Instagram boss Adam Mosseri is closing out 2025 with a 20-images-deep dive into what a new era of "infinite synthetic content" means as it all becomes harder and harder to distinguish from reality, and the old, more personal Instagram feed that he says has been "dead" for years. Last year, The Verge's Sarah Jeong wrote that "…the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it's faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do," and Mosseri eventually concurs:For most of my life I could safely assume photographs or videos were largely accurate captures of moments that happened. This is clearly …Read the full story at The Verge.

Wireless technology has enabled us to progress considerably within the tech space. We have powerful smartphones, laptops, and a whole manner of hardware that allows for the creation of the smart home. Although we've moved through a few standard generations now, we're still encountering issues relating to wireless communications when used with smart home devices. Most homes will have access to an ISP-provided router, the small box that comes with your broadband connection, which is tasked with handling all traffic sent through available channels.

We've seen DIY tinkerers make their own portable hardware plenty of times before. If you need some inspiration, just check out any cyberdeck, or that one time someone turned an Apple M4 Mac Mini into a portable computer. People just love making hardware that you can carry around with you.

Nothing lasts forever, so you can't really expect your PC to stay relevant beyond its realistic lifespan. PC components can become outdated due to performance leaps, new features, and efficiency improvements, among other things. That said, some components can age worse than others, and I don't mean, say, a CPU vs. a GPU. When you're buying parts for your build, you always have the choice to cheap out on some components or invest in quality, capacity, and performance in each department. The latter can drive up your budget, but it's almost always the smarter decision in the long run. Here are 6 components that you should ideally avoid when building a PC.

A new year is about to start, so the XDA team has been reflecting on the games that we’re looking forward to most next year. The big one, obviously, is Grand Theft Auto VI. Pushed out of 2025 and even further back into 2026 through two separate delays, we’re still eagerly awaiting what Rockstar Games has in store for us next and if it’ll live up to the lofty expectations already hoisted upon it.

It's hard to move away from something when you've gotten comfortable using it. But if it's for your health, the argument becomes a little easier, although it's still going to take a lot of convincing with something like a mouse.

I self-host a lot of apps with the only goal in my mind: better productivity. My productivity stack is packed with Docker containers for everything from smart home automation to deep-work productivity. But I’ve learned the hard way that "owning your data" doesn’t mean much if the tools are too clunky to use daily.

As a techie, I’ve been self-hosting my tools for a while now, mostly because I like owning my data and keeping my setup simple. The more I write, the more I’ve also realized how much I prefer markdown over heavy editors and complex file formats. It keeps my writing portable, future-proof, and easy to work with anywhere.

NotebookLM is one of the most powerful tools available to us today, but it boasts a major, glaring downside: you're completely locked in to Google, and all of your data is available for review. Even though privacy is implied, it's not guaranteed. Also, Google doesn't exactly have the best track record of maintaining projects in the long-term (remember Stadia?) For writers with multi-year-long novel projects, that's not acceptable.

You know that feeling you get where you're in a noisy environment for so long, you get used to it? Then you moved somewhere quiet, and you realise just how much noise you've been surrounded by over the past few minutes? That's how I felt when I moved from Windows to Linux a few months ago; once I had an OS that didn't pester me every so often, I realisedjust how spoiled I was using Linux.

When it comes to smart home control, having a dedicated display where you can control all aspects of the devices you have isn't just convenient, it's practically required once you amass enough of them. For awhile, the go-to recommendation for many has been a purpose-built smart display; devices like the Echo Show or Nest Hub are designed and marketed as the ideal control surface. They're always-on, voice-enabled displays that, on paper, make sense.

Have you ever tried downloading Google Chrome on a new Windows machine? If you have, you'll be very familiar with all the prompts Microsoft throws at you to stop you. From a little banner ad for Edge after searching for 'Chrome' using Bing to pop-ups appearing as you navigate the 'Download Google Chrome' page, Microsoft wants to make it very clear that it has a browser, and it'd really prefer it if you used it over Chrome.