AcuRite must kill its customers’ favorite companion app due to “obsolete technology,” VP of product development Jeff Bovee tells Ars Technica. AcuRite, which makes smart weather-monitoring devices, announced this month that the My AcuRite iOS and Android app that has been around since 2016 won’t be available after May 30. After that date, device owners must use AcuRite NOW, which AcuRite released in June 2025, to control their gadgets. The…

The US government will take equity stakes worth a total of $2 billion in a slew of quantum computing companies, including a startup backed by a firm with links to the Trump family and one taken public by a Pentagon official. The announcement by the commerce department that it had signed letters of intent with nine companies—including GlobalFoundries and IBM—sent shares in quantum specialists soaring on Thursday. Both IBM, which…

It’s not an ideal time to be buying a new PC or doing a major upgrade. Price crunches for RAM and storage chips are making all kinds of components more expensive, and the shift to DDR5 in modern Intel and AMD CPUs means that a lot of people would need to pay money to replace their current DDR4 kits if they wanted to step up to a significantly newer, faster…

Google on Wednesday published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser codebase that threatens millions of people using Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and virtually all other Chromium-based browsers. The proof-of-concept code exploits the Browser Fetch programming interface, a standard that allows long videos and other large files to be downloaded in the background. An attacker can use the exploit to create a connection for monitoring some aspects of…

President Donald Trump’s latest pitch for using taxpayer dollars to secure his White House ballroom featured a militarized building—including a rooftop hardened against drone strikes and a “drone port” that could potentially house military drones. The remarks came on May 19 as Trump gave reporters a personal tour of the ballroom project that has already involved the demolition of the White House mansion’s East Wing. The president spoke of installing…

As of July 1, at 12:01 am UTC—or June 30 at 8:01 pm ET—people seeking access to Plex’s media server features through a one-time purchase will have to pay $750. That’s three times the current price of $250. The new price will not affect current Lifetime Plex Pass holders. A Lifetime Plex Pass allows you to stream from your own Plex Media Server to a device connected to your own…

Security researcher Brian Krebs brings us the news that America’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA) has had a large store of plaintext passwords, SSH private keys, tokens, and “other sensitive CISA assets” exposed in a public GitHub repo since at least November 2025. The now-offline public repo—named, somewhat aspirationally, “Private-CISA”—was brought to Krebs’ attention by GitGuardian’s Guillaume Valadon, who was alerted to the repo’s presence by GitGuardian’s public code scans….

Iran claims it will charge US tech companies fees for using undersea Internet cables that run beneath the contested Strait of Hormuz shipping lanes. The war has already halted multiple projects and led to the suspension of cable repairs in the region—and the latest Iranian threats may accelerate efforts by Big Tech and Gulf countries to find alternative routes for bypassing the Strait of Hormuz’s digital chokepoint. The latest assertions…

Many gadgets marketed as being “smart” make me wonder if they would be better off dumb. Some examples are smart TVs that insist on sending your activities to businesses to track you, smart fridges that use the Internet to cycle through ads, smart gym equipment that won’t work offline, smart toothbrushes whose batteries drain too quickly, or virtually any gadget that forces you to use a minimally effective or otherwise…

When Windows 11 launched in 2021, we mostly liked its refreshed look—the rounded corners and menus with just a hint of translucency were a nice change from the flat colors and hard corners of the Windows 8/10 era. But its reformulated taskbar and Start menu came with a number of functional regressions from the versions in Windows 10. Some of these were addressed quickly; others continue to linger. A new…