built-in OS, experiencing "motion smoothing" without having turned it on after updating to Roku OS 13. Some people are reporting that their TV never offered "Action Smoothing" before, but it is now displaying the results with no way to turn it off. Neither the TV's general settings, nor the specific settings available while content is playing, offer a way to turn it off, according to some users.

"Action smoothing" is Roku's name for video interpolation, or motion smoothing. The heart of motion smoothing is Motion Estimation Motion Compensation (MEMC). Fast-moving video, such as live sports or intense action scenes, can have a "juddery" feeling when shown on TVs at a lower frame rate. Motion smoothing uses MEMC hardware and algorithms to artificially boost the frame rate of a video signal by creating its best guess of what a frame between two existing frames would look like and then inserting it to boost the frame rate.

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I enjoyed riding the Tenways CGO800S far more once I stopped thinking of it as a bike, and more like the e-bike version of a reasonable four-door sedan.

It is a bike, to be sure. It has two wheels, handlebars, pedals, and a drivetrain between feet and rear cog. It's just not the kind of bike I'm used to. There are no gears to shift between, just a belt drive and five power modes. The ride is intentionally "Dutch-style" (from a Dutch company, no less), with a wide saddle and upright posture, and kept fairly smooth by suspension on the front fork. It ships with puncture-proof tires, sensible mud guards, and integrated lights. And its 350 W motor is just enough to make pedaling feel effortless, but you'll never quite feel like you're winning a race.

I also didn't feel like I was conquering the road when I was on the CGO800S so much as borrowing my aunt's car for an errand. The "Sky Blue" color helped cement the image of a modern-day Mercury Sable in my head. It's not meant for no-power riding, and its battery isn't a long-hauler, with a stated 53-mile range. It's comfortable, it's capable, and maybe we've long since reached the stage of the e-bike market where some bikes are just capital-F Fine, instead of them all being quirky experiments.

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One of the major data brokers engaged in the deeply alienating practice of selling detailed driver behavior data to insurers has shut down that business.

Verisk, which had collected data from cars made by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai, has stopped receiving that data, according to The Record, a news site run by security firm Recorded Future. According to a statement provided to Privacy4Cars, and reported by The Record, Verisk will no longer provide a "Driving Behavior Data History Report" to insurers.

Skeptics have long assumed that car companies had at least some plan to monetize the rich data regularly sent from cars back to their manufacturers, or telematics. But a concrete example of this was reported by The New York Times' Kashmir Hill, in which drivers of GM vehicles were finding insurance more expensive, or impossible to acquire, because of the kinds of reports sent along the chain from GM to data brokers to insurers. Those who requested their collected data from the brokers found details of every trip they took: times, distances, and every "hard acceleration" or "hard braking event," among other data points.

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The biggest feature in iOS 18, the one that affects the most people, was a single item in a comma-stuffed sentence by Apple software boss Craig Federighi: "Support for RCS."

As we noted when Apple announced its support for "RCS Universal Profile," a kind of minimum viable cross-device rich messaging, iPhone users getting RCS means SMS chains with Android users "will be slightly less awful." SMS messages will soon have read receipts, higher-quality media sending, and typing indicators, along with better security. And RCS messages can go over Wi-Fi when you don't have a cellular signal. Apple is certainly downplaying a major cross-platform compatibility upgrade, but it's a notable quality-of-life boost.

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  Prioritized notifications through Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence, the new Siri, and the iPhone

iOS 18 is one of the major beneficiaries of Apple's AI rollout, dubbed "Apple Intelligence." Apple Intelligence promises to help iPhone users create and understand language and images, with the proper context from your phone's apps: photos, calendar, email, messages, and more.

Enlarge / All these goons are targeting Captain America, as shown in icons above their heads. Good. That's just how he likes it. (No, really, he's a tank, that's his thing.) (credit: 2K/Firaxis)

I fully understand why people don't want multiple game launchers on their PC. Steam is the default and good enough for (seemingly) most people. It's not your job to compel competition in the market. You want to launch and play games you enjoy, as do most of us.

So when I tell you that Marvel's Midnight Suns is a game worth the hassle of registering, installing, and using the Epic Games Launcher, I am carefully picking my shot. For the price of giving Epic your email (or a proxy/relay version, like Duck), or just logging in again, you can play a fun, novel, engaging turn-based strategy game, with deckbuilding and positioning tactics, for zero dollars. Even if you feel entirely sapped by Marvel at this point, like most of us, I assure you that this slice of Marvel feels more like the comic books and less like the overexposed current films. Just ask the guy who made it.

Tactical deckbuilding is fun

The game was very well-regarded by most critics but was not a financial success upon release in December 2022, or was at least "underwhelming." Why any game hits or doesn't is a combination of many factors, but one of them was likely that the game was trying something new. It wasn't just X-COM with Doctor Strange. It had some Fire Emblem relationship-building and base exploration, but it also had cards. The cards blend into the turn-based, positional, chain-building strategy, but some people apparently saw cards and turned away.

Enlarge / What can I say? It was tough putting the Brompton C Line Electric through its paces. Finding just the right context for it. Grueling work. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

There’s never been a better time to ride a weird bike.

That's especially true if you live in a city where you can regularly see kids being dropped off at schools from cargo bikes with buckets, child seats, and full rain covers. Further out from the urban core, fat-tire e-bikes share space on trails with three-wheelers, retro-style cruisers, and slick roadies. And folding bikes, once an obscurity, are showing up in more places, especially as they’ve gone electric.

So when I got to try out the Brompton Electric C Line (in a six-speed model), I felt far less intimidated riding, folding, and stashing the little guy wherever I went than I might have been a few years back. A few folks recognized the distinctively small and British bike and offered a thumbs-up or light curiosity. If anyone was concerned about the oddity of this quirky ride, it was me, mostly because I obsessed over whether I could and should lock it up outside or not.

Enlarge / So much depends upon a red puzzle cube, pinned by servo motors, inside Mitsubishi. (credit: Mitsubishi)

The last time a human set the world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, it was Max Park, at 3.13 seconds for a standard 3×3×3 cube, set in June 2023. It is going to be very difficult for any human to pull off a John Henry-like usurping of the new machine record, which is more than 10 times faster, at 0.305 seconds. That's within the accepted time frame for human eye blinking, which averages out to one-third of a second.

TOKUFASTbot, built by Mitsubishi Electric, can actually pull off a solve in as little as 0.204 seconds on video, but not when Guinness World Records judges were measuring. The previous mechanical record was 0.38 seconds.

There are a few footnotes and caveats to what would otherwise be an incremental gain and nifty slow-motion video. The first thing is that the world record reported is for "fastest robot to solve a rotating puzzle cube." That intriguingly sidesteps the much better-known "Rubik's Cube" identifier. Rubik's notably lost its trademark on any rotating 3×3×3 cube puzzle game in Europe. Perhaps Mitsubishi and Guinness simply wished to avoid touching a trademark registered to a company with a known litigation history.

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Members of the Legendary Computer Bugs Tribunal, honored guests, if I may have your attention? I would, humbly, submit a new contender for your esteemed judgment. You may or may not find it novel, you may even deign to call it a "bug," but I assure you, you will find it entertaining.

Consider NetHack. It is one of the all-time roguelike games, and I mean that in the more strict sense of that term. The content is procedurally generated, deaths are permanent, and the only thing you keep from game to game is your skill and knowledge. I do understand that the only thing two roguelike fans can agree on is how wrong the third roguelike fan is in their definition of roguelike, but, please, let us move on.

NetHack is great for machine learning…

Being a difficult game full of consequential choices and random challenges, as well as a "single-agent" game that can be generated and played at lightning speed on modern computers, NetHack is great for those working in machine learning—or imitation learning, actually, as detailed in Jens Tuyls' paper on how compute scaling affects single-agent game learning. Using Tuyls' model of expert NetHack behavior, Bartłomiej Cupiał and Maciej Wołczyk trained a neural network to play and improve itself using reinforcement learning.

Enlarge / How well do you know your friends and family? Can you smack a 2010-era controller in their hands to win intangible points? (credit: Die Gut Fabrik LLC)

If there is any reason to head into your garage or attic and dig out that PlayStation Move controller, it's Johann Sebastian Joust. Actually, there's a second good reason: that game, and three others with the same spirit, are all free now on Steam for PlayStation, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The reason and timing are unfortunate, as Die Gute Fabrik, the Danish developer collective behind Sportsfriends, can no longer support or update the 10-year-old game. But the group is doing the right thing, making the game free on all platforms, including Steam, transferring ownership of the game to Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It), and working to open-source a version of the JS Joust game for Linux so that perhaps it can be fit to work with other motion-sensitive controllers or through some other scheme.

Sportsfriends, previously described at Ars as a "stellar pack of multiplayer-only gems," are four games meant for "couch co-op," i.e. playing in the same room as other folks holding controllers (or glowing Move sticks, in the case of JS Joust). Each one is a little masterwork of clever design and hard to encapsulate briefly, but if you don't have time for the deeper dive, here goes:

Enlarge / The font styling is very intentional. (credit: TinyPod)

I traded in my Series 5 Apple Watch last week to Apple after the battery couldn't make it through most evenings. There wasn't much resale incentive on the open market, because the screen was far from pristine and the battery was nearly 5 years old. You can replace the battery yourself, but, already having a lot of fix projects on the shelf, I opted to send it off, take a gift card, and move on.

If I get a chance, though, I'm going to ask Apple for that watch back. Apple can keep its estimated $90. I am cautiously but earnestly optimistic that the tinyPod can give me more value than a gift card number I plow into some future iPhone upgrade. In fact, the tinyPod, according to its creator, should go on sale for around that $90 mark after a more detailed reveal in June.

No electronics, just a lefty-oriented Apple Watch case

The tinyPod is essentially an iPod-like case, complete with circular-scrolling clickwheel, into which a strapless Apple Watch can be snapped in. Once inside the case, the scroll wheel function is "entirely analog and physically rotates the watch crown," according to tinyPod founder Newar, better known as "Sentry" on X (formerly Twitter) and in jailbreaking circles. The crown-moving mechanism and general case enhancements to the Watch are patent-pending, Newar wrote by email. More on the scroll wheel will be shown next month, he wrote, at a "proper launch."

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They wanted to make money by selling cheating tools to Destiny 2 players. They may have ended up setting US legal precedent.

After a trial in federal court in Seattle last week, a jury found cheat-seller AimJunkies, along with its parent company Phoenix Digital and four of its employees and contractors, liable for copyright infringement and assigned damages to each of them. The jury split $63,210 in damages, with $20,000 to Phoenix Digital itself and just under $11,000 each to the four individuals. That's just under the $65,000 revenue the defendants claimed to have generated from 1,400 copies of its Destiny 2 cheats.

Bungie's case appears to have gone further than any other game-cheating suit has made it in the US court system. Because cheating at an online game is not, in itself, illegal, game firms typically lean on the anti-circumvention aspects of the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). That's how the makers of Grand Theft Auto V, Overwatch, Rainbow Six, and Fortnite have pursued their cheat-making antagonists. Bungie, in taking their claim past settlement and then winning a copyright claim from a jury, has perhaps provided game makers a case to point to in future proceedings, and perhaps more incentive.

Enlarge / VideoCardz' leaked image of a ROG Ally X, seemingly having gone through the JPG blender a couple times. (credit: VideoCardz)

Asus' ROG Ally was the first major-brand attempt to compete with Valve's Steam Deck. It was beefy and interesting, but it had three major flaws: It ran Windows on a little touchscreen, had unremarkable ergonomics, and its battery life was painful.

The Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) Ally X, which has been announced and is due out June 2, seems to have had its specs leaked, and they indicate a fix for at least the battery life. Gaming site VideoCardz, starting its leak reveal with "No more rumors," cites the ROG Ally X as having the same Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU as the prior ROG Ally, as well as the same 7-inch 1080p VRR screen with a 120 Hz refresh rate.

VideoCardz' leaked image, seemingly from Asus marketing materials, with the ROG Ally X's specifications. (credit: VideoCardz)

The battery and memory have changed substantially, though. An 80-watt-hour battery, up from 40, somehow adds just 70 grams of weight and about 5 mm of thickness to the sequel device. By increasing the RAM from 16GB to 24GB and making it LPDDR5, the ROG Ally X may be able to lend more of it to the GPU, upping performance somewhat without demanding a new chip or architecture. There is also a second USB-C port, with USB4 speeds, that should help quite a bit with docking, charging while playing with accessories, and, I would guess, Linux hackery.

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Bing, Microsoft's search engine platform, went down in the very early morning today. That meant that searches from Microsoft's Edge browsers that had yet to change their default providers didn't work. It also meant that services relying on Bing's search API—Microsoft's own Copilot, ChatGPT search, Yahoo, Ecosia, and DuckDuckGo—similarly failed.

Services were largely restored by the morning Eastern work hours, but the timing feels apt, concerning, or some combination of the two. Google, the consistently dominating search platform, just last week announced and debuted AI Overviews as a default addition to all searches. If you don't want an AI response but still want to use Google, you can hunt down the new "Web" option in a menu, or you can, per Ernie Smith, tack "&udm=14" onto your search or use Smith's own "Konami code" shortcut page.

If dismay about AI's hallucinations, power draw, or pizza recipes concern you—along with perhaps broader Google issues involving privacy, tracking, news, SEO, or monopoly power—most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage this morning. Moving past that kind of single point of vulnerability will take some work, both by the industry and by you, the person wondering if there's a real alternative.