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.

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.

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.

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.

As Microsoft begins to bring all of its apps under one roof, we're seeing the ones that get left outside get axed in favor of the newer, shinier apps. We're beginning to see the company introduce its best offerings under the Microsoft 365 Copilot banner, which has all the famous productivity apps and its infamous AI assistant rolled into one.

As Linux distros and desktop environments continue to march on, we're seeing developers take different stances on how they handle the X11 vs. Wayland problem. Some developers are keeping an X11 and a Wayland version of their software around to cater to both parties. Some are planning to get rid of X11 entirely, and others are going back to X11 with a potentially new and improved version of it.

When we first moved into this house, it was part of an ongoing development, and not every house was occupied (or even built). I wasted no time getting fiber-to-the-home installed and setting up a mesh kit with one node on each floor, thinking that would be perfectly adequate for our needs. And it was, mostly, until we started noticing odd glitches in wireless connectivity in parts of the house.

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.

The best tools in a developer’s arsenal aren’t always the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. In fact, some of the most transformative utilities I have used over the past year are open-source projects or generous free-forever tiers that many people overlook.

Whether you're assembling a new rig or upgrading your old powerhouse, 2025 delivered some compelling GPUs across the stack, for every use case and budget. The year brought a mix of solid entries from both NVIDIA and AMD. Amid the show of the Blackwell-powered muscle of Team Green to the value-driven RDNA 4 advancements from Team Red, we also witnessed a surprisingly robust response from Intel with its wild card entry into the market, as the chipmaker continues to win back its place in the GPU market.

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) debuted with Windows 10 as a simpler way to run Linux distributions without needing a third-party hypervisor. WSL 2 improved its numerous shortcomings and became an easy way to run and manage multiple Linux distros on Windows. I personally use it with an Ubuntu VM running Docker for a PaperlessNGX instance with a local LLM. WSL now supports GPU passthrough, so running the local LLM by powering it with my NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU isn’t an issue.

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.