One of the benefits of self-hosting is that you don't have to rely on cloud subscriptions to back up your data or get locked into specific services. This has cost-saving benefits, but also keeps your data under your control. I currently back up my images and videos to an Immich server hosted on my NAS, along with saving daily backups of my desktop PC.

Video games are an entertainment medium that has been around for over 75 years at this point. Within that time, there have been game releases with an impact so great that they changed the way we see how games are played and received by players. They became staples of the time they were released, as well as representations of the best aspects or potential that the medium can achieve. While most big games end up becoming popular or beloved, not all of them can end up becoming legendary titles that remain relevant beyond their release years. Games like that change the industry in ways that we can't imagine until they finally arrive and become iconic games that we won't stop talking about.

Your GPU should be the main performance driver in your gaming PC. It's probably the component you spend the most on, and for good reason. It's the single biggest factor in your PC when it comes to gaming performance. However, it's not the only factor. Other components still have a massive influence on your frame rate, and if you ignore them, your GPU won't be able to run at its full potential.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the banks behind Zelle over claims that their payment platform enabled “massive amounts of fraud” that caused customers to lose more than $1 billion between 2017 and 2023. In the lawsuit, James alleges Zelle was rushed to market, resulting in a design that made the platform “an obvious conduit for fraudulent activity.”Early Warning Services (EWS), a company owned by major institutions including Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and others, launched Zelle in 2017 as a way to let customers send money from their bank account to other users on the platform. However, James claims EWS “knew from the beginning that key features of the Zelle network made it uniquely susceptible to fraud” and still “failed to adopt basic safeguards.”One of the alleged issues highlighted by James’ lawsuit includes a registration process that ”lacked important verification steps” that enabled scammers to sign up using misleading email addresses, which they could use to pose as a government employee or business to trick Zelle customers into sending them money that they couldn’t get back. Following government pressure, Zelle began paying back victims of imposter scams in 2023.Additionally, James claims EWS did not ensure that banks reported customer complaints about fraud in a “timely” manner and falsely advertised the service as a “safe” money transfer tool. “Even when EWS did receive reports of fraud, it failed to promptly remove the fraudsters from the Zelle network or require banks to reimburse consumers for certain scams,” James alleges.The lawsuit touches on many of the same points as the one initially filed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In March, the CFPB dropped its lawsuit against Zelle amid the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the agency and the firing of former head Rohit Chopra, who had taken an aggressive approach to tech regulation. That still hasn’t stopped scrutiny from federal lawmakers — and now, New York’s attorney general.Zelle spokesperson Eric Blankenbaker pushed back on these claims in a statement to The Verge, saying Zelle “leads the fight to stop fraud and scams” in the US. “This lawsuit is a political stunt to generate press, not progress,” Blankenbaker says. “The Attorney General wants to hand criminals a blueprint for guaranteed payouts with no consequences, opening the floodgates to more scams, not less. That’s bad policy and puts consumers at greater risk.”Attorney General James claims EWS violated New York law and is asking for restitution and damages for all New Yorkers harmed by scams on Zelle. “I look forward to getting justice for the New Yorkers who suffered because of Zelle’s security failures,” James said in the press release.

When Nintendo announced Drag x Drive, a Joy-Con mouse-controlled wheelchair sports game, for the Switch 2 I was tentatively excited. I have a lot of time for developers trying new things, and sports video games are hardly replete with disability representation. Having been hands-on with the game, however, Drag x Drive has left me baffled and in significant pain.As a "driver" - wheeled robots that come in three mostly indistinct flavors: guard, center, and forward - Drag x Drive has you play pickup games of three-on-three wheelchair basketball. You navigate the game by pushing and pulling your Joy-Cons across a surface in a motion vaguely s …Read the full story at The Verge.

NotebookLM is a fantastic research assistant from Google, designed to help you make sense of large amounts of specific information you feed it. This unique attribute helps reduce hallucinated information that you might find in results from other AIs, such as Google Gemini or ChatGPT. I prefer leveraging this to peruse support documentation and user manuals for the software I rely on, and trying it with AutoHotkey surprisingly helped me conquer previously challenging scenarios.

Microsoft PowerToys has an impressive suite of tools that can change how you use Windows 11, helping you enhance your productivity. It might not be the best overall for Windows users, but Microsoft is hard at work to improve the experience with new features and improvements. Continuing the tradition, the software giant has recently pushed a new update to PowerToys, adding a host of new features and improvements.

Leaked images reveal the Insta360 Go Ultra will once again be available in black or white color options. | Image: Roland Quandt It hasn’t been officially announced yet, but leaked pics and specs have revealed the new design and capabilities of Insta360’s next ultra-compact action camera. The most notable update, thanks to product shots shared by reliable leaker Roland Quandt, is a new square design for the camera, which has previously been pill-shaped. It will also supposedly be called the Insta360 Go Ultra, instead of the Insta360 Go 4 had the company stuck with its previous naming convention.According to the leaks, the Insta 360 Go Ultra measures a little over an inch on each side (30mm) with the lens located in the corner of the camera. It weighs 53 grams, which is quite a bit heavier than the 35.5 gram Go 3 and 26.5 gram Go 2, but the Go Ultra features a new 1/1.28-inch sensor and 4K/60fps video capabilities. That’s twice the framerate of the updated Go 3S that was introduced about a year ago.The camera will feature stabilization and a horizon lock feature, as well as an Active HDR mode that can capture more vivid videos when recording at 4K/30fps. The Go Ultra will also include a redesigned Action Pod dock that includes a flip-up screen for live previews and doubles as a wireless remote. It will also boost the Go Ultra’s runtime, but specific details about the new camera’s battery life aren’t known yet.As for a potential release date? Previous iterations of the Insta 360 Go have debuted in June and even earlier, but leaks haven’t yet revealed when the company plans to officially launch the latest version.

If you’ve enjoyed Elon Musk’s ongoing beef with Sam Altman and OpenAI, get ready for a whole new chapter: soon they’ll be rivals not just in AI, but in brain-computer interfaces too. The Financial Times reports that Altman and OpenAI are backing a new company called Merge Labs developing brain implants, making it a pretty direct rival to Musk’s Neuralink.This has clearly been an interest of Altman’s for a while though — he wrote about “the merge” between humans and machines on his personal blog back in 2017, and connects it pretty directly to his work at OpenAI:The merge can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot. But I think a merge is probably our best-case scenario.

It has been a good week for people who use Snapdragon X processors, and it's only Wednesday. Only yesterday did we catch wind that Epic Games was finally adding compatibility for Easy Anti-Cheat to Windows on Arm devices. The update allows people on Snapdragon X devices to play multiplayer games that use the technology, including the ever-popular Fortnite. Granted, the update requires the developers to actively download, install, and push the changes to their games, but the installation looks easy enough, so hopefully we'll see a lot more Windows on Arm-compatible games in the near future.

The Starlink Mini in Denmark. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge Starlink now charges $5 a month to pause its high-speed, low-latency internet service, a feature that used to be available for free. It affects Roam, Residential, and Priority subscribers in the US, most of Europe, and Canada with lots of exceptions. SpaceX hilariously calls it an upgrade, but I call it a bait and switch for anyone that bought a Starlink Mini with that "pay as you go" promise. The free pause feature has been replaced with a $5/month (or €5/month) Standby Mode that comes with "unlimited low-speed data" that's "perfect for backup connectivity and emergency use," according to the email sent to subscribers. Some early testin …Read the full story at The Verge.

Summer vacation has a bit of a habit of ending quickly, which ultimately means it’s time to (unfortunately) switch gears and start preparing for the upcoming school year. My fall semester starts in less than a month, and I already know how fast these last days can fly by. I also know just how quickly the semester itself will feel once it’s underway. Before I've even properly adjusted to my schedule, deadlines and assignments will start piling up.