Twenty-five years ago today, a young, little-known programmer by the name of Bram Cohen fired off a short message to a mailing list for peer-to-peer enthusiasts. "My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here," Cohen wrote, followed by a link to his personal website."What's BitTorrent, Bram?" the founder of the list asked in response.Cohen never bothered to reply. The world would find out soon enough.In the following years, BitTorrent quickly became the world's most popular file-sharing app, unleashing a massive wave of piracy that upended Hollywood forever. At one point, BitTorrent was said to be responsible for a …Read the full story at The Verge.

It might be easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you need to upgrade your router, and the one provided by your internet service provider simply isn't good enough. However, modern ISP gateways, especially the Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E units distributed over the last few years, feature decent chipsets and capable internal antenna arrays. The problem isn't actually the internal silicon or even the settings. It's that ISPs routinely install these boxes next to incoming utility lines in the worst possible locations in your home, like dark basement corners, inside metal utility closets, or wedged directly behind massive smart TVs. Your ISP router doesn't need to be replaced. It needs to be moved.

Home Assistant 2026.7 just landed, and it brings with it a number of improvements. What I'm most interested in with this update are the changes made to automation. The team has once again poured time and resources into improving the way they're handled. With 2026.7, automations are now easier for everyone to build, understand, and maintain, making it much more accessible to build a feature-rich smart home.

OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5 percent ownership stake as a way of easing tensions with the Trump administration and blunting mounting public backlash against AI, according to the Financial Times.CEO Sam Altman argued that giving the public a financial interest in the company would be the best way to share the upside of AI, the FT reported, citing two unnamed people familiar with the talks. He's said to have first pitched the idea to Trump early last year.Altman reportedly suggested the 5 percent figure. Based on OpenAI's latest funding round, which ended with the company valued at $852 billion, that stake would be worth …Read the full story at The Verge.

The interesting thing about a brilliant idea is that, just like everything else, it will eventually fall out of style. However, unlike everything else, someone will end up reinventing it years or even decades down the line. It may not be a one-for-one replica of the original concept, and it may have a totally different name, but its very DNA is strongly reminiscent of an idea from the past.

I've used Vivaldi as my web browser for some time now, and I love a lot of things about it, including the customization options for the homepage. There's actually quite a bit I can do with it, and I've turned it into a pretty useful dashboard.

Most local LLM advice spends about 90% of its time on which model to download and almost none on what to do once it's loaded. You just pick a model and a quant, and off you go. It seems a lot of people leave the settings and parameters alone unless something's wrong, which is a shame because half the complaints about local models being slow or weird aren't really the model; they're the settings. And that's a much easier problem to solve than swapping to a different model entirely.

Text snippets are one of the easiest ways to save time in your day-to-day life. Essentially, you can type a very short text string and have it automatically expand to a piece of text that's as large as you want. It can save a ton of time with repetitive bits of information you may use throughout the day, like your address, email, and so on.

Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch: this new app lets you make and share little interactive "gizmos" built from an AI prompt, as reported by Business Insider. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI as the new social media, and he's previously described a vision of how users could use AI to make interactive experiences and share them with people. The launch of Pocket appears to be one manifestation of that idea, and it follows Meta hiring engineers from a company called Atma Sciences Inc., which made an app called …Read the full story at The Verge.

When we reviewed the Corsair 3500X case, we loved that it provided so much at an affordable price. Corsair managed to take one of its more popular cases, and make it more accessible. This case looks good, delivers great airflow, and it's easy to build.

In the lead up to its eventual launch, Valve weren't shy in labeling the Steam Machine as a system capable of 4K gaming at 60 fps. Mere days before it shipped, that line vanished from the product page with an "up to" qualifier; a hedge that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the "GabeCube."

DDR4 platforms seem to have made an unexpected comeback this year, and for most hardware enthusiasts, that's a sign of bad news. The industry-wide demand for DRAM over the past ten months, followed by a supply shortage and subsequent inflation in prices has made platform upgrades to the DDR5 ecosystem economically unfeasible for many. With the demand from data centers showing no signs of slowing down, the return of DDR4 in consumer PCs feels like a rational response.