You only have a few days left to take advantage of these excellent pre-order promotions for Samsung's Galaxy S24 lineup. The Galaxy S24 Ultra, S24+, and S24 get small refinements here and there, but the major upgrade this year is going to be its brand-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy SoC. While it's still early in the year, there's a good chance that some of these devices will up becoming one of best Android smartphones of 2024.

Illustration: The Verge Was it a joyous outage where you got to relax, or did something mission-critical go wrong? Either way, “a portion” of Microsoft Teams went down Friday for over eight hours — with outages in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to status updates from Microsoft’s official account. At 8:17PM ET Friday, Microsoft tweeted that the worst is over, but that the company was still mopping up, with a handful of issues still ongoing. Shortly after midnight Saturday, the company called the all-clear: “we’ve confirmed that our Microsoft Teams service and features have been restored or have returned to optimal health,” it writes. So yeah, if you couldn’t communicate with your colleagues via Microsoft’s biz comm... Continue reading…

Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images Legislation needs to be passed to protect people from fake sexual images generated by AI, the White House said this afternoon. The statement, from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, came in response to a question about the spread of fake sexualized photos of Taylor Swift on social media this week.Jean-Pierre called the incident “alarming” and said it’s among the AI issues the Biden administration has been prioritizing.“Of course Congress should take legislative action,” Jean-Pierre said. “That’s how you deal with some of these issues.” She did not refer to any specific legislation that the White House was backing.“There should be legislation, obviously, to deal with this issue.”The images spread across X in particular on... Continue reading…

When you start counting all the different Windows 11 editions, the list keeps getting longer. For starters, there are typical consumer-focused SKUs such as Home and Pro, while Pro for Workstations and Enterprise variants are tailor-made for business environments. The Education and Enterprise editions, on the other hand, are aimed at businesses. Hence, the probability of stumbling upon one of those on your friend's gaming PC is next to none.

There are lots of examples of AI in the software world. From image generation to writing entire text passages, anyone can do cool things with AI. However, these AI models require processing power, and the hardware world is heating up in an artificial intelligence-based war to become the king of model processing.

OnePlus has made a name for itself, offering smartphones with higher specs than you would expect, given their low prices. And OnePlus made a splash with the OnePlus 11, which we liked a lot in our review, especially given its relatively low price compared to similar phones by other manufacturers. Now that the OnePlus 12 is here, is upgrading it worth it? Read on to find out in our comparison below.

The Jamstik Classic. For many years now, my Stratocaster has been a memento hanging on my wall representing the time before I got a MacBook. I swapped my electric guitar out for a 25-key keyboard controller and a library of virtual instruments once my career headed to podcasting. In Logic Pro or Ableton, the Stratocaster could only sound like a Stratocaster, but the MIDI keyboard could be anything I needed it to be for my music or sound design work.But recently, I bought a new guitar that offers those very same strengths: Jamstik’s Classic MIDI Guitar, which has brought my unused fretboard skills back into the digital audio workstation (DAW), with almost as much flexibility as the musical keyboard.The Jamstik Classic is a fully traditional electric guitar... Continue reading…

Overclocking is one of the best things you can do to improve the overall output of your CPU and squeeze that extra performance out of your PC without spending any money. Combine that with an overlocked GPU, and you may end up with a significantly better performing PC that'll yield better framerates in games, faster render times in various editing programs, and more. Most Intel and AMD CPUs out there in 2024 have a little extra performance headroom which you can safely explore without worrying about damaging them. Modern processors usually have boosting technologies included that allow for some degree of stock overclocking, but you can push them further with overclocking methods, provided you have the supporting hardware.

Still frame from a teaser reel of Lumiere clips | Image: Google Google’s new video generation AI model Lumiere uses a new diffusion model called Space-Time-U-Net, or STUNet, that figures out where things are in a video (space) and how they simultaneously move and change (time). Ars Technica reports this method lets Lumiere create the video in one process instead of putting smaller still frames together. Lumiere starts with creating a base frame from the prompt. Then, it uses the STUNet framework to begin approximating where objects within that frame will move to create more frames that flow into each other, creating the appearance of seamless motion. Lumiere also generates 80 frames compared to 25 frames from Stable Video Diffusion.Admittedly, I am more of a text reporter than a video person, but... Continue reading…

Picking the best motherboard may not be as exciting as, say, choosing a CPU or a GPU, but it's an important part of any PC build. It's the first component that you start your build with as it's essentially a platform on which you install the components on. Installing the motherboard inside the PC case itself is quite easy, but there are a few important things that you may not know, especially if you're new to the world of PCs. For instance, you might think the first step is to immediately install the motherboard inside the case, but it actually isn't. There is a lot that goes on a motherboard before it's ready to get inside the case, and there are a few prerequisites to take care of as well.

Image: The Verge Many of us are hyperaware of the multitude of ways we can be tracked with modern technology, so you may feel like you don’t need to add another to the mix. But knowing the whereabouts of trusted friends and family can be useful a lot of the time, and it’s something you can do from your Android phone.It’s worth saying at the start that you stay in control of who can see you and when — and you can stop location sharing at any time if someone in your life goes from being trusted to distrusted. I’ve used this many times to figure out where to meet someone or to check when guests are going to arrive so I know exactly how much time I’ve got left to tidy up. It can be helpful for parents, too, to know their kids are safe and where they’re... Continue reading…

The majority of the best laptops available today have been slimmed down to the point that internal hardware is no longer modular. Components like wireless cards, solid-state drives (SSD), and especially memory (RAM) are often soldered right to the motherboard along with the processor (CPU), making it difficult or entirely impossible to upgrade anything once the device leaves the factory. This can seriously harm the lifespan of a laptop, especially if you, say, opted for a beefy CPU that no longer has enough RAM to keep up with modern software demands. The good news? All hope is not lost. There are still some great upgradeable laptops on the market, and we've collected them here to help you find the right one.