Google and Valve will kill “Steam for Chromebooks” experiment in January 2026

Bad news if you’re one of the handful of people using Steam to play games on a Chromebook: Google and Valve are preparing to end support for the still-in-beta ChromeOS version of Steam on January 1, 2026, according to 9to5Google. Steam can still be installed on Chromebooks, but it now comes with a notice announcing the end of support. “The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st,…

August 8, 2025
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Google discovered a new scam—and also fell victim to it

In June, Google said it unearthed a campaign that was mass-compromising accounts belonging to customers of Salesforce. The means: an attacker pretending to be someone in the customer’s IT department feigning some sort of problem that required immediate access to the account. Two months later, Google has disclosed that it, too, was a victim. The series of hacks are being carried out by financially motivated threat actors out to steal…

August 7, 2025
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OpenAI launches GPT-5 free to all ChatGPT users

On Thursday, OpenAI announced GPT-5 and three variants—GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano—what the company calls its “best AI system yet,” with availability for some of the models across all ChatGPT tiers, including free users. The new model family arrives with claims of reduced confabulations, improved coding capabilities, and a new approach to handling sensitive requests that OpenAI calls “safe completions.” It’s also the first time OpenAI has given…

August 7, 2025
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Sonos says it’s forced to raise prices while trying to win back customers

During what’s supposed to be a year of redemption, Sonos has announced that its gadgets will become more expensive this year, complicating the company’s comeback plans. Tariffs that US President Donald Trump announced last week take effect today, including a 19 percent tariff on goods imported from Malaysia (the levy is said not to apply to semiconductors and was cut down from a 25 percent tariff that Trump threatened in…

August 7, 2025
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Review: Framework Desktop is a mash-up of a regular desktop PC and the Mac Studio

Framework’s main claim to fame is its commitment to modular, upgradeable, repairable laptops. The jury’s still out on early 2024’s Framework Laptop 16 and mid-2025’s Framework Laptop 12, neither of which has seen a hardware refresh, but so far, the company has released half a dozen iterations of its flagship Framework Laptop 13 in less than five years. If you bought one of the originals right when it first launched,…

August 7, 2025
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Hulu’s days look numbered, but there’s reason for Disney to keep it around 

Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, announced today that Disney will “fully integrate” Hulu into the Disney+ app in 2026. Although a company representative told Variety that people will still be able to buy standalone subscriptions to Hulu, we can’t help but wonder how long that will last. A prim and polished app combining the catalogs, recommendations, and profiles for Disney+ and Hulu subscribers could make a…

August 6, 2025
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Google search boss says AI isn’t killing search clicks

Google has often bristled at the implication that its obsession with AI search is harming web traffic, and now search head Liz Reid has penned a blog post on the topic. According to Reid, clicks aren’t declining, AI is driving more searches, and everything is fine on the Internet. But despite the optimistic tone, the post stops short of providing any actual data to back up those claims. This statement…

August 6, 2025
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RIP to the Macintosh HD hard drive icon, 2000–2025

Apple released a new developer beta build of macOS 26 Tahoe today, and it came with another big update for a familiar icon. The old Macintosh HD hard drive icon, for years represented by a facsimile of an old spinning hard drive, has been replaced with something clearly intended to resemble a solid-state drive (the SSD in your Mac actually looks like a handful of chips soldered to a circuit…

August 5, 2025
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Murena’s Pixel Tablet is helping to wean me off Google

A lot of people are overly reliant on Google. They put all of their important messages, appointments, musings, contacts, and spreadsheets into Google products. Many are aware that Google, like many tech firms, is likely to prioritize its own interests over user privacy. But signing data away for technological conveniences is a common occurrence. Murena’s Pixel Tablet takes a stance against that norm. It’s Google’s Pixel Tablet hardware running an…

August 5, 2025
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Voice phishers strike again, this time hitting Cisco

Cisco said that one of its representatives fell victim to a voice phishing attack that allowed threat actors to download profile information belonging to users of a third-party customer relationship management system. “Our investigation has determined that the exported data primarily consisted of basic account profile information of individuals who registered for a user account on Cisco.com,” the company disclosed. Information included names, organization names, addresses, Cisco assigned user IDs,…

August 5, 2025
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