This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the action (and inaction) of lawmakers seeking to rein in tech platforms, follow Lauren Feiner. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.How it startedIn the offline world, age verification is often as simple as flashing a cashier your driver's license to buy a pack of beer, or an adult magazine (for whoever still does this kind of thing). Advocates for stronger barriers preventing children from accessing online porn have long argued for an equivalent on the internet: online age veri …Read the full story at The Verge.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is in line to potentially earn $35 billion in stock options, so long as the company hits a $100 billion market cap. One way to hit that target is by cutting costs, and one way of cutting costs is to close down a bunch of stores. The company closed 590 stores in fiscal year 2024, and said in a recent SEC filing that it anticipates "closing a significant number of additional stores in fiscal 2025." With the fiscal year set to end on January 31st, it appears the race is on, and according to a blog tracking closures, GameStop is planning on shuttering (or already has) over 430 stores this month.As of Sunday, January 11t …Read the full story at The Verge.

When people spec out a motherboard, they look at its PCIe generation numbers, VRMs, chipset lanes, and connectivity. What almost nobody pays attention to, however, is PCIe bifurcation, despite it being one of the most transformative features the platform can support.

Wing is bringing drone delivery to even more Walmart stores in 2026. The Alphabet-owned company announced today that its drones will be flying above 150 more locations this year, including in four new cities: Los Angeles, St. Louis, Miami, and Cincinnati. In June 2025, the companies said they would expand their delivery partnership to 100 additional stores in Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. So far, they've launched at several stores in Atlanta, in addition to Walmart locations in Dallas-Forth Worth and Arkansas. They currently operate at approximately 27 stores, and with today's announcement, the goal is to eventually esta …Read the full story at The Verge.

If you're one of the many, many people who received a password reset email from Instagram the other day, the company says it fixed the issue. What was the issue? Unclear. We reached out to Meta for clarification and have yet to receive a response. All we know is that an "external party" triggered the emails, and Instagram says you can safely ignore them. The company posted on X that the issue had been fixed and also claimed there was no breach of its systems. This seemingly contradicts reports from Malwarebytes, which said that information on 17.5 million Instagram accounts, including usernames, physical addresses, phone numbers, and email …Read the full story at The Verge.

This week, Google announced a new AI Inbox view for Gmail that replaces the traditional list of emails with an AI-generated list of to-dos and topics to track based on what's in your inbox. It's not widely available yet, but I have access, and in the few hours I've spent messing around with it, I can see how AI Inbox could be a helpful or even transformational way to manage your inbox. But right now, it's not going to change the way I manage my email, and I'm not sure it ever will.Before I dig in, I should note a few things upfront. AI Inbox is a very early product that's currently only available to "trusted testers." It's unlikely that yo …Read the full story at The Verge.

For a while, it seemed like everyone had a TiVo. It was a plot point on major TV shows; it had A-list Hollywood fans; it became a verb as ubiquitous as Google or Xerox. The love was well-earned, since TiVo had created a product that felt genuinely like magic. You could pause live TV. And rewind it. And even set shows to record for later, knowing they'd be there whenever you needed them.There's a reason you almost certainly don't have a TiVo now, though. The company quickly became a victim of its own success, and never managed to turn its game-changing concept into a big business or a truly lasting hit product. Meanwhile, the changes it hel …Read the full story at The Verge.

Not every phone needs to be a black rectangle. It's January, which means there's a whole year of rectangular glass slabs ahead of us. But before that happens, I managed to find phones of a different shape lurking around the corners of the CES convention center halls. They weren't center stage, of course. That was reserved for robots doing laundry badly. But in the margins at tech's biggest show, I saw some glimmers of hope that the future of phones might not look as same-y as it has for the past half decade - at least, if you know where to look.A phone for your phoneClicks, the company known for its keyboard cases, didn't just launch a combination MagSafe power bank and slide-out key …Read the full story at The Verge.

So, Apple has this feature called Handoff. The idea is that, if you're on your phone using an app, and you transition over to a macOS computer, the operating system will register that you've made the swap and ask you if you want to continue using your phone app on your computer. So, if you're browsing something on Safari on your phone, you can use Handoff to transfer it over to your macOS and keep going.

Before I dove headfirst into the self-hosting rabbit hole, PDF manipulation tools were the bane of my existence. Between their never-ending barrage of ads, limitations on file size, annoying watermarks, and paywalled features, I’d lose my patience whenever I had to edit PDF documents for my uni projects, and I say this as someone who has used both cloud platforms and freemium offline tools. So, you can imagine how amazed I was when I came across Stirling-PDF, a utility that runs locally and lets me edit every single aspect of my PDFs without the privacy-intrusive shenanigans of typical apps.

As a long-time Windows user, the one thing I detest the most is performance booster apps. They are branded as a one-click, magical fix for all PC-related performance problems, but the reality is quite different. These tools, instead of identifying performance bottlenecks on your system, apply generic fixes that are often detrimental to the PC's stability, health, and lifespan. Since every computer is different, whether it's the hardware or software configuration, the same steps, as expected, don't work across systems.

Remote management in a home lab typically starts with simple tools such as SSH, web dashboards, and occasional Remote Desktop sessions. That combination works until a box freezes so completely that nothing on the network can talk to it anymore. When that happened to me, I found myself digging out a spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse, then crawling behind furniture just to see a boot error. The rest of my setup felt modern and flexible, yet basic troubleshooting still required moving cables around the room.