Enlarge / TCL’s C655 Pro TV is advertised as a quantum dot Mini LED TV. (credit: TCL) TCL has come under scrutiny this month after testing that claimed to examine three TCL TVs marketed as quantum dot TVs reportedly showed no trace of quantum dots. Quantum dots are semiconductor particles that are several nanometers large and emit different color lights when struck with light of a certain frequency. The color…

Enlarge (credit: Andriy Onufriyenko via Getty Images) OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is “thinking.” Since the company launched its “Strawberry” AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries to probe into how the model works. Unlike previous AI models from OpenAI,…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A supply chain failure that compromises Secure Boot protections on computing devices from across the device-making industry extends to a much larger number of models than previously known, including those used in ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, and voting machines. The debacle was the result of non-production test platform keys used in hundreds of device models for more than a decade. These cryptographic keys form the root-of-trust anchor…

Enlarge / Apple’s M3 Max-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro. New Pro laptops and some desktops could be on tap for later this fall. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple’s newest iPhones and Apple Watches don’t come out until later this week, but the rumor mill is already indicating that Apple is planning a product announcement for October to refresh some of the products that didn’t get a mention at the iPhone event. Apple…

Enlarge / Illustration of a person who refuses to check their iPhone’s messages until RCS is enabled on their MVNO carrier, out of respect for their Android-toting friends and family. (credit: Getty Images) The future of inter-OS mobile messaging is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. With iOS 18, Apple has made it possible for non-Apple phones to message with iPhones through Rich Communication Services (RCS). This grants upgrades from standard…

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries. Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the Android-based boxes by putting malicious components in their system storage area, where they can be updated with additional malware at any time by command-and-control…

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google) On Thursday, Google made Gemini Live, its voice-based AI chatbot feature, available for free to all Android users. The feature allows users to interact with Gemini through voice commands on their Android devices. That’s notable because competitor OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode feature of ChatGPT, which is similar to Gemini Live, has not yet fully shipped. Google unveiled Gemini Live during its Pixel…

Enlarge / Sorry about all the black space in the lower-right corner. Nerdfetch does not make good use of the space it’s given—unlike the Asahi install on this MacBook. (credit: Kevin Purdy) Almost nobody truly needed Neofetch, but the people who did use it? They really liked it. Neofetch, run from a terminal, displayed key system information alongside an ASCII-art image of the operating system or distribution running on that…

Enlarge (credit: Vlatko Gasparic via Getty Images) OpenAI finally unveiled its rumored “Strawberry” AI language model on Thursday, claiming significant improvements in what it calls “reasoning” and problem-solving capabilities over previous large language models (LLMs). Formally named “OpenAI o1,” the model family will initially launch in two forms, o1-preview and o1-mini, available today for ChatGPT Plus and certain API users. OpenAI claims that o1-preview outperforms its predecessor, GPT-4o, on multiple…

Enlarge / Emojipedia sample images of the new Unicode 16.0 emoji. (credit: Emojipedia) The Unicode Consortium has finalized and released version 16.0 of the Unicode standard, the elaborate character set that ensures that our phones, tablets, PCs, and other devices can all communicate and interoperate with each other. The update adds 5,185 new characters to the standard, bringing the total up to a whopping 154,998. Of those 5,185 characters, the…