Apple’s AirPods can pair with their competitors’ devices and work as basic Bluetooth earbuds, but to no one’s surprise most of their really interesting features are reserved for Apple devices. What is surprising, though, is that simple Bluetooth device ID spoofing unlocks these features, a fact which [Kavish Devar] took advantage of to write LibrePods, an AirPods controller app for Android and Linux.

In particular, LibrePods lets you control noise reduction modes, use ear detection to pause and unpause audio, detect head gestures, reduce volume when the AirPods detect you’re speaking, work as configurable hearing aids, connect to two devices simultaneously, and configure a few other settings. The app needs an audiogram to let them work as hearing aids, and you’ll need an existing audiogram – creating an audiogram requires too much precision. Of particular interest to hackers, the app has a debug mode to send raw Bluetooth packets to the AirPods. Unfortunately, a bug in the Android Bluetooth stack means that LibrePods requires root on most devices.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a hack enable hearing aid functionality without official Apple approval. However, while we have some people alter the hardware, AirPorts can’t really be called hacker- or repair-friendly.

Thanks to [spiralbrain] for the tip!

The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infringing Disney’s copyrights “on a massive scale.”

According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate’s intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google’s image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters—they couldn’t do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing “copies of its protected works” to consumers. So all those memes you’ve been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn’t like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars.

The company calls on Google to immediately stop using Disney content in its AI tools and create measures to ensure that future AI outputs don’t produce any characters that Disney owns. Disney is famously litigious and has an army of lawyers dedicated to defending its copyrights. The nature of copyright law in the US is a direct result of Disney’s legal maneuvering, which has extended its control of iconic characters by decades.

While Disney wants its characters out of Google AI generally, the letter specifically cited the AI tools in YouTube. Google has started adding its Veo AI video model to YouTube, allowing creators to more easily create and publish videos. That seems to be a greater concern for Disney than image models like Nano Banana.

Google has said little about Disney’s warning—a warning Google must have known was coming. A Google spokesperson has issued the following brief statement on the mater.

“We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them,” Google says. “More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content.”

Perhaps this is previewing Google’s argument in a theoretical lawsuit. That copyrighted Disney content was all over the open internet, so is it really Google’s fault it ended up baked into the AI?

Content silos for AI

The generative AI boom has treated copyright as a mere suggestion as companies race to gobble up training data and remix it as “new” content. A cavalcade of companies, including The New York Times and Getty Images, have sued over how their material has been used and replicated by AI. Disney itself threatened a lawsuit against Character.AI earlier this year, leading to the removal of Disney content from the service.

Google isn’t Character.AI, though. It’s probably no coincidence that Disney is challenging Google at the same time it is entering into a content deal with OpenAI. Disney has invested $1 billion in the AI firm and agreed to a three-year licensing deal that officially brings Disney characters to OpenAI’s Sora video app. The specifics of that arrangement are still subject to negotiations.

The launch of the Sora app earlier this year was widely derided by the entertainment industry, but that’s nothing a little money can’t solve. OpenAI required copyright owners to opt out of having their content included in the service, but it later reversed course to an opt-in model. The Disney deal is OpenAI’s first major content tie-in for AI.

Meanwhile, Google’s AI tools don’t pay any mind to copyright. If you want to create images and videos with The Avengers, Super Mario, or any other character, Google doesn’t stand in your way. Whether or not that remains the case depends on how Google responds to Disney’s lawyers. There’s no indication that Disney’s licensing deal with OpenAI is exclusive, so it’s possible Google and Disney will reach an agreement to allow AI recreations. Google could also choose to fight back against this particular interpretation of copyright.

Most companies would channel Character.AI and avoid a fight with Disney’s lawyers, but Google’s scale gives it more options. In either case, we could soon see the AI content ecosystem become a patchwork of content silos not unlike streaming media. If you want to generate an image featuring Moana, well, you’ll need to go to OpenAI. If a DC character is more your speed, there may be a different AI firm that has a deal to let you do that. It’s hard to know who to root for in a battle between giant AI firms and equally giant entertainment companies.

Updated 12/11 with statement from Google.

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Back in April, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers delivered a scathing judgment finding that Apple was in “willful violation” of her 2021 injunction intended to open up iOS App Store payments. That contempt of court finding has now been almost entirely upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a development that Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney tells Ars he hopes will “do a lot of good for developers and start to really change the App Store situation worldwide, I think.”

The ruling, signed by a panel of three appellate court judges, affirmed that Apple’s initial attempts to charge a 27 percent fee to iOS developers using outside payment options “had a prohibitive effect, in violation of the injunction.” Similarly, Apple’s restrictions on how those outside links had to be designed were overly broad; the appeals court suggests that Apple can only ensure that internal and external payment options are presented in a similar fashion.

The appeals court also agreed that Apple acted in “bad faith” by refusing to comply with the injunction, rejecting viable, compliant alternatives in internal discussions. And the appeals court was also not convinced by Apple’s process-focused arguments, saying the district court properly evaluated materials Apple argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

While the district court barred Apple from charging any fees for payments made outside of its App Store, the appeals court now suggests that Apple should still be able to charge a “reasonable fee” based on its “actual costs to ensure user security and privacy.” It will be up to Apple and the district court to determine what that kind of “reasonable fee” should look like going forward.

Speaking to reporters Thursday night, though, Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said he believes those should be “super super minor fees,” on the order of “tens or hundreds of dollars” every time an iOS app update goes through Apple for review. That should be more than enough to compensate the employees reviewing the apps to make sure outside payment links are not scams and lead to a system of “normal fees for normal businesses that sell normal things to normal customers,” Sweeney said.

“The 9th Circuit Court has confirmed: The Apple Tax is dead in the USA,” Sweeney wrote on social media. “This is the beginning of true, untaxed competition in payments worldwide on iOS.”

An Apple spokesperson has not yet responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

“The sad truth is everybody’s afraid of Apple”

While some app developers have made the move to their own payment processors in the wake of April’s ruling, Sweeney said he thinks many were waiting to see if the decision would be overturned on appeal. With that fear now mooted, he said we’ll probably see “rapid adoption” of outside payment processors, including the Epic Web Shops that the company rolled out in October. Sweeney predicted that these kinds of web payments for iOS apps “will just become the norm” by the end of next year and that “after years of Apple obstruction, we’re finally going to see large-scale change happening.”

Sweeney also pointed to an alleged widespread “fear of retaliation” that has led many iOS developers to keep paying 30 percent fees to use Apple’s default in-app payments. Sweeney said that Apple has “infinite power to retaliate” against apps that add outside payment options by indefinitely delaying their app reviews or burying their products in App Store search results. Sweeney called this kind of “ghosting” a “totally illegal” exercise of “soft power” by Apple that regulators will need to look at if it keeps up.

When pitching Epic’s own outside payment options to major iOS developers, Sweeney said he frequently has to address fears that lower payment fees will be overwhelmed by the drop in users caused by this kind of Apple retaliation. “We’re just too afraid of Apple hurting our business,” Sweeney said in summary of the common response from other developers. “The sad truth is everybody’s afraid of Apple.”

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Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is also getting improved translation quality across dozens of languages and some Duolingo-like learning features.

The latest version of Google’s live translation is built on Gemini and initially rolled out earlier this year. It supports smooth back-and-forth translations as both on-screen text and audio. Beginning a live translate session in Google Translate used to require Pixel Buds, but that won’t be the case going forward.

Google says a beta test of expanded headphone support is launching today in the US, Mexico, and India. The audio translation attempts to preserve the tone and cadence of the original speaker, but it’s not as capable as the full AI-reproduced voice translations you can do on the latest Pixel phones. Google says this feature should work on any earbuds or headphones, but it’s only for Android right now. The feature will expand to iOS in the coming months. Apple does have a similar live translation feature on the iPhone, but it requires AirPods.

Translate can now use Gemini to interpret the meaning of a phrase rather than simply translating each word. Credit: Google

Regardless of whether you’re using live translate or just checking a single phrase, Google claims the Gemini-powered upgrade will serve you well. Google Translate is now apparently better at understanding the nuance of languages, with an awareness of idioms and local slang. Google uses the example of “stealing my thunder,” which wouldn’t make a lick of sense when translated literally into other languages. The new translation model, which is also available in the search-based translation interface, supports over 70 languages.

Google also debuted language-learning features earlier this year, borrowing a page from educational apps like Duolingo. You can tell the app your skill level with a language, as well as whether you need help with travel-oriented conversations or more everyday interactions. The app uses this to create tailored listening and speaking exercises.

The Translate app’s learning tools are getting better. Credit: Google

With this big update, Translate will be more of a stickler about your pronunciation. Google promises more feedback and tips based on your spoken replies in the learning modules. The app will also now keep track of how often you complete language practice, showing your daily streak in the app.

If “number go up” will help you learn more, then this update is for you. Practice mode is also launching in almost 20 new countries, including Germany, India, Sweden, and Taiwan.

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a new database on Tuesday, highlighting "the worst of the worst criminal aliens arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)." Dubbed the "dictionary of depravity" in a post on X, the DHS data categorize just 4 percent of immigration arrests since President Donald Trump took office in January as "the worst of the worst." At a congressional hearing on Thursday, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem faced tough questions about why the agency's deportation reality doesn't match its claim of targeting violent criminals.

Of the roughly 281,000 people arrested by ICE from January 20 through December 9, fewer than 10,000 individuals are classified as "the worst of the worst" by the DHS, according to analysis done by the Cato Institute's Director of Immigration Studies, David Bier. Of those classified, "a majority (56 percent) of the list has not been charged or convicted of a violent crime," according to Bier, "and nearly a quarter…had nothing but a vice, immigration (e.g., illegal entry), or non-DUI traffic charge." Thousands of faces and names have been placed on the DHS' list for minor offenses, like drug possession charges. 

The DHS database tracks closely with previous findings by Bier. After analyzing data on immigration arrests between October 1, 2024, and June 14, 2025, Bier found that 65 percent of people arrested by ICE had no criminal convictions, and 93 percent had no violent convictions. Even more recently, data on individuals booked into ICE custody since October 1 showed an increase in the number of detainees with no criminal convictions—73 percent—and even fewer people with violent convictions—only 5 percent. (Note that Bier's analysis estimated an even higher percentage of violent criminals in ICE custody than the new DHS database.) 

The DHS' own data now confirm that the majority of individuals being targeted in the Trump administration's immigration raids are simply not the "worst of the worst criminal aliens." 

This point was further exemplified during a House Homeland Security hearing on Thursday, in which Rep. Seth Magaziner (D–R.I.) asked Noem to answer for the deportation of Sae Joon Park, a U.S. Army combat veteran who had a green card and received a Purple Heart, who joined the hearing via Zoom. 

Park was deployed at the age of 19 to Panama in 1989. There, he was struck by gunfire. Upon returning home and being honorably discharged, he began experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and turned to drugs to cope, according to NBC News. In 2007, Park pleaded guilty to drug possession and went to prison in 2009 after not complying with a drug treatment program and failing to return to court. 

After serving three years in prison, Park received a removal order. But rather than deporting, Park attended annual check-ins with ICE until his latest check-in in early June, in which he was given an ankle monitor and ordered to self-deport within three weeks. Park is now in South Korea, a country he hadn't lived in since he was 7 years old. 

Magaziner also asked Noem about the immigration case of an Irish woman, the wife of Navy combat veteran Jim Brown, who was present during the hearing. Brown's wife, who immigrated legally to the U.S. 48 years ago, has been held in custody for the last four months. She faces deportation for the crime of writing two bad checks, totaling $80, 10 years ago, according to Magaziner. 

Noem defended the DHS' actions by asserting that it isn't her "prerogative, latitude, or…job to pick and choose which laws in [the United States] get enforced," and that the laws must be followed and enforced. Magaziner pushed back, stating that Noem has broad discretion in these cases that she is choosing not to use.

It's clear the DHS is using a relatively small number of immigrants who have committed violent crimes to justify a slew of rights violations, including excessive force, due process violations, and overcrowded, inhumane conditions in detention facilities as a means to achieve one of the Trump administration's chief goals: deporting 1 million people by the end of the year. Given this reality, Noem's suggestion that the current methods of immigration enforcement are done in the name of following the law rings hollow.

The post The Feds' 'Worst of the Worst' Database Is Stuffed with Nonviolent Offenders. Who Exactly Is ICE Arresting? appeared first on Reason.com.

Among the cohort who began college in 2004, 38% ever took economics. Among the 2012 cohort, only 26% took economics.

That is from Wendy Stock.

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