SSDs are fast, but not always. If you've ever run into performance issues with your drive, you've probably considered solutions like freeing up space, ensuring it's not overheating, or even just replacing it if you thought it was at the point of no return. But there's one fix for SSD performance issues that deserves more attention: the humble SSD firmware.

Last year’s Galaxy S25 Ultra. | Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge Samsung has released a new advertisement for its upcoming Galaxy S26 launch that all-but confirms rumors of a new display with a built-in privacy mode. Leaked videos show that the feature could be capable of entirely blacking out content from specific apps or parts of the display when viewed at an angle.The new advert shows a woman reading a racy romance novel on a subway, while curious passengers look over her shoulder. An overlay shows a quick flick of a "Zero-peeking privacy" toggle, which blacks out the titillating content for the nosy onlookers. That might sound similar to existing privacy filters, which have been available as after …Read the full story at The Verge.

Hollywood groups have spoken out against Seedance 2.0 since generated videos like fight scenes between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt went viral. | Image by Dave Benett / WireImage via Getty TikTok creator ByteDance says that it is working to improve safeguards on its new AI video generator after Disney, Paramount, and Hollywood trade groups accused the tool of violating copyright protections. Concerns were raised after hyperrealistic videos generated by the Seedance 2.0 model went viral last week, with the likeness of actors, such as Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and characters from Dragon Ball Z, Family Guy, and Pokémon."ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0," a ByteDance spokesperson said in a statement shared by CNBC. "We are taking steps to strengthen current saf …Read the full story at The Verge.

Two hours before one of the most important live events in Netflix's history, LA's sprawling CBS Radford Studio Center is abuzz with the strangest combination of things. As I walk through one cavernous soundstage on a Tuesday afternoon, I hear multiple people warming up their voices to sing. I pass a man carefully waving a hair dryer in front of a piano. Outside, a man and a woman, both in scant black leather, walk past with a wave. I'm told they're aerialists. Somewhere in this enormous rehearsal space, there's also a 74-year-old budding standup comedian, an 11-year-old gospel singer, and a dancing border collie.Such is the wondrous, bizar …Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple is upgrading its Podcasts app to let users "seamlessly" swap between audio and video podcasts using its HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) technology. While listening to a show, users will be able to switch to a horizontal video version of the podcast and download the video versions of a podcast for offline viewing.By giving users the option to quickly change between audio and video, Apple might be able to keep users from jumping to other platforms to watch episodes of their favorite shows. Video is becoming an increasingly popular way to consume podcasts, with YouTube saying last February that more than 1 billion people watch podcasts on the …Read the full story at The Verge.

Buying a brand new DDR5-8000 kit could set you back hundreds of dollars thanks to the recent RAM crisis. Let's say you purchase and install one of these, and then enable the profile in the BIOS, save, and then suddenly your PC won't post or, worse, it boots but crashes the moment you open a Chrome tab.

iPhone 17 Pro Apple is starting to test end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages with the developer beta of iOS 26.4 released Monday. Apple announced plans last year to support the feature, and once fully available, it will let iPhone and Android users send encrypted RCS messages to each other across platforms.However, with this initial implementation, Apple is only testing RCS encryption between Apple devices. It's "not yet testable with other platforms," Apple says. The company also doesn't plan to ship E2EE RCS messages with iOS 26.4; the feature will actually ship publicly in a "future update," Apple says.RCS messages significantly improve the exp …Read the full story at The Verge.

The hype surrounding the 2026 Steam Machine revival is nothing if not palpable at the moment. Valve seems to have finally perfected the "console-like" PC experience, offering a sleek, living-room-ready box that promises to bridge the gap between the desk and the couch. Right now, things are a bit iffy, though, what with the future of the Steam Machine itself being unclear, along with its pricing and software capabilities. That's thanks to the ongoing AI boom and the RAM crisis, which have proven to be a bane for PC hardware enthusiasts in 2026.

I've spent the better part of a decade building out an ebook library. Be it the hundreds of books I've bought, the many I've hoarded as part of free giveaways, and, of course, various Humble Bundles. My library is a sprawling mess of ePubs, PDFs, Mobi files, and a few esoteric files for good measure.

Over the years, you've probably busted a few of your long-held beliefs about computers, smartphones, and the internet. Google Chrome's incognito mode and safely ejecting a USB drive come to mind. These tech myths tend to persist long after they've been conclusively debunked. Word of mouth and the internet keep them alive far longer than you'd think. In this article, I'd like to talk about some more persistent tech myths that refuse to die even in 2026. I've tried to include some newer myths to keep things fresh, covering mesh networks, USB-C cables, and Linux gaming. Of course, there are still some classics on the list regarding smartphones, 5G internet, and PC gaming, so there's a good chance you'll find a myth you still believe.

For years, I treated the terminal as a necessary evil. Powerful, but often confusing, noisy, and harder than it needed to be. Most of the time, I was just trying to extract information from a wall of text. Then I discovered Nushell, and it completely changed how I think about command-line work. Instead of dumping raw text, Nushell shows data in clean tables, almost like a spreadsheet inside the terminal. The first time I used it, things just clicked. I wasn’t fighting commands anymore; I was asking clear questions and getting clear answers. Here's why this shift mattered to me, and why Nushell now feels like the terminal I didn’t know I was missing.

When I first started using Obsidian, it felt intimidating. Creating a note wasn’t as easy as it was in other apps. But little by little, I started putting together my setup and adding community plugins that gave me the look and features I needed to structure my notes the way I wanted.