Amid Trump tariff chaos, Nvidia launches AI chip production on US soil

Nvidia announced plans today to manufacture AI chips and build complete supercomputers on US soil for the first time, commissioning over one million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. The politically timed move comes amid rising US-China tensions and the Trump administration’s push for domestic manufacturing. Nvidia’s announcement comes less than two weeks after the Trump administration’s chaotic rollout of new tariffs and just two days after…

April 14, 2025
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Back to basics: Microsoft tests overhauled Start menu in Windows 11 beta builds

April 8, 2025

Windows 11 has become so synonymous with Microsoft’s push into generative AI that it’s easy to forget that it originally launched as a mostly cosmetic overhaul of Windows 10. But Microsoft continues to work on fundamental elements of the operating system’s design. Case in point, Windows tester phantomofearth enabled an overhauled version of the Start menu from a recent Windows 11 beta build, the menu’s first substantial rethink since Windows…

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Framework “temporarily pausing” some laptop sales because of new tariffs

Framework, the designers and sellers of the modular and repairable Framework Laptop 13 and other products, announced today that it would be “temporarily pausing US sales” on some of its laptop configurations as a result of new tariffs put on Taiwanese imports by the Trump administration. The affected models will be removed from Framework’s online store for now, and there’s no word on when buyers can expect them to come…

April 7, 2025
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FreeDOS 1.4 brings new fixes and features to modern and vintage DOS-based PCs

We’re used to updating Windows, macOS, and Linux systems at least once a month (and usually more), but people with ancient DOS-based PCs still get to join in the fun every once in a while. Over the weekend, the team that maintains FreeDOS officially released version 1.4 of the operating system, containing a list of fixes and updates that have been in the works since the last time a stable…

April 7, 2025
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Meta’s surprise Llama 4 drop exposes the gap between AI ambition and reality

On Saturday, Meta released its newest Llama 4 multimodal AI models in a surprise weekend move that caught some AI experts off guard. The announcement touted Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick as major advancements, with Meta claiming top performance in their categories and an enormous 10 million token context window for Scout. But so far the open-weights models have received an initial mixed-to-negative reception from the AI community,…

April 7, 2025
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NSA warns “fast flux” threatens national security. What is fast flux anyway?

A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and…

April 4, 2025
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Microsoft turns 50 today, and it made me think about MS-DOS 5.0

On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that…

April 4, 2025
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Google unveils end-to-end messages for Gmail. Only thing is: It’s not true E2EE.

When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as well as some of the basic security that underpins it. When Google uses the term…

April 3, 2025
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Nvidia confirms the Switch 2 supports DLSS, G-Sync, and ray tracing

In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we’re looking at. But interviews with Nintendo…

April 3, 2025
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Explaining MicroSD Express cards and why you should care about them

Among the changes mentioned in yesterday’s Nintendo Switch 2 presentation was a note that the new console doesn’t just support MicroSD Express cards for augmenting the device’s 256GB of internal storage, but it requires MicroSD Express. Whatever plentiful, cheap microSD card you’re using in your current Switch, including Sandisk’s Nintendo-branded ones, can’t migrate over to your Switch 2 alongside all your Switch 1 games. MicroSD Express, explained Why is regular-old MicroSD…

April 3, 2025
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