With the recent releases of visionOS 26 and newly refreshed Vision Pro hardware, it’s an ideal time to check in on Apple’s Vision Pro headset—a device I was simultaneously amazed and disappointed by when it launched in early 2024. I still like the Vision Pro, but I can tell it’s hanging on by a thread. Content is light, developer support is tepid, and while Apple has taken action to improve…

Crypto-hoarding companies are ditching their holdings in a bid to prop up their sinking share prices, as the craze for “digital asset treasury” businesses unravels in the face of a $1 trillion cryptocurrency rout. Shares in Michael Saylor-led Strategy, the world’s biggest corporate bitcoin holder, have tumbled 50 percent over the past three months, dragging down scores of copycat companies. About $77 billion has been wiped from the stock market value of…

Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee. Previously, people outside of a server owner’s network could access the owner’s media library through Plex for free. Under the new rules announced in March, a server owner needs to have a Plex Pass subscription, which starts at $7 per month, to grant users remote access to their…

It’s not a bad time to upgrade your gaming PC. Graphics card prices in the 2020s have undulated continuously as the industry has dealt with pandemic and AI-related shortages, but it’s actually possible to get respectable mainstream- to high-end GPUs like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT and 9070 series or Nvidia’s RTX 5060, 5070, and 5080 series for at or slightly under their suggested retail prices right now. This was…

Some members of the maker community are distraught about Arduino’s new terms of service (ToS), saying that the added rules put the company’s open source DNA at risk. Arduino updated its ToS and privacy policy this month, which is about a month after Qualcomm announced that it’s acquiring the open source hardware and software company. Among the most controversial changes is this addition: User shall not: translate, decompile or reverse-engineer…

The UK government will promise to buy emerging chip technology from British companies in a 100 million pound ($130 million) bid to boost growth by supporting the artificial intelligence sector. Liz Kendall, the science secretary, said the government would offer guaranteed payments to British startups producing AI hardware that can help sectors such as life sciences and financial services. Under a “first customer” promise modeled on the way the government…

One of the world’s premier security organizations has canceled the results of its annual leadership election after an official lost an encryption key needed to unlock results stored in a verifiable and privacy-preserving voting system. The International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) said Friday that the votes were submitted and tallied using Helios, an open source voting system that uses peer-reviewed cryptography to cast and count votes in a verifiable,…

We all know streaming services’ usual tricks for making more money: get more subscribers, charge those subscribers more money, and sell ads. But science streaming service Curiosity Stream is taking a new route that could reshape how streaming companies, especially niche options, try to survive. Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. The streaming service costs $40 per year, and it doesn’t have commercials. The streaming business…

Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said. The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said. So far, it’s unclear what…

Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines’ inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines’ processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business…