Smartphone mirroring, whether Apple- or Android-flavored, is one of those modern-day motoring gadgets that most drivers consider an absolute necessity. While it's unlikely that you'd confuse "CarPlay" with any of Apple's other software services, the same can't be said about Android Auto, especially given it sounds awfully similar to Android Automotive — Google's operating system for cars.
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The biggest difference is that Android Auto projects your phone onto the infotainment screen, while Android Automotive is a separate operating system that lets you access navigation and music without having to connect a phone. In essence, Android Auto is a phone-based infotainment system, whereas Android Automotive is a ground-up infotainment solution that's powered using the in-car hardware and is widely used among many automakers, including Ford, GM, Honda, Volvo, and so on.
It's worth noting that Android Automotive is open source and can be had with or without Google Automotive Services (GAS), which bundles Google Maps, Google Play Store, Gemini, and more. According to Snapp Automotive, unlike the aforementioned OEMs that use "Google Built-in," few automakers have opted to use Android Automotive without GAS, including Stellantis, BMW, Lucid, and Rivian. Yes, Rivian. Ironically, the same company that's reluctant about offering Android Auto and Apple CarPlay uses Android Automotive as the foundation for its in-car software experience.
To be fair, Android Automotive is far more comprehensive than a simple mirroring software. Because it's a more integrated approach, Android Automotive has access to a lot of the car's functions, including climate settings, seat ventilation, and even the ambient lighting, which Android Auto traditionally couldn't control. However, the website Android Authority reckons that's all about to change.
Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are evolving
Some CarPlay or Android Auto users probably know the frustration of having to switch between menus or having the navigation screen obscured by a climate-control popup because they simply adjusted the fan speed. It looks like that may be a thing of the past. Google is actively testing the idea of integrating HVAC controls on a future Android Auto update. Android Authority found code within the latest Android Auto v16.7 that points to a new climate control interface integrated onto the outer edges of the screen. Things are pretty much in the testing stage as details remain slim, and while you may think it's Android-only, iPhone users can expect something similar, albeit in the form of CarPlay Ultra.
According to MotorTrend, CarPlay Ultra allows you to adjust the climate settings without having to leave the CarPlay menu. The controls stay on the screen all the time, either on the sides or at the bottom. Unlike Android Automotive, though, CarPlay Ultra will still require an iPhone. In this YouTube video from Auto Focus, you can see Marques testing out the climate settings and a host of other things that CarPlay Ultra offers. However, only a handful of cars support CarPlay Ultra at the moment. While Aston Martins already have the tech, mainstream OEMs are still yet to ship cars with CarPlay Ultra. However, the likes of Hyundai, Kia, Ford, and Honda are expected to adopt it, while others like Mercedes, Audi, and Volvo have opted against offering CarPlay Ultra, according to a recent report from 9to5Mac. %!s()
“Paramount has deep roots in Southern California. My vision is to stay true to our roots,” wrote David Ellison in a letter to lawmakers representing the state in February.
What a difference a few months makes. Now the mogul is locked in a protracted legal battle with the attorneys general of California and 11 other states as he attempts to consummate a $111 billion mega-merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. And he’s in a race against time before a ticking fee penalty of $7 million a day kicks in at the start of October if the deal isn’t done.
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And each week, it seems, there’s a new leak suggesting the Paramount CEO may be exploring other options to move his company’s headquarters — and taking the idea seriously.
On Monday, it was Puck that kicked off another cycle when reporting that Ellison told staffers in a senior leadership meeting he plans to move the company headquarters out of state if the antitrust suit isn’t settled by Oct. 1, when that penalty fee begins. This leak underscores that urgent timetable and could be seen as both a negotiating tactic and a real consideration to pull up anchor for new shores.
As The Hollywood Reporter reported in July, Tennessee has been one of the states courting Paramount. Now add Texas, Georgia or another state to the list. The insinuation is that even if the merger eventually goes through, the two historic Hollywood studios could (theoretically) be moving out of their historic homes.
So the notion that Ellison would abandon Paramount’s historic place in Hollywood (literally: Paramount’s 65-acre lot, parts of it a century old, is the only big studio in the neighborhood, after all) to finalize his mega-merger isn’t a new one. But this narrative also represents a notable change in tune from Ellison, a California native himself and the product of two California universities, who not long ago was courting state politicians to win their approval for his mega-transaction. In the same letter where he laid out his vision for Paramount staying “true to our roots,” he pointed out that it was his regime that relocated the company’s headquarters from New York to the Paramount studio lot in L.A. Paramount also made a commitment to produce more movies for theatrical release, “all of which means more activity in Hollywood and local jobs,” he claimed.
The letter was sent to lawmakers Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Laura Friedman in response to their concerns about what the merger would mean for jobs in the state. “Our pledge to continue to license Paramount and Warner Bros. film and shows means there will be additional opportunities available for creative talent in Los Angeles,” Ellison continued. “Our pledge to continue to be active buyers of content from third-party studios and independent producers also means more good-paying jobs in Los Angeles.”
For the politicians who received that February letter, the threat to leave the state is prompting a bit of whiplash. “The reason Paramount has been an entertainment powerhouse for over a century is the crews, the writers, the artists, and the local businesses in my district. They are the best in the world at what they do,” said Friedman in a statement to THR. “It would be a massive mistake for Paramount to leave them behind, and it’s wrong to treat the workforce that built Paramount as a bargaining chip in a legal matter.”
In his own statement, Schiff said his “north star” was to “protect the jobs of the hardworking Californians” in entertainment. “I hope that Paramount will stick to their commitments to build a stronger Hollywood and keep production here,” he added.
And Ellison isn’t the only one at Paramount to have paid lip service to the virtues of working in California. Two of Paramount+’s major upcoming new shows, the Clueless sequel starring Alicia Silverstone and the original series Ascent starring Viola Davis, are filming in L.A. They’re joining other series under the Paramount corporate umbrella, like Matlock, Tracker and NCIS: Origins, that already shoot in the state. As a result, Paramount landed more than $37 million in the last round of California film and television tax credits.
“We’re proud to continue investing in the local creative community and production talent who bring our stories to life,” said CBS Studios president David Stapf in a statement on Monday, before the latest reports of Paramount’s roving eyes emerged.
How real is the threat to flee the state, then, or is this a laughable pressure tactic? As THR has previously reported, it’s not impossible to imagine Ellison relocating the company headquarters, but the rubber would meet the road on attempting to persuade executives to move their studio work to, say, Nashville or Austin or Atlanta. All told, about 17 percent of the Paramount’s workforce is based in L.A. alone, according to a study from CVL Economics, while 13 percent of Warner Bros. Discovery is based in the area. Good luck to those Paramount execs trying to meet an up-and-coming writer-creator for a casual coffee on Music Row or convincing anyone major other than Taylor Sheridan (who is soon to bid goodbye to the studio anyway) to briefly pop by for a meeting in Texas.
That’s not to mention the significant ill will that would be produced by kicking a local industry while it’s down, all while Ellison’s representatives have been presenting him for some time as the savior of Hollywood and its jobs, if only his deal goes through. (“We will continue to fight against any attempt to derail a deal that plainly benefits consumers, creators, and the industry as a whole,” a Paramount spokesperson said in response to a town hall where Hollywood workers aired concerns about job loss as a result of the mega-merger.)
The production downturn in California has been so severe that it’s created a grassroots movement to improve production conditions and become a major campaign narrative for L.A.’s mayoral candidates. “Paramount has been an iconic part of Los Angeles for more than a century, and we will work to ensure that Paramount remains rooted in Los Angeles, continues to invest in our city, and continues to support good-paying jobs for Angelenos,” Mayor Karen Bass, who is running for re-election, said in a statement to THR about the company’s latest rattle of the chains. It’s become a marketing tactic for television series and films to flaunt that they were made locally, rather than in, say, Romania or Australia.
For now, Ellison is attempting to ward off a trial with a stick, rather than a carrot, but the message keeps shifting. Maybe we should take his word for it that he means business on leaving California. But he said the opposite not too long ago.
Aug. 11, 8:48 p.m. Added a statement from L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. %!s()
There was a time when talky slabs of recent political history like “The Brink of War,” carried by skilled name actors who aren’t quite stars, were largely the preserve of Emmy-chasing TV networks. Today, with a bit of added Christian-right rhetoric, they’re ready for the big screen, as the growing faith-based film industry expands its palette in terms of subject matter — but not cinematic style, as evidenced by this dutifully drab gray-flannel enterprise from writer-director Michael Russell Gunn.
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The latest from so-called “values-based” distributor Angel Studios comes hot on the heels of their Fourth of July release “Young Washington,” which has drummed up nearly $47 million in theaters, and shares with that Great Man biopic the kind of textbook American patriotism that recalls, well, a certain kind of textbook. The story of how the 1986 Reykjavik Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev paved the way for the next year’s nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, it feels veritably designed (right down to its PG rating) to bore kids in history classrooms for generations to come. Adult audiences may be more willing when “The Brink of War” opens wide on Friday, but it’s doubtful they’ll be much more entertained.
“Young Washington” was stolidly old-fashioned, but still rousing in its gung-ho way. “The Brink of War” is a far dustier, more static affair: Its drama is all in two aging men seated at a table, arguing with each other over two days about nuclear disarmament in a remote Icelandic consulate building. That doesn’t have to be dull, of course, and if you squint a little at the screen, you can just about see the first-rate Broadway play that could emerge from this material — with no casting changes required — if the telling were just a little more tense, and the writing just a little more witty.
Gunn’s stiff script is attentive to the political dynamics and rhetorical thrust of the talks, and if its repeated emphasis on American honor, freedom and statesmanship makes for a somewhat pious exercise, you can’t deny the narrative stakes are high. The lines of conflict are established early and clearly: Where Gorbachev merely wants to discuss the banning of ballistic missiles, Reagan’s equal emphasis on human rights — in particular, the Soviet Union’s restrictions on Western travel for its citizens — complicates the discussion, while his insistence on pushing the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative continues to be a sticking point for the other side. (No surprise that the film glides over American political opposition to the latter proposal, unambiguously taking Reagan’s side on all fronts.)
What’s crucially lacking here is a particularly compelling sense of Reagan and Gorbachev as human characters. Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris, respectively, put forward solidly recognizable impressions of the men we knew from televised speeches and newscasts, but aren’t given many notes to play: The leaders’ inner lives are limited to standard-issue exchanges with their wives about professional duty and strain, which don’t vary much in tone from the pithy aphorisms they share with their right-hand men about diplomacy, or lack thereof. Even when religion comes up for discussion, it’s in predictably on-message Angel Studios fashion, as Reagan chides his atheist opponent for “denying [his people] the hereafter.” (“This is worse than propoganda!” protests one of Gorbachev’s aides; irony is not one of the film’s stronger suits.) At one point, Reagan spills some chicken salad sandwich filling on his shirt; it’s about the most unguarded moment we get.
Reagan also, naturally, gets the leading perspective, as well as the most generous sounding boards in the supporting ensemble: not just his wife Nancy (Hope Davis), who doesn’t travel to Reykjavik but provides repeated counsel over the phone, but his Secretary of State George Shultz (played with an air of gruff, salt-of-the-earth decency by J.K. Simmons), on hand to straighten out Team America’s priorities when the negotiations go awry.
Though the film’s lens is consistently ennobling — abetted by everything from DP Magdalena Górka’s sober official-portrait lighting to Austin Wintory’s overbearing score — Daniels gets Reagan’s combination of folksy squareness and flintier social conservatism. It’s a more substantial portrayal than Dennis Quaid’s in the tackily propagandistic 2024 biopic “Reagan,” though we’re still left with the impression that, in the ranks of American presidents on screen, the erstwhile movie star remains a less dynamic movie subject.
Harris, meanwhile, plays Gorbachev as an altogether more aloof, intractable and unknowable figure, which is precisely how the film wants it — though Branka Katić gives the canniest, funniest performance here as his watchful, image-conscious wife Raisa, here placed in a remote PR war with the U.S. First Lady where, yet again, America gets to come out on top. The film could use a few more such colorful secondary strands adjoining the main conflict, though one subplot involving a maybe-romance between two jaded journalists assigned to the summit is oddly framed and abruptly dropped.
Fairly deliberate for much of its two-hour running time, “The Brink of War” suddenly races toward a denouement in its final quarter-hour — somewhat eliding the fact that the Reykjavik Summit was, at least in the short term, a failure, with the two men’s talks ultimately stalling, and folding it into the clearer success story of the next year’s treaty. As the film’s single most lumpen line of dialogue reminds us at the close: “A journey of a thousand miles doesn’t begin with the most incredible arms deal in history — it begins with a single step.” Gunn’s film, on the other hand, is content to skip a few steps where necessary. %!s()
AI is reshaping nearly every part of the enterprise, from how employees work to how organizations compete. Increasingly, it's also reshaping the data architectures that underpin those efforts.
New global research from Cloudera suggests organizations are reassessing the data architectures that support AI. As AI expands beyond pilot projects and into core operations, enterprise leaders are reevaluating the architectural decisions that will shape how AI scales across the business.
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The Great AI Re-Architecture captures a broader shift in enterprise AI: AI has reached a point where enterprise data architecture has become the determining factor in whether organizations can scale it. Organizations are redesigning their data architectures to support the operational demands of AI, from governance to increasingly distributed workloads.
AI Is Reshaping Enterprise Infrastructure
Many organizations are reaching the same conclusion: their existing data architecture has become a limiting factor.
What’s driving that reassessment extends well beyond compute. Security, governance and compliance rank as the leading driver of architectural change (42%), ahead of improving performance (35%) and scaling AI initiatives across the business (33%). Meanwhile, 84% of respondents report that AI workloads have increased infrastructure costs. The survey suggests enterprise AI is changing the priorities behind infrastructure decisions. Security, governance and compliance now outweigh performance as the leading driver of architectural change, emphasizing how closely AI strategy has become tied to data protection and regulatory requirements.
Cloudera
"Security and compliance increasingly shape the way organizations design their AI architectures," said Sergio Gago, CTO at Cloudera. "Enterprise leaders want to expand AI without creating new risks for their most sensitive data."
Supporting enterprise AI increasingly requires architectures that can evolve as business requirements change while protecting enterprise data wherever it resides. The architectural decisions organizations make today will influence how easily they can expand AI as technologies and business priorities continue to evolve.
Governance Is A Driving Force For Scaling AI
Governance is becoming a defining factor in how quickly new initiatives move forward. Nearly all respondents (95%) say they delayed or canceled AI projects in the past year because of data governance, compliance or regulatory complexity, while more than half (55%) report delaying six or more projects.
The survey also suggests that governance is becoming more difficult as AI becomes more deeply embedded across the enterprise. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents say AI integration has made data governance more complex and harder to maintain as organizations manage data across increasingly distributed environments.
Cloudera
"AI changes the scope of governance," said Gago. "As organizations expand AI across the business, they need a consistent approach to managing data regardless of where it resides. That consistency gives organizations the confidence to scale AI without losing control."
Governance challenges increasingly intersect with security. As enterprise data becomes more distributed, organizations need a consistent approach to protecting sensitive information across every environment where AI operates. As enterprise data becomes more distributed, organizations must maintain consistent policies across environments without slowing AI development. That balancing act helps explain why governance is emerging as one of the defining operational considerations for enterprise AI.
For many organizations, governance has become a prerequisite for enterprise AI. The ability to apply consistent policies across increasingly distributed data environments can determine whether AI initiatives continue to expand or stall before reaching production.
AI Workloads Are Becoming More Distributed
Enterprise AI is prompting organizations to take a more deliberate approach to workload placement. Rather than relying on a single infrastructure model, they're evaluating where AI workloads will deliver the greatest value.
One of the clearest signs of this shift is workload mobility. Two-thirds (66%) of respondents say their organizations have moved AI workloads from public cloud back to on-premises or private cloud environments within the past year. At the same time, hybrid environments have emerged as the most common location for AI inference workloads, narrowly ahead of public cloud. Looking ahead, planned investments span public cloud, on-premises, edge and hybrid architectures, showing how organizations are expanding their options rather than converging on a single infrastructure model.
“Organizations want the flexibility to run AI wherever it delivers the greatest value. That requires an architecture that supports changing workload requirements.”
"Organizations want the flexibility to run AI wherever it delivers the greatest value," Gago said. "That requires an architecture that supports changing workload requirements without forcing a fundamental redesign every time priorities shift."
That flexibility allows organizations to align AI workloads with business requirements instead of infrastructure limitations. Some AI workloads prioritize performance and low latency, while others are constrained by where sensitive or regulated data can be stored and processed. Those competing requirements are encouraging organizations to design architectures that support multiple deployment models without sacrificing security or governance.
Enterprise AI will continue to evolve, and the infrastructure supporting it has to evolve with it. Organizations are designing architectures that let AI workloads move as business needs change without requiring a fundamental redesign.
Building The Foundation For Enterprise AI
The Great AI Re-Architecture is already underway. Organizations are redesigning the data architectures that support AI to meet the demands of enterprise-scale deployment.
The gap between AI leaders and everyone else will increasingly be shaped by architecture. Organizations that build data architectures capable of bringing AI to their data, wherever it resides, will be better positioned to scale AI as the technology continues to evolve.
Learn how Cloudera is helping the world's leading enterprises build the data architectures needed to scale AI. %!s()
This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, widely recognized as the formal founding of our nation and one of the early stages of establishing a democratic government.
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Over the past two decades, in particular, democracies all over the world have struggled with a lack of clear support. Democracy scholars have referred to these challenges as evidence of backsliding, in which political institutions slowly erode from within by backing away from democratic rules and norms and abandoning pro-democratic behavior. This phenomenon has many political and social scientists concerned.
One indicator of a democracy's health is how satisfied a country's citizens are with their system of government and how committed they are to making it successful. Depending on how happy citizens feel about it, they will behave accordingly—either by participating in democratic processes and living out democratic ideals or not.
On this point, a study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dissatisfaction with democracy resulted in lower support for democratic behaviors in Mexico, according to development economist and co-author Enrique Seira Bejarano of the University of Notre Dame. Seira, the Joe and Deborah Loughrey Professor of Economics, studies how malfunctioning political institutions can cause economic issues and how democracy benefits and spurs economic growth in a country.
Surveying more than 50,000 Mexican citizens across 6,300 electoral precincts during Mexico's 2017 state elections, Seira and his research team found that low levels of satisfaction led to a reluctance to participate in three democratic activities: attending poll worker training (a requirement for citizens during elections), staffing a polling station on Election Day and voting in the presidential elections a year later.
"We find that dissatisfaction with democracy predicts lower democratic engagement across all three behaviors," Seira and his co-authors wrote. Rather than relying on self-reported behaviors or country-level comparisons, the researchers studied the link between satisfaction with democracy and democratic behaviors at the individual level, merging administrative measures and analysis to create original data.
The research indicated that the more dissatisfied citizens were, the less they engaged. Those who reported the lowest level of satisfaction (in other words, surveyed as "not at all satisfied") were 4.6% less likely to attend poll worker training, nearly 12% less likely to staff their polling station and 2% less likely to turn out to vote.
Based on data from the Integrated Values Surveys, Mexico ranks 54th out of 75 democratic countries in average levels of dissatisfaction with democracy, according to the study. This suggests that numerous other countries are struggling with the same challenges—if not more so—than Mexico.
"Both globally and in Latin America, citizens' satisfaction with democracy has decreased by 10 to 15 percentage points since 2010," the researchers wrote.
Relatedly, in the United States, the share of citizens who think it is essential to live in a democracy is 71% for those born in the 1930s versus 29% for those born in the 1980s, Seira and his co-authors noted.
"Support for democracy as measured in surveys—which has been on a more than decade-long decline—is worrisome, since it is associated with a decline in civic behaviors," Seira said.
How corruption erodes trust, diminishes support
But what causes citizens to lose favor with their system of government and way of life?
According to Seira, who is also a faculty fellow at Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, there are several potential reasons. One is that American voters and those in other parts of the world are growing impatient with gridlock in Congress and how government struggles to accomplish goals and objectives.
Another possibility is that the welfare state has been retreating worldwide since the financial crisis of 2008, and citizens place blame on their democratic governments for causing some of that downfall. A third possibility is the influence of social media, which causes polarization in societies both in the U.S. and abroad, making it harder for democracies to function.
Yet another possibility—and one that has received less attention—is that citizens increasingly perceive corruption (the use of public office for private gain) as endemic. "The fraction of Americans who think the U.S. government is corrupt has been increasing and is now close to 70%—and, surprisingly, it is on the same level as democracies in Latin America," Seira said.
This statistic led Seira and his co-authors to conduct a second study on democracy—this one looking at whether and how government corruption leads to further civic disengagement. Seira and fellow researchers from MIT and Stanford studied 17 Latin American countries using both a field experiment and tens of thousands of surveys collected over a decade.
In their working paper, Seira and his team found that when citizens were exposed to high-level politicians' scandals, individual voter turnout causally decreased by 10 to 20 percentage points. In addition, contributions to support elections and honesty and trust between individual citizens all suffered. Furthermore, voting was affected most when incumbents perceived as honest were implicated in corruption cases close to election time.
"When they hear about these scandals involving high-level officials such as presidents, cabinet members, prime ministers and justices, voters are less likely to turn out to vote by 20 percentage points," Seira said. "When a president steals, citizens don't just lose faith in that president—they lose faith in democracy itself.
"And we show it causally," Seira explained. "Watching real footage of top politicians taking cash cut actual voter turnout by up to 27% and lowered support for democracy. Democracy is built on the promise of political equality, and corruption undermines that very promise."
Citizens' willingness to donate time to support the organizations of democracy—by volunteering to be an electoral observer, for example—decreased by 43% (relative to the 4.9% who volunteered on average). It similarly reduced their willingness to donate money in support of election activities by 16% (relative to 22.8% who donated). Even more worrisome, the researchers discovered, is that when top-level politicians participated in corrupt activities, explicit support for democracy declined in favor of authoritarianism.
Seira said the media plays a big role in highlighting political scandals. "The number of news stories about corruption has tripled in Spanish and doubled in English in the last 20 years, which just means that more of these events are in the public eye than they used to be."
This visibility creates an unfortunate trade-off, one for which a solution needs to be found, according to Seira. On the one hand, public disclosure forces accountability and denunciation of such behavior, which is needed for democracies to work. On the other, when citizens see that the system is corrupt at the highest levels, it can be very damaging to the credibility of the system itself. The culprit may not be that corruption is disclosed, but that it goes unpunished, as is often the case in Latin America and other developing countries.
In the field experiment part of the study, Seira and his colleagues found not only that corruption undermined citizens' trust in democratic institutions, but that trust in one another also suffered, with citizens less willing to entrust neighbors with money in incentivized lab-in-the-field experiments. In addition, exposing citizens to footage of their politicians taking bribes made it seem as if such behavior was acceptable, prompting individuals to steal money the researchers had endowed them with.
Can better civics education help?
Providing ample and relevant civics education to the next generation may be one way to strengthen democracy while combating dissatisfaction and corruption, Seira believes. Because the effectiveness of civics courses has not been widely tested, Seira and his co-authors are currently conducting research through a multi-country study of the effects of civics education on democratic behaviors.
"What we want to know is how effective these courses are," Seira said. "Do they generate more informed citizens? Do they allow citizens to critically assess the alternatives to democracy? Are citizens more willing to donate time and effort to support democracy? And to what extent can we make better citizens through education?"
Seira noted that even though the first two studies were conducted in Mexico and Latin America, respectively, and were not specifically reliant on U.S. data, parallels can be drawn between the regions and in how survey participants would have responded. The third study is ongoing.
Publication details
Andrés Santos Vargas et al, Satisfaction with democracy predicts democratic behaviors, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2026). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2517671123
Working paper: Apex Corruption Erodes Democratic Values
Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language.
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Can better civics education restore voter dissatisfaction over political corruption? (2026, August 11)
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