It seems that AI has really shaken the tech world down to its core. With Microsoft and Apple adopting AI big-time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Linux users would have passed on this tech trend. However, a recent project has proved us wrong, as the GNOME-based AI assistant, Newelle, has just been released in its 1.0 state.

It’s no secret that Adobe Creative Cloud is the gold standard for creative software. But it can start to feel like renting your creativity, which isn’t the best option for solo creators, students, or anyone on a budget. This is why I finally parted with the Creative Cloud — the monthly fees became too overwhelming, and I also had concerns about my data privacy.

Canceling an Adobe subscription is no mean feat. It can take months of consideration before taking the plunge and pulling the creative money plug. After a long time questioning whether I should avoid Adobe tools and testing out a myriad of creative software alternatives, these are the five major things I should have considered before canceling my Adobe subscription. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and if my lack of forethought can benefit anyone else, then it’s a win for me, at least.

I’ve talked about all the reasons I love Google’s AI-powered research assistant, NotebookLM, and how it’s changed my workflow more times than I can count. But just because the tool mostly gets it right doesn’t mean it hasn’t had its fair share of frustrations.

There are a lot of great tablets out there, but the iPad is going to be one of the top choices, offering an impressive experience that's great for work and play. If you've been looking for one with a big screen, powerful processor and 5G that won't hurt your wallet, this iPad Air is going to be just the thing, coming in at just $699 for a limited time.

Some games are born with a silver spoon. They are critically acclaimed, part of big IPs with even bigger names behind them, and commercial success is all but guaranteed. Think The Last of Us Part II, or Death Stranding 2, which, despite not resonating with a significant proportion of gamers, have still done commercially well.

Every time I built a new PC, I wasted several hours going through spec sheets before deciding on a RAM kit that I really liked. I used to obsess over every minute detail, trying to convince myself that the extra price would be worth it in the long run. But in reality, they didn't offer meaningful improvements. I encountered CPU bottlenecks before RAM speed and timings ever became a problem. There was really little to no benefit in chasing numbers that looked impressive on paper.

Google’s August Pixel update includes a fix for Android’s three-button navigation and gesture navigation systems becoming unresponsive.The issues appear to have started popping up shortly after the official release of Android 16 in June. Ever since that update, the user said that navigation has been “a complete mess” and that they ran into issues with buttons being “completely unresponsive” or delays of “over 30 seconds” on their Pixel 8 Pro. Another user said they had to occasionally press the back button “a few times” on their Pixel 9 to get the phone to register it. The swipe gesture to navigate back also occasionally stopped working, as noticed by Android Police’s Artem Russakovskii.Google’s patch notes only vaguely say that the issues would happen under “certain conditions.” In addition to general stability improvements, the update also fixes an issue where a scheduled dark theme wouldn’t work. It also includes a security fix for a high severity remote code execution vulnerability.The update is rolling out now for Pixel 6 devices and newer.

AMD and Nvidia make some excellent graphics cards for gaming, AI development, and more. Whether you plan to have a conversation with an LLM to aid with coding or enjoy some immersive virtual experiences with the latest PC games, you'll need one of the best GPUs from either brand to leverage all the latest and greatest technology advancements.

The keyboard and mouse are weird relics in the computing world. We've seen a ton of different concepts that aim to revolutionise each of them, make them more ergonomic and useful for our needs in a modern era. Still, we always seem to default back to the traditional designs that we've come to know over the years. And that's not even touching upon products that claim they'll make the keyboard and mouse redundant; I don't think I've ever seen one catch on in a big way.

OpenAI released a new free and open GPT model yesterday that can run on a PC, and now Microsoft is making that easy to do for Windows users. The lightweight gpt-oss-20b model is now available on Windows AI Foundry, and will be coming soon to macOS, too.You’ll need a PC or laptop with at least 16GB of VRAM, so you’ll need one of the top GPUs from Nvidia or the variety of Radeon GPUs with sufficient VRAM. The gpt-oss-20b model is optimized for code execution and tool use, and Microsoft says it’s “perfect for building autonomous assistants or embedding AI into real-world workflows, even in bandwidth-constrained environments.”Microsoft has pre-optimized gpt-oss-20b for local inference, and it hints that support for more devices is coming soon. That could mean we see a more optimized version for Copilot Plus PCs at some point in the future, much like how Microsoft has been adding a variety of local AI models to Windows recently.Microsoft’s speedy addition of OpenAI’s latest model to the Windows AI Foundry comes as Amazon was equally quick to adopt the new open-weight GPT-OSS models for its cloud services. It’s the first time you can run an OpenAI model locally on Windows, but it’s also the first time Microsoft’s biggest cloud competitor has had access to the latest OpenAI models — adding another dynamic to the complicated OpenAI and Microsoft partnership.

Researchers have already found a critical vulnerability in the new NLWeb protocol Microsoft made a big deal about just just a few months ago at Build. It’s a protocol that’s supposed to be “HTML for the Agentic Web,” offering ChatGPT-like search to any website or app. Discovery of the embarrassing security flaw comes in the early stages of Microsoft deploying NLWeb with customers like Shopify, Snowlake, and TripAdvisor.The flaw allows any remote users to read sensitive files, including system configuration files and even OpenAI or Gemini API keys. What’s worse is that it’s a classic path traversal flaw, meaning it’s as easy to exploit as visiting a malformed URL. Microsoft has patched the flaw, but it raises questions about how something as basic as this wasn’t picked up in Microsoft’s big new focus on security.“This case study serves as a critical reminder that as we build new AI-powered systems, we must re-evaluate the impact of classic vulnerabilities, which now have the potential to compromise not just servers, but the ‘brains’ of AI agents themselves,” says Aonan Guan, one of the security researchers (alongside Lei Wang) that reported the flaw to Microsoft. Guan is a senior cloud security engineer at Wyze (yes, that Wyze) but this research was conducted independently.Guan and Wang reported the flaw to Microsoft on May 28th, just weeks after NLWeb was unveiled. Microsoft issued a fix on July 1st, but has not issued a CVE for the issue — an industry standard for classifying vulnerabilities. The security researchers have been pushing Microsoft to issue a CVE, but the company has been reluctant to do so. A CVE would alert more people to the fix and allow people to track it more closely, even if NLWeb isn’t widely used yet.“This issue was responsibly reported and we have updated the open-source repository,” says Microsoft spokesperson Ben Hope, in a statement to The Verge. “Microsoft does not use the impacted code in any of our products. Customers using the repository are automatically protected.”Guan says NLWeb users “must pull and vend a new build version to eliminate the flaw,” otherwise any public-facing NLWeb deployment “remains vulnerable to unauthenticated reading of .env files containing API keys.”While leaking an .env file in a web application is serious enough, Guan argues it’s “catastrophic” for an AI agent. “These files contain API keys for LLMs like GPT-4, which are the agent’s cognitive engine,” says Guan. “An attacker doesn’t just steal a credential; they steal the agent’s ability to think, reason, and act, potentially leading to massive financial loss from API abuse or the creation of a malicious clone.”Microsoft is also pushing ahead with native support for Model Context Protocol (MCP) in Windows, all while security researchers have warned of the risks of MCP in recent months. If the NLWeb flaw is anything to go by, Microsoft will need to take an extra careful approach of balancing the speed of rolling out new AI features versus sticking to security being the number one priority.