Engadget News + Next

-On Friday, New York State Senators Liz Krueger and Kristen Gonzales introduced a bill that would stop the issuance of permits for new data centers for at least three years and ninety days to give time for impact assessments and to update regulations.

-Apple is gearing up for a slew of hardware announcements that will include upgrades for the entry-level iPad, iPad Air, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, according to Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter.

-Lyft has officially introduced teen accounts for ages 13 to 17. This is a rideshare feature in which teenagers can request their own rides, which is similar to Uber's pre-existing platform.
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Gamers, schmamers. We have AI data centers to power!
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-The company started a pilot program last year to allow developers to create dedicated AI note writers.  X’s Keith Coleman told Engadget that AI writers are “prolific” and that one has contributed more than 1,000 notes that were rated as helpful by other contributors.

-Vibes was introduced as a feature in the Meta AI app in September 2025. Similar to OpenAI's Sora app, Vibes lets users prompt Meta AI to create TikTok-style vertical videos.

-The US Central Intelligence Agency is ending one of its popular services, The World Factbook.
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The company said that integrating advertising would 'work against' the core principles of the chatbot.
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-The backdrop to the SCAM Act is a Reuters report from last November. Meta reportedly estimated that up to 10 percent of its 2024 revenue came from scam ads. The company is said to have calculated that as much as $16 billion of its revenue that year was from scams, including "fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and the sale of banned medical products."

-While it's true that X is the only major social network to make elements of its recommendation algorithm open source, researchers say that what the company has published doesn't offer the kind of transparency that would actually be useful for anyone trying to understand how X works in 2026.

-As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, the AI industry has been hoovering up manufacturers’ available memory chips and hard drives for its infrastructure developments.
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