In early December, Joshua Aaron, the developer behind the ICEBlock app - designed to let people alert others about the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents - filed a federal lawsuit alleging his First Amendment rights were violated. The Department of Justice had urged Apple to remove Aaron's app from its App Store, which the suit called unconstitutional. And Apple had complied - in the process, setting its own precedent for suppressing anti-ICE speech.The year 2025 has marked perhaps the biggest leap back for American free speech in generations. The Trump administration's war on immigrants and civil liberties has le …Read the full story at The Verge.

Before we saw the Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus, we had the Sega Channel. This was a service that lasted from 1994 to 1998, and let you download content and demos via cable TV signals. Sounds kind of lame right now, but trust me, a device downloading games off cable TV signals in the 90s was near-witchcraft. And, much like the modern-day gaming subscriptions we have today, Sega Channel had a rotating library of games that changed every month.

I've been on the fence about buying a 3D printer for a long time. I never fully bought into the popular idea that 3D printing is just an endless stream of solutions in search of problems, but I also wasn't convinced I’d get enough real value out of one to justify the space, cost, and learning curve. It felt interesting and the projects I've seen have been impressive, but it didn't necesarilly feel useful.

It is an interesting time for the handheld market. Analysts estimate the U.S. portable gaming console market is expected to reach $7.69 billion by 2032 at a compound annual growth rate of 8.75%, and the sales numbers speak for themselves. Valve's wild-card entry into the space, the Steam Deck, sold nearly 4 million units since its release, outselling all other handheld PC gaming consoles.

I have a love-hate relationship with the native Windows Photos app. It feels like an AI-powered oversimplification designed for a touch-first world that I don't live in. It also hides the file structure behind a clumsy timeline view and struggles to render high-resolution images without a noticeable stutter. For power users who manage thousands of assets, the native tool feels like a handicap. I can tolerate it if Photos is still bound to some obscure image format, and I open an image or two in a hurry. I've also found that Photos forces me to spin up a full-fledged editing suite like Photoshop for the simplest editing besides cropping and rotation.

The US Cyber Trust Mark Program, an Energy Star-style certification for smart home security, could be winding down less than a year after it launched. Safety testing company UL Solutions has announced that it is stepping down as the program's lead administrator, just a few months after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began investigating it over ties to China. The Cyber Trust Mark Program hasn't been officially shut down yet, but the loss of its lead administrator leaves it in limbo. It wouldn't be the first security program the FCC axed this year. In November, the FCC rolled back cybersecurity regulations for telecom companies …Read the full story at The Verge.

An f/1.2 aperture is a beautiful thing. Canon's new EOS R6 Mark III is an excellent camera. It's not a groundbreaking upgrade to the 3-year-old R6 Mark II, but it takes the same body with great ergonomics and adds more resolution, video that now goes up to 7K with open-gate filming, and improved autofocus performance. If you're in need of an impeccably good all-around camera for anything from wildlife photography to weddings and videography, you can't go wrong. It's an easy recommendation, especially if you already shoot Canon and are due for an upgrade. (But a used R6 Mark II is also very appealing if the higher $2,799.99 price is too lofty.)But the lens Canon launched alongsid …Read the full story at The Verge.

Cloud storage is the way most people will go if they're looking to get their hands on storage space that can be accessed from anywhere with nearly any device. However, over time, it becomes less affordable, especially if you're someone that's constantly adding to your collection.

The Gardyn Studio is that rare piece of tech that looks good inside my home. I can't grow anything. Multiple attempts to create a cottage garden, first in Idaho and now in South Carolina, have brought disappointment. Both are challenging climates, but where others have succeeded, I've been left with little more than a pile of cherry tomatoes for my vast efforts (those things are bulletproof). I'd all but given up on the idea of ever successfully growing my own food - I can't even keep those pots of herbs you buy at the grocery store alive for more than a week - until I met the Gardyn Studio 2.A smart indoor garden, the Gardyn Studio 2 is an automated growing platform that deploys AI to do what I failed to do: w …Read the full story at The Verge.

Lately, my digital life felt like a mess of half-finished to-do lists, buried browser bookmarks, and a dozen different apps that never quite talked to each other. I wanted to be organized, but the friction of switching between tools was more exhausting than the work itself. Everything changed when I finally went all-in with Notion.

When it comes to playing retro games, I like to take the middle ground between using the real deal and emulation. If I can, I prefer to use a physical game on an emulator on my PC. That way, I can use the collection that I've accrued over the years, but still take advantage of quality-of-life features that emulation brings, such as save states and retro achievements.

2025 was a pretty great year for Windows on Arm. If you're unsure as to what that means, Windows on Arm is a special branch that allows Microsoft's operating system to take advantage of a device that uses Arm's architecture. If you've purchased a Windows device lately and it came with a Snapdragon processor inside, that's Arm.