Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Meta says it may be forced to pull Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from New Mexico if the attorney general gets his way. The state is demanding a host of changes that the company says are impossible to achieve. After winning a $375 million jury award against Meta in a trial that argued the company misled users in the state about the safety of its products, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is asking the state court to order sweeping changes to the platforms. Among the asks are a prohibition on end-to-end encryption for minors, implementing age verification, and detecting 99 percent of new child sexual abuse material uploaded to its …Read the full story at The Verge.

The internet is full of copycat, stolen, reposted, and low-effort content - and Meta, at least publicly, has said it is working to cut off some of the reach.Beginning in 2024, the company has made incremental announcements saying it would begin limiting "unoriginal" content from being recommended on Instagram. It meant that if you were downloading and reposting someone's Reels, or spamming the same clip over and over, your content wouldn't show up in recommendation feeds or places like the Explore tab. Similar rules were later announced for Facebook, where "unoriginal" accounts risk losing their ability to monetize content. The idea is tha …Read the full story at The Verge.

Close watchers of the Supreme Court knew that the conservative supermajority was about to murder what was left of the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday's decision in Louisiana v. Callais took down Section 2 of the law, clearing the way for racist gerrymandering, because it is now racist to remedy racism. The decision is an affront to the history of the Voting Rights Act, an affront to the history of the United States, and an affront to math. The state of Louisiana, which is around 30 percent Black, has six districts. The voting districts are drawn so that there are two majority-Black districts. That is two out of six districts; approximately 33 …Read the full story at The Verge.

Meta is planning to pump billions more into AI investments this year, despite noting that millions of users have seemingly started to abandon its platforms. In an earning call on Wednesday, Meta reported that figures for "Family daily active people" - the term Meta has coined for all collective users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger - declined by 20 million this quarter compared to the previous three months.Meta attributes this fall to "internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia." It's up to you whether you take Meta on its word, given that by bundling the user stats together across …Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft is now rolling out its Xbox mode to all Windows 11 PCs. The new Xbox mode adds a full-screen interface to the Xbox PC app, much like Steam's Big Picture Mode, and originally debuted as the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) with Asus' Xbox Ally devices."Some players in select markets will be able to download the Xbox mode experience today, with availability expanding to more players in those markets over the next several weeks," says the Xbox team. You'll be able to get the Xbox mode by installing the latest Windows update for Windows 11.Xbox mode aims to try and bridge the gap between Xbox consoles and Windows, but its original …Read the full story at The Verge.

Except for Google's AI responses to searches, I've never used AI before, not once. Most people I know, when they hear this, say, "You haven't used AI? But it's so useful!" I disagreed; I'd seen the results Google's AI gave, and it honestly seemed overhyped. Then I thought about it and realized I couldn't really judge it without testing it. However, being into tech, I didn't want to risk my privacy, knowing the impact that can have, so I wanted to install the AIs locally instead.

The first thing that comes to mind when our CPUs run a bit too hot for our liking is to consider a new AIO. In fact, whenever I used to see CPU temperatures exceeding 85C while gaming, I'd start browsing Amazon or Newegg for better options. While a more powerful cooler can lower temperatures, the return on investment is far from convincing. Take that from someone who has splurged on multiple high-end AIOs like the Aorus 360 and Liquid Freezer II 360 in the past.

Being connected to the internet has always been slightly dangerous, but in the age of automated scanning and AI, it's never been more so. Network security is something many assume their router is going to handle on its own, if they think about it at all, but the myth of being too small to be worth targeting is long over. You should have a firewall to protect your network from external and internal threats, and it's one of the first things I set up when putting together a new home network.

Dallas-based genetics and biotech startup Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capitalists, the CIA, and Peter Thiel, among others. Its buzzy "de-extinction" projects aim to "bring back" lost animals like the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dire wolf - although it isn't creating copies of extinct creatures from ancient DNA, as the "de-extinction" tagline may suggest. In the case of the "dire wolves" presented to the world in 2025, the pups were gray wolves spliced with a few genetic traits to somewhat resemble the dire wolves. This ambitious branding opened the company up to questions about its conser …Read the full story at The Verge.

LXCs are one of the reasons Proxmox feels so good in a home lab. They’re light, fast, easy to clone, and usually much less wasteful than spinning up a full VM for every small service. When something only needs a basic Linux environment and a few predictable ports, an LXC can feel like the obvious answer. That convenience is exactly what makes it so tempting to use them for everything.

Rivian announced some changes today with regard to the factory its building in the state of Georgia. The company was planning to build the facility in two phases, each resulting in 200,000 vehicles of annual production capacity, for a total of 400,000 units. Rivian held a ground breaking ceremony late last year. Now the company says it is only planning for 300,000 units of annual capacity as a result of a revised loan agreement with the US Department of Energy - though its planning on hitting that annual capacity sooner than originally planned. DOE will now loan Rivian $4.5 billion, instead of the originally agreed amount of $6.6 billion …Read the full story at The Verge.

It is generally frowned upon to care too much about appearances. We have a lot of little aphorisms discouraging this - books and their covers, beauty being skin deep, style over substance, that sort of thing. Vanity is a risk. Should one put a disproportionate effort into how a thing looks, then said work may very well be considered shallow. But in the world of big-budget video games? That's how you win. Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit …Read the full story at The Verge.