Apple earned the lowest grades in a report on laptop and smartphone repairability released today by the consumer advocacy group Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund. The report, which looks at how easy devices are to disassemble and how easy it is to find repairability information, gave Apple a C-minus in laptop repairability and a D-minus in cell phone repairability. For its “Failing the Fix (2026): Grading laptop and cell…

LG was once a heavyweight in the smartphone industry, trading blows with hometown rival Samsung. However, as smartphone sales plateaued, the company struggled to stay competitive. In 2021, LG planned to make waves with a rollable phone, but it never moved beyond the teaser phase. Five years after LG threw in the towel on smartphones, the LG Rollable has appeared in a YouTube teardown that demonstrates why this form factor…

For more than a month, security practitioners have been warning about the perils of using OpenClaw, the viral AI agentic tool that has taken the development community by storm. A recently fixed vulnerability provides an object lesson for why. OpenClaw, which was introduced in November and now boasts 347,000 stars on Github, by design takes control of a user’s computer and interacts with other apps and platforms to assist with…

A Rome court has ruled that the price hikes Netflix imposed on subscribers in Italy in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2024 were unlawful. The court ordered Netflix to refund affected customers by up to 500 euros (about $576), depending on their plan. The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legislation that aims to protect consumer…

The cost of high-performance GPUs, typically $8,000 or more, means they are frequently shared among dozens of users in cloud environments. Two new attacks demonstrate how a malicious user can gain full root control of a host machine by performing novel Rowhammer attacks on high-performance GPU cards made by Nvidia. The attacks exploit memory hardware’s increasing susceptibility to bit flips, in which 0s stored in memory switch to 1s and…

Building a utility-scale quantum computer that can crack one of the most vital cryptosystems—elliptic curves—doesn’t require nearly the resources anticipated just a year or two ago, two independently written whitepapers have concluded. In one, researchers demonstrated the use of neutral atoms as reconfigurable qubits that have free access to each other. They went on to show this approach could allow a quantum computer to break 256-bit elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) in…

Someone is celebrating a birthday tomorrow—it’s Gmail. The iconic email service debuted 22 years ago on April 1, forever altering what people expected from free email. But 22 years is a long time, and the username you chose when you finally got your hands on an invite in 2004 may not have stood the test of time. Starting today, Google will let US-based users ditch an old username without creating…

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) was invented by a group of technology companies to be an open, royalty-free alternative to other video codecs, like HEVC/H.265. But a lawsuit that Dolby Laboratories Inc. filed this week against Snap Inc. calls all that into question with claims of patent infringement. Numerous lawsuits are currently open in the US regarding the use of HEVC. Relevant patent holders, such as Nokia and InterDigital, have sued…

Memory and storage shortages and price hikes that started hitting PC components late last year have steadily rippled outward across all kinds of consumer tech—some products have disappeared, gone out of stock, or been delayed, and others have undergone multiple rounds of price hikes. Today’s bad news comes from Sony, which is raising prices for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US just eight months after their last price hike. The drive-less Digital Edition will…

Netflix isn’t preparing for a multibillion acquisition anymore, but it’s still raising prices. As first spotted by Android Authority today, Netflix now lists its ad-supported plan as costing $9 per month, up from $8/month. The Standard, ad-free plan went up from $18/month to $20/month, and the Premium ad-free plan (which supports viewing from four, instead of two, devices simultaneously, 4K, and spatial audio) went from $25/month to $27/month. For comparison,…