On Tuesday, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation advised Americans to share a secret word or phrase with their family members to protect against AI-powered voice-cloning scams, as criminals increasingly use voice synthesis to impersonate loved ones in crisis. “Create a secret word or phrase with your family to verify their identity,” wrote the FBI in an official public service announcement (I-120324-PSA). For example, you could tell your parents, children,…

Microsoft has formally discontinued its Surface Studio all-in-one desktop, the company confirmed to Windows Central, a $4,300 touchscreen PC that the company updated with new components twice in the space of eight years. Windows Central reports that there are currently no plans for a follow-up to the Surface Studio and that a Surface Studio 3 may have been among the casualties of cutbacks to Microsoft’s Surface lineup. Like the Surface…

Broadcom will no longer take VMware’s biggest 2,000 customers directly. Instead, it will work with VMware’s 500 biggest customers, giving channel partners the opportunity to participate in deals and provide additional value for VMware customers. The reversal is being viewed as an effort from Broadcom to discourage migrations from VMware, but there’s skepticism around how much impact it will truly have. Various customers have lamented the changes that succeeded Broadcom…

On Thursday during a live demo as part of its “12 days of OpenAI” event, OpenAI announced a new tier of ChatGPT with higher usage limits for $200 a month and the full version of “o1,” the full version of a so-called reasoning model the company debuted in September. Unlike o1-preview, o1 can now process images as well as text (similar to GPT-4o), and it is reportedly much faster than…

Over the last few years, Apple has steadily been building password manager-style features into macOS and iOS, including automatic password generation, password breach detection, and more. Starting with this year’s updates—iOS 18 and macOS 15 Sequoia—Apple broke all that functionality out into its own Passwords app, making it all even more visible as a competitor to traditional password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden. One area where Apple has lagged behind…

On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a “12 days of OpenAI” period starting December 5, which will unveil new AI features and products for 12 consecutive weekdays. Altman did not specify the exact features or products OpenAI plans to unveil, but a report from The Verge about this “12 days of shipmas” event suggests the products may include a public release of the company’s text-to-video model Sora and a…

For most people, Windows 10 security updates are slated to stop on October 14, 2025, just over 10 months from today. That could end up being a serious security problem, given that Windows 10 is still the version used by a large majority of the world’s PCs. Users will be able to buy a one-year reprieve for $30, and businesses and other organizations will have the option to pay for…

One of the key differences between Apple’s Macs and the iPhone and iPad is that the Mac can still boot and run non-Apple operating systems. This is a feature that Apple specifically built for the Mac, one of many features meant to ease the transition from Intel’s chips to Apple’s own silicon. The problem, at least at first, was that alternate operating systems like Windows and Linux didn’t work natively…

The week before Thanksgiving, Marshall Brain sent a final email to his colleagues at North Carolina State University. “I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the university,” wrote the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and director of NC State’s Engineering Entrepreneurs Program. Hours later, campus police found that Brain had died by suicide. NC State police discovered Brain unresponsive in Engineering Building II…

An app outage that locked numerous rental car customers out of their vehicles is a reminder of the perils of completely relying on apps for basic functionality—especially when those apps have seemingly limited support resources. Zipcar is a car-sharing service that lets customers pay a membership fee to rent vehicles. Users use the Zipcar app to locate cars, unlock and lock them, share images of the vehicle (for proof that…