Hyundai’s latest Ioniq 5 model. Hyundai is now offering an “optional” security upgrade for the Ioniq 5 in the UK that prevents the car being stolen with a Game Boy-like device. Hyundai wants some Ioniq 5 owners to pay £49 ($65) to upgrade hardware and software components to prevent thieves using handheld devices to unlock and start cars without needing a key.Kia, Hyundai, and Genesis EVs have been under attack in the UK and elsewhere in recent years thanks to a sophisticated Game Boy-like handheld device that cracks the wireless protocols used by Hyundai Motor Group on vehicles like the Ioniq 5, original Kia EV6, and Genesis GV60.Hyundai is now offering a paid upgrade for Ioniq 5 owners in the UK, which it promises will address “evolving security threats” with improved software and hardware components for a “customer contribution of £49.” You can check to see if your Ioniq 5 needs this upgrade here, but there hasn’t been a similar bulletin for US vehicles yet.It’s not clear why Hyundai is asking customers to pay for the luxury of having their cars protected against a flaw in Hyundai’s own security mechanisms, particularly as the car maker offers a five-year warranty on its vehicles. We’ve reached out to Hyundai to comment on this security upgrade.Hyundai’s upgrades are designed to protect against a rise in thieves using a handheld device, which was reportedly designed by hackers in Europe to resemble a Game Boy. It’s been used for at least five years, and works on a variety of cars that use keyless entry systems.The Drive reported in 2020 that the device can intercept the signal emitted when you touch a car’s door handle, allowing it to crack the algorithm and send back a signal so the car thinks a legitimate key is present and unlocks the doors. The same manipulation technique then works to start the car and steal it, and it’s as easy as hitting a button instead of performing a relay attack to amplify the signal of the legitimate key.While these Game Boy-like devices cost around €20,000 in Europe, they’ve been widely used to steal a variety of Kia, Hyundai, Nissan, Gensis, and Mitsubishi cars in recent years. Hyundai’s Ioniq and Kia’s EV6 models were even among the most stolen cars in the UK in 2024, demonstrating just how vulnerable these cars are to this type of attack.Security researchers also found a flaw in Kia’s web portal last year that allowed attackers to unlock and start cars. It was part of a series of security flaws that have been reported to Hyundai Motor Group, the owners of Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis brands. Hyundai and Kia also agreed to a $200 million settlement in 2023 over the “Kia Boyz” attacks that allowed thieves to bypass a vehicle’s security system using a USB cable.

With Windows 10 falling out of support in mid-October, people have been preparing for the occasion. Some are planning to use Microsoft's extended support plans to get an extra year for their PC, while others will change operating systems. Some of the latter group will force Windows 11 on their computer, while others will use an alternative operating system, such as Linux.

Though I’ve been using NotebookLM since it was still an experimental Google Labs project, back when there was no guarantee it would ever launch widely, my usage was pretty limited at first. For the longest time, I only relied on NotebookLM for studying. It was the perfect revision companion and quickly became the only tool I depended on for learning new concepts, testing my knowledge before exams, and basically my secret to staying ahead without burning out.

I was six years old when Half-Life 2 came out, and no, that isn't when I played it. In fact, I didn't play Half-Life 2 until Episode 2 dropped in 2007, and for my 9-year-old self, it was a work of art through-and-through. 18 years later, it still is. I revisited the game last week, opting for the complete edition on Steam this time to get the full experience.

When most people think about NFC, they think of tapping their phone to pay for groceries or to pair a set of headphones. But in my smart home, NFC tags have become one of the simplest and most powerful ways to automate my daily routines, all without requiring expensive gear or utilizing voice commands.

On the face of things, self-hosting your own knowledge stack looks like a noble endeavor. You keep the digital sovereignty of your data, learn some new skills, and gain some measure of control over your digital life back from the companies that want to profit off it. And those are good, worthwhile reasons, because without pushback the too-big-to-fail tech companies are pushing their dystopian ideals onto the world. Our cloud storage quotas are only rented by the hour, and that means our archives, our data, our history are living on borrowed time.

As a lifelong PC enthusiast, I've dealt with high GPU temperatures way more often than I'd like, especially while gaming. In recent years, we've seen high-end GPUs drawing more than 400 watts, which generates a lot of heat and pushes triple-fan cooling solutions to their limits. Even at factory default settings, you'll see temperatures creep into the high 70s during extended sessions. I've experienced this with both my RTX 3090 and 4090, and living in a hot country certainly doesn't help.

AOL dial-up is ending on September 30th according to a statement posted on the company’s website. It marks the end of the service that was synonymous with the internet for many since its launch in 1991. “AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” reads the statement by the Yahoo-owned company. “This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.”You might be surprised that the service was still operating. I’m not. At last count, a 2019 US census estimated that 265,000 people in the United States were still using dial-up internet, just a few years after I wrote this:As a septuagenarian, my father’s story was typical of long-time AOL dial-up subscribers. His subscription was a security blanket. He was sure he didn’t need the dial-up component, but he didn’t want to risk losing access to his stock portfolio, investor forums, and email. His setup worked, and he could afford to keep paying the subscription he had dutifully paid for over a decade. With my help, we were able to migrate everything he used on AOL to the ad-supported and open internet that was already being delivered into his house via the broadband component of his cable package. Even after things were fully mirrored, he still felt trepidation when the time came to pick up the phone and terminate his dial-up account (despite AOL’s best attempt to obscure and complicate the procedure). Months later he told me he felt silly for letting the ruse go on for so long.Reading that now and I’m struck to think that the end of AOL dial-up arrives at the same time as Google Zero and the end of the ad-supported internet.

Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.“Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge. The Internet Archive’s mission is to keep a digital archive of websites on the internet and “other cultural artifacts,” and the Wayback Machine is a tool you can use to look at pages as they appeared on certain dates, but Reddit believes not all of its content should be archived that way.“Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Rathschmidt says. The limits will start “ramping up” today, and Reddit says it reached out to the Internet Archive “in advance” to “inform them of the limits before they go into effect,” according to Rathschmidt. He says Reddit has also “raised concerns” about the ability of people to scrape content from the Internet Archive in the past.Reddit has a recent history of cutting off access to scraper tools as AI companies have begun to use (and abuse) them en masse, but it’s willing to provide that data if companies pay. Last year, Reddit struck a deal with Google for both Google Search and AI training data early last year, and a few months later, it started blocking major search engines from crawling its data unless they pay. It also said its infamous API changes from 2023, which forced some third-party apps to shut down, leading to protests, were because those APIs were abused to train AI models. Reddit also struck an AI deal with OpenAI, but it sued Anthropic in June, claiming Anthropic was still scraping from Reddit even after Anthropic said it wasn’t scraping anymore.“We have a longstanding relationship with Reddit and continue to have ongoing discussions about this matter,” Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, says in a statement to The Verge.Update, August 11th: Added statement from the Wayback Machine.

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck will serve as an advisor at Meta to address “ideological and political bias” within the company’s AI chatbot, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The move comes as part of a settlement Meta reached with Starbuck, who filed a lawsuit claiming Meta AI wrongly stated he was involved in the January 6th Capitol riot.Starbuck has waged public pressure campaigns against companies that have diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, with companies like Tractor Supply, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson dropping their DEI efforts as a result. According to a lawsuit filed in April, Starbuck claims he discovered Meta AI’s false output after a Harley-Davidson dealer published a screenshot from Meta’s AI chatbot linking Starbuck to the Capitol riot and QAnon. Now, following President Donald Trump’s executive order to make AI less “woke,” Starbuck will advise Meta on bias. “Since engaging on these important issues with Robby, Meta has made tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias,” Meta and Starbuck said in a statement to the WSJ.During an interview with CNBC, Starbuck declined to say whether Meta paid him to resolve the lawsuit. “I’m one person, but this could cause a lot of problems across the entire industry when it comes to elections and political bias, and we wanted to be leaders in solving this problem,” Starbuck said during the interview. Earlier this year, Meta paid $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump over the suspensions of his accounts.Other people have attempted to file lawsuits alleging AI chatbot defamation. Conservative radio host Mark Walters filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in 2023, alleging that ChatGPT falsely stated that Walters was accused of embellishing funds from a non-profit organization. A judge granted summary judgment in favor of OpenAI and dismissed the defamation claim in May.

For Matter, this year was never going to be about flashy new features. Other than support for security cameras, which I hear should finally arrive this fall, 2025 is all about fixing problems. And with Matter 1.4.2, announced today, the smart home standard is taking an encouraging step forward.Back in January, Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (the organization that runs Matter), said this year was all about "focusing on fixing these reliability and performance issues." Now, over halfway through 2025, the CSA is finally looking to make good on that promise, and showing signs that it's prepared to pu …Read the full story at The Verge.

People really love their cozy games. Whenever a promising new title comes around, people are queuing up around the digital block, waiting for its release. Well, it seems that one game in particular has really resonated with the community; it only just released on August 7th and has already received over 700 reviews, with a 95% positive rating.