Enlarge (credit: Carl the Person/YouTube) Smart TV owners have been subjected to a growing amount of ads and tracking. Ad fatigue, only worsened by a trend that sees streaming providers trying to force customers into subscriptions with commercials, is understandable. We’re at the point where someone would rather use a broken laptop dangling off a TV than be subjected to the watchful eye of the TV’s native operating system. Earlier…

Enlarge / A bad update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software crashed millions of Windows PCs last week. (credit: CrowdStrike) By Monday morning, many of the major disruptions from the flawed CrowdStrike security update late last week had cleared up. Flight delays and cancellations were no longer front-page news, and multiple Starbucks locations near me are taking orders through the app once again. But the cleanup effort continues. Microsoft estimates that…

Enlarge / Researchers write, “In this image, the person on the left (Scarlett Johansson) is real, while the person on the right is AI-generated. Their eyeballs are depicted underneath their faces. The reflections in the eyeballs are consistent for the real person, but incorrect (from a physics point of view) for the fake person.” (credit: Adejumoke Owolabi) In 2024, it’s almost trivial to create realistic AI-generated images of people, which…

Enlarge / A marketing image for the Galaxy Buds3 Pro. (credit: Samsung) Samsung is delaying the release of the $250 Galaxy Buds3 Pro in the US from July 24 to August 28, per its website. The third-generation earbuds have Samsung moving from a bean-like shape to an Apple AirPods Pro-like design, including silicone ear tips. But some users have claimed that the new tips rip too easily. Samsung confirmed to Android…

Enlarge (credit: hdaniel) Airlines, payment processors, 911 call centers, TV networks, and other businesses have been scrambling this morning after a buggy update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software caused Windows-based systems to crash with a dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD) error message. We’re updating our story about the outage with new details as we have them. Microsoft and CrowdStrike both say that “the affected update has been pulled,” so…

Enlarge / A passenger sits on the floor as long queues form at the check-in counters at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, on July 19, 2024 in Manila, Philippines. (credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images) Millions of people outside the IT industry are learning what CrowdStrike is today, and that’s a real bad thing. Meanwhile, Microsoft is also catching blame for global network outages, and between the two, it’s unclear as of Friday…

Boundless premieres tonight, taking Vision Pro users on a hot air balloon ride in Turkey. [credit: Apple ] Today, Apple announced a slate of more than a dozen upcoming Immersive Videos for its Vision Pro spatial reality headset. The first, titled Boundless, launches tonight at 9 pm ET. More will follow in the coming weeks and months. The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content…

Enlarge / Ad-free Basic subscribers will be crane kicked off the plan soon. (credit: Netflix/YouTube) Netflix today confirmed suspicions that it will stop letting people pay $12 per month to stream without commercials. The ad-free Basic plan was the cheapest way to watch Netflix without commercials. The plan limits users to 720p resolution and one device and lets people download content. Netflix stopped offering the Basic plan to new subscribers…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) You have to read the headline on Nvidia’s latest GPU announcement slowly, parsing each clause as it arrives. “Nvidia transitions fully” sounds like real commitment, a burn-the-boats call. “Towards open-source GPU,” yes, evoking the company’s “first step” announcement a little over two years ago, so this must be progress, right? But, back up a word here, then finish: “GPU kernel modules.” So, Nvidia has “achieved equivalent…

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards) On Thursday, OpenAI announced the launch of GPT-4o mini, a new, smaller version of its latest GPT-4o AI language model that will replace GPT-3.5 Turbo in ChatGPT, reports CNBC and Bloomberg. It will be available today for free users and those with ChatGPT Plus or Team subscriptions and will come to ChatGPT Enterprise next week. GPT-4o mini will reportedly be multimodal like its big brother (which…