If 2025 was Microsoft's year of Copilot, then 2026 is shaping up to be Microsoft's year of cleaning up the mess it made in 2025. Between lots of AI integrations and buggy Windows updates, Microsoft has eroded user trust over the last year, and it knows it. Fortunately, the company is already making headway into fixing the operating system's biggest pain points, and it doesn't seem like it's going to stop any time soon.

OpenAI is preparing to launch a new frontier cybersecurity model, GPT-5.5-Cyber. CEO Sam Altman said the model will not be available to the general public, but will be first rolled out to a select group of trusted "cyber defenders" in order for institutions to shore up their cyberdefenses. The limited rollout will take place "in the next few days," Altman said on X. "We will work with the entire ecosystem and the government to figure out trusted access for Cyber."It's not clear who will get access to the model first, though previous "trusted access" schemes involved vetted professionals and institutions. Details of the model and its capa …Read the full story at The Verge.

Every home lab enthusiast reaches a point where ‘functional’ no longer feels ‘optimal,’ and my setup was no exception. Instead of spending an entire weekend optimizing the home lab, I decided to see if an AI could do a better job than I could, so I handed the keys to my infrastructure over to Claude.

I'll admit it; there's something about the vibe that consoles had around the OG Xbox era that I'm desperate to return to. Not just the Xbox, but the PS2, the GameCube, and even the Dreamcast; for me, that's when consoles still had that joy and whimsy to them before gaming got too serious and companies stopped doing fun stuff with their devices.

One of the coolest things about the tinkering community is that, if you have a problem connecting two pieces of hardware together, they've likely already figured out a way to bridge the two. It'll usually feature a Raspberry Pi or an ESP32 that sits between the two, but whichever computing device they pick, you can be sure that it'll be cheap, easy to set up, and best of all, really useful at what it does.

If you've tried to purchase a Steam Deck lately, you may have noticed that it's very difficult to purchase one from Valve if you live in specific regions. Right now, the popular handheld gaming device is going through a severe shortage issue due to RAM prices, delivery problems, and people opting for devices over PCs as the latter's prices skyrocket.

It's been almost three years since Silicon Valley started aggressively pushing large language model-based chatbots like ChatGPT as the supposedly inevitable future of everything, and there's no group that has felt the pressure quite like Gen Z.Like with many tech trends before it, it's no surprise that young people are among the biggest adopters of AI chatbot tools. But contrary to the tales spun by tech companies like OpenAI and Google, polling data shows that Gen Z students and workers are a big part of the wider cultural backlash against AI. And even as they utilize these tools, vast swaths of young people are deeply acrimonious and eve …Read the full story at The Verge.

Sony has finally stepped in to clear up the growing confusion around a new DRM (Digital Rights Management) system on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 consoles. Users reported that the system's latest updates seemingly introduced a requirement to go online once every 30 days to validate game licenses, but Sony now says this is false.In a statement to GameSpot, a Sony Interactive Entertainment spokesperson said that "a one-time online check is required to confirm the game's license, after which no further check-ins are required." The DRM rumors had sparked concerns that gamers who don't sign in every month would lose access to their games by …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you've spent any time in the local LLM space, you're almost certainly familiar with the hardware ceiling. The most interesting open-source models keep getting bigger, and the gap between what's published on Hugging Face and what you can actually load into VRAM at home has generally been growing, sans the handful of releases a year that run on anything and are genuinely impressive. Sure, you can download a 230B mixture-of-experts model for free, but it's not free to run. You need a workstation that costs as much as a car, and even then, you're often quantizing the thing into oblivion just to fit it.

You can't go wrong with a mini PC nowadays, especially with the price of RAM, storage, and other PC components going through the roof. Mini PCs are quite versatile, providing excellent power in a compact size. While they can be used as a desktop replacement for work, they can also be a compact gaming PC.

The Osmo Pocket 4 is no reinvention; it looks just like the Pocket 3. First they came for the drones, and now the vlogging cameras. DJI's Osmo Pocket 4 is the first of its compact steadicams not to launch in the US, following a string of DJI drones also missing the US market. The good news for American buyers is that the Pocket 4 is mostly an evolutionary upgrade, and there's little it does that the Pocket 3 doesn't (it looks like the rumored dual-lens Pro version will be more of a reinvention). The good news for everyone else is that those evolutions run throughout the Pocket 4, from the camera sensor to the controls. That makes this an unmistakable improvement over the previous generation.DJI Osmo Pocket …Read the full story at The Verge.

Most of us first noticed GPU upscaling through games because of the cleaner edges, the sharper image quality, and, well, the "free" performance. Features like DLSS and FSR have made upscaling feel like magic, powered by dedicated hardware like tensor cores that reconstruct detail faster than brute force rendering ever did.