White House to Add Alibaba to Pentagon’s China Military List, Risking Tensions with Beijing, Meta to Reintroduce Facial Recognition ‘Name Tag’ on Smart Glasses, and YouTube Launches Dedicated VisionOS App for Apple Vision Pro.
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Show Notes
Ring Cancels Police Video Partnership
Ring has canceled its planned partnership with Flock Safety, which would have allowed police using Flock’s system to request video footage from Ring doorbell owners via the Community Requests feature. The decision follows public backlash, including controversy over a Super Bowl ad, and marks a retreat from Ring’s past police collaborations involving sharing footage. Ring stated the never-launched integration was mutually called off due to requiring more time and resources than anticipated, and confirmed no customer footage was ever shared with Flock Safety, a company known for automatic license plate readers.
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U.S. Plans to Add Alibaba to Pentagon List
The White House administration is reportedly planning to add several companies, including Alibaba, to the Pentagon’s 1260H list as early as Friday due to alleged connections to China’s military. Although inclusion on this list does not impose formal sanctions, it prohibits U.S. government agencies like the Pentagon from future contracting with or procuring from the listed companies, signaling the U.S. military’s position. This move, which follows calls from U.S. lawmakers to add other Chinese technology firms, risks escalating tensions with Beijing despite a recent trade truce.
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Meta Brings Back Facial Recognition
Meta plans to reintroduce facial recognition technology, internally called “Name Tag,” to its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses as early as this year. The feature would use Meta’s AI assistant to identify people and provide information to the wearer. This move, five years after the previous system was shut down over privacy concerns, is intended to enhance the smart glasses and AI assistant, but Meta is exploring limitations like only identifying contacts or public accounts, to address significant ethical, privacy, and civil liberties concerns.
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YouTube Launches Vision Pro App
YouTube has released a dedicated visionOS app for the Apple Vision Pro, two years after the headset’s launch, moving past the previous web-based experience that lacked features like offline downloads. The new app supports standard videos and YouTube Shorts on a large virtual screen, offers a Spatial tab for 3D/VR videos, and allows for 8K playback on M5 models. The late release is notable given that rival streamers had native apps earlier, and it coincides with reports of declining Vision Pro engagement and sales, suggesting YouTube waited to assess the market. The app is currently available in the visionOS App Store and is compatible with M2 and M5 chip models.
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ByteDance Nears Moonton Sale
ByteDance is reportedly nearing a deal to sell its game studio, Shanghai Moonton Technology, to Saudi Arabia’s Savvy Games Group for an estimated $6–7 billion. This potential sale, five years after ByteDance acquired Moonton for $4 billion, signals a major exit from the online games market. The acquisition by Savvy Games Group, a Saudi PIF subsidiary and recent Scopely buyer, underscores industry consolidation, with Savvy targeting aggressive growth via Moonton’s massive global reach (1.5 billion installs, 110 million monthly active users).
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WP Engine Expands Lawsuit Against Automattic
WP Engine filed a third amended complaint against WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, alleging he planned to demand an arbitrary 8% royalty from multiple competing hosting companies for using the WordPress trademark. The suit also claims Mullenweg pressured Stripe to cancel WP Engine’s contract and cites internal communications showing threats. The complaint notes Automattic is already receiving payments from Newfold (Bluehost/HostGator). Automattic dismissed the amended filing as a rehash of rejected claims.
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OpenAI Debuts GPT-5.3 Codex Spark
OpenAI has introduced GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, a new, fast code generation AI model that runs on Cerebras non-Nvidia hardware. The model is a text-only research preview for ChatGPT Pro and API partners, boasting a 128,000-token context window and a reported speed of 1,000 tokens per second, 15 times faster than its predecessor, though still slower than Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 in its premium fast mode. Spark is optimized for speed in coding tasks and, according to OpenAI, outperforms older models like GPT-5.1-Codex-mini on key software engineering benchmarks.
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Google Warns of Gemini Model Theft
Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot, is facing increasing “distillation attacks,” a global intellectual property theft where actors, including commercial entities, repeatedly query the system (sometimes over 100,000 times) to steal its proprietary patterns in an attempt called “model extraction.” This aims to help copycats build or enhance their own AI. Google warns this vulnerability, inherent to open-access LLMs, will likely threaten smaller companies’ custom LLMs, especially those trained on sensitive data.
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DoorDash Drivers Paid to Close Waymo Doors
Waymo and DoorDash are conducting a pilot program in Atlanta where DoorDash drivers (Dashers) are paid a guaranteed $11.25 ($6.25 fee + $5 bonus) to close the door of a Waymo self-driving vehicle if a passenger leaves it open, as the car cannot move otherwise. This collaboration, confirmed by both companies, is intended to boost Waymo’s fleet efficiency and follows a previous partnership from October 2025 where Waymo vehicles started making DoorDash deliveries in Phoenix.
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What do analysts mean when they say that the AI boom is a circular economy, and is that bad thing? Nate Lanxon from Bloomberg explains. Plus We discuss what Discord’s demand for identification to unlock all its features means for anonymity on the web? And we have a trivia game that will test your knowledge of the intersection between technology and British musicians.
The rest of the news is people in the tech world jockeying for political advantage.
Sony’s ZV-1 was positioned as one of the first high-end point-and-shoot cameras targeting vloggers and content creators. Robb Dunewood share his experiences with it and why you just might want to own one if you make a living as a content creator.