You're probably familiar with the Internet Protocol. After all, it's the "IP" in IPv4 and IPv6. The set of rules that routes data across networks so that it gets to the correct destination. The protocol says how to divide the data into smaller packets for transmission, and how to address them for transport, just like sending a physical packet through the mail. It's most commonly thought of in relation to the Internet and transmitting data over Ethernet or Wi-Fi, but there are many other things it gets used for.

Hit is one of the best things to come from Linus Torvalds, if you exclude Linux. This version control system is excellent for developing software and collaborating on other code and solutions. Whether you happen to be building a website or creating a new Linux distro, Git is great for version control, history, branching, and completing the project with minimal fuss. GitHub is one of the more popular platforms for hosting Git repositories and projects. It's fantastic, but it happens to be owned by Microsoft and has a limited free tier.

Have you given the Mass Effect trilogy a try? If you haven't, I really recommend that you give it a shot. As much as people had complaints about how the trilogy came to an end (and honestly, I don't blame them), the series is still a stellar range that I believe everyone who's into the sci-fi genre should try at least once in their lives.

PC building is often focused on performance, and for good reason. Parts selection for a lot of enthusiasts revolves around getting the most for your money, and putting more dosh into parts like the CPU and GPU is the main way to accomplish that. Performance-per-dollar is a great way to select those parts, but what about everything else?

While there are many great alternatives to Adobe’s creative software tools — such as Krita being a good alternative to Photoshop — there are fewer viable alternatives to tablet-based Procreate. For on-the-go digital drawing, Procreate has dominated the market almost since its inception in 2011; however, with it only being available for iPads, it leaves a large gap in the industry for other tools to step in and provide what’s missing. Enter: Kreska. Released only in May 2025, this browser-based tool provides many similar features to Procreate, on more platforms, and totally for free.

Excel is one of the most versatile tools in data analysis and is significantly ahead of its competitors in terms of features and popularity. One of the key aspects that makes Excel versatile is that both an average person and a pro can utilize it to their advantage.

Lovense, the maker of internet-connected sex toys, left user emails exposed for months — even after it became aware of the vulnerability. In a blog post spotted by TechCrunch and Bleeping Computer, security researcher BobDaHacker found that they could “turn any username into their email address,” which they could then use to take over someone’s account.Though BobDaHacker initially disclosed this vulnerability to Lovense in March, the researcher claims Lovense waited months before fixing it, and still hasn’t fully addressed the issue. Lovense is behind a range of sex toys that users can connect to the internet and remotely control via its app, which came under fire for a “minor bug” in 2017 that recorded users’ sex sessions.As outlined in BobDaHacker’s post, the security researcher noticed something strange in the app’s API response when muting someone: it presented their email address. BobDaHacker then figured out that they could take advantage of this vulnerability by sending a modified request to Lovense’s servers, tricking it into returning the target user’s email address. BobDaHacker even developed a script that they say can convert someone’s username into an email address in less than a second. “This is especially bad for cam models who share their usernames publicly but obviously don’t want their personal emails exposed,” BobDaHacker writes. To make matters worse, BobDaHacker later discovered that they could take over a user’s account with their email address and an authentication token generated by Lovense. BobDaHacker initially reported these vulnerabilities in partnership with the Internet of Dongs, a group that aims to make internet-connected sex toys more secure. However, the security researcher says Lovense didn’t immediately fix the issue. Instead, Lovense claimed that the account takeover bug was fixed in April, even though BobDaHacker said it wasn’t, and that a fix for the email leak issue would take 14 months to roll out.“We also evaluated a faster, one-month fix. However, it would require forcing all users to upgrade immediately, which would disrupt support for legacy versions,” Lovense said, according to BobDaHacker. As noted by BobDaHacker, security researchers reported the same account takeover bug to Lovense in 2023, but the company appears to have closed the bug without actually fixing it.In a statement to Bleeping Computer, Lovense says it has submitted an app update “addressing the latest vulnerabilities” to app stores. “The full update is expected to be pushed to all users within the next week,” Lovense says. “Once all users have updated to the new version and we disable older versions, this issue will be completely resolved.” Lovense didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. 

For years, clock speed ruled the roost. It was the one metric you could point to, devoid of context, to say one component was "faster" than another. It's literally right there in the name. Clock speed directly shows how quickly your components are running; how many instructions it's able to execute in a second. And yet, today, clock speed is one of the least important specs you can pay attention to.

The console gaming scene has turned really strange in the past few years. Before, we saw three individual camps vying to compete with one another using raw processing power and exclusive titles. Now, we see Sony trying to take the home console market, Nintendo capitalizing on the handheld scene, and Microsoft throwing its arms in the air and just turning every device on the planet into an Xbox.

YouTube videos with strong profanity in the first seven seconds (words like “fuck”) are now eligible for full monetization, according to a video from Conor Kavanagh, YouTube’s head of monetization policy experience. Previously, these kinds of videos were only eligible for “limited ad revenue.”  Changes to YouTube’s inappropriate language policies have long been a sore spot for creators. In November 2022, the company began to potentially limit ad revenue if profanity was used in the first 8–15 seconds of a video. ProZD, whose real name is SungWon Cho, published a video where, after waiting 15 seconds, he called the policy change “the dumbest fucking shit I’ve ever heard.” (He later said that the video was demonetized.) YouTube adjusted its policies in March 2023, including allowing videos with profanity in the first 8–15 seconds to be eligible for ad revenue.I asked ProZD his thoughts about Tuesday’s change. “It’s about fucking time.”The company originally restricted monetization for videos with swearing at the start of videos to “align with broadcast standards,” Kavanagh says. “Advertisers expected ads on YouTube to have distance between profanity and the ad that just served.” However, “those expectations have changed,” he says, “and advertisers already have the ability to target content to their desired level of profanity.”While the only specific example of “strong” profanity Kavanagh provides is “fuck” —  he says that YouTube defines “moderate profanity” as words like “asshole” or “bitch” — “you get the idea,” he says.YouTube will continue to limit monetization if you use moderate or strong profanity in titles or thumbnails. Videos with a “high frequency” of strong profanity are also still a “violation” of YouTube’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines, Kavanagh says. “You have to pick and choose your fucks carefully.”

Microsoft Edge's tactics to keep people from swapping browsers are pretty well-known by now. While the browser will never explicitly block you from downloading a rival browser, it will definitely kick and stomp its feet about it and beg you to stay with Edge. It has gotten to the point where other browser developers are getting a little peeved over how Microsoft is handling things, and in early 2024, we saw Mozilla complain about how Edge badgers users when downloading a different app.

Despite appearing intimidating at first glance, containerized services are pretty easy to deploy, especially with all the home lab tools at your disposal. Sure, running Docker/Podman commands via a terminal is the ideal way to go about building your container library, but they can seem a tad too difficult if you’re not even accustomed to CLI-heavy utilities, let alone server distros. Their desktop variants of Docker and Podman can help newcomers out quite a bit, but containerization platforms further simply the esoteric art of self-hosting by providing a neat UI to grab templates and deploy them inside containers – all with the press of a button.