As Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out raids across the country, the agency is working rapidly to expand an online surveillance system that could potentially track millions of users on the web. Federal records uncovered by The Lever reveal that ICE is paying $5.7 million to use an AI-powered social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs, something Will Owen, the communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), calls an "assault" on democracy and free speech. The "real-time intelligence" platform is capable of ingesting and analyzing vast amounts of publicly available data, like social media …Read the full story at The Verge.

You can grab a four-pack of AirTags for just $64.99 right now. Apple’s AirTags have become one of my essentials while traveling, namely because they let me check whether my luggage is in the right place instead of panicking at the baggage claim. And right now, you can get a four-pack of AirTags at Amazon and Walmart for $64.99 ($35 off), which is just a few cents short of the bundle’s all-time low.The sleek Bluetooth trackers let you check their location using Apple’s Find My app. If the item is out of Bluetooth range, you can flag the AirTag as lost, and you’ll receive an update on its location whenever it’s near an iPhone or iPad. You can also share the location of an AirTag with up to five other people or select airlines if your bag doesn’t arrive at the terminal or you need someone to grab it ASAP.If you have an iPhone 15 or newer model, you can also leverage ultra wideband tech to enable “precision finding,” which will show you the distance and direction to your AirTag. What’s more, each location tracker uses replaceable batteries and carries an IP67 rating, meaning it can withstand immersion in up to a meter of water for half an hour.Read our original AirTag review.Apple AirTagsWhere to Buy: $99 $64.99 at Amazon (four-pack) $99 $64.99 at Walmart (four-pack)There’s no shortage of great gaming laptops out there, but it’s hard to argue against the value of Lenovo’s Legion 5 — especially given it’s currently on sale for $1,049 ($501 off) at Walmart, which is about $100 short of its recent Prime Day low. The Legion 5 features a 15.1-inch 2,560 x 1,600 OLED screen with a 165Hz refresh rate, an AMD Ryzen 7 260 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU. That’s a lot of power for a gaming laptop in this price range, and you can upgrade its storage (up to 2TB) and RAM (up to 32GB) yourself to improve its performance down the line.If you want a more capable machine out of the box, you can also pick up the step-up configuration with 1TB of storage and an Intel Core i7 14700HX processor for $1,199 ($300 off) at Walmart. Both models are equipped with a backlit RGB keyboard, three USB-A ports, two USB-C ports, an HDMI port, an ethernet port, and a power adapter port.Lenovo Legion 5 gaming laptopWhere to Buy: $1549.99 $1049 at Walmart (AMD model) $1499.99 $1199 at Walmart (Intel model)If you want to cut the cord (and binge-watch your favorite shows and movies), Hulu is offering a three-month subscription to Hulu with Live TV for $64.99 ($25 off) through November 5th at 6PM ET. The ongoing promo is limited to new and former subscribers, though, specifically those who haven’t had an active subscription in more than a month.Hulu with Live TV lets you stream more than 95 channels, including Comedy Central, VH1, and Adult Swim. A subscription also provides access to Hulu and Disney Plus (with ads), along with both ESPN Select and ESPN Unlimited. The trio of streaming services lets you watch live sports and download new shows and movies, including Andor, Abbot Elementary, The Lowdown, Alien Earth, Stay, and Tempest. Just keep in mind that your subscription will automatically renew at the then-current price after three months, unless you cancel it beforehand.Hulu with Live TVHulu (with Live TV) lets you stream over 90 channels with unlimited DVR. The subscription also comes with (ad-supported) Disney Plus and Hulu subscriptions, plus ESPN Select and Unlimited.Where to Buy: $89.99 $64.99 at Hulu (per month)More standouts from this weekSummer might be over, but you can still grab JBL’s Charge 6 at Walmart starting at $153.99 ($46 off). The waterproof Bluetooth speaker features an upgraded woofer, up to 28 hours of continuous playback, and an IP68 rating, meaning it can withstand immersion in more than three feet of water for over 30 minutes. The Charge 6 also supports JBL’s AI Sound Boost feature — which analyzes your audio to avoid distortion at higher volumes — as well as lossless audio from streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify (finally), so long as you connect using a USB-C cable.CMF’s Buds 2A were already a solid pair of budget earbuds, but they’re even more so today, now that they’re on sale at Amazon for Prime members for a mere $29 ($20 off). The inexpensive in-ears feature noise cancellation, a sweat-proof IP54 rating, and multipoint Bluetooth support, not to mention up to five hours of playback with ANC enabled or eight hours with it off. You can also tweak their sound, adjust ANC levels, and locate them via Nothing’s app, which is a welcome surprise for a pair of $30 earbuds.If you want to beef up your home security system, Ring’s Battery Doorbell Plus is down to a new low of $79.99 ($70 off) at Amazon and Best Buy. Our favorite battery-powered buzzer can record sharp 1536p video, capture an entire person from top to bottom, and features removable batteries for easy charging. It also lasts about two months on a single charge with HDR and snapshot capture enabled, and with a Ring Home subscription ($4.99 a month / $49.99 a year), can provide up to 180 days of history.

The idea of owning a 3D printer is exciting. The thought of bringing your ideas to life, layer by layer, has powerful appeal, especially when you see what others have made. But while 3D printing can be incredibly rewarding, it’s not the effortless process that product pages might make it seem. Before you buy your first printer, it’s essential to know precisely what you are committing to.

It took me a while to get into Ball x Pit. The new roguelike blends elements from games like Breakout, Vampire Survivors, and even city builders, creating a complex mix of ideas. But as is the case with many roguelikes, once I figured everything out well enough to get a taste of my first win, delving back into the pit for another round was all I could think about.Ball x Pit barely has a story - it's more like a setup. The initial moments of the game show a multi-tiered Gondor-like city called "Ballbylon" being struck by a giant, glowing rock (ball?), and all that remains is a giant pit that "treasure seekers" aim to explore. Then, you're d …Read the full story at The Verge.

MSI’s flagship is indeed titanic in stature, and certainly price. It's easy to get into the weeds on a hobby, especially if you're into PC gaming and dreaming of the highest levels of graphical performance. But how much is too much for hardware? Spending top dollar on graphics power, processing, RAM, storage, etc. - like many things - eventually leads to diminishing returns. When it comes to gaming laptops, MSI's $5,699.99 Titan 18 is well beyond that inflection point. But it's also like nothing else. It's not very logical to spend that much when other excellent gaming laptops are nearly as powerful but cost almost half as much. While the Titan is an absolutely reckless purchase, it's also a joyous one t …Read the full story at The Verge.

Robots will be flipping your burgers soon. Right now, there are robots stocking convenience store shelves in Japan. We haven't embraced that tech here in America yet, but it's hard to imagine 7-11 or Walmart won't at least experiment with it soon. Walmart gave up on its shelf-scanning robots in 2020, but machine vision and AI have improved a lot in the last five years, and it's only a matter of time before it's a machine refilling that row of family-sized Fruity Pebbles and not a kid earning some extra cash during senior year of high school.Truth is, there just aren't many jobs for teens out there anymore, and most of them have chosen to simply remove themselves from the job market …Read the full story at The Verge.

Network-Attached Storage rigs are often the most-used devices for transferring files, archiving data, and creating snapshots of other systems in home labs, and for good reason. File-based network shares can be hooked up with multiple systems (including virtual machines), and since NAS devices are essentially independent devices, you can use them as secondary nodes to self-host essential services. Heck, I’ve already got a dedicated TrueNAS storage server that runs alongside my Proxmox home lab.

Every other day, it seems like we hear someone complain about how Windows keeps getting worse, whether it's by adding features we deem unnecessary or shoving ads down users' throats. And all of that is valid criticism (after all, I'm a macOS and Linux user now), but the claims that Windows is actively getting worse tend to get blown out of proportion.

If you've ever used a Mac, you're probably familiar with its Time Machine feature. It's a system restore feature that lets you roll back to a saved point in macOS if something goes wrong while you are experimenting on your Mac. Windows also have a similar system restore feature. On Linux, however, such a type of safety net is absent by default. That's where Timeshift comes into play.

Spooktober has been going on in full swing, and in 2025, there's no shortage of fantastic horror games to play for Halloween that's right around the corner. However, it doesn't always have to mean screaming your lungs out in a dark hallway or dodging ghastly monsters lunging at you. It's quite alright if horror isn't your cup of tea — not everyone enjoys willingly making themselves stressed and afraid, and not everyone has to.

The BIOS is the home for essentially any setting you'd want to change about your hardware. There's a pretty absurd level of control given to you; voltage and current limits of everything from memory to your CPU itself.

The Flipper Zero is essentially a Swiss Army Knife of hacking and testing, but an ESP32 isn't too far off, either. I've already demonstrated how one can be turned into a Wi-Fi honeypot, but thanks to the ESP32-S3's USB capabilities, it can do a whole lot more. With some work, I was able to easily turn it into a BadUSB, just like what the Flipper Zero can do, and it's capable of running DuckyScripts.