Richard Lawler

Gershkovich, who had been sentenced to 16 years in prison, was released Thursday along with Paul Whelan, Alsu Kurmasheva, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and twelve others.

The Wall Street Journal reports the exchange involved “24 prisoners and at least six countries,” including Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life sentence in Germany for shooting and killing a Chechen rebel leader in a Berlin park.

There were reportedly only 150 pairs made and distributed in 2006 / 2009, but NiceKicks and SneakerNews report the PlayStation x Nike Air Force 1 Low will be re-released next year, according to unnamed sources.

Nike revisited the concept with a 2018 edition and a Paul George collaboration, but the originals are by far the best and have gone for as much as $6,000 on StockX,

As David Pierce wrote about the Friend AI gadget and company CEO Avi Schiffman:

He wants Friend.com to eventually become a social network for real-life and AI friends, and he wants to build more kinds of devices and try everything.

Apparently, he’s serious. 404 Media reports he spent $1.8 million on the domain after raising about $2.5 million. Schiffman said, “People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing.”

Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that “Apple Intelligence” features will be available for developers to beta test this week.

However, he also says the first ones won’t be released publicly until weeks after Apple’s big September updates for iPhone / iPad / Mac, etc. Rollouts for others from its WWDC showcase, like upgraded Siri, could stretch into 2025.

A month after TikTok made its First Amendment case against a potential ban, lawyers for the government responded Friday. The partially redacted filings (available in full here) include their arguments that the Chinese government could use data collected by the app or manipulate its algorithm to influence US elections.

One example pointed to search tools for the company’s internal Lark messaging tool, shown below.

Along with CrowdStrike’s post incident review, this has Microsoft telemetry data and some explanations (performance, tamper resistance) for the kernel driver architecture that crashed millions of Windows systems.

Microsoft has called for locking down that access, and this post again brings up alternate options:

...security vendors can use minimal sensors that run in kernel mode for data collection and enforcement limiting exposure to availability issues. The remainder of the key product functionality includes managing updates, parsing content, and other operations can occur isolated within user mode where recoverability is possible.

This teardown of the new Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a similar feel to Allison’s Z Fold 6 review — things inside are mostly the same as the previous generation. There are bigger batteries and other tweaks, but the similar layouts show how Samsung is iterating on the existing design, so hopefully, you think it’s already good enough.

Canadian officials now say that in addition to the drone practice spying incident earlier this week, "additional information has come to our attention regarding previous drone use against opponents, predating the Paris 2024 Olympic Games."

Canada Soccer CEO & General Secretary Kevin Blue:

In light of these new revelations, Canada Soccer has made the decision to suspend Women’s National Soccer Team Head Coach, Bev Priestman for the remainder of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and until the completion of our recently announced independent external review.