Google's oldest smart thermostats have an expiration date. The company has announced that the first and second generation Nest Learning Thermostats will lose support in October 2025, disabling most of the connected features. Google is offering some compensation for anyone still using these devices, but there's no Google upgrade for European users. Google is also discontinuing its only European model, and it's not planning to release another.

Both affected North American thermostats predate Google's ownership of the company, which it acquired in 2014. Nest released the original Learning Thermostat to almost universal praise in 2011, with the sequel arriving a year later. Google's second-gen Euro unit launched in 2014. Since launch, all these devices have been getting regular software updates and have migrated across multiple app redesigns. However, all good things must come to an end.

As Google points out, these products have had a long life, and they're not being rendered totally inoperable. Come October 25, 2025, these devices will no longer receive software updates or connect to Google's cloud services. That means you won't be able to control them from the Google Home app or via Assistant (or more likely Gemini by that point). The devices will still work as a regular dumb thermostat to control temperature, and scheduling will remain accessible from the thermostat's screen.

If you have one of these units, Google will be reaching out via email with some deals to soften the blow. In the US, owners can get a $130 discount if they upgrade to the fourth-gen Nest, which was released just last year for $280. In Canada, the discount will be CA$160.

Google is offering a discount on the fourth-gen Learning Thermostat for those still using the soon-to-be unsupported models. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

The situation is a bit more frustrating for owners of the European thermostat—Google doesn't have any newer units to sell. Heating and cooling systems in Europe have various quirks that set them apart from North American systems, and consequently, it has been more than a decade since Nest released a smart thermostat adapted to the continent. And it never will again, the company confirms. The European second-gen Nest Learning Thermostat will be the last from Google.

For anyone in Europe deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem, Google recommends picking up a third-party unit that works with Google Home. In compensation for the inconvenience, owners of the old second-gen device can get a 50 percent discount on the Tado Smart Thermostat X, which works with Euro systems and Google Home.

This move comes just weeks after Google confirmed it had discontinued the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm, as well as the Nest x Yale Lock. Google Nest isn't making a replacement, so Nest fans were directed to third-party First Alert and Yale devices that will work with Google Home.

Google has been shedding jobs in the Platform and Devices division that includes Nest. With fewer workers, it's not surprising the team would look to drop support for its older products. And in fairness, these devices have lasted far beyond Google's measly five-year commitment. So you can't say they didn't warn you.

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A lawyer representing MyPillow and its CEO Mike Lindell in a defamation case admitted using artificial intelligence in a brief that has nearly 30 defective citations, including misquotes and citations to fictional cases, a federal judge said.

"[T]he Court identified nearly thirty defective citations in the Opposition. These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist," US District Judge Nina Wang wrote in an order to show cause Wednesday.

Wang ordered attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster to show cause as to why the court should not sanction the defendants, law firm, and individual attorneys. Kachouroff and DeMaster also have to explain why they should not be referred to disciplinary proceedings for violations of the rules of professional conduct.

Kachouroff and DeMaster, who are defending Lindell against a lawsuit filed by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer, both signed the February 25 brief with the defective citations. Kachouroff, representing defendants as lead counsel, admitted using AI to write the brief at an April 21 hearing, the judge wrote. The case is in the US District Court for the District of Colorado.

"Time and time again, when Mr. Kachouroff was asked for an explanation of why citations to legal authorities were inaccurate, he declined to offer any explanation, or suggested that it was a 'draft pleading,'" Wang wrote. "Not until this Court asked Mr. Kachouroff directly whether the Opposition was the product of generative artificial intelligence did Mr. Kachouroff admit that he did, in fact, use generative artificial intelligence."

“Your honor, I may have made a mistake”

Kachouroff admitted after further questioning that failed to check citations, but "represented that he personally outlined and wrote a draft of a brief before utilizing generative artificial intelligence," Wang wrote. "Given the pervasiveness of the errors in the legal authority provided to it, this Court treats this representation with skepticism."

The judge's order quotes some of Kachouroff's responses at the hearing. When asked about one misquote, he said, "Your honor, I may have made a mistake and I may have paraphrased and put quotes by mistake. I wasn't intending to mislead the court. I don't think the quote is far off from what you read to me."

The judge's order continued:

When asked how a case from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky became attributable to the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, Mr. Kachouroff indicated that he "had given the cite checking to another person," later identified as Ms. DeMaster. When asked whether he would be surprised to find out that the citation Perkins v. Fed. Fruit & Produce Co., 945 F.3d 1242, 1251 (10th Cir. 2019) appearing on page 6 of Defendants' Opposition did not exist as an actual case, Mr. Kachouroff indicated that he would be surprised.

The lawyers must explain themselves more fully by May 5. "Counsel will specifically address, under the oath subject to the penalty of perjury, the circumstances surrounding the preparation of the Opposition to Plaintiff's Motion in Limine, including but not limited to whether Defendants were advised and approved of their counsel's use of generative artificial intelligence," the order said.

We contacted Kachouroff and DeMaster and will update this article if they respond. Kachouroff is with the law firm McSweeney Cynkar & Kachouroff in Virginia. DeMaster is an attorney in Wisconsin.

Lawsuit against Lindell, MyPillow

Coomer's lawsuit was filed against Lindell, the Lindell media company called FrankSpeech, and MyPillow. Lindell and his companies "have been among the most prolific vectors of baseless conspiracy theories claiming election fraud in the 2020 election," and Lindell falsely claimed that Coomer committed treason, the lawsuit said. Coomer is the former director of product strategy and security for Dominion.

"Defendants have published these numerous false statements, defamatory interviews, and other dishonest content maligning Dr. Coomer on the website frankspeech.com often alongside a sales pitch for products from MyPillow," the lawsuit said. "In addition, Defendants further made claims against Dr. Coomer a centerpiece of a failed 'Cyber Symposium' that they organized and broadcast around the world."

The February 25 brief that got Lindell's lawyers in trouble was an opposition to Coomer's motion asking the court to exclude certain evidence. Coomer's brief said "that Defendants will attempt to mislead and distract the jury with a smear campaign against Dr. Coomer based on completely or largely irrelevant attacks on his character instead of presenting proof that Dr. Coomer was involved in a criminal conspiracy to rig the 2020 presidential election. The Court should exercise its discretion to exclude the evidence set forth to avoid unfair character assassination and to ensure a fair trial on the merits."

Coomer asked the court to exclude evidence related to a September 2021 motor vehicle accident, his sex life, alleged drug and alcohol use, religious beliefs, and political views. In their brief that apparently relies on incorrect and fictional citations, Lindell's lawyers argued that much of the evidence Coomer wants to exclude is relevant to his credibility, character, and reputation.

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Roku, owner of one of the most popular connected TV operating systems in the country, walks a fine line when it comes to advertising. Roku's OS lives on low-priced smart TVs, streaming sticks, and projectors. To make up the losses from cheaply priced hardware, Roku is dependent on selling advertisements throughout its OS, including screensavers and its home screen.

That business model has pushed Roku to experiment with new ways of showing ads that test users’ tolerance. The company claims that it doesn't want ads on its platform to be considered intrusive, but there are reasons to be skeptical about Roku's pledge.

Non-“interruptive” ads

In an interview with The Verge this week, Jordan Rost, Roku’s head of ad marketing, emphasized that Roku tries to only deliver ads that don't interrupt viewers.

“Advertisers want to be part of a good experience. They don’t want to be interruptive,” he told The Verge.

Rost noted that Roku is always testing new ad formats. Those tests include doing “all of our own A/B testing on the platform” and listening to customer feedback, he added.

“We’re constantly tweaking and trying to figure out what’s going to be helpful for the user experience,” Rost said.

For many streamers, however, ads and a better user experience are contradictory. In fact, for many, the simplest way to improve streaming is fewer ads and a more streamlined access to content. That’s why Apple TV boxes, which doesn’t have integrated ads and is good at combining content from multiple streaming subscriptions, is popular among Ars Technica staff and readers. An aversion to ads is also why millions pay extra for ad-free streaming subscriptions.

Roku was reminded in March of how ads on its OS could be perceived as “interruptive” when it tested autoplay video ads that loaded before users saw Roku OS’s home screen. The test was an ad for the Moana 2 movie. Backlash ensued, especially among users who didn’t know the ad format was a test or that it was possible to close the video.

Rost told The Verge this week that all ads on Roku OS are “meant to be additive to the consumer experience” and that some ads are meant to “help guide people towards content they love.” However, feedback from the Moana 2 test was largely negative, with viewers criticizing the size, volume, and autoplay nature of the ad. It’s also debatable how much guidance Roku OS users really needed toward Moana 2, a well-known children’s movie that made the third most money at the global box office in 2024, per Box Office Mojo.

Despite the backlash, Roku still plans on finding ways to make ads on its platform more “shoppable, interactive, [and] relevant," The Verge reported.

Roku is built on ads, not hardware

Because Roku is an ad-centric streaming platform, its long-term ability to balance non-obtrusive ads with its need to sell enough ads to keep business running is questionable.

One of Roku’s most concerning ad experiments comes from a patent it received in 2024 that lets it show ads over anything you plug into a Roku TV’s HDMI port. As my colleague Andrew Cunningham reported last year, the technology includes “multiple modules dedicated to detecting and analyzing onscreen content and inserting ads on top of an existing video stream.” The patent describes a system that analyzes paused frames, uses metadata to identify objects in the frame, and sends that data to a network. The system then receives a “relevant ad” to shop during the paused content, the patent explains.

Roku hasn’t deployed that technology, and it may never. When The Verge asked Rost about the patent this week, the executive said that Roku OS is the company’s “primary” ad focus.

However, the patent underscores how reliant companies like Roku are on inventing new ways to force ads onto users, which makes Roku stand out to advertisers.

This will become more critical amid a tumultuous advertising market filled with uncertainty largely stemming from the current and potential global economic impacts of Donald Trump’s second presidential term and tariff push.

For a clearer picture of how critical ads are to Roku's business, in its fiscal Q4 2024 earnings report shared on February 15 [PDF], Roku revealed that its devices division lost $80.4 million during the fiscal year. Meanwhile, its platform business, which includes Roku OS and its advertising arm, reported about $1.89 billion in gross profit.

According to data from Hub Media Research shared in April, based on interviews of 5,000 US consumers, Roku OS is the most common connected TV OS in the country.

"HHs" stands for households. "SMP" stands for streaming media processor.

This gives Roku a lot of influence over what people expect from streaming platforms. As Roku continues seeking new ways to appeal to advertisers, watchful eyes are curious to see how much Roku will open the door to ad formats that could be viewed as intrusive. Of course, corporations and streaming viewers may have differing views of what's considered intrusive. With Roku OS's popularity, the company can play a big role in what the industry ultimately accepts in terms of ad delivery and ad loads.

Today, Roku says its ads aren't meant to be “interruptive." But it's hard to ignore the fine line between selling ads and pleasing customers, as some of the experiments and developing technology have shown that Roku can cross that line.

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Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times:

CBS News entered a new period of turmoil on Tuesday after the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Bill Owens, said he would resign from the long-running Sunday news program, citing encroachments on his journalistic independence. [...]

“It’s clear the company is done with me,” Mr. Owens said, according to a recording that was obtained by The Times. The correspondents Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley were in attendance — Ms. Stahl choked up as she praised Mr. Owens, and noted that he had “taken a hell of a beating” — and Anderson Cooper dialed in from Rome, where he was covering Pope Francis’ death for CNN.

During the meeting, Mr. Owens alluded to his displeasure with additional layers of oversight that CBS executives had placed on the program. “In a million years, the corporation didn’t know what was coming up — they trusted ‘60 Minutes’ to report the stories and program the broadcast the way ‘60 Minutes’ saw fit,” he said. Any change to that arrangement, he added, created “a really slippery slope.”

Mr. Owens also discouraged his staff from quitting in protest. “I do think this will be a moment for the corporation to take a hard look at itself and its relationship with us,” he said.

Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison. She has expressed a desire to settle Mr. Trump’s case, which stems from what the president has called a deceptively edited interview in October with Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on “60 Minutes.”

Legal experts have dismissed that suit as baseless and far-fetched. Many journalists at CBS News — the former home of Walter Cronkite and Mike Wallace — believe that a settlement would amount to a capitulation to Mr. Trump over what they consider standard-issue gripes about editorial judgment.

Journalistic outlets need owners who are committed to the cause. It’s that simple.

Wife of the man illegally transported to El Salvador is now in hiding after the federal government shared her home address on X

As the trade war between China and the United States continues to escalate, Beijing is responding by turning to one of its favorite retaliation tactics: limiting the export of critical minerals used in many high-tech electronics, from fighter jets to wind turbines. While China’s mineral restrictions may sound scary, the reality is that they haven’t been very effective in the past and stand to become even less so if the US and other countries finally get their acts together.

It all started in July 2023, when the Chinese government announced it would restrict the export of gallium and germanium, two critical minerals that are mostly used in making solar panels and semiconductors. Over the following two years, China’s list of controlled products expanded to include antimony, graphite, and other materials. Earlier this month, the Chinese government escalated things even further, subjecting seven rare earth elements to a more comprehensive export licensing program that covers the whole world and is designed to further choke off American companies.

Rare earths are a subset of elements under the broader umbrella of critical minerals that China has long enjoyed monopoly control over. In the short term, companies that need these rare earths might be able to rely on existing stockpiles or even turn to recycled electronics to find them. But eventually, the US and other countries will be forced to either ramp up domestic mining or reduce their dependence on rare earths, both of which would make China’s policies sting less. “China has got one shot, and it knows it,” says Ian Lange, an associate professor of economics and business at the Colorado School of Mines.

Rare but not irreplaceable

The export controls China announced earlier this month cover samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium—seven elements that belong to what is known as the rare earth family. They are called “rare” not because of their scarcity but because they often are mixed with other mineral resources and can be hard to separate out.

There are 17 rare earth elements in total, but the Chinese government chose these seven because they are part of a smaller subset of “heavy” rare earth minerals that the country has more control over than others, says Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That monopoly was built over decades as China created a robust supply chain for these minerals and the rest of the world turned away from what is a heavily polluting and niche sector. “China processes pretty much 100 percent of the world’s heavy rare earths, which means that they don’t just have a comparative advantage, they have an absolute advantage,” says Baskaran.

But the other important thing to know about rare earths is that—while they are used in a wide variety of products—those items typically only contain very small quantities, and often only in supportive roles. Last year, the United States imported about $170 million worth of rare earth elements, including some that China hasn’t restricted yet, according to the United States Geological Survey. For comparison, the US imported over $327 million worth of fresh potatoes and $300 million worth of potato chips between September 2023 and August 2024.

Perhaps the most important application for rare earth elements is creating magnets that improve the performance of products like electric motors in high temperatures. These magnets can be found in electric vehicles and consumer products like vacuum cleaners.

“The heavy rare earth elements are added as sort of a spice, a doping agent, to maintain the magnetism of the magnet at high temperatures. It also improves corrosion resistance and the longevity of the magnet,” says Seaver Wang, director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland-based think tank.

Beyond magnets, these rare earth elements can also serve a range of purposes, such as making metal stronger, improving radar systems, and even treating cancer. Without them, in many cases, technological infrastructure and consumer gadgets won’t be able to perform at the same level—but they will still maintain their basic functions. “The wind turbines will just go out of service 10 years earlier; electric vehicles will not last as long,” says Wang.

Lange agrees that the impact of losing access to heavy rare earth elements would be somewhat manageable for American companies. “One place where that rare earth is in your car is in the motors that pull up and down your window,” says Lange. “There are ways to just deal with some things that are not as fun, like rolling down your windows by hand.”

Loopholes and workarounds

In the past, China’s critical mineral restrictions haven’t worked very well. One reason is that US companies that want to buy rare earth minerals can simply go through an intermediary country first. For example, Belgium has emerged as a possible re-export hub that appears to pass germanium—one of the minerals Beijing first restricted in 2023—from China to the US, according to trade data. Since the European Union has much closer ties with Washington than with Beijing, it’s difficult for the Chinese government to effectively stop this flow of trade.

Another sign that China’s export controls haven’t been very effective is that the price of critical minerals has increased only slightly since the policies were first implemented, indicating that supply levels have remained steady. “Whatever they did in 2023 hasn’t really changed the status quo” of the market, says Lange.

But China’s latest restrictions are more expansive, and there’s already some evidence that things could be different this time. Companies that need these elements have been forced to buy them from other firms with existing private stockpiles, which have become more valuable in recent weeks. “There is a very steep increase in prices to draw down on stockpiles right now,” says Baskaran, citing conversations she’s had with rare earth traders.

In the long run, however, companies may be able to find technological solutions to address a potential shortage of rare earth minerals. Tesla, for example, announced in 2023 that it had reduced the use of them in its EV motors by 25 percent, and it planned to get rid of them completely in the future. The carmaker hasn’t clarified what it would use instead, but experts speculate it could be turning to other types of magnets that don’t rely on rare earths.

Where are the American mines?

While rare earths, or critical minerals in general, are often cited along with semiconductors as industries the US wants to reshore the most, the challenges associated with bringing each of them back are very different.

Unlike making advanced semiconductors, which requires using sophisticated machinery worth hundreds of millions of dollars and building extremely complicated factories, critical minerals aren’t that hard to produce. The technologies involved to mine and refine them are mature and both the US and Canada have large natural deposits of some of them. But the mining industry was pushed out of the West because it doesn’t generate much value and is also extremely polluting.

In the past, efforts to build up the critical minerals supply chain in the US have either been slowed down or called off. That’s more due to basic economic calculations, says Lange, rather than technological difficulties. “It’s like bending down to pick up a nickel,” he says, meaning the effort isn’t worth the reward.

Because companies only need tiny quantities of these minerals, the market for them is very volatile—prices can drop when a single new factory comes online and starts mass producing and refining them. That means if a mining company were to open up shop in the US, it could inadvertently tank the price of the same mineral it’s trying to profit from, says Lange.

But if China succeeds in strictly enforcing its export control policies, it might provide just enough incentive for the US government and private companies to finally reshore the mineral refining industry. If that happens, Lange says, it could take about two years for a new critical mineral operation to open in the US.

“It's really remarkable how China has actually maintained these monopolies in so many critical minerals for 20 years,” says Wang. “But I do think we are maybe starting to turn the corner, where China's market share may be peaking … and you are starting to see a resurgence of interest in these industries in Northern Europe, Australia, Canada, the US, and Latin America.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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