The increasing complexity of cyberattacks and the ease of automation means you should always have a well-configured firewall on your computer. That helps to filter unwanted traffic before it gets onto your PC, but it won't stop attacks from getting to other devices on your home network. Your Wi-Fi router also has a simple firewall on it, but these are often barebones and don't have a lot of options for customizability and other controls you might want on your network traffic.

The Verge eBay has “signed a definitive agreement” to buy online automotive transaction platform provider Caramel to help make buying and selling vehicles on the auction site “more simple than ever.”Caramel has a site and app that helps private parties and independent dealers sell cars by handling the paperwork, ownership transfer, financing, shipping, insurance, and more. The company has several marketplace and auction partners as well.Although eBay has hosted listings for used car sales and auctions on the site for years, it currently leaves it to the dealer to process payment and complete any paperwork. Fees such as titling charges are also handled through the seller, and you’d have to negotiate separately over things like dealer-installed accessories.Last month, online retail giant Amazon started its own “Autos” website for people to buy new vehicles from dealers (only Hyundai models to start). However, Amazon advertises that you can complete the transaction (including a vehicle trade-in) to completion and only need to pick up the car at the dealership.How eBay’s process will look is still to be determined. eBay says its agreement with Caramel was signed on January 11th, and the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of this year.

Image: Free Our Feeds Technology advocates and celebrities are backing the launch of Free Our Feeds, a campaign designed to “save social media from billionaire capture.” The project aims to raise $30 million over three years to support the development of a social media ecosystem powered by the AT Protocol, or the decentralized network powering Bluesky.The raised funds will go toward launching a public interest foundation to support the project, while creating an “independently hosted infrastructure” giving Bluesky users, developers, and researchers access to the content and data posted “no matter what the company decides to do in the future.”After starting as a research project under former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Bluesky became an independent company in 2021 and went on to create the AT Protocol, an open-source infrastructure that aims to create a social ecosystem with interoperable apps. Bluesky built its own social network atop the framework, raising millions in funds and attracting a growing number of users.Despite these efforts, Free Our Feeds believes “social infrastructure run in the public interest cannot be governed by a private social media company” forever.“Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, could offer a new pathway for the social web. Yet as it stands, it is still venture-capital backed,” Sherif Elsayed-Ali, the executive director at the Future of Technology Institute, said in a statement. “This important initiative aims to safeguard Bluesky’s underlying technology and put it on an independent pathway, so that the future of social media can be freed from the whims of any one company or group of billionaires.”Free Our Feeds will be led by nine custodians — including the Mozilla Foundation’s Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman — who will oversee the project’s “major governance decisions.”Mastodon is also moving away from the single ownership model used by social platforms like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X. On Monday, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko announced that he will transfer the ownership of the decentralized social network to a nonprofit organization because “Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.”With Meta making drastic changes to its content moderation policy, and X’s transformation under Musk’s ownership, the Free Our Feeds project couldn’t come at a better time — even if it might take some time for its efforts to come to fruition.Correction, January 13th: A previous version of the article misattributed a quote to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales due to an error from Free Our Feeds. The quote is from Sherif Elsayed-Ali.

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Another day, another announcement from Nintendo that isn’t the next Switch. Today the company revealed that its alarm clock, Alarmo, will be available at select retailers starting this March. The announcement includes the US, UK, and Europe.The $99 alarm clock launched late last year, but is currently only available to those with a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Today’s news opens that up to the larger public. The motion-controlled device lets users turn it off simply by getting up, though in my experience, that functionality wasn’t much use if you share a bed. It also includes a number of sounds and themes based on Nintendo properties, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe through a recent update.The news comes the same week that Nintendo is widely expected to detail its next console, which could happen on January 16th. It also follows a series of other announcements in recent months from the company. Most recently, Nintendo announced that a Lego Game Boy was in the works, which was preceded by announcements covering a museum, music service, and a test for a mysterious MMO.

Mercedes-Benz’s MBUX Virtual Assistant will use Google Gemini on the cloud. | Image: Mercedes-Benz / Google Google Cloud’s new Automotive AI Agent platform promises to “continue conversations and reference information” throughout users’ drives, and the first car announced with it is the new Mercedes CLA. That car has the next-generation MB.OS operating system with an upgraded MBUX Virtual Assistant. When Mercedes revealed it at CES in 2024, it didn’t say which company’s LLM it was running on. Meanwhile, the existing MBUX Voice Assistant system that could handle about 20 commands triggered with “Hey Mercedes” now includes results provided by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing, but it’s not a conversational platform. According to Mercedes, there’s a plan to roll out this upgraded system to “further models” that run the older Voice Assistant, but it didn’t specify which ones.The new MBUX Virtual Assistant will feature four “personality traits,” including natural, predictive, personal, and empathetic. It can also ask you questions for additional clarity to get you what you need.Google’s new AI Agent is tailor-made to automotive uses, leveraging Google Maps data to find points of interest, look up restaurant reviews for you, give you recommendations, answer follow-up questions, and more. Google says MBUX Virtual Assistant users will get access to “nearly real time” Google Maps updates. It also says it can “handle complex, multi-turn dialog.”The agent uses Gemini and runs on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI development platform, designed to help companies build out AI experiences. “This is just the beginning of how agentic capabilities can transform the automotive industry,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated in a press release.

The CPU is one of, if not the most critical components in a PC — whether you use it for gaming or not. If your CPU has integrated graphics, you can even boot and use your computer without a graphics card. Most users don't upgrade their CPUs as often as they swap their graphics cards because they would likely need to purchase a new motherboard as well.

Staying productive when your web browser is open is often an exercise in self-control. Sure, for some tasks, you could get your browser to read the text out loud to you, but you'll have to reach for the mouse and keyboard at some point. At which point, you'll have to resist staying away from YouTube, or social media, or any of the other millions of distracting elements online. However, you might be surprised at how productive you can be by just adding a few choice extensions to your web browser. Whether those extensions are for Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, or any of the underrated browsers, they can turn you into a person with a proclivity for productivity, and that's got a nice ring to it.

One of the big perks of PC gaming is that you can swap out components to make your computer better without having to replace the entire parts list. But whether you've upgraded to the latest and greatest CPU or want the best graphics card to run games at high frame rates and resolutions, you quickly end up with a stack of old PC parts that you're not quite sure what to do with.

For weeks and months, we were waiting for Nvidia and AMD to announce their much-awaited RTX 5000 and RX 9000 series GPUs (changed from RX 8000) respectively. While Team Green stole the show with its Blackwell announcement, AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs announcement was conspicuously absent from its livestream. The company talked about everything from its new Ryzen AI mobile processors and Ryzen Z2 series handheld CPUs to Ryzen 9000 HX processors with 3D V-Cache.

Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge Samsung is making the Galaxy Ring available to more people by adding size 14 and 15 rings to its options starting on January 22nd. With the expansion, which was rumored last month, the company says its ring sizes now run from five to 15, though it caveats that both size and color availability will vary by market. The new sizes bring the Galaxy Ring closer to competitor Oura, which already offers its smart ring in sizes four to 15. Samsung’s announcement didn’t include details about the ring’s weight or battery life, but the current lineup’s larger size 12 and 13 rings use bigger batteries and can last an extra day versus the others. The bigger options will be nice for those at the upper end of its size range, particularly if they’re only a half-size up. As my colleague Victoria Song wrote in her smart ring sizing guide, even if you’re able to slide the ring on, it could be hard to take it off again as your fingers swell in response to things like the food you’ve eaten or the environment you’re in.Samsung also announced it’s going to sell its smart ring in 16 more countries, including Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Greece, and South Africa, starting on February 7th, though the exact date for each release will vary, it writes.

While it's long been believed that Windows devices are more susceptible to malware and viruses, this doesn't mean that Apple devices are strangers to such threats. In fact, as macOS's user base grows rapidly, the operating system is becoming an increasingly popular target for malware attacks.

When you use Excel for project management, you need to manage deadlines and dependencies to avoid any delay. With a few clever formulas, you can transform those rows and columns into a powerful command center for your projects. In this post, I will go over essential Excel formulas to track progress with minute details, predict potential roadblocks, and keep your projects sailing smoothly towards the finish line.