A new Tech Transparency Project report suggests the parental controls families are told to trust may not keep teens from "nudify" apps on Apple's and Google's stores, which is a sobering gap between the promise and the practice. Apple has since tightened the rules. Separately, a U.S. House of Representatives member is introducing a bill that wants you to own the games, in an age where discs are vanishing, and digital codes are the ugly norm. And finally, imagine a TV that beams sounds from the visuals you see? It’s a work in progress now!

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A new report from the watchdog group Tech Transparency Project says the parental controls parents are told to rely on are not stopping teens from reaching "nudify" apps, which digitally undress people in photos. TTP registered four accounts for a 13-year-old boy, two on Apple's App Store and two on Google's Play Store, with parental controls enabled on one account per platform. Across the accounts, it reached 135 Nudify apps. The restricted Apple account could still get to 24 of them, while the restricted Google account reached 51, more than the 47 available on Google's unrestricted account.

The gap appears to come down to age ratings. Google's restricted search filtered out adult-rated apps but missed apps whose developers had labeled them suitable for young audiences, and app stores generally depend on developers to describe their own products. That is how some apps ended up marked suitable for kids as young as four. Apple has since updated its review rules to cover AI-generated sexual images made without consent, and apps that hide features until after approval, though TTP notes Apple does not treat apps that turn clothing into bikinis or lingerie as true nudification. Google says it suspended violating apps and restricted related searches, yet the 25 Apple and six Google apps removed by September 28, 2026 still worked on the test phones. TTP also says gift-card subscriptions never alerted parents, since pre-loaded funds let minors skip approval prompts for paid subscriptions.

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US Representative Ritchie Torres has announced the Power To The Players Act, a proposed bill meant to give gamers stronger ownership rights over the games they buy. It would target revocable game licenses and require publishers to provide an offline mode before they shut down a game's supporting servers. Torres wants consumers to have the right to own, play, and transfer their games, so that a single-player campaign doesn't vanish just because a publisher pulls the plug. For anyone with a growing digital library, the example Torres points to is familiar. NBA 2K25 is scheduled to leave digital storefronts on October 30, 2026, and its online servers are due to shut down on December 31, which will make certain features unavailable and could leave players with a much more limited experience.

Torres argues this makes modern purchases feel more like rentals than ownership. The proposal also lines up with the Stop Killing Games movement, which campaigns against publishers making games unplayable after ending support. There is a long way to go. The bill still needs to be formally introduced, debated, and passed, and its final text hasn't been made public, so the exact rules remain unclear. Publishers may argue that keeping older games running is costly or technically impractical, since some depend on online infrastructure or licensed content, and passage wouldn't automatically make digital games resellable like used discs. How the legislation handles those realities will determine whether it leaves players with something more than a license.

Researchers at the Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials have built a display that turns the screen itself into a speaker, with sound coming from wherever a character or object appears on screen. If a car races from one corner to the other, the audio travels with it. For anyone who has watched a character speak on the left while the voice comes from speakers below the TV, it targets a mismatch most of us have simply stopped noticing. The team fitted 80 small vibration motors to the back of the panel. Instead of shaking the whole screen, the system calculates how much power each motor should get so only the targeted patch vibrates. In tests, it landed on the correct spot 99.9% of the time, and active zones vibrated up to 35 dB more than quiet ones, which keeps sound from spilling across the rest of the screen.

AI handles the heavy lifting by tracking each sound source in a video, separating individual sounds from a mix, and sending each to its matching spot. An acoustic camera showed the audio shifting around a roughly 100-inch prototype as the action moved. Don't cancel your soundbar order yet. This is still a prototype, though the team has secured a Korean patent and published its research. The design is modular, so panels can be joined or split to suit different screen sizes, pointing toward living room TVs, car displays, exhibits and giant LED walls, and a few modules paired together can even produce deep, woofer-like bass. Lead researcher Dr. Dongjoon Kim says the team wants to bring the technology to modular LED tile displays next.

More at www.digitaltrends.com.

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