Author: Monique Irish Casingal

Meta Platforms has started settlement talks with 29 state attorneys general in the youth social media case over alleged harm to minors on Instagram and Facebook. Those talks began in the trial’s second week, even as the federal jury trial keeps moving in Oakland, California, Bloomberg reports.

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At the center of the states’ case is the claim that Instagram and Facebook used design features that allegedly kept minors hooked, helping drive anxiety, depression, and eating disorders. The attorneys general also say Meta broke the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent. Meta disputes all of that. The company says it has added teen safety tools and argues that youth mental health can’t be pinned on any single platform.

The timing stands out. The trial is already in its second week, and Bloomberg points out that companies usually don’t start moving toward a deal once a jury is already hearing evidence. The stakes are huge, too. Reported damages are estimated at about $200 billion, while figures from the states go as high as $1.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg.

If you keep an eye on online safety fights or social platform regulation, this is a case to watch. A settlement, or a verdict, could shape what comes next for lawsuits brought by school districts, local governments, and families. It could also give regulators more room to push for tougher protections for minors online.

For updates, Bloomberg’s coverage is the obvious place to start, along with the federal court proceedings still underway in Oakland. Meta is also dealing with pressure from other fronts, including a nearly $1 billion penalty in New Mexico and a California verdict connected to a young user’s mental health, Bloomberg says.

Spotify said on August 25, 2026, that its audiobook outage had been resolved and told users to update to the latest version of the Spotify app. The company had acknowledged the issue earlier that same day and later marked it as fixed. Even so, some listeners are still saying certain books won’t play, downloads are failing, and one bug is causing chapters to skip by at high speed instead of playing normally.

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Spotify still hasn’t said what caused the problem. And because it doesn’t have a dedicated public status page, there’s no easy way to tell whether this audiobook outage came from a server issue, a software bug, or something tied to licensing or content delivery. That matters if you use Spotify for audiobooks. Spotify rolled out audiobooks in the U.S. in September 2022 as part of its push beyond music and podcasts and into more direct competition with Audible, where reliability turns into a trust problem fast.

The outage also adds to a point of friction that Spotify Premium users already deal with, since Premium only includes a limited number of listening hours each month, and extra time costs more through paid top-ups. If you use the service regularly, it’s probably a good idea to install the update, then reload your library and see whether the affected titles will now play or download again in the latest Spotify app on your device.

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Veteran game developer Warren Spector said today that he’s retiring from game development after nearly 44 years. He pointed to his age, health issues, and how much the industry has changed, adding that the business is “just not as much fun for me anymore.”

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Spector is still best known as the creator and director of Deus Ex. Now 70, he helped shape the immersive sim around player choice, interconnected systems, and open-ended problem solving, and that design lineage runs straight through games like Dishonored and Cyberpunk 2077.

His résumé also runs through Ultima, Wing Commander, System Shock, and Thief: The Dark Project. That’s why so many developers and critics talk about him as a legend, and as one of the people who most strongly pushed player agency into the center of game design.

If you care about game design, this is a big retirement, especially coming after a rough last stretch at OtherSide Entertainment. Thick as Thieves lost momentum fast, Underworld Ascendant disappointed and took heavy criticism, and System Shock 3 has been stuck in limbo since 2020. Even with all that, Spector says he still wishes he could have made three more games, and he wants younger developers to keep experimenting.

You can still go back to Deus Ex on PC and see the legacy Warren Spector leaves behind.

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Episode 5 of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe arrives on HBO Max on Thursday, August 20, 2026. It’s called “Spoiler: Gary Works for UPS,” and it drops at 6:00 p.m. PT / 9:00 p.m. ET, picking up Stuart Bloom’s latest multiverse-scale mess. Internationally, new episodes have been showing up on Fridays. Season 1 began on July 23, runs for 10 episodes, and, if the current weekly schedule stays in place, should wrap on September 24.

The series follows Stuart as he tries to clean up an accident that threatens the multiverse across a stack of alternate realities. Kevin Sussman stars alongside Lauren Lapkus, Brian Posehn, and John Ross Bowie. As the fourth Big Bang Theory series, it keeps looping back to the original show too, with cameos from Raj, Penny, Bernadette, and Amy.

If you’ve been with The Big Bang Theory for years, the weekly cameos alone give you a reason to keep up. HBO Max has already renewed Stuart Fails to Save the Universe for season 2 after saying it was the platform’s second-biggest comedy debut globally, though it still hasn’t put out any actual numbers. Critics have been divided on the darker, stranger tone, while audience response has leaned warmer, including an 81% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, according to Rotten Tomatoes.

You can stream Stuart Fails to Save the Universe episode 5 on HBO Max on Thursday and, if the rollout stays the same, internationally on Friday.

Google’s new Pixel 11 ads on YouTube seem to include something the company hasn’t announced yet: a fitness tracker shown alongside the Pixel 11 phones and Pixel Watch 5. More than one viewer has now spotted the device across several ads, which makes it feel less like a random editing slip and more like Google letting people get a look at it.

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The mystery wearable looks too small to be a smartwatch and too capable to be a basic band. It has a narrow display in a compact body, landing somewhere between the screenless Fitbit Air and a full Pixel Watch.

From the design alone, you could read it as a blend of Fitbit Air and Fitbit Charge. That’s why some of the early speculation has pointed to a possible Fitbit Charge 7, though Google hasn’t confirmed a name, price, release date, specs, or even whether it plans to sell it at retail.

If you follow Google’s wearables, this is one to keep an eye on, because it would fit neatly between the Fitbit Air and Pixel Watch 5 while also lining up with Google Health’s broader coaching push.

The market numbers give that a little more context. Omdia says the wearable band market fell 2% year over year in Q2 2026, even as screenless trackers grew 122%, with WHOOP at 54% and Fitbit at 9%. In smartwatches, Apple led with 46%, while Samsung and Garmin were tied at 15% each.

For now, the only place to spot the mystery wearable is in YouTube ads, since Google still has nothing official for you to buy or download.

Nvidia says, at least from CEO Jensen Huang’s public comments, that it isn’t taking on unlimited risk to bankroll customer purchases. The issue came into focus after the chipmaker’s five-year credit-default swap spread widened to a record 82 basis points in mid-2026, according to market pricing. That debt-market scare was driven by investor worries about “circular financing,” especially once reports tied Nvidia to a possible $250 billion guarantee for an OpenAI data-center project.

Huang has described a different approach. He says the goal is to draw in more than $500 billion in third-party capital from firms such as Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR, using direct loans, equipment leasing and financing tied to usage. Under that setup, the main credit risk would sit with those investors, not with Nvidia.

If you’re watching Nvidia’s balance-sheet exposure, that distinction matters. Markets have calmed, backers see private capital as the practical route to fund new capacity, and Nvidia says its own role would be limited, at most, to residual-value support rather than broad guarantees on entire projects.

Still, the structure is something to keep watching through Huang’s public remarks and the market coverage around them. Skeptics argue that complicated financing can start to resemble bubble-era engineering if demand or revenue growth weakens, even as Nvidia keeps saying it doesn’t want to turn into the lender of last resort for its customers.

YouTube is tightening the rules for its Partner Program. The new YPP thresholds kick in on February 1, 2027, the company says. If you’re trying to qualify for ad revenue, the subscriber count stays at 1,000, but the watch-time requirement jumps to 8,000 hours a year or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days. That’s double the current bar of 4,000 hours or 10 million Shorts views. The fan-funding tier isn’t changing: YouTube says it will stay at 500 subscribers plus 3,000 hours or 3 million Shorts views.

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Creators who are already in YPP have a deadline too. According to YouTube, they need to accept the new terms by January 31, 2027 and keep their channel active by meeting one of these marks: 1,000 watch hours a year, 1 million Shorts views, or uploads every 90 days, specifically 2 long videos or 5 Shorts. Leave a channel inactive for 6 months and it can be removed. YouTube also says Shorts Pool payouts still require 10 million Shorts views in 90 days, although missing that target only cuts off Shorts earnings.

For people trying to turn a hobby into a business, this shift deserves attention. YouTube is pushing further toward a TV-style service, with seasons, premium shows, competition with Netflix, Max, and Disney+, plus YouTube Premium Lite in markets where, according to the company, subscription revenue is split 55/45 between long-form video and Shorts. And in those markets, subscriptions usually bring in more than ads.

This is the biggest YPP shake-up since 2018. YouTube says the Partner Program now includes more than 3 million creators and that it paid out over $100 billion to creators, artists, and media companies from 2022 to 2025. The response so far is mixed. Smaller channels, in particular, are warning that the new 8,000-hour bar will make it much harder to start making money.

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The European Space Agency has backed UK startup Siloton to build a compact retinal scanner for astronauts headed into deep space. The idea is to push chip-scale optical coherence tomography eye exams closer to something NASA could actually use on Artemis missions.

The concern here is Space-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome, usually shortened to SANS. Space medicine researchers have seen signs of it in 70% of astronauts on the International Space Station, and in about 15% to 20% the symptoms are serious enough to matter clinically. That can mean swelling of the optic nerve, flattening at the back of the eye, and folds in the retina that blur vision and nudge astronauts toward farsightedness. Sometimes the change is dramatic. After his 2005 ISS mission, astronaut John Phillips came back with much worse eyesight, even though it improved later.

The leading theory is that microgravity pushes fluid upward toward the head, which raises pressure around the brain and the eyes. The ISS already has a modified OCT system to keep an eye on this, but it still takes a bulky setup, and crews often need real-time guidance from specialists on the ground.

Siloton is trying to shrink those OCT-type components onto a photonic chip smaller than a coin and fit it inside a device about the size of binoculars. If that works, astronauts could scan themselves more often and with less training on Moon or Mars missions, where time delays make live support impossible. If you follow space medicine, this one’s worth watching. You can’t get it yet, and NASA’s own self-operated Mini OCT for the ISS is also penciled in for 2027.