IT General

The Toyota Crown Signia lands in a pretty interesting spot that a lot of entry-level luxury SUVs struggle to hit. It’s comfortable, well-built, and loaded with tech in a way that feels more premium than you’d expect at this price.

That was quick.

Some of the biggest AI companies have just agreed to provide the U.S. government with early access to their new AI models. And this went down just one day after a report from the New York Times detailed how the Trump administration was looking into government oversight of new AI models.

According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, three of tech's biggest AI companies — Google, Microsoft, and xAI — have all reached an agreement with the Trump administration to provide access to new frontier models before they are released to the public.

The three companies will provide this access to the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), which will evaluate new AI models on their capabilities and security. OpenAI and Anthropic have both previously agreed to a similar agreement with the Commerce Department in 2024.

CAISI has already completed over 40 evaluations on AI models before their release to the public.

“Independent, rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications,” CAISI director Chris Fall said to the WSJ. “These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment.”

Earlier this week, the WSJ also reported that the Trump administration is looking into a "cybersecurity-focused executive order," which would create an oversight group whose role is to create standards for AI models.

These recent developments come in the wake of the Trump administration's feud with AI company Anthropic earlier this year. The US government declared Anthropic and its AI chatbot Claude was a supply chain risk to national security after the AI company requested that the Trump administration not use its technology for warfare or mass surveillance purposes.

Previously, the Trump administration has taken a very pro-AI stance, citing the need for U.S. companies to maintain an edge over their Chinese rivals.

The Toyota Corolla is the safe, sensible choice, reliable, efficient, and brand new for the price. It’s the kind of car you buy when you want zero surprises. But in today’s market, that same money can unlock something far more exciting, if you’re willing to look in the right places.

Connections pulled a classic game design trick this week: showing the player a challenge they haven't seen before, but have unknowingly been preparing for this whole time.

The popular New York Times puzzle game, in which players usually are tasked with grouping a bunch of random words together into hidden categories, threw a heck of a curveball on Wednesday, May 6. If you haven't checked it out yet, today's puzzle is a bit strange in that it doesn't include words at all.

Instead, it's a bunch of symbols of mundane objects.

SEE ALSO: NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for May 6, 2026 Uh...what? Credit: Screenshot: The New York Times

The puzzle actually makes some sense if you do what I did and just look up the answers, but for everyday Connections players, it's obviously going to be a more stiff challenge than usual. Of course, people on the internet had some real thoughts about this. Mostly very negative thoughts, to be precise.

Turns out, people really don't like it when you mess with their daily New York Times gaming routine.

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But there was at least one person who thought it was pretty neat.

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Hopefully, tomorrow's puzzle is just words again.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.

Microsoft stands out as one of the most environmentally responsible companies in Big Tech, but a new report indicates it may be retreating from one of its most ambitious climate goals.

The Redmond, Washington-based company previously pledged to match 100 percent of its hourly electricity use with renewable energy purchases by 2030; Microsoft already meets its annual targets for renewable energy matches.

SEE ALSO: Trump plans to kill Energy Star appliance program

Now, with pressure to construct data centers to fuel AI, Microsoft is considering delaying or abandoning that hourly goal, Bloomberg reports.

The hourly clean power goal is named 100/100/0, indicating the intent to match all of its energy use, all of the time, with zero-carbon energy purchases. That goal is complicated by the enormous amount Microsoft is spending on data centers, around $190 billion through the end of the year. The data center boom has equated to less money for other corporate endeavors, like clean energy. In the wake of those costs, Microsoft has already begun reducing its carbon-dioxide removal program.

Many tech companies are looking to natural gas — which emits Earth-warming greenhouse gases — to partially power their data centers, rather than cleaner energy sources like solar, wind, or hydro power. 

The companies of Big Tech are all emitting more carbon in the wake of the AI race; Microsoft has seen a 23 percent jump in carbon emissions since late 2022, while Google's increased by 51 percent and Meta's by 64 percent during that same time period, Bloomberg reports.

You no longer have to shop the Ring lineup if you want an Amazon video doorbell with high-quality visuals. The company's Blink brand has released two new doorbells that promise a 2K resolution and AI alerts to help you learn who (or what) is outside.

Having spent 20 years building PCs from scratch, I've seen all kinds of hardware quirks and innovations come and go. I've been there when every PC without fail had an optical drive bay at the front, and I'm here now when that's just not a thing at all anymore. And while I love the new case aesthetics we were able to achieve by getting rid of that drive bay, I do miss it.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, vinyl has come back from the digital brink, outselling CDs in the U.S. since 2020 to become the leader in physical media sales. You’d have thought that success was solely on the back of nostalgia and reliving the glory days. But you’d be wrong. Generations that grew up streaming have also decided that holding a black petroleum disc in their hands is more valuable than a Spotify subscription.

A Utah law, enacted Wednesday, seeks to ban the use of VPNs to access porn sites.

The statute is part of SB 73, which contains amendments to the state's age-verification law. These laws typically require some proof of age to access adult content (or any content the state deems "harmful to minors").

Utah's age-verification law, SB 287, went into effect in 2023; it requires age verification via a digital ID card, a third-party verification service, or a credit card.

Pornhub promptly blocked users in Utah as the law went into effect.

SEE ALSO: Some UK users can go back on Pornhub. See if you're one of them.

Age verification often doesn't work because it can be circumvented. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which mask a user's real location, are one popular method for doing that. That's what the Utah law aims to tackle when it says porn sites must not allow VPN usage. Here's the relevant language:

A commercial entity that operates a website that contains a substantial portion of material harmful to minors may not facilitate or encourage the use of a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to circumvent age verification requirements, including by providing: (a)instructions on how to use a virtual private network or proxy server to access the website; or (b) means for individuals in this state to circumvent geofencing or blocking.

"Utah just became the first state in the U.S. to target VPN usage, and they are embarrassing themselves," said Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, in a statement sent to Mashable.

Holland added that the legal language in question reads like AI slop.

"You cannot require a website doing age verification to determine where someone using a reputable VPN is browsing from — this feat is literally impossible by design for even the best hacker," Holland continued. Websites are left with three choices, Holland said: block everyone using a VPN (which is likely impossible), require every site visitor to verify their age, or censor everything that might fall under Utah's "harmful to minors" standard.

Fight for the Future says it will endorse any lawsuit filed against Utah to overturn this law.

The digital civil liberties nonprofit, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), also criticized SB 73. EFF's associate director of state affairs, Rindala Alajaji, wrote in a blog post published April 30: "These provisions won't stop a tech-savvy teenager, but they certainly will impact the privacy of every regular Utah resident who just wants to keep their data out of the hands of brokers or malicious actors."

Alajaii added: "attacks on VPNs are, at their core, attacks on the tools that enable digital privacy. Utah is setting a precedent that prioritizes government control over the fundamental architecture of a private and secure internet, and it won't stop at the state's borders."

"Protecting kids while preserving freedom is not a new concept," SB 73 sponsor Sen. Calvin Musselman told The Salt Lake Tribune, and compared it to policies about alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. (Alcohol, tobacco, and gambling aren't protected by the First Amendment, however; free speech is.)

SB 73 appears to be the first bill enacted to block VPNs, but another ban has been proposed in Michigan. The UK government is also considering a ban on VPNs for minors.

When speaking with Mashable last year about age-verification, First Amendment experts warned of second-order censorship. The first order is age verification, they explained, but people find workarounds. Second-order censorship means banning the workarounds.

Android might be famous as an open ecosystem, but Google has made some features exclusive to Pixel devices. A handful of Pixel-exclusive features have genuinely changed how I use my phone, but a few others are best left undiscovered. Here's every major Pixel exclusive, ranked from the one I can't live without to the one I'd happily never think about.

Affordable electric crossovers aren’t usually where you go looking for a premium experience. Most options in this segment focus on value first, with simple interiors, modest performance, and just enough tech to get the job done. Luxury brands, on the other hand, tend to sit comfortably above that price bracket. At least, that’s how it’s always worked.

Amazon is no longer Rivian's biggest investor. VW (specifically, Volkswagen Group Technologies) has raised its equity stake in Rivian to 15.9 percent, putting it ahead of Amazon's nearly 12.3 percent investment.

Have you ever wanted your life to feel like a video game? Do you want to see XP points pile up every time you do something productive? Me too. And so I built a gamification system using Claude and Habitica to turn my life into an RPG.

Plex's Remote Watch Pass is getting a 50% price hike starting June 1, 2026. Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass in April 2025 as a cheaper alternative to the Plex Pass. Remote Watch Pass allows users to remotely stream from any Plex Media Server that a user has access to.

"Once you get past the first season, the show gets better." If I had a nickel for how many times I've heard that phrase, I'd be a rich man. I'm not a saint, either. I've said it plenty of times, and I'm about to do it again with these six shows. It's not that the shows listed below were terrible in the beginning. Quite the contrary. Most of them started fine, but they didn't hit their stride until the end of the first season. In some cases, these shows were on the brink of cancellation.

Finding genuinely good deals at Walmart just got a whole lot easier. The creator of camelcamelcamel, a popular free Amazon price tracker, has launched an identical tool for Walmart products called camelmart.

California-based programmer Daniel Green created camelcamelcamel in 2008 as "a code experiment" with Amazon's Product Advertising API, he told Mashable last fall. It took off among shoppers (and shopping reporters) after he put it online, so he hired a team of friends to keep it running — now for nearly two decades.

Camelcamelcamel and its browser extension, The Camelizer, can produce historical price charts for millions of Amazon products, making it easy to see if deals are worth adding to cart — or whether they're even "deals" at all. Users can also set up price-drop alerts to receive an email when an item goes on sale.

Here's camelmart's price history chart for the Apple AirPods Pro 3. At the time of writing, they were only 99 cents away from their record-low price at Walmart. Credit: Screenshot via camelmart.com

Camelmart pulls data from Walmart's official API and has the exact same features as its sister site. If you enter a Walmart product's URL into the search bar, you can view its price history and sign up for deal alerts.

SEE ALSO: What is camelcamelcamel? Just our secret weapon for finding the lowest prices on Amazon.

Camelmart doesn't have its own browser extension yet, but Green tells me via email that "We plan to eventually either add camelmart to our existing extension, or release its own separate extension."

This isn't the first time Green and his team have branched out from Amazon. They released a Best Buy price tracker called camelbuy back in 2009, but eventually shut it down because it "didn't get the traction it needed to sustain itself," Green said. Camelcamelcamel and all of its spinoffs have been supported by affiliate links, so if you buy something through a link on the sites, they may earn a commission.

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Pornhub's parent company, Aylo, has now announced that "age-confirmed" iOS UK users can once again visit Pornhub. In January, the company said that it would block Pornhub in the UK for most people.

The change is due to Apple's release of iOS 26.4, which Aylo's vice president of brand and community, Alex Kekesi, called "the world's first ever device-based age verification solution for its users in the UK" in a press release.

SEE ALSO: How to unblock Pornhub for free

UK adults who have confirmed their age through Apple's UK age-verification process can now visit Pornhub again.

Age verification can be done with a credit card or by scanning one's passport, driver's license, or other proof-of-age card. Apple will check if the device owner has a credit card on file to confirm if they're 18 or older. For children, teens, and unverified adults, Apple's Web Content Filter and Communication Safety features are automatically turned on. The latter blurs or warns about potentially inappropriate content.

Apple published these age requirements on its website on April 29. They come nearly a year after the UK enacted the Online Safety Act, a wide-ranging age-verification law. It also follows Aylo's request to Apple and other tech giants, Google and Microsoft, to enable device-level age verification in Nov. 2025.

Many people in the adult industry and free speech experts have been advocating for device-level age verification for years.

"We have been reaching out to the operating system providers to emphasize the need for a highly effective device-based solution, that includes Google, that includes Microsoft and Apple," said Solomon Friedman, partner and vice president of compliance at Ethical Capital Partners (which owns Aylo), in a Tuesday press briefing, 404 Media reported. "And on behalf of ownership, we're obviously delighted to see that Apple has instituted UK-wide, effective device-based age assurance."

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This next year or so is gearing up to be a big one for Apple. Case in point: Just this week, Mashable previewed the new features coming to iOS 26.5, and now there's already major news about what's coming in iOS 27.

According to a new report from Bloomberg's Apple insider Mark Gurman, Apple will soon let its users choose exactly which third-party AI models that they want to utilize with Apple Intelligence.

Apple is reportedly launching an "Extensions" feature, which will let AI companies opt-in and enable support for the feature through their App Store applications. If and when companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic enable Extensions for Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, respectively, users will be able to select those AI models for Apple Intelligence's Writing Tools, Siri voice assistant, Image Plaground, and more.

Gurman says that third-party AI tools would be able to power Siri's feature set with their own distinctive voices answering prompts. Apple's own Siri would be able to join in with its own distinct voice as well, though this will likely be powered by Google Gemini.

This feature is scheduled to launch with iOS 27 for iPhone along with iPadOS 27 and macOS 27. iOS 27 will likely be announced at WWDC in June and then released later this year around the same time as Apple's big iPhone event, where the company is slated to unveil iPhone 18 and potentially the brand new iPhone Fold.

SEE ALSO: Apple WWDC 2026: Everything we know so far

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Apple had received criticism over the past few years regarding its lack of AI strategy, and the company has largely been left out of the AI arms race. However, as its competitors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into developing AI models and infrastructure, Apple has opted to partner with companies like Google and OpenAI, letting its customers reap some of the benefits of AI without spending massive amounts of money.

Of course, Apple's lack of AI technology has also cost the company. Apple recently settled a lawsuit for $250 million over claims that it exaggerated the abilities of Apple Intelligence.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Oh my god, you guys, Legally Blonde's heroine Elle Woods is headed back to our screens. Not in Legally Blonde 3 (although that's been in the works for years), but in a new prequel TV series, titled Elle.

SEE ALSO: 2026 Summer TV preview: Every TV show you need to know about now

Created by Laura Kittrell and executive produced by Reese Witherspoon, Elle rewinds the clock to 1995, well before Elle set foot on Harvard's campus. Before she began studying fashion merchandising in undergrad, even! Instead, Elle shows us who Elle (Lexi Minetree) was in high school. Spoiler alert: She's just as bubbly as she is in college, and dressed in just as much pink to boot.

However, Elle's high school life isn't all California sunshine. Literally. In the show's teaser, Elle's mother (June Diane Raphael) and father (Tom Everett Scott) reveal that they'll be moving to Seattle. That's right: Elle Woods, the queen of pink, is heading to Seattle, the land of flannel, rain, and apparently, no blonde people.

The Seattle move sets the stage for another fish-out-of-water story for Elle. This time, instead of trying to fit in among snobby law students and old money types, she'll have to contend with her grunge-loving peers. But if there's one thing Elle Woods can do, it's keep it positive and make the most of a tricky situation. What, like it's hard?

Elle premieres July 1 on Prime Video.

BMW has announced the U.S. pricing and release date for the 2027 iX3, including a pleasant range boost for the electric SUV.