The GeForce RTX 4070 officially turned three this April, and yet it feels as if it were yesterday when the Ada Lovelace GPU was announced. This isn't nostalgia talking, not in the slightest. Rather, it feels like there has been no significant shift in the experience of owning a GPU, no missing features, and alongside it, no reason to eye a potential upgrade over the past three years.

Fox has announced that it's acquiring Roku outright, in a deal that values the streaming company at $22 billion.The deal will see Fox's TV networks and Tubi streamer combine with Roku's network of streaming devices, smart TV software, and The Roku Channel. The companies say in a statement that by combining they'll become the third-largest player in the US TV industry by viewing share.It doesn't sound like the plan is to build Roku and Fox into a walled ecosystem. The two companies are "committed" to keeping Roku an open-platform that works with other content providers, and to the "continued ubiquitous distribution" of Fox's own content. …Read the full story at The Verge.

The crease isn’t quite invisible, but otherwise this feels like the complete foldable package — on the hardware side at least. On paper, the Honor Magic V6 sounds like a tremendous leap forward for foldable phones: It's the thinnest one yet, with the biggest battery, and the best water-resistance ever. In practice, only the bigger battery feels like a meaningful improvement. The other upgrades are only fractionally superior to what came before.This isn't entirely Honor's fault. It's getting harder to make a foldable phone stand out; even last year's offerings felt like complete flagship phones. Huawei's Pura X Max stood out for its odd new aspect ratio, which we're expecting to see both Samsung and Apple replicate later this year. Then there are the trifolds, whic …Read the full story at The Verge.

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrive for a news conference with bipartisan senators on passage of the Online Privacy Protection Act at the Capitol on July 30, 2024 in Washington, DC. | Kent Nishimura/Getty Images. For months, Big Tech's Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months, lobbyists have run into roadblocks and incurred nationwide political blowback, and they now face the possibility that after the midterms, Congress will flip to hostile Democrats unwilling to work with them.But their final, most desperate attempt at preemption is coming with new baggage, related to an ent …Read the full story at The Verge.

Last week, Xbox boss Asha Sharma sent a memo warning of an Xbox "reset" ahead of expected layoffs, and today, Kotaku reported that Xbox plans to shut down Compulsion Games, the studio behind South of Midnight.Since taking over in February, Sharma has made some big decisions, including cutting the price of Xbox Game Pass and making Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution Xbox console exclusives. But in their "reset" memo, Sharma and chief content officer Matt Booty discussed many challenges facing the Xbox business, including that it has "over extended" with its studio system:We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franch …Read the full story at The Verge.

I'm on my third (or fourth) Synology NAS enclosure, with a stretch of ownership going back nearly a decade. That's a long time for me to stick with any single manufacturer, but it became time to part. I've written about this switch before on many occasions, but now that I've made the switch, I firmly believe I did the right thing for my home lab.

Google Chrome version 150 and 151, expected in late June and July, respectively, will cut off support for the last remaining workarounds for running older ad blockers, 9to5Google reports. Google phased out support for ad-blocking extensions built for Manifest V2, like uBlock Origin, in 2024. At that point, most Chrome users either switched to newer Manifest V3 ad blockers like uBlock Origin Lite or switched to a different browser. Google is now removing the final bits of code referencing its previous Manifest V2 extensions platform, so only ad blockers that work on the Manifest V3 platform will work in Chrome version 151 onward. Google d …Read the full story at The Verge.

Through more than two decades of travel for both work and leisure, my packing list has evolved from a random assortment of gadgets and accessories thrown together at the last minute into a refined checklist of gear honed by trial and error. The right packing list, I've found, can be the difference between a good trip and a great one. Or at least the difference between hectic trips to the local Best Buy and some extra time by the pool.My family's summer vacation this year will involve lots of hiking and exploring the great outdoors, but it will by no means be an attempt to disconnect from our favorite devices. Convenience, comfort, and peac …Read the full story at The Verge.

The RTX 3080 launched in September 2020 to varying levels of acclaim. On one hand, it was a fairly solid GPU in its own right, but on the other, it was impossible to get ahold of thanks to hardware shortages.

At Washington's request, Anthropic suddenly took its newest and most powerful AI models offline over the weekend. The American company said it had little choice after the White House demanded it block access for all foreign nationals, including its own employees. Abroad, the incident offered a sobering reminder that the US not only dominates frontier AI - its government also wields power over who gets to use it. The Trump administration's action was swift, sweeping, and imposed with little warning or explanation. The unprecedented shutdown of the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models - which were already subject to safeguards limiting their use in " …Read the full story at The Verge.

Amazon Fire TV Stick is the ultimate streaming gateway for millions of cord-cutters. But as subscription costs for legitimate services climb, many users are turning to cheap, unverified IPTV services to unlock thousands of premium channels for pennies.

Our internet connection has been mucky lately and a few weeks ago it gave up properly. The connection went on Monday afternoon, came back briefly that Wednesday, then dropped again when a power outage kicked in. By Thursday I was relying on data but then the cell towers near me had gone down for a stretch during one of those power outages, and I'd been working off and on for two days without proper connectivity. None of this would normally be a great week, but I got more done than I expected to, and most of that comes down to having a local LLM setup that runs without the internet.