DC wants Superman and other characters under the stewardship of human artists. DC Comics president and publisher Jim Lee said that the company “will not support AI-generated storytelling or artwork,” assuring fans that its future will remain rooted in human creativity. “Not now, not ever, as long as [SVP, general manager] Anne DePies and I are in charge,” Lee said during his panel at New York Comic Con on Wednesday, likening concerns around AI dominating future creative industries to the Millennium bug scare and NFT hype.“People have an instinctive reaction to what feels authentic. We recoil from what feels fake. That’s why human creativity matters,” said Lee. “AI doesn’t dream. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t make art. It aggregates it.”While DC has a longstanding policy that requires all artwork to be original and authentically produced by artists, the company has faced several scandals over the suspected use of generative AI in variant comic book covers. Backlash from people who oppose the technology over concerns that it will replace the work of writers and artists pressured DC to replace the suspected covers, and likely contributed to the company taking a firmer stance against using generative AI in future projects.“Anyone can draw a cape. Anyone can write a hero. That’s been around as long as comics have been. It’s called fanfiction, and there’s nothing wrong with fanfiction,” said Lee. “But Superman only feels right when he’s in the DC universe. Our universe, our mythos. That’s what endures. That’s what will carry us into the next century.”

There has never been a better time to start self-hosting. We're storing more and more in the cloud, relying on third parties to keep our data safe and ensure it's always available. This works well for streaming services and similar platforms, but for sensitive information and other tasks, it's becoming more apparent that self-hosting is the way forward for many, myself included. Managing your own servers, software, and data is becoming more mainstream, having previously been viewed as niche and for enthusiasts only.

The 512GB card is on sale for $88.47 ($31 off) If you’re a Nintendo Switch 2 owner who mostly buys digital games as opposed to cartridges (like me!), its 256GB of internal storage will run out quickly. Buying a microSD Express card gives you more storage, though at a higher cost than most people likely want to pay. However, Lexar’s 512GB and 1TB microSD Express cards are currently selling at the lowest prices we’ve seen yet.The 512GB model is $88.47 ($31 off) at Amazon, or double the extra storage to 1TB for $157.96 ($62 off), also at Amazon. That’s only a little more expensive than a comparable cards from Onn, Walmart’s house brand, but those are frequently out of stock (including at the time of publishing). In general, these are the best prices we’ve seen yet on this pricey storage.Lexar microSD Express cardWhere to Buy: $119.99 $88.47 at Amazon (512GB) $219.99 $157.96 at Amazon (1TB)The number of games you can install to a microSD Express card depends on the size of the card you buy, of course, as well as on the games in your library. For example, Donkey Kong Bananza requires just 8.9GB, while Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition eats up 60.6GB. Regardless, having extra space for digital games will likely be necessary at some point, even if it’s not right now.Here’s another reason why you should consider buying one, especially while they’re cheaper: several publishers are opting for Nintendo’s Switch 2 Game-Key cards, which look like cartridges, but are effectively keys that unlock a download and authenticate your system to play it. So, even if you’re buying a physical cartridge of a new game, you may need to rely on the extra storage space afforded by a microSD Express card to let you play it.

Belkin’s PowerGrip improves your smartphone’s ergonomics while you’re taking photos. | Image: Belkin First announced at CES 2025, Belkin’s Stage PowerGrip is finally available for $79.99. You can find power banks with wireless charging and more than 9,300mAh capacity for less than that, but Belkin has packed a lot of extra functionality into its latest that could justify the price if you’re a smartphone photographer.The imaging capabilities of many smartphones may now rival dedicated cameras, but their ergonomics do not. Belkin’s PowerGrip solves that with a DSLR-style grip on one end giving you a secure way to hold your smartphone while taking pictures, even with your phone in portrait mode. The PowerGrip also has its own shutter button, positioned on the top edge of the grip so it sits beneath your finger, that snaps images using a Bluetooth connection to your phone.Apple sells a similar accessory through its website called the ShiftCam SnapGrip Pro for $90 but its battery is limited to 5,000mAh and it can only charge two devices simultaneously. Belkin’s PowerGrip is more capacious and can charge up to three using its magnetic Qi charger, a USB-C port, and a built-in retractable 30-inch USB-C cable. It also has a small LCD display on the front showing its remaining battery capacity and a screw mount on the bottom of the grip for attaching it to a tripod.

After a bunch of very cryptic teasers, Apple has finally revealed a proper look at Pluribus, it’s next big sci-fi series. The show comes from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, and stars Rhea Seehorn as Carol, “the most miserable person on Earth” who “must save the world from happiness.”The brief teaser trailer shows Carol seemingly being catered to by the rest of the world’s population, who have indeed been inflicted with the scourge of happiness. It’s not clear why Carol isn’t being impacted by whatever has changed the world, but everyone seems intent on fixing it so that she can “join” them. Carol, naturally, is very confused — and upset. It’s all very unsettling, but it seems like the show will balance things out with dark humor.Pluribus starts streaming on November 7th, and will be Gilligan’s first series since Better Call Saul wrapped up in 2022. It also caps off another solid year of science fiction on Apple TV Plus. Things started strong with the return of Severance at the beginning of the year, and continued with more seasons of Foundation and Invastion, alongside new additions like Murderbot.

YouTube is now giving some creators, including those who were banned for spreading covid and election misinformation, a chance to make a new channel, according to a blog post. Under political pressure, the company had said last month that it was going to set up this pilot program for “a subset of creators” and “channels terminated for policies that have been deprecated.” YouTube said in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), whose congressional commission issued multiple subpoenas to the company, that the opportunity would be available to creators banned for “repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”In 2020, YouTube announced that it would remove videos with covid vaccine misinformation and later expanded its policies to ban vaccine misinformation. After the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, YouTube also said it would give a strike to channels spreading 2020 election misinformation and suspended President Trump from making new uploads. But the company lifted the restrictions on Trump’s account and dropped some of its covid misinformation policies in 2023, and it recently loosened its content moderation policies more broadly to “reflect the new types of discussion and content” it sees on the platform.“YouTube continues to enable a diversity of perspectives and believes creators should be able to openly debate political ideas on the platform,” the company said in its letter to Rep. Jordan.Last month, YouTube also said it would pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump in 2021 over the ban. $22 million of the settlement is set to be used to help build a new White House ballroom. Its parent company, Alphabet, had lawyers in court earlier this month defending its Google ad-tech monopoly against Trump’s Department of Justice.The new pilot program kicks off today and will roll out to “eligible creators” over the “next several weeks,” YouTube says. “We’ll consider several factors when evaluating requests for new channels, like whether the creator committed particularly severe or persistent violations of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, or whether the creator’s on- or off-platform activity harmed or may continue to harm the YouTube community.”The pilot won’t be available if you were banned for copyright infringement or for violating YouTube’s Creator Responsibility policies, the company says. If you deleted your YouTube channel or Google account, you won’t be able to request a new channel “at this time.” And YouTube notes that if your channel has been banned, you won’t be eligible to apply for a new one until one year after it was terminated. “We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance — YouTube has evolved and changed over the past 20 years, and we’ve had our share of second chances to get things right with our community too,” YouTube says. “Our goal is to roll this out to creators who are eligible to apply over the coming months, and we appreciate the patience as we ramp up, carefully review requests, and learn as we go.”

Windows Updates have done more for my PCs over the years than anything else. They’ve arrived in waves of helpful, important, and often necessary changes and OS features for decades. But sometimes they also make me want to donate my computer to the nearest hungry, hungry hydraulic press to be crushed into a billion pieces.

This isn’t the thinnest foldable phone around, but it is thin enough. Google's third foldable features plenty of improvements from its second, from a world-first IP68 rating to magnetic Qi2 charging, brighter displays, and a bigger battery. But one area it hasn't improved is the size and shape - in fact, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is a gram heavier and a fraction of a millimeter thicker than last year's 9 Pro Fold. In fairness, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold was noteworthy for how thin and light it felt by foldable standards. But the industry moves fast, leaving its successor one of the thicker new folding phones on the market.Over the last year, Oppo, Honor, and - most importantly - Samsung have all traded blows in purs …Read the full story at The Verge.

PCIe bifurcation has firmly planted itself as a necessary technology in consumer PC hardware. At its simplest, it’s just the process of dividing the lanes from a single PCIe slot into multiple smaller groups. For instance, you can take a full x16 slot and split it into four x4 slots, allowing for multiple devices to share that same set of lanes.

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) was one of a handful of Republicans to speak out against the “mafioso”-like comments Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr issued ahead of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension last month. Now, he’s hoping the liberal outrage over government censorship will fuel bipartisan support for a new bill letting Americans sue over speech violations. Cruz plans to introduce the bill in the coming weeks, he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. The bill would introduce new procedures for cases where people believe they’ve been censored by the government, making it easier for them to sue for monetary damages. It would include exceptions for government investigations, and carve out unprotected speech like nonconsensual intimate imagery. Cruz plans to host a series of hearings focused on government censorship that will include Carr, he told the Journal.“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it”Carr made his statements on a podcast after Kimmel included a joke about Charlie Kirk’s killer in a late-night monologue, telling TV networks that they could take “the easy way or the hard way” — the latter involving FCC action —  to get Kimmel off the air. (His show was pulled and then reinstated by Disney.)  Cruz criticized the FCC chair’s comments as “right out of Goodfellas.” Even if Cruz was sympathetic to the desire to see Kimmel off the air, he warned, “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”Cruz had been working on the upcoming bill even before Kirk’s death, according to the Journal, but after hearing support from Democratic colleagues for speaking out against Carr, he sees an opportunity to find common ground. “Perhaps that poses an opportunity for us to work together in a bipartisan way,” Cruz told the Journal. Still, some of Cruz’s targets are likely to make Democrats bristle and raise questions about how the law might be used. Late last month, he released a report accusing the Biden administration of turning the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “into an agent of censorship pressuring Big Tech to police speech.” On Wednesday, the Commerce Committee hosted an event where Cruz claimed the Biden administration had pressured social media platforms to deplatform witnesses for skepticism around COVID and mail-in voting.The Supreme Court last year reversed a lower court decision that found the Biden administration had unconstitutionally coerced platforms to remove such content, writing that there was not “any concrete link” between the Biden administration’s communication with tech platforms and the companies’ own decisions.There’s no love lost between Cruz and Kimmel, despite his supportive comments about the comedian’s suspension. While the senator told the Journal he’d be open to going on Kimmel’s show to discuss the forthcoming bill, he added that the late night host isn’t funny, and gloated that before Kimmel’s suspension, “my podcast was kicking Kimmel’s ass every week.”

For many years, TeamViewer was the undisputed king of remote access – a simple, quick solution to help a client or family member across the globe. However, the times have changed, and the tool we once trusted for quick fixes has become a liability. There is no shortage of rivals that offer better features, transparency, and more predictable pricing.

There’s still no telling when George R. R. Martin will turn in The Winds of Winter, and it’s not clear when House of the Dragon will be back for its penultimate season. But HBO has finally released a trailer and revealed the premiere date for its newest Game of Thrones spinoff series.Today at this year’s New York Comic-Con, HBO announced that A Knight of Seven Kingdoms’ six-episode-long first season will begin airing on January 18th, 2026. Based on Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas set decades before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire, A Knight of Seven Kingdoms chronicles the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and prince Aegon Targaryen (Dexter Sol Ansell). In the newly released trailer, no one really respects Ser Duncan — a lowly hedge knight who is eager to prove his worth and become a well-known figure across the kingdoms. But Aegon sees the large man as a potential ally who could help him travel to Ashford in the distant Reach. The two make an unusual pair in a land filled with far more formidable-seeming knight / squire duos. But the trailer teases some of how Dunk and Egg are destined to become players in some of the most important events in Westeros’ history.The trailer makes A Knight of Seven Kingdoms seem a bit more lighthearted than HBO’s last Game of Thrones spin-off. But like House of the Dragon, the new show looks like it will have no shortage of battles and fire-breathing monsters, which will hopefully make it an exciting watch when the show debuts next year.