The more than 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein emails released earlier this month by the House Oversight Committee have been enough to prompt more investigations into the convicted child sex offender and the people around him, like former Harvard president and OpenAI board member Larry Summers. Now, Luke Igel and Riley Walz have reformatted the source documents into a more familiar format for anyone looking into them by copying the Gmail inbox on a website called “Jmail.”

Walz, who has previously authored stunts like a website that unearths long-forgotten iPhone clips on YouTube and a fake Manhattan steakhouse, said they used Google’s Gemini AI to do optical character recognition on the source documents, making them more readable and searchable than the originals. You can type in a word like “Trump” or “SEO” and see exactly what discussions were happening in the emails released so far, and a one-click shortcut that goes from the Jmail site to copies of the source documents on the government’s website, so you can verify the text yourself.

In the weeks since these files were released, the president has signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which says the Attorney General must “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” within 30 days.

That doesn’t mean all of the remaining files will be released, as CNN points out. The law’s language allows information that might “jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution” could be temporarily exempt, but whatever is released could end up sorted into this more easily-scanned version pretty quickly.

Google is pushing back on viral social media posts and articles like this one by Malwarebytes, claiming Google has changed its policy to use your Gmail messages and attachments to train AI models, and the only way to opt out is by disabling “smart features” like spell checking.

But Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson tells The Verge that “these reports are misleading – we have not changed anyone’s settings, Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model.”

You may want to double-check your settings anyway, as one Verge staffer also says they had opted out of some of the Smart Features, but had been opted back in to having them on. In January, Google updated its smart feature personalization settings so that you could turn off the features for Google Workspace and for other Google products (like Maps and Wallet) independently of each other. 

In addition to things like spell checking, having Gmail’s smart features turned on enables features like tracking orders or easily adding flights from Gmail to your calendar. Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training.

Microsoft is bringing the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE), which adds a console-like UI while navigating through your game library on a PC with a controller, to laptops, desktops, and tablets. FSE launched with the Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X, and it has so far only been available on PC handhelds.

The expansion to laptops, desktops, and tablets is available as part of new Windows Insider Preview Builds on the Dev and Beta channels and for people in the Xbox Insider Program. To turn on FSE on your PC, “hover over the Task View icon on your taskbar and choose Xbox full screen experience,” Microsoft says. “You can also open Xbox full screen experience in Game Bar > Settings or by pressing Win + F11 to toggle the experience.”

However, even if you’re a Windows Insider, you may not have the access to FSE right away, as Microsoft says the feature is “gradually rolling out” with the new Windows Insider builds. It also requires that you have the Xbox app from the Microsoft store.

As of Friday, the company has started rolling out FSE to all Windows-based handhelds, too.

Microsoft admitted that File Explorer is slow and can take longer than usual to load, and it’s going to fix it in the next Windows 11 update. But the patch does not involve rewriting specific areas of File Explorer or fixing the root cause. Instead, Microsoft plans to preload File Explorer when you boot your PC.

If you understand Windows a bit, you might wonder how that will work. I mean, is it not like File Explorer always auto-starts on Windows 11 because the taskbar manager, desktop, and even notification centre are dependent on explorer.exe, after all, right? It’s true that explorer.exe always starts, but that does not mean File Explorer is open in the background.

When you boot Windows 11, it always starts the shell, which is linked to Explorer.exe, and it powers features like your taskbar and Start menu, as I mentioned above. But that does not mean File Explorer itself is running in the background, which is not the case.

Now, Microsoft wants File Explorer to always run in the background.

Microsoft says that it now preloads File Explorer in the background. Preloading simply means loading the app when it’s not even open, so when you actually try to launch, it will always open immediately. This would mean faster performance for you, but is that going to make Windows as a whole slower?

We don’t know, but I don’t think it’s an additional few megabytes of RAM usage is going to make Windows slower. In our tests, when we turned on the feature, File Explorer started to launch faster, and it did not really add to the overall RAM usage. But this change does not make navigating between folders faster.

Can you turn off the preloading of File Explorer?

Preloading might be a good idea for now, but if you run into performance issues after the update, you just need to open Folder options > View, and turn off the “Enable window preloading for faster launch times” toggle.

Microsoft says it’s still exploring the idea, and the “Enable window preloading for faster launch times” toggle will be turned on by default in Windows 11. Microsoft is testing the feature in preview builds. It’ll roll out to everyone in early 2026.

In addition, Microsoft is testing a compact context menu for WinUI 3 apps and even File Explorer. For example, Microsoft has created a new ‘Manage file’ option that houses options like Compress to ZIP file, Copy as Path, etc.

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The training of AI models and AI inferencing consumes vast amounts of water. How can energy and water usage be reduced?

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